Here is a 1 hour 40 minute debate on the issue of whether Britain should have stayed out of the First World War.
I'm very surprised by this outcome. British people, apparently, can be moved by debate. This is in contrast to my own hypothesis that debate accomplishes nothing. What is also interesting is that 10% of the audience did not vote the second time.
Proposition----------------------------Before---After
Britain should not have fought------19-------27
Britain should have fought-----------40-------62
Don't know--------------------------------41-------1
The speakers who thought Britain should have fought constantly made reference to WWII and tried to conflate the Kaiser to Hitler and the Nazis, because the position would have been untenable otherwise. They say that the Germans executing 7000 Belgian civilians was the worst atrocity ever until the Holocaust and was more than enough justification for Britain to go to war, but ignore the millions of Congolese the Belgians murdered under King Leopold's reign. I have no sympathy for the Belgians. They were horrible people in 1914 and they're still the absolute moral anus of the entire universe in 2016. The Belgians are the most immoral people who have ever lived, and if 7000 had to die to assure a quick, largely bloodless war between Germany and France in a repeat of 1870, then so be it. Had the BEF not stepped in at the Marne in 1914 there would have been no WWI. The Ottomans and Italy would not have entered, France would have been defeated in a few months (the German army was very close to Paris in September), and Russia, having lost all its allies, would have sued for peace.
France and Russia have always been the historical enemies of Britain. Russia, in particular, under the Tsar, was the most repressive state in Europe at the time. They were much worse than the Germans, who had the highest standard of living, the highest concentration of scientific and artistic geniuses, and the most freedom of any of the peoples on the continent.
The only allegedly bad thing the Germans did was engage in a very brief arms race in the building of warships, with an explicit goal of far less than the British navy. The Germans never wanted to be a threat, and they quickly abandoned the aim of expanding their own navy. Really, Germany just wanted its own place in the sun. The ancient regimes of Europe had already established their own global empires, and Germany, barely 40 years old by that point, wanted a little something for itself. They didn't want to conquer the world, or even Europe, they didn't want to depose Britain's rule of the sea, they didn't want lebensraum or to exterminate people, the Germans were not a threat to Britain. And if the Germans had political domination Europe in 1914, would that really be such a bad thing? Not for Britain. Germany would have in a stroke defeated Britain's two chief rivals. France would no longer be posturing in Africa, and Russia would no longer be trying to make inroads in Afghanistan. Britain would have come out on top had Germany won a brief European war in 1914!
Furthermore, had Germany won in 1914 the great problems of the 20th and 21st centuries would likely not have happened, certainly not to the scale that they did. The collapse of the European colonial empires led to massive problems that continue to this day. You can't expect to introduce cavemen to the 20th century and have them become modern people in a single generation. Because the colonies in Africa had lasted for such a brief time there was no chance for the African peoples to modernise sufficiently to allow for self-rule in a modern global society. You give modern weapons to cavemen you're going to have a bad time. The Europeans introduce guns and a global economy and then after a generation they leave. It's no surprise Africa is so fraught with corruption and genocide today, the natural violent tendencies of peoples who have been slaughtering one another for millennia had now been given geopolitcal legitimacy and modern weapons.
The partition of India was a disaster. The British knew it would have happened, and they just drew a line on a map, threw up their hands, and left. For 500 years the Muslims had brutally subjugated the Indians. In a free and democratic India, with Muslims outnumbered 10 to 1, their grip on power would evaporate and fear of reprisal loomed. Rather than take responsibility like adults, the British instead split India into Muslim Pakistan, and Everyone else India, and then left knowing 2 million people would be killed in the mass exodus that was to follow.
And let us not forget Arabia. You kick the Turks out and promise the Hashemite dynasty self-rule and then you stab them in the back, give half the land to the French who did absolutely nothing to deserve it, and renege on your promise to defend the Arabs from the vicious, repressive, theocratic Saudi clan who swept in and took control, introducing Wahhabism to the region, creating the second moral anus of the universe and sewing the seeds of global Islamic terrorism.
And that's just the colonies! Had Germany won in 1914 there would never have been a Holocaust. The Nazis would have never taken power and Hitler would have starved on the streets of Vienna. Lenin would have never escaped his exile and communism would never have taken hold in Russia, leading to the disaster of tens of millions of dead and the terror of Stalin. There would have been no Second World War that left 60 million dead if Germany had won in 1914. Without communism in Russia there would have been no rise of Mao in China, with the 500 million dead in the wake of the most repressive regime in human history. Tibet and Turkestan would be free. There would be no Cold War, no divided Korea, no Vietnam, no war in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. Had Britain stayed out of the war and allowed Germany to have a quick victory hundreds of millions of people would not have been murdered and the world would be a far safer place today.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Sri Sathya Sai Mobile Hospital
Sathya Sai Baba created a mobile hospital unit as an extension of his free health service to the poor. They travel around Andhra Pradesh to serve villagers who cannot travel to brick and mortar hospitals.
