The Future is Now...oh crap!

[PsychicWarVeteran]

I definitely tended to lean towards the idea that cities would be fantastic, shiny things as seen in Logan's Run, not the filthy, beat-up things they are depicted as in Blade Runner.

Also, being raised on Star Trek, I was all over the idea that money would be useless as people learned to get along and help one another. Har! Was I ever naive!

But then, I when I was ten I thought Space 1999 was prophetic, so...

[Foozle]

Capitalism will fail. Communism has never really had a fair go at it. Most political systems devolve into oligarchy/plutocracy.

Not so strangely, we are seeing it now in the U.S. The GOP is no longer a party beholden to certain ideals - it has been infiltrated and overrun by these "neo-whatever-you-want-to-call-thems." I have said it before and I will say it again: tax cuts only make sense when you run the govt. cheaply, not when you run a record deficit. The current powers that be in the GOP are selling their children into a wholly unworkable national debt.

But I guess if you are expecting the rapture any time now, you might as well bankrupt the govt.

While new Rome burns, we diddle ourselves. Most people are sheep, kept happy with bread and circuses. Whatever amuses is good for today, screw tomorrow. I love bees and most other commercials too!

I am utterly disappointed in humanity. Does it show? Ugh, what a thread...

My only good news, if you can call it such, is that I think Bush will lose in a landslide election favoring Kerry (the not quite as obnoxious as Bush, democrat warhawk). I think the focus on the supposedly "close" election is BS intended to make people despair. Hell, I despair every fucking day of my life - that won't work against me!

=)

[Foozle]

I express that idea this way:
I am a fruit-at-the-bottom person in a pre-stirred world.

I am willing to make myself work for a reward. Most people just want the reward.

You think I'm kidding. I'm not.

[Doc]

As a kid, I was always torn between utopian and dystopian visions of the future. I could just as easily imagine a Road Warrior or Blade Runner future as a Star Trek one.

As I get older, I'm starting to reconcile the two. I think we're going to go through a massive dystopian period before a relatively utopian one. Or maybe we are going through the beginnings of that dystopian period. I'm only barely kidding.

[Foozle]

This is an interesting point that I never thought about!

Heck yeah! I am very suspicious of people that are not trying to make earth into a paradise and instead focus on afterlife pipe-dreams. Maybe they don't like being alive, maybe they don't favor the living...

Or maybe they have some kind of idiot slave mentality and are not interested in improving themselves or their lot in life.

Or maybe they are the leaders of the people described above, and as such are living quite well off the gullibility of others.

Such are not for me.

So, Foozle, I have no idea how old you are, but how did you envision the future when you were a kid?

I'm a little older than you. To be perfectly honest, I don't know that I had a utopian vision of the future. My standard of living has always been tolerably good - better than that maintained by most people in the world. Often better than most of the people I know.

I just think it's sickening that I - a non-christian, non-jew, non-muslim, non-buddhist, etc - am one of the most generous, caring, obliging people I know. And most of the time I dislike everyone I meet. But disliking them and treating them like a different species is two vastly different things for me. I want, and strive continually, to treat others with the dignity and respect with which I wish to be treated. It's as if others operate entirely without a system of ethics or values except those provided them by that old time LCD - religion.

And that's not worth very much - religious people kill each other all the time. A quick read on world history proves that out.