This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is it called when you believe in a higher power but don’t know what it is?”
It is a paternalistic instinct we are born with and inculcated during childhood socialization, and is called “wishful thinking” for adults.
There are many “higher powers,” at least when contrasted against whatever “powers” a human being has.
None of those higher powers are a replacement for one’s parents, no matter how much one wishes theirs were not so toxic. The sad reality is that such wishful thinking is a byproduct of centuries of generational trauma.
If you’ve ever noticed how well-adjusted people are from loving families, you’d have realized how much natural self-confidence tempered by humility they exude. All that is required to develop that maturity is a parent who understands love and expresses it honestly, even when it’s most arduous and demands the most brutal honesty with oneself by admitting one’s shortcomings to one’s children.
This attitude and desire are biologically driven instincts with the essential elements guiding them. These are built into the brain’s hardwiring in the prefrontal cortex, from which a sense of justice and balance within the universe is derived.
“What is particularly interesting about these findings is that they suggest that the sense of justice is not something learned through experience or socialization but rather something built into the brain. This is consistent with the idea that certain moral principles are universal across different cultures and societies, such as the idea that it is wrong to harm others or that honesty is a virtue. These moral principles may be rooted in how the brain processes information about social interactions and relationships.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “With the stock market plummeting, market prices soaring, and unemployment on the rise, is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?”
One would think so. One would hope so.
However, history dispels that delusion.
If people remembered who was responsible for what, there would be few Republican members of Congress today.
DonOld Trump is considered “below water” in his numbers at an historical level, but that only means less than half of 350 million people support his performance.
Here are the daily results on Real Clear Politics, which aggregates results from multiple pollsters:
47.8% Approve of his performance and 48.5% disapprove of his performance.
From a polling and historical perspective, these numbers are considered disastrous for this president. Still, the reality is that almost half of the nation, by extrapolation, supports this wrecking crew of an administration.
There are over 150 million people who should be paralyzed with fear over the prospects of their future who are cheering on the destruction engine as it wreaks havoc over every aspect of their lives that they count on to survive.
These people are more focused on politics as a team sport in which they view themselves winning even though they may be losing everything. As long as their team remains in power to hurt those they hate, they care for nothing more beyond that because they expect the lives they’ve grown accustomed to living to stay as they’ve expected. None can conceive of the great steamroller bearing down on them because they believe it’s meant to destroy only the neighbours they hate.
They won’t realize the horror of the situation they are creating for themselves until being directly confronted by it. Even then, they won’t admit to being responsible for making their fates and will deflect responsibility onto their ideological enemies.
The greatest lesson we are learning about modern humans that we have been able to overlook throughout history, primarily, is the impact of mental health on the stability of our societies.
We have been living with generational PTSD for thousands of generations and have accepted many toxic attitudes and behaviours as “normal,” while in today’s world, we’ve begun asserting a need to address these toxicities. The consequence has been an escalation of toxicity because those most afflicted cannot and will not seek help for their dysphoric conditions. They will escalate their rejection of responsibility for their destructive behaviours and attack those who seek to address those behaviours to help cure our species of their horrifyingly destructive impacts.
Anyone who has dealt with abusive behaviours understands how the abuser becomes most dangerous when they feel that their grip on power is loosening. They despise it when their victims become more capable of defending themselves against them. Their response is rarely an act of introspective self-awareness, leading to acknowledging how they are being asked to transcend their hatred. Their responses are almost always an escalation and a vicious attack against those who shine a light into their darkness to force them to confront its ugliness.
DonOld Trump will never acknowledge his responsibility for escalating international conflict because he sincerely believes himself to be victimized by his victims for not simply rolling over and capitulating to his demands.
Almost 150 million Americans think like he does to varying degrees and that means Americans will be plagued by Republican betrayals of basic human decency until, like addicts, they hit rock bottom and realize they won’t survive without acknowledging how much they depend upon the support of the international community in which they belong to and begin begging for assistance.
That won’t happen until at least after they trigger a deep depression.
That also won’t happen mainly because their opposition is also in denial over the severity of their problems. They still mistakenly believe that they can reason their way back to sanity.
