And I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we didn't think that the current cultural conflicts aren't on the level of things that start civil wars.
I can't help wondering just what will trigger an apocalyptic explosion. It's not as if we're seeing tensions reducing on any front really - even the issue of wearing face coverings has become a highly charged fault line. I remember shortly after that gorilla was shot there was a meme going around that said something along the lines of "if an illegal immigrant shot a gorilla with an AR-15 to protect a child whose Muslim transgender parent had left it unattended to go to the bathroom, the internet would fall totally silent as everyone struggled to figure out what side they were supposed to be on". Except now I wonder how many would just start throwing fists, bottles or bullets before even bothering to figure out if there was more to the story.
I think the thing that troubles me most with so much of it is the sense that each side is trying to dominate the other. The whole concept of "live and let live" seems to have been lost somewhere along the wayside. The way I see it, if you don't like guns don't own a gun. If you don't like people marrying others of the same sex, marry someone of the opposite sex. It's really not that difficult. If you don't like someone wearing a mask or not wearing a mask just keep your distance. There's really no need for both sides to try and come up with "correct" behavior, as if anything deviating from what some arbitrarily selected (or, sometimes, self-appointed) arbiter of etiquette decrees is inherently unacceptable. If ever there was a reason to keep government as small as possible I think our current society provides it in spades.
Quite, but if your political philosophy is such that the moral impetus is so strong so as to disallow anything but what you 'know' to be moral, just, righteous, etc., then there is no room for 'live and let live' as the dynamic now becomes: good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, with nothing inbetween. There's no such thing as nuance, anymore. There is no middle; you're either for or against, and you're irredeemable unless you toe the party line. I'm afraid that it's the loss of a civilisation.
Certainly nuance seems to be critically endangered, if not mostly extinct in the wild. I guess it will be interesting to see what happens when the people who think gun owners should be exterminated come up against the people who own the guns. Somehow I can't see it ending well.
Bang bang, that awful sound. I'd like to think that the majority of these people are examples what happens when they don't experience life as suffering -- when they have to invent new categories just to get that experience of harm, wrongdoing, suffering, etc. So inwardly focused that a thing like a 'microaggression' becomes HR mandatory or else, heaven forbid, who knows what might happen. That when the reality hits them it will come with a side of 'sense'. That they lack the hatred and disdain of a Russian or French revolution. I think maybe in those moments they'll decide guns are a convenient way to end an argument, after all.
Folks are already being groundlessly labeled as traitors, sometimes without any sense of their political leanings, as if that should make a difference. Very little one can do in such a potentially volatile social setting. Perhaps a little more severe in such regions as my own. But there remains the ancient, ongoing contempt, fear and suspicion for any group other than one's own. And it's so easy to categorize and quietly enforce social pressure, speaking of the French Revolution ^^ et al.
Absolutely. This reversion to viewing people primarily through their group identities surely isn't doing anyone any good with respect to the temptation towards tribalism, 'otherism', etc. The individual is the ultimate minority, diversity, etc., but good luck explaining that to a bunch of sexists, racists, etc., who can't see beyond sex, or race, or what have you.
I guess it comes back to the whole concept that it's easier to knock down a strawman than understand the nuances of a situation which, like most situations, is best seen in shades of gray rather than absolute black and absolute white. Of course it requires that people understand how to think as opposed to being endlessly told what to think. If you can't explain why you think something the chances are all you'll ever be able to do is figure out that the person who thinks something different must, by necessity, be wrong. After all if you think X and you are right, a person who thinks not-X must be wrong. And at the level of who is a traitor, if I vote R and you vote D it's nice and easy for me to simply sit back and claim you want to sell everything to China while you claim I want to sell everything to Russia, rather than taking the time to figure out we might actually have quite a lot in common. The fundamental concept of the "I am Not Like You because...." premise of identity politics can do little other than sow division. I wonder how different things might be if the primary focus was to fill in "I am like you because...." and focus on the common interests we have, the goals we share (even if we disagree on how best to achieve them) and the like rather than fussing over whether we share a race, gender, orientation etc.
