jb-hb
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I wasn’t going to post anymore today, but what the heck. This is amusing/tragic.
My wife told me just now. Her entire office just discovered they all have Covid. The office that all had to get the shots to keep employment. Most of whom are fully boostered. And this isn’t the first time this has happened
I offered her a glass of water with one of my homemade corona-remedy icecube and she refused.
(crock pot – organic, scrubbed grapefruit peel, pineapple core and skin, tumeric, and ginger, low simmer or just keep hot in crock pot, 2-4 hours, strain out any solids, freeze cubes for later. 1 cube/4 hours when sick. Probably shouldn’t drink it if no specific need. The grapefruit peel releases something like quinine. Tumeric is good against inflammation. Ginger and pineapple have anti-parasite qualities, which for some reason seems to matter with coronoa so may as well throw em in there. A garlic pill along with that probably wouldn’t hurt.)
….refused, despite panicking about visiting her mother this weekend. Which she will do anyway. Do we believe in the danger or not? Maybe we make the proper religious observances – duty to panic. (DTP) Not quite real, not quite unreal.
She did take the D and K2 I offered at least. Sigh.
Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy ? The thing that has struck me most about the past few years is the wasted potential. If you can drive millions (okay, billions) of people crazy, surely you could have driven them SANE even more easily.
Since everyone now believes in and engages in self-contradictory self-defeating activities, either the people with power are idiots or liars. Or possibly they became so fascinated by the power of By Any Means Necessary that they became obsessively addicted to the means at the expense of any ends?
I’m looking at a new 4,000 unit apartment complex being put up.
It’s a total firetrap. I don’t understand how the building codes here allow it, but I’m looking right through all the stick-frame construction and there is not a single firewall.
Are there flat, window-covered sides facing due south with proper overhangs to take advantage of seasonal free passive cooling/heat? Nope.
Are there windowed cupolas on top and tunnels beneath, letting cool air be dragged up through the building for free during the summer? Nope.
How thick is the insulation, anyway? As thin as they can make it.
Are they putting a grocery store, liquor store, barber, pharmacist, veterinarian, doctor, restaurant, bar, bank, etc in the bottom level of the complex, so people can just go downstairs for whatever they need? So businesses can deliver goods to their door from inside the building? Nope.
Did they already build out 2-3 story luxury apartments in a 2 mile radius surrounding every light rail station so no poor people can live near the train stop and use it for transit to/from work? Yep.
Since they were building the kitchens from scratch, thus not needing to fit refrigerators to a standard size, did they opt for custom built-in refrigerators with 6in insulation instead of the usual 2in? Considering there was an economy of scale there with 4,000 units? Considering the landlord has to repair any refrigerator that breaks and that a compressor will last a lot longer with 6in insulation due to running less? Nope.
Are there allotments being made for gardening? Which did TPTB brainwash everyone into wanting, a victory garden or an iphone? Some of them want to be vegan now, I guess, but just keep those salad ingredients travelling 3,000 miles. BTW omg meat uses fossil fuels!
Are massive shipments of condoms being sent for free to countries with positive population growth numbers? Are B-52’s flying missions from Diego Garcia over these countries dropping millions of condoms and leaflets on family planning? Are aligned corporate interests showering these countries’ populations with incessant anti-population growth propaganda? No? Pollution, destruction of natural habitat, and resource depletion has no connection to population growth??? But we’re all going to die in 5 years? But we have billions of dollars to campaign rabidly on all sorts of tertiary issues?
I could go on. Obviously.
But these #%$#%tarts want us to starve to death and freeze in the dark while chewing bugs because they can’t be bothered to run anything properly and because they prefer to drive everyone crazy as opposed to drive everyone sane. You don’t need to be secretive or underhanded to get people to do things that are right and make sense. But I guess at least you COULD, if you felt compelled to keep a hand in things. But it’s this.
re: Germ’s spike-only damage article from yesterday.
I didn’t bother much about the injection until my employer started making noises about requirements.
At that point, I DID look into it and my mind was blown. The dangerous thing about Covid was supposed to be the spike protein. And they’re telling me they will inject me with RNA that will cause my body to manufacture that SAME spike protein in larger volumes than the virus would?
I imagined the following conversation:
Hi. We’re here from the government. We’ve been having a real problem with people getting burned lately, so we want you to take this govt-issued can of gasoline, pour it on yourself, and light yourself on fire.
Oh, so this is like a different, special kind of safe fire?
No.
So… I’ll be more resistant to fire afterwards?
No.
Wait, what’s the difference between getting burnt in an accidental fire vs this fire you want me to set on myself?
THIS fire has our blessing.
I know the whacko neo-marxist deconstructionists insist that there is no such thing as a reasonable person, that there is no such thing as common sense, and that words only mean things in terms of other words, but still, for even any 80 IQ person, shouldn’t common sense have made anyone laugh at this proposed solution?
Set yourself on fire, because we are seeing people getting burned? Flood yourself with spike protein because people are getting hurt by spike protein? It doesn’t even take research, education, intelligence, or anything else to have a common-sense reaction.
My guess is the Universe is trying to tell you something: now is not the time for “jobs”, as the entire economy is about to dissolve into a hustle. Without working banks, how can they cut a paycheck? Although you can get a job, might go to Taco Bell, then use your other hours to promote yourself and your own work privately.
