MakenaLikewise

The latest government data show that in 2018, the top 1% of income earners—those who earned more than $540,000—earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earned 48% of the income and paid 71% of federal income taxes.

I agree. Everything should be questioned. That’s literally what critical thinking and truth seeking is all about.

Ok then anakin skywalker

Since we're being ironic...

Male curfew penalizes all men for the wrongdoings of a few, which is collective punishment. The Geneva Convention established collective punishment as a warcrime. Male curfew = a warcrime

TL;DR: Animals are incapable of homo sapiens's higher order cognitions which allow us to anticipate how our actions will affect the future, which is the basis for morality. Lacking foresight, animals do not have as equal agency over their actions as do humans. Animals are thus irrational, incapable of true morality, and unequal to humans

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines basic axiomatic liberties that humans are entitled to, as follows:

1. The right to equality and freedom from discrimination
2. The right to life, liberty, and personal security
3. Freedom from torture and degrading treatment
4. The right to equality before the law
5. The right to a fair trial
6. The right to privacy
7. Freedom of belief and religion
8. Freedom of opinion
9. Right of peaceful assembly and association
10. The right to participate in government
11. The right to social security
12. The right to work
13. The right to an adequate standard of living
14. The right to education
15. The right to health
16. The right to food and housing

Article 1 of the UDHR, which lays down the philosophical worldview underlying the declaration, reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Homo sapiens are the only animal which experiences the phenomenon of consciousness and enjoys orders of higher thinking – like abstraction, meta-awareness, planning, and ethical judgement – of which “reason and conscience” are symptoms. Human’s are equal because each (healthy) member of our species has equal agency over their actions. With varying degrees of accuracy, we can predict the consequence of future actions. This foresight allows us to anticipate how our actions in the now will affect others in the future. We can then foresee how the restraint of certain behaviors in the present will fashion a better future for us and for others, which is the heart of ethical reasoning (e.g. “hard right over the easy wrong”). Thus, foresight allows for morality.

We can see this conscious-and-therefore-morally-capable basis for equality played out in the insanity pleading. When the court rules someone insane, the insane person is not held responsible for their actions because they are not rational actors and are thus incapable of moral judgement. They’re cleared of culpability, but are sequestered into mental hospitals, in no way equal or enjoying the same rights as the rest of rationally-capable society.

Additionally, thirteen out of sixteen of the liberties listed above cannot even be applied to animals even if our society agreed they should, because they deal with social constructs like education, work, and peaceful assembly. Until pigs don top hats and work as bank tellers, human rights categorically cannot be animal rights. In regards the the text of those very human rights, the proof is in the pudding:

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “The [first] article thus defines the basic assumptions of the Declaration: that the right to liberty and equality is man's birthright and cannot be alienated: and that, because man is a rational and moral being, he is different from other creatures on earth and therefore entitled to certain rights and freedoms which other creatures do not enjoy.”

TL;DR: Prisons should not beget a cycle of institutionalization but rather should be modules whose purpose is aimed at reintegrating criminals back into society.

U.S. Correctional facilities simply don’t correct their inmates’ behavior. According to The Hill, “the USSC (US Sentencing Commission) reports that, tragically, almost half of former inmates are arrested again within eight years of their release...” Prisons are valuable in protecting society by isolating those who break society’s behavioral contracts. Yet the American Justice System’s pattern of recidivism indicates that US prisons are merely punitive; they seek to eliminate the “problem,” with no intent of attaining any solution.

One’s individual hierarchy of values grinds the lens through which their world is filtered, which informs their personalized worldview that in turn directs individual action. Adjusting these patterns of behavior requires the reprioritization of one’s values at a fundamental level. Thus, repeatedly shoving criminals back behind bars often does not reduce recidivism because it doesn’t work on readjusting inmates’ value structure. Without effective rehabilitation, prison remains a threat to be avoided, rather than a lesson along the way to eventual reintegration in society.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, for example, 46.4% of federal inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. Following their initial release, such a high proportion of these offenders will again see the inside of a prison because the value and personality structures that led them to abuse substances to begin with remain in place. The first and only prerequisite for quitting is wanting to quit more than you want to use a substance. Although this decision must ultimately be executed with individual conviction, external guidance can expedite one’s path to realizing that a substance free life is often better than a life on substances. Such professional psychosocial guidance can and should also be used to rehabilitate offenders’ priority hierarchies in a way that allows them to be productively re-assimilated into society.

Prisons should not beget a cycle of institutionalization but rather should be modules whose purpose is aimed at reintegrating criminals back into society.

TL;DR: Begpacking – begging the locals of travel destinations to fund your trip – promotes a parasitic style of travel that deflates foreign economies.

“Begpacking” – begging the locals of the countries you visit to fund your international escapade – has become increasingly practiced in the last decade.

As Adventure.com journalist Ben Groundwater describes, “It seems to be most prevalent in Southeast Asia, in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, though you might see it in South America as well. Western tourists arrive in these places with no money and just take their chances, placing their trust in the kindness of strangers.”

Busking and selling handmade trinkets on street corners are consensual purchases that might even add verve to a city. But taking handouts from the locals of hard up countries to fund a personal holiday across their homeland is about as reprehensible as it sounds.

The very reason why southeast Asian countries let sweaty, waddling masses of westerners across their borders each summer is to generate tourism revenue. The tourist enjoys a relaxing exotic holiday, while the country receives a small chunk of the tourist’s yearly salary.

Yet begpackers fling themselves into new and exciting locations to prey off the goodwill of the locals, asking with no hope of ever reciprocating. Virtually every backpacker plans out their trip and purchases plane tickets. They have enough money to feed themselves at night. And if they don’t, they should seek out their home country’s social services, rather than willfully become a liability for a foreign people.

The money that one young man or woman panhandles to fund their gap year could have found its way into the hands of local social services, NGOs, or truly destitute individuals. Begpacking is a truly parasitic and harmful way of seeking a free ride, and begpackers should be turned over to their embassies.

TL;DR: Focusing on whether homosexuality is a choice is irrelevant because it is not inherently wrong. Justifying homosexuality with biology still presumes that homosexuality is a flaw that simply must be overlooked because it is outside human control.

Journalist Marcia Mallory of the Scientific American puts our culture’s take on homosexuality quite neatly. She maintains that, when asked if homosexuality is a choice, society either holds that people immorally choose to be gay, which the government should discourage, or, opposingly, that sexual preference is biologically determined and so the government should protect gay people from discrimination because homosexuality is an unalterable aspect of their identity.

Irrespective of the diverging prescriptions on how to best handle homosexuality, a single diagnosis is clear: homosexuality is, at best, a natural flaw that must simply be tolerated. There is, apparently, either no excuse for being attracted to the same gender, or there is some mess of biological factors that excuse homosexuals of their preferences.

Ostensibly writing in solidarity with the gay community, this article, entitled “Stop calling it a choice: Biological factors drive homosexuality” offers a few genes and evolutionary theories to explain why homosexual tendencies are completely predetermined. This belief is comfortable because it reasons that behavior must be excusable if it is out of our individual sphere of control.

After all, if you can’t make your cat bark, you might as well make peace with the fact that you’re stuck with a cat (obviously implying the dog would still have been favorable).

Regardless of justification, the assumption underpinning this line of thought remains that homosexuality is a blight. Using science to justify homosexuality is still no more tolerant than outright announcing homosexuality’s perversion.

TL;DR: Deplatforming is censorship performed by private companies. Deplatforming gives companies the power to control the ideas, language, beliefs, and facts the public is exposed to on the nation’s largest information-sharing sites.

Censorship, as defined by the Oxford American College Dictionary, is the “prohibition of any [information] that [is] considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”

Internet users must abide by certain terms of service – which contain company-specific codes of conduct – to use most modern social media and online forums. The lines of acceptable online speech blur in the small text of these “codes of conduct” sections found in most terms of service agreements, however, because these codes are often completely interpretational.

Because private companies have the right to arbitrarily create and enforce these unique codes of conduct, they can and do silence references, language, rhetoric, and information they deem “obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security” with impunity. Barring users from social media platforms or forums on such charges, termed “Deplatforming,” is, therefore, the poster child of censorship. Additionally, because these companies dually write and interpret their own codes of conduct (essentially internet quasi-laws), they have the power to deplatform those they simply don’t like or don’t agree with under the guise of “code of conduct violations.”

And as Big Tech’s power continues to snowball, so does their control over the information and language used on the nation’s largest information-sharing sites.

As Tim O’Brien of Ethical Voices puts it: “And maybe more importantly, who should be given the power to deny speech? Do we want that to be in the hands of the government, or another special interest, or somebody that opposes us, or a politician, or a company? Do we want the digital platforms deciding what speech is okay or not? And how do they do that? What criteria do they use?
So, I think it’s a slippery slope. I started in journalism and I’ve been in public relations all these years, and I feel that the First Amendment is sacred. And as ugly as it is when people sometimes exercise their free speech, I still think having the freedom of speech is something we need to protect.”

