A historical analysis reveals something that will probably sound familiar.
“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
Do you know anybody who fits that description? Can you think of maybe a large number of people like that?
“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
…
it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”
Uh-oh.
Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”
“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”
Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.
It’s all a bit on the nose, I think.
Maybe I should take up farming as a hobby.
But maybe our leaders will turn out to be enlightened and kind?
We can’t put a date on Doomsday but there is a countdown clock :
https://doomsdayclockcurrenttime.com/
There is an old Midnight oil song saying we have Minutes To Midnight (3 minutes long) but then that was back in the 1980’s..
This quote by HG Wells srings to mind :
Source (among otjher places and variants of this) : https://quotefancy.com/quote/820396/H-G-Wells-Civilization-is-in-a-race-between-education-and-catastrophe-Let-us-learn-the
Along with the knowledge that right now catastrophe seems to be winning and education adn the truth are falling well out of favour in some rather significant nations.
Just watched this – The Atomic People ( 1 hr 30 minutes long) powerful, moving, thought-provoking documentary on the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. WARNING: Confronting material, real life horror, war & aftermath.
80th anniversary of the latter today. With eyewitness testimony and interviews from the Hibakusha.
When the Atomic Bombs were dropped or just afterwards, there were just three Bombs. Today that number is roughly 15,000 nuclear bombs in the world. Almost all far more powerful and destructive by orders of magnitude than the A-Bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See Animation shows the deadly evolution of nuclear weapons (3 mins 15 secs, Tech Insider) & Nuclear Weapons: A Time-Lapse History (TDC under 5 mins long)
We have forgotten what should never be forgotten. When it comes to how horrific nuclear WMDs are. To the threat the pose to us all. Haven’t we?
Then there’s the reality of our rapidly overheating planet, the Mass Extinction we are causing and living through with biodiversity – a major and under-appreciated significant art of that being the insect – and arachnid – apocalypse noted in the previous thread here.
The most optimistic comment I can make is that whatever comes after us won’t have vast quantities of fossil fuels to help them fuck themselves up.
PZ wrote that Kemp said: “Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.” Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse.
That reinforces my re-post of what I said here on 05 august 2025:
Based on decades of personal experience and recorded observation of human behavior, we have, for years, posited that human society is generally a terrible failure: greedy, destructive, murderous, etc. There are some important devastating groupings of humans that are responsible for much of the death and destruction inherent in human society. They are personal and organized selfishness and hatred as manifest in religion, crapitallism, racism, political chauvinism, etc.
This ‘comic’ points out the gross failure of human society succinctly:
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/3187.png
My organization is not wealthy or powerful, but, we speak and act in ways that attempt to negate much of those failures of society. I’m going to carefully climb down off this soapbox and get back to work at efforts that are positive, progressive, secular and caring.
At this point, I don’t know if human society can pull out of the Death Spiral we are in.
@1 StevoR quoted HG Wells: Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe
I reply: The drooling majority masses are supporting a war on education! As I’ve said before: You can lead a horses ass to knowledge, but you can’t make him think.
PZ wrote with major sarcasm: But maybe our leaders will turn out to be enlightened and kind?
I reply: enlightened and kind?; Those words aren’t even in their vocabulary!
@2 I watched it on PBS. The US dropped the bombs but the lifelong isolation and social cruelty towards the hibakusha–that was all Japan. The US clinics for the nuclear survivors were a horror too–in the words of one survivor “they treated us like guinea pigs”. No treatments as such, just diagnostic tests and samples. Although you could make the argument that the US didn’t treat the downwinders in the US any better.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/trinity-test-downwinders.htm
No wonder Mango Mussolini wants to shut down the US National Park Service.
Science Fiction afictionados may recall the discussion in Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco about why we have not (yet) found signs of other civilisations.
Approx…” at this stage a civilization needs to make global decisions to survive”.
New rule: any prospective leader of a nation say, Britain or USA or elsewhere should first have a thorough health check by Independent doctors.
