@DemocracyMattersALot Remove them from office. They won't understand as long as they're being paid not to.
@riley @gildilinie I have one paperback which was falling apart so badly that an entire section was missing. (I later found an intact copy in a used bookstore.)
RE: https://syzito.xyz/@OccuWorld/116931255803930406
The Voidbringer CEOs have brought upon us the Everstorm, with its characteristic red light, as foretold in the archives of legend. ...and yet the powerful refuse to believe. We are not ready.
Proposed bill could make New York the first U.S. state with universal healthcare
WAVERLY, N.Y. (WENY) — The League of Women Voters for The proposed ‘New York Health Act’ (NYHA) would provide every New York resident with comprehensive health insurance with no copays, deductibles or out-of-network costs…
Okay, so I went on a brief book-sniffing expedition just now.
First, I sniffed a nice thick hardback we bought just this past year. It smelled of clean paper.
Next, I sniffed an English paperback from the 1950s. The scent was only a little stronger, but immediately sent me into a used bookstore flashback.
I guess the fact that it's that strong even after many decades is evidence that paperback books used to smell a long stronger than hardbacks do now.
I could dig up an old hardback for comparison, but what should my target year be? How long ago do we think this chemical change took place?
With regard to the idea that the chemicals were contributing to the paper aging -- two things:
I do know that "low-acid paper" is a thing which exists and lasts longer than cheaper paper; I think maybe it used to be a lot more (relatively) expensive than it is now.
When I first started collecting paperbacks, I acquired a bunch from my dad's collection and many of the older ones were seriously starting to fall apart. The glue was crumbling, the paper was fragile.
I always assumed that this meant (a) those books would continue to get steadily more fragile and might crumble to dust in another few decades; (b) paperbacks I bought new would start to look like those older paperbacks in a couple of decades.
Neither of these things has happened. The 1940s & 1950s paperbacks from my dad's collection are in pretty much exactly the shape they were in when I got them. The paperbacks I bought new in the 1970s maybe aged a little bit, and then stopped. The ones I bought in the 1980s and later mostly look unchanged.
I find this interesting, and I guess I came to the conclusion that they had to use super-cheap paper in the early postwar years but the quality improved significantly over the next 2-3 decades.
[This has been a Probably Unnecessary Rambleâ„ brought to you by Ritalinâ„¢ and Woozle's Brainâ„¢.]
@isaackuo Viri succeed because of evolved traits, so I think the analogy (rough as it is) still applies ;-)
Society is a kind of meme-virus too -- just usually more symbiotic than parasitic.
@isaackuo It's part of how the power-base maintains its power, yeah.
@isaackuo I mean, yeah, their ideas are ludicrous -- but there's got to be some kind of underlying cognitive-emotional structure that makes people not only believe those ideas but defend them against reality.
It's not that there's any excuse or justification for this; I'm thinking more in more practical terms -- I've been finding it really hard to deal with the fact that so many people are like this. I feel like I'm surrounded by monsters, an angry mob looking for any target on which to vent their rage.
Understanding what made them that way, and thinking that maybe they're not inherently monsters but have basically been infected by a very successful meme-virus, gives me some hope that there's a solution -- that human civilization doesn't have to be like this.
Even if we can't change any minds today, we can at least understand the patterns that we need to fight against -- the molecular signatures that our cultural antibodies need to learn to recognize.
@isaackuo I'd say that the reality is complex, and I have no doubt that many right-wingers are exactly as you describe.
The particular guy I was arguing with, though, seemed to be taking a stance that aligned with the walled-belief-states idea.
The only question is whether he actually believed that or if he just thought it might appeal to me.
...and now that you bring it up, I'm inclined to believe the latter. The idea seems too subtle for him, but the idea of using "fairness" as an emotional appeal seems well within his range.
A slight note on the other hand, though: the fact that he would arrive at that stance, and believe that I might not find it ridiculous, probably says something about his mindset.
Whether or not there are people who do believe that, this is not the first time I've seen it implicitly used as an argument. It seems worth documenting.
This all fits in with my airplane emergency metaphor: every disagreement over an issue that affects a lot of people is a power-struggle, not an attempt to solve a real problem.
