It's long. Feel free to skip. Just a stream of thinking.
I think everyone who thinks less of someone just for what they believe about the world should use that as an indicator that their thinking and understanding of the world is becoming out of touch with reality. We're all witnessing this kind of insanity on a scale that has caught most of us off guard. I mean, many of us saw it coming, but I thought it would progress slower than it has. I was even naive enough to think that people would see the insanity of this and utterly reject it. And some have. But dayam. I'm now hearing the talking points of postmodernism from the boardroom of my employer. People are becoming ideologically possessed at alarming rates and this is affecting long term friendships too.
I keep hearing people say that if someone "unfriends" you just because you believe something differently, they weren't really your friend. I don't think that's very true. Once someone becomes indoctrinated to believe a completely different reality from the one they believed when they were your friend, their thinking changes, their prioritization of values change, and the values at the top become uber critical of everything that doesn't line up precisely with their world view. It's not that they were never your friend. It's that they're no longer the person that was your friend. They're someone different now. They're lost in the insanity of ideological possession. The lost of friends over ideology makes it evident to me that a possible canary for this insanity is the unfriending. It's an indicator that you're starting to ideologically attach moral importance to your shift in moral values, so the people who disagree with you are immoral.
It's morally okay to have a different perspective from other people as long as it's based on any of the objective morals that most people have. So if your moral priorities result in social justice being the most important thing to you, that's totally fine. Where it becomes not fine is when you assume that someone else's rankings of common values brings them to a different top thing, like maybe loyalty, or liberty. So then you just cant' abide being their friend anymore because you think that's immoral. I think that's a canary in the coal mind. An indicator that you're becoming indoctrinated into an out of touch perception of reality.
No one has a full view of all that encompasses reality. We just have bits and pieces of reality learned by our lived experience and ranked and filtered by our temperaments. And yes, I used one of the SJW's terms. It does represent something real. Because not everyone's experience is the same, and we don't have the same temperaments, we all have different perspectives. And at least a little contains some objective reality. That is to say, something in one's lived experience points to something objectively real at least to some extent.
It's natural for us to believe something different based on our own individual perspective and how we interpret it. And that actually makes it morally "okay" for us to believe some different things. There's nothing inherently malicious about having different beliefs about the world than other people even if we believe things that are only subjectively true. I don't care what religion you are, because that's your subjective truth. As long as you're not malicious, it's not immoral to believe something different. But when you start unfriending people because you attach morality to the fact that they disagree with you, that just seems like the beginning of what turns into malicious behavior. That's potentially an indicator that you're heading into a bad place.
It's morally okay to be incorrect about something. It's morally okay to have a perspective that isn't mostly real. We're not all going to be right. But along with that, we also can't assume that the people who disagree with us are all wrong. Most every perspective has at least a little reality behind it. And if we care more about discovering more of all objective reality than protecting the perspective we have, we're more willing to try to understand the person's perspective instead of just assuming they're morally corrupt and then unfriending them.
People who see things from different perspectives, even if that perceptive doesn't have a lot of reality at all, can still see some parts of reality that other perspectives don't see. I've mentioned "lived experience". SJWs take that to an absurd extreme, but there is some objective reality in that term. I want to be open to gaining that piece of reality that the idea offers.
So what I'm saying I guess, you'll see the most clear view of objective reality if you look deeply at all the perspectives, and pick out from them all the things that you can determine are objectively true. I want to be better at that. Bias is a blinder to those other perspectives which might hold even just bits and pieces of objective reality, and if I refuse to see those then I"ll miss out on seeing more of the domain of that domain. But there's a place for skepticism too.
Perception is reliant on the information we take in and how we interpret it, filter it, and prioritize it. There seems to be a predominant dichotomy for how we accept new information. We think of it as the left/right divide, but perhaps it's more accurate to label the sides as "skeptical" and "accepting" of new information. Skeptical people are generally reluctant to accept new information. They might be thought of as people who are "right" or conservative in the literal sense. They tend to value the current or proven ideas more than new unproven, potentially harmful ideas. The accepting/open people are eager to accept new information. They might be thought of as people who are left or liberal in a literal sense. They tend to value new ideas above older ideas, sometimes just because they're new.
There are objectively real things on both sides. They both bring some important bits of reality to the overall understanding so they're both needed by society to keep it functional, growing, and prosperous. The accepting side is needed to help keep society improving itself. But not every new idea makes things better and if left just to the accepting people, they tend to accept ideas with not much critical thinking. Their criticisms are left for the old ideas. It is because of that we have an insane social justice thread. So it's helpful to have a healthy, vocal skeptical side to constrain the new ideas to adopting only that which is practical improves society. But that side can go awry too. The dark ages in European history is a good example of too much conserving of tradition and not enough reforming ideas taking root.
