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Humanity is in the early stages of the most significant evolution in its history: learning to think as a species.
This is the linking of human minds, values, information and solutions at lightspeed and in real time around the planet, via the internet and social media, says science writer Julian Cribb.
Global thought is opening the way to solve some of humanity's greatest threats – including climate change, famine, global poisoning, weapons of mass destruction, environmental collapse, resource scarcity and overpopulation, says Mr Cribb, who is the author of 'Surviving the 21st Century' (Springer 2017), a new book describing the ten mega-threats and what can be done about them.
"Thanks to the internet and social media, people are for the first time communicating across the barriers of language, race, nationality, religion, region and gender. While the internet contains much rubbish and malignance, it also contains huge amounts of goodwill, trustworthy science-based advice, practical solutions to problems – and people joining hands in good causes."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:05PM
This is the thing, you see the two parties as substantively different. They're not.
I think politics in D.C. is really most effectively seen as good cop, bad cop. The republicans openly sell America to the highest bidder while using rhetoric of free market, deregulation, and personal accountability to justify. The democrats on the other hand act as if this is unthinkable and oppose it on social grounds, moral grounds, economic grounds and we have the basic outlines showing up for our tug of war. What you and many people miss however is that when push comes to shove democrats line up to sell out the country just as quickly. The TPP trade agreement is a great example here. There's really nothing in there that was good for the American worker at all. It was little more than a massive handout to multinational corporations. For one tiny fragment of the things in it, it was set to greatly expand the scope and scale of ISDS [wikipedia.org] agreements. ISDS clauses essentially allow a corporation to sue a government for, quite literally, doing anything that might negatively affect their 'right' to profit. These settlements would be resolved in opaque private tribunals. And in cases where the corporations win, it would override national law. This is how, for instance, Phillip Morris was able to sue the entire country of Urugay for having the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco along with Australia because they had the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco as well as doing awful things like preventing smoking in public places. Uruguay eventually came out on top (... after 6 years) but had they not, they would have had to have rolled back all their laws and also given Phillip Morris a massive chunk of taxpayer dollar in compensation "lost profits." ISDS clauses in effect let corporations overrule national sovereignty.
Now think about the fact that the TPP was being pushed hard by Obama and was a no-go topic for nearly all of the corporate media in the US. And what coverage it did receive had more spin than Ma Long's backhand. And as we could expect nearly all republicans duely signed up except for a handful running for immediate major office like Rand Paul. But when Obama needed some democrat votes to get our representatives to do things like override their own right to review and amend the bill, democrats dutifully signed on because that's totally something you should agree to...
Climate change agreements are another typical good cop, bad cop play in D.C. I could go into so much more detail but I suspect the TPP stuff alone has already made start to approach the tl/dr range for most folks.