Into The Afternight: Our 3rd Shift O/T
17 repliesIf you’re still up and want to talk Chiefs, or just hang with fellow citizens of the Kingdom, this is the place.
Break out the camels, it’s here.
Not real Camels, of course, smoking prohibition laws preclude that – for your own good, mind. Your objections about liberty don’t matter, only your obedience.
With that, time’s yours.
Too much fun
Money.
Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike!
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/world/doomsday-clock-2023-climate-scn/index.html
Who the hell is Mike, and why does he matter?
This part was good, though.
Although the clock has been an effective wake-up call when it comes to reminding people about the cascading crises the planet is facing, some have questioned the 75-year-old clock’s usefulness.
“It’s an imperfect metaphor,” Michael E. Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Earth and environmental science department at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN in 2022, highlighting that the clock’s framing combines different types of risk that have different characteristics and occur in different timescales. Still, he adds it “remains an important rhetorical device that reminds us, year after year, of the tenuousness of our current existence on this planet.”
Every model has constraints, Eryn MacDonald, analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, told CNN in 2022, adding that the Bulletin has made thoughtful decisions each year on how to get the people’s attention about existential threats and the required action.
Odd, but the whole thing’s the quote.
That said, the Doomsday Clock has never been an hour away from midnight, so it presents a false scale. For the 90%+ of it, it’s “trust us, it’s bad”, and the minute increments are “trust us, we’re Scientists“.
It’s also a horrible trope, because it demands we treat the crisis as a driving priority, without any possible relief. That’s teaching folks to give up more than start following a virtue-signalling attitude of “everything I do really matters”. Make the problem big enough while spreading the needed following so wide that most will see the wall’s too high, and get back to living.
Coulda boiled it all down to “in the long term, fear is a lousy motivator”, which backed up by the fact that there’s no recent record of such a regime that’s been long-term positively productive. China’s kind of a special case, but that’s a different essay, the point is that whenever fear is used to keep ‘the people’ committed to ‘the program’, it can’t keep working. Folks find ways to adapt and avoid being caught doing the forbidden, and otherwise get on with life. No more compliance than you can get away with.
That says something about our own gov’t’s rush to copy China in terms of more citizen surveillance. For fuck’s sake, the NYC mayor had the gall to say ‘Big Bother’s not watching out for you, Big Brother’s watching out for you!’. That’s actual fascist talk, but will he be defended endlessly if actually called out? Are you kidding, he’s a Democrat.
Nevermind all that the doomsday clock is in itself a joke. Ostensibly founded by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for the purpose of warning about nuclear annihilation, it’s morphed into something decidedly different and at least as political as it is scientific, although given the cold war backdrop perhaps that was its intent all along. A simple look at the board which sets the clock is comprised of a majority of people are primarily political creatures of the DC and academia think tank policy establishment and by extention the interests that fund such sinecures. There are a couple with undergrad life sciences backgrounds that went into public health masters programs (an administrative/ managerial field more than scientific one). Then there’s a smattering of people with actual hard science backgrounds- including both physical and life sciences- which seem to be constituted solely to check off the illusion of credibility by having one of the range of disciplines from nuclear to astronomical to epidemiological to ecological. Imparting any authority to this propaganda outfit that only exists to con the midwit who exalts science as a sacrament rather than a continual process of investigation, skepticism, and testing is a fools errand.
https://thebulletin.org/about-us/science-and-security-board/
Well said.