UNDERSTANDING ROE BEING OVERTURNED · 7:31pm Jun 24th, 2022
UNDERSTANDING ROE BEING OVERTURNED
Ending abortion was never about babies. It is entirely about controlling and owning the bodies of women.
If you do not control everything that happens inside your own body, then you do not own your body - somebody else does. By definition, that is literally slavery.
The fight against abortion was always about re-enslaving women. Making women objects, possessions, things. Making women property again, as some religions, and some fairly evil men desire. You should know not all religions - under Jewish law, for instance, abortion is a basic right, supported by scripture. Judaism is being oppressed with the loss of Roe Vs Wade. This isn't about freedom of religion.
Overturning Roe is entirely about putting uppity women in their place. It is about dominating and controlling the sexuality, freedom, options, futures, and most of all bodies, of women. It is enslavement.
Because: if you don't control everything inside your own flesh, you don't own your own body. If you don't own your own body, by definition, you are a slave.
But it gets worse.
The foundation of Roe was the concept of a right to privacy. With that gone, everything else supported by a right to privacy is also endangered - and currently being examined for elimination by the far-right dominated court. That includes the right to contraception, the right to have sex for pleasure at all, and the right to marry the same sex. All three are almost certain to be eliminated by this ruling, in time.
And if you have no right to privacy, imagine the impact on every other aspect of your life. Think about it.
You have lost more than you realize right now.
Agreed, because they won't stop there.
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Griswold, Lawrence and Obergfell outright gets called out in the... Opinion, I think it's called in America? The legal doc that's overturning Roe v. Wade at any rate. Edit* Page 118-119. Amidst THICK legalese, too.
Link to PDF. May want to get this one, before it's altered or taken down.
That's in order they're mentioned above:
* Birth Control without prescription OR marriage.
* Being openly LGTB+ legally.
* Gay marriage protected by state.
Oh, and the man whose brain child this is, has carefully OMITTED another 14th Amendment. Loving v. Virgina. Despite the grounds for its legal dismissal being basically much identical to Roe v. Wade.
Because that's the Interracial Marriage Is Legal one.
And I present to you... Master and Mistress Thomas.
As I said over on my own blog... if this was satire or villains in a story, I'd consider the writer too heavy handed in hammering on the hypocrisy.
You express all my thoughts on this better than I could. It honestly sickens me to see people celebrating this decision, but this was their goal all along. Turn back the clock and plunge America back into the 1950s.
I hope they're proud of themselves, because they've just made life harder for millions of women.
100% correct, but as a point of secondary clarification: I grew up around the sorts of people who are celebrating the overturning, and I can tell you that at least some of them are doing so because they have been brainwashed to believe, truly, deep down, that it is about babies.
I tend to view them on a spectrum, where you have on one end those who are wrong about these issues, but believe wholeheartedly that it is about selfless moral quandaries, and the on the other end you have those who are clearly just performative, and are interested in power.
The people who made this decision are clearly the latter, but the population around us falls everywhere on that spectrum.
If this is to fought, and set right? We'll have to find ways to convince folks who are celebrating this for 'selfless' reasons, that they are flat wrong. Show them the horror of this decision, and all its immediate effects, and deferred implications. Show them they themselves, and those they love, are being harmed.
One of the ways I like to remind people of this; If the issues were truly about life, and children, to those in power? We wouldn't live in a society where there are so many preventable child deaths (malnutrition, gun violence, domestic abuse) and so many children in terrible circumstances (poverty especially). Let alone a society where parenthood is so devalued, both the parents, and the children (lack of good legal protections for parental leave, massive costs for birthing a child, massive costs for adoption, difficulty or impossibility adopting if you don't fit the exact mold of a conservative nuclear family).
It's been proven time, and time again, that the best way to prevent abortion (even if you only care about doing so for misguided reasons) is good sex ed, free contraceptives, access to free and good family planning services, etc etc... Solve the problem by dealing with root causes, not trying to 'treat' symptoms through enslavement. The math and science don't lie, and doing it the right way saves more lives than doing it the wrong way, even if you believe an abortion is a loss of life. Doing this the right way also makes our society better. Leaning into real, proper freedoms always does.
And worse still, because not only has a fundamental right to privacy been murdered on the altar of fascism, but so too has the precedent that the court is bound to the will of the people. So much of American 'democracy' so-called, what little was still good/working, is bound up in traditions and moires and folkways, not any real checks and balances, or rules.
