OpenStars

It's been years since he was impeached, the second time I mean. Government is slow AF.

Be the change you want to see in the world - with Crispr!

- advertising in the future

Pro-Tip: please don't actually do that.:-D

Yeah, it turns out that slapping the electron around like with a big stick or whatever causes it to change its behavior, go figure! :-P

Isn't this more of a self-pwn, where the mom was not already this way but needed to be forcibly converted into thus? :-P

The TV show Designated Survivor did a good job portraying that IMHO. He had to agonize over every decision and try to find a way to do the right thing in the right manner. But I guess Trump's real-life antics were more exciting and so that show was too "boring" by comparison, being too intellectual like that, and got cancelled.

We are lazy, greedy, and judgemental. Our "stuff" all pushes us further in that direction - e.g. social media, algorithm based video players, and somehow predating computers bc boomers do it too - yet it is our own fault for choosing to engage in it, when there are choices to pull back instead. And by "we" I mean not just the USA but our whole Western culture, see e.g. Brexit.

Like the audacity for someone who dropped out of high school to claim that they know better than all of the MD and PhD educated scientists + all relevant U.S. governmental organizations too (CDC, FDA, NIH, NIAID) + worldwide ones as well (e.g., WHO), about vaccinations, disease, and viruses that are far too small to be seen with the unaided eye, is staggering. Though I watched some videos like Plandemic and such where the media personality, who are entirely uncredentialed, walked people through the process: "murder is bad, right?" -> "so killing of innocent little babies in the womb is bad, right?" -> therefore somehow equating that to taking the vaccine is likewise equivalent to murder? Brainwashing techniques are strong, especially when delivered from an authoritative source, which causes people to receive things emotionally rather than rationally, and far worse, unquestioningly - despite how e.g. the very Christian Bible itself says "test everything against what you know to be true".

Then again, the sheeple do not know how! This was done to our culture, so I do take pity, but also we allowed it, and more to the point some of us are working to KILL PEOPLE, e.g. by cutting off access to medical care. It's not like I want those who do that to simply die, but like... ranked choice voting might be something worth looking into enacting, in the more liberal leaning states that could potentially get it passed? e.g. if a child who does not know how to drive grabs the wheel of the car you are in, you may want to grab it BACK before bad things happen... bc the consequences of a crash could be REALLY severe.

part 2 of 2 - read the other one first!

And moreover, who cares? If it helps you, go with it. Then again, definitely examine it, if you feel the capacity to, b/c I think True things tend to have nothing to fear from honest inquiry, only False ones, so I question EVERYTHING and don't worry, just leaving the outcome to the results of the investigation:-).

That said, I halfway agree in that I think people carry around so many strange things, that when you talk with someone you are only partway talking to them, and partway talking to all the stuff that they bring with them. That might also depend somewhat on the person, like if they have higher Mind (I really have no idea what that means, but somehow it might convey the point regardless... does that make any sense?) then perhaps they are more true versions of themselves. Whereas talking with e.g. Trump would be like talking with a puppet - he says whatever thoughts have been implanted into his brain just before seeing you. HE has no control, but perhaps *I* do? (like it or not even) Although... the flip side of that is that if *I* do, then why *not* him? That's the part I am still chewing over, slowly.

All nations will eventually disappear or change into something completely unrecognizable.

That... is such a beautiful perspective, thank you. I have thought that before, but can never seem to hold onto it - possibly b/c Lemmy and news keeps filling my head with doom & gloom, and it seems easier to just let the crowd have their way. But I will really try this time, b/c it seems worthwhile.

(There is a character limit for comments - or at least there was for Kbin.social and I assume for Lemmy as well? - so at the very least we are constrained in the length of each segment:-)

If you are interested, there is a book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett - who is a halfway decent author, e.g. of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which is a DEEEEEEP look into evolution - called "Breaking the Spell", where he delves into the mechanics of studying religion with the same tools that you would study anything else. The latter is really boring so that book of his I normally do not so much recommend reading in-depth, but in your case perhaps you would, b/c in it he says things vaguely similar to what you are saying. Chiefly, that tribalism was adaptive to the evolution of mankind, and while nationalism helped lift us up beyond that, the next step was due to religion, which allowed us to cross national boundaries. Like, "HEY there fellow Pastafarian brutha/sistah - [Joey from Friend's voice] how you doin?"

So I would call it like a "meta-government", due to how it sits on top of existing governmental structures. Like in a lot of European countries - e.g. Spain - people that I have talked to that grew up there were angry b/c they paid one set of taxes to their government, and another set of taxes to the Catholic Church all the way in Rome, which like Americans they were subjected to "taxation without representation", and worse yet they simply had no choice in the matter at all - they did not "choose" that religion, but merely by being born there that choice was made for them.

