“Enlightenment Now” seems designed to reassure both Republicans, who worry about increasing drug use and terrorism, and Democrats, who see racism and sexism as the crises of our time. Despite fears of resurgent racism, the number of hate crimes in America has been falling for decades, while analyses of Internet searches, which reveal searchers’ hidden interests, indicate that racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes are also in retreat. What Pinker calls “emancipative values”—tolerance, feminism, and so on—are becoming more common even in old-fashioned societies. (Young people in the Middle East now hold social views comparable to the ones held by young Western Europeans in the nineteen-sixties.) Although there’s been a recent surge in drug overdoses in the U.S., most of those who die belong to “the druggy Baby Boomer cohort . . . born between 1953 and 1963.” Drug and alcohol use among teen-agers—with the exception of cannabis and vaping—is at its lowest level since 1976.
Pinker’s message is simple: progress is real, meaningful, and widespread. The mystery is why we have so much trouble acknowledging it. Pinker mentions various sources of pessimism—the “progressophobia” of liberal-arts professors, for instance—but directs most of his opprobrium toward the news media, which focus almost entirely on of-the-moment crises and systematically underreport positive, long-term trends. (Citing the German economist Max Roser, Pinker argues that a truly evenhanded newspaper “could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.”) He consults the work of Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist who uses “sentiment mining,” a word-analysis technique, to track the mood of the news; Leetaru finds that, globally, journalism has grown substantially more negative.
The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a mental habit that psychologists call the “availability heuristic”: because people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of “the ease with which instances come to mind,” they get the impression that mass shootings are more common than medical breakthroughs. We’re also guilty of “the sin of ingratitude.” We like to complain, and we don’t know much about the heroic problem-solvers of the past. “How much thought have you given lately to Karl Landsteiner?” Pinker asks. “Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his discovery of blood groups.”
Even as “Enlightenment Now” celebrates our ingenuity, it suggests that there’s something bratty about humankind: we just don’t want to admit how good we have it. In “It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear,” the journalist Gregg Easterbrook offers a wider-ranging account of our pessimism. In his view, it’s the result of various demographic, cultural, and political trends. The country is aging, and older people tend to be nostalgic and grumpy. Reaganism made “ritualized denunciation” of the government routine, encouraging cynicism among conservatives; among liberals, a focus on marginalized groups has led to the competitive articulation of suffering, creating a culture of “majority victimhood,” in which every group trumpets its grievances. “Claims for liability and compensation have increased,” Easterbrook notes, reflecting the rise of a punitive society obsessed with the assignment of blame; fewer people attend worship services, where they might hear messages of hope or have uplifting interactions with neighbors. Thanks to cable news, talk radio, and social media, “society has opinionized,” and it’s now “expected that all will possess strong views”; this has fed the rise of “catastrophism,” or the continual overstatement of what’s wrong. (“Everything is terrible” is a stronger view than “Things are pretty decent.”) Finally, technology has changed. Easterbrook cites psychological research suggesting that the physical proximity of our smartphones gives them uncanny power to influence our moods. It’s one thing to see an alarming headline on a TV across the room, and another to feel it vibrating in your pocket.
Perhaps we’ve come to see history itself as one bad news cycle after another. The word “history” used to evoke “traditions to be respected, legacies to be transmitted, knowledge to be elaborated, or deaths to be commemorated,” the French historiographer Henry Rousso points out, in “The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary.” After the traumas of the twentieth century, however, we began to define our historical era by “the most lethal moments of the near past”—the conflicts, wars, and atrocities that “have had the most difficulty ‘passing away.’ ” We “delimit the contemporary era” by referring to “the ends of wars or sometimes the beginnings of wars: the end of World War I, the end of World War II, the end of the Cold War.” (In America, we talk about the Vietnam era and the generation born after 9/11.) “Since 1945, all contemporary history begins with ‘the latest catastrophe,’ ” Rousso concludes. We see the past in terms of crises, and imagine the future that way, too.
