Athletic Women - The Contemporary Feminine Ideal

The photo of two women in dresses is a typical photo from the 1950's in the USA, and the ideal feminine image of that era. The women and their clothes were not meant for anything adventurous such as alpine hiking, trail running, desert camping or hanging out in a gym. 

Social change of the 1960s began to challenge the narrow confines of the 50's woman. In 1967 Katherine Virginia Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. 

Men ceased to see outdoor adventures and time at the gym as a "chance to hang out with the guys" and instead saw those as ideal things to do with a girlfriend or wife. 

In the 1980's weightlifting gyms spread across the USA, with early dominant chains such as Gold's Gym. I was involved in that phenomenon in the 80's and 90's, and women were no small minority in those gyms. I was living in the South and Midwest in those years, a part of the country that doesn't trailblaze in social change, and yet as I said, women were in every gym I ever saw.

Feminists might use the image of the 50's to convince us what men want their women to be. In reality it is a rare type of man that would prefer the 50's women over the fit woman with the kettlebell. 

The emancipated woman in the fitness photo, we might assume she is also in law school, or a marketing professional, or a real estate agent operating in an upscale market. Fitness isn't mastered by the dumb, if she's fit she's also smart.

Any man capable of success is going to want a fit educated woman as his partner. Women don't need to worry about being pulled back into the 50's or into the Handsmaid Tale. The men that are going to be able to afford a house, and kids, is demanding...yes demanding...the woman to be fit, smart and rugged. 

Since the 1990's third wave feminism has pushed a more complex dynamic into all this. The latest feminism is proudly unfit, proudly obese, and full of nothing but contempt and hostility for  fit and badass women. Third wave feminism shames fitness and heterosexuality. It is a Mean Girls Club that insults and harasses any woman that is actually strong and intelligent. 

It is important for men, and fit smart women, to keep vigilant and know the Mean Girls Club is just our uglier end of the genetic pool trying to gaslight us into not seeing they are simply the very height of undesirable.

Appendix A: (somewhat related to the above blog entry)

"Men are just interested in big boobs" is a myth spread by fat lazy women. I see that claim plastered all over discussion threads where mostly women are posting. It stigmatizes men as simpletons, negates the trend towards liking fit women, and places a falsely higher value on a body shape fat lazy women tend to have.

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How to Inoculate Against Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory does not ask society to improve itself through laws, which is the only way a civilization can apply improvement.

CRT invents a new moral rule - a new "sin" - of which people can be guilty because of their relationship to a skin color. Unlike other sins - which you can see happening and try to avoid doing - you can only see the results of this new sin by listening to a certain kind of testimony which blames people's problems on this sin, and you can only resist this sin by accepting that testimony, which stridently insists that you accept a radical worldview and agenda.

In other words systemic or structural oppression isn't real. It doesn't help explain our experiences. CRT does not even TRY to describe what systemic/structural oppression is or the process by which it causes suffering. (In fact it aggressively beats back this line of questioning by asserting that rationality and cause-effect thinking are themselves systemic/structural oppression.)

CRT neophytes will sometimes cite overtly discriminatory policies like redlining or Jim Crow as examples. However, CRT academics and activists all agree that systemic/structural oppression is something else entirely, that personal bigotry and legal discrimination are merely manifestations of the underlying sin, and their decline does not indicate a decline in systemic/structural oppression.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

the-child-soldiers-of-portland/

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The Source of the West's Totally Wrong Radical Thought

First, take a scroll through the following photos. My writing resumes.

( The photos are of contemporary Chinese cities and infrastructure. )

What values lead to creating such a complex and technologically advanced environment? Implied by roads and high-rise residences, what kind of economy creates a massive amount of relatively wealthy people? 

I am not going to answer those questions, but I am going to answer with what doesn't.

What doesn't create these scenes is the shaming of wealth and the shaming of material things.  I am not villifying an individualistic pursuit of a simple life, but on a mass scale and baked into policy decision-making this is toxic and leads to a society that correctly can be called simpletons and will be servants for a more enterprising society.

If we look a bit wider at the philosophy Jesus preaches I think we'll see he favored the poor, and he preached the dangers of seeking wealth. This is his overwhelming message in the gospels.

…but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the Word, and it proves unfruitful.

Mark 4: 19    
 
17      And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 
18      And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 
19      You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and mother’.” 
20      And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 
21      And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
22      Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Mark 10: 17-22 (similar story in Matthew 19: 16-22) 
“Give to anyone who asks of you…”

Matthew 5: 42

 

19      “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 
20      but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 
21      For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

24      …You cannot serve God and money.

Matthew 6: 19-21, 24    
 

17      And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. 
18      Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 19: 23-24    

Mary’s Song of Praise (The Magnificat):

51      He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52      He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
53      He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.

Luke 1: 51-53




27      After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” 
28      And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
29      And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 
30      And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 
31      And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 
32      I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

Luke 5: 27-32  

  
“When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors… But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind…”

Luke 14: 12-13
__________

“You cannot serve God and money.” 

Luke 16: 13
__________

 

15      Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 

16      For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.

1 John 2: 15-16

Freeman Dyson: Biological Engineering for Space Colonization

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL

Freeman J. Dyson

Institute for Advanced Study

Princeton, New Jersey

IV.  Big Trees

I have spoken about the two first steps of biological engineering.  

The first will transform our industry and the second will transform

our earth-bound ecology.  It is now time to speak of the third step,

which is the colonization of space.  I believe in fact that biological

engineering is the essential tool which will make Bernal's dream of

the expansion of mankind in space a practical possibility.  

First I have to clear away a few popular misconcpetions about space

as a habitat.  It is generally considered that planets are important.  

Except for Earth, they are not.  Mars is waterless, and the others are

for various reasons basically inhospitable to man.  It is generally

considered that beyond the sun's family of planets there is absolute

emptiness extending for light years until you come to another star.  