That is kind of my thinking – that we are headed towards a stage at which “work” at a “job” could be headed for a wall that will convert it into squandered time. Earn some money so it can go poof in inflation or a bail-in?
Say you’re a guy with a lifelong furniture-making hobby. If you spend your time on making furniture in your garage and the currency collapses or your bank account disappears, the furniture will at least still be furniture.
I post these musings for anyone in a similar situation. IF I get a job, my priority is to make it permanent, not temp working, and remote.
Permanent because bureaucracies like to establish “gating” rules. You remain grandfathered into your old cellphone plan UNTIL you switch to a new phone, then their system forces you to change plans to change devices. It’s the same logic everywhere. If you are constantly passing through gates, you will hit the “update” rather soon. If you pass through a gate and then sit there, entrenched, you may very well still be subjected to capricious bureaucratic rules, but you avoid the gating feature.
Remote because it has become clear, jobs are now something to hold over one’s head. I’m not going to have a job take up all my time AND pin me down to one location. If I need to GTFO I don’t need “but then you’d lose that JOB” And I’m not keen to be physically present for any HR related “trainings.” I had 3 remote “trainings” with a live Ibrihim X Kendri in 2020 and the one blessing was that I could keep my camera off, mic muted, and give no traction to anyone for imagined attitudes, reactions etc. A corporate job with a physical office is a permanent continual liability.
Anyway, yes, I do have my own work I’m doing while I apply for 5-10 or so jobs a week. I’d recommend anyone in a similar situation do some kind of work of their own and not simply hold their breath while job searching. Particularly, think of work you can do that is still worth something (that cannot be retroactively wiped out) even if something significant happens to the currency, the banking system, etc. And that could even be just higher inflation.
But it just seems strange, spooky. An ocean of job listings, new ones continually coming out, more than I can keep up with. You might think OLD jobs might be left posted by lazy hiring managers and perhaps the economic environment is changing, so they just really aren’t looking for workers anymore? …but no, I am always filtering my search for jobs posted in the past 2 weeks or less. I find more acceptable jobs posted SAME DAY than I apply for.
So we have a “worker shortage.” I can see things public and private are visibly not getting done when I am out and about in my area. (Trees in the park that fell in a storm in May still lie there in October for instance. Businesses do not pick up the trash on their property. etc) Seemingly infinite job postings, even for remote work. Did we run out of people? Or are we not using the people we have? Did we run out of jobs and the postings are fake? Are winners and losers being chosen and if this results in things not getting done, so be it?
But whatever is going on, MAYBE I’m being done a kind of favor. I keep grinding away at my own thing while they don’t reply to me.
One might see the Paypal $2,500 fine for “misinformation” as a way to capture, in the same way that a corporate employer does, people with a “hustle.” Much like Patreon, a convenient payment processor to connect fans direclty to artists, decided they were going to be the artists’ feudal overlords instead. Folks, whatever hustle you do, ensuring diversification of options and resiliency is going to be a constant job. Think of what a stupid asshole would do and be prepared for that.
Multinational Advertisers Begin Pulling Out of Twitter (CTH)
I am reminded of a victorian-era mystery I read long ago. One with the typical drawing-room denouement at the end.
With all the suspects present, the hero runs through all the clues, solves the mystery by thinking out loud, as they would in a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie book… only to come to a startling conclusion. EVERYONE ELSE in the room was in on the murder. As he reaches the correct conclusion, they all rise up and kill him together.
It’s amazing to see, openly, how many corporations don’t exist anymore for their ostensible purpose – soap, toilet paper, cars, whatever. This is a declaration that the exist first as political entities. Or they collectively exist as A political entity, perhaps.
They’d rather pull ads than tolerate free speech?
Their openly stated prioritization is that they would rather disenfranchise you than sell to you.
I’m a little embarrassed, but let me spell it out – I’m applying for virtual call center jobs.
Job availability has NEVER been a factor in my job search. For all intents and purposes, there are infinite jobs. I can never get to the end of them.
The bottleneck that limited me to 70+ thus far were the job listings themselves. Hundreds to thousands of corporatespeak gibberish words. An investigation to parse out the words, research the company, figure out 1. what does the company actually do 2. what do they want me to do for them. 3. what sentence-fragment contradictory to the searchable fields in the job listing shows it’s not a good fit? Where, with what phrasing, has a vax requirement been hidden? I don’t run at windmills, I toss all those aside.
The listing typically takes you to a website where you need to rebuild your resume from scratch to fit the website form (they won’t take your pdf instead) questionnaires, multiple assessments, virtual recording-based interviews talking to a machine. There’s the cover letter to compose once you figure out who they are and what they want from you. All for a virtual (remote) call center job mind you!
So to recap – infinite jobs, peon jobs, awesome resume FOR the peon position (and I AM a peon, so that makes sense…), patient and methodical with all the hoop-jumping, bottom feeding, infinite jobs.
In the McCarthy era, there was blacklisting of celebrites. But they didn’t blacklist people loading packages into delivery trucks, people answering phones, people doing data entry, pet-manicurists, etc. I think it behooves everyone to keep in mind the combination of pettiness AND seriousness in play here.
