Question 1. How does one remain sane in the face of a delusional society?By sticking to testable facts and by telling the truth about those facts, and asking others to do the same, and accepting this will make some people quite upset at you.
Here are some of the more obvious, testable facts that the American elites want ignored:
--- There are more humans than the planetary ecosphere has capacity to carry. This population overshoot is destroying the environment, which (in a vicious circle) lowers the carrying capacity of the planet. Every day we collectively deny we are beyond carrying capacity, we sentence ten thousand people to death by starvation. (3 million starved last year.)
--- We are at peak oil. All major fields are pumping at capacity, but production is flat globally and falling in many important locales (e.g., Mexico, North Sea).
--- And even if we weren't at peak, we would have to curtail fossil fuel use for climate reasons.
Despite these actual crises, the elites clearly want people to forget about science - to vote their faith or their gut, instead. The elites are pushing this ignorance notwithstanding the fact that, without science and advanced technology, 90% of the people on the planet would be dead in a decade, even without organized warfare. They would simply starve to death or die from treatable medical conditions. The elites expect to hide out with food and fuel supplies and armed guards until the proletariat has died back to the level where they can be kept as house niggers.
Based on what I've seen lately, the elites are going to get their way. People, unfortunately, are not rational. Tversky, and other psychologists and behavioral economists, have been demonstrating this in behavioral experiments for the last thirty years. Their scientific evidence for lack of rationality in human decision making is now a toolkit that sophisticated propagandists for the elites use to undermine the societal consensus for the scientific method.
Question 2. Who is really "pro-life"?Scientists are pro-life, all life! Armageddon fetishists may want to commit collective, species suicide or ecocide; but I don't.
Why is it necessary to defend the four hundred year old body of scientific knowledge acquired by the whole of Western civilization against a bunch of self-proclaimed ignoramuses?
If your mind hasn't been ruined by the school system that the elites have been wrecking for the last forty years, science is so much more interesting than the repetitive dreck they try to pass off as entertainment - TV celebrities, sports heroes, pop musicians, and their unending baby bumps. Same old same old.
Of course, the main competition is not celebrity media; its fundamentalist religion. Their attitude is also "same old same old". In fact, its so old that its a joke:
IN GOD WE TRUST
It was flooding in California. As the flood waters were rising, a man was on the stoop of his house and another man in a row boat came by. The man in the row boat told the man on the stoop to get in and he'd save him. The man on the stoop said, no, he had faith in God and would wait for God to save him.
The flood waters kept rising and the man had to go to the second floor of his house. A man in a motor boat came by and told the man in the house to get in because he had come to rescue him. The man in the house said no thank you. He had perfect faith in God and would wait for God to save him.
The flood waters kept rising. Pretty soon they were up to the man's roof and he got out on the roof. A helicopter then came by, lowered a rope and the pilot shouted down in the man in the house to climb up the rope because the helicopeter had come to rescue him. The man in the house wouldn't get in. He told the pilot that he had faith in God and would wait for God to rescue him.
The flood waters kept rising and the man in the house drowned. When he got to heaven, he asked God where he went wrong. He told God that he had perfect faith in God, but God had let him drown.
"What more do you want from me?" asked God. "I sent you two boats and a helicopter."
What more do you lunatics want from science? We sent you birth control, peak oil warnings, climate monitoring satellites, pollution control equipment, and alternative energy technologies.
If you are the kind of person who makes plans for the future, there are a few basic expectations that guide your plans. Most people assume that, since the sun has been going around the earth since before there were humans, that it will continue to do so for the rest of our lives and the lives of our progeny. Some people, though, believe that the world is coming to an end, real soon. These are drastically different expectations; and, unsurprisingly, they result in drastically different plans.
Unfortunately, science is not in control in America anymore. Our leaders believe in magical thinking. That means denying science, ignoring facts, putting church dogma before democratically-enacted laws, and attacking the "usual suspects" of authoritarian rulers: powerful women, intellectuals, people of color, and gays.
