Sampson

If you're using that money to pay for your daughter's shoes then you're still giving the shoeshop money which allows that shoesalesman and the cashier in the shop a chance to earn their living. You're still contributing to society, it doesn't matter whether it's gone through the State or not. You'd have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about, as long as it's perfectly within the law.

Not to mention the huge rise in self-employment since 2000 has been the major story of the 21st Century economy and much like how the Industrial Revolution was the story of workers going from agriculture to manufacturing to cope with the technological changes, it looks like the modern technological revolution of the internet, computers and AI since the turn of the century looks to be the story of people moving into self-employment and freelance work. It's tough work and often requires much longer hours than a secure employed job to keep going - the government doesn't want to discourage this when this is undoubtedly the future of employment for so many. Trying to make some extra money for your partner, children and/or grandchildren isn't immoral, in fact it's the single greatest motivator to do well and to work long hours to contribute more to the economy there is (same reason inheritance tax is nonsense - you're cutting down people's #1 motivation to go further and work harder and to contribute more than they need to just get by) - this tax isn't just going to them so they can live more - it's going directly to the people they love - and there's no greater motivation to working harder, making more money and contributing more to society than that. Besides, where is the line drawn? If you talk through things with your partner in the evening and they help give you motivation or support which maybe make you push further or slightly change one of your decisions, how are they not an advisor at that point, who is making a positive affect on the business? If they support the household while you work at home, relieving the huge opportunity cost of the things around the house you'd have to do otherwise then how are they not also contributing then to? What's the difference between that or an office hiring a cleaner so the people in sales and marketing can concentrate on their jobs in a clean and motivating environment? It's not a loophole, you really think the government doesn't know about the possibility for abuse? If they knew about it they wouldn't they just close it? Of course not, because people would be rightly livid that they're kicking people trying to get by in the teeth just because they want to provide for their families, which makes people happier to work harder and contribute more.

Damn all those Uber drivers and Deliveroo cyclists trying to get their spouses in on their massive profits!

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Anyway... Yet another anti-establishment populist has just won in Europe. Really not sure where this huge collective surge in populism over the past 3 or 4 years is taking us. Just hope it doesn't end the same way it did last time in the 1930s. Czech election: Billionaire Babis wins by large margin - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41708844

I don't think we're that far off agreeing with each other. Tge potential abuse of industry is exactly why we have laws and regulations - and that freedom extends to exactly the point as to when you are hurting others - but at the same time the liberties of the individual should as you say be sacrosanct exactly to the point as to when the State is hurting people and restricting their freedoms too. It isn't an easy balance to maintain, of course it isn't. But industry can at least be regulated by the State whereas the State does not have anyone above it who can impose on it and it can get away with shortages at will and is open to myriad examples of corruption from elected officials, which is why, except in absolutely the most essential facets which a functioning society needs such as a military, police force, fire service, healthcare, education, roads etc., I believe nationalisation should be avoided - as the State has just as much potential for corruption, manipulation and exploitation as any private monopoly would. I don't think we should be doing away with incentives to reduce carbon emissions or regulations on the environmental dangers which can lead to climate change for example because they are actively harming our future, but for example neither do I think the State should be nationalising our future's robots and technologies or forcing Uber to become a co-operative - this is where I draw the line to the point where the State is beginning to overstep its boundaries and become too powerful.

