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Notes -
I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.
Staring at the sun today.Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.Covid was exactly the opposite, stoking fear rather than cooperation: "Isolate yourself. Other people will kill you by existing."
Probably worth noting that a significant contingent of Westerners are already primed to think this with respect to
global warmingclimate change (and the solutions thereto generally being "sokill themdestroy their ability to meaningfully exist at gunpoint, before they kill you").Covid is not the first "hide in a hole, the world is going to explode, and it's all the outgroup's fault", and it certainly won't be the last (nor is it unique to one or another political faction e.g. "sin causes extreme weather") but it is an excellent illustration of just how harmful that kind of thinking is.
This is a much less common view that “pickup trucks will destroy the planet”.
I guess maybe the panic about DEI hires driving planes(seriously, have any of the recently covered mishaps been due to pilot error?) might qualify, but global warming caused by pickup trucks/antivaxxers/strict abortion laws literally killing people is much more of a blue tribe thing.
DR Twitter commentator Isaac Simpson (“Disgraced Propagandist”) has made this exact comparison, saying that “the competency crisis” risks becoming the right’s equivalent of “the climate crisis”. It’s an interesting and troubling prediction.
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