DocWatts

I might post occasionally on the other sections of the Forum (in Intellectual Stuff), but I'll be stepping away from the Politics & Society section. It's been sad to see broader problems within our society impact this Forum in a negative way. Best of luck to you, the other mods, and folks I've interacted with here over the years. These discussions continue to be important, but I'm not finding what I need here any more.

America chose, and it chose to reject democracy in favor of a vengeful dictator. This is reflective of a broader shift in American culture towards conspiracism and hate. It's been extremely disappointing that this shift has been reflected in what's supposed to be a Conscious Politics forum as well - as evidenced by the number of people here who are eager to downplay and excuse Trump's monstrous behavior. This will be my last post in this section of the Forums. The quality of the discourse here has started to be more reflective of a YouTube comments page rather than a forum for people who are serious about discussing politics in a mature way. Absolutely disgusted with my country, and the number of people here, on this Forum, who have been enabled America's shift towards fascism. How anyone here can have watched Leo's content on epistemology and conscious politics, and come away thinking 'yup, Trump is our guy!' is mind boggling. Apologies to folks like @Hardkill and @Husseinisdoingfine, along with the moderators and the handful of other people here who've avoided falling into this trap. I've enjoyed interacting with you over the years. Best of luck to you, hope the Forum here becomes more reflective of your thoughtfulness and integrity over time, once it becomes unavoidable that life is getting far worse for people as a result of the outcome of this election. Maybe I'll check back in a few years, but for now it's goodbye.

It bears repeating that Trump hasn't won anything since 2016. His party lost ground in 2018. He lost again in 2020. His handpicked governor and legislative candidates lost badly in the 2022 midterms. When his election fraud case was put in front of a jury, he lost that as well, racking up 34 felony convictions. Trump is an vindictive, insecure loser.

Also: Tim Walz. This is what healthy, secure masculinity looks like.

As I heard someone else describe it, I'm feeling nauseously optimistic 😅. The momentum and vibes are on Kamala's side, especially as Trump has been seemingly going out of his way to tank his campaign in the last week or so, between his vile racist MSG rally and bizarre photo ops driving around in a Trump garbage truck. The fact that he's already claiming fraud in Pennsylvania is indicative of the fact that he's expecting to lose this must-win swing state But the stakes are too high for me to feel comfortable.

Thanks for this, as it's especially relevant at our current moment: "[They] did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946].” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45' In Weimer Germany's last free elections, not everyone casting ballots for the Nazis would have described themselves as a Nazi, and a lot of them didn't have any particular animosity towards Jewish people. What was far more common was that folks saw some personal advantage to throwing their lot in with vengeful nationalists, and were willing to downplay and excuse the monstrous things that Hitler and the Nazis were saying and doing at the time - just as people today are willing to downplay Trump's violent hateful rhetoric, his numerous crimes, the January 6th insurrection, and the Republican Party's ongoing coup attempt. Likewise, the vast majority of Trump supporters don't think of themselves as fascist enablers, but what they fail to recognize is that today's fascism couches itself in traditional American values, weaponized against out-groups within American society - just as Nazi fascism marketed itself in traditional German values, weaponized against the out-groups of its day. It's exactly this type of dynamic that the 'Banality of Evil' was referring to.

This axios article goes into it more detail, but the tldr is: yes, Republican voting ballots have shifted a bit in 4 years, but based on party registration alone for those who requested mail-in ballots, Democrats still have a sizeable lead here. That's leaving aside the non-negligible number of Republicans who requested a mail in ballot, but can't stomach voting for the orange felon. Almost no Democrats will be voting for Trump, on the other hand. Also, the urban rural divide hasn't changed. Votes for Kamala from Philly and Detroit are going to take longer to process than from the rural areas and small towns that favor Trump. https://www.axios.com/2024/11/05/trump-harris-2024-election-absentee-voting-red-mirage

Thank you! Let's save our democracy!!