Which is exactly why we have anti-monopoly and anti-cartel laws. If they're not being properly enforced that's a problem of a lack of enforcement for some of the relegation we actually need in free markets. Of course I believe I state intervention to an extent and a reasonable welfare state, the NHS, education, police force, military, emergency services and roads - almost everyone Right of Centre believes in that (though we might disagree on the extent of the Welfare State or the NHS) and of course I don't believe the Left all believe in the full Socialist state. We were doing cartoonist parodies of both sides (or at least I hope we were). But take an example like free tuition fees which is one that the Left of Centre and Right of Centre do disagree on in this country. It's a policy which ultimately favours the individual choices of one person over another - if someone chose to go to university then great, that's a grown-up responsible decision weighing up the pros and cons a person can make for their particular goals in their particular life knowing at a university education costs a hell of a lot of money to maintain buildings, offer extra academic resources, hiring staff, buying resources etc. etc. And you can take a very fair loan with a very low interest rate which you only pay back at a certain wage level, gets wiped after a certain time period so most people don't pay it off and doesn't affect you're credit score - even though it's called a loan, it works for all intents and purposes as a graduate tax payed by the individual who made the individual responsible decision to attend. Or you allow that person to go to university on the burden of the tax payer and millions of people who decide that university is not for them and not for their goals which they wish to achieve in life and want to go into work at 18 and to the job market have to pay for the other people's higher education because the State considered one's choice more worthy than the other rather than leaving the responsible choice to that particular individual based on their own particular goals in life. And we're already at a point where university education only pays for itself if you attend a red brick university, most people who don't, don't reap the benefit of the cost of attending university as degrees are becoming less and less valued in the workplace as more and more people are attending - it's a case where the State does not allow the indivudal to make their own decision based on their own circumstances despite knowing the responsibility which comes with either decision beforehand and instead allows one side to burden less of their own personal responsibility for their own choice. In terms of what set them off, WWII was absolutely caused because of the poverty and starvation of the Weimar Republic, WWI was caused by an uprising against the subjugation of Slavic people by the overbearing emperor of Austria-Hungary, Balkans was a bizarre race war by a totalitarian State and Iraq and Vietnam were reactions to muderous overly powerful states. Of course there are exceptions to the rule - My point was though, people violently rise up when they are hungry and impoverished - and free-trade and open markets between nations has greatly increased peace between those nations and within those nations - and weak States, free markets and free trade doesn't lead to war at all, in fact quite the opposite. It's strong State-planned Economies who deal in Protectionism to try and avoid competition to create a government monopoly who are the ones who lead to uprisings and make wars a hell of a lot more than ones which promote competitive markets and free trade.

Nothing to do with human nature and the evolutionary principle - it's because it brings people out of poverty and accepts that we shouldn't try to force billions of very different people with very different goals to all think and follow the same thing and allows the freedom of people to make their own individual decisions to match their own individual goals in life and has made the Western world far more peaceful. Conflict happens when people are impoverished and can't eat not because of business competition. "Coming to decisions by consensus and cooperation" is a good euphemism for the State to force people to live a particular way and to have particular goals which are decided by the State and to lose their individualism rather than people taking responsibility of their own individual decisions.

If we're straw-manning... The difference between the Right and Left? The Left believe that humans are innately evil and the State should have to force them to make the decisions they want to make because they're not smart or well intentioned enough to do it themselves. The Right believe humans are innately good and the millions of individual decisions billions of different people make every day should drive human progress and each individual should have the liberty to make their own decisions.

It's not pathetic. As the poor's wages increase, the more they spend at the supermarket, the more demand for products go up ergo the more supermarkets either have to pay supplier and prices go up and inflation goes up or the more the suppliers and supermarkets have to invest in their infrastructure to increase supply (but this takes time). Your lowest end is always going to stay at a similar level of real wages to an extent in the short-term though, that's how supply and demand works, because the more spending power people have, the more they want to spend on items and the more demand goes up and therefore prices must go up to meet that demand before companies can invest in creating more supply - because inflation happens as a result of increased spending and the minimum wage laws should go up as a result of inflation - you want the wages of the majority of your population to grow at a steady and predictable rate so companies have time to invest in infrastructure so they can increase their supply to match the extra demand created by the extra spending power meaning they don't have to put prices up to meet their demand If they can match it with increased supply. If companies don't have time to do this because the spending power of the public goes up too quickly then they can only respond to increased demand by putting prices up leading to inflation. 2% is a long way from a "pathetic" rise in a short time - it's a very good one and you don't want a huge rise of like 15% or something because that hugely increased the spending power in the Economy in the short-term can lead to hyper-inflation.

If you're not aware of the Double-Split Experiment, it's definitely worth reading up on or watching a few videos on until you grasp it - it's the most famous Quantum Mechanics experiment which explains the fundamentals of quantum mechanics best and why it's so mind bending and illogical and completely changed our view of the universe and reality.