Pessimism may even answer to our spiritual needs. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in his book “A Secular Age,” from 2007, argued that modern life is characterized by a sense of individual spiritual obligation. In pre-Reformation Europe, ordinary people were held to lower spiritual standards than monks, priests, and nuns, and a member of the laity might live an imperfect, worldly life and still be saved, as long as he supported, through prayer or alms, the work of the “virtuosi.” Such a system, Taylor writes, “involved accepting that masses of people were not going to live up to the demands of perfection.” Eventually, Protestantism intervened, making individuals responsible for their own salvation. In the new way of life that emerged, religion was democratized, and each person was charged with spiritual self-stewardship. Part of this shift involved a political credo. In Taylor’s précis: “We are all responsible for each other, and for society as a whole.”
Today, we tend to conceive the credo of social responsibility as an ethical idea, justifiable on secular grounds. Still, it remains tied to an inner, devotional imperative. We know that we accomplish little by reading the news, and sense that our infinite, tragic news feeds distort, rather than enhance, our picture of reality. Still, it feels wrong to outsource the work of salvation to Bill and Melinda Gates, and presumptuous to trust too much in the power of good works. Pessimism can be a form of penance, and of spiritual humility in a humanist age.
Pinker urges us to overcome these cultural, psychological, political, and spiritual biases, and to take a more objective view of the world. But human beings are not objective creatures. When social scientists write about life expectancy, educational attainment, nutrition, crime, and the other issues Pinker addresses, they often use the abbreviation Q.O.L., for “quality of life.” They use S.W.B. to refer to “subjective well-being”—the more elusive phenomenon of happiness, fulfillment, or life satisfaction. In “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’s media tycoon enjoys high Q.O.L. and low S.W.B. He is healthy, wealthy, and unhappy. The question is whether what befalls individuals might also befall societies. If so, life could be getting much better objectively, on the social scale, without getting all that much better subjectively, on the individual scale.
The most obvious way to tackle this question is to survey people from different societies. The annual World Happiness Report combines data from Gallup opinion surveys with economic and sociological studies; it finds that, in general, citizens of high-Q.O.L. countries (Finland, Norway, Canada, Germany) report higher levels of S.W.B. than citizens of low-Q.O.L. countries (Venezuela, Chad, Laos, Iraq). Look closely, though, and the story is more nuanced. Although economics shapes S.W.B., so do social and political factors: despite immense economic growth, Chinese citizens are no happier today than they were in 1990 (fraying social ties, created by rural-to-urban migration, may be to blame), while in many Latin-American countries people report higher S.W.B. than their otherwise low Q.O.L. predicts. (Latin-American respondents often cite their strong family bonds as a special source of happiness.)
In the United States, the two measures have diverged. Although per-capita income has more than doubled since 1972, Americans’ S.W.B. has stagnated or even declined. In a contribution to the 2018 World Happiness Report, the economist Jeffrey Sachs attributes this divergence to a public-health crisis centered on obesity, drug abuse, and depression, and to a growing disillusionment with business and government. From all this data, the picture is one of large-scale predictability and small-scale volatility. Thanks to broad improvements in quality of life, today’s children are likelier to be happier than their grandparents were. But within any shorter span of time—a decade, a generation, an electoral cycle—there’s no guarantee that S.W.B. won’t decline even as Q.O.L. continues to rise.
These metrics may reflect something fundamental about how we experience life. Many psychologists now subscribe to the “set point” theory of happiness, according to which mood is, to some extent, homeostatic: at first, our new cars, houses, or jobs make us happy, but eventually we adapt to them, returning to our “set points” and ending up roughly as happy or unhappy as we were before. Researchers say that we run on “hedonic treadmills”—we chase new sources of happiness as the old ones expire—and that our set points are largely immovable and determined by disposition. Some fundamental changes can affect our happiness in a lasting way—getting married, immigrating to a wealthy country, developing a drug addiction—but many life improvements are impermanent in character. Although food quality may have been worse in 1967, the pleasure of today’s better meals is intrinsically fleeting. More people survive heart attacks than in the past, but the relief of surviving wears off as one returns to the daily grind.