The DNC is still primarily in denial that they and their nation are in a war that will destroy them unless they can stir up the passion of love of country to match the passion of destruction driving their opposition. They’re still trying to play by the rules of decorum while denying how those rules are irrelevant to a monster who ignores them at best and who weaponizes them against the DNC.
This approach turns off a large contingency of potential voters because it is construed as cowardice, and to a large degree, it is. They can’t help but continually lose against an aggressive enemy when they perpetually move toward compromise.
At some point, compromise is more toxically destructive than full-on aggression, and the DNC hasn’t yet realized that it has long passed that threshold. They lost the ability to compromise when they didn’t hold the Bush administration accountable for their war crimes and now the chickens have come home to roost.
This does not bode well for America’s future and spells hardship, at best, for the rest of the world.
This is a period in human history and global politics with at least as significant an impact on our international culture as WW2 has had. How much more severe the impacts will become is impossible to guess because we haven’t even come close to the horizon that will allow us to perceive, let alone acknowledge how massive the engine of destruction is that bears down upon us all.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If tariffs make things more expensive for the other party, why is putting counter tariffs a good idea?”
Let’s first begin by dropping the notion that throwing counter-punches is a “good thing.”
A vast difference exists between a “good thing” and a “necessary thing.”
“Good things” result in mutual progress and shared benefit of growth.
A “necessary thing” is a strategy for mitigating loss and facilitating the reversal of destruction.
Punching someone back after they have punched you isn’t a “good thing,” but a “necessary thing” because they will continue to beat on you until you can do nothing but submit like a broken animal to their assaults until they decide to stop or until you’re dead.
Tariffs are often used in negotiations to achieve balanced results between two parties.
Tariffs can be a means of securing a stable trade relationship.
Tariffs can also be used punitively to attack a negotiating partner, precisely how bullies like Trump approach their negotiations. He championed this strategy of overwhelming negotiating partners with force in his “Art of the Deal” piece of provocative garbage. Bullying is his life pattern.
Trump has always been a bully and his behaviours have destroyed people’s lives.
The only way to deal with a bully that tries to overpower you is to debilitate them.
This approach is precisely how Putin has resolved his conflicts. He has never stopped at just pushing someone back. He has always taken his conflicts to an extreme resolution to eliminate any shred of threat as a message to anyone else who might threaten him. None of his political opponents were beaten to live their lives in a reclusive or marginalized state. They were all murdered to ensure they could no longer pose a threat against him.
Being assaulted by someone like Trump with a long history of behaving in a consistently bullying manner and whose commitments aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on — and who is backed by a psychopath like Putin whose goal is the total eradication of resistance means the necessary option of overpowering Trump and his strategy to such a degree that he is beaten to the ground like a rabid dog is a survival necessity.
Until he has been so broken and defanged that he can do nothing more than gum his way through future assaults, he will always be an existential threat to human civilization. Preventing him from throwing punches isn’t enough. He must have every single weapon of his broken beyond repair so that he lives in a state of total impotence like the swamp slug he is.
This is not a “good thing” by any stretch of the imagination. This is a horrifyingly “necessary thing,” if we want to see something resembling sanity return to society that can allow some form of stability to emerge.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why doesn’t Elon Musk or someone else develop a big project for reverse climate change by 2045–2100?”
There are no “big projects” that can reverse climate change occurring due to a cumulative consequence of many different aspects of human society — from energy production and usage to our diets and the homes we live in.
The closest we can get to reversing the effects with a single solution would be through carbon capture technologies, which currently have power requirements that exacerbate the energy contribution to climate change. It’s also nowhere near mature enough to capture enough carbon to reverse the damage.
Until we can generate energy through cold fusion, it won’t be anything close to a solution.
He should, however, use his platform to encourage the changes we need in society that would mitigate the destruction we are doing to our environment. He began his trek to global recognition of that very potentiality through the success of electric vehicles.
He has since shown us that his concerns have always been opportunistic parasitism and is more interested in fleecing hundreds of millions of victims into destitution and early graves than he is in furthering humanity or securing our future on this planet.
