I'm rooting for the handful of survivors. I imagine a quite different future for their descendants. But that's easy for me to make up; I don't have to...
I'm pretty sure the advanced aliens are not coming to rescue us from ourselves. For much of the last century, that's what science fiction writers cons...
Genetics does play a part in the tendency to some kinds of addiction, just as it does in how a particular chemical affects each individual. Additional...
What, like glaciers and islands disappearing, 50C heat and widespread extinction, while Putin waves his nuclear missiles around like an angry baby wit...
It's that conservation of matter thingie. Nothing comes from nothing. In order for something to accumulate in one place, it has to be removed from ano...
Yes, it pretty much is, according to the laws of chemistry but I doubt a deity had anything to do with it. Are you aware that Greek mythology is neith...
Why should it? People have very few and simple needs and motivations. The circumstances could be made a whole less variable by an AI making sure every...
Brave New World. Why is there so much glamouraziation of overpriced cars, film performers, football players and Rocket launchings? People get excited ...
We don't call all drugs recreational. Most drugs are therapeutic (prescribed for specific symptoms of illness) and many are remedial (to correct minor...
That was about when I bought a 5-cent chocolate bar and a 10-cent Classic Comic with my weekly allowance. And everything that couldn't run away was be...
Ivan and Fyodor are standing on street corner. A Lada goes by. Then a Trabant. A Skoda. Then a Lincoln. Fyodor asks, "Which of those cars would you li...
It didn't result in increased survival; it resulted in increased enjoyment. Other animals get drunk or high on purpose, too, so the craving may well h...
Better to have a choice, all the same. One good thing they did, though: a high quality education for young people with the brains and application. Qui...
Are you kidding?!! How many ads do you see on mainstream tv for over-the-counter remedies for everything from indigestion to allergies to every kind o...
our federal government legalized recreational cannabis in 2018. There were all kinds of dire predictions about slippery slopes, a surge of drug use an...
Personal goals - like the gentleman scientists of the Renaissance and financially independent inventors of the 19th century. A sense of achievement. C...
There was, indeed, plenty of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, infighting, etc. - as there always is in vertical organizations. There was worker dis...
No it didn't! Medical scientists did. They would have worked in exactly the same way if their education had been free and the result of the research w...
I'm inclined to agree. I can't see communism on a large scale at all, unless it evolves naturally through the stages of democratic socialism. And that...
Let me amend that: deaths caused by self-styled Communist regimes is between 60 and 150 million. They're dictatorships that gained power under a red f...
There is no reason a commune can't be governed democratically. I should imagine democracy would actually work very much better in a communist economic...
Hundreds of thousands killed one another. 'They' just conducted one side and took over when the carnage was done. Of course it can't. But nobody's eve...
It was an aborted experiment. For starters, the Russian revolution had been brewing since 1905; what actually set it off was a bunch of women. All of ...
I disagree with some of your statements about history, values and 'ethic'. As for the rest, I simply can't decipher what you're trying to say. Maybe s...
This is not an improvement on the first version. Demonstrate it. Or at least describe its manifestation and give examples. There is and it is recogniz...
What is not exactly what? Okay, so you're pretty much down to Europe, rather than the whole era. Given the period - say 1000-1300 CE, does that make t...
Anything can be said to have roots, but locating the root and identifying the plant are particular tasks that 'an adequate' observer should be able to...
I have a problem with that basic premise .... after which, it gets a little confusing. How long is 'an age'? Two centuries? Five? Wasn't monarchy the ...
Yes! I tested it first on those filmy little vegetable bags in the grocery store, then yesterday on the recycle and garbage bags. Works on all three t...
Elders, who have earned the tribe's respect through honesty and wisdom, and who listen to every voice with considered attention. If. Why should there ...
How do you distribute what you haven't found yet? In order to ensure co-operation, they have to agree on a plan for sharing the effort - food and fuel...
In the quoted scenario, there is no wealth to redistribute or even distribute. These people narrowly escaped from a burning city, clutching their chil...
What kind of stability do you think I'm 'looking for'? North American native nations were pretty stable for several thousand years before Europeans ar...
A-yup! Revolution or civil war, it falls down. If climate change and its human detritus gets there first, Marx was off on the time-line. I said he was...
It hasn't happened. Nor could it have happened in those circumstances, in that environment, with that beginning. The ends do not justify the means; th...
No, that's the communist fallacy, which I'm on extensive record of not having made. Communism could not have worked in China, because it was never att...
I wouldn't be so sure about that. We've come a long way from "lilies of the field!" - though these guys "sow not, neither do they reap." And if you lo...
One factor is probably that people can't afford to retire, or they go back to work part time, so the entire work force is growing older, while the you...
The global situation is already falling apart, as complex societies fragment into hostile factions, tribes demand self-determination and populations a...
Any one, given the right temperament, an optimal home environment and excellent guidance can be unselfish relative to his peers, but he can't influenc...
taking the bigger and more productive half from a large Arab population and giving it to a smaller population of European immigrants. No, the Arabs di...
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