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Michael Rupp friendica

It's Atheist Day!

Don't forget to celebrate by revealing your disbelief with somebody.

!Atheists in the open
Atheists in the open reshared this.

Sam Harris has a point, begging for the counter-points...

I believe that mentioning #SamHarris's name in mixed company can push #emotional #buttons on almost all people who have heard of him, or heard some of him, and even so for some people who have heard most of him. I think I know why that happens, but it's not why I am writing this. I have heard so much from him directly that I earnestly believe he is always ready to be wrong and change based on new evidence. However, he makes really strong cases for what he thinks, so if you disagree with what he is saying while he is saying it, you get the feeling that you are in a philosophical life or death struggle. I don't anymore because I have heard a sufficient amount of his spoken thoughts. I respect him a lot.

In his recent episode of #MakingSense "Can We Pull Back From The Brink?" (which seems to be a hot-take), he dispassionately discusses scale & judgment relative to the latest #uprisings and #police work—in earnest—hoping to find a way to make things better in a rational way. Give it a listen, please, maybe jot down notes so you don't let the good be the enemy of the bad.


What follows below is my reaction to his podcast above.

Regarding his "proximate cause" for the civil & uncivil unrest, I'd like to argue this is more accurate than Sam's claim.
#GeorgeFloyd, #Minneapolis #Protests, #AhmaudArbery & #AmyCooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show


Regarding his "if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind" part, I'm feeling a false dichotomy happening there. I'm no fan of #Anarchists ideals because they like #Libertarians don't present ideas that I can see as #sustainable or ideally doing the most good for the most people, but I agree with them in that what we are doing now isn't convincingly better.

Sam poses a world without cops vs. a world as it is. What about a world with different cops whos publicized mission matches their hidden agendas, and that type of police force is agreeable to the local public in a very democratic and constitutional-rights respecting way with real accountability for their actions?

Sam idealized "giving a #monopoly on #violence to the state" which if things weren't as they really are I could understand, but the reality is from the start we gave a monopoly on violence to a #mindfully chosen type of like-minded individuals who's direction came from only the #wealthy of #society. #Policemen and #prison #guards are far more like the depiction in A Clockwork Orange than they are in Blue Bloods. Sure, #NotAllCops, but it's supposed to be an ideal, a higher standard, and that is definitely not met.

It's also hard to know if my own #bias makes me feel the need to post this because Sam can say something in one in a sentence that makes me think of a rebuttal, and in the next sentence he will vindicate my thoughts, although I didn't hear it because of the distraction caused by the first sentence. Sam oddly uses some extreme examples of things that happened like firings from "woke-culture" for non-incidents to make his points—granted they were on the mass media so they have the power to cause #conventional #wisdom to be produced from thin air—but later in the podcast, he decided to claim the extremes causing the uprising were too #statistically #insignificant to justify the results on the ground. Not cool. Firings of well-to-do people for lousy reasons, bad, the #murder of black people for lousy reasons, not a significant thing statistically.

Sam, relative to #Democrats, reminds me of the dad-type who is harder on his own child than the rest of the world because he cares more about his own kid.

I'm not sure who Sam was listening to in general on the topic linked to #DefundThePolice to form his positions, but I think #TheDailyShow with #TrevorNoah does a far better job covering the concept than Sam did in his #podcast.
What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police?


Around 37 minutes in Sam starts to talk about the progress we have made with #RaceRelations in the #USA, and his points are valid, but I feel like the bright picture he presented was a sentence fragment that begged to be completed. A two-term black #POTUS (which Sam mentions), with the backlash of a #Trump (which he failed to juxtapose), and all that it has wrought since is not what I would consider a net gain in #Race #Relations.

Somebody who recently made this point, and is of better of recent notoriety than I, is Kimberly Jones. She eloquently states my position.
How Can We Win?


Sam goes on to justifiably suss out the difference between real and perceived patterns; the plural of anecdotal evidence is not data. A recent episode of Invisibilia agrees with him to some degree about how we can see a pattern where there isn't one because we have become #embattled by #acts of #aggression.
Trust Fall


He makes a lot of good points to shore up the mental space a #Cop might be stuck with based on what they experienced or were told by their superiors in the routine precinct meetings, but he didn't—to my liking—shore up the reasons why people economically below the middle-class citizen are also stuck in a mental space determining their actions based on their personal experience and that of their community. Change both their environments and cultures, and you'll change their actions. I'll offer a few places to find reasons to see things through the eyes of others if you haven't been out of your suburban cul-de-sac to find it out for yourself.





Later on, around 1:15:10 time mark, Sam starts to do a thing where he sees a statistical anomaly and without a good-enough theory of why there is an anomaly, he assumes things that I perceive as assumptions that are culturally forced on him based on his likely experiences to date.

