Hegar
Gentle nerd freak of the pacific northwest. All nation states are vermin.
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Rebury the disarticulated ochre-painted bones of an important deceased community member!
“Edomite!”
I was getting onto a bus, someone looked me over and spat out the word. It was clear from the tone that it was an insult, but it also sounded suspiciously bronze age, so I was very excited to find out what it meant.
Turns out it’s a biblical reference used by some black nationalist groups in the US to refer to white people as unclean or diseased. Edom was one of several late bronze age Canaanite kingdoms. At one point the torah describes them as slightly paler and dirty, hence the insult.
I’m not sure I understand your point so if I’m off base let me know.
Firstly, inheriting $200k - $1M doesn’t keep anyone poor. It doesn’t even stop wealth from concentrating at a level that harms others and warps society - it just prevents that level of wealth from passing down to people who did nothing.
Secondly, if everyone was poor who would be controlling them? You have to keep most people poor and a much smaller group of people unassailably wealthy to control them. That’s exactly the problem that high death taxes address.
I think you have to ignore large parts of his legacy to consider a genocidal warlord like Caesar “not so bad”.
Pursuing the agenda of the populares may have made him less domestically odious than some of his fellow patricians from the optimates, but he was still a member of the ruling class monopolizing power in his person. On top of the whole brutal genocidal warlord thing.
The people whose deeds reverberate through history are the powerful. The powerful are almost always evil, it’s just how humans work.
Neuroscience shows that as humans get power, our brain’s ability to perform empathy is damaged. So as an organism, a human’s capacity and willingness to inflict misery on others tend to increase in lock step with each other.
Belief in the divine likely comes from our brains’ hyperactive agency detection system: our brains err on the side of seeing agency where there is none in order to keep us alive.
If a branch snaps behind you and you react as if someone did it but it was really nothing, you’re fine. But if it was a human or other animal and you react as if it was nothing, you might be food.
Property crime is largely a factor of poverty, but also social inequality. If you lack a need you will try to fulfill that need. If you feel like you’re unfairly “less-than”, you’re much more likely to engage in prohibited behavior to correct that. But also if you have power or wealth, your brain becomes less capable of empathy making it much easier for you to criminally hurt others - the rich do most crimes.
Religion is just using this evolutionarily beneficial flaw in our brains to justify the unjust social hierarchies which drive crime. So in a roundabout way, religion puts upward pressure on crime.
Free will.
It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.
I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.
First time I quit i was sick and cigarettes tasted awful for a week, so I figured if I had already gone a week without I might as well quit. Whenever I got a craving I thought about how disgusting they tasted with a cold, and imagined spongey lungs filling with black tar till I gave myself a shiver of disgust.
I started up again years later while traveling, then quit for good while visiting my parents for 2 months - I know I’m too embarrassed to smoke around my parents.