# The fall of the West



## Spunt (Jul 5, 2021)

See if you can spot a pattern in the following:

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*The Akkadian Empire* was the first recorded empire in history, lasting from about 2500BC to 2200BC. It arose in what is now widely regarded as the cradle of civilisation itself, the "Fertile Crescent" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq. There is evidence that the first cities in mankind's history were built there as early as 6000BC. The Akkadian Empire was, without doubt, humanity's finest social, technological, military and economic achievement in history at that time, and for some time after.

The archaeological record for the Akkadian empire is thin, because it was such a mind-bogglingly long time ago and the cities were built over again and again by subsequent cultures. But there is evidence as to why Akkad fell:

1 - There seems to have been a warming of the climate, and subsequent food shortages. There is evidence that towards the end of the empire's life they were irrigating land that did not require irrigation before, suggesting that soil fertility was dropping alarmingly. Whole cities seem to have been abandoned to the encroaching desert.
2 - There is evidence of political strife, rebellion and civil war. Dig sites from the later Akkadian period show evidence of more military presence in areas in the centre of the empire than before, suggesting those soldiers were there to keep order and put down rebellions rather than defend the borders.
3 - Whilst the evidence is not overwhelming, there are indications that there may have been a plague of some kind before the end.
4 - We do know what caused the final fall, along with that of neighbouring Sumer. Nomadic peoples from the North, themselves facing the same food shortages as the Akkadians, changed from a nuisance at the border to an unstoppable horde. The weakened and divided Akkadian empire could not resist as they swept South, burning, killing, looting and pillaging until everything was gone.

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*The Ancient Egyptians* rose to greatness about 1000 years after the Akkadians. The Archaeological record for the Egyptians is extensive, though not complete. Everyone knows that under the Pharaohs, Egypt achieved levels of technology, society and architecture that mankind had not come close to before. Ancient Egypt was the pinnacle of human achievement at its time.

The fall of Egypt was more gradual than that of Akkad. Its rulers were stronger and its armies more powerful, but by the reign of Rameses III (ruled 1186-1155BC) it was in terminal decline:

1 - A volcanic eruption in Iceland some time around 1200BC cooled the planet and dropped sunlight levels for decades causing famines all over Europe and the Mediterranean.
2 - The resulting crop failures caused the rations given to workers and soldiers to fall. This caused the workers to go on strike (for the first time in recorded history) and soldiers to desert and rebel.
3 - Egypt, despite its problems, still had the most wealth and food anywhere in the world at that time. This attracted the greedy eyes of not only neighbouring civilisations (notably the Assyrians, against whom the Egyptians fought a series of vicious and ruinous wars), but also nomadic peoples. First came desert raiders from Libya and points West, but the biggest threat were the "Sea Peoples". Nobody knows exactly who the "Sea Peoples" were or where they came from, other than that they were an alliance of different people who had banded together in a highly effective alliance to raid and pillage. The most logical explanation is that they were formerly settled people from all over the Mediterranean driven to piracy by hunger.
4 - Egypt was crippled by internal division. Aside from the aforementioned labour disputes and military desertion, there was constant plotting and infighting within the political elite. Rameses III, a brilliant general who won a series of key battles against the Assyrians and the Sea Peoples, was assassinated by an ambitious underling, and the empire never recovered from his death - too unstable and divided to put up a fight against its many enemies, it was picked apart by its neighbours until it eventually what was left of it became a vassal of the Greeks.
5 - The reign of Rameses III was marked by several plagues.
6 - The Egyptians owed much of their military superiority to plentiful supplies of copper and tin, the metals required to make Bronze, which made the best weapons and armour. If you didn't have access to Bronze, you were SOL and you were going to get conquered by someone who had. But around 1000BC, people worked out how to get furnaces hot enough to smelt Iron. Not only did Iron make better weapons than Bronze, Iron ore was found just about everywhere, and now even the scruffiest band of raiders could have the best weapons and armour in the world. The old powers (Egypt was not the only Bronze Age civilisation to fall around 1000BC, only the biggest) had no answer to this new democratization of warfare.

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*The Han Dynasty* was the second, and arguably the greatest, dynasty of imperial China, lasting from about 220BC to 220 AD, about the same timeframe as the Roman Empire. Under the Hans, Chinese civilisation was Rome's only rival in its technological, social, and economic accomplishments. But the Hans fell:

1 - The dynasty was ripped apart by rebellions and civil war. The empire was so big and so unwieldy to govern that unlanded princes, generals and local warlords could seize territory and rule it sometimes for decades before the Empire regained control.
2 - As a result, the Han Emperors became increasingly brutal and tyrannical to try to keep order. This in turn led to more rebellions and more brutality until the entire Empire was in a near-constant state of civil war, with pogroms and genocide a regular occurrence any time there was a rebellion, which was often.
3 - Plague and Famine tore through rural areas. The crop failures this time were largely man-made, as constant civil war, raids and incursions from without and the increasing tendencies of warring parties to engage in Scorched Earth tactics and genocide destroyed the empire's ability to feed itself or protect against disease.
4 - Then came the nomads. Mongols from the North and Turkic peoples from the West tore into the Empire and were so successful that the once-proud Han Empire became a vassal of illiterate, nomadic horse lords so primitive they didn't even cook their own meat. The Mongols carried out a policy of mass rape and extermination so extensive that the Han Chinese (despite what the CCP would tell you) no longer exist genetically.

