Noam Chomsky: 'There's never been a moment in human history' like this one | Hacker News Reader

Noam Chomsky: 'There's never been a moment in human history' like this one

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41 pointspmoriarty15 comments

I'm not sure of the 'off the charts' point regarding Sweden and USA in terms of Corona virus. These countries currently rank #7 and #9 respectively on world wide deaths per one million population and significantly below other countries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Unless he is talking about raw numbers, but then that's not a very honest argument.

I see this point of view a lot, and it's a little scary. Per-capita numbers are obviously highly valuable, but why is the raw number of people dead somehow meaningless?

Not meaningless, but otherwise you are mostly comparing the _sizes_ of countries. Is being a bigger country (with more deaths) more dramatic than being a smaller one?

Nobody said the raw number of deaths is meaningless.

Here Chomsky's biggest concern is a nuclear war, for Elon Musk it's AI taking over the world. Almost every culture has its own version of this story (usually religious) about the world heading to a final event, and a new world order emerging thereafter. We humans are obsessed with stories of the end of the world.

And for the first time in history, since the middle of the previous century, we have some capacity of ending the entirety of human life on the planet, with only a few hands involved.

I cannot tell if legit or fear mongering.

I'd say it's both. We're in a really bad place. But, as a species we've been in plenty before.

"There's in fact evidence that the average temperature dropped 20-plus degrees in some spots," after which the great grassy plains of Africa may have shrunk way back, keeping the small bands of humans small and hungry for hundreds, if not thousands of more years."

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...

The only difference is that we're getting better and better at putting ourselves in really bad situations.

Counterintuitively, this is actually what makes me optimistic about the future. I think every generation before us (or near enough) thought they are at the end of times, humanity never faced such crises as now, and everyone else had it easy.

It doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to solve our problems, but at least it means we have a track record of working out utterly hopeless situations. Or if you like, just because a problem seems hopeless and beyond the reach of solution, it doesn’t mean it really is.

> World-renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky said humans are living through the darkest and most consequential time in history.

Not even close, unless you ignore collapse of Roman Empire, collapse of Han Empire, Mongol Invasion, The Plague, Religious Wars in Europe, Post-Columbus destruction of Native Americans, WWI, WWII, Cold War including Cuban Missile crises where a single person(Vasili Arkhipov)was all that stopped nuclear war between USA and USSR.

Climate change and nuclear arms, yes. The rest probably pale in comparison to those. Not to diminish their impact but they’re not existential threats to all mankind.

The current level of racial unrest, economic depression, and this pandemic will pass. Racism has always been a problem, the economy works in cycles, and we’ve got several vaccines in phase 3.

Chomsky is a political activist. This doesn't have a place on Hacker News.

Perhaps climate change is a crisis because it's clear there's no political will to deal with it in even an incremental fashion? The executive leaders of some countries, such as the usa, are even promoting the use of climate damaging outdated technologies like coal power plants.

1) There are other nuclear-armed countries that are a lot less stable than the US and Russia.

4) Unemployment means something different here.

In the United States, unemployment can very easily turn into living on the street with low chance of getting back into a home.

Look at the number of elderly people whose retirement plan has evolved into living in a van on BLM land. It's not pretty.

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