Good morning.
We are always talking about how the news cycle has grabbed the attention of the people and is constantly making us focus on things that do not matter or have little relevance to our actual lived lives, forcing us to be forever locked within the overton window while whoever is in power does whatever they want. So far all of us have missed the next step that comes after that realization, which is, what are those important things that the news is not mentioning that is relevant to our lives? Today, we shall look at a few such examples:
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The politization of science - remember when there used to be scientific controversies, some of which would get into the public sphere where there would be intense discussions about the same until the issue was finally resolved. Me neither. However, in the past at least within the academy itself, the scientists used to seemingly have more freedom in regards to the subset of topics they could get behind. It was a period of the science determining the truth rather than the social truth determining the results of science. Today, we find ourselves in upside down world, where the moment the science finds anything controversial in its results, or anything that does not match current social norms, it is shut down or completely forgotten. This isn't a new phenomenon, simply one that continues to grow in strength, until science no longer exists separate from politics. Nobody is any longer allowed to question a medical procedure, or doubt a doctor, or ask any questions about data relating to ethnicity. All of it goes under the rug whenever something wrong happens. Cultural blackpills are no longer permitted even within hard science departments.
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Memes and Propaganda acceleration - A meme can be pushed onto the public and spread to millions of people within hours. Today the most expensive department of a company is the advertising section. Millions of bots exist on every single social media site, and if you are starting up as a social media personality, it is recommended that you learn to build bots for your channel to spread further. Today people are being directed towards more ideas and narratives to control their beliefs than ever before. In the past centuries the Church or the state controlled the minds of the people and told them what was right or wrong, today it is whatever echo chamber they end up falling into, resulting in people who do not even share common values with the neighbor right next door. Today you have a strong opinion of things that you have not experienced yourself a single time in life nor have any risk of ever experiencing or any reason to care about. What's worse you are being told that is actually a good thing. You are caring about everybody else's problems before your own, isn't that great!
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The death of integrity - Everybody is out to win. Everybody is out to be the right person the moment they are interacting with anyone outside. Why shouldn't they be, this is what the system that caters to their every idea has taught them. This is what their echo chambers have taught them. You are right, they are wrong. If they are able to prove you wrong, they are assholes who did it the wrong way, and anyways you have a right to your opinion. The only time people need to interact with anybody else now is when they have an agenda, so now people only ever interact with anybody else when they have an agenda. There is no you they are talking to, you are just another notebook or audiobook for them to store their opinion and hope to have it repeated somewhere else. Nobody cares about standards anymore, there is no right or wrong, only the desired end goal to be reached and then if anything breaks apart along the way then "look at what you made me do!".
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Reality disconnect - Should you worry about not having any savings? Well nobody else around me is worried lmao. Should you care about higher education. Why, it doesn't even pay any real money. Should you try to hold a real job. No, the people are too mean and they hold the wrong opinions.
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Illegal actions of the state- All states commit atrocities or immoral acts. We always find out a century later with the present always promising that we are totally clean now guys. Any time there is a controversy in the world, the news cycle drowns it in all the noise, telling you what you should be caring about instead, until you no longer have any clue what was seriously wrong in the first place. Most people don't even know where the newest war broke out or when their own state wrongfully broke a contract or hurt people for questionable reasons. These are things that the state will do everything in its power to memory hole.
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Existential threats - Climate change will likely kill far more people than what the news lets on. The energy crisis turned out to be far worse than the news ever let on. The population collapse will almost certainly be far worse than the news lets on as the news keeps assuming an increase in fertility in between for no reason whatsoever. The news does not completely hide these things, because the common man is obviously not completely blind, but they will do all they can to hide the exact details, to hide any real insurmountable risk for the people, and when the blow hits, everyone will act surprised as to where it came from. Remember, in the case of climate change at least, there were reports about it since the start of the 20th century if not earlier. We simply have no capacity to get our heads around existential risks, and the news has no interest in reporting on real existential risk as people giving up or realizing they are completely fucked is not good for business.
You see the problem?
You aren't supposed to be determining the course of your life based on what the neighbor or friend a country away thinks. Your education is still going to give you a better job than no education. Holding a job has never been about being surrounded by people who love you. That's why you work 8 hours so you can do what you want with the other waking 8 and actually enjoy yourself with the money you make once you are away from work! People have become completely disconnected from how the societal system works at even the most basic level.
People now have zero conception of how the social contract works or why it was kept the way it was. Thinking the entirety of the social contract was about controlling people by the richest men and women. That was certainly a part of it but not 100%!! There was a whole bit in there about being able to live functional lives!
Conclusion - In a manner of speaking, outside of the overton window we are certainly in one of the decaying society phases where the people have lost complete connection with why we were living the lives we were in the first place and the understanding that the world runs on the basis of material input which is limited in supply. People have zero concept of the social contract and forgot one of the bigger chapters in the social contract was about how to utilize our resources and get the most out of the average individual in exchange for providing them the maximum resources possible without breaking or stagnating the system.