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*The Roman Empire*, and the fall thereof, is the most studied period in all of history save maybe WWII. The Romans held together the largest and most ethnically diverse empire the world had ever seen, and they held it together for 500 years. Under the Romans, humanity achieved levels of technology and civilisation never seen before, and not seen again for centuries after its fall. I could study for a dozen PhDs in the fall of the Roman Empire and still not know everything that is known about it, but the causes were roughly as follows:

1 - From about 150AD, the climate started to change, leading to food shortages and rebellions. Around 450AD there was an event known as the "Little Ice Age" that was instrumental in the final collapse, as starving nomadic peoples from every border of the Empire surged into it in search of food.
2 - The "Plague of Justinian" from 541AD (probably Bubonic Plague) was the first of a string of disease outbreaks that crippled the empire. The empire's advanced transportation infrastructure and communal water sources helped spread it on a level never before seen until it became endemic.
3 - In the last three centuries of its existence, the Empire was in a perpetual state of civil war. The state had become so weak that any two-bit regional governor or general figured that he had a chance of being Emperor, at least until the next guy came along. At one point there were five Emperors in a single year.
4 - Rome ran out of land to give its retired soldiers. For centuries the empire had rewarded its soldiers' loyalty with land on retirement. In the last few centuries this had to shrink, then cease, as there was no more land to give out. This created hundreds of thousands of disaffected former legionaries, hungry, angry and willing and able to fight, which fuelled the constant rebellions and sky-high violent crime.
5 - Rome's advanced technology contributed to its fall. As well as its plumbing and transportation spreading disease, it is possible that the lead pipes feeding its elites poisoned them and drove them insane.
6 - The conflict between traditional Hellenism and Christianity was another key factor in the instability and division.
7 - As so many times before, the nomads came. Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Franks and others, fleeing starvation, descended on the Empire and completely destroyed its Western half, leaving the Eastern half to limp on as the bankrupt, shrinking Byzantine empire that was finally put out of its misery in 1483 by the Seljuk Turks. Western Europe didn't reach the same levels of technology as the Romans for centuries after.

--

The descendents of the destroyers of Rome settled in its ruins and slowly built a Civilisation of their own - the West. The Franks became the French and the Germans, the Visigoths became the Spanish, the Angles and Saxons became the English, and so on. By about 1500AD the West became the most powerful and advanced civilisation that mankind had ever created. But look where we are now:

1 - We are at each other's throats. We haven't been this politically and religiously divided since the years immediately before WWII, which, if you consider the West to be a single, coherent civilisation, was more of a civil war over ideology and identity than a clash of civilisations. Ditto WWI, the Napoleonic wars and the centuries of conflict between different strains of Christianity. We have been fighting each other for centuries, each war more brutal and ruinous than the last.
2 - Our internal politics are unstable. Four US presidents have been assassinated in office, with many other unsuccessful plots. The last president caused rioting in the streets just by being elected. Congress has attempted to impeach 3 of the last 4 presidents for obviously ideological reasons. Supporters of the last president nearly overthrew the government by accident because they mistrusted the result of the election so much they rebelled. American cities are burning. The authorities are literally losing control of them, and local governments, criminal gangs and militia groups are effectively seceding from the US over ideological differences or just to grab power and wealth.
3 - We have just been hit by the most devastating disease outbreak in a century, aided in its spread by our advanced transportation technology. Even if we recover from this, there's nothing to stop it happening again and just like the other great civilisations before it, it has deepened divisions and mistrust, and led some to violence.
4 - The response by our governments has been oppression and brutality. Soldiers in the streets in the US, armed rebels being grabbed off the streets by unmarked vans. Most of Western Europe is almost a police state. Previously genteel and quiet places like the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands are murdering their own politicians, who as a result are becoming more secluded and remote from the people they govern. Most major policies are not subject to democratic control any more.

The present doesn't look good. But the future looks worse:

1 - Most estimates suggest that we will run out of fertile topsoil in about 80-90 years. A famine is coming that will make the Holomodor or the Great Leap Forward look like a child whining for ice cream.
2 - We will also most likely run out of economic fossil fuels around this time, and no alternative energy source can yet take its place. We need electricity for everything. Without air conditioning the warmer parts of the world are now uninhabitable. Without heating the cold ones are as well. In the UK and EU, the sale of internal combustion and diesel vehicles will be banned from 2030, making Europe's transportation infrastructure entirely dependent on its creaking power grid. All our information and knowledge is stored in devices that need power. We may look and laugh at the Ancient Egyptians for storing all their knowledge in the Great Library of Alexandria and losing it all when barbarians torched it, but we have been just as foolish. We cannot communicate without power. We cannot grow or distribute food without power. Our armed forces cannot wage war without power. If the grid goes down, the West falls. Bear in mind that in the last 12 months, Texas' power grid failed because it was too cold, and now the PNW/SW Canada's grid is failing because it is too hot.
3 - Speaking of heat, the climate is getting warmer. There's no denying it now. Whether humans caused it or not, it doesn't matter. It's gonna get real fucking hot. So much so that the warmer parts of the world (Africa, India, Central America) are going to become uninhabitable. Never mind crop failures, the temperatures may become unsafe for human life. In a couple of centuries, everything between the tropics will become like the Sahara, and the Sahara will become a scorched hellscape straight out of a Science Fiction novel. Low-lying areas will flood. In the UK, we used to get one catastrophic flood a century. Now we get one every year.
4 - This will force literally billions of people from their homes in search of food. You think immigration is bad now? This ain't shit. A few hundred thousand a year will become hundreds of millions. And these people will not be looking for jobs or benefits. They will be looking for food, and they will be desperate enough to take it by force, like their forebears going back 4500 years. Every single great empire in human history was destroyed by starving nomads created by climate change, disease and famine, and the West will fall to the same cycle. Nomadic hordes are like viruses. They cannot sustain themselves, they have to live by destroying. All the great nomadic conquests either burn themselves out when they run out of civilisation to destroy (Genghis Khan, the Huns, the Timurids) or when they settle and form their own civilisations in the ruins of the ones they destroyed (The Hittites, the Franks, The Vikings).

--

I'm not a professional historian. I'm just someone who can spot patterns. Food shortages, disease outbreaks, corrupt leaders and rebellions weaken empires until they are over-run by homeless, starving hordes. The West will go the same way as the Akkadians, the Egyptians, the Han, the Romans, and others. Forget Left or Right, no change of policy or leader is going to prevent this. Maybe Trans women really are women. Maybe the Jews run Hollywood. Who cares. We're arguing about videogames when annihilation is staring us in the face. I think the end will be about 100 years from now. Whether it's an abrupt end like the Akkadians and the Han, or a slow death like the Egyptians or the Romans, I don't know. But it's coming.


