Choosing/Decision-Making

I've meant to start developing a view for a while but I keep not starting because I haven't fully developed it. I'm going to bite the bullet and write a few ideas down, not yet complete and coherent. Sorry if it ends up confusing. When the internet was starting to become mainstream, say the 1990s, people looked forward to it democratizing communication compared to the press and broadcast since anyone could communicate to anyone else. Yet today social media creates many problems. Two of the top ones are (again, speaking loosely as I'm developing my thoughts) Cancel mobs Algorithms determining what messages to propagate determine culture These problems seem tyrannical. How did what seemed moving toward democracy became that way? Dominance hierarchies form when there…

People ask me all the time things like "how do you get by without flying?", "How do you get by without a contract with the power company?", and "how do you get by producing so little trash?" I know they're thinking about material things and mainstream values of acquiring more stuff even at the expense of relationships so from their perspective I'm depriving myself and sacrificing. From my perspective, I'm avoiding hurting people. I'm living by the US Constitution, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law even though the US government isn't enforcing it. Pollution and depletion deprive people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. The government gains revenue and…

The news keeps covering that population is growing less fast than before. Note that it is still increasing, just the rate of increase is slowing. They overwhelmingly treat it as a problem. They say so because they use economic models built to show population growth always helps, which is wrong. Their models saying something is a problem wouldn't necessarily mean it was a problem even if their models weren't wrong. In any case, how is people having the number of children they want a problem? Isn't people choosing how they live freedom? By the same token, isn't trying to get people to have more children coercion? In my post Are more people always better? I showed the medals of all the nations I could find…

For those who haven't read Sustainability Simplified, one of the main things it builds to is something that I thought crazy when I first thought it. The idea is a constitutional amendment in the style of the thirteenth, but instead of banning slavery, two main clauses, both traditional, both Enlightendigenous. One protects life, liberty, and property when the threat to them came through the environment. The other disallowing making property out of nature unless you leave enough as good in common for others, quoting John Locke. I call it an APPLE PIE Amendment for reasons you have to read the book for. The more I thought about it, the less crazy it felt, no more than the thirteenth must have before its passage. Now I'm…

Word choice matters. Why speak if you don't want to be understood? It's not their responsibility for me to be understood, even if I get mad at them for not understanding me. I recently wrote how I was Replacing "sustainability" with "not hurting people" and "polluting" with "hurting people" since "sustainability" is too abstract in many cases, as is the "environment." I'm not trying to help some abstract environment. I'm trying to help people and to alleviate their suffering. (I followed up with the post Corollaries to my recent post: Replacing “sustainability” with “not hurting people” and “polluting” with “hurting people”.) I'm experimenting with another change of word choice. People talk about comfort and convenience and juxtapose these things with struggle and challenge. We treat…