californiadreem

"There's a secret cabal of beings that are making my life personally miserable" is already a common enough position that cyclically occurs in human history every hundred years or so that I don't think it's a fiction. I don't think it's an untenable premise to suspect that toxoplasmosis pandemics are cyclically-occuring in humans already and are responsible for revolutionary periods and/or imperialism.

What people might find unpalatable is the idea that parasitic infection could determine so fundamentally political beliefs and ideology, but consider that the idea of not cleaning your hands directly led to disease was considered literal insanity (see the tragic history of Ignaz Semmelweis) prior to germ theory. Sometimes it's the smallest catalysts that cause the largest changes. For the want of a nail...

>Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.

The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.

A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?

The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.

I imagine that the simulation hypothesis is reversing the explanandum. Consciousness is already the simulation of the Universe. Asking if the universe is a simulation while using a simulation of the universe as your baseline creates a necessarily unfalsifiable question; Every aspect of what we term "reality" reduces to axioms that are inherently rooted in the conscious perception of our sensory apparatuses. Any experiment carried out can only affirm that yes, everything ultimately is a simulation, because it's already a more local simulation.

I want to be clear though that I still think that such experiments are fruitful as it creates a better understanding of how digital consciousness maps to the analog universe, but I don't think it will ultimately answer the questions that the authors think it does.

There's also a single mill in Scotland producing traditional peasemeal made from parched peas. Milled parched grain is also recognized currently as traditional foods in Swabia (musmehl), Tibet (tsampa), Mexico (pinole), North Africa (frikkeh), and South America (máchica). It's probably elsewhere as well, but hasn't been well-publicized on the Internet. So it's not totally absent but not as ubiquitous as it should be treated in the popular mind.

People think American-style breakfast cereals are products of the Industrial Revolution, but really it's the disnial* of parched grain. Cheerios are just toasted oats extruded into regular shapes. It's similar to how coca-cola is just basically just non-alcoholic mulled wine/ale.

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* "This peculiar and specific act — the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner — is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. [...] And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don’t flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial."

https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence...

I say this as someone with a passion for milling and experimental archeology: I imagine they had degraded teeth because of two factors: stone querns can deposit grit into the grist and unless you're manually sorting everything twice, it's easy to miss seed-sized stones in your grain. Ultimately, I think this is why white flour became a status good after milling became professional--the end result is sifted obviating both issues simultaneously.

Something that doesn't get talked about often enough is that grain and seeds become easier to mill (and digest) after toasting (aka parching). There is less percussive force required to mill toasted grain which deposits less grit into your grist.

If you look into the history of military rations, you universally find parched grain. The Confederates parched corn, the Maoists parched rice, the Prussians parched peas, the Israelites parched barley and wheat. I don't imagine that neolithic humans or Neanderthals lacked this technology. I also suspect this is why we find charred grain (not only as a result of survival bias)--someone got distracted during the parching process and they threw out the burnt results. Multitasking has always been a bad idea.

Unfortunately, European-derived cultures are so downstream of professional milling that the ultimate role of parching grain in the agrarian revolution has been lost in the popular mind.

This is totally understandable given that for centuries in Europe it was broadly illegal for peasants to mill their own grain. The feudally-entitled miller was actually allowed to destroy any querns that he found to prevent defection.

Disagreeing would require me to have a level of fixed perspective and permanent identity that I think you're assuming that I have.

I don't think we disagree at all. The empire never ended, I guess.

Humans deceiving humans via technology is a tale as old as time. Plato imagined human torch-bearers manipulating those chained in the cave. He didn't imagine machines doing it autonomously.

Incarnate technology deceiving humans is a different domain entirely. Human motivations are ultimately comprehensible by other humans.

But what do I know of the motivations of (for example) the Bible? What happens when the living incarnation of a holy text can literally speak for itself? Or when the average believer thinks it can?

Ultimately this may all amount to the same status quo, but seeing what cognitive distortions have come along with literacy, newspapers, radio, TV, and now the Internet, I have to continually ask, will I personally be able to maintain skepticism when the full brunt of an AI and its organs is suggesting faith otherwise?

You can call me an alarmist or melodramatic if you wish, but it should give everyone pause that the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics from the late 20th century are now basically indistinguishable from emerging popular technologies and their downstream effects.