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## Icasaracht (Jul 5, 2021)

OP be like


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## Epic Fail Man (Jul 5, 2021)

I think we should build a giant satellite laser and aim it at India and China to save the world, other than that I dunno.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Given how stupid, fat and complacent people are I'd say this is richly deserved.


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## SeniorFuckFace (Jul 5, 2021)

We can't get an accurate yesterday account of the world and you are trusting shit from over 1,000 years ago?


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## WeWuzFinns (Jul 5, 2021)

The industrial revolution created massive dysgenics and now everyone are passive nigger cattle. Niggers are too low IQ to embrace automation so they have to do crime, which is meritocratic and only the most niggerly niggers make it to the top and breed with baby mommas.


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## Just A Butt (Jul 5, 2021)

did you guys ever think that maybe it's self-correcting and that's why all these things happen? that humans, as a species, are destined to fail and re-invent every couple of generations? sometimes when i can't sleep i stay up and cut myself over and over while whispering "trust the plan" into the night.


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## Spunt (Jul 5, 2021)

Icasaracht said:


> OP be like
> View attachment 2318334


I was thinking more

But that works too.


Epic Fedora Man said:


> I think we should build a giant satellite laser and aim it at India and China to save the world, other than that I dunno.


TBH I think they'll be overwhelmed too.


SeniorFuckFace said:


> We can't get an accurate yesterday account of the world and you are trusting shit from over 1,000 years ago?


We don't know the details, but we know the themes, the patterns. Zoom out a bit and see that there's a cycle at play here.


Just A Butt said:


> did you guys ever think that maybe it's self-correcting and that's why all these things happen? that humans, as a species, are destined to fail and re-invent every couple of generations? sometimes when i can't sleep i stay up and cut myself over and over while whispering "trust the plan" into the night.


It's not implausible. But if that's correct, who or what is doing the correcting? I have friends into esotericism who literally think it's extradimensional space gods breeding then harvesting souls, so you never know.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Just A Butt said:


> did you guys ever think that maybe it's self-correcting and that's why all these things happen? that humans, as a species, are destined to fail and re-invent every couple of generations? sometimes when i can't sleep i stay up and cut myself over and over while whispering "trust the plan" into the night.


Sounds pretty brutal tbh fam


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## break these cuffs (Jul 5, 2021)

Just A Butt said:


> sometimes when i can't sleep i stay up and cut myself over and over while whispering "trust the plan" into the night.


Trusting the process is how you end up with Ben Simmons. No thanks.


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## StraightShooter2 (Jul 5, 2021)

The OP was "TL;DR", but my first guess was "Jews".' My second guess would be "anime porn".

The "West" is also just a vague, and often bastardized historical concept (such as by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists) which isn't limited to "the fall" of any specific nation. Rome fell, but the history of "the West" still continued and developed over time.


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## SeniorFuckFace (Jul 5, 2021)

Spunt said:


> We don't know the details, but we know the themes, the patterns. Zoom out a bit and see that there's a cycle at play here.


Okay, I see the winners write history, what now?


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

SeniorFuckFace said:


> Okay, I see the winners write history, what now?


Today's winners = tomorrow's losers because they can't help themselves and fuck with the recording of history to self-aggrandize or demean their defeated enemies, rather than faithfully record the past to learn from it and avoid repeating the mistakes their enemies did

This is why I say "fuck historians" - not because history as a field is a bad thing, but because historians manage to be the worst possible stewards of the field time after time


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## Rebel Wilson (Jul 5, 2021)

Odoacer was an inside job and the Eternal Greek Zeno overthrew the Western Emperor because he wouldn't kowtow to Constantinople.


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## Carlos Weston Chantor (Jul 5, 2021)

The second judeomasonry managed to successfully rebrand Christendom into "the west" this stillborn concept of a secular world order was already a putrid, rotting corpse, animated only by the necromancy of compound interest. "The west" was never anything more but a hallucination born in the mind of lunatics. The time is almost up and the blood of martyrs cries to Heavens for vengeance. The machine of Babylon will fall once more, and when billions of people are turned into minced meat by the collapse of industrial society the true children of God will walk free at last, liberated by universal carnage and purified by blood. "But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved" (Matthew 24:13)


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## Pimpleking55 (Jul 5, 2021)

Fossile fuels wont run out in the next 1000 years even if we increase consumption, there is still so much left untouched. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper and harder but running out....nah. Which is the same for rare metals and other stuff.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Pimpleking55 said:


> Fossile fuels wont run out in the next 1000 years even if we increase consumption, there is still so much left untouched. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper and harder but running out....nah. Which is the same for rare metals and other stuff.


That's the problem - digging deeper and harder, which requires more energy, more expensive and complicated tech perhaps.  It's a big enough problem that we're turning to fracking instead to tease out easier to reach oil deposits at the cost of... well, all the problems associated with the process.  We might have oceans of oil untouched under the surface, but it's a lot less useful if it takes a lot more energy and resources to extract in the first place.

The problem with shifting away from petroleum on any large scale is that the infrastructure for doing so is spotty at best and utterly absent at worst, which itself is a reflection of how infrastructure is held together with duct tape and fervent prayers in so many places here.  Combine this with the NIMBY insanity surrounding nuclear (probably the best bet going forward in areas where geothermal, solar, wind etc. are poor options) for a jawbreaker of a problem with layer after layer of stupid shit, and the oil lobby/petrodollar/OPEC problem (there's a distinct possibility that a massive shift away from petroleum might make the ME so fucking desperate they start doing really stupid shit).

We've avoided picking a poison for long enough that the poison's grown much more concentrated and virulent as it sits on that shelf that we want to forget about because we're comfortable NOW.


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## Lemmingwise (Jul 5, 2021)

Spunt said:


> Egypt, despite its problems, still had the most wealth and food anywhere in the world at that time.


Is this true though? Didn't india and china already have comparable food production?



Spunt said:


> We have just been hit by the most devastating disease outbreak in a century


More like we have just been hit by the most exaggerated allergic response (lockdowns, experimental vaccine) to a very infectious but relatively mild disease. We've moved on from the age of islamic terrorism to keep the western population in line and have moved forward to disease scare terrorism.

For years we hear how impossible it is to do border control to stop immigration and now we're introducing vaccine passports to control who gets to move and who doesn't.



