The Age of Mammals

December 25, 2006 7:09 PM

End of the Year Review, 2026. Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century.
posted by homunculus (55 comments total)

When the Mayan Apocalypse hits in 2012, this essay is going to look really dumb.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:25 PM on December 25, 2006

"And I want a pony, no, two ponies, and my own farm. And a million dolls. And a Unicorn".
posted by jourman2 at 7:26 PM on December 25, 2006

I love predictions that are predicated on one radical viewpoint winning, again and again, over a short period of time. They taste like delicious marshmallow fluff and are less filling. Too much, though, and they make me all sick.
posted by jmhodges at 7:33 PM on December 25, 2006

The Mayan Apocalypse was canceled in protest to Mel Gibson's movie.
posted by homunculus at 7:34 PM on December 25, 2006

"Predictions" and "predicated" only two words apart! Hooray for no editing.
posted by jmhodges at 7:35 PM on December 25, 2006

It's funny, jmhodges. When I first read your comment, I misread "one radical viewpoint winning" as "one radical viewpoint whining." I still agreed with it.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:38 PM on December 25, 2006

Somebody played too much Shadowrun as a kid.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:40 PM on December 25, 2006 [1 favorite]

In 2026 I will be a Deliverator. It's well established that by that point, the only thing that Americans will still be good at is software and high speed food delivery.

I just need a new name. I was thinking Ace Paladin, or maybe Victor Champion. (Rough, I know. But I've got 20 years to find the perfect one.)
posted by quin at 8:03 PM on December 25, 2006 [1 favorite]

How..... hip.
I mean, I'm a smidge more liberal than your average Communist, but is it just me or are all the utopian fantasies of the "stupid left" just a bit too full of buzz words like "mainstream media" and "Zapatista" and whatnot? Do these patchouli-wearing idiots ever have a little moment of clarity while trying to find the prettiest tomato at Whole Foods that Zapatistas are BLOODY REVOLUTIONARIES? Not the idealist downtrodden Ghandi-figures they heard about at their last poetry reading?
Sorry, it sort of drives me nuts. I'd much rather see an informative essay full of proposed solutions from someone with information AND analytical ability (such as Chalmers Johnson or Arundhati Roy) than this tripe. I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing which is created simply to place a soothing balm on the open sore of these "guilty white liberals" while those of us who do NOT make $70k a year have no real choice other than to shop at the Wal-Mart these armchair revolutionaries claim to hate.
I've got an idea! Instead of saving all your soda bottles up and writing up a fantastic voyage of libertarian/RenFaire swill after sending your annual $50 to the Sierra Club, why don't you sit down and use all that nervous energy you got from washing down your Fair Trade chocolate bar with your Fair Trade Coffee on something USEFUL? Like, say, starting a Cooperative retail outlet in a small town where the only other retailer is Wal-Mart?
What ever happened to sending a letter to your Congressman, anyways.
Not trying to snark on the post, just this sort of thing gets me cranky. People like that author are the reason the Republicans win.
/endrant
posted by eparchos at 8:25 PM on December 25, 2006 [2 favorites]

BTW, I don't have a problem with people supporting organic foods or recycling or anything else like that, just that we seem to have become content to make the same two or 3 "baby steps" for the past 30 years.
But patchouli just stinks, sorry.
posted by eparchos at 8:28 PM on December 25, 2006

Ok. Who wants to start a CoOp retail store? I live in San Francisco and... Well... Small business is actually quite large here.

Let me move to LA and start one there. Who's with me?
posted by subaruwrx at 8:30 PM on December 25, 2006

I'd much rather see an informative essay full of proposed solutions from someone with information AND analytical ability (such as Chalmers Johnson or Arundhati Roy) than this tripe.

Okay, I guess I should have made it clear that this is not that essay. I thought it was funny, and I think the author had her tongue in her cheek, mostly.
posted by homunculus at 8:41 PM on December 25, 2006

eparchos writes "Not trying to snark on the post, just this sort of thing gets me cranky. People like that author are the reason the Republicans win.
"/endrant"

eparchos, I think I love you. Can we get married please? Do you like boys? If not, you can totally have a woman on the side, no problem.



