Today vs. History

[subdued_passion]

I likes you because...

I think the more simulation material is available, the better. Real Dolls? Great! Porn? Sure. Video games? Definitely. Gives people the chance to do what they want to do without having to find another human being who may not be into being stored in a closet, objectified or killed.

And definitely performance art when some dude is in a shark cage and a 30 ton female pregnant shark has its way with the cage.

Go shark!

And it's wimmin! Wimmin in the branches! WIMMEN WHO FEEL THEY CAN ADDRESS ME! AND NOT AS AN EQUAL, BUT AS AN INFERIOR!

Fucking trees. Trees suck. Wimmin huggers.

You say stuffs like ^^^that.

 

[Byron In Exile]

It is my contention that TODAY...is a great day. Not for each individual alive right now and their particular circumstances, but for the statistical gains that we've made in culture, in science, in medicine, in art.

Hot and cold running water.

It's fucking paradise up in here.

 

[Recidiva]

You say stuffs like ^^^that.

Thank you! And I hope you eventually got some sleep.

I like you too! Parrot pictures are art, I'm sure of it.

 

[Recidiva]

Hot and cold running water.

It's fucking paradise up in here.

Antibiotics, germ theory, refrigeration.

I feel that those who feel history was a better time...have not read enough history.

 

[kbate]

Antibiotics, germ theory, refrigeration.

I feel that those who feel history was a better time...have not read enough history.

I'd go back to electricity rather than refrigeration as the best change in the history of mankind.

99.9% of our advances now come because we no longer need spend 70% of our day finding and preparing food or gathering material to get our heat.

today everyone is allowed to sit down and think, while historically, you had to find a rich patron who would feed, clothe and house you if you were a thinker rather than a fighter or worker.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Antibiotics, germ theory, refrigeration.

I feel that those who feel history was a better time...have not read enough history.

So very true.

Most of those alive today, tossed back 100 years in time, would not survive a week.

 

[Recidiva]

I'd go back to electricity rather than refrigeration as the best change in the history of mankind.

99.9% of our advances now come because we no longer need spend 70% of our day finding and preparing food or gathering material to get our heat.

today everyone is allowed to sit down and think, while historically, you had to find a rich patron who would feed, clothe and house you if you were a thinker rather than a fighter or worker.

Yes. I'd also like to thank Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis for discovering that you shouldn't do an autopsy and then go deliver a baby without washing your hands.

How much of our population increase is due to the fact that women can have babies without an incredibly high possibility that both mother and child die from childbed fever or other complications that are now easily fixed.

And I'm sorry that he ironically died of an infection to the hand. That sucked.

I think it's a sign of catastrophic success that people have enough electricity, free time and connectivity to come online and complain about how hard their lives are.

Relative to each other, yes, that's valid. Relative to the past? No contest.

 

[Recidiva]

So very true.

Most of those alive today, tossed back 100 years in time, would not survive a week.

I wouldn't survive 100 years back, unless it was some sort of deluded Jeanne D'Arc hit hard die fast way.

Migraines don't engender healthy social interactions when untreated.

According to the numbers I'd have died chained to the wall of an insane asylum while people fed me with a bowl pushed toward me by a long pole because I bit them. Not out of being insane, but from being seriously pissed off about being chained to a wall and being in constant pain.

 

[Byron In Exile]

I'd go back to electricity rather than refrigeration as the best change in the history of mankind.

99.9% of our advances now come because we no longer need spend 70% of our day finding and preparing food or gathering material to get our heat.

today everyone is allowed to sit down and think, while historically, you had to find a rich patron who would feed, clothe and house you if you were a thinker rather than a fighter or worker.

If it came to it, 99.98% probably.

So... where's the dividend?

Somebody somewhere is being a huge parasite.

 

[Recidiva]

If it came to it, 99.98% probably.

So... where's the dividend?

Somebody somewhere is being a huge parasite.

I'm spending maybe 35% of my time earning my living and maintaining my life, and this isn't heavy labor. I have a dishwasher and a sink and refrigerator and a car and a credit card.

The rest of the time I'm playing games and shooting the breeze online and watching stuff like Shark Week.

So probably me.

 

[Byron In Exile]

I wouldn't survive 100 years back, unless it was some sort of deluded Jeanne D'Arc hit hard die fast way.

There was a lot of that. People holding their lives at nothing compared to principles. These days, survival's the ticket.

Migraines don't engender healthy social interactions when untreated.

According to the numbers I'd have died chained to the wall of an insane asylum while people fed me with a bowl pushed toward me by a long pole because I bit them. Not out of being insane, but from being seriously pissed off about being chained to a wall and being in constant pain.

