@Antelope

Area 51 employee phone in. Back to back phone calls with wildly contradictory information made it pretty apparent that what Art Bell was trying to do was at odds with knuckleheads that wanted a moment of radio fame and bad actors taking up air time. Nice idea, but what’re you realistically expecting with that as a phone in idea on a radio show?

Answer: A good call screener/producer, and tighter control when callers go off the rails rather than letting them ramble on nonsense.

In practice, the show struck me as an example of "Being so open minded that your brain falls out." Every time I'd listen, I would wind up frustrated and change the channel as I simply couldn't sit through more of the bad parts of the show. I appreciate Art Bell's place in nonmainstream disclosure history, but his callers...

@Antelope @destraht

(in the 90s) there were people saying ‘look, shits gonna be rough’ and never followed up with a ‘maybe we should do something’. Now I’m here and I’m confused about the fact people are just talking about it again.

Speaking as someone who DID stand up and do something back then I can definitely address this. I became politically aware and active around 1990 and worked against war on drugs/war on terror (note both of these are abstractions) and ecological destruction.

Human apathy is the biggest driver- even people directly impacted and standing to benefit the most, frustratingly refused to lift a finger from a combination of laziness and learned/taught helplessness.

Mainstream normies always invoke simple, powers-that-be developed and curated tropes and one liners to dismiss entire branches of information. Bring up the "war on drugs" threatening everyone's liberties, people would say "I don't use drugs so it won't affect me, you're just supporting dope dealers and junkies!" Bring up war on terror threatening our liberties and draining our coffers and enriching corrupt nepots in the process, and the same canned thinking hand waves it away. "You're obviously a terrorist supporter, I stand with the USA!" This is how civil asset forfeiture grew, and how America did exactly what Bin Laden said it would: spill its blood and wealth in foreign deserts while destroying its freedoms from within.

Same goes with environmental causes. These issues were big in the 90s: BPA in food containers, forever chemicals churned out by the railcar and released carelessly, acid rain damaging aquatic life and remote ancient forests, clear cutting faster than replacement rate, pesticides in the food chain and cities, estrogen mimic chemicals ubiquitous in the environment affecting humans and animals.

Generally, mainstream people would attack the messenger with industry provided tropes: You just want to put people back into the dark ages! Back down and let multinational corporations massively profit by externalizing pesky environmental costs upon current and future generations!

SOME progress was made. Sulfur scrubbers on smokestack industries and low sulfur diesel mitigated the acid rain problem. BPA was banned from food containers and acceptable substitutes adopted. Water quality and discharge standards slowed and in some cases reduced pollution greatly. Landmark settlements were reached, albeit bastardized and exploited by greedy lawyers and grifters after the fact, for example Roundup, Asbestos contaminated talc, Camp LeJune contaminated drinking water, to name a few.

To this day, and even in this space, the phenomenon of identity politics and partisan talking points over serious analysis dominates public discourse on topics of Humankind-impacting importance. People will spout off nonsense and ad hominem, then drop the topic feeling they have "won." VERY few people have it in them to seriously challenge and review their interlocked assumptions periodically and prune the ones that have been proven false or obsolete as new information comes to light. I've spent a third of a century standing up to and challenging these phenomena, and have never given up even as I long ago recognized that most of the brightest among us are not above running with the masses and their simplistic meme level ideas as a matter of intellectual laziness and preventing cognitive dissonance.

There exist no EASY answers and solutions on a planet teeming with over 6 billion mostly stupid and self centered people. People will kick every can down the road, so it's pretty fair that catastrophic collapses that harshly impact them by the billions are not only inevitable, but fair and deserved/earned.