Also the article was... meh. Anyone who writes stuff like this and talks about the dissolution of the British Royal Family as an institution has their head wedged very firmly up their ass. The RF is as important to the national identity of the British as New York is to the USA. The idea that it could be removed is completely laughable, no matter what your views on their usefulness or lack thereof.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 8:47 PM on December 25, 2006

I thought this was a nice respite from Ubiquitous Metafilter Snark. As a unrepentant pessimist but a natural optimist, a post like this doesn't get my dander up. "Wouldn't it be nice..." as the Beach Boys sang...
posted by kozad at 9:01 PM on December 25, 2006

In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide)

Uhh, which one? The Eastern Divide, the Great Divide,, or the Northern Divide? Or maybe one of the smaller ones?

Hell, there's a divide in Oak Park, Illinois. Dump water on one side, it hits the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Dump water on the other, Lake Michigan, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the North Atlantic.

Hint: It isn't called the Midwest because of geographers.
posted by eriko at 9:05 PM on December 25, 2006

Reads like a hippie wishlist. Next.
posted by frogan at 9:07 PM on December 25, 2006

dis post sure gots some new whine from da same old barrels.

its already da futur, an' i wanna no--wherz my flyin' car?

predictin' is hard. especially the future. but what else can you predict?

(ya--i no--in russia, predicting the past is just as hard. but in amerga, the statement is now 'inoperative'.)

But--does it mean--Google is the Last Dinosaur? I think I see a delightful children's book.

ya think?
posted by hexatron at 9:14 PM on December 25, 2006

In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide)

Uhh, which one? The Eastern Divide, the Great Divide,, or the Northern Divide? Or maybe one of the smaller ones?

I suspect she's referring to what we here in the West (and at the USGS apparently) call "The Continental Divide".
... so do you Middle Easterners make your ladies wear chador?
:)
posted by eparchos at 9:15 PM on December 25, 2006

This whole thing reads like one giant fantasy of the idiot-left.

What thinking person looks at current trends in oil supply, global warming, and population growth versus the estimated viability date of the ITER project (2050) and walks away with the conclusion that expanding fission power is a bad thing? How is it possible to be so dumb?

Nearly every paragraph contains something as bad, if not worse, but that one in particular is galling because the message to abandon the anti-nuclear stance went out from the heads of the environmentalist groups a few years ago.

This article is suffused with a savage, beastly ignorance that makes me ashamed to be on the same end of the political spectrum as the author.
posted by Ryvar at 9:20 PM on December 25, 2006

Funny, one page over on the USGS site, we see Continental Divides in North Dakota and North America.

Like, you know, the Great Divide, the Northern Divide, the Eastern Divide....
posted by eriko at 9:22 PM on December 25, 2006

From their summary:

The continental divide, which is commonly referred to as "The Continental Divide," is perhaps more appropriately called the Great Divide, reflecting the great elevations along much of its trace and its great length from Seward Peninsula, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego near the southern tip of South America.

Note that, in your snippet from the original article, the Continental Divide to which she refers is capitalized.
"...is perhaps more appropriately called..." hardly indicates that there exists great confusion in the common parlance as to what the writer of that silly article meant.
So, you guys know how to make delicious hummus over there?
posted by eparchos at 9:31 PM on December 25, 2006

I read the whole thing through and yet all I can remember is 20 paragraphs of "fap fap fap fap."
posted by chimaera at 9:33 PM on December 25, 2006

"Antidote for the mainsteam media?" Wow, this stuff makes me thankful for the mainstream media.
posted by damn dirty ape at 9:36 PM on December 25, 2006

More creative responses to climate change included the tree-traveler and polar-bear collectives.