Runs 15 minutes.
Runs 15 minutes.
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
A Very Brief Introduction to Dragons
Were dragons real? Think about it, virtually every culture on earth, throughout all of history, has spoken of giant flying reptiles. All these stories can't possibly trace back to a single source. There has to be something deeper going on here.
The obvious problem is we don't find dragon bones. But we don't find the bones of lots of things. The number of unique human fossils could fill a bathtub, and a great many dinosaur species are known from a single bone (including the largest dinosaur ever discovered, which was identified by one bone that was destroyed in WWII in an air raid, and no other bones have been discovered since). Since fossils of anything are very rare it is not at all surprising that dragon fossils are rare, or non-existent.
What if we are looking in the wrong place?
People from all over the world who take certain hallucinogenic plants report seeing the same beings. One commonly encountered being is a man with an alligator head, and this alligator headed man says the same things to everyone. It can't all be a case of suggestion, where people encounter what they expect based on second-hand sources. What I suspect is that these are real non-physical beings who don't look like anything, being non-physical, but they assume a certain form in the mind of the person having the experience out of convenience.
What if dragons are like that? Dragons are not flesh and blood reptiles, they are non-physical beings encountered in altered states. That would explain why they can live for thousands of years, why they are wise beyond the limits of human intelligence, and why they are only encountered at the end of an arduous quest undertaken by an individual who has had specific preparation. What if going out to slay a dragon did not involve a knight suiting up in armor and riding off to battle a dinosaur, what if it involved fasting, and sensory deprivation, and ingesting certain hallucinogenic plants, and then the knight doesn't kill the dragon, the knight's encounter with the dragon allows him to eliminate negative qualities within himself? That is why only particularly pure knights of great spiritual fortitude could go out to meet with dragons, because the psychic shock would be disastrous for a lesser mortal (like a very bad trip). In that sense then dragons are not the enemy, they are the ally.
The obvious problem is we don't find dragon bones. But we don't find the bones of lots of things. The number of unique human fossils could fill a bathtub, and a great many dinosaur species are known from a single bone (including the largest dinosaur ever discovered, which was identified by one bone that was destroyed in WWII in an air raid, and no other bones have been discovered since). Since fossils of anything are very rare it is not at all surprising that dragon fossils are rare, or non-existent.
What if we are looking in the wrong place?
People from all over the world who take certain hallucinogenic plants report seeing the same beings. One commonly encountered being is a man with an alligator head, and this alligator headed man says the same things to everyone. It can't all be a case of suggestion, where people encounter what they expect based on second-hand sources. What I suspect is that these are real non-physical beings who don't look like anything, being non-physical, but they assume a certain form in the mind of the person having the experience out of convenience.
What if dragons are like that? Dragons are not flesh and blood reptiles, they are non-physical beings encountered in altered states. That would explain why they can live for thousands of years, why they are wise beyond the limits of human intelligence, and why they are only encountered at the end of an arduous quest undertaken by an individual who has had specific preparation. What if going out to slay a dragon did not involve a knight suiting up in armor and riding off to battle a dinosaur, what if it involved fasting, and sensory deprivation, and ingesting certain hallucinogenic plants, and then the knight doesn't kill the dragon, the knight's encounter with the dragon allows him to eliminate negative qualities within himself? That is why only particularly pure knights of great spiritual fortitude could go out to meet with dragons, because the psychic shock would be disastrous for a lesser mortal (like a very bad trip). In that sense then dragons are not the enemy, they are the ally.
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Post Economics
Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.
Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.
Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.
Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.
Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.
Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.
Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.
The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.
For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.
So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.
I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Was the Remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still About Colonialism?
One thing to note at the beginning, the aliens in the original were very liberal. They don't care what any species does on its own planet as long as no one tries to initiate violence between planets. They set up, in Klaatu's words, a police force of robots to kill anyone who tried to initiate violence, and that was the entire scope of the galactic government. The government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't try to hurt anyone else (you can hurt yourself all you want). The supreme directive of the aliens is that interpersonal violence is the supreme evil. And all involvement in the galactic government was voluntary. You didn't have to abide by the interplanetary law if you wanted to keep to yourself on your own planet, but if you did decide to join the galactic government there was no way to go back on that decision.
