do u think the establishment has any faint idea that

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that they have massively failed evrrything in this world, during the past two or three decades

Last edited by ollychan on 26 Apr 2019, 4:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

Have they though? Can you point to meaningful reasons the last 3 decades have been worse than any other time in history. Or that the mismanagement has been more incompetent?

We certainly have problems now, but we've always had problems, and nostalgic glasses tend to forget that.

I'd agree with Antrax in that, in general, things have been going pretty well for the last few decades even if we're seeing a few blips right now.

"The establishment" is also not a fixed group and it is constantly changing. For example, if you're American, then in the last thirty years you've seen the establishment shift from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump. Although Bush Senior was VP and Bush Jnr was, erm, his father's son, each of those was a pretty big departure from their predecessor and usually also their predecessor's predecessor.

Weirdly, "anti-establishment" sentiment is now a tool of the establishment in many developed countries.

It depends on what you mean by establishment. If you mean the capitalists, the super rich, the PTB, I'd say they are doing marvelously in their own terms where they win the money and control the power.

I think the news tends to focus on the embarrassments, and rightly so.

Where you get some inkling as to where things have gone right it's somewhat overembellished with people like Steven Pinker and Michio Kaku but you can get some sense that it's been a better 21st century for the developing world than the developed world and we may be on target to not only drastically decrease global poverty and malcontent can turn into shell states and massive terrorist breading grounds but you also have the possibility - if we can raise standard of living enough in the developing world enough - that we may even be able to get the whole world environmentally-concerned and capable of monitoring waste and consumption at just about every economic level per country or at least, possibly sooner, have an effective/significant economic strata in every country capable of and interested in monitoring such things.

The better part too - if developing world standard of living comes closer to developed world standard of living the need for military spending in many countries is likely to plummet, the quantity of war is likely to plummet, and while there still may be risks for plenty of strong-man shenanigans and still plenty of risk of loose nukes there won't be quite the risks of nation states running against each other and, as said above, fewer places from which terrorism can be an international concern.

its illiberal

Why don't people look at the popular culture like entertainment and the general academia fields too. If you look back, they have decades behind them of continuously shifting the overton window of opinion to the left in subtle or even more overt means. It's odd because I don't remember seeing them push anything that was "right" at all.

I think the situation is an order of complexity better than you suggest.

The simple fact is that the "old way" of generating power isn't going to work for most of the poorest people. Building transmission lines is expensive and often impractical. Much easier to forgo the coal plant and just stick a solar panel on every roof and a battery in every home - particularly as the global poor *tend* to live in sunny regions (exceptions being some parts of the old USSR, North Korea, some remote parts of Canada, and some islands - but these tend to b well served by wind power).

People aren't going to live environmentally conscious lives just because they care about the environment. They're going to do it because it makes economic sense.