You have to understand, people are individuals but they are also a holistic collective. If you genuinely ignore the national borders, if race, religion, politics, wealth, sexuality, technological skill and freedom of choice are all removed from the "collective average" of the world's opinion?

You get people who are afraid. And without those normally-acknowledged "boundaries" to muddle the numbers, you realize that collective is backed into a corner, and it is going to either die or kill whatever is planning to kill it.

That collective doesn't actually exist or have a will of it's own, no. The result of it's effects are not any different than if it did, though, and that means we have a serious problem.

Even in WWII, people were taken in by nationalism in some form. We don't have that this time. There is no overall "full unit of community" we respect. People will not join armies, people will not join cults, people will not join rebellions, parties, gangs. They, we, need to stop this now. If we do not stop, there will not be a rebuilding in the aftermath. People are too disillusioned with everything to rebuild.

When people fear the whole world, when they fear authoritarianism and anarchy in the same breath, when they cannot trust democracy because they cannot see each other as deserving of a stable, safe world? When having happiness is seen as antithetical to reality itself?

Stop. This. We can discuss how to fix this once we've demanded every government on the planet step down at the same time, and begin elections with ALL previous public servants barred from running, or face the consequences. If we don't demand it, if we consider money to be worth anything anymore, we are all dead. Money is dead and it will remain so until we arrest the people adding to this pile of bullshit for treason.

If we don't stop it, there's no reason to be here. Let's all just commit mass suicide if everything that exists is only there to exploit us.

You took a great deal of liberty in interpreting my comment. There is no anti-intellectualism there. That’s all in your head. My statement “I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave” was aimed at the reporters.

When the research is aimed at eventually building a power plant, then running the process for several minutes without even guesstimating an efficiency factor (or not reporting on it) seems very odd. We can be sure that energy was set free, which the researches must have had to dispose of somehow. I can’t imagine that they just blindly dumped it somehow without even checking how close their dumping process was to failing.

If you’d like to know what a constructive answer would’ve looked like, this is one: https://feddit.nl/comment/15463960