In my listening to various youtube and podcasts over the years, I’ve come across some interesting concepts.  First, it is pretty clear that social inequality is highly correlated with male violence and incarceration.  This partly explains the USA’s prison population.  Second, the US army doesn’t take soldiers with IQs below 81.  Carefully think about that, because the US army loves its cannon fodder, loves their obedient unquestioning masses of soldiers, has the budget and needs more people to swab the decks of ships and do all sorts of grunt work, yet they really won’t take the very stupid.  The reasoning is pretty obvious: the very stupid cost more than they are worth to the US military.

These two things interact, by the way.  The conscientious intelligent hard-working types are the ones who get rich, and they are always actively looking for others who are willing to put in the effort to get things done.  When people self-select for the intelligent being given opportunities, and the stupid being given nothing at all, then you get a nice Pareto distribution of wealth, which concentrates further over time, creating more social inequality, and therefore more male violence and incarceration.  Until the revolution hits, as David Graeber points out in his anthropological writings.

It is kind of like rats who need to play.  They’ll play with the bigger rat if the bigger rat lets them win some of the time, let’s say 30% of the time.  If they never win, if the bigger rat always pins them down, the little rat eventually will say “fuck you” and refuse to play with the bigger rat.  The same could probably be said about wolves.  If an alpha wolf is particularly brutal, the females get together and shorten his reign of terror.  If, instead, an alpha wolf is nice to the female, takes an interest in raising the cubs, and has lots of friends, well, he’s bound to be in power a lot longer than the psychopath.

If enough of the lower class men develop the “fuck you” attitude towards the rich, because the rich have exceeded the bounds of social inequality winning, because they have not been philanthropic, because they have neglected to improve the welfare of the children, then revolutions occur, and the redistribution of wealth occurs.  Inevitably this is followed by the dark ages because they’ve lost a bunch of intelligent problem solvers in the revolution, however restratification always occurs over time.  This is probably the basis for a bunch of the cycles of history.  War cycles, empire cycles, currency cycles occur on a fairly predictable basis.

In the spring, when the kings go to war, King David stayed home, and stared at Bathsheba.  In the spring, a ton of people yage leave forums.  It seems to happen pretty predictably every year.  In the spring, after having stayed in the long house through the winter with a bunch of gathered people, and listened to the stories, and feasted on the communal harvested food, in the spring, people got cabin fever, bickered over petty differences, and left to go their separate ways.  In the spring, the people split up into smaller groups, to hunt, to plant, to fish, to steal their neighbors’ stuff honorably by duel, to enslave a neighbor, to marry a rival.  People have not strayed that far from their connection to the land, to have left behind this spring behavior yet.

Maybe that’s why I hated, loathed, and detested school in the spring.  The winter was nice.  The fall was okay, but the spring made me itchy to leave and get things done instead of learning.  A feeling of restless angst overcomes me every year in the spring.  “It’s time to move on.  It’s time to get going.  What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing.  But under my feet baby, the grass is growing.  Yeah, it’s time to move on.  It’s time to get going.” – Tom Petty

I was having yet another argument on failbook, which is a waste of time, but it helps me hone my moral and philosophical thinking in ways that mere books can’t always.  I had discussed how Jordan Peterson has a different take on motherhood, and why females don’t get above the glass ceiling that often.  He said that the data showed that really well qualified females tend to be the conscientious personality type, and just as they get really good at their jobs, they figure out that they have families who they are also conscientious about, and then they don’t accept the high-powered position that is actually offered to them because they want work-life balance.

My friend responded with the typical identity politics labels of pseudo-intellectual, anti-feminist, and transphobic.  Here’s my response:

No, he isn’t. JP is an academic ivory tower type (Nassim Taleb would call him intellectual yet idiot), somebody who acknowledges that the science shows that males and female are biologically different in personality types which makes their behavior different, and who shows that dominance hierarchies appear throughout the animal kingdom in certain circumstances.

Those short one or two word labels to describe somebody are the problem I’m having with identity politics. See, he’s called a “conservative,” even though most conservatives hate his guts. He is more than his labels, and I’m not a “blind follower” because some things he says I disagree with.

