PSA: If all you have to do is wait in line, you’re privileged af
As if humans weren’t fiercely tribalistic forever. Other species beat each other to death, too.
The post may be right, but getting a bunch of homo sapiens from far away not to club each other to death is, historically, a hard problem, and countries and passports are kinda a stepping stone.
This is a call for world federalism. I support it, but it’s probably ahead of our time. A democratic world federation (a truly united nations [of earth] perhaps) would be able to more effectively solve many (global) problems.
Or it’s a return to how things were before nationalism rotted the brains of basically everyone on Earth
You’re imagining a false history. Before nationalism it was tribalism which is just small nationalism. Before that it was “if I see a male of my species I may have to kill them”.
Probably once aliens make their apparition, there’d be a much greater incentive to unite
Wait til you learn that the reason you hate immigrants and immigration is that the wealthy conditioned you to hate them. Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can’t? This allows the wealthy to profit off of international arbitrage, while regular citizens can’t. A CEO can move a factory to a low cost country to save on labor, but you in a wealthy country can’t move there to save on cost of living. And the citizens in a poor country can’t move to a wealthy country to earn better wages. The corporations get to take advantage of international arbitrage, but you don’t.
Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can’t?
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
Possibly Mexico, Canada, or China soon too, if the Trumpies get everything they’re asking for.
And the citizens in a poor country can’t move to a wealthy country to earn better wages.
Best example of this I’ve ever seen (other than Israel/Gaza, which is really more of an interior border) is Haiti/Dominican Republic. The fact that they’re all on the same island but one half looks like the fucking Korean Demilitarized Zone to keep the other half out is bleak af. Particularly nauseating when you’re seeing earthquake relief getting held up by some of the most evil bureaucratic fucks you’ve ever dealt with in your life.
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.
So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.
This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.
Oh definitely. But I’ve noticed that America’s failure to impose post-Soviet neoliberal capitalism on big parts of the periphery has resulted in more and more countries getting flagged for embargo and sanction. This has resulted in neighboring countries forced into some hard choices - Germany losing access to cheap Russian natural gas, the Philippines and Australia alienating itself from economic superpower China, Mediterranean shipping coasts skyrocketing after the Gulf of Aden becomes a free-fire zone due to the Americans’ ongoing feud with Iran.
The Cuban embargo can only function if it is isolated from the rest of the Caribbean nations. But putting all of Latin America on the shit list just means they trade with each other while you effectively embargo yourself.
Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.
Its gonna be a crazy ass decade
Corporations are people except when they’re conveniently not!
This is clearly a completely natural phenomenon, like the weather !
You think that’s bad? Every April I have to hand the country I live in a bunch of papers with numbers on them just to exist. If I don’t, they send men with guns. How crazy is that?
“ ‘Private property is the smallest unit of warfare’ - The Environmental Rescue Team Handbook”
— Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023), chapter 15
We live in a society
Sadly.
We live in a patchwork of societies, I think is the thing
Bottom text
I take it you’re not from the US, as we’re trained from birth to be overtly hostile to the concept, as well as each other.
There’s no team in I, and society would be a slippery slope to evil socialism.
But hey, we are oh so very free… to die in the gutter alone as other Americans tell us to hurry up as our continued existence is negatively impacting their property values.
This needs one of those bell curve memes.
Fuck you very much for making me read that.
I don’t care if you hate him; he’s right on this. this entire thing is bullshit.
Who hates him?
A lot of people think he’s become a bit of a wanker on social media and IRL. Some of his tweets are cringe and makes him doing like he’s lightyears up his own ass.
I was one of them until I realized that in grand scheme of things, he is net positive. So I don’t care if he is cringe, I learn quite a bit from him and I wish more influential people were smart like him.
Great!
Now consider why the “public” started turning on him in 2021 or so.
Fair enough. Maybe I just miss Carl too much
That’s always understandable. I think the bigger picture here is that we sometimes forget that they’re all humans, not just public figures. They have other thoughts and opinions that aren’t curated for the world.
Plus, Sagan’s era didn’t have Internet. People weren’t sharing with the world every single fucking thought that came out of their head. I’m sure we would’ve heard Sagan say some dumb shit here and there if he had to produce today’s world’s kind of content.
Sometimes I think he forgets he’s there to be the science guy and makes it about himself a lot, but when he gets on a science rant that’s when hea good, just going on about his love of science and why it’s cool as fuck.
Getting James Cameron to fix the stars in the Titanic remake boosted his ego a little bit, but I get that, I’d be a bit ego filled if I was able to make James Cameron change something in his film.
I don’t use twitter (never have tbh) so I’ve only ever seen screenshots of his more infamous tweets, but I have listened to a LOT of his startalk podcast. Most of the time he’s an entertaining person and seems to admit when he doesn’t know enough about a given subject (although I’ve seen a lot of criticism that he does tend to talk about things he doesn’t know, it doesn’t seem to be that way in the podcast at least)
He can be annoying in some of his podcasts though and you can feel his guests being diplomatic about it while still hearing a bit of annoyance in their voice or next sentence etc. But overall I rather quite like him, despite the Internet’s disdain for him.
More people making science popular and easily digestible is always a good thing IMO. But I’m also biased because I’ve really liked NDT since I was a kid due to seeing him in space documentaries when I was young, and I still love his version of Cosmos.
Black science man always talks like he’s done weed for the first time and is trying to impress his nephew’s friends.
