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Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial Civ

For discussions of events and conditions not necessarily related to Peak Oil.

Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial Civilization

Peak Oil
12
20%
Climate change
11
18%
Nuclear War
4
7%
Social upheaval
9
15%
Water/Food shortages
3
5%
Economic chaos.
18
30%
Disease/Pandemic
3
5%
 
Total votes : 60

Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby Plantagenet » Sat 09 Jan 2021, 22:55:24

aadbrd wrote: The dominant personality trait of your average American is of the troll, someone for whom every interaction is some flavor of insult. Everything is intended to score some sort of point. And this is true of both ideological poles. All social interactions have been gamified. There are only allies and enemies. I am glad that I chose never to waste my time joining Twitter because I think that above else has encouraged this kind of drive-by swipe approach.


Gosh, where do you live?

I meet all kinds of nice people here in Alaska, and when I travel around the US I meet more nice people, especially in small towns and rural areas. People aren't nearly as friendly in big cities, IMHO, but the average American I meet in my travels is a nice, helpful, friendly person.

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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby Ibon » Sat 09 Jan 2021, 22:55:46

Good post aadbrd
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby Pops » Sun 10 Jan 2021, 12:11:24

Ibon wrote:One area where I have optimism is on this point you make about everyone in America being hyper-individualistic..... this for me is a clear hallmark of our dying baby boomer generation.

I agree, it is all about the Boomers. If you read the 4 Turnings stuff, the boomer generation is of their "Prophet" generations: indulged as children they become insufferable moralists in adulthood—whether for or against. That's us.

As for MIllennials:
"More Millennials endorse strongly egalitarian views than previous generations," they write. "However, this trend is offset by the many Millennials who maintain ambivalent or traditional views."


Millennials are leaving religion out of skepticism and influence from Leftist Boomers but also because of the sexist attitudes of mainstream religion and it's rightward stagger in reaction to liberal "gains" these last years. The Schlafly revolt against equal rights, Brown v Board and “segregation academies,” Jerry Falwell et al, and on and on have soured Millennials.

That reactionary lurch of some white evangelicals to the right has morphed into the white-Christian-nationalist, hyper-masculine sect that elected trump, deny COVID and blame it on the heathen Chinese, and dress up as superheroes for an insurrection. There is a whole cultural cult out there who got tired of Jesus's turn the cheek, be nice to beggars, "cuck" attitude. People outside this life can't figure out why people who follow Jesus could vote for trump, they ascribe it to "judges" or whatever transactional gamble—they don't have any idea that Jesus is no longer a role model. trump is Badass Jesus come to deliver the deserving back to power.


Donald Trump and Militant Evangelical Masculinity
Indeed, white evangelical support for Trump can be seen as the culmination of a decades-long embrace of militant masculinity, a masculinity that has enshrined patriarchal authority, condoned a callous display of power at home and abroad, and functioned as a linchpin in the political and social worldviews of conservative white evangelicals. In the end, many evangelicals did not vote for Trump despite their beliefs, but because of them.


Amazon:
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values.

Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”



So, don't expect any great epiphanies from the "trump base" or even rescue by Millennials. Trump wasn't an anomaly or one-time transactional "deal" he was literally an answer to prayer. Expect more of the same.

.
PS, I guess that's a vote for Social Upheaval.
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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby jedrider » Sun 10 Jan 2021, 17:11:31

Thanks Pop, for that quote:

Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”
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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sun 10 Jan 2021, 19:47:41

Before you schedule the funeral for the small rural communities you might want to check how many of them have balanced budgets and manageable debt compared to the major cities which are billions behind in spite of sky high tax rates.
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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby Pops » Mon 11 Jan 2021, 12:53:12

vtsnowedin wrote:Before you schedule the funeral for the small rural communities you might want to check how many of them have balanced budgets and manageable debt compared to the major cities which are billions behind in spite of sky high tax rates.

You need a tax base to have government services and debt, ghosts don't pay taxes—but yeah, no debt.

Small towns are dying: industrial ag, automation, walmart and amazon, offshoring, urban wages and excitement, etc are killing them. The square here has the county courthouse, jail, city hall, title company and one attorney. Walmart out by the interstate, truckstop, farm store, red caboose cafe.
Biggest employers are schools, government, medicine, all mostly tax based.