Get serious. Make sober, intelligent judgements on what would be pointless, stupid, petty, unreasonable, profitless to do that could nevertheless be done that may affect you. The underlying value system that might be bringing that on. Even if it FEELS as though it is unreal, like a tv show or sports event signifying nothing but eliciting strong emotions. Get serious.
Consider this thought experiment. Drunk people don’t behave properly. However, if you ask a drunk what a reasonable sober person would do, they CAN tell you most of the time. Weird, right? I experimented with this myself back in college and found that, as an arbitrary act of will, I could do the reasonable thing if I modeled what a sober person WOULD do and was determined to do that.
Interesting.Today, it is as if we are drunk. Whatever I see or think, I FEEL as though it is just another ’08. I FEEL it is as if I am evaluating a TV show or sports event I dislike. As ramped-up as my outrage might get over it, in some sense, I ask, am I actually taking this in as reality or a kind of dream parallel to reality, lining up with it but somehow not actually the thing itself? They can’t be serious. It would be petty, wasteful, counterproductive, pointless? Who the #$#& am I to bother over?
So bring your emotional determination into the intellectual plane. If you’re drunk, what would a sober, wise person do? If you feel a sense of unreality and absurdity, but intellectually know, then what would a person who intellectually knew that did NOT feel a sense of unreality do? You can model that.
So, just my own two cents and field report. Maybe I just suck at job searches. But I suspect there’s insight to be gained here, as to where we are really at right now.
from Moon of Alabama
The United States on Wednesday accused North Korea of covertly shipping a “significant number” of artillery shells to Russia to aid its war effort in Ukraine
Oh no! People shouldn’t sell weapons to nations active in this conflict! That would be wrong!
The White House’s national security spokesman, John Kirby, said that it was unclear if the artillery munitions, which are being transferred through the Middle East and North Africa, had reached Russia. The United States does not believe that the additional weapons will alter the trajectory of the war.
It’s definitely happening, but don’t worry. It has no effect. It is useless.
Additional weapons will surely turn the tide for Ukraine (as we have assured you in wall to wall 24/7 repetitive messaging for 8 months) but additional weapons cannot be useful to anyone else.
B goes on to show, with a map, how there is a rail line directly connecting the two countries.
But if Bad Stuff goes through the middle east and north africa through intermediaries, even though it is totally useless, that’s way more spooky. People shouldn’t be big meanies. Not even totally ineffectually. That’s a rule. (unless it is us)
I’m particularly interested in this “amnesty” given my own personal situation.
I was let go by my ginormous employer in April for not divulging my experimental injection which does not vaccinate status. I had worked fully remote for over 2 years. The company exempted all retail employees from the requirement. They fired remote people with no workplace to go to in their entire state. The HR lady who announced the requirement said it was being done “For Clarity”
In April there was already PLENTY of information showing the ineffectiveneness and unsafety of this thing. I figured this must be the tail end of the panic. I gave it a few months to let things blow over and started applying for jobs in late July.
Over 70 applications. The only interview I got was with a 50 person company with no government contracts.
I had a fairly low level job. The kind of job that grinds through employees, has a high turnover. I’m just a peon, but my resume is kickass FOR the peon position I am trying for. I’m well spoken and do well on aptitude tests.
I’m not talking about getting a job here, I’m talking about getting an INTERVIEW. 70+ jobs that I have painstakingly researched to make sure I was a good fit for, cover letters tailored to the specific position, etc.
The 50 person company had a ton of applicants vying for one position. I made it through 3 levels of interview before I didn’t get the job. They seemed to think fairly highly of me – they asked me to apply again if another position opens up.
So I’ve puzzled over why a small company with a MORE rigorous process and higher standards would be the ONE entity that gives me an interview vs the ginormous corporate entities that just need to shovel humans into multiple open positions like cannon fodder. And every single position I have applied for is 100% remote. To hopefully avoid a replay of April.
Having watched our current president talk about creating a LIST, I do start to wonder.
Surely occupying me with some crap job 40+hrs a week is preferable to me having all the time in the world to do anything I want, think about things, etc? Maybe the concept is that the Gulag is now everywhere rather than a specific location. Gulag in place. Or I’m supposed to get so mad I do something evil and foolish?
My wife still views the firing as something I did to her as opposed to something that was done to me or to us. I’ve pointed out she VOTED FOR the dude who openly promised to do this to us. lol that does not go over well at all. The 70+ non-replies mean, to her, that I am doing something wrong and should just get a temp position. Ah yes, just maintain this level of employment uncertainty indefinitely as a way of life.
In one of the last team meetings, a coworker proposed – vociferously and at some length – that the unvaxxed should be made to wear “special clothing” ….”for safety.” I barely restrained myself from asking, for the sake of environmentally conscious action, if entire suits of special clothing was wasteful and a brightly colored arm band or badge might suffice. Nobody objected. The leadership present on the call did not lift a finger to stop nor refute her rant.
What do they even mean by amnesty? It appears to consist of NO concrete actions nor statements other than who, on the opposing side, doesn’t get to have it. Oh, amnesty? Really? Oh, so I get my job back with back pay? I can at least get A job maybe? This amnesty stuff is great news.
