from Hacker News

Know Thy Futurist

by amorsly on 10/10/17, 8:53 AM with 9 comments

  • by MarkPNeyer on 10/11/17, 4:53 PM

  • by Cacti on 10/11/17, 5:06 PM

    There is little difference in most cases between a futurist and a doomsday prophet. It is a thin veneer of science around what is essentially a religious troubodour.

  • by api on 10/11/17, 5:08 PM

    "Futurism is the American dream on overdrive: a disdain for the status quo and a belief that we can solve it all without unions, public education, and social safety nets."

    So scratch futurism off the list of usable political terms. It goes to the same dust bin as libertarian, socialist, communitarian, etc.

    Seems to me that any term that actually means something and that gains any use in politics will quickly get co-opted and turned into a dog whistle by some political tribe, rendering it useless for the purpose of actual meaningful communication. Futurism seems to have become a dog whistle for a wing of the alt-right or something like that.

    Maybe we need some kind of annotation scheme, like libertarian[1.14] where 1.14 refers to some kind of shared objectively published dictionary that defines terms precisely. That might make actual communication about political ideas possible.