Depending on where we look, the universe is expanding at different rates. Now, scientists using the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes have confirmed that the observation is not down to a measurement error.
Spot on! Jesus Himself hated the religious hypocrites (“Karens”) of His day, calling them vipers and white-washed tombs, full of rot and decay even if slapped with a fresh coat of paint on the outside. Some people hear that and say “naw, I think I, as a Bishop or Pope or whatever, know far better than Jesus what ‘Christianity’ should mean”, and then proceed to fondle little humans, but others think the latter is detestable and enormously gross:-(. Humans gonna human I guess, but it’s not all equally good or bad - some of it is INSANE, and inside of us all we know what’s what. Like if it happened to us or to someone we care about and we get mad, then we KNOW WTF is up. So those rich old white dudes (or equivalent thereof) are not even consistent with themselves, in that the walk does not match the talk, ergo it is false.
Ngl though, controlling the masses may have had a use, back in the day, before most people could read, by providing incentives for them to not kill and rape and steal and such. Even so, who can blame people then for being angry at finding out that their leaders don’t even belief the crap that they’re preaching? Which ironically doesn’t even mean that it is false, just that I am agreeing with you about the need to dissect the issue by separating the “belief system” from the “authoritarian religion” components. In any case, here in the USA the latter got hijacked and evangelical christians especially seem to almost equate “God = vote for guns & conservatism”. I almost just said conservatism there except that itself is too bland for many of them, who want to continue pushing to ever more far-right schemes. “God” for them is in-group selection.
Switching topics a bit, most of my friends online have been gay men. I am a cis het male btw, not that it matters but I am saying that I am friends with them not b/c of those shared aspects but more, I think, b/c they have empathy. People who have been through some shit end up having more “character” than those who do not. Entitled/spoiled people are the types to spit in your food, never dreaming of what else you have been through, and then they go and add to that burden. THEY would not want that done to THEM, yet they do it to you. On the other hand, people who are heavily bullied may end up broken and mean to others, so I am not saying that exposure to trauma causes empathy, but I am saying that it is a necessary if not sufficient component, it seems to me. So you have had that opportunity that they did not, and chose to do something with it. And that is indeed something worth being proud of!:-)
If you like the videos then I am glad that I sent the link to remind you of them. They are not light fare, but I did so enjoy pouring through them slowly, digesting each one in turn. It’s like a college course in the material!:-)
As for the media on the other side, well, let’s just say that Russia works in mysterious ways. Sometimes it is poisoning, but other times far more subtle. These days they are not even trying to be subtle anymore - Republican conventions are held in literal Moscow, as well as places such as Hungary. They are like minds, and Russia would be a fool not to partner with them, e.g. in that recent Tucker Carlson video interviewing Putin, if it would help speed the conversion of the USA from a foe to an ally. People do not spot it through b/c they are GOOD at what they do! Like, they poin ted out how Hillary Clinton was “corrupt” - b/c she WAS! The Supreme Court asked her to send all of her emails to them, and she told them “lolz no, Im gonna delete the ones that I do not want you to see first”. Nobody can say that the optics surrounding that are anything remotely close to good. In fact, I gotta be careful here or I will go full-on rant on you, but remember that Trump did not win that election so much as she lost it (likewise, he did not win the Republican nomination either, so much as Ted Cruz lost it, after JEB botched the job). Whoever leaked her emails did the real work in that election - but then it was her actual words that she actually said and her actual actions that doomed her. Trump was outright shocked to have won - he never planned on it, did not really want it even, and gave some very serious thoughts to turning it down even! And even when he took it, he still just wanted to do the TV show that he had planned previously, on top of the job of being president. He is like a child - it is the situation that put him there, not (so much) his own intentions. In fact, I even have a little empathy for him too - he didn’t want it, but he did try, despite the job being well beyond his capacity, and that’s actually the tiniest shadow of a little light there (1 out of 1000 but still… it is worth noting and giving him that much credit at least; along with the blame for you know, the actual genocide of Americans by e.g. telling them that the virus was not airbone when he KNEW that it was).
Anyway, it is not “just” the people that are broken, I agree, it is the SYSTEM. Although the system is made up out of people so… that’s where I get lost. But that is also why I think what you are saying is good, about not abandoning people: b/c if enough people did THAT, then the system would not be the way it is today. Somewhere in there I do think that the carrot needs to be set down and the stick picked up, and I acknowledge that I have never figured out that the line that should distinguish between them, but I think that when you KNOW that the carrot is the thing to be done and you do it ANYWAY despite the cost, that is integrity. Which some few authoritarians that I have met personally I feel like also have, in that they turn to the stick too readily and without understanding it, but most - e.g. those who showed up at the capitol - do not, b/c how can you “protect” the Constitution if you haven’t even so much as read it? A “coup” to overturn something is NOT the same thing as “saving” it, dummies!!!:-(
Which is why I have to admit that I have lost the faith: with ~80% of Americans being somewhere in the middle between the extreme left and right sides, and with good-hearted and honest people with some amount of integrity on both sides, yes and some child-like mindsets too, this isn’t something that most of us even seem to want to fight about? However, our media sells fear and extremism, and our politicians too, and with all these parasites sucking up our attention, how then is someone supposed to rise up and actually GOVERN? As ironically Biden has been doing, or at least trying to, though Congress and the Supreme Court seem more responsible for a goodly fraction of the issues that most average Americans are experiencing right now (not Gaza, but that’s a whole other thing, and frankly that doesn’t directly affect most “average” Americans either). I hope something will restore my faith, but I am not optimistic about that:-(. Therefore I believe that I am living in a dying country, but I do whatever I can to help others in my vicinity and abroad nonetheless, not b/c I think I will necessarily accomplish anything truly great there, but simply b/c it is who I am and how I want to be. We all need to live out our authentic lives, being our true selves:-).
Ngl though, controlling the masses may have had a use, back in the day, before most people could read, by providing incentives for them to not kill and rape and steal and such.
Oh yeah I 100% agree with that. Religion was basically a proto-government. It’s funny, reminds me of when I was in high school. I was part of the student newspaper and at some point I had written an article about religion and how it is basically an antiquated form of government and how it has no real purpose anymore. Edgy I know. The next Monday in school I heard about how the town priest had read the article during Sunday mass. Apparently he was NOT happy about it. I was pretty proud of that one, not gonna lie 😂.
People who have been through some shit end up having more “character” than those who do not.
Yeah I think so too, but it can also easily go both ways, especially when you can’t manage to get out of said shit. (Nvm I see now that I should read a bit further before starting to type bahah)
I do believe however that the ones who’ve inflicted the most pain on others as a result of their own pain have the potential to be the ones who try their hardest to make up for their mistakes, which is why I try hard to not discount anyone. I might be wearing rose-colored glasses but I have to keep them on.
As for the media on the other side
Yeah the right associating with leaders such as Putin and Orbán is fucked up on so many levels. They definitely are good at what they do. That’s one of the reasons I dislike how people on both sides treat each other like the other side is dumb. All sides have brilliant people and ignorant followers. And OF COURSE Hillary was corrupt, nobody who gets that far in politics has clean hands. They’re all corrupted in some way or another but not necessarily equally. Centrist cunts fuck off.
One of my best friends, brilliant guy, doctor of philosophy. A couple of years ago he decided he wanted to get into politics so he started small. He decided to run for city council here and won. It didn’t even take a year for him to absolutely hate the game. He said he could not sleep anymore, couldn’t handle how corrupted even stupid little city council members could be. He said there was no way for him to stay there without getting his own hands dirty and he wanted no part of it. Within a year he quit, and left the town to go teach halfway across the world at the University of Liverpool where he still is now. He couldn’t stand seeing these people anymore. It made sense then why our little town is dying. Even the tiniest amount of power is immense to tiny people. I’d like to see the day where we can offload a lot of these duties to some kind of AI, but that’s a whole other can of worms that we are not ready to open.
Trump is someone I have a very hard time having any empathy for, but yeah, I also have a teeny tiny bit, because he really is nothing but a child. However I don’t have any hope for him to ever turn around and do something good other than for his own selfish reasons. He is too old to grow up now.
Oh and on the subject of the Carlson-Putin interview. You wouldn’t happen to have a link for a re-upload? I still haven’t watched it because I refuse to even give it a single official view but I need to see it.
Anyway, it is not “just” the people that are broken, I agree, it is the SYSTEM.
It is. We are all products of our environment. I don’t think we actually have much control over anything, not even ourselves. That’s definitely one of my wacky beliefs. I’ve never been able to shake off the idea that we live in a deterministic universe so it is hard for me to stay mad at a person or a group of people when I don’t even believe they had any real control over their action. It would be like getting mad at the messenger. We still need to get mad and fight, but not the people. We need to fight ideas with better ideas. We need to love the people because they are us and we are them. Without them there is no us and vice versa. A world with no opposition is a world that would go sideways in no time.
In-fighting between humans has been a thing since forever and look where we are now. We are wayyyyy better off in most aspects than we were not that long ago. It’s easy to forget that when we’re forced to take a step backwards but we as a species will come back from this, we always have. At least, assuming we manage to heal our planet but unfortunately we can’t do that if we don’t somehow heal ourselves first.
A “coup” to overturn something is NOT the same thing as “saving” it, dummies!!!:-(
Yeahhh… I don’t even know what to say about Jan 6th. That is such a messed up thing. I think that a lot of people who showed up at the Capitol didn’t have bad intentions, they were misled. Although I’m sure there were plenty involved that absolutely had bad intentions. Most of them problably weren’t there in person.
this isn’t something that most of us even seem to want to fight about? However, our media sells fear and extremism, and our politicians too
That’s pretty much it. Most people don’t want to fight but the news, the politicians, corporations, whatever, they’ve all figured out that pitting us against each other was very profitable. Not only do we have parasites at home, we have parasites on the outside as well trying to creep in and profit as well. At this point it feels like we can’t trust anything or anyone, it’s no surprise that there is a rise in conspiracy brains.
I hope something will restore my faith, but I am not optimistic about that:-(. Therefore I believe that I am living in a dying country
But you kinda are hahah, when have you ever seen something that is not dying in some way or another? All nations will eventually disappear or change into something completely unrecognizable. Either something new and better is born out of the seemingly rotting carcass that is the American empire, or something terrible to you will take it’s place and that same cycle will repeat. It’s terrifying to think that we could lose our way of life, I tend to talk like I’m not scared but really I’m terrified. It’s the unknown part of it that is really scary.
I do whatever I can to help others in my vicinity and abroad nonetheless, not b/c I think I will necessarily accomplish anything truly great there, but simply b/c it is who I am and how I want to be. We all need to live out our authentic lives, being our true selves:-).
Those who aspire for greatness often end up accomplishing nothing. You’re doing the right thing. It’s impossible for one person to change the big picture but you can absolutely change what is immediately around you and that is a very powerful thing. That is where we need to put our energy. I feel like the internet has done us a great disservice in that area. We are not ready to be so connected yet. We’ve lost the will to fight locally because we are way too overwhelmed with things that are happening where we are absolutely powerless to help. Take care of your close ones so that they can take of theirs. The rest will work itself out. This is no time for apathy.
(Are we going for the longest comment thread in Lemmy history or what?)