The check shoould include signs of narcissism, psychopathy and other disfunctional personality traits.
And – in the case of Boris Johnson – signs of being a high-performing alcoholic.
Being a rapist is a big red flag.
SteveoR – great links, thanks. It guts me that the anniversary of the bomb is going mostly unnoted. HG Wells was cool, I have his bio here waiting to be reread.
Just reread Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time for the first time in decades. What a great book, what a great utopian vision. Published in 1976, she notes in the forward to the new edition (2016) how everything has gotten worse. Sigh.
Reminder that Grave of the Fireflies is still streaming on Netflix, an animated film about post-WWII Japan seen from the standpoint of an orphaned brother and sister. One of the best antiwar movies ever.
Also check out The Burmese Harp (aka Harp of Burma), another terrific antiwar movie.
There is a great Japanese antiwar film trilogy, unfortunately I do not recall the titles.
A society run by sociopaths, viewed at the granular level.
.
“Physicians with more patient complaints also more likely to receive industry payments”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-08-physicians-patient-complaints-industry-payments.html
@8
Have you noticed that he keeps hiring other rapists?
https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-sexual-misconduct-transition-gaetz-2fe42bb7ea72c5212236ae8d8c153901
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-inviting-sex-offender-white-house-2107403
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/TheLaw/lawrence-taylor-arrested-rape/story?id=10573105
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexual-misconduct/story?id=51956410
@11: “the human condition”, directed by kobayashi.
Boring old-style doom-mongering is meh.
(Like the Doomsday clock, basically — ever and perpetually just before midnight)
@9, 10 I could barely get through Barefoot Gen. “Be strong like the wheat” I don’t think Dance of the Fireflies will be queued up on my watchlist anytime soon.
HG Wells stories were pretty cool but he was a big proponent of the eugenics movement. Even taking into consideration that people are a product of the times they live in (racism was decidedly the norm at the time and taken as fact) he still believed/wanted all nonwhite races (including the white non-Aryan ones–“dirty white”) to interbreed with whites and die out on their own if humanity was to progress into some glorious (decidedly white) future. Might have to check out Woman on the Edge of Time though.
@12 “unsolicited patient complaints”
I’m wondering if that means that the patients complained without being asked/prompted or if there was a difference between referred patients and non-referred patients.
Either way, it’s not exactly news. Other studies have found that physicians were paid by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe their patented prescription medication to patients via kickbacks (excuse me “rebates”), particularly notable in oncologists but also noted everywhere else in the medical industry–it was equally true for obesity/diabetes meds, female birth control, etc.
** They’re called rebates because in theory, you can pass the savings on to your patient. Yeah right.
Given what such leaders have done and say they intend to do, the world’s constituents have shown remarkable restraint, particularly the ones who maintain their food, health, safety, indulgences, sanitation, and transportation maintenance. And the leaders have shown remarkable luck surviving their own self-destructive habits and preference for unsavory associates.
As my eventual step-father used to say, ‘You can’t beat the system’, you being one of the world’s constituents. In short, ‘remarkable restraint’ is a consequence of potential consequences for a lack of restraint.
(Also, ‘bosses’ are bosses, and very few of them are actually ‘leaders’)
Let me see if I have this correct.
“Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”
President Putin has managed to take a disaster called Russia and raise it up to the point that the CIA,—the CIA!—ranks it as No. 4 in PPP GDP. Life expectancy has improved. Overall living standards have improved.
President Xi has managed to (almost?) completele eradicate abject poverty in the People’s Republic of China; not poverty but extreme poverty and China now has the world,”s highest PPP GDP—again from the CIA.
President Trump seems to be managing to deprive, several million or tens of millions of US citizens of medical insurance.
Kemp is an idiot.
“President Putin has managed to take a disaster called Russia and raise it up to the point that the CIA,—the CIA!—ranks it as No. 4 in PPP GDP. Life expectancy has improved. Overall living standards have improved.”
LOL.
Go on, cite that data.