The aliens in the remake are authoritarian, if not outright genocidal. They glorify violence if it achieves their goal of protecting barely sentient life like bacteria or moss. Interplanetary law is imposed on all planets without any warning or announcement. Not only can you never leave, you don't even get to decide whether you join or not, you are born into the legal system and there are no alternative systems to escape to. The galaxy is a prison and you're stuck in it.
Now to think about colonialism you have to think about how the message from the aliens in the remake does not make any sense.
Planets that can support complex life are so rare in the universe that the aliens have to kill all humans because humans are polluting the Earth. And to do this the aliens don't use some hi-tech weapon that will kill ONLY humans and spare everything else, they release an exponentially expanding plague of robots that eats absolutely everything, including rock, erasing completely a biosphere that took millions of years to develop, and then they will re-seed the now totally barren, lifeless Earth with animals they saved from their zoo. And they think this plan can actually work. You strip the planet down to bedrock, cover that with a blanket of gazillions of dead robot bugs, and then place a small handful of plants and animals rescued from the handful of ships, and hope that the one pair of elephants doesn't eat the one grove of trees that gets planted and dooms all life on Earth to extinction permanently because now not only has the biosphere been wiped clean but all the zoo animals have died.
This plan can never work. Raising endangered animals in captivity and releasing them into the wild only works because there is a wild to release them into. If the wild is destroyed completely and the endangered animals are released into barren rock then the released animals will die too because there's not enough food to go around.
What if the aliens terraform the Earth again over millions of years? Maybe they will, but that still sets life back millions of years. They still have to keep the elephants alive on the tiny little ships for millions of years, and they clearly didn't bring enough plants with them to do that, unless the aliens feed all the animals the magic placenta material until new forests have developed. You can't have terraforming and Noah's Ark at the same time. If the aliens want to terraform the barren Earth then they'll have to accept that all the complex life they claim to cherish so much will go extinct, by their own hand, and evolution will have to start over again from bacteria. If the aliens want to preserve complex life they would have developed a human-specific virus that would have spared all other species. The aliens want to do both at the same time and would probably end up achieving neither.
So, since the alleged motivation and plan of the aliens makes absolutely no sense then we can suppose one of two things: 1. The writers never bothered to think things through and just got drunk and slapped a CGI-crapfest together in a weekend, or 2. The aliens are lying.
We're rational beings here, we know 1 is the correct answer, but just for fun let us assume the writers were intelligent and what they really intended was 2.
The aliens were hostile from the beginning because they wanted the Earth for their own use. They come to Earth and tell a couple of humans "You are not using your resources efficiently enough. We can use them more efficiently, so you must die." Mind you the aliens can control all electricity and all electronic devices, they have an unlimited power source, are capable of faster than light travel, and they can cancel inertia, they could easily transmit a signal to TVs, radios, and computers simultaneously without needing to physically meet at the UN building. This fact alone makes it look like a setup. The aliens could warn the planet but they decide to warn a handful of military personnel instead?
The aliens are classic invaders, and they are justifying their invasion in colonialist terms. The Chinese are not "invading" Tibet, they are "peacefully liberating" it, because the Tibetan people do not know how to live properly and must be "educated" and freed from the "oppression" of their government. Meanwhile half the population is "liberated" from living, all the Tibetan resources are extracted for Chinese use, and all the Chinese nuclear waste is dumped in Tibet.
Similarly, the aliens are not "invading" the Earth because they want to exploit it for themselves, they are "peacefully liberating" the Earth from the human "infestation".
Think about it. What is the difference between what humans are doing and what all other species do? Contrary to what Agent Smith said in the first Matrix, animals do not seek equilibrium, equilibrium just establishes itself naturally because the exploitative capacity of any group of animals is finite and is usually in line with the capacity of other competing species to avoid exploitation. When all the restraints are removed any species will use up all available resources until nothing is left. This is seen in every situation with an invasive species. Rats accidentally land on an island and within a few years all the native ground-nesting birds are extinct. The rats were not seeking equilibrium, they were following their biological directive to seek out resources and use them to make more rats. At the very least one can say humans are no more selfish than any other species, just that human capacity far exceeds that of all other species, so there is no competition, humans completely dominate in every environment, in every sphere of activity. In that sense humans are the most animal-like animals on the planet.
