The Fourth Turning Halftime Update

[pbrower2a]

(10-25-2018, 05:36 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Olaf Stapledon on Hitler:
https://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/be...ch2.html#8

German "National Socialism" is the culmination of the Fascist movement which began in Italy and has appeared in one form or another in every European country. I shall consider only the German form of Fascism, because, in it the true nature of Fascism is most clearly revealed.

National Socialism, or Nazism, seems to rest on a fantastic exaggeration of a fault which appears also in Russian Communism, but far less flagrantly, namely the disparagement of the individual. Another fault of Russian Communism it vehemently rejects, namely materialism; but the thing that it substitutes for materialism is something far worse, a false mysticism based on the false concept of race.

But the emotional source of Nazism is not simply bad. No great movement which gathers to itself the loyalty of millions and spurs them to extreme self-sacrifice is to be dismissed as sheer devilishness.

Eighty years later, Nazism seems literally demonic. If Bolshevism does not wallow in myth, fascism does in every one of its most violent and murderous forms (including Ku Kluxism, which shares much the same objects of hatred, if different myths). Maybe the fascism-lite  versions such as those of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in Austria, Salazar in Portugal, Pats in Estonia, Ulmanis in Latvia, Smetona in Lithuania, Pilsudski in Poland, Metaxas in Greece, and (in the better phases at the time) Horthy in Hungary were benign by contrast.

The emotional desire to extirpate whole peoples from the Earth or to allow them to survive only as slaves is itself evil, and sacrifices on behalf of such a desire is perverse.

Quote:Communists tell us that the whole Fascist movement, of which Nazism is the extreme expression, is simply a clever device by which " big business" seeks to rouse the masses against revolutionary Communism. In their view, Fascism is the last, most desperate effort of "capitalism in decline" to strengthen its waning power. No doubt big business did play an important part in launching Italian Fascism and the corresponding movements in France and Britain. No doubt it financed Hitler, and hoped to use him for its own ends. But the capitalists would not have succeeded as they did, nor would they have found themselves overmastered by the movement that they had supported, if there had not been a deep and wide- spread emotional need for the ideas and values of Fascism.

I have little question that the economic elites of any society would turn to fascism to establish the complete subjugation of the working classes and impose monopolized crony capitalism at the expense of even small-scale capitalists who would be squeezed into poverty and ruin. The United States was no exception in the 1930s and is not now. Fascists cleverly play disgruntled workers against the moderately-successful middle class (often identified as "Jews") on behalf of would-be monopolists and their lavishly-paid retainers known as executives. It is worth remembering that Weimar Germany did not have much of a middle class toward its end in part because the hyperinflation wiped out small savers and holders of insurance policies and pension funds. The German economy was itself extremely polarized between haves and have-nots due to cartels that precluded competition in business. What was much of the middle class was Jewish small-scale entrepreneurs who seemed wealthy because they had desirable wares in their front windows; never mind that the Jewish shop-owners either had those goods on consignment or were themselves heavily in debt to keep their businesses in existence.

The difference here and now in America is that our elites cannot achieve what they most fully want: an economy best described as a modern expression of feudal inequality.

Quote:In considering the causes of Nazism we have to distinguish between those influences which were at work throughout the whole Fascist movement and those which were peculiar to Germany.

Causes which were at work alike in Nazism and in other forms of Fascism, but which worked more violently in Germany because of Germany's suffering after the last war, were: revulsion against laissez- faire and a grossly individualistic social order and culture; revulsion against materialism as a theory about the world and the sources of human behaviour; revulsion against intellectualism; revulsion against the moral ideals of love and gentleness which had been so long preached and so little practised; vague revulsion against a whole civilization which had obviously gone rotten.

Halloween is coming, and it may be an unconventional opinion that the greatest horror movie ever made was Cabaret, which is often better remembered for high-quality music and the display of depraved behavior of those who patronized the cabaret that offered cynicism and sexual sleaze. But the elements of a horror movie are there: freakish characters, a creepy plot line, and bad things happening to good people. The only characters that I can like are the Jews, and we all know what will happen to them if they do not leave when the going is good. Although there are other stage variants that make different emphases, the emcee is a creepy character who shows delight (and a demonic character) at the end as straight-laced people sing "The Future Belongs to Me". The swastikas and Nazi salutes make the sexual sleaze and crass materialism look benign by contrast. The participants in the sleazy entertainment may have been creating resentments among the masses who have endured great hardships and frustrations and consider Hitler the solution to all their problems -- unemployment, economic insecurity, lack of meaning in life, nostalgia for the rural, and wounded national pride -- but they either leave when they can, become conformists in an inhuman order, or die.

The movie is styled much as a horror movie. What could be a greater horror than the rise of the most demonic figure of history destroying a shaky democracy?  

Quote:The Germans had suffered more from the rottenness of western civilisation than any other European people, and therefore their disgust with it was peculiarly violent. The economic collapse after the last war spread a profound distrust of the system of free buying and selling. It also roused a strong suspicion that high finance was based on superstitious veneration for merely man-made economic laws. It prepared men for a movement which would triumphantly violate all the recognized principles. The treatment which Germany suffered from the Allies after the military defeat turned the German people against the whole civilization which the Allies claimed to be leading. The post-war orgy of sensuality and every kind of self-indulgence disgusted the more earnest kind of German, and made him seek some kind of firm moral standards.

The German economy was excellent at producing fine wares; German culture was rich and creative in ways that it would never be again; German universities were excellent; German science and technology were enviable. What Germany was not good at during the Weimar Republic was in sharing the prosperity that only a few got to enjoy. Such fostered a strong, violent, and large Communist movement that wanted to establish a German version of the Soviet Union. Germany was a rich country whose people were poor because the aristocratic elites owned the land and a few plutocrats controlled the industry. 

Hitler was excellent at stirring resentments even if he had no good economic solutions for most people.

Quote:Two causes of Nazism were peculiar to Germany. One, no doubt, was the long-established and powerful German tradition of opposition to the civilization of Western Europe. Normally this impulse was kept in abeyance by the many great and truly civilized leaders of German culture; but the post-war situation enabled it to break out and set the tone of the new movement. This impulse to reject the established values of civilization took the form of a reversion to the old Teutonic impulse to glorify ruthless might instead of Christian loving-kindness, and to trust superstition, or "thinking with the blood", instead of Greek reasoning.

The other specially German cause of Nazism was the fact that this great people, with its recurrent dream of becoming the acknowledged "Herrenvolk" of the world, had suffered a decisive defeat in war. This disaster combined with the effects of economic collapse to produce a general social neurosis, a national inferiority complex with all the typical symptoms of arrogance and vindictiveness.

Hitler loved the most modern technology, especially for creating his war machine. He had no problem with appealing to the basest drives in people while sponsoring a mindless and cruel sort of heroism. 

Quote:Though these specifically German causes had a great effect in exaggerating the Fascist movement in Germany, it must never be forgotten that the main causes were at work in every country and had produced everywhere the symptoms of Fascism. Everywhere there was a deep sense that civilization had somehow gone bad and was stinking. Everywhere masses of men and women found themselves in abject poverty or desperate insecurity while a few flaunted their luxury. Everywhere the unemployed rotted in idleness. No one needed their service. No one cared for them. Masses of men in every European country were feeling that, since civilization did not want ,them, they did not want civilization. There was widespread disgust with licentious individualism and the ennervating doctrines of materialism. There was a longing for a new and bracing idea to save man from his directionless, self-indulgent way of living.

And as the old pattern of people getting industrial jobs and getting to enjoy an indulgent consumerism comes to an end, we find out anew what Karl Marx had to say of the proletariat: it has nothing to offer but its toil. Raw labor is losing its value everywhere, but the economic elites are even more indulgent than ever. Capitalism never offered anything other than material indulgence in return for subjection to ownership and management. Now that the material indulgence is no longer a perquisite of toil, many American shave nothing. Their old beliefs are shattered, and a crass demagogue offers contempt for people different from them, vague promises of national greatness abandoned in recent decades, and pretexts for violence against class enemies and people having the 'wrong' religion or ethnic origin -- or being a member of the educated middle class.

At least Hitler never excoriated Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven. Trump's supporters do.  

Quote:This was the social situation which bred the exasperated, neurotic condition favourable to Fascism and Nazism. The more positive motives which created it were broadly of two kinds, self-regarding and spiritual. Very powerful, no doubt, were motives of anxious self-regard and family responsibility in a crumbling and precarious society. Personal anxiety of this kind made men susceptible to any movement which condemned the existing order and promised security, and incidentally satisfied the craving for vengeance. But there was another kind of motive at work, connected with man's deep but often unwitting need to serve the spirit. To attribute any such motive to the Nazis may sound fantastic. And indeed it may well be that in the great mass of Nazis, both leaders and led, the hunger for the spirit was but a very minor factor. Certainly, crude self-interest, in the form of craving for security or craving for power and self-display, has been the main consideration with most of the Nazi leaders and many of their supporters. But I find it impossible to believe that this was all. The gravely wounded captive German airman who preferred to die rather than receive into his veins the blood of donors who were not German could not have been moved merely by self-regard. He believed his blood to be sacred, to be a vessel of the spirit. And he felt it his moral duty not to let it be contaminated. Similarly in the great mass of earnest young Germans who are ready to fling away their lives for the Nazi cause, who sometimes, it seems, actually long to do so, the ruling motive is obviously a sincere though hideously perverted loyalty to the spirit.

Nazi racism, like all racism, is superstitious, irrational, and pseudoscientific.  Today we have genetics, but it too can mix with superstition and pseudoscience. "Blood" as ancestry is now strictly an archaic metaphor. But racism thrives today because resentments make it a vehicle for salving the injured ego.  

Quote:This passion of loyalty to the spirit has certainly been tragically misguided. Its expressions have been very far from spiritual in the true sense. Revulsion from individualism sprang from a spiritual motive, the feeling for community; but the feeling expressed itself in the form of mere brutish self-surrender to the tribe, mere surrender of individuality, mere surrender of individual conscience and intelligence into the keeping of the mob-leader. The essence of community was utterly missed, namely that it is a relationship between clearly self-conscious and other-conscious individuals bound together in mutual respect and mutual responsibility. Further, the groping desire for the spirit was misled into a cult of the primitive. Because sophisticated values had gone bad on men's hands, primitive values acquired a fresh attraction.

What is spirit, anyway? This said, many people are obliged to leave their communities for economic survival. They will have to trade their paid-for Appalachian hovels that they are likely to lose for taxes and go to places where half their pre-tax income will go to rent to be paid to rapacious landlords (of which Donald Trump is himself an example) so that they can live where the well-paying jobs are. America today is the purest plutocracy in the world except for those countries in which the royal family owns the oil reserves that are the basis of the national economies or countries run by rapacious shysters and scammers. The capitalist or executive at his worse is no better than the feudal lord who demands that people suffer for his rapacious greed or die horribly. In medieval times death for rebellion from the demands of the economic elites could get one burned at the stake or subjected to the Iron Maiden. Here one has the prospect of slow starvation should the welfare system be abolished.

