Phi for All

To be fair, I define "anti-woke" as "blissfully ignorant". The arguments, to me at least, all sound like "You can't force me to see reality. If I want to drive with my eyes closed, that's my right!"

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

I thought removing colonial thinking was one of the most important things that humans should try to achieve, but you obviously disagree. By all means, start a thread on woke culture and tell us your take on it, I'll be sure to participate. I've been trying to wake up for 20 years.

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.

Ultimately, this part is completely up to you, but I have to ask why? You get an hour to edit/delete, so what's unsafe, even if you're past the time limit? I'm having a hard time thinking of how our editing rules are "unsafe". We aren't going to change, since we've actually experienced what happens when people can edit/delete at will. Talk about unsafe! In the distant past, we'd have people post one question, get a bunch of responses, then edit the question to make the responses look stupid, or bigoted, or some other manipulation. And of course, if someone makes a claim but can later remove it and say they never made it, a discussion forum becomes fairly meaningless. So, if you must go, perhaps you can first tell us what's so dangerous about holding people accountable for their part in a conversation? Edit to add: I see from this thread that you wanted to go back and edit your OP after others had responded and showed you how your idea was wrong. Can't you see how weird that would make the thread look, you removing errors from your OP that others comment on later in the thread? People reading that a month from now wouldn't be able to understand it.

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.

Good guess though!

I think you're beginning to see the problem with the term "lazy". Perhaps you're being lazy by only offering advice to help him physically. Your son is lazy for not exploring more solutions he's never explored before. Bunch of lazy people all over the world not bothering to deal with pandemics, mass shootings, anti-democracy extremists, poverty wages, cultural upheavals, authoritarian governments, religious extremism, and wealth disparity using the tools their parents gave them to cope. They should all get a little more exercise.

It depends on how much of this simplistic outlook you're willing to inflict upon a loved one. You insist your son is lazy when there might be any number of other reasons why your recommendations aren't working. To me, the complaints sound like there's a lot more going on. If it was simply about feeling a bit overweight, the extra exercise and focus on diet is a simple solution. I'm not going to advise you look beyond the "lazy" judgement, but I will say that kids today face a world unlike anything we had to grow up with. Their prospects aren't nearly as rosy, they face the judgement of millions of people on social media in addition to their parents and peers, and they see a lot of the lies about society that we failed to pick up on. The pressures they face can't always be dealt with by doing a few more situps, because they're more complicated and reach more deeply.

There are so many variation of this, and historically they all mean the same thing, that there is no evidence. If there was, the best way to reveal it is right up front in the opening post, but conspiracy never works that way.

What I see is young, strong, energetic people dropping the bullshit they've been force-fed like flies. They can see behind the curtain to where the uber-extreme wealth manipulators use "Democrat" and "Republican" as boogiemen for uninformed, fearful voters. They can see that worldwide there is an effort to prop up authoritarian governments and leaders in an effort to reduce the power of democracies. I see these people dropping the prejudices engineered into the system. I see them rejecting the hate and ignorance in favor of reason and clarity.

I agree, the evidence is clear in each of your posts.

Has any other supernatural event EVER occurred before? Supernatural means "outside of nature". I can't think of any actual events that have happened that had no natural explanation. I don't count stories in the Bible, since there are rarely any non-biblical writings to help verify them. That's not the way animal tissue works after death. We see decomposition effects, we witness what happens after a long time underground. We've long imagined that the dead can rise again, but the patterns of necrosis are well documented. Reanimating all the dead cells in a body is ridiculously expensive in terms of energy. And I suppose you believe that this magical reanimation is also going to make these resurrected people strong enough to push open a coffin with several cubic feet of dirt on top of it? At a certain point, faith in stuff like this seems quite silly to me, no offense. If it makes you feel comfortable, I hope it's worth it.

! Moderator Note We're not overly fond of conspiracy here to begin with, since there is rarely any evidence offered, but the real offense here is making these statements as if they're already known facts. I'm throwing this thread in the Trash, but you can start another one on this topic if you bother to back up ANY of your conjectures with actual evidence. For instance, Bill Gates predicted a coming killer virus because so were many leading immunologists, and of course we've known about vaccines and quarantines for centuries. If you wish to claim conspiracy, please support your claims with facts.

So what is ethical about judging whole groups of people based on the actions of some of them? By claiming all "athletes" and "players" are greedy and uncaring, aren't you discriminating against a LOT of people? Why should I expect help from anybody who is unlikely to be anywhere near my sphere of influence? And if Aaron Judge and I DID somehow find ourselves in a real tight situation in life (our lifeboat is leaking, for instance), what makes you so absolutely certain Aaron wouldn't help me out? Just because you have a jaded outlook on sports professionals, does that justify such generalized prejudice?

