The Doomsday Clock

[Missy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE8hx-bE2i8

Am I the only one who feels liek the world is just getting to be more of a mess all the time?

We live in a public health crisis and have for two years, things seem to be looking up from Omicron for now, but that doesn't account for the randomness of recombination, so we just have to hope that holds.

Half of America is schitzophrenic.

The American Republican party is for all purposes modern day Nazi's.

Just enough Democratic members of America's congress are stupid, lazy, ignorant or careless enough to enable the Nazi's.

Russia wants to find a way to undercut globalism at least and outright annex foreign sovereign territory at worst.

China is a rising superpower. (not that America is some special angel mind you)

Americans are more concerned about 'muh rights' than 'muh responsibilities'


People in the world are far too concerned with nationalistic sentiment over globalism. Nationalism being inherently divisive, ultimately serving only to enable people like Xi or Putin. This time around it may cost Ukraine.

I could probably keep going . . .

[Vekseid]

(Fixed your image)

I rather feel mixing climate change in with it stains the Doomsday Clock's message. The consequences of climate change play out over decades, centuries, and millennia. Tying it to a clock as some immediate consequence is harmful, in my opinion.

Beyond which, Russia has since shown its hand, and they've been bluffing the entire time.

I believe the real issues are going to originate in the impoverished world, like what is happening to Sri Lanka currently. A food crisis was looming even before Russia's invasion and India's heat events, and prices are already higher than those that triggered the Arab Spring. There is a real possibility of continually larger mass migrations, which in turn drive right wing sentiment.

[Jerram]

The American Republican party is for all purposes modern day Nazi's.

Just enough Democratic members of America's congress are stupid, lazy, ignorant or careless enough to enable the Nazi's.

I don't think "nazi" means what you think it means.  I'd be careful of throwing around that term so casually, there are Holocaust survivors still living who could explain this better than I.

[stormwyrm]

I don't think "nazi" means what you think it means.  I'd be careful of throwing around that term so casually, there are Holocaust survivors still living who could explain this better than I.

However, it seems that they're already disturbingly similar to the Nazi Party as it had been in the late 1920s. They even had their Beer Hall Putsch last January 6, 2021. Whether they will eventually become the reincarnation of the Nazi Party of the 1940s is still an open question, but all the signs are pointing in that direction.

[Jerram]

I'm out of this discussion.

[gaggedLouise]

I was discussing this at another site back in April, and both myself and some other people pointed out that if the panel that's set up to move around the hands of the clock had met recently, then they should have moved the hand to one minute before midnight - for several reasons. But apparently they only convene in January each year, and in January '22 they had not seen any reason to move the clock (though the time stamp has been moved ahead several times since 2015.

I think the clock has become a meaningless media stunt. If they're not going to move it ahead at this point, when three of the major nuclear powers of the world (Russia, US, UK) are deeply involved in a grinding war in eastern Europe, all three saying they "are in it for the long haul" and none of them will pledge to exclude the use of nukes, plus climate issues, an ongoing pandemic, damage to wildlife and enviornment all over the world and the risk of war in other places - then when would they find any reason to move the hands of the clock?

In a sense we *have* already hit midnight. Nuclear war isn't here, but the post-cold war international order is fracturing and (partly) breaking down. And this is at the same time that the US seems to be moving towards a serious crisis in its political system.

[Vekseid]

There's also the matter of how drastically nuclear policy has changed.

There are fewer nukes now than there were in the 50s. The nukes that remain are of lower yield. One of the major powers involved (the US) is actively moving towards a comprehensive prevention strategy - to wipe out another country's entire nuclear capability before they can respond, and to do so using relatively low-yield, low-fallout weaponry and tactics. The only country developing a meaningful counter to this (China) has an explicit no-first use policy.

There is no sane reason to believe we currently live in more dangerous times than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[gaggedLouise]

I'm not really expecting to see a major nuclear meltdown this year - but I still think there are grave long-term dangers entailed in what we are seeing now. Not least because the unlimited flow of weapons, the thundering war rethoric (on all sides, even if Putin is the most thunderous) and the lack of transparency and oversight into where we're heading risks numbing people, over time (and I mean the coming decade or so),  to the real danger of escalation into a nuclear war.

People in high places may be saying in five years from now, at another crisis: "Well, Ukraine didn't lead to anyone dropping any nukes, it remained a conventional war all along, you know - so now we know, if you're just tough then no one is going to really consider nuking you, that's just idle talk!". 

[GloomCookie]

While we like to give politicians shit for their short sightedness, I do believe that this is one time where having a bunch of politicians who were around during the Cold War helps. These are people who grew up during the era when Mutually Assured Destruction was a legitimate threat, and so that tempers their resolve to use nuclear weapons.  They're aware that the use of any nuclear weapon will be heavily scrutinized, set off alarms around the world, and generally scare the shit out of anyone.

Plus, the US was FAR more likely to use nuclear weapons in Korea. General Douglas McArthur wanted to carve a "nuclear trench" to cut off the flow of Chinese troops pouring into North Korea, and was almost to the point of ignoring President Truman to do it. At the time, US policy was threatening to shift to one of "Everyone has nukes so conventional forces are worthless", which is damned stupid and led to this thinking that nuclear weapons are absolutely the solution to any and every problem, and Truman (btw same President who authorized Hiroshima and Nagasaki) fired McArthur and sent him packing.

https://youtu.be/hERCPIiBprA

The biggest variable in all this is that Putin is... unstable. While I'm sure that the Pentagon and numerous other nations have a psychological history of the man, I don't think even they know 100% what he's going to do. We're lucky he hasn't used nuclear weapons currently, and I'm absolutely convinced they're watching just in case. All we can really do is watch the conflict devolve and hope Putin doesn't back himself into a corner where he feels the only way out is to nuke other nations.

[Vekseid]

I personally feel he is trying for madman theory.

The Biden administration has done far too good of a job predicting Putin for him to be 'unstable'. They may not know 100% but they have called his actions down to assassinations of pro-Russian leaders in the Donbass. We would consider the logic behind this warped as all fuck, but it is not beyond our ability to understand.