Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, we’d all like to pretend that humans have perfect free will and are always making conscious decisions about everything they do. Among other things it makes us feel better when we punish them for being bad. However, statistically speaking, a taste for rape *should* be baked into our genome as it is a evolutionary successful strategy. Most of us learn to overcome such things just as a puppy learns bite inhibition *however* if you want to have more rape (and incest!) in the future, one good way to make sure of it is to force mothers to bear the children that are the fruit of rape – some of those fathers may have never been exposed to the necessary socialization to learn bite inhibition, but others will be, for various hormonal or neural network shaped reasons, immune to it. See, that’s how evolution works. Aborting fetusi that are the results of rape and incest is lowering the odds that in the future those things will occur, because even though we like to pretend that we are entirely creatures of free will, in fact our decision making is colored a lot by the chemical soup wandering around in our blood. We’re loose confederations of subnets.

Just one more reason to be pro-choice, if anyone needed any. Also one more reason to not let the people who put religious beliefs in front of clearly observable science run the place. They will build a nightmare dystopia that even *they* don’t like – because evidence-based decision making really is the way to go.

So, I was just involved in a argument on facebook with someone who was under the illusion that there are no stupid people. I mean, I would love to live in a world where that was true – but it just really isn’t. Recent things coming from this person’s corner make me suspect that they have recently succumbed to a damaging information virus (translation: religion)

Anyway, this is one of a few different times today when I’ve been bothered by people who obviously believe things which are not true because of the religions they are infected with. Normally I’m all for whatever gets you through the night, but I think these beliefs in things which are not true are really starting to hurt us all. I mean, you have all the people who voted for Trump due to deeply delusional beliefs, but it goes a bit further than that. You have people pretending peak oil won’t happen, global warming isn’t real, and that if we just pray real hard everyone in the Ukraine will be okay. (You also have people ignoring that the US has over and over provided the weapons – and sometimes the soldiers – to destroy people’s houses and kill folks just as Russia is currently doing to the Ukraine – generally because we didn’t like their ideology surrounding resource allocation although occasionally just because it was profitable for US corporations)

Anyway, my point is, one of my problems with religion is that it makes people believe things that are clearly not true, and then make decisions based on those beliefs. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem facing humanity but it clearly is a problem.

I don’t know why it rubs me so much the wrong way today to have people making clearly untrue assertions and suggesting useless actions in response to disasters. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because of other factors. But the appeal of just deleting my facebook account seems larger than usual today. I do continue to think it will be useful as a vehicle for getting people to listen to my music, although it also may be that I’m never going to have that large a audiance because I am not sure I can be what most of the world would apparently want me to be – I mean, the odds of someone as anti-religion as me being cancelled seem pretty high.

I did unfriend the person – they haven’t contributed anything positive in my life in the last several years and various aspects of their smug superiority combined with lack of connection to observable reality made me think I’m better off without them. My patience with people who are convinced they are vastly superior to me seems to be wearing very thin.

So, I’m trying to figure out what bothers me so much about my recent disagreement on facebook over piracy and intellectual property. I think it’s the fact that these content creators would rather people go without than that they get a free copy of their content – they acknowledge these people can’t pay for it but they think that means they shouldn’t have it.

In general digital assets and capitalism are not a great fit, as I’ve mentioned, because you end up with a finite resource chasing a infinite one. For a long time the cost of buying content was mostly the cost of the carrier the content came on – and now, of course, the majority of the profit generally goes to the publisher and not the individual.

I think part of what bothers me about this is these people can see the police abusing the homeless and stealing their tents and be like “this is fine”. They can know we have 40 years of oil left after which we are all going to starve to death and capitalism is blocking us from solving this and be like, “this is good”. It’s like how I can’t fathom how anyone could continue to support religion after how many times religion has been epicly wrong – I mean, we’ve got things like Galileo, sure, we’ve got encouraging abuse of gay people despite a long list of reasons why they shouldn’t which I think I’ve documented elsewhere. I can *totally* understand why places like China want to outlaw Christianiy – it’s destructive! At the same time, I can’t really embrace the idea of outlawing ideas because once you start that, where do you stop? It’s one of the slipperiest slopes there is and I don’t think anyone is ever going to be unbiased enough to make good decisions on the topic.