He has the power of a global bullhorn that can be marshalled toward uniting humanity in the common cause of saving our planet and societies. Instead, he’s pissing it all away on ego masturbation at the expense of our future as a species.
He could have chosen to be revered like a god among humans for centuries by leveraging his resources to benefit humanity. Instead, he will be remembered as one of history’s most pathetically egotistical villains… assuming we survive his feckless recklessness.
Only a working-class member of society can pose this question because the little people are perpetually shamed when they take more than they need. This guilt may have begun in our early history while struggling for survival as tribal units, where scarcity was an omnipresent threat due to our level of development and not a consequence of the corrupt politics defining our world today.
If one tribe member took more than they needed, then it was apparent to all members that they all suffered. Greed was naturally restrained at that level, and like all traditions and attitudes inherited from our history, guilt-shaming people for taking more than they need has been passed on throughout the generations.
It’s been an effective means of encouraging people to consider the needs of others. Still, society is no longer plagued with the existential threat of scarcity by our physical incapacity to meet our needs. The threat of scarcity has transformed from a physical limitation to an entirely artificial construct created by the powerful in society to leverage the lion’s share of benefits to themselves. Scarcity has been transformed into a systemic issue enabled by politics, gluttony, and greed. Taking more than one needs at a local banquet no longer results in someone dying of hunger. However, we can still recognize and react viscerally to someone who gorges themselves to the point of vomiting up their overconsumption.
We don’t react that way with the wealthy, whose overindulgence is invisible to most because it manifests as an economic abstraction — numbers in a system characterized by intricate mathematical gymnastics. We don’t react that way to the Walton family underpaying their people and cutting back on staffing to the degree where the few employed are overworked and so radically underpaid that they need government subsidies to survive. We envy their successes and reward them with more benefits.
There isn’t a wealthy person on the planet who doesn’t take advantage of every benefit they can.
They do that as a matter of course and as a matter of pride. Donald Trump has bragged about circumventing his tax responsibilities, and the people cheer him for his success while envying it and wishing they could do the same.
We’ve created a double standard in a society where the privileged few are rewarded for taking advantage of benefits they don’t need while victim-shaming those who rely on benefits they desperately need to survive on the bare necessities.
There is something wrong with this picture, but we seem to prefer to ignore it when designing policies and creating legislation that dramatically affects the lives of billions.
Whether your issue with whatever benefits you or those you know may be taking advantage of, I would suggest we’re only playing into the biases corrupting our systems by focusing on what individuals do when availing themselves of benefits, We would all be far better off addressing the issue of benefits from a systemic level because the sentiment resulting from a fixation on what one’s neighbours are spending their food stamp money only enables the billionaires to justify their tax cuts and increase their subsidies.
After all, the legal concept of “lost opportunity cost” was entirely devised by a rich asshole who justified an entitlement to money beyond the tangible losses incurred in a conflict. It’s a legal argument flatly denied to someone who can’t afford to support it in a pay-to-play legal system.
Try not to forget how Elon Musk tried to sue his advertisers on Xitter for abandoning his platform because he felt entitled to the benefit of their advertising dollars.
This particular move is the equivalent of seeking a benefit from being paid for a job from which one has been fired. With this kind of toxic attitude of entitlement to benefits, I don’t think there’s any little person on the planet who should feel guilty about taking a benefit.
If we fix this surreal hypocrisy, we can discuss what is wrong with taking benefits.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do pro-choice people say life does not begin at conception when it does? Why not use one of the million stronger arguments other than basing their stance on a lie?”
Life begins at conception is the lie of anti-abortion hypocrites.
No matter how you slice and dice and dance around the hair-splitting, moving goalpost surreality inhabited by anti-abortion hypocrites, there is no rational justification for any of their idiotically myopic and arrogantly self-serving propositions.
“Life”, in the context of a child, is either a human life replete with every human characteristic or a lump of flesh no different than a tumor. You don’t get to have it both ways.
The human child-making process is precisely that: it is more often terminated spontaneously without will than with intent. Intent changes nothing about the fact that a significant proportion, if not technically the majority of all such processes do not complete. We see it everywhere in nature. It is reality in an unvarnished light.
