Bloody hell, I'm rolling around in the aisles today.

climate changers and Trump lovers, put a big red zed through this article.

Dan

put a big red zed through this article.
diver dan,
through realism rather than mere ideology ?

We all have our problems, but I doubt that many of us are living this nightmare. Western civilization is definitely on the way out; bit it's going to be gradual and relatively peaceful - experienced by as yet unborn generations without our memories, and without any incentive to resist. Wound up by the coronavirus, the author is acting like the mad, ignorant poor bastards clearing the supermarket shelves of tinned goods and toilet paper.

New World Order plans include 3 World Wars.
We're not off track, we're on track.

Excellent overall assessment of the situation that we are in.

And, contrary to ttbn it is correctly posited by some people who study these things that there are various earth-system "tipping point" triggers and scenarios which could accelerate the catastrophe (do a search on the topic).
I would add that the collective human psyche which is now in a state of global psychosis can also create various "tipping point" triggers too.

This essay describes the intrinsically destructive nature of the much vaunted Western mind and the universal Scapegoating Drama at the root of Western culture (in particular) which has created the situation:
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/Aletheon/ontranscendingtheinsubordinatemind.html

And once again the 100 or so summary statements featured in this reference provide a very sobering assessment of our situation. And various statements/callings re the necessary new ways of thinking etc.
Note the content of the first statement (1-1). Curiously the author also pointed out that the old order died on the 23rd of July 2006 - that is why the number 723 appears on the flag featured on the cover of the Not Two Is Peace book

http://www.dabase.org/not2p1.htm

This essay points out that there is hardly any civilization left any more, and also describes why.

http://www.da-peace.org/excerpt-reality-humanity

A couple of statements worry me.
"China and Russia have showed how capitalism can thrive under authoritarian rule". Is this a call to adopt Communism and / or autocratic rule over democracy? Every day thousands seek to enter and live in the US whatever it's faults. I don't see anyone looking to get into Russia and China to live.
"China, Russia, India and even Europe talk about a new world order". Absolutely! Xi wants a new world order where China control the world. Putin wants a new world order where he owns everything. I don't know about India but the European model is one where the technocrats control and own everything. Ultimately these three intensely dislike opposition, dissent and freedom of expression.
Peter McMahon could do with a walk in the park on a fine day. He seems weighed down with negativity and too ready to let fear dictate his view of the world.
Who was it who said "the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself".

And of course in your face proof that civilization is now almost irreversibly doomed is the appearance of the Demented Orange Barbarian, or Beelzebub the Tangerine Anti-Christ that now haunts the White House and systematically toxifying the collective American psyche.

He is also turbo-charging all of the negative elements featured in the 100 or so summary statements I referred to in my previous posting.

Global Civilisation is an oxymoron.

Sorry, but I see a lot of wishful thinking in this latter-day Luddite article? Who I suspect based on his preferred remedies is, like Adolf, a tree-hugging vegan? As always in such advocation, if you're no part of any rational solution, you're invariably part of the problem?

That said, civilisations come and go particularly those who get too big too draconian, too conservative, too autocratic, too authoritarian!

As someone, who was raised on hardship, knows starvation, homelessness and the horrors of abusive foster care/orphanages, can't agree with the remedies sort by this green autocrat!?

We don't have to be part of his doom and gloom scenario, but rather an inclusive, egalitarian Island of sanity and unprecedented prosperity in a world gone mad!

We need to become far more self-sufficient and able to close our borders to all comers! Even as we open the up to trade and electronically assisted commerce.

Need to embrace cooperative capitalism as a survival mechanism that allows our economy to grow without destroying cohesive egalitarianism and equality. And through that, incentivise maximised productivity and efficiency!

As opposed to stalled and stagnating economic paradigms currently preferred by greed motivated entities and decision-makers and their spitlickle lackeys

And it's not as though there are other superior economic choices, given this is the only successful free market, private enterprise, economic model that conscripts the usual economic flow on factors and obliges them to force every one dollar to stay in our economy doing the work of seven or more! TBC.
Alan B.