Even the people who stand to benefit from the power-struggle may be so programmed into that mindset that they will ignore real danger, even when it's a danger to them.
It seems worth pointing out that sometimes science is the subject of these false allegiances. This is where we get fake institutions and fake journals which "scientifically prove" that climate change is a hoax, smoking is harmless, etc.
If "separate magesteria" is supposed to be a walled-city system intended to keep belief-communities safe, it's failing pretty much everyone.
I can even go so far as to imagine that they see this system -- each belief-system in its own walled city -- as having been created as a way for us all to get along, a way to prevent religious wars.
When we say that science should prevail, they see that not as elevating it above or outside that system but as using it like a wrecking-ball to knock down the walls of separation that keep each faith-state safe from the others.
...which is ridiculous, of course, since the faith-conquistadors don't give a damn about whose walls they break down, and often go out of their way to attack science first (while posing as allies of one or another faith-state).
@oli I'd been struggling to really get inside the head of someone who would swallow the idea that one person, or even one set of people, can just slap a word or phrase on some idea -- "woke!" "fake news!" "socialism!" -- and thereby make it untrue.
Like, have these people never heard of con-artists? If a used car salesman claimed that all the other dealers were "woke socialists" and this beat-up junker is "the greatest car ever made in history", would that seal the deal?
The cognitive landscape I'm laying out here feels like it explains things at least a little. They've been raised with an understanding of the world in which certain areas of reality are firmly walled-off as being a choice -- and when we challenge their beliefs about those areas, we're trying to break down those walls. We're threatening their safety, violating their rights.*
(Again, they're completely wrong and are being suckered into serving powermongers, but the patterns of thought they were raised with make it almost impossible for them to see that.)
* (Haggling over a business transaction is outside that wall, so they're allowed to apply critical thinking.)
It's not true, of course, but their faith-emperors told them to believe it -- so now believing it it is is part of their emotional safety-net.
Which is to say:
To them, "science" does not represent an overarching attempt to objectively understand reality; it's just another competing belief-system, another empire. When science says religion is wrong, it's getting above its station and needs to sit down.
Not that there aren't far more egregious privacy issues in tech (and Android, and Chrome), but that does seem like something that should change.
(...and we need to find ways to make it easier for victims to escape abusers, so this kind of fine technical point doesn't even become an issue, but that's a whole other discussion.)
A recent discussion with a right-winger has given me a possible insight to WTF is going on with them, but there's still some work to do towards laying out the evidence.
While it's still fresh-ish in my head, though:
We all understand that there are limits to what we can reasonably call "facts", because there's so much we don't know about the universe -- but people have an emotional need to cope with the non-factual parts of life, so they fill in the gaps with stories that help them feel safer and more in control.
Historically, people organized around these stories: if a lot of people believe the same thing, then it must be true, right? So being together with other people who have agreed that a certain set of stories is how things actually are is comforting, because it gives them reassurance that they're not just guessing.
Those groups of people become "religion", and the stories they believe become "doctrine".
(I think this must be the origin-story for "separate magesteria", which posits that some beliefs are testable, but others are not and never will be, and therefore can only legitimately be settled by doctrine rather than science -- even as the science shows otherwise.)
The problem with this system is that right-wing authoritarian followers seem to be all too willing to include whatever they don't understand as part of the doctrinal realm -- and once they have accepted something as part of that realm, it becomes an integral part of their emotional safety-net, i.e. the set of stories they need in order to deal with the unknown.
Right-wing powermongers -- maybe think of them as "faith-emperors" -- have learned to exploit this tendency. They see ignorance, uncertainty, and confusion as unconquered territory they can claim (in the name of whatever faith will have them) by creating new stories around it.
Those stories are, of necessity, completely counterfactual. Stories that correspond to the evidence are part of science, and accepting those stories would be ceding territory to an enemy power.
This is why they get upset when we try to show that their beliefs about reality are in fact testable, and that the evidence contradicts their doctrine.
When we say "what you are doing is harmful", they see us trying to destroy their faith because we're attacking their safety.
They see us as trying to invade territory that rightfully belongs to them.
...or something along those lines, anyway.