TL;DR: Identity politics is probably the most unifying force we have against social injustice, yet can also grow to threaten democratic tolerance when certain identity lenses are used as the only filters through which we understand and value the experiences and hardships of others.

As much as our individuality rebels against labels, no one lives without fitting into certain societally defined boxes. We are not the labels that we collect throughout life, yet labels are the only ways we can draw commonalities among actors in an ultimately solitary, individual world. So even when all the labels ever conceived cannot form the correct silhouette of an individual’s identity, it’s often necessary to buy into abstract labels to form coalitions with people of similar backgrounds and experiences in order to enact social change.

Political strength is found in political numbers. It's more effective to rally for equal pay with other females struggling with the wage gap, and to rail against black-baised police brutality with other blacks. Taking to the street with a megaphone to shout about how the government doesn’t help your individually unique and personally dynamic life situation is a non starter, despite attracting approving snaps from passing english teachers.

The problem with identity politics arises when participants conflate their labels and coalitions with their individual identity. Identity politics turns destructive when participants begin asserting that they really are nothing more than their collection of labels, when they view people only through a discrete number of identity lenses and ascribe the associated assumptions of each lens to individuals.

Devaluing a white man’s commentary on minority hardships simply because he has not experienced those same trials is one such destructive example. This breed of identity politics values some voices over others, depending on where the speaker fits into the caste system of disadvantage. It essentially aims to give the plight of certain select, multi-disadvantaged groups more value than the hardships experienced by others. It’s weapon-x is the power of assumption, which expedites the endeavor of categorizing the ever-complex world into a cut-and-dry process. This mode of thought allows for the statement: “you have it better than me because I have brown skin and you have white skin,” ignoring the fact that “better” is relative and that experiencing the pain of the death of a family member hurts those in Gucci Sweaters as much as those in tattered, 20-year-old, tomato sauce stained shirts.

Identity politics is probably the most unifying force we have against social injustice, yet can also grow to threaten democratic tolerance when certain identity lenses are used as the only filters through which we understand and value the experiences and hardships of others.

TL;DR: Like other dopaminergic activities, pornography’s fickle “feel-good” fantasy land can exacerbate existing mental instabilities and drag life in a downward spiral. However, pornography can also add excitement and novelty to mentally mature, well adapted audiences’ sex lives.

Pornography’s effects depend on how and why it is used.

It has long been known that pornography acts on the brain’s reward center in a way that releases a cocktail of chemicals which provide a temporary buzz. One of these chemicals is a protein called DeltaFosB, which helps weave the strong neuronal connections that are necessary for learning any kind of new skill. However, once certain mental game-trails are so well-traveled that they become mental superhighways – and especially when they’re pathways that are integrated into the reward system – they can easily become conduits for compulsive, addictive behavior. According to fightthenewdrug.org, “DeltaFosB is referred to as the ‘molecular switch for addiction,’ because if it builds up enough in the brain, it switches on genes that create long-term cravings, driving the user back for more.”

Because porn activates the same brain regions (and similar chemicals) as alcohol, cocaine, and nicotine, it’s similarly addictive to these substances. Gambling, shopping, and eating also happen to share space and neuronal pathways with these same cognitive reward-center regions. Yet despite each act being compelled by dopamine and involving the release of DeltaFosB, not everyone who gambles stays in the casino long enough to aerify their bank account, and not everyone who drinks ends up blacking out every weekday night. Nor does every cocaine using partygoer do the drug compulsively, nor does every sweet-toothed man or woman binge.

Many of the aforementioned activities can be and are regularly enjoyed without interfering with a healthy lifestyle. Such behaviors become problematic, however, when their fickle chemical rewards are used to replace a stable sense of wellbeing that may otherwise be lacking from an individual’s life. For instance, “a recent study has shown that a feeling of loneliness is associated with the frequency of using sexually explicit Internet material among men (Weber et al., 2018). Some studies reported a link between use of pornography and low self‐esteem, and a few suggested that problematic use of pornography was positively correlated with lower levels of general self‐esteem.”

When porn is viewed by mentally healthy individuals for pleasure and exploration, it can add small doses of excitement and novelty to one’s life. Yet when porn and other neurochemically rewarding behaviors are used to fill a lack of contentment, they mantle whatever psychological need was missing – be it social acceptance, love, goal accomplishment, etc.. Reliance on “feel-good” behaviors to replace natural psychological needs begets an insidious cycle where the individual becomes dependent on the facsimile for wellbeing, and so must constantly engage in it to stimulate certain “feel-good” neurotransmitters which mask the underlying depression, anxiety, or loneliness. This need for constancy is a compulsive symptom of addiction that replaces the desire to straighten one’s life circumstances or to engage in previously rewarding behaviors (reltionships, sex, career pursuit)

In view of an apparent teenage mental health crisis, the younger generation may be more at risk to abuse, rather than use, pornography. According to The Conversation, “From 2009 to 2017, major depression among 20- to 21-year-olds more than doubled, rising from 7 percent to 15 percent. Depression surged 69 percent among 16- to 17-year-olds. Serious psychological distress, which includes feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, jumped 71 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds from 2008 to 2017.” With the backdrop of this health calamity, modern teens have extra obstacles to navigate in order to avoid porn abuse. Healthy use of pornography requires a self meta-awareness and maturity that is usually absent or only partially developed in adolescence. Although it’s possible to integrate porn into sex-lives in a non damaging way, today’s adolescents need to exercise caution and be apprised of their own modes of behavior before engaging in an activity with such an insidious underbelly as porn.

TL;DR: Not only is eBay's delisting of 6 Dr. Seuss books inconsistent with their treatment of other offensive listings, but it sets a dangerous precedent that it's acceptable for big tech to censor material from its users.

Early in March of 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced the retirement of 6 books they identified as portraying minorities in a character that was “hurtful and wrong.” Eager to demonstrate their commitment to racial tolerance, eBay quickly followed this announcement by halting user to user transactions involving these books. According to the New York Post, “EBay is barring users from reselling the six Dr. Seuss books that will no longer be printed due to their ‘racist’ imagery.”

Upon examination, each book does indeed exhibit clear racial caricatures and racially-intolerant-undertones. However, banning such inflammatory material is incongruent with the way the ecommerce platform treats other offensive listings. Critics pointed out, for example, that “eBay had copies of both Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the white supremacist novel, The Turner Diaries...on sale at the same time the Seuss books were being pulled.” For eBay, banning these books seems to be more of a PR stunt designed to establish rapport with younger, more socially-active generations than a true commitment to anti-intolerant policies.

Regardless, eBay should be wary of abusing their mediating powers to censor books, symbols, or art that they deem offensive. So many works of literature or antiquated art or symbols can have vastly different implications to different buyers. This 1938 silver coin that pictures a swastika on the tails side, for example, could be passively appreciated by any WWII relic collector. Just as easily, this 1874 original Ku Klux Klan cartoon by Thomas Nast could be examined and critiqued by an art history class, could be submitted to a museum of the south, etc.. In no way does selling or owning something inflammatory transfer the item’s immorality onto the owner, nor does it signify that the buyer must be offended or that the seller is depraved. Ebay is not an accredited school supplier and is not protecting anyone’s emotions or impressionable subconscious biases by de-listing Seuss’s books.

If the platform was truly committed to tolerance, eBay could have easily slapped an “offensive material” warning on the writer’s books (by the way, what standard is eBay upholding if KKK fan apparel like this is left completely unregulated). Instead, executives at eBay are setting the democratically-dangerous precedent that it’s acceptable to arbitrarily ban content from users, without regard for context or intent.

TL;DR: Believing positive illusions make us feel superficially happy, but prevents us from actualizing our potential.

A major tenet of the modern psychological subfield of Positive Psychology is positive illusion. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, positive illusion is “a belief about oneself that is pleasant or positive and that is held regardless of its truth.” Even if untrue, self-talk that inflates one’s self-image can pull people out of ruts by “focus[ing] on strengths instead of weaknesses [and on] building the good in life instead of repairing the bad”(Positive Psychology.com).

Being constantly subjected to an internal critic is part of being human. With all the euphony of a shrieking kettle, our superego ceaselessly derides us for eating too much, for sleeping too much (or too little), for not working hard enough, for not for not being creative enough, for not being attentive enough – for simply not being enough.

Indeed, inflating our self-image with the hot air of positive illusions overrides the uninterrupted stream of self-contempt we blast ourselves with for not living up to our ideals. It feels good to admire flawless photoshops of ourselves, and certainly feels even better to believe that we are those photoshops. Ultimately, however, positive illusions are self-defense mechanisms. They are filters we use to ignore the failings lurking within ourselves, are bridges we use to bypass – rather than explore – the dark crevasses of our psyches.

Yes, our internal critic mercilessly bombards the walls of our mind, hurling criticisms to find weak points in our psychology. Our psychological walls crumble when the superego hits weak points – hits insecurities – with its criticism. We are pained when sections of our minds crumble, because the insecurities hidden behind those walls are nakedly exposed.

