alanwatts

9 ms·

1.
by alanwatts 8y ago
>it is unconscionable that we support the literal mass murder and ill-treatment of billions of animals each year when there are alternatives that require no suffering and no death. There are ways to put down animals which require no suff
2.
by alanwatts 9y ago
*Psychology and psychiatry I meant to say
3.
by alanwatts 9y ago
>Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical , subjective ,
4.
by alanwatts 9y ago
>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience. Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indee
5.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>Activists would do quite a lot more good by demanding better from their own government. Easier said than done. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/mexican-activi...
6.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>This actually is democracy working as designed - people being free to bullshit one another They aren't free to bullshit one another. Facebook, Google, and co. regularly censor their users.
7.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Ah, my mistake. I misread it as "many more people..."
8.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Fair enough. Though my concern is not for myself, but rather for any potential great leader who could be silently neutralized/blackmailed/extorted by mass surveillance techniques. Whether the culprits' organizational classifi
9.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>the fact that many people are more worried about marketers than the NSA? How do you know this is a fact , was a global survey done? >I am more concerned about A than B" is not a claim that B does not exist, nor is it a claim th
10.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Dr. King was monitored by the NSA for "thought crimes". Is that "100% tinfoil hat mode"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...
11.
by alanwatts 10y ago
When suing in a case like this, punitive damages would be paid out of the governments budget, rather than the personal assets of those personally responsible, correct?
12.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Which is circular logic. To sue an entity which you fund is to indrectly sue yourself.
13.
by alanwatts 10y ago
The terms "foreign" and "domestic" are meaningless in the context of the world wide web.
14.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Neglecting to save millions of lives in order to make some extra money is okay , but killing a dog is not?
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by alanwatts 10y ago
It's not perfect if your endpoints are compromised.
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>You'd just make everyone's job easier. How is that a bad thing? 1,300,000 people die each year in car wrecks and another 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 more are injured and/or disabled. Google's motto is "Don't be
17.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore. Yes, like that of the post which I was directing my response towards: >As a lifelong believer in science... Science is fundamentally
18.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; -Harriet Tubman
19.
by alanwatts 10y ago
"Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant fr
20.
by alanwatts 10y ago
"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we were already doing." -Marshall McLuhan
21.
by alanwatts 10y ago
The income itself is what stabilizes the population, this phenomenon is known as the demographic-economic paradox. The real false assumption here is that increased standard of living leads to overpopulation. The data indicates the opposite
22.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>There are two states in nature. You either grow or you shrink. There is also homeostasis. Perpetual growth is cancer.
23.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>On one side, it's economically unsound Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects.
24.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>No. It's more effective to lobby your local member of parliament/congress to pass laws restricting what media organisations can or cannot do. No. Facebook has far more lobbying power ($) than any of us. There is a reason why y
25.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Perhaps this phenomenon is a result of the religious imperialism which first reigned over the New World. Nudity was highly sacrilegious for los conquistadores de las americas, but the violence they used was not.
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam. -Marshall McLuhan The Vietnam War was the only one which was so honestly
27.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Perhaps it is because the fundamental nature of "finance" as a social conception is inherently centralized. So any purposefully decentralized/distributed system used for financial (centralized) purposes becomes corrupted by d
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by alanwatts 10y ago
It's an ad hominem attack, an attempt to distract from the actual issue at hand. I.e., focusing on Chelsea Manning's sexual preferences, or on Snowden being a "narcissist".
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease. -Lao Tzu
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by alanwatts 10y ago
The family unit has been anything but since the industrial age. For ~99% of human history, families lived, learned, and worked closely together. As of late, the opposite is now true. How can parents provide adequate love and bonding to thei

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