Going through life ignoring minorly wrong things is a chill way to roll. You don't get in fights that way.

That's because they are either:

1. dumb, or
2. cynically entrenched into a bunker mentality of the kind engendered by politics and other perceived existential crises (see also: Eversor and myself defending the likes of the CIA against you philosophical types); see my quote from that John Cleese video about the closed mode and politicians.

It's amusing to think how quickly the perception of a threat (e.g., all of politics) quickly moves you from the open mode, where you can have "strong opinions, weakly held", to the closed mode, leaving you with no choice but to have "weak opinions, strongly held". Mathematically it's a result of democracy reducing the complexity of an entire nation down to two representative choices, and over time of course the dynamics of the political process collapses this complexity to not even be a good partition of two useful halves, but rather to a couple of flavours of a single broken system, with either side fighting tooth and nail for (perceived) infinitesimal gains.

On the other hand, the fact that there are two flavors of **** makes it all the more obvious that one clearly smells much worse to the educated nose, which gives HRC supporters all the more justification for their bunker mentality.

Thermodynamically, though, such an inefficient information processing system is eventually going to overheat and collapse on its own weight (or chug along on other merits).

In fact, one of the lessons of the election in 2016, is that the American economy seems to run itself pretty well on autopilot (uh, well, so far, apparently). Of course I remember Jon`C said something about Germany being on autopilot back in the 1930's as well.

Perhaps my lesson to young cynics would be: yeah, your vote doesn't matter all that much, and that's a problem worth thinking about solving. (And not by joining black flag anarchists who like to smash things.)

Oh, I meant to refer to either side as Sanders/Clinton but that totally isn't what that post says. Oops.

And yes, I didn't end any of these relationships (though I did say 'I' filtered them out of my life, I did so by just not doing anything different and refusing to pat them on the head for their cultism) these people have stopped talking to me. Which is fine for several reasons, the most important being that none of these people are my closest friends, and they are apparently the kind of people who will end relationships because they drank too much koolaid, which is unsettling to me. One of them did really want to have sex with me so if she shows back up I won't hold any grudges. Not for any of the other people either, but I'm definitely not letting people into my daily life who act like that over the minor stresses of an election.

Though the people in question were almost all angry about the fact that I wouldn't vote for Hillary to stop Trump, more than that I was saying anything obnoxious, and they considered my anarchism and love of human scale civilization as an attack on their identity, was the impression I got. They pressed me to acknowledge that she needed to be president to avert some cataclysm, and when I stated that her presidency would carry the bulk of the same risks of cataclysm, I somehow supported Trump. The Berniecrats in question had a similar reaction even when I had already voted for Bernie in the democrat primary but then said that his policies would likely not avert the most pressing catastrophes.

I am still friends with other more reasonable people who supported all three candidates.

And yes, I would have a similar lesson for young cynics, by becoming the kind of anarchist that builds tractors and pagan temples. But that isn't sexy, so carry a concealed weapon like a Sikh.

What were the cataclysmic consequences of an HRC presidency?

So far, all of the worst things that Trump has done (equivocation on article 5, pulling out of Paris Agreement) are things that HRC wouldn't have done, because, for the most part, they're things nearly any president wouldn't do. There's also repealing and replacing Obamacare, which, obviously HRC wouldn't be doing. (It strikes me that liberals/progressives/leftists who were equivocal about HRC didn't take at all seriously the moral hazard that a GOP government would make repealing ACA a priority, which is one reason why it was completely boneheaded thinking. How many of those people are now steaming over BCRA?)

I'm one of those people who thinks the Paris Agreement had already been defanged, and also that 2* of warming is already inevitable, not because we won't change our ways (we won't) but because of heat already in the system. 2* is also going to be catastrophic. It was like trying to cure cancer by switching to ultra light cigarettes.

She was going to chase economic growth and that isn't going to help things. Then again, I am not a climate change denier, and I group people who downplay the seriousness of climate change (it is very very bad and further very very bad changes are already assured) in with deniers, which includes almost all of the greenwashing democrats who think solar panels and their plastic covered Teslas are going to save the planet. But then I bring up nobody driving at all and it's just a completely insane thing to say because we have to protect the markets and futuristic fever dreams at all costs.