But, yes, there are many people who *love* the current system and want to perpetuate it – and I’m talking about people who are barely making ends meet. Just as there are many who are convinced Christianiy is the Only True Way and even that it’s totally reasonable to abuse other folks based on them not being Christian.

It’s depressing. I probably need to focus away from the large picture government etc for a while because it’s gotten too depressing.

So, I feel like some people might be forgetting that, from a big picture perspective, making money is not a goal for humanity at all. Businesses should not be in business to make money – if they are, they’re likely doing damaging and/or stupid things. They should be in business to provide a product or service. The money is a token used to indicate contributions to the group, that can then be traded for other resources the group provides – I talk about this some in resource allocation as a group, but I think people miss the point, so I will belabor it some more.

When the government takes some of “your” income (which it uses to provide services we all need), they’re actually taking the token that was given to you by the group in exchange for your contributions to the group. Money is never “yours” in the same sense that other things are, it’s always a pointer to group resources.

Beyond that, one also needs to bear in mind that corporations exist to make the world a better place by providing a need or want for the group, in return for which dollars are handed over. The whole system is *supposed* to ensure that everyone is contributing to the welfare of the group but in fact it often does the opposite, because owners and upper management feel that, even though they often contribute the *least* ongoing value, they deserve the lion’s share of the tokens (which they will then hoarde like idiots, see this).

I think part of the problem is that a lot of people have lost sight of the big picture. They don’t think about optimizing user experience or happiness for the system as a whole. However, we would all have the best user experience if we *all* were trying to optimize the happiness for everyone in the system as a whole. *Definitely* one of the things that is killing America – and that may well lead to extinction of humanity if we don’t get our heads on straight – is the making of decisions which ultimately reduce happiness as a whole, or even survivability, in order to make money. We see this in companies destroying ecosystems with toxic chemicals, we see this in America’s perpetual war machine destroying overall value in order to give military contractors yet another pile of pointers, we see this in a lot of places.

But, I still maintain, your well-optimized corporation does not make massive profits. We are *all* the richest when it plows the majority of it’s money into either R&D or employee salaries, and beyond that when the salaries are not vastly disparate, because those who get paid the million dollar salaries are likely to just hoard them.

Now, a aside here – America offers you the only safe option for changing jobs or ceasing working is to have a fairly large nest egg stashed away, and thusly I am doing a bit of money hoarding of my own. I’m not happy that this world forces me to do so or risk starving and freezing to death, I’m not at *all* happy that the homeless in my city have their tents stolen and burned and if I had my way *everyone* who participated in that would forfeit all their assets and be forced to be homeless for a year. We clearly live in a world that is far more dystopian than it needs to be, and part of the blame for that is quite rightly laid at the feet of the conservative and the religious, both of whom are provably believing wrong things and taking actions based on them that are holding us all back.

(It’s always struck me as funny that people call America a “democracy” but we’re not, at all. We’re a democratic republic where your options are generally between two folks neither of which would be as good a choice for leadership as a random individual picked by drawing straws – and while we speak of “keeping the world safe for democracy” and “spreading democracy” what we truly believe in is not democracy but capitalism. We have been known even to overhrow democratically elected governments in order to install friendly dictators but we will bomb you back to the stone age if you dare try some form of collectivism. America stands for “don’t share, don’t work together, be enslaved by the bosses until you die, own lots of guns though!”)

Anyway, to return to my original point, in a ideal world corporations are not concerned about making dollars, they are concerned about making goods and providing services. To have it elsewise means the products get steadily more poorly made and steadily less valuable – a example of how capitalism unfettered leads to a worse outcome for everyone. We must teach our children, and always remember ourselves, that dollars *are not value*, they are just a pointer to it. Decisions that make paper dollars but destroy real value (like holding a war over false pretenses) hurt us all and are to be avoided at all costs.

I have tried and tried, and I cannot come to any conclusion other than Christians worship Loki, and all of humanity’s memetics suffer for it.

I mean, consider, they worship a god that’s using a genetic algorithm to design bodies – as a side effect of this, we can safely bet there will be all sorts of things encouraging sex – starting out with it feeling good, then adding in that males (and for all I know females, no one tells me these things) experience stronger and stronger irrationality when they’re not having it regularly – and yet has declared sex a sin. Our perfect all knowing God is deliberately setting us up to lose and then blaming us for it?