Spunt said:


> The West will go the same way as the Akkadians, the Egyptians, the Han, the Romans, and others.



Yeah no shit, we've been dining on the corpse for a while. "The west" is already dead. But as a term it's kinda false. There was the spanish empire then the british empire and then the american empire, who were smart enough to let "the west" believe they are free and part of the same, equal partnership. The euro population anyways. The american population knew who was on top.

It's more apt to speak of the american empire. But when I say it's dead I'm speaking of the spirit and ideals. It' far from dead in material terms. That has a decade or maybe three before it is eclipsed.

But nobody likes doomers. You're not telling anything useful, besides the whole "better prepare for the worst".


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## Jetpack Himmler (Jul 5, 2021)

Spunt said:


> TBH I think they'll be overwhelmed too.


China's already dealing with the consequences. We all know that Beijing is a polluted hellhole, which applies to the rest of its cities. Hundreds, if not thousands of rivers in the country's north have dried up and I hear that it has happened to parts of Yangtze--the third-longest river on the planet! The CCP spent tens of billions of dollars on water diversion projects as a band-aid solution when better resource management (i.e. charging more for water usage) would suffice. However, the big problem with that is that majority are still poor and raising prices would cause potential unrest hence why the CCP will never admit fault or weakness. Given that North Americans are the biggest NIMBYs on the planet, we ignore the fact that they keep burning more coal and tearing ore out of the ground with no environmental controls--to say nothing of their labor practices--because it's "out of sight, out of mind" for us in addition to being greedy fucks. It's why Vancouverites get their titties over twinning an oil pipeline, yet fail to recognize their hypocrisy when they use their port to export thermal coal to the Far East.

Do I need to bring up how Ganges River pumps so much human waste into the Indian Ocean that the currents take it as far as Patagonia?


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Jetpack Himmler said:


> China's already dealing with the consequences. We all know that Beijing is a polluted hellhole, which applies to the rest of its cities. Hundreds, if not thousands of rivers in the country's north have dried up and I hear that it has happened to parts of Yangtze--the third-longest river on the planet! The CCP spent tens of billions of dollars on water diversion projects as a band-aid solution when better resource management (i.e. charging more for water usage) would suffice. However, the big problem with that is that majority are still poor and raising prices would cause potential unrest hence why the CCP will never admit fault or weakness. Given that North Americans are the biggest NIMBYs on the planet, we ignore the fact that they keep burning more coal and tearing ore out of the ground with no environmental controls--to say nothing of their labor practices--because it's "out of sight, out of mind" for us in addition to being greedy fucks. It's why Vancouverites get their titties over twinning an oil pipeline, yet fail to recognize their hypocrisy when they use their port to export thermal coal to the Far East.
> 
> Do I need to bring up how Ganges River pumps so much human waste into the Indian Ocean that the currents take it as far as Patagonia?


China's a house of cards waiting for a stiff breeze and their tenuous position is reflected in how much weenie-wagging they've been doing lately.  They're on the verge of economic and demographic implosion and if you think they wouldn't try something fucking stupid to try and avert the consequences of their own dipshit mistakes I have a Chinese bridge to sell you.

I don't really know if India appreciates how bad its current position is, but being China's neighbor is not a good thing to be right now on top of all their internal shit.


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## Kujo Jotaro (Jul 5, 2021)

Shit don't last


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## Michael Wade (Jul 5, 2021)

TFT-A9 said:


> China's a house of cards waiting for a stiff breeze and their tenuous position is reflected in how much weenie-wagging they've been doing lately.  They're on the verge of economic and demographic implosion and if you think they wouldn't try something fucking stupid to try and avert the consequences of their own dipshit mistakes I have a Chinese bridge to sell you.
> 
> I don't really know if India appreciates how bad its current position is, but being China's neighbor is not a good thing to be right now on top of all their internal shit.


Do you see em using nukes effectively? They just build a bunch of em secretly under Biden's watch.


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## Absurdist Laughter (Jul 5, 2021)

TFT-A9 said:


> I don't really know if India appreciates how bad its current position is, but being China's neighbor is not a good thing to be right now on top of all their internal shit.


Yet they have more secure elections than our own. The doom and gloom in OP's  post is really just that and nothing more, we are nowhere near Roman Empire; China is. We just got loud mouths exercising their rights to speak freely. Unfortunately, that isn't enough for them so they overstep and receive no punishment; as they should. The wrecking ball always swings back to take out the foundation beams.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Absurdist Laughter said:


> Yet they have more secure elections than our own. The doom and gloom in OP's  post is really just that and nothing more, we are nowhere near Roman Empire; China is. We just got loud mouths exercising their rights to speak freely. Unfortunately, that isn't enough for them so they overstep and receive no punishment; as they should. The wrecking ball always swings back to take out the foundation beams.


The fall of the Roman Empire did not just affect the Romans.


Michael Wade said:


> Do you see em using nukes effectively? They just build a bunch of em secretly under Biden's watch.


If we end up switching "Crazy Ivan" for "Demented Ding" I don't think we'll have too long to laugh about it.  I consider China more alarming than I ever considered the Soviets to be.


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## I Love Beef (Jul 5, 2021)

StraightShooter2 said:


> My second guess would be "anime porn".


You kidding me? Years of censorship in US modern sequential arts and Europe and the US huffing their own farts while proclaiming their comics are best have contributed to utter stagnation of progressing artistic and creative endeavors, let alone brainpower out west. If the US had an entertainment/animation and comics industry on par with Japan, we wouldn't have this fucking problem.



Spunt said:


> We're arguing about videogames


And I am going to go full on autistic about this shit.

You want to know why the greats like Maxwell, Edison, and Einstein were able to come up with their groundbreaking theorems about reality, matter, energy, and the fundamentals of the universe? They weren't fedoralords who were self centered fags, or luddites and biblethumpers who awaited the Second Coming, they were creative people who also had a great positive interest in the world around them and continued to have a sense of wonder. I say this because "insanity is doing something the same way over again and expecting different results." Edison may have made a lightbulb 10,000 times to get it to work, but fucking A, at least he figured out flaws and studied and figured out shit to get it right.