It is easy for people who still have early-modern or earlier ideas of propriety to see something wrong with abortion, homosexuality, contraception, interracial marriage, and erotica. Reproductive norms (a/k/a, sexuality) are much of the concern of people with primitive ideas, and many Americans have their minds in the 14th century and their bodies in the 21st. For some, sex is strictly for procreation and not for recreation. Guess who else was opposed to abortion, homosexuality, contraception, interracial marriage, and erotica. Nazis! "Interracial" sex could refer to sex between "Aryans" and "Jews", let alone blacks  and "Asiatics".  Sex is a very low drive intellectually, and it is easily exploited in gutter politics.

Quote:But though Nazism is a sorry perversion of the will for the spirit, we must avoid supposing that it is wholly bad and that it has nothing to teach us. It can at least teach us that the ideas and values which dominated the democracies during the period of advancing industrialism are not the final, inevitable and emotionally satisfying truth.

We are at the end of the era in which simply making more stuff will itself make us happier.  We have an environment to protect, and we  need Zero Population Growth just to keep life tolerable just to allow a comparatively few of us to live with middle-class norms. The alternative is a wrecked world of urban sprawl in a ravaged environment in which we devote more of our resources to avoiding the consequences of pollution. We will find the joys of life increasingly artificial and numbing. Life was easier when we had fewer people; the traffic jams were fewer, commutes were shorter, and real rents and taxes  were lower.

[WinterStorm]

(10-23-2018, 06:37 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Looks like Ragnarok already got to completing the walkthrough of WinterStorm's list. 

Going back to the digital revolution, which could be called "the Internet eats the world," I am halfway between WinterStorm's vision of a techno-utopia and Ragnarok's dark future of deep state control. Yes, surveillance and data collection and AI are pervasive, but I don't see it as a huge threat to human liberty, or as taking us far beyond our earlier twentieth century way of life.

We still drive cars to get everywhere, like we did 60 years ago, and put up with all the inefficiencies and risks because we like the freedom it gives us. We still need a job to pay the bills. We still depend mostly on the private sector for the benefits of life. We pay for TV and watch TV with different patterns, but "Netflix and chill" is still being a couch potato in front of the boob tube!

All true.  However, my vision of the future is only a utopia by today's standards.  It would be like trying to predict the 1950s from the vantage point of the late 1930s.  And predictions of the future, aside from the industrial utopian dreaming that was common, were very pessimistic.  It is my belief that society will turn utopian simply because that's simply what happened every other point in the cycle.  What this means is that we are likely to see a strong economic boom in the 2030s and 2040s (probably starting sometime in the 2020s) and lasting until the 2050s or 2060s.  We will live the digital utopia that is the dream of today.  However, like every High, there will be major problems.  The next Awakening will be the first fully digital one, and thus, it will raise issues pointed out by Ragnorok in his reply if these issues are not settled in this Crisis.  

Cyberpunk was invented in the 1970s and 1980s, and it described an advanced cyberpunk society deep in a 3T.  The 3T ended before we could see this full-blown flowering of a cyberpunk society.  We will, however, finally get to experience this type of cyberpunk in the 2070s (just wait until Cyberpunk 2077 comes out).  Before that, however, Cyberpunk will be expressed in somewhat different ways.  Today, we live in the age of Cyberpunk.  It is slightly different from the cyberpunk of a few decades ago because now we are well into the 4T.  Digital technology is used for propaganda, war, and for the general reconstruction of society today.  Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter are today all places where propaganda gets created and distributed.  The same technology is used for war.  Drones, robots, surveillance, and cyber-enhanced battle have become the new trends in war.  

During the High, cyberpunk will have a different expression, one that looks more like cyberprep or postcyberpunk.  It will be the digital utopia that has been advertised for some time now (just like the 1950s for the earlier industrial era).  But there will be issues that we are familiar with today, such as digital privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence, robots, intellectual property, cybersecurity, cyberwar, etc.  People will be substantially more affluent than today, and we might even get to end poverty.  Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google have likely consolidated their positions, and will likely mostly stay in place until the next Awakening.  So because Microsoft was not overthrown by Linux in this 4T (and that is looking increasingly unlikely), they will simply become (well, they actually are) a core part of the national infrastructure.  It will simply be a sci-fi type of paradise where rights abuses are swept under the rug, kinda like a future Minority Report that uses AI instead of psychics. Besides, the media today is full of stories of abuse by digital technologies.  Everyone remembers the story of a company robot harassing homeless people.  There are many stories of impoverished people being abused by algorithms, such as simple errors disqualifying applicants for public assistance on websites (a failure of egovernment, of technology planners, and conscience), buggy and glitchy software, algorithms that predict whether or not you are "a risk", etc. 

We still drive cars only because there has not yet been a replacement technology.  Electric cars are a replacement for gasoline powered cars.  And while they don't look different from gasoline cars on the outside, on the inside, the car is a fundamentally different technology.  Even gasoline powered cars are entirely different beasts today.  Automated cars are another replacement technology, which I believe will take off once the 1T gets rolling.  Flying cars is another one, even if only in taxi form.  We watch TV, but do a lot of other things too.  The younger you are today, the less TV you generally watch.  Your time is split among TV, gaming, and internet for entertainment.  While we do many of the same things, the difference is that our relationship to technology (which has remained largely fixed since the 1930s) has gone a fundamental and revolutionary shift.  We no longer have CRT.  Now, we have LED TVs.  We no longer have traditional light bulbs.  We now have LED bulbs.  We no longer drive mechanical cars.  We now drive computers with car parts attached as peripherals, to use the common narrative today.  All of this entails a very different economy.  These are digital technologies, which give us new capabilities that were impossible in the non-digital version of it.  LEDs, for instance, give people the ability to control it over a network, changing brightness and colors, and even using a computer program to automate the behavior of the light.  So while things seem the same, the way we are capable (or are required) to relate to it is entirely different.

[WinterStorm]

(10-22-2018, 07:00 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I agree with everything except for cashless society.  Too many problems there.  The first is privacy, next is it doesn't play nice with power outages. Finally, there are software fuckups that happen.  I blame the bank's use of contractors for this. That's oursourcing that happens. I experience schadenfreude every time any and all outsourced projects crash and burn like that.

The problems are easily resolvable. Generally, when products are developed, you can only pick two between speed, quality, and inexpensive. So many people ignore quality in favor of speed and cheapness. This can be remedied simply by have regulations prevent poor software design. As far as outages, that is a legit point. However, we have already been on this road for about a couple of decades. Again, I don't think cash will totally disappear. Rather, it will slowly decline either linearly or looking like some sort of long tail.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

1. I think only 10 year olds who are trustfund babies can afford those cars.
2. I don't think very many proles can afford those cars.
3. Home generators make lots of smog, so no thanks.
4. Flying cars?  Well, here in Oklahoma we have wild weather. Said cars would have to work with thunderstorms which have high winds and hail.  Would the cars still work after their apparati get hail dings? What happens if they get struck by lightning? Best of all are our howling blizzards. How would flying cars work in those? Blizzards cause the airports to cancel all of the flights. I have an idea for a prototype though.
First, we mandate that all private planes be self flying. It's best after all to use fat cats as our guinea pigs. After a sufficiently low death rate from plane crashes, then the software could then be migrated to cars. Next, only cars for fat cats would be outfitted. The reason for doing it this way is because only fat cats have enough money to afford prototypes and the private planes. There is absolutely no reason to spend money subsidizing test vehicles for proles who can't afford them. Private planes are just perfect because those make a perfect starting point since they're also already around. Just add software and apparatti and off ya go! I agree we can get to safe flying cars, though I'm sure we'll have some fat cats taking some dirt naps.
I say that's  a win win, IMHO.  

Tesla?  Oh yeah,  I sorta wonder how long folks will stuffing money into it.   Those financials look awful, man.

Even if Tesla ends up doing bad, the revolution has already occurred. Every major car manufacturer is slowly adding EVs to their lineup and the number of charging stations is increasing.

As for affordability, it will be much harder for a Crisis society to be able to afford it anyway. The average man in 1936 was a long way from being to afford a Levittown style house, but the economic explosion after the Crisis made it possible. Only the rich will afford it at first, but it will filter down to the masses in about a decade or two because most people drive cars that are less than 20 years old. Also, if you already have a car, then someone (Maybe it will be me. Who knows?) will start a service to add automation to existing cars. In 2025, these cars will be only for the Cadillac class. By the 2040s, it will have filtered down to the masses. As far as flying cars, totally agreed. Having humans pilot it will cause too many 9/11 style crashes.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

On Agile.  So when is it going to put secure programming and secure hardware in the process?  Given the number of security screw ups, it ain't part of the plan anywhere. Secure programming shouldn't be a nothought or afterthought like it is now.

Yup. It is my experience that you simply make it a compliance issue for software. Compliance always gets pushed to the top of the list as the most urgent issue whenever it is discovered that your software is not in compliance. All other development will be put on hold until the issue is resolved.

It's not like this stuff is really hard. The vast majority of incidents happen because of things as simple as leaving the front door unlocked. Don't use Password1234. Lock your screen when you are away from the terminal. Don't click on that weird looking link in that suspicious email. Don't store personal data (usernames, passwords, SSNs, etc.) in plain text files without encryption. Once you have the basics of cybersecurity covered, then it requires a lot more effort (such as the backing of a large and powerful organization) in order to conduct cyber attacks and cyber breaches.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Germany already does this.  Corporate America is too fucking cheap to have apprenticeships and the US government shovels way to much money on the defense offense budget.  There's also a problem with higher education. It's just another racket and the tuition is too damn high.  I bet nobody gets the nice $4.00/credit hour I had anymore.

Tuition's too damn high!






In some places the rent is too damn high also.  However, the rent's not too damn high in Oklahoma.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Pfffftttt.  Why do folks even use Outlook, Word, and excel when there's Openoffice?

Simply because it's the corporate standard and because there is already too much integration with Microsoft products anyway. A lot of organizations don't have the time, money, or personnel needed to make changes. So it gets put on the backlog, or discarded. It would probably require a political rather than economic change for OpenOffice to become standard.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62


I shall have nothing to do with Google because Google is an evil company that sends data to the deep state!  There's nothing that tastes as good as freshly churned butter.   The stuff at the supermarket is gorp.

There's no place like home.
127.0.0.1  google.com

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Smart homes are for sheeple , aka NPC's.



I suppose there those who don't have a hacker's outlook.
Smartspeakers.  eavesdrop on those. I bet the alphabet agencies do that as well. If there's one in the bedroom, PORN city.
I'd love to hack lightbulbs.   I'd make them work like Christmas lights by making them turn off and on a bunch of times.
Washing machine.  I'd like to keep it in the start cycle, add soap, and let it overflow.  Operation bubble bath, man.
Window blinds, up and down all around.
Water faucet.  Turn 'em on and run up a huge water bill for the victim.
IOT.  It's old news, but spam engines and DDOS  doers.

