People who reject the historical evidence for progress over the last few centuries are basically spitting on their ancestors' graves and saying 'You failed to do anything useful for us'. They are ingratitude incarnate.
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Funny how these New York leftists extoll the virtues of being happy and content amidst poverty and disease but never move to, say, South Sudan to experience true happiness themselves. God forbid they should go without their daily double latte crappucino!
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Nice take down of that straw man you whipped up
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He's spot on, you on the other hand, should lose that soy latte. Is not working for you.
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No he's not... He's speaking on a different level of analysis. Any specific case of poverty, etc., is just that, a specific case. On the whole, things are getting better for the world. South Sudan doesn't change that fact.
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Rothman argues that "The question is whether what befalls individuals might also befall societies" and concludes that, if so, objectively better societies do not lead to more individual subjective wellbeing. He could easily test that hypothesis on his own subjective wellbeing.
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Deepities? It seems to me that you, Pinker, are asking people to see the world from a very limited capitalistic worldview in which standard of living has been improving in the world and that is supposedly all that is needed. Nope. The environment is going to shit. NOT GOOD!!
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lol he has spent hundreds of pages talking about this maybe actually read what he writes?
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But didn't you know that any solutions to environmental issues that don't involve abolishishing capitalism aren't worth considering because reasons?
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Is the world 'better' enough? That's the question.
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No one is suggesting that things are "better enough," so now we can stop bothering with improving anything. The point of the book just says that things have gotten better, tries to explain how they got better, and that things can get better still.
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But an important point is that the better things get, the harder it becomes to continue improving, and the easier it becomes to make things worse. So we should count our blessings and try to be careful going forward as well.
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Does anyone else find the phrase “pseudo-profound verbiage expressing banalities” ironic?
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The New Yorker quotes sounded like Brian from Family Guy to me. Such a shame, I used to like the New Yorker. Now I can't get past the pretentiousness
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The New Yorker goes after site traffic more like. Just being controversial about a luminary to generate site visits. Need that to validate their standing and advertiser's dollars. Punish them by not playing their game.
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“Don’t like Pinker = Must hate science.” That’s an way to demonstrate how objectivy works.
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What it means is you don’t like the fact that the facts don’t support your ideological narrative.
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At the risk of deepity I'd say the struggle between quality of life & social well-being is the main theme of '1984'.
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