I love all the posts calling him arrogant and elitist for pointing out something, in a critical manner, that by their nature are arrogant and elitist: nation state borders.
Those things that make people who’ve done nothing feel entitled to more resources than other people by virtue of where their mother was hanging out when she popped them out.
I think dwelling on their artifical, self-serving nature is healthier than taking them seriously in any other sense than the threat of state violence for failing to pretend that they’re sacred.
Humanity, not to be confused with your own individual greed or birth lottery results, would be far better off abolishing them. They bring nothing to the table but dehumanization, death, and inequity. Most, even most who consider themselves to be on the privileged side of the imaginary line in the dirt, have far more in common with the people trying to get to the privileged side than the miniscule populations of sociopath humans that use them to secure and metastasize their ego score hoards, the entire point of them.
I wish I could upvote you a thousand times.
Yes and no.
Borders may not mean a lot when you just pop out of your mother.
But when you have worked 30-50 years building a place in a certain way you may actually have some legit entitlement on all that you built and worked for.
It’s a complex issue. We’ve seem some countries have bad issues because bad inmigration politics.
I know it’s against the dogma to even dare to talk about inmigration policies with anything that’s not “open borders”. It’s a sin and the inquisition will promptly come after me for just mentioning that massive inmigration did not improve one particular country. And that a too “welcoming” policy was a proved failure.
But reality beats any kind of dogma, propaganda or illusion. And as rational thinking human beings, when the dogma fails we are required to actually notice it and act accordingly.
How do the people living in squalor benefit despite working usually even harder with less protections than that worker who worked 30-50 years having their building being protected from those people’s opportunity to do the same? What’s wrong with that worker’s 30-50 years of building yielding a little less so that none of them toil 30-50 years for basically nothing? The one born on side A isn’t more deserving on the basis of being birthed on side A, that’s nonsensical.
You seem to be looking at this from a tiny nation state citizen concerned about threats from “the other” viewpoint rather than a holistic, humanistic viewpoint.
Self-serving self-interest doesn’t impress me. In most cases, such notions should be socially condemned. It’s the reason humanity is on the brink of destroying our habitat and are currently killing one another all over.
The most destructive notion humanity was ever inspired to have was “ok… But what’s in it for me?” Only cruelty, greed, and gluttony has ever come from such lines of thought.
kinda sucks to be less free than the fucking geese
Self-interest is the principal motive of migrants though. Instead of staying and trying to work to improve a bad place they chose to move to an already better place because it’s better for them.
They literally move because the other country have something good in it for them.
Why ask for some pristine selfness to some people but not to other?
I’m a member of the working class. I do get my income exclusively from work. I’m not capitalist, I work hard every day for what I have. So the amount of selfness and sacrifices that can and should be asked to me are small.
Between members of the working class solidarity must go both ways to work.
There’s no class solidarity if I, as a worker, am treated like some kind of capitalist oligarch that does not deserve what I have.
Why ask for some pristine selfness to some people but not to other?
“Pristine selflessness?” This is a strawman, no one is asking any such thing. It also feels a little like a false dichotomy, as there are many stopping points between “selfish opportunist” and “pristine selflessness.”
You being against other laborers plays into the hands of our shared common enemy that created and maintain this mass desperation under threat of state violence they’ve captured.
If you want to get a reasonable amount of the value of your labor, you need to look up, and not lose your focus of who your enemy is, not across an imaginary line at people those multinational oligarchs have made even more desperate for their famies than you.
I believe you aren’t a capitalist, but if you aren’t an all too common capitalist worshipper, no laborer should be your enemy, regardless of geography. They use that “compete against one another, here’s a knife, want to win? Then your neighbor has to lose” mentality to suck us dry.
I’m not against other workers. I would gladly work to produce weapons for them if they need to depose some oligarchs that does not allow them to stablish a workers society in some place.
What is bot reasonable is to give up on 90% of the world land and just suppose that the few places that have achieved some level of quality of life for a worker are the only place where all people are supposed to be. That just does not work. Not for them, not for me. Not for anyone. That policies are only going to destroy the few places we have built where workers can have good lives. And then… what? When europe is no longer a good place to live where is people going to emigrate to?
Emigration is not a solution to world problems. Is just ignoring a problem… How letting all capable workers from one place move to another makes the former place better for workers?
As I said, I’m open to other forms of class solidarity to solve issues. If I can do some to improve a country which have issues so that country is more livable I’ll do it, because it’s a long term good solution.