Chained to a wall might have been a good outcome. Beats being drowned or burnt.

 

[subdued_passion]

Thank you! And I hope you eventually got some sleep.

Some. All that laughing didn't help at all.

Antibiotics, germ theory, refrigeration.

I feel that those who feel history was a better time...have not read enough history.

Your thread has made me feel so nostalgic. My ancestral village is stuck in a different time. When we were kids and we'd go there for holidays we'd live without electricity, indoor plumbing or even stoves.

I'm quite young but I'm sure I must sound like an old granny when I say that as kids we'd draw water from a well, we'd chop branches and collect dried leaves to burn to cook our food, heat our water. Our village had no doctor and no priest. I've seen people die due to delays in getting medical assistance. I've lived in a time before cable television... heck before television...

I look at all the changes around me and I feel that my generation here is special because we got to witness those hardships first hand and I still get to play with the iPADs and the internets and who knows what in the next 40-50years.

 

[Recidiva]

There was a lot of that. People holding their lives at nothing compared to principles. These days, survival's the ticket.

Chained to a wall might have been a good outcome. Beats being drowned or burnt.

Even our political system, which is pretty tawdry and pathetic...is still better than one party killing each other literally instead of figuratively.

Well, for me I would have died. Mom had Rh- and I am Rh+ and I clinically died and was revived. I had a bunch of transfusions and they told my parents I'd be a vegetable and I was likely brain dead. My parents elected to remove me from life support and I...didn't die.

Now RhoGAM handles that.

 

[Recidiva]

Some. All that laughing didn't help at all.



Your thread has made me feel so nostalgic. My ancestral village is stuck in a different time. When we were kids and we'd go there for holidays we'd live without electricity, indoor plumbing or even stoves.

I'm quite young but I'm sure I must sound like an old granny when I say that as kids we'd draw water from a well, we'd chop branches and collect dried leaves to burn to cook our food, heat our water. Our village had no doctor and no priest. I've seen people die due to delays in getting medical assistance. I've lived in a time before cable television... heck before television...

I look at all the changes around me and I feel that my generation here is special because we got to witness those hardships first hand and I still get to play with the iPADs and the internets and who knows what in the next 40-50years.

I had an unusual upbringing for suburban America in New Jersey. My dad was an IBM programmer and my mom was a physical therapist, but he just really wanted to be a Mountain Man. I lived in a home that he built, with no air conditioning and the only heat was wood stove. He kept chickens and lots of our summer was spent splitting wood for the fire and growing an organic garden, picking the bugs off leaf by leaf. My mom had only organic food in the house, baked and cooked everything, sewed everything herself, including the sleeping bags for when we went camping. She would drive an hour to buy illegal unpasteurized milk. We spent our summers in a cabin in the Pennsylvania mountains, no TV at all. No dishwasher. No washing machine. Just books, a record player and a beautiful lake.

I'm not nostalgic exactly. It was hard and time consuming and ultimately didn't build my character to value that lifestyle, but to want to escape it as soon as possible.

So in a sense I can understand your nostalgia, but in my case it wasn't a full culture doing it, it was just my house on the block not having TV and having chickens and homemade everything.

Although going on vacations only to National Parks and not Disneyland was fantastic. I adore my country's landscape.

I have some benefits, I know how to survive in rougher conditions and I know a lot of the whys and wherefores, but I also deeply appreciate that modern conveniences give me back hours of time spent on repetitive tasks.

My parents ultimately remodeled their house to include all modern conveniences, including stuff I'd never seen like integrated vacuum technology where you plug the vacuum hose directly to the wall...I've moved back to the house when they moved to assisted living, and there's no more garden, all ornamentals, and although my dad insisted on something that resembles a wood stove, it's gas powered (and in fact saved our butts during the hurricane as it kept us warm, thanks dad.)

So I guess they got sick of it too.

 

[Antoninus]

I'm all for travel, but I've traveled mostly in the U.S. because I would like to get to know my own country, and it's wonderful.

I don't really care much about stereotypes because the only people who deal in them are wrong on both sides, being one or picking on one.

Development of computers was essentially creation of an entirely new realm of experience (yes, okay, a lot of it is porn, but...) and wasn't predictable. That's what's interesting about reading history or living it. I may not be the one to make the breakthrough, but I can predict with fairly decent accuracy that they will happen and that they're happening now faster than in previous history.

We need some level of breakthrough on energy management to develop the facilities that are created to test underlying tenets of physics. So that will happen, but right now the costs are prohibitive. We'll get over it. We've got a problem, enough smart people are frustrated by it, we find a solution. Maybe not soon, and can't predict when, but that's the way history progresses.