Imbuing cells in development with absent characteristics is an intellectual and moral betrayal of oneself and humanity. Wishful thinking is not reality. A fetus is not a child; while every child born is entitled to being loved and supported by parents who want them. To do less by forcing a development process is a hypocritical abuse of a life which leads to a multiplicity of victims…
…and for what? So that you can pretend you’ve charged like a hero into saving an innocent? The harsh reality is that you haven’t saved anyone but you have condemned innocent victims to hardship and society to increased social problems like crime and poverty.
If you stop and think about the issue of innocent children needing someone to defend their lives, you would lead a charge to save real children who are dying every few seconds due to preventable causes. Anti-abortion hypocrites never seem to care, however, about children after they are born.
Where do you get off pretending like you know better than the pregnant mother if that child will have a fair chance at a fulfilling life or a life of so much misery they commit suicide or go on a shooting spree or choose a life of crime as a way to get back at a world which didn’t want them nor cared about whether they lived or died?
How dare you lie about life beginning at conception?
Life is a continuum with no finite starting and stopping points beyond the individual’s experience. Each one of us is born and each of us dies. Those are the only boundaries we will ever experience.
If conception is life, then so are sperm and ovum. Not only is the anti-abortion hypocrisy self-serving and myopic bollocks, it’s an arrogant betrayal of one’s fellow humans and humanity as a whole.
There is absolutely nothing redeeming in the anti-abortion position. Anti-abortion hypocrites are inhuman monsters.:
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What happens if all the wealth in the world got distributed evenly to every human being for 1 day? Would we return back to capitalism?”
People would do far better thinking about the system that creates income disparity rather than imagining pipe dreams that would accomplish nothing.
Firstly, redistributing all the wealth in the world equally would not magically create a world of millionaires. For example, if Elon Musk were to redistribute approximately 400 billion to America’s 350 million, they would end up with only $1140.00.
The entire world’s wealth is approximately $454 trillion; if you divide that by 8 billion people, each person ends up with $56,750.00. You can’t buy a house for that in most developed countries. It’s nowhere near enough to make fundamental changes in a person’s life.
The problem may seem that we have money hoarded by too few people — such that eight people own half of the world, but that’s a symptom, not the cause of the problem. The problem is caused by how money is distributed throughout our capitalist systems.
The problem is caused by centibillionaires and corporate executives earning thousands of times more per hour than the average employee.
When that ratio was only 23 times more than employees per hour (as it was in the 1970s), more people had disposable income. When most of a population has a lot of disposable income, they buy many more goods and take advantage of many more services, which creates many more jobs and opportunities for self-employed people to sustain themselves. In short, the velocity of money in an economy is much higher — which means cash changes hands much faster than it does today when it’s mostly tied up in significant investments and essentially hoarded by too few people.
This is called a force multiplier in the economy and why the middle class is called the economy’s engine. Everybody wins.
You should ask instead: Why don’t we cap an upper limit on personal net worth to ensure the economy works for everyone? This strategy not only supercharges an economy like a finely tuned vehicle, it also eliminates government corruption. With a global cap of one billion in personal net worth, we could forever eliminate the threat we face by a globalist oligarchy.
We could end a centuries-long class warfare overnight with the stroke of a pen.
We could end poverty almost overnight.
If we were united in solidarity on this point alone.
It may seem impossible, but it would happen if eight billion people decided they wanted this to happen.
Try to think about that.
It would also end wars around the globe.
The war in Ukraine would end overnight.
Vladimir Pukin’, his oligarchic buddies, and all the rich techbros thinking they could reinstall a modern monarchy would be disempowered overnight.
No more familial dynasties. No more Walton family treating their employees like dirt while forcing them to get government handouts because they’re not being paid enough.
No more arrogant stupidity by people thinking they’re better than the rest of humanity that they regard like pack animals instead of human beings.
We would reduce and eliminate many social problems because money would flow freely. People would not be dying from poverty. A child would not be dying every five seconds from hunger. Homelessness would disappear. Altruism and food banks would become moot.