But massive inmigration solves nothing. It just ask for a big sacrifice to me to improve other lives. And again working class can do only so many sacrifices before it start thinking about itself.
Also. Inmigration is not even as class conscious as painted. We all know that we have that much inmigration only because capitalists need workers that are willing to accept less money for more work, not for any other reason. They are used as meat and oil for keeping the shareholders profits, in societies where native workers are asking for better salaries and won’t be easily exploited.
But massive inmigration solves nothing. It just ask for a big sacrifice to me to improve other lives. And again working class can do only so many sacrifices before it start thinking about itself.
Works every time.
Except my country barely have billionaries. It’s called a tax hell, and regulated hell by every bussiness man.
And rich people are the ones actually pushing massive immigration because it gives them cheap workers and weakens their country of origin so the can do nasty bussiness there.
Rich people here are actually the ones telling us that immigration is the best. Even the far right and conservative parties tells us that we need tons of immigrants.
Also migrants are taking away their own cookie. Letting themselves be in a weaker position in a foreign country to be exploited. Instead of taking control of their country and build another place where bussinessmen cannot fuck with them with ease.
The white old rich dude in the picture. He is the most supporting of massive immigration. Cheap workers for his business and a young latino maid wife that he can abuse because he sustain her financially. That’s the reality. That’s what’s happening. How is that good for anyone but the rich?
I promise you it is not a matter of personal sacrifice buddy, immigrants aren’t stealing our jobs/wages; Our employers are already taking care of that. If anyone is going to be sacrificed its gonna be the owner classes.
I think this idea that immigrants are to blame instead of those who are exploiting them is a fear/anxiety based on resource scarcity, but it fails to account for the artificial nature of that scarcity.
Our world has been, and is being, plundered by capitalist interests that throw us some crumbs to keep us docile. And like a starving dog we snap and growl at anything, anyone, who might take our share even without conceiving that our masters are the ones who’ve stolen from us.
Eat the rich.
Not saying there are stealing jobs. Or that they are the culprit of everything wrong.
Only thing saying is that mass inmigration have negative effects. Some of them is allowing capitalists to keep hiring for cheap and exploiting people.
Eating the rich is not opposed to a rational migration policy. Quite the contrary. As I said the ones benefiting more from mass inmigration are indeed the rich. Changing migrational policies is one effective way to hurt the super rich.
The weapons you would support being sent to free them in some hypothetical better world, in this world are used to oppress them. These places aren’t poor because the people just did a bad job at managing them, they are poor because they were bombed and looted.
You can go to the US’s policies in South America, their policy of keeping it under control as their own “backyard”, how the School of the Americas cranked out death squads, how neoliberalism was born with the sponsorship of a fascist coup in Chile, and how the Chicago School taught countries to privatise and disinvest from public infrastructure.
You can look at the IMF and the World Bank putting out predatory loans where the rulers of countries are bribed to sell out their own people, leaving them impoverished and in debt.
Or how the United Fruit Company kept several countries under its thumb, coining the term “banana republic”, so you could buy cheaper bananas.
Further back you can look at the rape of Africa, where European colonial powers did a campaign of unmitigated atrocities for decades, setting up imperialist structures that keep many of those nations subjugated to this day.
Or you can look at the modern example of Israel, which is sponsored by the US specifically to project power in the region. The extended wars fought by the US in that region are purely to maintain control over their oil.
I’m just pulling these off the top of my head. This is a tiny fraction of all crimes done to keep poor countries poor.
Neoliberalism works to ensure free flow of capital but restrict the movement of people, so that when their infrastructure is destroyed and they have nowhere else to go, they will be desperate enough to accept extremely low wages.
If you’re going to claim to be class conscious, you need to educate yourself on these issues and learn to have solidarity with workers everywhere. Talking about how you don’t want to sacrifice anything to make others’ lives better is the opposite of what we need to win the class war, especially when your better quality of life was bought with their blood.
I’m not American. But I’ll give a clear example about my country.
In Spain people used to migrate to Latin American. As life was better there. It was only until the 70… That the trend changed. We became a democracy and started fighting for working rights. And that worked. We made our country a better place. And people starting coming more and more snd more and now they are coming in mass.