Now that the court has taken this step, and that barrier is shattered, *anything* (as everyone has already noted here) is on the chopping block.
Anything.
They (the decision makers) are hypocrites, and anyone who doesn't realize that is being conned on a scale unprecedented since the last world war.
I think most who are reading/respond to your post understand, but I'm terrified by how little many of my peers/coworkers/etc, even the more eyes-open ones, seem to grasp the sheer scope of this.
This is at minimum equivalent in scale of damage to the Jan. 6th coup succeeding. Worse, perhaps, because it assures that the next one will succeed, 100%. If they can do this with women's bodies? They can sure as hell violate the sanctity of ballot boxes. And they will.
This is unequivocally the final brain-death of American freedom. The road to a fascist performatively-religious dictatorship is now very short, very fast, and mostly just full of performative acts to appeal to the rabid base, and to make everything seem and feel slightly more legitimate in their own minds.
We just lost the unique pairing of one of the strongest militaries and economies on Earth, with a generally freedom-oriented societal outlook and structure. There are countries who have equivalent geopolitical power, but they are equally or worse off fascist states as we now are. And there are still free places, but none of them have the power to stop us from steam-rolling them.
It's the dark ages again. But honestly, worse in every way. At least the dark ages didn't have computer-tracked databases hooked to a panopticon to aid in oppression, nukes on a hair-trigger, and climate change roaring at the gates.
Of course not. It's about dominion of religion, which is the polar opposite of freedom. But as long as the Christian Dominionists say it's about some sort of freedom, they have a perfect (if obviously false) excuse for what they're attempting. Like a schoolyard bully forcing a smaller child's fist into their own face while yelling, "Stop hitting yourself!" Doesn't fool anybody but an absolute moron.
"You should know not all religions - under Jewish law, for instance, abortion is a basic right, supported by scripture. Judaism is being oppressed with the loss of Roe Vs Wade."
That's an interesting angle to this I didn't know about; thanks for the information.
...Sadly, since it sounds like, in areas where abortion is particularly frowned on by the people in charge, Jewish doctors might be significantly more likely to still provide it... well, it doesn't seem much of a stretch for certain groups to add "killing Christian babies, probably sacrificing them" to the list of "reasons" why Jews are totally evil and hate crimes against them are actually okay.
Sigh.
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Yeah, there does seem to be a point of view in this country, predating the founding of this country, in fact, that "freedom of religion" means "the freedom of the One True Faith not just from persecution by people who are Wrong but to in turn suppress those people and their Wrongness". The Puritans didn't exactly come to North America to found a pluralistic society where even non-Abrahamic faiths were given equality under the law, after all.
Here's something that'll fry your grape: pay attention to the justifications behind the repealing of Roe. The court's actual logic behind it is that the Roe ruling (along with the aforementioned Oberfell and other similar rulings) were oversteps of the Supreme Court's power. The supreme court isn't saying "We're ruling against this", it's saying "We never had the justification to rule in favor in the first place, and doing so was incorrect".
Here's another fun little tidbit: The ruling doesn't ban abortion or anything of the nature... it's simply saying that that particular decision falls to the states, because it is outside the bounds of the constitution as previously interpreted, and is therefore not a federal issue.
As for my personal stance? I do fully believe that women have a choice as to whether to have children or not... but that particular decision happens (excepting in cases of rape) when they decide to have sex. Anything beyond that is simply the consequence of a choice already made.
In my ideal world? Sex without using contraception should be illegal (misdemeanor, for all sexes) without a document signed and dated by all involved parties saying that they acknowledge the intent of procreation. That solves the problem neatly, doesn't it?
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One of the points made is that America supposedly had no acceptance of abortion early on. This is yet another Republican lie - Ben Franklin himself offered an abortifactant recipe inside a math textbook he wrote.
It was specifically formulated to serve people in the colonies (proto-America) based on what herbs and ingredients could be found there.
If that isn't prior standing for abortion being accepted in early America, I cannot imagine a better one. So commonplace and so accepted that it could be placed in a math textbook as an aside. So young students, presumably, in trouble could read it and make the recipe.
