Lost in Translation

I despised Trump while he was running. Ted Cruz was my candidate of choice. At the time I thought Trump was a bumbling fool and was terrified at the prospect of him winning the nomination. When Cruz dropped out and Trump became the nominee, I was aghast. I even considered voting for Hillary. Then sanity returned and I realized I had two choices: vote Hillary (whom I knew would be bad for the country) or vote Trump (whom I hoped might not be bad for the country). On election day I crossed my fingers and voted Trump. When he won and was subsequently sworn in I watched with great trepidation. If he acted as president the way he acted as candidate then I would be quick to take action. To my great pleasure he began keeping his promises and actually started governing quite well. He still speaks off the cuff and says cringeworthly things, but by and large he is showing great leadership and is worthy of high praise. As you can see, I completely understand the change in Lindsey Graham.

The "Squad" - Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - are four freshmen congresswomen who embody extreme anti-American sentiments while occupying the cultural foreground of the modern progressive movement. While not actually leaders in Congress, they nonetheless hold positions of cultural leadership. Trump, via his tweets, is bringing this information to the foreground of the American people and is forcing their rhetoric front and center of the conversation happening now during the Democratic party selection process. He is forcing the Democrats to acknowledge the skeletons in their closet, namely that they are lurching far left towards full blown communism. This conversation serves a vital purpose: it forces the American electorate to wake up and realize what is happening (indeed, has been happening for decades) and make a choice. That choice is simple: allow the progressives to take power and hasten the decline of traditional American values in place of progressive values (i.e. big government collectivism) or return to traditional American values (limited government, liberty, and capitalism). It's a genius move, and you don't even see it since you are discussing how he treats these poor women while ignoring everything these women are saying.

Your observation of changing lines forming an "unbalance" within the individual trigrams (minute 14 in the video) is excellent! This idea had never occurred to me before... Thank you for sharing your insight. This is very good.

Seek justice, but not at the end of a guillotine. Guilt by association is a dangerous path.

It would be great to have a version of the TTC with hypertexts linking similar concepts, such as embodiment of Te, for example. This would allow readers to browse a passage and easily find other passages that discuss the same, or similar, concepts.

The ego-self will never let itself go freely, so it hides behind no-self and says 'look, I don't exist!' When true dissolution shows up, the ego-self, that had been pretending to not be there, suddenly panics. I think this is what you are describing. Certainly many claim to have fully dissolved the ego-self and continue to live. I don't doubt that is possible, but it seems to me that once fully dissolved, the next step is death, since there remains nothing here to warrant continued living.

Nu-cu-lar! Because, Science!

Um, no. By "invest" I mean "build more nuclear power plants so that we have more, and cheaper power." With more power - and cheaper power - industry will be better able to grow and thus provide the jobs and innovations needed to drive our civilization forward, thus improving the lives of everyone. "A rising tide lifts all boats." -- John F. Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_rising_tide_lifts_all_boats

Thank you for your response. Your position appears to be that we should eliminate modern civilization entirely, allowing untold millions or billions to die in the process, in order to prevent climate change from killing us. Do I read you correctly?

Oh, and don't forget about raising taxes and imposing new regulations (which often contain fees). It's severe enough to warrant that, of course.

I think this thread is quite illuminating. We have one camp who believe that climate change is an existential threat to all life on the planet, yet are unwilling to endorse the draconian measures needed to combat the threat. This is akin to someone yelling that their house is on fire while continuing to sit on the couch and watch television. We have another camp who express uncertainty about the existential nature of the threat, and whom are, in turn, regarded as anti-science, ignorant, or simply hate filled. This is often how the pattern unfolds when progressive ideologies are challenged. The crisis is severe enough to vote Democrats into office, but not severe enough to do anything about it once elected. It's all a sham...

Thank you for your response. You have presented evidence that man made climate change will lead to human extinction yet are unwilling to go on record as stating that you support forced wealth confiscation or nuclear power to combat the crisis. Therefore you either don't care about human extinction or don't believe the crisis is existential.

Here's a proof to determine whether a person really believes that climate change is the #1 issue facing the world today. Given: Man-made Climate Change poses an existential threat to life on Earth as we know it. 1) Are you willing to declare martial law, suspend civil liberties, confiscate wealth and force citizens to go without the conveniences of modern civilization (cars,airplanes,household climate control,access to electricity) to combat this crisis? (Yes/No) 2) Are you willing to invest in nuclear energy, despite the known long term issue with radioactive waste containment, in order to halt the immediate threat posed by CO2? [This is analogous to a person who is starving and you offer him food, but the food may give him diabetes in 10 years. Without the food he will be dead in a week, so it's pointless to refuse]. (Yes/No) If you answer No to either of the questions above then I must conclude that you really don't believe that man made climate change is an existential threat, and thus you are using the specter of climate change as a boogeyman to push your progressive agenda.