From this 40 years where migrational policies changed. And Spain moved from beeing poorer that Latin American to richer. We did not colonize anything, we didn’t use slaves, became s colonial power, invaded any other country or organizing any coup in any place, we did not divide Africa or done anything bad. Countries can get better without exploiting others. We got better by fighting for worker rights and making this place one of the places with more worker security in the world. That made us richer, that made us a place desirable for inmigration. I shall not accept negation of the worker struggle, and the worker sacrifices that achieved this by any identity-policy propaganda, where people are based or good based on their skin tone or the country they were born in. We achieved what we got without exploiting others. The FMI tried to destroy us as well and we managed to overcome it with socialist politics. We must now defend what we achieved, were are entitled to it, as we fought a lot for it.
Sure, as soon as we all agree on what form of government to have and what actions it should take, or at least the point at which we are all willing to not take up arms in opposition against it, we can get rid of these artificially conceived borders.
Black science man always talks like he’s done weed for the first time and is trying to impress his nephew’s friends.
I fucking hate this guy so much. He wants to be carl sagan or stephen hawking so badly, but hes ignorant as fuck and all his ‘deep thoughts’ are shallower than a puddle.
It would be fine if he didn’t talk with such a pretentious tone.
He would be fine if he only talked pretentiously in the fields he actually knows stuff about. He’s earned it for astrophysics. But its the everything else…
oh this bloviating asshat
Yeah fuckface, borders are this thing in geopolitics which ALSO involves OTHER sovereign nations that might not WANT your fucking moron face there
Missing the message because you hate the messenger.
What is the message? That borders are dumb?
Yes. Borders are dumb.
Countries are just lines drawn in the sand with a stick.
With a gun, now
Yes, it’s lyrics from a song, though.
Oh, very unclear if you wanted people to get that. Looks like a normal sentence. 🎶
The message is Neil’s daddy obviously didn’t love him
what he’s really complaining about is queuing, not borders. first world problem.
Weird way to misinterpret the obvious.
That’s how I read it. Rich man angry he had to stand in line.
I don’t care if you hate him; he’s right on this. this entire thing is bullshit.
Who hates him?
Apparently a lot of women who had to work with him
A lot of people think he’s become a bit of a wanker on social media and IRL. Some of his tweets are cringe and makes him doing like he’s lightyears up his own ass.
Sometimes I think he forgets he’s there to be the science guy and makes it about himself a lot, but when he gets on a science rant that’s when hea good, just going on about his love of science and why it’s cool as fuck.
Getting James Cameron to fix the stars in the Titanic remake boosted his ego a little bit, but I get that, I’d be a bit ego filled if I was able to make James Cameron change something in his film.
I don’t use twitter (never have tbh) so I’ve only ever seen screenshots of his more infamous tweets, but I have listened to a LOT of his startalk podcast. Most of the time he’s an entertaining person and seems to admit when he doesn’t know enough about a given subject (although I’ve seen a lot of criticism that he does tend to talk about things he doesn’t know, it doesn’t seem to be that way in the podcast at least)
He can be annoying in some of his podcasts though and you can feel his guests being diplomatic about it while still hearing a bit of annoyance in their voice or next sentence etc. But overall I rather quite like him, despite the Internet’s disdain for him.
More people making science popular and easily digestible is always a good thing IMO. But I’m also biased because I’ve really liked NDT since I was a kid due to seeing him in space documentaries when I was young, and I still love his version of Cosmos.
I was one of them until I realized that in grand scheme of things, he is net positive. So I don’t care if he is cringe, I learn quite a bit from him and I wish more influential people were smart like him.
Fair enough. Maybe I just miss Carl too much
That’s always understandable. I think the bigger picture here is that we sometimes forget that they’re all humans, not just public figures. They have other thoughts and opinions that aren’t curated for the world.
Plus, Sagan’s era didn’t have Internet. People weren’t sharing with the world every single fucking thought that came out of their head. I’m sure we would’ve heard Sagan say some dumb shit here and there if he had to produce today’s world’s kind of content.
Great!
Now consider why the “public” started turning on him in 2021 or so.
Next episode, Tyson discovers flowers.
Severed plant genitals?
We live in a society
Sadly.
We live in a patchwork of societies, I think is the thing
Bottom text
I take it you’re not from the US, as we’re trained from birth to be overtly hostile to the concept, as well as each other.
There’s no team in I, and society would be a slippery slope to evil socialism.
But hey, we are oh so very free… to die in the gutter alone as other Americans tell us to hurry up as our continued existence is negatively impacting their property values.
It’s crazy to think that the level of border control we have today would be unfathomable to someone even 100 years ago. If we go a bit earlier, how could you even ID someone without photographs?