Amnesty:
Did you notice the “amnesty” lady SPEIFICIALLY said “we can factor out malicious misinformation spreaders” in any amnesty, forgiveness, live and let live decisions?
So her article is certainly NOT a request for forgiveness.
It is ALSO not a plea for dropping any of the things she could have asked forgiveness FOR. No suggestion to stop nor undo.
Her article is best understood as a plea for TARGET PRIORITIZATION.
Translation of her Amnesty article “Right now, we need to concentrate all efforts against ‘thought-leaders.’ We can circle back around to everyday normies at a later time. Redouble our efforts on anyone we’ve labeled ‘malicious misinformation spreaders‘”
How else do you interpret an article that offers to stop nothing, undo nothing and declares “misinformation-spreaders” to be exempt from any amnesty?
like everything in opposite-land, the article calls for not letting anyone get away while saying the word amnesty. A prominent, renowned doctor losing their accreditation at almost the same time as the article being published is telling.
The “amnesty” article is saying No Mercy. In response to, at this very late date, a doctor’s life being ruined, it brings up amnesty and says “Not for THOSE guys” Because somebody might look up and say “Why the heck are we still coming after this dude NOW?”
ok I will try to disprove my theory. Jobs, fired, interviews, blacklist, blacklisted, vaccine, corporation, work
if this doesn’t get blocked, then I’ve no idea why I can’t post my little story about firing for the vax and the subsequent job search and observations about the larger context
hm. Interesting. I am posting nothing weird, offensive, no swear words, nothing illegal, etc. Whenever I try a short or long post referring to the color which is the absence of light, a bunch of people viewable in a linear fashion, and doing things to get money, even just those specific key words or terms BY THEMSELVES, screen loads to no new post. Very very strange.
It’s strange that I can post SOME things but not others. I posted a short post yesterday and another one today, went through fine. Tried a longer post and nope. The other day I tried a few suspect expressions and got stopped. Tried the long post again today, stopped again. Long-ish but I thought innocuous. So I pondered what could possibly be the matter
One thing I talked about was – a color commonly interpreted as the absence of light. Describing a record of specific people. In the context of not being able to get jjxjerbbbs. With my own personal account of what I am seeing. Let’s see if this goes through or not.
The US shouldn’t listen to Kiev???
Elensky clearly isn’t in charge of anything. Biden and Harris clearly, CLEARLY are not in charge of anything. Obviously.
One sock-puppet shouldn’t listen to the 2nd sock-puppet it is controlling? What?
I am posting this to determine if there is a technical issue or something objectionable being blocked in my attempted comment
Its all about how our rulers are using expressions to justify their ” right to rule” our social/economic systems, (the sheep).
The discussion got diverted by jb-hb and phoenixvoice.And the end result is always the working class being made miserable and terrified while a few people ride around in limos eating caviar occasionally purging and murdering each other out of paranoia and ambition.
The King of Persia in 500 BC would recognize the old, OLD primitive system they adopt. And when a socialist would unleash a deluge of cutting edge word salad theory on him, he would wait until they were spent, and then, with a twinkle in his eye, respond, “Ah yes. I use religion to legitimize my reign as well.”
you thought I further DIVERTED the discussion? Really?
Nazi Party was not interested in traditional goals of socialism and, in fact, hunted down actual socialists and actual communists
sigh. sure, sure. And if you were an Arian sect member in late antiquity, you would use language such as “The Catholics were not interested in traditional goals of Christianity and, in fact, hunted down actual Christians”
And you’d say that if you were an Arian, a Paulician, a Nestorian, an Eastern Orthodox believer, etc.
There’ are some great educational videos by youtuber TIK explaining this, for example:
—-Hitler’s Socialism | Destroying the Denialist Counter Arguments
—-National Socialism WAS Socialism | Rethinking WW2 HistoryConsider, if you will, The Crusades. The Crusaders viewed Saladin as an incredibly formidable foe, both as a leader and a fighter They also saw him as a great cultured, honorable, chivalrous gentleman. Somehow, the supposedly full-on evil Europeans of the time held up Saladin throughout the European continent as a paragon of virtue.
Or consider that the Crusaders and the Saracens managed to ally against the Mongols.
Consider instead the religious wars in Europe between Catholics and Protestants. Look up something called “Swedish Drink,” for instance. One of countless savageries. You don’t see that type of deliberate repeated over the top awfulness in the Crusades. Surely the looting, pillaging etc you see in every medieval war, but not THAT.
Why were Christians more savage to each other than to the Saracens of a different religion altogether?
Because nothing inspires revulsion and rage so much as blasphemy FROM WITHIN your belief.
So you told us “They couldn’t be socialists, because NAZIs hunted down “The” Socialists”
Translation “They couldn’t be socialists, because the socialists hunted down the socialists”
Were the Communists in charge of the USSR not Communists? Did they not hunt down every Trostkyist Communist they could find even in other countries?
Nothing fills the faithful with more rage than blasphemy and heresy
The predominant Socialist movement to this day is INTERNATIONALIST Socialism. They have become so dominant and strident now that if someone thinks there should be ANY limit to crossing borders, if someone suggests ANY concern to protect working class American jobs or bring some jobs back for working class Americans, the cries of outraged accusation that, in code, or outright, mean “NAZI!!!” are immediate and deafening?