In fact it is likely that space around the solar system is populated

by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich

in water and the other chemicals essential to life.  We see one of

these comets only when it happens to suffer a random perturbation of

its orbit which sends it plunging close to the sun.  It seems that

roughly one comet per year is captured into the region near the sun,

where it eventually evaporates and disintegrates.  If we assume that

the supply of distant comets is sufficient to sustain this process

over the thousands of millions of years that the solar system has

existed, then the total population of comets loosely attached to the

sun must be numbered in the thousands of millions.  The combined

surface area of these comets is then a thousand or ten thousand times

that of Earth.  I conclude from these facts that comets, not planets,

are the major potential habitat of life in space.  If it were true

that other stars have as many comets as the sun, it then would follow

that comets pervade our entire Galaxy.  We have no evidence either

supporting or contradicting this hypothesis.  If true, it implies

that our Galaxy is a much friendlier place for interstellar travelers

than it is popularly supposed to be.  The average distance between

habitable oases in the desert of space is not measured in light years,

but is of the order of a light day or less.  

I propose to you then an optimistic view of the Galaxy an an abode of

life.  Countless millions of comets are out there, amply supplied with

water, carbon, and nitrogen, the basic constituents of living cells.  

We see when they fall close to the sun that they contain all the

common elements necessary to our existence.  They lack only two

essential requirements for human settlement, namely warmth and air.  

And now biological engineering will come to our rescue.  We shall

learn how to grow trees on comets.  

To make a tree grow in airless space by the light of a distant sun is

basically a problem of redesigning the skin of its leaves.  In every

organism the skin is the crucial part which must be most delicately

tailored to the demands of the environment.  The skin of a leaf in

space must satisfy four requirements.  It must be opaque to far-

ultraviolet radiation to protect the vital tissues from radiation

damage.  It must be impervious to water.  It must transmit visible

light to the organs of photosynthesis.  It must have extremely low

emissivity for far-infrared radiation, so that it can limit loss of

heat and keep itself from freezing.  A tree whose leaves possess such

a skin should be able to take root and flourish upon any comet as near

to the sun as the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.  Farther out than

Saturn the sunlight is too feeble to keep a simple leaf warm, but

trees can grow at far greater distances if they provide themselves with

compound leaves.  A compound leaf would consist of a photosynthetic

part which is able to keep itself warm, together with a convex mirror

part which itself remains cold but focuses concentrated sunlight upon

the photosynthetic part.  It should be possible to program the genetic

instructions of a tree to produce such leaves and orient them correctly

toward the sun.  Many existing plants possess structures more

complicated than this.  

Once leaves can be made to function in space, the remaining parts

of a tree -- trunk, branches, and roots -- do not present any great

problems.  The branches must not freeze, and therefore the bark must

be a superior heat insulator.  The roots will penetrate and gradually

melt the frozen interior of the comet, and the tree will build its

substance from the materials that the roots find there.  The oxygen

which the leaves manufacture must not be exhaled into space; instead

it will be transported down to the roots and released into the regions

where men will live and take their ease among the tree trunks.  One

question still remains.  How high can a tree on a comet grow?  The

answer is surprising.  On any celestial body whose diameter is of the

order of ten miles or less, the force of gravity is so weak that a

tree can grow infinitely high.  Ordinary wood is strong enough to lift

its own weight to an arbitrary distance from the center of gravity.  

This means that from a comet of ten-mile diameter, trees can grow out

for hundreds of miles, collecting the energy of sunlight from an area

thousands of times as large as the area of the comet itself.  Seen

from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an

immense growth of stems and foliage.  When man comes to live on the

comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of

his ancestors.  

We shall bring to the comets not only trees but a great variety of

other flora and fauna to create for ourselves an environment as

beautiful as ever existed on Earth.  Perhaps we shall teach our

plants to make seeds which will sail out across the ocean of space to

propagate life upon comets still unvisited by man.  Perhaps we shall

start a wave of life which will spread from comet to comet without end

until we have achieved the greening of the Galaxy.  That may be an end

or a beginning, as Bernal said, but from here it is out of sight 

Dating in the Toxic Era 1980-2005

18 years old in 1980.

35 years old in 1997.

(all text after this point is "heteronormative", the entire context is heterosexual, because it is my life story and the things I was especially concerned with.)

As I began to be interested in dating and courtship, I wanted to be a good guy in relation to women. I supported feminism as far as women being able to pursue any career, any vibrant intellectual, athletic or adventurous activity. There are all kinds of archetypical bad guys in relation to women, and one might say I was trying to not be any of them.

That noble goal encountered a new wave of norms - progressives and feminists were deeming unwanted advances as a fundamental evil. 

I took the meaning of unwanted advances to it's logical conclusion: if I asked a girl out on date or implied an interest in anything beyond platonic, and she said no, then I have already committed the crime of an unwanted advance. 

Beyond being trapped in this logical conundrum, I was backed into a corner emotionally as well. 

Since all this was deeply seated and sincere, I had many many beautiful, charming, intelligent women spending time with me over the years. The more I thought highly of them, and felt they were precious, the more I doubled down on never committing a wrong so grave as an unwanted advance. And by unwanted advance I mean even uttering an interest in them beyond being friends.

Once in 1992 I was a fitness instructor at a physical therapy clinic, and the receptionist and I had this magical rapport. She was one of the most attractive women I've ever seen. A few months into being at the clinic and the owner took me aside and said the receptionist was very upset that I had suggested to her a guy she might like to date, he said she was so into me and traumatized by my not being interested.

In 1995 at the age of 33 an older female friend (this one truly platonic, not in my age group) was listening to me tell some personal experience, and she interrupted me and empasized that if a woman takes her clothes off she's wanting intimacy.

All the above may make a reader wince. For me it is just painful loss of opportunity. To me, even to this day and with all the self-criticism implied in this writing, logically I still see the barriers to having realized those relationships.

The common person would get past the barriers by believing in physical cues, context, things being implied without explicitly saying anything.

I can access all the above non-verbal and implicit communication, and often did pick up on it in real time. But here is the final inner barrier: how can we be sure these subtle acts are truly communicating what we assume? Ultimately, in the strictest sense, we don't know. We don't know if long engaging conversations mean an interest in more. We assume, but we don't know.

