epohon
7mo ago
Ordinary humans already have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms in 2024 than in 2000? You and I have very different definitions of far less. We are not living in pods, eating bugs, and owning nothing yet.
epohon
7mo ago
Why are you putting something I didn't say in quotation marks as if I did? And then, to add insult to injury, actually quoting me. You'll find that the text in italics is eminently falsifiable. If you want my prediction to be more concrete, then here: by the end of the century human population will be smaller than at the start of it, and an overwhelming majority of the remaining humans will have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms, both in absolute terms and relative to what those at the top will enjoy.
epohon
7mo ago
"Scarcity doesn't exist" is certainly a position, but I usually see it from the people far to the left of the leftmost motte poster. Because you sound like a techno-optimist, let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?
epohon
7mo ago
You did not approve the filtered comment you're replying to, nice moderation there.
Reacting to the shadow on the cave wall, I don't hold Lewis, or any other religionist, in any esteem at all. He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.
epohon
7mo ago
Nice bulverism.
Not as a reply to that particular poster, but as a general elaboration. My life is pretty carefree. But since 2020 I see what life will be like for everyone really soon, and since it's being steered there by agentic actors, the only escape is death before we get there.
epohon
7mo ago
Another day, another man engaging in auto-auto-da-fe. While the stellar minds of the frontpage Reddit debate if it is QAnon or TDS that make a person set himself on fire, less stellar ones dug up his manifesto, where he places Trump and Hillary on the same side, and Thiel and cryptocurrency at the heart of it all. Points for originality. Not many points, but some points. But this is only the background for a comment which I read in the thread, one of a thousand semantically identical ones over the years.
It sounds incredibly plausible that the term "conspiracy theory" and flooding the field with flat-earthers, bigfoot hunters, extraterrestial anal examination enjoyers, and the rest, is itself a conspiracy designed to discredit people who ask questions about Kennedy assassination and Mkultra by conflating them with kooks and schizos. But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.
And maybe it's a typical mind fallacy, but another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world. It is not the world I believe in. I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite. I know that I'm not as intelligent, as connected, as fortunate in the circumstances of my birth as them, so there is literally nothing I can to in mitigation, not to mention that malice aggravates the feeling of injustice so much more than bad luck, when something horrible happens. This world I believe we live in, the world of conspiracy theories that are true, is without a doubt not the more comforting one of the two.
And I think I was pretty clear that I sneer at your summary of my views as a strawman. As for what I would accept as falsification, it is simple. Flourishing of common people, rather than death and immiseration. No pods, no bugs, no fifteen minutes cages.
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