You have quite high expectations, I think. To overcome racism is one of the most difficult things in human life. The fear of the "alien" is very deeply ingrained in our psyche. Most people find their own bunch ( on the basis of "like attracts like" ) and erect walls so that the "others" cannot invade their territory (take this subculture for instance or the science vs. religion debates). If that fear is fueled by negative personal experiences, then it is nearly impossible to remain open-minded.
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Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens
- Thread starter ghostman
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Very good points, I grant you. I've certainly been told a time or two that I tend to be hard on people, and if I come off a bit as holier than thou... well, I'm a dick now and then, I admit it. But I guess this is where my own intolerance tends to flare up the hottest. I'm intolerant of intolerance - and whatever the circumstances are that lead a person to think in this fashion - as grownups, we have to own our shit; we're responsible for our beliefs. And just as the victim of childhood traumas grows up to inflict them on others - the origin of the cancer may explain the behavior but it really doesn't excuse it.
The thing that really baffles me is how incongruent these kinds of belief systems are with the psychedelic experience (as I experience it anyway). I thought the same thing a little while back when someone here was going off on some gnarly homophobic rant. I mean, how does one have a direct experience of unity with The Source, and then still cling to such an obviously limiting paradigm afterwards?
Truly... I just don't understand that.
The thing that really baffles me is how incongruent these kinds of belief systems are with the psychedelic experience (as I experience it anyway). I thought the same thing a little while back when someone here was going off on some gnarly homophobic rant. I mean, how does one have a direct experience of unity with The Source, and then still cling to such an obviously limiting paradigm afterwards?
Truly... I just don't understand that.
Why has nobody invoked Godwin's law on this thread. Oh wait, I just did...
Right on the spot.ghostman said:
O Brother Art,
You, me and MagicVenom, and just for the fun let's drag Ghostman into this too ; ) might have more in common than we would like to be true (real.) Don’t be so hard on yourself.
ghostman said:
LOL. Never heard of Godwin's Law before. Quite humorous, and appropiate at this point in the thread...:d
Uncle Knucles said:
I know you see the contradiction here, and the self transformation which makes you into that which you dislike. It is very, very hard and takes serious conscious effort to step back from the unconscious workings of the mind and embrace a more whollistic (and truer) perspective. There are no excuses, but we can have compassion for another who is lost within their own psyche such that they remain ignorant. People are they way they are because of their experiences, and it takes enormous effort to break away from the programming. But in the end understanding is not condoning. One must always be personally responsible.
I too have extreme difficulty understanding this as well. When you know all is One, how can you have such hostility to another self when the other is only a reflection of you?
If something bad happens, people can sometimes overreact and say racist things they don't realy mean.Saidin said:
That very thing happened to me, RIGHT HERE on the nexus. There was this thread about foxnews and some ancorfigure there, that o'reily dude. This guy has been spreading the word that the country where i live, not that i'm particularly fond of my country, but anyway..the country where i live is some criminal hellhole. This assumption was more or less based on the few things about my country that i do like, however wich is liberal druglaws and ofcourse all the other liberal things like euthanasia, gay-marriage, abortion, etc.
Anyway...that pissed me of big time.
And far-right people, wherever they're from, already piss me of even when they don't mention the place where i happen to reside as a stinking mess that better be nuked today than tomorrow.
So i started ranting about far-right in america and that it must come from people from the south who're illiterate, degenerated inbred morons.
Well...ofocourse i don't think everybody from the south is some kind of KKK crossburning redneck. But i just had to blow of some steam there.
Probably the same thing is the case with magicvenom.
I don't think he realy means all this.
Everybody always deserves the benefit of the doubt. That's why racism is such a terrible thing. Even if the majority of mexican immigrants WHERE indeed criminals, than you'd still have to give every mexican immigrant the benefit of the doubt.
And we all know this.
It's one of the fundamental principles of civilisation.
Blundering_Novice
Rising Star
Uncle Knucles said:
My sentiments precisely. I guess it says something about the psy experience; its not a panacea after all....
Magikvenom, unless you're a Native American, you're an illegal immigrant in the USA too. Worse, you're an occupier of the land of the people your forefathers committed genocide against.
