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  1. #11
    Hung Angel Platinum Poster trish's Avatar
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    On the bright side, you realize you're being corrected. Others might've said, "misinformed", or "steered wrong."


    "...I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize."_Alice Munro, Chaddeleys and Flemings.

    "...the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way". _Judge Holden, Cormac McCarthy's, BLOOD MERIDIAN.

  2. #12
    Senior Member Platinum Poster
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Quote Originally Posted by peejaye View Post
    I don't give you the pleasure of debating Br-exit or anything else because it's a complete waste of time & very patronising, you just correct everyone who doesn't share your neo-liberal right of centre pro-establishment points of view.
    A different point of view is just that, whether it is backed up with data or not, but to express it is part of a debate, whereas I find your most common response to someone who disagrees with you to be dismissive, which is your right but does not extend the debate at all. As for being neo-liberal right of centre pro-establishment I am puzzled as I am not neo-liberal or pro-establishment as you must surely know from my political history which I won't go into again, except to say that when I was NUPE shop steward in the Age of Thatcher, the working class guitar-playing electrician in our shop called me a Trotskyist, and the Irish Trotskyist called me a 'bourgeois liberal', so I guess I was doing something right. I can't really be fit into a neat category, and neither can you, which is how I prefer it. But I would also prefer you to engage with the real issues that faced us in 2017 which are not going away in 2018, which means Brexit, Brexit, and then some more Brexit. I wish it were not so.


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  3. #13
    5 Star Poster sukumvit boy's Avatar
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Probably the most significant aspect of medical science to 'come of age ' in 2017 was gene therapy .
    http://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-...t-path-forward


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  4. #14
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Quote Originally Posted by sukumvit boy View Post
    Probably the most significant aspect of medical science to 'come of age ' in 2017 was gene therapy .
    A similar, if longer article on this subject appeared in The Guardian yesterday.
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/...e-code-of-life


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  5. #15
    5 Star Poster sukumvit boy's Avatar
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Quote Originally Posted by Stavros View Post
    A similar, if longer article on this subject appeared in The Guardian yesterday.
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/...e-code-of-life
    nice article



  6. #16
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Steven Pinker has penned an article for The Guardian about 'feel good' books that he thinks you should read. It may be the antidote to those who feel with Brexit, Gun-Adept Teachers, Polish and Hungarian Nationalism, the Cyber-Warriors of Moscow, Genocidal Buddhists and so on, that the world is heading for armed Oblivion...

    Progress is not just material but moral: the world has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, heretic-burning, witch hunts, duelling, apartheid and male-only suffrage. It is also decimating child labour, capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality. The story is told in James Payne’s The Decline of Force, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code, and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc – an allusion to Theodore Parker’s famous line (beloved of Martin Luther King) that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. Still bigger pictures are presented in Johan Norberg’s Progress and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. And a deep theory of why humanity is destined to make progress may be found in David Deutsch’s dazzling The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch presents science as a force for betterment, since it impels us to explain the world while forcing us to acknowledge our fallibility.
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ou-an-optimist



  7. #17
    5 Star Poster sukumvit boy's Avatar
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    I read and discussed Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" on this Forum back in 2012 or 2013 ,to a groundswell of apathy ,LOL.
    However the point was that the incidence of death and violence against all people and minorities , women , LGBT people and even animals has declined dramatically over the centuries and especially since 1950 .
    http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-...+of+our+nature



  8. #18
    filghy2 Silver Poster
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    It's interesting that objective facts suggest that this is a better time to be alive that ever before in human history, yet people seem to be more dissatisfied that ever before in modern times. I guess it comes down to human psychology. Maybe people are dissatisfied because their circumstances are no longer improving at the rate they were previously accustomed to, or they perceive their position as slipping relative to other, or perhaps the media's tendency to focus on more sensational (usually bad) events skews their perceptions.

    The worry is that peoples' poorly focused reactions to their dissatisfaction may set in train dynamics that cause things to go backwards for a while. This has happened before. The 20th century began with great optimism about continued peace and prosperity but then we had two world wars and a great depression and an associated retreat in democracy and the rule of law in many countries.


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  9. #19
    5 Star Poster sukumvit boy's Avatar
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Eat the rich . Click image for larger version. 

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  10. #20
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    Default Re: 2017 -Year of Change?

