Mind Expanding Things that Aren't Science

Topic

We seem to have lost the old Thought Provoking (TM) mind expansion thread, so here’s a replacement.
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Astrology:
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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/06/i-was-an-astrologer-how-it-works-psychics
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Before you scoff, there are some interesting insights in the article that you don’t have to be a believer to appreciate. Here’s a couple of extracts that made me wonder:
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I’d understood organised religion to be something between an embarrassment and an evil. Yet as Aids did its dreadful work – this was the 1990s – I watched nuns offer compassionate care to the dying. Christian volunteers checked on derelict men with vomit down their clothes. I became uncomfortably aware that New Agers do not build hospitals or feed alcoholics – they buy self-actualisation at the cash register.

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I also learned that intelligence and education do not protect against superstition. Many customers were stockbrokers, advertising executives or politicians, dealing with issues whose outcomes couldn’t be controlled. It’s uncertainty that drives people into woo, not stupidity, so I’m not surprised millennials are into astrology. They grew up with Harry Potter and graduated into a precarious economy, making them the ideal customers.

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Some repeat customers claimed I’d made very specific predictions, of a kind I never made. It dawned on me that my readings were a co-creation – I would weave a story and, later, the customer’s memory would add new elements. I got to test this theory after a friend raved about a reading she’d had, full of astonishingly accurate predictions. She had a tape of the session, so I asked her to play it.

The clairvoyant had said none of the things my friend claimed. Not a single one. My friend’s imagination had done all the work.

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And my favourite:
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I can still make the odd forecast, though. Here’s one: the venture capital pouring into astrology apps will create a fortune telling system that works, because humans are predictable. As people follow the advice, the apps’ predictive powers will increase, creating an ever-tighter electronic leash. But they’ll be hugely popular – because if you sprinkle magic on top, you can sell people anything.

Replies

It’s a good point. I don’t have an explanation for Iceland, I thought everybody was happy in Iceland

 

 

Yeah I have no answer either. The disaprities just seem mysterious.

 

Maybe different countries have different philosophies fighting depression, some believing more in medication and others in things like talk therapy.

DavidM wrote:

It’s a good point. I don’t have an explanation for Iceland, I thought everybody was happy in Iceland

Yeah, because they are all medicated.

However, that statistic doesn’t really lead to any causal explanation. It is not directly stating the number of people that are suffering depression, but the number of people (per 1000) being prescribed anti-depressants. Access to healthcare, regulations on drug manufacturing and medical policy (such as emphasis on alternative treatments), cultural bias and practices also would be factors in that. From that statistic alone, there is no way to determine if the medication is being overprescribed. It could be possible that more people should be on anti-depressants — or that we need better drugs — and would be if distribution was better.

From 2011

Astounding increase in antidepressant use by Americans – Harvard Health

23% of women in their 40s and 50s take antidepressants, a higher percentage than any other group (by age or sex)

Women are 2½ times more likely to be taking an antidepressant than men (click here to read a May 2011 article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter about women and depression)

14% of non-Hispanic white people take antidepressants compared with just 4% of non-Hispanic blacks and 3% of Mexican Americans

Less than a third of Americans who are taking a single antidepressants (as opposed to two or more) have seen a mental health professional in the past year

Antidepressant use does not vary by income status.

So is it a good thing that so many more Americans are taking antidepressants? Many (perhaps most) mental health professionals would say, yes, because depression has been undertreated and because antidepressants are effective.

But there are also plenty of critics, as shown by this review in the New York Review of Books, who say the benefits have been overstated and that pharmaceutical company marketing is responsible for the surge in prescriptions.

Of course there’s a middle ground that combines—some might say muddles—these two points of view: depression was neglected and sometimes antidepressants are the remedy, but there is some overuse and has been a major factor in the 400% increase.

Too many factors to point to any one determinant. Most overuse may be among women because of cultural expectations where men are expected to withhold expressing their emotional unrest. Non-white, immigrant or poor cultures might have even stronger taboos approaching mental health or treatment for depression while having a high use of self-medicating abuse like alcohol or cannabis or opioids and stimulants from meth to cocaine.

 

 

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DavidM

 

Another edgy take by the mad Slovene!

 

I don’t think he is criticizing wisdom there though, he is just criticizing a kind of self-important rhetoric sometimes regarded as wisdom. I certainly agree with him rationalizing something after it has happened isn’t anything profound, but that is not what I’d call wisdom. For me I think the ultimate wisdom is Laozi and Zhuangzi.

I would disagree with him saying Jesus was not a wise man…

 

“Wisdom” can be a kind of racket though, it’s an industry really. But Zizek himself is a prime example who profits from it. These public fugures that are trotted out to give opinions. Real wisdom probably isn’t hungry for attention, it works in the background.

Intellectualism is a bit different. It’s been fairly replaced by the expert industry, but Zizek, like Chomsky, are one of the few remaining intellectual speakers.

At the same time, though, there is good reason to criticize the intellectuals as much as the experts in that often intellectuals are asked and feel compelled to get involved in topics in which they are not experts. Zizek and Chomsky are good examples as they are most widely known for their political ideas while their actual academic fields are much more theoretical and not directly in political science or social studies.

We just assume that a person who is so smart and informed in one field should have some “wisdom” to share in any other. Like how people always asked Einstein about topics that had nothing to do with physics or mathematics.

However, I do see Zizek’s point on the vague and often trivial nature of Wisdom. Not that it is simply theoretical or intellectual, but that it sounds nice but is endlessly insubstantial and irrelevant to any specific situation or problem in which you may find yourself. It is quite ill-defined.

Like religion in many cases, however, even much of philosophical wisdom is a waste of time.

Also in various forms of therapy which might even be considered a part of the “wisdom” economy. I mean things like pop psychology. In the 60’s, there were all sorts of books attempting to provide healthy and wise insights on our psychology like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death or Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Death and Dying. These would then fill the public consciousness with ideas about death that in the end are not entirely well-founded or, at best, are misinterpreted into a kind of pseudoscience even though actual practice can be affected by this. Like the idea that grief or terminal illnesses have a ready-made set of stages that counselors and doctors can use to “guide” their patients and their families through the “process.” When it is really far more complex (as Kubler-Ross would say) and simplification often ends up making the “process” more difficult.

Or things like 12-step programs and self-help seminars, every bit of wisdom is true, but often doesn’t make a bit of difference to the recipients of said wisdom.

It touches a little on the difference between deliberate and intuitive thinking. I personally have never been good at intuitive thinking since I was a child — no common sense — so it forced me to become very deliberate. No matter how correct an idea or solution to a problem “feels” that it is — I have to examine and test it first to prove whether it is true or misleading. Most often, I find a flaw in my thinking that then informs the next situation.

In general, wisdom has that same “feeling” of truth that won’t withstand examination.

However, what is interesting is the effect certain seeming insights have on the culture. Freud, for example, claimed to have created a new science of the unconscious but packed to the brim with ideas and concepts derived from only on a very limited set of patients in a very homogenous part of Europe. Most of the fundamental ideas of psychoanalysis have been specifically disproven or more to the point, the scientific nature psychoanalysis claimed is being shown as more pseudoscience or subjective rather than purely empirical and universal.

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein wrote about Freud and psychoanalysis — and they shared a common heritage as well — and he pointed out that though he did not see a great deal of science or logic in psychoanalysis, he did think that Freud had discovered a method of addressing the workings of the mind and personality with language that did not seem possible before.

 

 

Well this is a discussion that can go on till eternity. I agree there is “bad wisdom” (which of course isn’t real wisdom) but there is also good wisdom.

 

I think for some things, there is a subjectivity to wisdom. For instance some things you might say might be profound or useful to some, but not to jaded intellectuals who find it trivial. For instance saying to someone “You matter!” or “Be yourself, that’s good enough!” Some people, kids especially need to hear this, as society tends to have a habit of making kids feel worthless. Whereas someone else may scoff, saying “matter? How do we matter, define this matter, are we not just atoms swirling in the void?” etc

 

 

 

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Does that explain all these differences?

Probably not all but the US is I think one of 2 countries globally that allows advertising for prescription drugs. Nobody would pay for those ads if they didn’t influence more prescriptions being signed.

As someone who has moved from public to private healthcare the most obvious difference is over-prescribing. For example I went to the doctor here with gout, which is a condition caused by too much uric acid in your system. I got the drug that regulated that but also 5 or 6 others for swelling and pain and whatever. I just took the one that addressed the issue and was fine 24 hours later, the rest went in the bin.

There are always a lot of variables, Iceland gets little sunshine in winter which we know drives depression.

There’s also the argument that it isn’t a bad thing necessarily, people in need should be treated, I don’t think in Asia there is a good focus on mental health, although it is getting better. A lot of students are driven to suicide by pressure to perform.

A dataset like that needs a lot of analysis to get to root causes.

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Arjan Dirkse

Have you ever wanted to kill a Scotsman? Who hasn’t!

7 Obscure Types of Medieval Laws (Some of Which are Still in Effect…) – YouTube

Another interesting one: What Actually Was The Medieval Age? – YouTube

Terry Jones from the Monty Python group was an enthusiast of the Medieval period and criticized the idea that it was a Dark Age before the renaissance: The Middle Ages of reason | Terry Jones | The Guardian

The Renaissance was a backward-looking movement that hailed the distant past – ancient Greece and ancient Rome – as the only source of enlightenment. Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, wanted to put the clock back and to return to writing in Latin. And not just the Latin that was then current. He wanted to return to classical Latin. The Latin that was then current and still being spoken in the churches and monasteries was condemned as deficient. Rather than reviving Latin, the Renaissance killed it stone dead as a spoken language.

Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dante (although writing at the same time as Petrarch) wrote in the vernacular. They also celebrated the vitality, exuberance and individuality of ordinary men and women. They were the modernists and in that way they were truly medieval. Petrarch was the backwards-looking conservative. The proud despiser of the common people. The willing servant of a tyrant such as Bernabo Visconti. Petrarch provides a prototype for the Renaissance and for much of what follows.

I think a case could be made that we owe far more to the “Middle Ages” than to the renaissance or to the Greeks and Romans for most of our common Western Culture today. We are mostly peasants or commoners with cell phones and central HVAC.

