The West and it's liberties are hopeless

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I want to rant about how our government and medias is exploiting the response to a pandemic and creating a bigger crises in order to control us and have power over us. This is not about Trump or any other specific person, I don't want this thread to become purely about politics. I have anxiety because of our personal liberties slowly being ceded away in the last 50+ years and there isn't anything we can do to guarantee stopping it. Everything is irreversible.

I wish I could have lived a full life. At least, I am looking forward to that meteor heading to earth and quickly killing all of us, if anything. Just watching things get worse and watching it slowly erode is psychological torment, wondering how much worse it is going to get.

These are temporary measures for public safety and health. We are not the first humans that have had to take similar measures to slow the spread of a pandemic. It is shameful that people feel the need to politicize this crisis.

Sorry. No meteor is going to destroy the Earth...and our species is going to live on for many millennia afterwards.

Deal with it.

I’m tired of this doomsday crap.

You mean 2018 VP1, possibly hitting Earth in November 2020?
It has 0.4% chance to hit (99.6% chance to miss) and it's only two meters in diameter, it's an order of magnitude less than the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013.
Bodies of the size of 2018 VP1 are estimated to hit the Earth roughly once in a year, on average.

Media love to create doomsday narratives out of anything they can find.

The nearest in time big body I know of expected to closely approach the Earth is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(137108)_1999_AN101999 AN10, coming near in 2027. It's a big body, probably over a kilometer in diameter. According to currrent data, it's expected to miss Earth by about twice the distance to the Moon.
Astronomers are watching for such bodies for obvious reasons but then there come some journalists who bend fact and misunderstand data just to make a doomsday story out of it.

Magz gives excellent information.

This sounds better but am concerned something that large falling into the gravitational pull of the earth.Might be a concern ?, TY for this update magz

Gravitational pull from other bodies is taken into account. Objects like regular planets are very well-known and predictable, interaction with them is taken into account.
What we don't know are potential interactions with smaller, unmapped bodies. There are no precise maps of them, just estimates. This is why probabilities of impact can be calculated instead of precise "yes" or "no".
However, as the body can be observed approaching, uncertainities get smaller and smaller until there is a firm knowledge that another potentially hazardous body will miss us by a e.g. million kilometers plus minus hundred thousand.

Last edited by magz on 11 May 2020, 3:25 pm, edited 3 times in total.

There have been such "Gloom-and-Doom" statements made since this country was founded.  Yours is nothing new.There is no meteor heading toward Earth to kill us all.  Please stop trying to project your hopelessness for yourself onto the rest of us.

We are in the Haven folks. So hollywood guy has some fears and while to many of us, they might seem irrational, they are quite real to the person experiencing the fear.

I am quite sure that everyone has some irrational fears, from fears of darkness, to dying in a plane crash, etc.

I am sorry you are feeling so scared and hopeless. It is a terrible place to be. (((hollywood guy))) It is a scary time right now in the US for a lot of different reasons. Some people are optimists and are certain we will pull through it. We always have before. OTOH, there is always a first time.

It might be helpful to take some time to study history and learn of the crises the US has been through in the past. Those people, living at the time, did not know "we" would "win" the Civil War and the country be preserved. People living throughout WWII had no idea that "we" would "win." Or that there would be a vaccine for polio or diphtheria or small pox. Those were terrifying days.

There are parallels that can be drawn between this time and other events in history or in other countries that can make things look bad.

So I get it that you have some fear of the present and the near future. I do too. I hope you can find a way to get past your fear so you can live in the present and be comfortable in life as we have it right now.

BlazingStar is right, of course.

Do read up on some of that history, even if you have already.

These are bad times; but there have been worse times, and we overcame them.

You're right.  I lost track of that.  I'm sorry.

Well, if we want to steer the topic back to where it's intended, I'm feeling roughly the same to OP...

I grew up under a communist regime and saw the hopelessly fake and corrupt officials through my own eyes. With the capitalist governments still, I don't have an optimistic view on this pandemic itself or the policies that were enacted to reduce damages. Especially when governments established a system to track its citizens in the name of preventing the spread of the virus... chances are high that such a system will not be removed even after the end of the pandemic, if there will ever be an end to it. Still, there's no use to have anxiety about it, because there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. The phrase "personal liberty / freedom" has became more of an advertisement than anything real, since everyone is controlled by money under a capitalist regime.

But I also don't wish to live a full life. Now maybe there's something wrong in my head. But living a full life to me is watching myself decay over time and very likely having a long, expensive, and painful death from some chronic illnesses. The last few times when I travelled by air, I wished upon me that the aircraft would crash, so there's that.

It is not so much that Capitalism is inherently "bad" or "evil", but that avaricious and greedy people get involved in the Capitalist system and ruin it for everyone else ... just like what happens with Communism and Socialism.

Hi Faya.

Do you have beautiful Nature around you?

I agree - the system works, at least for the big picture economy. But when the few greedy people go higher up in the system and twist the mechanism towards working for themselves, things turn bad for everyone else. Same for any political system that involves more than a few people.



Maybe not where I live since this is an industrial city on a gradual decline. The place is filled with apartment buildings that look all the same. We call them a "Khrushchevka", the term you can look up online. City park near me displays retired fighter jets and children's toys. We do have some old growth forests and clean water a few hours of drive away.

But if you are asking if I have anything to distract myself from negative thoughts - I have adapted to the city and now I find myself enjoying the local railyard and mechanical workshops more than the open nature.