So , if hacked life won't be easier or more predictable.  Imagine coming home to the stuff mentioned above.

Roomba = cat chaser.
Smart mirrors = more PORN
Alexa/Cortana = hack in and order dildos and pocket pussies from Amazon.

This will become an issue for the next saeculum. However, I can simply do it all myself and avoid those concerns, and I suspect many will too. It will come to a point at which all IoT devices will be regulated. They will have to match some security standard for you be able to sell it in the marketplace because any cyber weakeness will by the end of this 4T and the next 1T will be seen as a national security issue, something that is already becoming a trend with the federal government. We still have many more years to go. Although I don't want to experience it, there is still a very high risk of a damaging cyberwar. If there is real cyberwar (which is likely to coincide with traditional war), then we will build a robust cybersecurity infrastructure that will allow most people to sleep at night. Too many people are still computing like it's the 1990s, with no thought to cybersecurity. By the 2030s, I suspect that Americans will have been scared into practicing good cybersecurity.

[Ragnarök_62]

(10-23-2018, 03:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 01:57 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-22-2018, 11:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We already live in a world society, since 1892. We only tried to hold back the inevitable tide in the 1920s, and now people who grew up in a white country are wondering what happened again to their white country. Immigration restriction laws were always racist. I documented that in a previous post. Again, as I keep reminding you, no, the immigration issue doesn't have to be partisan. That's why Bush and Obama agreed on a reasonable approach, and why a bipartisan group in the senate proposed a reasonable law and passed it. But the fanatical right-wing idiots in the Tea Party House blocked it. It proved to be the best issue for Trumpty Dumpty to run on. "They're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs, their bringing crime; they're rapists..." Bullshit.
More immigrants will not make us a shithole country. Sure, we need to cut down on population growth, in a humane way by increasing womens' rights and prosperity in all countries.

1. Legal immigration policy shouldn't be political. Likewise illegal immigration shouldn't be political.  Illegal immigration is bad because you get too many people and I think that immigration is a privilege, not a right.

2. So you have two stupid positions. Assigning bad stuff like drugs,criminality, etc. is not correct for legal immigration.  Likewise anyone who supports illegal immigration is also wrong. There are limits to the amount of resources available in the US. Immigration policy needs to take that into account. Also, illegals work under the table so that drains tax revenue. It also gives unfair advantage to employers who hire them. So with that, we need to have E-verify strictly enforced with strict fines for back taxes, tax evasion, and a huge fine for hiring illegal aliens to keep companies from doing that stuff.  I bet it was a fabulous issue for Trump because nobody has done squat about illegal immigration.  Folks are fed up with that nonsense. And... I don't care for race baiters who say any restrictions whatsoever on immigration is "dats razzists."

3. More people = more shit. Yeah we're already a shithole country, so more people will by default make us even moreso.

4. "Immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers."  Really? That's the exact position of Neoliberals!  Honestly,  I truly hate Neoliberals and want them all to burn in hell.  Maybe climate change will send a lot of their shit into the water to be homes to the fishes.

5. Women's rights and family planning. Yes, that's an excellent idea. That's one of few things I'd support foreign aid on.

1. "Too many people" is a worldwide question. I live on Planet Earth. The USA is an abstraction.

2. It is too hard for some deserving immigrants to come here. There needs to be liberal asylum availability, given the amount of tyranny in the world. True, it would be better if they stayed in their country and fought a civil war. But that's really asking them to get killed. Illegals shouldn't work under the table. They should be required to be paid minimum wage. They should be asked to pay a fine and show themselves to be good citizens. Not enough resources? I don't know what that means.

Obama was doing a lot on illegal immigration; he was Deporter in Chief and illegal immigration went way down. Trump did not use the issue because it was necessary; he used it only because he knew there are a lot of prejudiced, hateful people in the USA that he could rally behind him with false accusations, and who would vote for his hate-pandering. There was nothing to be "fed up with" at all, except to be fed up with Trump's race-baiting.

4. I didn't know neo-cons were those who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers. No, liberals say that, because it's the truth. Neo-cons start wars for no reason except to impose our economic needs and greeds upon other countries.

1. OK,  "borders=abstractions".  They may or may not be abstractions.  How about when a wolf pack sent marks, then is that an abstraction known by wolf packs. Humans don't know where human borders are and humans don't know any wolf pack borders. They are real when it comes down to the species in question.  Cats also do territories.
So , then "be known by the company you keep", then means (humans,wolves,cats) then territory [borders] is real enough to matter. So in the case at hand, that means there is a known procedure to control the population density in a bordered area that make it happen.


2. "The whole planet is running out of resources we don't need anymore. ..."   Yes, we agree with "whole planet is running out of resources."  Obviously too many peoples = fewer resources per capita.

And...  

"Not enough resources? I don't know what that means"  As for specifics, food and water for starters. Next is proper shelter, and no potty problems.  Next, you have the things make the US in general modern. So this is where the real difference lies.  OK, I'll start at 10,000,000 folks are allowed to come in. You can allocate that 10,000,000 amongst guest workers,refugees,and of course those already here. The thing to remember of course is to get to ZPG within 10 years. This is among things which can readily be done but ain't because assorted panderings here and there do happen.

3. It's the neo-liberals who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers.

"No, liberals say that, because it's the truth."  Are sure that all liberals think that way?  And... of course "immigration = better economy".  It depends on who you are and the statistics.   So does immigration increase the per capita GDP, does it affect how does this affect available resources? Neoliberals of course lap immigration up. This is simply the more people of any sort whatsoever, the more profits. Neoliberals are of course blind whether by profits or ignorant,, because unlimited growth on limited resources is a fail.

[Bill the Piper]

pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?

For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.

When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.

[Eric the Green]

(10-26-2018, 02:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?

For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.

When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.

I don't know where brower's post is that asks this, but this is a question for a philosophical thread of some sort. As I see it, spirit is synonymous with consciousness, which cannot be accounted for with mechanistic or physicalist theories, and is called the "hard problem" because physicalist scientists try to solve it in their terms, which cannot be done. As I see it too, it is an ethical or moral issue. Although it has been well pointed out to me by Dr. The Rani that physical things are valuable, when we respect living beings as spirits, including humans and all possible higher beings beyond humans as well, then we treat them better than if we consider them as physical objects without sentience. That of course does not extent to "transhumans" who have become machines.

The machine age and the industrial age (same thing, virtually) were built on the model of mechanical cause and effect physicalism. We have transformed the world into our own mechanistic model of reality. That has been useful to us, but it is idolatry to conceive the world in the image of our own machine model. Machines cannot substitute for conscious organic beings, and real progress is to extend our natural human potential through expanded consciousness. The endless progress of machines has its own momentum now, and its impact may not be positive unless subordinated to real life.

The consciousness revolution of the 2T, which reminded us of these facts about consciousness and machines quite clearly, has been put on the back burner in the 4T by younger generations who are overly enamoured with recent high tech progress, and who live in virtual realities. This trend has accelerated just in these 4T years since 2008 with the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile tech. It would be good to take stock of this trend at halftime.

[Eric the Green]

(10-25-2018, 08:49 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 03:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 01:57 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-22-2018, 11:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We already live in a world society, since 1892. We only tried to hold back the inevitable tide in the 1920s, and now people who grew up in a white country are wondering what happened again to their white country. Immigration restriction laws were always racist. I documented that in a previous post. Again, as I keep reminding you, no, the immigration issue doesn't have to be partisan. That's why Bush and Obama agreed on a reasonable approach, and why a bipartisan group in the senate proposed a reasonable law and passed it. But the fanatical right-wing idiots in the Tea Party House blocked it. It proved to be the best issue for Trumpty Dumpty to run on. "They're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs, their bringing crime; they're rapists..." Bullshit.
More immigrants will not make us a shithole country. Sure, we need to cut down on population growth, in a humane way by increasing womens' rights and prosperity in all countries.

1. Legal immigration policy shouldn't be political. Likewise illegal immigration shouldn't be political.  Illegal immigration is bad because you get too many people and I think that immigration is a privilege, not a right.

2. So you have two stupid positions. Assigning bad stuff like drugs,criminality, etc. is not correct for legal immigration.  Likewise anyone who supports illegal immigration is also wrong. There are limits to the amount of resources available in the US. Immigration policy needs to take that into account. Also, illegals work under the table so that drains tax revenue. It also gives unfair advantage to employers who hire them. So with that, we need to have E-verify strictly enforced with strict fines for back taxes, tax evasion, and a huge fine for hiring illegal aliens to keep companies from doing that stuff.  I bet it was a fabulous issue for Trump because nobody has done squat about illegal immigration.  Folks are fed up with that nonsense. And... I don't care for race baiters who say any restrictions whatsoever on immigration is "dats razzists."

3. More people = more shit. Yeah we're already a shithole country, so more people will by default make us even moreso.

4. "Immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers."  Really? That's the exact position of Neoliberals!  Honestly,  I truly hate Neoliberals and want them all to burn in hell.  Maybe climate change will send a lot of their shit into the water to be homes to the fishes.

5. Women's rights and family planning. Yes, that's an excellent idea. That's one of few things I'd support foreign aid on.

1. "Too many people" is a worldwide question. I live on Planet Earth. The USA is an abstraction.

2. It is too hard for some deserving immigrants to come here. There needs to be liberal asylum availability, given the amount of tyranny in the world. True, it would be better if they stayed in their country and fought a civil war. But that's really asking them to get killed. Illegals shouldn't work under the table. They should be required to be paid minimum wage. They should be asked to pay a fine and show themselves to be good citizens. Not enough resources? I don't know what that means.

Obama was doing a lot on illegal immigration; he was Deporter in Chief and illegal immigration went way down. Trump did not use the issue because it was necessary; he used it only because he knew there are a lot of prejudiced, hateful people in the USA that he could rally behind him with false accusations, and who would vote for his hate-pandering. There was nothing to be "fed up with" at all, except to be fed up with Trump's race-baiting.

4. I didn't know neo-cons were those who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers. No, liberals say that, because it's the truth. Neo-cons start wars for no reason except to impose our economic needs and greeds upon other countries.

1. OK,  "borders=abstractions".  They may or may not be abstractions.  How about when a wolf pack sent marks, then is that an abstraction known by wolf packs. Humans don't know where human borders are and humans don't know any wolf pack borders. They are real when it comes down to the species in question.  Cats also do territories.
So , then "be known by the company you keep", then means (humans,wolves,cats) then territory [borders] is real enough to matter. So in the case at hand, that means there is a known procedure to control the population density in a bordered area that make it happen.


2. "The whole planet is running out of resources we don't need anymore. ..."   Yes, we agree with "whole planet is running out of resources."  Obviously too many peoples = fewer resources per capita.

And...  

"Not enough resources? I don't know what that means"  As for specifics, food and water for starters. Next is proper shelter, and no potty problems.  Next, you have the things make the US in general modern. So this is where the real difference lies.  OK, I'll start at 10,000,000 folks are allowed to come in. You can allocate that 10,000,000 amongst guest workers,refugees,and of course those already here. The thing to remember of course is to get to ZPG within 10 years. This is among things which can readily be done but ain't because assorted panderings here and there do happen.

