approx Jan 2025:

Sometimes people are interested in what I have to say, and want to connect with me on some centralized social media. I won't connect via centralized media (except with phone numbers, but at least there I have rights), but since people seem interested, I feel like I should put something out there. I've been told that I have a way with words, but I don't think it comes across in my writing. Still, I'm going to try my best and put honest words on this page. Some of the things on the page I will be honestly wrong about, but I won't correct it here even if I later admit I was wrong; I think it is to peoples' detriment that we are only subjected to delicately crafted narratives that cater to our biases. I'm going to write like I talk, which means you should be prepared for some HARD conversational pivots.

Throughout this rant I will introduce definitions of words as they are meant here, and assume definitions of many others. These usages should not be considered as endorsements of those definitions unless I explicitly state as much, such as with my definition of "self". For instance, just because I use the term "woman" to describe someone that presents as, and does not deny being, feminine, does not mean I think defining "woman" as an adult female is wrong. I'm sure this seems like a strange opening statement, but for the issues I'm drawn to, I generally perceive two sides attacking strawmen of the other using just-dissimilar-enough language to find no common ground. We have benefited evolutionarily from constant fragmentation, oppression, and genocide, but we are too powerful to benefit from them further. Now we need to unify as a species and learn to self-regulate. For such a system to resist cancer, it must optimize for the individual, and fundamentally lack centralization. It only requires as much consensus as is required to prevent speciation. It cannot be that groups are allowed to secede and colonize the universe, as we would surely be to blame should our neighbors come seeking retribution.

Organisms obtain value from resources. Equivalently, the resources generate value. The tree generates shelter for the squirrel. The land generates sheep for the shepherd. Humans have done an amazing job of accumulating resources to generate any and all value a human could want. This causes two problems. The first is that we are evolved to always want more, so even when all our needs are met and we have loving friends and family, we so rarely feel like we have enough. The second problem is that humans have learned to hoard resources and to sell only value. Instead of selling houses, we would rather keep the house and sell only the value it generates through rent, so fewer and fewer people can own. The only decentralized, bottom-up, solution I have for this is to refuse to rent. Sleep in your car, or be homeless until you can afford a mortgage or, better yet, buy it outright. I chose to buy a van and live there.

The housing issue is troubling, but more infuriating is the way this has manifested for non-scarce resources. Though the labor by programmers, artists, and engineers to generate information is scarce, the proliferation and usage of that information is essentially non-scarce. Yet still, companies don't want to sell you art or software, they want to license it to you, under some restrictive terms, with some time limit. Our very culture is owned, and that ownership is enforced through laws by the state with violence if necessary. These laws are referred to as "intellectual property laws" and they exist to extend the new and unfamiliar world of non-scarce resources to our well-understood scarce world of capitalism. By effectively making non-scarce resources scarce, we can use the same overpowered economic system of capitalism to fuel supply chains to keep the engine of progress going for these non-scarce resources.

I do not fault the people of the past for creating this system because you can't just wait for a better system to show itself while your adversaries jump technological hoops. Workers acquire functional information to perform tasks and add to that information over time. As we extend ourselves with technology, more of the functional knowledge we acquire and build becomes infinitely replicable. Workers have always been paid for performing tasks, not for the knowledge they curate. Such a system disincentivizes workers from sharing knowledge, as rivals can use your curation as a starting point and cut you out. Intellectual property law emerged to give workers control over their contributions to collective knowledge.

This scarcification is not without price. Now you cannot simply contribute to things, because ownership means a piece of the pie, and they don't want to share. Since there is no absolute metric by which to weight different contributions, each monetization agreement must be agreed to by all parties, which gets more difficult as the number of contributors increases. This creates a non-participatory culture where no one can contribute, and a select few own everything, including what you watch, which songs you listen to, and which machine instructions are allowed to run on your devices. We are literally being mind controlled.

Human's have gotten to where we are today through a long history of integrating and improving on technology. We are primates with powerful visual perception that have perfected screens that are able to impart pertinent information at the speed of perception. Using our nerves, we direct information back into the device via twitches at a keyboard, touchscreen, or mouse. We already have brain-computer interfaces, and they are in our pockets. We are plugged into devices which only play media "owned" by someone else, and are only able to run approved programs. Someone else is controlling the device that you have already embedded into your mind. The device is an extension of your brain, and the software running on it is an extension of your mind. The media on your devices are the thoughts you think, and the software that runs your device is the mechanism of your thinking.

