trenton

@UnbornTao racial bias is common across all cultures when depicting Jesus. You can look for Chinese Jesus for example. The goal is to make him more relatable by not only changing his color, but also his ideology. Jesus is essentially boiled down to whatever the culture at the time deems desirable. This includes the belief that Jesus was a laissez faire free market capitalist. In communist countries Jesus is depicted as a man who would make up a whip of cords and use them to chase your animals out of a temple while yelling "do not turn my father's house into a marketplace" and scattering your coins. An interesting observation is that the belief that we are living in the biblical end times has been a false belief for thousands of years. 10 million Americans still believe this because so long as the belief is held in the present it is unfalsifiable. Basically, the belief that the end of the world is tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow is the day aliens decide to blow up the earth.

I should probably share my personal experience on this issue because autism affects my behavior in many ways. Hypersensitivity corresponds to a lot of experiences. This happened since I was a child and mother would yell at my sisters a lot. I was the one who cried and she had to adjust her behavior to account for these differences. I commonly have intense interests bordering on obsessions. This can allow me to be very detail oriented and exceptional in any limited field. I often laugh out loud instead of in my head. Apparently, most people don't struggle with this as much. This is why some people described me as a serial killer when I would pace back and forth a lot while laughing. Laughter is especially problematic when I am tired. This happened at school during seventh bell or toward the end of a long college day. Other classmates and the teacher would point out my strange behavior. I have an improved memory when I am absorbed or interested in any particular topic. People with autism can become a perfectionist when small details start to annoy them. This goes into a little bit with OCD. Meanwhile my memory is very poor when I'm not interested and it can make me seem indifferent to others. Guilt can be amplified in people with autism. This feeds into moral OCD when I'm afraid that I won't be able to control myself and I'm going to do something completely stupid. I am attempting to develop self trust to a sufficient degree so that I don't criticize myself when I have a thought which bothers me. I am often weaker in verbal communication, and I find writing easier. Other people often expect me to give quick answers when talking. I am usually very quiet and dreaming about grand ideals. I know somebody with a more extreme form of autism. This person is 14 and can't speak any language. Autism can be so different for so many different people that we may as well be talking about totally different conditions. It makes no sense to put Einstein in the same category as those with a very extreme form of autism. Maybe if this condition were better understood as our understanding of medicine continues to evolve, then maybe the proper distinctions will be made one day.

True suicide often is a mercy killing because a person is in intense suffering and they believe that nothing can change it. For example, if a person is in one of the twin towers on the day of 9/11, then they might jump out of the building to avoid being burned to death. In a sense suicide is a twisted form of love in that the goal is to avoid intense suffering. It can be very sad. @Danioover9000 I agree that we have been getting off topic and we should probably get back to the limitations of compassion. meanwhile @zurew beat me to the post. Prisoners must get jacked as a form of intimidation toward other inmates.

@Vibes I have a story about this. I once found a dying bed in my backyard. It was on its side trying to fly. I used my shoe to flip it over so it could stand straight. I wanted to try to help the new first like I did when I found one in the swimming pool, so I rescued it. I came back ten minutes later and saw the same bee on its side again in the exact same place in my drive way. This time undecided to kill it. For insects it is not practical to give them all the medical attention they need given the fact that their life span is much lower anyway and there are many things that hunt them like birds. Their numbers will not be hurt by stepping on one that is dying anyway. My position has changed and I now perform mercy kills on insects.

"Scientists have been reporting links between bacteria in the gut and autistic behavior since 1960. L-glutamine is an amino acid that repairs the lining of the stomach and can be quite beneficial, and can be found as a supplement. Another product that we have seen results with is Restore Gut Health Mineral Supplement." this is an interesting quote from the site I looked at.

