DocWatts

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

The mindset of Progress just for the sake of Progress is something that was constructed with the advent of the Modernist Paradigm. When in actuality what Progress really is is a Survival Strategy for coping with changing circumstances. As to SD-Purple... SD-Purple tribal societies served us well for the majority of time that humans have spent on this planet, but those sorts of Societies only work well when population numbers are low, and each group has plenty of geographic space to avoid conflicts with its neighbors. It also needs a stable environment to really thrive, as these sorts of societies are quite inflexible when it comes to dealing with changing circumstances, due to the importance that tradition plays in these sorts of societies. In a Survival environment where deviating from Norms and violating Taboos is likely to get you and your entire Tribe killed, it's not surprising that as a result these groups find often themselves unable to adapt to sudden and unexpected change. Not recognizing this limitation is the major shortcoming of ideologies like anarcho-primativism, and with proposed solutions to the problems of Modernity in works like Ishmael (a work I still appreciate to this day, even if some of the conclusions it draws are flawed).

Always liked Joe Scott's channel, he does a good job of explaining why the UFO footage that the Pentagon has released are very likely optical illusions resulting from the technology that was used in capturing this footage. That said I'm still open to the possibility that the alien hypothesis could turn out to be correct, but a dozen more grainy clips of grey blobs isn't likely to to be any more convincing than the last dozen.

Just to preface this, I happen to find the work of both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky endlessly fascinating and culturally important, but that said... I'd be careful about putting either Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche up on a pedestal as some sort of Sage or Moral Authority, as both were in many ways products of thier era. It's fair to say that both men were sycophants for 19th century oligarchic elites that were mistrustful of democracy. And both were also very far from being an embodiment of the philosophy which made up thier body of work. Nietzsche in particular was someone who had disdain for the vast bulk of humanity, and saw ordinary people as useful mainly for the utility they could provide to Elites. Much of his body of work reads as a power fantasy from someone who has been disempowered in thier own life; which I suspect is why Nietzsche is popular among angsty teenagers and young adults. And despite the moralizing of his fiction, Dostoyevsky was somewhat of a prick in real life, who used the proceeds from his books to pay off gambling debts he had accrued. After a mock execution for Left Wing activism in his youth, the trauma of this event sent Dostoyevsky down the road of simping for oligarchic power structures that would become so dysfunctional and incompetent that it would lay the seeds for its replacement by a brutal Totalitarian regime. Gorky on the other hand was an extremely admirable figure, and had he remained the face of socialism in Russia I suspect the History of the Country would have been much more positive.

@MarkKol@ The Drake Equation is a famous thought experiment by the American astronomer Frank Drake for thinking about how common extraterrestrial Civilizations may be.

That's also a fair point. Fact is we are in the improbable position of existing relatively early in the life time of the Universe, when you consider that 14 billion years is a blip compared to the projected hundreds of billions or even trillions of years before the eventual Heat Death of the Universe.

Quite familiar with the Drake Equation of which you're alluding to, but I would add that there are a number of factors that could potentially make Intelligent Space Faring Civilizations far less common than that 100 billion planets figure might suggest: Of those 100 billion planets, how many of those are in the Habitable zones of thier stars? Of the Habitable Planets in the Galaxy, how many actually develop complex, multicellular life? Keep in mind that most of the history of life on our own planet consisted of simple, prokaryotic cells. Complex eukaryotic cells able to combine into multicellular life forms might be an evolutionary accident for all we know. How likely is it that life to develop in to an intelligent, tool using civilization with both the desire and the means to explore beyond the confines of its own planet? How long do technological civilizations tend to last? Even if its for millions of years, in geologic time that's a relative blink of an eye. What are the odds that two nearby technological civilizations even coexist for the same short period of time during the last 14 billion years. Instead of looking at it as 1 in a million type odds, it seems more probable that a closer analogue would be a series of compounding highly improbable events. Like the chance that someone who won the lottery would then go on to win another lottery. And then another after that. The Universe is a big enough place that they're probably out there, but what are the odds that they happen to be right next door (on the scale of the universe, that is).

America is also a very complex and nuanced society, if only for the immense amount of regional diversity spread out over an enormous geographic area. Yet that doesn't diminish the Harm that America has inflicted on other parts of the world, or make its clearly unethical foreign policy decisions any more ambiguous (even if there is a diffusion of responsibility among decision makers and US citizens). Likewise, any honest attempts to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict has to begin with the recognition that a clear injustice lies as the heart of the conflict, and continues to take place to this very day. That doesn't mean trying to turn back the clock or anything as simplistic as implying that Israeli doesn't have the right to exist, but it does mean treating the Palestinians as full partners in coming to an arrangement that both sides can live with, rather than as a hostages or subjects (which is closer to how the situation looks to the rest of the world).

Or the dozens of other requisite systems to help navigate and maintain the damn things, like air traffic control, GPS, or something as simple as a socket wrench to open up a panel. Seems almost universal that having access to something that's 50 years ahead of current technology is a million times more useful than something that's orders of magnitude more sophisticated than what a society has access to.

