NDT the goat of saying rly dumb shit but everyone thinks it’s somehow enlightening. he’s like Jaden smith but Twitter likes him
I mean I agree with him here. It’s ridiculous how we are still this tribalistic species while basically everyone would be better off when we would work together (e.g. climate change would be non-existent)
It is possible to agree with something and still believe it is terribly presented.
Bold claim stating that climate change wouldn’t be real if we just worked together. As if we didn’t live in an ice age as the same species we are now.
Yes, but… did you know, if you kiss a mirror you will always kiss yourself on the lips. How’s that?
actually schizoposting before it was popular
Saying dumb shit with smart words is pretty tight tho.
Expressing the basest of notions with the loftiest of words is the pinnacle of wit.
Wait til you learn that the reason you hate immigrants and immigration is that the wealthy conditioned you to hate them. Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can’t? This allows the wealthy to profit off of international arbitrage, while regular citizens can’t. A CEO can move a factory to a low cost country to save on labor, but you in a wealthy country can’t move there to save on cost of living. And the citizens in a poor country can’t move to a wealthy country to earn better wages. The corporations get to take advantage of international arbitrage, but you don’t.
Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can’t?
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
Possibly Mexico, Canada, or China soon too, if the Trumpies get everything they’re asking for.
And the citizens in a poor country can’t move to a wealthy country to earn better wages.
Best example of this I’ve ever seen (other than Israel/Gaza, which is really more of an interior border) is Haiti/Dominican Republic. The fact that they’re all on the same island but one half looks like the fucking Korean Demilitarized Zone to keep the other half out is bleak af. Particularly nauseating when you’re seeing earthquake relief getting held up by some of the most evil bureaucratic fucks you’ve ever dealt with in your life.
Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.
This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.
So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.
This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.
Oh definitely. But I’ve noticed that America’s failure to impose post-Soviet neoliberal capitalism on big parts of the periphery has resulted in more and more countries getting flagged for embargo and sanction. This has resulted in neighboring countries forced into some hard choices - Germany losing access to cheap Russian natural gas, the Philippines and Australia alienating itself from economic superpower China, Mediterranean shipping coasts skyrocketing after the Gulf of Aden becomes a free-fire zone due to the Americans’ ongoing feud with Iran.
The Cuban embargo can only function if it is isolated from the rest of the Caribbean nations. But putting all of Latin America on the shit list just means they trade with each other while you effectively embargo yourself.
Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.
Its gonna be a crazy ass decade
Or mostly anywhere really. The EU exists for all that to be easier within the EU.
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!
But you take them off when you kiss a mirror on the lips
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
I wish I could upvote you a thousand times.
I don’t care if you hate him; he’s right on this. this entire thing is bullshit.
Who hates 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.
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 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.
This dude really is a pompous ass sometimes.
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
What about this tweet reads as pompous to you?
To judge others so, you must be the personification of kindness and benevolence. Surely?
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.
Yes borders are bullshit, but he really doesn’t have to come across all high and mighty about it
Hits the joint “borders man”
This is not interesting.
I’m not saying NDT isn’t a smart guy, but yeah he does tend to do that thing a lot where you describe a normal concept in a sort of detached anthropological way so it sounds profound even if it isn’t.
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.
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…
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.
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,
As if humans weren’t fiercely tribalistic forever. Other species beat each other to death, too.
The post may be right, but getting a bunch of homo sapiens from far away not to club each other to death is, historically, a hard problem, and countries and passports are kinda a stepping stone.
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?
Maybe it’s because I know autistic people, but NDT’s obtuse starry-eyed splaining never triggered me as much as it seems to others.
He’s an astrological trapped on a planet. What do you expect
Personally, I find him irksome because I get a strong vibe from him that he thinks of himself as a very smart person, looking down on the intellectual peasants. Part of why I perceive him that way is because this is how I used to think, as an autistic nerd who built much of my identity up around being smart. That’s also why behaviour of the sort that shows up on /r/iamverysmart (such as many of NDT’s posts) makes me cringe so much.
Dissecting this a bit further, it’s not necessarily that I think he thinks he’s better than other people — rather the opposite: some of the most intellectually arrogant people I have known are, at their core, deeply insecure and feeling the need to justify their interests by presenting themselves in a certain way.
Yeah that’s exactly the vibe I get but for some reason it makes me feel more charitable towards him. Maybe because it doesn’t trigger like an echo cringe in me because I’m not like that.
(I’m just like directly insecure lol)
it’s worth noting when the hate against NDT started and who was the most vocal about it.
Cosmos aired, and the christians flipped their shit. At the time, it was hilarious. Now it’s kinda sad.
I’m not Christian, haven’t seen the show, and still think he’s a pompous ass.
If I said the shit that fart smeller says people would literally say “shut up stoner” to me.
You have to have an advanced degree, wealth and celebrity in order to publicly proclaim something that an introspective 12 year old would yell at his friends at 4 in the morning after completing a dare that he could gulp down a whole cup of sugar without coughing or puking
