Leo Gura

The reality is that government has little impact on your individual life unless something very specific happens like a draft for WW3, or you get unlucky enough to get in some terrorist cross-fire. If you don't got to protests and you don't work in government, virtually nothing will happen to you. You can live in Putin's Russia or Saudi Arabia, and unless you are actively challenging political power or your country is at war, nothing bad will happen to you. How do you think most of the world lives? Most people live in peace even in a warzone. Even in Ukraine people mostly live in peace and go about business as usual. When bad stuff happens, it falls on a very small percentage of the population. Only those who are unlucky get hit. Realistically we are talking about a market crash and some bad inflation. That's mostly what I expect. Plus a bunch of media noise, chaos, and corruption. And of course the death of democracy. Death of democracy does not mean that you personally get a gun to your head.

Close to 10 years. You don't need some man-made chemical to have healthy teeth.

I don't see the point in that unless you are maybe an illegal immigrant. And even then it probably doesn't make sense. Our political situation is bad, but you should be careful not to over-react to it. Realistically you can look forward to a market crash, but even then it's not a reason to leave the country. And don't forget that you can still be successful in the middle of a market crash. I made lots of money in 2008-2010 when everyone was complaining about a bad market. Your individual performance has little to do with large average trends. The market could crash 50% but you could still have the best career of your life. People were making careers in the midst of WW2. So don't overreact. You should focus on being productive and creative, not wallowing in political doom and gloom. By the time Trump crashes the market you could start a business and earn a million dollars. Watch less news and focus on your creative work.

Of course it's wrongness relative to the light of your own consciousness. How else could it be? Your consciousness is the only game in town. But by the light of your own consciousness you clearly see things you've done in the past which were wrong. So wrong that you look back at it now and you cringe. But, there is more of this wrongness within you right now which you have not yet recognized, but you could recognize. To get grounded, start by deeply investigating examples of ways you've been clearly wrong in the past. And I don't just mean obvious things. You've been clearly wrong about many non-obvious, subtle things which took your years of life experience to realize and outgrow. Investigate that. Then you will have examples to help you identify more wrongness which is yet hidden within you. It is not futile at all. You should be able to make a list of 100 things you've been wrong about in your life. And not just trivial stuff -- profound, serious, subtle, important stuff. There are a lot more ways of being wrong than being right. So don't worry, you've got plenty of grist for the mill here. But also, it takes experience, suffering, time, and distance to start to see serious wrongness within you. You're too close to yourself to see all of it. But still, you should be able to see some. As just the tip of the iceberg you can explore all the ways you've been wrong just in your activity on this forum. Not wrong according to me or some Mod, wrong according to your own better judgment. Everyone one this forum should recognize things they said on this forum that were wrong, which you know you would not have said if you were more consciousness and less selfish. Of course I speak from experience.

The only realistic way out of this mess is a rude awakening. Either a market crash or some kind of geopolitical disaster like a war. Something ugly and nasty. People need to feel the consequences of the corruption and incompetence on their wallet or as some personal inconvenience. People won't awaken through logic or argument but through pain. We have exhausted all the reasonable options at this point, so only pain remains.

It's not the kid's fault, but why is a child of an oligarch in the Oval Office being used as a prop for a photo op? Only due to the corrupt situation we are in. Musk is so cozy with the most powerful elected position in the world that he brings his children there like daycare. It's so absurd that people wouldn't believe it if you made a Hollywood film of it. It's like proudly taking a selfie with Satan and bringing your kid along. That's our situation now.

@Theprofessional Don't forget to thank me in your Oscar speech

Very nice! But go deeper. Nothing isn't merely touching you, it is YOU! Connect the Nothing to the You until you realize their identity. Then You become immortal

I didn't even mention that it can be used for non-toxic drug synthesis and extraction.

This isn't a problem. Just make film and forget about making literature. You will ultimately provide more value by being passionate about your work than by doing something else because you think you have to. Max value comes from max passion. No one wants to learn literature from someone who would rather be making film. Leave that job for those who love literature more than film.

I avoid flouride. I use black charcoal toothpaste. Just find a brand you like.

I suggest that they don't even recognize progress as progress. Do you think JP or Musk think wokeness is progress? No. Their worldview is so twisted they see progress as evil. Civil Rights is evil, not progress, in the mind of an old-school conservative. The Taliban does not see feminism or gay marriage as progress. Neither does MAGA. So there is an interesting relativity to what progress means to people. People disagree about what counts as progress. For example, is Soviet Communism progress? Is cutting off your penis progress? Is 50%+ taxation progress? Is hiring people to meet racial quotas progress? Is free heroin at your local pharmacy progress? It outsourcing jobs to China progress? Who decides what progress means?