@Danioover9000 Or more likely any practical use for this technology would require energy sources and material science that's hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than anything we have. Going back to the fighter jet example, you could give an entire fleet of them to Roman Empire, but it wouldn't be of any use if the only energy sources available at the time are muscle power and burning wood.

That $30 billion United Nations estimate I mentioned was specifically for Sustainable Development programs to help areas lacking in food security become self sufficient. If you're thinking that it would just be a no strings attached cash handout to political leaders in unstable areas (or UN peacekeepers handing out sacks of food to poor farmers), you've got the wrong idea.

Seems a bit like assuming that the Roman Empire could have reverse engineered a fighter jet that was sent back in time. Inadequate material science and a lack of foundational theoretical understanding would have prevented them from being able to grasp what it was they were even looking at, let alone reverse engineer such a complicated machine. There's no reason to assume that our current efforts would be any more successful.

Totally agree. Less than one percent of the US Budget goes towards Foreign Aid to other countries, though many Americans somehow believe it's much higher (polls indicate that an average American mistakenly thinks that it's closer to %10 ). When just %10 of the US Military budget would be enough to vastly reduce (or even eliminate) world hunger were it redirected towards the helping the poorest areas of the world, hard to see the current allocation of resources as nothing short of a tragedy. Source: Estimates for the yearly cost to end world hunger range from $7 billion to $265 billion a year, with $30 billion being the UN's figure. https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/ https://borgenproject.org/cost-to-end-world-hunger/

Or another possiblity is that aliens are here observing us, yet the vast majority of sightings are false positives. Both things can be true at the same time. Hell even if the alien hypothesis is eventually validated in some substantial way, that doesn't mean that every ambiguous sighting is credible, or that those weird lights in the sky that you saw in the sky weren't an optical illusion with a terrestrial explanation.

I don't disagree with this. I may be more skeptical about the efficacy of eyewitness accounts, but aliens as a provisional Theory to be tested seems reasonable. My disagreement stems less with the theory itself, and more with jumping to premature conclusions from data which is at this point highly ambiguous and interpretable. I guess I would liken it somewhat to someone declaring that String Theory is "correct", rather than a highly provisional framework that's yet to be verified in a substantial way (and just be incorrect and the wrong way of looking st the problem).

Yeah but i've also been on jets, and are familiar enough with them to place that object moving in a strait line at 30,000 feet in to a context that I can make sense of. Now who can say that they have anything approaching a comparable level of familiarity about something from another world made with alien tech?

I'd counter that the situation being analogous to the vast majority of people in the area where I live having zero experience with snakes, and being unable to differentiate a Black Mamba from a dozen other species of similar looking North American Snakes at a glance. Could a Black Mamba have somehow made its way from another continent to North America, or have escaped captivity? It's certainly possible. If a rumor of such was spreading about, I would expect quite a few false positives from people who have no particular expertise in the type of phenomena they're trying to identify. Likewise, do I trust that most ordinary people to correctly identify that the small blob in the sky is actually a UFO and not an optical illusion caused by something more conventional? Not so much. Just because I'm willing to give the guy who has flown jets for 18 years a lot more credibility when he speaks about a strange encounter he had, doesn't automatically extend credibility to every person who interprets a blob they saw in the sky as an alien. Or to put it another way: aliens might exist, but that doesn't mean that the vast majority of sightings aren't false positives.

I know this was written to demonstrate a point, but Nazi Germany's actual war aims were never 'taking over the world'. Thier actual aims were to become the dominant power in Europe, and then expand in to Western Russia in an ideologically motivated war of annihilation with the practical aim of seizing resources and living space. Had they been successful the death toll would have been orders magnitude worse than the Holocaust. But an actual German victory would probably look more like the Cold War (with Germany occupying the place of the USSR) rather than Man in the High Castle. Nor they were never anywhere close to being able to develop a nuclear weapon (turns out that declaring the most brilliant scientists of the age enemies of the state has a way of arresting progress towards nuclear weapons). The only reason the United States was able to successfully develop Nuclear weapons during World War 2 is because they had the Industrial Capacity to turn the entire country in to a factory for developing fissile materials.

That's a bad analogy; under most circumstances (other than something incredibly contrived) the moon is a fairly unambiguous object. No one is going to mistake it for a bird or an airplane. UFO sightings occur under what I'll charitably call suboptimal viewing conditions; at the very least there's a lot of room for ambiguity (leaving aside the cases that have been debunked). My neighbor who works in a factory might mention that he thought he saw a deadly Black Mamba snake slither across his garden (a species that's native to Africa rather than North America), but I'd take the claim a lot more seriously if it were coming from my Zoologist friend who's an expect on Snakes (and actually knows what the hell they're talking about). Not sure why we should trust randos who have no special expertise or qualifications on identifying ariel phenomena any more than we'd trust randos to come to thier own conclusions on how Covid spreads.