Recently, I was listening to NPR the other day about the struggles of the Yanomami tribe against mining interests in the Amazon. I applaud the efforts to protect their rights to the land, but the person they interviewed was an American working on their behalf. She seemed to have an assumption that the tribes needed to be protected from the introduction of modern products and conveniences as it threatened their culture somehow.

However, I question if that is either true or really what the tribe wants. I don’t think the introduction of new foreign technology is necessarily a bad thing or restricting a group of people to ancient practices of foraging and hunting is necessarily a good thing. Many so-called savage or primitive tribes turned out to be quite good at quickly integrating western introductions like horses, firearms and medicine into their culture for their own benefit. It didn’t take a generation for Plains Indians to become better at horsemanship than the Spaniards that introduced the animal to their lands. After the New World was discovered, some of the best sailors turned out to be Native Americans who had never been on a ship before and neither had any of their ancestors.

The problem isn’t the technology or products we trade with them. They can use it and, like ours, their culture will develop from what it encounters. The problem is pushing them off their land.

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

he problem is pushing them off their land.

I wonder how people who are against private property rationalize calling America “their land”. Doesn’t it, like, belong to everyone? It clashes with the modern lib left idea that all countries need to be diverse.

 

We romanticize the Indians even when wars and genocide, incredible creative torture, human sacrifice etc were pretty common to many tribes. Zizek also talked about this, one of the rare times I agreed with him. We talk about their special culture and how precious it is while also expecting them to have many liberal values that are actually quite limited to Western democratic countries.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I wonder how people who are against private property rationalize calling America “their land”. Doesn’t it, like, belong to everyone? It clashes with the modern lib left idea that all countries need to be diverse.

I think most people would agree that “everyone” usually means “the people who have lived on this land for ages” and not just anybody who wanders in with a bunch of mining equipment to exploit that land’s resources. I don’t think what you’re trying to say really fits the story Jonny mentioned.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

We romanticize the Indians even when wars and genocide, incredible creative torture, human sacrifice etc were pretty common to many tribes. Zizek also talked about this, one of the rare times I agreed with him. We talk about their special culture and how precious it is while also expecting them to have many liberal values that are actually quite limited to Western democratic countries.

Sure, we still have to get past the Rousseau-ian notion of the noble savage to some extent. But then again, that’s the kind of argument that will be used to say, hey, we don’t own them anything, everybody was a mean motherfucker back then and we were just the meanest of the bunch and that’s that. Which is also besides the point.

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I wonder where power lies in society. I think Foucault accurately said power lies with the people who determine “truth”. If this is true, that means the traditional religious structures at least in liberal democratic countries have lost most of their power to institutions like modern science, academic institutions, and media organisations like the big newspapers, CNN, etc. And their “fact checkers”.

 

However to some extent, power still comes from the barrel of a gun. If you just shoot or jail anyone who says something that is offensive to you, you do amass some sort of power.

 

I guess it’s all just facets of what makes up power. Obviously money is important too, to spread your version of truth. Buy academics and newspapers to write what you want.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I wonder where power lies in society. I think Foucault accurately said power lies with the people who determine “truth”. If this is true, that means the traditional religious structures at least in liberal democratic countries have lost most of their power to institutions like modern science, academic institutions, and media organizations like the big newspapers, CNN, etc. And their “fact checkers”.   However to some extent, power still comes from the barrel of a gun. If you just shoot or jail anyone who says something that is offensive to you, you do amass some sort of power.   I guess it’s all just facets of what makes up power. Obviously money is important too, to spread your version of truth. Buy academics and newspapers to write what you want.

It’s hard to say if post-modern philosophy has really grappled with the basic philosophical problem that the initial assumption of most philosophy is to be skeptical of the immediate and obvious.

The problem with the idea that ability to determine truth conveys power is that it takes power to have the ability to determine the truth.  It is putting the cart before (i.e. “in front of”) the horse. Or the computer before the operating system (which makes even less sense, I confess).

The programmer controls the computer with the operating system, but the programmer needs the power to load that operating system in the first place.

So, the insight really is that power can control the determination of truth, but that is a method whereby power is maintained. Not obtained or invented. Where power lies is often found in sustainability. In the origination, power is obtained by simply being alive when the society or community is founded. Or by being a founder after a revolution, war, etc. The essence or generation of power is the luck of being first.

The maintenance of power then lies in controlling the truth or ideology and information of the resultant social order. Power, in the end, is either being the “thing that can survive a fight” or by projecting the impression that one is that thing and thus win fights by preventing or avoiding them. In dictatorships, loyalty is preserved by klepocracy. The people you as a tyrant need to maintain power must believe that they can profit more from you than from any sort of opposition.

However, that is talking around power. Having power and keeping power are not about power itself. What is power itself? It is the ability to make other people do what you want them to. However, there is no one foundation of that power. Even in constitutional democracies, the reasons that people obey are diverse and often have nothing to do with the political foundations of political power. People often do the same thing in masses because we are social animals, but the individual reasons can be completely different. The foundation of power could simply be that we are a social species that organizes itself in that way.

A social group will always promote a portion to power positions (often the most convenient group – not necessarily the strongest or smartest). It will then divide into a less powerful opposition group or groups (though usually there is just one notable opposition). And the majority of people will be mostly obedient along a spectrum of people supporting those in power for the sake of stability and those expressing dissatisfaction by overt or covert support of the opposition. There is no reason behind it any more than there is a reason to erosion or the formation of an anthill. It is natural phenomena.

Anonymous wrote:

However, there is no one foundation of that power. Even in constitutional democracies, the reasons that people obey are diverse and often have nothing to do with the political foundations of political power. People often do the same thing in masses because we are social animals, but the individual reasons can be completely different. The foundation of power could simply be that we are a social species that organizes itself in that way.

That’s a good point. It’s not one thing, power is more like a kind of accumulation.

 

However I do think the weaving of narratives is a big part. Claiming the BIG STORY. Like what happens in a revolution, getting people to join your cause. Of course it will fall apart once the story in unravelled by reality, but that can take some time. Maybe some generations. And with certain degrees of group pressure or outright oppression you can keep it going for a long time.

 

But I also get your point that to be able to plant the narrative succesfully you need to already have power too.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

However I do think the weaving of narratives is a big part. Claiming the BIG STORY. Like what happens in a revolution, getting people to join your cause. Of course it will fall apart once the story in unravelled by reality, but that can take some time. Maybe some generations. And with certain degrees of group pressure or outright oppression you can keep it going for a long time.

Still, that seems more like a rear view mirror look at what happens. The narratives only work because they are stories the people are willing to hear — and wanting to hear as well. Even reality will be denied if it is interpreted in ways that people don’t accept. Controlling all the media outlets and education won’t work if the people are not already willing to obey. Reality may never assert itself with a completely controlled society either – like North Korea.

However, the especial factor is that there is no direct experience of the truth. Every fact is communicated only through interpretation and even our so-called immediate experiences is actually very mediated by our conscious and unconscious processes.

In reality, each event is just something that happened. Even cause and effect are implied rather than an explicit truth (as Hume pointed out). The interpretation of the event or fact is the paramount factor when determining the behavior of people, BUT those in power and those submitting to power are equally subject to those interpretations that best support the position they are in. Opinions often seem to be emotional self-defense mechanisms maintaining the ego rather than considered examinations of reality. Leaders – even if they are knowingly spouting lies – would not really have a better ability to know or handle the truth than those beneath them.

Now, they will know more information in political matters, and they may know what they are saying is not the truth but a self-interested interpretation of events, but I don’t necessarily think it matters even if the people know it’s a lie either. No one in the Soviet Union really believed the news or what the Party was telling them, but they still obeyed, and honestly, a lot of the reason is that they didn’t have any better interpretation of the truth.

So, even the ability to control the definition of truth may not be enough to generate, win or keep power. Instead, the definition of the truth, the nature of the leader’s interpretation itself, also needs to fit the people’s expectations. The leaders can’t get away with any truth they want, but they will have to conform their own lives and behavior to the interpretation of it as well.

A friend of mine told me a story about when he had his first kid. He and his wife decided that they would not do the imaginary characters thing. They told their son that there was no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, it was just something people would do to trick their kids.

Then, for some impulsive reason, when he lost his first tooth, they decided to tell him that they were going to put it under his pillow and the Tooth Fairy would take it and leave a dollar while he slept. So, a while after he went to bed, my friend went to his son’s bedroom to deposit the dollar and take the tooth, but the boy wasn’t asleep. After a couple more times of this, and he asked his son what was wrong. Why couldn’t he get to sleep?

Naturally, it was because he was freaked out by all this tooth fairy business. There is no Santa Claus. There is no Easter Bunny. BUT there is a freaky sprite that slips into your house at night while you are asleep to take teeth at a dollar apiece? What the frap?!

So they had to tell him it was just another fake fable parents tell their kids to trick them. Those in authority can’t change the story any way they want. Having the power to tell the story is one part, but then they have to stick to the story they’ve told.

Anonymous wrote:

The leaders can’t get away with any truth they want, but they will have to conform their own lives and behavior to the interpretation of it as well.

To an extant, but in their version of the story of what needs to happen it is vital that they are in charge. Their version of living in accordance with the truth doesn’t preclude them from becoming rich as shit, eating the finest food and flying first class (or a private jet).

 

We read accounts of Kim Jong Un drinking the finest champagne while his people starve, and think that’s bad, but we have similar absurdities – of course with less starving and fewer gulags. Celebrities flying private jets to a climate conference to tell the plebs to ride a bike, or better yet stay home and only talk on zoom.

 

It’s like maybe the ultimate power is getting people to go along with the  blatantly absurd, or meekly accept it. Like the church with transsubstantiation. You’re a good believer if you accept this piece of bread is the body of Christ.

 

And often, there is the implied threat of violence (or being otherwise hurt) for not going along. Though not always of course. Maybe being forced to use violence is actually a weakness on the part of the leaders, the best thing is for people to accept willingly.

 

 

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

To an extant, but in their version of the story of what needs to happen it is vital that they are in charge. Their version of living in accordance with the truth doesn’t preclude them from becoming rich as shit, eating the finest food and flying first class (or a private jet).

Yes, but it doesn’t stop the commoners from running or using black markets, gambling, drinking, etc. either. Both upper and lower classes know that the “truth” isn’t true, but that knowledge does not lead to a change in behavior. So, controlling the truth could not be the source or determining factor for power.