But wasn’t the working class supposed to be central to the socialist position? You see the hierarchy of values revealed. INTERNATIONALISM is the holier value.
So different sects broke off. Like the Catholic Church, one became a big winner. Now, having won, ANYTHING smacking of nationalism deserves unreasoning rage. And of course, a continual distancing from that other sect of the same religion is essential.
And of course it is important to make distinctions between the two meanings of “socialist.”
As an adjective, meaning “socialistic” I suppose, there are quite a few left-leaning people who would say that programs to humanize society can be helpful and are desirable. But these are not socialists and are not in favor of Socialist policy. They just think yes, it is reasonable to have some socialistic measures. Surely. SOME educational measures, help for out of work workers, etc, CAN be a net value add for society and we can therefore afford it where it is EFFECTIVE.
Ask a SOCIALIST
“at what point do you have the right amount of Socialism?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, like, at what point will the mix of private/capitalist and socialist/government stuff reach its perfect balance?”
“I’d like to say something evasive right now and pretend to not understand your question”
“Well ok, let me put it like this. At what point would you draw a line in the sand and fight to stop FURTHER adoption of socialist methods?”
“Is that the Space Shuttle over there?”
Open Borders is INTERNATIONALISM. Try having THIS conversation.
“What would you say is the optimal maximum population for the US and what would be the optimal influx of new people per year”
“I’d really like to be evasive right now”
“well, ok. Let me make it simpler. Is 3 million per year a good number? What about 1 million? What are the advantages to that?”
“I’d really like to be evasive right now”
“Well, ok, what if we cut to the chase here and move all 8 billion people within the borders of the US. Would you be happy then? Everyone here and no one not here finally?”
“pshaw pshaw that’s silly”
“but IF YOU COULD, would you be satisfied at that point vis a vis open borders?”
“oh but I only want people who DESIRE to come to the US to have free ACCCCEEESSSSS”
“OH. Well there are 4 billion super poor people who definitely want to come. What if we increase the population of the US by 4 billion, would that suit you? 3 billion? 2 billion? Why not? So it’s only because of physical limits to logistics, but otherwise you would? No? Why not?”
Any explanation given on why that amount is NOT what they want (and ask for it if they don’t give it) can just lead to a lower absurd figure. I guarantee the conversation will NEVER drop to a non-absurd number. (“…so you concede there are limits for specific rational reasons?”) It will always be stopped before that point.
How much socialism is too much socialism? How much internationalism is too much internationalism?
The main thing isn’t to solve problems for poor and working class people pragmatically
It is to hopefully, finally, perfectly make everyone adhere to certain holy truths. They are NOT to be understood as real people in real places doing real things.
And the end result is always the working class being made miserable and terrified while a few people ride around in limos eating caviar occasionally purging and murdering each other out of paranoia and ambition.
The King of Persia in 500 BC would recognize the old, OLD primitive system they adopt. And when a socialist would unleash a deluge of cutting edge word salad theory on him, he would wait until they were spent, and then, with a twinkle in his eye, respond, “Ah yes. I use religion to legitimize my reign as well.”
Curious about this comment – “in 2020, as a staunch atheist, I was forced to admit, religion appears to be part of the Human Operating System. If you pull it out, they will to fill it in again. ”
What was it that forced you to admit this?
Observable reality. Screeching purple haired tatooed whales kneeling and chanting in the public square while experiencing adrenal gland exhaustion.
I recently read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. One author, a staunch atheist. Perhaps THE staunch atheist. The other, a fascinating Catholic mystic.
Merton pointed out something very interesting – from an approved Catholic text. That God could be understood as existence. Not physical existence ie the substance, the things. No. The act, the verb. Existing. Existence itself.
Very interesting because Merton went the path of traditional Catholic monastic tradition and then ALSO delved into the Eastern monastic tradition. It immediately reminded me of Suzuki’s Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, in which he admonishes the reader to not regard a table as a static object, but as an incarnate action – see “tabling” when you look over there, not tabling. Everything in the universe as actively existing or as active existence the verb.
If you look over at Ayn Rand’s John Galt speech from Atlas Shrugged – you find the same thing! EXISTENCE.
And then evil makes more sense too. What does evil hate? Creation ie existence? What can’t it bear? The way things are. It would be better to invert things or for everything to be everything and anything, perhaps? Merton and Rand would recognize evil as essentially the same thing!
But anyway, observable reality. People driving themselves nuts trying to adopt or invent a new religion growing increasingly desperate while doing everything they can to not look at the obvious solutions readily available. Nor are they looking at the cause of their need.
I go in for stoic philosophy I suppose, myself. And I just can’t buy into the other thing. Can’t work for that corporation so to speak. That would be a whole additional useless and drawn out conversation in which you demand that I deeply offend you to the core, so I’d say don’t invite me to do that. Maybe just be happy an atheist is taking the stance they’re taking for the moment and mull it over. We don’t HAVE to get into the typical atheist/christian internet battle.
the internal combustion fleet is most properly understood as a disposal system for the least valuable byproduct of petroleum refining.
IF we were to replace internal combustion engines with electric, our refineries would still need to refine oil for all the many, many things our survival depends on. Including the tires for the electric vehicles.