They’re also worshipping a God who arranged for there to be a whole plethora of equally probable (or if you prefer improbable) religions but will only reward you for picking the right one. If you happen to be of a certain evangelical stripe, you also think God will torture you for all eternity for picking the wrong one.

And, of course, we have a God who is nowhere to be found – of course because of the way our minds work if you listen real hard you will hear signals that are not there, but as far as signals that clearly are, God does not appear to have a phone number, a email address, or be saying anything meaningful that everyone can agree on. In addition, we *know* humans make up stories when it benefits them, and we know that Christianity benefits the priests – who of course push it harder than anyone. So God is asking us to believe something that is on the face of it extremely improbable. Hello, Loki?

Of course, it gets better. You have young earth christians who believe God created fake dinosaur bones and fossils and even fake but completely internally consistent science like carbon dating just to fool you. Heh heh heh! To lead you *away* from having a good outcome when you die.

I’m serious, can you all not see the trickster-god-ness about all this?

Now, if we had memetics that *matched* the fact that we’re wired to fall in love more than once, and also didn’t try to punish individuals for having sex, and also encouraged decisions that lead to greater happiness for individuals and for the race, Earth could very easily be a paradise. Instead, though, we have people trying their hardest to imply that hedonism is a sin, is wrong and bad, and that you should wait for your pie in the sky by and by. As Utah Phillips said, my my, that’s a lie.

I of course want my society to not push monogamy as the one true way, and to take care of everyone’s children – and everyone. To keep everyone housed and fed whether they want to do something productive or not. To not punish people for “crimes” that hurt no one but them, and to try to lead people towards love. To encourage people to enlarge their family when people “cheat” instead of breaking more hearts and leading to more sadness. To stop behaving as if lovers are each other’s property. To not ask people to behave in ways that are contrary to human nature. And so on, and so forth.

I do also seriously think we would be better off with a decentralized authority system than with any system that made one entity control everything. I also think it’s interesting that Christians have declared that God is static – unable to think, unable to transition between states. I tend to think if there is a God or Gods, they’re bigger neural networks than we are. This, of course, puts me at odds with anyone who thinks that God could make a mistake.

(Again, with the loki thing, we are born *tabla rasa*. There are multiple ways for God to get perfect beings that are exactly what GOd wants. One is to have them born with the neural structures already in place to behave the way God wants and the other is to use something like a computer instead of something like a NNN. One presumes God knows this, being all-knowing and all that. God is punishing us for being what *e made us. Christians will assure us over and over that it’s man’s bad, fallen nature that is why God doesn’t like man, that in fact Jesus was the perfect human and everyone else is awful and needs Jesus’s death to redeem them. OK, I call bullshit on *so many levels* on that:

#1: God is setting the rules. Therefore a sensible, moral God would say “no one needs to die for people to be forgiven”. Now, I realize most Christians deny God free will and say “God is just. Therefore he has to kill his own son to forgive us.”. Translation: God is less capable of changing his mind, growing, or ethical behavior than humans. [This is a common problem I have – Christians appear to me to put God in too small a box. Then they’ll assure me that “But you are not God!”. The next person who says this I’m going to respond with “Prove it.” – Not that I think I *am* God, but I think they aren’t either and neither are the people who wrote this whole mess. Either that, or we all are, but I don’t see much divine about Christianity except the words of Jesus himself – and not even all of those.]

#2: God created us to be what we are, or at least left a mechanism in place and running that led to our creation. Perhaps *e didn’t expect a evolutionary algorithm to exhibit signs of free will but this definitely calls bullshit on the whole “omnicient” thing

#3: There is NOTHING I have done in my life that warrants killing someone to forgive. I’ve made some mistakes, as have we all, as we are destined to do because we start out blank and our options are to either make mistakes or do nothing at all. NNNs learn by making mistakes and then integrating the results of them.

