Feds: ‘Poor’ Consume Like The Rich

Really? Where and how? Anecdotes mean nothing. There were kind, charitable, virtuous people even in the 1200's. The fact that we still have some is meaningless.

Humankind slaughered more of it's own in the last 100 years than it ever did in the previous 6000 years of history combined. Is that progress?

Well, it is now that we have boards to keep creatures like yourself out of mischief.

I mean, while you're writing a witty rejoinder to this post, you're not out sawing off a head, are ya?

Yes I am. I have technology on my side and it allows me to multitask my shenanigans.

Whose talking anecdotes?

News stories of people helping people happen every day.

As long as there are humans there will always be war - and, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you support the war in Afghanistan and Iraq?

There are two reasons there were more deaths in the last 100 years A) there's more people and B) we have the technology for greater destruction.

Doesn't mean we're any worse now than we were before.

Kind of half-ish right.

I initially supported Afghanistan immediately after 9/11. When it became obvious that it was going to be a long term clusterfuck I quickly soured on it.

As for Iraq, I did initially get caught up in the hoopla and supported it. About the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I gave up on supporting the Iraq war too.

It certainly doesn't speak well to the claim that we're better than we were before either.

I think if we can keep those kinds of people from grabbing power after a reset, we will all be better off.

How are you going to stop them?

You'll have a lot of killing ahead of you...greed and solipsism run deep in this pathetic child species.

Pretty much the whole damn species to be sure.....

You'll also have to deal with those functions that most people won't consider worth providing out of the goodness of their hearts. Disallowing greedy profit motive means some things just will not be available.

(A) The plague was not the last major reset in Europe, though arguably it required the longest period of recovery

and

(B) Europe is not the only place that major resets occur

That said, RE the bolded part of your post, for the most part I agree, and that's what I've been saying throughout this thread. So do we agree that we agree, or do you still think I'm disagreeing with you on that particular topic?

So are you saying we couldn't advance without the reset? Or, to put it in less genteel terms, you believe a certain percentage of the population needs to die off before the rest can make any progress?

True story: If you're calling in the King of Battle and you ask for "Shake & Bake"...first off they'll probably berate you for using slang. Then they'll dump a mix of High Explosive (HE) and White Phosphorus (WP) shells on your target.

I don't know if killing would be necessary. I think enough people are aware that such people exist and that they should be denied power, that the masses would be able to stop them if need be, without resorting to violence.

If you're agreeing with me, then I don't understand your previous questions about prior points in time being preferable to this one.

I think a very strong power - be it a reset or revolution - is what it will take to advance out society past the current evolutionary juncture in which the economy is the focus of our lives.

I may joke around with UA about such things but I really don't believe it - and ..., I think UA is also joking to a certain degree.

In fact, pretty sure Ted Kazinski and his ilk are the only people who take that shit seriously.

I asked you - paraphrasing here, because I'm not going to wade through the entire thread - whether you thought any other period in history was better than this one, and you replied - again, paraphrasing - "Why do you want to live in any other period in history?"

Well, then, here we disagree, because while progress is often, at least temporarily, made in emotional reaction to a disaster (think of how everyone behaved on September 12, 2001), the progress is often temporary (think of how quickly that behavior dissipated), and disaster isn't necessary for progress.

In fact, I'd argue, it actually slows progress.

So now you're saying disaster isn't necessary for progress?

It's a start.

Well, in that utopia, you're going to need a well informed and educated populace capable of critical thinking.

But, look at the history of this country, and how education has been sabotaged at every turn, and look at this board at how people kick and thrash to hang onto their ancient superstitions, and their indoctrinated partisan biases.

And then remember, the greedy aren't content to write manifestos, and make street speeches, they'll just grab some fuckin' guns.
Look at large hunks of Africa.

How are your Eloi people gonna handle that shit?

No, frankly, I think those days are fucking gone.

The day of the revolution, and the "social movement", has done all it can, and all it's going to do.

Except maybe in openly despotic countries, I.E. "the Arab spring".

The only thing that's going to pick off the remaining human evils, is obsolescence.

Like how whaling for whale oil on a mass scale died down with the discovery of petroleum.

And how the demand for lantern oil vanished almost overnight with the invention of the light bulb.

Tech, and tech, and tech, and tech, until there's nothing evil left to profit off of.

And fundamentalist religion wants to sabotage that, and there's no guarantee they couldn't win.

Remember, the dark ages lasted almost three times longer than this country has existed.

Enlightenment is a blip in history.

Okay, so that's your hypothesis, what's your evidence?

If people were smart enough such that they would stop them, why would it take a reset? These people that you speak of are already in power, and we don't stop them now.

Her evidence is a few news articles about people being nice.

.... I'm done.

It's one thing to type up crap on a message board, it's quite another to live those superstitions in the face of disaster - especially if those superstitions tell you that "all the good people were already taken to heaven and here you are left behind".

Rebuilding will take up so much of a person's time, organized religion will be put on the back burner - and a person's faith is the only thing that will see them through.

You may have a point here. I just don't think the human race will last long enough for our present way of life to become obsolete.

Because the people are no longer in control of the government - corporations are.

All that means is that (A) there are more people on the planet than ever before and (B) the technology of killing has improved.

The reasons why people kill or, more importantly, don't kill, are where you see the improvement.

Damn, this thread really make a comeback in the last eighty posts!

Give evolution about a million years or so... Providing there's no nuke or bio war.
Mankind is still not far from being out of the cave.

B-but we need nukes and bio wars in order to be our better selves!

We have no more selection pressures to evolve us anymore.
Without genetic manipulation, and cybernetics, this is it.

Our next step in evolution will have to be intelligence guided.

Not that I'm hot for the prospect, just saying.

Our options are transformation of self, or of society.
Inner, or outer.

Transformers, or Star Trek.

X-men!

The course of our evolution is now in our minds.

We have this big brain, but only use 10 percent of it - at least, that's what "they" say.

So, we need to start using our brains and get out of the rut we seem to be stuck in.

That's been debunked ages ago.

Just think of it in electronics/computer terms.
If your system accesses everything at once, it fucking crashes.

To "use", all of your brain, you'd have to be in a grand-mal seizure, or undergoing ECT.