4 ms·

And that’s just the U.S. - inequality there is comparatively low compared to an awful lot of the world. Brazil, for instance, is just nuts, and resultantly spen

And that’s just the U.S. - inequality there is comparatively low compared to an awful lot of the world. Brazil, for instance, is just nuts, and resultantly spends a lot of its time teetering around a political sinkhole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient Unfortunately, it’s been the outcome of every system we’ve yet tried - wealth always accumulates. It has, so far, only been redistributed through violence - either direct action by the proletariat, or their mass slaughter in war, allowing redistribution amidst the survivors. I’d love to imagine that this time we can find a different path, but ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck.

forgetfreeman 7mo ago
"ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck" Our species has been on the planet for what, roughly 300,000 years? 290,000 of which was spent mostly on chasing our food. By comparison our modern fumble-fucking around with political systems designed by and for a notional elite class is a blink of the eye. We've beaten worse odds.
- madaxe_again 7mo ago
  That period was just the same shit on a smaller scale. The story is told by our genomes and by those of pathogens and parasites - again and again breeding concentrated and bottlenecked, suggesting power accumulation, and again and again entire germlines went extinct, as the old guard were violently usurped - and we’ve plenty of archaeology that shows wholesale slaughter of entire populations. And… chimps follow the same patterns - accumulation of breeding rights to a select germline, followed by violent revolution, infanticide, all of it. We are cut from the same stuff.
  - forgetfreeman 7mo ago
    You seem to be asserting that there is some kind of genetic governor on our species social development. If that's true and this is literally all we're capable of the most ethical thing to do would be to engineer a species-ending pathogen before we've completely destroyed every ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps whatever comes next will do a better job.

forgetfreeman 7mo ago

"ten millennia of precedent is a hard trend to buck" Our species has been on the planet for what, roughly 300,000 years? 290,000 of which was spent mostly on chasing our food. By comparison our modern fumble-fucking around with political systems designed by and for a notional elite class is a blink of the eye. We've beaten worse odds.

madaxe_again 7mo ago
That period was just the same shit on a smaller scale. The story is told by our genomes and by those of pathogens and parasites - again and again breeding concentrated and bottlenecked, suggesting power accumulation, and again and again entire germlines went extinct, as the old guard were violently usurped - and we’ve plenty of archaeology that shows wholesale slaughter of entire populations. And… chimps follow the same patterns - accumulation of breeding rights to a select germline, followed by violent revolution, infanticide, all of it. We are cut from the same stuff.
- forgetfreeman 7mo ago
  You seem to be asserting that there is some kind of genetic governor on our species social development. If that's true and this is literally all we're capable of the most ethical thing to do would be to engineer a species-ending pathogen before we've completely destroyed every ecosystem on the planet. Perhaps whatever comes next will do a better job.