#4: The whole “Jesus died therefore you are forgiven but only if you believe in Jesus” thing makes no sense, no matter what you do. It seems like most Christians finally just turn off part of their brain so they can believe it, but there’s no logical series of steps there. I sometimes think it was *supposed* to not make sense, because it’s part of a virus crafted to disable part of the infectee’s brain

Yes, I realize this was a very long parenthetical.)

While we’re talking about confusing stuff, we’re supposed to be afraid of Satan, because Satan is trying to lead us into a life of sin. Why? Because he wants company in Hell? Are we *sure* Heaven is better than Hell? The description I heard of Heaven from a young earth christian made it sound like wireheading, and we already know that ultimately wireheading turns out to be unsatisfactory. It turns out just being forever perfectly happy isn’t what creatures that are part of time want – we *want* the story, the narriative, etc.

I was always afraid of Satan because I thought he wanted to torment me, and indeed the Satan in my head – probably constructed out of neurons in response to my parents’ forced religious indoctronation – does seem to often do exactly that – when he isn’t trying to jam communications with other entities. But the *real* Satan presumably is being tortured himself – or else it turns out that a complete absence of God is actually quite a livable state and maybe even enjoyable in it’s own way. If God is convinced that everything but monastic life in prayer is sin, then maybe I’d enjoy hell more than heaven. If hell is deliberately painful, though, then I start to question both God’s motives and God’s ethics. Which leads us right back to..

YOU CHRISTIANS ARE WORSHIPPING LOKI!

So, I keep thinking about this topic because I keep feeling like if I could just put the right words on my thoughts, it would suddenly make sense to the Christians in my life why I’m so convinced the religion A: was made up out of whole cloth B: contains harmful ideas and C: should be relegated to the dustbin of history

I acknowledge that they’re generally not that likely to be able to integrate this information – that in fact the structure of their minds will prevent it because of the massive neurological upset that understanding would bring them – suddenly their entire mind would need fundamentally re balanced. But it still bothers me, especially when I have people on Facebook very sincerely assuring me I’m going to hell for not believing the right things in the right way.

I know I’ve talked elsewhere about how having a plethora of religions, each claiming to be the one true way and that all adherents to all other religions are less-than, is a awful thing we should be doing away with, especially since we now live in the age of weapons that can kill millions in minutes and we can no longer afford to have wars for no particularly good reason.

In any case, one basic thesis of Christianity that I hear pushed again and again is that man is so flawed that Jesus has to “die for our sins” because “God is a just god and demands that someone be punished for all these sins”. It’s insisted that even people who have only committed minor sins are way too flawed for our perfect God. It’s also insisted that Adam’s failure to obey God was part of what started all this.

But hang on a minute. God *Created* us with neural networks that start unformatted (almost no internal structure, we are mostly born tabla rasa). If God wanted perfect obedience, creating us a state machine (similar to the computer I’m writing this on) would have gotten H* exactly that. God clearly either had no knowledge of how neural networks work (which would prove the all-knowing part a lie) or *wanted creatures that wouldn’t always walk the straight and narrow perfectly*. It is not the nature of a mostly-blank neural network to immediately leap to perfect behavior – some sin along the way is *inevitable*.

Now, mind you, I’m not asserting that we’re designed by a supernatural being at all, I’m fine with the idea that we may have just happened, that a evolutionary process may be all there is that is responsible for our existence. What I can safely rule out, however, is that we were created by a all perfect being that should then be punishing us for being flawed. This has always had a couple of problems in the argument

1) The Christians who argue that God *has to* punish us for all eternity for our limited and temporal sins are

a) Arguing for a evil God. Only a evil creature would punish so disproportionally to the crime
b) Arguing that God has no free will. And yes, they really do argue that! They say he *Can’t* just let our mistakes slide, that it’s outside of his nature because he is a Just God (never mind that eternal torture for temporary errors, especially the low grade errors must of us commit, is about as unjust as I can imagine)

2) The Christians who argue that the only path to redemption is through Jesus are

a) Aruging that God has no problem with the vast majority of human population being misled in a way that leads to them being tortured eternally or
b) Arguing that God can do nothing about the plethora of religions that claim another path or
c) Arguing that their supposedly just and moral being has no problem with expecting us to *guess* in the face of huge amounts of misleading information, *including the observation of the world around us which would *strongly* support the idea that humans are storytellers who manipulate each other for money at the drop of a hat and that religions are just a way for the priests to manipulate the sheep in order to get money

