Eight years today (2012)
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
― James J. Lachard
Beautifully written ...
Also, as an unexpected bonus, the book showed that philosophy shouldn't neccesarily be only theoretical high-brow word games, it can be a pleasant and highly practical experience as well.
I find myself coming back to it very often, or sharing it with others.
I found a lot of peace with this quote:
> I keep looking for meaning, but all I've found so far is that in order to be at peace with the present, we must be at peace with the past, because the present is a product of the past. Accept. Accept. Accept. Learn to love the present moment. What happened, happened.
> I keep looking for meaning, but all I've found so far is that in order to be at peace with the present, we must be at peace with the past, because the present is a product of the past. Accept. Accept. Accept. Learn to love the present moment.
Sometimes it helps me to remember that the present is literally the only thing that exists. Looking too much into the past produces guilt; too much into the future, anxiety. I hope in this new world we're building with all the great technology, we put a stronger emphasis on learning contentment which can only come from accepting the present in all its myriad forms.
How does one not become complacent after reading this? I am confused. On one hand people pull all nighters doing mundane things as doing customer support because you are the founder, and you have to do it (and endanger their health and maybe life). And on the other hand this.
If you find you're doing something only for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it's time to re-examine whether you should be doing it at all. Staying power usually requires that you derive some meaning from the actual activity itself, that the day-to-day of it gives your life purpose.
Where do I focus my memes? The millions dead and dying from malnutrition. Its absolutely preventable, we have the technology to solve it and its abhorrent that it continues into the modern era. You can join me, or you can pick something else. Just try and have a positive impact, and if you are good enough (and lucky) this world might just remember you when you are gone.
Yes, it's very moving. Hopefully, enough so that people will donate to pancreatic cancer research. It's a cancer that kills most people, and yet we do little research.
Steve Jobs and Randy Pausch also left this world way too young:
Paul's closing remarks remind me of a bit that the late Bill Hicks used to sign off with:
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”
>Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world
Drop your military spending and Putin will take more of your lands. Or North Korea will finally invade as they keep promising. Or ISIS will march in and smash up your museums and rape your women. Its childish to dismiss game theory when it comes to the taking of land.
>and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
Space is like rapture for geeks. What space exactly? Terraform a planet? Good, now you have the exact same problems you have here except less natural resources, so expect even more competition for scarce resources. You won't escape your problems, you'll just make them worse. The first space colony won't be utopia, it'll be a wild-west nightmare of lawlessness and conflict.
The reality for now is someone has to protect the pacifists. It is hard to believe that ISIS exists in the modern world. They are so depraved that they make the Nazis look like good guys.
ISIS was born amongst the chaos of the failed state of Iraq, and covert support and funding of rebel groups to topple Assad in Syria, out of warfare, not ex-nihilo.
A far more conservative attitude to when to fight and when to supply arms might do the west no harm at all, and allow them to spend a lot of that money on something more productive.
You want to end ISIS? Sorry there isn't a quick way to do so. Build a school for women in one of the countries they inhabit, protect it with drones and soldiers, build power plants, and give them internet connections. Change the culture, not at the end of a gun but with sandwiches for their hungry, water for their thirsty, and knowledge for their curious. Do this everywhere we are invited, and then do it in the places we are not. Then in a few generations took a look the world you have created, I promise you it will be a better one.
Similar things were said about the Viet Cong, except for the cellphones. The Mijahideen defeated the Soviet Union and arguably lead to it's demise. The US got kicked out of Lebanon and Somalia. I happen to think that won't happen with ISIS, mainly due to the oil but also because the West has allies nearby in the region, or at least people we can work with such as the Kurds, Shia Iraqis and Turkey. Still, being high tech and spending big doesn't guarantee victory.
ISIS may not be an existential threat to the USA, sure, but they're doing a lot of damage to a lot of people and it looks like they will continue to do so for quite some time to come.
Data like this puts the real threat of ISIS in perspective: http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...
You're quite right about tactics. They need to be contained militarily, but they won't be defeated that way.