(There is a character limit for comments - or at least there was for Kbin.social and I assume for Lemmy as well? - so at the very least we are constrained in the length of each segment:-)
If you are interested, there is a book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett - who is a halfway decent author, e.g. of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which is a DEEEEEEP look into evolution - called “Breaking the Spell”, where he delves into the mechanics of studying religion with the same tools that you would study anything else. The latter is really boring so that book of his I normally do not so much recommend reading in-depth, but in your case perhaps you would, b/c in it he says things vaguely similar to what you are saying. Chiefly, that tribalism was adaptive to the evolution of mankind, and while nationalism helped lift us up beyond that, the next step was due to religion, which allowed us to cross national boundaries. Like, “HEY there fellow Pastafarian brutha/sistah - [Joey from Friend’s voice] how you doin?”
So I would call it like a “meta-government”, due to how it sits on top of existing governmental structures. Like in a lot of European countries - e.g. Spain - people that I have talked to that grew up there were angry b/c they paid one set of taxes to their government, and another set of taxes to the Catholic Church all the way in Rome, which like Americans they were subjected to “taxation without representation”, and worse yet they simply had no choice in the matter at all - they did not “choose” that religion, but merely by being born there that choice was made for them.
Ngl, but the Catholic Church does do some good stuff - and whenever it e.g. feeds the hungry, visits the sick and constrained in prison, whenever it does as the Bible says and “takes care of widows and orphans”, THAT is awesome and I support THOSE efforts 100%. Ofc when they lie and steal and cheat and murder and rape then THOSE efforts I am 100% against. I used to be very angry at the Catholic Church for a long time myself, though fortunately I healed, and now I see that the people inside of it do what they do not even just in spite of their religion, but sometimes because of it, though we are imperfect humans, and some are fairly deadly. It is just that with any political structure, or religious, or anything at all involving humans (and also chimpanzees, not only our closest living relative but also one of the only other species on earth that takes active delight in murder!), a close watch must be kept on it to ensure that it does not go astray.
And yeah, I keep hearing stories of people who step up to be that kind of old-school “statemen” rather than a “career politician”, who cannot stand it and must leave. The literal DEATH THREATS offered to those people, by the most extremist among us, coupled ofc with the actual murders (like the Boeing whistleblower), have made me realize that the concept of “Illuminati” is absolutely real - maybe not as an actual irl society with a special ring and what-not, but obviously power corrupts, and obviously those who have it will concentrate the highest amount of resources to themselves - that’s just human monkey nature.
I also quit something - a teaching position, not politics - and I have a great deal of sympathy with what he went through, it is not easy to just walk away, but ofc it would have been far worse if he had stayed and compromised himself. Everybody just said “try to do the best you can, and help those who you can”… implying to ignore everyone else, just take the money from the parents and run, never mind that one person physically cannot do the task justice, oh and then double the number of students on top of that, b/c why the fuck not, the computer will do all the “real work” anyway, right? :-| I would rather Epstein myself than heap such heavy burdens upon people though, saddling them with large debts while not helping them get ahead in life, and worse making them think they know something, by altering the externally-reviewed scores so that the school (I don’t want to say which one) could avoid losing its accreditation, which it had already been warned about previously and was in danger of it happening again. You REALLY cannot help people, when the entire system is stacked against you to prevent that. Or perhaps I am naive and I should have stayed in, to be “one of the good ones”, except I just am not that kind of person. It would have killed me, inside. So yeah, I GET IT. Somewhat, or at least think I do:-).
And yeah, maybe your town will die off then. Perhaps even… I doubt you will take this the wrong way so I will go ahead and say it: perhaps it should? Survival of the fittest and all, and that applies to towns just as well as species, and even the United States of America: if we do not “fit” into the existing world structure, then we might go down, at Putin’s behest but also by our own stinking bloody hands, b/c we are too stupid to realize that the whispers he sent to us (e.g. “the vaccine is harmful”) were not real nor even “our own”.
AI will not be ready in time for us - maybe some future generation, but not us. Nor would we really want it to - shows such as Wall-E (and I have read similar stories for that identical concept written decades prior to that) have convinced me that when life gets comfortable enough, people will simply give up and allow “mommy”(/“daddy”) to take care of them. Which is, to a large degree, the very thing that has put America into this mess we are in now? Laziness, more than any other singular factor.
Try to have empathy for Trump: fuck we all know that he does not deserve it, but it is not for him, it is for you. I don’t care one bit about him, but I don’t want you to have that monkey on your back, as the saying goes. He is a scared, whiney, piss baby who puts dumps into his diapers and then has trouble walking about. He acts that way out of fear, and b/c he knows no other way. In MANY ways, him being put in charge was not his fault, but rather those of people who are far more crafty (and have espionage capabilities) than he. He is a victim too - he is not just a symptom, mind you, being also a cause, but among the many things that he is, a victim is one of them. You or I possibly could have ended up there as well. Except, and this is the part I am learning more recently, we NEVER would - maybe if our entire backstory had been different, but as we are now and looking forward, we NEVER would have allowed that. There truly is a RIGHT and a WRONG, and Trump is all kinds of the latter. He is barely more than a monkey, while we have moved upwards by the power of Mind, and short of like dementia or some such, I cannot imagine anyone who has done that could ever turn back down. I used to shy away from that thought, b/c it seems not humble (in the midwestern USA that is YUGE to never appear anything other than humble:-P). But now I realize what true humility is: finding the Truth, whatever it is, and paying homage to that. Which makes him, and more importantly the system that put him there, my enemy. And even so, I still have empathy for the fucker… but I would still consign him to jail.
Likewise, I refused to watch the Tucker Carlson video too:-). But if you don’t want to watch the whole thing - like me:-) - here is one with just the highlights and commentary from the GREATEST PERSON ALIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW, Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2h3KnWAWY. It is The Daily Show, which I believe should not be HBO, so I hope you can see it.
Determinism: I also believe that. I cannot prove it though, so I don’t hold to it too hard. Also, it doesn’t really matter, to me, b/c even if things were fore-ordained, we don’t know what those things are, so we must treat each new event as totally not that way, yes? :-P It’s just an abstract idea in my head, consistent with there being 2 time dimensions (if I am remembering that correctly), or anyway if there is just the one, then it may be something along the lines of an exapanding wave of matter as it moves outwards from the Big Bang at constant velocity. If that were true, then time travel should be impossible, b/c once the wave passes, past times literally do not exist anymore, nor do future ones yet. An alternate formulation is that both past and present DO exist, and if we had the technology then we could travel along it, always “forward” but bucking the universal constant outwards pressure and instead returning to a “past” time/space continuum. Also, an outside observer could “see” our future. Then again, a “God” (like The Matrix computer), could foresee the future in other ways, not with foresight but simply with raw power, just like the Russian leader Gorbachev said “we will bury you”… and then decades later, it is happening - he meant it, he set things in motion to make it happen, nobody bothered to try to fight back, and, here we are). I think these thoughts are straight-forward from Einstein’s theory that time & space are far more connected than people previously conceived. Ofc we do not “know”, but is fun to conjecture nonetheless:-).
But then I read something from CS Lewis that entirely changed my thinking on that subject forever (one of his deep philosophy essays, I do not now recall which one). Yes, we may be pawns on a chessboard, but who is to say that WE are not ALSO the players!? If life is a video game, WE could be the characters, but “WE” could ALSO be coming down into our avatars from above. Truth tends to be stranger than fiction, and we truly don’t know what’s what, so any explanation could be the One. It could be just as likely that we are all “one”, part of Gai and each having a dream of our own lives as if we are separated.
And moreover… damn I hit the character limit. Well, for now I will continue to a part 2, but I need to stop doing that at some point:-P.
If you are interested, there is a book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett - who is a halfway decent author, e.g. of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
That does sound right up my alley I’ll write it down. However my reading ability lately is not great. If I read 2 books in a year, that was a good year hahah. I already have a pile of books on my desk that has been there for about a year now and once in a while a book gets added on top but none get removed from the bottom 😭
Ngl, but the Catholic Church does do some good stuff
Absolutely! Not only the Catholic Church, many religions do a ton of good stuff. It’s sad that these days it is difficult to see that part of it. I have family members who would not be where they are today if it wasn’t for Religion. I don’t even know what their religion is called but it’s not one of the main ones around here. It’s a very small church. They’ve never talked about it, they’ve never tried to get anyone else in the family involved and I respect that so much. All it did for them is put them on a much better path than the one they were on. They went from violent alcoholics to basically loving saints and there is nothing fake or forced about it, if you know what I mean. I still feel
I used to be very angry at the Catholic Church for a long time myself, though fortunately I healed
I can relate to that a lot. I still feel guilty about how I used to be around religion. Particularly with my mom. She used to believe and for some reason I couldn’t accept that. I would often talk shit about religion and her beliefs, try to convince her it was all just bullshit. Now I just ask myself why the fuck would I want to take that away from someone? Especially someone like my mom who basically just used religion as a way to calm her mind about the afterlife. Worst part, the most painful part, is that one of the reasons she probably believed so strongly was because it was a way for her to believe that she might be able to see my brother who died before I was born.
I also quit something - a teaching position
Ouch… I’m really sorry you’ve had to leave a teaching position. That is a tragedy, but don’t bother second guessing your decision. Whatever you did was the right thing to do. You can still teach even though you aren’t in a teaching position and I have a feeling you weren’t in it for the fame and the fortune that comes with the official title of “Teacher”.
And yeah, maybe your town will die off then. Perhaps even… I doubt you will take this the wrong way so I will go ahead and say it: perhaps it should?
Bahah none taken at all. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to take offense when I basically said the same thing about your country! It just is what it is sometimes. Maybe if we all understood that, we would take better care of what we have but no. Too many people take what we have for granted.
Try to have empathy for Trump …
Agreed. There are no monkeys named Trump on my back at this point. In a way I don’t really “care” anymore. I’d rather concentrate on the things that are happening rather than the people who we view as the cause of those things because it’s never really just one person. Trump wouldn’t have been able to do much if there wasn’t a growing mass of people who somehow connected to the things he was saying. To put the blame on one person would be ignoring the true root of the issues. Do I believe he deserve every punishment he gets? Yes, 100%. What he does not deserve is my time and energy. I’d rather spend it on people who might end up voting for someone like him.
…from the GREATEST PERSON ALIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW, Jon Stewart…
Hahah! Yaaaass! I wanted to watch the whole thing raw before I watched Jon Stewart on it though but I will probably end up just watching that instead.
Determinism: I also believe that. I cannot prove it though, so I don’t hold to it too hard.
Ahhhh yes. This is the part that really sent my brain into a death spiral 😂 It still does. It is just such a “fun” thing to think about. There is so much to think about when you know nothing. I see it as any other kind of belief. Since you can’t prove it, it should only enter the equation when nothing else can help you make a decision. When there is no right or wrong, or all options are appear to be either right or wrong, to me that is when beliefs are useful. Then again, that is kind of why we’re at this point in time right now. Ironic. Some beliefs are just more dangerous than others I guess, or maybe it’s just the incompatibility between certain beliefs that is dangerous.
And yes, since we can’t know whether we have free-will or not, we must treat it as if we did because our brain tells us we do but we still need to remember that our brain lies all the time. Well, maybe not as much lie as it omits a lot of information.
he meant it, he set things in motion to make it happen, nobody bothered to try to fight back, and, here we are)
I like that thought. Inertia isn’t only applicable to the physical world.
I have to apologize, I am having a hard time grasping your thoughts on space and time. If you want you can try to re-word that for me as I wouldn’t mind having a clearer picture and toying with your ideas a bit.
Yes, we may be pawns on a chessboard, but who is to say that WE are not ALSO the players!? If life is a video game, WE could be the characters, but “WE” could ALSO be coming down into our avatars from above.