Backwards time travel isn't theoretically impossible. It's impossible because we can't travel faster than the speed of light. If you could travel faster than light you would travel back in time. Current consensus seems to be that time isn't linear as we perceive it - everything happens at once. There's a great video on it here - again, I'd really recommend PBS Spacetime for anyone interested in this stuff it's an incredible YouTube channel.

Tbf infinity is a pretty incomprehensible subject for human brains to understand in itself but mathmatically you can actually add to infinity or increase its size. There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1 but you can still go above 1 to an infinite number of times - but there are still just as many numbers between 0-1 and 0-10 (an infinite number in both). Similarly there are an infinite number of even numbers but you can still add odd numbers in between them and stretch the sequence of numbers out - but there is not twice as many whole numbers as even numbers - there's an equal number of both (infinity). There's a famous thought experiment called Hilbert's Paradox about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms each of which is occupied - however new guests have no room because each room is occupied but new guests arrive - if this hotel is infinite then to allow for new guests you just move guest in room 1 to room 2, guest in room 2 to room 3 etc. infinitely along the line and room 1 is now free for the new guests.

But even so infinite potential different laws of physics at the point of creation does not neceserially mean infinite timelines where everything that could happen does happen. But many worlds theory is not multiple universes at the point of creation, it's the idea that any time a particle's wave function collapses and it can be in one of numerous positions, it is simultaneously in all those positions and the universe "splits" into parallel universes each one containing each possible position of the particle and therefore every time we make a decision we simultanously make every possible decision but the universe "splits" and we only observe one path of all this, so there are parallel universes of every possible decision and collection of particles ever possible. It makes the most sense from Occam's Razors point if view in that it requires the least jumps of faith as an explanation of Quantum Mechanics. I'm not sure I'm fully behind it as I think the Copenhagen Interpretation is better but the Many-Worlds Interpretation isn't just something some guy made up on the fly, - particles do exist simultanously in all possible locations they can be at the same time until they are measured and we can measure the probability of where that might be to minute detail (and Quantum Mechanics is the most rigerously tested and most mathematically sound Theory of the Universe humans have ever come up with) and given a particle which was previously in numerous locations simultaneously now only appears in one - what happened to other locations it was in? Given the maths is objective on this and a much better indicator of the universe than our human senses and that the maths only predicts that the probability of where that particle could be but doesn't say that what we perceive is the "correct" answer - it's not far-fetched and requires less leaps of faith and less additional parts to the theory on top of the maths to theorise that it continued to be in every possible position it could possibly be simultanously but the universe "split" and we could only observe this version -than it is to say the particle was in every possible position it could be simultanously and then decided to be in one of those position through random chance or by design with no explanation of what decides that or why it would be in every possible location beforehand or how it managed to appear that way if so and that explanation takes much more explaining away and leaps of faith than many worlds theory does. I'm not saying it's right, but it absolutely isn't silly or some explanation some guy just thought up off the top of their heads and it's mainstream physics for a reason. It's a genuinely sound theory and one which requires the fewest leaps of faith for one of the most bizarre and mind-bending pieces of natural phenomena in the universe.

There wouldn't have to be infinite possibilities necessarily, only different formations of the laws of physics. I think you're confusing multiverse theory with the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics which is what Rik and Morty do.

Just wanted to add that PBS Space Time is an incredible YouTube channel for physics stuff like this. Must have watched all their videos. Mindblowing stuff. Also physics definitely interacts with philosophy as per the debate above. After watching all those videos I do find human free-will a bit of a stretch these days for example. It appears to me either a deterministic or random model of the universe is the only one that makes sense and it seems unlikely humans have any free-will or any influence on how the particles which make up our brains function for example.

