Trump's Payroll Tax Cut Will Kill Social Security by 2023
- Thread starter Buyetyen
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It's neither a steady process, nor is their perfection in the future, but people work very hard for better one step at a time. That is the theory of progress. That is progressivism. That's what I believe.
You are correct, "the system" isn't always improvement, but improvement is always part of the system. Those who declare the whole thing broken and rotten condemn not just the sins and the mistakes, but also every success. It disregards every good done by society, and the goods outweigh the bads by a tremendous margin.
Seems like that's gonna depend on whether "the system" leads to irrecoverable environmental collapse in this century, doesn't it?
America was the great experiment in democracy. I think at this point we have enough data to conclude that while liberal democracies are a viable model of government, our way of doing it is really stupid and counterproductive.
A) It won't.
B) Would we prefer a world without the industrial revolution? I'm sure you recognize the world is better in many ways from what people have done, particularly through petroleum products. There are flaws and side effects, yes. But that's criticism of imperfect solutions, and should be judged as that, rather than pretending people shouldn't even try to fix problems.
That's adorable.
A lot of times, I think we'd all be happier in a world without the agricultural revolution.
Do I? Sure, I can drive 50 miles to work every day, and I've got a computer, but I've also got poorer air, poorer night skies, a world order of boundless human suffering to fuel my people's consumerism, and my generation isn't really feeling the wealth and personal satisfaction of meaningful work from all that oil.
Oh God, I'm probably lying again, I hate it when I do that.
Isn't that your position, pretending that we shouldn't try to replace a broken system with a better one?
By chance have you read the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari?
Trading saber-tooth cat attacks for mass shootings was something of a step down for us, I think. At least the cat only takes down one victim at a time and actually eats what it catches. Can't even say that shit of most hunters today.
Ayup. I'm not as fond of it as Guns, Germs, and Steel, or some other more serious history texts (Harari wears his biases on his sleeve, and I wish he'd actually gone into detail about modern studies on still existing hunter-gatherer societies to reinforce his points rather than just declaring them factual), but it gave me a lot, and I mean a lot, of food for thought about the human condition both modern and ancient, and our place relative to the rest of the planet's ecology.
Even aside from that-- we're the only species who spends the majority of our time doing shit we don't want to do. And we're meant to be the best one?
"You're born in debt. And you spend the rest of your life working to pay off that debt while gaining more of it. You have to work to live, but you spend all your time working instead of living. SCREW YOU CAPITALISM!!"
-Aggretsuko
Silvy, c'mon, what would the world be like if nobody had invented air conditioning? It's too terrible to contemplate such an alternative reality. As a southernor, I firmly believe that the invention of A/C proves humanity as God's chosen people, and the rest of the universe can suck it.
Huh, maybe I should actually give that a watch, I got put off of it cuz of all of @tippy2k2 's meming about it (somewhere else away from the forums). And I have several references who will testify on the stand that a Tippy recommendation means to stay away.
The show really takes a scalpel to late-stage capitalism and Japanese work culture. Season 2 in particular features a character who explicitly says his goal is to make capitalism obsolete. I had to do some research before I found out that one other season 2 character is meant to be implied to suffer PTSD from cram school.
Mmm, I can sort of relate to that. In the schools I grew up in, there were more Asian kids than white kids. A lot of those Asian kid stereotypes, in regards to the tiger parents and after-schooling and such, are unfortunately true. I was a witness to at least one in-class nervous breakdown that I remember back in middle school.
USA
Yea, one of my Vietnamese-American friends Is constantly mocking his Mom for being the typical "scary angry Asian Mom" who will cut you if you get anything other than a perfect score on everything and would talk about how she literally chased them (him and his little brother) around the house with knives screaming crazy shit at them.. They recorded her once and played it in guild chat. It was frightening.. My Mom could be scary when she was mad, but his mom was a whole other level of scary.. People going to get PTSD just from listening to her in guild chat. XD
EDIT( But see.. even though she was crazy scary.. they thought it was funny to make her get mad and go crazy so they would do stuff on purpose just to watch her lose her shit. This was a form of entertainment for him and his brother rather than a punishment.. the madder she got, the more she threw stuff at them and chased them or hurt them, the funnier they seemed to think it was)
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...hang on, it actually started in Guangdong? Fucking hell, that takes Contagion (2011 movie) from "eerily coincidental" to "absolutely spooky prediction". Pandemic of a respiratory virus jumps from bats to humans in Guangdong province - which is already just two provinces over or about 800km from Wuhan - and goes global via Hong Kong and Macau. And on release it was majorly praised for its scientific accuracy, too.
This whole thing's also been unsettlingly close to the early chapters of World War Z, too, but I digress.