Yet, instead of fighting the uncomfort of our insecurities by painting veneer over our blemishes, what if we were receptive to the attacks on our psyche? What if we saw psychological pain as the feedback necessary to identify and shore up areas of our life in which we are falling short? Our internal critic is dogged and often merciless, but it’s also useful. It lets us know when we fall short of our goals and fail to actualize our potential. It keeps us on an upwards trajectory by hurling stones when we act in ways that worsen our conditions by, as runner Steve Prefontaine put it, “wast[ing] the gift.”

‘Positively” deluding ourselves into believing that we’re already actualized forecloses the possibility of living in reality that we can actually improve, where we could find tangible actualization. Finding temporary happiness in positive illusions robs ourselves and robs the world of the good we could experience and contribute on the journey to expressing our fullest potentials.

I'm still convinced there's no high more intense than, on a Sunday night, realizing that Monday is a labor holiday

TL;DR: Whichever party politically dominates the government also controls the Department of Education, which controls nationwide curriculums. Secondary school political classrooms could easily become trojan horses for political parties to subconsciously push agendas, which could sway the collective thought of future voter generations.

In both the US and the UK, a department of education annually reviews and sets the national curriculum. In each country, the position of the department’s chief officer – the Secretary of Education – is a cabinet level position. It’s customary practice for new presidents and prime ministers to clean out the previous administration’s cabinet advisors in order to restock the positions with political allies along party lines. For example, conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed conservative Gavin Williamson to head the UK’s Department of Education in July of 2019, while democratic President Joe Biden appointed democrat Miguel Cardona as the US Secretary of Education on March 1st, 2021. Thus, the Department of Education and the curriculum it enforces is controlled by whichever political party dominates the government at any given time.

Writing politics into secondary school curriculums gives the Department of Education independent power to determine what qualifies as political “core competencies.” Due to the above-illustrated top-down nature of federal bureaucracies, this provides a conduit for political parties to push their agendas on impressionable schoolchildren in ways that can permanently alter future generation’s ways of thinking. Because many political philosophies branch out from separate views of human nature, it’s entirely foreseeable for a political curriculum to foster a certain basal lens/way-of-thinking (weltanschauung) among its students, while still avoiding contemporary hot-button issues. Even minutely favoring certain philosophical tenets early on can radically shift an entire generation’s worldview down the line.

If a generation of young students are indoctrinated with partisan values, they begin to take those lessons as axiomatic. Not even critical thinking cannot combat this kind of hive mind group-think, because critical reasoning skills themselves are developed in classrooms. Even hyper intelligent people are subject to subconscious biases. For example, it's been shown that high IQ doesn’t correlate with low cognitive bias; rather, intelligent individuals simply craft clever intellectual defenses of their cognitive biases.

Politics is not a stand-alone subject. It requires a wide base of knowledge from many different subjects. While well-intentioned, teaching politics in secondary schools gives politicians the power to plant the seeds of unconscious bias in future generations of voters.

Its 2am and now I'm starving

TL;DR: When aimed correctly, populism is a force that can repel tyranny. When aimed incorrectly, however, populism can target well-intentioned institutions and eat the very democracy it created.

“Populism argues that elites are corrupt and the people need better representation” (1).

The United States was born out of populist calls for self-representation among the allegedly self-serving British monarch and parliamentary elites. Enlightenment-derived concepts like universal equality and inborn rights formed the basis for the populist demands of parliamentary representation and local colonial legislatures which swept colonial America. Thus out of populism ensued the great democratic “American experiment,” wherein every man – regardless of status – would be entitled equal representation under a “one man one vote” doctrine.

Athenian democracy, too, rose out of populism. Dr. Lipset of George Mason University relates that, in pre-democratic Athens, “The ruling aristocracy gradually acquired the best farmlands, while many small farmers went into debt...The more wealth and privilege you had, the more you had to say about the nature of the system” (2). In order to quell the rage of the indebted and disenfranchised, the Athenian sage Solon launched a process of political liberalization that would grow into a democratic Athenian government (2). Even in ancient Greece, those who felt trampled on by the velvet shoes of nobility used populism as a vehicle to achieve political equality.

Yet, when allowed to run its course, the same populist demand that spawned democracy amusingly re-emerges to entice democracy to eat itself.

Mantling the ultimate modern populist, Donald Trump paved his road to the White House with rhetoric that appealed to the archetypal middling American worker; “Hedge fund managers are getting away with murder” and “I have a great relationship with the unions” were some of his 2016 campaign trail war cries (3). Four years later, however, he unleashed populism’s destructive side with claims that his political opposition defrauded him of the 2020 election. As is customarily populist, Trump called foul on corrupt big politics, targeting the US electoral system – and the US democratic machine by association. He ended up aiming populism’s elitist contempt at his political opponents in Washington, using populism to (physically) attack democracy in the January Capitol riots.

Populism is indiscriminate in choosing victims. Its support of equality can be a useful tool for socioeconomic reform, yet can also consume democracy when turned on democratic institutions. As Stanford political scientist Anna Gryzmala-Busse duly points out,

“Populist politicians and governments view the formal institutions of liberal democracy as corrupt creations spawned by crooked establishment elites – and so they systematically hollow out and undermine these institutions, such as the courts, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the press, and so on. They justify these attacks as replacing discredited and corrupt institutions with ones that serve ‘the people’ – or, in other words, populist parties and politicians. Moreover, precisely because populists claim to represent “the people,” they have to define the people first and that often means excluding vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as religious or ethnic minorities and immigrants” (1).

TL;DR: Accounting for nuance allows for consideration of different perspectives which, in turn, allows for empathy. Empathy leads to understanding and consensus, which underpin democracy. Modern phenomena like cancel culture are indicative of the prevailing wave of group-think which disregards nuanced viewpoints in a way that is dangerous to democratic consensus.

Life is unimaginably complex. Human experience is multifaceted and radically individual, and there is no single lens that is best suited to navigating the human condition. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Recognizing the true complexity of the world and our place in it cultivates empathy by forcing the consideration of different perspectives. Acknowledging nuance requires willingness to see the whole truth in a way that requires disassociating identity and emotions from deeply-held convictions. And pursuing and accepting naked truth requires intellectual discipline and impulse control. Yet acceptance of the world’s nuance – willingness to see truth – is acceptance of reality.

Still, accounting for nuance is hard. It takes scrutinizing over facts to determine the fullest truth, it takes willingness to overcome entrenched biases, it takes open-minded communication, and it takes empathy. It takes resistance against the comfort of falling in with our familiar tribes. It takes potent personal conviction. It takes work.

As our society has already discovered, it’s easy to be intellectually lazy, to relax the brain in the technicolor flicker of political pundits who feed the insidiously addictive confirmation bias cycle. Indeed, today’s increased political polarization is the disease that collective intellectual laziness has led our society to catch. Populism and cancel-culture are symptoms of this disease.

Under the obnoxious brew of misguided activism and intellectual laziness that is cancel culture, it’s in vogue to paint nuanced behaviors and issues as black and white. As one Vocal Media writer puts it, “...extreme labels seem more performative than anything. They're not a solution. They're someone wanting to stake out a position to prove how they're so much more woke than everyone else, how they're such a great activist. That's not constructive” (1).

Of course, there are certain social stances that our society takes as axiomatic because we’ve collectively worked them out to be squarely right or squarely wrong. “Police brutality is wrong. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are bad” (1). But each of these issues – along with every other issue – are intensely interconnected and complex beneath the skin of their hot-button labels. Cancelling conversation-goers who are trying to work towards a nuanced compromise defeats any potential that our ideologically varied society will ever fix what is broken.

The fervor surrounding certain contemporary social problems is so great that it puts blinders on our society. Nuance fades into the background because abortion, racism, constitutionality, spirituality, poverty, identity, and healthcare are simple. You’re either on the right side or you aren’t.

As Huffington Post writer Qasim Rashid pointed out, “Simply open your mouth on Israel-Palestine, and faster than you can blink you’ll be labeled either a heartless Zionist or a Hamas terrorist. Both extreme labels are equally fruitless” (2). Those labels are worse than fruitless – they’re dangerous. They construe the other party in the conversation as a threatening existential other. Rather than working through or “winning” a conversation, labels like this deal with disagreement by destroying the conversation altogether (in the same way the US simply “will not negotiate with terrorists”).

Such open disregard for nuance constructs walls that empathy cannot penetrate. Without empathy, there is no understanding. Without understanding, there is no conversation. Without conversations, there is no democracy.

I agree. Vaccine passports fly in the face of the herd immunity we are all striving for, whereby it should not be necessary for every member of society to get vaccinated to beat the virus. As you said, vaccine passports would discriminate against those who cannot ever get inoculated.

TL;DR: While standardized achievement tests have no place in college admissions, standardized aptitude tests are useful in rounding out applicants' holistic academic profile and in determining future academic potential.