Oh and Texas is actually part of Mexico anyway, isn't it, so I hope you're not going to shoot them for crossing that particular border?
Etc. Can you see what I'm getting at here, about your hypocrisy and the general futility of the borders and boundaries mentality? In truth, it shouldn't matter where these people are from, even if you're a Native yourself. We are all citizens of the Earth and we should all have an equal right to travel wherever we wish across the planes of existence. What does matter is that these four INDIVIDUALS hurt your loved ones without provocation, and for that I give my sympathies and I hope that they are brought to (humane and proportional) justice.
It's a shame you've let this incident corrupt you into an ignorant racist. Seems like they've turned you into one of them... a hater...
By the way, I like your avatar- isn't that Huichol beadwork, from Mexico?
Oh and Texas is actually part of Mexico anyway, isn't it, so I hope you're not going to shoot them for crossing that particular border?
Etc. Can you see what I'm getting at here, about your hypocrisy and the general futility of the borders and boundaries mentality? In truth, it shouldn't matter where these people are from, even if you're a Native yourself. We are all citizens of the Earth and we should all have an equal right to travel wherever we wish across the planes of existence. What does matter is that these four INDIVIDUALS hurt your loved ones without provocation, and for that I give my sympathies and I hope that they are brought to (humane and proportional) justice.
It's a shame you've let this incident corrupt you into an ignorant racist. Seems like they've turned you into one of them... a hater...
By the way, I like your avatar- isn't that Huichol beadwork, from Mexico?
syn said:
how about likening it to the way humans interact with ants?
We kill them, burn them, sometimes we study them. we put them in little houses for our children to play with.
we have laboratories dedicated to study the social structure of ants.
I think that is how ET's percieve us. do we share technology with ants? are they even aware of our social structures.
I think it was michio kaku who talked about this.
just a thought though, its nice to hope they would be nice to us, but why should they. why are we so awesome?
We only kill and burn ants when they invade our territory. But I get your point, and personally I agree that if we base our assumptions on aliens on how life works here on earth, then I agree we wouldn't want to meet them. One could also look at how Europeans treated indigenous people- some exploited them, while others tried to help them. The exploiters prevailed for a long time because it was a frontier age of 'might being right'.
(As an aside, sometimes I think of how human societies resemble ant and bee colonies as much as the small groups of other primates, and I wonder if we have some insect DNA spliced into us? Feel free to laugh if that's scientifically silly.)
In human society at least there are altruistic as well as callous people. Intellignece varies greatly between individuals. The question is, are the most intelligent people generally more ethical? If the answer to that is yes, then maybe there is still hope that a more intelligent alien race might be worth knowing.
Still, maybe not worth the risk in my opinion. I guess we try to contact them for the same reasons that we try to contact god... children now adults pining for a parent figure to look after them. That and our unstoppable curiosity, the thing that has made our species so successful to date.
(As an aside, sometimes I think of how human societies resemble ant and bee colonies as much as the small groups of other primates, and I wonder if we have some insect DNA spliced into us? Feel free to laugh if that's scientifically silly.)
In human society at least there are altruistic as well as callous people. Intellignece varies greatly between individuals. The question is, are the most intelligent people generally more ethical? If the answer to that is yes, then maybe there is still hope that a more intelligent alien race might be worth knowing.
Still, maybe not worth the risk in my opinion. I guess we try to contact them for the same reasons that we try to contact god... children now adults pining for a parent figure to look after them. That and our unstoppable curiosity, the thing that has made our species so successful to date.
Not silly at all. In fact, it’s probably true:ohayoco said:
Scientists uncover transfer of genetic material between blood-sucking insect and mammals
I think you can expect that the more intelligent a social species is, the more ethical it is at the same time. But that would not nessecarilliy mean more moral or 'better' in that sense. I mean that it's logical to expect a higher moral intelligence, wich could mean that they're more sadistic, more xenophobic, more altruistic, more cosmopolitan...it can go in any moral direction. To a moral that would even be totally different from ours.
It is dangerous to draw too sharp a link between intelligence and morality, but it is naïve to believe that there is no such link at all.
