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I'm inclined to argue about the title "most powerful nation on this planet". It's a nice tagline, but the metrics for which it applies are narrowing rapidly.
by blunte 7y ago
I'm inclined to argue about the title "most powerful nation on this planet". It's a nice tagline, but the metrics for which it applies are narrowing rapidly.
But still, let this be a lesson to those who would follow bad leaders to their own demise; or rather, let it be a lesson to their offspring who watch them follow the bad leaders.
I suspect humanity follows cycles of enlightenment, complacency, and self-destruction (or irrelevance, which is equally damning depending on the individual). We appear to be between stage 2 and 3 at this point.
- rabidrat 7y ago> I suspect humanity follows cycles of enlightenment, complacency, and self-destruction This theory would agree (and it makes sense to me): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 7y ago> I'm inclined to argue about the title "most powerful nation on this planet". Richest underdeveloped country? Most powerful failed state?
- bigyikes 7y agoWe can debate the originally proposed title, but failed state? Come on.
- sandov 7y ago> But still, let this be a lesson to those who would follow bad leaders to their own demise; or rather, let it be a lesson to their offspring who watch them follow the bad leaders. a.k.a 90% of the population. At such point, you're just complaining about human stupidity, instead of any specific group. And our children will be just as stupid as us, but their leader will say dumb things about other issues instead of chloroquine.
- blunte 7y agoI'm not entirely sure that's true. Or maybe it's a case of "we've traded the old bugs for a set of new bugs". Anecdotally I can identify two of the four living generations of my family having observed and corrected _obvious_ failures of their elder generation. What's perhaps harder to recognize is the new bad traits that get introduced. To be fair, though, each generation has increasingly different circumstances than the previous one. The human circumstance seems to be varying more with each generation as of the industrial age. Ideally we would collect and review all the previous lessons learned. But we tend to get fascinated by new shiny things (or Netflix series), so we aren't evolving optimally...