Friendly election PSA to keep a cool head, in light of the potential for chaos and confusion on election night:

HARRIS IS AHEAD IN IOWA Why this is a big deal: Iowa is a state that Biden lost by 8 points in 2020, and Seltzer is widely recognized as the most accurate pollster of the last several election cycles (correctly predicting Obama, Trump, and Biden's victories). If Harris is up by 3 in Iowa (the most conservative of the Midwest states), it's highly likely that she's going to sweep the other Midwestern states she needs to win the election. There's a good chance that this is also indicative that the polls have been overestimating Trump's support in the other swing states as well.

Most of my posts tend to be in the Intellectual Stuff and the Society & Politics sections, since that's closer to my areas of expertise. I do engage in vipassana meditation, but I'll fully admit that meditation isn't the main focus of my contemplative work. I've spent the last two years writing a book on introspective epistemology (a 'field guide' to construct awareness, as I pitch it), and I've been working with some other philosophically minded folks in metro Detroit to build an in-person metamodern forum (https://fluidityforum.org/vision/). Over the years I've diverged from Leo's particular approach to spirituality, since at some point I think you do need to step aside from your initial influences and forge your own path. My work focuses more on embodied phenomenology - basically, understanding how we create knowledge from within the limitations of our lived, human perspective within Reality; and what this means for our constructed sense-making frameworks. That said, there's still a lot that I agree with Leo about, but I'd say that we have very different areas of emphasis. Psychedelics isn't a focus of my work, though I fully recognize that they can be very useful for subjective consciousness expansion. I approach nondualism in a different way than Leo. And I also place less emphasis on frameworks like Spiral Dynamics, since I feel that in practice it's often used as a form of epistemological and sociological bypassing.

Thank you for this. The number of people simping for an OBVIOUS authoritarian grifter in what's supposedly a conscious politics forum has been disappointing. The immaturity, equivocation, whataboutism, and excuses are more reflective of what I would expect to see in a Facebook comment section, or from talking to low-information voters. It's certainly not evident of people who've put in the work to have a solid grasp of epistemology, that's for damned sure.

Mind you, I'm not saying that Trump's Cult won't be primed for political violence should he lose. Any political violence will be aimed at sewing enough chaos to disrupt certification of the election, with the hope that either the Supreme Court or House of Representatives will overturn the results in Trump's favor. The basic aim is to create a chaotic environment which throws doubt on the results as a pretext for his next coup attempt. Short of an historic blowout on election night, Trump is %100 going to try and declare victory before the bulk of ballots are counted. He'll be rely on the 'red mirage' affect that we saw in 2020 (where certifying ballots from high population density cities takes far longer than in rural areas) to claim that he 'won' before all votes have been counted. To that end, Trump has been flooding polling aggregates like 538 with a slew of paid-for low quality partisan polls, which he will use as a pretext for the baseless claims that the polls showed him winning, and now the election is being stolen from him.

All that LGBTQ want is to be able to do their business, wash their hands, and go back to whatever it was they were doing without being threatened or harassed. This a total non issue. The only reason it's being harped on is to deny trans people access to public spaces. Trans bathroom panic is the modern equivalent of the 'whites only' water fountain.

Difference is that Biden, not Trump, is the president this time around. This time, the MAGA fascists won't find soft targets that have been left deliberately undefended by traitorous allies in the government. If they try another Jan 6 stunt, they'll be resisted. Moreover, long prison sentences for the MAGA insurrectionists will dissuade many from a second attempt. Stochastic terrorism is of course an ongoing threat, but probably nothing as coordinated as another Jan 6. That said, Trump is %100 going to try to overturn this election should be lose, since the presidency is what's standing between him and a prison sentence. But this will likely happen through lawfare and scheming rather than an armed uprising.

Arnold is an absolute treasure, the country would be in a much healthier place if he was the face of the Republican Party rather than Trump. Brings to mind how John McCain was capable of actually being a decent human being while he was running against Obama. Kind of shocking how much things have changed in just 16 years.