The one thing Humans have beyond other animals is rational intelligence. As smart as they are, chimpanzees and dolphins not only don't care about the environment, they do not know what an environment is. Not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things, humans developed the concept of an environment and realised "If we follow our biological directive and eat everything then there won't be anything to eat in the future, so if we want to survive we have to put limits on our biological directive and utilise the available resources in a more efficient way." Humans are the only creature on Earth that has ever had that thought. Humans are then, simultaneously, the only creatures capable of destroying the biosphere, the only species capable of preserving the biosphere, and the only species that knows what a biosphere is.
And in 4 billion years that thought has only arisen ONCE. The very same thought the aliens claim to profess only ever arose in ONE species on the Earth, and the aliens want to exterminate the ONE species like themselves, the ONE species that had moved beyond instinctual selfishness to rational selfishness and, in some cases, rational altruism. (It is mysterious to note that the event that led Keanu to spare humans was a single instance of a mother comforting her child, which is something most mammals do to preserve their own genes and is thus an instinctually selfish act, rather than, say, agriculture, or treaties limiting fishing or pollution, or the whole concept of protecting endangered species, or nuclear nonproliferation treaties that have done more to protect the environment than anything.)
The aliens, then, are more selfish than the humans. The aliens are not more moral, they just create moral-sounding language to justify their selfishness. This is the same thing all colonial powers do. The natives are too ignorant, or to racially inferior, or they are simply being oppressed, and so the moral colonialists must move in and take over, kill the ruling class (the humans) and use their technological, intellectual, and moral superiority to uplift the lives of the oppressed natives (other animals and plants). Not enough is known about the aliens' culture to say for certain which mode of colonialism best applies, but they seem very similar to Communist China to me.
Was that what the writers intended when they came up with this remake of the great sci-fi classic? Not a chance, they were just making a popcorn flick, but it certainly has been entertaining to over-analyse the film.
The aliens in the remake are authoritarian, if not outright genocidal. They glorify violence if it achieves their goal of protecting barely sentient life like bacteria or moss. Interplanetary law is imposed on all planets without any warning or announcement. Not only can you never leave, you don't even get to decide whether you join or not, you are born into the legal system and there are no alternative systems to escape to. The galaxy is a prison and you're stuck in it.
Now to think about colonialism you have to think about how the message from the aliens in the remake does not make any sense.
Planets that can support complex life are so rare in the universe that the aliens have to kill all humans because humans are polluting the Earth. And to do this the aliens don't use some hi-tech weapon that will kill ONLY humans and spare everything else, they release an exponentially expanding plague of robots that eats absolutely everything, including rock, erasing completely a biosphere that took millions of years to develop, and then they will re-seed the now totally barren, lifeless Earth with animals they saved from their zoo. And they think this plan can actually work. You strip the planet down to bedrock, cover that with a blanket of gazillions of dead robot bugs, and then place a small handful of plants and animals rescued from the handful of ships, and hope that the one pair of elephants doesn't eat the one grove of trees that gets planted and dooms all life on Earth to extinction permanently because now not only has the biosphere been wiped clean but all the zoo animals have died.
This plan can never work. Raising endangered animals in captivity and releasing them into the wild only works because there is a wild to release them into. If the wild is destroyed completely and the endangered animals are released into barren rock then the released animals will die too because there's not enough food to go around.
What if the aliens terraform the Earth again over millions of years? Maybe they will, but that still sets life back millions of years. They still have to keep the elephants alive on the tiny little ships for millions of years, and they clearly didn't bring enough plants with them to do that, unless the aliens feed all the animals the magic placenta material until new forests have developed. You can't have terraforming and Noah's Ark at the same time. If the aliens want to terraform the barren Earth then they'll have to accept that all the complex life they claim to cherish so much will go extinct, by their own hand, and evolution will have to start over again from bacteria. If the aliens want to preserve complex life they would have developed a human-specific virus that would have spared all other species. The aliens want to do both at the same time and would probably end up achieving neither.
So, since the alleged motivation and plan of the aliens makes absolutely no sense then we can suppose one of two things: 1. The writers never bothered to think things through and just got drunk and slapped a CGI-crapfest together in a weekend, or 2. The aliens are lying.
We're rational beings here, we know 1 is the correct answer, but just for fun let us assume the writers were intelligent and what they really intended was 2.
The aliens were hostile from the beginning because they wanted the Earth for their own use. They come to Earth and tell a couple of humans "You are not using your resources efficiently enough. We can use them more efficiently, so you must die." Mind you the aliens can control all electricity and all electronic devices, they have an unlimited power source, are capable of faster than light travel, and they can cancel inertia, they could easily transmit a signal to TVs, radios, and computers simultaneously without needing to physically meet at the UN building. This fact alone makes it look like a setup. The aliens could warn the planet but they decide to warn a handful of military personnel instead?