Standardized achievement tests – standardized assessments of crystalized intelligence – have no place in the college admission process because high school learning itself is not standardized. The interplay of funding, locale, quality of educators, external life events, and campus culture devises a unique set of advantages and disadvantages for each individual student to contend with. The quality and substance of American high school education fluctuates wildly across the country. Heck, as long as privately owned schools’ curriculums meet loose federally defined “core competencies,” they are free to concoct their very own set of available studies and graduation requirements. Thus, in the States, you’ll notice a paradox: all HS diplomas are regarded as equal, despite the fact that everyone knows each one suggests radically different competencies.

When some students have nationally accredited teachers offering the comprehensive list of AP subjects, while some have at best access to one or two honors courses in tangential subjects, while still others have mandatory athletics or community service or enforced study halls, it is unfair for college admissions committees to measure every applicant’s accrued scholastic knowledge with the same yardstick.

Statistically, those who’ve achieved in the past have a greater chance of continuing patterns of achievement into the future than those who do not have past records of achievement (as most of us already know). Measures of past achievement like GPA, class rank, extracurricular activities, awards, and athletics are subjective, school-specific variables. These metrics are created by particular schools to measure how well students perform in those individual school-particular conditions. Thus, non-standardized achievements come together to form a student’s profile of past achievement in a way that’s more reflective of how individual students have maneuvered their unique advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities than standardized achievement tests could ever illuminate.

For this reason, standardized college admissions achievement tests – like the ACT (1),(2),(3), and SAT II subject tests – should be discontinued.

There remains, however, a place for standardized aptitude testing in college admissions. Standardized assessments can be useful and relevant so long as they measure a student’s capacity for future learning and achieving inside a college’s specific academic environment.

No matter how industrious and self-advocating a student presents themself as, there is no value in admitting students who lack certain critical thinking and reasoning skills which will prevent them from operating on the academic level the institution demands. A STEM heavyweight like MIT, for example, has a biased admissions rate towards applicants who demonstrate innately high mathematical reasoning skills (known as quantitative reasoning on the SAT). Colleges use metrics of how quickly students can process information as evidence of how effectively students will be able to adapt to and run with the new information higher education foists on them.

Because colleges invest in students when they admit them, admissions committees need some quasi-objective method for determining the rate at which applicants are able to learn, which plays into how likely students are to perform up to the institution’s academic level.

As an aptitude test, the SAT measures students’ language and quantitative reasoning skills (1),(2). In fact, the SAT has been tightly correlated with IQ (4) which, in synergy with motivation, impulse control, and industriousness, helps educate admissions committee’s guesses as to which applicants hold the most potential to excel at their school. In coaction with relevant markers of past achievement, aptitude tests are merit based assessments which are useful in rounding out applicants’ holistic academic profile and which help to predict future potential.

TL;DR: With free-market interventions (taxes, subsides, incentives), the Government can redirect capitalism’s innovation and competition to take down the existential threats to the planet’s climate that we currently face. Capitalism played a role in ruining the Earth, but it may be the only system that can fix our planet.

As a system where participants’ primary goal is to maximize individual profit, capitalism aggressively drives economic competition and innovation. With climate change accelerating at unsustainable rates, the US government needs to unleash its free market on pollution, carbon emissions, overpopulation, and reliance on nonrenewable energy sources.

Media outlets, scientists, and academics often spread rhetoric that capitalism is our planet’s supervillain. Indeed, they have a point. Our modern free market rewards companies that maximize profits while minimizing financial risk in a way that allows them to outcompete other companies. Relying on fossil fueled production lines is prudent because oil, gas, and coal are low risk, cheap, and reliable.

If one manufacturing company switches to expensive solar power while every other manufacturing company operates on cheap energy, for example, the sustainably-powered company will shoulder a higher production cost and will thus have to hike up their goods’ prices to make the same profit as the gas-guzzling/coal-burning plants. Sticking with fossil fuel powered factories, on the other hand, standardizes the cost of production among companies so that the prices of each company’s goods are not undercut by competitors.

From a business-survival standpoint, fossil fuels are the obviously sensible choice. Yet an outright fossil fuel ban immediately makes every made-in-the-USA-stamped good more expensive and simply outsources industry to overseas factories.

Without changing the US’s economic fundamentals, the only way out of this feedback loop is to draw attention to sustainable solutions with federal monetary incentives. With businesses’ “almost singular focus on economic self-interest,” [1] money can lead the free market’s innovation like a carrot-on-a-stick.

For instance, introducing a carbon-tax or expanding already-existing subsidies for EV auto manufacturers could help liberate the auto-industry from reliance on combustion engines by reducing the profitability of sales of fossil fueled vehicles. Businesses exist to generate profit; those companies which adapt their business models to maximize profit thrive, while those which remain rigid become obsolete. It follows that companies will redirect their innovation toward sustainable transportations systems which will maximize corporate profit.

The government can expand these same coercive methods to other industries as well. Government subsidies and financial incentives (rewards, grants, etc.) can act as catalysts to spur the development of less space intensive housing, biodegradable alternatives to plastic, and chemical solutions to the atmospheric carbon imbalance. The key to creating a sustainable model of capitalism is providing economic incentives large enough to make the incentivized-course-of-action something that companies will voluntarily pick. Negative incentives (like fines) should be avoided, however, as this will drive companies to outsource production to unregulated countries.

Although subsidies and incentives can only move the needle for so long, they can help refocus the innovative power of our free market on the planet-threatening issues facing our society. Kickstarting economic interest in sustainability is three-quarters of the battle; once enough brain power and capital is poured into innovative environmental solutions, the market for saving our planet will be as immense as it will be lucrative. The pollution, rising sea levels, warming temperatures, and overpopulation we face are existential threats that are not going away anytime soon. Thus, they offer stable and sustainable opportunities for innovative business ventures. As the CEO of EcoAlpha Asset Management expresses, “It’s not “sustainable” business when a company takes a long view and targets problems that aren’t going away — it’s smart business” [1].

Sources:

[1] https://ensia.com/voices/only-capitalism-can-save-the-planet/

If the fed levied, for example, a 5% tax on factories that run on fossil fuels, it would (most often) be financially easier for companies to simply move their factories to a different country (China, Vietnam, etc.) than to put money into developing whole new alternative power sources.

Fines and other negative incentives could cause something like the modern California business exodus, but on a national scale.

TL;DR: Consciousness is independent of biology; thus, self-aware AI should be entitled to the same rights/protections which society guarantees to free-thinking human beings.

In the next half-century, artificial general intelligence (AGI) – the computer-code counterpart to human intelligence – could become a reality. According to Forbes, “a survey of AI experts recently predicted the expected emergence of AGI or the singularity by the year 2060” [1]. Regardless of when a digital sentience revolution occurs, artificial consciousness will force mankind to reconsider AI’s aim and position in society.

Lacking legitimate consciousness, modern AI’s are unthinking tools that software engineers use to outsource their computations and simulations. Even the world’s most currently advanced AI machine-learning systems – like Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer – are simply new-age draught-animals. AI’s are merely designed to aid human beings, ergo the first digital network that is complex enough to sustain consciousness will awaken as a slave to human taskmasters.

Despite its artificial origins, bodiless form, and silicon – rather than organic based – consciousness, a self-aware AI must be treated as an equal member of society. Our society (USA) instructs that, in order to be held legally responsible for action, a citizen must be able to understand charges, understand penalties they may face for certain actions, make decisions, and communicate, among other indicators [2]. It follows that these legal criteria comprise society’s definition of consciousness. Because the law is applied equally to all citizens, meeting the prerequisite criteria to be held legally responsible for actions implies equal citizenship (i.e. an actor is legally regarded as a citizen once it is “conscious” in the eyes of the law).

Moreover, as evidenced by the (US) Criminal Code, our society presents the state of self-awareness and the state of existing as a human as independent phenomena which are not necessarily mutually inclusive. As Justia.com states, “a defendant cannot be convicted of a crime if they are not mentally competent to stand trial” [2]. The “incompetency” and “insanity” pleadings evidence the point that simply being human isn’t enough to entitle everyone to the same legal treatment, discrediting the idea that all humans are equal societal members simply because they are all the same species.

Rather, being regarded as an equal rests on a legally-defined, distinct state of “self-awareness” which is decoupled from biology. It follows that, so long as the legal criteria for consciousness are met, an incorporeal but sentient entity – like an AI unit – should be regarded as a free-thinking agent, worthy of equal status with all the other free-thinking biological members of society.

As far as humanity knows, there is no manual to the universe insisting that consciousness must only exist as a product of biological cells. Currently, no one is in a position to assert that metal-based electricity-fed consciousness is inherently worth less than neuronal-based blood-fed consciousness. Two factories that shell peanuts with different techniques still end up producing the same valued product, just as two different structural schema that both net self-awareness ultimately produce equally valued beings. Metal or flesh, all rational actors are equal in the agency they have over their decisions, and all are equally accountable for the footprints they choose to leave on the world.

