Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Except when there actually is an existential crisis. But I hope you're right and this particular one can be muddled through - personally I think where we are now is because of 40 years of muddling through having basically no plan for the end of our resources. In fact, it's from having no long term socioeconomic plan of any kind other than two diametrically opposing and wildly hopeful visions - either "the market will save us with its golden hand" or "the government will save us by honoring the social contract". I think we're learning right now that neither one can save us. What could save us is a fucking plan.
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Steve Barnes,
It's called a microscope Ben. ;-)
I expect a bit more than x8 from anything claiming to be a microscope. My toy one as a kid did x300. Perhaps it's a miniscope?
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to recordari,
Pffft. My wind-up radio has a built in torch. And it's waterproof. Ready? I'm going disaster hunting for the halibut.
When the revolution comes, my survival kit is "not driving a European car".
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to John Armstrong,
There is nothing evasive about either approach. In fact they usefully illuminate each other.
I'd hope. I take Craig's point that you can look through the other end of the telescope to avoid seeing the carnage sometimes. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't look through it that way sometimes.
<aside>How many people know that when you look through a telescope the wrong way, it can make things seem small and distant unless you put them right up to the eyepiece? Then it works like a really powerful magnifying glass.</aside>
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
But illegally, you can have anything, and it's probably easier to get an illegal firearm there than here.
If your aim is to rob people then it's the only kind you'd want. Also, over here you can get a license, but not for gangster weapons. To get MSSA guns you need a bloody good excuse. An especially well organized gang of bank robbers operating in Auckland at the moment don't seem to have them, some of the robbers are only carrying knives. Says a lot to me.
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Stephen Judd,
American friends of mine laugh when I've told them of experiences on London's streets in the past - "those kids'd totally get their asses kicked over here!" - but they may not appreciate the vacuum of public etiquette that a child can sense, and then flood with their own hatred for everything around them.
And neither of them seem to realize that in America, anyone can "pack the nine", making children by far the most dangerous people on the streets.
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You know something, I’m have a real problem getting invested in an existential crisis at the moment.
Fair enough, I'm finding it equally hard to get too wrought up about riots in London. I find it quite easy to see a bigger context, because there actually is one.
seen from sufficient distance, it says, the corpse and the hacked limbs are not so very terrible.
If you spot any of those in London, be sure to link, with warnings. I'm not taking a long view to avoid spotting the corpses. I'm taking it because global economic collapse concerns me more than looting in London, but I do think they're connected.
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I'll say "m'kay" and move on.
That's why I said "my parents", rather than "our parents".
But I'm serious. It seems to me that Western capitalism is in crisis, because the logical outcome of it is finally coming to fruition, that the means of production have mostly moved out, and it's now mostly uncompetitive and stagnant.
I see only 2 paths, and they are quite divergent from each other.
1. Accelerating the decline through austerity, which encourages further capital, and human, flight. In this direction I see poverty and eventually massive scale armed conflict.
2. Brake the decline with forced investment, and stabilize out at an acceptable, much lower, rate of growth, which in the long run will actually be a higher overall rate of growth, because the physical and human capital will not keep disappearing.
Call me a socialist for thinking the second is better than the first. I don't believe in revolution, in fact I think revolution is far more likely down the first path, and anything that we can do to avoid that happening again would be good.
I discount the third path:
3. More of what we've been doing
Because that's exactly how we got to where we are now, the path that we've been following for around 40 years now, and I think it can't continue.
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Each to their own chicken entrails : )
I'm with Tom in thinking that we're in a time of crisis the like of which has not been seen in my own lifetime, nor that of my parents. I don't know if it will play out like the 1930s. I certainly hope not. I hope that the industrialized world can learn to regulate its way out, rather than resorting to massive scale violence. The very existence of nuclear weapons makes things much different to the 30s, in which wars between Great Nations might have seemed winnable to more than just mad people. The proxying of war into the Third World seems to me to have nearly played out - now it's just bankrupting Americans rather than projecting their power. Will humans have the sense to realize that we have the power to make heaven on earth, by incremental changes to our economic management? That war is a disease that needs to be eradicated, by tinkering with the capitalism that feeds it, until it isn't capitalism any more?
-
Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Rich Lock,
Trust me, I know how daft and OTT that sounds. But it's the best I've got.
There's probably scientific versions, analyzing crowd psychology. But I expect it's pretty soft science.
There's always evolutionary arguments, although they seem to be little better than making shit up half the time - you can see why it is that the species might have rioting mechanisms built in, certainly wild massed violence characterizes human history, and it seems likely to me that prehistory would have had a fair share too, just less well organized for carnage. The mechanism does exactly what Stephen says, transcends the individual, because of course groups have more power than individuals. How else can one explain why people would rush headlong into a battle, in which it is patently clear that many people on both sides will lose their lives? It's like playing Russian Roulette. The reason is that it is not an individually rational choice, but it is a collectively rational one. Groups that have this ability to mass hysteria are more powerful than groups that don't.
Most animals know to avoid beehives because the bees go berserk, not caring that they are tiny, easily killed. En masse, they can't be intimidated, which makes them very intimidating as a collective.
One of my favorite authors, Doris Lessing, put it well when she observed that the ugly brutal animal side of humans is shockingly close to the surface, that it really doesn't take much for it to leap to the fore, even in the politest of society. Later on, people are surprised at the way they acted, that collective madness came upon them so easily, and would layer all manner of rationalizations onto their earlier behaviour. I was reading this during "Shock and Awe", and it rang horribly true, how previously civilized friends relished the wholesale murder of people in the Middle East, and acted in a frighteningly tribal fashion when I voiced any dissent at all. Years later, they admitted they were wrong, that no good came of it, but still insisted that it was the right thing to do at the time, just poorly executed.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 552 553 554 555 556 … 1066 Older→ First