The set-point theory is dispiriting, since it implies limits to how happy progress can make us, but it also suggests that progress is more widespread than we feel it to be. This last conclusion, though, makes sense only if we define “progress” in a certain way. “Imagine Seema, an illiterate woman in a poor country who is village-bound, has lost half her children to disease, and will die at fifty, as do most of the people she knows,” Pinker writes:
Now imagine Sally, an educated person in a rich country who has visited several cities and national parks, has seen her children grow up, and will live to eighty, but is stuck in the lower middle class. It’s conceivable that Sally, demoralized by the conspicuous wealth she will never attain, is not particularly happy, and she might even be unhappier than Seema, who is grateful for small mercies. Yet it would be mad to suppose that Sally is not better off.
Pinker is right: Sally is better off. To say so, however, is to acknowledge that we can be better off without feeling that way—working two jobs to pay tuition and save for retirement, Sally still suffers—or worse off without knowing it. Progress is objective and impersonal, at least in part, and can unfold without making us happier. “The goal of progress,” Pinker concludes, “cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric.” Quality of life is higher today, no matter what you think, and it was lower under Communism, no matter how you feel about those whole-night concerts and epic soccer games. A blissful existence in the Matrix wouldn’t count as progress. There’s more to life than subjective well-being.
In a book titled “The Optimism Gap: The I’m OK–They’re Not Syndrome and the Myth of American Decline,” from 1998, the public-policy reporter David Whitman cited statistics showing that, in nearly every domain of life—crime, pollution, health, income, happiness—Americans were optimistic about themselves but pessimistic about society as a whole. While believing that crime was rising in general, they congratulated themselves for living in neighborhoods that were mostly crime-free; convinced that the economy was getting worse, they remained confident about their own earning potential. Pinker, too, finds that people are afraid for civilization but hopeful about themselves. Certain that those around them are living lives of quiet desperation, they continue to predict increases in their own life satisfaction. But it seems that this optimism gap isn’t just inaccurate; it’s pretty much backward. The world, as an objective whole, has been getting better. It’s our individual experiences of life that are unlikely to improve. We should be optimistic about civilization but neutral about our own future happiness.
A final reason for doubting progress is the future, in all its terrifying potentiality. One of Pinker’s most persistent critics is the statistician and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan,” “Fooled by Randomness,” and other explorations of uncertainty. For the past few years, in a relentless barrage of tweets and Facebook posts, Taleb has responded to Pinker’s optimism by distinguishing between “thin-tailed” historical trends—picture the trailing ends of a bell curve—which are likely to continue indefinitely, and “fat-tailed” ones, which retain their capacity to surprise. Pinker shows that, during the past century, per-capita deaths from fire have declined by ninety per cent in the United States. In Taleb’s view, this is a thin-tailed trend, since it’s the result of innovations, such as better materials and building codes, that are unlikely to reverse themselves. By contrast, the decline in deaths from terrorism—far more people were killed by terrorists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—is a fat-tailed trend; as Taleb writes on Facebook, “one biological event can decimate the population.” Pessimists of the Taleb school argue that we underestimate the number of fat-tailed trends. In a review of “Enlightenment Now,” the theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson imagines a hypothetical book, published in 1923, about “the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews.” The authors of such a book, Aaronson writes, would have reassured themselves that “an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously” for that progress to be reversed—which, needless to say, is what happened.
Maybe our views about progress depend on our time horizons. Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World” tells the stories of two researchers, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug, who occupied opposing sides of the twentieth-century debate about the human population. In Mann’s terms, Vogt was a “prophet”: he predicted that, unless global population growth could be slowed, worldwide famine would result. Borlaug was a “wizard,” who argued that innovations in agriculture would make it possible for farmers to feed everyone. In the event, Borlaug was right: the “Green Revolution,” which he spearheaded, dramatically increased crop yields and saved billions of lives. But the deeper debate between the two sides—“Cut back or produce more?”—persists, this time around climate change. Today, pessimistic prophets argue that radical conservation is the only way to avoid a climatic apocalypse, while optimistic wizards propose innovating our way out of the crisis, perhaps through geoengineering or the creation of new energy sources. Our species seems to face a fork in the road: “If a government persuades its citizenry to spend huge sums revamping offices, stores, and homes with the high-tech insulation and low-water-use plumbing urged by Prophets,” Mann writes, “the same citizenry will resist ponying up for Wizards’ new-design nuclear plants and monster desalination facilities.”