I was born with autism. According to my research, there are people genetically predisposed to autism, and it can be influenced by environmental factors. However, all of these environmental factors involve a woman's pregnancy. Prenatal complications can influence the brain development of a fetus, thus creating a link to autism. The closest thing to a link between vaccines and autism would be the fact that pregnant women are advised not to take certain vaccines. It isn't like you give a five year old a vaccine and, it changes his brain structure this dramatically. I agree that in many cases autism could be a gift. There are people like Albert Einstein who are believed to have had high functioning autism. Autism can make it hard to relate to people emotionally, but people with autism can have enhanced logical abilities that compensate for this and can be used to create an alternative morality. Low functioning autism is the most problematic with a failure to develop speaking. In fact autism is such a broad spectrum, that maybe low and high functioning autism shouldn't even be classified as the same condition. There are new distinctions being made in ADHD for example to distinguish different disorders. Autism is different for a lot of people And it is misleading to classify them in the same way. Dr. Michael Cory https://www.autisticworld.com/11-ways-autism-cure/#:~:text=Field Control Therapy – This is a pretty,Encephalitis is a cause for many mental illnesses. This wildly contradicts what I learned about autism. There are others with autism who claim they cannot be cured because of how they were born while others claim that they were cured. Maybe for some it is environmental And for others it is genetic? Now that I am finding sources which contradict each other, I am no longer as sure.

I will do my best to steel man Leo's position in favor of the death penalty for the sake of argument. In the society Leo envisions, the criminal justice system is mostly focused on rehabilitation because imprisonment is incredibly inefficient. In fact imprisoning criminals can psychologically damage them, making them even more violent, increasing the likelihood of recidivism. In this way our current criminal justice system is poor at preventing crime. Our society should be effective at preventing crime because it is inefficient to rehabilitate everybody. In Leo's society, many of the crimes are prevented because there would be no more heavy metals in our food and water causing brain damage, wealth inequality and homelessness would be reduced, and spirituality and emotional mastery would be taught to children at a young age. For the most part this would prevent violent crimes worthy of the death penalty. For example, sometimes school shooters are discovered to have brain damage, and when the brain damage is corrected, they no longer have the desire to kill a dozens of children. This would be a controversial case for the death penalty if the man could plead insanity because heavy metals damaged his brain and caused him to do it. When rehabilitating criminals some criminals are too far gone. Psychedelics may increase compassion for some people, but for others they have no effect, or they even embolden people who have no desire to change who they are. In this way the death penalty can either serve as a deterrent or a necessary solution to a dangerous criminal. For example, Leo would give a criminal in rehabilitation an ultimatum. Either change who you are or else your gonna die. I remember sadhguru made similar arguments about justice being too slow. He points out that many people claim they would be compassionate and forgive a murderer, but if the murderer raped your daughter, cut your spouse in peices, and burned everyone in your family alive while cutting off your fingers one at time while laughing, then you would have a different opinion of the death penalty. A similar crime actually took place in America before. There are many criminals who would gladly do these things again if not for the death penalty. Sadhguru argued that justice is too slow for a man who clearly raped and murdered somebody. The family is then forced to relive all of the events dozens of times in a court with an excessively long appeals process. Leo's position is controversial because of the corruption of the criminal justice system. Although in a different society it would make sense to have the death penalty, we are currently dealing with a criminal justice system that hurts blacks more than it does whites as highlighted in "the new Jim Crow." The war on drugs has made our prisons overcrowded when though there are many medical benefits to marijuana and psychedelics. The death penalty has been suspended before. For example in 1972, the supreme court struck down the death penalty for four years because of how dysfunctional the criminal justice system was. 1976, the problems with jury selection were resolved and the death penalty was reinstated. If the death penalty were suspended in our current society to address the corruption of the criminal justice system, then it could fix a lot of the problems we currently face. This includes prosecutorial misconduct, mass incarceration, racist sentencing, federal judges who fail to refuse themselves when they hold stocks in a company involved in the case, misleading plea bargains, our dependence on plea bargains, failure to inform citizens of their rights, treating people like felons even when they are found innocent, and the fact that innocent people can sit on death row for 40 years even when they are known to be innocent. The last on is major because people lose faith in the death penalty when innocent people are too frequently killed for crimes they didn't commit. This is a problem as bad as the biased jury selection to ensure the death penalty. Maybe the death penalty could be suspended for about five years then reinstated if sufficient progress is made.