3. It's the neo-liberals who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers.

"No, liberals say that, because it's the truth."  Are sure that all liberals think that way?  And... of course "immigration = better economy".  It depends on who you are and the statistics.   So does immigration increase the per capita GDP, does it affect how does this affect available resources? Neoliberals of course lap immigration up. This is simply the more people of any sort whatsoever, the more profits. Neoliberals are of course blind whether by profits or ignorant,, because unlimited growth on limited resources is a fail.

It could be that you are looking at resources within a nationalist perspective. So, if we allow millions more immigrants into our country, they could use up more resources within the United States.

It is true that we need fair trade, and I don't like the idea of free trade that allows poorer nations to get rich while our own industry and economy are hollowed out because factories and jobs are exported for cheaper costs, whose products are then imported back into the USA and replace local business.

Nevertheless, a fair trade world economy is possible, and in that perspective, the question is not population growth through immigration into the USA that affects "resources," but world population that affects resources, since our resources now come from all over the planet. What I favor is availability of birth control, female emancipation, and economic growth through fairer distribution of wealth and power in all countries. Some kind of international policy is needed to promote this trend, which many nationalists oppose and accuse of being a conspiracy to impose world control.

As for neo-liberals, most of them are Republicans, and while they certainly support more population growth to create economic growth to gain and hog more profit for themselves, most of them today are deferring to Trumpism, whose leader has captured their party, and so are going along with anti-immigration schemes with little protest. Only a few like Jeff Flake are staying true to their neo-liberal philosophy in that regard. Most Democrats are only neo-liberals to an extent, that extent being the feeling that they must sometimes compromise and submit to the great power and false appeal of deceptive, immoral Republican/Reaganoid/Tea Party free-market neo-liberal ideology in our politics today.

[Ragnarök_62]

(10-25-2018, 12:55 PM)WinterStorm Wrote:

(10-22-2018, 07:00 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: I agree with everything except for cashless society.  Too many problems there.  The first is privacy, next is it doesn't play nice with power outages. Finally, there are software fuckups that happen.  I blame the bank's use of contractors for this. That's oursourcing that happens. I experience schadenfreude every time any and all outsourced projects crash and burn like that.

The problems are easily resolvable.  Generally, when products are developed, you can only pick two between speed, quality, and inexpensive.  So many people ignore quality in favor of speed and cheapness.  This can be remedied simply by have regulations prevent poor software design.  As far as outages, that is a legit point.  However, we have already been on this road for about a couple of decades.  Again, I don't think cash will totally disappear.  Rather, it will slowly decline either linearly or looking like some sort of long tail.

OK, "remedied simply by having regulations...".   Well, this is the real problem then. Why aren't there regulations now, given all of the headaches we've had already?  As for cash, I see it as never going away, and there may be fat tails which occur every now and again that preclude a linear relationship of cash availability and time passage. The problems are not easily resolvable because they still exist. The real problem is that those making public policy are the wrong people.  We have the wrong policies to address certain issues.

OK, Let me explain. The largest issue is climate change. If climate change is not addressed in a realistic manner at present. Therefore our current policy which is in force supports the global warming process. It can be no other way. CO2 emissions are still rising because of current public policy. So as far as electric cars, current public policy ensures that only fat cats will be afford them. This is because as long as fossil fuels are readily available, most folks will just go, meh, electric  cars ... along with whole lot of other climate change items. So, there is right now, no path from A to B when it comes to anything like technoutopia. Given current public policy, well at least in the US, it's fossil fuels all the way baby. I know |Europe has made some adjustments to their public policy to address climate change. So, I'll give you say Germany perhaps achieves full conversion of electric cars. In any even Germany will have a higher per capita ratio.  I think the real problem is due to assorted groups' agendas.  

If one agrees that there are groups getting in the way of the goal, [address climate change per specific parameters.  ] A specific parameter would be the amount of CO2 emitted per year.

The next thing to do is to find out which groups are your opponents. I use the word, "opponents", to make sure I'm clear in explaining ideas and to pack as much meaning/word as possible.


So, the opponent I'm going to concentrate on are Neoliberals. Essentially, Neoliberals are opponents because, duh, they oppose everything I support and vice versa.

Now, to think of how to answer of Lenin, "what's to be done".  

The best way to play an opponent for me is to play a modified game of no limit Texas hold'em. So, no, there shall be no Call of Duty from me here.  However, Call of Duty has 2 things that matter. Like all things military, you need strategy and tactics. Texas hold'em has these as well. So when dealing with Neoliberals, one strategy is to undermine them via asymmetric tactics. So, the first strategy is to enact a carbon tax. Some tactics are to pair the tax with a citizens' dividend.  That is to say, since a carbon tax is regressive, then rebating the tax on a per household basis make the carbon tax, not a tax, but a gimme with some amount of prepayment. Neoliberals can't no go and say "carbon taxes = moar government".  The carbon tax screws people because it's a tax. The best part and asymmetric part is it decreases some Neoliberal's power over the long term. This is one thing I have in mind. This is like Texas hold'em because, I know playing it, that how you play the current hand  plays a role in how you play future hands, because your opponents register that event as well. This is something simple to poker players and few others. You are supposed to pay close attention to your opponents' behavior to allow you to play better poker. That is why I chose the carbon tax as the first agenda item. The tax will also cost your opponents money/power from now on and that's how you win public policy poker.   Notice how that forces Neoliberals to play a losing hand. If they say it's a tax then I can say no it isn't. It's a modified version of universal basic income. Besides it's y'all who keep bitching about unpaid for entitlements.  The money folks get will be called "carbon dividend".  If Neoliberals can enjoy dividends, then so can everyone else.

The next thing to do to make you utopia come true is a VAT tax. Now, I'm going to pair that with single payer health insurance, aks, Medicare for all. This hand must be played after the first hand and after folks are pleased with the first hand.  Neoliberals in general oppose this because VAT tax screws up profits. They'll have to eat some of the costs. Other Neoliberals are even more upset since this is an existential matter. Here is where I'm going to use electric cars for a good purpose. "With the advent of electric self driven cars", the at fault status is murky.  Therefore, we'll ensure nobody has to worry about medical bills which may arise from accidents. Likewise, the carbon dividend will help a bit with income difficulties.  Of course, the same will happen to folks who work at health insurance companies.  Most of these will go away with single payer. If concern about job losses gets to be an issue, then simply start up Germany's employment model. 

This whole thing is called #OperationMindFuckNeoliberals

Another player at the table is NeoConservatives.  This player has the well known profile of a maniac.

Neoconservatives' policies exactly math that of a poker maniac. They make policies based on ego trips, like "my country is perfect in every way", and performing aggressively to attract a following. The situation here is also a big problem.  Neoconservative public policy promotes chaos at the least and thermonuclear war at the most extreme. In addition, Neoconservatives have succeeded in attracting a following. On the plus side, all of their policies when enacted have failed. The goal is to undermine their power. The first tactic is to simply collect data on their past and current failures.   Some data for information purposes:

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/26/r...rrors_iraq
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/...me-change/
https://popularresistance.org/violent-co...s-in-nica/

This data and more supports the conclusion that every Neocon strategy has ended in failure based upon the criteria of "promoting peace and stability in the region".   With that remains the problem of the US is intent on implementing failed strategies. So, let's look at the tactics used with the strategies.  First we support proxy forces who have at a later time turned on us. These proxies have also sold arms on the black market. Next , we just drop bombs everywhere because the logical alternative of boots on the ground is political suicide. The tactic of bombing of curse does nothing to winning people or influence overseas. One other problem is a big one. There is no tactic installing a replacement government addresses the folks' in regime changed country
legitimacy.  Rather, Neoliberals use Neoconservatives as patsies to get access to resources, irl. So the goal is to exile Neoliberals from public policy, plain and simple. Perhaps someone running for office will try this sometime since just making folks aware of the tawdry record of  Neoconservative policies actually are. I think one thing to do is to have a commercial spot showing how Libya now looks in contrast to how it look before the "human rights" intervention will inform many as to how screwed up that sort of policy actually is.   And be sure to add the slogan "Mission Accomplished!" as a cherry on top.


So, you see, this 4th turning has just 2 enemies, but they are for the most part domestic. I'm sure their defeat will expand the options for the future a whole lot.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

1. I think only 10 year olds who are trustfund babies can afford those cars.
2. I don't think very many proles can afford those cars.
3. Home generators make lots of smog, so no thanks.
4. Flying cars?  Well, here in Oklahoma we have wild weather. Said cars would have to work with thunderstorms which have high winds and hail.  Would the cars still work after their apparati get hail dings? What happens if they get struck by lightning? Best of all are our howling blizzards. How would flying cars work in those? Blizzards cause the airports to cancel all of the flights. I have an idea for a prototype though.
First, we mandate that all private planes be self flying. It's best after all to use fat cats as our guinea pigs. After a sufficiently low death rate from plane crashes, then the software could then be migrated to cars. Next, only cars for fat cats would be outfitted. The reason for doing it this way is because only fat cats have enough money to afford prototypes and the private planes. There is absolutely no reason to spend money subsidizing test vehicles for proles who can't afford them. Private planes are just perfect because those make a perfect starting point since they're also already around. Just add software and apparatti and off ya go! I agree we can get to safe flying cars, though I'm sure we'll have some fat cats taking some dirt naps.
I say that's  a win win, IMHO.  

Tesla?  Oh yeah,  I sorta wonder how long folks will stuffing money into it.   Those financials look awful, man.

Even if Tesla ends up doing bad, the revolution has already occurred.  Every major car manufacturer is slowly adding EVs to their lineup and the number of charging stations is increasing.  

OK, I agree that the per capita number of  EV's will go up. However, if Big Fossil Fuel gets its way, then there shall be a long time to wait.  So I think if you want the above, you need something along the lines of what I wrote above to happen first. The other problem folks have is they never consider what's on the other end of the cord.  At present, there's a lot of coal plants on the other end. That makes a lot of EV's "coal burners".


As for affordability, it will be much harder for a Crisis society to be able to afford it anyway.  The average man in 1936 was a long way from being to afford a Levittown style house, but the economic explosion after the Crisis made it possible.

The above assumes a 1950's type of high.  A "high" isn't really a good name, IMHO.  I prefer "recovery period". For example, the US could experience something like post WWII Europe. Our industrial base looks bombed out. That's because globalization has been the next best thing to bombing to wreck assorted industrial bases.
Climate change was not an issue last time either. If climate changed isn't addressed in a proper manner, then it's gonna suck for a very, very long time.

 Only the rich will afford it at first, but it will filter down to the masses in about a decade or two because most people drive cars that are less than 20 years old.  Also, if you already have a car, then someone (Maybe it will be me.  Who knows?) will start a service to add automation to existing cars.  In 2025, these cars will be only for the Cadillac class.  By the 2040s, it will have filtered down to the masses.  As far as flying cars, totally agreed.  Having humans pilot it will cause too many 9/11 style crashes.  