Oh god yeah. That is something that I have thought about a lot. I also like the idea that we are all just one consciousness experiencing itself from within, or just a bunch of thoughts trying to sort themselves out in some sort of giant cosmic brain. I dunno hahah, these ideas can go pretty far and get pretty crazy. It’s just so much fun to think about. I miss Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and their crazy psychedelic-fueled ideas.
----PART 2----
And moreover, who cares?
Exactly.
That said, I halfway agree in that I think people carry around so many strange things, that when you talk with someone you are only partway talking to them, and partway talking to all the stuff that they bring with them.
Oh it is very rare that you will get to truly talk to someone. I think you’re always interacting with a translation layer that sits between an interface and the actual mind.
I do believe there is a higher mind and that we all have it but that it can be buried and suffocated. It’s very difficult to stay open-minded these days as we are constantly bombarded with crap coming from all directions. I can’t blame anyone for closing that door after a while. I also think that you should never really be interacting with the same person twice. Healthy people grow and change constantly.
I have thought that before, but can never seem to hold onto it
I know exactly what you mean. It is extremely difficult to hold on to. It takes a conscious effort to do so but it is absolutely worthwhile. To me it offloads a ton of weight from my shoulders.
This is part 1, then space-time wonkiness in part 2:-).
Sheee’s bAAAAaaaaack 😱
She is absolutely the BEst biTCH!:-) (I really hope you take that as I meant it, in that I mean that you are awesome:-P)
Ngl, I think Darwin’s Dangerous Idea took me a year to read through. Except that’s got to be a lie - it surely took more:-P. And I never did finish the other one… - nor iirc did the person who unloaded gave it to me:-( Anyway I am glad that I read the former one at least, and have at least heard about the latter, b/c when I was young I was taught “young earth creationism” (as pretty much everyone in America is, despite how most people outside of the USA iirc pretty much never are), and that (first one) was perhaps the chief resource that helped me logic+reason my way out of that - not alone, but it helped. So it had personal significance to me to be worth that investment of time. I don’t know if either of those books would have that kind of punch in your case, but I did want to share so that you could make that determination on your own, knowing that they exist:-).
Your example of Religion is perfect: real or not, it has enormous benefits, as too does the placebo effect. Jesus Himself used it, even as He commanded to redirect it - e.g. towards taking care of widows and orphans, which implies everything up to and short of that as well, e.g. paying workers their wages. That said, it can also become horribly corrupt, as can anything that People touch - e.g. Science+Technology can lead to nuclear war, genocidal tools, even experimentation upon being beings; Education can be twisted to become “re-education” in a totalitarian regime (see e.g. Uighurs); Math can… well I am sure it can somehow be used poorly as well, maybe by making numbers go brrr i.e. chasing after “efficiency” i.e. profits at the expense of the human beings involved:-(.
But if it can be used poorly, then surely it could be used well too, like you mentioned, to turn someone’s life around by offering them a REASON to exist. We all need that. Fome some, atheism or agnosticism is enough, but not everyone - e.g. not me personally. That said, it can also be super great to break away from a poorly-used, poorly-run one, like an overbearing one that actively hurts people. Especially here - but really almost anywhere except the hardest of the hard sciences, like it happens in politics - there is a huge gulf between things like the real, actual, full Truth (which for religion nobody knows - e.g. the Christian Bible even explicitly says that it is impossible to know, like “now we see dimly, in part, as if a reflection from a dirty mirror…”), and then what we think is true, and then also distinct from both of those how people chasing after power use as their method to control others. e.g. when I am at my job, it is not Religion that is used to control me - all mention of personal beliefs is highly taboo - so there it is rather Authoritarianism that accomplishes that purpose for them. Relion is one tool of control over the masses, but it is not the only one, and it is not inherently either good or evil. (Arguably it is good when it says to e.g. “hold fast to what is true”, but that can be bad when what it thought to be true is incorrect, and the people are willing to e.g. behead someone over a disagreement)
Moreover, even full “Logic”, in the hands of a child - i.e. virtually everyone, especially those among us that choose to act that way, as in child-ish behaviors observed in adults - becomes mere “justification”, to serve their ends, rather than being an end unto itself. This is why I place a lot of value on “stories” to help us see that - Isaac Asimov, Pinocchio, Star Trek TOS’s Spock’s emotional quest to gain parental & societal validation through (ironically) expunging his emotions by achieving Kolinahr (his motivations for that are explained much deeper in the book than the movie), and the converse of that in TNG Data’s perfectly-logical quest to become more “human” by discarding logic when appropriate, e.g. to appreciate and be able to tell a joke.:-D So… even logic itself, becomes a mere tool to be used for some aim, in the hands of our monkey selves. Whether it “should” be this way or not is irrelevant, as it simply is.
So anyway, philosophy is so extremely central to these foundational aspects of our lives, and many can find their meaning in Religion, and in Logic, and I like that:-). It deepens us, which is good, but if used improperly, then just like a surgeon’s scalpal or again like any tool at all, it can harm us just as if not all the more readily, by virtue of touching our lives in such a vulnerable spot.
Speaking of, if I can make a suggestion: PLEASE only think about these matters if and when they are fun for you. I want to enjoy your company, not add to your burdens:-), like if any of this would stress you out.:-D
And further along those lines, I hope that you take heart in that all of our relationships with our mothers are this way, it seems to me. From when you were the tiniest little baby all the way forward until now - e.g. you would kick and scream and spit up onto her, not even b/c it was “her”, but then later especially, yeah, b/c it was specifically her. I am no child psychologist, but that is the “normal” state of affairs it seems. For all monkeys even. At the same time, I am glad that you grew out of it. Also fwiw, that seems unlikely to be the sole reason that anyone would “believe” something - surely it must have been a big one, but also if she grew up in it that would be another point towards it, the “sunk cost fallacy” you know, and so on. But everyone is different - e.g. for me I don’t even necessarily “want” to believe (or if I do then I am deceiving myself - which is also a distinct possibility!), but I have to chase down wherever my investigations lead me, and if that causes me to ditch it one day then I will. On the other hand, the latter viewpoint of life is rather unusual, so I cannot project that onto everyone, and yeah maybe she actually was holding onto that thought for her own sake, plus whatever other background reasons, in which case I am glad that she had it - false or no. We do need our security blankets - I used to think the more solid they are the better, but the more I see how society is crumbling around us (and the corresponding suicide rates), the more I question my belief in that. To be clear, I still believe that for ME, and I would hope that others would STRIVE for the same, but I must accept that the vast majority of people will not do so.
I am not really a “teacher” at all I think - it was kind of a career path that people just “expect” for others to follow, but my problem is that I only care about helping people who WANT to be helped, so I think I am more of a “helper” at heart. So now I am a software engineer where I get to do that. I have lost some autonomy, but that could be good as well. I never had any ability to truly help people who REFUSE to be helped, and it would have killed me to keep trying and fail. In that sense, NOBODY who has that kind of “teacher” mindset should have a job where they have to actually TEACH in today’s current capitalist societal framework. It self-selects otherwise.
What he [Trump] does not deserve is my time and energy.
YAAAASSSS QUEEN! Except… hrm, it will keep coming up, every few years and also rearing its ugly head. It is something that we cannot ignore, except for the sake of our mental health, we have to, even though we couldn’t if we tried. Doesn’t that just about sum it up!?!?
I also “feel like” I know what you mean there about predestination or whatever we are calling it - “fate”. It is one of the most dangerous mindsets b/c it robs people of their agency - but we really do seem to also have that!?!? (Maybe?) So it’s like there’s a Truth there somewhere, but darned if I know what it is, and whether True or not, how does it even help me either way? This is why I like CS Lewis: he also talked like that, having lived it first. Like, if we had not believed that first, and then late in life learned it, that might have been more helpful for us. Instead, we (all three of us) stumbled upon it earlier, and now do not know how it fits in with the rest of the framework. I liken it to a mage/sorcerer type who learned some kind of arcane branch of magic, so while their buddies are going around doing all the cool, useful stuff like fireball, we basically got nothing to show for it, except that we happen to know (what might be, MAYBE) a deeper Truth. It could end up being the most powerful magic of all, but what good does that do for us, practically speaking, on a daily basis?!
If you were asking more about the Russia connection, Fox News is what has damaged America, and Russia funded/started Fox News. There is a documentary about it on Netflix, which I haven’t watched, just piecing that together from other sources. But I am guessing that you rather meant the other thing:-).
But I will have to put the time/space thing in a separate part again due to space limitations.:-D
She is absolutely the BEst biTCH!:-) (I really hope you take that as I meant it, in that I mean that you are awesome:-P)
Bahah no worries, literally everybody calls me that. Ok I lied, my parents don’t, but everybody else does!
And further along those lines, I hope that you take heart in that all of our relationships with our mothers are this way, it seems to me.
Yeah you may be right about that. These days however I am working towards being friends with my mother instead of just being her child and that has been kind of a healing experience.
She really hasn’t grown up in a religious family but still, everybody else around was. People were living and breathing in religion. My grandfather hated organized religion though. He stopped going to church very early in his life and never made his children attend which is kind of crazy for someone who grew up in the early 1900s. He saw religious people as sinners looking to be forgiven on Sunday just to start a whole new week of sinning. Dude was an absolute bad ass but he suffered from chronic depression his whole life. I really wish I had the chance to discuss with him more.
I am not really a “teacher” at all I think
Aw, yeah, I understand what you mean. Jobs tend to suck the life and soul out of everything though. You can still be a teacher and not be in the teaching profession but the helper label still has a nice ring to it! I feel the same way though. I have a hard time throwing my energy at someone who can’t be bothered to bounce that energy back at me. It is so exhausting.
YAAAASSSS QUEEN! Except… hrm, it will keep coming up, every few years and also rearing its ugly head.
Oh I know, but there is a point of diminishing return for time and energy spent on things like that and it comes on real quick. Just gotta realize when that happens and stop.
It is one of the most dangerous mindsets b/c it robs people of their agency
Well, the way I see it, even if everything was predetermined, I still make all my decisions as if I do have agency because my brain is convinced that I do. The difference is that in the back of my head I’m not sure I really did have a choice so it’s not worth agonizing over too much. What is done is done. Regrets just serve to influence future decisions.
liken it to a mage/sorcerer type who learned some kind of arcane branch of magic, so while their buddies are going around doing all the cool, useful stuff like fireball, we basically got nothing to show for it, except that we happen to know (what might be, MAYBE) a deeper Truth.
Hahah I like that comparison. We will probably never know in our lifetimes either, and that’s ok. I have nothing impressive like fireballs to show but I know that people see something in me that I can’t put my finger on. It’s gonna sound like a weird brag but people fucking love me and I’ve never been able to figure out why. All my life I’ve never been able to go to any kind of gathering without having people just flock around me. I’ve always just kinda wanted to be left alone so at gatherings I would try to find a nice quiet corner and have maybe a couple close friends with me, but I would always end up being swarmed and overwhelmed. Maybe that’s my power, people magnet. I have no clue how I would use such a power but I feel I’m getting closer to figuring it out.
EDIT: I will be back for part two at a later time! I’m currently in the process of buying a house and becoming something that I hate, a landlady 🤢. I’m currently having a wild internal battle about this but no matter which way I look at it, I have to do it. Gonna get back to that for a bit but I will be back.