@Razard86 I profoundly disagree with Leo on that statement. I looked at "the new Jim Crow" for example which goes into detail about the criminal justice system. for example, blacks receive harsher sentencing than whites. This translates into blacks receiving the death penalty while whites do not even though the same crime is committed. There is a whole slew of problems with plea deals. The fact that prosecutors can provoke a guilty plea because of your lack of money is outrageous. The criminal justice system depends on these practices because of the mass incarceration caused by the war on drugs. Leo also tends to side with police officers in controversial cases. I wonder why he takes this kind of stance on criminal justice.

These people would be too dangerous to keep in a prison. Prisons can be used a grounds to spread their ideology and escape through prison riots. ISIS is doing this and recruiting new members in prisons. Think of all of the violent criminals these people could radicalize given life in prison.

@Leo Gura I can see why you think medical science is horrible. In this case it makes sense to hold the position that vaccines could cause autism, but our current understanding of science is not sufficient to prove this decisively. my doctor told me that the heavy metals in the food and water don't to hurt me. I use a water filter knowing that most water does not meet the epa safety guidelines. In this case the false beliefs are scientific studies are trustworthy, science has reality figured out, and your doctor gives you good medical advice. Today's society has thoroughly conditioned me into thinking science should be trusted. I would seem unreasonable to them if I heavily doubted science, but it seems reasonable to doubt it anyway.

@Leo Gura this kind of discussion is welcome. I remember now that in Nazi Germany jew was defined differently. There are white nationalists who hold that Jews are a different race than white because they base it On blood, not beliefs. When I think "Jew" I think of a person who believes in the Torah and goes to a synagogue. Maybe there is more to being a Jew than I previously assumed. It seems a Jew could be that or someone who inherited Judaism from their parents by blood. Suddenly, I can see why a white nationalist or Nazi would be so afraid of Jewish blood. That would explain why they chanted "our blood and soil." As for the claim about vaccines being linked to autism, there are many studies on it that claim the myth is debunked. Apparently the MMR vaccine is the most controversial. The reason people believe this is because Andrew Wakefield published a study on the MMR vaccine claiming it caused autism. He was stripped of his medical license in 2010 as the study was retracted by the Lancet. The ethical concern was that Wakefield failed to disclose that he applied for a patent for his own measles vaccine and was being paid to prove the vaccines were harmful. This man holds a lot of responsibility for spreading these lies and he is still out there claiming the CDC is covering up proof that vaccines cause autism. What makes you think there is a connection? What study are you looking at?

The list of alternative sources of energy continues to grow. I wonder how long it would take to implement all of these different sources so that we can stop depending on fossil fuels. Good video.

This is an interesting and complicated issue. Pretty much everybody wants to be anti-corruption. The approval of Congress is at an all time low with 82% of Americans disapproving of their actions. Reasons for this disapproval include partisanship, favoritism toward the rich, election security (including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen), nepotism, and much much more. The paradox comes up when being too critical of governmental corruption can destabilize a country. The legitimacy of those in power and all of the laws they pass are drawn into question. The question becomes how much corruption is tolerable? Yes the American government is corrupt in more ways than can be listed, but if the governed population does not believe in the stories of the great democracy, then what will we be left with? A power vacuum could easily be created if the United States suddenly became very strict on corruption. Some examples in other countries could be the corruption blitz in South Africa, the Tigray war of Ethiopia fought because of an illegal election, or the constant need to maintain a massive propaganda machine in places like North Korea and China. If the illusions propagated by communist countries were suddenly pulled away, then wouldn't that create a massive destabilization of these regions? How should anti-corruption be applied in the middle East? The United States is constantly struggling to maintain a positive relationship with Saudi Arabia in spite of their deep corruption in order to keep receiving oil. This could become the source of massive political pressure from around the globe to switch to renewable energy, similar to the pressure placed on Europe because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Is there any amount of corruption which should be tolerated in order to avoid unnecessary destabilization? I think these questions are important because faith in the US government is very low and there are many calls to violence especially by MAGA. In this case their claims of corruption aren't even real and it is very destabilizing. Is there a more organized way to confront governmental corruption without undermining faith in democracy? What would it take to restore faith in democracy?