Enough on "unwanted advances", now we move on to the feminist war on physically fit healthy women.

Where I was born, progressives were pro exercise and fitness. When I moved to Seattle I encountered my next hurdle constructed by feminists - a hostility towards women being expected to be physically fit. 

I had been a fitness geek since 1989, a weightlifting instructor, long distance runner and mountain and desert hiker. My only, and I mean only, vision of life with my spouse was as a daily active lifestyle of inner city biking, and effortless hiking in the mountains, especially hiking and camping in the winter.

Now, in Seattle, I was in a culture that shamed my vision of what married life should be. To expect a woman to be fit was tied to being concerned with her visual appeal to me a hetero male - and that can be construed as seeing women as a sexual object - which is another fundamental evil feminist culture cannot tolerate.

In 1999 I began dating this pear shaped girl I was thoroughly not attracted to physically. I was just trying to fit in. After a few months I tried to break it off with her, but it took a year for her to accept it.

Eventually I would marry someone I met in grad school. She was and is a life long third-wave feminist [Wikipedia]. She was the very vanguard of the movement - to keep the peace I dared not express any predilection towards fit women. On top of her ideology, her adult years had been a history of being slim then being overweight, back and forth. She spoke with pride about in her mid-twenties deliberately gaining weight to spite her mother's nagging for her to be more attractive.

I have the saddest deeply intimate story to tell. After the birth of our son, she got in the best shape of her life. I know because I've seen photos of her past, and the body she developed from aerobics and yoga at home was by far the most fit of all her years. 

One day she came out of the shower and was so amazingly sexy. Here is the emotion that hit me: I was elated then hid it and was sad. Saddened that if I had shown some great sexually charged enthusiasm that be valuing her new sexy fit self more than her previous self. I allowed her feminist value system to negate any of the special reaction and attraction her new body was prompting.

One year after her physical peak, she began to gain weight quickly, becoming so large someone asked her in sincerity if she was pregnant. To this day she is especially large, and we are divorced. 

Now I want to move on from this diary of experience. There is hope and some good news. Technology has thoroughly killed some of the toxic effects of the unwanted advance conundrum. Dating apps and sites like OKCupid and Tender are now the common way people find each other. Being on the site, and especially explicitly stating in one's profile what you are after, is explicit and declarative. 

Problem solved (a bit late for my generation).

Next let's think sociological, I have an insight that is plain as day to me but haven't heard from anyone else.

You know how in hospitals and maybe other environments sterilizing can wind up killing good germs and leaving predominantly the bad lethal germs? 

A lot feminist hostility has done just that - nullified and silenced good men and left the truly dangerous and hideous men unscathed.

As of this writing in 2020 we have in recent years had ghastly murders of women for simply being women. I'm thinking especially of the man in Florida who walked into a bank, asked all the women to lie on the floor, and he executed them.

The agenda of feminists is a hot house flower - only able to live in the most favorable environment. College campuses, city bureaucracies in the more progressive metropolitan areas, high profile companies et cetera are where the criteria of feminists is taken seriously. Beyond that, on the individual level, it's the sensitive, thoughtful men who give the feminist criteria a role in shaping their behavior.

But not anyone in Pecos Texas (for example), and not any of the groups of mean, brutish, aggressive men that are the actual perpetrators of real hurt to women.

I contend these men are more toxic and violent to women than in the pre counterculture years precisely because we have abandoned the critique of men in the form of demanding some degree of gentlemanly behavior towards women, leaving a void. 

Toxic third-wave feminism, toxic women hating men

....and the main harm going to nice men and women.

TikTok: Challenger to American WOKE Hegemony

Hegemony: leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.

Cultural Norms: the agreed‐upon expectations and rules by which a culture guides 

the behavior of its members in any given situation. 

Cultural norms theory: A theory of mass communication which suggests that the mass media selectively presents, and emphasizes certain contemporary ideas or values. According to this theory, the mass media influences norms by reinforcing or changing them.

It is 2020 and I as a resident in United States live in a media landscape dominated by companies for the most part headquartered in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City. Over the last decade online activists have pressured America's media to subtract content that is un-affirming to LBTGQ, obese women, blacks and latinas. Media has been shamed into praising poor, fat(females only) and gay. 

WOKE/Feminist/Marxist activists have deftly pruned and reshaped social media, movies and advertising we see and re-share by years of shaming campaigns, with news outlets reporting on the shaming campaigns and in effect normalizing their extreme illiberal intolerance by covering it in the plain vanilla mainstream news sphere.

Enter a giant wildly popular social media phenomenon...that is headquartered in Bejing. (Please leave aside the question of national security risk, or communism and focus on cultural influence. I really don't think those Korean/Japanese/Chinese dancing and lip-syncing young women are communist soldiers)

Back to headquartered in China. Finally, a company that would be deaf to a social justice shaming campaign coming from (for example) a student organization at UC Berkely. China is just too big a population of consumers to worry about an American sub-group. 

Not because Chinese companies are rude, rather... ironically... they are not used to American censorship via our social justice warriors. And not only is the company not perceptive nor receptive to this pressure, I would posit the users/consumers on their platform wouldn't bend their behavior to please American militant leftists.  

The illiberal conservatism of the American Left casts a long shadow, that thankfully ends at the west coast, and thankfully there are other big wealthy sophisticated cultures that can produce content that avoids the intolerant pathologies of American social justice ideals. 

In the U.S. the Left have worked deftly to change society to omit the heterosexual default in public discourse. 

Heteronormativity: the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex. A heteronormative view therefore involves alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles.

Backtrack a little for context and intent. I am presenting these views without respect to religious ideas. I am agnostic-atheist, and for the most part China is also. I do support gay rights to live happily, safely and with access to any right heterosexuals have. I am not on offensive against gays, rather, I am on the offensive towards Leftist illiberal extremism and offering that TikTok is a giant counterforce to that extremism.

Gender and orientation aren't the only domains TikTok sets up a counter to WOKE. Wired magazine had a cover story on why the West should be suspicious of TikTok from a values standpoint. The writer takes up a sizable op-ed to claim "digital blackface" is rampant on the platform. 

(TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface)

The Wired article is talking about this: hundreds of thousands of cute Asain girls use black male rap tracks as the audio track to lip sync and/or dance to, the Asian girl being the video star and the rap is the soundtrack. The point of view of the Wired piece is black culture is ripped off. The Asian girls probably see few to no black people, and use rap without any real care for people of color.

I counter that this cultural appropriation is beautiful, a natural result of an interconnected world, and art, especially digital copies of art, have no borders. 

If TikTok is bought by an American company I fear the new owners will care what that Wired piece said, and the subsequent waves of shaming, which will kill everything good on the platform.

Enough with the set-up and meta statements. Let me plunge into presenting instances on the TikTok platform that support my assertion (talk about and quote several TikTok videos).

First up is minseonk1m and her English language teacher skit. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcc4y/

The laugh is she pronounces Coke as cock. Beyond the humor what is a useful challenge to American queer-friendly feminism and the whole gender fluid and Questioning nonsense. This video shows a strikingly beautiful Asian female assertively being as sexually binary as possible. She strongly wants the sexually opposite. She is a good role model for confused American females.

Another video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcwBg/ ) by minseonk1m uses a female rappers track, and the gist is an aggressive hetero female with zero solidarity with other women.

Lialiu_chinese has a cute video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDyepDo/) teaching the phrases "ni hao" meaning hello, "niang" means mother, and "ni hao niang" means... "you're so gay".

TikTok has challenges for it's video makers. Some audio track is put on the platform and video makers are to use the audio to make a 'face zoom' vid, or dance, or some collage to reflect the song. 

The challenge is competitive, goal is to get the most views and likes. TikTok pays per view. 

One challenge is an audio track of black male voices saying "which chicks will you NOT date?" and several replies of 'Asian'. The audio ends with an Asian female voice saying "what are talking about? You can't even get in that side of the club". Asian girls use the audio and make videos with them looking stunning and not-assessable on the last words of the track.

Another challenge has girlfriends entering a room surprising their boyfriend by being totally nude. It's POV and the girl isn't seen, just the boyfriend's reaction.

There is a #foryou hashtag, and the vids are overwhelmingly young fit females in revealing clothes or bikinis and word bubbles asking guys what they think. The #foryou hashtag is completely general, often beautiful Chinese mountains or cities, a few animal vids. But the dominant content is sexy females trying to appeal to men. I've never ever seen an unattractive person on #foryou. I've never seen unattractive scenery in the background of any video. There are rumors TikTok screens out poverty and unattractiveness.

A final note. TikTok is driven not by the social network paradigm. It is pure cutting edge Chinese machine learning. And I as an American citizen, praise it, want to use it. 

WOKE

Wokish is a different language from English. Failure to understand the differences and their purpose is double plus ungood.

The differences can be seen in sudden shifts in word frequencies starting in the Year 2013. Just as the Mayan Long Count calendar aprocryphally ended in the year 2012, so did the English language disappear for many people, replaced by the vocabulary of a new age: Wokish for woke folx.

I'm not making any of this up. You can see these sudden shifts using Google's ngrams viewer, which now incorporates texts from recent years. The results are uncanny. Here we can see gender-affirming beginning to replace life-affirming in 2013, and grow for the last 7 years as fast as life-affirming did in the 1990's.

Crits [history of critical race theory] don't affirm universals and individuality. In fact they find that whole notion an abhorrent product of liberal, western, capitalist domination designed to enable racist oppression. Just as in Orwell's newspeak, wokish employs doublespeak. Words sometimes deliberately mean their opposite - not depending on context, like an auto-antonym, but simultaneously holding two contradictory meanings, forcing you to accept an absurd contradiction as truth.

Affimation is an example of doublespeak. It is not the intent of affirmation to make people of color, women, LGBTs, people with disabilities or people of a certain size feel good in their skin. On the contrary, because there are many intersections of privilege, and new ones remaining to be discovered wherever there is [capitalist] domination, the point of affirmation is to "challenge" the dominance (privilege) of whatever is not being affirmed.

So for example fat, disabled, poor, black transgender women in prison are not "affirmed" in the sense of having their accomplishments celebrated and their issues priorities. They are "affirmed" in the sense of drawing attention to the oppressive dominance of whatever-they-are-not. Affirmation involves these people becoming woke or re-educated about their own internalized oppression as well as the internalized dominance of their oppressor. And even then intersectionality is not done working it's verbal magic until our fat, disabled, poor, black, transgender female inmates start calling out each other's privilege as non-indigneous people who benefit from historical colonialism and genocide.

Affirmation = degradation.

Wokeness is not about loving some things or people and hating others. It's about getting everyone to hate themselves, so they'll become angry and support a revolution which brings crits to power. Then maybe things will get a little less horrible, they tell us.

Do not believe a word of it. It's irrational and harmful. 

Related: rights are good affirming is wrong

Racism

[ written by friend. posted anonymously ]

First, even in science, the role of science is to inform not to decide. This is the empirical method. We do science to prove something, and then we use that to inform our next steps. This is and always has been the appropriate role of science. The fact is, science is merely data, in this context. Data can't make decisions. It definitely cannot make value judgements. Politics is all about value judgements. Data is really good at providing context for value judgements, but it can't make those judgements. What does science say about racism? It exists. The distrust of people who are different is an evolutionary trait, evolved because it was useful for improving odds of survival. It is no longer strictly necessary for that purpose among humans, because we have developed civilized cultures where we don't go around murdering each other all the time. Is racism evil? This is an opinion, not data. Science does not have opinions. Science cannot make that value judgement. If we add a value judgement, science can answer the factual parts.

For example, if we decide that all people deserve to be treated well, science can be used to conclude that racism that results in poor treatment of people is bad. Note, however, that given that axiom, it doesn't support the conclusion that being racist is evil, only that mistreating people (out of racism or not) is evil. In addition, the same axiom can be used to conclude that treating racists poorly is just as bad as racists treating people they are racist against poorly. Of course, this isn't the SJW axiom. The SJW axiom is that merely being racist is evil, even if it doesn't result in bad or harmful behavior. They've cut science out the problem entirely, which is just a little ironic, I think.

