Leo Gura

Of course, the ability to make this distinction is what it all comes down to. Conservatives are often too blinded by ideology to be able to make it. And hence the tragedy of it all.

Some narrow criticisms are. But many of the criticisms of police that I hear from progressives are just coming from ignorance of how policing works. To truly criticize the police effectively one would need a lot of experience in the field. Because it's a management and training problem. Specific and laser-targetted reforms are needed, not vague slogans.

The Buddha did 7 years of hardcore yoga practices, all of which he aced. That's before his ultimate enlightenment. Jesus trained with John The Baptist. Baptism was a technique of holding your head under the water until you nearly drowned, and then in the last second of your life, pulling you out. That was Jesus' teacher. That was Jesus' analogue of a psychedelic experience. Jesus also did a 40 day fast and vision quest int he desert. I'm sure you've heard of it. If you hold yourself under water until you're nearly dead, you'll have some trippy experience Be careful what you wish for, though. If I told you guys to do what Buddha or Jesus did to attain enlightenment, you would call me a madman and a criminal. I'm coddling you here like puppies Psychedelics are what I tell you to do when you're too meek to do a 40 day vision quest in the desert.

In a certain sense, of course. Why else would you eat? You eat because you are attached to material existence and material existence makes certain demands of you. That's the cost of existing on Earth. If you are cool with existing elsewhere, then maybe you can stop eating. I doubt a DMT entity needs to eat, but it only exists in DMT space. You can't transcend all biological limits so long as you wish to remain a biological being. You can certainly transcend everything biological, the only question is what will remain of you? If you wish to exist on this Earth then you may have to put up with many biological limits, like having to take a shit. The limits we're most interested in transcending here are not biological but psychological. And many of those you can certainly transcend. Nothing crazy about that.

Haha! "Something happened" = "I imagine it did" What you're not grasping yet is that IMAGINATION = REALITY That's the backstory you invented to explain the present infinite unknown. It works exactly like in a dream. Whatever questions you have, ask it of your dreams. "Is that dog in my dream real? Does it exist when I'm not sleeping?"

The logic of this is very simple: Psychedelics are ultimately a distraction only if all teachings and techniques ever taught are ultimately a distraction. If you are going to argue against psychedelics, that's fine. But then stop being a hypocrite and apply all your same arguments to every book, video, guru, ashram, teacher, retreat, workshop, seminar, school, podcast, etc. Because all of these are technologies invented to speed up an otherwise nearly-impossible process. Without any of these technologies the odds of you awakening would be zero. You would have to be lucky enough to stumble into it by accident. Don't forget, even the Buddha and Jesus had lots of training. They used many radical techniques. They didn't just stumble into it.

Again, to be fair here, progressive protesters burn shit down, vandalize stuff, and occupy government property too. So it's more than just slogans. Civil rights riots do happen and property gets damaged and some people even die. But they are not equal to MAGA buffoonery. MAGA is in a league of its own. The difference is that Civil Rights is a legit cause to fight for. Overthrowing democracy just so Trump can have a 2nd term is not.

This is stretching it. Most police are professionals with integrity, not MAGA buffoons and degenerates. Sure, police generally skew conservative, but conservative != MAGA. It's very important that we don't make the cliche progressive YouTuber mistake of demonizing all conservatives as MAGA idiots because conservatives will be around for another 1000 years, and we need to leave room open for a healthy and reasonable conservative party. The conservative party cannot be eliminated. But MAGA buffoons can. We need to build a pathway out of MAGA and back into healthy mainstream conservativism because these people will definitely not turn progressive. I know it's shocking, but conservativism and idiocy can be independent variables. You can be conservative without being batshit crazy.

I would frame it as: Getting rid of police is like trying to cure a tree from pests by ripping out its roots. This analogy properly shows the foolishness of the strategy. The cure should not be worse than the disease. Getting rid of pests requires a delicate touch, not a chainsaw.

@Star Don't get confused. Shiva (the dark figure above) is NOT the devil nor evil. Shiva is the masculine/Emptiness. The darkness of the image can be misleading to Western-centric minds who associate dark with evil.

#HumanePolicing The message needs to be uplifting and quasi-spiritual. You need to win the moral high-ground on this one. Stage Green's meanness is showing up here. Mean Green as Wilber calls it. There's definitely some truth to that. Green fails without compassion. Compassion for police is important. They do hard work for little pay and they are mostly good people. Blaming and demonizing cops is a bad move. Police should not be demonized any more than your child who got a bad grade in math class.

#HumanizePolicing That's the crux of what's needed. That's the solution. Who is gonna say NO! to Should we humanize the police? Do you want an inhuman police-force in your town? Check mate! Your political propositions need to resonate with positivity. If your message is easy to misunderstand or demonize, you've lost. I am progressive but even I cringed the first time I heard Defund The Police. And I still cringe when I hear it because then I have to clarify to people, "I am very progressive, but I'm not naive and impractical like those socialist hippies."

I know that. But some extreme progressives go so far as want more than that. Some talk of disbanning the police. The problem is that they few make the rest of the movement look dumb and nonsensical. This is similar to socialists screaming: open boarders. Welp, Covid shut them up real fast. And besides, the slogan is misleading and terrible. If what you want is to cut down on over-policing, then make that your slogan: Stop over-policing. Or better yet something positive like: Better training for police. Then police will be onboard with that. How are police gonna feel when you yell to defund them? How can police be supportive of progressives? They can't when you put their survival on the line like that. It would be like if I told a mother: Don't support your child. She would never listen to me again after that because it sounds so against her entire point of existence. When you create existential threats for people, expect them to react like cornered animals.