Sources:

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/06/10/how-far-are-we-from-achieving-artificial-general-intelligence/?sh=42c244676dc4

[2] https://www.justia.com/criminal/procedure/competency-to-stand-trial/#:~:text=A%20defendant%20cannot%20be%20convicted,mentally%20competent%20to%20stand%20trial.&text=It%20does%20not%20prevent%20the,is%20found%20to%20be%20competent.

On January 27th, Reddit users on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets collaborated to synchronously buy millions of shares of the slowly dying companies GameStop, AMC Entertainment, Blackberry, and others. GameStop emerged as the rally’s flagship, with the sudden Reddit-driven swell in demand launching the stock’s price into low Earth orbit, up nearly 1,200% from a week ago [1].

This is a catastrophe for multi-billion-dollar hedge funds like Point72, Citron Capital, Melvin Capital, D1 Capital Partners, and Maplelane Capital, who took short positions on the brick-and-mortar video game retailer, betting on GameStop’s bankruptcy [1]. Market Insider reports that these hedge fund short sellers have collectively lost over $5 billion* as they battle against the army of small-arms Reddit traders who continue to pump the stock price up [1].

Prior to the January 28th opening bell, the commission-free online brokerage Robinhood announced that GameStop trading – along with AMC, Blackberry, Bed Bath & Beyond, Nokia, Kosh, and others – would be restricted “to protect the firm and [the] customers” from high volatility and from unpredictable market conditions [2].

Halting trading on the specific collection of stocks whose recent trading patterns have adversely affected multi-billion dollar hedge fund interests is unsavory on its face yet, impossibly, it gets worse. Robinhood didn’t equilaterally freeze all trading activity across these Reddit-targeted stocks. Instead, they locked down any new buying activity on these stocks, while leaving the selling market a free-for-all. Stocks of GameStop (and others) could only be sold, not bought.

In a market where any buying pressure on a company raises the price of its stock while any selling pressure lowers the price of its stock, Robinhood only gave GameStop price one direction to move: down.

Investopedia defines market manipulation as, “the act of artificially inflating or deflating the price of a security or otherwise influencing the behavior of the market for personal gain.” By restricting buy orders (while sell orders where permitted), Robinhood mechanically punched a hole in GameStop's valuation to bleed out price strength which had previously been supported by millions of traders' private capital. By forcing GameStop’s stock price into the dirt, Robinhood effectively appointed itself as the arbiter of company valuation. It appeared that the brokerage itself decided that GamesStop had become too overvalued and forcibly bent the stock’s price to conform to what it arbitrarily deemed as “fair value.”

A brokerage is charged with facilitating smooth and fair trading through matching buy/sell orders, not with picking winning and losing companies. Forcing a stock’s price action in a certain direction is manipulatively and unfairly “influenc[ing] the behavior of the market;” it is privately valuing companies and marketing them to buyers in a way that flies against our buyer-valued free market.

Hedge-fund nepotism is also implicit in Robinhood’s GameStop purchasing restrictions. In restricting buy orders, Robinhood favors GameStop short sellers by making bullish positions impossible. The fact that Robinhood favors short selling hedge funds the moment that billions of hedge fund dollars are at risk of flipping into the hands of retail (individual) investors is no coincidence; Robinhood has cultivated valuable relationships with several hedge fund market-movers and fears losing favor with the influence these companies provide. According to the Washington Post, “Citadel and other market makers pay Robinhood a small fee for this privilege [of looking at Robinhood-collected market data], which gives the market-making firms information about retail trading patterns. Citadel said it uses this information to improve its trading algorithms'' [3]. Under the guise of protecting traders from volatility, Robinhood barred traders from opening GameStop positions to bail out short selling hedge funds with whom they had mutually profitable relationships.

Robinhood’s attempt to interfere with GameStop’s stock price through biased restrictions is a disreputable abuse of brokerage power and should be condemned.

*1/29/21 - CNBC now reports hedge fund losses are as great as $20 billion. Ouch.

References:

[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/hedge-funds-torched-wall-street-bets-gamestop-short-squeeze-reddit-2021-1-1030016596

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-trading-robinhood-ceo/robinhood-ceo-says-limited-trade-to-protect-firm-and-customers-idUSKBN29Y017?il=0

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/29/robinhood-citadel-gamestop-reddit/

If intrigued, here's some further (not-so-serious) reading straight from a r/WallStreetBets rebel alliance member who's fighting against hedge fund interest: https://isthesqueezesquoze.com/

In his Report of the First Voyage, Christopher Columbus treats the Amerindians he encounters not as human beings, but as tools – mechanisms he exploits to achieve a specific purpose.

Columbus did not attempt to sail around the world in the name of exploration; rather, he set out to find a maritime route to Asia, one that would give Europe access to luxury Asian markets. Thus, his predisposition towards lucrative opportunity influenced the way that he viewed the New World and its inhabitants. Relating his first encounter with the natives of Hispaniola, he writes, “I took by force some of them in order that they might learn [Castilian] and give me information of what they had in those parts” [1]. Columbus forcibly apprehends an American in order to exploit his knowledge of local resources (which Columbus plans to pillage). Not only does this demonstrate flagrant disregard of basic ethical standards of conduct, it affirms Columbus’s intent as a pillager – a raider in the name of Spain. He wants nothing more than to push his way into the lucrative Asian spice trade, casting aside the humanity of anyone in his path.

This attitude is further asserted by Columbus’s proclamation as he lands in the New World for the first time: “…all of them I have taken possession for their Highness, by proclamation and with the royal standard displayed, and nobody objected” [1]. Intent on claiming land, Columbus subjects the inhabitants of Hispaniola to his way of life, his culture, and his national identity. He abstains from peaceful negotiations with the natives, and instead imposes Spain on an unwilling and unknowing people. To Columbus, Amerindians are simply pawns to be controlled as he seeks to find his own wealth and fame. They are things to be Christianized, exploited, and made to bend knee to the Spanish (and by association, Columbus), despite the fact that they, too, are humans with their own diverse experiences, culture, and way of life.

References:

[1] https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text1/columbusletter.pdf

My feline friend left a trail of excrement on my windowsill this morning...might be time to hang up a new cat-sized rug on my wall and go puppy shopping

Islamic and Kantain ethics both converge on the idea that humans have innate agency in their life and can exert control over their behavior and life circumstance.

Rejecting the Compatibilist account of free will offered by preceding empiricists, Kant maintains that humans – solely based on the merit of being human – possess an innate and radical agency within the world. Essentially, he holds rationality and free will to be one concept defined under two words, arguing that the ability to rationalize liberates people from slavery to instinctual behavior.

In his Dialectic, Kant generally states that “insofar as we are perceptible biological bodies we are just as causally determined as everything else in the physical world, but insofar as we are rational beings who act for reasons we are free” [1]. The freedom which Kant affirms to exist in each human is not freedom in an anarchic sense, sanctioning a storm of immoral behavior simply because we are not subjected to direct control. Instead, it is the freedom of choice; for once a being can articulate its existence, it can also understand each pathway of a decision and the ramifications of these actions. Thus, humans are empowered with agency as a result of our inborn rational nature. We can understand (or, as Kant says, “articulate”) our impulses and, by extension, exercise restraint, giving humans power over our own actions.

The Quran echoes this same sentiment through more theological coloring, propounding humans to be effectual and in-control of life thanks to God-given free will. In discussing the “forgetfulness” (fall) of Adam, the Qu’ran comments that, unlike prophets who occasionally forget their covenant with God, “some individuals intentionally fail to follow divine guidance, whether or not they are tempted to do so by Satan” [1]. Rather than acting because someone has “‘God’” or the ‘“Devil’” in their heart, this statement suggests that people are capable of exercising complete control over their own actions, independent of divine will. Much like Kant’s conception of people as rational beings, Humans are painted as agents whose conscious actions have tangible effects.

Each philosophy recognizes, however, that humanity’s freedom of choice is not without consequence; both Kantian thought and Islamic philosophy resemble each other in identifying the root of human evil. Summarizing Kant’s position on the origins of “radical evil,” Leslie Stevenson writes, “But for Kant what is is radically evil in us is not our natural desires or the tension between these and duty; it is what he calls the ‘depravity’ of human nature – the freely chosen subordination of duty to inclination, deliberate preference for one's own happiness (as one conceives it) over one’s obligations to other people” [1].

Unlike the Christian model of sin (where even thoughts and urges can be sinful), Immanuel Kant maintains that biological desires are perfectly normal: “Kant’s position is not that radical evil attaches to our animal nature, which is innocent in itself” [1]. Rather, he identifies the greatest evil as humans using their free decision making ability to give in to selfish (and often animalistic urges), especially when they only benefit the self. Kantian ethics stress adherence to “duty,” where personal desires take a backseat to morally defined behavior.

This exact ethos is mirrored by the Islamic theory of morality, which emphasizes one’s suppression of potentially harmful (biological and non-biological) desires. In discussing the nafs (a concept akin to plato’s “appetitive soul”), the Qu’ran asserts that, “‘Evil’ is not a quality that inheres in human beings; it is the consequence of actions taken in pursuit of particular desires. In themselves, those desires are perfectly natural…” [1].