History of critical race theory

[ written by a friend. posted anonymous ]

Herbert Marcuse: Critical Theory is an alternative to traditional theory. Traditional theory strives to be objective. Critical theory seeks to expose and challenge power structures. In other words it's revisionist Marxism that tries to explain the failure of socialism and rise of fascism in the West as a problem of false political consciousness: the sheeple need to get woke. Any kind of left wing political violence is considered a good sign in Critical Theory, because the status quo is always assumed to be on the verge of going full Third Reich.

Angela Davis: Student of Marcuse, communist, radical feminist and black power revolutionary. Returns to the academy after left wing political violence peters out in the 70's. Loves every kind of communist dictatorship and left wing cult (Jonestown.) Hates every kind of liberal democratic reform movement. For example instead of decriminalizing drugs, her "solution" to mass incarceration is "schools not jails." It's about which ideological tribe controls the bureaucracy and not the actual treatment and rights of people under that bureaucratic system.

Kimberle Crenshaw: Around 1990 develops critical race theory into Intersectionality. The idea here is that poor black women (or these days we would say LGBT+ BIPOCs) need to get woke so they can lead the movement using their personal knowledge as victims of multiple kinds of oppression. In other words civil rights reforms were just more false consciousness, because Western democracy and it's capitalist mode of production is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, and nothing will change until people get really mad about that and take to the streets to force the current regime (i.e. liberal democracy) out.

Robin DiAngelo: critical race theory and whiteness studies scholar. Develops theory of White Fragility while giving corporate racial sensitivity trainings for the last 20 years. Shows up on the radar about 7 years ago with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (which is very much built on critical race theory - see the About page of any organization affiliated with the movement.)

I was a very woke left wing socialist anarchist back in 2013 when "white fragility" appeared in our lexicon - 3 years before she spoke at Evergreen and 5 years she published her manifesto of the same name. However, my wokeness was with the old school Marxists, anarchists and communists, who were very skeptical of the "identity politics" of the critical race theorists. Critical race theory was a mental virus that infected our movement and turned us against each other, every white activist striving to call each other out for (purely intellectual) abuses of white privilege and defensive white fragility. It was all 100% NONSENSE, but it was also highly effective at derailing our movement, and has cost me several friendships.

People go to corporate sensitivity trainings to save their jobs, they listen to critical race theory in college because they want to learn and they show up at Black Lives Matter protests thinking that they are literally protesting for black people's lives, and then they get fed something different.

Because critical race theory is NOT about helping individual black people or solving specific problems that affect black people. It's about using racial anger and guilt, as well as sexual identity, poverty, disability, obesity, and other sensitive subjects to radicalize people and put leaders with the correct critical ideology in positions of political and bureaucratic power.

________________________

Struggle Sessions

Here's an article I had cut out from March 9, 2019; about a year-and-a-half ago, well before the virus and what I guess I will call our cultural conflict.

Peggy Noonan says:

"I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don't want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely."

The "struggle sessions" Noonan explains, were introduced by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s to purge China of its enemies. University students were charged to "clear away the evil habits of the old society and extinguish what came to be known as 'the four olds'—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture."

So when Noonan proposes that "the spirit of the struggle sessions are here," she means there is a group of people in the United States who want to purge it of, what they perceive to be, political enemies and "evil habits."

"The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don't try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence."

This is a snapshot of how tense our society was a year-and-a-half ago. Primed and ready for the explosion that was sparked on May 25.

________-rights is good. _______-affirming is wrong

Today in the US minorities and the historically marginalized have rights. Even in the most backwater little town, if someone slaps a man for being gay at a grocery store, a deputy sheriff is going to show up and the attacker is going to be in handcuffs.

And that is real progress over how it was 50 years ago. 

________-affirming is not a right, it is optional and personal. Companies, campuses and others that demand for example queer-affirming or black-affirming discourse throughout the organization are creating a new kind of exclusionary dynamic. 

In the case of demanding queer-affirming dialogue the social damage goes further. The majority are heterosexual, and they have the right to discuss life, goals and the reality around them in a heterosexual way. Their rhetoric gets to be heteronormalized, for heterosexuals to do otherwise is absurd. The species is binary gendered and heterosexual by majority, it has to in order to make offspring and continue as a species. 

LGBTQ live on a heterosexual owned planet, having the right to live out their dreams in safety and unharrassed. 

....but not especially accommodated in all public discourse.

It is time for those that agree to undo the soft fascism in our more progressive organizations. We have mistaken a lot of silly language as progressive, and it is time to be rude to the toxic actors that have spread this garbage.

-------------------

post script: all the above written by someone supporting the legalization of gay marriage since the late 1970's. I am for legal rights.

Inspiration for this post came from this hilarious stuff by BLM.

Cause of Seattle Homelessness

Seattle did not make it's people homeless by a rising cost of housing. Those lower salary people moved for the most part to lower cost commuter cities to the south.

The homeless are from all over the United States. They selected Seattle because of the services for the homeless and especially for the leniency the courts provide.

Seattle homeless advocates actively recruited the homeless across the United States to relocate to Seattle.

While Amazon was recruiting the best and brightest tech workers from all over the US to Seattle, the city grew with this counterpoint of opposites -skilled tech and unskilled drug addicts and mental issue homeless.

Amazon the company recruited the best and brightest to add to the intelligence and wealth quota of Seattle, while Seattle government and NGO partners recruited the most problematic and unpromising individuals from all over the United States to come to Seattle in order to give these same compassion industry social justice careerists their own job security.

This analysis of systemic causes does not mean one should be divorced from compassion or helping the struggling. This systems critique simply spotlights the nurturing of a problem into a larger size by a class of careerists and their sentimentally alligned peers who reject any view other than them and their homeless being virtuious and beyond reproach, and wealth and the functionally intelligent being evil.
  

Black Lives Matter "What We Believe" Translated

Jump to: hilarious queer-affirming lines
On June 31 2020 I posted to Facebook this statement:

---

Want reforms that result with negating the unjustified killing of black men?

