Let's burn everything!

No more books!

No more cities!

No more schools!

No more society!

Why ban books when you can just burn them? Isn't that more fun?

In just two generations, no one will be able to read.

Without reading, knowledge, science, and civilization will end.

No need to take over school boards when there aren't any schools and no teachers to teach kids!

No more libraries to police! No more librarians! No more anything!

No more cities, freedom of thought, exchange of ideas, or new ways of thinking.

Yes, friends, after it's all over, and billions of people are dead, we can go back to being hunter-gatherers and pretend that the last twelve thousand years just never happened.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2022 09:27PM by anybody.

Evolution, not revolution. Idiocracy is a documentary.

Yes, in two generations our current civilization could be demolished. Then within approximately one hundred years, people would start to organize into a new civilization that would look an awful lot like the one we have now.

Would it be more homogeneous?



I love watching YouTube videos of all the various nations’ The Voice competitions and I love it when the singer looks like a ‘blend’ and then they show the parents and you wonder how they got together, and if there are other kids, they are usually also exotic looking in their blending.

Australia and the European Low Countries seem to lead in this…


Regarding the end of our current civilization, I think “castle-keeps’ will survive/exist where modernity will be sheltered.

Maybe they won’t all hold out, but enough will so that they’ll always be some place on earth where you can get a Big Mac, fries and a soda.

Considering 10 countries have had the ability to turn the Earth into a sun over the past 50 years and have not used it, is a miracle. Every day some crazy tyrant doesn’t hit the big red reset button, is a day for celebration.
Live long and prosper!

How about when the presence of micro-plastics in the human body reach the threshold necessary for our bodies to become recyclable?

People be following the weak around, waiting for them to keel over . . .

Pretty sure the guys with all the money are working on ways to stay alive forever, by transferring their heads to a robot that will keep them alive indefinitely, unless Kim Jong UN or Putin hits the big red reset button.

A thousand years of Elon Musk, Now there's a scary mental image!

Try to imagine Elon as a Mo General Authority.

?

The destruction of the "daughter" library in the Serapeon of the Museon of Alexandria at the turn of the fifth century from the film "Agora" (2009).

https://youtu.be/f5lTRa_ZJn8

Seventeen hundred years ago, "Christians" destroyed anything they deemed to be against their religion and plunged the entire western world into the Dark Ages. Today, they are once again trying to do the same thing — ban books, end secular education, end democracy, and impose religious patriarchy and theocracy.

Have we learned nothing?

Are we once again going to destroy our civilization?

Why?

To placate delusional fools who belive in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and satiate religious fanatics who imagine themselves to be "victims" of religious persecution simply because they cannot dominate other people who do not share their beliefs?



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2022 06:52AM by anybody.

I agree with your conclusion but the Alexandrian evidence is a good deal more ambiguous than you suggest. In the first place, it's not clear that Christians destroyed the library. Some accounts say they were to blame, some say it was Roman soldiers.

In the second, it was hardly that event that "plunged the entire western world into the Dark Ages." Any account that does not include the denuding of Rome's agricultural base, the epidemics and pandemics that came with the closing of the ecumene and the introduction of pathogens to which Europeans and North Africans had little or no immunity, and the movement of peoples from the Eurasian Steppe and the German world is incomplete.

and was left unable to withstand the external events that ended the classical world.

The "destroyed from within" theme is certainly prominent, and yet what that phrase means varies from observer to observer. To some it was the rise of "bread and circuses" populism, to others it was the loss of appropriate religion.

But that moralism is more Herodotus than Thucydides. The truth is that Rome had *never* experienced threats of the magnitude of the 3rd to the 5th centuries. It had never depleted its agricultural resources by exhausting its soil before; it had never experienced a series of such severe plagues before; and nothing in the preceding millennium had brought such enormous movements of powerful tribal groups before. On the other side of the coin, Rome had not previously experienced disproportionate economic growth in a part of the empire as it now did in Byzantium, growth that curtailed the power of Rome to rule even its own possessions.

Thucydides would observe that if such mundane dynamics explain the fall of an empire, reaching for moral hypotheses is unnecessary and probably misleading.