Ngl, but the Catholic Church does do some good stuff - and whenever it e.g. feeds the hungry, visits the sick and constrained in prison, whenever it does as the Bible says and "takes care of widows and orphans", THAT is awesome and I support THOSE efforts 100%. Ofc when they lie and steal and cheat and murder and rape then THOSE efforts I am 100% against. I used to be very angry at the Catholic Church for a long time myself, though fortunately I healed, and now I see that the people inside of it do what they do not even just in spite of their religion, but sometimes because of it, though we are imperfect humans, and some are fairly deadly. It is just that with any political structure, or religious, or anything at all involving humans (and also chimpanzees, not only our closest living relative but also one of the only other species on earth that takes active delight in murder!), a close watch must be kept on it to ensure that it does not go astray.

And yeah, I keep hearing stories of people who step up to be that kind of old-school "statemen" rather than a "career politician", who cannot stand it and must leave. The literal DEATH THREATS offered to those people, by the most extremist among us, coupled ofc with the actual murders (like the Boeing whistleblower), have made me realize that the concept of "Illuminati" is absolutely real - maybe not as an actual irl society with a special ring and what-not, but obviously power corrupts, and obviously those who have it will concentrate the highest amount of resources to themselves - that's just ~~human~~ monkey nature.

I also quit something - a teaching position, not politics - and I have a great deal of sympathy with what he went through, it is not easy to just walk away, but ofc it would have been far worse if he had stayed and compromised himself. Everybody just said "try to do the best you can, and help those who you can"... implying to ignore everyone else, just take the money from the parents and run, never mind that one person physically cannot do the task justice, oh and then double the number of students on top of that, b/c why the fuck not, the computer will do all the "real work" anyway, right? :-| I would rather Epstein myself than heap such heavy burdens upon people though, saddling them with large debts while not helping them get ahead in life, and worse making them think they know something, by altering the externally-reviewed scores so that the school (I don't want to say which one) could avoid losing its accreditation, which it had already been warned about previously and was in danger of it happening again. You REALLY cannot help people, when the entire system is stacked against you to prevent that. Or perhaps I am naive and I should have stayed in, to be "one of the good ones", except I just am not that kind of person. It would have killed me, inside. So yeah, I GET IT. Somewhat, or at least think I do:-).

And yeah, maybe your town will die off then. Perhaps even... I doubt you will take this the wrong way so I will go ahead and say it: perhaps it should? Survival of the fittest and all, and that applies to towns just as well as species, and even the United States of America: if we do not "fit" into the existing world structure, then we might go down, at Putin's behest but also by our own stinking bloody hands, b/c we are too stupid to realize that the whispers he sent to us (e.g. "the vaccine is harmful") were not real nor even "our own".

AI will not be ready in time for us - maybe some future generation, but not us. Nor would we really want it to - shows such as Wall-E (and I have read similar stories for that identical concept written decades prior to that) have convinced me that when life gets comfortable enough, people will simply give up and allow "mommy"(/"daddy") to take care of them. Which is, to a large degree, the very thing that has put America into this mess we are in now? Laziness, more than any other singular factor.

Try to have empathy for Trump: fuck we all know that he does not deserve it, but it is not for him, it is for you. I don't care one bit about him, but I don't want you to have that monkey on your back, as the saying goes. He is a scared, whiney, piss baby who puts dumps into his diapers and then has trouble walking about. He acts that way out of fear, and b/c he knows no other way. In MANY ways, him being put in charge was not his fault, but rather those of people who are far more crafty (and have espionage capabilities) than he. He is a victim too - he is not just a symptom, mind you, being also a cause, but among the many things that he is, a victim is one of them. You or I possibly could have ended up there as well. Except, and this is the part I am learning more recently, we NEVER would - maybe if our entire backstory had been different, but as we are now and looking forward, we NEVER would have allowed that. There truly is a RIGHT and a WRONG, and Trump is all kinds of the latter. He is barely more than a monkey, while we have moved upwards by the power of Mind, and short of like dementia or some such, I cannot imagine anyone who has done that could ever turn back down. I used to shy away from that thought, b/c it seems not humble (in the midwestern USA that is YUGE to never appear anything other than humble:-P). But now I realize what true humility is: finding the Truth, whatever it is, and paying homage to that. Which makes him, and more importantly the system that put him there, my enemy. And even so, I still have empathy for the fucker... but I would still consign him to jail.

Likewise, I refused to watch the Tucker Carlson video too:-). But if you don't want to watch the whole thing - like me:-) - here is one with just the highlights and commentary from the GREATEST PERSON ALIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW, Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2h3KnWAWY. It is The Daily Show, which I believe should not be HBO, so I hope you can see it.