I completely understand what you are saying because no one ever wants it to come to that and everyone wishes we lived in a world where we didn't have to go to war - but just as an example - what happens if it was on your own doorstep? What would you think if a fascist regime took control of the UK and the State was murdering people because they were the "wrong" religion or race or sexual orientation or had different political views from them? Would you be happy for all the other countries in the world to just sit by and watch or would you rather them try to intervene and throw over the state? Even though you know you or your family or friends could be killed by the conflict you also know you or your family or friends could be killed by the state at any time - would you still consider that as an unjust war then? Even though you know there's the risk that it absolutely could spiral out of control and get worse - would that still be justification for not wanting to see intervention in all this suffering you are seeing every day? What about the everyone else in this country? It's not an easy answer. No one thinks it's an easy decision to trade off human lives and try to work out if you're saving and enhancing more lives in the long run, but sometimes it has to descend into that - no one thinks it's a good subject but it has to happen. There absolutely are just wars and the Korean War and the intervention in Yugoslavia were 2 examples of where more good has come from them - of course not for everyone, families were destroyed by it - but we can always (and rightly) look at the people who's lives were ruined by intervention and can never understand the horror they must have gone through in a way we can't look at the people who would have gone through horror if military intervention had never happened. You *always* go to war when you never know how it will work out - war is the individual decisions taken by often millions of people and what happens afterwards is impossible to determine - but no major nation goes to war without gathering all the possible intellegence and going through every possible permutation but even then there's no way of really knowing what's going to happen - not without some simulation of the brainwaves of all the millions of people directly or indirectly involved. To descend into the obvious exanple - WWII was horrific and devastating and we had to ally up with one of the most evil men in history in Stalin to win it and the Cold War and the War on Terror and the devastation of millions of people are still ultimately fallout from it - but do you honestly think we should have just sat back and just see what Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan do? Absolutely the US is susceptible to being on the wrong side of realpolitik as well and it absolutely has chosen the worst of 2 evils on occasions - And yes, opposing the Soviet Union in the Soviet-Afghan war was one of them - but often you can only see that in hindsight and I've certainly not seen a US conflict where they simply "invaded" a country to maintain power without good reason. They did it in the Cold War to stop the spread of Communism and it eventually worked - millions died because of those wars which was a tragedy, but 100mil of their own people were murdered because of Communist states and who knows how many more could have died because of it. Personally I'd say any state which actively murders it's own people because they don't toe the right political and/or religious line to be evil - yes, of course it's subjective, no one thinks they are evil and every evil dictator has had millions of supporters but that doesn't mean we should start ignoring it - I mean how far would you go - because there's no such thing as "objective evil" we shouldn't decry Mao, Stalin, Hitler or Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito as evil? You don't think the Soviet Union or North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party or Ho Chi Minh's VC were evil? Yes it's just me making subjective decisions I don't care because Fascism and Communism (as is Islamic State) were the absolute definition of storybook evil and they caused the State murder and suffering of hundreds of millions people unlucky enough to fall to the tyranny of their nation - the US opposed them to the end above all else and even though it sometimes put them getting the wrong side of realpolitik, led to the death of millions comparing them to an invading country is just silly - who knows where the world would be if we just sat back and didnt oppose the spread of Fascism and Communism without the US during the Cold War - who knows how many hundreds of millions more would have been murdered? No one does, which is exactly why this isn't an easy or predictable decision, but I'd rather we didn't just sit back and let evil spread - of course war should be the absolute last port of call and no one wants it to come to that but sometimes there's nothing left but to oppose it with force.

Absolutely. Because the anti-commumist options in Afghanistan and Iraq was considered the lesser of two evils at the time when the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia which had directly murdered about 100mil of their own people were making headway in to the Middle East. It turned out horribly but no one could've known Communism would've fallen so dramatically - even if you asked people in 1986 people would've thought you mad suggesting it, it was only when Gorbachev came into power when things started to change. Sometimes you have to decsend into realpolitik. I mean we allied with Stalin to bring down Hitler for heaven's sake and even though we were left with 45 years of tyranny and a division of Europe as a result of it, it was probably the right thing to do.