We all have our traumas. For instance my grandfather had a similar story - he would not entertain the notion of us having any relion besides Catholicism, though he himself had not attended church in decades. He saw too much how the sausage was made, and could not stomache it, though he still believed, ostensibly, except he did not, but again would not allow us to go our own way without comment. I realize that came from his pain, though have too much of my own to really be able to fully set foot into his shoes there. I realized from all that - and later from reading the irl backstory of CS Lewis, who walked away from his puritanical upbringing to become atheist - that a lot of people have a made-up “god”, and that quite frankly Jesus Himself not only “would be” but WAS fucking PISSED at that aspect of life. We all should be more atheistic - yes, this from the very words of Christ Himself!!! (hehe, my rather… “liberal” interpretation of them anyway:-P, e.g. “be ye either hot or cold, not just making up whatever the fuck you want and call it a day”)
I feel like there is a Truth to the universe - this is what makes e.g. planes fly in (or in Boeing’s case fall out of) the sky - and while we do not have to choose to live in Reality, preferring our fantasy dreamland adventures, it really is (probably) better to do so. So the real question is whether God exists or not, not whether we want him to. Ofc that proves a bit hard to answer, or to prove even if someone knew for certain. Like in The Matrix movie, if Neo himself introduced himself to you and you saw him fly, but did not record it on camera (or even if you did), how could you convey that? Similarly, how can smart people convey the complexities of mathematics, of physics, of philosophy, to people who literally cannot - as in do not have the capacity to uptake - understand even a fraction of wha t you speak of? How can people who KNOW convey that both the Left and the Right side of politics are both WRONG, having been bought out by corporate special interests (but that even so, one side is most definitely even more so in that regard lately…)? Ofc we cannot, and really, except the “hard sciences” one, how can we even be fully sure of what we DO happen to know? (and even there, physics is constantly over-turning old ideas - like the latest thought that there is no need for all that “dark matter” that the media has been throwing about for decades now, just poof, it’s all gone now!? ofc most things are merely supplanted by a higher-resolution version, like Newtonian is not gone just relegated to a subset of Einsteinian mathematical formulations of our understanding of the universe)
Another thing I use the Bible for btw is as a repository of the “wisdom of the ages”, as in even though I believe in a God, putting that aside and conjecturing at worst as if that were a false statement even, there is still some merit in its depictions of things. And I definitely looked through its verses regarding teaching… which convey that you just CAN’T force knowledge onto people, not b/c of stupidity but rather b/c of obstinancy. “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” I still would have offered them the benefits of my knowledge & experience regardless, except it was heartbroken to think that they were being saddled with generational levels of debt, for a degree that they probably would not even use, b/c they lacked the emotional maturity level to handle life beyond the (post-No Child Left Behind era) high school level.
Regrets: I actually have very few of those in my life, b/c I realize that the past me did not know what the current me does, so how could I have done any differently, and furthermore why bother thinking along the lines as if I somehow could? That said, like CS Lewis (this being the main reason why I like him, b/c I so very much “get” his struggles), I often arrive at the correct conclusion from the most bass-ackwards route, which highly ironically may thereby end up making it potentially the wrong thing, for me in my circumstances. So am I “ahead”, or am I “behind”? Yes! I have a feeling that you, having experienced more than one major “transition” in your own life, may understand exactly what I mean there!:-P (others may be born there already, while you had to struggle to get there, and vice versa) But no matter how painful, those struggles are also what define us and give us character so… tbh I probably would have skipped them, but I am also grateful, in a tiny way, that I am who I am now, and can appreciate so much that I otherwise would not have been able to - if that makes any sense whatsoever?
I would guess that people love you b/c you seem to have genuine empathy + depth both. That seems… rare these days. It should NOT be, and you would not think it, but given how often people take advantage, it does seem to be like a beautiful flower that gets mowed over quickly as if it were some weed that people feel the need to stamp out quickly:-(. Especially on the interwebz. If you want, you can use that power to make people feel better - as you already do, but I mean consciously! - but ofc I hope you also hold it in check, so that you manage to meet your own needs as well (which are ofc interconnected to helping others, so it truly is a balance there, not just all one or all the other way). I feel like it is good to be Masters of ourselves rather than the other way around. Which ironically… I accomplish by giving in to my desires? But like, making sure that I acknowledge ALL of those, not hyper-fixate on just one at any given moment.
Bring on the part 2 then! When you are ready. I know what you mean about ownership - I have nothing now but one day if I ever could, the thought of needing to do that worries me. As it probably should:-). 💫
Similarly, how can smart people convey the complexities of mathematics, of physics, of philosophy, to people who literally cannot - as in do not have the capacity to uptake - understand even a fraction of what you speak of?
Funny, I was thinking about something similar last night. I’m not a very mathematically inclined person but for some reason last night I was thinking about it and how people who are “mathematically inclined” must see the world in a completely different way than I do. Kind of like how your average gamer and a game programmer might see a video game world differently. You can try to explain to the gamer who knows nothing of the complexities behind game programming and how it is really just all numbers, but they might not be able to see the numbers that make up that beautiful world you’re playing in. This line of thinking can be applied to so many things. I sometimes feel like we may all be on the same planet but we all live in a completely different world.
Another thing I use the Bible for btw is as a repository of the “wisdom of the ages”
Yes, that is how I see it too. I don’t know if I had mentioned it in one of my previous replies, since I don’t even remember when that was, but I actually found my grandmothers old bible a couple days ago and decided to start reading it. I read the Satanic bible so I figured I might as well give God’s book a chance! I think it can definitely be a useful tool in that regard because things really haven’t changed all that much. Humans are still the same.
Regrets
I see it the same way you do. Were it possible, I might go back in time and tell my younger self to do some things differently, but I would effectively be killing my current self and I love this bitch. It wasn’t always the case but now I think I’m actually kinda cool, I can see value in myself and I wouldn’t want to be someone else. All roads lead to home, some are just longer than others but in the grand scheme of things I don’t believe there is such a thing as wasted time.
but given how often people take advantage
Yeah, that is one thing that had made me grow a bit cold in the past, as a coping mechanism. Fortunately over the years I have learned to deal with these things a lot better. I can’t avoid abusers but I can recognize them and limit their impact on me. When I say abusers I don’t necessarily mean bad people either, although there have been some. Some people just don’t realize just how much of their pain I soak up when they dump their trauma on me and some would basically only use me for that but I let it happen. I think it is just as much my fault as it is theirs, I simply overestimated what I could handle. I might’ve also been able to handle much more when I was younger but then as I grew older that shit started weighing really heavily on me.
I hope you also hold it in check, so that you manage to meet your own needs as well
That is something I have only recently realized I had to do, for the sake of all my loved ones I need to prioritize myself.
You may not be a fan of Kendrick Lamar but his song “Mirror” off his latest album (Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers) resonated with me SO strongly. I get the most intense “frissons” whenever I listen to it. The entire album is an absolute masterpiece, as is everything he does in my opinion. It all builds up to “Mirror”, it might not be as impactful if you haven’t listened to the whole album but it still is.
I accomplish by giving in to my desires?
Absolutely, you need to do what you need to do to build a strong foundation for yourself. Only when you have that can you support others.
Some people can think in 7 dimensions at once, or so they say. For those of us who struggle to even contemplate a hypercube, we may not even begin to realize how impressive that must be. Then again, that is only one form of IQ, and EQ is still entirely separate. Still, how could an eagle even begin to describe to a turtle what life is like? Not that an eagle is “better” and a turtle “worse”, but despite coinhabiting the same “world” as in physical space, they do experience that world according to SUCH different criteria that they essentially live in separate realities, like different dimensions of that “world”.
As you said. Similarly in the USA, a white person can call out to a police officer and have some expectation of receiving immediate help, whereas a black person might get the literal opposite of help if they tried the same action. Rich or beautiful people likewise receive differential treatment - the same location, the same experiences, but received against a backdrop of a different lifestyle. Getting fired, or divorced, may just be laughed off by those who would be “set free” by such, vs. someone for whom that is their last thread. It is “the same”… yet so very, Very, VERY different! The tortise and the eagle, or the hare.
The irony there is that mathematics is pretty much the one universal constant. English, or French, or other languages may vary in their interpretation, and even Logic itself becomes subsumed by mere Justification in human hands. Even programming languages differ - identical syntax may be interpreted differently by C, C++, Java, etc. - though it does come fairly close when you specify all of the code, the language, and the receiving device, which together deterministically implements the mathematical instructions via the flow of electrons in the physical world. Math made real - pattern becomes substance (or something else even cooler-sounding, I dunno:-P).
Speaking of I have not read a Satanic one - surely there must be more than one type? - but I would give it a chance if I ever came across it. There’s a lot to like there. Also a lot I do not like, but that is the same with literally everything. Not quite the same thing, but on a related note: most pagan religions “lost” the war against Christianity, which I feel like gives the latter some credence. Although… ofc it is not that Christianity “won”, so much as that they “lost” - a HUGE distinction. Perhaps Christianity will lose someday as well… or maybe Jesus is a space/reality alien and when the energy beings come to enslave the human race, those of us who follow it will have been more properly prepared to serve the new overlords? (after all, if Might makes Right, especially for a being - like the owner of The Matrix - who literally can MAKE a Universe, then they do get to call the shots, whether we like it or not) Yeah, that’s pretty out there, so I will bring us back to: who knows, really? Nobody, at least not perfectly, though we try to do the best we can, as far as we know at the time.
I do not believe in wasted time either… although just try telling that to a boss! Those with more authoritarian mindsets are not capable of accepting this aspect of the Universe, and I concede too that there must be a Balance. So wtf does that even mean - that it both is a waste of time, yet that waste was itself not a waste!? Yes. You get me. It is a contradiction, and within that paradox lies such beauty as to take our breaths away. Yin and Yang - not one or the other, but fucking both, always and never not that.
You also have a beautiful perspective on abusers: sometimes they do not mean it, sometimes they do but are not “evil”, sometimes they are but… so what? We still gotta roll how we want to, not just always react to however others want, or even not want, us to. We chase after our goals, and they do whatever little thing they want, and we need not even break our stride as we press onwards. This point was REALLY driven home for me HARD when Trump won the 2016 election. Conservatives just did not give two fucks about “him”, but they liked what he could do for them… it was quite strategic. Raw. Naked. Bleeding. Evil incarnate… and therefore beautiful for all of that? Like that movie Haunting of Hill House: a darkness that shines as bright as the stars themselves - and all the more deadly as a result of that. Jon Stewart tried to warn us, he foresaw that and said how “liberal media aims to be correct, but conservative media aims to be effective”. This is why I have lost faith in democracy: it depends on presuppositions, specifically that the voting citizenry are aiming to vote correctly, and that errors are distributed randomly; however it is vulnerable to an outside attack that cause all the errors to bend in a single direction: towards the will of the evil ones (whoever they may be - Putin, Bezos, Musk, and others who prefer to hide deeper in the shadows). Oh well. Like everything else: I will enjoy it while I can.
But anyway, you were speaking of smaller-scale abuses, like a turtle crying over something to another turtle, never realizing that e.g. taking a long time to speak could be agonizing to an eagle (or the analogy works far better in reverse:-D). Many people do not realize it. Many others do realize it but do not care:-(. Some even realize it, care, and enjoy it:-|!? But if you get overwhelmed, you cannot help anyone else, least of all yourself, so yeah, guard your heart, most definitely. Literall nobody else can do it for you (well, they can help though:-).
