Wartime

Well, what is one supposed to think about that?
Somehow you get the impression like another one of those useless actions humans do, thinking their sit-ins, their stopping to live, their praying and singing stupid songs may impress the Gods to have mercy on them - all while there actually should be to learn that this pilgrimaging to a certain place won't till their fields, won't build them cars or cell-phones or anything else of their dearly-enjoyed modern life that they take as so damn self-evident.
In other words: Boys and girls from schools in the (Western) civilization - if you really want to do anything to help easing the climate disaster, stop quitting school, better go and get quitting wanting a new smartphone for every Christmas or birthday. Better even stop using them completely.
Stop purchasing a new wardrobe just for optical reasons. Stop going vegan for hysteria or hipster reasons - the soy for your meat-replacement products comes from Brazil too, getting shipped over a big ocean.
You really think that using the "angry child wants to get its will and screamingly throws itself upon the floor"-tactics are going to get you anywhere?
Kids, just get real: It really takes to bend over backwards in order to stop the world from spinning for a single second.
And, judging from your ages, there really is to doubt if you actually still care about the subject you make a fuzz about now after a couple of years...

Strange with photographs it is these days: They look like being made only yesterday, although factually they're already years old. The content they show, for long, is true no more...

By the way, did anyone take notice that Facebook has now been known broadly for 10 years already?
Sure it's lasted longer than Myspace, after the time of the big hype... And sure this came less expected than it turned out in the reality. As all things that get hyped for some time eventually fall to dust again and get forgotten.
After all the privacy scandals and the revelations about collecting data (never really deleting something you posted), this is quite a bit of miracle - but, maybe, the key here more lies with "there is no alternative offering to theirs". If you wanna head off somewhere else and receive about the same supply, there is none. Nobody's managed to build up something else until today with about the same reach like them who doesn't have this as his behind-the-scenes business model.
So, unless they really make some decisive mistakes in their business policy, count on it being another decade with them. But this second decade you can put under a very strong screening, as making something last for 20 years in the internet really is a feat...

https://questionoftheday.dreamwidth.org/25772.html

questionoftheday asks: What's the scariest or most disturbing thing you have ever come across on the internet? (question submitted by firewhispers)


My answer: In terms of "haunted, it would be definitely something like Silent Hill 4. Why? A game which has ghosts in it that follow you all around, harm you and which you can't kill, then there's a serial killer guy running around trying to complete an occult ritual which supposedly is dead, and selected people get drawn into a strange parallel dimension, before they die, which you can strangely enter through a hole in your bathroom wall - then there's definitely some haunting going on on your harddisk.

Other than that, joking aside: The real scary shit of the internet is humans. You know why?
If they perceive you as some object that opposes their opinion and if they feel you as a threat to them, in combination with that, then they're able to produce an inner cinema that makes you ask "Now, what the heck did just go broken??". Accusing you of all kind of stuff which you never said, did or revealed about you, throwing bullshit phrases at you like a Gatling-type machine gun - if it wouldn't be that disturbing, stress your nerves or possibly have other kinds of consequences for you, it was a good comedy show. Seriously.
(Pretty revealing too about the character you just deal with, by the way, in terms of their own prejudices and narrowmindedness.)

Verschwinden auch andererorts überall die CD-/DVD-Rohlinge aus den Regalen der Läden?


Do blank CDs and DVDs disappear from the shelves of the shops all over the place elsewhere too?

...You know, where you nerd activists for the internet and admonishers of data privacy have been missing?
Not where it was about bringing innovation into the living rooms and free education, not where it was about keeping snooping eyes out of you living room.
It's even more simple.
Where was your word as the internet was turned into a commercial field and a place of the same life seriousness like the real life?
Once it was a harbor for people who felt misunderstood, who had specialized interests and who didn't find anyone to talk to in the same situation so easily right around the corner living next to them. It was a place where people could meet anonymously and not be ashamed about every shit they think and put interest in - or where they needed to calculate that next day some S.W.A.T. team is gonna kick their door in because some dubious fucker didn't like their opinion or decided to act the "concerned citizen"!
Also, there weren't whole industries of lawyers which just live from telling people they violate some big corporation's copyright or they talk the wrong way about movie/game X!
You know where you would have been needed?
Just as this kind of Pandora's box started to be opened! As this resort was turned into a place of jealousy, hate and aggressive agitation!
'Cause when Pandora's box gets opened, you can never close it again. That's exactly what things have become in the reality...
Now all outcasts, misunderstood people and nerds have lost their place to be almost completely. "Almost" because, if you're unlucky, even in the most hidden place in the internet anyone finds you, reads you and sees the need to stop you from what you're doing!
Even all your software to become anonymous again doesn't revoke that process 'cause the race has already begun for long to get a hold of this. Just before it really got started and became a common thing.
...Tell everyone what you think you can do to give this back to them, to the people who wish and who need it - for the sake of creativity or their own sanity.

