May242012
I intercept a space craft putting out a distress signal. I dock, and it seems abandoned as I enter the second floor. I go one floor down, taking the stairs. The lift buttons aren’t working. Elderly people are wandering around the first floor and the captain is missing. I go back to the stairs and go down to the basement maintenance level.
The captain is tampering with wires, pliers and a small blow-torch. He is sweating and intensely focused and doesn’t notice me and is startled when I announce myself. I tell him that I got the distress call and boarded. We go back upstairs and the elderly passengers are in a panic. They haven’t heard from the captain or the upstairs passengers in several days and suspect that their children suggested they go on a space cruise so they could abandon them - they thought they were going to be jettisoned into space. This is the first they’ve seen of the captain in two days. The captain is rambling about trying to ‘fix’ the second floor door, explaining to the passengers that this is why they haven’t seen the others. It becomes clear from his nervous ticks that he hasn’t slept in several days. He tells me to please go check if the second floor door is properly sealed, why he tries settle the passengers.
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May232012
When you’re about to go tumbling down the rabbit hole or into the abyss, you should tie yourself to reality with a rope. When you’ve gone too far, you tug the rope and get pulled back. That’s the trick. Most people don’t bring a rope. The ones that do end up as the prophets of our time.
6PM
atheistme:
And it is so stupid.
I can’t even believe that as an atheist, I have a better understanding of how faith works.
LAKDJFASLKFJD
We know there are several things in the bible that are false (we’ll use Noah’s Ark as an example). I can say “Noah’s Ark never happend as it was written in the bible”…
Religious people don’t care about ‘truth’ as a philosophical concept. They identify as religious people and take on the values of their group, which includes accepting that ‘truth’ cannot be known because the ultimate authority has a monopoly on it. Through this, anything can be accepted by them as long as it comes from a source which is seen as authoritative enough. They don’t ‘believe’ Noah’s Ark actually happened, so much as it’s important to their identity that they go along with it.
Nietsche would frame the religious mind in terms of different types of morality. those who wish to be subservient because they have a weak will - and hence structure their morality around following and self-sacrifice… and those who wish to lead because they have a strong will - who structure their morality around creating and extrapolating their ideas into reality.
When a person thinks that all truth and meaning can only come from authority, the findings of science in determining truth/reality from falsehood/fantasy become meaningless. Little wonder that religious people love the scientific method when they can interpret it to support their views but strike out at the very same method when it disagrees with them.
Faith is the position that one should accept something as true before/without being proven, because of the importance to the group identity to do so. One of the best ways to confront the religious mind is through showing them the Inconsistency of Revelations - that people of many different religions have claimed theirs is true due to some divine inspiration (which makes all but one religious group deluded, or all of them). To maintain belief they have to push themselves further into absurdity and arrogance by making a deeper emotional appeal - that their religion really is the truth and all others are simply wrong; that all others are delusions. This can only be done by Special Pleading, which is a classic fallacy (When confronted with this, watch them quote bible verses - you’re just meant to see the truthfulness of it, because they don’t have any rational points left to make), and makes it more obvious what faith really is - an emotional appeal to maintain group identity around an authoritative father figure who forbids that you think for yourself.
May132012
We’ve all heard it said that a woman can’t be the political leader of a country because they’re too emotional. It’s usually phrased something like “They have the nuclear codes! What happens when ‘that time of month’ comes around and emotion overtakes reason!?”
and the usual response is “That’s sexist! A woman is as capable as a man in any position of political leadership!” - and in witnessing this response, I feel some dismay. Not because the response is inaccurate, but because the respondent has already given their antagonist too much credit, as well as fallen into a trap.
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11PM
I decided to merge both of my tumblrs into one. I couldn’t figure out where to draw the line on where I should post certain things, and felt like I was dissecting my personality to make it more palatable. And that just wasn’t ‘me’.
So I’ll repost everything (all five posts of it) from that tumblr, then delete it.
Here’s the first post from it, after which I won’t be pointing out which ones are reposts from the old tumblr.
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5PM
Anonymous asked: In your opinion, what is the biggest problem in the world right now, and how do you think we might best fix it, or begin to fix it?
