AynCrap

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [ 1 ] ~ ~ ~ The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some. If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media. Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining. CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plau...

A podcast, Citations Needed , forgot that poverty, violence, hunger and infant mortality are declining and decided that all of the media folk saying positive things about the major trend of our time (modern economic growth) are all wrong. The neoliberal optimism industry is hard at work pushing a cherry-picked slab of bias in our faces and we fellow optimists are all being bamboozled. Of course this is completely wrong, per abundant scholarship and evidence, some even tweeted by Pinker himself on November 24th 2018, four days before this podcast was released. At 05:00 into the podcast they seem to suggest that liberal capitalism = alt-right and fascism! You might wonder why I bother mentioning this since they say they don't take the fish hook theory very seriously themselves. It's because they insist on reading things Pinker isn't saying into Pinker's public statements, so I will work from the assumption that I am supposed to read things these podcasters aren'...