LengAwaits

What about Ween?

Yeah, politicians have been manipulating rubes forever. Nothing new.

March 13th of this year is when I first heard about it:

(Fox News Source)

Of course it's not a good reason, but it's also not the main complaint. That's a disingenuous argument.

The problem is that the locations that offer IDs become political footballs.

Imagine that you change the law to require a certain type of ID in order to vote (even though you already have a social security card, it doesn't count for voting purposes), and that said ID cannot be acquired via mail.

Imagine, then, that the place you go to get the necessary ID is closed down, or intentionally understaffed via defunding/budget cuts. Hours reduced to 10am-4pm Monday through Friday, perhaps, when most people work. The next nearest location may be hours away. It may not be accessible via public transit. It then becomes incredibly burdensome for someone with limited time, transportation, or income to get the necessary ID. Now you're able to control access to the IDs in lower income areas by shuttering or defunding locations.

This isn't just a theoretical situation. This occurs.

Now, I think you'll find that most people are onboard with requiring ID to vote, provided that the barriers to getting the ID do not have a chilling effect on low-income voters.

But that's not the way things tend to go.

Present a plan that expands access to the ID printing services and watch the resistance to these sorts of policies disappear. Or better yet, mail one to every eligible taxpayer the first time they file a tax return. It's not particularly difficult.

Cooperation and sharing are just as much "human nature" as selfishness. We contain lots of "natural" impulses, but people will prioritize and grow into those impulses which society most rewards.

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state.

(...)

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before. In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.

(Full Text PDF)

That is very frustrating, to be sure.

However, the ways we've begun to think about sapience are so intriguing, as well. We're beginning to move away from the anthropocentric view that humans are the only sapient creatures. Corvids, elephants, and dolphins probably already make the cut (among other vertebrates) according to the current definition of sapience.

Ants, too, which makes me wonder about the potential for deepening our understand of group/swarm sapience, as well. True "hive minds", etc. Fascinating stuff!

So much of our understanding of the natural world comes from comparing creatures to ourselves through surface level observation. The more we can relate to an organism, as we perceive it, the more likely we are to elevate its status or "worthiness", it seems. Now, in the presence of modern technology, we're discovering how little we actually knew about how the world around us works.

This all ties strongly into historic religious world-views, and elevation of humans to god-like (or god's chosen) status. So much to unpack!

Haven't we moved into the belief that many/most multicellular organisms are sentient?

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. ^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience^

The studies on plant ‘cognition’ and their ‘nervous system’ are not for naught. They have produced doubt. Some researchers are suddenly unsure about the status of plants and this doubt is necessary to get researchers engaged in and to acquire funding for research into plant sentience. The question of plant sentience is one of those fascinating question where, whichever answer is true we will all be in awe. If plants are sentient, then we need to rethink much of our current understanding in neuroscience. How could such a vascular system, different in so many ways from our own nervous system, give rise to consciousness? If plants are not sentient, then we are witness to a self-maintaining entity capable of complex cognitive behaviour without the presence of consciousness. ^https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-024-09953-1^

This topic fascinates me. I'm not trying to be confrontational or argumentative, sorry if it comes off that way.

That's totally fair, and I agree with you. I probably shouldn't have used the phrase "high form of humor". I more meant "worthwhile form of humor". Even that doesn't really encapsulate what I mean.

I don't know. It can be hard to separate brainrot from intelligent comedy, and I laugh at both, myself. I'm not the comedy police or anything, I just don't want to end up here:

That's me! Cringe and proud.

You're not being a jerk, you're being pedantic.

Ignorant is absolutely the better word, and I should have used it.

I think, however, that people are far more capable of gaining intelligence than we give them credit for. I don't believe that IQ is assigned at birth, and it's been shown that the entire idea of IQ testing is extremely flawed.

There are people born with learning disabilities, of course, but that's a whole other conversation.

Shitposting is just pretending to be stupid/racist/shitty for laughs/attention, right? Pretty low form of humor, if you ask me (no one did), but I'm also guessing a lot of shitposters aren't just pretending.

I like a laugh as much as the next person, but we can't sit around going "Why are people in this country so fucking stupid/racist/shitty?" while simultaneously elevating "acting" stupid to some high form of humor. You see how that's counterproductive, right?

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

*“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.” - Jason Garrett-Glaser*