Green activists of today - what do you still want protesting and invading coal-fired power stations or blocking convoys that transport nuclear waste from nuclear power stations to final disposal sites?
What is it that you see in this? Aren't there already environmental threads that deserve as much attention as these old dogmas of the Green movement?
At all, what about your own lifestyle? Do you spare to own computers, cars, live without electricity? Do you take care what your furniture is made of? How old it is? Do you live in one and the same flat for 20 years, no matter which way the tide comes?
Do you all produce your own clothes from your home-grown cotton plantation, so that people in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia or China aren't exploited?

Tell you what. If you're so obsessed with your ecologically okay energy production, how about not protesting in front of the fence of some headquarters of a big energy producer - and demanding from him to finally lie down cables to the several windmills build in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea? How about not making it a topic "we got alternatives, only this system doesn't like to change its structures"?
Or, how about not complaining about the behavior of this state that it protects one of their model car fabricants for building software into its cars, so the waste gas quotas are made suitable to the formal guideline?
How about not complaining being promised for 30 years that your car shall eat less and lesser gasoline, but in fact every newer car eats some more than the last?
Or, how about asking for what practice they imagine, when prohibiting all vehicles with conventional combustion engines, but technology is far from being able to offer you a car that can drive a thousand kilometers with one charge?
The only "truck" ever invented with success that can carry weights and cargo over long distances is an electric locomotive! But what is being invested, build and sold to private operators for trial? Streets and highways, no railroad tracks!
How are even your packages from an online retailer of your choice supposed to get to your home, when trucks are being prohibited? By drones?! By those energy eaters who can only carry one bundle at a time?!

What do you think all that comes from that enables you your comfy lifestyle?!
Does it come from swinging a wand in the air and speaking "Hocus pocus...!"?!
Does material get born from pure ideas?! Pure castles in the sky?!
If your forefathers had worked like that, they wouldn't even have been able to achieve sanitary facilities in every flat!
They'd still sit there in poverty, work to death, die from industrial dirt when they're 40 and see 3 of their 5 children dying in the meantime!
Oh, shit, I forgot... The first part already starts to become reality again, only in a bigger cage with more toys to distract and entertain oneself!

Go fry an egg - sort the hell of your own crap and protest again if you have found some good reason for it!
Go and read some books, instead of staying with old dusty dogmas or steadily trying to re-invent the wheel!
Listen to your parents and grandparents, how ecologically okay they could live even though dirty technology existed!
Learn from science that still is from times where ideas haven't been sold like bread - and figure out what things work like! You can even find answers in there for the problems of today!

Most of what you believe in to be the right path is a bunch of old dogmas and nonsense planted into your head by media and NGOs who are being paid for telling you what the world works like instead of making you think yourself!

...And by the way, rechargeable batteries of any kind, also the battery in your smart phone and in your electric car, all of them contain rare earth metals, dug out of the earth, making a few Chinese people die somewhere far away 'cause this shit is poison.
The good Lord didn't let them rain from the sky because you were such well-mannered children of the sun!
If someone ever told you this - he's liar.

The Matrix is something that is real.
No, you're not stuck in a computer game wired onto you for your life, so you don't notice you're a battery for a machine.

All that you believe in, all that you think is right and wrong, all correlations that exist materially between one and another thing, that is The Matrix.
The way you got taught the path functions like, the way your mind thinks, based on these lessons and experiences, the way the world works like, and the way you believe - loosely based or even melt with these thoughts - the world functions like.
In other words: The imagination in your brain that you have about the world. That is The Matrix. The REAL one.
You don't even need a computer simulation for that as your brain is already capable enough of fooling itself and keeping itself in a dream world that is not as the reality is like.

Materially spoken, this equals as if you believe in gravity and that humans can't jump a 100 meters far, just like in the movie. Only with the difference: The reality surrounds you even though, dictates the base for the impressions your senses make. You can try if the belief in gravity is nonsense, but if it's there, it's gonna strike you dead even though. There is no computer simulation between you and the reality that feels real, but isn't.
The belief in nonsense is gonna bring up consequences for you right away. There's no second try or "Wanna continue?"-question. Dead is dead.

Speaking in terms of which the reality is full of virtual constructs that create a Matrix in your head that exists unconnected to the reality, that becomes a virtual dream world like in the movie,
it's, for example, if the doctor tells you that the pills help, but you feel more and more physically miserable. If you think, in plundering and destroying a supermarket you harm the big players in capitalism. If you assume that hard work alone makes you become someone someday.
Or, if you believe that buying things make you happy. If you think owning a house and a fat car, a spouse and children adding to that, are the universal recipe to make everyone happy. At all, if you think that it's perfectly normal that all people need to be married when they're 30, and so you need to be too. If you think every follower of a religion must wear the visible symbols of this religion just to be a member of this belief.