Of course innocent people die and are made homeless when you go to war or bomb a country but that doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose evil. You cannot just diplomatically talk nutters out of power - it's a sad inevitibly of life that war sometimes is the lesser evil than sitting by and doing nothing. But you ultimately cannot know how it's all going to turn out so it's a very difficult decision, certainly not an easy one where you don't know what's going to happen. The Korea and Vietnam wars were already underway. The US didn't create those wars or invade those countries those wars at all, it got involved and took sides in already ongoing conflicts. US lexicon? You honestly don't think the Kim dynasty, Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein were evil people who caused tyranny and mass murders on their own people's lives? And that the US wasn't going there to try and bring these regimes down and to ultimately try and make their people's lives better? Whether naive or not or successful or not - Can you please explain exactly what you think was the US' motivation was if not trying to bring down tyrannical regimes for the freedom of its people? The US is the overwhelming power in NATO because it pays for almost 75% of NATO's collective miliary power on its own and was the overwhelming instigator of the Yugoslav bombing. NATO was a non-entity at the time of the Korean War - it was exactly because of the Korean War that the US wanted to build up support against the Warsaw Pact and Communist expansion that NATO really became an entity of any power. But I'm not sure on your point? Why does whether you go through an alliance body like NATO have anything to do with whether military intervention was successful or not or whether you can predict the outcomes or not?

The Korean War didn't go well? So you think the US should have just stood back and let North Korea invade South Korea leading to a further 50million enslaved by the North Korean regime for almost 70 years now? While South Korea is now one of the most thriving countries in the world? How exactly didn't the Korean War go well? The US managed to defend South Korea, it didn't manage to save everyone but it saved tens of millions of lives from tyranny by the brainwashing and enslaving cult of the Kim dynasty. The US didn't invade Vietnam it just took over military action from France. And it didn't go well because they lost the war and the VC continued their evil regime - not because of anything that happened afterwards because of NATO and the US' intervention. You do not know what would've happened had the US won and he was overthrown. Iraq has turned out horribly becaise even worse regimes have replaced Saddam Hussein - but you ultimately don't know how the replacement will turn out. The US didn't stay out of the Yugoslav wars, it was NATO bombing of Yugoslavia which eventually brought Milosovic down. And in those cases more peaceful regimes came into power and I think most people would agree was an example of good military intervention. It's not obviously possible to know how things will turn out at all. You can never know really the turnout of the regime which comes into power afterwards - remember back in 2000 when we all thought Putin was going to a peaceful democratic leader? But at what point do we just sit back and let evil regimes cause untold suffering and murder and ignore it? At what point should we intervene? And at what point should we just sit back? It isn't an obvious answer at all and it's easy to get it wrong and end up causing more harm than good, absolutely it is, but that doesn't mean we should always sit back and never fight against evil regimes.

Why is it pathetic? They were fighting against the Kim dynasty, Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein - all of whom caused incredible suffering and mass murder of their own people - and the Korean War was a defensive war, the US joined South Korea it to try and stop the people of South Korea being enslaved by an invading tyrannical regime. Vietnam and Iraq didn't go well but you think that means we should never fight against evil because it's impossible to know how it will turn out afterwards despite the countless thousands of hours of prepping and intelligence the US and NATO do before deciding to enter a conflict? What do you think of the interventions against Slobodan Milosevic? A war that managed to overthrow a murderous regime and has slowly allowed the people of former Yugoslavia to build better lives away from the murderous tyranny of the state. I mean I went to Croatia 3 or 4 years ago and it's an incredibly beautiful country which is now a peaceful and very typical central European country, you wouldn't believe 15 years previously a genocidal maniac was leading a race war there and what horror could have still been going on there if he was never deposed.

America has made a lot of mistakes and often made things worse but the majority of those were trying to overthrow evil governments who murdered their own people, it's easy to make them the villain but they aren't imperialist and we'd all probably be a Soviet puppet state if America didn't exist and didn't bomb all those nations and tried to assassinate these leaders post-war whatever its faults. Like Iraq turned out to be a disaster but they were in there to overthrow an evil leader who killed his own people - it was understandable what the motivation was and not imperialist, it just didn't work and made things worse as you can never predict the way these things go.

