DocWatts

@Radu97 Just out of curiosity, how knowledgeable are you about the Roman Empire to be making such a comparison in the first place? Because if there is a (very loose) analogy to be drawn, the final Century of the Roman Republic would be a far more instructive case Study than the eventual collapse of the Western half of the Empire centuries later.

As someone who listens to a huge volume of podcasts, audiobooks, actualized.org content, etc, I actually completely agree with this. You're not going to get nearly as much value out of any of these things if you don't take time to pause, reflect, and integrate them in to your life. I would also say the same thing is true of reading Books as well. I question the Wisdom of finishing a dense book on any topic, and then just diving in to another dense book immediately, without allowing the mind time to integrate and synthesize new ideas and concepts.

Thanks!

:Title: Been meaning to change mine, but I must have missed the widget to do so on the page to edit your profile.

Game Developer/Artist here. We live in a time where it's easier than it's ever been for one person (or a few people) to create a game. Game engines like Unity use a streamlined drag and drop interface, along with a simplified scripting language that's much easier for non Coders to pick up and learn than Programming Languages of olde (such as C or C++, which are quite a bit more difficult for newcomers). Other engines like GameMaker Studio or RPG Maker allow someone to make a game with limited or even no coding. That said, there's a lot more to making a game than knowing how to Code; game design is a Skill, every bit as much as learning how to play an Instrument is a skill. Furthermore, it's a skill that involves many hats such as Digital Art, Graphic Design, and UI Design just to name a few. But these are things you can learn if you have the motivation to. And things that aren't your strong suite (such as sound design or digital painting) are things that you can bring another person in for. That said, will one or two people working on a game in thier spare time create the next Skyrim or Fallout? Of course not. But there are plenty of highly successful and innovate games that were made by either one or just a few people. Something like Undertale is one of the most highly rated games ln Steam, and was made by one dude who learned game design by working on ROM Hacks (ie mods) of old Snes games.

Renting a House is in many ways the best of both worlds: avoids the downsides of being crammed in to an apartment complex, as well as the downsides of actually owning a House: namely maintenance costs like having to fork out $10k to replace an aging leaky roof for instance, or the possiblity of being underwater on a mortgage if your Life circumstances change.

This. I appreciate (and have enjoyed listening to) his perspective on metaphysical topics, but it's a bit like opening a Ken Wilber book and having to read through yet another lengthy explanation on the Four Quadrants, something that you've read through five times already... (Though I guess getting compared to Ken Wilber isn't the worst thing in the world )

While you might be able to sell people at Orange on some of the surface elements of Green by presenting arguments for it on Orange's own terms (ie "Ecologically sustainable businesses are more profitable!" Or "The Materialism paradigm is actually bad science"), generally speaking people move from one value Meme to another because thier current paradigm isn't working for them. Perhaps they are feeling emotionally unfulfilled, or thier value Meme is causing them dysfunction in thier lives. Or maybe they came face to face with one of the ugly realities of thier worldview (such as economic exploitation), and that causes them to have an existential crisis. Or perhaps their life circumstances changed, and they now find themselves a wage slave confronted with the brutal realities of what life is like for a poor person. Perhaps they do some psychedelics, and have an experience which causes them to start questioning the assumptions behind thier Materialist Reductionism paradigm. To put it mildly, moving from one paradigm to another is a really big deal, and not something that can be undertaken without a serious reexamination of one's basic sense of Self Identity.

The benefit of smaller countries like Finland decarbonizing is that they serve as a Model or Case Study for the larger countries to look to; both to prove that it can be done, and as a sort of working model or template that can be learned from and adapted to the particular circumstances of different countries. Sort of similar to how Universal Basic Income is being experimented with on a small scale first, with the hope that it can eventually be adapted to work at increasingly larger scales.

For sure. Was thinking about this as not only a way to step back and gain a bit of meta-perspective, but I was also considering how I'd approach the subject in a casual conversation with someone who's not necessarily versed in topics such as epistemology or ontology.

Interesting way of framing it. I assume that the realization part is what makes Spirituality distinct from Philosophy, which also deals in metaphysics. Thanks, I'll check it out. Though I never found an 'Investigation in to Truth' to be a useful definition, since there are many ways of Investigating Truth. Science, philosophy, and the various religious traditions would all make that same claim. Tossing Spirituality in to the mix doesn't specify what makes it distinct; though I recognize it can certainly inform all three.

I can't see such a thing being even a remote possibility until humanity develops to the point where there's not vast differences in wealth, power, and more generally human development among different regions of the planet. The only reason that something like the European Union works is because the center of gravity for that region is at world-centric (rather than an egocentric or sociocentric) worldview. And it certainly wouldn't be possible under current global socio-economic conditions, where the world economy depends to a large degree wealthy regions of the planet using thier developmental advantages to exploit less developed regions. Perhaps when the center of gravity for the entire world is at roughly SD-Green (rather than roughly SD-Blue/Orange, which is where it's at right now), something like a Federated World Government might be possible. But it almost certainly won't be in our lifetimes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/6/15/22533396/democrats-congress-decriminalization-marijuana-drug-policy-reform-act The Bill is known as the Drug Policy Reform act, and would Federally decriminalize personal possession of small amounts of all Drugs. It would also reclassify a bunch of substances as no longer a Schedule 1 Drug, opening the door for Legally sanctioned Trails for Medical and Health benefits. The Bill's overall goal is treat Drugs as a Public Health (rather than a Criminal) problem, and would more or less end the War on Drugs as it currently exists. That said, obviously there's no way in Hell this is going to pass both the US House and Senate. But the fact that a Bill like this is even being considered goes to show just how far the Overton window has shifted in favor of a more open minded and humane approach to Drug Policy. Something like this being openly discussed in the US Congress would have been unthinkable just 10 or 15 years ago.