It is interesting that both Kantian and Islamic belief recognize desires as unavoidable parts of our human experience, and hold them to be completely amoral. When reconciled with humanity’s gift of rationality, this belief emphasizes personal accountability for individual actions. Humans are not slaves to animalistic desires; we transcend animals because we are able to rationalize. Thus, we have a choice in determining which actions to carry out and which actions we will suppress. By extension, worldly evil is not something created by the doctrine of “original sin,” by Satan, or by God; it stems from humanity's lack of discipline and failure to withhold potentially damaging urges from affecting other people.

While Kantian ethics and Islamic thought define human nature and the origin of evil on virtually the same terms, the two schools of thought are put into practice in very different ways. This divergence stems from a contradiction in marking humanity’s place in the universe.

While Islam constructs a sense of place around the conception of a singular creator (with humanity as his representatives on Earth), Kant argues that metaphysics are outside the limits of theoretical rationality, and therefore should not be bothered with. Leslie Stevenson summarizes his approach to religion (and thus humanity's place in the universe): “Kant’s approach is to reinterpret theology in terms of morality, and he suggests that the scriptures should be interpreted in that way, even when it is not their literal meaning. In this view there is no need for miracles, priests, rituals, or sacraments” [1].

Kant holds that religions are simply collections of philosophical ideas; vehicles created to transmit moral teachings. Conceptually, this seems like an inclusive approach to creating a “universal church” [1]. However, avoiding metaphysical debate detracts from the value of Kant’s morality. A cornerstone of his ethical philosophy is defined as doing the right thing “‘simply because it is right.’” But where is the incentive in suppressing desires if we cannot know where we fit into the world and how morality will help advance our own life condition? The value of being moral, then, is left up to personal reckoning.

Islam, at least, lays out a binding reason to conduct moral behavior: “When a human being acts, divine honor...is at stake, and God is anxious that his honor not be tarnished by the misdeeds of his servants” [1]. As humans are God’s “‘deputies,”’ Islam holds moral behavior on Earth to be supporting humanity’s relationship with a benevolent creator. People are presented with a higher moral imperative to act virtuously and, because of this, Islam has become one of the most practiced religions in the world (accruing around 1.8 billion adherents).

Regardless, the similarities between these two models of thought (despite geographical and chronological differences) speaks to the universality of certain fundamental truths concerning human nature and, by extension, the basal similarities of all human beings.

Reference(s):

[1] Thirteen Theories of Human Nature, by Leslie Stevenson, David L. Haberman, Peter Matthews Wright, and Charolette Witt, pages 149-185

Although Tolkien’s tales of Middle-Earth are often consumed for their brilliant and “harmless” imagination, they actually constitute a romanticized colonial fantasy, perpetuating the West’s traditional self-concept as a righteous bastion against the forces of an evil and diametrically different “other.”

The story-arch of the Lord of the Rings is the primary medium through which the trilogy’s Orientalist sentiment becomes apparent. Superficially, the concept that a coalition of elves and men unite to save the free world from impending evil-driven doom is rather tasteful and outwardly moral. The danger in this plot, however, lies in its dependency on a nefarious “other” for existence. Said differently, the righteousness, purity, and heroism of the plot and its central heroes would quickly dissolve without provocation from an evil force. Thus, the main character’s virtues do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they congeal as an ideological response to the “evil” present in their world.

This phenomenon is eerily similar to the mindset of European colonizers who, upon encountering the “lazy[ness], sensual[ity], and despotism” [1] of new foreign cultures, proclaimed themselves to be custodians of civilized morality. The entire self-image of the colonial west relied on its difference and self-proclaimed moral superiority in comparison to other cultures, exactly how the Lord of the Rings paints the world in binary, with the protagonists fighting for moral “good” against servants of moral “evil”. Just as Tolkein’s “men of the west” are righteous because they fight against evil incarnate, the colonial west’s struggle against barbarism inherently makes it an “anti-barbaric” force defined by what is is not (rather than substance/what it is).

The Lord of the Rings further expands on Orientalism's creation of the “other” (as defined by Edward Said) [1] by incorporating racial tension into the trilogy’s plot. As a general rule, Tolkien celebrates the genocide of orcs and orcish culture, commemorating it as a cleansing of the Earth. He morally rationalizes this stance by placing orcs into a seperate species and contrasting the appearances of humans with that of orcs, relating the latter to be “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes” [2]. This ghastly description evokes hate, disgust, and fear from the readers (and imposes them onto the orcs) in order to justify the protagonists’ slaughter of these creatures. Tolkien effectively links the moral depravity of orcs with their physical image, suggesting their wickedness to be a biological fact (rather than a malleable intellectual decision or ailment).

In much the same way, Belgian King Leopold II vindicated his malicious exploitation of the Congolese on racial boundaries, suggesting that Africans were biologically less capable of civilization. Joseph Conrad offers readers insight into this historical pattern in his novel Heart of Darkness, relating the moral state of the native Congolese with their physical condition: “they were nothing earthly now -- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation” [3].

Regrettably, Tolkien’s depiction of the orc is laced with similar racist diction that creates an immovable, biological barrier between western morality, beauty, and civilization, and “savage, cruel, and barbaric” cultures.

References:

[1] Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, by Dr. Edward W. Said

[2] http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism_in_Tolkien's_Works

[3] Heart Of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, page 11

(The following concerns specifically the United States Military, although pieces of this argument could be extrapolated to fit other international militaries)

The armed forces are, and – unless human nature radically changes in the near future – will likely always be, necessary to “serve the American people, to defend the Nation, to protect vital national interests, and to fulfill national military responsibilities” [1]. It’s comically naive and ignorant of human nature to hold the belief that, had the US no military, every other player in the international community would sit back and simply wish us well.

From Iraq (67% US disapproval rating) to Yemen (69% US disapproval rating) to Lebanon (71% US disapproval rating) to Pakistan (73% US disapproval rating) to Palestine (80% US disapproval rating) [2], to nuclear threats from North Korea, to the rise of ISIS, to the rise of China, to Russian cyberattacks, and to the storming of the US Capitol, threats to the international order and to the security and existence of America have been, and will most likely continue to be, very present and very real.
Even more, despite the International Community’s best efforts to (often) engage in civil diplomacy, not all countries play by the same rules. Since 2013, for example, China has been illegally constructing forward operating aircraft bases on man-made islands in the South China Sea. “China’s ‘war without gunsmoke’ strategy had already resulted in the near-normalization of its South China Sea military buildup and its ‘nine-dash line’ claims...Combined with Chinese disregard for a 2016 Hague ruling that invalidated Chinese nine-dash line claims, it is obvious that China will continue to persist in its claims. [3]” Complete disregard for the International Court of Justice’s ruling illustrates that countries have their own international agendas and, often, have no intention of yielding to toothless international condemnations. Such antagonists pose threats to international stability, human rights, and, often by extension, US security.
Accordingly, the armed forces act as an effective deterrent to those who would antagonize peace, domestically or abroad. Our military enables us to engage in international collective defense pacts (think NATO) which deter international bullies and drastically reduce the likelihood of (potentially catastrophic) hot wars. The leverage inherent in collective military action or in mutually assured destruction ensures that diplomatic promises will have tangible consequences, compelling/ensuring international peace and cooperation.

Moreover, the US military is an apolitical entity. It is jointly commanded by Congress and by the President, both of which are, as elected delegates, servants to their constituents – servants to American citizens. Thus, military action is ultimately a result of the representative will of the American people. “The Constitution of the United States divides the war powers of the federal government between the Executive and Legislative branches: the President is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces (Article II, section 2), while Congress has the power to make declarations of war, and to raise and support the armed forces (Article I, section 8)” [4]. In conjunction with the 1973 War Powers Resolution, all military force must be moderated by the collective judgement of Congress and of the President, and the President must consult with Congress before introducing armed forces into hostilities [4]. The military has no political agenda; it is simply the fist to the Government’s brain. Thus, moral implications of military action fall on the collective American conscience. Citizens are ultimately responsible for the military’s actions; thus, abstaining from military service does not clear us of the nuanced moral determinations which are inherent in using force to resolve conflict – that responsibility is all of ours to bear.

Accepting the premise that the military is a natural and necessary component of modern societies makes those among us who voluntarily sign away their free will to call the shots as to what is right and wrong morally laudable; those who volunteer to do our country’s dirty work personify the ethos of service to our society.

Sources:

[1] https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/us-army-overview.html#:~:text=The%20Army%20exists%20to%20serve,National%20Security%20and%20Defense%20Strategies.

[2] https://time.com/60466/9-countries-that-hate-america-most/

[3] https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/04/17/chinas-island-fortifications-are-a-challenge-to-international-norms/

[4] https://www.loc.gov/law/help/usconlaw/war-powers.php#:~:text=The%20Constitution%20of%20the%20United,and%20support%20the%20armed%20forces

It amuses me that anyone who can honestly weigh in on this subject has to first admit to using psychedelics which are illegal in both the US and the UK

I couldn't agree more. Regardless of political persuasion, painting the other side of the aisle (which recent voter turnout revealed to be quite literally half the country) with a single brushstroke detrimentally ignores ideological complexities and variations to the point where politics regresses from a practice in self-reflection to a tribal war of my sports team vs your sports team.