The aliens are classic invaders, and they are justifying their invasion in colonialist terms. The Chinese are not "invading" Tibet, they are "peacefully liberating" it, because the Tibetan people do not know how to live properly and must be "educated" and freed from the "oppression" of their government. Meanwhile half the population is "liberated" from living, all the Tibetan resources are extracted for Chinese use, and all the Chinese nuclear waste is dumped in Tibet.
Similarly, the aliens are not "invading" the Earth because they want to exploit it for themselves, they are "peacefully liberating" the Earth from the human "infestation".
Think about it. What is the difference between what humans are doing and what all other species do? Contrary to what Agent Smith said in the first Matrix, animals do not seek equilibrium, equilibrium just establishes itself naturally because the exploitative capacity of any group of animals is finite and is usually in line with the capacity of other competing species to avoid exploitation. When all the restraints are removed any species will use up all available resources until nothing is left. This is seen in every situation with an invasive species. Rats accidentally land on an island and within a few years all the native ground-nesting birds are extinct. The rats were not seeking equilibrium, they were following their biological directive to seek out resources and use them to make more rats. At the very least one can say humans are no more selfish than any other species, just that human capacity far exceeds that of all other species, so there is no competition, humans completely dominate in every environment, in every sphere of activity. In that sense humans are the most animal-like animals on the planet.
The one thing Humans have beyond other animals is rational intelligence. As smart as they are, chimpanzees and dolphins not only don't care about the environment, they do not know what an environment is. Not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things, humans developed the concept of an environment and realised "If we follow our biological directive and eat everything then there won't be anything to eat in the future, so if we want to survive we have to put limits on our biological directive and utilise the available resources in a more efficient way." Humans are the only creature on Earth that has ever had that thought. Humans are then, simultaneously, the only creatures capable of destroying the biosphere, the only species capable of preserving the biosphere, and the only species that knows what a biosphere is.
And in 4 billion years that thought has only arisen ONCE. The very same thought the aliens claim to profess only ever arose in ONE species on the Earth, and the aliens want to exterminate the ONE species like themselves, the ONE species that had moved beyond instinctual selfishness to rational selfishness and, in some cases, rational altruism. (It is mysterious to note that the event that led Keanu to spare humans was a single instance of a mother comforting her child, which is something most mammals do to preserve their own genes and is thus an instinctually selfish act, rather than, say, agriculture, or treaties limiting fishing or pollution, or the whole concept of protecting endangered species, or nuclear nonproliferation treaties that have done more to protect the environment than anything.)
The aliens, then, are more selfish than the humans. The aliens are not more moral, they just create moral-sounding language to justify their selfishness. This is the same thing all colonial powers do. The natives are too ignorant, or to racially inferior, or they are simply being oppressed, and so the moral colonialists must move in and take over, kill the ruling class (the humans) and use their technological, intellectual, and moral superiority to uplift the lives of the oppressed natives (other animals and plants). Not enough is known about the aliens' culture to say for certain which mode of colonialism best applies, but they seem very similar to Communist China to me.
Was that what the writers intended when they came up with this remake of the great sci-fi classic? Not a chance, they were just making a popcorn flick, but it certainly has been entertaining to over-analyse the film.
Monday, April 11, 2016
20 Things Wrong with The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)
1. The kid was super annoying.
2. Gort was in 2 scenes, and he turned into a cloud of little bugs that ate everything in the second scene, for no reason.
3. The CGI Gort looks totally fake. They could have shot an actor on a green screen and made him look 20 feet tall like Xerxes.
4. Klaatu has magical powers that fluctuate depending on what the plot calls for at any given moment.
5. Klaatu has magical powers, full stop.
6. Klaatu kills people to show how violent and destructive humans are?
7. Life is so precious that the super advanced aliens need to abduct animals on an ark because they plan on killing every living thing on the planet?
8. The super advanced aliens invented a weapon that eats absolutely everything, including rocks, because they wanted to wipe out the humans. Why not just engineer a human specific virus and spare all the other creatures?
9. The alien super weapon can convert any random matter into more copies of itself regardless of the chemical composition of what it eats, and it can apparently generate a limitless supply of energy out of nothing.
10. If the aliens have free energy and they are so worried about humans polluting the Earth why not just give humans the free energy technology and solve the problem without killing anyone?
11. Klaatu makes one half-assed attempt at contacting all the world leaders and then decides "To hell with it," and releases the super weapon to destroy the planet.