An irritating example in my area is the ethos that California needs to go ahead and burn down. A strange sentiment in an area that has, itself, suffered dramatically from wildfires and sends firefighters to Cal. Having experienced seasons of tragic fire in California, the 5th largest economy in the world, with 40,000,000 people, I beg to differ, but strive to leave judgement to God.
I read an interesting article about how California used to conduct managed burns to keep things fresh but apparently that's not environmentally friendly enough, so now they have the same amount of fire (or maybe more fire) that rages uncontrolled, because the ultra-woke brigade didn't want maintenance to be done. It's curious that people would apparently rather see raging wildfires burning out of control than contained fires burning under some control, but I guess there's no accounting for lack of understanding of consequences. I supposed if things are controlled burns you don't get to blame them on climate change.
I don't know everything about California's forest fire mitigations strategies, but based on the knowledge I've gained listening to some experts on fires here in BC, there is likely not one simple method for fire mitigation or one single reason for the increased fire hazard. If anything, long term fire prevention has led to larger uncontrolled fires because increased fuel load in the understory and ground level. BC does occasional proscribed burns. There are some other factors like biodiversity of the stands that can make a difference which was noted in our 2017/2018 fire years. They still don't know exactly why some younger stands were left completely untouched while the older or younger stands around them burned. I also wonder about encroachment of urban/rural land in California such that fires in years past did not burn peoples homes - again a similar situation seen here as well. Fire behaviour in 2017/2018 was also unprecedented in the speed at which they would run - some fires ran close to 40km in a 24 hour period. Hard to tame a fire that moves faster than we can contain them.
On this, the hard truth that we appear to be losing control sinks in and the environmental catastrophies of Rev seem not so far away or at least sadly plausable. The notion that mankind has plenty of time to get a grip on natural disasters seems quaint.
When those natural disasters are exacerbated by human impacts it's not that unreasonable a statement.
I still wonder why so people want to pay astronomical prices for oceanfront property when they also preach a message of rising sea levels washing away entire cities. Or even why the great and the good (you know, the ones who lecture us about not flying cattle class on vacation once a year) travel by private jet.
What? You mean there is some hypocrisy out there? Anyway, hypocritical behaviour does not change the matter but only muddies it.
150 year old communities burning to the ground is becoming a perennial expectation. West coast power companies take the brunt of the blame, but they had relatively little problem for the past 100 years, because the climate produced suitable rains and moderate temperatures. Very little has been done as far as preparation is concerned. Believers and their favorite Administration preaching that this is all a hoax will suffer loss of credibility at best. An appropriate response (if not too late) would involve radical change and international commitment. Evil California has banned straight-fuel vehicles by 2035, and the state produces more wind-power than it can use, selling the rest to neighboring states, per example. I think things will get much, much worse, everywhere, before, globally, any comprehensive policies take hold, and then decades of slow remediation will be required. The shame is that mankind potentially has the technological know-how to not only avert massive destruction but shape a powerful, environmentally-friendly infrastructure. Maybe take their plastic garbage out of the oceans? Might be too late.
I'm not saying hypocrisy changes things, it's just hard to take people seriously when they claim that carbon emissions will lead to the end of life as we know it, tell everybody else that they need to cut their (already small) emissions and then go about the business of freely polluting because they are apparently too important to be affected. Even at the most basic level it's hard to take people seriously when they claim a billion brown people in coastal areas of third world countries will die if we don't Do Something Drastic Right Now, and then reach for the air conditioning because it's a little bit warm in their living room. For good measure the whole global warming / climate change concept seems to reinvent itself regularly enough and claim support from just about any observation, to the point it looks more like a religion than a science in so many ways. A brutally cold winter is evidence of climate change, as is a mild winter, as is a warm winter. A hot summer is caused by climate change, as is a cool summer. Heavier than normal rainfall is down to climate change, as is normal rainfall and low rainfall. Since there doesn't seem to be a single possible observation that might even call the theory into question it's hard to take it very seriously. It doesn't help that the solution to the problem is invariably "introduce a new tax on...." - apparently it's OK to drown a billion brown people in some other nation as long as we give the government some extra money to spend on important initiatives like the Gay Druid Pensioner Action Group or something.