The overton window simply exists to keep whoever has free time on their hands still focused on issues that do not actually matter 9 times out of 10 so that they are never able to beat the system.
Nor will you ever be able to doubt the system. The system is perfect, and when its not perfect its your neighbors fault for choosing the wrong option. The state is the final answer. Always has been. Always will be.
Leave the overton window and realize the only winning condition is what you do at the individual level for 90% of the human population and then to do things for your community or your city once you reach the remaining 10%.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Bangladesh is probably going to mostly go underwater around 2400 or so, but that's super "not a real year". A lot of it's going to get (more) flood-prone before then, though (the vast majority of Bangladesh is near-zero elevation; it's basically a giant river delta).
There are a few island nations with ~0 elevation which are going to cease to exist; they're rather upset about this.
Some coastal cities are going to need dikes/storm walls that didn't have them already. Some of them are probably going to ignore doing this, with predictable consequences.
Russia/Canada are going to become more habitable and the Arctic Ocean more relevant for commerce.
Some ecological issues, mostly stuff in the Arctic like "polar bears might go extinct". Less in the Antarctic because East Antarctica isn't melting any time soon. Nothing particularly vital for humans, though.
Not a whole lot else IIRC. If you live in the First World, there's nothing super-catastrophic in terms of personal consequences unless you live at low elevation in cyclone (a.k.a. hurricane) country and you are in the aforementioned "no storm wall" category.
Still worth doing some cheap stuff (solar is getting damned cheap these days, and nuclear's always great if you can bulldoze past the NIMBYs) to mitigate the required spending on adaptation, but it's not going to be DOOM.
Meanwhile in 2022:
China (worlds #1 wheat producer) had its worst ever winter wheat harvest due to spring flooding. China was then hit with the most extreme heatwave behavior we’ve ever observed in the late summer, seeing the world’s third largest river system plummet to record low levels.
India (#2 largest wheat producer) banned wheat exports due to a largely failed crop due to its early summer heatwave, even in the face of global pressure among the potential shortage from the Ukraine situation (luckily we got that Ukraine shipment issue sorted).
Pakistan underwent the same record breaking heatwave in the spring, and was hit with what can only be described as a biblical scale flood event with 1/3 of the country being underwater, in late summer.
River systems across Europe fell to record lows as a record heatwave sat on the continent in early summer. Satellite images revealed that half of the famously green British Isles turned brown.
As of September, Argentina (# 3 world corn producer) delays planting as it sees “the worst planting scenario for corn in the past 27 years” amidst drought.
In late summer, work on detailed underwater maps below the thwaites glacier is published, showing that it is only blocked by a small underwater ridge and could collapse suddenly, on the timespan of several years. A glacier which if retreated fully would lead to between 2-10 feet of sea level rise globally.
Other research published last year found surprisingly warm water flowing underneath the glacier.
Summer 2022 in the northern hemisphere tied for hottest ever recorded. We currently sit at ~1.1 degrees celsius warming.
We are projected to end up around 2.7 degrees warming by the end of the century, given current climate mitigation commitments.
This would likely be enough to pull several Earth system tipping points into play, but I won’t get ahead of myself.
WAIS is significant but not enough for DOOM. That's why I mentioned the dikes/stormwalls.
The only tipping point AFAIK that's actually a potentially-big deal is the clathrate gun. I know about the Gulf Stream, but cooling Europe down is not actually the end of the world. We're not going to wind up like Venus absent somebody spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing fluorinated gases and dumping them into the atmosphere (and, well, come on, even if literal doomsday cultists were to somehow get access to >MbS-money the rest-of-world would notice and stop them; this isn't something you can do stealthily like brewing up smallpox).
We don’t need to end up like Venus to face severe consequences.
That’s why I’m sharing you news of so many crop failures in 2022 at just 1.1 degrees warming.
By 2070, billions people are projected to live in areas experiencing annual levels of heat that are currently only seen in 4 small pockets of the hottest parts of the Sahara: https://www.ft.com/content/072b5c87-7330-459b-a947-be6767a1099d
The maps on this are great ^
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
There exist climatic conditions which make it extremely likely that famines and mass migration occur.
And the world system is rather fragile if such events were to occur. We saw how disruptive even a relatively small mass migration from Syria was, or similarly with Venezuela. What happens when it’s the population behemoths of India Pakistan, Bangladesh, and East Africa simultaneously? (Chosen for their horribly unfortunate proneness to the extreme heat).
What happens when you get a few bad years for crops and suddenly food is very expensive? People riot, of course, and we see general chaos in the world system. (Sometimes waves of riots end up with civil wars, it’s a dangerous fuel).
And of course, all the tipping points are important, as they may push us several 0.1 degrees warmer ontop of all our emissions. There is the Amazon dieback, there is the permafrost thaw, there is the changing Arctic albedo, there is the North Atlantic Circulation slowdown, etc.
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