His statement of, "we're talking about career criminals", to categorize police shootings as justifiable is a tip-off that the data is trusted on its face, and it bothers me that there is no acknowledgment that the path of a person who was cultured into being a "career criminal" could have started with a bogus arrest for marijuana consumption. People who haven't been flushed by the system think merits can save you. I, a white person from the middle-class, had many run-ins with the police where I undeservedly was let off the hook with a warning, and no records of mine were permanently kept in the system.
America Loves to Jail | I Love You, America on Hulu

Sarah on Her Criminal Past | I Love You, America on Hulu


Also, also, people without stuff may crime to survive, where people with means most likely crime to entertain themselves.

He mentions how Officer to Suspect interactions of the same race are more likely to be #violent. Like what if a like-race-category on the PD has more to prove to their coworkers when confronting a like-race-category "suspect". Since the incident of how PD's retaliate on anybody that crosses them in a cult-like way, e.g. the dismissal of LAPD's Chris Dorner the recently uncovered Buffalo PD case of Cariol Horne, it is very plausible that race discrimination or tacit racism pervasive in the PD's causes it the way a sidewalk in disrepair causes a bone injury. Did we even check to see if there's a bias in reporting where non-white officers are more likely to report things #truthfully? #Institutional #racism would come down hard on non-white employees and be forgiving of white employees.
8:46 - Dave Chappelle


He then jumps to a hypothesis that because blacks are more likely to #resist an #arrest because of real or perceived systematic racism problem, "the only response is for the police to increase their use of force". Damn Sam. That's the only choice they have? Like de-escalation techniques never worked? Like the way patrolling went in the months and years before the incident has nothing to do with how things go down? The cop's only choice was that. Sorry Sam, I reject your null hypothesis.

Maybe black on black violence outside police to non-police interactions wouldn't be so high if there wasn't a clear signal from the system that blacks don't matter to the police, and their bullshit arrests or stops & frisks are randomly distributed to make tally sheets on clipboards look right for municipal reporting. If an innocent black person was shaken down without #probable #cause and no tangible #justification, will they later call the cops when a local criminal act by a black person is being committed? If you are a skilled black criminal, will you cut in some of the local police on the action you are running? Any cop that don't give a fuck about black people would give a fuck more about a black person helping his kid get through college with side money. In the #Somebody Podcast linked above the Chicago PD's local precinct office couldn't find Courtney Copeland's killer with the evidence handed to them on a silver platter, I—personally—can only assume the cops are the mob.

Somewhere around 1:30:00 we hit a concept of what kind of people would want to be cops in such a #hostile #work #environment. "Who's gonna want to be a cop now?" Ugh! This smacks of, the only people that care about privacy are people doing something wrong, I ain't got nothing to hide. He further postulates that only prison guard type people will want to be cops. #WTF. Maybe if good people didn't think they were going to be gang-land retaliated against for doing the #morally #altruistic thing, they might take a chance on being a cop. If whistle-blowers didn't know by past examples that it would end all their #future #careers in one fell swoop, there might be more people doing good things for the world. Where's Reality Winner now? Our #dominating #culture propagated by those in power is #cancerous, and to extend the metaphor, many of us still think #smoking is good for their health. I would definitely want to go for it and become a cop if I didn't personally have reasons to see the PD's near me as corrupt from first and credible second-hand experiences.

Near the end, about 1:34:00, he's claiming the videos are warping our perception of the problem. I think in that he is putting the wrong weight on the value of loss and cascading ill-effects one police act of murder of a minority has on our country. We are supposed to be founded on all people are created equal, innocent until proven guilty, and so on.
What the Hell Happened This Week? | The Daily Social Distancing Show


Bear in mind, if I didn't mention something Sam said in his #podcast, it's about a 99% chance I agreed with him.

!Atheists in the open
This adds on nicely to the "rant" above. Mike Pesca, in the first 5 minutes (the only part I care about for this context), outlines how holding for one variable in statistics tells a whole different story than the one Sam was rationally presenting.

Give Up That Racist Tradition


Corona Virus to Clergy to COVID-19 hot-spots

Well, this isn't really a stunner ... to people who are more #scientifically schooled.

#Churches become willfully ignorant wholesale vectors of the #COVID-19 #Pandemic.
Authoritatively, #Traditions #Trump #Wisdom and all too early many #people #die.



!Atheists in the open

infantilisation | a regressive abuse

Something for @Atheists in the open

There's a great new post by TheraminTrees that overlaps a lot of problems which # causes in the world in a very subtle manner, almost negligently insidious in nature. I hope people find this liberating or at the least entertaining.


commanded to love | performing false emotions for tyrants

TheraminTrees has just put together another masterpiece. Aunt Julia is an awesome moment about 12 minutes in.
Spoiler Alert:
Click to open/closeCards to Aunt Julia that the child never met are a metaphor of Prayers to God.

This episode deals with #Narcissism and I wrongly assumed he was going to talk about #Trump. He didn't go there. I was pleasantly surprised to find out he was "giving away the game" that #Narcissists play on the rest of us and how to block and/or avoid those #psychological bad-trips.


#Religion #Atheism #Mindgames
!Atheists in the open

!Atheists in the open Not sure why, but this forum isn't listed anymore on the public directory.

Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)

double binds | narcissistic ‘no-win’ mind games

This is a gem for the @Atheists in the open #forum. It's hard to notice how frequently you are caught in these traps until you hear him map out some examples.

TheraminTrees is a wonderful contributor.


Can Christianity Save Western Civilization?

(Betteridge's law of headlines applies to the subject posed above)

For some #Atheists the content covered by DarkMatter2525 is old-hat; hashtag :yawn. The video at the bottom is his, the video on the top was what made him want to do it.

Rediscovering Faith: My Journey Back To Christianity


Can Christianity Save Western Civilization?



Time travel Jump-links to specific concepts:

Note: if you pass through from here to the YouTUBE site, his expanded video description section has all the documentation backing up what he says in this one.

If you want the long-form version of his response video where he plays the content of the top video above as he responds to it, he did post it; Christian Nationalism is a Bad Idea
!Atheists in the open #Christian #Nationalism

Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)

Hell's Angel (Mother Teresa) - Christopher Hitchens (The Truth about Mother Teresa)

While transferring my #Bookmarks out of #Google #Chrome and into my #Nextcloud #Server I found this gem to post on @Atheists in the open

Christopher #Hitchens calls the famed #Caholic #Nun, Mother Teresa, #Hell's #Angel.

Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)

Mr. Deity Episode 1: Mr. Deity and the Evil

Well, this is a fun #Atheist #Entertainment channel I didn't know about till this morning.

misterdeity YouTUBE channel

Mr. Deity Episode 1: Mr. Deity and the Evil




@Atheists in the open

Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)

false equivalents

This is a brilliant video. It gets at the core of so many of today's problems with #Relationships, competing group dynamics, #Religious intolerance, and so many more societal maladies. You can see it fit nicely onto #HateGroups from ordinary #Bigots all the way to #MassMurderers by #NeoNazis or other #WhiteSupremicy groups.



@Atheists in the open

Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)

YANSS 157 – The psychology behind why people don’t speak out against, and even defend, norms they secretly despise

This is an amazing #Podcast about how and why we get stuck in #GroupThink. Theirs a new buzz going around about #FreeSpeech but from the point of view of, "you're #Censoring me!" This podcast is focused on the, "why am I censoring me?" We are doing it because we don't realize that a majority of us think contrary to the incorrect conventional wisdom of the day, but we fear speaking out because we don't have evidence to support our silent dissenting thoughts are in the majority view, especially not within whatever our current social group is. People who might agree with you in private can't risk defiance of the group's thinking in public, so they will not be an ally. This makes us in aggregate doomed to stick with terrible ideas till enough catastrophy happens to the established leaders and the spell gets broken.
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/644509107&color=ff5500
@Atheists in the open
This entry was edited (5 years ago)

A Tower That Reaches The Heavens

If you appreciate cheeky things to say to annoy your #Priest, #Nun, #Sunday #School #Teacher, #Deacon, #Rabbi, #Preacher, maybe even #Imam, etc., then this story is for you.
Spoiler Alert
Click to open/closeIt hinges on the premise of the #Tower of #Babylon. If #God got his panties in a bunch over a 300-foot tall building, why not stop us from skyscrapers, space travel, Google Translate?

The show is a more playful romp than, "can God make a rock so big even he can't pick it up?"

@Atheists in the open
This entry was edited (5 years ago)

The Case for Abortion that Every Pro-Lifer Needs to Hear (Ft. Rachel Oates)

#Abortion and #AbortionRights are hot topics in the #US #News but these videos calm down the rhetoric and make salient #Scientific points to resolve the debate.

Part 1




Part 2


Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)
I have given this a lot of thought in the past. My content is still lounging on Blogger. Someday I'll migrate it all to my own server.

First I laid out why I thought Christians didn't have a leg to stand on with the X( - Pro-Lifers + their BS post.

Maybe relevant to your question, I fleshed out my theory about how its big business interests that drive Christian "soldiers" into a fight, (which is inherently racist because most people in poverty were of a race that was demonized and dehumanized and still loses from the actions of well-meaning Christians), so that their industries can benefit from the people who get denied abortions; War = Abortion?. (I just realized I have outdated links on that one :facepalm).

I also wrote another one that pulls the ProLife-rug out from under Christians; X( - The Golden Rule. [fail].

A hypothesis I never wrote about yet is, that most if not all of the true believers in the Right To Life movement have some form of PTSD from the loss of a child due to natural circumstances. Stillborns, intentional pregnancies that didn't take, etc. They tried so hard and have nothing from it, then... they see people being gifted with what they were denied and they lose their collective minds.
Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)
I'm going to have to friend connect to you in order to comment on the post. (I'm Friendica based)

Keebo friendica
Comic Book is a way different story than the movie
Michael Rupp friendica (via ActivityPub)
Been so long since I read a paper comic book I wouldn't know Thanos was ever in the paper versions. I think it was the 1980's that I last read one, and even then they weren't hot off the press.

tribalism

This TheraminTrees doesn't make a single bad video.



#Religion #Tribalism
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