It’s a symptom or function of power, but both sides – the powerful and powerless – are obligated to acknowledge and conform to the official version of events publicly while each side privately does not believe it, but the social structure is maintained regardless. Masses of people obey simply because everyone else does and the leaders lead because they are told to be the leaders. The source of power is where you are among the people around you. If people turn to you for direction – then you’re the leader. If you turn to someone else, then they are.

Anonymous wrote:

and conform to the official version of events publicly while each side privately does not believe it

I think this was common in communist Eastern Europe. Eventually you reach a point where people just don’t believe anything the media says. I am not sure that could happen here, but we have a very dark winter coming in Europe which will impoverish a lot of people and may leave people unable to heat their homes. That sort of crisis could change many viewpoints. I think our society largely functions because there is a promise of prosperity, things working, people not falling into abject poverty. If that is endangered, who knows what will happen.

 

 

Often, harsh conditions work for the system of power. North Korea is the purest example, but WW2, 9/11, etc. – crises and uncertainty can tie people closer to the government system probably more often than it leads to revolution or even reform.

However, as far as power, I don’t think enough attention is applied to obedience as the source of power.

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Arjan Dirkse

Yeah but obedience isn’t just given to anyone…it is given to specific people, by certain groups. I think this is distributed along some kind of blueprint in society. Some obedience is given to cops, some people follow the NYT, people follow their doctor, their religious leader, Qanon, etc. To take cops as an example, one of the stories that shapes this is ACAB – and that story (or meme, I guess) originates somewhere. It has its “superspreaders”. Same for the “back the blue” people. (It’s funny that the way memes spread on the internet, anyone can become a carrier, or an infectious agent. You don’t need a lot of power for that. However the top twitter users are all politicians or celebrities, and Elon Musk) They’re stories that solidify (or question, in the case of ACAB) power and authority.

It’s hard to say as most of the stories or systems of authority apply to pre-existing power. The story or perceived truths justify the already established use of power rather than convey it. Especially in dictatorship or totalitarian regimes where no one buys the stories and use of power is it’s only legitimacy.

obedience is the only real factor to power that can be demonstrated. People doing what they are explicitly or implicitly commanded whether they agree with it or not.

anarchic culture would certainly have freer citizens but it is unlike we would ever naturally have a society where obedience is not present.

Anonymous wrote:

Obviously money is important too, to spread your version of truth.

It’s the most important by some measure. It always surprises me our societies are so full of conspiracy theories when all you really need to do is follow the money.

Why do the US and UK hate an Islamic theocracy when it’s Iran but love it when it’s Saudi Arabia that is the catalyst of far more extremism? Money. They buy loads of arms and have the most oil.

Why does Rees-Mogg campaign for Brexit and then move his investment fund to Ireland? Because he doesn’t care about sovereignty and the UK, that scenario makes him the most money.

Why do even left wing politicians shy away from massively popular policies? The US public in polls overwhelmingly wants higher minimum wage and stronger gun control, none or which are on the table from any party. In the UK even a majority of Tories want public utilities taken back into public ownership but it’s taken off the table because millions are spent lobbying against it because extracting money from government is the most lucrative concept around.

A British nuclear physicist showed the workings that if the money spent on nuclear research and cleanup had been spent on insulating homes instead  you’d never have needed any of it in the first place, however thrift doesn’t make major profits, doesn’t have advocates spending millions on it to get a return of billions. It’s all money, always. Often carefully disguised as something else but it’s money.

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garjones wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Obviously money is important too, to spread your version of truth.

It’s the most important by some measure. It always surprises me our societies are so full of conspiracy theories when all you really need to do is follow the money.

Why do the US and UK hate an Islamic theocracy when it’s Iran but love it when it’s Saudi Arabia that is the catalyst of far more extremism? Money. They buy loads of arms and have the most oil.

Why does Rees-Mogg campaign for Brexit and then move his investment fund to Ireland? Because he doesn’t care about sovereignty and the UK, that scenario makes him the most money.

Why do even left wing politicians shy away from massively popular policies? The US public in polls overwhelmingly wants higher minimum wage and stronger gun control, none or which are on the table from any party. In the UK even a majority of Tories want public utilities taken back into public ownership but it’s taken off the table because millions are spent lobbying against it because extracting money from government is the most lucrative concept around.

A British nuclear physicist showed the workings that if the money spent on nuclear research and cleanup had been spent on insulating homes instead  you’d never have needed any of it in the first place, however thrift doesn’t make major profits, doesn’t have advocates spending millions on it to get a return of billions. It’s all money, always. Often carefully disguised as something else but it’s money.

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lorcan_nagle

Gentlemen:

Mind expansion… Still hard to wrap the mind on some anecdotes on observed phenomena

I would like your take on this picture and its assertion
as to whether it is really a fact.

This is a lot of seconds:

Which is EXACTLY the same amount as the number of angels that can pass through the eye of a needle.

Mind expanding, indeed…

Al-x wrote:

Gentlemen:

Mind expansion… Still hard to wrap the mind on some anecdotes on observed phenomena

I would like your take on this picture and its assertion
as to whether it is really a fact.

This is a lot of seconds:

Al, you think too small.

This video will give you a better perspective:

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Al-x

Anonymous wrote:

People doing what they are explicitly or implicitly commanded whether they agree with it or not.

That’s what scares me. In many ways I think we are a bit similar to China. If tomorrow the government and media decided to wage some kind of social campaign aginst some ethnic group, they would quickly be locked up like the Uyghurs in China. The majority would eventually swallow it. Just have newspapers and tv saying “social scientists say [ethnic group X] needs re-education” and similar messages, and many would go along with it.

Al-x wrote:

I would like your take on this picture and its assertion as to whether it is really a fact.

A lot of science here for a thread that says no science. 😂

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

If tomorrow the government and media decided to wage some kind of social campaign aginst some ethnic group, they would quickly be locked up like the Uyghurs in China. The majority would eventually swallow it.

I can’t say it isn’t a concern, a lot of media whips this shit up but I also have to say our culture in the west is very different to east Asia. We are more individualistic and rebellious and while we have made shitloads of terrible mistakes – colonialism, slavery and internment obvious ones – we do stand against it too. I hate the manipulation of the culture wars but they are ‘wars’ because there is not an acceptance of a party of media line on any of it.

garjones wrote:

I can’t say it isn’t a concern, a lot of media whips this shit up but I also have to say our culture in the west is very different to east Asia. We are more individualistic and rebellious and while we have made shitloads of terrible mistakes – colonialism, slavery and internment obvious ones – we do stand against it too. I hate the manipulation of the culture wars but they are ‘wars’ because there is not an acceptance of a party of media line on any of it.

Well I dunno. People in “Western” countries aren’t inherently more rebellious and individualistic than anyone else, there may be a tradition of that in some countries, but I think that could easily switch.

 

I think it is important to maintain nuance, and a kind of, call it baseline humanitarianism. Respect and kindness for people in general, hate the sin but love the sinner. There is a kind of roughening and vulgarization of the culture going on. It seems to have started in the run up to Trump’s election, so it definitely comes from the right, but it seems to infect much of the political spectrum.

On another, possibly related note, there was a report by a leading research institute here that there is a rise in severe emotional and mental problems in high school aged girls from 27 % to 48 % over the last 4 years. There was a newspaper article about it. (It said boys’ mental health has deteriorated as well, but not as badly as that of girls.)

 

We’re setting kids up for a lifetime of depression and anxiety. I am not sure what we’re doing wrong, but things are getting bad.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I think it is important to maintain nuance, and a kind of, call it baseline humanitarianism. Respect and kindness for people in general, hate the sin but love the sinner. There is a kind of roughening and vulgarization of the culture going on. It seems to have started in the run up to Trump’s election, so it definitely comes from the right, but it seems to infect much of the political spectrum.

Individually, that is the only apparent choice of action, but when it comes to mass social behavior, it may be folly to think that these sorts of catastrophic events can be rationally avoided or manipulated into happening. Like with expulsion of the ethnic South Asian population under Idi Amin’s Uganda. It’s not like Amin created the anti-Asian sentiment any more than Hitler created anti-Semitism or Stalin created the animosity against the Kulaks (though of the three “dekulakization” is the most interesting and complex from a sociological standpoint). The leaders – good or terrible – are operating in the context of culture, and it doesn’t seem like they are actually directly manipulating it as much as they are a part of it like any other person in society.

So, the involuntary nature of political swings and eruptions are influenced by so many ultimately chaotic factors that it is not very likely any particular policy decision or ideology or political action even by those with immense dictatorial power can guarantee a desired outcome or avoid a despised one. No matter how rationally a nation may act to avoid warfare or even genocide, it can find itself in the middle of a disaster regardless.

garjones wrote:

It’s the most important by some measure. It always surprises me our societies are so full of conspiracy theories when all you really need to do is follow the money.

This is true – in the end, money is the scoreboard for our society and for the world irrespective if it is a consumer or producer society.

Though I don’t really follow the reasoning that money, or markets or capitalism, is the root of all behavior, good or bad. Many times I’ll hear someone  – sometimes that someone is me – pointing to the nature of markets to explain the poor behavior from investment banks to movie studios, but at the same time, getting rid of the market or central banking would lead to even greater problems – like we’re seeing as cryptocurrencies recapitulate all the problems that historically centralized finance and regular currencies encountered over hundreds of years of development.

It is true that a lot of the behavior that we follow was the result of particular people coming up with particular solutions or specific projects that caught fire in the society. However, for every one of those “innovators” like Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Alan Greenspan or politicians from Lincoln to Thatcher to Putin, there are thousands of people that could have been in that position. There are plenty of reasons those people are not remembered or failed, but one of them is that it depended on the ideas the people in the society adopted.

(Minor note: 500 years ago, almost no one in the world thought that it was flat. That really is only something that could take off today with the Internet.

However, that kinda proves the point.)

Anonymous wrote:

So, the involuntary nature of political swings and eruptions are influenced by so many ultimately chaotic factors that it is not very likely any particular policy decision or ideology or political action even by those with immense dictatorial power can guarantee a desired outcome or avoid a despised one

Well nothing can guarantee anything. But I do think political bullshit can exploit the cultural climate, and make it worse.

 

On the other hand I also don’t want to let people driven to commit atrocities because of political propaganda off the hook. “Well everybody on my side thought the opponents are human vermin” is no excuse.