Determinism: I also believe that. I cannot prove it though, so I don't hold to it too hard. Also, it doesn't really matter, to me, b/c even if things were fore-ordained, we don't know what those things are, so we must treat each new event as totally not that way, yes? :-P It's just an abstract idea in my head, consistent with there being 2 time dimensions (if I am remembering that correctly), or anyway if there is just the one, then it may be something along the lines of an exapanding wave of matter as it moves outwards from the Big Bang at constant velocity. If that were true, then time travel should be impossible, b/c once the wave passes, past times literally do not exist anymore, nor do future ones yet. An alternate formulation is that both past and present DO exist, and if we had the technology then we could travel along it, always "forward" but bucking the universal constant outwards pressure and instead returning to a "past" time/space continuum. Also, an outside observer could "see" our future. Then again, a "God" (like The Matrix computer), could foresee the future in other ways, not with foresight but simply with raw power, just like the Russian leader Gorbachev said "we will bury you"... and then decades later, it is happening - he meant it, he set things in motion to make it happen, nobody bothered to try to fight back, and, here we are). I think these thoughts are straight-forward from Einstein's theory that time & space are far more connected than people previously conceived. Ofc we do not "know", but is fun to conjecture nonetheless:-).

But then I read something from CS Lewis that entirely changed my thinking on that subject forever (one of his deep philosophy essays, I do not now recall which one). Yes, we may be pawns on a chessboard, but who is to say that WE are not ALSO the players!? If life is a video game, WE could be the characters, but "WE" could ALSO be coming down into our avatars from above. Truth tends to be stranger than fiction, and we truly don't know what's what, so any explanation could be the One. It could be just as likely that we are all "one", part of Gai and each having a dream of our own lives as if we are separated.

And moreover... damn I hit the character limit. Well, for now I will continue to a part 2, but I need to stop doing that at some point:-P.

That would only solve the purely math parts. So it would solve "2+2=?", but it would not solve "two plus two equals?".

And even if it did, don't miss the fact that this is an indicator of more foundational problems that lie beneath. Like if you ever wake up and your clock is wrong, you might want to find out why - perhaps its battery is low, and if so, it will never get any better as long as you and it live, until you deal with that. Or maybe you had a power outage, and a bunch of things could have gone wrong in relation to that (is your pilot light out, are you now leaking gas everywhere?)

Here's a funny popular-culture take on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VemLkVbsmz0.

I mean... some might argue that even 98% wasn't enough!? :-D

What are people supposed to - ask every question 3 times and take the best 2 out of 3, like this was kindergarten? (and that is the best-case scenario, where the errors are entirely evenly distributed across the entire problem space, which is the absolute lowest likelihood model there - much more often some problems would be wrong 100% of the time, while others may be correct more like 99% of the time, but importantly you will never know in advance which is which)

Actually that does on a real issue: some schools teach the model of "upholding standards" where like the kids actually have to know stuff (& like, junk, yeah totally) - whereas conversely another, competing model is where if they just learn something, anything at all during the year, that that is good enough to pass them and make them someone else's problem down the line (it's a good thing that professionals don't need to uh... "uphold standards", right? anyway, the important thing there is that the school still receives the federal funding in the latter case but not the former, and I am sure that we all can agree that when it comes to the next generation of our children, the profits for the school administrators are all that matters... right? /s)

All of this came up when Trump appointed one of his top donors, Betsy Devos to be in charge of all edumacashium in America, and she had literally never stepped foot inside of a public school in her entire lifetime. I am not kidding you, watch the Barbara Walters special to hear it from her own mouth. Appropriately (somehow), she had never even so much as heard of either of these two main competing models. Yet she still stepped up and acknowledged that somehow she, as an extremely wealthy (read: successful) white woman, she could do that task better than literally all of the educators in the entire nation - plus all those with PhDs in education too, ~~jeering~~ cheering her on from the sidelines.

Anyway, why we should expect "correctness" from an artificial intelligence, when we cannot seem to find it anywhere among humans either, is beyond me. These were marketing gimmicks to begin with, then we all rushed to ask it to save us from the enshittification of the internet. It was never going to happen - not this soon, not this easily, not this painlessly. Results take real effort.

Thank you for the correction. I keep forgetting b/c Trump is the one in diapers who can barely walk down a ramp, while Biden stumbles while walking up the stairs. Neither can control their tempers and both have slurred speech, though Biden can pull it together occasionally whereas Trump never seems to.

For the job of President of the most militarily powerful nation on earth, they are both older than dirt, though as you pointed out, not equally so.

The last one also caused a huge number of "excess deaths" as well...