Interesting that the only person who agrees with this half wit calls himself "Daffy Duck"?
Why this was given any time is beyond me. Anyone who feels he has any credence sell your house to me for twenty bucks and take to the road.

Intro looked interesting and the ride began ok but the steering started to shake at David Suzuki. Tried to hang on a bit longer but then came half man, half bear, half pig and realized the wheels were coming off so I bailed out.

Cont. Energy and water are critical as are the two pillars that alone support every western-style economy, energy and capital! Capital has never ever been cheaper, energy never ever dearer! Moreover, weaponised by adversarial nation-states!

We need to break this nexus and use the lazy trillion dollars of lazy capital around the globe to change everything we've effed up in the last seven or so decades, courtesy of ultra-conservative thinkers/fiscal illiterates.

Who compounded their mistakes/our problems, as long as they were able, by continuously repeating them in an absolutely asinine capital/surplus squandering, vote pur-chasing exercise, of biblical proportions!

Sat on their hands, when as a trading nation, we should have been transitioning to a cheaper, carbon-free, reliable, dispatchable, MSR thorium/nuclear wast burning, nuclear power!

And thereby allowing us to not only retain our manufacturing base, but massively expand it!

Coupled to the rollout of deionisation dialysis desalination, we could've quite literally drought-proof the nation as well as a changed arid wasteland, from dust bowls to veritable clean green gardens of maximised export agriculture/food and fibre production.

Middlemen profit taker/commission sales (robber barons)need to be outlawed, given these absurdities force price to always rise faster than natural inflation and double the cost of doing business/cost of living!

Finally, the last piece of this economic jigsaw has to be fair dinkum tax reform that incorporates massive simplification and has to be unavoidable! And rolled out as an unavoidable flat tax of 15%

Coupled to a very generous raising of the tax-free threshold!

15%!? Hell, that'll force most companies to pay more tax! Given the most they paid for the year ending 2017, was 13%, as actual cash transferred to consolidated revenue, with some paying as little as 4%, and a reported 40% paying no company tax to anyone anywhere?

Farm tax practises and 7-year averaging can remain and adjusted downward at the new rate.

Remember, this is a tax on profits/earnings/income! Not turnover as represented by the usual, recalcitrant, vexatious mischief-makers and BS artists! Who want a fair and equitable one-tier UNAVOIDABLE tax system, like a hole in the head
Alan B.

I think we can firmly place this article with every other "chicken little" alarmist crap produced in the hundreds every year since the 1800s.

i doubt whether humanity will collapse, albeit there are serious problems that always need to be addressed.

I have just been watching Germaine Greer being interviewed by Julia Zamiro. Germaine and her fellow students thought that capitalism was going to fail, even back then. Very perspicacious. It isn't doing very well at present so perhaps the author is onto something.
David

The author is missing the Roman Empire - which terrorized the world.

All that can be said about the author's fear-mongering was already addressed 1900 years ago in the parable of the fox and the fish, by Rabbi Akiva ([Berakhot 61:b]):

"It is like a fox walking along a riverbank when he sees fish gathering and fleeing from place to place.
The fox said to them: From what are you fleeing?
They said to him: We are fleeing from the nets that people cast upon us.
He said to them: Do you wish to come up onto dry land, and we will reside together just as my ancestors resided with your ancestors?
The fish said to him: You are the one of whom they say, he is the cleverest of animals? You are not clever; you are a fool. If we are afraid in the water, our natural habitat which gives us life, then in a habitat that causes our death, all the more so."

- http://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.61b.7

I thought this was an excellent article and highly thought-provoking. It seems we are "done for' on a number of fronts, not least climate change, and, as David Attenborough says: "We can only slow the decline, not stop it". Here's hoping though, that we can avert the Sixth Mass Extinction, given extinction is forever. Stabilising and reducing human population numbers before Nature does it for us is critical.

so evolution is crap. I have been saying it on olo for the best part of 20 years.

It saddens me that authors like this are paid to think at our Universities. Everything is bad, and we are all doomed, be it a virus, climate change, endocrine disruptors or even Gaia.

If we fill our universities and the minds of future leaders with this sort of thinking, then maybe we are all doomed!