While there's a lot of truth to what you're saying here (and I agree this is both the net effect and the intent of many politicians and religious leaders who push abortion as an issue), I think it's only fair to point out that most people who oppose abortion do so because they legitimately feel they're saving innocent babies, not because they consciously want to exercise dominion over women—which is why the gender gap in abortion opinion is not very wide. It's important to understand the mindset of the people you disagree with and most of them aren't Machiavellian.
This ruling can't affect those rights directly because rulings are strictly limited and explicit on what they concern; but it can be used as precedent in establishing other rulings. The main issue is that the Court's current makeup could lead to reversals on those other topics independent of this ruling. Thomas has already called on his conservative colleagues to join him in eliminating those rights.
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Yes, enough mandatory paperwork will definitely solve all these conflicts and problems. (sarcasm)
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Yes it absolutely can. The five Republican assholes are already on it and Thomas JUST made a statement saying that Griswold, Lawrence and Obergfell should all be reversed. Why? Because they ALL depend on the very same interpretation that permitted Roe. The came after Roe, based on the decision in Roe. In overturning Roe, the reason they used was that this interpretation was false.
This is just the beginning. Next up: gay marriage, contraception, sex for pleasure and not reproduction, sex out of marriage, and... very weirdly, considering Thomas and his wife.... interracial marriage. All of these are supported by the foundation that Roe created. That foundation has been destroyed.
If the five traitors follow their own twisted and faulty logic - and their stated desires and plans - they literally MUST overturn Griswold, Lawrence and Obergfell.
Do you comprehend this - the magnitude of this? Roe is just the first of many, many steps.
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The people you are trying to excuse are dumbshits who have been grifted. Those not part of the grift are low intelligence shitkickers who, yes, believe the ridiculous bullshit fed to them over the past forty years (I've been following this over that time, I've watched them get programmed by religious grifters). They are acting mindlessly, out of emotion, sure. I don't disagree.
But, frankly, the same thing could be said for the average person an any historical atrocity. The Rwandan Genocide? The average shithead just followed the group and killed his neighbors. Following the group mindlessly literally IS the problem.
I can't excuse them because they have been tricked into believing bullshit.
The basic responsibility required of any citizen in a democratic nation is to actually take the shared power seriously - and rationally. The attack on Roe, by the average shitheel is not being done rationally. Every atrocity begins with a belief that god or gods decree it.
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I have to agree, you have to eventually blame the stupid people for being stupid.
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Oh, I'd not heard that claim, that I recall, but thanks for the information disproving it anyway! Neat.
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Sadly, try and explain this to them and they'll launch off into a spiel about how those things cause AIDS or some other bullshit (prohibitions on contraception in some Christian denominations is precisely the reason AIDS is so rampant in some parts of Africa, ironically enough). As you rightly conclude, it was never about saving lives. It's always been about punishing women.
The government has no business knowing anything about your body or what you do with it, so long as it doesn’t directly impact the rights of others. Forcing someone to carry to term regardless of their wishes is a gross violation of that person’s self-determination, ie their right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Full Stop.
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I know you’re trying to discuss the logical side of this. I can see that you’re trying to find some kind of reason that anti-choice regressives (yes, they’re no longer conservatives now that they’re actually going backwards) believe that they’re doing the right thing when—to us—they clearly aren’t. But you’re operating on the false assumption that their arguments have any kind of discernible rationale. You can’t argue with someone who has already been convinced—often through multiple acts of doublethink—that they are correct. They are, for lack of a better term, insane; they believe something that is not real and are unwilling to do anything but spout the same tired arguments, regardless of new information.
And I know you want to think this overturning of RvW doesn’t have immediate knock-on effects, but it does directly affect those other rulings. Texas did not wait for RvW to be overturned before passing their abortion-seeker bounty program. It did not stop other state legislatures from making their trigger laws. Emboldened by this ruling, regressives will push for new laws to restrict or ban those other rights as well. Because of this ruling, those laws can go into effect immediately.
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Ironically, as a person of faith, this is all a very strange Star Wars style trash compactor to find myself in, because many who share my faith don't share a more enlightened, truly life-centric viewpoint that prioritizes actual love, and help for others. They're either flat out deluded, or they're willfully malicious and hiding behind liturgy, and telling even those two camps apart is getting harder and harder...
