#existential-threats — Public Fediverse posts

Climate disasters and insurance claims: delay, deny, defend >>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/20/australian-insurance-company-complaints-surge
#FossilFuels #risks #disasters #floods #fires #InsuranceClaims #insurance #SocialInstitutions #ExistentialThreats #ClimateCrisis #ClimateBarbarism

Major Historical Threats to American Democracy & in 2025 – History Analysis by Perplexity Pro – September 10, 2025

Major Historical Threats to American Democracy 2025

The Civil War Crisis (1850s-1860s)

The most severe threat in American history came from the convergence of polarization over slavery, racial conflict, and economic inequality between North and South. This led to actual secession, civil war, and the temporary breakdown of democratic governance.

Sources: The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; American Civil War (Wikipedia)

Reconstruction Collapse and Jim Crow (1870s-1890s)

Following the Civil War, violent suppression of African American voting rights through terrorism, lynchings, and systematic disenfranchisement effectively ended democracy for millions of Americans for over half a century. The Wilmington coup of 1898 exemplified this threat—elected officials were forced to resign at gunpoint and replaced with white supremacist Democrats.

Sources: The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; Reconstruction Era (Wikipedia)

The Founding Era Crisis (1790s)

Political polarization nearly brought down the young republic as the Founding Fathers split into hostile partisan camps, creating what one scholar called “partisan warfare” that threatened the nation’s survival.

Sources: We’ve been here before – JHU Hub – Johns Hopkins University; The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; Foundation Era Crisis, 1790s (Wikiepedia)

Current Threats Under Trump’s Second Term (2025)

Significant Attacks on Electoral Integrity

• Suspended voting protections meant to expand voter access
• Dismissed critical voter access cases despite DOJ obligations
• Issued executive order baselessly accusing the Biden campaign of election interference
• Required proof of citizenship to vote and mandated changes to mail-in ballot practices

Sources: The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election; Dangerous cracks in US democracy pillars – Brookings Institution

Undermining Rule of Law

• Pardoned approximately 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists, including violent offenders, on his first day
• Demanded DOJ seek evidence to prosecute the previous administration
• Attempted to freeze trillions in federal funding through illegal orders
• Challenged birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution

Source: The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election

Executive Aggrandizement and Corruption Risks

• Granted unelected Elon Musk unprecedented access to classified information and power over government departments through DOGE
• Rescinded ethics commitments for executive branch personnel
• Implemented Schedule F to potentially replace thousands of career civil servants with loyalists
• Created new avenues for potential foreign influence through business interests

Source: The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election

Authoritarian Tactics

• Used rhetoric labeling political opponents as “evil,” “enemies,” “criminals,” and “lunatics”
• Made anonymous violent threats against federal judges reach “unprecedented highs”
• Weakened election infrastructure by disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force
• Created a “climate of political fear unprecedented in modern American history”

Source: Dangerous cracks in US democracy pillars – Brookings Institution

Ranking of All Threats to American Democracy

Tier 1: Existential Threats

1. Civil War Crisis (1850s-1860s) – Actual dissolution of the Union and armed conflict
2. Trump’s Second Term (2025) – First time all four democratic threats converge simultaneously
3. Reconstruction Collapse (1870s-1890s) – Systematic disenfranchisement lasting decades

Tier 2: Severe Institutional Threats

1. Watergate Era (1970s) – Presidential criminality and constitutional crisis
2. World War II Internment (1940s) – Mass violation of civil rights under executive power
3. Founding Era Crisis (1790s) – Near-collapse of early democratic institutions

Tier 3: Significant But Contained Threats

1. McCarthyism (1950s) – Suppression of political dissent and civil liberties
2. Various wartime restrictions – Temporary but concerning expansions of executive power

The systematic nature of current threats—targeting elections, rule of law, civil liberties, and institutional checks simultaneously—creates what experts call “an especially grave moment for democracy.”

Unlike past crises that involved one or two threats, this convergence makes the current period extraordinarily perilous.

Sources: The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context; Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy | PS: Political Science & Politics; and, Perplexity Pro research.

#2025 #AI #AmericanDemocracy #artificialIntelligence #AuthoritarianTactics #CivilWar #Convergence #Corruption #DOGE #DrWeb #Elections #ExistentialThreats #HistoricalThreats #HistoryAnalysis #JimCrow #Musk #Reconstruction #RuleOfLaw #September #WesternDemocracy

An Arctic meltdown is accelerating global warming: We’re blowing by multiple tipping points. How will we adapt? #GlobalWarming #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateChange #environment #Arctic #ExistentialThreats

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-arctic-meltdown-global.html

In further evidence of the very concept of intellectualism crumbling before our eyes, Geoffrey Hinton has been awarded a #NobelPrize in .... #Physics.

🙄

Hinton is a key purveyor of the #ExistentialThreats of #AI, AKA the #Singularity. Absolutely bonkers.

@timnitGebru https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113272698607132931

#AIHype #stochasticparrots #longtermism #AGI

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-would-take-the-brunt-of-an-attack-on-u-s-nuclear-missile-silos/

The mindlessness of the enterprise that is the nuclear weapons deterrent is staggering.

