DocWatts

I like Wilber but I feel he tends to strawman Green at times. I think he also overestimates how much influence Academia has on the culture at large; how many people in the general population know who someone like Michel Foucault is, or could articulate the arguments of Dialectic Materialism used in Marxism?

This type of behavior needs to be called out, and anyone supportive of White Supremacist political violence and intimidation needs to be socially ostracized. We can't allow this sort of thing to become normalized if we want to continue living in a Democracy.

Looking back on this era, Red Hats will be looked at as 2020's equivalent of the Brown Shirts.

Not a waste of time at all. If nothing else, reading pivotal thinkers like Marx or Plato will give you historical context and a deeper understanding of ideas which have shaped the world we live in. The whole concept of Epistemology came out of philosophy; ditto for science which was at one point known as Natural Philosophy. Every political system that exists today has roots in philosophical ideas of 'the dead old white men' that were decried earlier (and yes Leo, this will eventually include you as well. ? ). Also realize thay you can entertain a philosophy without necessarily believing in it. No sane person would want to live in Plato's Republic, but I'd argue understanding that work is important because of how much it's shaped the last few thousand years of history in the West.

bUt BoTh SiDes aRe at FAuLt! aNtIFA iS jUSt as bAD! You know things have gotten really bad when MAGA Cultists start re-enacting scenes out of Max Max Fury Road

@Forestluv My primary concern is for mail in ballots that arrive after Nov 3 being successfully contested in Courts by partisan judges and thrown out, and not being represented in the initial Totals. So yes, the 'before' part is what I was referring to.

@Forestluv Thanks for the explanation. I was thinking specifically of how many swing states/districts Trump and the GOP could overturn where the races are close enough to give them enough of an excuse to do so. From what I've seen on fivethirtyeight, I get the impression that the election will likely turn on Pennsylvania (every prospective outcome there has the winner of the election go to the candidate who wins Pennsylvania). I know that fortunately Pennsylvania is not a deep red state, but how safe is it from tampering if Biden squeaks out a win by only a point or two? I also wonder what the results will end up looking like on election night, vs a week or two later when all of the votes are counted (not that they all will be, due to intentional tampering). When will as close to a consensus we are going to get start to emerge (realizing that at best maybe two thirds or three quarters of the country will see it as legitimate)?

So here's a question; how much of an electoral lead does Biden need for the results to survive intentional tampering by Republicans, whose strategy is to throw out as many votes as possible and declare the election over before the mail in ballots have been counted? We know that they will almost certainly be leveraging GOP friendly courts to overturn and invalidate unfavorable results wherever they can.

^ ^ ^ This ^ ^ ^ The 'Marketplace of Ideas' that people like to argue for is a vast oversimplification of how ideas spread and propagate through a society; (ie that the Better Ideas or Arguments will always end up winning out in the end). The idea that most people in a Society come to their beliefs through a careful, deliberative process of weighing the pros and the cons of the arguments that they hear is largely a myth; most people will simply accept the view that emotionally resonates with them (for a host of psychological and developmental reasons) most of the time. And we all know how vulnerable people are to being emotionally manipulated, and how susceptible the average person is to a host of cognitive biases that they have little awareness of. And that's without even delving in to group-think and mob mentality. In addition to the point made above, I'll also add that even if the vast majority of people don't take hate speech seriously, it only takes one person who's become radicalized to hurt or kill dozens or hundreds of people (the majority of terrorist violence in America is done by white supremacist Hate Groups). I would hope it would be obvious how shifting the Overton window so that ideologies like White Supremacy or Fascism go from being fringe ideologies that are socially ostracized, to gaining some degree of tacit acceptance in mainstream society, is extremely harmful and dangerous.

This is just based off from my own experience, but maybe start off by trying to get them to consider that Materialism is in fact a paradigm. Understand what triggers Orange (supernatural beliefs and superstition, New Age woo-woo), and use the tools that Orange is comfortable with (science, logic, rationality) to get them to take a meta-perspective to thier worldview. Couch your discussion in language they can understand, basically. If they're heavily science oriented, you could perhaps make a clear distinction between Materialist Reductionism and a broader view of Science. Quantum mechanics, relativity theory, or the cognitive science of consciousness could be used as jumping off points to explore the idea that there are other aspects that of reality that fall outside of Materialism. If you're going to go this route, I'd recommend that you choose a discipline that you have a fairly solid grasp of, at least conceptually. If they're in to philosophy, I'd highly recommend the works of Thomas Nagel, who goes in to some depth about deconstructing the Materialist paradigm in a way that's difficult to misconstrue as religious or woo-woo (Nagel himself is an atheist).

What the GOP wants is democracy South African style, before those pesky blacks started Voting and screwing up a perfectly good Apartheid system.

I don't think you can make an argument that Tolerance is an absolute Good, the same way you can't make an argument that Freedom is an absolute Good. Whether it's a Good or not is always going to be Contextual. How benign or malignant is the behavior or idea that we're considering Tolerating? Do you take a Harm Reduction standpoint when looking at Tolerance, or do you take a moralistic stance, consequences be damned? I think there's an interesting discussion to be had on the topic, because it's far from a black and white issue.

Most of this was covered in Leo's Conspiracy Theory video, no need to debunk all of Alex Jone's bat-shit crazy, unfounded ideas point by point here.

@Origins I think the problem isn't so much that he's an excessively unhealthy version of Red ( as far as Red goes, he seems to be pretty par for the course). But more so that Red is a really dysfunctional Stage for a segment of the population to be at in a pluralistic Democracy whose center of gravity is at Orange.

If you yourself spent a significant amount of time in Orange, one thing that might help is to try to think back to how you would frame the issue you're trying to convey in terms that you yourself could have understood when you were at thay stage of development.

I always thought of Trump as an amalgamation of everything bad about America; Trump is America's Shadow.

Since it's probably only a matter of time before Texas goes Blue due to demographic changes, I'm curious how the GOP will respond when they're literally unable to win presidential elections in the Electoral College. Maybe we'll finally abolish the Electoral College at long last.

Ha! Yes, I recall Don Beck's telling of that story during a lecture series on SD that I was listening to a while back.

In some of his other works he goes on to explain how Green often fails to recognize the differences between Dominator Hierarchies (which are bad and should be done away with) and Growth Hierarchies (or Holarchies as calls them).

Systems Thinking isn't exclusive to Yellow, as it has it's beginnings in awareness of systemic issues beginning in Green. I could probably make an argument that a handful of pre-Green intellectuals like Marx and Hegel tapped into elements of systems thinking (though in a limited way). The inter-intra distinction of systems thinking between Green and Yellow that was mentioned makes a lot of sense. @Rilles. Great post by the way.

While I'm still somewhat new to Vaush's channel, I've noticed that he can come across as abrasive at times, even while the points he's making are completely valid. Which is why I was really impressed by the level of patience and compassion he displayed while debating with a young and impressionable kid who most likely grew up in Conservative household, and was a victim of right wing emotional manipulation and fear mongering. Of course it's a two way street and the conversation turned out as respectful as it did because the kid was open minded enough to at least listen to the points Vaush was making, but it was encouraging to see, and something Lefties should be more open minded to when these sorts of opportunities present themselves.

Nice!

Groundhog's Day - Hey, a beloved movie that's about self actualization and emotional growth, and playfully explores the Buddhist notion of samsara.