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NNadir

(33,368 posts)
2. I must be missing something, since I'm not sure what you're trying to advise me to do.
Mon May 27, 2019, 03:40 PM
May 2019

Exactly who am I "lumping" with whom?

Who exactly are these people "making sacrifices" who I addressed in the OP?

Admittedly, as a cynic who earned his cynicism, since, in general, a cynic is nothing more than an idealist worn down by reality, I'm not all that prone, especially at my age, to taking advice, but I am interested in understanding what you are trying to say.

If I am being advised to embrace optimism, let me say this; there are two kinds of optimism, blind optimism, and hopeful optimism. The former can be, and in my view with respect to climate change especially, is toxic and extremely destructive and dangerous. The latter is an understanding that even if something is improbable but good, it remains possible. I see very little of the latter, but the world is awash in the former. I hope that will change, but I do not expect it will, hence my prediction about history.

We're at 415 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we're still reciting dogma, left and right.

As for change, I do not agree it happens slowly. I lived through unbelievable and rapid change. The world I live in is nothing like the world into which I was born. I may as well have moved to a different planet, because I am very much on a very different planet than the one into which I was born.

I'm so old that I come from a time when liberalism involved giving more attention to human poverty than worshiping electric cars depending on human slavery to operate. When I was a kid, slavery was generally agreed to be a bad thing. That's how old I am.

This is the magnitude, for just one example, of the change I have seen in a single lifetime.

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