Having cracked the petroleum into all its constituent parts and having successfully, virtuously converted the entire internal combustion fleet to electric/battery (a fairy godmother intervened, perhaps)…
WHAT ON EARTH will we do with all the gasoline we are accumulating? Where will we store it? Do we ship it back to the oil wells and pump it back down? Just release it on the ground? Spray it on our crops? What new systems for massive gasoline storage and transportation will we have to develop? What new massive quantities of petroleum fuels will we burn in the course of this? What new massive environmental disasters in gasoline storage/transportation will happen as we work all this out?
We will DIE if we stop refining petroleum. We can’t not produce gasoline as a byproduct. What’s the plan here? Do idiots think “getting off oil” consists of refusing to use gasoline while producing endless, ginormous, stupendous surpluses of gasoline with no place for it to go? I guess they do.
Whether it’s coal>electric or hydrogen that replaces it, what’s the damn plan for where the gasoline we definitely will still produce GOES?
2020’s – a tour de force in Shame Mismanagement.
Have you been baptized? Have you undergone the purification ritual?
If they had made it something innocuous like bathing my feet in specially blessed water to show we all are purified and Belong, I would have still refused. But instead they chose something far, far more idiotic.
I don’t think I can ever forget. They fired me in April. It made no sense. I had worked from home for over 2 years – not ONCE had I come in to the office to do my job. They WAIVED the requirement for people working retail, in contact with the public 40+hrs a week! But fully remote people with nowhere physical to GO for work in their STATE were let go for not taking The Waters.
Shame, being such an incredibly powerful factor in human life – overpowering, if anything- MUST be a survival trait. Because we live as social creatures, surely.
I’ve wondered about people with perfect memory. People who remember literally everything. Why wouldn’t this be ALL of humanity? Surely, a powerful survival trait. Think how much wisdom and skill you could accumulate.
…but humans are social. We cannot accomplish anything of meaning without others. And whatever we accomplish gains meaning in the context of others. Are you more or less likely to write a symphony, a book, paint a painting, if you are the last person on earth or if there are people you will be able to show it to?
(no, don’t virtue signal as a Profound Artist – HONESTLY. Everyone is gone. No effect on your making art or other content? And if you say no effect, I’d make it just the same, in your isolation as the last human on earth, you WOULDN’T fantasize about aliens one day finding your desolate planet and your art, or the cultural remains of humans in general? …and why would that be?)
I suspect strongly that the reason we are forgetful is for survival.
We are primates. If there’s one thing we should remember, it’s that we are primates. I say chimps can understand every Shakespeare play in its essence. Hamlet has played out in Chimp society many times. We are a scheming, resentful, paranoid lot, us primates. We can be nice too, but nevertheless.
How the heck can we survive, if we NEED each other, if our meaning derives so strongly on a social basis, if we remember every lie, nasty action and word? So we forget. Why else wouldn’t perfect memory have become the dominant trait? We MUST forget. Just to live with each other.
The intricate, wobbling balance of memory, shame, and other factors. With religion, philosophy, tradition as steadying moderating forces.
But yeah. Some things you cannot and should not forget.
thanks @ Antidote. long, loooooong time Automatic Earth lurker here. (well over a decade, I am guessing?) lol, like others posting recently, I broke silence after seeing that weirdo berating Dr D for overposting. If Dr D posted 10x as much, I would read it all and wish for more. like – fine, HERE’s an overpost for ya!!1!!
As a staunch Atheist, I’d like to make a few observations.
It’s always strange to see supposedly rational fellow-atheists assuming that anything done “While Christian” is a Christian action. (but super-selectively) …but then, 90% of the “fellow atheists” I encounter, if I can put them at ease that they have a receptive audience, admit to all kinds of belief in mystical or irrational claptrap. Wicca, Tarot, Pyramid Power, various things they call The Science that are against science and which they cannot reason out.
They seem to argue on the basis that, if a geographical area was predominantly Christian, demographically, then anything done in or by entities within that region are definitively Christian actions stemming FROM Christianity, which seems very strange.
When Christians want to argue to me that all the Things That Make Society Possible all come from the Bible, I point my finger at the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, etc. They didn’t have the Bible. They had libraries, schools, running water, a courts system, irrigation, nuclear families, marriage, etc WITHOUT the Bible and without Christianity. As an atheist, I’d argue that all these institutions that make civilized life possible and pleasant are definitively secular, as they exist successfully across all societies and civilizations despite the fact that they each have religions that say everybody else’s religion is wrong.
Check the evil actions performed “by Christianity.” Do they happen across all ages, all societies, all religions? Then evil IS ITSELF SECULAR IN NATURE, not belonging to any one religion. As secular as running water and libraries.
Or do my “fellow” atheists pick on Christianity because, along with having a religion, they had WRITING? Because predominantly Christian nations were writing down what they did, then examining them over hundreds – thousands – of years, they’re bad guys, because bad things were written down? …but if entire continents such as Africa, North America, and South America have no writing, thus no written records, then it means nobody did anything bad there like the Christians did???