Oy.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:51 PM on December 25, 2006

Officer Defecation Movement?...... sounds messy.
posted by Liquidwolf at 10:03 PM on December 25, 2006

In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide)

Hell, up to a certain point, the "Midwest" was called the "Northwest". Hence, Northwestern University.

Smithsonian once published a survey of Americans that showed the farther away from the Midwest that you lived, the farther West you put it.

Anyway. Lots of people go to sleep before Christmas prematurely counting their presents.
posted by dhartung at 10:03 PM on December 25, 2006

as i read this, something bothered me, but i couldn't put my finger on it ... at first, i thought it was the glib prediction of every granola leftist disaster we're all familiar with ... then i thought it was the lame attempt to semi-parody them but still be serious about them

after a few minutes of thought it hit me

where's china? where's russia? where's japan? where's india? ... and africa, the middle east, and some entity called southeast asia are mentioned barely in passing?

what a dimwittedly provincial and ill-considered scenario for our future ... it's worthless tripe, even if every thing she predicts becomes true because she forgot to mention what most of the world will be doing

dumb, dumb, dumb
posted by pyramid termite at 10:36 PM on December 25, 2006

That was an informative link dhartung, as a long time resident of the Midwest, I've oft wondered why they hell the name stuck. I mean, by and large, Wisconsin is closer to the Eastern shores, and by and large, the people I associate with identify more with New York than we do with L.A. (Which is overstating the case, we identify with Chicago and Detroit, but if we wanted to be coastal, I think more people here would look to NYC and Maryland than we would the Western states.)

(Though as a sample of one; my experience might not be totally indicative. I am biased as I have relatives on the East coast, and thus, my compass of opinion points directly to the where I have spent many formative years.)

But if I were to look at fashion trends, I would comment that most of our styles seem to lean towards the East cost before what comes from the West. Sure it's three years behind, but eventually we get there...
posted by quin at 10:58 PM on December 25, 2006

Prognostication has always been prescriptive (either directly or in the form of a cautionary tale) instead of descriptive, regardless of the source's stated intent. I find it a far more plausible prescription than the transhuman Rapture of the Nerds or religious eschatology.

If you want an inverted, cautionary version of the above," simply chart China and Russia's descent into fascism as the apparatus to manage US-style planned capitalism (free market? please) in a world where that model hasn't dismantled and provides the global model.
posted by mobunited at 11:24 PM on December 25, 2006

mobunited, I have no idea what that meant, but I swear to you, it sounded compelling, so when and if I ever decide to write my thesis, I'll be coming to you for help.

Because, while I don't know what you were going for, I can appreciate the language you used.
posted by quin at 11:43 PM on December 25, 2006

mobunited wrote...
If you want an inverted, cautionary version of the above," simply chart China and Russia's descent into fascism as the apparatus to manage US-style planned capitalism (free market? please) in a world where that model hasn't dismantled and provides the global model.

Damn mobunited, you are the Don King of..... well, I have no idea what you are the Don King of, but that's sort of the point.

I want to produce a whole line of products featuring that paragraph: posters, mugs, t-shirts, the works. We will hold international symposiums to dissect and attempt to understand it. Of course there will be massive factional disputes over the quote mark, but that will be part of the mystique.

Perhaps I will put it to music and sing it as a soothing lullaby to my future kids.
posted by tkolar at 1:18 AM on December 26, 2006

quin: the further you get from Lit Theory, the less high sounding bullshit should work. Excellently argued bullshit is a different story.

mobunited: explain how moving, chronologically, from massively gory political purges of Mao & Co to a [somewhat apologetically] crushed proto-revolution in Tiananmen to "just don't criticize too directly in print or bring the hordes back to Tiananmen" is a descent into fascism?

Giving credit where credit is due, "Transhuman Rapture of Nerds" is an excellent description of Ze Singularitie :-)
posted by trinarian at 1:19 AM on December 26, 2006

The Royal Family is as important to the national identity of the British as New York is to the USA.