There has probably always been this sort of Yin/Yang divide of temperaments between these two ways of handling new information. Sometimes one side gains too much power over the other and society suffers from either bad old ideas conserved, or insane new ideas accepted. Then something awesome happened. The idea of free speech is one new idea that gave a voice to accepting people and skeptics. And society, as a result, achieved the ability to be mostly at peace with each other, at least to the extent that there is reasonable balance between the two.
But today the accepting side is having a significant voice in the public square at the expense of the skeptics. Of course there are platforms for skeptics to speak freely, but because of the nature of individually consumed media, they'remostly speaking to themselves. That's not really a public dialog. We have a media that strongly favors the accepting and strongly disfavors the skeptics. We have social media which is really the mechanism that has escalated all this extraordinarily quickly, and they strongly favor the accepting and strongly disfavor the skeptics.
The only salvation from where we are is the thing that has created peace in the West: balance between skeptics and accepting, enabled by free speech. But people are isolating themselves from the voices needed most now by unfriending them at an individual level, and de-platforming them at a societal level. Skeptics' voices are marginalized. It's now morally wrong to be skeptical of any of these new ideas. So now it's impossible for the individuals who make up the masses to see the objectively real parts that inhabit another perspective. The left is now unconstrained and mostly free to spread its bad ideas, without rebuttal. And we had a canary for some time, and didn't realize that was an early indicator of trouble ahead. I dunno. Maybe it's too late in my lifetime to see skeptics have their voice back. Every time I think we're making progress to regain the balance, something happens and we lose what we've gained.
It had seemed that most of the bad ideas were contained in the fringe university departments, in the far left urban areas, in the left corners of media. It seemed that people were seeing the nonsense and were starting to push back. Then that ***damn idiot cop unknowingly closed off even more of society to hearing a skeptical perspective of the CHAZian world the uber accepting people propose. One can be too reluctant to accept new ideas. One can be too open to new ideas. There's a sane space which many people are leaving in droves.
I think everyone who thinks less of someone just for what they believe about the world should use that as an indicator that their thinking and understanding of the world is becoming out of touch with reality. We're all witnessing this kind of insanity on a scale that has caught most of us off guard. I mean, many of us saw it coming, but I thought it would progress slower than it has. I was even naive enough to think that people would see the insanity of this and utterly reject it. And some have. But dayam. I'm now hearing the talking points of postmodernism from the boardroom of my employer. People are becoming ideologically possessed at alarming rates and this is affecting long term friendships too.
I keep hearing people say that if someone "unfriends" you just because you believe something differently, they weren't really your friend. I don't think that's very true. Once someone becomes indoctrinated to believe a completely different reality from the one they believed when they were your friend, their thinking changes, their prioritization of values change, and the values at the top become uber critical of everything that doesn't line up precisely with their world view. It's not that they were never your friend. It's that they're no longer the person that was your friend. They're someone different now. They're lost in the insanity of ideological possession. The lost of friends over ideology makes it evident to me that a possible canary for this insanity is the unfriending. It's an indicator that you're starting to ideologically attach moral importance to your shift in moral values, so the people who disagree with you are immoral.
It's morally okay to have a different perspective from other people as long as it's based on any of the objective morals that most people have. So if your moral priorities result in social justice being the most important thing to you, that's totally fine. Where it becomes not fine is when you assume that someone else's rankings of common values brings them to a different top thing, like maybe loyalty, or liberty. So then you just cant' abide being their friend anymore because you think that's immoral. I think that's a canary in the coal mind. An indicator that you're becoming indoctrinated into an out of touch perception of reality.
No one has a full view of all that encompasses reality. We just have bits and pieces of reality learned by our lived experience and ranked and filtered by our temperaments. And yes, I used one of the SJW's terms. It does represent something real. Because not everyone's experience is the same, and we don't have the same temperaments, we all have different perspectives. And at least a little contains some objective reality. That is to say, something in one's lived experience points to something objectively real at least to some extent.
It's natural for us to believe something different based on our own individual perspective and how we interpret it. And that actually makes it morally "okay" for us to believe some different things. There's nothing inherently malicious about having different beliefs about the world than other people even if we believe things that are only subjectively true. I don't care what religion you are, because that's your subjective truth. As long as you're not malicious, it's not immoral to believe something different. But when you start unfriending people because you attach morality to the fact that they disagree with you, that just seems like the beginning of what turns into malicious behavior. That's potentially an indicator that you're heading into a bad place.