On the reverse side, plenty of the folks who hold the more Christ-like viewpoints by my metrics, are of different faiths/beliefs/persuasions, and often balk at my professions of faith and lump me in with those who are the 'noisy gongs' and 'clanging cymbals.'
I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone, because to me the whole and most obvious core of my faith is the importance of love and empathy towards others, and meaningfully making their lives, and the world, better. Christ demands, in my view, a prioritization of love of others above all else. Above proselytizing, above litigating, above liturgy, above pride, above the finer points of theology or belief, and above symbols and flags.
To see people spit in the face of that is devastating and I shudder to think where we are headed. Beliefs, of any kind, whether political, religious, scientific... They're extremely dangerous when they get out ahead of our natural moral obligations to care for eachother, and this planet. Time and again we see it in history, no matter what 'it' is; Whenever 'it' is at the top of the pyramid above love, and empathy?
We're going to have a bad time.
And it drives me crazy that people in so many of my old circles refuse to see that.
Even if you take faith, and emotion out of it? Heck, even if your core heuristic is selfishness? Pure logic alone demands an acceptance of the benefits of selfish altruism. It's been scientifically proven. A rising tide floats all ships. No one is an island. We live and die as a group. Whether you think that's because of God/Gods/Goddess/Goddesses and/or evolution, it's still the inescapable truth. Reality doesn't care 'why,' the way we do philosophically. It's cold hard math. Like the force of wind, and tides; You can work with it, and benefit, or work against it, and die.
It drives me insane to see people not only willfully violate the core tenants of their faith, in the name of God, but also to just be so gosh-dang-frakkin stupid.
As Mr. Spock might put it, logic dictates that acting in love, and true faith (no matter what faith), always means acting for the good of others.
'Pro-life' in the truest sense can only mean being in favor of choice, privacy, and freedom. And freedom means that everyone should have free access, among other things, to all the medical care they could ever conceivably need, or want, to live both healthily *and* comfortably. How we missed this fact in the 'land of the free' will always be one of our greatest tragic ironies.
Thank you for coming to my TED
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I suspect that at the end of the day they enjoy having power, and using their power to control others. After all, he who controls the media controls the narrative (as the Daughters of the Confederacy can testify). The fact they are so quick to judge others is also worrying, as well as inability to love others.
After all, and forgive me if I am wrong, but wasn't it Jesus who told us to 'love your neighbour as yourself' and 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone'?
What I wouldn't give for the world to be run by a few more human shaped unicorns and a few less humans.
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Spot-on, and incidentally those words were (among other things) words of warning for this exact kind of scenario.
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The irony is staggering.
It is rather a lot horrible, yeah. It's been two steps forward, one step back for so long... Here we go two steps back, or so.
I hope that when the U.S.A. fixes this that they make it stick firmly. Mind you, considering how long it's taken to get to this point, how far we've come so fast in the last fifty years or so, I still think we're doing okay. We might not be the ones to live to see paradise, but we've gotten to see some of the best days so far. It's not hopeless that we'll yet see some bright ones ahead, too.
You've been around longer than me by a couple decades. A lot of folks, I tell them they're taking for granted how good things have been. They didn't see what so many folks had to go through, to get to this point. I want to know what you think of all this, from your perspective, having seen even more.
The world, for all of the good we've done in the richest parts, there are so many places where people suffer so much worse. There are so many places where human life has little, if any value, even to the poor folks who have little more than their own. There are so many places where hating people for their race, culture, or religion is so normal that they don't even think about it, let alone feel ashamed about it. There are so many places that know only war and conflict with no end, no community or good government to rally behind. There are so many places where what government they do have is an ironclad regime demanding total fealty at the other end of a gun barrel.
I hear people go on and on about the War in Ukraine, and no doubt it's horrible, but it's not the worst thing happening in this world today. It's not even the worst war that's happening in this world today. https://www.rescue.org/article/top-10-crises-world-cant-ignore-2022
But for all that horror and pain and suffering, things keep getting better. We take two steps forward, one step back, but we keep making progress. We've made so much progress, so fast, and that's why I think so many people have lost touch with the amazing progress we HAVE made. Even the progress in my own lifetime, I see people who have no idea it was worse than now within living memory.
I believe that there is still hope for the world. We'll lose lives and people will suffer, and tragically it's life, for now. I think we'll still lose less lives, and people will suffer less, and we'll keep getting better. But what about you? Do you see how far we've come? Do you believe we can hold fast, and keep pushing forward, no matter how many steps back they try to pull us? Or, do your more experience eyes see me as the deluded one rather than them?