Question 3. How does one make a rational criticism of delusional/magical thinking?Delusional systems are self-sealing, and will simply label the critic an enemy. Al Gore tried to talk about the environmental problems, and got vilified.
Fundamentalist Christians have been recruiting cadre for decades and turning them loose to enforce religious correctness. One of the first differentiations fundamentalists make is that scientists "deny god". Scientists are demonized for thinking, because "thinking is the snare of the devil".
There is a new kind of "utopia" afoot in America, warming up for its brief turn on the blood-spattered stage of history. There are no mass murders in America, yet. (We have inflicted mass slaughter on an innocent country, Iraq.) But the climate for mass murder has been created. History shows us that the larger atrocities committed by fanatics rarely occur at the beginning of their regimes. The progression is always: differentiate, demonize, and destroy. We are at the doorstep of the destroy stage. The Tennessee UU shooting is a spark that may fizzle out or may catch. The McCain campaign to demonize Obama is pouring fuel on those sparks.
Insanity is not rational; but, when backed up with guns and soldiers, it is lethal.
As the new ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia. The cities were evacuated, factories and schools were closed, and currency and private property was abolished. Anyone believed to be an intellectual, such as someone who spoke a foreign language, was immediately killed. Skilled workers were also killed, in addition to anyone caught in possession of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, or any other modern technology.
http://www.cambodia.org/khmer_rouge /
I have no intention of being killed for my eyeglasses, my hard-won education, or my refusal to kowtow to power-hungry theocrats. I am no B'hai, believing that non-violence will save me from people with murder in their eye.
Nevertheless, fighting violence with violence is the last resort. We need to fight violence with common sense. More importantly, we can't just be anti-; we need to fight for a purpose. What has set this country adrift is its loss of purpose. It has been said that the New Deal put itself out of business. It created a prosperous America, which then turned around and voted for Reagan. But, now Reaganism has run its course; and America is again devoid of any purpose except cheerleading our military adventurism.
Therefore, I offer the following outline of new purpose as an answer to the questions I have posed.
Article 1:
A Scientific Purpose: A sustainable planet....if its not sustainable, then humanity has just been 4000 years of looting nature, with a very bad ending.
....6.5B people alive today; 3M starve every year.
............How can you be pro-life and not care about all this death?
Article 2:
A call to action (be good stewards of this planet - for our own continuation)
....Speaking truth to ignorance
............not sin & redemption; but ignorance & enlightenment
....I am dumbstruck at the self-destructive denial of reality, the willful ignorance.
............Fundamentalism is an affront to common sense.
....We must get people to think rationally again
............We must reduce emotionalism, which media pour on everything, like sugar.
....When people think, they will see the planet is in danger
............We need to move to alternate energy
............We need to use biotech
............We need to limit the population
Article 3:
The scientific worldview IS legitimate. It is not anti-human or un-spiritual....Its purposes and goals have created the means for billions to live.
....Its rise has limited, somewhat, the destructive irrationality of humanity
....We have enough knowledge to fix things; but not enough will
............Overpopulation is at root of all problems.
....The planet is finite; rationality is limited.
............Fundies must be stopped or life is over in our lifetime
....................They are wrong. Billions alive today, and more in future will pay for that.
....The world is unknowable but manipulable
............Fundies: it is neither. Scientists: it is both.
....There is emergence and "life" at every scale
............All life is connected
....................Horizontal gene transfer
....................Epigenetics
....................The origins of multi-celled life in endosymbiosis
Article 4:
We now read the book of life - why isn't everyone fascinated?There is a whole new world right here, but it is "invisible/microscopic". Like a god, it is everywhere, but mute. What does it mean when so many people do not accept its existence, much less try to comprehend it.
Just as it took knowledge to appreciate that Copernicus was right and the Catholic Church was wrong about heliocentricity, it takes knowledge to understand that evolution is proven beyond a doubt by massive genetic data banks that demonstrate the relationships of species, by detailed examination of the mutation rates of various genetic copying systems (polymerases).
To the creationists, the world is one big black propaganda operation, and god is the intelligence agency running the game.
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arendt
