Mankind is done for

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All of the arguing about what candidate is better than another makes no difference long term. The only way for humanity to survive is to not continue to deplete the earth's resources faster than they can be regenerated. Good luck with that! It certainly isn't something Biden, Sanders, Trump, China is addressing.

Eventually the earth will have its way. It will kill most or all of us off. Maybe the sun will do us in with a Carrington Event .The last big one was in 1859 before the rise of modern electrical and electronic systems. Can you imagine the world with most electrical and electronic systems destroyed? Maybe a super virus will kill off most of the world's population. Who knows?


I read a book a long time ago. It was titled "The World Without Us" I think. It gave the scenario that all of humanity died in a single day. How long would the earth take to recover? The ending was somewhere between 1 and 10 million years where biodiversity had fully recovered. There are loads of unknowns though. No one can predict long term future like that. It gave me comfort, all the same.

This post is partly inspired by the idea of vote blue no matter who. Sure it is good to stop the trainwreck that is the orange one and the republican party. It can help for a short time to preserve the status quo or even get slightly better with Biden or Sanders in office.

To change the long term future will take very radical change though, which no one is even talking about. I'm resigned to the fact that humanity will mostly or completely die out. I know with my health conditions I will be lucky to last another 20 years, maybe much less. A severe stock market crash or cutbacks in medical benefits could hurt or kill me.

C'est La Vie
La Vie
 

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Up next, Womankind!
 
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I probably should have used a different word in the title but humanity doesn't work either so don't know what it would be.
 

Kalel

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i blame the Fermi Paradox...we haven't been able to get past the great filter and just be another civilization that will collapse cause we can't get over our base tribal instincts and help one another..

 
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Back in the '60s youth uprised. Did that change anything? I don't know, I hope somewhat. The Vietnam war stopped. Some say that had more to do with draftees who were damaged and fighting in that war. A certain fact is the war stopped when I was about 15. It was terrifying for me. I had to think about when I was ready to die, since I could not shoot another person and most likely could not survive in jail.

The only way that countries ever really change is when there is massive support or uprising from the population, especially the young. I am too fragile to make much of a difference now. My mom advocated heavily for civil rights. For example, she used to go into Camden and apply for apartments as a white woman with fake bad qualifications. Then the organization she worked with had a black person with better qualifications apply. If my mom got the apartment they would sue. That is radical. That is doing something. She died when I was 14. I wish I could say I have done some of the same things as my mom in my life.
 
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My mom volunteered for the Black People's Unity Movement, which had a side organization she was part of, named Friends of the BPUM since she was white. She had been a student to be a civil rights lawyer at Rutgers for two years, but unfortunately developed cancer and died.
 

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i blame the Fermi Paradox...we haven't been able to get past the great filter and just be another civilization that will collapse cause we can't get over our base tribal instincts and help one another..
I would hardly blame the Fermi Paradox... I'm one who believes Drake was way too optimistic with some of the values assigned. To be blunt, the Drake Equation was a back-of-envelope equation with some dubious assumptions.
However, we as a civilisation are facing a Great Filter and I have doubts we are rational enough to pass it. It's not we have to be emotionless drones to survive, but that we don't utilise rationality and empathy well. If only we had enough rationality and empathy to stop allowing sociopaths to control us.

(rant over)
 

Brenda Archer

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I would hardly blame the Fermi Paradox... I'm one who believes Drake was way too optimistic with some of the values assigned. To be blunt, the Drake Equation was a back-of-envelope equation with some dubious assumptions.
However, we as a civilisation are facing a Great Filter and I have doubts we are rational enough to pass it. It's not we have to be emotionless drones to survive, but that we don't utilise rationality and empathy well. If only we had enough rationality and empathy to stop allowing sociopaths to control us.

(rant over)
And the sociopaths aren’t generally spotted by many people. They’re taken at their word and admired, even while they leave behind clues that a perceptive observer can notice. If their victims speak up, they get blamed. A lot of people seem to like sociopaths and wish they were like them. Pushing back at this tendency is a constant struggle, just to carve out a space for caretaking. Even knowing the sociopathic tendency will parasitically feed off the caretaking, and mock the empathetic people, I can’t bring myself to join the people who admire the sociopaths. It’s always so profoundly broken.
 

Sid

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There are leaders and followers. Most of us are followers.
Followers love it that leaders take the lead, decide, think for them, as long as the leaders leave them alone and throw them a bone sometimes, or at least aren't to harsh on them.
You can see this everywhere, in politics, at work, at schools, in social life.
The followers are happy not to be in charge and not to make decisions.

Mostly the leaders of the worst kind, those who are unpredictable and inconsistent, are the ones that frighten the followers and then you get those who start to worship that leader even more in hope it will turn to 'normal' for them and the others feel they should revolt, make the world a better place, but most of the time don't get to the point to take control.
 
