I think that:
1. We may soon be able to rejuvenate human tissues and perhaps whole humans. Our own bodies can provide much of the needed cellular machinery.
2. New technology can enable people to escape the evils of our current economy, especially if doing so becomes national policy.
3. These two things together can greatly improve our lives, especially if we see them coming.
Substack:
https://t.co/VOQaNE7S5g
Website:
https://t.co/RfeueGtxnI
The Palestinians have been in Palestine for much longer than most American bloodlines have been in the USA. I do not agree with the river-to-the-sea people who call for Israel's eradication, but the Palestinians deserve to have Gaza and almost all of the West Bank for themselves. And NOTHING can justify the genocide that the Israelis, with our help, have inflicted on the Gazan Palestinians.
Ted Bundy murdered at least 30 women, and perhaps as many as 36 or even more. If he were still alive and in prison, and if he declared himself to be a woman and demanded to be housed with the female prisoners, should the prison authorities be forced to acquiesce?
With regard to transgenderism, liberals seem to have started with a reasonable desire to allow people to live as they wish, but ended with a sacred cow which they insist must not be challenged, questioned, or lampooned in any way.
The Democratic Party needs to remember that it exists within a pluralistic society where different beliefs compete for public support. Some manifestations of transgender ideology, such as the wholesale mutilation of children too young even to get a tattoo, are certain to be challenged. If Democrats cannot defend transgender practices logically, they should not resort to intimidation and violence to silence opposition. If they do, American democracy will end, and the country will descend into a low-level civil war of the type that is all too common around the world.
What if every American racial or ethnic group were to claim, as its own, every contribution its members had made to contemporary America? Would Indigenous people get all of their land back, but at the price of having no access to modern medicine, modern communications, modern culture, anything made of metal, anything that uses electricity, and anything requiring an internal combustion engine?
The European and other settlers of modern America were neither better nor worse than other groups of people; they were simply more powerful. That power derived from mastery of technology and of the forms of social organization that technology makes possible. As almost all large groups of people do, they used their power primarily to benefit themselves.
How many of the people who constantly raise the accusation that the USA exists on "stolen land" really regret that the USA came into existence in roughly its present form?
@ElissaSlotkin Honestly, I'm tired of the craziness on both sides of the political spectrum. The first major political party that comes back from the Twilight Zone will probably get my support.
@LindseyGrahamSC There is a great deal of evidence that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. No matter how illustrious the history of the Jewish people or of individual Jews might be, genocide cannot be tolerated. What the Irish are doing is not anti-Jewishness, it's opposition to genocide.
Palestinians are Semites, just as much as the Israelis are. Palestinian and Israeli lives are equally valuable. No country has the right to systematically murder hundreds of thousands of defenseless people, which Israel appears to have done and to be doing. We have the ability to stop Israel and a moral duty to do so.
G) An out-of-control foreign policy that pays too little heed to the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. We seem to think that gargantuan crimes, like the one were ar abetting in Gaza, will never ricochet against us in the form of nuclear terrorism, but they actually might. We seem to think we could never panic Russia into using nuclear weapons, but if history is any guide, the unthinkable might well happen.
There is a new alternative to capitalism and socialism, distributive economics. The motivating principle behind distributive economics is that government policy should enable people to live as self-sufficiently as possible as individuals or in small groups, and to put as much purchasing power into the hands of the average person as possible. Specifically:
1. As much intellectual property as possible should be in the public domain
2. Small groups of people should be given first crack at solving social problems, with higher levels of government involved only when needed.
3. Education should be as free as possible.
4. Perhaps economic units should be only as large as they need to be to accomplish their objectives, but not larger.
Capitalism, socialism, and trade unionism all suffer from the fact that when people delegate power, they hand their welfare to others who may not care about their interests or even understand them.
As David Graeber made clear in his book Bullshit Jobs, much of our disappearing wealth is not stolen, but instead is simply wasted. Distributive economics could reduce that waste by making things simpler and more visible.
@VividProwess Palestinians feel the same way about the Israeli flag, and with much greater justification. An organized genocide is underway in Gaza. Palestinian and Israeli lives are equally valuable. The first step toward ending public hostility toward Israel is to stop the genocide.
Trying to end Hamas's control of the Palestinian liberation movement will be as futile as trying to undermine Viet Cong control of Vietnamese nationalism was during the Vietnam War. Any Palestinian government that depends for its existence on outside support will inevitably lose the confidence of the Palestinians themselves, just as the pro-American governments in South Vietnam had very little real support among the Vietnamese. What Senator Graham advocates is a recipe for still more mass extermination, as if there has not been enough already.
In our hubris and cruelty, we have lost sight of one extremely important fact: nuclear weapons are spreading around the world. They can be delivered without fancy methods such as airplanes or missiles; a 1 megaton nuclear warhead weighing 600 pounds can be delivered via a half-ton pickup truck. We depend on the restraint and good judgment of the rest of the world to prevent nuclear terrorism, but our actions are steadily undermining that restrain and good judgment.
We need to force the Netanyahu government to honor the ceasefire, which we have the ability to do, and we need to abandon any grotesque Imperial fantasies about turning Gaza into prime commercial real estate.