At any rate, despite the dark things I said, I hope that I have given you some hope, too. So much darkness, getting brighter bit by bit, towards the dawn.
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War is always horrible, but that is not the real issue with Ukraine. As you point out there are dozens of wars, big and small, and millions upon millions of people are suffering terribly right now, this very moment.
The issue with Ukraine is that the person attacking Ukraine is a highly religious nationalist psychopath. Putin has told us clearly who he is, and what he wants. He wants to put the old Russia - the Russian Empire - back the way it once was. He wants that empire to dominate the world, he wants the secular West to diminish, and preferably, end. He wants to do this because he is slowly dying of cancer (this has been credibly documented), and he has turned to religion. He believes, apparently, that his soul will be saved and he will go to heaven if he can 'get the band back together', so to speak. And to do this, he is, quite clearly, willing to throw everything he has at the task. And that includes nuclear weapons.
All the other terrible conflicts you offered a link to are bad. But not one of them could destroy civilization forever, not one of them could end most complex life on the earth. The war to conquer Ukraine realistically could. Is such an outcome likely? Nobody can agree. Some pundits say the chance is small - only one percent. Others place it at ten, and some at one-in-three. It all depends on just how religious Putin actually is, just how desperate he becomes, and what the world does in response to his provocation. It also depends on how long he remains breathing (hopefully not long).
The situation is critical for both the survival of humanity and any hope of preserving Western, more or less democratic, secular dominance in the world. Since I despise religion, and loath autocracy, I vastly prefer Western-styled culture and lifestyle, and because I like being alive, I am reasonably concerned with how the conquest of Ukraine turns out.
But, despite that, one of the few remaining superpowers - America, the limping, weak superpower - is failing. The seditious and traitorous rise of highly patriarchal, purely heterosexual, White Christian Nationalism wearing the hollowed-out skin of what used to be the Republican Party is potentially the end of America, and definitely the end of any pretense of personal liberty or diversity. The specter of nuclear war combined with the rise of religious eschatology hell-bent on Final Judgement is a toxic mix that, I reason, easily leads to the next big war of civilizations on the earth: the great rat versus cockroach war.
But even if the world doesn't go nuclear, the issue of how you and I are going to live remains. I am not eager to live in an America where my breathing is considered to be an illegal act. I like breathing. It keeps me going. By every value and law that the current Republican party stands for - and wants to implement - I instantly become a target. I am literally everything they directly hate, or I love people who they directly hate. If it gets to the level of camps, I will be in them, against my will.
But to answer your overall question, I think that this time period, right now, counts as at least one Great Filter Event. To survive it, humanity needs to drop religion dramatically - or overcome it somehow - and humanity needs to eliminate all acts of conquest. It needs to end war. Humanity needs to end nuclear weapons forever, it needs a world government and an end to nationalism entirely. It needs to deal with the collapsing environment as if it were a matter of life and death, which it is.
Frankly - and this is going to sound cruel, I suppose - the issues of nuclear annihilation and climate/environmental destruction are so large that all the little human issues of millions of people starving here or there almost don't matter. They are irrelevant to the degree that if all humanity is dead, their suffering never mattered anyway. The cockroach people won't care, neither will the rat people.
That leaves the West. Europe and America and Australia and Japan and South Korea and such. The crazy, mostly secular (mostly) folks who have environmental movements and anti-nuke protests and don't (mostly) murder their protesters. Mostly. The last hope of planet earth, as far as I am concerned. Low religion, high education, high (relative) freedom, high technology, and most importantly of all - wealthy. The only people who can get anything (positive) done.
If that falls, either to war, or to authoritarianism, or to conquest, or to religion, well...
I say, basically, Game Over. Game Over, Man.
But, if humanity somehow overcomes the current enumerated threats above, then... that's one major (perhaps the biggest) Great Filter Event passed. These are interesting times.
Yes - I am honestly saying that the history we are currently living through could be a 'make it or break it' time for human civilization.
And it is a big deal, because if civilization falls, it ain't getting up again. We are past peak-everything. There are not enough Easily Acquired (inportant point!) resources left on the earth to permit starting over from scratch. Infinite (nearly) resources don't matter if they are so deep they are effectively impossible to dig up to use. Humans had enough for one (ONE) industrial revolution in history. That's it. Apparently, on earth, you only get one.