I like the idea of using the rich as guinea pigs...

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

On Agile.  So when is it going to put secure programming and secure hardware in the process?  Given the number of security screw ups, it ain't part of the plan anywhere. Secure programming shouldn't be a nothought or afterthought like it is now.

Yup.  It is my experience that you simply make it a compliance issue for software.  Compliance always gets pushed to the top of the list as the most urgent issue whenever it is discovered that your software is not in compliance.  All other development will be put on hold until the issue is resolved.  

I would hope so. I'd like to make sure say Sarbanes Oxley applied to protection of personal information held by assorted online platforms. The provision is as you say below.  All such information must be encrypted, and a defined security policy is enforced.

It's not like this stuff is really hard.  The vast majority of incidents happen because of things as simple as leaving the front door unlocked.  Don't use Password1234.  Lock your screen when you are away from the terminal.  Don't click on that weird looking link in that suspicious email. Don't store personal data (usernames, passwords, SSNs, etc.) in plain text files without encryption.  Once you have the basics of cybersecurity covered, then it requires a lot more effort (such as the backing of a large and powerful organization) in order to conduct cyber attacks and cyber breaches.  

Don't forget patching software. Companies have been taken to the cleaners for blowing off patching. Since patching isn't done , that's another one to add to Sarbanes Oxley. Even script kiddies can exploit that stuff.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Germany already does this.  Corporate America is too fucking cheap to have apprenticeships and the US government shovels way to much money on the defense offense budget.  There's also a problem with higher education. It's just another racket and the tuition is too damn high.  I bet nobody gets the nice $4.00/credit hour I had anymore.

Tuition's too damn high!






In some places the rent is too damn high also.  However, the rent's not too damn high in Oklahoma.

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Pfffftttt.  Why do folks even use Outlook, Word, and excel when there's Openoffice?

Simply because it's the corporate standard and because there is already too much integration with Microsoft products anyway.  A lot of organizations don't have the time, money, or personnel needed to make changes.  So it gets put on the backlog, or discarded.  It would probably require a political rather than economic change for OpenOffice to become standard.  


Or they have now-nowism disease. A proper way of deciding is to determine the cost of the switch and the amount of savings if any. Next, determine the pay off period, if any.  Yeah, it's not gonna pay for itself this quarter, bu ok, how long?

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62


I shall have nothing to do with Google because Google is an evil company that sends data to the deep state!  There's nothing that tastes as good as freshly churned butter.   The stuff at the supermarket is gorp.

There's no place like home.
127.0.0.1  google.com

Quote:Quote=Ragnarök_62

Smart homes are for sheeple , aka NPC's.



I suppose there those who don't have a hacker's outlook.
Smartspeakers.  eavesdrop on those. I bet the alphabet agencies do that as well. If there's one in the bedroom, PORN city.
I'd love to hack lightbulbs.   I'd make them work like Christmas lights by making them turn off and on a bunch of times.
Washing machine.  I'd like to keep it in the start cycle, add soap, and let it overflow.  Operation bubble bath, man.
Window blinds, up and down all around.
Water faucet.  Turn 'em on and run up a huge water bill for the victim.
IOT.  It's old news, but spam engines and DDOS  doers.

So , if hacked life won't be easier or more predictable.  Imagine coming home to the stuff mentioned above.

Roomba = cat chaser.
Smart mirrors = more PORN
Alexa/Cortana = hack in and order dildos and pocket pussies from Amazon.

This will become an issue for the next saeculum.  However, I can simply do it all myself and avoid those concerns, and I suspect many will too.  It will come to a point at which all IoT devices will be regulated.  They will have to match some security standard for you be able to sell it in the marketplace because any cyber weakeness will by the end of this 4T and the next 1T will be seen as a national security issue, something that is already becoming a trend with the federal government.  We still have many more years to go.  Although I don't want to experience it, there is still a very high risk of a damaging cyberwar.  If there is real cyberwar (which is likely to coincide with traditional war), then we will build a robust cybersecurity infrastructure that will allow most people to sleep at night.  Too many people are still computing like it's the 1990s, with no thought to cybersecurity.  By the 2030s, I suspect that Americans will have been scared into practicing good cybersecurity.

Yes, cyberwarfare is a teal thing. And yes, like all things that provoke assorted conflicts, the exile of Neocons will help mitigate against this. Yeah, China And Russia have the ability to do this stuff. Neocons make this worse by hawkish statements and policy.  A better approach is to assume Russia and China are run by sane people. I rather doubt they'd like their lights getting turned off as much as we.

And, the people who are squawking about Russia,Russia,Russia need to STFU.  First, who wouldn't use nice big fat juicy targets like Facefuck and Twatter to cause mischief. There they were in 2016, just 2 big fat sitting ducks. So Russia had nothing but a troll farm full of shitposters and a few thousand for ads and just look at the results. I have to say that's one hell of a bang for the buck.  As for foreign interference.  Meh, we let Saudi Arabia and Israel among others to meddle a whole lot more than Russia. The proper thing to do is forbid any foreign influence whatsoever, period.  Social Media should just post a big fat warning on their pages. "The information displayed here is for entertainment only and the opinion of the posters."  Now, with that closing, you can see why Texas Hold'em is a good bet in the US. The amount of misinformation does find it's way to the tables in the USA.

[Ragnarök_62]

(10-26-2018, 01:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-25-2018, 08:49 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 03:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 01:57 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-22-2018, 11:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We already live in a world society, since 1892. We only tried to hold back the inevitable tide in the 1920s, and now people who grew up in a white country are wondering what happened again to their white country. Immigration restriction laws were always racist. I documented that in a previous post. Again, as I keep reminding you, no, the immigration issue doesn't have to be partisan. That's why Bush and Obama agreed on a reasonable approach, and why a bipartisan group in the senate proposed a reasonable law and passed it. But the fanatical right-wing idiots in the Tea Party House blocked it. It proved to be the best issue for Trumpty Dumpty to run on. "They're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs, their bringing crime; they're rapists..." Bullshit.
More immigrants will not make us a shithole country. Sure, we need to cut down on population growth, in a humane way by increasing womens' rights and prosperity in all countries.

1. Legal immigration policy shouldn't be political. Likewise illegal immigration shouldn't be political.  Illegal immigration is bad because you get too many people and I think that immigration is a privilege, not a right.

2. So you have two stupid positions. Assigning bad stuff like drugs,criminality, etc. is not correct for legal immigration.  Likewise anyone who supports illegal immigration is also wrong. There are limits to the amount of resources available in the US. Immigration policy needs to take that into account. Also, illegals work under the table so that drains tax revenue. It also gives unfair advantage to employers who hire them. So with that, we need to have E-verify strictly enforced with strict fines for back taxes, tax evasion, and a huge fine for hiring illegal aliens to keep companies from doing that stuff.  I bet it was a fabulous issue for Trump because nobody has done squat about illegal immigration.  Folks are fed up with that nonsense. And... I don't care for race baiters who say any restrictions whatsoever on immigration is "dats razzists."

3. More people = more shit. Yeah we're already a shithole country, so more people will by default make us even moreso.

4. "Immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers."  Really? That's the exact position of Neoliberals!  Honestly,  I truly hate Neoliberals and want them all to burn in hell.  Maybe climate change will send a lot of their shit into the water to be homes to the fishes.

5. Women's rights and family planning. Yes, that's an excellent idea. That's one of few things I'd support foreign aid on.

1. "Too many people" is a worldwide question. I live on Planet Earth. The USA is an abstraction.

2. It is too hard for some deserving immigrants to come here. There needs to be liberal asylum availability, given the amount of tyranny in the world. True, it would be better if they stayed in their country and fought a civil war. But that's really asking them to get killed. Illegals shouldn't work under the table. They should be required to be paid minimum wage. They should be asked to pay a fine and show themselves to be good citizens. Not enough resources? I don't know what that means.

Obama was doing a lot on illegal immigration; he was Deporter in Chief and illegal immigration went way down. Trump did not use the issue because it was necessary; he used it only because he knew there are a lot of prejudiced, hateful people in the USA that he could rally behind him with false accusations, and who would vote for his hate-pandering. There was nothing to be "fed up with" at all, except to be fed up with Trump's race-baiting.

4. I didn't know neo-cons were those who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers. No, liberals say that, because it's the truth. Neo-cons start wars for no reason except to impose our economic needs and greeds upon other countries.

1. OK,  "borders=abstractions".  They may or may not be abstractions.  How about when a wolf pack sent marks, then is that an abstraction known by wolf packs. Humans don't know where human borders are and humans don't know any wolf pack borders. They are real when it comes down to the species in question.  Cats also do territories.
So , then "be known by the company you keep", then means (humans,wolves,cats) then territory [borders] is real enough to matter. So in the case at hand, that means there is a known procedure to control the population density in a bordered area that make it happen.


2. "The whole planet is running out of resources we don't need anymore. ..."   Yes, we agree with "whole planet is running out of resources."  Obviously too many peoples = fewer resources per capita.

And...  

"Not enough resources? I don't know what that means"  As for specifics, food and water for starters. Next is proper shelter, and no potty problems.  Next, you have the things make the US in general modern. So this is where the real difference lies.  OK, I'll start at 10,000,000 folks are allowed to come in. You can allocate that 10,000,000 amongst guest workers,refugees,and of course those already here. The thing to remember of course is to get to ZPG within 10 years. This is among things which can readily be done but ain't because assorted panderings here and there do happen.

3. It's the neo-liberals who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers.

"No, liberals say that, because it's the truth."  Are sure that all liberals think that way?  And... of course "immigration = better economy".  It depends on who you are and the statistics.   So does immigration increase the per capita GDP, does it affect how does this affect available resources? Neoliberals of course lap immigration up. This is simply the more people of any sort whatsoever, the more profits. Neoliberals are of course blind whether by profits or ignorant,, because unlimited growth on limited resources is a fail.

It could be that you are looking at resources within a nationalist perspective. So, if we allow millions more immigrants into our country, they could use up more resources within the United States.

It is true that we need fair trade, and I don't like the idea of free trade that allows poorer nations to get rich while our own industry and economy are hollowed out because factories and jobs are exported for cheaper costs, whose products are then imported back into the USA and replace local business.

Nevertheless, a fair trade world economy is possible, and in that perspective, the question is not population growth through immigration into the USA that affects "resources," but world population that affects resources, since our resources now come from all over the planet. What I favor is availability of birth control, female emancipation, and economic growth through fairer distribution of wealth and power in all countries. Some kind of international policy is needed to promote this trend, which many nationalists oppose and accuse of being a conspiracy to impose world control.

As for neo-liberals, most of them are Republicans, and while they certainly support more population growth to create economic growth to gain and hog more profit for themselves, most of them today are deferring to Trumpism, whose leader has captured their party, and so are going along with anti-immigration schemes with little protest. Only a few like Jeff Flake are staying true to their neo-liberal philosophy in that regard. Most Democrats are only neo-liberals to an extent, that extent being the feeling that they must sometimes compromise and submit to the great power and false appeal of deceptive, immoral Republican/Reaganoid/Tea Party free-market neo-liberal ideology in our politics today.