12. Klaatu's people are hypocrites, as John Cleese points out. Klaatu's people DID destroy their home world, and in a fit of desperation developed free energy, and instead of giving other species the same opportunity, they decide to wipe them out instead.
13. Klaatu's people can cancel inertia, so why does he need the password to escape the government prison? Why doesn't he just blast his way through the walls?
14. The size of the killer bugs Gort transformed into varies depending on the scene. In one scene they are microscopic, in another they are clearly the size of common garden ants.
15. Klaatu DOES say "Klaatu barada nikto" but super loud "dramatic" music drowns it out.
16. Why did Klaatu's ship land on Earth in 1928 to pick up Keanu Reeves' body and then decide to come back in 2008 to kill all humans when humans were clearly making progress in saving the planet by that time. The worst time for ecological destruction was in the 1950s when thousands of open air nukes were being detonated. Pollution and environmental destruction have decreased since then, so humans are making progress, if at a somewhat slow pace. Klaatu should be able to appreciate that more people care about the environment now than ever before.
17. Klaatu destroys Gort in the end.
18. The device Klaatu uses to destroy Gort not only destroys all electronics on the planet, it stops everything mechanical, whether it is electronic or not!
19. Building on the horror from 18, think of all the people who died when all machines were destroyed? Every plane in the air fell to the ground, all submarines sank and were crushed in the ocean, everyone in an elevator is trapped and will suffocate, everyone on a ship is permanently stranded at sea unless they can paddle to shore, everyone who requires insulin will die now that there is no refrigeration, ALL vaccines and medicine will be wiped out, food production will decrease dramatically, 5 billion people, at least, will die. The annoying kid and the suspiciously attractive scientist will almost certainly die within the year. Rather than saving humanity, Klaatu has pretty much doomed humanity to the iron age permanently, since all the scientists and engineers who will be needed to rebuild the Earth's infrastructure will almost certainly die. It would have been a lot more merciful just to wipe everyone out rather than let billions of people starve to death.
20. WHY THE HELL DIDN'T KLAATU JUST GIVE HUMANS THE DAMN FREE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY?! That would have solved every single problem with the story. None of this makes any sense. That's why changing the story doesn't work. The 1951 story was perfect. "Humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets and the aliens don't want humans to spread war to outer space so they quarantine the Earth." Works perfectly. The 2008 story makes no sense. "Humans are polluting the Earth so aliens who completely destroyed their home planet with pollution will completely destroy the Earth and remake it without humans." That makes no sense. Just give humans the free energy and no one will ever pollute again! Then no one needs to die! It only takes a few seconds to think this through. The writers could have come up with something just as relevant to the 21st century as nuclear weapons were to the 1950s, but NO, they came up with something incredibly stupid with more plot holes than Swiss cheese! It does not make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
2. Gort was in 2 scenes, and he turned into a cloud of little bugs that ate everything in the second scene, for no reason.
3. The CGI Gort looks totally fake. They could have shot an actor on a green screen and made him look 20 feet tall like Xerxes.
4. Klaatu has magical powers that fluctuate depending on what the plot calls for at any given moment.
5. Klaatu has magical powers, full stop.
6. Klaatu kills people to show how violent and destructive humans are?
7. Life is so precious that the super advanced aliens need to abduct animals on an ark because they plan on killing every living thing on the planet?
8. The super advanced aliens invented a weapon that eats absolutely everything, including rocks, because they wanted to wipe out the humans. Why not just engineer a human specific virus and spare all the other creatures?
9. The alien super weapon can convert any random matter into more copies of itself regardless of the chemical composition of what it eats, and it can apparently generate a limitless supply of energy out of nothing.
10. If the aliens have free energy and they are so worried about humans polluting the Earth why not just give humans the free energy technology and solve the problem without killing anyone?
11. Klaatu makes one half-assed attempt at contacting all the world leaders and then decides "To hell with it," and releases the super weapon to destroy the planet.
12. Klaatu's people are hypocrites, as John Cleese points out. Klaatu's people DID destroy their home world, and in a fit of desperation developed free energy, and instead of giving other species the same opportunity, they decide to wipe them out instead.
13. Klaatu's people can cancel inertia, so why does he need the password to escape the government prison? Why doesn't he just blast his way through the walls?
14. The size of the killer bugs Gort transformed into varies depending on the scene. In one scene they are microscopic, in another they are clearly the size of common garden ants.
