Oddbean new post about login | logout If you would've told me 20 years ago that we would have to fight other human beings to stem the extinction of all of humanity, I would have thought you were insane.
@3967703f I remember some years ago making a similar point about the political cycle. It was just after t-rump was elected. "If just after WWII you had told people that their grandchildren would be living in a world where fascists openly controlled the USA, Israel and UK, and the leader of the free world was a German Woman, they would have locked you up in an asylum."
@3967703f Nah... in 2003 (that is 20 years ago) I saw all this shit coming like a train but no one in my area believed me (even my parents didn't)... Of course I was also a sick child but what's some details between friends... BUT! It matters not if it is insane or not, what matters is we can do this and we got this ✊
@3967703f TWW: There is but one moment, all things and all time exist in this moment. In life you are given to know as much of the moment as you can perceive. *We started raising kids. After all the work and demonstrations we believed in the change. We protected our kids and got them through school and left activism to other younger people but they faced much higher barriers with more attractive distractions. Aware of much more risk people now face new challenges and will prevail. OWOP
@3967703f the WTO fights in America happened around the turn of the bad century. That’s exactly what those anarchists were fighting against then.
@3967703f About 24 years ago, author Naomi Klein (among others) predicted the coming of an event horizon for the (by now) ultra-concentrated wealth due to deregulation and megamergers. Even the most alarmist of them back then didn't predict it arriving at the same time as the #climateCrisis bill was coming due, and how much of the world would completely and absolutely ignore it, even while it's literally killing them.
@3967703f 20 years ago, I could see this coming. 60 years ago, many people already saw this coming.
@3967703f On the one hand, I'm both surprised & charmed that you were such an idealist (by which point I was already 53 & jaded). On the other hand, I'm wondering what wonderland you were living in, to have been seeing things through such rose-colored glasses. 20 years ago, we were still in San Diego, & the right-wing stupids were rabidly fighting the elegant wind turbine 'farms', claiming they caused cancer & killed birds. (They didn't care about birds one iota.)
@3967703f >"I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that." - James Gustave Speth