There’s really nothing there that’s not solvable, it’s just. . . difficult to break context, you know? I’ve pretty much dedicated every neuron to trying to get around the mess and simplify things for almost two years, and while solutions are easy to find, ‘understanding things for other people’ is a bit of a nightmare.
Still, I think we’ve almost got a trick that can work (ugly draft, apologies, it’s been an adventure figuring out which of hundreds of pages of stuff people need). Nothing works for everybody, but that’s where addition by subtraction comes in, you know? That creates a new problem (did we just leave the crazies with the bombs?), so we have to address that, but there are multiple solutions there. Never one, one is never good enough, but several together, yeah, that works.
If enough of us got together we could change the world in weeks, the problem is we’re too beaten down and too tired of failing. . . so any solution’s got to be REALLY good, true?
And we fix the basics, then at least we can start worrying about real problems rather than ones we’ve created. Real people were always supposed to take precedence over made-up laws, right?
The fact that ‘I’m sorry, I wan to help, but my hands are tied’ is a sentence uttered by actual people is indicative of the problem, I think.
Um, no actually. Jesus did not make lepers part of the community again. The story goes more to the experience driving him pretty much bats, AND not being resolved.
No, not everyone needs to go to college, nor does every want to, and that’s fine. What’s wrong is when academically-capable people cannot go because of money problems. There is no justification for allowing publicly-supported upper education to shun students on the basis of income. You want to talk about social issues and safety nets, but not about the hungry person being allowed to learn to fish?! You want to speak to women as breadwinners, but not allow them educations? Speak to their health issues but not to the systemically-enforced ignorance that keeps many of them ignorant of the means toward better health?
When I speak of principles, I refer to those the Founders had when the Constitution was drafted, ratified, and then amended and again ratified. THOSE principles. The ones government and the entire population are supposed to observe n the first place. It has nothing to do with religion or twerking or let-them-eat-cake, but everything to do with doing whatever we do responsibly - which is basically, whatever the hell we each like, providing we don’t harm others in doing it. Those are universal rules followed by most religions and philosophies, both formal and informal. Details may vary, but the principles remain universal, because they require above all recognizing and accepting our differences.
And, fwiw, several of the Founders were ‘deists’, rather than religionists. Their founding principles were intentionally humanist and intended by their very definition to allow for differences of opinion… So, don’t even try that with me. It’s ok that you disagree. I’m fine with you believing in anything you wish, right up to glittery rainbow unicors. It’s just not ok if you attempt to distort my own position, even via application of rhetorical ‘questions’.
Yes, I think that’s pretty much on the money. I have also spent the past few years simplifying in dozens of ways. Only wish I’d wanted it sooner! I guess, when we’re young, we want to succeed. And since we measure that success with material gains, it’s almost a given that we will try to acquire as much material as possible. It’s only late that we realize we don’t own it - it owns us!
And for the best down-and-dirty on that, we have to turn to George Carlin, lol. He called it perfectly, as usual. I reviewed all the Carlin routines I could, as I was trying to explain American English to an immigrant relative who just doesn’t get it. Decided Carlin wouldn’t help the relative - too American to be comprehended. But it did serve to remind me of a lot of ideas that influenced so many of us…and that we drifted off from as families and jobs and stuff became our only focus. We had some good ideas - and many were very practical. They just wouldn’t function under the weight of the same system they argued with, and most of us became casualties of that argument one way or another.
And yes! Bucky was brilliant. As was Ayn Rand, though she seems often misunderstood. Her story about simply checking out of the system altogether in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ makes the point rather well. The two were very different in many ways, yet with a clearly similar goal - to give every individual human the best possible shot at happiness and success, but not confuse the collective with that individual, as government tends to do so often. The ginormous question is always, how?
Very true, though I’m not too sure what can be done, from a user perspective. I do very much appreciate what you are trying to do with discourse, and I really hope you succeed.
The easy fantasy is to change humanity, but I don’t see that happening any time soon, so how to manage peoples craziness via interfaces and algorithms? I always liked Slashdot’s techniques, brows them at +3 and the quality is quite good. Community derived kill files? Still, I’d like to try to train people to think a little harder, instead of letting their buttons be pushed and then reflexively answering.