What do I personally think is most likely to happen?
Well, I'm not hopeful. I want to be wrong. But I have seen humanity whining and whimpering about all of these issues pretty much nonstop for the last 62 years, and not a goddamn single truly useful thing was ever done, at least for long. They managed to reduce the number of times nukes could glass the planet from eighty to... what is it now? Twenty, now? It only takes one time to glass a planet. I don't call that real progress, I call that the illusion of progress.
As for climate and environmental destruction? The ozone layer is coming back. Mostly. But the Amazon will be a desert, like in my stories, in just a few decades. That's actually accelerating right now. China (and a lot of other places) is/are burning coal like there is no tomorrow - and because of that, pretty much they are on the nose. The level of C02 is the highest in all of primate history right now, which means that my Bureau prediction of the atmosphere is coming true. It's been a Silent Spring in my yard, how about yours?
I put my best prediction of the future in my Conversion Bureau stories. So, that. Only there is no Equestria coming to save us.
For those that don't want to bother with a million and a half words, the timeline is basically this:
Nations become aggressive (We Are Here)
Nuclear arms are used on a small scale
The world is severely damaged by this
Societies collapse, nations fall, civilization begins to crumble
Environmental collapse continues and accelerates
Displaced people become a major threat to global stability
A ruthless totalitarian global government is formed in desperation
New technologies allow a better standard of living for all
Everyone eventually is fed and watered thanks to such tech
A global worldfavela grows, farmed by a small elite class
This is considered to be the Golden Age Of Man
But the biosphere is irrevocably damaged, and will fail complex life completely in time
Earth, with large animals anyway, is doomed
But - the resources to escape earth have long since been wasted
The elite (and their effective slaves) move to Antarctica to try to survive as long as possible
The end of humanity is a very long whimper
Bacteria remain, as do some insects. Maybe small rodents. The sea is dead for a long time.
If anything evolves after man, it will never have an industrial revolution or space travel
One billion years from now, the earth becomes (naturally) uninhabitable.
The end.
There, saved you a million and a half words.
Is there an alternative?
I always think of H.G. Wells 'Things to Come'. Wings Over The World and a scientific civilization. Or, maybe, there could be a sudden - like very, very soon - mass secular humanist movement towards a rational global civilization.
How likely you think that is going to happen in the next twenty to fifty years is how likely I think humanity is going to make it. Place your bets.
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Yea, things aren't looking good right now.
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Don't worry, we don't have a billion years before the Earth naturally becomes uninhabitable. We have half that:
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Interesting. Thank you for the correction. Apparently this estimate has been updated since last I read about it. That is even less time for the cockroach people to enjoy their shot.
Pretty much every piece of logic used to justify aborting a child is word for word the same logic that was once used to justify slavery of other races and I have little doubt that future generations will view abortion and those who espouse it with about as much contempt as we do slavery today.
"Its okay because they dont feel pain the way we do."
"They aren't REALLY people."
"Its my property, I can do with it what I want."
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The issue is not fetuses. It never was.
The issue is whether or not a woman owns her own flesh and her own life, or whether she is property, an object, a thing, a slave, whose only value is in being a vat to grow new humans in.
If you do not control everything that happens inside your own flesh, you do not own your own life, or your own body. Somebody else does.
THAT IS THE ONLY ISSUE.
Outlawing a basic medical care like abortion is entirely about re-enslaving women.
Not a single word in your post is relevant or valid. This is the literal enslavement of women to the state. This is taking bodily autonomy from women.
I can tolerate a lot of things; I cannot tolerate support for slavery. You are supporting the enslavement of women by supporting taking their ownership of their own flesh away from them.
Reproduction is not sacred. Self-ownership and autonomy are sacred, if anything in life is.
Shame on you. I am very disappointed in you for that post.
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I was raised Catholic. Somewhere between age 10 & 15 I lost what little faith I had, entirely because of this - That I was observing the hypocrisy so often practiced there. It's...depressing, because the actual message of Jesus was as you said - it's entirely about love, compassion, and caring. I spent so many years actually trying to do the thing of 'Call out' and I never had any form of response.
