The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

> you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting

I'm sorry you feel insulted, that's mainly on you, this was not my intention. I suggest you reflect on why you feel insulted when an internet stranger calls a book (which you did not write) as propaganda.

I can acknowledge without aversion that it may be possible that it is sometimes harmful, and sometimes not. Can you do the same?

>Bias is a given for any work, why is that a problem to you?

Bias and misinformation leads to delusion, delusion leads to disharmony, disharmony leads to suffering, at least often. I consider concern for the well being of others to be a good thing in an absolute sense...but this is a bias on my part, "each to his own", and enjoy the consequences Mother Nature rewards us. But please let's also consider how our fellow humans are making out in the lot they were born into.

> If there’s misinformation in the book - I’m all ears.

Is this to say that you are able and willing to consider all sound arguments, without bias?

As for Rosling: I think if people considered the entirety of his message things would be better....as I recall, he was an advocate of international aid rather than immigration and refugee policies saving some of the people from underdeveloped countries? To me, this seems like a better approach for several reasons.

> Is it pervasive?

I believe so, I think young Wittgenstein and many others are objectively correct, and that this can be objectively proven with virtually unlimited examples, because language is a fundamental building block of reality. The alternative, that all the people involved in disagreements derived from language are joking or something and I'm not in on it, is just too much for me.

That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse.

But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils.

> Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture

It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water.

> Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.

That seems unlikely, given that total fertility in wealthy countries is well below "replacement" (2.1 children per woman). Reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, could only be approaching replacement if the sex ratio is massively skewed in favour of girls.

1. UN chart of TFR for "more developed regions": https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Observe the assumed but never yet seen floor to fertility rate.

People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills.

I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.

Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.

Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue.

As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.

You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates.

Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.

The problem is there, regardless of anyone who keeps their head in the sand. Humanity will meet the limit, and people will be unable to afford children. There's no if, there's when. The only question is whether future-we will be able to have 2, 1 or 0 kids on average, and how much fucked the planet will be at the point of realization. If your vote goes for "0 and very fucked", make sure to teach your kids to not whine about it later and to keep the pride.

That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.

Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.

You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.

Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.

That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.

We can hardly call that a victory.

Are you trying to say that saying only a % of people can have children is murder in regards to those that don't get to? Aren't we already doing this by imposing financial circumstances/classes on people rather than evenly distributing wealth as much as possible?

This really is a big crux of capitalism, there is simply no room for society to take a breather and enjoy life unless one is lucky enough to make it to retirement, and even more lucky to make it there in health. No room to reflect on new technology and inventions and decide whether we are on the right track, as a society. But chaos is inherent to big groups, so I'm not saying there is a different way forward on a planet with 8 billion people.

My point is that there are options for the future. Even if they are not palatable ones. It's not as cut and dry as global warming has already started, it is too late to fix it or mitigate it, and we are all fucked no mater what.

Every second of every day, month, year, etc. they are constantly shifting.

The political problems will sort themselves out (literally people problems), and the infrastructure will be built to accommodate the changing demographics. People move, people build. This is basic stuff.

The Late Cenozoic Ice Age,[5][6] or Antarctic Glaciation,[7][8] began 34 million years ago at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary and is ongoing.[5] It is Earth's current ice age or icehouse period. Its beginning is marked by the formation of the Antarctic ice sheets.

In the last three million years, glaciations have spread to the northern hemisphere. It commenced with Greenland becoming increasingly covered by an ice sheet in late Pliocene (2.9-2.58 Ma ago)[11] During the Pleistocene Epoch (starting 2.58 Ma ago), the Quaternary glaciation developed with decreasing mean temperatures and increasing amplitudes between glacials and interglacials. During the glacial periods of the Pleistocene, large areas of northern North America and northern Eurasia have been covered by ice sheets.

As for this question:

> What amount of pathos, pleasure, love, beauty, could justify the life and suffering of even one person who say, was raped and murdered in childhood?

I'm not really in the business of doing these sorts of utilitarian calculations, and I think this back-and-forth is a great example of why I don't think they lead anywhere useful. But it seems to me that you could make the same argument as Parfit above in reverse.

