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> When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stoppi

> When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness. I don't understand such analysis when there are opposing "blob" forces trying to push the world into worse state. Forget about people dying in earthquakes, consider current wars, we are using resources (human, capital, tech) to destroy resources (uprooting human lives, destroying buildings, blowing up infrastructure) while those very resources could be used to create more resources which solve problems and create wealth. World is not a closed system, there are forces operating which for whatever reasons are not aligned for humanity's flourishing.

iJohnDoe 11mo ago
The Bush/Cheney wars were peak evil of modern times of sending our children off to die just to make Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton rich. Bush and Cheney should be considered mass murders. Not to mention your point about all the funds that could have been spent elsewhere.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  This is not an unpopular opinion. No one on the right or left defends the second Iraq War anymore and few defend the war in Afghanistan.
- astrange 11mo ago
  Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War. The US is an oil exporter and doesn't have any oil contracts in Iraq. In fact, no one makes money from any wars, and defense contractors profit less during wartime than peacetime. One universal principle about US politics is that many people try to sound savvy by claiming X thing is obviously about the money, or that some secret evil competent person did something and successfully profited from it, and then if you look their explanation is always wrong. In fact there are no competent evil people and bad ideas are simply just bad for everyone. …Also, Bush's PEPFAR program was so good that I think he's clearly saved more lives than any other president even if you count the wars against him.
  - add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
    Yes, Erik Prince famously donated his company's time during that era.
    - astrange 11mo ago
      No, we didn't do a war so that Blackwater could secretly profit from it. We did it because Cheney felt like doing one for emotional and ideological reasons.
      - mnky9800n 11mo ago
        like preventing sadam hussein from selling oil in euros.
  - kamranjon 11mo ago
    “Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War.” This seems wrong? Halliburton secured a 7billion dollar contract where they were the only allowed bidders, their subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) was estimated to receive at least 39.5billion dollars in federal contracts. Halliburton experienced a 80% increase in revenue by the first quarter of 2004… Most of these contracts were “cost-plus” which meant they were guaranteed reimbursement for their costs + a guaranteed profit on top of that. As a result of the war many oil companies including BP were awarded access and development contracts to the oil fields, with BP extracting well over 15billion dollars worth of oil. Over 150billion dollars in oil money apparently just went missing or was “stolen”. Also the US has maintained control over Iraqi oil revenue since the beginning of the war in 2003. It would seem to be almost rewriting history to make such a statement…
rayiner 11mo ago
That’s backwards. Our fight isn’t against “blob forces, but instead against human nature and regression to the mean. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is the default state of humanity. The life you have in San Francisco or wherever is a bubble of order and flourishing in a hostile world, like the inside of a single cell organism.
- MangoToupe 11mo ago
  What's the difference? Surely this is worth fighting in both instances. Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
- walleeee 11mo ago
  The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless. Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
  - api 11mo ago
    > The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else" This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed. This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years. Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology. It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.

iJohnDoe 11mo ago

The Bush/Cheney wars were peak evil of modern times of sending our children off to die just to make Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton rich. Bush and Cheney should be considered mass murders. Not to mention your point about all the funds that could have been spent elsewhere.

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
This is not an unpopular opinion. No one on the right or left defends the second Iraq War anymore and few defend the war in Afghanistan.
astrange 11mo ago
Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War. The US is an oil exporter and doesn't have any oil contracts in Iraq. In fact, no one makes money from any wars, and defense contractors profit less during wartime than peacetime. One universal principle about US politics is that many people try to sound savvy by claiming X thing is obviously about the money, or that some secret evil competent person did something and successfully profited from it, and then if you look their explanation is always wrong. In fact there are no competent evil people and bad ideas are simply just bad for everyone. …Also, Bush's PEPFAR program was so good that I think he's clearly saved more lives than any other president even if you count the wars against him.
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
  Yes, Erik Prince famously donated his company's time during that era.
  - astrange 11mo ago
    No, we didn't do a war so that Blackwater could secretly profit from it. We did it because Cheney felt like doing one for emotional and ideological reasons.
    - mnky9800n 11mo ago
      like preventing sadam hussein from selling oil in euros.
- kamranjon 11mo ago
  “Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War.” This seems wrong? Halliburton secured a 7billion dollar contract where they were the only allowed bidders, their subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) was estimated to receive at least 39.5billion dollars in federal contracts. Halliburton experienced a 80% increase in revenue by the first quarter of 2004… Most of these contracts were “cost-plus” which meant they were guaranteed reimbursement for their costs + a guaranteed profit on top of that. As a result of the war many oil companies including BP were awarded access and development contracts to the oil fields, with BP extracting well over 15billion dollars worth of oil. Over 150billion dollars in oil money apparently just went missing or was “stolen”. Also the US has maintained control over Iraqi oil revenue since the beginning of the war in 2003. It would seem to be almost rewriting history to make such a statement…

rayiner 11mo ago

That’s backwards. Our fight isn’t against “blob forces, but instead against human nature and regression to the mean. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is the default state of humanity. The life you have in San Francisco or wherever is a bubble of order and flourishing in a hostile world, like the inside of a single cell organism.

MangoToupe 11mo ago
What's the difference? Surely this is worth fighting in both instances. Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
walleeee 11mo ago
The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless. Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
- api 11mo ago
  > The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else" This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed. This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years. Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology. It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.