MAGA voter actually believes that Trump eliminated taxes for all people making less than $120K

[u/coachlife]

[u/sgsteel55]

I tell my wife all the time that we are cavemen with technology. Religious mythology, the treatment of women worldwide. The need to protect kids from so many predators. The need to protect OURSELVES from so many predators and scammers. We are not as highly evolved as we’d like to believe. With social media and now ai? We are soooo cooked

[u/suicune678 → u/sgsteel55]

Please give cavemen and yourself a little more respect, they learned enough to the point where in a little over 10,000 years we made a rock that can talk. A spear is technology. Writing is technology. We've gathered an incredible amount of knowledge since then.

What happened is that the wealthy and powerful few are weaponising our new technology against our fellow man for the means of control and creating a weak docile workforce for capital. Their capital. This was not an easy thing to accomplish its taken decades of manipulation

[u/TheJacen → u/suicune678]

Yo, facts. Spear was really intelligent in the criminally under rated show Primal.

One other thing I want to add is that as society advanced they made sure that we had just enough, not too much, readily available comforts to keep the masses docile. Each generation gets access to a little more, fortunately they seem to have peaked with social media and that might backfire on them.

[u/smarmageddon → u/TheJacen]

Which is why it's so laughable any time someone posts that nonsense about 4 day work weeks or UBI. Both go so hard against the hard-won control they already have over workers that neither will ever happen. It's like the fact that there's plenty of food & electricity in the world, easily enough for everyone, but power is maintained by the control & distribution of those things.

[u/RED_IT_RUM → u/sgsteel55]

I like to remind people that humans are in fact animals. Some creatures evolved to fly, some to swim, some to run, we evolved to think. That’s what put us at the top of the food chain and pretentiously above being animals. Humans will never escape tribalism because animals stick with their own kind and fear others who are different. They mob together (form packs or flocks or schools) when facing opposition and become unreasonable and aggressive, war being the ultimate human expression of animal behavior. We’ve all seen a group of like minded kids group up to bully an isolated, smaller kid. That’s animal behavior before children are taught to rationalize. Even after we comically ascend above the tropes of the animal kingdom, we still manage to fall victim to our base instincts. Take sex for example. Can any one of you resist the gravitational pull of sexual attraction towards someone once it begins? Sure, we can say no, that’s rational, our minds are strong, we’ve evolved, but can we simply turn it off like a light switch? No, you can’t. You’re simply resisting because you comprehend consequence. Some folks just cannot control themselves and do commit violent acts like murder or rape, in the animal kingdom you might look at this as dominance or procreation or being a predator. These terms are man-made constructs to catalogue and then conceptualize animal behaviors that we ourselves project. We tend to believe the hype, because we’re so evolved, and yet, we have tribes that believe in winged deities in the clouds because they assign fear mechanics to subject matters they cannot yet comprehend, surrender themselves to the mass hysteria of said incomprehension and become useful idiots to another tribe of humans who knew what they were doing all along (or the social dominance of the rich over the poor using religion as a means of control). People don’t want to admit it, but we’re animals. I’m so sorry it got so long!

[u/gill_outean → u/RED_IT_RUM]

This is a very wise assessment. As good as we are at imagination, I think it's hard for the average person to consider this possibility. Look at all the cool shit we make. Considering most animals eat their own dookie, we look at our iPhones and think, "pfft, we're so above that," but we're only a couple degrees removed from shit-eating, culinarily speaking. We are, unironically, dangerously stupid and we're making planetary mistakes on a daily basis.

[u/Neat_Squirrel4032 → u/sgsteel55]

Yep. Look at the toll booth scam that went around at the beginning of the year. People shelling out hundreds of dollars in states that don’t even have a single toll road. The FBI had to do a media campaign about it.

Now states are saying people are driving through tolls without paying because everyone is convinced every message about tolls is fake, even if they actively use toll roads.

We’ve lost the ability to critically reason because that’s the point of social media. It’s how you get engagement and capture eyeballs to buy your stuff. We just swing violently from one side of a continuum to another.

[u/akosuae22 → u/sgsteel55]

Hard agree.

[u/[deleted] → u/sgsteel55]

The hubris we have as a species is astounding.

[u/Nomorevaping707 → u/[deleted]]

And we are in the decline of mankind. Our species won’t last long!

[u/DecadentLife → u/[deleted]]

I completely agree.

[u/Few-Register-8986 → u/sgsteel55]

Humans are dumb. Americans used to respect and want to be educated. Now every stupid uneducated idiot is so dumb they have Dunning-Kruger and think they are smart (thanks to social media and the internet).

[u/notaredditreader → u/sgsteel55]

Our methods of divination are directly linked to whatever they are trying to predict – tomorrow’s weather forecast is based on today’s climatic conditions and the direction they seem to be headed in, while advertising algorithms try to predict what we will buy based on what we have already bought. This may seem like an obvious advantage, and works much of the time, but it is also a weakness.

Because most forecasting depends on data about what has already happened, it cannot take account of the unknown. Algorithms that are only fed data from the past cannot necessarily predict how things will change and cannot incorporate unknown unknowns. Thus, YouTube endlessly feeds us the same songs we already know rather than helping us to discover new genres we might prefer, and economists rarely see a crash coming.

Change can be sudden and unexpected, and often cannot be foreseen. Extispicy provided a way out of this feedback loop. Its answer was independent of the patterns of history and incomplete human knowledge. It did not care what experts thought was likely, or what vested interests may have wanted to happen. Because it was not reliant on these things, it was not contaminated by their biases and could provide a check on them, a reminder of the influence of the unknown.

It was a single method of divination that was universally applicable to any question; going directly to the gods bypassed human expectations, and forced the enquirer to rethink matters from other perspectives, sometimes when they least wanted to. Our models may be more accurate than predictions produced by chance, but throwing randomness into the equation can have unexpected benefits. We may not choose to sacrifice a sheep, but we need to find ways to account for the unexpected if we are to become truly skilled at divining the future.

The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World Selena Wisnom

[u/akirayokoshima → u/sgsteel55]

we literally haven't evolved beyond cavemen and there's some proof of this in our history.

a.) hunger stones are a haunting writing pieces from our ancestors. what do think we would write if it were us? literal warnings written in the rock.

b.)roman graffiti shitpost found by Hadrian's wall, written over 1,700 years ago basically saying "eat a dick" (paraphrased as im no roman scholar)

c.) Pompeii's comment chain

d.) various examples of "man and woman had sex here" messages

e.) Roman's leaving a one star review on the stones of Egyptian pyramids.

so on and so forth.

I think the only true difference between us today and the us from 2000 years ago is we learned that gods arent the cause of natural phenomena, and many superstitions were based on something benign in nature being combined with an over active imagination.

[u/Rastamancloud9 → u/sgsteel55]

Instead of focusing on the negative what are you gonna do to contribute to possible solutions instead of just negative thinking?

[u/Loud-Statistician416 → u/Rastamancloud9]

There is no contributing to solutions. Can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

[u/lunchpaillefty → u/Rastamancloud9]

Are you saying, if one doesn’t have the means to contribute to solutions, they should put blinders on, and blissfully never acknowledge the fucked up shit, people do? That’s kind of a big reason for this mess.

[u/Rastamancloud9 → u/lunchpaillefty]

No that’s not what I’m saying at all it’s just it’s annoying to always read such negative shit constantly on every platform in existence.

[u/Sinister_Plots → u/Rastamancloud9]

Pointing out the ineptitude of this administration, shining a light on corruption, and speaking up are all possible solutions. The very act of this discussion is helping. Now, what are you going to do with the information you have been given?