The neural web inside our skull is even more so than a computer, a universal machine that is suited to perform different tasks with the same piece of wiring. If the wiring is such that the brain is very good at performing one type of task, you may expect it to be good in other tasks that would require the same circuits to be active as well.
I also think that there could be a genetic connection between humans and insects. There are many other characteristics that we share, some of wich are shared by all lifeforms, some by all animals, etc.
There are as far as i can see two options:1-we share some of the genes that are responsible for behaviour, or 2-natural selection has through identical environmental conditions lead to the evolution of certain types of behaviour, those types of behaviour are bounded by basic mathematical principles so neural pathways that result in behaviour that fit's these mathematical principles is selected by evolution and thus through different genetic expressions the same mechanisms of behaviour with the same odd characteristics are selected.
Those two scenario's are although different fundamentally simmilar: In a cold environment, species with long hairs could survive better so species that share a gene for long hair could be selected, but different genetic heritage's could through the years in the same environment also lead to the same long hair in different species.
I still think though, that for species to evolve into these superiour high-tech sci-fi aliens, you need an awfull lot of time. Maybe statistically there cannot be any planet that has this time. Every once or twice in a million year you'd have a major catastrophe that would lead to the mass extinction of a species on any planet, so that no civilisation ever get's to evolve as far as we are speculating it gets.
It is dangerous to draw too sharp a link between intelligence and morality, but it is naïve to believe that there is no such link at all.
The neural web inside our skull is even more so than a computer, a universal machine that is suited to perform different tasks with the same piece of wiring. If the wiring is such that the brain is very good at performing one type of task, you may expect it to be good in other tasks that would require the same circuits to be active as well.
I also think that there could be a genetic connection between humans and insects. There are many other characteristics that we share, some of wich are shared by all lifeforms, some by all animals, etc.
There are as far as i can see two options:1-we share some of the genes that are responsible for behaviour, or 2-natural selection has through identical environmental conditions lead to the evolution of certain types of behaviour, those types of behaviour are bounded by basic mathematical principles so neural pathways that result in behaviour that fit's these mathematical principles is selected by evolution and thus through different genetic expressions the same mechanisms of behaviour with the same odd characteristics are selected.
Those two scenario's are although different fundamentally simmilar: In a cold environment, species with long hairs could survive better so species that share a gene for long hair could be selected, but different genetic heritage's could through the years in the same environment also lead to the same long hair in different species.
I still think though, that for species to evolve into these superiour high-tech sci-fi aliens, you need an awfull lot of time. Maybe statistically there cannot be any planet that has this time. Every once or twice in a million year you'd have a major catastrophe that would lead to the mass extinction of a species on any planet, so that no civilisation ever get's to evolve as far as we are speculating it gets.
Chalchiuhtlicue
Rising Star
I live in Arizona, a state which is having a hard time right now dealing with illegal aliens. It's not the folks who come across looking for work that we're worried about. It's the drug cartel thugs who drag crates of cheap pot or various white powdery substances through the desert and into homes across America. Like, if we didn't pay for the stuff, they wouldn't be bringing it across. (at this point, I don't know who "we" is, but I wish he'd go very far away or clean up his act...) We, however created the problem and we should deal with it, but we don't.
Folks who own ranches or live in towns along the border have to contend with hundreds of not-so-nice folks walking through their property on a nightly basis, taking whatever isn't welded down, and occasionally shooting those who get in their way. These thugs need to be stopped, but it's like standing at the edge of the sea with a broom, trying to push back the waves.
This does not mean, however, that all the folks coming in from Mexico are criminals. Mostly, folks who come here really want to work. They put their lives on the line to get here, and no matter how miserable we make it for them, they keep coming because they want a better life for their families. Think about it...you save up every cent you can put your hands on, sometimes for years, then give it all to a "coyote" you hope you can trust to show you the way across. Then, you walk all night, sometimes all night for several nights in a row, hiding out in the day, scared to death of rattle snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, the Border Patrol. You have very little food, almost no water...the coyote gets lost....the very old and the very young get heat stroke. Some die. Then you get to the vans the coyote promisted, and you end up at a "safe house" in some strange city, held hostage while the coyotes try to squeeze more cash out of your relatives. Ofte, they kill one or two of the group, just to make a point. Then, if you're ransomed out, you're on your own. You have no papers, no place to stay, no "opportunity". Yeah, you steal. It's that, or die.
