Eric Schmidt writing about the Ukraine / Russia drone war, not very +ve for Ukraine.
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
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I tend to be much more optimistic than that. I think that a big part of the horrible trauma put upon us is that we have little idea what human nature is really like. And I would add that that optimism is not just happenstance of my own personal nature, but I would have to take you back to the days of the "Four-minute mile" controversy to see why.
You can see in this article that it was widely thought impossible, and not just from pessimism, but from long experience and even scientific reasoning:
Did doctors/scientists say that breaking the 4-minute mile was impossible?
So I see humanity's current situation as analogous: we're suffering under a tremendous Satanic oppression (literally, as I came to find out), and that's like a runner back in the early 50's wondering if he can run the 4" mile but he hasn't noticed he's wearing a full suit of knight's armor over coveralls made from lead dentist's aprons. Well, there's no way.
But if he notices that extra weight and removes it, most people (as we saw in that Quora article) would still disbelieve, that being again from all experience and very good reasoning.
But fast-forward to today: all competitive middle-distance runners can do it and many talented high-schoolers. Who saw this coming? Who predicted such a simple thing? No one. They had no idea what was not only possible for humans, but commonplace.
So there's my analogy: we have all reason for pessimism, and also no idea what is really possible.
Optimism is a good thing. But overcoming a limit isn’t proof we can get along. Saying its up to god or its satans fault is just shifting the blame and avoiding admitting its us. Even if we have common goals, people will be crabs in the bucket and pull others down. We can make great strides working together, but in order to make that work we have to leave a lot of shit at the door. People of all types, creeds, intellect and political affiliation can work at the same factory building tractors, and be successful and have no issues when everyone leaves their personal issues out of it and just do the job. An army can be made up of hundreds of thousands of men who would never speak to each other outside of service but working together can conquer countries and continents.
If you're with a small group of like minded people, things are usually okay. But working in large groups is where it breaks down. This is hardly definitive, but it helps illustrate the point.
Lets quickly estimate the different types of people we all deal with/are. This will by no means be the accurate number, but lets say this gets us a ballpark figure. 12 zodiac signs, everyones fairly familiar with those, and how they are described to be different from each other. Not saying this is right by the way, but its commonly accepted among the masses. So theres 12 to start. Now we have men and women, very different physically and mentally. 24 types of people. Some people ate very smart, some are very stupid, and some are average. Without making this too complicated for a throw away analogy, we’ll call this three; above, average, and below. So 3 x 24=72 types. Add in religion. Again for simple numbers as i don't have and don't care to search for the exact number of religions we’ll again go with 3, representing very religious, agnostic/questioning and non religious/atheist. 3x72=216 Pro choice and pro life? 2 more types! 432 now! Leftwing, centre, rightwing? 3x432! 1296 types of people and we ain't done classifying people by a long shot.
You can see where this is going. Having multiple distinct personalities come together to accomplish something is hard to impossible to pull off when people complicate the issue. Hell a family of 5 trying to agree where to go out for dinner can be a trial and a half. Dad wants tacos, mom wants Italian, Mike wants pizza, Debbie wants sushi and little Billy wants McDonalds. The whole family needs food, and no matter what choice is made most will be upset even though its in their best interest to get said food. Its like this for everything.
Being able to communicate with people can be an arduous task in itself depending who its with. If the other person is like you, it can be simple and easy but if they're not you find banging your head against the wall easier. We don’t all have a common framework to work with when we deal with each other on a global scale and its gotten worse down at the local levels. And i’m not about to hand control over peoples thoughts to any of the cults out there that want such control. The christians think everyone should be christian, the muslims think they should be muslim. I’d include jews here but they seem to want jews in control and a tax cattle population of goyim doing their bidding so similar but distinct. They all believe if everyone does exactly what they want then things will be better. The problem is theres multiple positions like this and none can prove theirs is the correct one.
Humanity working together as one without issue is a science fiction premise. At this point I’d accept WH40K’s emperor of mankind coming down and smashing away all religions and taking us to the stars to build a galaxy spanning empire over blue haired facial piercing teachers who claim to want a better world and then convince children to chop their dicks and tits off.