My Bold:
Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. They make up 36% of all counties. Between 2008, the cusp of the Great Recession, and 2017, they enjoyed nearly 99% of all job and population growth.

What remained of job and population growth was divided among the 21% of counties that are called micropolitans, which have midsized cities with between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, and the remaining 42% of counties that are rural.

Nationally, 71% of all metropolitan counties grew between 2008 and 2017, but more than half of the remaining micropolitan and rural counties did not grow or shrank in population.


I love small towns and rural life, hurts me to see them die. I almost always lived in or around small towns. Since the internet I've hoped it would enable a resurgence, a distributed workforce. I moved way out at the very edge of the internet as soon as it was possible—I have fond hopes for StarLink for the same reason.

Maybe after the collapse of industrial civilization?

.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby Plantagenet » Wed 13 Jan 2021, 01:52:26

Pops wrote:Small towns are dying: industrial ag, automation, walmart and amazon, offshoring, urban wages and excitement, etc are killing them.


That was pre-2020. Everything is different now after the pandemic and the summer of black lives matter riots.

Numerous studies are showing that big cities like Chicago and New York and San Francisco are now losing population. And who's going? Mostly young, mostly white professionals
who have discovered that they can do their jobs from anywhere using ZOOM and other online cloud-based packages and they don't have to worry about urban problems, including the rapidly rising urban crime rates.

And where are they going? Mostly to small towns and smaller "second-tier" cities. Now not every small town is attractive to these young professionals...but you go to Bozeman, Mt. or
to coastal Maine or to Florida or Idaho or other areas where there is skiing or sailing or hiking or a university and a hot cultural scene (hot for a small town) and real estate is BOOMING.
For instance Real Estate prices in places like Bozeman MT have just about doubled over the summer.....and all because many young professionals are fleeing LA and fleeing New York
and fleeing Chicago and resettling in nice small towns.

real-estate-market-continues-to-boom-in-Montana]

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Re: Most immediate threat or cause of collapse of Industrial

Unread postby evilgenius » Wed 13 Jan 2021, 05:37:02

aadbrd wrote:When I used the term communitarian I meant a sense of belonging to part of a larger community, a diverse one. And the largest community people have withdrawn from is the sense of the US as a whole. We now live in at minimum two Americas, red and blue, and then it breaks down further from there. What you said about hyper-individualism is true, though.

I think people have lost their social skills altogether. The dominant personality trait of your average American is of the troll, someone for whom every interaction is some flavor of insult. Everything is intended to score some sort of point. And this is true of both ideological poles. All social interactions have been gamified. There are only allies and enemies. I am glad that I chose never to waste my time joining Twitter because I think that above else has encouraged this kind of drive-by swipe approach.

I have thought for a long time that this rewiring of the brain would eventually spill out into how we deal with each other face to face. And it has. Even before COVID we were reeling from what seemed like one mass shooting a week for a while. There is a profound lack of empathy, a spiritual void at the center of the american psyche and it doesn't matter whether it's some guy who goes through the motions attending the local megachurch while retweeting calls to put Fauci's head on a spike or some holier than though pink-haired SJW who is spending all her time piling onto JK Rowling.

I think America is experiencing a crisis of discovery. The discovery we can't make is what the truth is. Humanity has evolved intellectually over time to understand the truth by one of two mechanisms, reason or experience. There is actually a third component by which that discovery can be made, but it is not an independent category per se. It is the category which is made up of the blending of those two methods. Right now, we are so oversold upon whichever method, depending upon which side we are on, that we distrust the other method. As a whole, we are not moving in the third category.

The third category is the one in which people respect whichever method they are not currently using. They know the value of it because they have found truth with it before. From the point of view of the third category, we have always been able to find the restraint not to bash one group or another that we always knew hadn't gotten things quite right. There was always a possibility they saw something else that was important. Religion, for instance, always fell into that light. Alas, if there are any questions like that, we have an army of like minded people at our fingertips who will all tell us soothing things that we want to hear.

It could be that we are operating in the third category, but that it takes a kind of wisdom to do so? We let our percentage of the blend determine what we think is wise. We may be too accepting of what is like us, and rejecting of what isn't, as we go about seeking wisdom.
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