@Razard86 very true. In the end all worldviews are partial because we would be driven insane if all of the information in the universe were poured into us at once as if to know every memory of being that ever lived. Any logic we make will be based on our own biases that help us to make sense of an infinitely complex universe.

I finished watching the episode and I think there is one major flaw and one major point Leo hit perfectly on the head. I think the main flaw is that the list of double standards was too long and it distracted from the deeper points he attempted to point to. This deeper point would be the lack of bias and other methods for avoiding hypocrisy. I would like to use this thread to include other methods for addressing hypocrisy aside from the homework assignments. One observation I have is that when you judge someone in the heat of the moment, there is commonly a temptation to mimic this behavior. It's like "if you do this to me then I'm gonna do it to you." We could say that criticizing people for a certain action creates an image in your subconscious mind. This image in your subconscious mind can still influence your behavior. It is not just that for example, I am a secret homosexual, therefore I criticize homosexuals so that I can appear straight. An alternative form of hypocrisy can be I criticize homosexuals so much that my mind is therefore conditioned to think of gay sex, and I therefore develop stronger homosexual tendencies as a consequence of focusing on and criticizing homosexuals. I think a lot of people miss the reverse application of hypocrisy and how it can be created through judgement. A second example would be a woman who criticized police officers for over playing the situation like it was worse than it was. She ended up doing the same thing. This subconscious image can come up in a variety of ways in all kinds of fields. I remember in radical honesty it talked about how people think self criticism is a virtue. I am guilty of this. It is the reverse extreme of hypocrisy And I call it hypercritical rather hypocritical with hypo meaning little and hyper meaning a lot. In one's effort to avoid hypocrisy, you could paralyze yourself. This is part of what stops me from talking. In essence, I should be able to clear all of these standards, but I don't care if others can. It is about me trying to be the best and thinking self criticism is the way to do it while not worrying about criticizing others, reasoning that it helps avoid hypocrisy. The deeper point about a lack of bias is dead on. First of all, the reason I am drawn to politics is because of objectivity. When I see people fighting and arguing, I see that people think with so many biases and ideologies that they can't think straight. They are unable to view the situation impartially. What I begin to wonder is, what would politics look like without bias? How different would it be? Who would I have to become in order to be a politician who thinks impartially, has no double standards, and really looks at the situation from many angles with an open mind? In order to be good at politics you would have to be very selfless. You would need to be willing to let every assumption, every value you hold, and every ideology come into question. You would have to be very humble and self reflective rather than defending yourself with so many rationalizations. This is the beauty that attracts me to politics. It is not about justice. It is not about fighting the oil companies, corrupt politicians, or terrorists per say. It is about using politics to grow yourself into the best person you can be. As a consequence justice can happen and you will still do your best to ensure these things happen. But just imagine how profoundly different politics would be if the main goal was the greater jihad, and it were very conscious of creating lesser jihads. I still fail sometimes because I see it as practical to urge action and I see very limited ways to move society forward in politics otherwise. But I hope you are the beauty in objectivity and a lack of bias that I see, and why I want to become such a thing so much. It is almost like the Buddhist desires desirelessness, and I am biased toward biaslessness. I still fail though, but it would be cool if it could be done somehow. Swinging the pendulum to hyper criticism of oneself still doesn't do it. This is the reason why I didn't white wash my memories when I was ashamed of myself as a child. A common lie is "it was just a bad dream." Self honesty is pivotal for developing biaslessness. The homework assignments and the book list will touch on these points. One of the themes I noticed in chess coaches is that chess is intended to reach us objectivity. Many chess players make mistakes because of their emotions. They make one mistake so they make another and another and another until they lose. When people are attached to winning and being the best, they cannot think straight. Objectively, chess is a draw if both sides play well and there will be no winning brilliant queen sacrifice. When we want to win so badly, we over press and end up losing. This happens even to grandmasters and world champions. I did this in chess club and in my family. Eventually, the people in chess club were too afraid to play me and I had a hard time finding people who really want to study and challenge me. Most of them were casual players making moves that were obviously mistakes from my point of view. This is how you lose the meta game when you destroy people so badly they leave chess club because they feel stupid. Perhaps this is the beauty that science aspires to be. It tries to take emotions and philosophy out of the equation to stick with mathematical proofs. What science is trying to do is remove bias and attachment to spiritual teachings commonly found in religion. Science fails in this task for many reasons, but the theme is the same. Science is an attempt to get at truth, but easily corrupted by pragmatism like religion. Religion is also infatuated ideals like God, love, truth, and so forth so goes about it in deeply corrupt ways. We could say that becoming unbiased is the seeking of love, but the process is still very biased because of survival. I have yielded results with begin even handed. A good example is when my sisters are arguing. When I point out that one side is making more rational arguments, they accuse me of favoritism and picking sides. When my sister started accusing me of this, I pointed out the times that I sided with her rational arguments and sided against her irrational arguments. She smiled at me silently As if she saw that I was making a genuine effort to be intellectually honest regardless of who wins the argument. This What we say people are supposed to do In arguments all the time. We are supposed to weigh the evidence and have an open minded impartial discussion, but almost nobody ever does it. This why arguing and debating seems so futile sometimes when the goal is to distract from your own bullshit And win the debate rather than being the best person you can be while seeking truth for truths sake. As a result I usually stay out arguing, but I can't always avoid it. My sisters treat arguments like I treat chess games and it isn't fun to argue with them.

