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Closer To Truth has a new website, which I think is quite well made, visually appealing, and features all the high-quality content the channel is known for. I highly recommend it: https://closertotruth.com

I've spent 7 years as a faculty member at a minority serving institution and have a few insights that might be worthwhile into the whole concept of "woke" culture. 1. It's important to recognize that the fact that 70% of the student body comes from minority backgrounds and only 20% of the professors do. There are systemic reasons for that gap, reasons that should be thoroughly explored, identified and ameliorated so that there are no longer inherent biases in who gets to succeed and who doesn't. Evidence show the biases run deep - school districting, mortgage lending, access to medical care, etc and so on all affect opportunity. Contrary to DeSantis's lawyer's asinine comment, it's important to recognize that the playing field is not level and that race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability status etc all impact the opportunities an individual has to achieve 2. This can lead to a toxic environment (looking at you academic twitter) where fingers are pointed at people based on their identities as being undeserving or otherwise representative of a social injustice simply by existing. There have been multiple examples of extremely vindictive campaigns aimed at ending the careers and destroying the lives of privileged individuals for what amount to fairly innocuous statements or actions. Using "wokeness" simply to enact revenge on people that one deems to not deserve their position of privilege is counter-productive, I know first hand that what it does is push the privileged - who you need at the table to enact change that addresses inequity, out of the room. They delete their twitter accounts, stop coming to the EDI meetings and stop caring. 3. At the same time, the DeSanitses of the world can't deny the very observable, measurable, fact that systemic bias exists. You can't say that a poor, Hispanic, child with a single parent who has PTSD has the same pathway to becoming governor as a white, wealthy child with a stable home life because we all know that it's just not true. Pretending that they do because acknowledging your privileges played a role in your success/or lack thereof in spite of them makes you uncomfortable, or contests your flawed "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" philosophy is just fallacious and leads us back to point 2. 4. So wokeness with compassion is an important pathway to a more just and equal society. It's a term that's abused and corrupted by both sides of the argument, but if the way it is implemented is respectful, compassionate and empathetic itleads to a better place for everyone.

Interesting chat, which prompted a couple thoughts: One, an ET race that coldly calculates and affirms a high value on annihilating an entire planet of sentient beings...strikes me as very likely to be the sort of race that bombs itself back to the Amish farm level of civilization well before they make it into interstellar space. It's hard for me to see a fairly united planetary civilization evolving that would lack an ethical reluctance towards mass murder. I would think such an amoral perspective would lead more towards a planet of small balkanized states too busy feuding to be able to allocate sufficient resources to starfaring. As for "malevolence," I guess this depends on how one defines that term. Some might argue that a race that could justify such abhorrent acts as wiping out an entire sentient race, on a mathematical algorithm, would have a rather profound malevolence "baked in" to their character. And again, it's hard to see this character being one suited for longterm survival of an advanced civilization. My sense is that they would always be skating over very thin ice above a Hobbesian nightmare. (this is one reason I found the Klingons a rather improbable spacefaring race in the Star Trek franchise)

Or "left" as "evil socialist communist baby fornicator"

They may be using the same dictionary that defines "liberal" as "anti-American".

In a recent court case, a judge asked a lawyer for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to define "woke" since they kept using it in their comments. The lawyer, for one of the fiercest "where woke goes to die!!" culture warriors known to any of us, answered thusly: "The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." Why do you so strongly object to that? Why is the word "infesting" the right one to use, or do you perhaps have an entirely different definition of "woke" than Ron DeSantis himself?

I like this guess, @joigus. Here is a little evidence supporting it:

True. And personally I’m partial to the third option - that we simply aren’t going to see any alien civilisations any time soon. But we may well see more primitive forms of extraterrestrial life in the near future, perhaps even within our own solar system. I’d also like to point out that, in a Dark Forest scenario, a civilisation acting in the most rational way within the confines of that mathematical game (ie eliminating other civilisations) does not imply malevolence on their part. They simply do what they need to in order to maximise their own evolutionary potential in what is a scenario with few other options, given the constraints imposed by the laws of physics. Even an otherwise benevolent and ethical civilisation may find it necessary to take such drastic steps. Also, just because we place a high ethical value on life (do we??) does not necessarily mean that others share this concept.