Mann thinks the wizard–prophet distinction reflects a fundamental biological reality. If bacteria are left to grow in a petri dish, they’ll multiply quickly, then consume all their resources and die. The same goes for all species adaptive enough to flourish unconstrained. At first, “the world is their petri dish,” Mann writes. “Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment. . . . Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food.” A biologist tells Mann that “it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out.”
Both wizards and prophets hope that we can break this pattern. Wizards exhort us to “soar beyond natural constraints” using technology. (Think of Elon Musk, with his solar roof tiles and spaceships.) Prophets implore us to reach, through conservation and political reform, a “steady-state accommodation” with nature. (“What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources,” the activist Naomi Klein writes.) Both sides agree that progress of a general sort isn’t enough: unless we adopt a decisive and coherent survival strategy, we’ll become victims of our own success. “The Wizard and the Prophet” provides an unsettling coda to “Enlightenment Now.” Pinker could be right in the short term but wrong in the long term. Maybe the world is getting better, but not better enough, or in the right ways.
In the Middle Ages, painters used triptychs to sum up the state of the world. On the left, one might see our origins, in the Garden of Eden; in the center, ordinary, terrestrial life; on the right, the torments of Hell. Above it all, Christ floats in Heaven, surrounded by angels: our redemptive future. One longs for a modern equivalent—a data-driven version of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment” or Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” equal to the contradictions of the human situation.
In “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” the Swedish global-health statistician Hans Rosling, who wrote the book with his son and daughter-in-law, tries to find such a picture. Most depictions of the world, Rosling thinks, are either too optimistic or too pessimistic; if they don’t succumb to despair, they seem to look too quickly away from suffering. Rosling adopts a mantra—“Bad and better”—to avoid these extremes. “Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator,” he suggests:
The baby’s health status is extremely bad, and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. . . . That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
Rosling’s image captures many of the perplexities of our collective situation. We desperately want the baby to survive. We also know that survival doesn’t guarantee happiness. The baby is struggling, and suffering, and will continue to do so; as a result, we’re more likely to be happy for her than she is to be happy for herself. (Pinker, similarly, is happier for us than we are.) It’s possible, moreover, that she’ll be saved only temporarily. No one is ever truly out of the woods.
In the meantime, the baby’s survival depends on the act of diagnosis. Until her ailments are identified, they can’t be cured. Problems and progress are inextricable, and the history of improvement is also the history of problem-discovery. Diagnosis, of course, is an art in itself; it’s possible to misunderstand problems, or to overstate them, and, in doing so, to make them worse. But a world in which no one complained—in which we only celebrated how good we have it—would be a world that never improved. The spirit of progress is also the spirit of discontent. ♦
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 4:13 pm
“Does the psych ward know you smuggled in a mobile phone? You are in a deep state of paranoia..”
translation: “If I can’t face the truth then try to change the topic”…lol what a dumb kid that can’t even admit failure.
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 4:15 pm
“Why don’t you ask yourself, Exceptionalist!”
LMFAO, did I bitch slap you earlier boney juan and now you take a lame shot at me. What a pussy
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 4:20 pm
kid dumbass, I am looking for a reference that Trump is making that claim. Your stupid (economists said November 16) BS don’t cut it. This is typical of your empty comments littered with deception and embellishments. Did you cheat your way through your fantasy PHD?
Cloggie on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 4:39 pm
Now is a good time to waste yourself, millimind. Here are the New Masters of the Universe for ya:
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/donald-trump-und-wladimir-putin-anfang-einer-freundschaft-a-1218790.html
Bye-bye George Soros, Richard Haass, Paul Krugman, Diane Feinstein, etc, etc.
Mind the step on the way out! Mazzeltov!
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 5:48 pm
“Are Things Getting Better or Worse?”
Just like in real estate, it’s “Location, location, location.”
If you live in a growing country, it is getting better every day. Most of Asia and some of Africa, and a few South American and European countries.
See the map here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/worlds-fastest-growing-economies/
If you live in the OECD (developed) countries, like the Us, and those not in the above class, it is getting worse. Much worse.