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Caliandris

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There are leaders and followers. Most of us are followers.
Followers love it that leaders take the lead, decide, think for them, as long as the leaders leave them alone and throw them a bone sometimes, or at least aren't to harsh on them.
You can see this everywhere, in politics, at work, at schools, in social life.
The followers are happy not to be in charge and make decisions.

Mostly the leaders of the worst kind, those who are unpredictable and inconsistent, are the ones that frighten the followers and then you get those who start to worship that leader even more in hope it will turn to 'normal' for them and the others feel they should revolt, make the world a better place, but most of the time don't get to the point to take control.
When I went to my first Parent Teacher Association meeting and came back Chairperson, my father-in-law gave me a book about fundraising (he'd been a professional fundraiser in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when they were virtually unknown in the UK and fundraising was a volunteer occupation).

It had within it some very useful information, which I have found to be true, and the knowledge has come in useful for me on many occasions. The book is "Designs for fundraising (principles/patterns techniques) by Harold J. Seymour (1966 McGraw Hill).

**begin quote, with gaps indicated by ...**
"In any field of human activity, not just in fundraising, the leaders are indeed rare - never more than 5 per cent of any group or constituency, and usually less. These are the creative citizens, with what Harry Emerson Fosdick has called "a sense of privilege". They light the way, originate action, create the confidence, sustain the mood, and they keep things moving.

"And then 25 or 30 percent of the total, is the key group best described as responsible. For they are the ones who can be depended upon to play a thoughtful and proportionate part in any program engaging their advocacy and support. True, they need leadership and guidance, as everyone does, and are susceptible as all of us are to the climate and the planned action. But it is not for them that planners must provide supervision, system, and the goad.They will do what they say they will do and will try to do it in the way you want it done....

"Then come the merely responsive, that major group that will probably respond to varying degrees if all the portents and pressure are about right. They rarely act out of sheer impulse, unless negatively. The burdens of inertia and procrastination are ever with them....

Finally, at the bottom and merging with the larger group, is the inert fifth. This is the ultimate residuum, which exercises the rights and privileges of citizenship only under direct compulsion and daily shows us in the opinion polls that it can rarely even make up its mind about anything. The finest rhetoric never reaches these people, if only because they are not there to listen. Yet their lamentations never cease, and they are always the first to threaten to cut off the support they have hardly ever given...."
**end quote**

He goes on to say that just as the rule of thirds applies to donations, with a third coming from the top ten gifts, a third coming from the next 100 gifts and a third from the rest, the people helping in a campaign can be split into thirds... a third doing what you ask as long as you tell them what to do , a third responding under pressure and prodding, and a third won't do anything no matter how hard you try.

Certainly, I found this information was accurate for an active parent teacher association - along with the fact that it was the people who did the least and were unwilling, who complained the most about whatever was done.

I thought it *wouldn't* apply to my Quaker meeting. After all, weren't they all socially-responsible people with consciences and a will to do what is right? But it did - particularly the number of people who are willing to initiate and lead things. And the bottom fifth who won't do anything, even support an event.

It's been something that has come in useful to me on numerous occasions, and with entirely different populations. And so I share it here, for your delectation. The most useful thing about it was that it taught me not to waste my time on someone who was needing a lot of persuading to do anything.

It also made me aware how many people are willing to do stuff, if only someone else will tell them what to do. Understanding the big gulf that lies between the first group who are willing to lead and initiate, and the second group, who are only comfortable if they are being told what to do, was also something that came in very useful - and the understanding that the leadership group of 5% find it hard to understand that truth and work with it, too, because it is so different from their own attitude, where they would rather do anything than be told what to do.

It's also important to understand that the same person, in a different group, may fall into a different category. Someone who leads at work may not wish to do so in a sports club, for example, or a charity fundraising for children. So each group has to be thought of as a separate entity, and you should not make assumptions that a leader in one will necessarily lead in another.
 

Brenda Archer

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There are leaders and followers. Most of us are followers.
Followers love it that leaders take the lead, decide, think for them, as long as the leaders leave them alone and throw them a bone sometimes, or at least aren't to harsh on them.
You can see this everywhere, in politics, at work, at schools, in social life.
The followers are happy not to be in charge and not to make decisions.

Mostly the leaders of the worst kind, those who are unpredictable and inconsistent, are the ones that frighten the followers and then you get those who start to worship that leader even more in hope it will turn to 'normal' for them and the others feel they should revolt, make the world a better place, but most of the time don't get to the point to take control.
It’s safe to say most revolutions fail. People were staging peasant revolts for centuries before democracy started to spread. Sometimes, revolutions succeed and are then co-opted by the worst people.

On the micro level, many people in abusive family systems stay there. Only a portion break out, leaving them virtually orphaned and also sometimes scapegoated by the larger society. And of them, only a certain number will have the resources to establish healthy families of their own and reverse the trend.

Still, it seems to me it’s worth it to push back at abuse and corruption. If people get exhausted and stop, their society will be pickings not only for dictators, but also for external attacks. They can also collapse from resource mismanagement.
 
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