Is this some sort of magical belief in observer-caused reality? The Americas did not exist until a Christian European observer showed up to cause them and their peoples to come into existence, at which point, coincidentally, at the moment of creation,Europeans started writing down what those newly-created-by-christians non-christian people were doing such as slavery, human sacrifice, and torture of prisoners of war? (also, repeatedly passing the Carrying Capacity of their surroundings and experiencing dieoffs/crashes? The Mayans… Cahokia?) Had they not shown up, the natives would have lived in blissful, peaceful, non-sinful innocence forever? The only way for them to be innocent would be to not BE, due to the entirely SECULAR evils perpetrated by every society in any age anywhere on the planet that wrote down what they were doing. Just make up your mind if you think it is due to human nature or the technology that allows record-keeping.
The non-christian Ottomans and Barbary Pirates practiced the second-largest slavery system for hundreds of years against predominantly Christian Europeans (see Candide by Voltaire…) but enslavement is a TRAIT of Christianity? The atheist USSR practiced the largest slavery system in human history, but slavery is a TRAIT of Christianity? Maybe enslavement and resource extraction are secular in nature. No thanks goes out to Christian Britain, whose navy eliminated slavery from the continent of Africa?
That said, if you are going to heap every single evil action done by demographically predominant Christian societies, nations, organizations etc onto the religion, like, if your assumption is that anything done by a demographic IS their religion, then, following the same rule, you would have to heap every single good or useful thing onto it as well, wouldn’t you? To be even close to intellectually honest?
So…everything that keeps you alive, then? Anything at all that brings you good? It’s all CHRISTIAN? You’re basically living in a Matrix pod in which the pod and all inputs are Christian – everything good, everything necessary? And how long do we argue on this absurd basis before you, my fellow atheist, admonish me to be more spiritual and start Raising My Awareness about, idunno, tEh bAlAnCe, chakras, yoga, whatever? (protest as you will, 90%+ of my discussions with “atheists” veer off in that direction)
And the Crusades! THE CRUSADES!
Look at a map, man. The Islamic Conquests were an enormous military achievement. Greater than Napoleon, Hitler, or Alexander. You could say, in sheer territorial gains, the Mongols had it beat, but for staying power, the Islamic Conquests beat the Mongols as well. The Romans at their height conquered less territory but lasted longer. Arguably the greatest conquest ever is still the Islamic Conquest.
If you look at Europe, Africa north of the Sahara, and the Near East as one some-what diverse cultural, economic, civilizational unit, then you have to conclude that the Arabs were absolutely kicking their collective ass.
Conquests: Isreal, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Afghanistan, Sudan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Spain, Sicily, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Rumania. Pakistan, Crimea, Hungary.
Look at a map to see where Tours and Vienna are. That’s the high-tide mark.
3/4 of the land area of this economic-cultural bloc was conquered and with its back against the wall. You think they wouldn’t bother to couch any pushback in religious terms? Did the atheist USSR couch a pushback against German invasion in religious terms, despite being staunchly atheist?
And what was the extent of the pushback? er…. Spain, Sicily, and temporarily parts of the Levant? And hundreds of years later, slowly, the Balkan peninsula? Look at what happened to Germany in response to ITS massive conquests. Look at what happened to Napoleonic France. Theirs is a post-conquest success story by comparison. They got off extremely easy, historically speaking. Hey, sometimes that’s just how it goes.
So,far from trashing the Islamic expansion – I say it is arguably the greatest conquest in history. It commands respect, because competent use of force tends to do that. But they practiced enormous conquests, massive amounts of slavery, wholesale negation of pre-existing cultures, and were not Christian.
So, giving up on the broad brush of history – Oh, one PARTICULAR Christian was a Big Meanie? Well, did Jesus TELL him to do that thing and then he did it? No? Did Jesus tell him NOT to and he did? Oh. So that’s Christian in your book? Pardon the use by an Atheist, but… JE-sus!
Again, if you want to heap all secular ill that OBVIOUSLY exists across all societies, all peoples, all time periods, on the head of Christianity, then go ahead and heap all the credit for all good as well and live in the Christian Matrix pod. Go on. The impression I get is that ex-Christians want God/Jesus to be The Big Daddy EVEN WHILE saying they are Atheist. There was something wrong somewhere, daddy make it all better. My NON EXISTENT daddy, that is. Despite not existing, it’s still all his fault.
It was heartening to see, during the lockdowns, that copies of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius sold out. SOLD OUT! An 1800 year old book that could be published by any publisher due to no copyright, all copies from all publishers… sold out. Throughout 2020 I could feel the Stoics gritting their teeth and saying to society at large, perhaps under their breath “Damn it just CARRY THE WEIGHT. Just look things in the face, FACE them and… Carry. The. Damn. Weight.” Feels like the past 2 years have been an object lesson in what happens when nearly an entire society just continually cringes away from looking at and thinking about things.
For many years, nothing would piss me off so much as that GK Chesterton quote, about if a man doesn’t believe in God, he’ll believe in anything.
But here we are. Self-avowed atheists blaming non-existent God for secular ills. Dabbling in ouija, half-understood eastern mysticism, the occult. Gathering in town squares, chanting and kneeling. Why even go on a journey? Might as well have just stayed at home and gone to church. Good god. (ha)
I blame Automatic earth for my having sat through My Dinner With Andre last week. That 3 minute clip is the only good section of the movie.