Anyway, the fundamental mismatch between the way unpatterned neural networks behave on their way to learning to be patterned neural networks and the apparent expectations of God as described by the Christians seem to me to be a valid reason to declare the religion is bullshit. That’s before we even get into the abusive nature of “God loves you so much that he built a special place to punish you if you don’t love h* back”. Most of the behaviors the Christians ascribe to God we would call abusive if anyone else did them, and generally I think what’s going on here is the Christians, who have brainwashed themselves into believing the Bible’s threats about God are true, are so afraid of what God could do to them that they apply the “Where does a 600-pound monkey sit? Anywhere he wants to” strain of morality to God.

So, I’ve been pondering Trump (for example)’s tendency to rob his supporters, stiff his vendors, and whatnot. I then started to realize that every time anyone has in any way messed with my paycheck, they have been politically conservative. Politically conservative people are more likely to delay paychecks, fail to pay, pay less than what was invoiced, etc.

I was realizing that this makes sense. Conservative politicians are generally the ones who say we should not have safety nets, not support our neighbors, etc – this makes sense, they are dishonorable in the sense that they want the advantages of being part of a group (see Resource Allocation As A Group) without being willing to pay their share. They’re like the people who want to use open source software but keep their bug fixes as proprietary instead of contributing them back to the open source project.

I wonder if they realized that if *everyone* behaved as they do we would all be much worse off as a species? I suspect some of them know this but are too hooked by the money and power being the biggest asshole is gaining them, while others of them are genuinely deluded into believing that being conservative (in the sense of going back to times when we were more selfish and/or awful) is a winning move.

At one time, I thought that conservatives provided a balancing effect on our viewpoints and we’d make worse decisions without them.

I’ve come to believe that no, in fact, we’d be a lot better off without their influence on the systems of power and in fact they are just awful, possibly even evil.

Look at recent events. They want to ban providing food and water in lines for voting while they deliberately reduce the number of polling places in liberal areas. This is called cheating – and it is something they do often otherwise we wouldn’t be burdened with them at all.

And, of course, they want to ban children – which they include 18-to-21-year-olds-in – from getting health care if they are transgendered. THis is a impressive level of awfulness. It does represent the truth that conservatives do not want us to be free – they want billionaires to be free and everyone else to be enslaved, and if at all possible they would like the Christian equivalent of sharia law. But not for them – after all, look at Matt Gaetz – only for everyone else. They have basically no moral compass – they are convinced a abortion is murder but bombing people who happen to believe in a different way of allocating resources is A-OK – in fact bombing people just because they happen to have oil is A-OK, or even just because we’d like more profits.

They generally care more about money than continued survival – they’ll defend fracking because it’s fine if our children have bizarre cancers and no water to drink as long as they can continue to have dirt cheap electricity and gasoline now – and they’ll also defend preserving stupid investments – we will tax the wind turbines because they’re competing unfairly with coal, we will block new solar installations because it might make fracking irrelevant.

They will of course find epic new ways to be racist. When Trump ran on a platform of racism, they loved it. Bring back the Klan!

And, they’ll argue for finding ways to make it look like humanity is barely holding on when in fact we’re fantastically wealthy. They’ll demonstrate the ultimate in fiscal irresponsibility, designing a awful resource allocation system and then insisting we stick to the paper accounting system when the reality is we have tons of food and tons of land and houses.. but the paper accounting system says we don’t have enough so we need to make people starve to death.

They will game the system whenever possible, and they’ll encourage the tyranny of the ultraminority – after all, the majority of people were not conservative even when the conservatives manage to capture both houses and the presidency. The conservatives are just willing to do more awful things – as they demonstrate day after day

They also repeatedly lie using their media and then claim that it is the liberal media that is lying. It’s demonstrable that they lie, but their followers just carefully forget all the lies. I am sure there’s a fair amount of brainwashing / emotional illogic agreeing that goes on every time their followers listen to Fox And Friends or Rush – and of course a lot of their followers carefully ignore any data point that indicates they are wrong.