My beliefs and ideas about civilization are fundamentally incompatible with there being a president at all, probably. It's not that there are going to be cataclysmic consequences of an HRC presidency, it's that there are going to be cataclysmic consequences probably as long as there is a US (or most other countries for that matter) in it's current form and I don't think it's morally correct to avert your eyes and play along. I don't buy the lesser of two evils stuff, not on some principal, but because the evil is structural. The Obamacare replacement is definitely nonsense, but at the end of the day, I'm more concerned about things like ocean circulation changing and the movement or loss of the Asian monsoon starving most of India, or when I inevitably become a climate refugee, or my parents dying of heatstroke regardless of their access to healthcare than I am about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

So you think at the end of the day politics doesn't matter, because forces far greater than what humans have any control over, and which are completely indifferent to human suffering, are destined to create destruction on a scale far greater than what humans are even capable of achieving?

I guess you can paint it that way if you want, but no, not at all. But also definitely. I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

But to not quote true detective, the forces that humans don't have any control over are just ourselves, and like many of our ancestors we will exceed the carrying capacity of our environment. Only now it's not just overfishing a lake, overgrazing a basin, or all over the scales and accompanying complexity in between here and there, now it's the entire earth's ecosystem services collapsing, which includes all of the lakes and all of the grasslands, and we have managed to expand the contribution that one person can do to this overshoot to unimaginable scales through fossil fuels. Call me a neomalthusian if you want, but that sure looks like what is happening, and at the end of the day, the only politics that matter are ones that make a genuine effort to avert that since it's result (despite Jon's airponics, whatever the **** that is) will be extinction of most complex life. But there aren't any, because that would require totally refiguring everything about our society, and we probably had to do that well before I was born to have a real effect. But mostly, muh markets! We can't let the auto companies go under! How will we commute two hours to work?

So at the end of the day politics matter desperately, but forces that are exactly human cause us to be indifferent to our own suffering and are destined to create destruction on a scale far greater than what humans are even capable of imagining. To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing, we should do all of the things we should have done to mitigate this, but I think we should do them as a form of species wide hospice care and not delude ourselves into thinking what we are doing is 'helping'. At the very least, people shouldn't get upset when I say that's how I've chosen to live my life when they ask me my thoughts.

The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't require human consciousness, and indeed it has played an important role in shaping our world since the very beginnings of life (mass extinctions, included). On the contrary, human consciousness - and the irrational ideologies it produces - is the one thing in the natural world with the potential to finally overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma.

But, hell, if you want to dance into oblivion I'm not gonna stop you.

Economic policy is nearly unchanged since Trump took office. We have the same chairman of the fed, and no important legislation has been passed.

I expect an economic downturn soonish due to the fact that the stock market seems to have been growing at a faster rate than real economic growth.

I've been noticing some clues recently that show that Google is the new 90's/00's-era Microsoft:

1. I am forced to reboot my Android phone in order to work around bugs that Google refuses to fix
2. My Nexus 5X takes about as long as Windows 95 did to boot up in the bad old days, for God knows why, in this age of virtualization and instant-on suspend and restore of more capable operating systems (despite being based on Linux!)
3. Google News has recently been redesigned in what seems like a competition with the default Windows XP theme to hide (or in this case, remove) valuable information in the UI, and style it with that Fisher-Price toy look and feel
4. Google is being investigated by the EU for anti-competitive business practices.
5. I am forced to install a third party app (Termux) just to have basic Unix command line functionality and programs that take the place of the crappy, non-scriptable, closed-source bloated spyware that ships with the O.S., just like I used to do when circustance had me stuck on a Windows machine and I installed Cygwin to achieve the same
6. I bought this phone because it was a heavily discounted to get unlocked hardware at a below market price point ($200 for a $350 phone), but the OS came pre-installed with no option to remove or replace (in this case the situation is worse than Microsoft)
7. And of course: the entire product is an inferior copy of something made by Apple, even while propogating all of its original sins

Talk to Nick Pizzalatto and Thomas Ligotti about it, since they wrote that.

In addition to identifying as a pessimist, do you identify as a nihilist?

There's the Sophoclean adage: "It would've been better never to have been born at all". I always thought he meant that suffering is so constant a feature of life, and everything that happens in a life is extinguished by death. Life not only has no purpose, but it's unbearable while it lasts. It would've saved each of us the trouble to not have to go through it and experience misery. (I've thought that this view is actually a kind of extreme form of utilitarianism.) Your view seems to be quite similar (hence, we should "walk hand and hand into extinction" together). That seems more nihilistic than pessimistic, to my mind. It's not that bad things happen in life. Life, especially human life, which is capable of introspection and awareness of death, is, as you've said, a kind of unfortunate anomaly in nature. It entails, as an inextricable feature, permanent discomfort and alienation.