About 100 some years later, and in the information age, where schools are more focused on garnering test score medians and educational standards to quota, where the arts are full of nostalgic dipshits too hipstering out for the past, where graduates (and dropouts) are meant to be perfectly molded for the workforce, and where even society is meant to keep this going along, I am not surprised at how the dynamics of all of this fucks over the creative and curious part of the brain. If you want my honest opinion, here's a tin foil hat: _the corporations and the government doesn't want creativity._

If you ask me, exposure to creativity is feared these days because it gets people thinking beyond their paradigms, and you can't reign in and have a legal flock of slaves plebs to parade around to die for you if they don't think a certain way you want them to. Think about all of the stuff in the past that has been picketed by the morality squads and "for the family" fuckers. Comics, video games, animation, rock n' roll, what do these things have in common? They are rooted in the arts and to be creative to get any output for its workload. Exposure to art spreads by inspiration. Can't have that now!

And I hate to take a dig at our pasttime, but, you want to know why we get spergs like Chris Chan and spastic weeaboos and hardcore furries? They have no outlet for their creativity. If anything, I'd have to conclude that's what the glowfuckers want. When you can't win a war feasibly, turn to the devil. Great going there.

This boils back to how we should have found solutions or should be in the process of doing that, but nope! Money, political power, egotism, that's more important.

tl;dr Insanity is an aspect of poor government, and a lack and/or restriction of creativity is a sign of something more fucky going on. Let's keep going, because this shit is interesting.


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## Absurdist Laughter (Jul 5, 2021)

TFT-A9 said:


> The fall of the Roman Empire did not just affect the Romans.


I'm not making that argument, that it didn't. I'm just saying, we aren't as bad as it seems.


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## Exigent Circumcisions (Jul 5, 2021)

Yeah but none of those dead gay cultures had Sargon of Akkad, Ethan Ralph and the Kiwi Farms to save them.


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## Least Concern (Jul 5, 2021)

Jetpack Himmler said:


> Do I need to bring up how Ganges River pumps so much human waste into the Indian Ocean that the currents take it as far as Patagonia?


If you're thinking of that image which purports to show the amount of human feces in seawater in the Indian Ocean, it's a fake. Nobody is going out and measuring fecal concentration at various points in the middle of the ocean. Someone just took a picture showing the effects of the south Asian tsunami of the mid-'00s and put a silly caption on it.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Absurdist Laughter said:


> I'm not making that argument, that it didn't. I'm just saying, we aren't as bad as it seems.


I certainly hope you're right, but I'm looking over my shoulder at every other possibility.


I Love Beef said:


> You kidding me? Years of censorship in US modern sequential arts and Europe and the US huffing their own farts while proclaiming their comics are best have contributed to utter stagnation of progressing artistic and creative endeavors, let alone brainpower out west. If the US had an entertainment/animation and comics industry on par with Japan, we wouldn't have this fucking problem.
> 
> 
> And I am going to go full on autistic about this shit.
> ...


I'd tie this in to what feels like a collective infantilization of the populace.  External loci of emotional control and self-image, the message of government involvement (read: overreach) being perfectly fine and law-abiding citizens have NOTHING to fear, the swings towards immoderate extremes of thought in every direction.  For all the world, it looks to me like people are being turned into perpetual children, shallow as puddles and hollow as 55-gallon drums, for "betters" to impress upon and insert their desired systems of thought into.


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## I Love Beef (Jul 5, 2021)

TFT-A9 said:


> I'd tie this in to what feels like a collective infantilization of the populace. External loci of emotional control and self-image, the message of government involvement (read: overreach) being perfectly fine and law-abiding citizens have NOTHING to fear, the swings towards immoderate extremes of thought in every direction. For all the world, it looks to me like people are being turned into perpetual children, shallow as puddles and hollow as 55-gallon drums, for "betters" to impress upon and insert their desired systems of thought into.


And all for the War Machine. As well as Big Corporate and the Banks.

Hate to bring in another topic to this, but either America sweeps itself up in rebellion or goes down disunited. That's the only way I see it.


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## Spunt (Jul 5, 2021)

Exorbital Columnations said:


> Yeah but none of those dead gay cultures had Sargon of Akkad, Ethan Ralph and the Kiwi Farms to save them.


Well, the Akkadians literally did.


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## mexican landscaper (Jul 5, 2021)

#GamerGate2: Fall of the West


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## Pimpleking55 (Jul 5, 2021)

TFT-A9 said:


> That's the problem - digging deeper and harder, which requires more energy, more expensive and complicated tech perhaps.  It's a big enough problem that we're turning to fracking instead to tease out easier to reach oil deposits at the cost of... well, all the problems associated with the process.  We might have oceans of oil untouched under the surface, but it's a lot less useful if it takes a lot more energy and resources to extract in the first place.
> 
> The problem with shifting away from petroleum on any large scale is that the infrastructure for doing so is spotty at best and utterly absent at worst, which itself is a reflection of how infrastructure is held together with duct tape and fervent prayers in so many places here.  Combine this with the NIMBY insanity surrounding nuclear (probably the best bet going forward in areas where geothermal, solar, wind etc. are poor options) for a jawbreaker of a problem with layer after layer of stupid shit, and the oil lobby/petrodollar/OPEC problem (there's a distinct possibility that a massive shift away from petroleum might make the ME so fucking desperate they start doing really stupid shit).
> 
> We've avoided picking a poison for long enough that the poison's grown much more concentrated and virulent as it sits on that shelf that we want to forget about because we're comfortable NOW.


I think fracking is more an political problem, like our country for example: We rather mine gas ourselves from an very expensive to dig and crappy gas field rather than to get our gas from Russia and use our crappy gas fields as a last resort. But no cheap gas because Russia bad.


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## wtfNeedSignUp (Jul 5, 2021)

Spunt said:


> 1 - We are at each other's throats. We haven't been this politically and religiously divided since the years immediately before WWII, which, if you consider the West to be a single, coherent civilisation, was more of a civil war over ideology and identity than a clash of civilisations. Ditto WWI, the Napoleonic wars and the centuries of conflict between different strains of Christianity. We have been fighting each other for centuries, each war more brutal and ruinous than the last.