In the last year or two, that has changed. I don't consider myself remotely Christian anymore, but the only way of putting it is 'I know if it turns out Jesus did do all that, we'll be cool'; so many years to finally see & reject the vast number of false prophets preaching bullshit like the Gospel of Prosperity. It's...depressing how many people have fallen under their sway, and a sort of hilariously bitter irony that they are the very thing they claim to oppose.
The few true Christians out there - We're cool. And the non-Christians of any beat who, as you say, have that focus on Love & Compassion are the core value. So yea, I feel your pain, in some sense, because nowadays...I finally understand what people mean to say one walks with the Divine, even if my particular manifestation is a wholly personal religion.
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Human-shaped unicorns exist. The problem is very few of them are aware they are unicorns trapped in human bodies, and spend their lives crippled by the trauma & dissonance of being brainwashed into an unnatural moral philosophy. Finding a way to heal the unicorns is...something I spend a lot of time working on, now.
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I don't think religion itself is the core problem here, though certainly it is one of the most convenient covers. The problem is that so many people are...rigid. That if the world doesn't conform to their narrow viewpoint, it must be opposed/destroyed. Like, I consider China probably the Great Threat right now, even moreso than Putin (Because even if Putin tries to Launch the Nukes, if the chain of command disobeys...which is very probable because 'Launch the nukes' = 'Everyone you loves dies' and...well, turns out people are very reluctant to do that) - and China is secular.
Authoritarianism can manifest anywhere. It does fit more readily in the current right-wing environments, but there are Authoritarian Leftist movements as well - the TERFs are a perfect example of that, where their narrow worldview of 'womanhood' is busy making life hell for us on both sides of the Pond.
I fully agree this is a Great Filter test, and I hope we can pass it because I'd like to see what's next...but since so many people refuse to see what is coming and there will be so much unnecessary death as a result...
It's like, the best path I can see forward is one of us saying 'Fuck this system' and overthrowing it from within, which requires an extremely cagey mastermind able to infect Capitalism with a virus that makes the entire system reinvent itself.
Am I scared? Fuck yes, I'm terrified we'll fail this test.
But I'm still hopeful. I believe we will pass - it may be naive, but the reality is if we fail, as you said, game over.
So the only real choice is to be certain we are going to win and do everything possible to find the scenario that remakes the world into something better.
Not sure what that is, yet, but step one is acknowledging the scope of the problem, and then saying 'Fuck it, we're pulling it off' and finding a way. Naive? Sure. Stupid? Almost certainly. Arrogant? Hell yes.
But the alternative is fire & death, and if naive stupid arrogance is the only thing that has a hope of pushing past it, sign me up. The dystopia is already here, after all, and that means it's time tor rewrite the narrative.
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And that's the real core of it; Real and healthy faith is always predicated on something personal. Plenty of people have real faith in things they shouldn't, and often its not healthy because its not personal (faith in flags, nations, creeds, and what-not).
If God is love, then neither we, nor God, are served by any action or inaction that flies in the face of love. If there is no God, or we have misconstrued the Divine in any number of ways? Then all we have is love anyhow, and we still ought to lens all that we do through love. You can get there with pure logic.
The problem, as you identified, is our rigidity. Further, our rigidity as defined by self-reinforcing systems that reward short-term selfishness at the expense of anyone and anything else.
As a programmer, who got my degree in my uni's 'school of engineering' I like to think I picked up some good engineering basics along with the coding. When I look at our present system I see something that is ridiculously overcomplicated, badly overgrown for its available resources, and extremely brittle.
As pessimistic as it sounds? You can't fix that, in my view. Not 'in-place,' anyhow. It has to be... How to put this... Disassembled. First.
I love DIY; Woodworking, painting, roofing, tile-work, electrical, metal-working... I've done at least a little of it all, and renovated more than one house now... Often the best solution for something sufficiently rotted is to gut it and start over from studs. Otherwise you can't find all the hidden nastiness (mouse nests, rotted roof deck panels, cracked studs, pinhole leaks, frayed wire) that lies under the layers of visible nastiness at the top (peeling paint, shoddy broken tiles, curling shingles, etc).
All of which is a round-about way to say that my philosophy and plan is to accept the total inevitability, and even potential future benefits, of forthcoming rapid and violent societal decomplexification (IE collapse) and then be around after to ensure, by hook or by crook, that we (as James Earl Jones said in Dawn's Early Light) "Do better next time."
