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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1396 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 29, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The Israel/Palestine conflict is concrete and producing real deaths, whereas environmental issues are speculative and we’ve had them around for a while now.

Even for really serious environmentalists, the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now. Whereas tens of thousands of Gazans really have died and more are being starved. It’s no wonder it inspires people to greater efforts.

(Of course, other concrete horrors happen all the time but people hear much more about Israel/Palestine for path dependency / antisemitism / whatever reasons.)

the world has demonstrably failed to end for a while now

Experience shows this doesn't work on cultists. They just move the world end date further in the future without updating anything else. Can be done unlimited number of times. Also the public has very limited memory - all the failed world end predictions over the last 50 or so years are available, and make absolutely zero impression and present zero problem for anybody predicting world to end again. Same btw about hundreds of thousands of Gazans starving - no matter how many times those things turn out to be lies, every next time it is claimed people believe it instantly and uncritically.

Experience shows this doesn't work on cultists. They just move the world end date further in the future without updating anything else.

My favorite instance of this is the Church of the SubGenius prophesizing that the X-Day was July 5, 1998. When the day arrived but without aliens, they did a facepalm and said they had it upside down! X-Day is actually in the year 8661.

They really put every other cult to shame.

The church of the subgenius was, to be fair, actual satire.

"satire" is what the Conspiracy calls truth when it’s afraid people might believe it!

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