Some definitions of words are more beneficial than others. If you define your arm to be "attached" to you instead of "part" of you, then it may change your mind when I offer to replace it with this shiny replacement that will surveil you, prevent you from understanding how it works, prevent you from modifying it, and disobey orders, but that will also be so neat, shiny, do your taxes, connect you with friends, improve your business, and make you more attractive. People today so often can't navigate because they have completely outsourced that ability to their phones' turn-by-turn navigator. We MUST define "self" to include technology. As time progresses, the number of decisions made by digital machines is constantly growing compared to biological humans. Those that never consider technology to be a part of them are doomed to become some vestigial limb of the species that is eventually pruned.

I said it before but this bears repeating as people, initially, have a real hard time taking me seriously on this point: We are literally being mind controlled. We have integrated technology into our minds, technology whose inner workings are kept secret from us. This is your mind and you cannot change how it works. Others have written codes (anti-features) that operate against your best interest and put it in your mind where you cannot change it. The only media you watch is generated by a select few gatekeepers that are policed into one narrative. These devices are an ever-increasing portion of our mind and they are utterly not free.

One last thought I will mention on that point. So often, I talk to people and convince them that they are literally being mind controlled using arguments similar to those above. Invariably, their response is something along the lines of "Wow, that's a really great point. We are literally being mind controlled in a way that we should be concerned with. I'm not going to do anything about it because I don't know how I would, and I have other things to think about. However, I think it's really cool that you are concerned with this and I hope you really get to the bottom of this and improve it the way you are saying". How creepy is that? Imagine you are on a space ship with a crew, and realize some alien slug is on your head. You manage to scrape it off and as your head clears just a little, you look around and realize EVERYONE has a similar brain slug. You run up to someone fixing a door and frantically explain what is going on. The repairman's eyes open in shock as they realize you are right. The repairman responds: "Wow that's a really great point! But, I have to finish fixing this door and go home and make dinner for my family. I really hope you figure that out." What the fuck is going on? Are we all frogs in boiling water?

But all is not lost. Surely you've come to the ramblings of a drug-addled, alien-obsessed hobo who believes the government is surveiling us through backdoors in virtually every device, because I must have all the answers. Jokes aside, I do have what I believe are good next steps toward that end. A good problem to tackle is the monetization problem of free culture. Basically, we need to build an alternative to capitalism for non-scarce goods. To support the supply chains, we need to figure out how to support people that make contributions in a way that is free, local-first, and decentralized. To incentivize shared knowledge, we must as much as possible pay workers for the knowledge they share.

For a more concrete discussion of how I think we should accomplish that, I will defer to my presentation I am working on here, though it isn't really complete yet without me presenting it. Basically, I want to enable individuals to invest in the contributors that make the culture they use in a way that is both under that individual's control and optimized for that individual's best interest. In the short term, I want to build that system to enable cash transactions based on value declarations, by the individual investing, on contributions. In the long term, I want to use those value declarations, along with people's existing social connections, as an alternative to normal currencies. In effect, this creates a bottom up social credit system.

In the future we might contribute not just culture, but raw information about the world as part of the commons. Slowly but surely I think we will tend towards a bottom-up surveillance system, where people control their own sensors and choose to share enough to keep themselves and others safe. I may not want to report on law breaking for a law I disagree with, but I sure as hell want the ability to "tattle" when my neighbor's house gets broken in to. I want to lower the barrier to entry so everyone can contribute to the trajectories of culture. I want to enable a plurality of narratives and be able to work with those I disagree with on the things we do agree on. I think we need to allow for contributions by the socially challenged and those who have out of distribution beliefs. God help those with both. (And God especially help those with both, and whose beliefs piss off the powerful.)

approx Feb 2025:

Alright, you made it this far into my ramblings, so I'll talk about a fun one, and one that was promised in the title. My entire life, I made fun of people that believed that human's weren't the smartest thing here on earth. When I say "smartest", I mean smarter in a way that we would all agree makes something smarter. Specifically, I mean they have more advanced technology and understand a strict superset of the physics we know (our physics ⊊ their physics). If the stories of higher beings from the world's religions have any validity, then those beings are also smarter than us in this way. The image of abrahamic angels using technology more advanced than cell phones seemed so ridiculous that it fueled my atheism. Eventually, I came across this podcast episode interviewing David Fravor¹ where David describes encountering a UAP as a Navy pilot. If accurate, the basic claims of the story include an object with no discernible flight surfaces, propulsion, or heat signature. An object that could rapidly accelerate despite these oddities. Everything we observe that accelerates does so by pushing against matter to push it forward, conserving conservation of momentum. We know of two ways to make an object fly: push off the air (balloons, planes, helicopters, gliders, etc.) or eject matter really fast (rockets/missiles). These claims describe something that didn't appear to do either of these things; had my favorite podcaster gone full tin-foil hat?

This was my first exposure to the topic, but there were plenty of references in that video to get me started down a rabbit hole. Things apparently really heated up with the 2017 New York Times article that publicized three military UAP videos, as well as information about past US efforts to study UAPs. Shortly after that podcast episode, the unclassified version of the first UAP report came out, and it seemed to confirm the detail I found most consequential:

Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.

If something is able to move against the wind while suspended in the air, then it must have a sufficient machinery to propel very quickly. How could it possibly do this without us being able to discern the means of propulsion? Either it should be pushing off air, or it should be expelling rocket fuel, right? Did someone actually make an EmDrive (or a warp drive)? Could the government have technology so advanced in secret? Throughout history, physics has always led engineering. We understand the basic principles of a process long before we are able to productize it. We should at least have some ideas HOW such an object could exist if normal humans made it, but it seems to violate conservation of momentum, which defies all well recognized physics models (unless they managed to manipulate dark energy). Now MAYBE I could grant you that today our military is so great that they can make such technology and that they suppressed some key physics discoveries from making it to the public. Even then, the descriptions of the objects are consistent going much farther back, at least through project blue book and project sign. Even if we can make those special technologies today, there is no way we could make them at the end of World War II. If we had that kind of technology, we would have used it in the war. All this makes me rethink dismissing people like Bob Lazar. More recently, there was another Senate hearing where David Grusch made claims about a misinformation campaign against the American public to hide the existence of aliens, and the reality of crash retrieval and reverse-engineering projects on those alien craft, dating back to around World War II. More recently, in November 2024, the senate heard more extraordinary testimony. Why is our government hearing these people out, platforming them, and giving them a voice? Did they pass the UAP Disclosure Act and create ARRO to trick the public into believing there is legitimacy to what is actually a hoax? Wouldn't that be more crazy than aliens existing? To be clear, when I say "aliens", I don't necessarily mean extraterrestrials, I mean anything that understands human-level physics/technology (or better) and that is not a normal human. For instance, if there was some break-away human civilization that had the ability to make flying devices that thwart our modern physics models while the normal human governments fought the second world war, then I would consider the break-away civilization "non-normal" humans, and thus aliens.

How do we deal with lower beings? We put up barriers to keep nature separate from our controlled environments. We call the outside a nature preserve, and the inside civilization. I think we are merely on the nature side of someone else's barrier. In some respects, you can imagine we might seem like bears to them: simple creatures with the ability to deal ferocious damage through primitive means if you don't plan accordingly. However, I think we are likely much more like ants than bears. Once ants get into your civilization, it is difficult to get them out. You can't let ants just rule your pantry, so the most humane thing to do is make sure no ants get in (else you must genocide those ants). I think humans are the same way with aliens. If humans knew where technology and superior physical understanding was being held by some advanced civilization, we would do everything in our power to extract and utilize those resources. For ants, the stakes are less high than with humans because once modern humans obtain that information, they won't loose that information. Maybe staying somewhat discrete is a courtesy of the aliens to avoid a situation where they have to kill us, the way we would ants that get in our way. It's also not difficult to imagine they might be trying to avoid cultural genocide. At this point we know too well how more powerful cultures tend to annihilate the less powerful on contact. How could unchecked contact with other (apparently very nearby) intelligences not drastically change the trajectory of our culture?

