rockdoc123 wrote:The solution
There's two different things here. There are ideal-world prescriptions and then there are viable platforms based on how the world actually works and how the normies sway with the breeze.
As much as we disagree, we are more clued in to the reality of the situation than normies. So what we'd support and what they'd support are two different things. It doesn't really accomplish much for us to sit around the campfire and prescribe solutions if our prescriptions are acceptable to only 0.00001% of the population.
My personal wish would be for the government to be a technocracy. To ascend to positions of power would be mostly a function of intelligence. You can see how democracy of late has done the opposite. GW Bush and Trump are both mental incompetents.
Even Trump's own exiting cabinet stream feels this way about him, that he's perhaps so dumb that he should be forced out of office. I say this not to bash Trump as much as to indict the entire democratic experiment insofar as we get the government we deserve.
If you step back enough the picture that emerges is a bleak one, namely that people are, generally, dumb, selfish, and driven by tribal loyalties of one brand or another. This has the net effect of creating the situation we have now, i.e. tragedy of the commons.
It's rare to have philospher kings who galvanize the public to do positive things. This is why there is so much nostalgia for someone like JFK. More often than not leaders ascend to power by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Brain-stem motives lead to yeast in petri dish outcomes. So for the most part I don't see leaders as leading as much as being a product of the current zeitgeist.
So when we have threads here and people say "this is the solution, I've been pushing it for x years" doesn't there come a time where you concede that such solutions are effectively hopeless due to a lack of support beyond a small clique of clued-in doomers?
I'm all for people spitballing ideas but in the end it's just pissing in the wind. We sit around in our silo preaching to the converted while the Amazon burns and Greenland melts.
When I venture out into the world I know where I can apply some body-english to the problem, at the voting box or through personal consumption habits, and I do that as a matter of sheer principle. But at the same time I have to concede to the ultimate hopelessness of the situation as a whole whether we hit the wall at 50 or 150mph.