DocWatts

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

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.