I am simply in awe of human faith in the creative power of their thoughts and beliefs – or, in other words, belief that they will override reality and substitute their own if they put fingers in their ears deep enough and yell “la la la” loudly enough.
It’s not just one thing in isolation, it’s a pattern. For instance, the Italians built a city of 6 million people between a stratovolcano with a history of explosive catastrophic eruptions and a supervolcanic field, where they literally intended to build a new spa resort at the edge of the solfatara crater in the smack-middle of what is equivalent of the Norris geyser basin in Yellowstone, and now that the supervolcano is acting up and the experts are advising immediate evacuation of at least the village in the red zone, everybody is acting as if the problem is going to go away if only they stopped noticing it.
On a political level, we are in a situation where nuclear escalation of the conflict in Ukraine didn’t happen yet only because Putin was so opposed to starting the nuclear war himself that he’s trading immediate retaliation for loss of deterrence, basically making it more likely in the long run. This, of course, is only a symptom of the global destabilisation due to a systemic collapse of the entire West, which became so ideologically unhinged it’s acting like a retard with a gun; economically, sociologically, politically and in all other relevant terms, the West is doomed.
And this is the situation where the Internet is full of people who:
– obsess over new gadgets
– obsess over vacation spots
– talk about “1st world problems” ironically while California is either on fire or having an open insurgency or not having water
– ridicule “doomsayers” who are concerned that the world as we know it is fucked
– obsess over CO2 emissions, gender and plastic straws.
The entire news feed looks like something that would have been on “Onion” or some other satire fake-news site a decade ago. But yeah, everything is fine, people have been saying the world was going to end thousand years ago and it’s still here.
That’s true, people have indeed been predicting the end of the world since antiquity. However, people in the fifth century have been saying that the Rome is falling and the anti-doomers, starting with St. Augustine, replied that people have always been predicting the fall of Rome and yet it’s been here for a thousand years and it will be here for another thousand at least.
I wonder whether the dinosaurs would think that the world is still here. Let’s ask them. Oh wait…
Sounds like building a human sacrifice altar, inspired and directed by a hungry Rakshasa gang. Less conspicuous than a concentration camp, not that there aren't enough of those.
Intentionally planting and enforcing distractions is a convenient trick from the daily toolbox for buying social peace and postponing chaos while manipulating stock markets, plundering national resources, and reducing human rights to nothing. No more rich bourgeoisie to fund a revolution, they are on their yachts, yachting their yacht girls & Zac Efron.
I don't see anything deliberate behind it; on the contrary, they are just idiots. If a volcano didn't blow in a thousand years, that translates as "eternity" to humans; even the things that happened in the times of their grandparents are "ancient times", and if something didn't happen in a thousand years, it "never will". So, by some kind of logic, a supervolcano becomes harmless, and you can build a town there, right in the centre. What actually matters to humans are the things that happen in the present, that year, and during their lifetime – harvest, their children growing up, and so on. And, since the volcano didn't blow them up yet, it's fine. Those craters around, they are just part of the scenery, how God made them in the beginning or whatever.
And the politicians, why they don't evacuate them? It's also simple. If they evacuate, and the volcano doesn't immediately blow, it will be a huge scandal, ending the politician's career. That must be avoided. If the volcano does blow, that will also be an end of the politician's career, but not as certainly, since they can always hide behind all kinds of fictitious uncertainties and "science" (which of course they are paying for). So, basically, since the politicians exist in short term between two elections, they are naturally disinclined to make long term plans and, for instance, evacuate Napoli 20 years in advance of any trouble, because it is obvious that something will blow sooner or later, the city of that size is impossible to evacuate once trouble actually starts, and so on.
That's somewhat similar to me and the end of the world. If I issue warnings in time, meaning long enough period that you can do something serious and strategic about it, it will also be long enough period of nothing going on that my warning will be dismissed as baseless. If, however, I issue a warning and shit immediately happens, they will say either that it was obvious because anyone could have known it at that point, or that the warning was too close to the event to be useful, because they didn't have time to do anything.
Also, if someone is stupid enough, they can slice a catastrophic event into small enough slices where during most of them "everything is fine". Essentially, when you jump from a 90th floor window, you started the process that will inevitably end in your death, but during the entirety of the fall you are perfectly fine, in fact you might feel better than usual, because the fall doesn't kill you or harm you in any way, it's the sudden deceleration at the end.
For instance "it's not the WW3, the nukes are not flying yet", "it's not WW3, it's just a power outage and an Internet failure, we didn't hear anything about nukes", "it can't be nukes because we're fine here, it's just doomers spreading rumours". Basically, during most of the world's end the idiots would be saying that it's all fine, and even when they are dying they would think it's just them, and the world will be fine, because it always was, which guarantees that it always will be, in their reasoning. All the while, I'm like "sure, believe whatever, I don't give a shit".