Greetings Friends, Another riveting blog post. Lately my brothers have been telling me to write my thoughts down in some form and hope that someone eventually reads them, probably like 150 years in the future. So here we are. I guess we'll leave the topic of the impossibility of exposure for another time (though I have manifold methods of proving that side of the argument). The easy straightforward things to write about are the state of geopolitics and how it is changing rapidly post covid; a related topic is how mass militarization with no obvious deterrent must unerringly lead to conflict between Great Powers (or minor powers), how said deterrent can not develop without actual battlefield usage (according to Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley this would probably the prophesized Doom Drone that has such conventional firepower to deter all means of fighting it a la the Way of the Pilgrim by Gordon R. Dickson), and on to more philosophical topics. ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... Last week I took off thursday from work since my brain was sharply deteriorating into nothingness, I went and dealt with a bank situation to make my sister happy and then walked to the book store to buy Marcus Aurelius' The Meditations and then read it on a bench in an isolated park-like environment which wasn't there when I was a child. The main philosophical point I have is relevant to big data essentially, it's something like Determinism can be proven through statistics and data analysis, so you can have a perfect consumption model, marketing model, as well as opinion pacification models; more or less what large companies are trying to do but failing at and not really setting restraints on to prevent mass inflation worldwide (except for the US) which would invariably lead to problems via kicking the can down the road; I hold that this is mostly a philosophical notion and while it has many practical applications it needs to be tangled with in the philosphical environment first in order to get to a functionally utilitarian worldview instead of a purely profit based one. Another philosophical point which my brain just phrased a few minutes ago is the Transient nature of Perspective, which is a model of self awareness essentially and relevant to Marcus Aurelius hence the image header; basically your perspective shifts as you age but the perspective you held when younger is not necessarily more or less wrong than your current perspective; there are exceptions to the rule but for the vast majority of people shifts in perspective do not invalidate the previous point of view or whether or not it ever had merit. If you want to simplify all truths to some universal set of values to export so that you can ensure more and more funds reside in the wealthiest countries and especially small numbers of people while maintaining everyone else's status quo standard of living then it is to your benefit to also oversimplify concepts such as traditionalism vs progressivism making one out to be irrevocably worse than the other and so forth; but if you want to maintain perspective it behooves you to try to understand and work with the other point of view instead of bombarding it into oblivion via cancellation or actual MLRS systems.