An end to racism isn't a goal connected with that.

There will always be racists in this country.

Especially with the moving goalposts of the Woke AF community, with the focus on ever nuanced categories like LBGTQ+fat and Trans Blacks as their heighted points of vigilance....especially if anyone is applying today's moral standards to America's past historical figures...as if we've discovered moral absolutes and can apply across all time. Woke AF has nothing to do with progress or a powerful nation and economy, their goal is the worst of all things: a self-righteous and small economy backward people, giving an eternal blank check to those of a global south and indigenous cultural heritage, and condemning the rest of the world (especially any great empire cultures such as British, American, Russian, Chinese) to eternal guilt. (exactly opposite of how we should respect cultures, the empires are full of the more significant history and valuable culture)

If black lives really mattered, specifically the need for regular black men just going to the store or to work to not be in danger due to the occasional pathological police officer, then this protest campaign would have stayed focused for the goal.

---

A friend of mine wrote the following unpacking of the official Black Lives Matter political platform, which is insightful, and more epsecially telling of how counterproductive to the goal the platform is.

---

I ran https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ through the automated political BS translator:

Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission was to build local power and to intervene when violence was inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

"build local power" = recruit black activists nationwide
"intervene when violence was inflicted" = use tragedies to get attention
"vigilantes" = George Zimmerman, who is a mentally unstable vigilante thug, but also a bit of a unicorn.

In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.

"imagining and creating" = imagining
"anti-Blackness" = a demon that keeps people asleep until they get woke (no, I'm serious, I looked it up here: Recognizing And Dismantling Your Anti-Blackness: Janice Gassam: Forbes)
"social, economic and political power to thrive" = a sense of total despair, failure and helplessness

Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.

"a call to action" = words
"state sanctioned violence" = guns
"anti-Black racism" = cops
"connect Black people from all over the world" = sit at our computers.
"act together in their communities" = sit at their computers.
"violence inflicted on us by the state" = political power we would like to wield ourselves.

Enraged by the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, and inspired by the 31-day takeover of the Florida State Capitol by POWER U and the Dream Defenders, we took to the streets. A year later, we set out together on the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson, in search of justice for Mike Brown and all of those who have been torn apart by state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Forever changed, we returned home and began building the infrastructure for the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which, even in its infancy, has become a political home for many.

"Dream Defenders" = communists who want to replace corporations, police and prisons with education and welfare spending.
"justice for Mike Brown" = use Mike Brown's death to get attention for our movement.
"Forever changed" = BLM became a communist movement that wants to compete for police funding.
"become a political home for many" = recruited many black people to spread our message.

Ferguson helped to catalyze a movement to which we’ve all helped give life. Organizers who call this network home have ousted anti-Black politicians, won critical legislation to benefit Black lives, and changed the terms of the debate on Blackness around the world. Through movement and relationship building, we have also helped catalyze other movements and shifted culture with an eye toward the dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness. These are the results of our collective efforts.

"ousted anti-Black politicians" = voter registration drives, canvassing, call centers and other staples of electoral politics
"won critical legislation" = letter writing campaigns, phone calls, petitions, etc.
"changed the terms of the debate on Blackness" = appropriated Black identity
"dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness" = losing your black card from spending too long in the Sunken Place.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is as powerful as it is because of our membership, our partners, our supporters, our staff, and you. Our continued commitment to liberation for all Black people means we are continuing the work of our ancestors and fighting for our collective freedom because it is our duty.

"the work of our ancestors" = your black identity
"our collective freedom" = BLM's political power

Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported.

"recommit to healing" = remind ourselves how helpless and oppressed we are
"a culture where each person feels seen, heard and supported" = a safe space where privilege is shunned

We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal  

We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements.

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

= We cultivate a mob mentality and addiction to social media because we're about power, not sacrifice.

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prequisite for wanting the same for others.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements. (This is the second time they've repeated that point. They sound a lot like black separatists, and a little like antifa.)

We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.

= We reject African-American identity and identify as an international Black race. (Again, 90% black seperatist, 10% antifa.)

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expssion, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal. 😂

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

= We put the most vulnerable transgender victim group on the prow of our ship 😂 🤣.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

= We are black lesbians who hate homophobic black dudes more than the white devil himself.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

= We are a coven of black lesbian witches.😂 🤣 🤣

We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

= We use unconditional love toward people like ourselves to recruit them into our movement. (That sounds very culty.)

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

= We recruit homemakers and single moms at the margins of the workforce who have some spare time.

We disrupt the Western-pscribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

= In our experience as black lesbians, you don't need a man. White people invented marriage. There's no patriarchy in Africa. 😂

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

= We encourage straight people to keep that in the closet. 😂

We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.

= Honestly we're trying to elect Joe Biden in 2020. Viva la revolucion!

We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.

= We police each other's thoughts and feelings.

CHOP Seattle Autonomous Zone Photos

All photos taken June 20 and 21 2020. 

An addition on June 21 was the presence of security. I don't mean professional security guards or police. They were CHOP community members with two way radios. They seemed highly organized, I was closely monitored by them any time I was on the zone boundary (their security stayed along the boundary)

The epicenter was in the area with the two SUVs in the photos. There is a large garden, plants are above ground in bags. The Riot Kitchen is in this area also. 

I write philosophy and science fiction. My better works have been The Oscillating Communist Capitalist Machine and Autistic Crow Computer. See all my books here: https://www.amazon.com/Lance-Miller/e/B003UQL0O6/

Do Not Tax Amazon

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/councilmember-teresa-mosqueda-unveils-her-own-proposal-for-taxing-seattles-big-businesses/

So wrong. Opposing this.

Tax for big tech companies in Seattle and directs the revenue for supporting undocumented immigrants. Mosqueda said this proposal "gives support to black and brown communities for which we owe for 400 years of oppression".

Here is why it is wrong.

1) Amazon and Expedia have spent big in building their headquarters in Seattle inner city. Revitalized the city. Now targets of shakedown by demagogues.

