You can't even imagine freedom until you know the ways you are a slave.
The purpose of this post is to give a reader and myself the ability to quickly match a given social issue with our position on it.
Issues to my mind can be roughly sorted by duration or scale. For now I’m going to generate two lists then, topical and general.
Topical Issues:
Trump’s Immigration ban:
Trump Election Protests:
Trump Generally:
General Issues: (In no particular order as yet.)
This notion that emotions are controllable is shared social mythology, not science.
“Conscious emotion is in a way a red herring: the feeling and behavior prompts are surface responses the initial mechanism orchestrates … Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we make happen. We try to manipulate our emotions all the time but all we are doing is arranging the outside world so it triggers certain emotions, we cannot control our reactions directly. “~Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology, New York University.
We hide from it to avoid the hard problem of free will and the resulting problem with culture based on that myth.
These facts undermine virtually all of our excuses for harming others and lauding ourselves. From the work ethic to prison to democracy, to identity itself and even religion.
Sorry, you’re just a meat machine too and you live inside a great big lie. The sad fact is that OTHERS have more control over your emotions than you do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
You know… I’m reminded of the Chinese parable of hell, the one with the long chopsticks. Where in heaven they feed each other and in hell they all starve because they can’t feed themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons
Our emotions are literally a lot like that. So quit being mean to each other.
Specifically you can start by supporting a basic income and making prison tolerable.
See also: http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/
I’d just like to point out that the shadiest of behaviors in the context of digital advertising are logically ethical if you grant the premise that charging for data copies ever is ethical.
(Charging per hour to create or manage data is entirely different as that is equivalent to charging to build furniture or the like. Also privacy rights are not intellectual property law.)
Essentially, logically, you are either a hardcore intellectual property law abolitionist like myself, or you are in favor of commoditizing and privatizing every single bit. If at any point you say with regard to profit seeking shenanigans “that’s going too far” you’ve become logically inconsistent, cherry picking, and hypocritical because “muh income” is a fallacious argument you’ve already accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy
Either every piece of data ever (including every individual elemental digit, letter, bit, concept, shade, or symbol) should be exposed (to protect profits) and someone’s property, or it should all be confidential (the opposite of open to perpetual “fraud” inspection) and free (as in speech and beer) where the concept of “owning” a piece of data is a contradiction in terms in the same way now that the idea of owning a letter is.
Logically, you really have to pick one. But of course humans are free to be illogical and what we have here as a result is in essence a religious conflict with an infinite range of denominations.
As an IPL abolitionist, I adblock on principal first, safety second, and mental health third.
That third one is really important and rarely if ever mentioned. Neurologically and psychologically you can’t actually disregard an ad. It gets filed and processed by your brain regardless of your conscious will. You must first see something to choose to disregard it, and by then for some brain processes it’s already too late.
(Don’t think of an elephant right now. See? Too late.)
The cumulative impact of these unwanted intrusions is harmful to cognition in my opinion. You start getting false impressions about ratios and popularity of certain concepts and new defaults form in your mind that aren’t actually majority positions. These false positions are crafted expressly to open you to further manipulation.
The preferable situation is to it impossible to own any abstraction. You may take credit for discovering or inventing it, but you don’t ever get to own it. That is, the selling of copies or access is legal but it’s also perfectly legal for the buyer to in turn sell copies as well. This would put everything in the public domain that isn’t private, like medical records and your personal stuff. Restricting the sharing that data would be handled case by case from other directions on other grounds, such as privacy violations not profit or quasi-property protections.
Any effort that literally can’t or won’t exist without the the current IPL system profit motive, wouldn’t or couldn’t, and that would be the price we pay for the utility gained on the other end of everyone being able to remix everything and all software and art and the like being collaborative.
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I didn’t bother replying, it’s clear that they’ll just repeat the tired line of “risk” which isn’t the point as explained at length several times above.
Bet you my balls they are still using all the GHS hardware we all paid for and making bitcoin off it. They just aren’t sharing because of course sharing (or standing by contracts) isn’t “profitable.”
Sadly the law only protects people who can afford lawyers. If you keep your offenses “civil” (as in civil suit grade) and you limit your targets to people who can’t afford lawyers, you can do whatever you want.