Everyone who knows anything knows Russia has used up its Soviet stockpiles, has used up most of its savings (sovereign fund), has fully geared up to a wartime economy and that only produces stuff that gets blown up.
You, mate, are fucking guzzling the propaganda.
(Most amusing, I remember your wankings about the invincibility of Russia, and it now controls less territory in Ukraine than it did when you parroted their propaganda)
I’m surprised that no one has brought up the famous Arnold Toynbee quote.
Toynbee said this long ago in the mid 20th century.
These 19 civilizations all collapsed from within.
That fits with our present situation.
The USA is very definitely being attacked from within and is on a downhill slide right now.
Dystopian fantasies are everywhere. Try this AI generated dystopian vision, it may amuse: MAGA Ballroom 2028.
robro, that’s just what the actual Nazis would have loved. Not bad.
silvrhalide @16
The Time Machine could be taken as descriptively dysgenic social commentary in how it treated the “upstairs/downstairs” class divide of Wells’ time extrapolated far into the future. Though critical of the social stratification which resulted in the Eloi and Morlocks, I don’t think he was promoting the assumed dysgenic outcome in any manner. I recall Ray Lankester’s degeneration ideas having some influence on Wells’ thinking.
Wells was at least Fabian adjacent and eugenics was fashionable in some socialist and progressive social circles. I recall him invested in a prescriptive eugenics in his nonfictional views, but his ideas might have changed over his life arc.
“Though critical of the social stratification which resulted in the Eloi and Morlocks, I don’t think he was promoting the assumed dysgenic outcome in any manner.”
I entirely concur.
The Eloi represent the billionaire class, against which this blog rails, and the Morlocks the, um, lesser people.
Yeah until the horrors of WWII were unveiled HG Wells was a eugenic prick. From an essay by Wells scholar John S Partington (referencing a preceding essay on Wells’ views previous to the 30s):
Partington tempers that slightly:
From H.G. Wells’s Eugenic Thinking of the 1930S and 1940S. (Essays).
Utopian Studies
On the later Wells:
It goes on but with nuance:
After the awkwardness of Nazi eugenics Wells vibe-shifted a tad:
John S. Partington has a book on Wells called Building Cosmopolis
The Political Thought of H. G. Wells
If someone like Ernst Mayr had toyed with positive eugenics as he did I can cringe and give him a nasty scowl for that. Negative eugenics takes it to a different level! Fuck you HG Wells. And with their pathogenic and parasitic metaphors the Nazis went well beyond negative eugenics ideology.
His visionary fiction was rather good and he was generally better than most contemporaries when it came to racism and elitism.
Any way, do go on insulting him — in his grave, he neither hears nor cares.
(Your opinion is just that, Hemidactylus; and I have my own about you. But you are not yet dead, you still care)
Those who invoke Machiavelli’s name in such a blasé manner as a synonym for evil probably have no idea of his all too real sufferings via the strappado for being perceived on the wrong side of Medici intrigue. Yes he would later kiss up to them, but they and others are the actual villains despite his disparaged political power writings.
Cesare Borgia and his henchman Micheletto Corella as well as Pope Alexander VI were models he depicted. Savonarola with his “bonfire of the vanities” was a fanatic but also unarmed prophet. I can’t recall if Machiavelli deployed him but Ferdinand I of Naples was mentioned by Jacob Burckhardt for his mummy museum which grotesquely kept his enemies close. That’s some Hannibal Lecter level shit there and speaking of Hannibal we have there depicted in book and movie a hyperbolized Florentine reaction to the Pazzi conspiracy against…the Medici.
Given that violent backdrop Machiavelli was a mere writer who became a demonized adjective. He was at least Renaissance humanism adjacent though that humanism would become a pejorative much later for those obsessed with classicism. This view was relevant to Huxley vs Arnold and later more vehement rifts to the present.
[Machiavellianism:Machiavelli::Social Darwinism:Darwinism]
He was not a mere writer. He was a thinker. And what he came up with was, basically, RealPolitik.