Who are the young punks who rob and kill? More often than not, they are the children of poverty who have been abused themselves, who band together to deal with racism and prejudice, poverty and abuse in their own way. They live in a world where violence is the quick answer, where everyone agrees that death is an honest way to go and living is nothing but hanging in through pain. You see little tatooed tears at the edge of their eye. Life is that way, permanently sad. So sad you can't cry no more...you have to have a tatoo, instead.
Arizona is bankrupt, both financially and emotionally. It sounded like a good idea to pass a law saying if you are here illegally, we're going to arrest you. Makes sense, no? But, aha! In order to figure out who is illegal and who is not, we're going to have to ask. That means hundreds, maybe thousands of Mexican Americans are going to have to be subjected to guys with guns and attack dogs going through their car at "checkpoints" put up without warning all over towm. I have gone through this, and even with nothing to fear, it's scary. But it happens all the time, so it gets down to just being annoying. Pretty soon we take it for granted, like having to take off your shoes, get x-rayed and sort things out in your bag into little plastic tubs just to get on an airplane. We institutionalize our loss of personal freedom, our bad choices, our dirty launddry. That's the American way.
It is easy to blame crime on the nationality of the person or persons who committed it, but is it fair? Crimes happen in every culture. Nobody ever does anything because it's the wrong thing to do...Everyone always does what seems right at the time. What we need to be doing is looking at WHY crimes are being committed and FIXING the problem at the source. There is no such thing as "senseless" crime. It made sense to the person who did it! Why? What could have been done to break the chain that led to that person's horrible decision?
There is always a reson, and if there's reason, there's debate, and through debate ideas get passed on like seeds that grow, and if fostered, new reasons happen and life gets more interesting. Hate, on the other hand, does nothing but curdle the opportunity for growth. We can't learn from hate, we only dry up and constipate.
The bad stuff gets you when you hurt that much.
Shake it off and turn it around.
Arizonans are turning against that law that's bringing all this hate to the surface.
They can see it's not constitutional, in that many more people will lose their civil liberties than just the illegals.
But we still need to do something about the criminals invading the Southwest on their way to bring drugs to eager buyers on OUR side of the border.
Might I suggest a boycott? If Americans would stop buying the crap the cartels are bringing across, they'd stay home and we could deal with the farm workers who just want to work. If we took the money we've been spending on preserving our oil rights in the middle east and pumped it into the economy of the inner cities, young people would have jobs and gangs would cease to be attractive. There will always be criminals, but if we could afford more law enforcement in the areas where crime happens, streets would be safer. It's all related.
Pay attention to what you have, how it got here, and where it's going when you're through with it. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
Thanks for listening.
--The Old Hippie, Chal
Folks who own ranches or live in towns along the border have to contend with hundreds of not-so-nice folks walking through their property on a nightly basis, taking whatever isn't welded down, and occasionally shooting those who get in their way. These thugs need to be stopped, but it's like standing at the edge of the sea with a broom, trying to push back the waves.
This does not mean, however, that all the folks coming in from Mexico are criminals. Mostly, folks who come here really want to work. They put their lives on the line to get here, and no matter how miserable we make it for them, they keep coming because they want a better life for their families. Think about it...you save up every cent you can put your hands on, sometimes for years, then give it all to a "coyote" you hope you can trust to show you the way across. Then, you walk all night, sometimes all night for several nights in a row, hiding out in the day, scared to death of rattle snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, the Border Patrol. You have very little food, almost no water...the coyote gets lost....the very old and the very young get heat stroke. Some die. Then you get to the vans the coyote promisted, and you end up at a "safe house" in some strange city, held hostage while the coyotes try to squeeze more cash out of your relatives. Ofte, they kill one or two of the group, just to make a point. Then, if you're ransomed out, you're on your own. You have no papers, no place to stay, no "opportunity". Yeah, you steal. It's that, or die.