I would describe something similar. It is like you realize all of existence is nothingness and this nothingness expands and expands as you merge with all of it. You become indistinguishable from all of reality when you are nothing. Some describe it as the abyss. I remember how I kinda freaked out when that happened and I stopped meditating for a bit. I triggered it with the help of the power of now by Eckhart Tolle. When the ego mind does not contextualize itself with past and future you are left with the present. Transcending time is the same as transcending ego and it could create these sorts of experiences. I would like to see advice on how to not freak out when that happens to do that I can just enjoy what I'm not used to. Maybe I would meditate more. At the very least you can try different forms of meditation like satisfaction or body scans. At least I found they were less intense.

I could add to this discussion a warning about this work. By eliminating our double standards, we create a more logically consistent worldview. This can cause our worldview to become more convincing and appear to be true. An important warning is that just because our worldview is logically consistent, doesn't mean it is true. We can still reach out conclusions through false premises. To give an example, my mother made a clear effort to maintain a logically consistent worldview while being a Catholic. She took it very far. if she has faith in her religion, then she does not hold it to be more valid than other religions. You could have faith in any belief system and it would be as valid as her own. She took it so far to conclude that morality is relative. She will follow the moral compass of Catholicism, but if in your worldview homosexuality is acceptable, then she will not judge you for it. A Catholic can go so far as to judge you by your standards and themselves by their own standards. This would give you a religious person who does not believe in proselytizing and convincing others of their correctness. even so, they can still have the problem of false beliefs as in any worldview. Noticing our double standards can help us eliminate our own internal contradictions, but we can still be honestly mistaken. These honest mistakes become more likely because our logically consistent worldview starts to seem very convincing, so we hold it as if it were reality. Perhaps this is common in science. After many studies, science can become so convincing that we underestimate it's fallibility. Remember that even seemingly fair and consistent standards could be founded upon a false premise.

@Bobby_2021 Here it is.

@Finax very interesting https://www.washingtonpost.comoutlookoutlook/2020/04/02/yes-russia-spreads-coronavirus-lies-they-were-made-america/ If other countries intentionally spread these kinds of lies, then it makes me wonder how much is our propaganda influenced by other countries. The CIA can do this so effectively that they manufacture consent for coups in Latin America. In the case of COVID, the polarization was partially driven by countries actively trying to hurt us.