One of my favorite passages of Nietzsche:



http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm

Sorry, I thought the 'But to not quote true detective' would give away that the first paragraph is, in fact, a quote from true detective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oX2xFo7JA4&t=166s The Rust character is basically a caricature of my perspectives and people who have seen that show often assume that those exact positions with the accompanying implications and tone of the show actually resonate with me. And they do, sort of, but that isn't actually a good summation of what I think about the world or how I live my life.

I identify as myself mostly, and while probably not an actual card carrying pessimist (though as far as personal philosophy goes I am an anti-natalist ((Schopenhauer?)) but I'm not confident enough about my grasp of reality to tell other people that should be their choice) I am probably a nihilist in the vein of Nietzsche in that while nothing matters that leaves room for a life affirming construction of my self/our selves. I would probably vibe with the better to have never been born at all sentiment if my life hadn't been pretty great so far. I bet later in life I'll be more on it, but there's definitely room for that sentiment in my worldview.

I recently bought a used copy of Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I have been told the book is insanity, but am now perhaps intrigued enough by your comment to amuse myself with it.

Spook you seem to be in despair at once at the plight and the nature of humanity.

What if the purpose of an organism (or species!) in life was to replace itself with its successor?

[quote=George Bernard Shaw]
In the Beginning
ACT I


The Garden of Eden. Afternoon. An immense serpent is sleeping with
her head buried in a thick bed of Johnswort, and her body coiled in
apparently endless rings through the branches of a tree, which is
already well grown; for the days of creation have been longer than our
reckoning. She is not yet visible to anyone unaware of her presence, as
her colors of green and brown make a perfect camouflage. Near her head a
low rock shows above the Johnswort.

The rock and tree are on the border of a glade in which lies a dead fawn
all awry, its neck being broken. Adam, crouching with one hand on the
rock, is staring in consternation at the dead body. He has not noticed
the serpent on his left hand. He turns his face to his right and calls
excitedly.

**

ADAM. Eve! Eve!

EVE'S VOICE. What is it, Adam?

ADAM. Come here. Quick. Something has happened.

EVE [_running in_] What? Where? [_Adam points to the fawn_]. Oh! [_She
goes to it; and he is emboldened to go with her_]. What is the matter
with its eyes?

ADAM. It is not only its eyes. Look. [_He kicks it._]

EVE. Oh don't! Why doesn't it wake?

ADAM. I don't know. It is not asleep.

EVE. Not asleep?

ADAM. Try.

EVE [_trying to shake it and roll it over_] It is stiff and cold.

ADAM. Nothing will wake it.

EVE. It has a queer smell. Pah! [_She dusts her hands, and draws away
from it_]. Did you find it like that?

ADAM. No. It was playing about; and it tripped and went head over heels.
It never stirred again. Its neck is wrong [_he stoops to lift the neck
and shew her_].

EVE. Dont touch it. Come away from it.

_They both retreat, and contemplate it from a few steps' distance with
growing repulsion._

EVE. Adam.

ADAM. Yes?

EVE. Suppose you were to trip and fall, would you go like that?

ADAM. Ugh! [_He shudders and sits down on the rock_].

EVE [_throwing herself on the ground beside him, and grasping his knee_]
You must be careful. Promise me you will be careful.

ADAM. What is the good of being careful? We have to live here for ever.
Think of what for ever means! Sooner or later I shall trip and fall. It
may be tomorrow; it may be after as many days as there are leaves in
the garden and grains of sand by the river. No matter: some day I shall
forget and stumble.

EVE. I too.

ADAM [_horrified_] Oh no, no. I should be alone. Alone for ever. You
must never put yourself in danger of stumbling. You must not move about.
You must sit still. I will take care of you and bring you what you want.

EVE [_turning away from him with a shrug, and hugging her ankles_] I
should soon get tired of that. Besides, if it happened to you, _I_
should be alone. I could not sit still then. And at last it would happen
to me too.

ADAM. And then?

EVE. Then we should be no more. There would be only the things on all
fours, and the birds, and the snakes.

ADAM. That must not be.

EVE. Yes: that must not be. But it might be.

ADAM. No. I tell you it must not be. I know that it must not be.

EVE. We both know it. How do we know it?

ADAM. There is a voice in the garden that tells me things.

EVE. The garden is full of voices sometimes. They put all sorts of
thoughts into my head.

ADAM. To me there is only one voice. It is very low; but it is so near
that it is like a whisper from within myself. There is no mistaking it
for any voice of the birds or beasts, or for your voice.

EVE. It is strange that I should hear voices from all sides and you only
one from within. But I have some thoughts that come from within me and
not from the voices. The thought that we must not cease to be comes from
within.

