Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 19
I recommend you read through and contemplate all the following Wikipedia pages on the major emotions, since these emotions will run your whole life and the life of everyone you ever meet:
- Emotions (general)
- Fear
- Anger / Rage
- Guilt
- Shame
- Embarrassment
- Hatred
- Anxiety
- Sadness/ Depression
- Regret
- Grief
- Happiness
- Loneliness
- Disgust
- Boredom
- Hubris/ Arrogance / Pride
- Pleasure
- Suffering
- Awe/ Wonder
- Envy / Jealousy
- Gratitude
- Inspiration
- Ecstasy / Bliss
- Amusement
- Love
- Desire / Craving / Lust
- Nostalgia
- Shyness
- Apathy
- Empathy
- Emotional Exhaustion
- Insecurity
- Fatigue
- Stress
- Trauma
- Frustration
- Passive-Aggressive Behavior
- Denialism
- Defense Mechanisms
That's a lot of reading! — which they should have made you do in middle school.
Get good at recognizing and identify all these emotions within yourself and others.
This is why voting for RFK Jr is a mistake:
I know RFK Jr appeals to many independents and those fed up with the system, but in the end all it will do is help reelect Trump. Make no mistake, a 2nd Trump term will be a total shit-show and disaster.
The RFK Jr campaign is utterly irresponsible given what was said in the video above.
I have no problem if RFK Jr runs for President. But if a major goal of his campaign is to spoil the election for Biden because Trump is preferable, that is insanity and shows a total disregard for reality. That kind of nonsense should not be encouraged.
If RFK Jr gets Trump reelected, curse be upon him.
This interview gives you a look into the mind of how the American right-wing are corrupting the court system by stuffing it full of religious fundamentalist Christians.
Leonard Leo is a powerful fundamentalist right-wing backroom deal-maker who's had a profound influence on the judges elected to every court in America, including the Supreme Court. Basically, every judge elected by Republicans doesn't even get considered until Leonard Leo personally vets him/her for ideological "alignment", which a euphemism for Stage Blue Christian fundamentalism.
I want you to get inside the minds of such people to see how they see the world and how they rationalize their political manipulations.
To be fair, there can be valid disagreement and difference of perspective when it comes electing judges and legal philosophy. And the left-wing can also be guilty of trying to stuff their of ideologically aligned judges into the court system. I'm not simply saying that we should elect as many liberal judges as possible in a tit-for-tat political game. The problem is that our court system is being corrupted by the appointment of ideologues through an elaborate and elitist system of backroom deal-making. In order to be a highly developed nation America needs an impartial and unbiased court system, which is only possible if we elect openminded, non-ideological, non-political judges. But people like Leonard Leo are running sophisticated backroom schemes to make sure that every judge put up for nomination is a Christian loyalist. They call this "alignment". This is grossly undemocratic because a handful of little-known elites like Leonard Leo have a massively disproportionate influence over the legal system. They use their dark political connections to skew the legal system in ways that favor themselves, their families, their businesses, their ethnicity, and their religion. Regardless of whether you hold left or right positions, such a system is corrupt. If the left did this (and to some extent they do), it would also be corrupt. Because judges are not being evaluated on their intelligence and impartiality but on their alignment to one ideology or another.
Most Americans don't even know that there is this silent, secret war going on to manipulate and skew the entire legal system. Billionaires, lobbyists, businessmen, and religious fanatics are corrupting the American legal system to favor themselves and their friends at the cost of everyone else. This is one of the most despicable and insidious forms of corruption, and yet it's all happening out in the open and isn't even considered a crime.
The most important criteria for electing judges must be: truth, non-bias, non-ideology, non-partisanship, openmindedness, and consciousness. A system for electing such judges is a meta-priority that trumps everything else. No one should be allowed to manipulate this system through backroom deals and politicking. One of the worst impacts of the Trump presidency on American democracy is that he deepened and normalized the corruption of American courts. This is the kind of subtle thing which most voters and political laymen do not even think about when they say stuff like, "Trump and Biden are equally bad." It is critical that America develops a more democratic system for the election of judges. That doesn't mean that judges should be directly voted on by the public, as that would introduce all sorts of undesirable political pressures, but we need a system that cannot be manipulated by elites like Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo's approach is fundamentally anti-democratic and undermines the separation of church and state by over-representing his religion in the legal system.
If you are on the left, it's important to acknowledge that leftist and liberal policies can be very harmful.
Since liberals are usually more developed than conservatives, it's especially easy to lose site of the reality that just because a policy is left-wing does not automatically make it harmless. This is especially a trap for leftists because leftists are usually coming from good intentions and empathy, a desire to make society more fair, open, and kind. However, those intentions can easily backfire in catastrophic ways if you underestimate human nature and the realities of survival. Collective survival is a lot more challenging than any of your ideals and utopian fantasies. If you over-estimate human goodness, kindness, selflessness, consciousness, and level of development, you end up proposing policies that devolve into chaos and create much suffering. And, counter-intuitively, this devolution could kill more people than white supremacist neo-Nazism. In general, what I see is that the left is so busy fighting against the depravity of the right that they take no time to seriously self-reflect on the harms that could be caused by overly-liberal policy decisions.
