Epstein email asking if Putin had pics of Trump blowing “Bubba”, which was one of Bill Clinton’s nicknames

You still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea? How amazingly primitive.

You still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea? How amazingly primitive.

Not really, no. A lot of the major ones, like the Flood, but there’s plenty of original content in every religion. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.

And my point is that if all these same stories keep popping up, maybe there’s some significance to them.

Technically

It seems like the prevailing theory is that it’s a Latin pun where “salis” means both salt and wit/intelligence/sense.

More “salt” would be more “sense”.

You avoid growing plants because it’s emasculating.

I avoid growing plants because I’m awful at it and it’s cruel.

We are not the same

I guess the major question is who redistributes the resources without a hierarchy? If no one can exert their will over another, how do you take resources from the wealthy?

Right but you equally aren’t interested in changing your worldview. I also used to believe the things you did. Why do you assume it’s me that’s brainwashed and not you? I changed my mind because of interacting with people in many contexts. I’ve witnessed them be selfish, lazy, combative, for no reason other than emotional response.

The fact that you’re so stubborn proves my point. Here we are, you refusing to cooperate to find new ground, unwilling to believe that my perspective comes from experience and not propaganda. It’s ironic. How do you expect an entire civilization to cooperate if you can’t find common ground in a simple conversation?

Paleolithic and neolithic societies didn’t have millions of people. The small percentage of greedy people becomes a much greater problem at that scale.

I find it pretty offensive that you can’t conceive of any disagreement that isn’t the result of brainwashing. It’s extremely counterproductive

On the contrary, my mind is constantly open and I’ve read quite a bit. But what I’ve read generally falls into three categories:

1. Totally hand-wavey, concerned more with guiding principles than actionable models. No attempt is made to describe how to devise a non-hierarchical system that fulfills the needs of the people.

2. Delusional, based entirely on people suddenly being way more cooperative and efficient in group decisions than they’ve ever actually been observed to be en masse.

3. Inconsequential, “non-hierarchical” is abstracted so far that most modern democracies could be described as such after relatively minor reform. These seem the most practical to me, like the proponents actually considered the mechanics of how the system would work in the material world.

I’m not trying to dismiss it, but everything I’ve read either makes it sound like a fantasy, or a minor change.

why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place?

Some people are greedy, or jealous, or just want to be in power.

If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way

That seems like circular logic that hand-waves the intrinsic difficulty of the task as a trifling detail. You’re assuming a solution exists, and then assuming that solution can deal with any new threats.

Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.

That just leaves the tricky transition period. What do we do in the meantime? I think a single generation is massively underselling the timescale, what you’re describing is likely to take a century or more. You can’t build a system off of humans suddenly having heretofore unobserved commitment to the collective good.

We’re berry-picking primates advancing too fast for our nervous systems to keep up. Anarchism is a nice utopia to think of, but it isn’t much comfort for people living today.

But I can assert power over you by threatening you with a baseball bat. If I get a group of buddies with bats, we become the power structure.

You can’t eliminate power structures forever, they arise spontaneously in a population. You can’t abolish power structures because abolition requires a power structure to enforce.

The best you can do is devise power structures with multiple layers of accountability. So long as some people are bigger, stronger, meaner than others, power imbalances will exist. If you don’t have a structure to regulate those imbalances, warlords and mafiosos will make their own.

You were never taught that corruption is bad? I was. I was also told not to lie, cheat, steal, harm others, etc. I think most people were, and yet we still have crime. D.A.R.E. told entire generations of kids that drugs are bad, and yet people still use drugs.

How do you prevent people from promoting corruption and making role models of the corrupt? That requires some method of enforcement, otherwise you might as well be wishing on a star.

By fighting corruption instead of building a society on top of it

But how? How do you enforce the fight against corruption without a system which itself is vulnerable to corruption?

How do you build such a system though? Every system is eventually exploitable. The US system of checks and balances was actually a pretty solid attempt, but it eventually fell to corruption. The USSR was a noble attempt, but it eventually fell to corruption.

How do you construct a system which has the authority to prevent corrupt individuals from oppressing others, but doesn’t oppress people itself?

There are centuries of religious thought by mystics developing upon the texts inspired in part by those stories. The parts based on common ancient legends comprise a relatively small part of religious texts.

And still, if anything that’s supportive evidence. The ancient legends that pop up again and again, that survive centuries of canonical revision, probably reflect deep and spiritually apparent features of reality.

They contradict each other on many aspects.

Yes, which is why I said to compare them to see where they don’t contradict each other.

So either only is from God or none of them are.

Never said any of them were from God. They’re all from humans attempting to describe God.

The Bible, and the Quran, and the Vedas, and every other religious text are human attempts to describe God. None of them are going to get it quite right in every detail, but you can learn a lot by cross referencing them to see what they agree on.