Arrival of Surprise Dystopian Future

Every futuristic narrative written about machines becoming human-like is a dystopian horror story. It's turning out to be an accurate prediction, only with corporations instead of computers.

It's Not Safe On Either Side of the Box

For some people, the idea of thinking outside the box is a phobia, and thinking inside the box is seen as a gateway drug.

The Super-Valuable Zero

We have a numbering system that shows an increase from 10 to 100 by adding a zero, even though we're told that zero is nothing. Knowing this, the system causes many brains to get overloaded with WTFs when we're told 1 million requires exactly six of these nothings. It's no wonder so many math students think their teachers have taken way too seriously what they came up with when they were stoned.

Life Proves Nothing

The argument in favor of the existence of a creator deity because the universe is "fine-tuned for life" is flawed in a basic way that should not be easy to overlook. We can pick any item or substance or system that exists and say the universe is "fine-tuned" for it, meaning the claim is literally pointless. Anything that exists exists because the conditions in which it exists allows for it. This is about as far from a special condition that needs a deity as can be imagined. If someone wanted to claim the existence of an entity with supernatural powers, an example other than carbon-based creatures that came about where it was possible needs to be shown.

A Job Should Not Be One's Enemy

Any full-time job should be one that a person can hold for life and live off of it. The attitude held by many that some jobs should only pay a minuscule amount because they should only be seen as stepping stones to “better” jobs is nonsense. Not all people are suited for management jobs (or want them), for example, or other posts that require different skills or are in other ways not suitable. This should not mean that people not be allowed to live a comfortable life being anything from a flight attendant to a deli counter employee to a department store clerk. These jobs will always be needed and to insist that the people who hold (and want) these jobs are not worthy of a living wage is an insult to them and just plain wrong.

Silent Penis-Vagina Shame

It is certainly not a sign of humanity's overall mental health that we feel weird about saying "penis" and "vagina" even though each of us has one and most want regular access to more.

Satirical Bible Bedtime Story Hits Home

For those of us who experienced this as children, I wanted to share this from The Onion...

Bedtime Story From Fucking Bible Again

BEAVERTON, OR—Saying that he has to deal with this shit every single night, local 6-year-old Andrew Neel was exasperated to learn Thursday that the bedtime story his mother would be reading him was once again...

Because so many people are responding to this one on social media, I think it's struck a nerve.

"Nanny" Objectors Acting Like They Need One

It seems that the people who voice fears and complain about a "nanny state" would have more credibility if they didn't act like mean, rude and obnoxious children who haven't outgrown the need for a babysitter to stop them from hurting themselves and others.

Military, Inc.

The current attention being paid to the lack of services being delivered to veterans should be seen as another clear indicator that our military is nothing more than a business venture. Just like when an employee of a business no longer works there and the company no longer pays for benefits, the military is doing the same thing. The number of companies that still have pensions and health care for retirees is miniscule, a huge drop from the past--again, just like the military. The military is using an increasing number of sub-contractors, even for combat-related tasks, a move that also mirrors businesses structures. Finally, military action is now almost exclusively based on making large profits for a small group of people by executing "takeovers."

Ignoring the Obvious Nature of Interdependence

It seems to me that the fairly obvious fact of interdependence gets ignored when forming ideas and making decisions about how we organize societies. No human can thrive on their own, letting alone survive solo. This has been stated many ways by many people, but it still seems to carry little weight.

Let's consider all of the things individuals use that exist because of others. The most obvious include homes, cars, clothes, food, electricity, health care, schools, roads, every kind of household appliance, railroads, shoes, roads, along with all of the smaller included items of each, and more. Some of the less obvious include dental floss, toothpicks, computers, ink, batteries, light bulbs, traffic lights, soap, music, art, the post office, and more.

There is one other thing that should be looked at separately that's arguably more important than any of the others: information. We all learn about the world from the education we get from others--in both formal and informal settings. What we learn is almost exclusively learned from others, and we can hardly take advantage of anything else without the knowledge we accumulate.

Individualistic notions as the basis for a society cannot be fruitful because the foundation for such ideas are false; any results will be rubbish. As a test for someone who disagrees, place yourself in a non-inhabited area, naked, with no items created by others, including what you've learned from anyone else. Survival will be brief.

Each of us does next-to-nothing that contributes to our way of life. We get to take advantage of the features of societies because everyone else provides them for us. Those who convince themselves that they've "earned" on their own everything they have are ignoring the true nature of our shared existence. Valid conclusions stemming from individualism will never be realized. In order to successfully address and improve how we live, we can't ignore how the system of human existence works.

Quote: "Humans are social animals, perhaps with an innate biological drive for social interaction. We do not just live in society: we invent society in order to live." - Jim Baggott, A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Author's note: This is a quotation adapted from Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material, Verso, 1986.)

An Underused Way To Uncover Bogus Claims

I would like to see a conservative politician who insists that right-wing positions don't favor the wealthy asked what would change if they purposely set out to do so. Nothing, would be the correct answer, unless they wanted to declare that moving even further in the direction of their stated positions would be required.

I think this type of general question doesn't get pursued enough. When someone tries to claim that whatever they are advocating for does not line up with an opposing claim refuting it, ask how their position would be different if they set out to do what their opponents fear. If the answer is "nothing," then the position has been shown to be invalid--either incorrect or a lie.

Another example is contained within the first three verses of Revelation.