15. Klaatu DOES say "Klaatu barada nikto" but super loud "dramatic" music drowns it out.
16. Why did Klaatu's ship land on Earth in 1928 to pick up Keanu Reeves' body and then decide to come back in 2008 to kill all humans when humans were clearly making progress in saving the planet by that time. The worst time for ecological destruction was in the 1950s when thousands of open air nukes were being detonated. Pollution and environmental destruction have decreased since then, so humans are making progress, if at a somewhat slow pace. Klaatu should be able to appreciate that more people care about the environment now than ever before.
17. Klaatu destroys Gort in the end.
18. The device Klaatu uses to destroy Gort not only destroys all electronics on the planet, it stops everything mechanical, whether it is electronic or not!
19. Building on the horror from 18, think of all the people who died when all machines were destroyed? Every plane in the air fell to the ground, all submarines sank and were crushed in the ocean, everyone in an elevator is trapped and will suffocate, everyone on a ship is permanently stranded at sea unless they can paddle to shore, everyone who requires insulin will die now that there is no refrigeration, ALL vaccines and medicine will be wiped out, food production will decrease dramatically, 5 billion people, at least, will die. The annoying kid and the suspiciously attractive scientist will almost certainly die within the year. Rather than saving humanity, Klaatu has pretty much doomed humanity to the iron age permanently, since all the scientists and engineers who will be needed to rebuild the Earth's infrastructure will almost certainly die. It would have been a lot more merciful just to wipe everyone out rather than let billions of people starve to death.
20. WHY THE HELL DIDN'T KLAATU JUST GIVE HUMANS THE DAMN FREE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY?! That would have solved every single problem with the story. None of this makes any sense. That's why changing the story doesn't work. The 1951 story was perfect. "Humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets and the aliens don't want humans to spread war to outer space so they quarantine the Earth." Works perfectly. The 2008 story makes no sense. "Humans are polluting the Earth so aliens who completely destroyed their home planet with pollution will completely destroy the Earth and remake it without humans." That makes no sense. Just give humans the free energy and no one will ever pollute again! Then no one needs to die! It only takes a few seconds to think this through. The writers could have come up with something just as relevant to the 21st century as nuclear weapons were to the 1950s, but NO, they came up with something incredibly stupid with more plot holes than Swiss cheese! It does not make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Reincarnation Questions and Hypotheses
There are a few reasons I suspect reincarnation is both possible and exists:
1. As a child I had past life memories (I don't remember anything now). I stopped talking about it when no one believed me.
2. It is the best explanation for other children who have veridical past life memories.
3. It explains certain things about human development that we don't understand.
4. It makes sense mechanically, working as a sort of metaphysical version of gravity.
5. It's fair.
6. Pretty much everyone believed in reincarnation in some form until the 14th century. (Reincarnation, of at least certain individuals who suffer traumatic deaths, is still a part of orthodox Judaism today.)
The main questions that exist surrounding the idea of reincarnation are as follows:
1. Which of the two suggested mechanisms for reincarnation is accurate, the individual soul coming back life after life as all the world's religions suggest, or the new age model where different souls incarnate that are connected through an "over-soul"?
2. How long is the typical duration between successive incarnations on Earth?
There seems to be a great deal of leeway with this, depending on the belief of the person. Some people who believe in instantaneous reincarnation may indeed instantaneously reincarnate. In the Tibetan model rebirth takes place after 45 days, ideally, though with reincarnated lamas it looks like it usually takes 2 or 3 years. With a lot of people from the Second World War and the Holocaust they seem to have started coming back after 50 or 60 years. Yogananda suggests 200 years is a normal time. I suspect that people wait to reincarnate until after the whole family has died, so they can all meet up again before departing once more for Earth, although with sudden horrific deaths the wait time seems to be a lot shorter.
An enlightened being can reincarnate at will, but with the average person I suspect something akin to the Hindu system is in place where a person spends time in one of the astral heavens until the merit they accrued in the previous lifetime has expired (which may take hundreds or even thousands of years) before having to come back. This makes sense, metaphysically.
3. How many souls are there that are incarnating? Let's for the moment just talk about humans. (I suspect more advanced animals like apes and dolphins also reincarnate like humans, but we can't ask them so it's impossible to know. Also animals who have spent a great deal of time with humans, like pets, also may have individual rebirths. Generally it is said that wild animals, and I suspect plants too since recent studies with tomatoes and trees reveal that at least certain plants are conscious too, tend not to have individual souls, but I have no idea.) There are at least 8 billion human souls, and since the maximum number of humans possible on the Earth is assumed to be about 12 billion let's say that's the minimum number of individual souls. That would mean that the time between incarnations would necessarily be very short. If, on the other hand, there were 100 billion souls then the time between incarnations would be very long, since there have only been 108 billion people who have ever lived, so only a handful would have ever reincarnated. If there are 1 trillion souls then no one will ever need to reincarnate because it will take millions of years to run out and hopefully humanity will all reach enlightenment before then and we can be done with the Earth permanently.