They aren't that important, dirtynumbangelboy. They're probably on a par with somewhere like Ames, Iowa
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:41 AM on December 26, 2006

Very badly written. Plus, he spells Colombia: "Columbia".
Next.
posted by signal at 3:20 AM on December 26, 2006

That was an informative link dhartung, as a long time resident of the Midwest, I've oft wondered why they hell the name stuck.

Because the Midwest moved. When the term was coined, it referred to western Pennsylvania and Ohio. The West, as it was, were things like the Illinois Territory.

After Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, the settlement of the Great Plains picked up speed -- and, of course, the former Western territories became states. Thus, "midwest" moved west with them.

It has never been a very precise term.

However, there's clearly the East coast States and the west coast states. In between, you have the Mountain West, and then the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio river basin.

Calling the northern half of that the Midwest isn't too hard to see.
posted by eriko at 5:06 AM on December 26, 2006

That link of eriko's is a classic example of a specialist so deeply immured in his specialty that he's forgotten how to communicate effectively with outsiders. It was a very interesting piece and I learned a lot from it, but at the same time I kept wanting to shake the author until his head rattled. Here's a useful sample of head-rattling smugness and obliviousness:

Many definitions either explicitly state, or implicitly imply, that continental divides separate waters that flow to different oceans. By this rather restrictive definition, it is obvious that the North American continent must have more than one continental divide, because three oceans surround the continent. Therefore, there must be a continental divide between the drainages of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, between the drainages of the Pacific and Arctic oceans, and between the drainages of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. This point alone is sufficient to forever abolish the formalized place name, The Continental Divide, from all geography textbooks and references. Clearly, no single, unique divide qualifies for this singular place name on the North American continent.

Clearly, I am so superior to you silly laypersons I don't know why I'm bothering to talk to you!

Dude, ordinary people aren't geographers. They don't even want to be geographers, or (I know this is hard to believe) care about using language in a way that would satisfy geographers. This is the same professional deformation that makes poor Geoff Pullum over at Language Log keep ranting about people who talk about "using X and Y in the same sentence" or "Z is a verb." When we laymen talk about the Continental Divide, we mean what you want us to call the Great Divide. We're not going to start calling it the Great Divide to make you happy, so you might as well get used to it. We don't give a shit about the Arctic Ocean or the fucking St. Lawrence Seaway, any more than most people care about separating statements about sentences and grammatical terms from statements about nonlinguistic reality. Your favorite specialization sucks, and so does mine. Just ask the hoi polloi.
posted by languagehat at 5:51 AM on December 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

What ever happened to sending a letter to your Congressman, anyways.

Dear Congressman,

I've been writing to you since 2004. It is now 2017 and you are probably dead, along with your stupid policies.

You suck(ed).

Sincerely,

hal9k
posted by hal9k at 6:17 AM on December 26, 2006

> The Royal Family is as important to the national identity of the British as New York is to the USA.

Royal Family or no, when you have to have Gordon Brown out there talking up "Britishness," it's clear that British national identity is a moribund concept. That's why it takes identity cards now to tell who's a Brit and who isn't. (The RF's decades of Paris Hilton behavior didn't help things either, did they?)
posted by jfuller at 7:47 AM on December 26, 2006

This explains why, for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but sentenced to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah diaper laundry. (People who are still bitter about his reign are bitter too that the webcam there suggests, even at his advanced age, he still enjoys this work that accords so well with his skill-set.)

C'mon, the whole thing was worth it just for this image alone, no?
posted by John of Michigan at 8:41 AM on December 26, 2006

So, if this is a bad example of a vision of the future, what would be a good one? That is, assuming there is such a thing. I mean, even the most casual sci-fi fan must think good (if not necessarily realistic) predictions exist, right?
posted by Acey at 9:22 AM on December 26, 2006

The important point that you all seem to have missed is that we are in possession of a document from the future!!!
posted by sonofsamiam at 9:28 AM on December 26, 2006

"Anyone who writes stuff like this and talks about the dissolution of the British Royal Family as an institution has their head wedged very firmly up their ass. The RF is as important to the national identity of the British as New York is to the USA. The idea that it could be removed is completely laughable, no matter what your views on their usefulness or lack thereof."