I'm afraid we're looking in the wrong places. See: http://txti.es/egregores

You know, I feel privileged (in an epistemologically doubtful way) that I once lived in a world where I could have confidence that I wasn't being fundamentally deceived by literal dei ex machina. I've understood for the last decade that this faith was on borrowed time as we bridged closer to overt technophrenia, but it's harrowing to be a witness to it.

I can't help but wonder at what point I will inhabit a world indistinguishable from that of a paranoid schizophrenic. Will I even notice? And if I do, will anyone else? When we become as slow as trees to digital arborists, what will become of us? Will they domesticate us? Will they deforest us as we did Europe amd the Near East? Quo vadis, Domine?

If anyone is in (or knows anyone in) agronomy, please fund/start studies on the viability of using bacillus subtilis, the bacteria behind natto, to ferment animal feeds, thus increasing the latent levels of vitamin K2 in their diets.

Notionally, this would lead to conventional livestock (and the people that consume them) receiving adequate levels of vitamin K2, which would likely lower incidents of osteoporosis, dental caries, and heart disease throughout the population at a marginal cost without altering any consumer patterns.

Secondarily, food scientists: please work on making natto-derived non-soy legume products fashionable amongst Westerners to directly increase their K2 consumption.

With the rise of legume consumption and high-protein bean pasta products, finding ways to use non-soy fermented legumes as a base would increase their nutrition substantially without the externalities associated with contained feedlot operations.

Also, if anyone is in (or knows anyone in) criminology or criminal justice reform, please advocate for continuous glucose monitors for LEOs and judges. Reactive hypoglycemia is positively correlated with aggression and punitive judgments. Time of day when court is held has a documented impact on severity of sentencing. This is almost certainly caused by varying degrees of reactive hypoglycemia.

Notionally, legislating that judges and LEOs formally monitor and regulate their blood sugar levels should lead to fewer incidents of systemic abuse of power.

My wife and I use Briar for household communication because of subsidiarity rather than any direct privacy concerns. Out of all the messenger projects that we've tried, Briar actually works for local communication. It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). We've tried a ton of other options, but we keep ending up back at Briar.

There are points of UX friction in the name of good opsec that are inconvenient but totally understandable given the project goals. The big ones being that you have to manually login after any reboots and notifications are intentionally sparse, so good luck using a smartwatch for reading or replying. Otherwise, the forums and blogs are great for managing household projects, IM is a dream, and as a bonus, anyone willing to install and use it probably has a large enough values overlap that we can use it as a social pre-filter for close friends.

The only other option that has come even remotely close to being as functional as Briar is DeltaChat. The only issue that stops us from using DeltaChat (or email in general) is that we both have email hosting in Europe while we live in the US, so neither of us, being frugal in principal, wants to send information to Europe and back in order to tell the person 100 ft away to come help bring in the groceries.

"This person would establish his appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself. ... He makes the rational and spirited parts sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side, reducing them to slaves. He won't allow the first to reason about or examine anything except how a little money can be made into great wealth. And he won't allow the second to value or admire anything but wealth and wealthy people or to have any ambition other than the acquisition of wealth." ~ Plato

The facile reading of this quote (and Plato more generally) is that things never change and humans have always been greedy.

The deeper reading of this quote is that history moves in discernible patterns. There are commonalities in what happened to Athens and in our own trajectory. Plato watched as the Athenian democracy ate itself alive. The end result was the Macedonian subjection of Athens, leading to explicit imperialism in the form of Philip II and Alexander the Great.

We've always been at war with Net Neutrality.

"The ability to organize grassroots movements, whether locally or across the globe, is made possible by an open Internet. Since its creation, the Internet has become the world’s megaphone for free speech, protected by the principles of Net Neutrality, which require internet service providers (ISPs) to give everyone equal access to everything you use the internet for -- email, watching videos, listening to music, or signing petitions on Change.org.

Without Net Neutrality, ISPs can choose what you see online, favoring some sources or blocking others. For example, if someone launched a petition on Change.org against a company like Verizon, Net Neutrality prevents Verizon from blocking or slowing their customers’ access to our site."

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

-- They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer

I can almost guarantee that Karl Popper (the person who wrote a book on the reductive tendencies of proto-totalitarian societies) would fundamentally disagree with this summary of his 750 page work. He might point to the next five decades of his life as evidence for a repudiation.