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Ahh, so, I began writing a very long and detailed point by point reply to this weeks ago, and I still have the in-progress bit saved. I had hoped to offer some good to counter the doom, but before I could finish I had to go to bed, and since then I've struggled to get back to it. It occured to me that it's been so long now, I'm not sure if you would even want a response!
I really appreciate what you said though. Thank you for taking the time to write such a long and detailed reply!
I guess the main thing is that we either have a chance or don't, but we can only succeed if we keep fighting for it. If we're doomed then we always were, but giving up is pointless. You might as well try, even if you're not sure if you can succeed, because if you're going to fail anyways there's no harm done. If there is a chance you don't know about, you might trip over it, but only if you keep going.
The other thing was, as bad as things might get, I don't think we'll end up pre-industrial and have to do it over again and be unable to. There might be setbacks, even big ones, but I believe people will survive past this.
The last thing though, is a question of your own goals and wishes. I expect you want to live as long as you can, right? First off, not die, then maybe get into transhumanism and immortality? Of course that can't happen if the people of the world wipe themselves out, or even just us. But, it seems like you're worried about the long-term survival of life and civilization in the universe.
From the perspective of an individual, of course I want to keep living and build an amazing and wonderful future. However, it seems really likely that the universe itself will end eventually, in a variety of ways. It won't happen for an unfathomable amount of time given current models, but there are limits. If you're likely to end up dead before we figure out immortality, why does it matter if the world ends afterwards, or at some unfathomably far away point? Whether there is life in the universe or if it's inert, what's the difference to a person who already died?
I don't want to come off as accusatory with that question, though. I already said it's important to keep fighting as long as we're alive, for the possibilities we don't know exist on top of the remote chances we know about. I'm trying to figure it out philosophically, for the sake of future non-human intelligence.
For whatever reasons led me to this point, I don't want to reproduce as a human, but I do want to create artificial intelligence. Something new, that isn't life as we know it, but yet is still alive in a sense. The trouble I'm having is that there doesn't seem to be any point to living or existing. We got to this point by evolving from the simplest life, and that's built up into a mix of instincts, emotions, and intelligence, that drive us, but there isn't really any point to it. We end up making our own points, as intelligent beings, but they're built out of our physical needs combined with emotions and instincts, and other things like our problem-solving minds and ability to plan for the future...
A mind created from scratch doesn't have that unless we put it in, but it's sort of like asking "Why would you make a robot that can feel pain?" It seems like unless we base our new beings on animals, we'll have to put in some reason for doing anything, or they won't do anything, because there is no innate or natural reason. But then, what would we put in there?
On one hand, I'm struggling with the practical philosophy there, but also the ethics of it all. I keep having to ask myself if it's a good thing to create a new life or mind or something else. It is bad to kill, but is it good to make new life? It seems like people might just be doing it because of a sort of the physical process of passing on genes, that developed from the earliest life forms.
Because of that, I want to know why other people think that it's a good thing to perpetuate life and civilization. I hope you can give some insights there, since you are such an interesting and unique person, and also very thoughtful and well spoken.
So, that was pretty long just now, right? I appreciate you taking the time for me here. I know that's pretty far topic drift from Roe v Wade. If you would like to see the rest of what I would have replied with, since I do have the progress saved, please let me know and I can finish that and give that to you as well.
Thank you for your time, and for all the things you've done over the years. Your creations have touched me time and time again and I believe you have made this world a vastly better place for those who are living through it.
Relee the Squirrel
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Yes, please, Relee! I'd like to see!
Just makes me glad i don't live in America.
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I wish I didn't have to. But, I am too old and not wealthy enough for any other desirable nation to want me and my family. Things are going South, in America (yes, pun intended considering the rise of fascist white Christian nationalism).
¡Preach!:
I totally agree with you.
In countries in the English Commonwealth, the policy was thus:
The "Rare" came from education, empowering women, and access to contraception.
With the rise of pædophilic husbands forcing their wives to abort the sex they do not want to molest, "¡You will only bear boys/girls!", they outlawed sex-selective abortion:
That is how it is now. We should adopt that policy.
Loving, Griswold, Lawerence, et cetera are doomed. Do not forget about all of the dominionist decisions which came out in June too.