The Great Leveling in progress. Slip slidin’…
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:06 pm
“How does it feel to be a looser kid?”
Looser than what?
And how would you know whether MM is loose or tight Davy?
Antius on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:14 pm
“If you live in a growing country, it is getting better every day. Most of Asia and some of Africa, and a few South American and European countries.”
Makati, isn’t that because these places were shit poor to begin with? One of the paradoxes of wealth. It is much easier for a country with a $1000/capita GDP to double its wealth, than it would be for an already wealthy country which already has fifty times that income level. It is called diminishing returns. It isn’t a sign of failure, it is just a sign of inherent limitations.
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:14 pm
Good work grehggie, I will make an effort to return the favor:
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:16 pm
Antius, that is too inconvient for 3rd word. He prefers his imagination over reality.
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:17 pm
“LMFAO, did I bitch slap you earlier boney juan and now you take a lame shot at me. What a pussy”
There is nobody on this forum with the username boney juan Davy, you haven’t ‘bitch slapped’ anyone, and what do cats have to do with anything?
Just more of your usual delusions.
Go and speak with a mental healthcare professional, and please leave the comments and debate to the adults.
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:34 pm
“Good work grehggie, I will make an effort to return the favor:”
There is nobody on this forum with the username grehggie, Davy, and as per usual, what the ‘f’ are you going on about? What favour?
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:39 pm
Antius: Maybe you should take some advice from this quote:
“Never judge people who have little to nothing as one day you may find yourself having nothing at all.”
That is in your future if you are an American. Better to move down the ladder voluntarily than to fall from the top. SPLAT!
Be patient. The fall is coming.
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:39 pm
“Antius, that is too inconvient for 3rd word. He prefers his imagination over reality.”
There is nobody on this forum with the username ‘3rd word’, Davy, and if anybody here lives in an imaginary world, that would be you.
You are completely delusional buddy. Even the forum members that you keep referring to do not exist.
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 6:51 pm
Davy is a frustrated, immature, delusional, teat sucker, Greg. Living off of his family and hating everyone.
I always get the impression that he would like to strike out and hit all of us who see him for what he really is and point it out.
I do see him “going postal” at some point. I hope he gets help before that happens so others are not hurt. He stalks all of us here as if we were his prey.
He could not exist in a city or regular job so he hides in the most backward, uneducated, inbred part of the Us.
JuanP on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:06 pm
Delusional Davy “LMFAO, did I bitch slap you earlier boney juan and now you take a lame shot at me. What a pussy”
These past few days I have been posting comments mirroring Davy’s. I have copied his words, expressions, attitudes, and behaviors. I have behaved like a kindergarden’s bully giving him pejorative nicknames, bullying him, abusing him, systematically contradicting him, throwing tantrums, and picking fights. He responds to this pretty much like Pavlov’s dog, as do nis multiple personalities. LOL!
JuanP on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:10 pm
… his multiple personalities. Will the exceptionalist give me hell for my typo? LOL! At least I succeeded in making him write better sometimes and taught him to use paragraph breaks. His word salads and rants used to be unintelligible before that.
Antius on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:11 pm
“I always get the impression that he would like to strike out and hit all of us who see him for what he really is and point it out.”
How many people here have actually met each other?
Wouldn’t it be funny if most of the people here were just AI computer programs that call each other silly names to make it look like the board is being used?
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:18 pm
A reminder that Robert Mueller who has presented these indictments without presenting evidence…
is the same Mueller who lied on behalf of the intelligence community to start the Iraq war.
https://twitter.com/bullshit_hero/status/1018454587424964608
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:18 pm
Ant, we are real people. Well, at least I am. Are you? LOL
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:24 pm
bTW Ant, I am glad I will never meet Davy or MM or a few others here. It would be too dangerous. I prefer sane people.
There are a few others here whom I would like for neighbors, like GregT and JuanP.
But, this is the internet and we are scattered all over the world. When the net goes down for the last time, we will only have those physically around us to rely on. I am working to build a friendly, trusting, co-operative, self-sufficient relationship with my neighbors. I hope you are doing the same.