All of these things that you assume to be true without asking, create The Matrix for your head. The virtual reality you live in, the world which you think is true, but that is only like a full-scale computer simulation.

If you want to awake from it, want to know what is real now and what not, consider: There's no-one like Morpheus who can tell you that this overall thing you got running in your head is a lie. That there is some other reality and this is the one you can hold onto because it's real.
Even reality is only what people discover to be factually wrong, the way it was previously assumed.
There is a lot of factually-based recognitions that can help guiding you on your way, which you can trust because they've been proven to work this way, but it's not like all of reality has been cleared that way already.
In your search for a world whose concept is logic again, you've gotta walk many ways and open up your senses.
The famous question "Why do my eyes hurt?" - "Because you've never used them before." remains vital for all of your existence. And you can't always choose which one becomes the bitter truth for your life. If you got a deadly disease or cancer, you can't also choose to just have a stomach ulcer, can you?

The Matrix is... the cage you lock your own mind in. The prison you set for your own thoughts and feelings. The factual truth that you don't want to see - as well as the weird fantasy you declare for yourself to be true, even though it isn't.

The way out of this is... observing what happens to the left and to the right of yours. Going researching on your own. Wanting to know things exactly. Accepting at all, when something you got taught to be a certain way, is totally wrong factually.
When you don't want to stay with what you've been given as information from the world.
If you notice, things aren't correct that way you got told, and you don't decide for ignoring or blaming yourself for not understanding it or not being able to fit in.

(Attention: This is highly speculative content and shouldn't be taken with scientific correctness!
Further down, it also shouldn't be taken as hatespeech or as a base to reason artificial interferences to execute population policy.
At first, it's just thoughts considering and philosophizing about a subject and it's meant as nothing more than that.)

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World population grows every year, mainly in Africa and Asia.
Although in those areas, at least Africa the most, the common health care accessible to the normal people is far away from being satisfying. Still a lot of people die in their child years.
But even though, of those who are born, still a higher number manages to survive to make the population grow.
Is that so?
Population growth in Europe and other areas in the world counted as "developed" these days, it happened the most as technological and scientific progress appeared. As the influence of the Christian churches slowly declined, compared to the Middle Ages.
The increase in what health care could provide from the scientific viewpoint, and even the more as the distribution to the normal populace with low and average income for the time episode started to take place (for the sake of taking the soil away from social democrats and early communists), this is what is considered as the main reason for the explosive population growth that appeared between the 19th and the 20th century.
In Asia, this is partly the case, if you take a look at China which keeps increasing its capacities for provision constantly. But compare it to India. India is rich in population, but still the caste system is intact and richness and the deepest poverty both exist in this country without ever seeing light at the end of the tunnel to ever change. The normal population can't have that access to proper health care, otherwise it couldn't be one of the main research countries for medication tests on humans.
So, how would this rule apply there? Health care increasing the chances of survival of the individual, while people still tend to have families with many children born because of social reasons?
Is the population in the "developing" countries really the problem, if distribution of health care to everyone, as a base for survival of the masses of people born, is no topic in those despite economy experiencing growth all the time?