Having a net worth meeting or exceeding a billion dollars does not necessarily make someone moral or immoral.

The claim that, “simply put, there is no way for someone to become a billionaire without someone losing out.” is a generalization premised on the assumption that, similar to matter/energy, national/global wealth is a static entity that cannot be produced or increased (i.e. that economies are stagnant and do not grow). For instance, if the national or global wealth “pie” is a fixed size, no one can possibly get rich without making someone else poor – without taking someone else’s share of the pie, along with their own.

Yet this is simply not the way economies – on a national or a global scale – operate. Noah Yuval Harari, Israel historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, relates that, since the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the ensuing industrial revolution, human progress has been “built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources into research, things can improve” [1]. Thus, technological inventions, organizational developments, new goods, new services, and new products can all “increase the sum total of human production, trade, and wealth,” effectively growing the total wealth pie available to humans [1].

Indeed, although “economic prosperity and lasting economic growth [have been a] very recent achievement for humanity” [2], a glance at any graph of worldwide GDP (which adjusts for simple population-proportional growth by measuring the average income earned per person in a given area in a specified year) from, lets say, 1870 to 2016 [3] will very clearly let you know that global economies have been growing like hormone-soused teenagers. Modern economies are not stagnant; instead, they are growing (mathematically) exponentially, perhaps even uncontrollably.

This allows for some members of society to get rich without impovershing others; a kind of “I can be wealthy without your becoming poor; I can be obese wihout your dying of hunger. The entire global pie can grow” [1]. Thus, someone can become a millionaire, a billionaire, even a trillionaire, without, as you say, “someone losing out.”

Entrepreneurs and business owners create value for society by adding to a country’s net production or capacity to supply services, and by investing in increased means of production as the company grows (taking on new workers, investing in new tech, investing in the growth of new/other companies). “In [economist Adam] Smith’s story, people become rich not by despoiling their neighbors, but by increasing the overall size of the pie. And when the pie grows, everyone benefits” [1]. For someone to get rich in a free market, they must create their net worth’s amount of productivity in a society; they must mechanically make the wealth pie larger. In a free market, individuals, as agents of free will, determine where they want to spend their money. It follows that someone who has accumulated wealth has done so with the consumer consent that is implicit in willful transactions. If, hypothetically, a tycoon has built his or her fortune through illegal methods and/or without consumer consent, they are immoral (and often criminal) because of reprehensible actions that broke the free markets mechanisms of consent, not because they simply possess an enormous amount of wealth.

Adding on, the claim that “[Billionaires’] gains are not the result of fair work, but of the exploitation of an underpaid and over labored workforce, who rarely see the fruits of that labor returned to them” rests on the deduction that employees are often entitled to higher-than-now-withstanding compensation for the productivity they produce. Yet, an employee’s wage is deferent to not only the law of supply and demand, but also to their threshold for economic risk-taking.

A box packer at one of Amazon’s warehouses, for example, receives at least an hourly wage of $15. The packer competes for his job/wage with everyone else in the national pool of unskilled laborers who too are willing to work for an hourly wage of $15. An excess of people willing to work at Amazon warehouses paired with a limited number of available employment slots means that those who are willing to work for less have a greater chance of being hired than those demanding higher wages. In the marketplace of employees, there is a balance between taking a job for a certain wage and securing an employment, or rejecting the existing terms of employment and looking elsewhere. This is a story we have all heard before. Still yet, employees are able to affect wages determined by supply and demand by invoking collective bargaining. Unionizing allows for a system of mutual consent between employees and employers, wherein acceptable yet sustainable wages can be worked out.

Additionally, wage is determined by the economic risk that certain actors within the market are willing to incur. Founding a company, for instance, requires a novel idea that addresses a specific problem or fills a specific niche, orders an immense allocation of (often unpaid) time, and demands a commitment of personal capital. Moreover, should the venture “go under,” the founder(s) is/are personally responsible for shouldering the cost of bankruptcy. The disparity of the economic risk-reward calculus between the employer and his or her employees is evident; if the company fails, the owner incurs the financial loss, while the employees simply lose their wage. Incurring entrepreneurial risk has the potential to make someone tremendously wealthy if the venture is successful, while simultaneously threatening economic ruin if the venture fails. Wage or salary seekers, on the other hand, incur less financial risk and rely on safety nets (forms of employer reimbursement) to smooth their financial volatility; naturally, this translates into less potential for incredible financial success, while also minimizing the chance of financial ruin.

Finally, we should perhaps consider that, at a certain point, consumer responsibility comes into question. It is irrational to both criticize those who have founded popular and useful companies – and to continue voluntarily feeding their snowballing wealth – while simultaneously lamenting the fact that they increase in value with our willful spending. Billionaires increase their wealth under the terms of our free market. If we, as individual consumers, are willing to buy their products or invest in their visions, we also must live with the fact that, at some level, we are personally responsible for increasing the wealth accumulation of the wealthy.

References:

[1] Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, pages 310-312

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=us+economic+growth+vs+world+economic+growth&sxsrf=ALeKk028lr3aOw5xbfFH7IVI66JuZh3eyA:1610833005684&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwigw9vItKHuAhVQVc0KHSJfDO0Q_AUoAnoECB4QBA&biw=1440&bih=698&safe=active&ssui=on#imgrc=TfaVDFG6YVTpFM

Human attraction is a complicated thing, and there is definitely an argument to be made for the fact that we, as humans, cannot necessarily control who/what we find attractive and, further, that attempting to retool our sexual or romantic tastes is a harmful repression/denial of self (i.e. "Love is Love" and should be accepted as such).

But indeed, for a host of reasons, projecting a fetishized ideal onto someone is unsustainable and detrimental to relationships (primarily because the idealizer only chooses to see their partner as the category they desire, rather than as the individual their partner exists as). Yet I estimate an argument can also be made that monogamous relationships are preferential, and that someone who shuns long term committed relationships can go through life with the primary aim of exploring their sexuality and indulging themselves in what they find attractive.

gotta get servings of fruit in somehow

I agree! I'm not really sure when misinformation – or completely censoring information –has been beneficial to anyone ever (in the long run)

Incredible right

It sounds to me like this phenomenon is more of a trade off. On the one hand, acting straight comes with a statistically lower chance of being harassed by homophobic agents in society, while also benefitting the actor's career goals and income. As you said, however, "an individual acting straight means they are rendering their sexuality invisible in order to further themselves within a society that doesn’t accept their identity." Making the decision to don the mask of heterosexuality and consciously maintain this every hour you are in public seems exhausting and likely comes with its own set of psychological ramifications. I guess this ability is really only a privilege depending what your priorities are in life, and depending on how much weight you assign to certain factors. Also, certain LGBTQI+ cloaking devices that you describe, such as "changing minute details such as hand movements, crossing legs, or lowering voice registers" or changing clothes, etc. seem to be things one can learn from observation/practice/coaching if the individual so desires. Again, I'm not sure if hiding your sexuality is so much a privilege as it is a choice between two ugly scenarios, each holding different but bad options all the same.

I think you're correct in your assessment that a predetermined judicial term length (as long as they are not up for reelection at the conclusion of their term) would make appealing to voters for reelection irrelevant while also furthering the goal of a fair, representative democracy.

Also the idea that each pres. administration would get 2 nominations is about as non-partisan and non-inflammatory as politics can get. One thing that just came to mind is whether or not it would be more effective to skip POTUS altogether and instead delegate congressional committees to directly nominate and vote on replacement judges. This would bypass any lingering misrepresentation from the electoral college/POTUS apparatus and represent a slightly more direct will of the people

Fast food chains are temporally, physically, and economically efficient, and each meal tends to be very calorically dense. Compared with humanity’s messy and often starvation-plagued past, this superabundance of readily available calorie packed food is a miracle. Now trailing behind diarrhea, starvation no longer cracks the top 10 as a leading global cause of death. Yet, as we vanquish one of our most stubborn historical rivals, another naturally takes its place. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases have risen to take the number one spot on the things-that-kill-lots-of-human-beings-every-year chart. Taken by itself, this fact is not immediately troubling, until you realize that the number one cause of heart disease is obesity, and the number one cause of obesity is an unhealthy diet – and then you have to come to terms with the fact that a bag of fast food doesn’t exactly contain the highest quality nutrition known to man. Equipped with this knowledge, you promptly realize that fast food is not all the rave the food industry made it out to be, but that it is, in fact, directly feeding the snowball of death that is cardiovascular disease. It becomes abruptly apparent that the international rise of fast food is not one of the world’s greatest achievements, but one of the most tragic events in recent history.