    Quote Originally Posted by filghy2 View Post
    It's interesting that objective facts suggest that this is a better time to be alive that ever before in human history, yet people seem to be more dissatisfied that ever before in modern times. I guess it comes down to human psychology. Maybe people are dissatisfied because their circumstances are no longer improving at the rate they were previously accustomed to, or they perceive their position as slipping relative to other, or perhaps the media's tendency to focus on more sensational (usually bad) events skews their perceptions.
    The worry is that peoples' poorly focused reactions to their dissatisfaction may set in train dynamics that cause things to go backwards for a while. This has happened before. The 20th century began with great optimism about continued peace and prosperity but then we had two world wars and a great depression and an associated retreat in democracy and the rule of law in many countries.
    It is a paradox for someone intelligent like you, but it would be folly to blame it on voters as 'idiots' which some people do, so I think the perception for many is that on key indicators they do not feel better than they were, or with those under the age of 30, are not in a better place than their parents were at their age. Key indicators in the UK are housing, wages, personal debt, low interest rates, the threat to pensions, lack of job security and a belief that politicians are out of touch. For many younger people the Brexit vote has been an additional shock, implying that the future is going to be even worse than what we have now, with the additional shame of anti-immigrant feeling dragging things down.

    When you view the positives, notably in health, the diseases that destroyed lives when I was born -Smallpox, TB, Polio, Measles to name but four- have either been eliminated or reduced to marginal cases. Since the 1960s but not until then, most households have had their own internal bathroom and toilet facilities with hot and cold running water. The extent of education and health care has grown far beyond what the makers of the NHS envisaged, but has been a positive benefit to mankind as a whole, not just to citizens of the UK. Set against this, is a worrying dismissal of science, not just climate change denial, but as found in the Five Star Movement in Italy that is opposed to the vaccination of children against Measles on the basis of the -completely discredited- claims that the vaccination causes autism. Whether or not the MS5 gets this policy nationwide depends on who forms the next govt in Italy, but local implementation has seen increases in measles cases not seen elsewhere in the EU, while there is a longer term problem with the decline of funding for science across the board in a country that has excelled at since the 19th century if not before.
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-measles-cases
    http://www.vaccineconfidence.org/ita...-science-cold/

    On the downside science has reduced the amount of human labour needed to make things: a steel plant in the US employs one-fifth of the labour in 2018 that it used in 1980, but technology one day may 'set us free'. The conduct of war is no less savage than it once was, but the technology of war means that the destructive power of weapons and the air power used to deliver them means more people can be killed with fewer men. At its peak, the US in Vietnam deployed c549,500 service personnel, I don't think the deployment in Iraq exceeded 100,000 at its peak. Yet we have seen air power obliterate cities or large districts in cities.

    Where we have gone backward is in conflict resolution. The peace treaties that were a feature of the 1990s -Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinians, Bosnia and Serbia- have been replaced by a rejection of them, notably by Israel which has led the way in violence -under Israeli Rules a state can kill anyone it wants wherever and whenever it wants to, imprison them, destroy their home, tear up their farming land, and nothing will be done to stop it. After 9/11 and as a consequence of it, states decided they can follow Israel, so that Guantanamo Bay stands as a rejection of the rule of law at any level but is little different from the penal system that arrests 14 year old girls in the illegally Occupied West Bank and tries them in secret, while the international law of armed conflict, and humanitarian law lies buried in the graves of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza and the Occupied Territories.

    Moreover, international chaos is now the favoured option of three states which believe it will benefit from the absence of legal restraint on warfare and the effective impotence of the WTO and the UN, namely Russia, the USA, and China. That the US is now presided over by a semi-literate moron may just be a temporary phenomenon, that his party is opposed to free trade in the broader sense, re-defining it as 'whatever we say it is', that human rights has been relegated to the museum of ignorance is one of the most worrying developments I have seen and while I don't expect to see a 'world war' as we had in the past, I believe warfare itself may be 'going online' and that the threats of the future may be economic rather than existential.

    And all this so rich people can get even richer, and protect and grow their assets at our expense.

    So for all the gains we have made that make life better, that have lifted millions out of poverty and given us another 25 years of life, long haul holidays, smart phones tablets and computers, the threats remain from the same places: ignorance, greed and ambition. We must always hope for a better world, but prepare for the worst.


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    Last edited by Stavros; 03-05-2018 at 02:36 PM.

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