 

In South Africa after the Apartheid era there was a “truth and reconciliation” committee. Maybe we should try something like that. It seems the US is in some sort of cold war, things are not that bad here, though I disagree with many things that happened here because of covid. (But I admit my mental health situation made that worse. Maybe the thing that scared me the most is the ongoing digitalization of our society, with the QR codes we had to use, and how that made life for many people more difficult)

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Arjan Dirkse wrote:

On the other hand I also don’t want to let people driven to commit atrocities because of political propaganda off the hook. “Well everybody on my side thought the opponents are human vermin” is no excuse.

Still, by what authority could you or I hold them responsible? We’re here involuntarily born into the mess left over from previous generations’ wars, slavery, colonial periods, plagues and genocides. In politics, economics and society, the causes of events would have had to have been dealt with starting a few decades ago, but since we don’t have a clear view of even the recent past, we’re a mass social organization often stumbling in the consequences of mistakes that were actually made ten, twenty or fifty years ago.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

In South Africa after the Apartheid era there was a “truth and reconciliation” committee. Maybe we should try something like that. It seems the US is in some sort of cold war, things are not that bad here, though I disagree with many things that happened here because of covid. (But I admit my mental health situation made that worse. Maybe the thing that scared me the most is the ongoing digitalization of our society, with the QR codes we had to use, and how that made life for many people more difficult)

I like the theory behind things like the “truth and reconciliation committee.” However, even it was poorly designed for actually enacting reforms. For example, the committee in this case could grant amnesty for human rights violations, but could not award reparations. There was another committee for that, but it has been kind of a failure.

At the same time, reconstruction in the American South after the Civil War started off well, but without Lincoln in the White House, it too quickly fell to the social pressures maintaining the racial status system.

I don’t think much lasting good comes from seeking people to blame and punish after these catastrophes. In the FOG OF WAR documentary, Robert McNamara implies pretty heavily – or maybe even outright states – that the firebombing campaigns against Japan were knowingly designed to inflict massive civilian casualties, and in the end, the brutality of the final months of the bombing were designed to force the Japanese to agree to an unconditional surrender. The main aim as far as his commanders were concerned was to ensure that the Americans could not be held accountable for war crimes due to the number of civilians killed.

So, ironically, the fear of being held accountable for massive carnage inflicted in war led to even more brutality in committing those crimes rather than the opposite. At the same time, the reconstruction of Japan and Germany where practical concerns for leniency even when unjustified actually proved beneficial as both those nations are good examples of successful recovery in the postwar periods.

It is not illegal to be evil. There are such things as war crimes, but war itself is not a crime… unless you lose the war. Taking everything a person owns and kicking them out to live on the street is certainly about the most evil thing a person can do short of assault and murder, but foreclosures happen every day. It might even be a law enforcement officer that will throw you out of your house.

U.S. Foreclosure Starts Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels Nationwide | ATTOM (attomdata.com)

It’s somewhat hypocritical for societies to try to hold people accountable when we don’t really accept any serious responsibility for the consequences of our own behavior and policies.

It is a similar argument that the Nazis would make against the Allies prosecution. They would point to the other European nations and America and note that countries like the USA and the UK were basically enjoying the rewards of a culture that only a generation earlier eradicated or subjugated its own non-European or non-White/Christian members – – including Jews. Of course, after the Nuremberg trials, the Allies would go on to tolerate – or even aid and abet – equally vile behavior from many nations around the world during the cold war. Accountability usually depends on what is politically expedient rather than what is or is not just.

 

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Uncle Retrospective

I don’t really mean punishing every single individual who contributed to something bad or evil, when whole societies are bound up in that it is just impossible to do that, it would destroy whole countries and it ends up punishing even people who did nothing wrong. By “not letting them off the hook” I mean more something like being truthful about it, condemning it, and working towards the goal of not letting it happen again.

 

I am open to seeing the bombings of German cities and the firebombing of Japan, and the nukes, as a war crime. I personally of course have no power at all to hold anyone accountable, but I can speak up and condemn something, Or I guess what little power I have is voting for someone who does promise to hold someone accountable. So I can say Putin should be held accountable, while also saying someone like Bush or Cheney should be held accountable for what they did in Iraq, or whichever Western politician or company did something bad.

 

But I know it is unlikely those people will ever be held accountable. We live in a very non-ideal world.

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And we wouldn’t want to live in an ideal world. Or, more bluntly, only ideal people could live in an ideal world, so we would all have to go. It’s the central problem with most ideological systems. For the system to be applied in the real world, we’d already need to have the ideal people and society in place. The ideal world that whatever ideology proposes to impose would already need to exist for the ideology to bring it about. When you read Marx, for example, there is an underlying assumption that the state of communism was a natural endpoint for capitalism. Not something that needed to be brought about really, but something that would eventually emerge through the material progress of the dialectic.

However, then you get into Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao as they actually try to bring it about, and they come to the conclusion that the problem is with the people rather than the ideology. They needed to bring about “new men” so that the dream of communism – originally a de facto inevitability – could truly manifest.

There is really no way to hold people accountable honestly as that would require judgment from an ideal position as well. Often, the position of authority that gives any nation or society the power to judge others was won by the earlier generation committing the same actions and atrocities that the current generation is now sitting in judgment upon.

It becomes pointlessly regressive

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

People in “Western” countries aren’t inherently more rebellious and individualistic than anyone else

Well not genetically, we are all essentially the same beings. They are culturally very much more rebellious and individualistic. I can point to it both in academic studies and in anecdotes of my life for the last 20 years.

You may view ‘inherent’ as meaning some unavoidable destiny, I don’t think that but ‘inherent’ literally means you inherited it. I inherited an understanding that teenage kids argue with their parents and should leave home at 18. My Malaysian side inherited neither of those things are true or desirable.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

nothing can guarantee anything

I think I need that tattooed on my arm

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Todd

garjones wrote:

They are culturally very much more rebellious and individualistic. I can point to it both in academic studies and in anecdotes of my life for the last 20 years.

 

It would be interesting to read such an academic study.

 

I dunno, I agree we have a more liberal tradition in some countries but I am not sure how solid or durable it is. And for instance if you look at countries like Germany or Eastern Europe or Southern Europe, they were fairly recently still dictatorships.

 

So the really traditionally liberal countries is a small bunch, the Anglosphere, France, the Benelux and maybe Scandinavia.

Liberalism might just be the result of a difficulty to concentrate power. The more absolute or concentrated power becomes, it also becomes more brittle. Controlling information or the perception of truth becomes more imperative the more power is monopolized and maintaining that power becomes more costly. Absolute authorities are less efficient than shared power structures. Also, the one thing despots absolutely need to know is what the actual truth is in spite of all the mediated propaganda. However, that becomes harder to acquire as everyone in the government is too scared to actually tell the leader anything true but is contrary to the party line or what the leader wants to believe.

 

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Todd

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

It would be interesting to read such an academic study.

There’s an interesting recent Freakonomics podcast episode that goes into the sociological studies. How there’s a scale of ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ structures in societies. It won’t surprise many that the USA is very much on the loose end and China on the tight and everyone else somewhere in between.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-u-s-is-just-different-so-lets-stop-pretending-were-not-replay/

I would say it’s not really the same as ‘liberalism’ or the political structures that come out of it. It’s more to do with conformity and cohesion and of course saying Asia or the West is a broad generalisation, there are gradients within the countries there and yes they can also gradually change.

On a deep cultural level though you see a far greater degree of conformity and a much lower level of conflict. Conflict, especially in public, is hugely frowned upon. It’s not framing any kind of superiority, if you look at Singapore it’s hugely advanced, efficient and successful, if you go to a mid income town in the US or UK they look like shitholes in comparison with more crime, homelessness and poor infrastructure and services. It is though also very compliant.

As an example we’d see every day, loose structured societies have a lot of news and entertainment content with argument as part of it, if someone is proposing a tax rise they’ll automatically book a low tax advocate to counter them. That programming does not exist over here. Sometimes because the media is controlled but also because they are less confrontational.

So that’s why I am not convinced that it’s as easy to pick a target and everyone buys in, as as happened in China, that’s not to say a majority couldn’t happen though. It’d be fought against tooth and nail but yeah we’ve seen far right ideas get traction in western democracies, which could be enough to form a government (which in the US and UK – on the very loose end of the scale – doesn’t actually require a majority because of their dumbass electoral systems).

Well I’m not sure. Despite the “rugged individualism”, or the looseness or the liberal political traditions in Western Europe, Westerners have done a lot of persecuting certain groups, for their ethnicity or politics or whatever.

 

I think we’re quite susceptible to manipulation into hate, as we’ve seen in the not-all-that-long-ago history and also the last few years with the coronavirus. (Although with covid we didn’t go as mad as China.)

 

If you take the US, I think there is a kind of cold war going on that could progress into violence and persecution of people with the wrong politics.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

or the looseness or the liberal political traditions in Western Europe

‘Liberal’ keeps coming back here despite me never mentioning it and pulling back from that.

Looseness has no real direct connection to ‘liberal’. Essentially the loosest societies can be very right wing. The Reaganomics/Thatcherite idea is low taxes and personal autonomy overt society, Thatcher famously said society does not exist.

They are the ‘loosest’ in society and not at all liberal economically or socially.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

If you take the US, I think there is a kind of cold war going on that could progress into violence and persecution of people with the wrong politics.

Sure I just said that a majority far right could take control in the US. My argument is that it wouldn’t without public dissent and argument. There is no ‘cold war’ in China, 90% just accept the party line and will continue to do so.

 

 

Anonymous wrote:

Liberalism might just be the result of a difficulty to concentrate power. The more absolute or concentrated power becomes, it also becomes more brittle.

Liberal is one of those odd words that can mean whatever. Like democracy or socialism.

I think the original ideas of liberalism come from Rousseau and the Enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. Speaking from my personal perspective, from Dutch society which is socially and economically very liberal, we owe most of our current culture to those developments, and the influx of American culture after WW2. I think we tend to underestimate how much good it gives us, and we sometimes long for a more “cohesive” society without realizing how much that would suck.

