The Austin said:
MorphingDragon said:
The Austin said:
This is just ridiculous.
It was two minutes to midnight when the world was about to bomb each other into submission;
And it's five minutes to midnight when, aside from an ECONOMIC recession, everything is pretty alright.
What the fuck is 10 minutes to midnight? A world where people get along just fine?
What about 15 minutes to midnight? It that a world where everybody holds hands and frolics in the meadow?
Don't even get me started on 4PM, or as I like to call it, "8 hours to midnight."
Because Economic recession and Capital abuse are such tiny insignificant issues...
lol.
You know what?
You're right.
The world is probably going to end any minute now, all because of the recession.
I'm going to go hide in my bunker.
Actually almost all wars come down to economic reasons one way or another, especially today. Right now we face a situation where there are too many people and too few resources. We're literally destroying the planet in the pursuit of wood, metal, and other things, and we're not coming close to producing enough for the people currently on the planet to maintain anything close to the US standard of living, and if we increase production we wind up depleting the resources even further until we run out. With the global population increasing this makes things even worse.
A lot of people tend to bury their heads in the sand, but a lot of the current issues with say China come down to them wanting a higher standard of living for a country that consists of roughly 1/3rd of the world's population. As they demand things like better housing and to drive cars pressure put on the already fragile wood and oil production go even further. To compete for these resources China employs it's robber economy, sweatshop labour, and other things which are having a pronounced effect on the rest of the world, and nations like the US who go into recession when the stiffer competition and greater strain mean their domestic economy has trouble meeting it's own requirements.
Right now most people realize we have too many people on the planet but don't want to reduce the population due to "OMG, it involves killing human beings". Like similar times of global tension you see people building up larger militaries and making plans to go to war to meet their own needs. China for example has been working on it's Navy and the abillity to project it's huge population into other countries offensively, it's also been working on systems to blind US satellites to reduce the threat of MAD from first world nations like the US if it DOES decide to invade. There is plenty of saber rattling if you read the right stuff about China wanting to colonize other countries for "living space", justified by a combination of racial supremacy, and payback for "slights" going back to the Opium wars and even further.
The point here isn't to argue geo-politics, simply to say that I agree with you and the guy your responding to both it seems. Like it or not the world is a powder keg, and despite what merchants and business interests always say, economics are a reason for wars, not something that prevents them. After all the Romans believed they were invincible because of how central they were to trade and how they maintain the roads, they were in denial right as the barbarians assembled outside the gates and tore them down. Hence the saying "Barbarians At The Gates" for being willfully ignorant and oblivious to the obvious.
That said for those that read this far, the "Doomsday Clock" started out as a good idea, but rapidly became too political for it to matter. Barak Obama for example should have moved the clock closer, not further away, not so much beause he's a bad guy, but because those same apparent tendencies that "filled people with hope" meant he wasn't aggressive enough to maintain the peace. Right now the big threats that have a chance of ending the world, or the world as we know it, like China, have continued to grow. China has grown more militarily powerful, not less, and we've been doing very little to try and curtail their development
in a practical sense.
On the other hand the "Clock" has become too heavily tied to WMD (which is ironic given when and why it was created). Right now WMD disarmament is more of a political position than anything. WMD if anything has helped preserve the peace as long as we've had it, and really the biggest threat to the world right now are WMD countermeasures, like the missle interception abillity the has demonstrated and which slotted off the Russians due to treaties with the now-defunct USSR, and China's satellite blinding systems (do a search for Satellite, Lasers, China, or Chinese Anti-Satellite Lasers).
Right now the big threats are wars over economics and living space, with WMD being irrelevent due to countermeasures terrorism and conventional warfare rises, huge overpopulated countries who can mount huge armies and deliver the navally (like China)
become the major threat, and while we do see WMD used they wind up having to be delivered at relatively close range. Hypothetically things like huge scale EMP, and Biological and chemical weapons are going to be the big things that do in humanity as opposed to
traditional Atomic weapons.
As odd as it sounds I'd probably put us as closer to two minutes to midnight on the clock, and argue that ironically military action to remove certain developing threats would move it back.
As far as the Aztecs go... I'm hoping we're about to see the birth of Shadowrun for real, I look forward to my future existance as an Elven battle mage.
