Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.

The prefix “Mc” or “Mac” is Celtic anyway, not Germanic, so you failed in that sense too.

And that’s leaving aside the fact that he’s not actually a billionaire.

US bald guys gotta stick together.

How is that going to work when you live in a group of around 30 to 50 people, all of whom are closely related either through blood or marriage, and all of whom have known you for your entire life?

What we see in all of the ethnographic literature on small-scale hunting and gathering societies is that you absolutely cannot rise to a position of power and influence simply on the basis of strength. To the contrary, the way you gain power and influence is by being a good and wise and generous provider for the group, not by beating your fellow tribe-mates down.

If you know of an example that demonstrates your idea, please do tell, since I am unaware of any such case in the existing anthropological literature.

No, we don’t see any evidence of this at all in the ethnographic literature. To the contrary, what we tend to see is antisocial actors being socially ostracized or killed by the larger group. This is evidently a very old behavior since we absolutely see it in chimp bands as well which means that it goes all the way back to our most recent common ancestor which existed 6 million years ago.

We are

Born like this

Into this

Into these carefully mad wars

Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness

Into bars where people no longer speak to each other

Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this

Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty

Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed

Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

-Charles Bukowski

Bullshit. Responsible news consumption is how we make informed decisions about the world. It’s a critical part of any democracy which is why Burke called it “the fourth estate.”

Not at all. For the vast majority of our time as a species we lived in small hunting and gathering bands wherein the accumulation of personal wealth and property wasn’t really possible and one’s status instead depended on merit. It’s only with the dawn of agriculture, about 10k years ago, that the accumulation of personal wealth and private property becomes a thing. For better or worse, for reasons I don’t have the time to go into here, agriculture is a kind of ratcheting trap, and once we embraced it we could never go back and never will.

The thing now is to recreate the small-scale egalitarianism that we evolved to live in, but how we do that in the material world we’ve created is far beyond me.

And it wasn’t even that long ago either. I feel like I’m talking to teenagers.

Speak for yourself. Hard science isn’t boring to me.

I think you’re giving Limbaugh more credit than he deserves.

This. This is exactly what OP was talking about when they said we look crazy to the rest of the world.

But since these are mutually exclusive propositions, only one side can actually be correct. Do you really think it’s more likely to be the science-denying conspiracy-minded side? The side that elected a transparent con man and buffoon, and appears to want to elect him again?

That’s not what they said at all. WTF is wrong with people?

This will never stop being weird to me, or at least unfamiliar.

Reason; I was raised by boomers, but they were legitimate 1967 Haight-Ashbury hippies (actually my dad derosed out of Vietnam in '67, so he wasn’t in SF until '68, but leave us not quibble) who even now, though both my parents are dead, are still far to the left of me, and I’m basically a Bernie-style democratic socialist.

To put in perspective, while my parents weren’t actually part of the SLA, they personally knew and were friendly with some of the most notorious of the lot, though they had parted ways by the time the SLA started to get seriously crazy.

All of which is just to say that growing up with Boomer parents in NorCal was a very different experience for a lot of gen Xers like myself.

Union tradesmen and teamsters both make good money. It’s the non-union workers getting screwed.

China faces the largest demographic collapse of all. It’s a ticking time bomb not just for them, but also for the global economy.