ADAM [_despairingly_] But we shall cease to be. We shall fall like the
fawn and be broken. [_Rising and moving about in his agitation_]. I
cannot bear this knowledge. I will not have it. It must not be, I tell
you. Yet I do not know how to prevent it.

EVE. That is just what I feel; but it is very strange that you should
say so: there is no pleasing you. You change your mind so often.

ADAM [_scolding her_] Why do you say that? How have I changed my mind?

EVE. You say we must not cease to exist. But you used to complain
of having to exist always and for ever. You sometimes sit for hours
brooding and silent, hating me in your heart. When I ask you what I have
done to you, you say you are not thinking of me, but of the horror of
having to be here for ever. But I know very well that what you mean is
the horror of having to be here with me for ever.

ADAM. Oh! That is what you think, is it? Well, you are wrong. [_He sits
down again, sulkily_]. It is the horror of having to be with myself for
ever. I like you; but I do not like myself. I want to be different; to
be better, to begin again and again; to shed myself as a snake sheds its
skin. I am tired of myself. And yet I must endure myself, not for a day
or for many days, but for ever. That is a dreadful thought. That is what
makes me sit brooding and silent and hateful. Do you never think of
that?

EVE. No: I do not think about myself: what is the use? I am what I am:
nothing can alter that. I think about you.

ADAM. You should not. You are always spying on me. I can never be alone.
You always want to know what I have been doing. It is a burden. You
should try to have an existence of your own, instead of occupying
yourself with my existence.

EVE. I _have_ to think about you. You are lazy: you are dirty: you
neglect yourself: you are always dreaming: you would eat bad food and
become disgusting if I did not watch you and occupy myself with you. And
now some day, in spite of all my care, you will fall on your head and
become dead.

ADAM. Dead? What word is that?

EVE [_pointing to the fawn_] Like that. I call it dead.

ADAM [_rising and approaching it slowly_] There is something uncanny
about it.

EVE [_joining him_] Oh! It is changing into little white worms.

ADAM. Throw it into the river. It is unbearable.

EVE. I dare not touch it.

ADAM. Then I must, though I loathe it. It is poisoning the air. [_He
gathers its hooves in his hand and carries it away in the direction from
which Eve came, holding it as far from him as possible_].

Eve looks after them for a moment; then, with a shiver of disgust, sits
down on the rock, brooding. The body of the serpent becomes visible,
glowing with wonderful new colors. She rears her head slowly from the
bed of Johnswort, and speaks into Eve's ear in a strange seductively
musical whisper.

THE SERPENT. Eve.

EVE [_startled_] Who is that?

THE SERPENT. It is I. I have come to shew you my beautiful new hood. See
[_she spreads a magnificent amethystine hood_]!

EVE [_admiring it_] Oh! But who taught you to speak?

THE SERPENT. You and Adam. I have crept through the grass, and hidden,
and listened to you.

EVE. That was wonderfully clever of you.

THE SERPENT. I am the most subtle of all the creatures of the field.

EVE. Your hood is most lovely. [_She strokes it and pets the serpent_].
Pretty thing! Do you love your godmother Eve?

THE SERPENT. I adore her. [_She licks Eve's neck with her double
tongue_].

EVE [_petting her_] Eve's wonderful darling snake. Eve will never be
lonely now that her snake can talk to her.

THE SNAKE. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who
whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.

EVE [_shuddering_] Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw
your beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things.

THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to
conquer it.

EVE. How can I conquer it?

THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth.

EVE. What? [_Trying to pronounce it_] B-birth?

THE SERPENT. Yes, birth.

EVE. What is birth?

THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out
of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That
is birth.

EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful.

THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very
subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You
see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I
say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast
when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

EVE. Born is a beautiful word.

THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful
every time?

EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why.

THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not?

(...)
[/Quote]

Well I think that's tacky.

Biology generally is.

(As for Shaw, a lot of people seem to find his writings rather fanciful.)

Speaking of serpents, Danny Hillis' message in that (old!) TED talk is to get people to realize that life (i.e., spontaneous phenomena which locally fight the second law of thermodynamics), which, for reasons of improbability, begin as uncoordinated populations, must eventually



i.e., to overcome the prisoner's dilemma by coordinating into larger entities (e.g., multicellular organisms, or in our case, whatever comes next).

The fecund mess we're seeing now is just a brief moment in geologic history where we either succeed or fail to birth a successor that saves us from ourselves, as it were. And with your antipathy to both the nature and plight of homo sapien society, Spook, "why not?", in the words of Shaw's serpant of Eden.

Otherwise, life on Earth in general is pretty well built to survive things like climate change, though human society as we know it may not. And biology has no problem at all going through long periods of scarcity, strain, and general suffering (in fact, it was designed for this).