1, Yes, I consider natural resources in a nationalistic manner being I think nation-states are the most accepted venue from which public policy can be effect-ably enacted and enforced. A lot of resources don't have a global extent. That means the amount of concern for the disposition of a particular instance of a resource basically varies from a lot for those located nearby and goes to "who gives a fuck" about another instance that's far away. Mineral deposits which include a lot of water aquifers are a good example. The typical American doesn't give a rat's ass about a lake in Africa. Likewise, few Africans know about or even care about American lakes. I'd say, that's human nature.

2. Fair trade.  Yes, I agree with you on that as well.  I'd just add that if cheaper prices are due to some sort of exploitation, then those items so made do not constitute even fair trade, but items produced with an external price of how ever much damage was done in making said item. This means there are lots of reasons just to either ban it outright or tax it to recover whatever externalilities that have been identified.

3.  Democrats in disarray: So, this is what you essentially said. I agree with you on this completely. This means of course the Democratic Party faces an all in moment. I have presented some different hands for winterstorm to consider. In that post, I have described the cards to play and how to play them.  I'm sure I'm not the only one with assorted ideas to have. Obviously, I'd prefer the Democrats to play my cards and fold the ones they are playing now. I think the DNC has problems winning because duh, they keep playing shitty hands.

4. Compromising with Republicans. 
a. In theory they can compromise with Republicans if they knew what exactly their immigration policy is. Is it open borders?  This is something I'm not sure of  , but it appears to be the default without whatever Trump does. So here first, Democrats need a clear policy wrt immigration.
b. They should not compromise ideals which address Neoliberalism as an enemy. They just need to replace "Russia" with "Neoliberals", and let that go.


5. International this and thats.
The best way is to used the time test method of using treaties. This also plays nice with the constitution.
An example of a good treaty is harmonizing carbon taxes. This could be applied to the rates/ton, how to assess assorted product groupings,how to account determine shipping. A product sourced further a way has more shipping, so a higher tax needs to be there.  I would not, ever however pool carbon tax proceeds towards a world fund.  This doen't work because folks get pissed off. The Eurozone is good example of that. Banks went to hell in Greece, but Germany said, no, no no money from us. Essentially, what happened in Greece is a Neoliberal profit extraction operation. They cooked the books for Greece to get in the  EU. Then the cheap loans created the boom bust cycle. This , along with no money for you is why Greece is becoming another shithole.  And...

now you see on circling back. This is why Neoliberalism and Neoconservativism are the true axis of evil. Both do nothing but spread death, misery, shitholedom worldwide with the final price of ecocide.

You see that's what happens. If you keep playing bad cards over the long term, you are a LOSER.

[Eric the Green]

(10-31-2018, 06:48 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-26-2018, 01:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-25-2018, 08:49 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 03:43 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-23-2018, 01:57 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1. Legal immigration policy shouldn't be political. Likewise illegal immigration shouldn't be political.  Illegal immigration is bad because you get too many people and I think that immigration is a privilege, not a right.

2. So you have two stupid positions. Assigning bad stuff like drugs,criminality, etc. is not correct for legal immigration.  Likewise anyone who supports illegal immigration is also wrong. There are limits to the amount of resources available in the US. Immigration policy needs to take that into account. Also, illegals work under the table so that drains tax revenue. It also gives unfair advantage to employers who hire them. So with that, we need to have E-verify strictly enforced with strict fines for back taxes, tax evasion, and a huge fine for hiring illegal aliens to keep companies from doing that stuff.  I bet it was a fabulous issue for Trump because nobody has done squat about illegal immigration.  Folks are fed up with that nonsense. And... I don't care for race baiters who say any restrictions whatsoever on immigration is "dats razzists."

3. More people = more shit. Yeah we're already a shithole country, so more people will by default make us even moreso.

4. "Immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers."  Really? That's the exact position of Neoliberals!  Honestly,  I truly hate Neoliberals and want them all to burn in hell.  Maybe climate change will send a lot of their shit into the water to be homes to the fishes.

5. Women's rights and family planning. Yes, that's an excellent idea. That's one of few things I'd support foreign aid on.

1. "Too many people" is a worldwide question. I live on Planet Earth. The USA is an abstraction.

2. It is too hard for some deserving immigrants to come here. There needs to be liberal asylum availability, given the amount of tyranny in the world. True, it would be better if they stayed in their country and fought a civil war. But that's really asking them to get killed. Illegals shouldn't work under the table. They should be required to be paid minimum wage. They should be asked to pay a fine and show themselves to be good citizens. Not enough resources? I don't know what that means.

Obama was doing a lot on illegal immigration; he was Deporter in Chief and illegal immigration went way down. Trump did not use the issue because it was necessary; he used it only because he knew there are a lot of prejudiced, hateful people in the USA that he could rally behind him with false accusations, and who would vote for his hate-pandering. There was nothing to be "fed up with" at all, except to be fed up with Trump's race-baiting.

4. I didn't know neo-cons were those who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers. No, liberals say that, because it's the truth. Neo-cons start wars for no reason except to impose our economic needs and greeds upon other countries.

1. OK,  "borders=abstractions".  They may or may not be abstractions.  How about when a wolf pack sent marks, then is that an abstraction known by wolf packs. Humans don't know where human borders are and humans don't know any wolf pack borders. They are real when it comes down to the species in question.  Cats also do territories.
So , then "be known by the company you keep", then means (humans,wolves,cats) then territory [borders] is real enough to matter. So in the case at hand, that means there is a known procedure to control the population density in a bordered area that make it happen.


2. "The whole planet is running out of resources we don't need anymore. ..."   Yes, we agree with "whole planet is running out of resources."  Obviously too many peoples = fewer resources per capita.

And...  

"Not enough resources? I don't know what that means"  As for specifics, food and water for starters. Next is proper shelter, and no potty problems.  Next, you have the things make the US in general modern. So this is where the real difference lies.  OK, I'll start at 10,000,000 folks are allowed to come in. You can allocate that 10,000,000 amongst guest workers,refugees,and of course those already here. The thing to remember of course is to get to ZPG within 10 years. This is among things which can readily be done but ain't because assorted panderings here and there do happen.

3. It's the neo-liberals who say immigrants make good workers and business people and good customers.

"No, liberals say that, because it's the truth."  Are sure that all liberals think that way?  And... of course "immigration = better economy".  It depends on who you are and the statistics.   So does immigration increase the per capita GDP, does it affect how does this affect available resources? Neoliberals of course lap immigration up. This is simply the more people of any sort whatsoever, the more profits. Neoliberals are of course blind whether by profits or ignorant,, because unlimited growth on limited resources is a fail.

It could be that you are looking at resources within a nationalist perspective. So, if we allow millions more immigrants into our country, they could use up more resources within the United States.

It is true that we need fair trade, and I don't like the idea of free trade that allows poorer nations to get rich while our own industry and economy are hollowed out because factories and jobs are exported for cheaper costs, whose products are then imported back into the USA and replace local business.

Nevertheless, a fair trade world economy is possible, and in that perspective, the question is not population growth through immigration into the USA that affects "resources," but world population that affects resources, since our resources now come from all over the planet. What I favor is availability of birth control, female emancipation, and economic growth through fairer distribution of wealth and power in all countries. Some kind of international policy is needed to promote this trend, which many nationalists oppose and accuse of being a conspiracy to impose world control.

As for neo-liberals, most of them are Republicans, and while they certainly support more population growth to create economic growth to gain and hog more profit for themselves, most of them today are deferring to Trumpism, whose leader has captured their party, and so are going along with anti-immigration schemes with little protest. Only a few like Jeff Flake are staying true to their neo-liberal philosophy in that regard. Most Democrats are only neo-liberals to an extent, that extent being the feeling that they must sometimes compromise and submit to the great power and false appeal of deceptive, immoral Republican/Reaganoid/Tea Party free-market neo-liberal ideology in our politics today.

1, Yes, I consider natural resources in a nationalistic manner being I think nation-states are the most accepted venue from which public policy can be effect-ably enacted and enforced. A lot of resources don't have a global extent. That means the amount of concern for the disposition of a particular instance of a resource basically varies from a lot for those located nearby and goes to "who gives a fuck" about another instance that's far away. Mineral deposits which include a lot of water aquifers are a good example. The typical American doesn't give a rat's ass about a lake in Africa. Likewise, few Africans know about or even care about American lakes. I'd say, that's human nature.

World trade goes much further than local concerns about preserving lakes and forests etc. We all use products and raw materials that come from all over the world today. So I think a concern to protect our resources from immigrants is mis-placed. In our world trade economy, we are not going to have immigrants using up our national resources, because we get everything we need from all over the world.

It's true we need more-local governance on many things, like how much is extracted from particular places, and preserving them from over-settlement; not just some total world government over everyone and everything. But we also need world organizations to manage many aspects of our environment and trade.

Quote:2. Fair trade.  Yes, I agree with you on that as well.  I'd just add that if cheaper prices are due to some sort of exploitation, then those items so made do not constitute even fair trade, but items produced with an external price of how ever much damage was done in making said item. This means there are lots of reasons just to either ban it outright or tax it to recover whatever externalilities that have been identified.

True

Quote:3.  Democrats in disarray: So, this is what you essentially said. I agree with you on this completely. This means of course the Democratic Party faces an all in moment. I have presented some different hands for winterstorm to consider. In that post, I have described the cards to play and how to play them.  I'm sure I'm not the only one with assorted ideas to have. Obviously, I'd prefer the Democrats to play my cards and fold the ones they are playing now. I think the DNC has problems winning because duh, they keep playing shitty hands.

4. Compromising with Republicans. 
a. In theory they can compromise with Republicans if they knew what exactly their immigration policy is. Is it open borders?  This is something I'm not sure of  , but it appears to be the default without whatever Trump does. So here first, Democrats need a clear policy wrt immigration.
b. They should not compromise ideals which address Neoliberalism as an enemy. They just need to replace "Russia" with "Neoliberals", and let that go.

Should, but will they? Can they? Being something of a practical realist, I can't expect high ideals to always prevail in the Democratic Party. In these times, we may need sometimes to accept the lesser evil or the partial good to ward off the fullness of evil on the other side.

A multi-party parliamentary system works better in most democratic countries; our system is the oldest, and is obsolete, despite concerns voiced by some that a tyrannical minority can take over a parliamentary system. That only happened in a fledgling democracy 80-100 years ago. And we have seen already in the 21st century how our own USA system may be no better in that regard. We have a political party duopoly, in which people are afraid to vote for what they want because of fear of the other party, and an elected king system in which the president and the administration have too much unchecked power, especially to start wars, and also one that can't be taken out by a vote of no confidence, but someone we are stuck with for 4 years at least unless 2/3 of the senate agrees (s)he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. And a senate and electoral college that favors backward rural states, plus the legal ability of politicians to choose their voters rather than vice-versa, and to buy elections and suppress votes. Much reform is needed.