I'm a bighorn sheep, or perhaps a dog. Maybe I'm a cockroach. It depends on my mood at the time.

Hi

Thank you for clarifying your position. Given this information it seems appropriate to take absolutely any action to prevent such an apocalypse, including forced confiscation of wealth and, if necessary, slave labor. Can you see how dangerous this position might be, especially if you are wrong? Can you see how politicians might abuse the data to use climate change to coerce their agenda?

I understand that your hypothesis (as expressed by the link given) is that anthropocentric global warming is causing imminent and irreversible harm to the climate that will lead inexorably to either man's extinction or at least to a massive human die-off. This position correlates to what politicians like AOC have stated and is by and large accepted by much of the mainstream left. Do I correctly understand you?

Now we are finally having a good conversation. It is a fact that civilization needs power. Every form of power has both benefits and costs. Some power is clean, but unreliable - for example, wind and solar. Other power is reliable, but dirty - e.g. coal and nuclear. So we come back to my original question: what do we do? We can't have unreliable power. That's unacceptable. I hope we can agree on that. So how do we make clean power more reliable? How much will that process cost? And how can we make dirty power less dirty? How much will that cost? This is the correct conversation.

I wasn't sure whether to put this in General or Off Grid, so I split the difference and here we are. I'd like to discuss the advantage of evil. By this I mean the advantage an individual receives towards the realization of their goals by being willing and able to act unethically and immorally. Some examples: A businessman who grows wealthy by engaging in inside trading; A politician who gains office by lying about his opponent; An athlete who wins a competition by cheating; A cultist who gains a loyal following by preying upon the weakness and fears of believers. It's commonly understood that evil will eventually lose. We see this trope appear again and again in good storytelling and it does appear to hold some truth in real life. Most people prefer to live in a good society and most criminals are eventually caught (for something, at least). But some evil people do flourish. So I leave the topic at that. What is the advantage of evil?

A very good definition of evil, in my opinion.

It's important to realize that climate change is not a standalone issue. It is tied part and parcel to progressivism as a whole, which means the full panoply of social justice, including the lurch towards socialism, anger towards the grievances of the past, racial division, and a slew of others. These all have one thing in common: the transfer of power from those who currently hold it to those who want to hold it. They are all straw men and red herrings.

Squishing dissent? Far from it. I want more conversation on the matter. It is the progressive left that has coined the term "climate change denial' as a means to squash dissent. And I don't claim the climate is not changing. I don't even claim that man is not partially a factor. What I am asking is what should we do about it? The left repeats the mantra of coal bad, oil bad, nuclear bad, water good, solar good, wind good. If actually enacted, their policies would do nothing to aid the climate, since countries like China won't make the change. All that would happen is the western world would bankrupt itself and developing countries in Africa and India would be stymied in their attempt to pull themselves out of poverty. I don't call that "progressive." I don't call that "compassionate." That sounds like good old fashioned virtue signaling. It's a balm to soothe the white liberal guilt for the crime of being born. It's a cancerous idea and needs to be cleansed before it kills the host, which in this case is modern civilization as we know it.

I have my faults. That is true. But in the matter of climate change and how it relates to public policy, I absolutely hold superior ideas to progressives.

I don't hate progressives. I hate their policies. I think progressives are immature. Can you name a single progressive who has sold his beach front property out of fear of rising sea levels? Can you name a single progressive who endorses nuclear energy as a PROVEN alternative to fossil fuels? Progressives, lead by AOC, think we are nearing an extinction level event due to climate change, and their solution is to transfer money from coal and oil into solar and wind, all the while ignoring nuclear?!? Wake up, man! It's a power ploy! That's all it is. It's a means to an end, the end being the assumption of power. Climate has nothing to do with it.

There are two sure-fire ways to know that people don't actually believe in Global Warming as much as they claim to: 1) People still buy very expensive beach front property. 2) People are terrified of nuclear energy. When the Left starts selling all their million dollar beach front homes and begins to endorse nuclear energy I will begin to take them seriously. Until then they are just babbling, histrionic, childish morons and I have no time for their self-hatred by proxy.