This premise fails right at the start. Why would "they" lose their power when people know about aliens? All the reasons why the current batch of political leaders are in power remain valid if aliens exist, whether they're democratically elected or authoritarian despots.
Expand upon your thoughts to comment in good faith :) This isn't reddit
Why do you attribute either opaque or transparent behavior/comms on UFOs from the power structure, if there is nothing to be gained either way by said power structure?
IF there is any discourse to be had on UFOs, power structures hiding things etc. it would be on the topic of US DoD obfuscating Next generations Weapons testing for sake of operational security. This has been a formal USAF departments initiative since the 80s, and it's very transparent initiative.
We very well could survive, but maybe only after 6-7 billions of us starve. 1-2 billions of people is considered to be natural carrying capacity of Earth.
Perhaps we could do it gradually enough where nobody has to starve, we get rid of the "REPRODUCE REPRODUCE REPRODUCE" propaganda, and we just naturally end up back near a natural population instead of overpopulating until we die of a metaphorical heat death.
I really don't like that phrase. It should be "reality has a progressive bias". Progressive is the opposite of conservative. "Liberal" is a specific ideology, and will end up in a position somewhere on the progressive-conservative spectrum based on how progressive or conservative it is.
Specifically it is the ideology of Capitalism, representative democracy, the rule of law, etc... basically the ideology of the enlightenment.
This misuse of Liberal is easy to track the etymology. The colloquial usage of "liberal" does sound like an opposite of conservative, it's basically a synonym for "lenient". But colloquial usage is often totally incorrect in certain contexts, like this one.
People who use "liberal" as an opposite of conservative are just bad at type theory.
FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias.
You could just as well say he still agrees with your point about reality comporting more with a progressive understanding of ethics, while at the same time parodying Fox News for incoherently making spurious charges of "liberalism" at every turn.
Why are they saying "on our way" to something that's already here? We even have a name for it: the Anthropocene Extinction Event. Seems dishonest for them to ask that question and then fail to mention the name of it.
This seems to relate to my quest as a metamage "to identify and assemble the Epistemological Primes into the Knowledgecore and use it to defeat the Omnarch". I'm taking a somewhat opposite approach to a PhD, embracing what I've seen someone else refer to as "high-leverage generalism" but at the metaphorical doctorate level.
All this stuff about tokens and vectors is quite different from my approach. I'm always interested to see how other metamages approach this issue.
I think a hypergraph structure is the only thing capable of properly representing knowledge. Knowledge is not just a bunch of nodes with 1:1 connections; there's complex structure in the nodes.
This relies on false definitions of capitalism and communism, definitions which I believe are carefully crafted to preclude you from having certain thoughts.
You seem to understand capitalism as "freedom" and communism as "government control". These false definitions are what leads people to believe Democrats or Nazis are leftists, when they're very far from it.
Really, capitalism is that thing where when you work harder your boss gets richer. Someone else besides you is the owner of the products of your labor. Capitalism allows the capital-owning class to use the worker class as machinery for a free ride through life.
Socialism (communism isn't quite the right word here) is "worker ownership and control of the means of production". Yes that has included tyranny in the past, but modern socialists are mostly of the libertarian type and totally reject government control of anything.
Yes, advertising is a lot like capitalism, but that's because they both serve only to redirect productive capacity towards things which the parasitic class wants instead of what we need. Advertising convinces you to buy useless trinkets and to think in ways you never would have thought otherwise.
Just as the OP has “definitions crafted to preclude him from having certain thoughts”, I’d argue the same for this comment.
You have essentially used a bad-looking, cynical description of capitalism vs an idealised description of socialism. It’s not fair game to compare a cynical view of capitalism in practice with an idealised view of socialism in theory. You either both compare them in practice, in which capitalism wins every time; or compare in theory, in which both are probably on ties, because any idealised version promises the same prosperity and society well-being.
Capitalism is about investment, more than anything else. Why was capitalism born at the creation of the Stock Exchange? Because then savers could use their savings as funding for entrepreneurial endeavours. As British Victorians wanted, the goal was “to live off from the interest made by interests”, referring to their investments’ growth and compounding returns.
In socialism, they essentially want to strip off capitalists from their savings and funding and let the State manage it all. Socialists assume a centralized institution can handle all of the information and get right the incentives, which has been seen to not work every time you try it.
It is also a contradiction of terms to say that socialism, as it was defined by any socialist theorist, is of the “libertarian type”; who by definition wants both economic and social liberties to individuals, whereas socialism by its very postules looks forward to remove any economic liberty and ownership of capital as means of production, whatever vague definition they use to define these (a laptop can be both a means of production and a consumption good at the same time).
Further, advertising is like capitalism from the business perspective, not from the customer perspective. For the business it’s an investment. From the customer it’s just the cost to pay to use a service. And, as said, what defines capitalism is investment, not consumption, and prove of that is that we’ve always consumed stuff along history but only when investment was institutionalised and carried out at scale through a Stock Exchange that capitalism was coined, referring precisely to the act of investing and reinvesting.
Capitalism actually wants to convince you to be frugal, save, and invest your savings. It is consumption, and not capitalism, that tries to convince you to spend it all. Both are antagonists. Consumption is born from opulence, not capitalism. If socialism did also produce abundance in extreme levels for everyone they would be as consumptionists as they could ever be, just as we are in our rich, Western societies. Note that less consumptionist societies like Singapore do better and are considered to be more capitalists than countries like Spain or Italy.
Again, it is opulence that causes excessive consumption: and it’s only capitalism the system that has indeed produce overwhelming wealth to every individual, both poor and rich, something that no other system has ever achieved at the same order of magnitude. And that’s nothing mystical or religious: it’s just that capitalism = investing and reinvesting, so no wonder we have much more to consume if we are all day reinvesting the product of our means of production into more means of production.
It's a totalitarian nightmare right now too, what rock are you living under? Why would one group of the same ideology be tyrants and not the other, just because they have a few different policy opinions?
Democrats slap a rainbow on everything and call it liberation. Republicans slap red white and blue on everything and call it freedom. They're both pawns of the same ruling class who get a free ride on our backs.