Here's a brief list of left-wing policies which could be very harmful:
- Socialism, Communism, Marxism
- Defunding the police
- Drug legalization
- Open boarders, unlimited immigration, unlimited multiculturalism
- Unlimited globalism, unrestricted free-trade and job automation and outsourcing
- Sacrificing economic growth for climate change action
- Pushing for green energy even when green energy yet capable enough
- Over-taxing and over-regulating business to the point where business packs up and leaves
- Printing too much money, spending too much money, going into debt
- Pacifism, demilitarization
- Removing religion and faith from peoples lives
- Being overly-liberal and permissive with sex
- Confusing children with gender fluidity and queer gender ideology
- Calls for revolution, calls for collectivizing private property
- Nationalizing certain industries and businesses
- Heavy top-down regulation
- Suppression of speech, anti "hate speech" policies, excessive political correctness
- Affirmative action, evaluating hires based on diversity vs merit
- Unlimited technological advancement, unlimited scientific innovation
- Accelerationism
- Eroding the notion of objective truth, too much relativism
- Pushing democracy and other liberal values on less developed parts of the world
I'm not saying any of these policies are necessarily bad or harmful, but as a leftist I want you to contemplate their potential harms. If you have convinced yourself that these policies cannot harm millions of people, then you're fooling yourself. Fundamentally, what the mature leftist needs to come to realize is that being too liberal, too loose, with how you run society can lead to the deaths of millions of people. If you don't understand that, you are so naive that you're dangerous.
After much research and contemplation on the question of, Was Hitler, Stalin, and Mao liberal or conservative?, I've come to the conclusion that it's not a good way to look at the issue. A better way is to break down their policies in liberal and conservative ones, and then evaluating which of those policies did the most damage and why. This doesn't just apply to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, this is a way to evaluate any political leader. Just categorize their policies by liberal vs conservative without paying attention to their professed ideology, because most political leaders are not pure, they have policies from both sides, and what matters most is the policy and its impact on people.
The People Profiles YouTube Channel is a fantastic source for biographical documentaries on the greatest political leaders. Use it to deepen your understanding of geopolitics and human nature.
You can find hundreds of documentaries on the channel, but here are some of the most important and my favorites:
- Saddam Hussein
- Muammar Gaddafi
- Lenin
- Robert Mugabe
- Augusto Pinochet
- Idi Amin
- Mao Zedong
- Deng Xiaoping
- Fidel Castro
- Pol Pot
I recommend you study all the world's greatest dictators and tyrants. There's a lot of political wisdom to glean there.
In the 1970's this Italian singer released a song entirely of fake English lyrics. It's supposed to sound like English but it isn't and it means absolutely nothing.
It's kinda genius.
It would be amazing if some singer/musician made an entire career singing pure gibberish. Album after album of gibberish. Until becoming the most famous singer in the world. And when they ask him, "Why did you choose to do it this way?" He replies, "Because I was never any good at writing lyrics."
What a niche! Wide open.
This is a lesson in finding your niche. You gotta think outside the box.
It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
I signed up to the most advanced version of the Claude 3 AI and we had an extensive conversation about political philosophy.
Claude 3 Opus is the most advanced AI available to the public at this time.
If you want your mind blown, read it.
The conversation is about 60 pages long.
I have now incorporated AI into how I do philosophy. In fact, I don't see how good philosophy could be done any other way. From now on all my work, all my videos, will be created in collaboration with AI in order to provide the most factual, nuanced, well-researched, and robust perspectives. I ask the AI to poke holes in my theories and supply me with examples and counter-examples.
In these 60 pages of conversation I did not find that Claude 3 Opus made a single mistake in logic or historical fact.
Claude 3 Opus is more intelligent than 99% of humans.
Folks sometimes complain that this blog doesn't have a search function. That's because it is unnecessary.
You can search any website via Google like so:
"site:actualized.org/insights/ xxxxxxxx"
Replace xxxxxxxx with your search term.
Google is a powerful tool. Become a power-user of it. You can do very pin-pointed searches to get the information you need.
When AI came out a year ago, I was somewhat blinded by the initial enthusiasm and the creative potential it can unlock. Now as I learn more about AI and gain more experience using it, I'm thinking more deeply about its impact on artists and creators. My biggest problem with AI is not that it's going to kill mankind, but that massive corporations are going to use AI to create extreme wealth inequality at the cost of small creators.
So I share the following perspective with you:
I'm still very pro-AI. It's not going away and it will lead to some truly amazing creative tools over the next decade and beyond. But it's important not to ignore the potential theft, abuse, and exploitation that comes along with that. There's going to many positives but also negatives and it's important to see AI with clear eyes, free of bias. The problem is not AI but the selfish and unscrupulous people who exploit it.
What we have learned from the last 25 years of the internet era is that many tech companies got fabulously rich stealing data from the whole world, because data theft wasn't even a concept. Well, the next 25 years could be an even bigger data theft if we aren't vigilant. One of the important functions of government should be to prevent data theft by massive corporations.