Andre got mad at the elbow-specialist doctor for not “seeing” his mother. Dude, you are trying to fix an elbow, so you needed an elbow guy, right? If your mom’s furnace goes out, you want the HVAC guy to obsequiously mourn your mom for you as well?
What would have SATISFIED Andre in that situation? Had the doctor said a word or two, more generally about his mother, he’d have been complaining over dinner, “Well, he saw her, but he didn’t SEE her.” I reckon his demands would have been neverending. If the doctor dressed up in sackcloth, smeared himself in ashes, and began tearing out his hair and keening for Andre’s mother, er…. MAYBE then?
And based on everything else Andre said – his total disconnection with reality, his implicit constant psychedelic drug use, his constant travel away from family and friends, preferentially into places where people did not speak his language, he was totally disconnected, anesthetized. Meaning is an emergent function of CONTEXT and he had both bombed his own context back into the stone age and then done violence to his own ability to perceive whatever context would be left.
And I suspect, at the bottom of it all, he was ashamed because he did not feel what he ought to have felt AND he had no structure through which to express any grief, no rituals, nothing. So he took it out on the Elbow Guy. Elbow Guy needs to feel these things about his mother FOR him. He spent 2 hours at dinner talking in an entirely circular fashion how he continued to try to “access reality” and was continually tearing down all structures and implicitly attacking even his a priori faculties via heavy drug use and whacko postmodernist deconstructionist thinking. Unspoken but obvious.
Ohhhh so you wanted the Elbow Doctor to be a PRIEST for you??? If you WANTED a priest in the hospital room, why on earth didn’t you go GET one? What’s WRONG with you?
“Maybe we could have, like… monasteries” Sir. …Sir!!! you DO have monasteries. Go to one right now if you want one.
Andre didn’t tell a bunch of fascinating stories over 2 hours. He told one boring repetitive short story over and over and over for 2 hours. Vizzini ALMOST pointed out the problem to him when he brought up the Renaissance and Science. He NEARLY explained that laying down a structure of understanding on top of reality is absolutely necessary to derive context and therefore meaning, thus Andre’s emptiness and constant failed attempts to “get at reality” through tearing down all the structures, drug use, and occasional chaotic attempts to create religious ritual.
But Vizzini veers off as soon as he starts to get close to that answer. Because it would immediately follow that Andre’s pseudo zen buddhist deconstructionist postmodernist drug-quest is doomed and the EASIEST answer is to grab a product sitting on the shelf, tested and honed over a couple thousand years – not currently being beta-tested or anything – and just avoid wasting another 20 years of his life, just slap that sucker on, bolt it down, and get on with something that is proven to work, get on with LIFE.
But this would involve admitting a host of things, starting with admitting what he actually NEEDS. So Vizzini gets close and then makes a Confession Of Faith. I Believe All The Things. No, of course of course. But a weird type of Confession of Faith that in an almost terrified manner steps around huge holes we must all agree to not look at or discuss.
If I were to sum up My Dinner With Andre, it would be – this is a movie about two men sitting in a sinking lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with water filling the boat from a hole from which they have pulled the plug. While their boat sinks, they discuss everything EXCEPT the hole and the plug sitting right next to it.
in 2020, as a staunch atheist, I was forced to admit, religion appears to be part of the Human Operating System. If you pull it out, they will to fill it in again. With something awful and new that is on its first Beta test. The Beta test tends to last for about 2,000 years with awful things happening while we work the kinks out. May as well have stayed at home and used an off-the-shelf product sitting right there waiting for you. Rather than spending decades re-discovering the wheel. Or waiting millennia for the bugs to be worked out. Just consider if you have the time to spare.
So, having, with all our enlightenment, discarded Christianity, we now adopt a new religion that involves loading people down with unbearable unwarranted guilt, and then coaching them to project that guilt, examined, unprocessed, onto others. So basically we now have a religion that has ensconced the “reasoning” and abuse methods of Cluster B personality disorders.
Just fantastic. Might as well have just stayed at home and gone to church, made some casseroles for some potlucks, run coffee hour once in a while, do an occasional build for Habitat for Humanity, do the egg toss at the Church Picnic, donate to a horrible christian charity from time to time. Evil, hypocritical structures, right?
Sorry, I’ve just had it with all these fake atheists.
Stop mismanaging your shame, “atheist” dudes. Shame is a secular human trait. It doesn’t come from religions that attempt to address it. It doesn’t come from people doing record-keeping. It cannot be resolved by ignoring it and projecting it. Nature is NOT perfect. It’s one of YOUR arguments against Creationists, remember? So nature does what’s Good Enough and, for our own well-being, to prevent ourselves from wasting all the time in our lives, we slap a structure down on top of it that, itself, is GOOD ENOUGH.
An entity that can RECOGNIZE shame is not the ROOT CAUSE of shame. If anything, the 2020’s seem to be all about tearing down all the pragmatic good-enough things because they lack perfection. So now we watch to see if we end up at sticks, rocks, and cannibalism, or if we pause to realize some of the stuff we accumulated over the past 8,000 years was good for something.
If you’re an atheist, you should have SOME respect for empirical data. You should have SOME respect for facing up to facts and considering them. Like John Cusak in Say Anything …I can’t work for that corporation. But I’m not blind either.