The good thing about him, is that he gets me to think through a couple issues I have in ways I haven’t done since dermot explained the true history of the relationship between the church and science. A bit like my brief flirtation with Ayn Rand’s philosophy in college, I, too, had a brief flirtation with feminism recently. I thought that I wanted equality of outcome. I thought I wanted dominance hierarchies to vanish off the face of the Earth, because I’m still anti-centralized globalized Patriarchy. But through listening carefully to the Scandinavian experience of equality of opportunity, and hearing how it drove the outcomes even further apart, I was able to understand that I actually wanted equality of opportunity, much more than I wanted equality of outcome. From there, I understood that I wasn’t opposed to hierarchies as a complete category of behavior, so long as they included separate matriarchies as well as anarchies within them for the majority of the time.

This means it is not enough to say “global civilization is a heat engine” and be against it. Nor does that automatically make me a technocopian. It isn’t either/or. I’m neither. I’m not a label. I change my mind when presented with compelling evidence. In every storm, there are pockets where living creatures find shelter from the worst effects of the devastating wind, rain, and hail.

I found that JP was all for women choosing how they wanted to live their lives. Is that not feminism? Is it freedom of choice that is feminism? Or is it equality of outcome? You can’t have both. You can’t have liberty as well as safety either. This is part of the philosophical struggles I have with some of the very basic foundational principles of western civilization. I don’t have a simple two word label for my answers, and they change. There are very specific and rare situations in which equality of outcome is actually the preferred thing. There are very specific and rare situations in which I would choose safety over liberty. Not always though.

Meanwhile, she who feeds you owns you. Jordan Peterson doesn’t feed me my breakfast. No, the grocery store, and therefore the petrochemical industrial vulture capitalist system does. What say we put aside our trivial differences and focus on our agreements, then? The equivalent of Jordan Peterson’s “Clean up your own room” translates very neatly into “grow your own food.” That’s not individually, because from a risk management perspective, that wouldn’t work, but it is very locally though.

Water is life. Water is alive. After you’ve cleaned up your house, clean up your local rivers too.

After reading yet another article on how teenagers so easily get around parental controls on their screen devices to access things worse than porn, combined with the article on how social media is part of an evil plot to stash people into emotionally manipulating echo chambers, I’m uneasy.  The thought that the social media algorithms are deliberately steering teenagers and young adults into self-harming websites, anorexia websites, predatory behavior websites, much less sexting and porn, turns my stomach.  As it should.

If you are going to control the behavior of the world, you will need to control the evil behavior too.  That’s why there’s always a bridge between the police and the gangs, protecting each other, turning them towards their competition.  I suppose that’s why there’s always a link between the powerful and the pedophiles, for the blackmail and control files material.  As long as there is hierarchy, there will be abuse, murder, rape, pillaging, and the like.

Unfortunately, hierarchy is a natural order kind of thing.  Lobsters have it.  Although, it is a shifting thing, and can be seasonal as well.  Does that mean that all the evil predatory behavior is situational and seasonal as well?  You don’t have to look far to find evidence of that sort.

So, how do we control our teenager’s web use?  We don’t.  We can filter websites, sure, but the sheer quantity of new apps out there every day which can be abused makes that a moving target.  We can filter keywords, sure, but how many misspelled and made-up slang terms come along on a daily basis?  Instead, perhaps we should guide our teenager through the worst of the stuff online, so they know how to be wary of the traps that lurk there.  Like taking your teenager to the casino at 2am to see the worst of the gambling addiction, or hanging outside a bar at 2am to see the worst of the alcohol addiction.  Knowing what is possible, and knowing that the answer is a strong community with strong communication skills, could help reduce the individual risks.

Give up perfection, and you can fight dirty.

It has become increasingly difficult for me to figure out what people are trying to accomplish these days.  I get bogged down in the glamor displays I guess.  If somebody spends their time insulting people, even if the insults are particularly witty, and the choir being preached to claps thunderously with applause, it was never their intention to change the other parties’ mind.  When Hillary calls swing voters in key states a basket of deplorables, that right there is where she loses the election.  Not just the election, mind you.  That is also where her party lost the upcoming mid-term elections as well.  See, she didn’t offer them jobs.  She insulted and dehumanized them instead.  When her followers go on to call the people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump racist bigots, they lose yet more voters.