No big country has been in actual war for decades.


Spunt said:


> 3 - We have just been hit by the most devastating disease outbreak in a century, aided in its spread by our advanced transportation technology. Even if we recover from this, there's nothing to stop it happening again and just like the other great civilisations before it, it has deepened divisions and mistrust, and led some to violence.


LOL no, Corona's deaths are exaggerated to use it politically.


Spunt said:


> 4 - The response by our governments has been oppression and brutality. Soldiers in the streets in the US, armed rebels being grabbed off the streets by unmarked vans. Most of Western Europe is almost a police state. Previously genteel and quiet places like the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands are murdering their own politicians, who as a result are becoming more secluded and remote from the people they govern. Most major policies are not subject to democratic control any more.


I wish people start minecrafting politicians rather than let the current situation to continue. Besides that everything you said has no basis in reality.


Spunt said:


> 1 - Most estimates suggest that we will run out of fertile topsoil in about 80-90 years. A famine is coming that will make the Holomodor or the Great Leap Forward look like a child whining for ice cream.
> 2 - We will also most likely run out of economic fossil fuels around this time, and no alternative energy source can yet take its place. We need electricity for everything. Without air conditioning the warmer parts of the world are now uninhabitable. Without heating the cold ones are as well. In the UK and EU, the sale of internal combustion and diesel vehicles will be banned from 2030, making Europe's transportation infrastructure entirely dependent on its creaking power grid. All our information and knowledge is stored in devices that need power. We may look and laugh at the Ancient Egyptians for storing all their knowledge in the Great Library of Alexandria and losing it all when barbarians torched it, but we have been just as foolish. We cannot communicate without power. We cannot grow or distribute food without power. Our armed forces cannot wage war without power. If the grid goes down, the West falls. Bear in mind that in the last 12 months, Texas' power grid failed because it was too cold, and now the PNW/SW Canada's grid is failing because it is too hot.
> 3 - Speaking of heat, the climate is getting warmer. There's no denying it now. Whether humans caused it or not, it doesn't matter. It's gonna get real fucking hot. So much so that the warmer parts of the world (Africa, India, Central America) are going to become uninhabitable. Never mind crop failures, the temperatures may become unsafe for human life. In a couple of centuries, everything between the tropics will become like the Sahara, and the Sahara will become a scorched hellscape straight out of a Science Fiction novel. Low-lying areas will flood. In the UK, we used to get one catastrophic flood a century. Now we get one every year.
> 4 - This will force literally billions of people from their homes in search of food. You think immigration is bad now? This ain't shit. A few hundred thousand a year will become hundreds of millions. And these people will not be looking for jobs or benefits. They will be looking for food, and they will be desperate enough to take it by force, like their forebears going back 4500 years. Every single great empire in human history was destroyed by starving nomads created by climate change, disease and famine, and the West will fall to the same cycle. Nomadic hordes are like viruses. They cannot sustain themselves, they have to live by destroying. All the great nomadic conquests either burn themselves out when they run out of civilisation to destroy (Genghis Khan, the Huns, the Timurids) or when they settle and form their own civilisations in the ruins of the ones they destroyed (The Hittites, the Franks, The Vikings).


How is that the problem of western countries? Unless they let every fucking third worlder come in (which they might), the brunt of the damage will affect them.


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## Blamo (Jul 5, 2021)

Want midwit autism?
Actually, I kinda have an issue with saying that the West is falling. That really depends on your social status and other biases. Yes, I dislike the direction of things, but, I can see that, from the current elite and system's perspective past values are worthless. You having a family, friends and community is just getting in the way of business and complicate their top down control.

Is the West falling on an elite level? not really. Considering good luck finding a country beside some relics that are not neo-liberal consumerist countries. Their reliance on globalization will eventually bend their culture to fit into the globohomo mold.

But ultimately, morals and beauty etc. simply don't mean anything for our spreadsheet driven civilization. Many past things need to be re-check for their origins. For example... the 19th century patriotism and nationalism was basically an excuse for local bourgeois to grap the wealth from hereditary aristocracy and create small closed markets for themselves to build up capital. Slower communication, logistics and lack of industrialized culture creation helped countries to keep their own flavor and language for a longer time. Due to mass armies working better, people were given democracy to feel better about themselves.

Now wars are waged by machines and professional soldiers. Capital can instantly go wherever it want and no healthy bodies are needed in factories. So... why even have anything beside androgynous blobs who work their javascript job, then blow all their money of product? Having different groups of people would simply complicate selling products and services. etc. Not to mention people having actual common ground could create their own closed market and economy. Which is the ultimate sin.

tldr: nice things are basically obsolete


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 5, 2021)

hey @Save the Loli

I think you said in the coof thread something like that the powers that shouldn't be are driving the USA to "balkanize". If that happens, what do you think the USA would split into?

Maybe the USA and some leftist place with some "progressive" name?


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## Sped Xing (Jul 5, 2021)

Honestly it's a relief that it's over.


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## TFT-A9 (Jul 5, 2021)

Sped Xing said:


> View attachment 2319700
> 
> Honestly it's a relief that it's over.


I suddenly feel much less Western.


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## Haim Arlosoroff (Jul 5, 2021)

I would read Sir John Glubb and Polybius to understand the fate of all nations when the top stagnates and the bottom suffer the effects of changing conditions.  In short (I know this will not be short enough for very specific interested parties who share Null's love for Israel) but societies break from the internal factor of changing technology rendering the Upper Classes unable to continue to legitimately hold the power and wealth they've accumulated and the external factor of disease, climate, and the eternal stage of every nation when the fleecing of the American middle class over the past half century – under both parties – has left millions precarious, dependent, and in need in immediate relief.