Kamala Harris knocked it out of the park with her closing argument to the American people, delivering the best speech of her career. The symbolism of delivering these remarks on the doorsteps of where Trump launched his Jan 6 insurrection while explaining that Trump is a 'petty tyrant' was a brilliant rhetorical move, because it both acknowledges the threat he poses to our country, while deflating the strongman facade that he's been so desperate to cultivate. In actuality he's a weak, vain, and increasingly unwell narcissist who's easily to manipulate. At the same time, she laid a clear vision of how her economic policies will benefit working and middle class Americans. Having Medicare pay for home health care is a HUGE life changing policy proposal for millions of families, and is poised to be the signature policy proposal of her administration, akin to the Affordable Care Act. The contrast between this closing argument, where Harris is calling for unity, decency, and democracy - and the shit show of Trump's hate filled, Nazi-esque Madison Square Garden rally- couldn't be more clear. I'm feeling increasingly confident that we're going to win this. And finally, a plea to my fellow actualizers. If you happen to live in the United States, please make sure that you Vote in this election. RFK Jr or Jill Stein isn't going to be president in a few months - it's either going to be Trump or Harris, so please vote accordingly. After all, what's the point of pursuing this work if you can't get the most important moral question of your time correct? Do you really want to be working towards awakening in a fascist country?