I see combating stereotypes as a side benefit of international communing. Much like trade, unless we have a xenophobic or parasitic approach, everyone benefits with more open communication. If we learn about their culture and they learn about our culture, we see the diversity within cultures and recognize each other's essential humanity. The out group becomes the in group.

An energy revolution is big. Not merely the transition to sustainable forms, but the ability to call upon arbitrary electrical (for example) power without consideration to cost would usher in a second industrial revolution. When I think of the tropes of science fiction, I think energy weapons, commonplace spaceflight, etc. These require not the revolution in genetics or information processing we've had, but a revolution in energy. I hope to see that in my lifetime.

 

[Antoninus]

You are clearly someone who is an excellent judge of beauty and what it takes to create it and promote it in the world.

Look it up.

I can understand where renard is coming from at least. There's a legitimate conservative reaction against postmodernism (and deconstructionisn, in my view) as being essentially vacuous and unrelatable. As offering a criticism without substance or alternative. I tend to share this view, especially of the philosophical postmodernism. But wonder of wonders, postmodernism is hardly the whole story. If like me you loath postmodernism, there's a community out there for you to give your voice. You're free to choose alternatives. Think contemporary art sucks balls, and "arts and crafts" should never be uttered in the same breath? Then dollop some oils on your pallet and get cracking on that neoromantic landscape and bury yourself in nationalism. The arts have never been as robust as now. Thanks to modernity.

 

[Not Normal]

I'm really happy with the many things modern living affords me. I like having light at the switch, hot water as needed, and central heat and air. I love a stocked kitchen from a grocery store with more things than I can even fathom. I like the internets and all of it's splendor.

 

[Recidiva]

I see combating stereotypes as a side benefit of international communing. Much like trade, unless we have a xenophobic or parasitic approach, everyone benefits with more open communication. If we learn about their culture and they learn about our culture, we see the diversity within cultures and recognize each other's essential humanity. The out group becomes the in group.

An energy revolution is big. Not merely the transition to sustainable forms, but the ability to call upon arbitrary electrical (for example) power without consideration to cost would usher in a second industrial revolution. When I think of the tropes of science fiction, I think energy weapons, commonplace spaceflight, etc. These require not the revolution in genetics or information processing we've had, but a revolution in energy. I hope to see that in my lifetime.

Absolutely! I am all for people being better behaved. I'm a fan of travel. Just saying that when I've traveled, people of other nations treat me well and I treat them well and if we're all in a helicopter tour over the Grand Canyon you don't need to speak the same language because thumbs up and "Ooooh!" works. I haven't experienced all that much in the way of people being mean to me, and of course America is made up with so much ethnic and cultural diversity it's easy to be immersed.

Yes, an energy revolution is huge and it's what we need, to change the way we think about it, to change the way we generate it, to change the way we manage it. We need something transformative. I am not saying I know what that is, but I'm with you, I want to see it. When I say energy I also mean the way we think of money. I'm hoping for a sort of Star Trek synthesizer or a Back to the Future Mr. Fusion where we transform perceived waste into perceived valuable forms at lower costs than it takes to fabricate otherwise.

 

[Recidiva]

I can understand where renard is coming from at least. There's a legitimate conservative reaction against postmodernism (and deconstructionisn, in my view) as being essentially vacuous and unrelatable. As offering a criticism without substance or alternative. I tend to share this view, especially of the philosophical postmodernism. But wonder of wonders, postmodernism is hardly the whole story. If like me you loath postmodernism, there's a community out there for you to give your voice. You're free to choose alternatives. Think contemporary art sucks balls, and "arts and crafts" should never be uttered in the same breath? Then dollop some oils on your pallet and get cracking on that neoromantic landscape and bury yourself in nationalism. The arts have never been as robust as now. Thanks to modernity.

Yes, but art needs to change. I think we need this step, and that it will lead somewhere. Impressionism was considered complete junk and lack of craft.

But we have craft. We have the history and the methods, now we're playing with transforming it. Some of it is, yes, crap, but each generation of artists can't continue by simply tracing the forms of their ancestors. At some point you have to explore new forms with vision.

Yeah...some of it sucks, but it's the process that I honor and I know why it has to be done that way, to get to somewhere new. We're not there yet, but enjoy the ride.

 

[Recidiva]

I'm really happy with the many things modern living affords me. I like having light at the switch, hot water as needed, and central heat and air. I love a stocked kitchen from a grocery store with more things than I can even fathom. I like the internets and all of it's splendor.

Amen.

*fist pump*