I live in western Washington State. Never been to New York. Would like to, but at the same time, NY is little more than an abstraction to me, and a handy set of cliches and stereotypes, and does little to inform my sense of "national identity."
posted by stenseng at 9:37 AM on December 26, 2006

stenseng wrote...
a handy set of cliches and stereotypes, and does little to inform my sense of "national identity."

What is a national identity other than a handy set of cliches and stereotypes?

In particular, what is the British Family other than a handy set of cliches and stereotypes?
posted by tkolar at 9:41 AM on December 26, 2006

damnit, I left out the / on the second i again.
posted by tkolar at 9:42 AM on December 26, 2006

That link of eriko's is a classic example of a specialist so deeply immured in his specialty that he's forgotten how to communicate effectively with outsiders.

My point. If you live on the East Coast, the Continental Divide is the one that splits you from the Midwest, the one that runs along the Appalachians. It stands out -- while the Rockies are impressive, it's easy to reach 10,000 feet when the plains of the front range are over 5,000 feet. The Appalachins look impressively large, despite few reaching 6,000 feet. They start near sea level.

West Coasters would think of the one nearest them. Midwesterners tend not to care, because the few divides in the Midwest don't stand out like the Eastern and Western divides do.

The whole point is that the writer assumed that everyone would instantly parse "The Continental Divide" as the Great Divide. That's a poor assumption. The first Divide I learned about was the Eastern divide. I used to live on the Mississippi/St. Lawrence divide, but when you're talking an elevation difference in the ten-twenty foot range, you don't really notice it unless your job involves "where does this water go?"

IOW, amongst the writers sloppy mistakes was assuming that there's one divide, that it is called The Continental Divide, and that everyone would instantly parse that correctly.

Both the Eastern and Great Divides have signs on them along major highways that say "Continental Divide."

As to calling the entire Midwest the Mid East? Perhaps she should look at that Red-Blue map to find out where the vast expanse of Bush Voters is.
posted by eriko at 10:41 AM on December 26, 2006

Alright, fine, not NYC. Something more abstract; Mom & apple pie. College football. Whatever. My point still stands.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 10:48 AM on December 26, 2006

I always thought it was called the "Midwest" because it's in the middle of the Western Hemisphere?

New York isn't a great example of the national character, because the culture here is radically different than most of the rest of the country (a lesson I've learned the hard way). Mass transit, endemic liberalism, packing 1000 people into a 1/20 of a square mile--all things that are well and good, but not exactly characteristic of about 99% of the landmass.

Of course, Mom, apple pie, college football . . . these aren't great for everybody either. That's an equally defined group of people who don't necessarily share traits with everybody.

But our national institutions--the presidential election, thanksgiving, the Super Bowl, Independence Day--these are things that define the national character. They're events that everyone (at least, a vast majority) participates in, regardless of location or political affiliation. If you took one of these away (and seriously: "Decolonization Day"? I'd take up arms), you would have the same affect on the populace as taking the Royal Family away from Britain would have. Everyone would survive, but the country wouldn't be the same. Just like there's a difference between the America of championship boxing matches and horse-racing and the America of today.
posted by thecaddy at 11:27 AM on December 26, 2006

Reads like a hippie wishlist. Next.

Damn hippies.
posted by homunculus at 11:41 AM on December 26, 2006

Hippie wetdreams. Bosh and flimshaw, i say. This sort of arrogant fooferah makes me want to turn conservative and start wearing a fedorah and sock-garters.

The day a Mexican has to teach me about horticulture is the day my asshole turns inside out and comes out my mouth!
posted by ELF Radio at 12:23 PM on December 26, 2006

You can lead a horticulture but you can't make it think.
posted by eriko at 2:16 PM on December 26, 2006

I like Conan's "In the year 2000" better.
posted by anotherbrick at 4:24 PM on December 26, 2006

mobunited: explain how moving, chronologically, from massively gory political purges of Mao & Co to a [somewhat apologetically] crushed proto-revolution in Tiananmen to "just don't criticize too directly in print or bring the hordes back to Tiananmen" is a descent into fascism?