That's not a phrase most people of faith use. It seems to imply some kind of proof, which doesn't fit well with the concept of faith. And Jesus hated banks, remember? Render unto Caesar, right? The best "entrance into heaven" argument I ever heard was that God doesn't do the judging, nor does it require belief in Jesus. YOU judge yourself to be worthy or unworthy of heaven, for whatever reasons. It's such a fabulous place that many will think themselves unworthy and linger outside the gates, which is the real Hell. It's only your judgement that decides.

Indeed, though it seems lately that we have to sift through 5 spammers, 4 religious extremists, 3 crackpots, and 2 science deniers before we get a sincere science enthusiast.

You're in luck, since I've heard some very convincing arguments lately that laziness, at least the way we typically think of it, never existed in the first place. It's simply a way to judge people who aren't doing something you think they should. The idea that people would rather do nothing than anything else is patently untrue. What we've always thought of as laziness is often just smart people refusing to do something in which they see no value, or smart people doing their jobs with the least amount of effort. Some jobs have been so dumbed down that they're almost insulting. Personally, I've always bragged about working smart rather than working hard. Does that make me lazy? This is one reason why I think the term is being misused. Right now, lots of business owners are screaming about lazy workers bringing conflict and problems, but I know a lot of those folks are just fed up with being underpaid. Productivity has been through the roof for the last 50 years, but wages have stagnated for workers and they're sick of working for a pittance while the rich sit on fat stacks of cash, waiting for the worker to falter so they can buy up their assets at twenty cents on the dollar. Again I think you're off by a bit. It's not the comforts that makes us less smart or want to work less, because historically, saving up for the comforts made us work harder to earn them. I think it's the convenience. Convenience seems to promote an attitude where people should do dumb things in order to save time. Spend an extra 25% on items from a small store so you don't have to spend the time dealing with a bigger store. Or shop online thinking to save some time but end up researching 20 products and their comments sections for three hours. Convenience lets you drive on fresh asphalt AND ensures you'll have potholes next year. I think "lazy" is a pejorative whip used by those who want us to work harder on their terms. Humans in general aren't lazy at all. We're ultra smart and curious, and we all prefer to do the things we want to do as opposed to the things we may HAVE to do. Nobody teaches us when we turn 18 that we have to parent ourselves from now on, and the real job of parents is to get us to do things we don't want to do. Practically everybody wants to do things as opposed to not doing anything, but they often don't want to do what everyone else thinks they should be doing. I remember being called lazy once because I arranged my work area to where everything was a bit closer to me. The boss hired me to make fittings and put them into boxes, not walk around unnecessarily, but when I tried to do a better job he called me lazy for not wanting to walk those extra steps. I pointed out that it saved me a LOT of time, but he still thought it was lazy. Said a young man shouldn't mind a few extra steps. I thought he was crazy.

! Moderator Note The latest spam tactic is to later add the link to their essay writing services in the quote they use, rather than in their own writing. The delay must fool the system, so it needs to be dealt with manually.

I have humor blindness because I can't see myself laughing at that.

When viewed through the right lens, we represent a diverse spectrum of light-hearted people.

! Moderator Note We're a science discussion forum. This reads like your blog, and it's not. We discuss science here. If you'd like to do that too, start a topic in the appropriate section, and give us a good place to start a conversation.

You don't get to base anything off that thread, since you did a really poor job of supporting your ideas there. Anything you stacked on top of that pile of nonsense is just going to fall over quickly. You make a LOT of assumptions, you suppose a great deal, and you don't bother to back any of it up with more than your waving hands. Honestly, you claim it's impossible to define life or death but then claim it's necessary to define it in order to understand what you're talking about. None of it seems rooted in any kind of science, but is rather just how you think things should be, or what makes the most sense to you. The problem with that is you don't know enough science to make guesswork like that meaningful. There's no way to test your ideas, so they aren't science. Sorry, but discussing a wild guess isn't as fun as you seem to think. People of science want more.

If you have a question for Homework Help, post it just like your first post. Give it an appropriate title, ask your question, the members will try to help.

Pretty sure we've got enough resources to invest some effort towards the viral threat of coronavirus AND possible bacterial threats from new sources. Don't fall into the trap of thinking humans as a species have to focus on one thing at a time. Back on topic, it seems clear this is a classic crisis representing both big dangers and big opportunities. I hope we have the time to sort through which is which.