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

This book, written nearly 2,000 years ago, contains the claim right up front that the things described within will be happening "soon" because the "time is near." For those who don't skip over or ignore this verse, they somehow claim that it doesn't mean the predictions would happen at any particular time; "soon" and "near" can mean what they mean when otherwise used.  But, using the above questioning idea, if this passage had been written with the intent that "soon" and "near" were to be accepted as they are used everywhere else, how would it  have been written differently? The answer is that it would require no changes, meaning that the claim that it means something else is bogus. (This passage can only mean that time ran out on Christianity a long time ago.)

You Don't Have To Lie About Me, I'll Do It Myself

Politics has now progressed to the point where politicians not only lie about their opponents' positions, but also their own. And the members of the media, the group that's supposed to be playing the role of referee, have decided to go along for the ride, leaving the public to fend for itself while tumbling in a wave of increased mis-informed.

Lame "Do Your Research" Statements

It is okay to not take anyone seriously who shares an opinion if, instead of offering validation, submits instead the instruction "do your research" but fail to share their's.

18th Century Solutions Don't Fix 21st Century Problems

A quote from this story about a current issue in the Mormon church: "Excommunication is a nineteenth-century Mormon solution to twenty-first century Mormon problems."

I read this and immediately thought it could also to the U.S. Constitution, only push back the comparison another century.

Ignoring For Millennia What We Know

Time apparently does not wear down our resistance to some of our best realizations.

The humble suffer when the mighty disagree. -Phaedrus (1st century CE)

There's no surer justice in the world than that which makes the rich thief hang the poor one. -Peire Cardenal (13th century CE)

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. -Jean-Paul Sartre (20th century CE)

Just one more related quote that nicely reveals an insight into why wealth can manipulate motivation.

Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they torment us with their loss. -Samuel Gregory (19th century CE)

Recent story about how money changes us: "7 Weird Things Money Does To Your Brain"

Letting "Obvious" Claims Slide

One of the most pervasive but easy-to-fix mistakes we make is asserting that a claim about something is so obviously true that it need not be tested. Famous examples from past centuries include the weight of an object affects its speed when falling and the earth being the center of the universe. Modern examples include the claim that abstinence education reduces teen pregnancies and the need for abortions, and the idea that nothing stops atheists from acting in the worst ways possible.

People who have thought this way hold the mistaken notion that the claim contains its own proof, eliminating the need to investigate and verify. This erroneous situation needs to be addressed during everyone's primary school education so that, as adults, people don't make major decisions based on "obvious" claims that fail under scrutiny.

Maligning What Was Requested

It is a common complaint from women that men don't communicate well or enough. But when they do, it is now sometimes disparaged as “mansplaining,” something that's not going to improve things. Why don't we go ahead and start using a term like "bitch talk" to our vocabulary and see if anything positive comes of it.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Just finished reading A Beginner's Guide to Reality by Jim Baggott. It is an intertwined history of philosophy and science, and I liked the book quite a bit. The people and topics in this book that have been written about by many authors, but every author brings their own take to anything they write about, something that allows us to take away new insights and ideas.

One of the items in this book that is an example of this is a discussion in the epilogue about the "socio-cultural revolution" that takes place in science when an area is undergoing a paradigm shift due a building consensus around a new set of discoveries or ideas. He compares it to similar changes that occur in other segments of human societies, showing that science does not exist outside a society's culture and is, in fact, influenced greatly by it.

This general idea was not new to me, but I got something new from a footnote where he paraphrases Thomas Kuhn : "Kuhn wrote that when this happens, individuals in the communities behave as they occupy different (social) worlds. Even though they may use the same language, many of the words in this language have taken on quite different meanings in these different worlds. The worlds are incommensurable. The words no longer have any common measures by which they can be unambiguously compared."

I couldn't help but see what's happening today as a "perfect storm" of this problem, with political, religious and other social groups currently going through this process at the same time. People have stopped trying to communicate and are just throwing insults around, at least partly because communication has become virtually impossible--incommensurable. The factions into which we have siloed ourselves have combined full-blown defensive postures with no-surrender attitudes with anything-goes attack strategies.

We are also fooling ourselves and missing what's really going with this loss of the ability to communicate on by thinking, "Why don't they realize what we're saying is so obviously true?" We are dumbfounded at "the ignorance" of the other groups and become so frustrated that we can longer justify being civil.

What a mess.

P.S. After this original post, I ran across this short article and video about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box Analogy talking about individual perspective versus shared experiences when it comes to shared meaning of the words we use.

Removing Humans From Human Communication

I wonder what the long-term results will be from our growing acceptance of more group-based interactions like social media to our communication options. This adds to the history of technology continuously giving us more not-in-person methods of communicating. Have we gained more than we've lost?

(Coincidentally, here is one recent story on this topic.)

Abandoning Ourselves

All those who have gone through a business school or spent any time in a job exposed to how major business decisions are made know that people are seen as no different than any other aspect of a corporation. The phrase "human capital" is sometimes used to place people in the same category as machinery, buildings or other materials. By de-humanizing people this way, we have actually convinced each other that we should be indifferent to ourselves, that we don't matter any more than a barrel of oil or a box of paper clips. Is this really a tenet worthy of our continued support? It should be seen as terrifyingly insane to create a system on which we are all supposed to rely that abandons actual people so unsympathetically. This is eligible to be a plot for a horror story.