The biggest problems in the world are the monetary and banking systems. For thousands of years, usury was illegal (charging excessive interest on loans) because people knew that if the rich got richer just for being rich, they would end up owning the world. The founding fathers of America had a lot to say about it, too. We’re in a situation where a few powerful people can shake the world economy around for profits, and when it goes haywire, they offer solutions which they stand to gain from. The perfect example is the US bank bailouts. The bank’s predatory lending helped destroy the economy, then they held a whole country hostage saying that if they didn’t get bailouts there would be martial law and total chaos. Central banks are run as private corporations, for profit, with little input from governments, and they often (if not always) have conflicts of interest. the foxes are guarding the henhouse.
Which is where the difficulty of fixing it comes in. Most people don’t know what’s going on. To begin to fix it, there needs to be cognitive dissonance - people need to start to realise that the bank isn’t looking out for their best interests. I find that the best way to plant cognitive dissonance is through straight facts. It puts in new information, and people are generally rational enough to figure it out for themselves. Here’s a good video on how the monetary system works - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5352106773770802849.
I think a lot of the trust in banks is a hang-over from the baby-boomer days when the capitalist dream was being realised. Rapidly increasing quality of living, people buying land and cars, having big families. And the bank was their friend. World War II had been won and Big Oil was riding the wave. Then comes globalisation, the space and information ages, and predatory banking.
Here’s a really good movie narrated by Matt Damon on predatory banks and the GFC. - http://www.theotherschoolofeconomics.org/?p=2499. The ideal solution might be a gold-based dollar instead of a fiat currency. We might be too far gone in the global economy for this to be stable, but at the least, governments should be issuing currency, not private corporations with conflicted interests.
I should wrap this up because it’s become a rant.
There are theories that alcohol prohibition came along not because of a moral crisis, but because ‘Big Oil’ saw that alcohol was competition against gasoline, and their partners in the newspaper business printed ads and articles supporting prohibition. There is also a theory that Hemp was made illegal because it posed such a huge risk to petrochemical companies. I’m not talking about marijuana here, that one is Hemp’s narcotic cousin, and is collateral damage of this competition over petrochemical production. Apparently Hemp can be used to produce a huge range of textiles and posed a threat to the oil monopoly. Incidentally, the oil monopoly on petrochemicals is largely what fuels the military industrial complex - which undoubtedly wouldn’t be so pressing if the West didn’t need to gain a foothold and fuel aggression in the Middle East. (Hemp is also one of the fastest-growing biomasses in the world and can capture a huge amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. If people want to end war, oil dependance, and climate change then just legalise Hemp. It wasn’t originally banned based on empirical studies anyway. A moral panic was manipulated to drive out competition (with drug companies, too). I’m not lying to get it legalised so people can get high. There are hard economic reasons why. More reading on that - http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/pot/blunderof37.html (an unreferenced, but interesting essay) and http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100728143848AASj2P1 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Uses.
But to my point - slightly less pressing than the monetary and banking system is the oil monopoly on textiles and energy. They are at the point they are now because of age-old corporate propaganda. Collusion with the media to lie to hundreds of millions of people, fuelling wars and killing millions. To begin to fix this, one can talk to people about the reasons why Hemp should be legalised to bring down this monopoly and propaganda, and stress the biomass/CO2/climate change issue. It’s competitive, productive and renewable. Maybe get involved with groups that campaign for legalisation for reasons other than cognitive freedom (that IS a good enough reason why, but unless higher-ups see good economic, pragmatic reasons, they will never yield). The promulgation of science and the scientific method is useful as it allows people to extend their rational thought and combat propaganda on their own.
2AM
So I was at my girlfriends house one day and the doorbell rang. Saturday or Sunday afternoon (don’t remember exactly) and we weren’t expecting company, so we figured it was religious folks. While being glad that they were here in the afternoon and not 8am, because we had been out the night before, neither of us really wanted to deal with this. But a flashback to watching the street preachers and their detractors yell back and forth emotionally reminded me: “No situation has ever been resolved or bettered by a lack of information”. So I decided to talk to them and figure out what their tactics are. What sort of demographic they’re aiming for, how informed they are, how they present themselves, emotional/logical appeals, and so on.
I open the door and there are two middle-aged women, dressed conservatively and smiling politely as middle-aged, religious women are wont to do. I notice the ever-so-slight twitches in their face signalling their disappointment that I’m not a gullible pensioner or someone closer to their demographic. They knew they’d have to stretch for this one. They wouldn’t know how to do it on the fly, so they politely parroted the memorised script, fully ready for rejection. But I listened. And they had some really good things to say about Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Just kidding.
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