Who are the young punks who rob and kill? More often than not, they are the children of poverty who have been abused themselves, who band together to deal with racism and prejudice, poverty and abuse in their own way. They live in a world where violence is the quick answer, where everyone agrees that death is an honest way to go and living is nothing but hanging in through pain. You see little tatooed tears at the edge of their eye. Life is that way, permanently sad. So sad you can't cry no more...you have to have a tatoo, instead.
Arizona is bankrupt, both financially and emotionally. It sounded like a good idea to pass a law saying if you are here illegally, we're going to arrest you. Makes sense, no? But, aha! In order to figure out who is illegal and who is not, we're going to have to ask. That means hundreds, maybe thousands of Mexican Americans are going to have to be subjected to guys with guns and attack dogs going through their car at "checkpoints" put up without warning all over towm. I have gone through this, and even with nothing to fear, it's scary. But it happens all the time, so it gets down to just being annoying. Pretty soon we take it for granted, like having to take off your shoes, get x-rayed and sort things out in your bag into little plastic tubs just to get on an airplane. We institutionalize our loss of personal freedom, our bad choices, our dirty launddry. That's the American way.
It is easy to blame crime on the nationality of the person or persons who committed it, but is it fair? Crimes happen in every culture. Nobody ever does anything because it's the wrong thing to do...Everyone always does what seems right at the time. What we need to be doing is looking at WHY crimes are being committed and FIXING the problem at the source. There is no such thing as "senseless" crime. It made sense to the person who did it! Why? What could have been done to break the chain that led to that person's horrible decision?
There is always a reson, and if there's reason, there's debate, and through debate ideas get passed on like seeds that grow, and if fostered, new reasons happen and life gets more interesting. Hate, on the other hand, does nothing but curdle the opportunity for growth. We can't learn from hate, we only dry up and constipate.
The bad stuff gets you when you hurt that much.
Shake it off and turn it around.
Arizonans are turning against that law that's bringing all this hate to the surface.
They can see it's not constitutional, in that many more people will lose their civil liberties than just the illegals.
But we still need to do something about the criminals invading the Southwest on their way to bring drugs to eager buyers on OUR side of the border.
Might I suggest a boycott? If Americans would stop buying the crap the cartels are bringing across, they'd stay home and we could deal with the farm workers who just want to work. If we took the money we've been spending on preserving our oil rights in the middle east and pumped it into the economy of the inner cities, young people would have jobs and gangs would cease to be attractive. There will always be criminals, but if we could afford more law enforcement in the areas where crime happens, streets would be safer. It's all related.
Pay attention to what you have, how it got here, and where it's going when you're through with it. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
Thanks for listening.
--The Old Hippie, Chal
Well said Chalchiuhtlicue.
People are always going to use drugs. Better to legalize them all, and throw the billions we spend on law enforcement into treatment and prevention programs. The drug war we have raged for the last 40 years has been an abject failure. Over 1 trillion spent, and absolutely nothing to show for it.
Look at the Netherlands. Legal drugs, needle exchange programs, prevention and treatement, and their use is 60% of what the US is per capita.
People are always going to use drugs. Better to legalize them all, and throw the billions we spend on law enforcement into treatment and prevention programs. The drug war we have raged for the last 40 years has been an abject failure. Over 1 trillion spent, and absolutely nothing to show for it.
Look at the Netherlands. Legal drugs, needle exchange programs, prevention and treatement, and their use is 60% of what the US is per capita.
Saidin said:
Agreement all around with concurrence in regard to Chalchiuhtlicue's post. Well said! But yeah, on the point of the cartels: If you've ever tasted of coca or its extracts, it's no wonder that there's no way to eradicate it's use, but coca didn't breed the cartels, prohibition did.
Shrabbit420
Rising Star
Stephen Hawking is such a tool. His argument makes no sense, if aliens were going to invade us for our resources they would've done so long ago, way before we started polluting the earth, and way way before we had the defensive capabilities we do now. Aliens do exist, they are just waiting for the majority of people accept that fact and get over their "mars attacks!" scenarios that they envision. And with Stephen Hawking, supposedly one of our greatest minds, spreading this kind of information I don't see people wanting alien contact any time soon.
Shrabbit420 said:
Source?
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