People could tell which village you came from just by your accent, strangers would easily stand out
Sure, but go to a city and you’re just another import. Go to another country, and you’re just “the foreigner”. Through almost all of human history, you could just kinda leave your past behind if you just ran away
So deep, so wise.
Only plebs wait in line. I put my request in an envelope, a government servant picks it up at my door and takes it to more government servants who do all the work before hand delivering it back.
And you wait 6 months.
Well I don’t plan my trips last minute like some harlot.
Had to put on pants to go outside due to artificially created laws.
Facts 😢
I dunno I kind of hate sitting where someone else’s sweaty ass has sat on first. I’ll let this one slide.
Just don’t sit then, ever again!
Not so much me. It’s, in fact, my fetish.
But you take them off when you kiss a mirror on the lips
I think about this a few times a year and I become sad each time. We only get this one planet in the whole ass universe. And we can barely see all of it, unless we’re lucky and/or rich (at least moreso than most of humankind).
It’s profoundly ridiculous.
Mobility is better now than it has ever been, so don’t get too sad about that.
You’re totally right about this. I find it frustrating in a different way that the ability to travel is easier and possible, which hasn’t been the case for the majority of humanity, but (generally) artificial restrictions prevent it from happening.
I’m from Canada and my partner was born in Europe. When I hear how easily she was able to travel by train and plane, it makes me sad that we don’t have a similar system. Even airfare is significantly cheaper there because trains are a worthy competitor.
A friend of mine who has relatives in China has talked about how people my age (university age) have been using the new train system to see so much of their country than they otherwise would be able to.
I hope that eventually there will be a similar transit system in Canada that allows poor people to see the country they live in. And I understand that by even living in Canada I don’t really count amongst the global impoverished population. I understand the privilege.
But only for the rich. If you don’t have money, you can’t
escapeleave your country. Barely even travel in your own country. Society has broken our nomadic heritage. We did it to ourselves eons ago when we started cultivation of the land, but with the modern borders and stuff, it’s just been made so much harder.Cool, just down vote instead of having a conversation…
I was flying to south East Asia, looking at the digital map of the plane. From above, you can kinda see the country lines.
What made me feel that incredible sadness is that within a 1000 mile radius, a child born might live in a world where they struggle with starvation and have worms in their stomach, or wake up each day with anime and toys. Some countries have so much wealth and resources. Where others barely have anything. I think about all of that as I fly to my vacation destination, having been incredibly lucky to have been born in a pretty wealthy country.
One could argue that you can be poor/abused anywhere. But there’s a clear difference in quality of life here.
One could argue that you can be poor/abused anywhere. But there’s a clear difference in quality of life here.
Very true. You’ve captured my exact sentiment here.
And also, the very fact that you can be poor even in rich countries is an even greater failure of the system. Nobody in a “rich” country should be impoverished. There are plenty of resources there to take care of everyone as long as we all work together. But the system rewards only those who work for themselves.
Hell, no one in the world would need to work more than 10hr a week if it was our goal and we just decided to equitably and efficiently share resources.
That would be pretty sweet if accurate. Just satisfy the bare necessities and be free the rest of the time. Exploring other topics, for fun and benefit.
If we can supply this many people with the basics necessary for survival and work under our current extractive systems, and these systems concentrate resources in the wealthy few, then we clearly have enough to raise the standard of living worldwide. All the while reducing individual labor requirements,
I think it actually is interesting if you’re going to call out humans as a species of animal!
All across species from unicellular to megafauna, from plants to fungus, you can find mechanisms used to defend an individual’s physical territory. Ants and bees from the same species will fight and kill others colony members of they stray into their territory. Bears will fight and kill other bears. Our closest relatives, chimps, will go to war with neighboring chimp bands.
Artificial borders are humans way of saying “this is my territory enter at your own risk”. The REALLY interesting thing is that we have established systematic exceptions to the behaviors we see in nature. “Ask us before you come and you can visit and be safe here from those that enforce our territory.”
The temporary nature is unique, many social animals will permanently adopt an outsider into their group on occasion, equivalent to immigration, but I’m not aware of any that have pre-agreed temporary violations of group territory.
I guess you can draw that comparison, but then human territories are exponentially bigger than anything an equivalent social animal might claim as “enter at your risk” area. A traveling pack of dogs can just go around another pack’s territory. We can’t do that, we’re boxed in. There’s no neutral space left. I guess you could argue there’s international waters, but that’s practically inaccessible to most people.
okay I don’t know how to articulate this properly but i’ll try;
fukn get rekt ngt
This dude really is a pompous ass sometimes.