I want to share with you a phrase that I have always hated: “If you see yourself in others, whom can you harm?” Whoever invented that must have had two loving parents, and can just fuck right off as far as I am concerned for rubbing that in the faces of those of us who did not. Setting that aside, part-way, even if you gave zero thought to your own welfare and cared exclusively for others, you STILL need to take care of yourself, or you will not be able to do that! (for very long) YOU ARE A PEOPLE TOO!!! I really like how the Bible portrays that: “the measuring procedure that you use to levy judgement upon others is the identical process by which you will use to judge yourself”. People either suck, in which case you do, or they are worthwhile, in which case… say it with me… you are worthwhile too:-P. I have fought against this every hour of every day of my entire life, but it is True nonetheless. I HATE that thought… but I can’t fight physics, or in this case the more relevant part is that it is just how human psychology works. I do not know much, but this is one that I do feel certain about, and I hope sharing these thoughts help you too (and by extension, perhaps me as well?:-P).
I am glad that you are going through such a time of change, to be able to get frissons!:-) I have been closing off so much lately that it will take some time to open up again:-(. But that too… is not a waste of time (except it is, but even so - it is what must be:-). I almost wonder why he says “I’m sorry”, b/c it is the Right thing to do, though I get that he does feel guilt for it too, but still there is that nagging thought: is that a slight admission of doubt, that he is not entirely certain that it is the correct path? And like, he could have said “I need to choose Me”, but instead he chose the other wording… so I wonder, what does that mean? I am probably over-thinking it, and quite frankly the intricacies hardly matter, b/c the main thing is what it means to you. I am SOOO glad that it gives you peace - b/c yes gurl you NEED to get that!:-)
About me saying that I accomplish Mastery of my Mind, I wanted to be sure that I conveyed that I feel like I cannot win when it becomes a “struggle” - even at best if one side or the other were to totally conquer the opponent, then I overall would lose. So by “giving in to my desires”, I mean not fighting it, nor letting it win either, but striving to achieve that Yin/Yang balance of winning when and where most needs to happen at each given moment, the trick being to find what that is. Some things I have practiced enough to have a really good idea of precisely where that line is, while other things I severely struggle on a daily basis to even identify the factors involved. As I suspect we all do, at least those of us who allow ourselves to remain open to adventure rather than falling prey to stagnation.
Hehe, this music is good for other reasons too:-D.
Spot on! Jesus Himself hated the religious hypocrites (“Karens”) of His day, calling them vipers and white-washed tombs, full of rot and decay even if slapped with a fresh coat of paint on the outside. Some people hear that and say “naw, I think I, as a Bishop or Pope or whatever, know far better than Jesus what ‘Christianity’ should mean”, and then proceed to fondle little humans, but others think the latter is detestable and enormously gross:-(. Humans gonna human I guess, but it’s not all equally good or bad - some of it is INSANE, and inside of us all we know what’s what. Like if it happened to us or to someone we care about and we get mad, then we KNOW WTF is up. So those rich old white dudes (or equivalent thereof) are not even consistent with themselves, in that the walk does not match the talk, ergo it is false.
Ngl though, controlling the masses may have had a use, back in the day, before most people could read, by providing incentives for them to not kill and rape and steal and such. Even so, who can blame people then for being angry at finding out that their leaders don’t even belief the crap that they’re preaching? Which ironically doesn’t even mean that it is false, just that I am agreeing with you about the need to dissect the issue by separating the “belief system” from the “authoritarian religion” components. In any case, here in the USA the latter got hijacked and evangelical christians especially seem to almost equate “God = vote for guns & conservatism”. I almost just said conservatism there except that itself is too bland for many of them, who want to continue pushing to ever more far-right schemes. “God” for them is in-group selection.
Switching topics a bit, most of my friends online have been gay men. I am a cis het male btw, not that it matters but I am saying that I am friends with them not b/c of those shared aspects but more, I think, b/c they have empathy. People who have been through some shit end up having more “character” than those who do not. Entitled/spoiled people are the types to spit in your food, never dreaming of what else you have been through, and then they go and add to that burden. THEY would not want that done to THEM, yet they do it to you. On the other hand, people who are heavily bullied may end up broken and mean to others, so I am not saying that exposure to trauma causes empathy, but I am saying that it is a necessary if not sufficient component, it seems to me. So you have had that opportunity that they did not, and chose to do something with it. And that is indeed something worth being proud of!:-)
If you like the videos then I am glad that I sent the link to remind you of them. They are not light fare, but I did so enjoy pouring through them slowly, digesting each one in turn. It’s like a college course in the material!:-)
As for the media on the other side, well, let’s just say that Russia works in mysterious ways. Sometimes it is poisoning, but other times far more subtle. These days they are not even trying to be subtle anymore - Republican conventions are held in literal Moscow, as well as places such as Hungary. They are like minds, and Russia would be a fool not to partner with them, e.g. in that recent Tucker Carlson video interviewing Putin, if it would help speed the conversion of the USA from a foe to an ally. People do not spot it through b/c they are GOOD at what they do! Like, they poin ted out how Hillary Clinton was “corrupt” - b/c she WAS! The Supreme Court asked her to send all of her emails to them, and she told them “lolz no, Im gonna delete the ones that I do not want you to see first”. Nobody can say that the optics surrounding that are anything remotely close to good. In fact, I gotta be careful here or I will go full-on rant on you, but remember that Trump did not win that election so much as she lost it (likewise, he did not win the Republican nomination either, so much as Ted Cruz lost it, after JEB botched the job). Whoever leaked her emails did the real work in that election - but then it was her actual words that she actually said and her actual actions that doomed her. Trump was outright shocked to have won - he never planned on it, did not really want it even, and gave some very serious thoughts to turning it down even! And even when he took it, he still just wanted to do the TV show that he had planned previously, on top of the job of being president. He is like a child - it is the situation that put him there, not (so much) his own intentions. In fact, I even have a little empathy for him too - he didn’t want it, but he did try, despite the job being well beyond his capacity, and that’s actually the tiniest shadow of a little light there (1 out of 1000 but still… it is worth noting and giving him that much credit at least; along with the blame for you know, the actual genocide of Americans by e.g. telling them that the virus was not airbone when he KNEW that it was).
Anyway, it is not “just” the people that are broken, I agree, it is the SYSTEM. Although the system is made up out of people so… that’s where I get lost. But that is also why I think what you are saying is good, about not abandoning people: b/c if enough people did THAT, then the system would not be the way it is today. Somewhere in there I do think that the carrot needs to be set down and the stick picked up, and I acknowledge that I have never figured out that the line that should distinguish between them, but I think that when you KNOW that the carrot is the thing to be done and you do it ANYWAY despite the cost, that is integrity. Which some few authoritarians that I have met personally I feel like also have, in that they turn to the stick too readily and without understanding it, but most - e.g. those who showed up at the capitol - do not, b/c how can you “protect” the Constitution if you haven’t even so much as read it? A “coup” to overturn something is NOT the same thing as “saving” it, dummies!!!:-(
Which is why I have to admit that I have lost the faith: with ~80% of Americans being somewhere in the middle between the extreme left and right sides, and with good-hearted and honest people with some amount of integrity on both sides, yes and some child-like mindsets too, this isn’t something that most of us even seem to want to fight about? However, our media sells fear and extremism, and our politicians too, and with all these parasites sucking up our attention, how then is someone supposed to rise up and actually GOVERN? As ironically Biden has been doing, or at least trying to, though Congress and the Supreme Court seem more responsible for a goodly fraction of the issues that most average Americans are experiencing right now (not Gaza, but that’s a whole other thing, and frankly that doesn’t directly affect most “average” Americans either). I hope something will restore my faith, but I am not optimistic about that:-(. Therefore I believe that I am living in a dying country, but I do whatever I can to help others in my vicinity and abroad nonetheless, not b/c I think I will necessarily accomplish anything truly great there, but simply b/c it is who I am and how I want to be. We all need to live out our authentic lives, being our true selves:-).
Oh yeah I 100% agree with that. Religion was basically a proto-government. It’s funny, reminds me of when I was in high school. I was part of the student newspaper and at some point I had written an article about religion and how it is basically an antiquated form of government and how it has no real purpose anymore. Edgy I know. The next Monday in school I heard about how the town priest had read the article during Sunday mass. Apparently he was NOT happy about it. I was pretty proud of that one, not gonna lie 😂.
Yeah I think so too, but it can also easily go both ways, especially when you can’t manage to get out of said shit. (Nvm I see now that I should read a bit further before starting to type bahah)
I do believe however that the ones who’ve inflicted the most pain on others as a result of their own pain have the potential to be the ones who try their hardest to make up for their mistakes, which is why I try hard to not discount anyone. I might be wearing rose-colored glasses but I have to keep them on.
Yeah the right associating with leaders such as Putin and Orbán is fucked up on so many levels. They definitely are good at what they do. That’s one of the reasons I dislike how people on both sides treat each other like the other side is dumb. All sides have brilliant people and ignorant followers. And OF COURSE Hillary was corrupt, nobody who gets that far in politics has clean hands. They’re all corrupted in some way or another but not necessarily equally. Centrist cunts fuck off.
One of my best friends, brilliant guy, doctor of philosophy. A couple of years ago he decided he wanted to get into politics so he started small. He decided to run for city council here and won. It didn’t even take a year for him to absolutely hate the game. He said he could not sleep anymore, couldn’t handle how corrupted even stupid little city council members could be. He said there was no way for him to stay there without getting his own hands dirty and he wanted no part of it. Within a year he quit, and left the town to go teach halfway across the world at the University of Liverpool where he still is now. He couldn’t stand seeing these people anymore. It made sense then why our little town is dying. Even the tiniest amount of power is immense to tiny people. I’d like to see the day where we can offload a lot of these duties to some kind of AI, but that’s a whole other can of worms that we are not ready to open.
Trump is someone I have a very hard time having any empathy for, but yeah, I also have a teeny tiny bit, because he really is nothing but a child. However I don’t have any hope for him to ever turn around and do something good other than for his own selfish reasons. He is too old to grow up now.
Oh and on the subject of the Carlson-Putin interview. You wouldn’t happen to have a link for a re-upload? I still haven’t watched it because I refuse to even give it a single official view but I need to see it.
It is. We are all products of our environment. I don’t think we actually have much control over anything, not even ourselves. That’s definitely one of my wacky beliefs. I’ve never been able to shake off the idea that we live in a deterministic universe so it is hard for me to stay mad at a person or a group of people when I don’t even believe they had any real control over their action. It would be like getting mad at the messenger. We still need to get mad and fight, but not the people. We need to fight ideas with better ideas. We need to love the people because they are us and we are them. Without them there is no us and vice versa. A world with no opposition is a world that would go sideways in no time.
In-fighting between humans has been a thing since forever and look where we are now. We are wayyyyy better off in most aspects than we were not that long ago. It’s easy to forget that when we’re forced to take a step backwards but we as a species will come back from this, we always have. At least, assuming we manage to heal our planet but unfortunately we can’t do that if we don’t somehow heal ourselves first.
Yeahhh… I don’t even know what to say about Jan 6th. That is such a messed up thing. I think that a lot of people who showed up at the Capitol didn’t have bad intentions, they were misled. Although I’m sure there were plenty involved that absolutely had bad intentions. Most of them problably weren’t there in person.
That’s pretty much it. Most people don’t want to fight but the news, the politicians, corporations, whatever, they’ve all figured out that pitting us against each other was very profitable. Not only do we have parasites at home, we have parasites on the outside as well trying to creep in and profit as well. At this point it feels like we can’t trust anything or anyone, it’s no surprise that there is a rise in conspiracy brains.
But you kinda are hahah, when have you ever seen something that is not dying in some way or another? All nations will eventually disappear or change into something completely unrecognizable. Either something new and better is born out of the seemingly rotting carcass that is the American empire, or something terrible to you will take it’s place and that same cycle will repeat. It’s terrifying to think that we could lose our way of life, I tend to talk like I’m not scared but really I’m terrified. It’s the unknown part of it that is really scary.