Howdy! Thought I might share this write-up I did on the origins of modern science, which delves into how our intuitions about relevance (what is and isn't considered important for a particular problem) inform our problem solving frameworks. This write up is prelude to a deconstruction of scientific realism for the philosophy book I've been writing, 7 Provisional Truths. Enjoy! _______________________________________________________________ Horizons Of Relevance The crux of empiricism's staying power, in both its early and scientific incarnations, stems from its broad applicability to a wide range of practical problems. The key to this versatility? It’s tied to why our problem-solving frameworks are useful to us in the first place. Just as tools empower us to shape raw materials into desired forms, methodologies such as empiricism equip us to steer events towards desired outcomes. Put simply, a methodology is a structured, replicable practice for guiding actions towards an intended purpose. When working as intended, the guidance that these frameworks provide isn’t arrived at by happenstance. It instead follows from successfully pinpointing what’s relevant for a particular problem. While pinning down what’s pertinent to a given goal may sound straightforward, it can be deceptively complex. Our lifetime of experience with everyday tasks tends to mask the formidable challenge of discerning relevance in situations where we lack this expertise. The process of determining what's salient - that is, what stands out as important - for a given purpose is known within cognitive science as relevance realization. While it’s yet to become a household term, relevance realization exposes a pivotal aspect of our problem-solving that's easily overlooked in folk-epistemology. The development of germ theory aptly exemplifies many of these challenges. It shines a spotlight on how our intuitions of salience can be highly misleading, while revealing the ease with which outcome-determinative factors can elude the untrained eye. While it’s become common sense that diseases are transmitted by germs spread through bodily fluids and contaminated material, this wasn’t evident to anyone just a few centuries ago. The existence of microorganisms, not to mention their power to disrupt our bodily processes, isn’t an inference that’s readily drawn from surface-level observation. The barrier to connecting these dots can be traced back to the environmental context that our perceptual abilities are adapted to. In essence, our sensory systems are evolutionarily calibrated to an intuitive, human-centric scale. Think of this perceptual baseline as the person-sized ‘factory setting’ to which our experience of both space and time is instinctively attuned. To borrow and extend a term from meteorology, let’s call this anthropocentric frame of reference the mesoscale (from the ancient Greek words for 'middle' and 'size'). So what’s the link between the mesoscale and our intuitions about relevance? The connection is that it’s our perceptual canvas for drawing inferences from our embodied experience. Though our intuitions of relevance are formed at the mesoscale, this anthropocentric realm is just a tiny slice of Reality. Venturing beyond this familiar domain poses a number of unique challenges, beyond the fact that phenomena become difficult to observe and manipulate as the scale shifts away from our day-to-day perspective. At extremely small and large scales, everyday phenomena can behave in very counterintuitive ways. Take water, for instance. While its behavior is well accounted for at the mesoscale, from an ant’s point of view water becomes a sticky, globule-like substance with significant surface tension. And from a planetary vantage point, its currents shape the climates of entire continents as it circumnavigates the globe. Moreover, we often fail to grasp how day-to-day phenomena are intrinsically linked to processes operating at temporal and spatial realms vastly smaller or larger than our habitual frame of reference. Returning to our water example, for most of human history it would have taken a feat of imagination to connect the ocean tides to the invisible pull of the distant moon and sun. That is, until Newton's field guide to universal gravitation upended our cosmic perspective. By the same token, attributing the air that we breathe to the waste products of tiny, invisible creatures in the oceans would have seemed equally far-fetched. Then imagine Leeuwenhoek’s surprise at his chance encounter with microbes from tinkering with glass lenses - and how this discovery would go on to change the world. The basic takeaway is that our habitual intuitions about relevance are tightly bound to the mesoscale that serves as our stage for daily life. While early empiricism probed the limits of this human-sized backdrop, venturing beyond its comfortable boundaries requires highly specialized techniques. Which brings us to the innovations that the scientific method brought to empiricism - and how its transformation of daily life propelled this methodological toolkit into a bona fide folk-theory of Reality. But before we part the veil of scientific realism, it will be instructive to touch upon the historical contingencies that gave birth to modern science. Lest we forget, the scientific method wasn’t an inevitability, and its successes were far from guaranteed. Instead, the achievements that would propel the popular image of science from a specialized mode of inquiry into a de facto ‘theory of everything’ weren’t preordained. Far from mythological depictions of science as a universal cipher to ‘life, the universe, and everything’, it’s important to keep in mind that the science method was invented - not ‘discovered’. In keeping with our theme that our human perspective within Reality is an essential feature of our problem solving frameworks, the story of science can be traced to a specific time and place that was ripe for an epistemological revolution. The Historical Foundations Of Modern Science The iterative toolkit that would become modern science found its initial foothold in 16th and 17th century Europe, amidst a convergence of highly contingent social factors. A Pandora’s Box of socially disruptive forces was busy uprooting European civilization from feudalism, which had taken root in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The prevailing social order, consisting of subsistence farmers bound in hereditary service to a military aristocracy, had been devastated by the Black Death - a civilizational apocalypse that wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Carried by flea-infested rats who’d made themselves at home amidst the open-sewers and waste-filled streets of European towns and cities, the fetid conditions of daily life were ripe for this plague to spread its tendrils into every corner of society. Sparing neither cities nor countryside, Europe experienced rapid depopulation over just a handful of years, shattering the demographic foundations that had sustained feudalism for centuries. With laborers now worth their weight in gold, centuries of feudal bondage began to crumble, sowing the seeds of a transformative zeitgeist which would go on to change the world. From feudalism's ashes, a new social order was coalescing around a form of economic activity that historians would later term mercantilism. Driven by commercial interests and secured by maritime power, cosmopolitan exchange was the lifeblood of this new order, flowing into Europe from the New World. Of course, this early form of globalization bore little resemblance to ‘peaceful exchange’ - it was enforced with brutal systematicity through guns, germs, and steel. Alongside these developments, the Protestant Reformation had loosened the Catholic Church’s iron grip over European thought, undermining its ability to suppress knowledge perceived as a threat to its authority. This decentralization of knowledge was accelerated by the printing press, which opened the doors to a dissemination of information on an unprecedented scale. Ancient Greek empiricism, preserved as an incidental byproduct of European monastic transcription and Islamic scholarship, was finding a new audience amongst an emerging stratum of society eager for practical knowledge. An ascendant entrepreneurial class, unshackled from centuries of feudal constraints, found its interests increasingly served by empirical proofs over appeals to authority. To that end, military competition amongst rival European powers had created a practical need for what we would now call ‘Research and Development’, entailing a far more rigorous approach for how ideas are tested against reality. In sum: it would be a mistake to think of the development of science as inevitable. Quite the contrary: it was driven by practical problems which emerged due to a convergence of historical contingencies. The impetus behind the invention of science can be traced to limitations of early empiricism, which was proving inadequate as the problems it was applied to became increasingly complex. The crux of these shortcomings is that pre-scientific empiricism was calibrated to search for patterns of relevance within our person-sized mesoscale. In itself, there’s nothing surprising in this limitation, since the mesoscale is the obvious place to begin probing for clues in lieu of additional information that points elsewhere. But lest we paint a misleading picture, let’s make sure to give early-empiricism its due before moving forward; for it was able to accomplish quite a lot within this narrow, person-sized slice of reality. Beyond setting the stage for modern science, its success in probing this everyday domain brought us the principles behind many ideas and technologies that we still rely upon today. Agriculture, mathematics, navigation, and wheeled transport are testaments to this legacy. These noteworthy achievements notwithstanding, compared to its later scientific variant, the scope of problems that early empiricism was effective for was reaching a perceptual ceiling. The crux of the matter is that there’s nothing inherently special about the mesoscale, beyond the fact that it’s what our perceptual system and intuitions are calibrated for. And as we’ve seen, what affects us on the mesoscale can have explanations that are invisible to us from this perceptual default. And with that, we wrap this lightning tour of the historically contingent origins of modern science. As we’ve seen, empiricism was a notable expansion in our problem-solving repertoire, applicable to a host of day-to-day domains. But it would pale in comparison to the profound shift that occurred as the scientific method emerged. As we’ll see, its unprecedented operational success in transforming virtually every aspect of daily life would inadvertently birth a strange metamorphosis. What began as a more rigorous iteration of empiricism would be gobbled up, bit by bit, by tacit Transcendental assumptions that are outside of what science itself can provide evidence for. In our next section, we'll pull back this veil of scientific realism to reveal the more nuanced relationship between our models and the Reality they approximate.