 

I think welfarism ultimately also comes from the original liberal ideas, the ideas of human rights, that no one should be deprived of the basic means of life. China for instance hardly has a social safety net and it has a homelessness problem that is worse than that in the US. (Of course there are also more right wing liberals that want to decrease welfare. Like Thatcher and Reagan were. But that is still liberalism, albeit a right wing variety)

 

 

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I think welfarism ultimately also comes from the original liberal ideas, the ideas of human rights, that no one should be deprived of the basic means of life. China for instance hardly has a social safety net and it has a homelessness problem that is worse than that in the US. (Of course there are also more right wing liberals that want to decrease welfare. Like Thatcher and Reagan were. But that is still liberalism, albeit a right wing variety)

However, the medieval age and feudal system was also based on similar Christian principles. The lord was responsible for his vassals – not just their obedience, but their welfare as well. Though all land belonged to the kings or popes or whatever prince ruled at the time, much of it was basically public land that would be parsed out by the peasant community for the good of its members. The infirm and insane were considered the responsibility of the community as well. Much of the viewpoints of the pre-Enlightenment or pre-Renaissance way of life and principles were promoted by enlightenment philosophers and poets that wanted there to be a “dark age” that they led Europe out of.

There are many reasons from many different perspectives for any particular policy or approach. In the case of welfare, for example, there is an argument from the conservative or even aristocratic point of view in that satisfying basic needs serves many purposes. It releases social tension that arises when people go hungry as resources are not shared fairly. Also, it shackles poor people to an economic system that serves the interests of the wealthy or middle class. It also gives the state control or increased influence over the fringes of society where organized collective action might threaten the power structure. A statist would certainly see the benefits of a welfare system as much as a liberal might – they just see different benefits and will seek to influence the policy to obtain potentially opposing ends.

Personally, looking at reformers like Charles Dickens, Margaret Sanger and Franklin Roosevelt, their inclination for helping people seemed as motivated in maintaining the basic nature of their societies rather than actually transforming them. The essential premise being that if capitalism and representative democracy are so great, then the benefits should be rewarded to all people. When, in fact, it may be that unfairness and oppression of some classes was a necessary component of the society they promoted.

 

Yeah, after reading some stuff the idea that “liberalism” led to the welfare state seems absurd. I think I was wrong about that. And of course many “right wing liberals” are keen on reducing welfare. Gar mentioned Thatcher and Reagan is also very much one of those figures. (They were right wing, but I think they’re regarded as neoliberal.)

 

I think many states in Europe started coming up with their welfare ideas specifically to counter the left; so you could say the left, socialism, communism, anarchism and were mainly responsible. It was their pressure that led to the powers in charge making those changes.

 

This is an interesting read: https://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780896802629_intro.pdf

 

 

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

This is an interesting read: https://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780896802629_intro.pdf%5B/quote%5D
It is interesting to look at the view of nomadic groups and peoples in history – obviously the Roma or Gypsies/Travelers/Pavees (Pikeys in Snatch) are specific nomadic ethnicities operating on the fringes of societies, but nomadic behavior has been a constant factor in society irrespective of economic prosperity or depression. Nevertheless, the great depression here was the most historic period where “Hobo Culture” developed.

My grandfather was a hobo in the depression, which he defined as a “migrant worker.” Then there were “tramps” which he distinguished from hobos as “migrant non-workers” and then there were the “bums” which were non-migrant non-workers. Of course, WW2 pretty much put an end to the most prolific period of hobos as most of those young men were drafted or enlisted and then found plenty of work when the ones who survived came home.

However, it is also interesting that a lot of wealthy and upper middle class people live considerably migrant lifestyles as business takes them all over the country and the world so they spend the majority of their lives away from home. Even when they aren’t working, they are off on vacation.

In regard to many of these problems though, we have to contend with the difficulty of defining or explaining the current modern or even postmodern society. Since the 80’s and 90’s the relationship between people and their governments or between the powerful and the powerless has changed so that people are more like residents of a region and politics has been “outsourced” to governmental parties that seek to enrich themselves while the institutions of the government are degraded. Or more to the point, they enrich themselves by degrading the institutions of government.

Increasingly, in America, it doesn’t feel like we’re in a nation, but the nation is simply the place where we work and live. America is a business and the government is just the management. Which is probably a large part of the reason that the American society has such a hard time handling people that don’t or can’t work or understand that social services aren’t supposed to be able to pay for themselves. We have no trouble understanding why the military or police cost money to maintain, but we’re all too ready to cut social services because they lose money.

However, that is one condition of keeping a population mostly demobilized and disenfranchised. The best example might be Putin’s Russia. After the turmoil of the 90’s, the Russian people were obviously disillusioned with the government and left politics to Putin who became the only institution in Russian politics that had any legitimacy.

Nevertheless, the deal was that the majority of the people would remain politically inactive as long as Putin could guarantee them the ability or opportunity to make a living and he would not force them into service to the government – basically draft them. So, it is now a big risk that he is mobilizing a population who demobilization has been one of the pillars of his power. On top of that, he can’t effectively mobilize them militarily unless he motivates them politically first. However, except for the minority of far right activists, that is not going to be possible, and the far right are hardly Putin’s allies. Already, many of them are blaming him for losing the war.

America is in a completely different situation, but with similar fundamentals. A lot of the reason it still works in the United States is that we’ve always been in a similar situation that other nations have encountered in the modern world. We’ve always been a nation filled with people from many different cultural backgrounds living in a geographic region that is not the ancestral home except to just a very few, so we’ve basically been just a group of people with no real cultural connection other than we work together. So, we’re constantly refurbishing our decaying institutions because these are the only things that keep that going. It’s a mess, but it is a perfect mess.

Yet it is a lot of trouble and the US, EU, Russia and China are facing a lot of the same internal problems. The USA’s major advantages are economic and geographic, but the major conflicts between the various minority factions against the backdrop of a majority of politically inert or inactive people are similar.

 

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Todd

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Yeah, after reading some stuff the idea that “liberalism” led to the welfare state seems absurd. I think I was wrong about that. And of course many “right wing liberals” are keen on reducing welfare. Gar mentioned Thatcher and Reagan is also very much one of those figures. (They were right wing, but I think they’re regarded as neoliberal.)

Essentially it’s just the vagaries of interpretation of words.

Liberal means generally not restraining something. So you can be socially liberal by allowing people to behave very freely or economically liberal by allowing markets to do the same.  Those two though are very rarely embraced by the same political movements. There may be an exception in David Cameron’s government in the UK where they legalised gay marriage and were generally quite socially liberal while also being neoliberals economically.

In fact because it confuses people neoliberal theory was retagged by many as neoconservative because it is embraced by parties that like to brand themselves ‘conservative’ but in truth liberal is more accurate.

Neoliberal is an economic policy, not a social one, which is of course confusing when liberal is more frequently used in a social context but such are the complexities of the modern world.

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Todd, garjones

Yeah exactly. It’s why I liked the focus of that study and on socially ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ societies because liberal is word open to a lot of interpretations and why I shied away from it.

There’s a lot of bullshit around word definitions. I find it very tedious to hear debates about ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ that immediately define them by the extremes, neoliberalism or communism. When all societies have a bit of both and an incredible amount of hot air is wasted with people refusing to understand the point.

 

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

True, and honestly, it is difficult to actually distinguish if people are discussing the same thing or actually debating completely different things as if they are the same. Sometimes politics, government and power refer to the same thing, but as far as the way they operate in the real world, they are often separate. Like nation, country and culture could be the same, but often are very different in daily experience.

For me, liberal is best defined as a political position that emphasizes individual liberty over state power opposed to statist or authoritarian political positions that emphasize state power over individual rights. While I think most people irrespective whether they identify as liberal or conservative are actually at heart liberal in their outlooks, I also believe that most political parties whether they consider themselves on the “right” or the “left” actually behave from a statist or even authoritarian position in that government power often is treated as inherently absolute. There is and has been an increasing trend where constitutional rights are seen as “granted” by the constitution when the original intent was that they were simply recognized as existing prior to the foundation of the government.

In real practice, of course, we only have the rights we can defend, and to defend them, it takes money. So, if you don’t have money, you don’t really have any rights in practical terms, while an increasing amount of money conveys rights that people probably shouldn’t have. However, I’m not against privilege in society — I don’t think the solution to unfairness is to take away privileges people enjoy but we should expand those privileges to everyone to enjoy.

At heart though, there is a kind of crisis in the US and many Western nations where people don’t really have a clear idea of what the government actually does and certainly there seems to be an impression that whatever the government does is riddled with a bureaucracy that is itself riddled with loopholes. This became especially evident during the pandemic when we had Federal authorities imposing certain mandates, the County imposing other mandates, the city imposing other restrictions and then various public or semi-public agencies connected with city, state, municipal and federal governments involved in governing schools, post offices, utilities, libraries, etc. It feels like I’m always voting for some position in some election and no matter what the candidates say they want to do whether lower taxes or deal with homelessness or water conservation, not even they seem to know what actual job the position they’re running for actually does in the government.

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

In real practice, of course, we only have the rights we can defend

I think that is logically wrong. If that were the case, you can never have your rights violated, because  if it is possible to violate them they aren’t rights.

 

It is an interesting question. Dowe have any inherent rights? Not in the state of nature. We just survive or die. The rights we have are social constructs, granted to us because people thought it is bad to be murdered or raped or left without no protection to all predators the world can produce. But if you claim rights exist, they have to exist irrespective of the physical power to enforce them.

 

Still I get your points rights aren’t worth all that much if they can’t be defended. I watched some videos of anprim writer Derrick Jensen a while ago, and while he has some interesting views, I think this worldview is wrong. He states we have to live in harmony with nature, granting the natural world rights not to be disturbed. Western civilization destroys the world for some meaningless concept of progress (differing from his idealized version of indigenous people who always live in harmony with nature). For instance he is against any and all mining. We don’t have the “right” to do that.

 

I think that is all very much fantasy. The truth is we are bound to leave a footprint on this Earth, in order to make our lives better. We might develop the consciousness to preserve some things that have value in their pristine state, like endangered species, flowers, landscapes etc. but as a species we just aren’t there yet (and possibly never will be.)

Yes, but I was speaking in practical terms. In ideal terms, rights exist separate from the constitution and simply mean what “ought” to be. However, in practice, the only way to know if you have a right is to try to exercise it and then see what happens when it is challenged.