Taking a look at Europe and the already "developed" areas.
Population numbers in those areas have never been higher than today. Today is the max for these ever in history.
If those wouldn't live from getting people from other areas of the world moving into their territory, population numbers would already be in a noticeable decline. (Except for US because reproductive rights are under constant threat of clerical conservatives of being abandoned or killed by lack of funding, and people from the lower classes, who bear the most children there, depend on social programs to provide this to them, as proper distribution of health care to people from all states of wealth doesn't exist there.)
In the developed nations, about 95% of the population born survives into old age. Predators in the 5%-quota are diseases, malformations, accidents, pollution, man-made violence and psychic diseases caused by circumstances habored in this way of civilization.
So, population numbers in those areas remain constant with a slight decline in the long term. They get actively tried to be kept on the max. Be it home-bred population or through immigration.
And this through all the times.
So... basically, where does the point of attention lie really when it comes down to population policy?
In the developing countries, where still the least of the humans born survives until they're adults, and they die in a young age because of diseases damaging their health, or in those areas where nearly every person born survives until approximately 60 at least? And the number of people achieving this is being kept relatively constant at all times?
It may be worth picking up this hard constrast "95% survival" vs. "high mortality" for a closer look.
While the times of boom economic growth are over in the developed world, everything's build up that needed to be build up, now it only suffers from wrong proportion of the distribution, population decline in harsher numbers would be the logical consequence - as, in the phase of building something up, it needs more resources than when only maintaining and keeping up the state of things as they are currently. Also, there is not a need for "more" resources to be used as ante in the process.
Not even to speak of when the next stage of the technoligical age becomes reality and some more machines replace the human labor in the productive sectors, which makes the part of the population being employed in that sector become out of work and for sure also a part of them "obsolete" in the terms of the employment market.
So to say, the high population numbers of the developed world, in the long term, progress into a state of all of its population that it habors isn't "needed" anymore. It's like only in a position of consuming and sucking up resources, in a position of being a "consumer". Unable to give back or be of relevance to the integrity of the system. Others would call it drastically "trash", that's what they are then. - "Trash" that would need to be administered until its death and not be renewed / replaced by another person, to be exact.
So... when an area tries to keep its population number up in a state like before the big industrial boom at the beginning of the 20th century that it actually doesn't need anymore, it raises the question towards "How healthy for the planet is this strategy?"? How good in population policy worldwide is this actually?
And how much does it distort the numbers?
How much is it a factor that's part of the overall problem?
How much does that overclocked number cause in damage because a part of the population already exists in needlessness, but still they consume resources like all other people who are needed by the system to function?
To state something very clearly: The people who this applies to, they aren't to blame for what they are. If they have worked through a respective way of education and even performing an occupation for an amount of time throughout their lives, then there's no talking about "self-caused circumstances". Those people aren't obsolete because they haven't had ambitions and therefore were lazy and spoiled since a very young age. They've become obsolete because the system they live in doesn't need them anymore. In a certain span of time they were needed indeed, but now no more. - In difference to people who didn't even try for a decent school education and stayed away from it to hang out with friends, drink beer and destroy window glasses.
Therefore, because they're not to blame, they should at no point of the story be treated like if they were.
The solution for these should just be, plain and simple, to not to replace them in the next generation. Their life remains untouched, but as there is no need to have another person regrow into that position, there better shouldn't exist one to respawn.

When these obsolete numbers are being kept and maintained constantly, how much does it distort the real needs and the real functionality of the system that humans build for themselves to live in?
How much is it also responsible for overpopulation - for population that is there, but without a need of human civilization for them to exist?
What happens - how do the numbers look if that population doesn't exist anymore? In the developed world, as well as when Africa, Asia, South America only has the population number that it needs (considered, the economy of the "developing" areas also makes it to a state of things comparable to the so-called "industrialized nations" measured by what their environment allows)?
What if there are not that many people around anymore whose only purpose is to be there as a consumer because there is no task for them in this world?
And, what would happen to the yearly growth numbers if socially the issues of "children as security that supplies you in bad times / old age" would be adequately solved, in combination with that?
What would happen if mankind only grows or stays the same in such masses that it also has tasks for in its differing societies?

At least upon further thought it doesn't seem like the developed world is totally not to blame for the problem of the overpopulation. They try to keep up a number within their territories that's unrealistically high compared to the possible employment rate that it's able to supply when everything is run under fair circumstances (opposed to the current strategy of part-time work and letting the developing countries produce their food and their consumer goods).
When 95% of all humans survive until old age, you don't need people to have 2 and 3 children or more anymore. Better you should be happy if some people can't or don't want to have children because of certain reasons. Because that's getting closer to a realistic number, not even to speak of the children who would suffer for their whole lives as adults if there is no purpose in society for them.
And not even getting started to speak of the impact on the environment if there's one big resources-consumer less in the world...

It would be a drastic restructuring of society as it was to adapt to these circumstances with less people exsting again. But that process would be inevitable, as human civilization always finds a way of making work and production more effective than before, and by the time, this comes at the cost of human labor. No matter which economical system or system of world views it has in a century.
It is like one and only constant thread that keeps unfolding in history.

If not for those processes in mankind, which one can regard from one or another thousand positions, just think about the extinction of animal species: Animals vanished, as humans claimed the living space and bred like rabbits. Where humans live, animals have to go as humans want to live alone or even need the space for themselves.
One doesn't need to wonder about that process, as the earth has only a limited amount of living space.

Environment topics - overpopulation - vanishing of animal species - economy - social problems - all these topics are interconnected with each other. Each brick - another little factor in the other issue.
And when humans want to live up to the high goals they set for themselves in their enthusiasm, then they need to show a willingness to do something for this and to also adapt their societies to the links of the circumstances that are right in front of them.
There is no washing without getting wet. And no-one said it would be comfortable. Who thinks it would be, he lives in the world of a little child... Fairytales and unicorns.

Information vanishes when the last one to tell it dies.