Quote:5. International this and thats.
The best way is to used the time test method of using treaties. This also plays nice with the constitution.
An example of a good treaty is harmonizing carbon taxes. This could be applied to the rates/ton, how to assess assorted product groupings,how to account determine shipping. A product sourced further a way has more shipping, so a higher tax needs to be there.  I would not, ever however pool carbon tax proceeds towards a world fund.  This doen't work because folks get pissed off. The Eurozone is good example of that. Banks went to hell in Greece, but Germany said, no, no no money from us. Essentially, what happened in Greece is a Neoliberal profit extraction operation. They cooked the books for Greece to get in the  EU. Then the cheap loans created the boom bust cycle. This , along with no money for you is why Greece is becoming another shithole.  And...

now you see on circling back. This is why Neoliberalism and Neoconservativism are the true axis of evil. Both do nothing but spread death, misery, shitholedom worldwide with the final price of ecocide.

You see that's what happens. If you keep playing bad cards over the long term, you are a LOSER.

Yes, they are the true axis of evil.

I will consider your points about a global carbon tax scheme. I'm not sure it would work either. They might work within countries or regions.

[Eric the Green]

(10-26-2018, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-26-2018, 02:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?

For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.

When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.

I don't know where brower's post is that asks this, but this is a question for a philosophical thread of some sort. As I see it, spirit is synonymous with consciousness, which cannot be accounted for with mechanistic or physicalist theories, and is called the "hard problem" because physicalist scientists try to solve it in their terms, which cannot be done. As I see it too, it is an ethical or moral issue. Although it has been well pointed out to me by Dr. The Rani that physical things are valuable, when we respect living beings as spirits, including humans and all possible higher beings beyond humans as well, then we treat them better than if we consider them as physical objects without sentience. That of course does not extent to "transhumans" who have become machines.

The machine age and the industrial age (same thing, virtually) were built on the model of mechanical cause and effect physicalism. We have transformed the world into our own mechanistic model of reality. That has been useful to us, but it is idolatry to conceive the world in the image of our own machine model. Machines cannot substitute for conscious organic beings, and real progress is to extend our natural human potential through expanded consciousness. The endless progress of machines has its own momentum now, and its impact may not be positive unless subordinated to real life.

The consciousness revolution of the 2T, which reminded us of these facts about consciousness and machines quite clearly, has been put on the back burner in the 4T by younger generations who are overly enamoured with recent high tech progress, and who live in virtual realities. This trend has accelerated just in these 4T years since 2008 with the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile tech. It would be good to take stock of this trend at halftime.

I wish you well on your Orion adventures, Bill. There are exciting frontiers unfolding, as there have been in many fields for centuries now, and perhaps never more than today. Bon voyage and safe flight, spacefan.

I recognize that when humans first ventured into space and went to the moon, they could look at our blue planet from above and from afar, and marvel at its uniqueness and special value. The ecology movement to preserve life here on Earth never got a bigger boost than when we were all able to see it from the point of view of the Moon, in 1968-69. That is the frontier I most value today. That picture was even chosen by the publisher of my book for its cover. The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?

[Bill the Piper]

(11-01-2018, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?

I know you sort of wrote me off, but...

What are those "inherent life abilities" which cannot be expanded using biotech?

[Eric the Green]

(11-05-2018, 09:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(11-01-2018, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?

I know you sort of wrote me off, but...

What are those "inherent life abilities" which cannot be expanded using biotech?

Everything we know, just about. Not applying technology to expand our range, but expanding our potential of our given bodies and souls. And the word "soul" is important, even if you don't think the individualized consciousness survives death and possibly returns for another go-round.

For starters, our physical athletic ability. Sure, athletes might convert to prosthetics, but it is also possible to increase our abilities without them. A lot of this goes back to job one, learning to develop our mental and consciousness abilities. This has been developed for centuries in Oriental countries, but is largely ignored in the West, as monasteries have been limited to Christian devotion, whereas Buddhist and other monasteries in the East have trained peoples' minds to focus.

You may have heard of speed reading. If people were taught to read without talking to themselves, instead of talking to themselves or say words out-loud as they read, our reading abilities would increase, and so would our focusing ability. Job one is to learn to think without talking to ourselves. That would increase human abilities many times over. But it's too hard for the average person to learn now. Supports for meditation is an expanding frontier of human ability.

Our personal relationships are really screwed up. People offend others, and are also too easily offended. The ability to put ourselves in others' shoes and observe the golden rule remains a learning curve on the path of developing our inherent life abilities. When will we be able to have intimate relationships with more than one person, and thus have a society with more love, without the feelings of jealousy and abandonment ruining them? How about a freer sex life, but without abuse and harrassment? What about our tendency to remain slaves to our past hurts, which screws up so many of our relationships? How about our abyssmal family structures, with all the abuse and the lack of respect for young people or elders?

And our social and political life is even more screwed up. So many reforms, and the ability of our systems to enact them, remain undone. Most of our societies on Earth are oligarchical, authoritarian or even genocidal. Even Buddhists in places like Myanmar cannot necessarily observe their spiritual principles in the way they treat other religions. We are barely out of the cave in developing our inherent life ability to communicate and respect others' rights and fulfill our responsibilities to others in society. Another tech network like facebook will not help us at all. We can see this here with people like Galen and other libertarians who don't even have a concept of social responsibility. And people on other extremes like the tyrants in fascist and communist lands and their supporters who have not developed respect for human rights, and people like Trump and his followers who cannot empathize with people of other nationalities, races and genders. And this does not even mention our relationships with other species and with Earth, which are the most screwed up and tyrannical relationships of all. But our very lives also depend on improving this.

This does not even mention the path of spiritual enlightenment, which has been pursued by a small minority before the new age, but is now open to all, and yet still traveled by relatively few. It comes down to what we can do and perceive, not what a machine can do for us, even if tech and pharmacy can help open the doors. Our psychic abilities and our ability to contact the dead and know our past lives and history, is a frontier that would transform us enormously if pursued. Our metaphysical, spiritual and philosophical knowledge and our experience of God is neglected, while scientific knowledge expands, although there's still much to learn along all the paths of knowledge.

And our arts and music are neglected, resulting in a crass popular culture that surely could be improved if we took some interest in developing our sensitivity and creative abilities, and in supporting them and freeing them from corporate market commercial domination. No people have ever had the knowledge of other cultures past and present, the potential of our new media, and ability to access inspiration, as we have today, and yet our potential to create an artistic renaissance remains untapped. Creativity is not a technological ability; it's an inherent soul ability. Even technological invention itself depends on human inspiration and perspiration.

There's just a sample. I have no hope at all that tech can fix these things. On the contrary, over-reliance on tech progress, and neglect of human life progress, is the biggest problem we face today. These are considerations not to write off.

[Bill the Piper]

(11-05-2018, 12:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Everything we know, just about. Not applying technology to expand our range, but expanding our potential of our given bodies and souls. And the word "soul" is important, even if you don't think the individualized consciousness survives death and possibly returns for another go-round.

For starters, our physical athletic ability. Sure, athletes might convert to prosthetics, but it is also possible to increase our abilities without them. A lot of this goes back to job one, learning to develop our mental and consciousness abilities. This has been developed for centuries in Oriental countries, but is largely ignored in the West, as monasteries have been limited to Christian devotion, whereas Buddhist and other monasteries in the East have trained peoples' minds to focus.

You may have heard of speed reading. If people were taught to read without talking to themselves, instead of talking to themselves or say words out-loud as they read, our reading abilities would increase, and so would our focusing ability. Job one is to learn to think without talking to ourselves. That would increase human abilities many times over. But it's too hard for the average person to learn now. Supports for meditation is an expanding frontier of human ability.

Self discipline is indeed very important. Better education, including some mindfulness techniques, would no doubt be helpful. But it's no panacea. People have been practising the techniques you describe for millennia, and it did not eradicate autocracy, violence or even stupidity. Was pre-colonial India (with roughly the type of values you prefer) a paradise on Earth? Perfected galactic humans will have brain structure allowing for more self-discipline. I don't see contradiction between "traditional" and "transhumanist" ways of improving oneself. Both can be both beneficial and harmful, depending on a choice of values. Admirable self-discipline of many shariah students is wasted on learning to conform to 7th century tosh. The same for transhumanist techniques. Imagine a bunch of neo-Nazis using genetic engineering to create a race of perfect soldiers. That would be transhumanism, but not of the extropian kind. I don't advocate for "technological might is right" but for extropianism. Combatting tyranny, poverty and disease are also extropian goals, because they contribute to many individual human minds being able to achieve higher level of development. It just happens technology is helpful in accomplishing desirable things.

Quote:Our personal relationships are really screwed up. People offend others, and are also too easily offended. The ability to put ourselves in others' shoes and observe the golden rule remains a learning curve on the path of developing our inherent life abilities. When will we be able to have intimate relationships with more than one person, and thus have a society with more love, without the feelings of jealousy and abandonment ruining them? How about a freer sex life, but without abuse and harrassment? What about our tendency to remain slaves to our past hurts, which screws up so many of our relationships? How about our abyssmal family structures, with all the abuse and the lack of respect for young people or elders?

The above seems to require two changes in human nature:
-Improved empathy
-Lowered sex drive (few animals are obsessed with sex the way humans are)

Dionysian, sex-positive values of the millennial saeculum are a cause of many social ailments. Broken families interfere with children's emotional development. Racy pop culture prompts teens to have sex before they achieve the necessary maturity. Many young men suffer from porn addiction. This value system needs to be terminated. If you have any doubts, remember that the fall of Roman civilization was also preceded by an era of orgies.

Empathy and sex-positive ideology are not necessarily compatible. Being preoccupied with sex makes one think of other people as sexual resources (the opposite sex) or competitors (the same sex), rather than as fellow sophonts.

Both aims I postulate here can be achieved to some degree using natural techniques. Some Buddhist meditations allegedly enhance empathy. I've heard that hypericum is a natural herbal remedy that lowers the sex drive. But there is no question biotechnological means would achieve more results. Of course, I wouldn't implant a chip in my mind if simple cures are enough. I only doubt they're enough to heal the species, which has had immense problems for at least 5000 years. It could not be otherwise, since our nature is a result of adapting to hunting and gathering on savannah rather than being a citizen of a world-society.

Quote:And our social and political life is even more screwed up. So many reforms, and the ability of our systems to enact them, remain undone. Most of our societies on Earth are oligarchical, authoritarian or even genocidal. Even Buddhists in places like Myanmar cannot necessarily observe their spiritual principles in the way they treat other religions. We are barely out of the cave in developing our inherent life ability to communicate and respect others' rights and fulfill our responsibilities to others in society. Another tech network like facebook will not help us at all. We can see this here with people like Galen and other libertarians who don't even have a concept of social responsibility. And people on other extremes like the tyrants in fascist and communist lands and their supporters who have not developed respect for human rights, and people like Trump and his followers who cannot empathize with people of other nationalities, races and genders. And this does not even mention our relationships with other species and with Earth, which are the most screwed up and tyrannical relationships of all. But our very lives also depend on improving this.