I fucking hate this guy so much. He wants to be carl sagan or stephen hawking so badly, but hes ignorant as fuck and all his ‘deep thoughts’ are shallower than a puddle.
It would be fine if he didn’t talk with such a pretentious tone.
He would be fine if he only talked pretentiously in the fields he actually knows stuff about. He’s earned it for astrophysics. But its the everything else…
I think it actually is interesting if you’re going to call out humans as a species of animal!
All across species from unicellular to megafauna, from plants to fungus, you can find mechanisms used to defend an individual’s physical territory. Ants and bees from the same species will fight and kill others colony members of they stray into their territory. Bears will fight and kill other bears. Our closest relatives, chimps, will go to war with neighboring chimp bands.
Artificial borders are humans way of saying “this is my territory enter at your own risk”. The REALLY interesting thing is that we have established systematic exceptions to the behaviors we see in nature. “Ask us before you come and you can visit and be safe here from those that enforce our territory.”
The temporary nature is unique, many social animals will permanently adopt an outsider into their group on occasion, equivalent to immigration, but I’m not aware of any that have pre-agreed temporary violations of group territory.
I guess you can draw that comparison, but then human territories are exponentially bigger than anything an equivalent social animal might claim as “enter at your risk” area. A traveling pack of dogs can just go around another pack’s territory. We can’t do that, we’re boxed in. There’s no neutral space left. I guess you could argue there’s international waters, but that’s practically inaccessible to most people.
okay I don’t know how to articulate this properly but i’ll try;
fukn get rekt ngt
Yes borders are bullshit, but he really doesn’t have to come across all high and mighty about it
I’m not convinced that he knows how to come across in any other way
Imagine what it would be like having a disagreement with him
He would be absolutely insufferable
It’d be like arguing with a lemming, soooo smug and self-important.
In fact, forget the disagreement
Join Schengen! It’s easy, unless Austria abuses it’s Veto rights
Typical Austria… (i actually have no idea if this is typical , the only thing I know about Austria is Hitler was from there 😅)
This dude really is a pompous ass sometimes.
What about this tweet reads as pompous to you?
“If everyone was as wise as me, I wouldn’t suffer this tiresome charade”
If you close your eyes and imagine a future Star Trek utopia, are you still imagining borders? It’s a pretty standard opinion that borders are an outcropping of our worse natures and should eventually be left behind.
Borders are absolutely in the star Trek utopia. Everything has borders. What we do about those borders is the difference.
Each quadrant, solar system, etc has borders. These are even more arbitrary as the current state, county, and country borders across our world tend to follow natural terrain or longitude and latitude. None of these exist in space. But the quadrant borders are as easy to cross as for me to drive to my next US state. However, the Kardassian border is not so easy to cross, just like it’s not so easy for me to cross into North Korea.
Borders are not the inherent issue here. Conflict is the inherent issue, and borders are how we try to minimize that conflict.
They should really issue some sort of identification showing to which quadrant you belong so that friendly quadrants will accept you as a visitor with open arms.
Well, he’s ridiculing the fact that everything we have setup for governance is, in fact, made up. I don’t see why that’s pompous. I know his tweets tend to be a bit too pedantic for certain topics, but that is his persona. He is one of the few peopeople responsible for this generation finding science cool. He’s allowed that much.
It’s sophomoric.
Agreed he can be pompous but I think since he’s an astronomer he is making the point that if you were in space and looked at earth you would wonder why are there borders
Because it turns out sociology, anthropology and politics also exist.
If you were in space and looked at Earth you wouldn’t see any people.
EDIT: Crap, someone is going to point out that you can see lights at night, aren’t they? This thread is for pedants and now I’ve started a conversation about biomarkers you can see from orbit.
But you can see lights on the dark side!!
The whole point is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can change it if we wanted to, we are participants of sociology anthropology and politics. Oh well social constructs
Yeah, but that’s my point. There’s a tendency, particularly on STEM people, but also on your average normies, to think that “social constructs” aren’t “real”. This is a very bad take that often causes a lot of problems.
Ofc it’s real. Money is a construct and it’s real.
But what we made creates so much suffering and takes lives away. That’s just not necessary. And ofc changing it will probably take some power away from the previliged, that’s the point. Ideally we want everyone to be satisfied, but not when there’s still people dying of starvation.
I don’t know that I claimed it’d take power away from the privileged. If I had to make an educated guess, the idea that “it’s a social construct so we can change it” tends to lead to proposing easy solutions to complicated problems that only work if we all agree they work.
They normally don’t work.
And if the people proposing them are powerful enough to get convinced that all they need to do is force everybody to agree with them regardless it often ends in tears.
Hell, catch me in a good day I’ll tell you changing natural realities is easier than changing social constructs. On par at best, and nature at least won’t argue about it.
You probably would though, there are no single manned space missions far as I know.
I’m going to point out that you edited without editing.
Next level pedantry.
You know continents, rivers and mountain ranges exist?
Your point is?
Earth is beautiful!
There are heaps of examples of those that aren’t political borders, though. I live between a river and some mountains. The other side of the river is another county but still the same country, and the other side of the nearest mountains isn’t even another county. Egypt is on both sides of the Nile and also on both sides of the Africa-Asia border, Russia is on both sides of the Urals and the Europe-Asia border (wherever you draw it, if you draw it at all), America is on both sides of the Rockies and so on
El Paso?
No, I’m in Scotland. Isn’t the other side of the river from El Paso across the Mexican border anyway?
To judge others so, you must be the personification of kindness and benevolence. Surely?