At the same time though, oppression of rights is very difficult and inefficient for an authoritarian government to enact. Essentially, often, it doesn’t take much of an uprising for an oppressive regime to topple almost immediately. As soon as there is any organized, collective or regular opposition or exertion of individual rights, it reveals that the regime simply doesn’t have the resources to sustain itself.

The reason most of these authoritarian regimes stay in power for so long is because the people are convinced to oppress themselves and each other. Even in North Korea, it’s the people that are mobilized to maintain the power of the leadership and prevent challenges to it from themselves. Often, the real threat to authoritarian regimes is not liberal opposition that can be easily demonized as a bunch of anti-social degenerates and treacherous criminals who are really working for some foreign power, but it comes from opponents that are even more ultra-conservative and authoritarian than the regime is itself. Like the Ayotollah in Iran overthrowing the Shah, for example. They replaced an autocracy with an autocratic theocracy.

After WW2, colonial powers were overthrown and often replaced with dictatorships that allied themselves with the new superpowers that replaced the colonial empires – the United States or the USSR. And in many of these cases like Libya or Iraq or even Russia today, these dictatorships remain in power because the people under their rule don’t trust each other. Tribal, ethnic and political divisions inside the society are unable to cooperate to remove the leaders no matter how insane or destructive they become – so they continue until internal opposition is able or is simply forced to take to the streets or some outside force removes them from power – often the United States and its allies – and often chaos and civil war ensues.

Anonymous wrote:

At the same time though, oppression of rights is very difficult and inefficient for an authoritarian government to enact.

 

Yeah whoever heard of rights being oppressed, that almost never happens…

My point though was that it is not solely the government that directly oppressed or coerce the people. It goes back to obedience but when a society submits, its members also enforce submission. Just like the order of a prison is overturned when the inmates rise up together against the guards, oppressive regimes that survive decades are often toppled rapidly and almost immediately when they are opposed by the masses. The prison doesn’t have and cannot have enough guards to truly imprison thousands of men just as nations don’t have enough police and soldiers to directly oppress tens of millions.

However, prisons are rarely taken over by the inmates just as oppressive governments are rarely overthrown. The people do not work together and instead work against each other. And if anyone steps out of line, anybody is all too ready to call the cops on them.

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Todd

To be fair Arjan I think Johnny’s point is not that rights are never oppressed (he gave several examples where they are) but that if the people unify and stand up for them generally they can. Britain ruled India with 10,000 troops, for a population of 250m at the time. Brute force was never able to control such a vast country, it was combined with persuasion, bribery, propaganda.

It’s the same in Russia now, if the people wanted to topple Putin they could, they toppled the Soviet Union. The reason they don’t is the majority don’t want to at this moment.

The other side to that is also very well shown in the Iran example. If you read something like Persepolis toppling the Shah was very much supported by the liberal middle class, however the power vacuum was filled by religious autocrats who were more organised.

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Todd

Honestly, we don’t even need to look at oppressive dictators or oligarchies to see the way populations not only support oppression of politically unpopular positions and activities.

Anti-royal protesters are being arrested in the U.K. : NPR

Hill said police initially told him he was arrested under the U.K.’s recently toughened laws on protests, a change that came after advocacy groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter mounted large and/or disruptive protests in recent years.

The new law allows police to act in cases which they deem to be “unjustifiably noisy protests that may have a significant impact on others” or seriously disrupt an organization’s activities.

Many people probably don’t care about the monarchy, but some care quite a bit on both sides. Nevertheless, we won’t see much outrage when someone is arrested by disrupting a coronation or some other royal function as that is a bit rude. However, the governmental crackdown on protests and dissenting opinions will find more support when arrests are made of unpopular protestors. I even saw an instance where a protestor was assaulted by other members of the crowd before the police dragged him away, but the people that bodily assaulted the protestor were not even questioned by the police.

However, this will certainly have an impact when arrests are made during protests about topics people do care about.

When Iran’s government faces protests, it cracks down with harsh violence, but the pro-government population also takes to the streets in its own demonstrations against the opponents and critics. The Kremlin is terrified of people taking to the street as well, but it too counts on its own supporters in the population to mobilize and control the streets whenever that is a possibility.

Oppressive governments do a lot to maintain their control, and that is a very inefficient and risky method of governing as it takes a lot of unproductive activity to impose total control, but it can’t do anything unless it maintains significant support from a large portion of the population that will then police itself and other members of the communities under their rule.

Yeah the new law on protest in the UK is very open to abuse. Like many British laws the wording is so broad you could criminalise almost anyone.

I think we do have to acknowledge the approach though too, the anti royal protesters arrested in that period were all released without charge, I think the police more than anything wanted to avoid an escalation either way.

It does operate on a knife edge though, Britain’s approach in application for most of its modern existence has been quite pragmatic. In a knee jerk reaction to unlicensed raves in the early 90s they effectively criminalised playing music with ‘repetitive beats’ in your car, if you think about it almost all music with any percussion has repetitive beats.

In the end almost nobody was arrested or prosecuted on that basis but if an autocrat wanted to the British political and legal system is primed to let them do it. A PM with a good majority can effectively do whatever they want. It’s a system all the way back based on faith that people will generally be sensible about it and that is being tested by populist rhetoric.

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Todd

Yes, it is being tested, and right wing politicians seem to be making ground in the Western nations (which also include nations like Japan and South Korea).

Europe holds its breath as Italy expected to vote in far-right leader | Giorgia Meloni | The Guardian

However, right wing and authoritarian are not entirely the same thing. Authoritarian politics has a big challenge in the West because as much as we all hate each other, we all hate our governments even more — especially those politicians that we vote for. When they inevitably break their promises, it feels like they broke their promises to us directly – it’s personal!

Certainly, partisanship and divisions inside a society are necessary to prevent any substantial internal challenge to authoritarian power, but at the same time, authoritarians either need to mobilize the society to be loyal and obedient and even love the government OR they need a population like Russia’s that is majority apolitical and essentially outsources all political action to the authoritarian leader. Something that is now at risk as Putin tries to militarily mobilize a politically demotivated population that really has no loyalty to his regime.

I mean, the United States was able to maintain the draft in the Korean and Vietnam wars because it was right after the victory of World War 2. Pro-American sentiment was at a high. And the population never demobilized politically but instead mobilized against the war in Vietnam. Then after 9/11, patriotism driven by fear allowed the US to go to war again in Afghanistan and Iraq, but even then there was no conceivable way we would reinstitute the draft. Trying to reinstitute a draft in the modern (or postmodern) political world is crazy — it’s a big experiment with a lot of unintended consequences already popping up.

If any truly authoritarian government emerged in the US or Europe, I think it would look a lot more like Russia’s where the population is more politically demotivated than like Iran or North Korea’s or China’s where the population has a loyalty to the dictator or party in charge.

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garjones, Todd

Anonymous wrote:

If any truly authoritarian government emerged in the US or Europe, I think it would look a lot more like Russia’s where the population is more politically demotivated than like Iran or North Korea’s or China’s where the population has a loyalty to the dictator or party in charge.

I don’t know. I thnk some voters in Italy or Hungary are pretty motivated and loyal to Orban and Meloni.

 

Vaclav Havel warned one time some Western countries had made some quite mistaken assumptions about the Eastern European countries that were joining the EU, basically don’t think these countries are quickly going to change into the typical idea of a Western liberal consumerist culture. There’s no such thing as European culture, it’s just a mass of different contradictory ideas and beliefs.

 

(This is getting close to political thread stuff but I honestly don’t know what to make of Meloni. Italian politics is just weird.)

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I don’t know. I thnk some voters in Italy or Hungary are pretty motivated and loyal to Orban and Meloni.

It is a concerning trend, but at the same time, “trend” seems to describe it. Like we could see a far left party win the elections within a few years from now. The consumerist nature of Western Culture mirroring the way that people switch between competing brands on the shelf.

As far as a philosophical or mind-expanding point of view, I do wonder if the very nature of voting actually acts more to demotivate political participation.

In our everyday lives, we seem to understand that voting is a last resort. As a kid, when there were family arguments over whether to go to a movie or a game or stay home and play monopoly, etc. the “let’s vote on it” was where we ended up when no convincing arguments could be made. It was essentially, “hey, you got a vote and lost so stop complaining.”

Of course, the “let’s vote on it” was really only an option when the parents knew they had enough votes to do what they wanted anyway. Parents always have the veto power and willingness to use the nuclear option.

Political parties, government bureaucracies and elected officials have also come up with long-standing systems and focus group tested approaches to neutralize the outcomes of votes anyway. From Brexit to the referendums in Ukraine, voting is a political tool to basically provide cover for whatever actually undemocratic or authoritarian act the people running the vote want to take. It sanctions political action with the appearance rather than the reality of popular consent. Votes are often cast irrespective of the arguments, logic or even self-interest of the voters.

Of course, like many philosophers pointed out, this is only political power. Economic power is usually monopolistic meaning that it depends on the absolute control of some resource, commodity or financial instrument. The legal and political foundations of a society are necessary to produce this control or “ownership” but the exercise of economic power is often exempt from any sort of democratic redress or limitation, and even the regulations or legal recourses to challenge it have been compromised and neutralized by the influence of that power on the politics from which it derives.

Anonymous wrote:

Political parties, government bureaucracies and elected officials have also come up with long-standing systems and focus group tested approaches to neutralize the outcomes of votes anyway.

Honestly for me the only option right now is to just be against the whole political establishment, they’re insane – or evil. The right wing alternatives are worse though. Almost all choices are shit.

 

There are two political parties here I would still consider voting for, the Socialist party and the Partij voor de dieren – animal welfare party. They’re both outside of the mainstream left, but that also means they will never end up in a ruling coalition.

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I am quite happy that with the German Green party, I do have a voting option that is conscionable. Relatively speaking, they still don’t have a lot of scandals, and you feel that it still matters to them to get the policies right. They’ve recently really grown and are starting to have a bigger influence, and their current party leaders are pretty good, too.

They way things are going right now, the SPD/Green coalition won’t get another shot though. (And especially not without the free-market liberal FDP that is hampering them in the current three-party coalition.)

I do think the party system will always be unavoidable in most cases. Factions forming are natural – or at least conditioned to be the first rather than last resort – like voting.

