Quote from: TDoS on Mar 30, 2024, 09:16 PMDefine "sting"? Those of us born into the condition didn't even really think about it, or consider ourselves that. In part because there was also someone poorer down the block. By comparison, with a working man in the family at a factory rather than just a farmer, we had a TV and some rabbit ears and sure looked "rich" to some other in the holler. They only had a radio. Nobody had health care, black lung was knocking off the miners regularly so we attended family funerals couple times between the age of 10 and 15 that I remember, what college educations handed out with unlimited loans to anyone who wanted them, so they could major in ethnic studies or symbolism in prehistoric art of whatever passes for upper level education nowadays. We were 14 years old and most already smoking because it was cool. You want protein? Here is a trap and a gun..go figure out how to get some meat or go hungry.

'We' didn't write this post, you did. And it's pretty clear you thought about it a lot. You just don't know what to do about it (for good reason) and rationalise that impotence into some kind of special superpower that you imagine wielding over people who 'don't know what poor is'. Which is patent bullshit. You are/were poor, poor people in the first world are considerably better off now compared to then, without thereby being freed from the shackles of their social betters. This selective redistribution (which is a tautology; redistribution and social welfare within an unequal social system is always selective) is possible at the expense of the vast majority of human beings globally who were abysmally poor then and even moreso now. And no immediately discernible ways to fundamentally alter this state of things. That's all it is.

QuoteI think collapse is just the result of humans being human, the way we treat each other, our economic and social systems, the things we strive for and turn to bad ends, the dismissal of the collective good in favor of the individual gain, and all the other mechanisms that have encouraged us to be selfish, mean spirited, dogmatic, anti-science, conspiratorial and just outright self centered "me first" humans. 

There is no innate human nature. If there were, the earliest modern humans woulda created and destroyed industrial civ tens of thousands of years ago. The conditions and processes of social organization which led to surplus accumulating slave society, the one we inhabit, are also the ones that created the potential for a universal humanity. But just because something can happen doesn't mean it will. Just because eggs can lead to chickens doesn't mean they always do. Sometimes an egg is just an egg.