If higher beings share this earth and allow us to live despite the damage we do to the ecosystem, even going as far as to obscure their presence for our benefit, then we must be worth it to them. If they believe in us, then maybe we should believe in us too. People have believed in higher beings across every civilization and every culture, and the message is somewhat consistent: higher beings are aware of us, have some generally positive disposition towards us, though they mostly leave us to figure things out on our own. I've heard some argue that if aliens are withholding knowledge from us, that they are doing some moral bad by not helping us. I take the stance that knowledge must be built, not simply memorized, so maybe it's not as simple as them "withholding" something. In fact, the claims by those previously in our government that are coming forward in these senate hearings suggest that we actually have been allowed to recover alien technological artifacts and study them. I trust that the aliens are helping us in whatever way they find most ethical, and I'm content to lean on their understanding on this matter. It seems reasonable that we would join them on a technological level some day, so they really only have two options, to kill us or to live in harmony with us. It seems like they have chosen the latter, and I think we will too.

approx March 2025-2026:

I tried to really knuckle down and organize my life to make room for things like the ramblings of a drug-addled, alien-obsessed, hobo. Somehow, to my surprise, it is August, and my last entry was dated February. Nevermind that that version hadn't really been finished until some time in March. How could anything like the ramblings of a drug-addled, alien-obsessed, hobo be created from an organized life anyway? And so I go back to the sweet psychedelic (in the sense that includes THC) source, and yearn for sober days, as if their "order" was more valuable than chaos. There is a moment that I often have on the comedown from a high where the solution to a problem crystallizes, and I have the energy to create an Proof of Concept (PoC) in one sitting. A very long sitting that goes into the night, and hopefully not too deep into the morning. It's not right to say that the drug should get too much of the credit. It comes from the sober morning of drinking in the world, and stewing over thoughts. It comes from days prior, talking with people about their perspective on things, and stories of problems they dealt with themselves. Too often do I see people that never have sober moments. I've certainly been guilty of staying too high for too long, but having learned the value of sobriety, I no longer chase extreme highs. I have also been guilty of chasing extreme sobriety, though strangely I have had more trouble kicking that habit.

So somehow I'm here and ready to ramble. I made notes of ideas to include, and have other ones not written down. The ones I wrote down seem to be about morality and the existence of Non-Human Intelligences (NHI) (i.e. aliens. God, this guy really is obsessed). We'll certainly get there, but maybe not in this ramble. What I really want to talk about, is Intellectual Property (IP) law. To the uninitiated, there are two schools of thought regarding how to dedicate intellectual works to maximize freedom. I dub these IP pacifists and IP libertarians. IP pacifists use permissive licenses that allow their incorporation into any downstream work, even one with non-freedom-respecting license restrictions. To put any sort of restriction on the license is a threat of violence. Not violence directly by the licensor, but violence by the state on behalf of the licensor. In contrast, IP libertarians use "copyleft" licenses. The way I usually explain copyleft is as distributing something with no strings attached except the singular string that says you can't attach more strings. You grant all the freedom in the world except the freedom to restrict others' freedom. This is a threat of violence, but only in response to violence, and is not a threat to initiate it.

Fortunately, libertarians and pacifists get along just fine, even if they can't always stay in the same room. I recently had an argument with a pacifist that certainly made my gears turn. The argument had to do with the most quintessential libertarian IP license, the GNU General Public License (GPL). It was made to apply to software, and to ensure that people using your software can understand and modify it, any software that uses it needs to make its own source code available to the end user (if you never distribute the software then there is never an end user to which you must divulge source code). But my friend argues to me approximately: "What if I play a GPL game, and want to modify the game to do something clever and efficient. Someone hears what I've done and wants to see it. I don't want to share the details of how I modified it. I should be able to make my modified game available in compiled form WITHOUT sharing the source code of how I did it." The GPL, in order to fight for a world where people are able to own and control their own computers, says that if you give someone some software with GPL code in it, that you MUST also give all the source code for that software. But how does that square with my friend's right to compile the source code as they please and do whatever they want with the result, like handing the binary without corresponding source code to a consenting adult? In truth, my friend is technically right, the GPL is theoretically restricting my friend, under threat of state-sponsored violence, from doing what my friend should certainly be able to do.