Antius on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:26 pm
“Ant, we are real people. Well, at least I am. Are you? LOL”
How would you ever know? I am just a ghost behind a computer screen. I do find it amusing the frustration that so many here have over people they have never met 🙂
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:28 pm
“How many people here have actually met each other?”
If you care to go back about five years ago Antius, and read the comments here, people for the most part got along and treated each other with common courtesy and respect. Until Davy went off of the deep end that is.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, many posters here, including myself, have absolutely had enough of his five year long tirade of personal attacks, name calling, and childish BS.
Enough is enough.
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:29 pm
3rd world you are a scrawny old white guy in a sea of color 3rd world country. When or if SHTF you will be wishing you had family, friends, and solid relationships from the US. You will likely die lonely and broken. Sad
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:30 pm
Is this the setup for the next 9/11?
“Two Department of Energy security officials tasked with transporting deadly substances left plutonium in the back of their Ford Expedition, where it was promptly stolen from a Marriott parking lot in San Antonio.”
“… authorities still have no clue as to the whereabouts of what the government admits are “bomb-usable materials”.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-16/us-officials-robbed-plutonium-and-dirty-bomb-materials
Slip slidin’…
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:30 pm
Putin laughs and waves aside Mueller’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers during Fox News interview
http://www.businessinsider.com/putin-laughs-at-mueller-indictment-russian-gru-officials-fox-news-interview-2018-7
Well see who gets the last laugh Vladdy boy..Nobody laughs at the elders..
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:32 pm
Madkat
Remember before peak oil part one happened we got hit with 911..Now peak oil part two is coming in a few years..So expect the same thing but bigger..And it will be blamed on Russia..And they will be nuked back into the stone ages..
Antius on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:34 pm
“In case you haven’t figured it out yet, many posters here, including myself, have absolutely had enough of his five year long tirade of personal attacks, name calling, and childish BS.”
Maybe its the world’s longest practical joke? I find it difficult to care very much about anything that is said here, even when Cloggie yanks my chain over Brexit. It is an obscure internet chat room, full of people (allegedly) that have never met and never will.
Davy on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:34 pm
Until the Canadian anti-Americans went off of the deep end with attacks both personal and nationalistic. When I first came to this board I was naive about Canadians. They were actually the people I felt a kinship to but the quickly changed once I met them. Now I understand the backstabbers they really are. I am talking the so called intellectuals. The sheeple Canadians are for the most part fine. It is the people like grehger that think they are smart and clever that are the hypocritical trash the country is producing these days.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:39 pm
I bet they hit Putin with a dirty bomb..Blow up half of Moscow..To send him a message..
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:48 pm
Look who it is Robert Mueller testifying before congress on behalf of the intelligence community that Iraq has WMD’s..
https://twitter.com/bullshit_hero/status/1018454587424964608
He is a great liar..Busted! Oh well..The media will never tell anyone..
LMFAO!
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 7:58 pm
“Until the Canadian anti-Americans went off of the deep end with attacks both personal and nationalistic. When I first came to this board I was naive about Canadians.”
“It is the people like grehger that think they are smart and clever that are the hypocritical trash the country is producing these days.”
This is exactly the childish BS that I was referring to. Both of my wife’s parents were Americans, and I have good friends and family members throughout the States.
Until you show myself and others here basic common courtesy and respect Davy, and put an end to the constant name calling, childish rhetoric, and delusional accusations, this does not stop.
Your choice.
fmr-paultard on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 8:08 pm
if i have an atractive PhD gf who can teach me geopolitics why should i feel inferior to supertrads county america?
kicking the anti-american dog made of granite should hurt, why keep doing it?
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 8:16 pm
My wife, paul-tard, like most women, is not the least bit interested in geopolitics.
And your ‘anti-American dog made of granite’ is a figment of your imagination. In other words, it does not exist.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 8:20 pm
Venezuela facing ‘economic collapse,’ IMF warns
http://www.france24.com/en/20180716-venezuela-facing-economic-collapse-imf-warns?ref=tw_i
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 8:46 pm
This site has an unusual collection of insane people, and they all seem to be living in the Us. Day, MM, fmr-, Boat, etc. Or are they all just in denial?