4. Why are all, or most, of the faculties lost in the interim between incarnations? Babies, even of enlightened beings, still have to learn to walk and talk all over again, and very few people come here knowing calculus (reincarnation is, I think, the only explanation for genius as seen in people like Freeman Dyson who knew more about mathematics as a very young child than most people ever learn in a lifetime). You would think someone like the Dalai Lama who has come back 14 times now would be born knowing how to walk and talk, because he has that much more experience than an ordinary mortal.
It does seem that some memories sneak through, at least at the beginning. Young children exhibit xenoglossy, speaking languages they never learned, but they knew from a previous life. This universally disappears after 4 or 5 years. And with genius and rapid development of certain faculties there seems to be some degree of anemnesis at play. If you learned something ten times already then relearning it in your next life will be very easy.
These lists are in no way exhaustive. Rather, they serve as a useful summary of the situation.
1. As a child I had past life memories (I don't remember anything now). I stopped talking about it when no one believed me.
2. It is the best explanation for other children who have veridical past life memories.
3. It explains certain things about human development that we don't understand.
4. It makes sense mechanically, working as a sort of metaphysical version of gravity.
5. It's fair.
6. Pretty much everyone believed in reincarnation in some form until the 14th century. (Reincarnation, of at least certain individuals who suffer traumatic deaths, is still a part of orthodox Judaism today.)
The main questions that exist surrounding the idea of reincarnation are as follows:
1. Which of the two suggested mechanisms for reincarnation is accurate, the individual soul coming back life after life as all the world's religions suggest, or the new age model where different souls incarnate that are connected through an "over-soul"?
2. How long is the typical duration between successive incarnations on Earth?
There seems to be a great deal of leeway with this, depending on the belief of the person. Some people who believe in instantaneous reincarnation may indeed instantaneously reincarnate. In the Tibetan model rebirth takes place after 45 days, ideally, though with reincarnated lamas it looks like it usually takes 2 or 3 years. With a lot of people from the Second World War and the Holocaust they seem to have started coming back after 50 or 60 years. Yogananda suggests 200 years is a normal time. I suspect that people wait to reincarnate until after the whole family has died, so they can all meet up again before departing once more for Earth, although with sudden horrific deaths the wait time seems to be a lot shorter.
An enlightened being can reincarnate at will, but with the average person I suspect something akin to the Hindu system is in place where a person spends time in one of the astral heavens until the merit they accrued in the previous lifetime has expired (which may take hundreds or even thousands of years) before having to come back. This makes sense, metaphysically.
3. How many souls are there that are incarnating? Let's for the moment just talk about humans. (I suspect more advanced animals like apes and dolphins also reincarnate like humans, but we can't ask them so it's impossible to know. Also animals who have spent a great deal of time with humans, like pets, also may have individual rebirths. Generally it is said that wild animals, and I suspect plants too since recent studies with tomatoes and trees reveal that at least certain plants are conscious too, tend not to have individual souls, but I have no idea.) There are at least 8 billion human souls, and since the maximum number of humans possible on the Earth is assumed to be about 12 billion let's say that's the minimum number of individual souls. That would mean that the time between incarnations would necessarily be very short. If, on the other hand, there were 100 billion souls then the time between incarnations would be very long, since there have only been 108 billion people who have ever lived, so only a handful would have ever reincarnated. If there are 1 trillion souls then no one will ever need to reincarnate because it will take millions of years to run out and hopefully humanity will all reach enlightenment before then and we can be done with the Earth permanently.
4. Why are all, or most, of the faculties lost in the interim between incarnations? Babies, even of enlightened beings, still have to learn to walk and talk all over again, and very few people come here knowing calculus (reincarnation is, I think, the only explanation for genius as seen in people like Freeman Dyson who knew more about mathematics as a very young child than most people ever learn in a lifetime). You would think someone like the Dalai Lama who has come back 14 times now would be born knowing how to walk and talk, because he has that much more experience than an ordinary mortal.
It does seem that some memories sneak through, at least at the beginning. Young children exhibit xenoglossy, speaking languages they never learned, but they knew from a previous life. This universally disappears after 4 or 5 years. And with genius and rapid development of certain faculties there seems to be some degree of anemnesis at play. If you learned something ten times already then relearning it in your next life will be very easy.
These lists are in no way exhaustive. Rather, they serve as a useful summary of the situation.
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