My response is this: what is your right to transmit obfuscated mathematical functions (i.e. compiled binaries) matter in the face of species-wide enslavement? How do you know when to go to sleep? You check a screen. How do you know when to wake up? Your phone wakes you up. How do you know what you need to be doing? Most of us check a screen for that. What messages have I been sent on what platforms? Where are my electronic TODOs? What's the weather looking like? How is the current political climate? What opinions should I consider, and how will I spread opinions of my own? Our computers rule us and we are restricted from ruling the computers we integrate into our selves. My friend, should I care that you weren't allowed to share obfuscated functions, because you didn't want to share the source? In crafting legal strategies for using existing laws to fight for freedom, the right to hide the source code of obfuscated functions you distribute is less important than the right to bodily autonomy. Unfortunately, your anti-social use case will just have to be collateral damage in the pursuit of liberty for all.

The realization of the copyleft, libertarian IP, license for artistic works is the Creative Commons Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) license. My favorite example of a work with this license is the Secure Contain Protect (SCP) cannon which includes, among a large pantheon, lore about The Infinite Ikea. Again, the idea is that anyone is free to recreate, share, and re-imagine The Infinite Ikea without restriction, so long as they don't try to restrict others in the resulting work. Interestingly, you wouldn't be able to distribute re-imagined The Infinite Ikea with Disney characters because Disney claims "all rights reserved" for their characters. Incorporating Disney adds strings, and CC-BY-SA doesn't allow you to attach more strings. While IP Libertarians usually respect the law and oblige as such, there are some IP pacifists that say "to hell with it"! How dare institutions claim to own culture? Culture is our common heritage as people that live and breathe in this day and age. How dare you say that my art is invalid because the Jack Sparrows in my Infinite Ikea looks and sounds like Johnny Depp? Did I not experience Lilo and Stitch as a child? Am I not allowed to remember and re-imagine? Copyright is censorship! Such an IP pacifist might well disregard the law, and imagine as they please. This might result in court cases, peopled fined, and others put in prison through state-sponsored violence, but surely the pacifist, who wields no weapons and seeks freedom could not possibly be blamed. In contrast, a true IP libertarian would never do this. While an IP pacifist wields no weapon, IP libertarians gladly weaponize the law (in self-defense), and would not undercut copyright law itself, lest their weapon loose its bite.

In truth, I struggle to identify totally with either IP pacifists or libertarians. Emotionally, I identify with IP pacifists, but seeing the success of free software licenses and their ability to grant bodily autonomy, I have largely adopted IP libertarian ideology. Despite my anarchist ideals, I think that achieving anarchy requires most people to play by the rules. I'd like to say that were the end of it, but I still have these emotions about it. What about music? We humans have sung longer than we have talked. When I hear music that is crafted to tap into my innate musical proclivity, should I resist my desire to sing along? Humans being in community with others has always involved making music together. How can someone be allowed to claim ownership of something so fundamental to the human condition? I think my favorite free culture advocate, Nina Paley, said it best: "Copyright is brain damage!" Humans are neurons in the brain of society. By even considering copyright in our artistic works, we are censoring ourselves.

approx April 2026:

So where does this leave us? We are mind controlled by other humans, some of which know that non human intelligences (NHI) exist here on earth. Why don't the NHI talk to us? They probably do, just not in ways that cause humans to become 100% aware of their presence here. But they aren't entirely secretive either. In fact it seems at some lower level humans are perpetually aware of a higher presence (still very few of us are "atheists"). We still aren't advanced enough to be considered "people" to them; we are still animals in their nature preserve.

Since the NHI are so careful about how they interact with us, maybe we should pay attention to the ways they DO interact with us. They wander around without regard for human borders. When we attack them they usually disappear, but sometimes fight back (and presumably win in general). Makes sense, we do that to other wild animals. What's with cattle mutilations? Sure, some are probably the doing of humans, but there are a LOT of mutilations not a lot of people being tried. The mutilations often have no blood at the scene and wounds that suggest factory-grade machinery. It creeps us out to think of some mechanical beast spookily mutilating these creatures in a way that only humans could do. I think the messaging there is pretty clear. Who could do something so cruel? We could, in our factory farms; the factory farm we all allow to operate. It's a reminder that what we are doing is evil in a way we can understand.