Cause Obama has good wisdom. Of course, because radicals don't like any moderation.

Hehehe... You don't need to research world traditions to realize that you have both masculine and feminine aspects to your psyche. This is like saying you need to talk to a French-trained chef in order to know that you enjoy sweet and salty food both, and that there is a complex and important interplay between the two in most dishes. Notice that every good dessert recipe calls for some salt.

Trump is a special case. Don't count on it when there is a more reasonable conservative running like Mitt Romney. They will go for a Mitt Romney type like a dog for a bone.

Just to be fair, those progressives calling to defund/disban the police are also hypocrites and fools. Today TYT is yelling about why the police didn't show up sooner. Talk about hypocrisy. If you defund the police, how are they gonna protect you from an armed MAGA coup? Police need to be well-funded and well-armed. But also well-trained. The progressive slogan to defund the police is probably the clearest example of stage Green stupidity. I understand that they mostly mean to reallocate funds to social work and the like, but a social worker is not gonna stop a crowd of MAGA idiots. That slogan -- defund the police -- is like political suicide.

In the biggest picture Trumpism is actually good because it will teach society important lessons about epistemology, democracy, social media, and late-stage capitalism. All of these lessons have still not been deeply integrated by most of society. Hitler served an analogous function. These are negative case-studies for posterity. Society learns what is right by fucking up for all to see. It is not enough for us to fuck up individually, we must also fuck up collectively to learn collectively.

Imagine if Hitler had access to Facebook, YT, and Twitter.

Yes, it's a perfect storm of shit: internet technology and late-stage capitalism with a stage Green shadow. Under capitalism businesses are incentivized to infect the minds of their audience with garbage because it makes such good money. Facebook, YT, CNN, and FoxNews are making a killing off all this ideological garbage and drama. Nobody at these companies cares about the epistemic and mental health of the country's citizenry. Because there's no incentive to care. In a democracy citizens need healthy, educational, high-consciousness sources of information. But under late-stage capitalism people are fed a McDonald's-like diet of garbage social media memes and drama. The information diet in our society has as much nutritional value as a can of Coke. I've talked about this problem in my video: The Deep Problem Of Marketing Very under-rated and under-watched video. I also talk about it these problems in Cult Psychology - Part 2

Yes, cults prey on the psychologically vulnerable, exactly as Trump did. But it was greatly exacerbated by the new technologies of the 21th century. Really, all this Trumpism and anti-vax stuff just boils down to humans learning how to balance out the new power afforded to them by the internet. When under-educated humans are allowed to create their own epistemic echo-chambers via social media in a capitalist system -- shit hits the fan. It's the same problem as allowing dumb people to mess around with their own DNA. Imagine if your average FoxNews viewer got a hold of DNA-changing technology like CRISPR? Imagine what kind of monstrosities they would create. The problem is that epistemology is such an abstract and intangible thing that almost nobody takes it seriously. At least with DNA modification it's tangible and easy to regulate and see its dangers. But no politician or TV pundit sees the very real dangerous of modifying one's epistemology. Think of it this: If you discovered your teenage son tinkering with his DNA or plutonium, you would freak out and stop him immediately. But what do you do when your teenage son is tinkering with his epistemology on his iPad???

The ultimate problem is how do we deprogram all these MAGA members after Trump exits? It's the same problem as cult deprogramming. This is an epistemology problem. The right-wing has created such as deep and profitable ideological echo-chamber that I don't even know where to begin healing it. We see this with Pizzagate, anti-vaxxers, Flatearthers, etc. Go try healing one of these people. It's impossible. They got cancer of the mind. And not just one but a cluster of them. There is a very anti-mainstream mood in the air. But what these anti-mainstreamers don't realize is that being anti-mainstream can be WORSE and lower in consciousness than the mainstream! Which is why we have the word "cult". A "cult" is just a toxic splinter cell within mainstream cult-ure. The only difference between culture and a cult is that culture is proven by natural selection to scale and be sustainable whereas a cult is not. Culture is a cult which has proven itself sustainable and healthy over the centuries when others did not pass the natural selection tests. MAGA will obviously not pass the natural selection test. It is no scalable or sustainable.

Absolutely! The last 4 years have created a right-wing MAGA echo-chamber of epic proportions which has rotted the minds of at least 40% of Americans. This is the real problem. And this problem will not end with Trump's exit. The real problem is confirmation bias thanks to social media of unprecedented scales. People are literally using social media to cherrypick and construct fantastical views of reality, and no one can stop them. Ironically this is a consequence of an increase in democracy. The democratisation of epistemology is a very dangerous thing when people have no clue what epistemology is. I explain all this in my video: Understanding Democracy: https://www.actualized.org/articles/understanding-democracy

It's not just the physical guns. It's the culture and the level of inequality. In a country with a great social safety net, violence and its cultural glorification is not so necessary. In Finland those are mostly probably hunting rifles -- also a part of Finish culture.

It's just basic psychology of the ego. Nothing mysterious about it. The ego is very predictable in its tricks once you study the ego deeply enough. When you fully understand the ego-mind, people's behaviors become so predictable. People are like robots that way. Because they are just acting out cravings and fears. Nothing more. A person driven by craving and fear is very predictable. Truly original behavior requires Tier 2 cognitive development. The lower you are on the Spiral the more predictable your behavior is. Like an animal. Once you become ridiculously conscious your behavior becomes impossible to predict because you're so free, flexible, and creative. Your mind has been jailbroken.