.@Jimmy_Dore & @StevenOh talk about @BarackObama and the truth about his legacy. https://t.co/3GOwFLLknq pic.twitter.com/aeZhn4MbMr
— The Young Turks (@TheYoungTurks) November 26, 2016
Thanksgiving is a difficult time for those of us who do have perspective or those of us who adhere with conviction to social rituals.
Both can apply of course and to those poor souls I wish proportional good luck.
The hardship of the latter is logistical and often emotional. The pressure of putting on or attending the event can be substantial to put it mildly. Many people feel quite forced, and some literally are if they are under 18 or are otherwise beholden.
This pressure (ironically thankfully) doesn’t apply to me. My true family is quite small. My extended family for one reason or another lives entirely separate lives from mine. Likely this is a good thing as our extreme differences would only bring us pain were we forced to be together.
The second hardship however, perspective, is for better or worse one which most vexes me. I feel like it hits me harder than most. I could argue this as a fact by way of statistics. But justifying my use of oxygen is not the point of this writing. I simply wish to share some of my perspective to publicly announce my gratitude and to maybe help those who share something of this issue.
Things across the planet are embarrassingly grim for a species that likes to call itself “advanced.” (Click image below for merely one ironic example.)
But that’s not the whole story. Perspective isn’t just awareness of atrocity. It’s also awareness of what isn’t news. As Theodore Parker said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Accordingly, if I were capable of making a truly complete list of all the people to whom I am grateful and why, it would consume the storage capacity of the world. A list invariably leaves off names and of course memory is always incomplete anyway. I truly love my few friends and family and I’m confident they know how I feel. (Indeed, poor souls, they graciously hear about it with great frequency.) For those whom I can’t honestly say I feel love there are always degrees of positive regard.
This includes you. More than most on Earth in fact, simply by virtue of reading my blog. I am thankful to every person who has spent even a single intentional second reading my blog.
Beyond that I care about every person ever. Even the monsters. I care about everything in the universe which is capable of feeling. And I am grateful even to things which cannot. Such as the chair I’m sitting on, or the rice in my bowl, or the bowl itself. I am grateful to the humans that provide me these things, and that list is extensively long to a person with perspective. Very possibly even so long that it encompasses all humanity.
Think about every human being whose actions, inaction, choices, and nature contributed to transforming sunlight and dirt (and of course I am grateful for the sunlight and dirt as well) into a delicious bite for me to enjoy and be grateful for.
Every person I angered who didn’t bash my head in with a rock, every person whose efforts made it safe to move the food from field to store, every researcher whose product kept me alive to this point, every tax payer who’s ok with a bit of their payment going toward keeping me and tens of millions of others from starving, and on and on. I’m grateful for all of you and I thank you on behalf of myself and all those who would but can’t for whatever reason.
I am grateful for every agent of pain and death reduction and joy and life magnification in existence. If you can look at your life and honestly say that you bring more joy and life than would have otherwise been here, you are a good person and have my personal approval and respect. If you do not and wish you did, then let me say you can possibly start soon and you still have my gratitude for your sincere desire to do so.
If you are an agent of pain and death however, you have my pity. I pity your victims and I pity you. The future must be terrifying for you simply because you have a shrinking place in it. Change is coming that will exponentially weaken your ability to do the harm you do. The cosmos lacks a sense of vengeance, so it’s possible that your pathology will be ultimately rewarded by life. But that only makes the choice of becoming an agent of life and joy all the more worthy of gratitude when it’s a choice. But you should hurry.
I don’t think it’ll be your choice for very much longer. I hope to see a future where causing unwanted death and pain is essentially impossible because we have constructed such a compassionate and accurate culture that the reasons for wanting to torture and end others just don’t exist any more.
And here we arrive at the real reason why I am so pandemically grateful. You are all on balance marching us towards a glorious future. A UBI is coming, the friendly AI is coming, the reactors are coming, the post-scarcity era is coming, and while you may not agree these things are good, I assure you, they are. And I thank you.
Why on god’s blue earth would I tell anyone to use cex when you stole 200$+ from me via your cloud mining scam?