Quote: (11-12-2014 06:01 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:
Quote: (11-12-2014 04:12 PM)Samseau Wrote:
It's not the age of the man that matters, it's the age of a woman. You know, the wall, infertility past 35, etc. When we're talking about traditional societies, that's really just a codeword for feminine women.
There's a lot of naivete in this thread. Sp5, for example, thinks globalization is some kind of unstoppable force of nature. Even when I pointed out to him that globalization has happened thousands of times in the past and always results in failure, he continues to spout the same deterministic "End of History" globalization nonsense. "This time is different!" I think Sp5 is just too damn brainwashed by his legalistic background. Most lawyers I talk to fall into this trap. They believe in the rule of law will save the day and maintain order no matter how much society changes.
Facts are facts: Intelligent women aren't having children (too busy chasing careers), dumber men and females are becoming the norm (the ones who have children because they can't figure out how to put on a condom), and intelligent men are giving up on society. The dumber men and women of the future aren't going to be able to sustain our technology economy.
It's plainly obvious none of this globalization shit is going to last, unless we make machines that think for us. Good luck with that one. We've got robots but they are nothing more than farm animals made out of metal.
If the leftists maintain power until the point of collapse, then people will become fiercely national again (it's a survival mechanism) and those who cannot integrate will be eradicated.
This is a very prescient comment, Samulus. And it's one I happen to agree with.
It's easy to lose one's perspective. We should be thinking in terms of centuries, in terms of millenia, in terms of the whole span of history.
What many people take for granted today as the product of enlightenment--liberalism, excessive personal freedom, atheism--are entirely unknown for most of history. For most of history, the individual had little rights: it was the clan, family, or tribe that mattered.
People were kept in check by the moral codes of religion and the tribe.
But all of this has been dismantled by globalization-loving, neo-liberal corporatist culture. This is a culture that has been feeding us the lie of gender equality, feminism, and all the rest of the PC garbage that has been the West's mantra for the past 30 years.
The West has gone too far in its indulgence of personal freedoms, in my opinion. Each man now believes himself to be an emperor, each woman an empress. They behave accordingly, and the society rots away.
And Samseau is right about the false promises of "globalization": this is nothing more than a catchword for the super rich plutocrats to steal more and more of everyone's money.
Your real future is tribalism. In the short term, there will be disorder, turbulence, and a fight for resources. Make no mistake.
Every time the media tells you what to think and how things are "going to be", you should get really suspicious.
An excess of liberty eventually produces a backlash of puritanism. Which will be coming soon, I think. Liberalism has sown the seeds of its own destruction. The likely immediate future is: religious revivalism, the collapse of state structures, turbulence and social violence, and tribalism of varying degrees.
You guys are salivating for a collapse into chaos or some kind of totalitarianism, to bring back your traditional tribal past. Liberty bothers you.
Me? I took an oath to support and defend the Bill of Rights several times in the military and elsewhere. My loyalties and preference are with "the worst system of government, except for all the rest," as Churchill said. With all its faults, democracy is preferable to big money oligarchy, absolute monarchs, "aristocracies," and communist and fascist dictatorships. I'm not a crypto-monarchist or crypto-fascist. I'm not in favor of imposing authoritarianism to suppress "excessive personal freedom." I can ride out other people's obnoxious-but-legal behavior without calling for Big Brother to stop it.
Maybe there will be a collapse or some large countries will turn into North Korea or Turkmenistan by isolating themselves, of course. I've said nuclear war, new diseases and planetary depletion are threats to survival, not just society.
But as I said, barring disasters like that, the world is going to get more integrated. There will be waves of political disruption like 1848 or 1968, sure. I see rioting in the near future just because of economic changes, the lack of jobs, imbalances caused by money in politics. Politics and society will adjust.
Look at what it would take to reverse the trend of global integration: (1) the end of instantaneous satellite and fiber optic communications including the end of the internet, global media, Facebook, Skype, and Tinder, (2) the end of air travel, (3) the end of international trade, (4) the end of the movement of money. How and in what lifetime do you expect this to happen? Sure, in a thousand years anything and everything can happen. Maybe people will stop using iron tools and the wheel, too. But those extreme scenarios are branded as pure science fiction, not based on observable facts from which reasonable trends can be extrapolated.
The one observable trend you mention is declining IQ scores. Assuming you are correct, and that the trend will not be reversed by what I think are naturally self-correcting social forces (like smarter women deciding not to repeat their mothers', or their childless aunts', experiment with deferring children for career, or tax incentives), it's going to take a long time to manifest any real effects, if ever. Why? Look at the world as it is now. The Philippines has an average IQ of 86, yet still manages to maintain general order and economic growth, and is improving its governance and prosperity. Even Ireland, with a very stable democracy and high per capita GDP, has a lower IQ, in the mid- to lower 90s, than most other European countries and the USA. Iran is down in the 80s, yet still has a nuclear program and a sophisticated economy which is almost totally isolated because of sanctions. It still functions.
IQ is not as big of a deal as it's made out to be. When I started out in the army, I was a personnel clerk. I had access to all of my soldiers' test scores, which included the AFQT, generally regarded as a percentile score of intelligence, and the GT score, which is an IQ score. I noticed two things: one, there were some guys with humble backgrounds with high scores, and two, scores did not correlate much with observed articulateness, ability to function in the army, and judgment. In those days, we had guys with GT (IQ) scores down into the 70s. I was friends with some of those guys, and they didn't seem impaired in any observable way and functioned well in the army in moderately technical fields. Similarly, there were guys with above-average IQs who were complete idiots with no judgment.
So even if 100 years from now the USA has the average IQ of Iran or the PI, is there going to be a collapse? Nah.