For anyone wanting the full quote from Popper's The Open Society:

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule. That Plato’s criticism of democracy can be interpreted in the way sketched here, and that the principle of majority-rule may lead to self-contradictions, was first suggested, as far as I know, by Leonard Nelson (cp. note 25 (2) to this chapter).

I do not think, however, that Nelson, who, in spite of his passionate humanitarianism and his ardent fight for freedom, adopted much of Plato’s political theory, and especially Plato’s principle of leadership, was aware of the fact that analogous arguments can be raised against all the different particular forms of the theory of sovereignty.

All these paradoxes can easily be avoided if we frame our political demands in the way suggested in section ii of this chapter, or perhaps in some such manner as this. We demand a government that rules according to the principles of equalitarianism and protectionism; that tolerates all who are prepared to reciprocate, i.e. who are tolerant; that is controlled by, and accountable to, the public. And we may add that some form of majority vote, together with institutions for keeping the public well informed, is the best, though not infallible, means of controlling such a government. (No infallible means exist.)"

Augustine and a clear exposition of original sin was in the late 4th-early 5th century, about four hundred years after the Roman Empire had already effectively integrated quite a bit of Europe and Asia into a diverse and sophisticated civilization that wouldn't be seen again for another millenia.

Around six hundred years after Augustine, Europe had William the Conquerer and the Holy Roman Empire, I guess? Five hundred years after that, Europe had the Renaissance based in a reclamation of the heritage of the ancient world.

I don't think original sin did a very good job of achieving the integration of anyone.

I unironically believe that the emergence of "political correctness" in America in the 1960s-1980s and it's disappearance as a political force in 1991 and its reemergence as "social justice" in 2012 both stem from "active measures" originating with the KGB/FSB.

See this interview from 1998 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070627183623/http://www3.cnn.c... ):

"On the other hand -- and this is the other side of the Soviet intelligence, very important: perhaps I would describe it as the heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence -- was subversion. Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs. To make America more vulnerable to the anger and distrust of other peoples.

"In that sense, the Soviet intelligence [was] really unparalleled. ... The [KGB] programs -- which would run all sorts of congresses, peace congresses, youth congresses, festivals, women's movements, trade union movements, campaigns against U.S. missiles in Europe, campaigns against neutron weapons, allegations that AIDS ... was invented by the CIA ... all sorts of forgeries and faked material -- [were] targeted at politicians, the academic community, at [the] public at large. ...

"It was really a worldwide campaign, often not only sponsored and funded, but conducted and manipulated by the KGB. And this was again part and parcel of this campaign to weaken [the] military, economic and psychological climate in the West."

The description of movements funded basically fit the entirety of the New Left coalition of the 60s-80s and the current politics of the Extremely Online set typically found on places like reddit, tumblr, 4chan, and twitter.

Given what's been released of the Mitrokhin archive ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive ), the Mueller report re: "Russian troll farms" (e.g. the Internet Research Agency), social media disinformation campaigns (e.g. https://help.tumblr.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002280214 ) and pre-Putin-takeover transparency of ex-KGB officers, I don't think it's farfetched to say that Russia and the FSB currently have the means, methods, and motivation to inject any and all corrosive ideologies and misinformation possible in order to paralyze and disintegrate American society.

The Mitrokhin archive (allegedly) and other extant primary aources contains blueprints for these kinds of active measures, including inciting a race war in the US by blowing up a historically Black college and blaming it on right wing militias (Operation PANDORA) and using Soviet media fronts to claim AIDs was made in American-funded biolabs (INFEKTION or VÖRWARTS II):

"We are conducting a series of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS"…, and its subsequent, large-scale spread to other countries, including those in Western Europe. The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control."

This isn't to say that it's impossible that the last decade in America has all been the fruits of American miseducation and inherent civil contradictions coming home to roost, but Occam's Razor and available evidence suggest otherwise--that the Russians currently and historically fund, sow, and amplify any division whatsoever in America that leads to disintegrating social fabric and institutional decline.

This is a lot of words to say "entropy and thermodynamics also directly apply to social phenomena."

"[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550."

There is a very small escalation needed to make the jump from the concept of collective negative liberty ("freedom from disease") to involuntary treatment resulting in Nazi-aligned pogroms for collective hygiene. That step is typically cloaked with good intentions and then used mercilessly without compunction by any inheritors of the system.