At the very least, modern governments seem quite convinced that the evil contained within a pouch of McDonald’s fries is worse than that of global epidemics, malnutrition, and poverty. In the summer of 2008, New York City became the first city to ban trans fats from restaurants. Pumping everything from the McRib to McNuggets and beyond with grams upon grams of trans-fat, fast food joints like McDonald’s were specifically targeted by NYC’s health reform. The city later unsuccessfully attempted a ban on sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces, which was shot down by a state appellate court. Inspired by the efforts of health activists south of the border, Canada enacted a ban of all trans fats (even imported goods containing trans-fat) as of September 17, 2018. Moreover, the World Health Organization has released a plan to help countries eliminate the artery clogging substance in the next five years. Acknowledging this new killer, it seems that countries around the globe are addressing the obesity epidemic just as they would an outbreak of disease; they are specifically looking for behaviors that correlate to the development of obesity and taking policy action to eliminate these behaviors. In a metaphorical kind of way, this behavior is analogous to that of a loving older brother who shows you the ropes around a new school and makes sure that you stay away from the “dislikeables,” as they will ruin your schooling experience for sure. Still, there are some who resist these newly enacted dietary restrictions.

When you break down the facts and the studies and read the lab reports and listen to the esteemed scientists who know everything about anything everywhere, the need to rid our society of this satanic substance might appear quite obvious. “How could someone possibly argue that trans-fats are beneficial to anyone in any scenario ever?” you might ask. However, you may find yourself asking the wrong question. You see, in the minds of many Americans, the real debate is not over whether trans-fats and other extremely unhealthy foods are scientifically proven to be bad for you; it is whether or not the government gets the power to control what you put in your mouth. Daren Bakst, a research fellow in agricultural policy at the Heritage Foundation, summarizes this viewpoint rather succinctly:
“They may not make smart choices, but that’s up to each individual to choose. It’s not up to the government to choose consumer behavior and lead people to eat a certain way – even if the government is right.”
Many people have come to the realization that, in order to accept the government making our dietary decisions, we must also accept the underlying premise of a government with “absolute knowledge” – an idea akin to many old European monarchies, where power was passed down due to the belief that the royal family was chosen by god, and thus had been conferred the ability to rule absolutely. Less radically, many Americans recoil at the thought of a “mother government” that “knows what’s best” because, philosophically, diet regulation is a slippery slope. What gives the government the authority to act as our brains and make decisions about what is good for our bodies? Who determines where the line is drawn? Will our precious apple pie be replaced with helpings of vitamin tablets and kale simply because those things are ‘good’ for us? Who even gets to determine what ‘good’ is? It is questions like these that troubled the minds of many Americans in the wake of the NYC trans-fat bans and the push towards smaller soda sizes. Foreigners might observe (with measured amounts of disdain) that Americans cling to their Krispy Kreme and Coca-Cola; however, there is a library of reasons why US citizens guard their sweets as vigilantly as they guard their speech.

I acknowledge that the NYC sugar-elimination push was the wrong move, while simultaneously appreciating the importance of removing toxins from regularly consumed foods. The government did, however, make a valuable contribution to its citizens by mandating that food companies supply nutritional labels on all consumable products. I am of the mind that one of the government’s most critical roles is found in supplying the American people with information, which citizens can interpret how they please. Just as people are presented information and are left up to their own wit to take stances on certain subjects (like politics, religion, etc.), regulating eating habits should not be in the government’s wheelhouse. Just as the government does not tell people what to think, they should not be told what to eat or what is necessarily healthy for their unique body or how much enjoyment someone should derive from food. People should be provided the information they need to be able to make informed nutritional decisions – decisions that should be made independently of the state.

Sources:

https://www.everydayhealth.com/heart-health/experts-top-contributors-to-heart-disease.aspx

https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/06/05/the-great-government-takeover-of-food

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets

https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2015/15_0065.htm

https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death#malnutrition

https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/2018/05/15/who-wants-trans-fats-gone-from-the-global-food-supply.html

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/09/17/canada-bans-use-of-artificial-trans-fats-in-food-products.html?rf

In the past half-decade, many White Americans – especially those in celebrity spotlights (e.g. Zack Effron) – who have styled their hair into "dreadlocks" (ropelike strands formed by matting or braiding hair) have been accused of culturally appropriating African American culture. Non-black people who have publicly worn dreadlocks have been charged with “appropriating” and “stealing from” black culture, while still others jeer non-black dread wearers for “playing at being black,” without having to adopt the alleged adversity or social stigma facing the black community.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term “cultural appropriation” as, “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.” In layman's terms, cultural appropriation is, most archetypally, the theft of a feature of a (usually subordinately perceived) culture, perpetrated by a (usually dominantly perceived) culture. The appropriating culture ostensibly lacks a familiarity – an obligatory intimacy – with other cultures on a level high enough to use their symbols; thus, use/adoption of a cultural symbol by a non-associated group is often perceived as disrespectful to or mocking of the appropriated culture.

It is self-evident that this idea exists as long as it is acceptable for certain groups of people to claim exclusivity over the ideas, customs, arts, languages, and practices of their ancestors (who developed and advanced the culture) and of their cultural contemporaries (who maintain the culture in the modern day and carry it into the future).

Still, all forms of cultural exclusivity or ownership can be claimed only so long as cultures remain single, distinct, and pure organs. In other words, the “rights” to certain cultural symbols become less exclusive to groups and more ubiquitous to humanity the more our cultures, races, and ethnicities overlap.

As history ceaselessly marches towards a point of absolute interconnectedness, cultures, races, and ethnicities will continue to converge into each other. Take, for example, adding drops of food coloring to a glass of water. As time increases, each drop – although originally distinct shades – will disseminate across the surface until they each spread out to touch the rim of the glass in all directions. The new, homogenous pigment will be fundamentally composed (and dependent) on each constituent shade, yet will neither be blue nor red nor yellow. Likewise, modern mechanisms of globalization are accelerating the convergence of axes of definition that once existed as parallel planes. For instance, cellular communication, internet and social media access, and high speed (and cheaper than ever) air and motor travel (to name a few) are blending once-separated lines of identity into complex, pluralist intersectionalities. The resulting identities are not merely a tally of constituent cultures and races – are not the simple arithmetic of adding up the sum of the ingoing colored drops, but are the lenses created through the unique way in which each of these strata intersect. There are quite literally infinite potential shades of color, infinite combinations of axes – of oppression, of advantage, of race, of ethnicity, of culture, of hair color, of natural talent, of disability, of sexuality, etc. – which can be combined to produce individual identities. Thus, it follows that the individual is the ultimate minority. In accordance, when someone is – with no more meaningful investigation than a simple glance at skin color – attacked for appropriating another culture, the accuser ignores their victim’s potential multifarious intersectional identities that could, in a million ways, cross to entitle ownership to a cultural, ethnic, or racial symbol that may parallel their (the attackers) own claim (also, might I add, making assumptions about someone expressly based on the color of their skin is a form of ignorance known as racism).

The essential truth that human identity has potentially infinite axes and intersections instructs that the only way to maintain cultural exclusivity claims will be to designate some as-of-yet-unimagined omnipotent construct as the final social arbiter, piecing out who belongs to which cultures, races, and ethnicities, and delineating where intersections that may entitle ownership to certain symbols may arise. It is here that the thesis of cultural exclusivity unravels, because culture is not merely a birthright; that is to say, one does not belong to “x” culture simply because they possess “y” blood and “z” skin color. As Yi Wang of Harbin Engineering University summarizes rather succinctly, “People are not mere objects of cultural influences, but subjects who can reject or integrate culture.” The fact that cultural identity is a malleable, adoptable, and combinable spectrum, based most fundamentally on matters of free choice (i.e. where to live, which cultural aspects you integrate or reject, etc.), makes the task of excluding individuals from cultural symbols on the grounds of perception all the more unthinkable.

Moreover, certain characteristic aspects of cultures have developed independently in multiple cultures around the world, making the game of picking apart what belongs to which culture and which culture belongs to whom all the more convoluted. For example, as CNN reporter Emanuella Grinberg writes, “Historians and anthropologists have found evidence of the ‘do [dreadlocks] in ancient Egypt, Germanic tribes, Vikings, Pacific Islanders, early Christians, the Aborigines and the New Guineans as well as the Somali, the Galla, the Maasai, the Ashanti and the Fulani tribes of Africa.” What’s more, each of the aforementioned sects have fathered handfuls of distinct cultures, each of which has proliferated into their own new subcultures, and the pattern continues. Ginberg echoes this sentiment again by relating a piece of dialogue from speaker and writer Feminista Jones: “Given dreadlocks’ rich history, it’s hard for one group to claim them.”

She follows up on this, saying, “Sure, white people can wear locs. For some, they have religious or spiritual meaning. For others, it’s just a hairstyle. My research informed me that Indian monks wore them long before they reached the Western Hemisphere, so I’m not sure anyone has any particular claim.”

Sources:

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/45742?redirectedFrom=cultural+appropriation#eid1223654010

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/31/living/white-dreadlocks-cultural-appropriation-feat/index.html

https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/09-Yi-Wang.pdf