
Noam Chomsky: 'There's never been a moment in human history' like this one - pmoriarty
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/514212-noam-chomsky-theres-never-been-a-moment-in-human-history-like-this-one
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NicolasGorden
I'm not sure of the 'off the charts' point regarding Sweden and USA in terms
of Corona virus. These countries currently rank #7 and #9 respectively on
world wide deaths per one million population and significantly below other
countries: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-
deat...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-
worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/)

Unless he is talking about raw numbers, but then that's not a very honest
argument.

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happytoexplain
I see this point of view a lot, and it's a little scary. Per-capita numbers
are obviously highly valuable, but why is the raw number of people dead
somehow meaningless?

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rich_sasha
Not meaningless, but otherwise you are mostly comparing the _sizes_ of
countries. Is being a bigger country (with more deaths) more dramatic than
being a smaller one?

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hashbig
Here Chomsky's biggest concern is a nuclear war, for Elon Musk it's AI taking
over the world. Almost every culture has its own version of this story
(usually religious) about the world heading to a final event, and a new world
order emerging thereafter. We humans are obsessed with stories of the end of
the world.

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timbuckley
And for the first time in history, since the middle of the previous century,
we have some capacity of ending the entirety of human life on the planet, with
only a few hands involved.

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runbsd
I cannot tell if legit or fear mongering.

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phobosanomaly
I'd say it's both. We're in a really bad place. But, as a species we've been
in plenty before.

"There's in fact evidence that the average temperature dropped 20-plus degrees
in some spots," after which the great grassy plains of Africa may have shrunk
way back, keeping the small bands of humans small and hungry for hundreds, if
not thousands of more years."

[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-
human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c)

The only difference is that we're getting better and better at putting
ourselves in really bad situations.

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rich_sasha
Counterintuitively, this is actually what makes me optimistic about the
future. I think every generation before us (or near enough) thought they are
at the end of times, humanity never faced such crises as now, and everyone
else had it easy.

It doesn’t mean we are guaranteed to solve our problems, but at least it means
we have a track record of working out utterly hopeless situations. Or if you
like, just because a problem seems hopeless and beyond the reach of solution,
it doesn’t mean it really is.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> World-renowned scholar and activist Noam Chomsky said humans are living
> through the darkest and most consequential time in history.

Not even close, unless you ignore collapse of Roman Empire, collapse of Han
Empire, Mongol Invasion, The Plague, Religious Wars in Europe, Post-Columbus
destruction of Native Americans, WWI, WWII, Cold War including Cuban Missile
crises where a single person(Vasili Arkhipov)was all that stopped nuclear war
between USA and USSR.

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johnwheeler
Climate change and nuclear arms, yes. The rest probably pale in comparison to
those. Not to diminish their impact but they’re not existential threats to all
mankind.

The current level of racial unrest, economic depression, and this pandemic
will pass. Racism has always been a problem, the economy works in cycles, and
we’ve got several vaccines in phase 3.

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RickJWagner
Chomsky is a political activist. This doesn't have a place on Hacker News.

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HenryKissinger
.

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komali2
Perhaps climate change is a crisis because it's clear there's no political
will to deal with it in even an incremental fashion? The executive leaders of
some countries, such as the usa, are even promoting the use of climate
damaging outdated technologies like coal power plants.