Winning them over with kindness doesn't have a great track record unless there's some other bastard to be the iron fist.
The truth is if the US wanted they could have ended the troubles in Iraq. It just wasn't worth it.
I imagine what would happen if you dropped high end cellphones and tablets in these parts of the world; mobile phones equipped with super fast free internet connection, and a library of great videos, content, knowledge. Both fun and educational obviously.
My point is that once a man is learned and cultured, it becomes harder to get him to hate another regardless of their differences.
Sounds a little bit like hackers in a garage...
It's the teachings combined with the knowledge of them combined with a desire to follow them that is creating the current situation with IS and other groups.
Because its not that hard to observe the conditions in the world, historically, in which people are attracted, and not attracted, to violent groups like IS, of varying sources of ideological propaganda.
> They always reference the Qu'ran, the hadiths and the sunnah in everything they do.
Yes, that's their source of ideological propaganda, and its obviously a source that makes a lot of sense when you are recruiting in a place where people are previously socialized to favor those sources.
But there are plenty of people in the same regions that aren't violent extremists that also reference the Qu'ran, hadiths, and sunnah in everything they do.
> The US foreign policy was used as a convenient excuse
The US foreign policy is one of the major factors creating the conditions which lead to their particular application of the Qu'ran, hadiths, and sunnah being as successful as it is in appealing to people in the region.
And there are plenty of people who have been screwed over by US foreign policy but who, again, somehow manage to refrain from committing atrocities.
Terrorism generally seems to spring up where there is both a big political grievance and some kind of ideological foundation to hook it onto. That's not an absolute requirement (e.g., I don't believe the Tamil Tigers had any ideology beyond their nationalism; on a much smaller scale, the occasional cases of Christians blowing up abortion clinics aren't very political) but generally that partnership is what does it.
And when that's the case, it's misleading to blame the terrorism exclusively on the ideology or exclusively on the political grievance.
Groups like IS and al Qaeda, so far as I can tell, really truly do believe that what they are doing is justified by Islam; and they really truly do believe that what they are doing is a necessary response to US intervention in the Middle East.
Any religion can be distorted. There's a buddhist army and two buddhist terrorist groups currently operating, yet most people would rate buddhism as one of the most pacifist religions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement
There's no excuse for what ISIS does. No reason is strong enough for the kind of barbarity they practice, but characterising it as purely senseless and ignoring the actual reasons behind it doesn't help either. The actual reasons they do what they do may not be sufficient or reasonable relative to their actions, and may not actually align well with their rhetoric, but they do exist.
Different people react to things differently, interpret things differently, take ideas more or less seriously, and so on.
I think the reasoning: "if ISIS was about religion, then all muslims would support ISIS", would approximately equally support: "if ISIS was about foreign policy, then all Iraqis would support ISIS".
I don't think either of those if-thens holds as an if-then, regardless of the truth value of the "if" part.
> It's the teachings combined with...a desire to follow them
where do you think that desire comes from?
Saying "US foreign policy" created these groups isn't a great short hand for talking about the creation of the conditions that foment these groups. In reality it's an incredibly complicated situation where almost any action will have downsides that entail a lot of human suffering, but US foreign policy is an outsized input into that situation, so it's right to hold it responsible in turn for whatever those consequences are.
http://wartard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-idea-of-isis-histo...
Hint: they don't do it because they read it in a book, any more than the US kills and maims people because of the bible.
The movie Three Kings explores this a bit:
ISIS is evil, but they are not unhuman.
Turn off the news. It's just a ride, man. ISIS is irrelevant, like Goldstein. It's nothing but a farce to get you to start sentences with "The reality is for now..."
Ignore them.
You'd be surprised who's worse. Hint: they look like "good guys" and pretend they have the moral high ground.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis...
Now, he who helped create ISIS, funded its operations, and enabled it to reign and kill people, in order to sell weapons and destabilize a region, is worse than ISIS.
What exactly is controversial about this?
