The Natural Imbalances of Good and Evil
Finding myself somehow compelled to read an oddly titled article, The Problem of Painful Socks, I was pleasantly surprised by the author’s captivating manner and writing style in sharing such a mundane and otherwise painfully pleasant experience.
The purpose and intent of his story soon became clear, despite the humorous spoiler alert in the subtitle: The great abstractions of good and evil, pleasure and pain, are sometimes sliding down our shins.
Though not clearly stated in the author’s sublime conclusions, and in direct contrast to his inference that good and evil exist only in the minds of the observer, it immediately dawned on me why there is indeed more evil than good in the world, more ugliness than beauty, more lies than truth.
The existence of good, evil, pain, pleasure, and beauty is an objective truth, clearly expressed by the author’s admission of his experiential fascination with an allergic reaction to his socks, and is in direct conflict with his underlying claims to the contrary.
If suffering were only in the mind, the author would not have called his own itch ‘painful’ or called scratching it ‘pleasant,’ as each is an objective testament to reality.
Does the author not believe what his eyes see, or what his hand writes, or does he believe all such matters are tricks of the mind?
Does the author not believe that evil or immoral actions can cause physical pain, or that the compassion in acts of goodness can bring physical comfort, or are these too tricks of the mind?
As the author correctly alludes, too much of a good thing loses a significant measure of its goodness if readily available in abundance.
Hence, my novel takeaway is that we are drawn to pursue and favor goodness, beauty, and truth precisely for their inherent scarcity relative to the ready abundance of evil, ugliness, and lies.
Though I have yet to have any revelations explaining the rather troubling, random, and heavy-handed nature of fate in doling out the extreme variations of ultimate desert (what one ultimately deserves), I am at least comforted by gaining a rational, unexpectedly pleasant explanation for the wicked ways of the world.
In reading his story a second time, it finally sank in that this erudite bloke was directly discrediting the existence of God as some emotional crutch for humankind rather than a spiritual guide. He did, after all, mention the belief in an all-powerful God as an exercise in whistling in the wind.
He cleverly and rightly so claims that nothing would exist to be measured or perceived if the mind and consciousness of human beings were not present to do so.
Yet, in the last breaths of his sock story, he correctly claims there is no such thing as a perfect world and then aptly leans on a civilizational understanding of heaven and hell as an inherently human foundation for framing the world as we know it.
The very question of the remaining doubt I previously alluded to—the fact that suffering is distributed unfairly—is precisely what raises doubt about a benevolent God; it is the very measure of doubt most responsible for questioning the existence of a benevolent deity.
At the end of the day, and our lives, and most certainly throughout the journey, what matters most is our ability to experience and comprehend the wonder, joy, and sorrow life promises. To do that with any level of success requires faith.
That humanity has chosen to place such faith in a mysterious, wise, transcendent power beyond the natural world makes perfect sense. It goes a long way toward explaining the inexplicable to a highly intelligent life form that firmly believes itself to be much larger than the sum of its biological parts.
My heart goes out to this well-intended, rational, and good-hearted black woman and all of the good black people just like her. They suffer constantly as a result of their group's overall behavior, along with the rest of us, but even more so because people rationally group these individuals with the preponderance of bad actors in their group. Hopefully her message gets through.
This woman speaks the TRUTH!!
( I have said all along that if Karmelo didn't mean to k* ll Austin, why did he st* b him right in the heart? And Karmelo didn't have a single mark on him... )
The media narrative is falling apart one witness at a time.
For months, people were told what to think before they ever heard the testimony. Now that witnesses are taking the stand, some people suddenly don't want to hear the facts.
Truth doesn't change because it makes your side uncomfortable.
Evidence matters. Testimony matters. Facts matter.
If your opinion can't survive the truth, it was never based on the truth to begin with.
I take it you meant to say those individuals and those like them instead of "these people." Not all black people are like them. The question I would like to know is whether MOST black people are like them, or whether these insane, Low-IQ predators and those who blindly support them are a clear minority of black Americans. I would like to believe that the vast majority of black Americans are decent people of sound judicial judgment and honest disposition, though I would like some statistical information to confirm, if possible.
🚨🇦🇱BREAKING: Day 8 of mass protests in Tirana, Albania
✊️🇦🇱Thousands have once again gathered in the capital to oppose the controversial Trump–Kushner resort project, as demonstrations enter their eighth consecutive day
#Albania
The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote from the Senate to bind us to another country.