I agree. But what I am getting at is that I spend as much time as I can asking why not in regards to things other than human society as we know it, and that isn't allowed in human society as we know it. And so we die. Or something will come from left field and we can continue down our ugly and tasteless course.

Would you guys agree that the most tasteless thing of all is immoral unexamined life, which nevertheless takes pride in perpetuating itself? But then biology is going to be full of it, since uglier but more adaptive approaches are going to be more fecund than the gems. So we need a cult leader and inventor like a Richard Stallman to beat the tastess bastards who defect, and at once beat them at their own game and also expose them as morally defective.

But if you aren't both of these things (inventor and philosopher), then you are just an angry and blind lamenter of some lost golden age that actually was born amid a mountain **** anyway, until something created it.

Well I think the parts of the status quo that I'm not feeling are uglier and less adaptive, though they are more virile to be sure. Though, it's not like there's some sort of purity we can reach. "You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow; the defeat of creation. This is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life everywhere in the universe." There was no golden age, and I don't think there is a way to invest or philosophize your way into one.

Also I said that idea was tacky because I thought you were just talking about having children.

Adaptivity is with respect to scale. Something can be locally adaptive (i.e., selfish, where adaptive = virile) but globally wasteful (e.g., cancer). This is the problem of cooperation.

I was, because reproduction is how biology already accomplishes what we need to do, but at the next (interpersonal) scale. In both instances, the purpose of life is to create new life apart from itself.

The question is whether or not our children will kill us by becoming parasites that amplify our own unexamined vices (e.g., Google and Facebook and whatever the **** it is they think they are building when they talk about A.I.).

Sure, "conservation of suck" is a thing. They question is where you put it in space and time. Evolution puts it in the past, having tried many failed versions of yourself to achieve coordination at the level required to actually successfully build a multicelluar organism that can do amazing things like think / speak / create / coorporate, and for the most part not get cancer or have allergic reactions.

As for being forced to do wrong at every stage of the universe, all that tells me is that intuitive notions of right and wrong are insufficient tools alone for humans to grasp the exact bounds of moral progress, without taking into account a mathematical appreciation for biology and physics. At any rate, if you want to do less harm locally you can start by being vegetarian (although I don't).

Wait why does the fact that life creates life other than itself mean that is a or the purpose of it?

Because it's been practicing this whole existence thing under the assumption that this was in fact its purpose, for billions of years. Of course at a fine-grained level, there may be other purposes (like marching off to war, or storing ATP), but on the whole we are pretty narrowly constrained by evolution to operate with a very specific worldview (despite the illusion of generality that brains tend to give).

Also, because of the Ben Franklin cartoon.

But where does the purpose come from

At any rate, in a loose way, when you communicate your ideas in language, you are obsoleting your physical body in the sense that the most important outlines of your thoughts can vicariously live on without you, which as far as I'm concerned falls under the umbrella of "expending time / thought (i.e., slowly dying) to breathe life into something apart from myself".

Where does the form that organs in your body take come from?

That something is capable of being construed (by me, in this case) as purposeful is not the same as "acting purposefully", which i imagine has a surprisingly small significance on average. But the illusion is a nice source of motivation for creativity.

Canadian Supreme Court determines that Google is an accessory to deliberate international trademark infringement, rules that Google must de-index the website containing infringing content worldwide.

Americans everywhere argue:
- Google is a US company, only the US courts have the right to order them around.
- This infringes on Google's free speech.
- Canada doesn't have free speech.
- Obviously this means China will now order Google to deindex Tiananmen Square worldwide.

What none of them understand:
- The US takes trademark infringement pretty seriously too, guys

It probably didn't help Google's case that their lawyers completely phoned it in; their central arguments were as follows:

1.) this ruling might break some law in some country, somewhere, but Google has no idea which law or country (if only there were some sort of... tool, or website where you could search for that kind of information)

2.) we're Google, **** you

and the Canadian government was about as impressed by their antics as they should be.

I guess they weren't prepared for Canada to be an actual country and not just roll over when an ~employer~ says to.

Don't there exist treaties that require companies to respect the intellectual property of foreign nations? If the website is in Canada, how is this different than the US being angry at China for stealing their own IP?

LMAO.

google

Yes, among other things the WTO (as a whole) takes a dim view on international trademark infringement.

The infringing website was originally hosted by Canadians, but the operators have fled overseas and continued their deliberate infringement. Google profits by facilitating that infringement.

This particular court case sought to compel Google to comply with an emergency injunction closing down the infringing website.