That said, since you mentioned the UK: the UK had a billion people in Africa and Asia as slaves in its colonies just until 50 years ago. This, besides enslavement and resource-grabbing included countless executions, rapes, torture, aggression, war etc. ISIS has a lot of work to do to match up the numbers.
Don't make the mistake that the villain with the suit and the clean shave is much better than the crude foreign-looking fundamendalist villain.
Even the sun. One of the most powerful entities my mind can possibly comprehend. The entire reason for everything we know. The source of nearly every tiny bit of energy we consume. It's temporary. It'll be gone one day and when it is, it'll be like it was never there.
Accepting these things is one of the most terrifying, difficult, powerful and freeing things I've done. It's very powerful to be able to step back and assess my situation in the context of "will this matter in 50 years when I'm on my deathbed?" In so many difficult decisions, it's made the answer clear: "in 50 years, will I remember feeling good because I took my parents' advice and didn't move and didn't upset them? Or will I look back with regret on the opportunity I didn't take across the country."
I really like this article. It's very important to remember that everything we think is so strong and foundational can go away in the blink of an eye.
Somehow it feels very comforting to me, thinking about this and the size of the universe.
I was surprised by how close the end is. The circle of life of stars -- where they form, die, and are born again from the ashes -- looks to be impossible more than 1-100 trillion years from now. I'm not sure why, but that seems to be the most dangerous thing in the article. Without new stars forming, there are no new planets forming in new habitable zones, which means no new life.
I wonder if something could be done by intelligent life to avert the ultimate end. Could intelligent life theoretically artificially keep new stars forming?
Besides, I found another interesting article regarding earths future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
Consider, becoming a doctor may allow you to take some great vacations and be content that you helped people on your death bed, but those are just a few days so you need to consider the day to day life as a doctor not just the highlights.
A very comprehensible example for me is Don Knuth. A part of his drive is his ambition to finish the series of books.
Having said so, there is no panacea and I think it very well depends on how one's system is wired.
Another way of putting it is if you talk to lottery winners you’re getting a very biased viewpoint.
As I said before, its all down to wiring.
Also given the advancements in medicine and increase in life expectancies, I think the chances are a lot many people will live to 60+ so planning life for the worst case may not be optimal.
The contents of the dream do not matter; just like your dreams at night, it is in the symbolism that you must look for true meaning. Why are you going through the things you are? Are there lessons to be learned? Nor do the laws of the dream matter -- only your belief in them. Would it be possible Jesus resurrect if this world were true and death were king? Or is there something more than the body's eyes see?
Anyway, I'm a follower of the course (A Course in Miracles) if anyone cares about this kinda stuff. If I go on any longer I'll just get down-voted by this pedantic community that will be like "Well actually, a big explosion happened long ago and gave you your free will you stupid lofty-minded primate"
A less snarky response is context is important.
PS: Sorry if this came off as harsh, but ambiguity is not really a win. It's like a defense attorney saying look my client is wearing a top hat today he must be innocent; it's just not relevant information.
This gets back to context. You interpret things in such a fashion, but many people are horrified by the morality presented in the Bible. “Suffer not a _ to live.” Really that’s just such an uplifting message.
Granted, ignore the inconvenient parts is a very common approach, but if you’re doing that then just be honest about it. Ex: Timothy 2:12 is just not quoted that much anymore, but it used to be tossed around quite frequently.
The Sermon on the Mount I find beautiful. The general account of Jesus' life too. I also rather like Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon is basically porn!
You cannot destroy heaven and so you dream of these things. We're all helpless victims and if there is a God, he is a cruel master. This isn't the way and creates a lot of sadness and unnecessary conflict in the world.
For clarification, I'm being absolutely sincere. Because your initial assertion eliminates any further dialogue if you sincerely believe it. So why post here? Shouldn't you be looking for Neo, and awakening him so you can be free of the hell that is the dream?
Do not dally Morpheus. Or conversely, do not spout non-sequiturs and expect to get upvotes.
Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you."