That matters little when another country is already controlling us.
@5149jamesli Fair point, James, but I suspect the problem lies also in the veracity of the ballads themselves, not simply the archaic manner in which they are counted.
Only in an America can an industry that has collectively lost over half a trillion dollars —at a pace of roughly a million dollars a minute — ask for (and likely get) government subsidies.
One reason the Iran war may not end before the midterms is that it gives Trump the perfect scapegoat. He can blame rising prices on the war and hold out false hope that as soon as the war ends, prices will come crashing down. He can’t risk ending the war and prices staying high.
There is a nation that blackmails the world w/ nuclear weapons threat. There is a nation that corrupts the US through foreign influence in campaigns & press. There is a nation that sponsors & engages in systemic terrorism of civilian populations for political gain.
It's Israel.
Jeff Currie thinks we are sleepwalking into one of the biggest commodity shocks since Covid and the market is still pricing it like a headline risk instead of a physical crisis (Save this).
He calls it molecular contagion and last week, jet fuel shortages were concentrated in Singapore, where prices spiked to roughly 230 dollars a barrel.
This week the same pattern has shown up in Rotterdam at around 220 dollars and in Thailand, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Australia which means the dislocation has gone intercontinental.
In his words, there is no longer any meaningful spread between Singapore and Rotterdam, no spare barrels to re route, and no policy lever that can solve the problem in the short term.
Currie’s core point is brutally simple, you can print money, but you cannot print molecules.
The futures curve, the paper market is still trading around 100 dollars a barrel.
The physical market on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz is telling a completely different story, with Oman crude spiking to 173 dollars and Asia bound blends effectively clearing around 130 dollars a barrel.
Refined products like jet fuel and diesel are already spiraling north of 200 dollars a barrel in multiple hubs.
That is the tale of two markets he is talking about.
On one side you have screen prices that look volatile but manageable, helped by algorithmic trading, cross commodity hedging and the lingering belief that high prices fix high prices before anything breaks.
On the other side you have physical supply chains that are already breaking, tankers being diverted, refineries bidding against each other for the last uncommitted barrels, and regional shortages that cannot be solved with central bank liquidity.
Tomorrow will be exactly 59 years since Israel bombed the USS Liberty.
You'll see pro-Israel accounts and Zionist bots flood the zone with "it was a tragic mistake". That is a blatant lie.
The world deserves the truth and the veterans deserve justice. Share this thread. 🙏🇺🇸
Bestselling novelist David Baldacci on how AI companies deliberately stole every book and academic paper published in the last 70 years:
Baldacci is a named plaintiff in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, alongside John Grisham, Scott Turow, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen.
They're also representing roughly 60,000 unnamed plaintiffs.
He explains how AI companies arrived at novels as the key ingredient for building superintelligence:
"The AI community searched the world. How do you create superintelligence? They tried everything to try to figure out, how do you do this? They fed dictionaries into it. They did lots of stuff. They finally found the only way to create super intelligence that they needed was to feed novels into the large language models. Novels worked, finished products of storytelling with characters and dialogue and research and events and interactions. That was their Holy Grail moment."
Baldacci points out the obvious path the AI companies could have taken —negotiating with the five major publishers, each of whom represents around 100,000 writers.
Instead, they chose theft. @davidbaldacci continues:
"They decided we're just going to steal them. I'm not saying anything out of school. They've admitted this. They got most of the books from a Russian pirate website where they would go and download the books from there. And they didn't even want their software programs to know they were stealing the books. So they had the software program that would scrape off the copyright page, scrape off the ISBN number on the back, and just download the book itself."
The scale is staggering.
Over the last eight or nine years, every book and every academic paper published in the last 70 years worldwide has been ingested into the large language models at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
Baldacci testified about this on Capitol Hill in July.
He describes the personal toll of being a named plaintiff:
"I've had to give them all of my materials, all of my financial information I've had to give them, let them come in and do a complete scrape on all of my emails, all of my communications. I sat through a nine hour deposition like I've done something wrong. They said, yeah, we've taken your books, we haven't paid you a dime and we didn't ask your permission, but we should be entitled to do it because AI is so cool. That's basically their legal argument."
The parallel case against Anthropic in California has already settled for $1.5 billion, to be paid out over two years to 50,000 writers. The OpenAI and Microsoft case is now past discovery and heading toward a settlement conference.