We face two existential futures, and the one exacerbates the other. As climate breaks down social order, who is going to babysit the nuclear waste depositories - in three major geographic locations (China, Russia, US)?

It is all madness.

#Nuclear
#ClimateEmergency
#ExistentialThreats

SPEAKING OF EXISTENTIAL THREATS
as i've said before, Apartheid Clyde is just a front to a cartel of market manipulators that i've decided to call ponzillionaires because their billion dollar valuations are ponzi schemes.

so, seeing Apartheidboi's expected antisemitism & his cartel of investors, i went into a bit of a deep dive at #PewResearch and found 10 demographics #ExistentialThreats to ponzillionaires

1. "6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019"
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/04/11/6-demographic-trends-shaping-the-u-s-and-the-world-in-2019/

In 2002 I read this book & reflecting back over the events of the last 6 years, I realize they were all manifestations of the same "#CriticalState" #collapse of US led Western hegemony. Trump, Brexit, George Floyd, Covid, Jan. 6th, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, are all tied together. There are more #Catastrophes ahead as this massive landslide triggers more landslides & realignment into a new "stable" critical state.
#EndOfTheWorld
#ExistentialThreats
https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquity-Catastrophes-Happen-Mark-Buchanan/dp/0609809989/ref=asc_df_0609809989/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312165853622&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1531593830702971316&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=t&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019546&hvtargid=pla-562876110686&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=60258872297&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312165853622&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1531593830702971316&hvqmt=&hvdev=t&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019546&hvtargid=pla-562876110686&dplnkId=112d80f9-a7d1-487f-a3bc-1e35e493f7b3

Thinking about existential risks and optimism/pessimism...

(If you don't like contemplating The End of Everything ... turn away now.)

I was revisiting an old post of mine on how Steve Pinker's Panglossianism annoys me:

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/d0b93200d8e40138d780002590d8e506

Past Me wrote something Present Me is nodding vigorously to:

"A global catastrophic risk by definition has not yet occurred and therefore of necessity exists in a latent state. Worse, it shares non-existence with an infinite universe of calamities, many or most of which can not or never will occur, and any accurate Cassandra has the burden of arguing why the risk she warns of is not among the unrealisable set."

That is, a moronically tedious response to raising questions of existential or major threats (e.g., collapse of civilisation) is that they've been often predicted but haven't occurred yet. (At least for Civillisation Present Main Branch.)

This ... seems to me strong shades of the #AnthropicPrinciple: if we were living in a timeline in which such an existential threat had occurred ... we wouldn't be having the conversation right now.

Moreover, presuming You Only Die Once (Ian Flemming / James Bond notwithstanding), then of the entire universe of existential threats, only one can in fact be realised.

To read this as suggesting that this mean that all other potential risks are then irrelevant ... seems to me a Category Error of Unusual Size. Put another way: with enough potential trials (say, habitable worlds on which technological civilisations do arise) one might suspect that there are in fact numerous ways in which those meet their end. It's just that our tools for information gathering and transmission are somewhat unequal to the task of actually recording that, at least at present. And quite possibly for all time.

But in a Gedankenexperiment presuming an Actuarial Department of All Civilisations In The Universe there might very well be at least some experienced distribution of Civilisation Ending Events which could be catalogued and for which actuarial risk might be tabulated. The nature of the problem is similar to the distinction between risks ascribable to a single individual vs. an entire population.

As an illustration say, your individual risk of dying in an automobile accident might be roughly comparable to that of dying in a mass-extinction asteroid impact --- the latter are less frequent but have far greater magnitude.

(Asteroids also likely pose a far more consistent risk to individual lives over the entire history of the Earth than automobiles do --- roughly 4.5 billion years to date for the first, and about a buck-twenty-five centuries for the second.)

But even that comparison fails to capture what I see as a salient distinction between car wrecks and meteor strikes: odds are very low that everyone on Earth is involved in a fatal car collision at once, but high that they might perish in the same Large Impactor Event. Simply focusing on individual actuarial risk utterly ignores this.

But back to Pinker, Panglossianism, and dismissing catastrophic risk on the basis that it's not yet occurred: the dismissal is directly and intrinsically related to the nature of the threat itself, and in its own way actually validates the nature and scope of such threats.

It's also utterly irrelevant in any meaningful sense of characterising statistical likelihood as the objection is effectively a class of sampling error and self-selection bias.

Anyhow, that's what's been troubling my little head for the past day or so. And I don't think I've seen this expressed by anyone that I'm aware of (though as usual, I suspect it's not an entirely novel realisation). If this does sound familiar, cites/references are strongly encouraged.

#ExistentialThreats #CatastrophicRisk #EndOfTheWorld #CategoryError

What is the present state of civilisation and challenges facing it?

(Piggybacking off @cwebber's thread / poll.)

Intent here is to focus on the relationship and scope of problems, not the specific problem(s) themselves, if any. Though I suspect some may wish to discuss that in comments....

#Poll #BigProblems #ExistentialThreats #Risk #ThreatPerceptions #PaulChefurka