First, a note. I dont like this interface. I have a far bigger window to arrange text in with my own email tools. It'd be far more efficient for me to receive the postings in my regular email. I have the tools to compile them all in a directory on my drive, consult what they have to say, then respond. This online interface cont let me do that.
Feel free to send me email on your opinions; daybrown uses the hughes.net email server.
We usta do this back on some of the BBS nets. ONLY there, I could use ANSI to colorize the postings. Those from the moderator mite be red, your post would have green letters, a troll I dont much bother with mite be barf pink, and so on.
The LOSS of functionality as millions of idiots and trolls came on line, along with all the spam, is reflective in part to
http://dc-pc.org/malaise/malaise.html which suggests, among other things, that the irrationality is pandemic, and that much of it is do to raising the last couple of generations on sugar cereals and junkfood.
Its not like rational discourse in these postings is going to get thru to them. I'm all for sustainability, but we are not going to get there in a way that wont disturb other liberal sensibilities. Power elites always mismanage the resource base. And when that mismanagement reduces supplies, the elites, rather than cutting back to buy time to look for real solutions, out of their own instinctive gruop think actually *INCREASE* their exploitation of the lower classes. This destabilizes the system. Sometimes the empire merely sheds unprofitable provinces, as we now say, 'failed states', and (bread & circuses) beer & baseball do on like always, with a market, but still endurable lifestyle for the lower classes.
Other times, it leads to revolution and total "Collapse" as Jared Diamond goes into in his latest book. but either way, vast numbers in most of the world will die of famine, pandemic, and violence. Draconian law will be attempted in the great pwoer centers of the developed world, which may, or may not work. Never before has tyranny been imposed without more control over the flow of information that is now possible electroncially.
But the internet is a fragile system that could use a backup. Course, that'd only be useful if there is someone else rational enough to be worth a dialogue. When Adlai Stevenson was told that he had the "Thinking man's vote", the gov replied:"Yes, but I need a majority". And the question is, what the demagoguery selected by that majority will do to us all. History suggests it can get a lot worse.
There is no way in hell that anything reasonable that any of us here have to say will have any effect on the outcome at all. We'd do well to quit rating about what needs to be done, and think about what we need to do to cope with whatever it is that is coming down whether we like it or not.
Linear Mode