You are right in guessing that I've read Herodotus -- and Thucydides -- and Xenophon. "The History" is one of my favourite books.

I just hope that when our crisis comes -- and that is just a few decades off now -- that we will be able to withstand it...unlike Ancient Rome.

Western Civilization has already collapsed twice.

We might not survive a third.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2022 09:07PM by anybody.

I think the crisis is occurring right now. Constitutional democracy will defeat fascism--for the movements now meet the definition of that word--in the next five years or it will cease to exist.

Pax Americana is toast. I don't think BRICS has any interest in ruling post-empire America. It will still be a constitutional democracy, even if it's more on par with India.

What will politics be like when Millennials are in their 40s and 50s? I can't even imagine. I remember Carter's 1970s. We got through that. We got through the riots. They were worse than those of 2020/2021.

Gas might not come down if they can make the global warming narrative stick. I mean, its a real thing but CO2 is not much of a greenhouse gas. Methane and SF6, those are greenhouse gasses. I think it's more about squeezing markets to extract profits, which runs counter to attempts to weaken Russia.

The big question, as posed by Pink Floyd, is "Mother will they drop the bomb?". Is there a way out of the psychopathy gripping the planet? Is world leadership a reflection of our own demons? Then we are back to Franklin's "if you can keep it". It seems we can't keep ourselves.

All groups inevitably polarize and then push to oppositional extremes. Story as old as time. Each side deadly sure theirs is the ONLY WAY. We invented the words principle and truth and integrity and god as weapons for this purpose.

This apparently is part of our DNA. Mother nature letting us pull our own plug and wishing we would hurry up and get on with the self-treason as she can't find a plague that really works anymore.

I can't control 8 billion people. I will do the best with what I have. That may just be taking donuts to work sometimes. We really are down to the little things being what count.

May I please have a doughnut? :)

Of course. Any time, Susan. But the coconut ones are mine. Oh, and, the spice ones. Hands off! There is a limit to my generosity.

Common, actually - it's simply the pig realizing it's in a factory farm
(pigs estimated to have the intellect of a three-year-old - they know what's going on)

. . . know what helps to moderate/optimize?

100% chocolate, 42 grams daily - packed with Good Schtoff e.g. anandamide, theobromine, phenylethylamine, tethrahydrobetacarboline, epicatechin, procyanidin, tryptophan, serotonin --- pro-neuroactive, anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogen, and it boosts metabolic rate.

Being neuro-optimized sure helps when tackling problems/life.
Neuropharmacotherapy at its tastiest

The darker and more loathsome the better.

"In just two generations, no one will be able to read."

Many US kids now can't read Cursive handwriting as it is not taught in school.

Even more cannot read cuneiform. But somehow, we've survived that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2022 08:41AM by Devoted Exmo.

As long as the rioting, pillaging, assaults, homicides, and arson are all "mostly peaceful."

That's a pretty good description, but surely there wasn't any arson at the Capitol on January 6th.

about the January 6 show trial. People only wanted to talk about gas and grocery prices. Imagine! NBC dropped coverage ("going to streaming....") and switched to the US Open.

People don't believe the Jan 6 proceedings...or don't care.
Or both.

What you mean to say is people that hang around YOU. Many people, around the world, are watching with great interest. How are you liking the new DOJ subpoenas that went out today about the fake elector scheme? I am also really looking forward to watching some other information they subpoenaed.. Alex Holder has a whole bunch of footage they are looking at and he will be deposed Thursday. The final cut will be on Discovery+ so I guess I will have to break down and subscribe at least for a while. We all want to watch it.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/21/1106402470/trump-documentary-unreleased-footage-jan-6-committee



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2022 02:23AM by Susan I/S.

Imagine

there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin' for today
Ah
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
You
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

You may be tapping into a deep archetype here, this American mythos of purification by fire. What if enough people believe in it to make it happen? Fire and brimstone sermons aren't such a good idea if humans have enough fire and brimstone on hand to incinerate civilization.

"They can't wait for it all to be over. You can feel the yearning".

Anybody sounds like a Nihlist. Pol Pot tried your fantasy in Cambodia.

It's irony, Rubicon.

Irony.