Trump camps and baby jails

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

LittleRaven, your image isn't loading for me. Is that Bezos or Elon Musk?

People saying "well they have to put the kids somewhere, they might have been taken here by coyotes!"
I am worried about the extent you will rationalize and defend things. Because once you put toddlers in cages, it's hard to see things going uphill from there.

[TGLS]

I think it's something like this:


Honestly, there are a few more factors (namely changes in the way C level executives are compensated) that are the cause of why the pay gap has grown enormously over the last few decades.

[LittleRaven]

LittleRaven, your image isn't loading for me. Is that Bezos or Elon Musk?

Neither. It's the first microchip. Bezos and Musk, as capital owners, are beneficiaries of the world automation has created, but they are not what is shifting the world, however much they and other may think so.

I am worried about the extent you will rationalize and defend things. Because once you put toddlers in cages, it's hard to see things going uphill from there.

You act like putting toddlers in cages represents some kind of nadir for humanity. Is it, really?

[Yukaphile]

Humanity is effed up and always has been and there's no light at the end of the tunnel in sight yet, and as far as I can tell, things are only going to get worse before they get better, if they even do at all with the impending climate change disaster.

[LittleRaven]

Humanity is effed up and always has been and there's no light at the end of the tunnel in sight yet, and as far as I can tell, things are only going to get worse before they get better, if they even do at all with the impending climate change disaster.

No. Humanity, for all its flaws, is amazing. We haven't dominated the planet by being effed up. There are 7 billion of us running around now, more than any scientist would have thought possible just a few decades ago, and we've managed that by being clever, empathetic, and cooperative. Sure, we have our darker side, but the better angels of our nature are slowly winning, and have been for a very long time.

[Yukaphile]

EMPATHETIC?! We fight all the time! We can't agree on anything! History is being rewritten at a rapid pace and crimes of the past are not being accounted for! If anything, we seem to be reverting to the most base aspects of our nature, giving in to hate and ready to start fighting each other like in the good old days over superficial differences that don't matter, or life-and-death wounds of the past that do matter that the other side doesn't think matters. It's horrible.

[LittleRaven]

EMPATHETIC?! We fight all the time! We can't agree on anything!

Hardly.

Tell you what. Take 200 chimpanzees, load them into a 737, then set out on a trans-Atlantic flight. You'll be lucky to land with 50 still alive. And yet tens of thousands of humans do this every day, with nary an incident. We ship billions of tons of food from where we have excess to where we need more. Despite possessing more technical killing power than ever before, fewer people die from warfare than any time in recorded history. We save babies born at just 23 weeks old. We live longer, grow taller, and are more educated. Humanity as a whole is more connected and powerful than we have ever been - which is good, because we have some pretty big challenges we'll need to tackle.

It's true that we're not in paradise. We were kicked out of that garden a long time ago. But make no mistake - we are finding our way back.

[Yukaphile]

But it's not just raw statistics and math. It's about pain and our perceptions of pain. It's about public image, and what people who are in the public eye say. It's about the elite and how they shape perception. And it's about how people sell us information, which is just getting warped and twisted with the passage of time to the point people can't tell what's false and real anymore. And it is severely depressing that many of the worst crimes of the past on par with the Nazis haven't been accounted for except by a handful. No, we're not in paradise. But we could be doing a hell of a lot better than this, and we're not living up to our potential. We DO, as you said, have an immense capacity for goodness, love, redemption, and selfless charity. But all I see in the world is just... bleeding stand wounds that's spilling over as the crisis approaches. Climate change is only getting worse, and I really think soon we'll have reached the point of no return. Hell, it appears many scientists seem on the verge of trying to find a way to gently break some very bad news that no one wants to listen to.

[Robovski]

Just stop engaging with the kid Raven, they are too committed to this emo dystopia at present. This is the best of all worlds as this is our only world, we don't get alternative ones to choose from and we can only change the course of the world with the levers we are given. If Yukaphile wants to see it all as ''everything is awful and humanity is worthless'' then hopefully they will see that viewpoint through and leave the world to those with brighter outlooks.

[LittleRaven]

But it's not just raw statistics and math. It's about pain and our perceptions of pain.

Anyone who's worked in an ER knows that 'perceptions of pain' are a horrible, HORRIBLE way to judge anything. There are people who will swear on their mother's grave they are on the verge of death but who are actually just jonesing for an opioide fix. There are people who are literally dying but will tell you they're perfectly fine - because shock has completely shut down their ability to judge their own condition. Raw statistics and math have their own issues, but they are the best tools we have to accurately measure anything.

If you want to go looking for pain and suffering, well, the world will not disappoint. It has been ever thus. But bit by tiny bit, we are pushing back the darkness. Climate change will be the great challenge of our era, but it's hardly the first great challenge we've faced and it's not likely to be our last.