Imaginary stone dogs, oily dreams, delusional views of the real world, arrogance, immaturity, uneducated, frustrated, suicidal. Did I miss any adjectives? They are why the Us is going down fast.
The average American is so brainwashed that they think they are still the “exceptional”/”indispensable” country when they are just the opposite, as they will soon find out.
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 8:47 pm
…Davy, Mm, ….
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 9:12 pm
Hope you like your planet well done..
https://imgur.com/a/mZPVb3G
Now be a good little sheep and watch love island
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 9:20 pm
Madkat
I have never denied the US is going to collapse..I just know that so is the entire OECD and the global economy..
Do you want me to cite the data of OECD and Global GDP decline?
Now shut the fuck up already..You are the one who is denying and only focusing on the US..
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:26 pm
“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” ― George Carlin
“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”― Benjamin Franklin
Nuff said.
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:28 pm
“Now shut the fuck up already..You are the one who is denying and only focusing on the US..”
Those who are most reliant on the global economy and JIT delivery systems, will be affected the most when they are gone.
It isn’t exactly rocket science MM.
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:29 pm
Imight add:
“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” ― Hendrik Willem van Loon
^_^
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:33 pm
Greg, some just don’t accept that the higher they are, the harder they fall. It will be most painful for Americans who are used to wasting four times the resources that are their share than for a Filipino who has been living on much less than his/her fair share.
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:36 pm
As has been pointed out to you many times before Makati, Canada is in for just as much pain as the U.S. Is. Same shit, smaller pile.
Makati1 on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:43 pm
Greg, yes, I am aware of that, but I blame the US for most of the world’s problems today, not Canada. Australia, Japan and the other imperial wannabees are also going to suffer, but probably not to the same degree as Americans. Japan and Australia are moving away from the Us and towards their neighbor, China.
As for the 3rd world, or as it is now called “undeveloped”, the pain will be less. Maybe much less. My bet is on much less. We shall see.
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:50 pm
Madkat
Global GDP
1973 (4.4)
1984 (2.7)
1999 (1.8)
2016 (1.3)
2028 (0.0) Global Economic collapse
Source: World Bank
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locati
Any questions?
MASTERMIND on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 10:56 pm
Madkat
You are going to feel the pain..You old angry incel..And don’t worry if you run out of diapers you can just use your right hand, like the muzzies..
LMFAO!
GregT on Mon, 16th Jul 2018 11:06 pm
MM,
Between yourself, Davy, and fmr-tard, why do the three of you care so much about Makati’s choice to move away from the tax farm that he was born into?
Cloggie on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 12:03 am
Well see who gets the last laugh Vladdy boy..Nobody laughs at the elders..
I do.
You know what it is, millimind, you once had the Huns, from the depths of Asia, who terrorized Europe for a century or two. And then all of a sudden they disappeared, never to be heard of again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huns
Exactly the same is going to happen to your tribe of Khazars (“Talmud-Turks”), also from the depths of Asia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars
A satanic, sadistic, ruthless tribe, who with Marxist, financial and dialectical methods managed to descend upon the white Christian world in the 2nd half of the 19th century and began attempt to take it over and destroy it from within like a swarm of termites can do to a wooden house. Without it we would not have had the horrors of Bolshevism, WW2, multiculturalism, mass immigration and likely CW2/WW3. You managed to get America and Russia under control by 1933 and together destroyed the European world.
The handshake yesterday of Putin and Trump in Helsinki could mark the beginning of the end of the Tribe, but also the beginning of the end of the territorial integrity of the United States, in its present shape.
It is going to hurt a little.
https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Century-Yuri-Slezkine-ebook/dp/B005646E32/ref=sr_1_1
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 12:09 am
Clogg
Yea right..Trumps daughter married a Jew..And his is Israels bitch boy..You can’t beat the power players of the world..Trump is the fall guy for the oil crisis and next great recession 2.0..He is the globalist useful idiot.
LMFAO!
MASTERMIND on Tue, 17th Jul 2018 12:10 am
Trump Is Israel’s “Useful Idiot”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/selected-articles-trump-is-israels-useful-idiot/5647707