Wouldn't improved empathy put end to market fundamentalism, tribalism and even animal abuse?

Facebook is actually detrimental to moral and intellectual development. It has nothing to do with a healthy sense of personality in community, since it merely creates a sense of being a member of a herd. Faceborg must be destroyed! Individualism must be encouraged, but an individualism of a right kind, an individualism of a self-taught philosopher and artist, not of a bully!

Quote:This does not even mention the path of spiritual enlightenment, which has been pursued by a small minority before the new age, but is now open to all, and yet still traveled by relatively few. It comes down to what we can do and perceive, not what a machine can do for us, even if tech and pharmacy can help open the doors. Our psychic abilities and our ability to contact the dead and know our past lives and history, is a frontier that would transform us enormously if pursued. Our metaphysical, spiritual and philosophical knowledge and our experience of God is neglected, while scientific knowledge expands, although there's still much to learn along all the paths of knowledge.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". However... if you prove the existence of an afterlife, you win the Randi prize!

Quote:And our arts and music are neglected, resulting in a crass popular culture that surely could be improved if we took some interest in developing our sensitivity and creative abilities, and in supporting them and freeing them from corporate market commercial domination. No people have ever had the knowledge of other cultures past and present, the potential of our new media, and ability to access inspiration, as we have today, and yet our potential to create an artistic renaissance remains untapped. Creativity is not a technological ability; it's an inherent soul ability. Even technological invention itself depends on human inspiration and perspiration.

I agree arts and music are neglected, especially by civic generations, who don't have the sensitivity you boomers have. People born in the 90s usually listen to primitive electronic dance music, which has no emotional dimension and is mocked even by many Xennials like me!

Tech itself may not make you more creative, but imagine developing a fully automated economy like in the sci-fi Culture series by British writer Iain M. Banks. In such an economy, labour and money are no longer necessary. People have all the time they want for social life as well as artistic and philosophical endeavour.

[pbrower2a]

(11-05-2018, 12:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-05-2018, 09:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(11-01-2018, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The field of expanding human potential, as opposed to the very different field of the transhuman, still beckons. What more can we be? How much can our inherent life abilities expand?

I know you sort of wrote me off, but...

What are those "inherent life abilities" which cannot be expanded using biotech?

Everything we know, just about. Not applying technology to expand our range, but expanding our potential of our given bodies and souls. And the word "soul" is important, even if you don't think the individualized consciousness survives death and possibly returns for another go-round.

For starters, our physical athletic ability. Sure, athletes might convert to prosthetics, but it is also possible to increase our abilities without them. A lot of this goes back to job one, learning to develop our mental and consciousness abilities. This has been developed for centuries in Oriental countries, but is largely ignored in the West, as monasteries have been limited to Christian devotion, whereas Buddhist and other monasteries in the East have trained peoples' minds to focus.

You may have heard of speed reading. If people were taught to read without talking to themselves, instead of talking to themselves or say words out-loud as they read, our reading abilities would increase, and so would our focusing ability. Job one is to learn to think without talking to ourselves. That would increase human abilities many times over. But it's too hard for the average person to learn now. Supports for meditation is an expanding frontier of human ability.

Sometimes we must talk to ourselves. We must reflect on the consequences of accepting what we see in print or hear in spoken media.

Quote:Our personal relationships are really screwed up. People offend others, and are also too easily offended. The ability to put ourselves in others' shoes and observe the golden rule remains a learning curve on the path of developing our inherent life abilities. When will we be able to have intimate relationships with more than one person, and thus have a society with more love, without the feelings of jealousy and abandonment ruining them? How about a freer sex life, but without abuse and harassment? What about our tendency to remain slaves to our past hurts, which screws up so many of our relationships? How about our abysmal family structures, with all the abuse and the lack of respect for young people or elders?

Some people are particularly uninviting as people into whose shoes we might walk. I certainly do not want to think like a criminal, a lunatic, or someone intellectually impaired. Poor? I have been there, and it is awful. The only thing good about poverty is food stamps, and they compel me to focus on food for its virtues instead of convenience.

Quote:And our social and political life is even more screwed up. So many reforms, and the ability of our systems to enact them, remain undone. Most of our societies on Earth are oligarchical, authoritarian or even genocidal. Even Buddhists in places like Myanmar cannot necessarily observe their spiritual principles in the way they treat other religions. We are barely out of the cave in developing our inherent life ability to communicate and respect others' rights and fulfill our responsibilities to others in society. Another tech network like Facebook will not help us at all. We can see this here with people like Galen and other libertarians who don't even have a concept of social responsibility. And people on other extremes like the tyrants in fascist and communist lands and their supporters who have not developed respect for human rights, and people like Trump and his followers who cannot empathize with people of other nationalities, races and genders. And this does not even mention our relationships with other species and with Earth, which are the most screwed up and tyrannical relationships of all. But our very lives also depend on improving this.

Commerce and spirituality do not go well together. Commerce compromises everything (including politics, religion, art, science, education, recreation, the environment, health, and human welfare) for profit. Nobody says that we do not need grocery stores, iron ore mines, and automobile repair shops; aside from a healthy private sector we also need a healthy public sector and keep the two separate.  Life is nothing more than compromise for the poor, which one can understand due to the insecurities that poverty imposes. For others, people need to know what to do with their bounty.


We need to learn what we can do with what we have. Surely we have heard of the pathetic character known as the hoarder, someone who buys and keeps stuff and ultimately finds the stuff dominating his life. There often is some emotional trauma involved... and the stuff compromises mobility, destroys the possibility of a social life, and may even pose a risk to personal health and safety.

Quote:This does not even mention the path of spiritual enlightenment, which has been pursued by a small minority before the new age, but is now open to all, and yet still traveled by relatively few. It comes down to what we can do and perceive, not what a machine can do for us, even if tech and pharmacy can help open the doors. Our psychic abilities and our ability to contact the dead and know our past lives and history, is a frontier that would transform us enormously if pursued. Our metaphysical, spiritual and philosophical knowledge and our experience of God is neglected, while scientific knowledge expands, although there's still much to learn along all the paths of knowledge.

We can contact the dead by reading their biographies and their personal writings, listening to their compositions, experiencing their art, and watching their movies. In a way, such people as Lincoln, Einstein, Bach, Matisse, and Kurosawa are very much alive. Attempts to contact Uncle Ed or Aunt Edna from the 'spirit world' are more showmanship, often a fraud, better at separating people from their money than at connecting anyone to the dead. Past lives? Was I a Jew slaughtered in the Holocaust or was I a Nazi official who did the slaughtering but who died at the end of a rope as judgment of the Allies? Was I a plantation slave or a slave dealer? Even if past-life regression is real, what accountability or sense of victimhood would I have? No thanks on that one! I have no desire to be part of any enmity between Romans and Carthaginians!

I can make a case for God -- but that requires limitation of the concept of God to reality. The laws of mathematics and physics are what they are, and so are both the binding curve of energy and the stricture of electron shells. That 4+7 can be whatever one wants creates mathematical anarchy. The binding curve of energy has iron (Z=26) at the low point after exhaustion of energy from nuclear synthesis in stars, and if that point were in a lighter element (let us say calcium, Z=20), then iron would be too rare to allow an Earth-like planet to have a magnetic field and for hemoglobin to form. Copper (Z=29) necessary for technologies from battle axes to electrical wiring would be really rare. Maybe supernovas would be more common and astronomy would be even more chaotic. If the binding point were at a heavier element (let us say zirconium at Z=40), then iron meteors would be far more common than they are now, and such a highly-toxic element as arsenic would be more of a peril to life. There would be much more inert krypton (Z=36) which seems innocuous -- until one recognizes that it would flood planetary atmospheres and suffocate any chance for the formation of life. Even something so subtle as that beryllium-8, which could supposedly form from the meeting of two alpha particles (commonplace helium-4 from hydrogen fusion), is so unstable that its ephemeral existence is possible long enough only in extremely hot, dense cores of stars that it can meet a third alpha particle to form stable carbon-12. Were beryllium-8 more stable it would force the synthesis of carbon-12 in the Sun's core already with even more intense production of energy, and the Sun would already be a red giant that would have put life at an end on Earth.

A change in structure of electron shells -- and most significantly the first one, might allow four electrons instead of two. Hydrogen and helium would be less volatile, and they would more easily amass in stars -- bigger stars that go supernova. Planetary bodies would also form of hydrogen and helium in warmer locations. There would also be more planetary collisions. Hydrogen and helium would be very different in their chemistries, with hydrogen perhaps as an alkali metal -- and we have enough of those already. The sixth element, carbon, would be a magnesium-like alkali-earth metal instead of having the extensive chemistry that carbon has in reality. Next would be a substance intermediate between boron and aluminum in chemistry where nitrogen is. Because this is an alternative universe, it need make no sense.

The Universe makes sense, and we humans can contemplate it? Thus God? God -- but no guardian angels or other such malarkey.

Quote:And our arts and music are neglected, resulting in a crass popular culture that surely could be improved if we took some interest in developing our sensitivity and creative abilities, and in supporting them and freeing them from corporate market commercial domination. No people have ever had the knowledge of other cultures past and present, the potential of our new media, and ability to access inspiration, as we have today, and yet our potential to create an artistic renaissance remains untapped. Creativity is not a technological ability; it's an inherent soul ability. Even technological invention itself depends on human inspiration and perspiration.

STEM is wonderful, but it is not enough. Unless people become homo oeconomicus in the extreme, people will need to learn how to live after far fewer hours of work than most now endure. As someone with Asperger's, an employer might not want me around for office politics, which seems to fill time not spent in genuine work in bureaucratic organizations. Economic reality will have to adjust for technological reality. Enrichment of human existence will do far more for us than the enrichment of economic elites.

To be sure, creativity often reflects technological ability. What could have been  more 'technological' than the pipe organs that Bach used? I used to disparage movies that rely heavily upon special effects, but there have been some movies that, despite having excellent scripts, would have been impossible without computer-generated imaging. Elderly creative people might have their creative careers extended due to medical technologies. By the standards of his time, J S Bach lived to a ripe old age -- but just imagine him creating music until he reached a lifespan commonplace among recent members of the GI generation. Antibiotics are standard treatment for the syphilis that killed Franz Schubert at 31 or made Robert Schumann mad and unproductive, or the rheumatic fever that compromised the heart of Gustav Mahler and killed him off at the peak of his innovative productivity. Antibiotics were not around then. An antibiotic such as penicillin seems like a primitive technology today, but it was not so primitive when it was new.

Quote:There's just a sample. I have no hope at all that tech can fix these things. On the contrary, over-reliance on tech progress, and neglect of human life progress, is the biggest problem we face today. These are considerations not to write off.

Just don't let the money-grubbing plutocrats take command of it all.