The North Korean State isn't really a government so much as it is a Hostage Situation involving 25 million people...

To be fair, weed's pretty much legal in much if not most of the US by the point. More perturbing is that the US Incarcerates more people - both the total number and per capita - than any other country in the world. More even than China, an authoritarian State whose with roughly four times the population of the US.

Coming from someone who works in the Industry, I'd argue that the Gaming Industry is as spread out over the Spiral as any other entertainment media such as films or books. Much of the Indie gaming scene has already been Green for some time now. The second best selling PC Games of all time, Minecraft, is just as much an educational tool that encourages creativity as it is a Survival video game where you fight monsters. Encouraging to see some (but by no means all) of the bigger studios beginning to adopting Green values. The most Progressive large gaming companies tend to be a mix of Orange and Green; namely they're Orange in thier business model, and Green as far as thier Company Culture and their Social (rather than economic or business) Values.

https://theconversation.com/us Would highly recommend The Conversation as a high quality, complex news analysis source that's relatively neutral and unbiased. Vox also does very good reporting and analysis, though they do skew Left (not a big deal if you know that ahead of time, and get your information from a variety of sources)

@bejapuskas Emphasis on the more part of 'more Historically accurate'. It's less a matter of any one theory of Race Relations being 'correct', and more a matter of making sure that the systemic nature of Racial Injustice is taught at all. Hard to have a useful perspective on many of the social problems we face today if you're completely ignorant about how practices like Red Lining prevented Black Americans from being able to accumulate wealth, or the explicitly racist motivations behind the War On Drugs. Consider something like Black Lives Matter, and how incomprehensible that movement will be to someone who mistakenly believes that all forms discrimination went away after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the sixties.

That's great to hear that you're studying to become a Teacher. In my own opinion, probably the best thing that people who want to educate people on the subject is to disassociate the History of Race Relations in America from the Critical Race Theory label, as all that it does is give ammunition to Bad Faith actors. By dragging this subject in the muck of the Culture Wars, what the Right is hoping for is to portray a more historically accurate picture of Race Relations in America as just another instance of wacky and far fetched Left Wing Theory run amok.

The thing is though that not every Issue has room for Good Faith disagreements as to whether its basic premise is credible or not. Just like there's not an Honest way to argue that the Holocaust didn't happen, there's not really an Honest way to argue that Systemic Racism within the US doesn't exist. Of course that doesn't mean that every problem in the US is due to Racism, but to deny the bigger picture that Systemic Racism is still very much alive in the US is just factually incorrect. In both cases there's such an overwhelming spectrum of evidence to support the basic premise that both the Holocaust and Systemic Racism within the US are Real, that it takes an act of Willful Ignorance to ignore or discredit the reality of either one. Now within the basic premise, there's a ton of room for different perspectives as to why racial injustice continues to exist, and how to best address it. Marxists may have one answer. Liberals will have another. Libertarians will have a perspective different from both. But the person sticking thier head in the sand and denying that there's even a problem to discuss is someone to be sidelined and ignored, because they're obstructing productive engagement with discourse around the topic.

As long as the person you're engaging with isn't in denial over the reality of ongoing systemic racism in America, then at that point it just becomes a discussion over the particulars. Plenty of space to have Good Faith disagreements if that's the case, just like there's plenty of space to discuss the best approach for combating Climate Change. The idea that racial injustice isn't an ongoing problem in America, like the view that Climate Change isn't real, isn't a view worth taking seriously or engaging with, no matter who it's coming from. Doing so only serves to gives a platform to Bad Faith actors and harm Public Discourse over these issues.

I really don't see the Wisdom of getting drawn in to Culture Wars debates with Bad Faith actors on the Right over this issue, since all that CRT really is is a more accurate and honest account of American History than the propaganda that many Americans grew up with. This is because it takes seriously perspectives other than just that of the dominant group. The way that the Right uses this issue to provide an emotionally charged distraction in lieu of an actual Policy Platform, is similar to how they pound thier chests about Cultural Marxism and Transgender kids participating in Sports. Useful for distracting thier Constituents from the fact that the Republican Party has openly embraced Authoritarian Plutocracy.

Great discussion on Rebel Wisdom about political Metamodernism.

I would also add that the problems we're facing today (primarily those caused by Modernity) are Collective in nature, and not something that levels lower on the Spiral are equipped to deal with. And for what it's worth, SD-Green does actually Integrate a lot of the positive aspects of Purple, adapting them to Modernity. Of course this can have problematic aspects as well, such as the idealization of earlier societies, and the re-emergence of 'Magical' beliefs and thinking. But as the societal center of gravity shifts more towards Green, I would expect to see an increased efforts to adapt and integrate Wisdom from traditional societies in to a modern context.

I absolutely agree. Jared Diamond, a sociologist who spent a lot of time living and working with tribes in Papua New Guinea, wrote an entire book on the subject. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15766601-the-world-until-yesterday