Alcohol.
Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.
Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.
So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.
Impunity of members of UN security council
If a UN resolution is vetoed by at least one of the members of the UN security council, the said resolution is thrown in the trash. That means that if a war crime is serving the interests of at least one member of the UN security council, its full impunity is de facto guaranteed. Even worse: some of the members are notably war-thirsty and 2 of them aren’t even democratic. And there is no way to change this way of functioning because it also can be vetoed by the said members. How many crimes have been made possible because of that?
Cyberbullying
Not a single judiciary system is able to tackle a phenomena that can happens from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world an can imply a handful of thousand of persons. Big tech does not have legal obligation nor financial or ideological interest to tackle it because forcing them would be unconstitutional. The rare cases where justice give a fuck about it, you get at best the condemnation of a bunch of nobodies after years of legal procedure during which the bully continues, and most of your bullies are still unpunished and free to launch a punitive expedition.
Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up
What are you talking about? Catheters have already solved this problem
You have to take it out though
That’s a different problem. Or, if you don’t want to solve that problem, you’ll have an infection problem. But you don’t have to worry about getting out of bed in the middle of the night anymore.
Currently struggling with this right now
keep an empty gatorade bottle by your bed. wide mouth, soft lipped.
I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.
In Marx’s own idea the point were class warfare is no more is when our civilization can satisfy any needs of anyone.
It would be the ultimate goal of communism, perfect equity through infinite automation of all resources.
Then they would only be art, philosophy, science and social activities.
Except, as long as there’s limited resources, fighting for it is our nature. To the point of having to much if may be.
Considering how little we actually know, how much we are still figuring out today, how wrong we once were, and most definitely still are on many things, about said nature, the naturalistic argument is IMHO rather weak. The argument silently assumes too many things, at least with our current knowledge - that human beings do actually have an inherent nature, that said nature is uniform enough across the whole species to make that generalization, that said nature is inevitable and can’t be evolved past or rationalized against, that it always was the case and will always be, etc.
Yeah I feel like human nature is actually cooperation.
It definitely is a big part of our nature as social creatures.
Although we can cooperate with our group and fight against another, hence the consistent wars throughout history.
I think human nature isn’t one sided.
But you’re right in that cooperation is the most effective (and desirable) way of survival.
Definitely true.
I think the hypothesis of a nature both in human actions and society as a whole does have enough merits to be a good starting point.
Were I think there is a lot of unpredictability is on conditions of living and technologies.
Technologies especially, evolve so much quicker than society or human nature.
I would say recently our technologies twisted some of our own nature. For instance how we reproduce in such a controlled way.
Not only this but we do now more than ever things not because of our nature. And it’s also been put into very unique situations.
A great example is social media (including Lemmy itself). We have access to communication so far from us it created very unique communities.
If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.
And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.
As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.
Greed.
America is a great example of this.
In the US and Canada?
Car dependency / Car centrism.
Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.
But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.
The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.
Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.
Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.
Wait til the petro dollar crashes. It’s going to be hilarious
EVs are coming, no matter how expensive/wasteful, you’d always have a car option.
As they do, they’re quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don’t expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he’s stuck paying for something that he can’t afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.
Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?
I don’t think so.
That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.
We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…
…but we are not.
So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.
Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…
But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…
All vehicles become more expensive.
If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…
The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.
So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.
So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.
No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.
They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.
Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.
git solves this.
i love me some doom pr0n now and again, but it sounds alot like some people are due for some exercise and they’ll be just fine. Things might turn out for the better
… git?
Like… git hub, git commit?
???
Yes! Those who can code and use git can collaborate and work remotely. Lessening the need for long depressing commutes
Sorry, no.
I mean, you’re right that git enables this, and that would obviously be a great choice for many tech workers, but employers in the US despise remote work and will do everything they can to never allow that to be any where near as widespread as it easily could be.
Not sure if you’ve somehow missed it, but after Covid lockdowns ended, basically every large tech firm in the US started mandating return to office work, and many of them even admitted they did so as a way to functionally lay off employees without actually laying them off.
Even Zoom, the company that maintains the most widely used remote work software… mandated their employees return to office.
There are ultimately 2 real reasons for this, ignore the bs that comes out of the media:
- Middle managers and up basically realize that their lifestyle suffers if they don’t have the ability to micromanage people in person.
Actually effective management can easily be done remotely by competent managers, competent work can in most cases be done by competent employees remotely, but the managers need to feel that in person social hierarchy dominance, or they get upset.
- Commercial real estate.
If we went to a massively more remote work paradigm, a fuckton of offices become pointless.
This crashes the commercial real estate market, offices start going (even more) vacant or converting to residential or mixed use, which would lower housing prices.