As for me, well, I didn’t vote for either evil, but that still doesn’t keep me safe from the dehumanizing declarations of those who declare that I put Trump in office!  I can only roll my eyes with disbelief.  My State’s outcome was never in doubt, and it went to Hillary, as it would.  So much shouting!  So much anger!  Do you really think that insulting my intelligence and morality is going to get me to change my actions?

That’s not how proper arguments change people’s minds.  First, we must understand that people do in fact change their minds over time with sufficient evidence.  People actually wash their hands now between the morgue and the birthing wing of the hospital.  A great number of people in the US used to be Christian, and now are not.  They changed their mind.  Why?  Evidence.  Or the lack thereof.  Neither insults nor love-bombing worked nearly as well as evidence.

Next, people seem to think that people’s opinions are now their tribal identity.  Divided and conquered so neatly, they are ushered into their social media echo chambers, made more comfortable by being surrounded by those like-minded individuals, and yet, and yet, they’re not really like-minded at all.

You are not your opinion.  How could you be?  Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m an anti-vaxxer.  I’m not, because my views are a hell of a lot more complicated and nuanced than a mere label could ever portray, but let’s pretend that I am.  A vaxxer comes up to me, and how do you think they try to convince me to vaccinate my child?  That’s right.  They insult me.  “You stupid person who just wants millions of babies to die horrible deaths, just get your child vaccinated already!”  This is obviously NOT the way to convince somebody to do something.

You want to know how the Anti-Vaxxers convince people?  Evidence.  They bring up hundreds of published studies in scientific journals.  And I do mean hundreds.  We’re not talking about oh Wakefield got retracted.  That’s nice.  But the other 10 studies which replicated his results using entirely different populations weren’t retracted.  Now, Anti-Vaxxers could use the same methods of insults that the Vaxxers do, and some of them do because immaturity of argumentation styles exists everywhere you go, but for the most part, they have done far more research than your typical Vaxxer has.  Like Atheists who know the Bible far better than most Christians do, of course the Anti-Vaxxer has done far more medical research paper reading than the typical Vaxxer has.

If you know full well that insults don’t work to convince people to change their mind, why are they so prevalent in use these days?  My best guess is that they’re tribal signaling.  They say, I’ve already argued this, my mind is made up, and since I know that you will defend your views to the death, I’m going to dehumanize you until you die instead of building bridges to accomplish a shared vision or goal.  This is why the world needs reenchanting by the way.  People are disconnected from the soil, from the plant kingdom, and from each other.  The only way you can connect with somebody who holds different views than you do, is to be able to share their viewpoint enough to acknowledge that you do still share values.  Life is still sacred.  Nobody wants children to die.  Nobody wants babies to die.  Nobody wants them to die from gun fire, from heart disease, from cancer.  Nobody wants them to die in warfare, from bombs, from defective car parts, from virulent illnesses.  You can’t see that if all you see is the pro-gun label on somebody’s forehead.

Take the labels off, and you get a father whose child died from a vaccine, and his neighbor whose child died from the flu.  You see their utter grief, and their desperation that another father won’t have to suffer the same agony.  Can you imagine the power that would occur if these two fathers got together, and said, we BOTH don’t want children to die.  What can we do to make vaccines safer, so that more parents are willing to take them, so that less children end up dead or irreparably vaccine-damaged for life who do take them?  But no, that can’t happen right now.  Instead we are herded into groups based on opinions.  But what if we could talk, and listen, and collaborate with each other to get what we really want, less dead children?  How can that even happen if I am totally right, and you’re just too stupid to see it because you are evilly evil with an extra helping of evil sauce on top and obviously want to murder as many children as possible?  Meanwhile, the pedophiles in top echelons of the government continue their predatory ways, same as it was in Rome.  We’re so busy fighting each other, the children continue to suffer and die.  The drone bombing in the Middle East continues.  The dumping of toxic and hazardous waste in the middle of the street in African and Asian countries where the children dig through the garbage for food to eat continues.  I’m starting to think that the evilly evil with extra evil sauce on top people are the people who argue endlessly instead of doing something to stop the evil they can.