John Morales
Social Darwinism isn’t really a thing, so maybe you are saying the same about Machiavellianism despite the latter as a psychological concept with questionable historic referent. There’s gotta be a better term than Machiavellianism.
As for Wells are you going to ignore the negative eugenic elephant in the room? I mean I agree his fiction can be held separate. His based nonfictional worldview is a bit sus.
Machiavelli died in 1527 and it’s fun to watch the two popular Borgia shows (historic fiction both) and documentaries on the Medici to get an idea of his milieu. I’m not about to pin Kissinger on Machiavelli.
He wrote satire and allegory, Hemidactylus. Parables.
Anyway, you go on hating him, I cannot stop you, cringe as you look while you do it.
It’s as if I never quoted an essay by Wells scholar Partington in my @27.
It’s as if you’re not following me.
It sounds no less pessimistic than familiar, and I note that in every single instance in the past in which that quite familiar claim has been made it has not come to pass. You know, Matthew 24:34 type of thing.
Doomsday clock, since whenever.
—
Maybe consider that civilisations are but organisms in some sociopolitical milieu, and some die, some are born, and so forth.
That is, as a population of civs, not as the thing itself.
(The barbarians are at the gate! Malthusian chaos! Big Brother is a bother)
@29 Hemidactylus:
Wikipedia says that, uncited. (Depicted in TV drama The Borgias). Ferdinand (aka Ferrante) lived in the 1400s. Jacob Burckhardt was a historian in the 1800s.
A rando was unable to find any other sources, much less contemporary, and got no response from r/AskHistorians seeking more. I also had no luck corroborating.
I DID find the passage in Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), page 22. (German filtered through Google Translate)
Ah, that 19th century racism. Spaniards circa 1500, so praiseworthy. /s
Wikipedia – Marrano (Spanish crypto-Jews, as in Spanish Inquisition converts)
I’m thinking the claim is apocryphal.
@34 John Morales
Backing up the truck with the requisite reverse mode beeping I was initially following up to silvrhalide @16 saying:
Can you even dispute that? The Time Machine was dysgenic, no? Have you heard of Lankester’s concept of degeneration?
I can’t even fathom why you think the negative eugenics is not relevant or why you are evasive.
No. Not that I disputed that.
I wrote nothing about the eugenics movement, pro or con or otherwise.
You are reacting to nothing. What I wrote, I wrote, and it has zero to do with that.
You tried to shit on the person, without basis.
That’s the point.
You have your own skewed jaundiced view, but as I noted: “He wrote satire and allegory, Hemidactylus. Parables.”
(The author is not the art)
In The Borgias: the hidden history G.J. Meyer says this:
There’s a vague reference to “credible sources”. Meyer’s endnoting is atrocious but I found this:
Full bibliographical cite I’m not about to hunt down: Prescott, Orville. Princes of the Renaissance. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970
So maybe it was more legend than truth. The Borgias show took liberty with the stories having the mummies set up in some sort of Last Supper at a table to great effect for the scene. I think Micheletto (the cheese cutter guy) was visiting Naples, but it’s been years since I watched it.
That was for CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @35
Flanders and Swann are doubtless considered hopelessly on fashioned and middle class nowadays but this 1967 still works provided that you know that it’s now about one hundred and ninety tons. allowing for population growth.
I have seen it estimated
Somewhere between death and birth
There are now three thousand million
People living on this earth
And the stock-piled mass destruction
Of the nuclear powers that be
Equals for each man or woman
Twenty tons of TNT.
Every man of every nation
Twenty tons of TNT
Shall receive this allocation
Twenty tons of TNT
Texan, Bantu, Slav or Maori
Argentine or Singhali
Every maiden brings this dowry
Twenty tons of TNT.
Not for the thirty silver shilling
Twenty tons of TNT
Twenty thousand pounds of killing
Twenty tons of TNT
Twenty hundred years of teaching
Give to each his legacy
Plato, Buddha, Christ or Lenin
Twenty tons of TNT.
