You're not engaging with the challenge to your original statement.
You don't protest by sitting out. So what are you doing?
What the radical left are doing is sitting out in protest of a broken system.
There has never, ever been anything approaching a protest that starts with the words "sitting out".
That's not revolution, that's apathy and disinterest. That's what the people in power want.
Don't sit out. Stand up. Do something. Or don't. But don't lie to yourself and others and say that sitting out of the problem makes it any better.
No, they haven't always been extremely greedy and selfish. All social animals strike a balance between self-interest and group-interest, and humans are no different.
Some humans have always been extremely greedy and selfish. And some of those humans have always been charismatic and persuasive. And many other humans are not equipped to differentiate between emotionally persuasive and right. Well-intentioned humans will often connect themselves to the wrong people or ideas.
That's not really their fault. We're repurposing evolution's creations for things they weren't built to do. We're trying to build empathy and connection with people that are chronologically, geographically, and/or psychologically distant from us.
And unfortunately we're trying to do that while a handful of us try to sever those connections and build physical and metaphorical barriers between us for their own self-interest.
Most of us struggle with the ability to feel empathy and connection with our own future selves. We often choose instant gratification over personal benefit, we often choose to forego temporary burdens in the present at the foreseen expense of finding greater burdens in the future.
That's not greed or self-interest. That's the opposite of self-interest. That's just the burden of the rising ape. But it's no reason to lose hope, and it's no reason to stop trying.
The most important proof that humans aren't all greedy and selfish is that people are still trying to do better. We are still trying to build better connections, even as others try to tear them apart.
It isn't by necessity a religious program, though I freely acknowledge its theistic roots, and the fact that many are religious and do rely on deity as higher power.
But the reason these people were capable of this bravery is stated in the article and is specifically not their piety - it's their honesty.
"Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"
"Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."
The most important lesson to be learned in AA has nothing to do with God and everything to do with addressing falsehoods - the lies people tell themselves and others to justify their behavior and to excuse their actions.
Through time, habit, and conscious effort and will, these people have primed their minds to be willing to accept a fundamentally difficult truth - that what we think and what we feel can be false. That the things we tell ourselves, the things we tell others, and the things we do can all be wrong.
We all have a responsibility to face those truths with courage and transparency. We have a responsibility to own our flaws and mistakes and make amends where possible. That is the guiding truth of AA. It all started with God, but it ends with the individual, and how they face those truths.
Then you're not actually advocating for change. If you have no interest in changing minds then you have no interest in any meaningful difference in the future. Besides, the consent has been manufactured and the horses have been lead to a poisoned pool.
The apathetic dismissal of people as helpless - the belief that they are, individually and as a whole, incapable of change or redemption or worse, unworthy of it - is a small but meaningful part of the machine that has altered reality in front of our very eyes.
We appear to be in one of many pivotal moments in history, where economics and politics and technology all tip the dominoes that are human lives toward an entirely new and irreversible state.
Hard times tend to meet demagogues and easy answers, but they also tend to force people to come together and face hard truths. I'm not saying you personally can save or change them all - perhaps not even save any. But there are plenty of good, ignorant people that will have opportunities to learn some terrible lessons very soon.
The changes in attitudes towards social media websites, caused in this instance by Elon Musk are a great way for those in power to suppress another Arab Spring type event in the future.
The change in attitude is the consequence, not the cause. The best way for those in power to suppress another Arab Spring type event is a change in ownership of a massively influential social media platform where the richest man can take over completely to censor and control the narrative and oh, whoops... that already happened.
The issue is Grice's "maxim of quantity". It's a linguistic model of how we speak to each other - we provide the appropriate amount of information, and no more. Providing a surplus of details "for context" immediately puts people on guard because it quite literally is suspicious.
Breaking the maxim of quantity in this way is like saying "asbestos-free cereal!" It's a detail that wasn't necessary for context, and so its inclusion seems intentionally designed to communicate some implicit information that we're meant to understand.
No, you don't need to say "all slavery is bad" when someone says "slavery is bad" because that was an unnecessary detail to add in context.
People don't need to defend themselves to you and say "you're right, indentured servitude and prison labor are bad, so white slavery is bad too" because they weren't talking about those things. They were talking about slavery as it is protrayed in RDR2 and you seem to be trying to change the conversation.
Yes.
Profess: 1) To affirm openly; declare or claim. 2) To make a pretense of; pretend.
If one makes a pretense of holding beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not hold, one is a hypocrite.
Whether anyone else understands the pretenses of the hypocrite or not does not change the definitions of the words.
Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess
Having no values or beliefs and being self-consistent with ulterior personal values does not change the definition of the word.
If one professes beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not possess, one is a hypocrite.
Headline from fox news: "Oliver North: Israel will have to put people on the ground and it will be bloody"
Reality is truly stranger than fiction. If any writer continued to use a character like him for so long in such obvious ways without suffering any consequences, readers' suspension of disbelief would be shattered.
He was there for Iran-Contra. He is still here for Israel-Hamas. The exact same playbook. Place political gain over national interest. Put lives needlessly in danger and extend suffering for an easy win.
Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
Holding a position when politically convenient and reversing your stance on that position due to political convenience is hypocrisy. It may be typical and expected, but it's still hypocrisy.
Initiateofthevoid
joined 2 weeks ago
The Montgomery bus boycott didn't start with sitting out. It started with Rosa Parks sitting in.
Not to mention the easily understood fact that an economic boycott - one which causes direct material consequences - has absolutely no relation to some sort of "political boycott", which causes zero consequences against anyone in power.
Yes? Congratulations, you are therefore contributing to our continued democratic decline.