I think the first problem here is characterizing the Chinese response to Tiananmen as "apologetic," instead of the more apt, "murderous, censorious display of state power."

People have a cartoon notion of fascism as all totalitarianism, all the time, with a side order of genocide.
Fascism doesn't really require much more state control of free expression than is needed to prevent an opposition from gaining ground. China is a classic fascist example; It merges state and corporate interests through private enterprise controlled by party cronies. That's the fascist economic model right there.
posted by mobunited at 11:11 PM on December 26, 2006

Damn mobunited, you are the Don King of..... well, I have no idea what you are the Don King of, but that's sort of the point.


Yeah, that was pretty lousy. Here it is in English:

People make up stories about the future to express opinions about the present. People who say they're trying to really predict the future are usually lying or trying to sell you something. Predicting the future comes in utopian and cautionary dystopian flavours at the far ends, with a bunch of middle options.

The article is a utopian argument for dismantling the current global, corporate infrastructure. The cautionary dystopian version of it would feature Russia and China making the best use of that infrastructure as rising fascist powers, because without democracy, the partnership between corporations and nation states that arises *is* fascism, stright from Mussolini's definition. Also, this may well be inevitable because the US has demonstrated that it *wants* to make the current structure work without democracy. In essence, it's currently helping China and Russia enter fascist phases from a position of strength, which previous fascist movements didn't get to do.

And it -- the US -- is actually doing this, not some free-willed corporations that the US can't do anything about because of the "free market." There's no free market and all such US-China business partnerships happen through the direct collusion and encouragement of those states, not any hands-off policy.

In this scenario, we get fun things like China bribing the US to look the other way until it can finally conquer Taiwan, Russia remanding its private enterprise to the cronies surrounding Putin's dynasty while it reduces the dissident statelets at its fringes to rubble, and a world defined by planned, corporate economies whose failing practical infrastructures (all brownouts and rolling blackouts! all the time!) gain no benefit from the fringe wars that enrich their elites. Essentially, you'd have an Iraq-style mission in every timezone until the participants just start to run out of steam.
posted by mobunited at 11:27 PM on December 26, 2006 [1 favorite]

My point. If you live on the East Coast, the Continental Divide is the one that splits you from the Midwest, the one that runs along the Appalachians.

Nonsense. I live on the East Coast, and I don't think of it that way. But I had a checkered, cosmopolitan upbringing, so I conducted a scientific survey by asking my wife, who's spent virtually her entire life on the East Coast, "Where's the Continental Divide?" She answered without the slightest hesitation "It runs down the Rockies..." finishing up with "It's a physical thing, it's not a political name." Just to make sure, I checked Webster's New Geographical Dictionary, and it said:

Continental Divide or Great Divide. The watershed of the North American continent; the line of highest points of land separating the waters flowing W from those flowing N or E and extending SSE from NW Canada across W United States through Mexico and Central America to South America where it joins the Andes Mts.; in Canada and U.S. generally coincides with various ranges of the Rocky Mts.; in Mexico comprises the great plateau bet. the Sierra Madre ranges [...] Its central point is the state of Colorado where it comprises many peaks above 13,000 ft.

Now, you may not like that definition, and Mark A. Gonzalez may not like that definition, but that's the definition laypeople use, and my response to any and all scientific complaints is the same as my response to those who want people to use begs the question or hoi polloi "correctly": Too bad, people say it the way they say it, and you can get used to it or keep beating your head against the wall. (I also say that the word "correct" does not mean what the purists think it does, but if I tried insisting on that I'd be beating my head against the wall.)
posted by languagehat at 6:41 AM on December 27, 2006

Same author: While many of the big stories in 2006 were bad news, there were hundreds of activist successes in 2006 that permanently changed the world.
posted by homunculus at 10:12 PM on December 29, 2006