When there is a major imbalance though, it often leads to unrealistic political action. Even well-meaning political goals can get out of hand when there is no check on the party in power. Ideology stretches its wings and we get all sorts of unintended and unwanted consequences. California has been safely controlled by the Democratic Party for so long, for example, that it is just inconceivable it would turn back, but, ironically, it feels like conservative politicians have not had a better chance to make gains as much as they do now.

It’s concerning but few serious Republicans in California are openly MAGA candidates. In fact, Trump has proven to be a boon to Democrats as there are divisions in the GOP here between Trump fanatics and conservative moderates. In many ways, Trump’s appeal to extremists is what is losing them the moderate conservative vote.

However, the downside of that is that the Democratic party plows ahead with unrealistic policies that have very real, detrimental impact on the average citizen. Eventually, that pressure will force voters to another party or force an alternative party that is a very real threat by dividing the voting base the party depends upon and thus losing votes against a more unified GOP.

I’m interested, what do you see as unrealistic political action?

Things like the abortion bans or voting rights infringements that rise up when one party has all the power and follows ideological principles. It doesn’t solve the problem they think they are solving and it just makes life harder for the citizens – especially poor and working class even if they agree with the principles.

On the other end, California has a lot of admirable initiatives for climate change, but California is just one state – it is not a nation and it is trying to address a problem that requires international cooperation. You ask most Californians and they support the idea of the entire state driving electric cars by 2030 (now 2035 and maybe 2050 by the time 2030 rolls around) and they will certainly say they are for it, but ask them if they plan to buy an electric car, and the answer is likely “I can’t afford it.” Hell, most people can’t afford to buy any car and I don’t see that changing.

Also, we have regular power outages and “flex alerts” where we can’t use electricity to even charge the car. If we have a major disaster like an earthquake where the power is out for weeks, what’s the plan? We want everyone to get an electric car and we are cutting the production of electricity at the same time for the same general reason – greenhouse gas emissions – and it won’t make a dent in climate change because it’s a global problem. We have to suffer the consequences of the solution to the problem but at the same time it doesn’t solve anything so we also have to suffer the consequences of the problem anyway.

Recently our governor proposed a windfall tax on oil companies because the gas prices are so high it “must” be price gouging. However, our gas is harder to produce because California has strict pollution controls on it. Our cars can run on the same gas as any other state, but here it takes special refineries that are harder to maintain and more expensive to staff. And that tax will just get tagged straight on to the prices at the pump. A lot of people who work here drive three hours a day to get to their jobs because they can’t afford to live here. So the burden those policies again lay heaviest on the poor and working class. But the politicians are concerned about housing the homeless when we can’t even house the people that work here.

These are admirable ambitions, but at the same time, they are unrealistically doomed to fail – and the people who are behind them won’t be in office to face those consequences so what do they care. The party will remain – until it doesn’t. Instead, these policies will be held up as an example for opponents to use on why it is a bad idea to try to address climate change, or ban abortion, or restrict voting rights when you’re just a state government.

Instead, when political parties face tight competition, they tend to focus on the scope of what their government can actually achieve and especially on making sure the basic administration is effective and produces results for the people they serve.

 

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

If we have a major disaster like an earthquake where the power is out for weeks, what’s the plan?

 

Seriously it sucks that you have regular blackouts, those are very rare here. But I agree you need a stable electricity grid if you want electric cars. Otherwise it’s a cruel joke. So that needs to get fixed.

 

If you have a disaster of course the grid is not going to work for a while but I think generators will have to provide energy for emergency services. This is not just a matter of electric cars, hospitals for instance also need emergency back up power for blackouts.

Remember the earthquake in Haiti a few years ago? Countries across the world sent aid, and the US sent an aircraft carrier.

I remember a lot of snide comments, “Typical of the Americans, first thing they think of is a show of force…”

In fact, an aircraft carrier has a fully equipped surgery, the equal to any in a major hospital, and the ability to treat hundreds of patients. It has helicopters that can ferry supplies. It *has* supplies, lots of them. It has hundreds of well-trained, efficient men (& women) it can get on the ground to start helping instantly. And what was really overlooked by the critics: it has a nuclear power plant that can be hooked up provide energy to multiple on-shore facilities.

If a massive disaster such as a blackout hits the US, they’ll be fine, they’ve got lots of aircraft carriers. (Sucks if you don’t live on the coast, though.)

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Arjan Dirkse

[njerry]

The main problem, here in the US, is that we are a selfish and obstinate people. According to polls two-thirds of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to combat Climate Change; yet whenever a local initiative is enacted, there is immediate pushback by individuals who feel that composting, or recycling plastics/cardboard, or carrying re-usable shopping bags to eliminate disposable plastic or paper bags, is too much of an inconvenience. Hell, we can’t even bring ourselves to eliminate the one-cent coin even though it costs much more (in terms of materials, resources, man-power, and energy) to make a penny than that penny is actually worth. Our Canadian neighbors have successfully eliminated the penny and just round up or down as appropriate; but Murricans are too stubborn to accept even this small concession.

Everyone wants the federal government to fix things, but we personally don’t want to be inconvenienced even slightly; this, in spite of almost every citizen in every corner of our country being impacted this year by the effects of climate change, with droughts and heavy rains, with wildfires and flash-flooding, with unprecedented heatwaves and deep freezes, and hurricanes and blackouts and so on and so on…

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by njerry.

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DavidM, Todd

Anonymous wrote:

Recently our governor proposed a windfall tax on oil companies because the gas prices are so high it “must” be price gouging.

They are right though mostly.

As you say the extra taxes and environmental costs are there but passed on at the pumps, which is why it costs more in California than say Texas.

So we need to take a step further back in the process away from retail and a barrel of oil on average in the last 5 years may cost $70 (this is a global price always in USD). When Russia due to its war or Saudi reduces supply, as are both happening now, the global price goes up. So today the Brent crude price is $95. No costs have been added to how much it takes to extract that oil, if Exxon has an oil field in California it’s getting $25 more in profit. If OPEC cut production again, it has gone to $120 earlier this year, so they are make $50 more for the same product that cost the same to produce.

‘Price gouging’ is where my ‘mostly’ comes in because in this case Exxon have not driven that price up, they have no control unless they are also throttling supply (they aren’t) but they get paid it anyway, so in Europe tends to get described more charitably as ‘unexpected excess profit’ and is often subject to a windfall tax, even Thatcher imposed one once.

This weird market can be seen here in Malaysia, our oil company (Petronas of the twin towers fame) is government controlled so my gas/petrol price has remained exactly the same for the last year. That’s because they are just feeding the excess profits from the oil price back into the pumps as subsidy, once the price goes down again they just cut the subsidy so the price can remain the same. That is a luxury though that only countries with their own oil supplies can do (windfall and/or subsidy), the rest have no option.

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Christian

So it’s not price gouging, but it sounds an awful lot like price fixing, which is just as bad.

Yeah the energy business is fixed in that way. OPEC is openly described as a cartel which within any single country would be illegal. To describe it as gouging is fair with regard to them, just not the individual oil companies (we’ve seen Shell’s CEO say he expects windfall taxes, not exactly welcoming it but seeing it isn’t unfair).

We’ve seen similar with the way all domestic energy in Europe is being charged in line with natural gas, even if it comes from coal or hydro or wind. I can’t say I really understand why in that case but the energy business seems quite divorced from the actual costs of generation.

I’m considering becoming a member of the remonstrant church over here. It’s generally a very liberal church, the services are open to anyone and they encourage people to shape their belief in the way they like, there is very little pressure to conform to a common dogma. They’re protestant but very different from the hardline calvinists.

 

I think in many ways I’m at least a cultural Christian. These things are part of our blood. When I started re-reading the Bible a few years ago, I was struck by how many expressions we use come from that book, and mainly from the gospels. And how many of our “moral cliches” and basic beliefs are from the gospels. Especially the sermon on the mount.

 

Jesus is just a very inspiring figure. However in my worldview I also like taoism a lot, stoicism, some parts of Buddhism…I think it’s alright to just take insipration from many different sources, I mean why the hell not? Who’s stopping me? All of these traditions have interesting things to say.

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DavidM

DavidM wrote:

So it’s not price gouging, but it sounds an awful lot like price fixing, which is just as bad.

Not sure it is bad as much as it is a realistic response. The energy industry worldwide is subject to a lot of regulation and manipulation by governments as they deal with the combination of private business and public service expectations. Some are nationalized and others are privatized. We have PG&E, Edison and LADWP (as well as a number of other utilities like Burbank Water and Power) and they all have different corporate models.

The price is negotiated with various tactics, price fixing versus government imposed price caps. It’s only bad in the context of free market ideology which hardly ever applies to the actual reality.

What I find questionable though is the political tactics used against the energy producers and providers. Primarily due to political sentiment, we have a negative view of the energy companies and these accusations of price gouging are designed to paint them as ravenous robber barons taking advantage of a bad situation and making it worse.

However, the people working for those companies are just like us and focused on making a living. Your neighbor down the street who works at a refinery or oil drilling and shipping company or utility. Do you think they are involved in a conspiracy to bilk the world out of their hard earned money?

No one, even the people nominally in charge, are really in control of these economic and financial systems. Most of them emerged long before any of us were born and if there were many better alternatives then they would have emerged as well. There are a couple of misconceptions that drive this particular instance. First, the idea that a governor of a state really can do anything significant to curb high gas prices. Certainly, he could reduce the emissions and pollution standards to get CA in line with other states, but then he loses the base of his support that put and keeps him in office. Second, the idea that the energy business is intentionally raking in profits for nefarious reasons. They are operating like any other business, it’s just that energy touches everyone and everything. It’s the way of business in general that is the problem and no one can control that – not even entire societies can control it.

That’s a general reality for the world. It doesn’t care if we exist – it is not designed for us and it is hard to make a living. Everyone will eventually fail to make a living here. However, you can’t blame anyone for that, so our immediate response is to blame each other. It’s like gang fights between prisoners who were all imprisoned for crimes they did not commit and condemned to death in a penal colony with no guards to keep the peace.

 

Ok. So I will hugely contest this reading.

My first experience with the oil business was with Shell offering my banking staff 3 times the opening salary for the same job in banking so they all just left. In retrospect I think the major flaw in schools career guidance is not what you study or do but the industry you work in. A receptionist for Exxon will earn at least double what one for a bank will.