Those who aspire for greatness often end up accomplishing nothing. You’re doing the right thing. It’s impossible for one person to change the big picture but you can absolutely change what is immediately around you and that is a very powerful thing. That is where we need to put our energy. I feel like the internet has done us a great disservice in that area. We are not ready to be so connected yet. We’ve lost the will to fight locally because we are way too overwhelmed with things that are happening where we are absolutely powerless to help. Take care of your close ones so that they can take of theirs. The rest will work itself out. This is no time for apathy.
(Are we going for the longest comment thread in Lemmy history or what?)
(There is a character limit for comments - or at least there was for Kbin.social and I assume for Lemmy as well? - so at the very least we are constrained in the length of each segment:-)
If you are interested, there is a book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett - who is a halfway decent author, e.g. of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which is a DEEEEEEP look into evolution - called “Breaking the Spell”, where he delves into the mechanics of studying religion with the same tools that you would study anything else. The latter is really boring so that book of his I normally do not so much recommend reading in-depth, but in your case perhaps you would, b/c in it he says things vaguely similar to what you are saying. Chiefly, that tribalism was adaptive to the evolution of mankind, and while nationalism helped lift us up beyond that, the next step was due to religion, which allowed us to cross national boundaries. Like, “HEY there fellow Pastafarian brutha/sistah - [Joey from Friend’s voice] how you doin?”
So I would call it like a “meta-government”, due to how it sits on top of existing governmental structures. Like in a lot of European countries - e.g. Spain - people that I have talked to that grew up there were angry b/c they paid one set of taxes to their government, and another set of taxes to the Catholic Church all the way in Rome, which like Americans they were subjected to “taxation without representation”, and worse yet they simply had no choice in the matter at all - they did not “choose” that religion, but merely by being born there that choice was made for them.
Ngl, but the Catholic Church does do some good stuff - and whenever it e.g. feeds the hungry, visits the sick and constrained in prison, whenever it does as the Bible says and “takes care of widows and orphans”, THAT is awesome and I support THOSE efforts 100%. Ofc when they lie and steal and cheat and murder and rape then THOSE efforts I am 100% against. I used to be very angry at the Catholic Church for a long time myself, though fortunately I healed, and now I see that the people inside of it do what they do not even just in spite of their religion, but sometimes because of it, though we are imperfect humans, and some are fairly deadly. It is just that with any political structure, or religious, or anything at all involving humans (and also chimpanzees, not only our closest living relative but also one of the only other species on earth that takes active delight in murder!), a close watch must be kept on it to ensure that it does not go astray.
And yeah, I keep hearing stories of people who step up to be that kind of old-school “statemen” rather than a “career politician”, who cannot stand it and must leave. The literal DEATH THREATS offered to those people, by the most extremist among us, coupled ofc with the actual murders (like the Boeing whistleblower), have made me realize that the concept of “Illuminati” is absolutely real - maybe not as an actual irl society with a special ring and what-not, but obviously power corrupts, and obviously those who have it will concentrate the highest amount of resources to themselves - that’s just
humanmonkey nature.I also quit something - a teaching position, not politics - and I have a great deal of sympathy with what he went through, it is not easy to just walk away, but ofc it would have been far worse if he had stayed and compromised himself. Everybody just said “try to do the best you can, and help those who you can”… implying to ignore everyone else, just take the money from the parents and run, never mind that one person physically cannot do the task justice, oh and then double the number of students on top of that, b/c why the fuck not, the computer will do all the “real work” anyway, right? :-| I would rather Epstein myself than heap such heavy burdens upon people though, saddling them with large debts while not helping them get ahead in life, and worse making them think they know something, by altering the externally-reviewed scores so that the school (I don’t want to say which one) could avoid losing its accreditation, which it had already been warned about previously and was in danger of it happening again. You REALLY cannot help people, when the entire system is stacked against you to prevent that. Or perhaps I am naive and I should have stayed in, to be “one of the good ones”, except I just am not that kind of person. It would have killed me, inside. So yeah, I GET IT. Somewhat, or at least think I do:-).
And yeah, maybe your town will die off then. Perhaps even… I doubt you will take this the wrong way so I will go ahead and say it: perhaps it should? Survival of the fittest and all, and that applies to towns just as well as species, and even the United States of America: if we do not “fit” into the existing world structure, then we might go down, at Putin’s behest but also by our own stinking bloody hands, b/c we are too stupid to realize that the whispers he sent to us (e.g. “the vaccine is harmful”) were not real nor even “our own”.
AI will not be ready in time for us - maybe some future generation, but not us. Nor would we really want it to - shows such as Wall-E (and I have read similar stories for that identical concept written decades prior to that) have convinced me that when life gets comfortable enough, people will simply give up and allow “mommy”(/“daddy”) to take care of them. Which is, to a large degree, the very thing that has put America into this mess we are in now? Laziness, more than any other singular factor.
Try to have empathy for Trump: fuck we all know that he does not deserve it, but it is not for him, it is for you. I don’t care one bit about him, but I don’t want you to have that monkey on your back, as the saying goes. He is a scared, whiney, piss baby who puts dumps into his diapers and then has trouble walking about. He acts that way out of fear, and b/c he knows no other way. In MANY ways, him being put in charge was not his fault, but rather those of people who are far more crafty (and have espionage capabilities) than he. He is a victim too - he is not just a symptom, mind you, being also a cause, but among the many things that he is, a victim is one of them. You or I possibly could have ended up there as well. Except, and this is the part I am learning more recently, we NEVER would - maybe if our entire backstory had been different, but as we are now and looking forward, we NEVER would have allowed that. There truly is a RIGHT and a WRONG, and Trump is all kinds of the latter. He is barely more than a monkey, while we have moved upwards by the power of Mind, and short of like dementia or some such, I cannot imagine anyone who has done that could ever turn back down. I used to shy away from that thought, b/c it seems not humble (in the midwestern USA that is YUGE to never appear anything other than humble:-P). But now I realize what true humility is: finding the Truth, whatever it is, and paying homage to that. Which makes him, and more importantly the system that put him there, my enemy. And even so, I still have empathy for the fucker… but I would still consign him to jail.
Likewise, I refused to watch the Tucker Carlson video too:-). But if you don’t want to watch the whole thing - like me:-) - here is one with just the highlights and commentary from the GREATEST PERSON ALIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW, Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2h3KnWAWY. It is The Daily Show, which I believe should not be HBO, so I hope you can see it.
Determinism: I also believe that. I cannot prove it though, so I don’t hold to it too hard. Also, it doesn’t really matter, to me, b/c even if things were fore-ordained, we don’t know what those things are, so we must treat each new event as totally not that way, yes? :-P It’s just an abstract idea in my head, consistent with there being 2 time dimensions (if I am remembering that correctly), or anyway if there is just the one, then it may be something along the lines of an exapanding wave of matter as it moves outwards from the Big Bang at constant velocity. If that were true, then time travel should be impossible, b/c once the wave passes, past times literally do not exist anymore, nor do future ones yet. An alternate formulation is that both past and present DO exist, and if we had the technology then we could travel along it, always “forward” but bucking the universal constant outwards pressure and instead returning to a “past” time/space continuum. Also, an outside observer could “see” our future. Then again, a “God” (like The Matrix computer), could foresee the future in other ways, not with foresight but simply with raw power, just like the Russian leader Gorbachev said “we will bury you”… and then decades later, it is happening - he meant it, he set things in motion to make it happen, nobody bothered to try to fight back, and, here we are). I think these thoughts are straight-forward from Einstein’s theory that time & space are far more connected than people previously conceived. Ofc we do not “know”, but is fun to conjecture nonetheless:-).
But then I read something from CS Lewis that entirely changed my thinking on that subject forever (one of his deep philosophy essays, I do not now recall which one). Yes, we may be pawns on a chessboard, but who is to say that WE are not ALSO the players!? If life is a video game, WE could be the characters, but “WE” could ALSO be coming down into our avatars from above. Truth tends to be stranger than fiction, and we truly don’t know what’s what, so any explanation could be the One. It could be just as likely that we are all “one”, part of Gai and each having a dream of our own lives as if we are separated.
And moreover… damn I hit the character limit. Well, for now I will continue to a part 2, but I need to stop doing that at some point:-P.
Sheee’s bAAAAaaaaack 😱
That does sound right up my alley I’ll write it down. However my reading ability lately is not great. If I read 2 books in a year, that was a good year hahah. I already have a pile of books on my desk that has been there for about a year now and once in a while a book gets added on top but none get removed from the bottom 😭
I can relate to that a lot. I still feel guilty about how I used to be around religion. Particularly with my mom. She used to believe and for some reason I couldn’t accept that. I would often talk shit about religion and her beliefs, try to convince her it was all just bullshit. Now I just ask myself why the fuck would I want to take that away from someone? Especially someone like my mom who basically just used religion as a way to calm her mind about the afterlife. Worst part, the most painful part, is that one of the reasons she probably believed so strongly was because it was a way for her to believe that she might be able to see my brother who died before I was born.
Ouch… I’m really sorry you’ve had to leave a teaching position. That is a tragedy, but don’t bother second guessing your decision. Whatever you did was the right thing to do. You can still teach even though you aren’t in a teaching position and I have a feeling you weren’t in it for the fame and the fortune that comes with the official title of “Teacher”.
Bahah none taken at all. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to take offense when I basically said the same thing about your country! It just is what it is sometimes. Maybe if we all understood that, we would take better care of what we have but no. Too many people take what we have for granted.
Agreed. There are no monkeys named Trump on my back at this point. In a way I don’t really “care” anymore. I’d rather concentrate on the things that are happening rather than the people who we view as the cause of those things because it’s never really just one person. Trump wouldn’t have been able to do much if there wasn’t a growing mass of people who somehow connected to the things he was saying. To put the blame on one person would be ignoring the true root of the issues. Do I believe he deserve every punishment he gets? Yes, 100%. What he does not deserve is my time and energy. I’d rather spend it on people who might end up voting for someone like him.
Hahah! Yaaaass! I wanted to watch the whole thing raw before I watched Jon Stewart on it though but I will probably end up just watching that instead.
Ahhhh yes. This is the part that really sent my brain into a death spiral 😂 It still does. It is just such a “fun” thing to think about. There is so much to think about when you know nothing. I see it as any other kind of belief. Since you can’t prove it, it should only enter the equation when nothing else can help you make a decision. When there is no right or wrong, or all options are appear to be either right or wrong, to me that is when beliefs are useful. Then again, that is kind of why we’re at this point in time right now. Ironic. Some beliefs are just more dangerous than others I guess, or maybe it’s just the incompatibility between certain beliefs that is dangerous.
And yes, since we can’t know whether we have free-will or not, we must treat it as if we did because our brain tells us we do but we still need to remember that our brain lies all the time. Well, maybe not as much lie as it omits a lot of information.
I like that thought. Inertia isn’t only applicable to the physical world.
I have to apologize, I am having a hard time grasping your thoughts on space and time. If you want you can try to re-word that for me as I wouldn’t mind having a clearer picture and toying with your ideas a bit.
Oh god yeah. That is something that I have thought about a lot. I also like the idea that we are all just one consciousness experiencing itself from within, or just a bunch of thoughts trying to sort themselves out in some sort of giant cosmic brain. I dunno hahah, these ideas can go pretty far and get pretty crazy. It’s just so much fun to think about. I miss Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and their crazy psychedelic-fueled ideas.