Soon subsidies will mitigate uncertainty, but also aggravate dependency and undermine productivity. This is not just theory. History’s only other superpower republic – Ancient Rome – never regained its middle class after making its grain dole permanent.  Then deregulation and tax reform will come again, citing the golden age when America enjoyed seemingly unlimited productivity and job creation.  American corporations are no longer American, but global. They now have foreign elements in their supply chain and workforce. Furthermore, they factually have foreign owners and answer to foreign interests. So unregulated, multinational corporations sell out American workers to the lowest foreign bidder to make an extra dime.  It is mathematical and inescapable.  The sandwich of conditional dole - behave poors! - and the Dane-geld being paid out to the entirety of the world's economic organization ends the median classes and maximizes the conditions where the most common and durable source of factionalism has ever been found - the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

Laissez faire isn’t a solution, it’s Carte Blanche to undercut American workers. The last fifty years of unrestrained capitalism is transforming America into a place that resembles the stratified aristocracies of old Europe more than the hopeful egalitarian Republic which our Founding Fathers established.  Likewise, Rome learned the hard way that you cannot restore a productive and independent middle class with subsidies, and that the middling virtues are not quickly revived.



> _Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government._


_-James Madison, Federalist No. 10_

America, first from the World Wars and then from the end of the Cold War, has been spoiled.  It has left the middle classes to rot, under the combined efforts of racial and capitalist factions, and the logical thing has happened.  If this is not corrected, and the rot has already seeped into the economy and the government, then the combined capitalism of changing technologies and geopolitics lending uncertainties to the rich and socialism of changing climates and economies lending uncertainties to the poor will squeeze the middle class completely out.  And America will become the very caricature the histories paint of failing empire, hysterical partying - for the end is coming - from the rich and hysterical rioting - for the cause is justice itself - from the poor.  It has, I'm sure you can see, already begun.


​What is going to happen is simple.



> _But when a new generation arises and the democracy falls into the hands of the grandchildren of its founders, they have become so accustomed to freedom and equality that they no longer value them, and begin to aim at pre-eminence; and it is chiefly those of ample fortune who fall into this error. So when they begin to lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the people in every possible way. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence. For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the houses of office by his penury, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch._​


_-Polybius, The Histories_
​Going forward instead, we could – with only the slightest adjustment to the tax code – cap household net worth at some reasonable multiple of the median net worth (but not tax existing wealth).  Every pay cut, tax hike, price increase, hidden cost, layoff, job outsourced, debt, foreclosure, benefit reduction, pay disparity, and machine and algorithm which reduces the wages of a flesh-and-blood American worker – in other words, all forces depressing the median – are computed by the median net worth. Thereafter, the very top could only enjoy further financial gain only when the median gains. The rationale for this is that when the top is anchored to the median, all the energies of most industrial minds would have to also focus on the common goal of increasing the median. This approach would align the interests of the billionaire class to the middle class.  But will we?  No.  For the reforms needed, all without new subsidies, corporate taxes, or business regulations, may already be too late to implement.  The geriatric minds of Congress bar the doorway to change, and the only political party that actually runs the country - through the press, universities, and institutions if not the public offices - thinks the rot empowers them with political capital and celebrity.
​

The purpose of political faction is to obtain control over policy. Control over policy requires control of the government. The greater the scope and importance of governmental action – that is – the greater the sphere of the government’s operations, the wider the scope of policy, the greater and more intense the faction must be to obtain control over the government.  If the way is shut for the necessary reforms then the pressure will build until either of two conditions are met: the impossibility of peaceful revolution strengthening then the inevitable alternative of violent revolution, or the policing and murder of the violent revolutionary faction by the declaration that White Nationalism is the greatest threat America has ever faced.  We know which the system - with all its past arguments and current interests - logically chose from its position.

The only alternative to the growing factionalism within America resides within the restoration of a large, robust, moderate, independent middle class.  The principal policy of any just faction growing within America's rot must be to restore America’s middle class and social mobility.  Whoever holds that narrative holds the power to argue the ultimate issue and chastise the other side's pettiness and defective tunnel vision.  Whatever the racism they hold.


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## Save the Loli (Jul 5, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> hey @Save the Loli
> 
> I think you said in the coof thread something like that the powers that shouldn't be are driving the USA to "balkanize". If that happens, what do you think the USA would split into?
> 
> Maybe the USA and some leftist place with some "progressive" name?


Probably a West Coast state (Washington, Oregon, California, probably Nevada and Arizona and whatever else the Commiefornians can seize) and an East Coast state (Maine down to Virginia) which are hyper-progressive California-on-steroids hellholes, Hawaii (Chinese puppet state/naval base), Alaska (same as Hawaii but also receives "Chinese immigrants" i.e. prisoners who work in Chinese "employment camps"), and then 1-3 other countries in the middle which are deliberately isolated from the world and subject to glowie infiltration until they install neoliberal governments that rape the land for cheap food and minerals.

I believe they want something like this to divide the US. When we have Civil War II/World War III, I bet they will invite the Chinese military in as a force multiplier since the US military has such insane rot in it that even if 80% supports globohomo the rebels still stand a chance at winning because losers like Chief of Staff Mark "Critical Theory rules" Milley and Lt. Colonel (probably a future general lol) Fatboy Vindman would in an actual war be on par with the average Italian WWII general or Stalin's favorite generals in 1940.


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## Cabelaz (Jul 5, 2021)

If the west collapses i can finally go to fort bragg and have my personal howitzer for the small small price of a bag of meth


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 5, 2021)

Save the Loli said:


> Arizona



Despite how last "election" went, I doubt Arizona would really join the leftists in any split, unless Phoenix is leftist enough. In a civil war, "battleground states" could become literal battlegrounds.

I hope Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo doesn't happen, but it does seem headed in that direction, seeing as how divisive politics are now. And "influencer" jerks and clown "journalists" certainly don't help things. Being a Republican in Current Year is as bad to the woke cult as being a KKK member - maybe even worse.


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## Blamo (Jul 6, 2021)

Sped Xing said:


> View attachment 2319700
> 
> Honestly it's a relief that it's over.


Finally, the East Side won.


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## YachieKicchou (Jul 6, 2021)

America was at it's absolute peak when homes were affordable, you could reliably retire, you could easily afford a home, college didn't put you in debt, neighborhoods were safe, and other things.

We're going to keep decaying and eventually collapse as long as we keep ignoring basic human needs and
 happiness. It's nihilistic too, there's no point to any of it. We could keep this country going for hundreds of more years if we reversed course and had a government interested in looking out for the people. 

