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Stephen Hawking disappointed by Brexit

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So he tells the Guardian:

Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share.

If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species. More.

Elite boilerplate.

First, do we even agree what the problems are and how to prioritize them, let alone what the solutions are? Or how to implement them?

Lacking such agreement, the more we get together, the unhappier we’ll be.

Overpopulation, for example: There are wide differences in population growth and decline in the world today. Would Hawking care to say which groups of people have too many kids? Who is going to tell them?

Brexit is simply a nation state deciding (narrowly) that there wasn’t enough agreement on key issues to justify the level of union with continental Europe that the EU created. It’s not a war and it’s not a form of social injustice, as he claims. But social elites are doubtless freaked to discover that British people have been forming private opinions on such questions.

Solution: Ban private opinion! Let Eurocrats decide everything.

See also: Brexit: Initial concerns and impacts (kairosfocus)

Celebrate the science writer as asshat

Job slaughter at Britain’s Guardian

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Hat tip: Mashable

Comments
Robert, I think Hawkings is like a retired champion boxer, who soon gets to miss the limelight. And guess who encourages the superannuated Great and the Good to hold forth on any and every occasion, but our infinitely perjurious press and TV. I stopped pulling my hair out (it's currently dropping out, anyway) after I complained about them asking Baroness Cardboard's opinion on everything from the social calendar of my Aunt Fannie to the price of fish and chips. Parenthetically, if the latter were not a metaphor, I feel sure she would have allowed that fish and chips were now quite expensive, but it is the price we must pay for our 'freedoms').Axel
August 4, 2016
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AMEN. These problems of Hawkings are not problems or priority at all. Once again what do these guys studying, if they are, the sky know about mankind better then anyone else. THEN one can cooperate without a oppressive control. Does Britain and America need to join together to do things? No!. They cooperate better then anyone else. Sharing the wealth to aboid envy?! that sounds like robbing the wealth from those who create it and giving to those who do not. There are problems in who gets what but giving it the third world is just robbing us. Would Hawkings give up his wealth he had in life? What did he ever accomplish anyways relevant to science history? I never understand the prestige he is held in. Another Sagan type. (maybe not that bad)Robert Byers
July 31, 2016
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Yawnmike1962
July 30, 2016
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