This one should be entertaining. It is very difficult to cover up every possible plot hole when creating an alternative universe. Feel free to share your own. I will give examples from Harry potter. 1. Troll in the dungeon Dumbledore told everyone to proceed to their dorms, but the slytherin dorm is located in the dungeon. Dumbledore clearly hates them and wants them to die. 2. The lack of background checks. Hogwarts allowed voldemort, a fraud, a ware wolf, a death eater, and umbridge into the position of defense against the dark arts. They have a bad track record with this. Maybe the ministry of magic is supposed to take care of it, but the wizard world is corrupted by money. Death eaters would have had to bribe the ministry of magic to get this to work. This would close the plot hole and it makes sense if malfoy and his dad are rich. 3. Wizard chess alternative Most people don't notice these things because most people are not chess players. Interestingly, he could have sacrificed Harry. The story could have been more intense if Harry said "don't sacrifice yourself, sacrifice me instead!" Not really a plot hole because the final position was organized correctly and Nh3+ worked, but sacrificing Harry was technically better. In the final position, Ron needed either the knight or the bishop to cover the g1 square for checkmate. Either could have been sacrificed for checkmate. The biggest problem for the crew is the fact that they have to take the place of missing pieces. If you know the chess theory, you know that white can easily exploit the fact that black cannot trade these pieces gaining a huge advantage. If the enchanted chess board were smart, it would have forced exchanges, and the crew would be dead immediately. If black can't trade these pieces, it is a huge handicap and most people don't know how bad of a handicap it is. It is worse than being down a queen. In fact, you could even leave the white queen open to being captured, knowing that a knight or bishop would die as a result. The white queen is therefore immune to capture, giving white a forced win from the start of the game. Ron was losing from move one if white exploited this strategy to kill the entire crew. I found this entertaining enough to open this thread. I know there are funny plot holes in star wars as well. Interestingly people take these plot holes very seriously and get heated and angry about it. What plot holes do you know of?

I think the forum would benefit a lot from this kind of distinction As we practice making it in this thread. Especially if this forum has a heavy left wing bias, it makes sense to discuss what a stage blue and stage orange shadow looks like In our psyche. Progressives are mostly around green and they become judgemental of conservatives when the radical difference in values is apparent. As we discuss ways to integrate blue and orange, we should also make direct comparisons between a tier one and tier two perspective. A tier one perspective would commonly "should" the other side. As if their values should be different than what they currently are. This is a sign that tier one may view its perspective as the only true way to see reality. Meanwhile a tier two perspective would notice that the Republican party is clearly problematic. For example, they lie about the coup. But tier two would react to this differently than tier one. The key difference seems to be in judging people for their character. A tier two perspective would not really demonize someone for a character that fits their values even if it is radically different from their own. This would be a mark of integrity on their part. What do you think? Can you make some direct comparisons between green and yellow? How should the blue and orange shadow be integrated? How can we discuss the problems of the Republican party at a higher level than we currently are?

@Oeaohoo very interesting take. I remember stage green might criticize yellow for seeming indifferent and apolitical sometimes. But if tier two is incompatible with our entire political system, then it makes sense. This requires a recognition that liberals and conservatives have been arguing for thousands of years compromising all along the way. There is no real truth to this. In fact stage yellow might be behind the scenes trying to solve a complex issue without engaging in direct argumentation. What would "tier two" do instead of engage in a system of compromises?

This feels so exaggerated yet so real at the same time. The crowd constantly overlooks blatant corruption when they are partisan.

@Willie I don't think so. His intentions are clear in many of his crimes. For example he tried to rig the election by finding the votes. He's aware that he is breaking laws for his own personal gain. Given how many things he got away with I lost hope of him being brought to justice. This is because the republican party defends him no matter what hence they obstruct all investigations. They know what their doing.

Very good and emotional video. The people enjoy themselves whenever they can creating an uplifting environment in spite of their history being destroyed with deaths of hundreds of thousands. Pretty educational and stunning at the same time.