No matter how serious things are you still need time for rest and entertainment and socializing. Do not guilt trip yourself over such things. It's only a problem when it is used excessively as an escape, addiction, or distraction. There is no problem going to a concert a few times a year. That is fully compatible with work and life purpose. If you work hard for 8 hrs on your LP, that is enough. Then you take the rest of the day off. And you can not work on weekends. This is important for long-term sustainability. Your life should not be only about work. So there's no contradiction here. Going all-in on an LP does not mean you have no social life. Find a way to build a social life that aligns with your LP and perhaps even leverage your LP to socialize and have fun if such a synergy is available.

Not always. Sometimes. Selfishness can also blow up in your face very quickly, like a cheap firecracker.

This is actually more complex of an issue than it seems. If, for example, we passed a law that felons cannot run for office, then it could easily be weaponized by a corrupt government to keep good people from getting elected. This is exactly what happened in Russia. Putin uses such a law to keep all his best political opponents out of the elections, like Nivalny, by slapping them with phony felony charges. For another example, consider Lula in Brazil who was imprisons on phony charges and blocked from running in elections. But of course in a healthy system felons should not be allowed to run for high office. Just note that such a system is not so easy to create and sustain because corruption will creep in and abuse any mechanical rules.

I suggest that they don't understand this. They feel the threat, but they are in such deep denial that they honestly think they will win the battle. Which is why they fight it so hard. Take Jordan Peterson, for example. I'm sure he believes that he will defeat the Wokes/Greens. He probably feels he's well on the way to achieving that goal with the victory of Trump/Musk. It's a very powerful illusion of victory because in the short-term is seems like it's working, but of course in the long-term it will fail. But Jordan Peterson will be dead by that time, so from his POV he will fee like he won. Which is the whole point: to feel like you won until death. To stall out the clock. Think of Osama Bin Laden or Hitler or Putin or the Confederate South. These people honestly think that their worldview will win in the end. They go to their graves thinking they were right. It's an elaborate self-deception.

It does work, but people are easily influenced and brainwashed via social media. You can take a stage Orange-Green person and radicalize him through social media to hate Green and vote Blue-Orange. That's basically what has happened. Corrupt media has poisoned peoples' minds against Green. It is easy to demagogue and propagandize an ignorant and selfish populace, especially on social media platforms which reward rage-bait, reptile-brained content feeding into peoples' deepest biases to maximize profit. The American populace's development level is pretty evenly split between Orange-Blue and Orange-Green. So all it takes is a bit of social media influence to tip the scales. And it's always easier to tip the scale down than up because of gravity.

Rigor turned into a dogma leads to its own kind of self-deception and falsehood. However, intellectual rigor is a superior strategy to intellectual sloppiness. Truth-seeking is kinda like good investing, is not about always being right, it's about discipline on solid principles and strategy, rather than doing whatever feels good. There is no problem with aliens building the pyramid as a hypothesis. But then you must bring the data to back it up, or shut up about it. A principle of good epistemology is that you don't go around speculating and promoting ideas which you have no solid evidence for, just because you love the idea or it feels intuitively true. Discipline your mind to stick to the sound data and recognize when your mind floats off into fantasy. It is obvious that someone like Graham Hancock is reasoning backwards from his conclusions. He wants and needs there to be an advanced lost civilization -- he is attached to that romantic idea -- and then he travels the world cherrypicking data to justify his conclusion. This is bad epistemology which leads to self-deception. That is not how to do truth-seeking. If there was solid evidence for aliens building the pyramids I would be all for it. But there isn't.

No one voted for Musk. The situation is completely sick.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is also very good on this topic:

@Raze Are the charges criminal or civil? What damages is she seeking?

Decay into corruption is a never-ending problem. All systems decay over time. So Spiral Dynamics is not enough to save us. Non-corruption should never be taken for granted, as if it will hold automatically without our effort. There were many checks on executive power but over the last 10 years they were all corrupted away. The Congress was corrupted, the judicial was corrupted, the media was corrupted, the corporations were corrupted, the citizenry was corrupted. You can't have a healthy system when every branch of the system, from public to private, is corrupted by rampant greed, selfishness, and ignorance. In the end, nothing governs mankind but ourselves. If every leader is going to be greedy and selfish then MAGA is what we'll get. It is not really one person doing all this damage. The damage has been done by thousands of leaders and enablers across government, courts, business, political parties, and media -- because they are all epistemically bankrupt.

Yes No

Of course.

The image of those three in the Oval Office IS the corruption. Look no further. This is like two demons hosting a news conference to announce a committee to search for corruption. Only a fool would take them seriously.