----PART 2----
Exactly.
Oh it is very rare that you will get to truly talk to someone. I think you’re always interacting with a translation layer that sits between an interface and the actual mind.
I do believe there is a higher mind and that we all have it but that it can be buried and suffocated. It’s very difficult to stay open-minded these days as we are constantly bombarded with crap coming from all directions. I can’t blame anyone for closing that door after a while. I also think that you should never really be interacting with the same person twice. Healthy people grow and change constantly.
I know exactly what you mean. It is extremely difficult to hold on to. It takes a conscious effort to do so but it is absolutely worthwhile. To me it offloads a ton of weight from my shoulders.
This is part 1, then space-time wonkiness in part 2:-).
She is absolutely the BEst biTCH!:-) (I really hope you take that as I meant it, in that I mean that you are awesome:-P)
Ngl, I think Darwin’s Dangerous Idea took me a year to read through. Except that’s got to be a lie - it surely took more:-P. And I never did finish the other one… - nor iirc did the person who
unloadedgave it to me:-( Anyway I am glad that I read the former one at least, and have at least heard about the latter, b/c when I was young I was taught “young earth creationism” (as pretty much everyone in America is, despite how most people outside of the USA iirc pretty much never are), and that (first one) was perhaps the chief resource that helped me logic+reason my way out of that - not alone, but it helped. So it had personal significance to me to be worth that investment of time. I don’t know if either of those books would have that kind of punch in your case, but I did want to share so that you could make that determination on your own, knowing that they exist:-).Your example of Religion is perfect: real or not, it has enormous benefits, as too does the placebo effect. Jesus Himself used it, even as He commanded to redirect it - e.g. towards taking care of widows and orphans, which implies everything up to and short of that as well, e.g. paying workers their wages. That said, it can also become horribly corrupt, as can anything that People touch - e.g. Science+Technology can lead to nuclear war, genocidal tools, even experimentation upon being beings; Education can be twisted to become “re-education” in a totalitarian regime (see e.g. Uighurs); Math can… well I am sure it can somehow be used poorly as well, maybe by making numbers go brrr i.e. chasing after “efficiency” i.e. profits at the expense of the human beings involved:-(.
But if it can be used poorly, then surely it could be used well too, like you mentioned, to turn someone’s life around by offering them a REASON to exist. We all need that. Fome some, atheism or agnosticism is enough, but not everyone - e.g. not me personally. That said, it can also be super great to break away from a poorly-used, poorly-run one, like an overbearing one that actively hurts people. Especially here - but really almost anywhere except the hardest of the hard sciences, like it happens in politics - there is a huge gulf between things like the real, actual, full Truth (which for religion nobody knows - e.g. the Christian Bible even explicitly says that it is impossible to know, like “now we see dimly, in part, as if a reflection from a dirty mirror…”), and then what we think is true, and then also distinct from both of those how people chasing after power use as their method to control others. e.g. when I am at my job, it is not Religion that is used to control me - all mention of personal beliefs is highly taboo - so there it is rather Authoritarianism that accomplishes that purpose for them. Relion is one tool of control over the masses, but it is not the only one, and it is not inherently either good or evil. (Arguably it is good when it says to e.g. “hold fast to what is true”, but that can be bad when what it thought to be true is incorrect, and the people are willing to e.g. behead someone over a disagreement)
Moreover, even full “Logic”, in the hands of a child - i.e. virtually everyone, especially those among us that choose to act that way, as in child-ish behaviors observed in adults - becomes mere “justification”, to serve their ends, rather than being an end unto itself. This is why I place a lot of value on “stories” to help us see that - Isaac Asimov, Pinocchio, Star Trek TOS’s Spock’s emotional quest to gain parental & societal validation through (ironically) expunging his emotions by achieving Kolinahr (his motivations for that are explained much deeper in the book than the movie), and the converse of that in TNG Data’s perfectly-logical quest to become more “human” by discarding logic when appropriate, e.g. to appreciate and be able to tell a joke.:-D So… even logic itself, becomes a mere tool to be used for some aim, in the hands of our monkey selves. Whether it “should” be this way or not is irrelevant, as it simply is.
So anyway, philosophy is so extremely central to these foundational aspects of our lives, and many can find their meaning in Religion, and in Logic, and I like that:-). It deepens us, which is good, but if used improperly, then just like a surgeon’s scalpal or again like any tool at all, it can harm us just as if not all the more readily, by virtue of touching our lives in such a vulnerable spot.
Speaking of, if I can make a suggestion: PLEASE only think about these matters if and when they are fun for you. I want to enjoy your company, not add to your burdens:-), like if any of this would stress you out.:-D
And further along those lines, I hope that you take heart in that all of our relationships with our mothers are this way, it seems to me. From when you were the tiniest little baby all the way forward until now - e.g. you would kick and scream and spit up onto her, not even b/c it was “her”, but then later especially, yeah, b/c it was specifically her. I am no child psychologist, but that is the “normal” state of affairs it seems. For all monkeys even. At the same time, I am glad that you grew out of it. Also fwiw, that seems unlikely to be the sole reason that anyone would “believe” something - surely it must have been a big one, but also if she grew up in it that would be another point towards it, the “sunk cost fallacy” you know, and so on. But everyone is different - e.g. for me I don’t even necessarily “want” to believe (or if I do then I am deceiving myself - which is also a distinct possibility!), but I have to chase down wherever my investigations lead me, and if that causes me to ditch it one day then I will. On the other hand, the latter viewpoint of life is rather unusual, so I cannot project that onto everyone, and yeah maybe she actually was holding onto that thought for her own sake, plus whatever other background reasons, in which case I am glad that she had it - false or no. We do need our security blankets - I used to think the more solid they are the better, but the more I see how society is crumbling around us (and the corresponding suicide rates), the more I question my belief in that. To be clear, I still believe that for ME, and I would hope that others would STRIVE for the same, but I must accept that the vast majority of people will not do so.
I am not really a “teacher” at all I think - it was kind of a career path that people just “expect” for others to follow, but my problem is that I only care about helping people who WANT to be helped, so I think I am more of a “helper” at heart. So now I am a software engineer where I get to do that. I have lost some autonomy, but that could be good as well. I never had any ability to truly help people who REFUSE to be helped, and it would have killed me to keep trying and fail. In that sense, NOBODY who has that kind of “teacher” mindset should have a job where they have to actually TEACH in today’s current capitalist societal framework. It self-selects otherwise.
YAAAASSSS QUEEN! Except… hrm, it will keep coming up, every few years and also rearing its ugly head. It is something that we cannot ignore, except for the sake of our mental health, we have to, even though we couldn’t if we tried. Doesn’t that just about sum it up!?!?
I also “feel like” I know what you mean there about predestination or whatever we are calling it - “fate”. It is one of the most dangerous mindsets b/c it robs people of their agency - but we really do seem to also have that!?!? (Maybe?) So it’s like there’s a Truth there somewhere, but darned if I know what it is, and whether True or not, how does it even help me either way? This is why I like CS Lewis: he also talked like that, having lived it first. Like, if we had not believed that first, and then late in life learned it, that might have been more helpful for us. Instead, we (all three of us) stumbled upon it earlier, and now do not know how it fits in with the rest of the framework. I liken it to a mage/sorcerer type who learned some kind of arcane branch of magic, so while their buddies are going around doing all the cool, useful stuff like fireball, we basically got nothing to show for it, except that we happen to know (what might be, MAYBE) a deeper Truth. It could end up being the most powerful magic of all, but what good does that do for us, practically speaking, on a daily basis?!
If you were asking more about the Russia connection, Fox News is what has damaged America, and Russia funded/started Fox News. There is a documentary about it on Netflix, which I haven’t watched, just piecing that together from other sources. But I am guessing that you rather meant the other thing:-).
But I will have to put the time/space thing in a separate part again due to space limitations.:-D
Bahah no worries, literally everybody calls me that. Ok I lied, my parents don’t, but everybody else does!
Yeah you may be right about that. These days however I am working towards being friends with my mother instead of just being her child and that has been kind of a healing experience.
She really hasn’t grown up in a religious family but still, everybody else around was. People were living and breathing in religion. My grandfather hated organized religion though. He stopped going to church very early in his life and never made his children attend which is kind of crazy for someone who grew up in the early 1900s. He saw religious people as sinners looking to be forgiven on Sunday just to start a whole new week of sinning. Dude was an absolute bad ass but he suffered from chronic depression his whole life. I really wish I had the chance to discuss with him more.
Aw, yeah, I understand what you mean. Jobs tend to suck the life and soul out of everything though. You can still be a teacher and not be in the teaching profession but the helper label still has a nice ring to it! I feel the same way though. I have a hard time throwing my energy at someone who can’t be bothered to bounce that energy back at me. It is so exhausting.
Oh I know, but there is a point of diminishing return for time and energy spent on things like that and it comes on real quick. Just gotta realize when that happens and stop.
Hahah I like that comparison. We will probably never know in our lifetimes either, and that’s ok. I have nothing impressive like fireballs to show but I know that people see something in me that I can’t put my finger on. It’s gonna sound like a weird brag but people fucking love me and I’ve never been able to figure out why. All my life I’ve never been able to go to any kind of gathering without having people just flock around me. I’ve always just kinda wanted to be left alone so at gatherings I would try to find a nice quiet corner and have maybe a couple close friends with me, but I would always end up being swarmed and overwhelmed. Maybe that’s my power, people magnet. I have no clue how I would use such a power but I feel I’m getting closer to figuring it out.
EDIT: I will be back for part two at a later time! I’m currently in the process of buying a house and becoming something that I hate, a landlady 🤢. I’m currently having a wild internal battle about this but no matter which way I look at it, I have to do it. Gonna get back to that for a bit but I will be back.
We all have our traumas. For instance my grandfather had a similar story - he would not entertain the notion of us having any relion besides Catholicism, though he himself had not attended church in decades. He saw too much how the sausage was made, and could not stomache it, though he still believed, ostensibly, except he did not, but again would not allow us to go our own way without comment. I realize that came from his pain, though have too much of my own to really be able to fully set foot into his shoes there. I realized from all that - and later from reading the irl backstory of CS Lewis, who walked away from his puritanical upbringing to become atheist - that a lot of people have a made-up “god”, and that quite frankly Jesus Himself not only “would be” but WAS fucking PISSED at that aspect of life. We all should be more atheistic - yes, this from the very words of Christ Himself!!! (hehe, my rather… “liberal” interpretation of them anyway:-P, e.g. “be ye either hot or cold, not just making up whatever the fuck you want and call it a day”)
I feel like there is a Truth to the universe - this is what makes e.g. planes fly in (or in Boeing’s case fall out of) the sky - and while we do not have to choose to live in Reality, preferring our fantasy dreamland adventures, it really is (probably) better to do so. So the real question is whether God exists or not, not whether we want him to. Ofc that proves a bit hard to answer, or to prove even if someone knew for certain. Like in The Matrix movie, if Neo himself introduced himself to you and you saw him fly, but did not record it on camera (or even if you did), how could you convey that? Similarly, how can smart people convey the complexities of mathematics, of physics, of philosophy, to people who literally cannot - as in do not have the capacity to uptake - understand even a fraction of wha t you speak of? How can people who KNOW convey that both the Left and the Right side of politics are both WRONG, having been bought out by corporate special interests (but that even so, one side is most definitely even more so in that regard lately…)? Ofc we cannot, and really, except the “hard sciences” one, how can we even be fully sure of what we DO happen to know? (and even there, physics is constantly over-turning old ideas - like the latest thought that there is no need for all that “dark matter” that the media has been throwing about for decades now, just poof, it’s all gone now!? ofc most things are merely supplanted by a higher-resolution version, like Newtonian is not gone just relegated to a subset of Einsteinian mathematical formulations of our understanding of the universe)
Another thing I use the Bible for btw is as a repository of the “wisdom of the ages”, as in even though I believe in a God, putting that aside and conjecturing at worst as if that were a false statement even, there is still some merit in its depictions of things. And I definitely looked through its verses regarding teaching… which convey that you just CAN’T force knowledge onto people, not b/c of stupidity but rather b/c of obstinancy. “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” I still would have offered them the benefits of my knowledge & experience regardless, except it was heartbroken to think that they were being saddled with generational levels of debt, for a degree that they probably would not even use, b/c they lacked the emotional maturity level to handle life beyond the (post-No Child Left Behind era) high school level.