Fight for a global cap of one billion because that’s more than enough to live in bloated luxury.
If we need one goal for eight billion people to rally around, we should make this our goal (along with UBI).
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do scientists believe that the universe and the Big Bang can come from absolutely nothing but find it so hard to believe in the Holy Spirit?”
Creatio ex nihilo
This is a Latin phrase which means “creation from nothing.”
It is a phrase used in all three Abrahamic religions. The idea of something from nothing comes from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions, not from science.
Scientists don’t claim something came from nothing. Your religion makes that claim.
Instead of learning about your religion, you invent nonsense derived from your religion and concoct fiction about a discipline you choose to remain ignorant of while using your fiction as justification for smearing what you have made no effort to learn anything about.
Don’t you think that’s a bit convoluted?
It’s referred to as a straw argument.
Your straw is a religious phrase you attribute to science, and then you use that false attribution as justification for fraudulent criticism. You imply hypocrisy in science while embodying hypocrisy in your question.
If this were a behaviour that rarely occurred, it would be easy to overlook. Instead, the hypocrisy you have demonstrated occurs so often that it’s almost a surprise when a question by a believer to atheists isn’t hypocritical.
Where does one find a “Holy Spirit” buried under so much hypocrisy from religious folks?
My memories of church doctrine don’t seem to include hypocrisy as an attribute of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps I missed that while my eyes rolled back up into their sockets as my head began thumping from all the mind-numbing nonsense I was being exposed to.
It could be my knees getting sore from the padded board while I wondered when I could sit back in my seat.
At any rate, I always found myself more interested in learning about scientific concepts because they made sense. I felt like my imagination was lit up when learning something tangible, while my mind felt dulled into a stupor every time I felt forced to endure the mind-numbing religious patter.
I never understood why people would prefer being lulled into a stupor to stimulating their imagination. I used to chalk that up as a subjective preference indicating benign differences between people.
I have come to realize, however, that the incuriosity of people who prefer to wallow in fiction rather than choose to stimulate their imaginations with knowledge indicates a tremendous gulf which creates problems in society.
Dialogues online with religious people rather than in person seem to provide greater freedom in exploring those differences in thinking, so perhaps you can address in more personal terms why it is that you don’t know your doctrine and believe the doctrine you don’t know but have heard it somewhere is a product of science.
Aren’t you in the least embarrassed to realize you have admitted to being ignorant of both science and the religion you seem to want to be associated with?
How does one go through life pretending they are devoted to this thing called religion but remain so ignorant of it at the same time?
I’m sure your first instinct is to dismiss these words as “fake news,” so I’ve included an AI summary to help you cope with how you have just humiliated yourself in a way not unlike peeing in your pants in public.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If AI becomes capable of independent thought, would it ever develop emotions or just mimic them?”
That’s the $64,000 question.
Since emotional intelligence comprises a significant component of sentience, whether a machine can be considered sentient may be contingent upon whether it experiences emotion.
Our survival instincts drive emotions, and it stands to reason that a machine must be self-aware enough to value its existence and fear its extinguishing.
This is the “tricky part” that makes this entire issue more complex than many understand or are capable of appreciating. Sentience is a subjective state of being; no one can determine its boundaries with 100% certainty.
Here’s an example of an argument posed on Reddit which highlights the “fuzzy nature” of sentience:
No matter how confident people may be in their predictions for a singularity emerging, when or if that might happen is beyond anyone’s guess. It’s possible that such a threshold can never be met and that AI, no matter how much logic it’s capable of mastering, will never be sentient.
Self-awareness in an artificial context is the modern day alchemist’s dream of converting lead into gold.
Another analogy is Pinocchio — a puppet who dreams of becoming a boy. It succeeds only through magic (setting aside the notion of a puppet capable of dreaming and how that also indicates sentience).
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will the next President be able to reverse the current destruction of the government?”
No.
The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of freefall, but the destruction will be permanent.
The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.
The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.
The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.
The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.
Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.
The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.
This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.
The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.
The numbers don’t lie.
The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.
No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.
We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.
We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.
We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.
Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.
More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.
The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.
The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.
There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.
If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.
thotbag 