If someone led an essentially perfect life for 100 years, filled with all the things we all agree make life good, but then was subjected to 30 seconds of torture and then murdered, that's still a good life on net, and I think you'd be hard pressed to make a serious argument that those 30 seconds of intense suffering at the end are terrible enough to make that life not having been worth living.

So, by the same kind of induction that Parfit does above, it seems you could contrive a situation where the vast amount of universal conscious flourishing being experienced by, let's say, quadrillions or consciousnesses would "outweigh" the suffering of however many millions of apes it took to get there.

And even in the particular case of a horribly murdered child, is it universally true that no life ending in that manner could have been worth the suffering at the end? If a child lives ten wonderful years with loving parents, doing all the best things a child can do, but then dies horribly, can we be sure that life wasn't worth living? That it would be better on net had it never happened?

I'm not sure, and like I said, I don't typically go in for arguments that work on this basis. I'll admit that's probably partially because they feel distasteful, but I think there's also an intuition worth examining that those types of arguments don't really work, that they miss something critical about subjective experience when we try to sum up all the goods and bads of a life into some metric that can assign that life into a bucket of "worth living" or "not worth living."

tl;dr - I'm not convinced, and I'm happy I exist.

Obviously yes, there's an apples/oranges problem with comparing data sets collected in different countries under different law enforcement regimes, etc...

But between e.g. 2022 and 2017 in San Francisco specifically? I don't see the argument.

(Also important to note that while "Larceny" might be plausibly related to police ignoring crime, other things like "Murder" are very much not if you aren't accusing the police of hiding bodies. And violent crime shows the same trend.)

Bullshit. You're applying census logic to crime statistics to sow FUD. The census doesn't count people who hide from the government. That does not mean we cannot trust census data, just that it isn't flawless.

It's a count of crimes reported by citizens. You can drill down further to see which ones stuck through to arrests and convictions. This is the closest to actual data we're ever going to come in measuring a concept like "crime."

The problem is that the stats tell a wildly different story than what progressives want to hear, so they move to discredit the police and their data with academic vagaries like "overpolicing." Let's examine that.

Police supposedly overpatrol black communities. Besides Wayne Williams and the DC snipers, can you name any black serial killers?

Something like 35% of all serial killings in America are committed by black males (4-5 victims each, and this does not include gang shootings!). The implication is that if police "overpoliced" white areas in the same way, there would be a similar rise in body count from white perpetrators. White communities should be knee-deep in their dead by this logic, yet I don't see anybody complaining about all the corpses in the streets. The act of policing does not "generate" murder victims. Black men just kill a lot of people and it's an uncomfortable truth.

Domestic violence is the other big lie we swallow. Men stopped beating their wives, so women invented new reasons to claim victimhood. Now just yelling at them is reframed as assault in the social sphere, and we're presented no end of excuses for why "rape" can't be reported to the police. It's not spousal rape anymore, it's more-vague "consent violation." Adhering to agreements that are subject to arbitrary change is impossible and unenforceable, but if you run afoul of it, they run to social media telling "their" truth (which is notably distinct from "the" truth). Nobody asks your side or gives you a fair hearing. They immediately isolate you from friends and family and sever your means of financial support. This is literally vigilante domestic violence against men, committed by the "victims," in plain sight, with public support. Believing women (or anybody else) without evidence is the flag of a fool. Police report or it didn't happen.

Here's the truth: the argument of overpolicing was applicable only to property crime, but through sophistry the left reframes it to look like it applies to all crime, the stats are faulty and all cops are bastards. Every bit of this is exaggeration for political effect.

It would not surprise me in the least if Denmark or Sweden did in fact have the highest rates of property theft. You have pickpockets, high density, and are welcoming of refugees and gypsies. I trust the stats. I don't trust you.

Literally every category in that chart shows a reduction in crime over the last year. You're inventing a "trend" by extrapolating a line straight across an outlier (the covid pandemic). No one would look at that data and say crime is getting worse. You'd say crime got worse and is now back at baseline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Can you share who this person is so I can look up what they ran on?

But you make a good point that a lackluster police response does lower the incidence of reporting crimes, effectively doctoring crime statistics. You'd have to evaluate whether this trend has increased or decreased relative to historical periods when factoring that into any comparison, though.

I have known people that had stolen things returned because the police found the items while investigating/arresting the thief for other crimes. It seems foolish to not bother with filing a report just because they aren't actively investigating every report they receive.