What about this tweet reads as pompous to you?
“If everyone was as wise as me, I wouldn’t suffer this tiresome charade”
Well, he’s ridiculing the fact that everything we have setup for governance is, in fact, made up. I don’t see why that’s pompous. I know his tweets tend to be a bit too pedantic for certain topics, but that is his persona. He is one of the few peopeople responsible for this generation finding science cool. He’s allowed that much.
It’s sophomoric.
If you close your eyes and imagine a future Star Trek utopia, are you still imagining borders? It’s a pretty standard opinion that borders are an outcropping of our worse natures and should eventually be left behind.
Borders are absolutely in the star Trek utopia. Everything has borders. What we do about those borders is the difference.
Each quadrant, solar system, etc has borders. These are even more arbitrary as the current state, county, and country borders across our world tend to follow natural terrain or longitude and latitude. None of these exist in space. But the quadrant borders are as easy to cross as for me to drive to my next US state. However, the Kardassian border is not so easy to cross, just like it’s not so easy for me to cross into North Korea.
Borders are not the inherent issue here. Conflict is the inherent issue, and borders are how we try to minimize that conflict.
They should really issue some sort of identification showing to which quadrant you belong so that friendly quadrants will accept you as a visitor with open arms.
Agreed he can be pompous but I think since he’s an astronomer he is making the point that if you were in space and looked at earth you would wonder why are there borders
You know continents, rivers and mountain ranges exist?
Your point is?
Earth is beautiful!
There are heaps of examples of those that aren’t political borders, though. I live between a river and some mountains. The other side of the river is another county but still the same country, and the other side of the nearest mountains isn’t even another county. Egypt is on both sides of the Nile and also on both sides of the Africa-Asia border, Russia is on both sides of the Urals and the Europe-Asia border (wherever you draw it, if you draw it at all), America is on both sides of the Rockies and so on
El Paso?
No, I’m in Scotland. Isn’t the other side of the river from El Paso across the Mexican border anyway?
Part of the other side of the river is Mexico, another part is New Mexico, the nearest mountains have Texas on both sides—it just happened to also fit your description. Kind of wild that there is a part of Scotland that has the same unusual artificial and natural barriers.
Because it turns out sociology, anthropology and politics also exist.
If you were in space and looked at Earth you wouldn’t see any people.
EDIT: Crap, someone is going to point out that you can see lights at night, aren’t they? This thread is for pedants and now I’ve started a conversation about biomarkers you can see from orbit.
You probably would though, there are no single manned space missions far as I know.
I’m going to point out that you edited without editing.
Next level pedantry.
The whole point is that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can change it if we wanted to, we are participants of sociology anthropology and politics. Oh well social constructs
Yeah, but that’s my point. There’s a tendency, particularly on STEM people, but also on your average normies, to think that “social constructs” aren’t “real”. This is a very bad take that often causes a lot of problems.
Ofc it’s real. Money is a construct and it’s real.
But what we made creates so much suffering and takes lives away. That’s just not necessary. And ofc changing it will probably take some power away from the previliged, that’s the point. Ideally we want everyone to be satisfied, but not when there’s still people dying of starvation.
I don’t know that I claimed it’d take power away from the privileged. If I had to make an educated guess, the idea that “it’s a social construct so we can change it” tends to lead to proposing easy solutions to complicated problems that only work if we all agree they work.
They normally don’t work.
And if the people proposing them are powerful enough to get convinced that all they need to do is force everybody to agree with them regardless it often ends in tears.
Hell, catch me in a good day I’ll tell you changing natural realities is easier than changing social constructs. On par at best, and nature at least won’t argue about it.
Proposing easy solution to complicate problems is never my point.
My point is we can stop actively reinforcing the construct that hurts people, or at least be open to be more lenient about it. And see where that leads us to. We don’t want to just drop in a complete new construct and have everyone agree to it, I don’t think that’s even possible. But change in a direction we want to and let the rest develop naturally, just like how we developed the current system.
Obviously it’s not easy, it’s complicated as you said. But the current system requires active reinforcement. Doing a little less is a whole lot better than doing more to hurt.
But you can see lights on the dark side!!
To judge others so, you must be the personification of kindness and benevolence. Surely?
