I maintain that war in Ethiopia (and the wider Horn) is not inevitable. The current outbreak of war reflects the fact that Ethiopian elites keep choosing war over peace. Unfortunately, despite repeatedly choosing war, Ethiopian leaders continue to enjoy support from a cast of warmongering academics, journalists, public intellectuals, civil society actors, and a whole host of foreign actors — all of whom have long taken sides and become cheerleaders for their respective camps.
In name only. But they are actors.
The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.
Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.
Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?
Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.
Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.
That anti-intellectualism developed because the self proclaimed intellectuals were so persistently, consistently wrong about so many things that many people lost all trust in them. Academia moved away from the foundational principles of the scientific method, that the truth of a model lies in its ability to repeatedly make correct predictions, to treating what they thought sounded morally good as true regardless of how far from reality it was.
I’m in this camp as well. I can’t stand the anti-intellectual trend, but the cultural elites in America got high on their own supply and just untethered themselves from reality, while our economic elites betrayed everyone by changing the economy into a machine that only benefits some people with college degrees while tricking another giant swath into buying useless degrees on credit. It’s more anti-elitism going on than anti-intellectualism. And they brought it on themselves. They should have offered something better.
Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, largely through better tech <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-average-life-expectancy-has-more-than-doubled-since-1900" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-average-life...
Musk becoming a trillionaire because people value the shares of his ventures for stupid amounts doesn't actually make the poor poorer. If anything things like starlink help connect the more distant places.
zackmorris · · focus · HN ↗
In name only. But they are actors.
The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.
Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.
Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?
Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.
Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.
What a sick joke the future has become.
logicchains · · focus · HN ↗
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
tim333 · · focus · HN ↗
Musk becoming a trillionaire because people value the shares of his ventures for stupid amounts doesn't actually make the poor poorer. If anything things like starlink help connect the more distant places.