Thanks for the link, This one of my favourite channels I watch on YouTube.

Are you talking about disease of the young or the old? There's a difference. During my lifetime there have been significant global reductions in mortality of the young and one would hope that this positive trend will continue. However, as one who has seen most of his former friends and work colleagues pass on, I would suggest that there are positives in not exiting this world to a fanfare of dementia and double incontinence. We are mortal and sooner or later something will get us. There are a whole raft of fatal conditions that evolution has not eradicated because there is no advantage to the survival of our genes in doing so. This is part of the human condition whether we choose to accept it or not. There does come a time when the survival of our offspring is best served by the removal of our burden on them. It would seem selfish not to accept this. Better to make peace with oneself, and when the time comes, accept pneumonia as the old person's friend. There are many much worse ways to go.

As I look into the psychology, the Puritanical origins of the term stand out. You're judged by your productivity, and righteous folks don't mind hard work, so if you're struggling you must not be very virtuous. We've been taught to blame the victim for their struggles, and it's been going on for a long time. It's the same mentality that told us we're actually helping certain people by forcing them to work because they're basically lazy and would do nothing if we didn't beat them and chain them.

Lazy is an accusation, a label, and a judgement all rolled up into one. Ironically, we often use the term so we don't have to work harder to find out what's really wrong. Lazy is a lazy conclusion. I'd start by acknowledging that if a person isn't doing something obvious to relieve a detrimental situation, then perhaps you don't fully understand the situation. In your son's case, putting on a few extra pounds may not be the problem. He may not understand what's bothering him, so even though he knows how to drop the weight, he may understand that it won't help the real problem, so he doesn't bother doing it. This may be a whole different problem. Your argument assumes all the problems involved are simple fixes, so if people aren't doing these simple fixes they must be lazy. The current population of the world is being bombarded daily with things nobody has EVER had to deal with before, in ways we never had available to us. We're more connected to others, but we've never been more isolated either. There is a ludicrous amount of resources being spent to confuse, obfuscate, and promote the kind of economic chaos that the extremely rich thrive on. Our kids see things daily that probably confuse the hell out of them, like politicians representing the People who vote down paid sick leave for rail workers when our supply chain problems are critical. Or that we do nothing to change our concept of masculinity despite the fact that men commit 90% of the murders worldwide. It's a bizarre, late-Capitalism, extremist era we live in, and our problems are many and diverse. Don't be lazy and simply label us all lazy. Some of us are rather flummoxed, unsure, uncentered, or we have too many problems competing for our limited time.

What your proposal seeks to do is increase the contact area between brine and the lower couple of hundred feet of the atmosphere in order for it to approach equilibrium at 100% RH more rapidly. My point is that nature already does this quite effectively. The missing step is getting heat into the system. This is required to both increase the water holding capacity of the airstream and reduce its density sufficiently to allow it to rise. The amount of heat the sun is putting into the ocean to try and do this is measured in Terawatts. And in the cases we have mentioned that isn't enough to overcome the local conditions which are dominated by cold ocean currents. How many TW do you propose adding to this equation? Have you ever heard the phrase 'latent heat of vapourisation'? Have you any idea what it means?

I do get the picture. 1) If there is a significant onshore wind, it is already humid and will cause rain inland. There is no problem to address. 2) You cannot significantly increase the humidity of this wind without increasing its temperature. 3) The evaporation of brine requires even more heat input. 4) I've not even mentioned the astronomical pumping costs. This quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib gives an idea of the practical realities you are trying to reverse: ie The 'significant onshore wind' and 'rising thermals' simply don't happen. If they did, it wouldn't be a desert.

I don't find your responses particularly informed or useful. Others have posted cogent posts, but yours are becoming rude, and certainly not worth reading. Byeeee.

Would you like to split this off from this thread and create a new discussion around this? I'm happy to participate especially since I have strong objection against the current "woke" culture that seems to be infesting society in many countries across the globe.