Father, mother, son and daughter
Give us land and seed and water
Children have no need of sharing
At each new nativity
Come the ghostly Magi bearing
Twenty tons of TNT.
Ends the tale that has no sequel
Twenty tons of TNT
Now in death are all men equal
Twenty tons of TNT
Teach me how to love my neighbour
Do to him as he to me
Share the fruits of all our labour
Twenty tons of TNT.
Writer(s): Michael Flanders
Wells gave a glimpse into his flavour of utopia when he wrote in 1901 that “those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people” that fail to be “efficient” would have “to die out and disappear”. He also produced long screeds on Jews.
From a Guardian article.
The above article is https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/19/white-supremacist-statues-must-fall-scientists
In the category of most ironic town names (from submoron‘s link):
Just for fun here’s a link for Karl Marx and racism. Warning; this translation uses the ‘N’ word
https://www.fairmontsentinel.com/uncategorized/2020/08/13/marx-others-offered-racism/
@38 Hemidactylus:
lol. Found it.
Orville Prescott’s Princes of the Renaissance (1969), p69-70.
treacherous and impossible to know = credible.
jrkrideau @20, you’ve vanished, but here’s some more about Russia’s fantabulous economic miracle; enjoy:
Ugh, we got a Tankie in the forum.
that there looks to me to be the root of the problem this looking for an “enlightened leader” that eventually leads to a criminal take over of society with all the despotic results and collapse. It is and always was “We the People” it is by the consent of the governed any thing happens regardless of how or why that consent is granted freely given in the spirit of love and solidarity, provisionally on a day to day basis, abject subjugation by fear and terror and death or corrupt bribery and self interest. That consent must always be given without it there is nothing but death and collapse
I am not led by them, but they get to make the rules.
Bosses, not “leaders”.
(Quite the misnomer)
(Without goons to enforce his will, without Judges to exculpate his misdeeds, Trump is a fat ranty old man)
@47 Akira
Tell us you’re an enthusiastic repeater for Washington propaganda in eight words. That’s pretty impressive. (What does Tankie even mean these days? Do Israel’s Merkava tanks count?)
For that matter, Trump excluded, it feels like Kemp is shying away from listing any U.S. allies as examples of dangerous psychopaths. It was remiss not to include Starmer, Merz, Bin Salman, Netanyahu, or al-Sharaa in that company.
beholder, I see you do not dispute you are a ‘Tankie’.
For you, courtesy of BubbleBot, after I put it to it:
Me: What does Tankie even mean these days? Do Israel’s Merkava tanks count?
BB: The term “Tankie” does not refer to literal tanks like Israel’s Merkava. It’s a political pejorative, originally coined to describe hardline Marxist–Leninists who supported the Soviet Union’s use of tanks to suppress uprisings—most notably the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968).
🔍 Contemporary Usage
Ideological meaning: A “Tankie” is someone who defends authoritarian communist regimes, especially Stalinist or militaristic anti-capitalist states.
Expanded scope: The term now applies to those who support or excuse repression by states like China, North Korea, or Russia, often in opposition to Western liberalism.
🛑 Misapplication
Merkava tanks: These are Israeli military assets, not symbolic of Marxist–Leninist ideology. Associating them with “Tankie” is a category error—akin to confusing a metaphor with its literal referent.
In short: “Tankie” is ideological, not mechanical. The Merkava doesn’t count.
[I know; jrkrideau is the Tankie, you are just slime, beholder]
Dear Myers:
Please tell us more about “ordinary people doing well after the collapse”.
Nathaniel Hellerstein, are you even aware PZ was quoting that?
@2. silvrhalide : “@2 I watched it (The Atomic People documentary about the hibakusha -ed) on PBS.”
Here in Adelaide SA it was broadcast on TV on SBS on the 80th anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing – 9th August.