2) Across every culture from Ancient Greece, Ancient and Contemporary China.... the wealthiest work with symbols only (finance, law, literature, math, engineering, software) and the poorest of the poor harvest crops. This is a standard dynamic, and moral systems that try to shame or punish the dynamic are foolish, futile, and a route to poverty and ignorance.

http://progressive-positive.blogspot.com/2019/09/wealthy-tech-created-homeless-ultimate.html

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" are the disease killing Seattle.

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" is part of the disease killing Seattle.

Impartiality before law. The restorative justice construct fails in this sense - if a millionaire's nineteen year old son from Bellevue came into Seattle and struck a random stranger in the face, would the restorative justice inclined city attorney advocate for a harsher sentence than this homeless drug addict with 72 previous convictions?

That is not equality.

Finally, redeeming souls is not the job of the city or county, they are mixing religious valuation of individuals in with their mission of making the city high functional. From a secular political philosophy standpoint that is a wrong.

See more deeply why it is wrong here:  why-we-want-monsters-and-should-want-to.html

Reference:
https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/why-this-seattle-judge-filed-a-complaint-against-himself

Tao Te Ting Poem 80

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 80

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster
     than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no on uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple,
     their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way.


This is an ancient Chinese thought from around 500 BC. It is before the emergence of a Chinese Empire, which is antithetical to the vision in this poem. The poem is saying stay local, stay simple with no machines, and it even opposes literacy.

While the Far East abandoned this view, some in the West, and Native people's, embrace it as a preferred way.

It's always going to be the losing way, subsumed and consumed by a more powerful global mechanized society. There is no other outcome.

So it is not an option for mitigating climate change.

Reference: https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu80.html

Wealthy Tech Created the Homeless: The Ultimate Bad Narrative

Crosscut Media: Seattle is addicted to bad narratives about homelessness

Crosscut Media as offered the ultimate reference for the sick, wrong narrative that propels the political/activist/NGO machine that has created the homeless epidemics of Seattle and San Francisco. It is an erroneous narrative divorced from reality.

The truth is Seattle and San Fancisco are temperate cities with lots of services and law enforcement leniency for the homeless, and the visible homeless are not from these cities but rather vagabond drug addicts and mental cases from all over rural and suburban America. Seattle/San Francisco are destinations for the nation's homeless.

No matter how one feels about the homeless and the addicted - on a regional policy level - creating the beacon of services and leniency for the whole nation of vagabonds to migrate to creates an untenable, unsolvable problem.

My bus route serves a major addiction services methadone clinic (I support these clinics, no negative connotation intended). I've ridden the bus with hundreds of these patients. From what I can tell, they are from rural and suburban places all over the country.

The software engineers making 150,000 are not the problem, and Chinese millionaires investing in highrise condos are not either. They have made the city prettier. Those who have gotten priced out of the city have moved to bedroom communities from White Center to Tacoma. I personally have many long time friends who have made the move to a home or apartment further out in the Seattle metro, including myself. I have absolutely no friends that were priced out of their Seattle residence and are now an addict living in a tent or RV in the city...absolutely none.

A word about the software engineers making an average of 150K annual salary, and the high tech, high rise offices that have increased in the city. I love the city this transformation has created. No matter my own status, I love the city Amazon and other tech giants have helped create. This is the very kind of city I want to experience.

The only cancer this city has is the narrative politicians and activists subscribe to and serve -the narrative of the software engineer pushing the lower middle class towards substance abuse and homelessness.

I'm tired of accomodating that cancer, and the voices that spread it.

Why We Want Monsters, And Should Want to Jail Them Too

A society that creates a few murderers and insanely violent people is a society where we can say liberty and diversity are alive and well.

I am not saying murderers and insanely violent people have a right to live as they want, in complete freedom. I am saying we should create them, then jail them. 

The last thing we should want is to be a society that has eradicated these monsters. Specifically, we should never want the surest death of all -homostasis. If we somehow intervened in everyone's upbringing and had uniformly great outcomes for all, that would be a society that had cutoff the non-linear dynamism needed for evolution and iterative adaptation. It would mean certain jeopardy for that society. They would be uniformily healthy and happy as seen from within, and easily crushed by an external society capable of novel mutations.

In essence - homeostasis is terminal. 

We are successfully producing our murderers and other monsters through, essentially, freedom. By this I mean the solitary lives we in the USA have made possible. With this solitude comes the ability to devise deeply personal perspectives on the meaning of life, and what is a proper pursuit of happiness. With this many people coming up with their unique internal self, the variety is staggering, and scary. 

We don't want the scary ones, but they are byproduct of creating the totally original ones that are useful. 

So we should accept that the monsters are steadily going to be produced, and accept that we have only two choices: they are left to be free and pursue their goals, or stop them from having their freedom through incarceration or death.

We seem to currently have a third way of dealing with the monsters, by desiring to intervene and convert them to another kind of person. Reform. This impulse goes back thousands of years, to religions as diverse as Christianity and Taoism.  

This is wrong. There is no right to convert people, to change their current deep seated goals. It is right to stop them, but not right to change their internal selves.

Our laws are not discovered absolute truths. They are not operating within a moral plane, or aiding a moral agenda. They should be a constellation of rules that output a society that has a coherent sustaining organization with power over its environment, and power to project goals and control over ever more territory (such as outer space), and power to project goals and control into the future. 

We have missplaced relativism. The proper place to allow relativism is allowing that a person with violent designs is a perfectly functioning person.  Where we should have less relativism is in the belief in our wider social enterprise....this sustaining organization of people, materials, machines and infrastructure that projects power over the environment and the future. We should be unflinching in liking its power, and seeing this power as a better thing, and not having that power as a worse thing.

We only jail the monsters because of their threat to the rest of us who want to exist for some time in this sustained culture, not because the monsters are psychologically wrong. 

Stealth form of Climate Migration

In 1995 I was in Antarctica working as science support. It was there I met scientists evaluating climate change and global warming. Our conversations convinced me to move to a region that would do the best in the next few decades as the globe warmed.