We don't need socialism to do it, either. We didn't have socialism when we had these things. But somehow the idea that the government step in and reverse course and have human-facing policies is branded as 'dirty pinko shit' and now nothing is done. Look how long it took to get any stimulus check out to the people while they printed money to bail out corporations.

FDR very famously saved capitalism.


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## Mr_Sam_Bones (Jul 6, 2021)

some people are simply superfluous on this world, the world doesn't need South Asia, The Middle East or Africa. Ancient civilization didn't have nukes, the modern day starving nomads are a non-issue if the big red button is at the right desk


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## Smolrolls (Jul 11, 2021)

Your Children (are not your children) I Boston Gay Men's Chorus
					

Your Children (are not your children) (Joshua Shank, music; Khalil Gibran, text) presented by the Boston Gay Men's Chorus at "Sons & Daughters" filmed live o...




					www.youtube.com
				




They'll take your children...and your going to love it you mean bullies!


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## heraclius33 (Jul 11, 2021)

Honestly Appalachistan will be the graveyard of the US Empire.


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## ZeCommissar (Jul 12, 2021)

First things first, I do not see us running out of electricity anytime soon...or really ever for that matter. We will just have to adapt and change what resources we use. This is especially true if you're making energy predictions over five damn decades from now.

I don't know why for the life of me OP is listening to people that make predictions 80-90 years in the future. Look at humanity in the year 1910, and then look at us in the year 1990 and tell me if you see anything resembling 1910 anywhere. The technology we could have at 2100 could be unimaginable to us today, or just somewhat mediocre. Technology got us into this mess, and it will get us out of it. Finally I don't see why people speak about Western culture like its one all encompassing civilization. If America and the majority of Europe turns to shit and "falls" that doesn't mean western culture will just die in the same way it didn't die when the Romans fell. "We will all die if you don't listen to the experts! I listen to them so you should listen to ME!" Yeah, bullshit. Stop listening to those people OP. Im not saying climate change isn't real, but we aren't close to some world-ending scenario. Besides ill be fucking dead by 2080 anyway, so I kinda don't give a fuck.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 12, 2021)

ZeCommissar said:


> Technology got us into this mess, and it will get us out of it.



I think it's possible "Uncle Ted" was right: the more tech advances, the less freedom there'll be, because there's more centralized control. And of course, certain globalist tyrants behind that control.

Anyway, the modern world overall sucks, so I hope it changes for the better. Even if some global catastrophe wipes _Homo sapiens_ out, it wouldn't be as bad as Current Year never ending. Maybe tech really could be used to make the world a futuristic utopia, assuming the population stops being so full of dicks?



ToroidalBoat said:


> The typical modern American city really is like a machine. From the air, it looks like a circuit board. The cheap corporate-built buildings look like electronic components, and the roads look like circuit pathways. Down on the ground, there's no real society. Everyone is isolated in their homes, mechanized transport, or at places of business (remember that SpongeBob clip?).
> 
> Only technology and mechanistic routine - with an over-reliance on the vendor system - keeps things going. Even food is distributed by vendors in bullshit portions at bullshit prices from industrial processing. And to keep things running, the modern world has to have excessive rules. Many live the same.
> 
> ...


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## ShoFuKan (Jul 12, 2021)

ZeCommissar said:


> The technology we could have at 2100 could be unimaginable to us today, or just somewhat mediocre. Technology got us into this mess, and it will get us out of it.


Nuclear Fusion is could stop countries burning coal, you have a Dutch start up, Ocean Cleanup, working on developing tech to trawl the ocean for plastics. Modern cities that wern't built in the 1800s are being designed to handle large traffic flow and incorporate green gardens and the like. Bionic parts arn't deus ex levels yet but it's getting there.

I know the doom and gloom of modern day and thinking you don't matter in the large scale shifts of the worlds governments and corporations makes you feel insignificant but we live in interesting times. In 1900, 90% of the world was in undeveloped countries, even just 100 years ago China had warlords, Korea was under occupation by Japan that introduced the basis of their modern society, Africa was split between colonial powers, South America was awash of revolutions and trying to establish legitimate governments. And now, only about 9% of the world live in abject poverty.
Tech has pushed us this far and it'll get humans futher.


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## Fougaro (Jul 12, 2021)

The West was done the moment people decided to mock Sargon's suit instead of helping him to get Trump tweet #GamerGate and start a systematic campaign of ethic cleansing in games journalism. Games journalism could have been ethically cleansed, UKIP could have won, Trump could have been REEE-elected and the West could have been saved, but we had to act like White Chocolate Americans...


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## Thomas Talus (Jul 12, 2021)

I Love Beef said:


> You want to know why the greats like Maxwell, Edison, and Einstein were able to come up with their groundbreaking theorems about reality, matter, energy, and the fundamentals of the universe? They weren't fedoralords who were self centered fags, or luddites and biblethumpers who awaited the Second Coming


James Clerk Maxwell was a deeply religious man. So was Faraday. Newton wasn't 100% orthodox, but he was within the boundaries of acceptable religious positions of the time, and spent more time on trying to figure out when the Second Coming would happen than he did on calculus or physical mechanics.


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## I Love Beef (Jul 12, 2021)

Thomas Talus said:


> James Clerk Maxwell was a deeply religious man. So was Faraday. Newton wasn't 100% orthodox, but he was within the boundaries of acceptable religious positions of the time, and spent more time on trying to figure out when the Second Coming would happen than he did on calculus or physical mechanics.


I think we can reinterpret what I said as that they weren't doomsday fanatics who locked themselves up or zealots of divine madness. You can be pious and still be a man of the world, I agree with that.

ngl I do also believe that a new form of Christianity has to come about considering all of the shit older denominations have pulled. Everyone's turned away from fire and brimstone because after several wars around the globe later, we're only realizing that the worst of the world tends to come from mankind. Ironically, atheists don't get that, which I don't expect them to either.


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## Captain Syrup (Jul 12, 2021)

Why did Rome fall?  Naked and petty corruption. 

Why is China overtaking us?  Simple, we sold ourselves cheaply.  Utilities, technology, real estate, cattle grazing...  We don't even our own land.


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