Regrets: I actually have very few of those in my life, b/c I realize that the past me did not know what the current me does, so how could I have done any differently, and furthermore why bother thinking along the lines as if I somehow could? That said, like CS Lewis (this being the main reason why I like him, b/c I so very much “get” his struggles), I often arrive at the correct conclusion from the most bass-ackwards route, which highly ironically may thereby end up making it potentially the wrong thing, for me in my circumstances. So am I “ahead”, or am I “behind”? Yes! I have a feeling that you, having experienced more than one major “transition” in your own life, may understand exactly what I mean there!:-P (others may be born there already, while you had to struggle to get there, and vice versa) But no matter how painful, those struggles are also what define us and give us character so… tbh I probably would have skipped them, but I am also grateful, in a tiny way, that I am who I am now, and can appreciate so much that I otherwise would not have been able to - if that makes any sense whatsoever?
I would guess that people love you b/c you seem to have genuine empathy + depth both. That seems… rare these days. It should NOT be, and you would not think it, but given how often people take advantage, it does seem to be like a beautiful flower that gets mowed over quickly as if it were some weed that people feel the need to stamp out quickly:-(. Especially on the interwebz. If you want, you can use that power to make people feel better - as you already do, but I mean consciously! - but ofc I hope you also hold it in check, so that you manage to meet your own needs as well (which are ofc interconnected to helping others, so it truly is a balance there, not just all one or all the other way). I feel like it is good to be Masters of ourselves rather than the other way around. Which ironically… I accomplish by giving in to my desires? But like, making sure that I acknowledge ALL of those, not hyper-fixate on just one at any given moment.
Bring on the part 2 then! When you are ready. I know what you mean about ownership - I have nothing now but one day if I ever could, the thought of needing to do that worries me. As it probably should:-). 💫
Funny, I was thinking about something similar last night. I’m not a very mathematically inclined person but for some reason last night I was thinking about it and how people who are “mathematically inclined” must see the world in a completely different way than I do. Kind of like how your average gamer and a game programmer might see a video game world differently. You can try to explain to the gamer who knows nothing of the complexities behind game programming and how it is really just all numbers, but they might not be able to see the numbers that make up that beautiful world you’re playing in. This line of thinking can be applied to so many things. I sometimes feel like we may all be on the same planet but we all live in a completely different world.
Yes, that is how I see it too. I don’t know if I had mentioned it in one of my previous replies, since I don’t even remember when that was, but I actually found my grandmothers old bible a couple days ago and decided to start reading it. I read the Satanic bible so I figured I might as well give God’s book a chance! I think it can definitely be a useful tool in that regard because things really haven’t changed all that much. Humans are still the same.
I see it the same way you do. Were it possible, I might go back in time and tell my younger self to do some things differently, but I would effectively be killing my current self and I love this bitch. It wasn’t always the case but now I think I’m actually kinda cool, I can see value in myself and I wouldn’t want to be someone else. All roads lead to home, some are just longer than others but in the grand scheme of things I don’t believe there is such a thing as wasted time.
Yeah, that is one thing that had made me grow a bit cold in the past, as a coping mechanism. Fortunately over the years I have learned to deal with these things a lot better. I can’t avoid abusers but I can recognize them and limit their impact on me. When I say abusers I don’t necessarily mean bad people either, although there have been some. Some people just don’t realize just how much of their pain I soak up when they dump their trauma on me and some would basically only use me for that but I let it happen. I think it is just as much my fault as it is theirs, I simply overestimated what I could handle. I might’ve also been able to handle much more when I was younger but then as I grew older that shit started weighing really heavily on me.
That is something I have only recently realized I had to do, for the sake of all my loved ones I need to prioritize myself.
You may not be a fan of Kendrick Lamar but his song “Mirror” off his latest album (Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers) resonated with me SO strongly. I get the most intense “frissons” whenever I listen to it. The entire album is an absolute masterpiece, as is everything he does in my opinion. It all builds up to “Mirror”, it might not be as impactful if you haven’t listened to the whole album but it still is.
Absolutely, you need to do what you need to do to build a strong foundation for yourself. Only when you have that can you support others.
Some people can think in 7 dimensions at once, or so they say. For those of us who struggle to even contemplate a hypercube, we may not even begin to realize how impressive that must be. Then again, that is only one form of IQ, and EQ is still entirely separate. Still, how could an eagle even begin to describe to a turtle what life is like? Not that an eagle is “better” and a turtle “worse”, but despite coinhabiting the same “world” as in physical space, they do experience that world according to SUCH different criteria that they essentially live in separate realities, like different dimensions of that “world”.
As you said. Similarly in the USA, a white person can call out to a police officer and have some expectation of receiving immediate help, whereas a black person might get the literal opposite of help if they tried the same action. Rich or beautiful people likewise receive differential treatment - the same location, the same experiences, but received against a backdrop of a different lifestyle. Getting fired, or divorced, may just be laughed off by those who would be “set free” by such, vs. someone for whom that is their last thread. It is “the same”… yet so very, Very, VERY different! The tortise and the eagle, or the hare.
The irony there is that mathematics is pretty much the one universal constant. English, or French, or other languages may vary in their interpretation, and even Logic itself becomes subsumed by mere Justification in human hands. Even programming languages differ - identical syntax may be interpreted differently by C, C++, Java, etc. - though it does come fairly close when you specify all of the code, the language, and the receiving device, which together deterministically implements the mathematical instructions via the flow of electrons in the physical world. Math made real - pattern becomes substance (or something else even cooler-sounding, I dunno:-P).
Speaking of I have not read a Satanic one - surely there must be more than one type? - but I would give it a chance if I ever came across it. There’s a lot to like there. Also a lot I do not like, but that is the same with literally everything. Not quite the same thing, but on a related note: most pagan religions “lost” the war against Christianity, which I feel like gives the latter some credence. Although… ofc it is not that Christianity “won”, so much as that they “lost” - a HUGE distinction. Perhaps Christianity will lose someday as well… or maybe Jesus is a space/reality alien and when the energy beings come to enslave the human race, those of us who follow it will have been more properly prepared to serve the new overlords? (after all, if Might makes Right, especially for a being - like the owner of The Matrix - who literally can MAKE a Universe, then they do get to call the shots, whether we like it or not) Yeah, that’s pretty out there, so I will bring us back to: who knows, really? Nobody, at least not perfectly, though we try to do the best we can, as far as we know at the time.
I do not believe in wasted time either… although just try telling that to a boss! Those with more authoritarian mindsets are not capable of accepting this aspect of the Universe, and I concede too that there must be a Balance. So wtf does that even mean - that it both is a waste of time, yet that waste was itself not a waste!? Yes. You get me. It is a contradiction, and within that paradox lies such beauty as to take our breaths away. Yin and Yang - not one or the other, but fucking both, always and never not that.
You also have a beautiful perspective on abusers: sometimes they do not mean it, sometimes they do but are not “evil”, sometimes they are but… so what? We still gotta roll how we want to, not just always react to however others want, or even not want, us to. We chase after our goals, and they do whatever little thing they want, and we need not even break our stride as we press onwards. This point was REALLY driven home for me HARD when Trump won the 2016 election. Conservatives just did not give two fucks about “him”, but they liked what he could do for them… it was quite strategic. Raw. Naked. Bleeding. Evil incarnate… and therefore beautiful for all of that? Like that movie Haunting of Hill House: a darkness that shines as bright as the stars themselves - and all the more deadly as a result of that. Jon Stewart tried to warn us, he foresaw that and said how “liberal media aims to be correct, but conservative media aims to be effective”. This is why I have lost faith in democracy: it depends on presuppositions, specifically that the voting citizenry are aiming to vote correctly, and that errors are distributed randomly; however it is vulnerable to an outside attack that cause all the errors to bend in a single direction: towards the will of the evil ones (whoever they may be - Putin, Bezos, Musk, and others who prefer to hide deeper in the shadows). Oh well. Like everything else: I will enjoy it while I can.
But anyway, you were speaking of smaller-scale abuses, like a turtle crying over something to another turtle, never realizing that e.g. taking a long time to speak could be agonizing to an eagle (or the analogy works far better in reverse:-D). Many people do not realize it. Many others do realize it but do not care:-(. Some even realize it, care, and enjoy it:-|!? But if you get overwhelmed, you cannot help anyone else, least of all yourself, so yeah, guard your heart, most definitely. Literall nobody else can do it for you (well, they can help though:-).
I want to share with you a phrase that I have always hated: “If you see yourself in others, whom can you harm?” Whoever invented that must have had two loving parents, and can just fuck right off as far as I am concerned for rubbing that in the faces of those of us who did not. Setting that aside, part-way, even if you gave zero thought to your own welfare and cared exclusively for others, you STILL need to take care of yourself, or you will not be able to do that! (for very long) YOU ARE A PEOPLE TOO!!! I really like how the Bible portrays that: “the measuring procedure that you use to levy judgement upon others is the identical process by which you will use to judge yourself”. People either suck, in which case you do, or they are worthwhile, in which case… say it with me… you are worthwhile too:-P. I have fought against this every hour of every day of my entire life, but it is True nonetheless. I HATE that thought… but I can’t fight physics, or in this case the more relevant part is that it is just how human psychology works. I do not know much, but this is one that I do feel certain about, and I hope sharing these thoughts help you too (and by extension, perhaps me as well?:-P).
I am glad that you are going through such a time of change, to be able to get frissons!:-) I have been closing off so much lately that it will take some time to open up again:-(. But that too… is not a waste of time (except it is, but even so - it is what must be:-). I almost wonder why he says “I’m sorry”, b/c it is the Right thing to do, though I get that he does feel guilt for it too, but still there is that nagging thought: is that a slight admission of doubt, that he is not entirely certain that it is the correct path? And like, he could have said “I need to choose Me”, but instead he chose the other wording… so I wonder, what does that mean? I am probably over-thinking it, and quite frankly the intricacies hardly matter, b/c the main thing is what it means to you. I am SOOO glad that it gives you peace - b/c yes gurl you NEED to get that!:-)
About me saying that I accomplish Mastery of my Mind, I wanted to be sure that I conveyed that I feel like I cannot win when it becomes a “struggle” - even at best if one side or the other were to totally conquer the opponent, then I overall would lose. So by “giving in to my desires”, I mean not fighting it, nor letting it win either, but striving to achieve that Yin/Yang balance of winning when and where most needs to happen at each given moment, the trick being to find what that is. Some things I have practiced enough to have a really good idea of precisely where that line is, while other things I severely struggle on a daily basis to even identify the factors involved. As I suspect we all do, at least those of us who allow ourselves to remain open to adventure rather than falling prey to stagnation.
Hehe, this music is good for other reasons too:-D.