Then when I moved to Penang I met a lot of people that worked in oil and gas (including an American insurrectionist who faced relative poverty from massive luxury when his contract ended and he had to go back to the US).

The industry is dripping in money because in reality it costs $3 on average to extract a barrel of oil and they manipulate it to be $100+ at sale price. Saudi Arabia and Qatar do fuck all c0mpetenetly, they just have easily extractable oil. In the UAE they have an ‘Emitarisation programme’ which is basically giving wages that will make you top 5% in the US or Europe guaranteed, even if you are useless. The expats with knowledge and qualifications just suck it up as they know they add no value but they are being given $10k a month tax free and rent free.

A close friend said he watched a colleague earning US$250,000 a year spending most of his day on Facebook.

If California, for all its flaws, asked its oil companies to wear butt plugs and dance a ballet twice a day they are making massive, massive profits because the entire industry is rigged. Look at quarterly profits of all the big oil companies, they never lose money.

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DavidM, Christian

As long as you don’t work for Exxon, you should be fine:

Exxon’s Exodus: Employees Have Finally Had Enough of Its Toxic Culture

To emphasise my point, at the top of that article:

 

The 140-year-old oil company is making more money than ever.

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Todd

Yeah, but the money it is making is worth a lot less than it was just a couple years ago much less than decades ago.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but the question is who is to blame? Also, what business isn’t rigged?

I know M&A managers who basically do “nothing” for years and then in one deal make profits for the company that more than make up what the company pays them even including the bonuses. Judging people by their day-to-day labor may not really be a good evaluation.

Like producers – producer is a vague term that covers a lot. A line producer, for example, is very different from Executive Producer or any of the other, often many, producer credits on any project. Essentially they are managers, but often they are not directly involved in anything the audience actually sees on the screen.

Their job though is to take responsibility. That’s basically what the producer is paid to do. They are supposed to make sure whatever project they are on is delivered. If the people that actually make the film do their work – then the producers basically do nothing. However, that never happens in reality, but producers are constantly ridiculed for doing nothing and at the same time ridiculed whenever they actually try to contribute anything to the production. They are paid to take the blame and as a result they have a lot of authority but often not a lot of actual work to do.

It’s not terribly different in the corporate world, and honestly if I could get a job making a fortune doing nothing because the system is rigged, I’d take it – though I imagine that is not really the case for most people who have those jobs. Unless the job is being born into a billionaire family or royalty, I bet you’re getting paid for something and dire consequences await if you don’t deliver it.

But is it their fault? Or is it the fault even of the people at the top of the pyramid? We’re certainly not going to change it, but is there even anyone that could change it?

In retrospect I think the major flaw in schools career guidance is not what you study or do but the industry you work in. A receptionist for Exxon will earn at least double what one for a bank will.

Yeah, I think economic and career guidance in schools really doesn’t take into account the reality. At the same time, it is ironic how student loans allowed a lot more people to go to college, but at the same time, we’re having trouble filling some vital positions because the need to pay back those loans forces students to focus on jobs that will allow them to start making money quickly. So we see more specialists in medicine while basic or general medical care is in crisis as no one is applying.

Everything is messy and every business is a mess. People will point to oil companies, arms manufacturers, silicon valley, drug companies or the F.I.R.E. economy as inefficient, unfair and corrupt industries, but I don’t really see any businesses from athletic shoes to cookies that don’t suffer the same problems. I imagine it costs Nike around $12.50 to make a pair of shoes that it will sell for $150. However, no one needs an Air Jordan to go to work except for NBA players, so most people focus on the companies that touch everyone like the people that provide our gas or phones or food and then point out how bad they are.

 

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Todd

Anonymous wrote:

Yeah, but the money it is making is worth a lot less than it was just a couple years ago much less than decades ago.

No. None of this is true. They are making much more money. Shitloads.  Off the scale thanks to Saudi and Russia strangling supply.

It is a fundamental mistake to imagine all industries face the same challenges and admin and tax all that crap. Nothing at all to do with lazy guys in TV. Energy is and always has been divorced from normal market forces.

I am struggling to believe how naive this nonsense is that it is just normal, like making shoes or executive producing Magnum PI.

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Well, if you’re going to be intentionally obtuse and completely misrepresent my points, I don’t need to continue on the forum.

Well, that seemed like an overreaction. Hope you’re okay, Jonny, and will be back later on!

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Dave

Please come back Johnny! This thread sucks without you. We’d be posting cat pictures instead of having deep debates.

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Arjan Dirkse

Anonymous wrote:

Increasingly, in America, it doesn’t feel like we’re in a nation, but the nation is simply the place where we work and live. America is a business and the government is just the management.

Well what is a nation? I think it can be many things. You can define it around a certain ethnicity but also around ideas.

 

The idea that America has some special destiny is pretty much mocked these days, but it’s not an unusual sentiment. I think people of most countries and ethnicities have feelings like these, that they’re “special”. Certainly Russia has it, France, China, Japan, Korea…really I think most countries, or ethnicities. The Netherlands too in a way, but I don’t know what is left of it after the corona mess.

 

To some extent national pride is transferred to the EU which is an expanding concept unlike European nation states.

Mind expanding thread, the kitty edition

 

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DavidM, Christian, Todd

Christian Trump event left evangelical pastor ‘absolutely terrified and horrified’

I still don’t get how so many professing Christians can support Trump. Just because God puts leaders in positions of power doesn’t make them all godly.

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Todd

JRCarter wrote:

I still don’t get how so many professing Christians can support Trump. Just because God puts leaders in positions of power doesn’t make them all godly.

They don’t give a shit. They’d be fine with Trump eating babies as long as it’d mean they get to control women’s bodies.

The actual MAGA christendom as a religious experience that the article describes is pretty bloody disturbing though.

In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, Pastor Caleb Campbell revealed that he decided to make wooing Christians away from the MAGA movement his personal cause after he attended a Christian event hosted by Turning Point USA, the right-wing activist group founded by Charlie Kirk.

During the event he attended, says Campbell, Kirk misappropriated quotes from the Bible in order to make it sound like God wanted Christians to be armed to the teeth with firearms.

“I was absolutely terrified and horrified,” Campbell tells the Globe and Mail.

Well, I suppose it’s good to see that there evangelical pastors who are terrified by this. Let’s hope he can find some more of those.

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Todd

Adding some gunfire to the average boring sermon is probably an improvement though.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Adding some gunfire to the average boring sermon is probably an improvement though.

I just realized this last post could be seen as offensive. I mean “talking about guns” rather than shooting actual guns in a church. Given that there have been actual shootings in churches I understand the post is distasteful.

‘Inclusive’ restaurant turns away Christian group because of its beliefs. Who’s the bigot?

That’s a tough one, I can see both sides in the argument. If this group engaged in harrasment of LGBT people or people seeking abortion, I would understand refusing them.

JRCarter wrote:

‘Inclusive’ restaurant turns away Christian group because of its beliefs. Who’s the bigot?

It’s the “Christians”, they’re the bigots.

Ingrid Jacques is the bigot.

Yeah the truth is there is nothing to go on there. The piece JR shared is a heavily biased opinion column.

Yes in theory refusing custom because of religion is bad but this is so without context you can learn nothing about the real motivation.

If I ran a cafe would I welcome the Westboro crowd? Fuck no. Would I ban all Christians? Fuck no again.

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DavidM, lorcan_nagle

garjones wrote:

Yeah the truth is there is nothing to go on there. The piece JR shared is a heavily biased opinion column.

Yes in theory refusing custom because of religion is bad but this is so without context you can learn nothing about the real motivation.

If I ran a cafe would I welcome the Westboro crowd? Fuck no. Would I ban all Christians? Fuck no again.

It’s a good example of one of the points Chomsky makes in Manufacturing Consent – You limit the expression of thought in part by setting definite limits on what’s deemed acceptable speech, and then encourage heated debate within those limits. It shouldn’t be a controversial idea that outspoken bigots aren’t allowed into private businesses, but the media will sure as hell try and get you debating it in an attempt to seem “balanced”

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garjones

I’ve been thinking about the difference between monotheism and polytheism…in monotheism as we know it God becomes some abstract principle on which everything relies, whereas in polytheism you have multiple spiritual forces which make the universe alive…like a life force in everything. I kinda like the latter more….there is something off putting in a lot of Christian writing which denigrates material life, says our only hope should be for our eternal rewards etc

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Christian, DavidM, Todd

Jordan Peterson on twitter is now calling for public flogging of doctors giving gender affirming care. Holy Christ. It seems the culture has gone insane. Some people do want to turn the clock back to the medieval era.

 

In some ways the medieval era was great, the art was truly fantastic but in most it sucked. I mean Thomas of Aquino who was supposedly one of the greatest thinkers of the era, which I can’t affirm or deny because I really haven’t read anything he wrote, allegedly said one of the greatest joys in heaven is being able to watch the suffering of the condemned in hell. That isn’t good or enlightened or transcendental, that is just plain hateful nastiness. And the papal palace in Avignon has a torture chamber in its basement. To me that’s satanic rather than Christian.

 

There seems to be a coarsening, a vulgarization of the culture to the point where a bunch of people openly boast about wanting to see people who aren’t exactly completely ideologically aligned with them suffer and die. To a point I can understand this, I mean there are people I woud like to see removed from this Earth. But there is something Holy and Ultimate in mercy. In breaking bread with the enemy. Sometimes when I feel shitty the best thing for me to do is read parts from the gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the peacemakers and all that. Could be “cucked”, as the kids say, but I think it’s powerful.

Interesting to hear people in the media enumerate the things Jesus died for according to them. Everybody makes up their own Bible.

My sister was saying that she was teaching kids that the resurrection was the important thing. Not the crucifixion itself, but Him coming back to life was the great thing.

And I’m left wondering… she’s been a Christian her whole life and a church-goer on-and-off throughout it… how could she have so fundamentally misunderstood it?

Jesus died for our sins. That’s the only important part of the story. The resurrection was an afterthought, and not actually necessary at all (except as a means to convince those with insufficient faith).

 

Your sister needs to read House and Powers of X

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Sean Robinson, Christian

DavidM wrote:

Jesus died for our sins. That’s the only important part of the story. The resurrection was an afterthought, and not actually necessary at all (except as a means to convince those with insufficient faith).

I think your sister’s view of this may be telling. Not particularly of your sister, I mean, but christianity in general.

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DavidM