What people should keep in mind is that the apt historical comparison at this point is the rhetoric and tactics the Nazis were using to destroy Weimer democracy in the early 1930s, while they still had some constraints on their behavior (just like American fascism is working to subvert the constraints that are imposed upon them by American democracy). It's unfortunate that the type of folk-history that's common here in the 'States mostly mostly glosses over how the Nazis were able to subvert democracy, with most of the focus going to the horrific things they did while they were in power (which is obviously very important, but less instructive for where we're at now). (To that end, I would HIGHLY recommend 'The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic' by Benjamin Carter Hett as a resource for anyone who wants an in-depth account of this).

The racism on display was so ugly and blatant that the public relations teams for the RNC (!!) are working overtime to backpedal from the rhetoric here. Puerto Ricans (who I remind you are American citizens) were literally referred to as 'garbage' by an RNC vetted 'comedian', reading from a teleprompter. Mind you, this is coming on the heels of Trump literally praising Hitler, endorsing a self-described 'black Nazi' for governor of North Carolina, calling immigrants 'vermin', referring to American citizens who oppose his dictatorial plans as 'the enemy within', and openly stating that he wants to deploy the military against United States citizens. Short of Trump stepping on stage in front of a swastika and calling for a final solution to the 'illegals' problem, it's hard to think of how the historical parallels could be made any more blatant at this point.

Welp, wasn't expecting a full-blown reboot of the infamous infamous 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden as Trump's 'October Surprise' (just a week before the election, no less), but we find ourselves living in strange times.

Bernie's answer to: "I disagree with Kamala's position on the war in Gaza. How can I vote for her?"

YouTube has had a longstanding policy of demonitizing and delisting videos for controversial topics that aren't palatable to advertisers (meaning they're on the site, but they won't show up in your Recommended feed). I've seen vids on topics such as suicide and the Holocaust get delisted. Ever notice a video title with 'N*zi' instead of 'Nazi' in the title? That's that the algorithm at work. Little surprise if Rogan's three hour pow-wow with a rapist who launched a violent coup against our government is deemed 'controversial' by the algorithm.

To be fair, Biden had the advantage of a Democratic House and Senate for the first two years of his term (which, to in all due credit, he was able to make effective use of). Due to the fact that the 2024 Senate seats that are up for grabs are highly unfavorable for Dems, Harris will most likely come into office with a hostile Republican Senate, where there will be little chance of getting any substantive legislation passed. Holding the country together long enough for MAGA to run out of steam once their Cult leader succumbs to dementia, goes broke, ends up in prison, or drops dead from obesity is a more of what I'm expecting from her. If she's able to expand upon Biden's progressive policies, great! But it's going to be hard for her to do so without more support.