Can’t have that kind of bubble pop, or else we go through something similar to the 08 crash… in an economic environment that is already very precarious at best, and more realistically is already contracting in basically every metric other than GDP.
… We have a whole bunch of generally normalized social views and approaches to many aspects of how things work, which are all mutually reinforcing, which prevent actual social progress from happening, and the hatred of remote work is one thing that reinforces our car dependent construction of society.
It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off with more widespread mass transit, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people would be better off being able to do remote work.
Those things don’t make C Suite see line go up next quarter.
If I had more time under my belt I’d probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now
$100k+ in what currency? The base model of the EV I drive is under $45k
U$. The Rivian I want is about $120k
You can’t make a generalizing statement about how EVs are expensive and then say you were talking about one of most expensive models you can buy…
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. The Netherlands was also a car dependent place that bulldozed neighbourhoods for highways a few dozen years ago and look at where they are now. Change can happen, it just needs a critical mass of supporters and time, lots of time.
Us Americans just elected a fascist, who won the popular vote, who wants to do the exact opposite of a massive infrastructure rework, he and his sycophants want to cut every kind of government funding for social and government services of all kinds, keep ‘joking’ about invading Mexico, annexing Canada, buying Greenland.
We do not have a mass of supporters who are effective at applying pressure on the government… because we now, even more obviously, live in a naked oligarchy that controls the government and mass media… our democracy is broken, our representatives are purchased, our population heavily subject to anti intellectual right wing propoganda funded by oligarchs.
We also do not have lots and lots of time.
Many states in the US are currently seeing home insurance companies either dramatically raising rates or just leaving: The climate catastrophe driven collapse of many areas has begun, and it will only get worse without a massive coordinated government directed response… which goes dorectly against the ideology of most of our oligarchs and most of our people who believe what those oligarchs tell them to via the media they own.
We will not have the money to build out better transit infrastructure … that will all be spent responding to more and more intense natural disasters and internal migrants.
At the federal level, yes. There’s lots of things going wrong in the “greatest” country on earth. That doesn’t mean you should stick the head in the sand and ignore advocating for incremental improvements. If no sensible transport advocate actually does anything for it because they think there isn’t enough public support, you’ll never achieve that goal, no matter how many advocates there actually are.
Not just bikes recently released a video which touches on this topic with some more differentiated discussion:
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-two-cities-used-to-be-the-same
https://youtu.be/4uqbsueNvag
Greed.
Similar to this, I’ve got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).
I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc…
We’re still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)
In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.
Greed is the biggest issue we have in this world right now.
It should be made to be a mental health disorder that must be treated professionally and by taking away the money not needed to operate their business.
Kill tax breaks and strip the rich with 90% taxes on everything over 5 million dollars of any money they make even capital gains and investment income.
Own one home pay regular taxes, own two double the tax, own three triple the tax and so on until no one wants to own more homes. Same goes for corpos that rent to people at above market rates using software to drive rental prices up.
Greed must be made to be shameful and punishable not accepted and desired. Robber barons like Musk and Bezos should taxed into non existence.
Top 5 earners get publicly executed if they own over 500mil.
I think the ancient Romans would make their richest people pay for the construction of warships. You would only get out of it by pointing to a richer person to pay.
Do that but not for warships, pay for infrastructure repair, all those roads and bridges that keep the economy going need to be brought up to today’s standards and new bridges built to replace ones that are crumbling. Their wealth could not have been built if not for the roads and tracks that are now crumbling beneath years of cuts to local and state/provincial governments.
There’s no problem in society that can’t be fixed. But the problem is there’s too much conclusion without proper understanding
what do you mean
Exactly
Indubitably
It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.
“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.
Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.
But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).
This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.
Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.
When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.
And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.
For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.
That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.
Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.
Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.
And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.
But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.
We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.
This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.
This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.
We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.
But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.
These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.
Thanks for this. Was very thought provoking. It goes along with something my generation teases about with growing up in the 80’s. It was an entertaining and dangerous world and we didn’t have time for all this anxiety depression stuff. Haha
Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.
Rent is due in 7 days.
I don’t know if that’s a problem with society so much as it is a problem with reality.
…or a problem with time and sequences of events.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
Most don’t not just from some technicalities but because parents or otherwise we have a biological urge to consent to being alive and make live being.
The consent is from our nature and only extreme circumstances makes it otherwise.
Not true, police come and lock you up if they catch you trying to stop being alive
skill issue
What do you mean the police?
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
Putting them in jail if that’s what you mean is pretty barbaric.
Again though the police can’t detain you indefinitely. What stop people from doing it is being cared for the reason they wanted to in the first place.
Isn’t the hospital and medics the one who cares for suicidal people?
not in America, where hospitals aren’t free and a call to the suicide hotline will have the cops going to your house
This is so fucked. Yet another way the criticism Luigi brought is relevant.
Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.
I don’t know if that’s true. I shot myself in the head once and just woke up like nothing had happened. I suspect life might not be as fragile as it appears from the outside.
It is surprising how resilient we are. Getting shot in the head is an example, we often underestimate the chance of survival.
Unfortunately it doesn’t prevent all suicide.
Populism
This is as old as the democracy itself, and we still don’t know how to fix it. People are so easily driven by their emotions and stubborn about their political opinions that you only have to exploit cynically their low instincts to take the power, especially in a crisis context. And once populists are in the power, they hardly give it back.
Journalism that has any tooth whatsoever would mostly fix this.
As long as no proper journalistic standards exists, populists can pour their BS down the media drain unquestioned, unchallenged. If that’s all you hear about a topic, that’s what you’ll believe.
alcohol is especially hard to ban because it’s just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that’s how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it’s just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don’t brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn’t turn into alcoholics is good enough
Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).
- Correctly identify the actual problem.
- Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
- Name / describe the state without that problem.
- Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.
The only problems that aren’t solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.
As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can’t find a thread I’d recommend asking over there, because you’ll get a lot of good answers.
Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That’s the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it’ll find another avenue.
Not to mention it occurs naturally in rotting fruit. It would be like attempting to ban photosynthesis.
Are we gonna outlaw yeast, too?
During prohibition in the US, there was inoculated fruit juice being sold with the warning like: “do not leave unattended for 2 weeks at room temperature, as it may ferment”.
Stay away from my bread.
Weed is illegal in many parts of the world, as are psychedelic mushrooms.
And those are even harder to make consumable than fruit literally fermenting on a tree, or yeast getting into some sugary drink.
So unless we’re gonna get rid of leavened bread and cut down every Marula tree we’re not getting rid of alcohol.
Mushrooms just grow here in the grasslands. Only problem is harvesting season is mostly in the autumn. So you need te dry them.
But (magic) mushrooms growing in the wild are pretty common in north-west Europe. ( The species is found in a lot of places psilocybe semilanceata ) of course there are many more and you don’t even have to wait to get fermented.
Still even I can just pick them they are still not allowed here (in the Netherlands)
True, but yeast spores are in the air, and if you leave an appropriately sweet and sterile liquid open it will just… make alcohol. They use this technique in Belgium to harvest wild yeast for Lambic.
So until magic mushrooms start showing up inside my house I still don’t consider it equivalent.
In NL there’s a loophole: the fruit (paddo) is illegal, but the mycelium (truffle) isn’t.
Believe me someone will try.
Eventually biology itself will be banned because of how un-controllable it is. All that will be allowed will be silicon components manufactured by a central authority or assembled under centrally-approved code.
Studies have shown that not all alochol abuse is trauma-related.
That’s an interesting article. I appreciate that they mention that the studies may be flawed because they attained wildly different data, probably due to methodology. They also mention that people with personality disorders are often not caught by these surveys.
Did you not read it? Personality disorders ARE caught by the studies. The article references a 2020 study by Elizabeth A. Evans et al., which explicitly examined the prevalence of personality disorders among people with opioid use disorder. It states, “55.1 percent of women and 57.0 percent of men with opioid use disorder were found to have a personality disorder, such as borderline, antisocial, etc." Also, the article mentions findings from 16 studies on antisocial personality disorder among people with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Seven studies explored borderline personality disorder in AUD populations, with prevalence estimates ranging from 6–66 percent and a median of 21 percent. These wide-ranging results reflect the inclusion of personality disorders in the research.
I’m certain you misspoke?
The first half of the article focuses on the biggest study, the NSDUH
SAMHSA’s annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). NSDUH does not measure different mental health conditions individually, and probably fails to catch personality disorders.
That’s where I saw the information.
That’s one survey, you said “these surveys” (plural) which is why I was confused.
I was mistaken. It is the biggest and most discussed survey though so I still think it should be mentioned.
Sometimes alcohol abuse is just addiction. Trauma soon follows, though.
A person chases oblivion for a reason. In my experience.
Explain pls
I’m not OP, but I am a former alcoholic, and the son of a woman who drank herself to death.
In many cases we have severe untreated mental illness, often inherited and/or from childhood trauma. We are generally suicidal. Getting black out drunk (chasing oblivion) is better than living with your thoughts and emotions.
Anecdotally, I’d like to add that most of the many alcoholics I’ve known have very strong empathy and emotional intelligence. The sad state of the world certainly contributes to some people’s alcoholism. I know it did with mine.
For many reasons, alcoholics choose to kill themselves slowly with alcohol rather than a faster way that could cause even more grief and pain to the people around them.
I believe that has been your personal experience, but that’s not the case for everyone. Addiction isn’t rational, and alcoholism wears a lot of costumes.