I moved to Seattle, for the mitigating effect of the cold ocean, and simply being farther north. In the 21 years I've lived in the region its worth noting it went from having a brief thunderstorm every few years to having several thunderstorms per year. It also went above 100 degrees for the first time since records have been kept.

2018. I've become a rent refugee. I'm now relocated in Las Vegas and trying to start over. I'm now in a region that is already a climate disaster, with summers so hot the sidewalks are 180 degrees.

Beginning some years ago a building boom began. Many years have had over 80 high rise building projects, most being condos and apartments. Besides those skyscrapers, the city has built up and steady stream of 10 story apartment complexes totally dominating main neighborhood streets.

The spike in amount of supply has not lend to lower prices. One bedroom apartments now average just under $2000, and two bedrooms average over $2500 per month.

The primary source for the investment dollars funding these building projects are Chinese hedge funds.

(I am not even remotely anti-Chinese, nor against global economic investment. I've always seen the west coast's binding with Japan/Korea/China as a mark of superiority over the rest of the USA.)

I am also not prone to conspiracy theories of malevolent or pathological intents by powerful entities. Yet what I am about to assert sounds like a conspiracy and like a warning of ill intent by foreigners.

I think the Chinese, being less religious and more purely aligned with science, have more wholly embraced the idea of global warming. I think that as a result their wealthiest are making plans for that future. I don't think they are investing first in Vancouver BC Canada, then Seattle because those places look like a good return-on-investment, they are investing in a place for their grandchildren to live in 2050.

When I moved to Seattle in 1996 I thought I was embedding myself in the place forever. I naively did not concentrate on buying land or a residence in the region. I mistakenly had a local-centric view that I was here, foreigners were far away, and this place was mine to exist in while the rest of the world burned and stormed.

I didn't think through the idea of massive concentrations of wealth by a population scientifically smart enough to use that wealth to push aggressively into the most hospitable regions of Earth.

So now here I am, in burning unsustainable Las Vegas.

Well played Chinese, well played.

Proper Application of the Multiverse

Many Worlds Interpretation / Wikipedia.org

Quantum Mechanics Manyworlds / Stanford.edu

What if that situation you were in during sixth grade, where you found your passion in music because your aunt gave you a nice guitar, was changed? Your aunt never gives you a guitar, and in that same year you find your passion for drawing cartoons.

The multiverse theory suggests both happen. You are going along as a sixth grader and in one universe you get a guitar, in the other you do not. In all the Universes you are you, you just take the a different path at the fork in the road. 

In a multiverse the Nazi's loose in one, win the war in the other ; the electric car gets adopted as the way we do cars, in the other gasoline cars become the way we do cars. 

With each moment being a moment of on/off for whether something happened, this means the multiverse is huge, with each moment spinning off at least two versions....one where the ball was caught and the other where it was dropped. 

So hopefully you're comfortably imagining an endlessly branching out Universe of different outcomes. 

I offer that that the multiverse theory is a better metaphor for understanding evolution. 

In the multiverse metaphor there are forks, as in biological life with mutations. The mutant butterfly with a new color pattern or length for its legs spins off eventually to a new species. Lions, cheetahs, jaguars and house cats all have a common ancestor, just like in multiverse theory an event can have multiple outcomes. 

Of course in the case of evolution, we live with and see the multiplicity of mutations living all under the roof of one Universe. In the case of evolution all the different species of feline, canine and primate live on the same planet.

What about the mutations we don't see?

We talk about the amazing diversity of life by pointing to the living things around us. What about the things not in existence?

The diverse living things are not the only Multiverse....they are a small percentage of the Multiverse.

The lives that died young (before able to create offspring), and groups or species that went extinct, are the rest of the Multiverse. They are the negative space of the Multiverse.

All those born with mutations that did not work out in their environment are very much an example of diversity. They are just the end of diversity the environment killed off.

This isn't just the phenomenon of "birth defects". Mutations that gave an animal too much power in their biological niche can go extinct by being too strong. Think of a pack of wolves that have an odd
mutation of longer legs. They outrun all their prey. They are wildly successful and well fed for a season. Then, very soon, all of their prey are hunted to zero. That pack of longer legged and faster wolves dies due to not being fit for their environment. So it is not just birth defect mutants that die, but the overly strong or fast mutant that ruins its food supply by eating it all.

The only mutations that work are those that lead to offspring, and those offspring having offspring.

With all this established, we can easily see the biological Multiverse is constantly generating every form of life there could be, and the pressure of reality prunes much of the diversity from the living.

It is like an airplane factory that randomly generates every physical form of plane...even planes with the most bizarre things like playground swings and stair cases welded to their sides....and the reality of flight blots out of existence the ones unfit. What constitutes unfit?  Those not capable of coming back to the airstrip after taking off.

So all those planes the left the ground and never came back occupy the negative space of that Multiverse.

The largest portion of the Multiverse are the bad ideas, the failures, those that didn't make it. The largest portion of the Multiverse died. Died in a way that did not leave offspring, descendants in our present world.

The negative space of the Multiverse is what the Universe deemed undesirable unable to support within the frameworks and dynamics of reality. You see the strikethrough because, unlike us and our prejudices that load our desires and undesirables, the Universe is more open than we are. If we were in charge, there might be much more negative space in the Multiverse. 

Evolution is not about life, it is about death. It is not about seeking out and aiding good design, but about killing bad design. 

Evolution does not seek to make functional eyes, it does not seek to make the glories of the world around us. Evolution is just the negative space of the biological Multiverse. It only kills bad design. We end up with what survives, and call it good.

We as humans want to say a good or intelligent designer created all this good.

This is unfortunate, because the only omnipresent....God....or simply overarching immutable power....is one of subtraction....of death.

The only God that propels this enterprise called Life forward is one that employs death, combined with wildly prolific attempts at creating offspring. Mass birthing, and mass death of those outside of some boundaries, with those boundaries fickle and shifting constantly.

In the Bible Jesus healed the sick, brought back the dead, and never married and had children. The very opposite of the omnipresent dynamic that keeps Life going.

Possibly the only true God is Odin -the God of promiscuous sex and death.

Note, the multiverse analogy I describe is more how science fiction has depicted multiverses.