It's morally okay to be incorrect about something. It's morally okay to have a perspective that isn't mostly real. We're not all going to be right. But along with that, we also can't assume that the people who disagree with us are all wrong. Most every perspective has at least a little reality behind it. And if we care more about discovering more of all objective reality than protecting the perspective we have, we're more willing to try to understand the person's perspective instead of just assuming they're morally corrupt and then unfriending them.
People who see things from different perspectives, even if that perceptive doesn't have a lot of reality at all, can still see some parts of reality that other perspectives don't see. I've mentioned "lived experience". SJWs take that to an absurd extreme, but there is some objective reality in that term. I want to be open to gaining that piece of reality that the idea offers.
So what I'm saying I guess, you'll see the most clear view of objective reality if you look deeply at all the perspectives, and pick out from them all the things that you can determine are objectively true. I want to be better at that. Bias is a blinder to those other perspectives which might hold even just bits and pieces of objective reality, and if I refuse to see those then I"ll miss out on seeing more of the domain of that domain. But there's a place for skepticism too.
Perception is reliant on the information we take in and how we interpret it, filter it, and prioritize it. There seems to be a predominant dichotomy for how we accept new information. We think of it as the left/right divide, but perhaps it's more accurate to label the sides as "skeptical" and "accepting" of new information. Skeptical people are generally reluctant to accept new information. They might be thought of as people who are "right" or conservative in the literal sense. They tend to value the current or proven ideas more than new unproven, potentially harmful ideas. The accepting/open people are eager to accept new information. They might be thought of as people who are left or liberal in a literal sense. They tend to value new ideas above older ideas, sometimes just because they're new.
There are objectively real things on both sides. They both bring some important bits of reality to the overall understanding so they're both needed by society to keep it functional, growing, and prosperous. The accepting side is needed to help keep society improving itself. But not every new idea makes things better and if left just to the accepting people, they tend to accept ideas with not much critical thinking. Their criticisms are left for the old ideas. It is because of that we have an insane social justice thread. So it's helpful to have a healthy, vocal skeptical side to constrain the new ideas to adopting only that which is practical improves society. But that side can go awry too. The dark ages in European history is a good example of too much conserving of tradition and not enough reforming ideas taking root.
There has probably always been this sort of Yin/Yang divide of temperaments between these two ways of handling new information. Sometimes one side gains too much power over the other and society suffers from either bad old ideas conserved, or insane new ideas accepted. Then something awesome happened. The idea of free speech is one new idea that gave a voice to accepting people and skeptics. And society, as a result, achieved the ability to be mostly at peace with each other, at least to the extent that there is reasonable balance between the two.
But today the accepting side is having a significant voice in the public square at the expense of the skeptics. Of course there are platforms for skeptics to speak freely, but because of the nature of individually consumed media, they'remostly speaking to themselves. That's not really a public dialog. We have a media that strongly favors the accepting and strongly disfavors the skeptics. We have social media which is really the mechanism that has escalated all this extraordinarily quickly, and they strongly favor the accepting and strongly disfavor the skeptics.
The only salvation from where we are is the thing that has created peace in the West: balance between skeptics and accepting, enabled by free speech. But people are isolating themselves from the voices needed most now by unfriending them at an individual level, and de-platforming them at a societal level. Skeptics' voices are marginalized. It's now morally wrong to be skeptical of any of these new ideas. So now it's impossible for the individuals who make up the masses to see the objectively real parts that inhabit another perspective. The left is now unconstrained and mostly free to spread its bad ideas, without rebuttal. And we had a canary for some time, and didn't realize that was an early indicator of trouble ahead. I dunno. Maybe it's too late in my lifetime to see skeptics have their voice back. Every time I think we're making progress to regain the balance, something happens and we lose what we've gained.
It had seemed that most of the bad ideas were contained in the fringe university departments, in the far left urban areas, in the left corners of media. It seemed that people were seeing the nonsense and were starting to push back. Then that ***damn idiot cop unknowingly closed off even more of society to hearing a skeptical perspective of the CHAZian world the uber accepting people propose. One can be too reluctant to accept new ideas. One can be too open to new ideas. There's a sane space which many people are leaving in droves.
I mean. If you didn’t want to read it, that’s fine. If you want to discuss shortcomings that’s fine too. But if you think I’m saying both sides are the same I have to doubt you read it. The echo chambers of course are what gets people to the point where they can accept any just any nonsense. And don’t think that the right doesn’t have echo chambers too. 