Another common message is to not destroy the environment. In fact, that is probably the most common message people identify in any claimed interaction with an NHI, right before "we got our eyes on your nukes; stop it with those".

And just like that I'm bored of talking about aliens. That's the weirdest part of the UFO topic. When I first was convinced of the real presence of NHI here on earth, I lost my atheism. I wanted to argue with my atheist friends about what is more likely. I still very occasionally try to persuade people, but usually it's like talking to a brick wall. At the time of this writing, there have been 5 recent bombshell public congressional hearings about the UAP/UFO phenomenon and government reverse engineering efforts on recovered crafts. Certainly it has happened that someone stands before congress and lies, but with so many people established across the government? Why are none of them being tried for their "lies"? There's nothing you can say to someone that has decided they are right. Though maybe that's a bit pessimistic. Plenty have treated the topic fairly, I just have a few people in mind.

But wait, didn't I say I was bored talking about aliens? Yes, now we are talking about the completely distinct meta topic of how aliens are weirdly not that interesting to talk about. You can talk to people about it, but usually they consider the topic thoughtfully but briefly, or it's like talking to a brick wall and not worth it. Why so brief? Well, in what way does the knowledge of NHI presence affect you? It doesn't seem to affect your daily life much, since they were always there. It's still business as usual. In fact, it would be a real problem if everyone spent all their time talking about NHI. People perform jobs which form supply chains and eventually bring food to peoples' homes. That seems to be at least part of the motivation for this slow burn disclosure of NHI existence by the state. But goddamn, it's TOO slow. I'm already bored about it. Next topic. Something more about personal philosophy that actually informs day-to-day decisions.

approx May 2026:

I don't think I have the capacity to hate people. I love literally everyone, even if they are infected with what I believe are bad ideas. Even still, I think using violence against another is sometimes appropriate. The rule of thumb I support is that if you initiate violence against another, that the other has the right to use proportional violence to the threat someone poses. For instance, If I try to subdue someone (for which it is possible for me to subdue), then after subduing I could theoretically inflict lethal damage. Therefore, if someone tries to bind you, then you should be allowed to kill that person. And what if a toddler runs up to you with blood-lust in their eyes and a knife in hand? Unless they really get the drop on you, likely the worst you can expect is some stitches at a hospital. In that case, it wouldn't be too crazy to spare yourself in a way that results in a brief hospital visit for the toddler, but nothing worse. It may be that some action is worthy of reprisal for the whole situation, but I don't consider the immediate act in the moment to be suspect. Though that makes me worry about the toddler that DOES manage to really get the drop on you. I suppose if the toddle has to die, we would consider the secondary initiators, or "man slaughterers" (instead of murderers) as we call them. Who gave the toddler the knife? Did someone teach the child murderous intent? Some things really are like acts of god and a person just gets smote I guess.

A philosophy like this requires a solid definition of what counts as "initiating violence". I'm going to rely on a lot of primitive notions that I won't attempt to define. Does a rock have a body, so is smashing it an act of violence against a rock? If you consider the rock to have a body, then yes it is, but do you care about violence against a rock? I'll define violence as occurring when one entity causes physical harm to the body of another, with the understanding that a body should generally be able to relocate itself to another location that is not claimed by someone else. It is not a loophole that entities could collectively claim all locations, hence entrapping you, because then those entities would would be doing violence. Living on a 2d plane makes this a bit more complicated as now countries entrap people every day. Hopefully we can achieve our destiny of becoming mole people with a third dimension of existence that allows more free travel (airplanes do this to some degree).

But let's not get into mole people too much. When is violence "initiating" vs "in response"? I just said state boarders are violence. Is the state initiating that violence? Probably, but maybe not. What is the danger posed by someone trying to cross a border? There certainly might be some danger when that someone is traveling in a big group of people with guns and bombs. But what about when the state stops someone from leaving? Surely that must be initiating violence, no? Even that isn't so clear. I made this point briefly earlier in my ramblings:

It cannot be that groups are allowed to secede and colonize the universe, as we would surely be to blame should our neighbors come seeking retribution.