The question is just, is there any way to totally disempower them or at the least ensure they only have as much power as a fair vote would grant them? The problem here is they are willing to do awful things – probably eventually including calling for the murder of liberals – in order to get their way. They need spanked, badly, but I am not sure how to spank them. They *want* a civil war – they would love to shoot millions of us. There’s no reason to think either side would win in a civil war, either – it’s something everyone would lose.

The irony is they are the people that talk the loudest about words like ‘Freedom’ – but of course that only means you are free if you think like them. And they wrap their authoritarianism and willingness to cheat in the flag – just look at Mitch claiming all his awfulness is patriotic.

So, one of the things I find rather creepy about Christians is their willingness to defend the ethics of God. It’s pretty clear to me from looking around Earth that if there is a God they’ve been operating with some very questionable ethics (the proliferation of religions, each claiming to be the only true one, makes one suspect that if there is a God, they either don’t care about us at all or they enjoy watching us fight – then we could discuss the ethics of using evolutionary algorithms to design a body that *someone is living in while it’s being designed* – especially the lack of any way to turn off the pain / damage report subsystem.

In essence, most Christian defenses of God’s ethics come down to “A 600 pound gorilla can sit anywhere he wants to” – which I suppose might mean that Christian worship of God is worthless to God because they’re only worshiping h* because they’re afraid of h*. Of course, I’ve always found the thought that a supreme being would want worship rather questionable anyway, see various posts in various places.

As usual as I pen these words I contemplate that a few hundred years ago I would have been put to death for them.

Anyway, one net result of all this is I find the idea that there *isn’t* a God actively aware of us or engaged in our lives (which might not mean there isn’t a God at all – as I’ve said elsewhere I think there probably is but they’re probably about as aware of us as we are of individual cells in our body) vastly preferable to the idea that there *is* one and everything I see before me is their idea of how things should be run.

Although, on the other paw – I’ve mentioned elsewhere how no one could ever know if they were at the top of the stack – even God may believe there is something above h*, whether h* is willing to admit this to humanity or not. (And there may well be.. it may be turtles all the way up, or all of us may be in some sense above any one of us). So maybe God isn’t disavowing all religions because *e isn’t sure whether *e is at the top of the pile or not. It’s a interesting idea to play with anyway.

It’s kind of impressive, really. At this point the Republicans think cheating on elections is just dandy. Calling for violent overthrow of the government is fine. Trump should get a pass for that and the many felonies he’s demonstratibly committed (the washington post was kind enough to round those all up for us at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/rap-sheet-trump-crimes/2020/10/16/c6a539da-0e61-11eb-8a35-237ef1eb2ef7_story.html). Of course, I’ve come to expect cheating from the republican party, I’ve come to expect voter disenfranchisement, and apparently in the new normal we can also expect violence from them. (To be fair, they did lots of false-flag violence while pretending to be Antifa during the summer, so this is just stepping up to committing violence in their own name)

I knew they were the party of corruption and lies, but I didn’t realize – and I should have, given how often they talk about how patriotic they are, something that they wouldn’t have to say if it were actually true – that they were the party of destruction of our democratic republic. If they can’t win elections fairly, they’d like to just get out the guns and stop having elections.

Of course, their almost-always-lying “news” sources (Fox, Breitbart, Rush) have whipped them up into a frenzy and made them believe some things which are *clearly not true* (look, if you are dumb enough to think there’s a conspiracy to change the election results that *every single judge* signed off on, including many appointed by the most recent administration – then I can’t help you, you’re dumb enough that you’re likely going to darwin-award yourself sooner or later anyway.)

I think a lot of what’s going on is many of the republican party members are going on, emotionally, what they’d *like* to be true – they want for more humans to be in favor of treating their fellow man awfully than to be in favor of sharing, because it makes their awful behavior more defensible (because everyone’s doing it)

And as far as the leaders, they’ve realized they can cheat and lie their way out of having been complicit in a attempt to overthrow a fair and free election, and they’re in favor of that.

We need to figure out some way to hold their feet to the fire, because it is clear that the party of lies, corruption, and “screw you, I’ve got mine” is going to continue to be as awful as possible for as long as they can, and that apparently includes giving Trump a pass for having deliberately created a violent attack on the capital because he’s such a toddler that he can’t cope with having lost a election.