@ 51, Disingenuous troll and Trump and fascism enabler beholder :
Utter bullshit as usual from a Putin apologist and Trump enabler pretending to be left wing yet betraying and harming all those who are actually left wing.
Calling out tankies – Putin apologists and suporters of the Russian invasion and genocide in Ukraine – does NOT make anyobne pro-USA propagandists. As someone who ha s proven to be a spreaderof trumper prop[agangda and anti-Democratic hate liek yourself clearly already knows.
You already sound more than stupid and willfully ignorant enough beholder, you don’t have to deliberately fake yourself any more disingenuous stupidity. We all know by now what “tankie means and who is and isn’t one. You are.
As someone (beholder) who has proven to be a spreader of Trump propagangda and anti-Democratic hate like yourself clearly already knows.
Kemp of course told us why he selected the individuals he did:
So it only “feels like Kemp is shying away from listing any U.S. allies” if (a) you didn’t bother to read the quote properly or (b) you’re a tankie, believing that in any list of big bad things, those associated with enemies or rivals of the USA, if mentioned at all, must be heavily outnumbered by those associated with the USA and its allies – and that any writer failing this test is a lackey of the CIA.
@40 Try Stand or Fall by The Fixx
Crying parents tell their children
If you survive don’t do as we did
A son exclaims there’ll be nothing to do to
Her daughter says she’ll be dead with you
While foreign affairs are screwing rotten,
Line morale has hit rock bottom
Dying embers stand forgotten
Talks of peace were being trodden
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
Is this the value of our existence
Should we proclaim with such persistence
Our destiny relies on conscience
Red or blue, what’s the difference
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
It’s the Euro theatre
It’s the Euro theatre
It’s the Euro theatre
An empty face reflects extinction
Ugly scars divide the nation
Desecrate the population
There will be no exhaultation
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
Stand or fall, state your peace tonight
It’s the Euro theatre
It’s the Euro theatre
It’s the Euro theatre
Stand or fall
Stand or fall
Stand or fall
Stand or fall
wtf is with YT tonight
@25 HG Wells clearly painted the Eloi as the rightful inheritors of the earth with the Morlocks as their predatory and subhuman kin. And Weena was undeniably the Beatrice figure in the time traveler’s sojourn through sci-fi purgatory. Although it’s certainly interesting to note that both the Morlocks and the Eloi ultimately descend into HG Wells’ “fitfully flopping football object” at the end of the world. But it’s equally undeniable that the Eloi and the Morlocks are really racially coded, not just class coded. Morlocks preying on the flower of white upper class humanity that is Weena? Come on. There a lot of not terribly well hidden “nonwhite men are coming to rape and murder our pure white women” not-so-sub subtext going on there. Yeah, it’s nice that he later modified his beliefs for the slightly better (unlike HP Lovecraft) but I also wonder how much of that was due to the Nazi beliefs falling out of fashion, given that he died shortly after the end of WWII.
It’s interesting in the sense that HG Wells was born a member of the “downstairs” class but still idolized the “upstairs” class. Kind of offers some insight into how the MAGA mindset operates.
@ 56 It aired the same night on PBS.
@23 Nice! I particularly like the incoming tide part.
@20
Sure… as long as you aren’t standing in front of an open window or conscripted for the Russian military. Just ignore any premature deaths from political dissidents, like Navalny.
Maybe if you’re Han Chinese and a party loyalist. The Uighyrs, Tibetans, Nepalese, Manchurians… they don’t seem to be doing nearly as well. Things that the Taiwanese have to look forward to–not living in extreme poverty. (Or maybe just not living, period.) Hong Kong doesn’t seem super happy with the way things are going either. And there are entire Nepalese villages where all the adult men have only one kidney, because they sold the other one for money to live on. But hey, they’re not in extreme poverty! They sold a kidney to avoid it!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8914735/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-nepals-kidney-valley-poverty-drives-an-illegal-market-for-human-organs
What does fascist flavored Kool Aid taste like, exactly? Asking for a friend.