What happens if a stream of invaders continues to pour from some otherwise distinct civilization? Depending on the threat posed, it may well be reasonable to annihilate that civilization completely. For that reason, people trying to leave your country may well pose a risk of violence worthy of deadly force. But maybe not. I have many anarchist friends that would hotly debate my defense of state-enforced boarders. It is difficult to construct even a nebulous definition of when violence is initiated versus retaliatory because we observe that life is a constant cycle of violence going back through time immemorial. It seems like there are two solutions to resolve the paradox of continued violence (presuming that we want a world with less violence). The first is to annihilate competition completely so they can never retaliate, or to (when possible) fight violence with carrot, not stick. To fight with carrot, I mean to create positive incentives for cooperation. That one appeals to me because I don't think it's likely that I would be part of the one special group that makes it out on top. In the past (my atheist past), I would have said that my belief in our potential to form a carrot-wielding, harmonious, society constitutes my very real faith in humanity. Now I have real evidence: we do not see the NHI have world wars with nukes going off or really anything that looks like epic space battles. So probably we'll figure it out :3

The last ramble got to be so short because as governments generally corroborate: nothing to see here, pay it no mind, go home. I'll continue this one with a topic that comes up reliably. Some people don't eat meat. Some of those people have very well thought out reasons for why they don't eat meat. Some people hear a simple argument and stop eating meat without too much thought. For others, there isn't much reason at all; it's an emotional truth. Though I feel that my reasons are some of the more well thought out ones, I don't think any less of the other strata. It simply shouldn't take that much convincing to explain why we humans shouldn't be eating meat the way we do. There is an analogy I often relate when someone asks why I don't eat meat (or at least, I won't let my money pay for flesh as a product):

Suppose an armada of extra-terrestrial aliens (i.e. not the terrestrial aliens I've talked about so far) come to earth looking for a home since fleeing their dying planet. Suppose further that these aliens NEED to consume humans in order to survive. I would certainly "fight back" and try to protect my own against the invaders, but at the end of the day, I can't honestly say I wouldn't do the same in their situation. Instead, while fighting back, I would be trying to construct a way for us to live in harmony.

Now lets consider a different scenario, but similar. Instead, the aliens don't need to eat humans, they just taste really good. They then proceed to force all the humans into close quarters, and breed the humans to be fatter, dumber, and more compliant. Humans loose their connection to the environment and become wholly contained in the alien establishment. Not only do they eat us, but they even eat us in such large quantities that in some cases their health starts to degrade because of the gusto with which they consume our flesh. Still worse, they begin to pollute with their factory farms and start destroying the environment.

Maybe our hunter-gatherer ancestors were like the aliens in the first scenario, but humans today clearly resemble the second scenario's aliens. Those latter aliens represent something far worse. You don't just "fight them and protect your own", you find where they came from and kill them there too. Genocide may very well be the right answer. So are humans worthy of genocide? I think we will be if we continue as is, but that our ignorance shields us from such a verdict. As humans become more aware, I think we will naturally stop factory farming like we do. My choice to stop eating meat is a part of that. You reading these ramblings is likely a part of that too.

One last anecdote to close out this ramble: I recently went to buy a replacement pair of rock climbing shoes at a climbing gym. The previous vegan pair I had purchased hadn't lasted very long. I asked the attendant about my options with the plant-based shoes, and as part of their detailing, they mention the option of a non-plant-based shoe. A shoe of leather. What a natural seeming suggestion. The leather shoes cost half as much and probably last twice as long. I'm basically being asked "are you willing to pay 4x the cost for climbing shoes so you can avoid clothing yourself in the flesh of others?" And I'm just like "yeah, I guess I will pay a few extra hundred bucks to not cloth myself in the flesh of others." I even said as much to the attendant, who saw the irony of the situation and gave a slight but genuine laugh. Vegans get a lot of hate because they tell others what they think, and no ones wants to argue with someone that is calling them a murderer, but are they really that wrong?

<I will probably append to this, but for reasons stated at the beginning, I will mostly avoid editing anything above>

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