But when it has happened before during the Industrial Revolution where Marx and Lenin thought the technological advances of industrailisation and mechanisation could lead to a workless and moneyless Utopia where no one would be exploited - and it turned out horrendously because the only way to hold it together was through having an authoritarian state who forced people to live a certain way and because forcing tens of millions of very different people to work in harmony could only be achieved by treating everyone the same which caused people to lose their individuality and their indivual choice, individual motivations and individual ideals. Whereas Capitalism is by design a far more adaptive system so just ended creating jobs in different sectors (I'm not saying it will always do this but that we shouldn't just bin Capitalism just because it stalls in the short or medium term to adapt - that is exactly what led to the rise of Communism, Socialism, Nazi-ism and Fascism in the 20th Century). And it's natural that a lot of people are cynical and fearful that the exact same thing will happen again and similar movements which we spent decades trying to bring down won't all happen again - especially now anyone under 35 is too young to remember it - and the main reason we learn from history is so we don't repeat the same mistakes. That's not to say it will go exactly the same way, but where does it all lead? If we don't have to work to achieve our basic needs then who is going to work to offer to perform our luxury needs when we need them? Who is going to work to become a trained chef to cook great meals for people? Who is going to go down to the sewers and clean them out when they're blocked? Who is going to be a tax collector or dig up our roads to keep our power lines or internet lines all running and who is going to decide what new roads and infrastructure need being built? There are millions of unpleasant jobs people won't do if they don't need to fulfil their basic needs but which society needs to be done to function. And if you mean robots will be built to do *all* these things Who is going to create the equipment and computers needed so we can do all this? So they can automate it all? Are we going to get another version of Stalin and Mao's visions where they did anything to cause fast industrialisation in their country to reach a perceived Utopia - even though they became the 2 biggest mass murderers in human history in the process of doing it. How can we create robots and machines which do everything humans can and better without making them conscious and at that point aren't we enslaving conscious species? Couldn't that lead to mass revolution and robots murdering humanity? And if they could do all these things couldn't robots also do all those things you described - creative pursuits, sports, government, entrepreneurialship etc. all better than humans as well (as they would have a much better understanding of the maths of the universe and how human brains function which is all these ideas ultimately are) and if so how could humans achieve anything in those fields which anyone would care about anymore? isn't having robots who run our government, decide our fashion, do all our menial jobs, write music specifically for us, become better friends and spouses etc all a bit frightening and dehumanising? Another one of the biggest talking points at Sillicon Valley in recent years is the idea of "heaven on Earth" and the idea of creating a cloud where human consciousness can be uploaded to when we die - now even the thought of that could easily see the uprising of "techno religions" where they will do anything to drive towards this possibility including working people to death or forcing everyone to work towards it at gunpoint as Stalin and Mao did with industrialisation. And what about robot armies? Humans wouldn't even be able to rebel against their state as they have done in the past because they'd all be murdered easily for any uprising no matter how big and then replaced by robots. And there's also the problem that one not fully thought through line of code could easily lead to the death of humanity because if a robot needs to fulfil its purpose regardless of humanity than it will - and there are many potential places where Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics could break down. I find this subject really fascinating as I love technology and work in IT. But one of the things which most scares me about it is that exactly these ideas and preaching we won't have to worry anymore and can get things like food and housing for free (when nothing in life is free - it all comes at someone else's labour cost both directly and indirectly) is that I could easily see it causing a rise in radical politics and a second wave of Communism and Fascism which preaches that this new technology can lead to a Utopian society - just as the Industrial Revoloution led to - or the rise of radical new techo-religions which preach a movement in creating consciousness in the cloud after death. And it could be so so easy to end up going down that path - and this is one of the reasons why I keep bleating on about how the rise in populist hard Left and hard Right ideas in the West over the past 4 or 5 years scare me because they're proving these ideas can get through again when it seemed after WWII and the Fall of the Berlin Wall these ideas were all behind us. It's why I keep saying - what I find most scary about Trump is he's showing that bareface lying can get through and that pushing ideas which are those of an individual past congress can get through and that populists can get elected and why I find it frightening when Corbyn and Macdonnell talk about the workers seizing control of robots over their bosses too - because there's so much potential danger with these ideas getting through and people proving you can be successful with these ideas by sinply championing the common man while attacking immigrants, religious minorities or the "bourgoise" business elite - just as they were doing in the 1930s - not because these people coming through *now* might be the one which lead to destruction but because they fundamentally damage the checks and balances We've spent decades putting in place and open the door for manipulative liers, Utopianists and ideologues to get through again. Anyway sorry for the long post - but it's a fascinating subject, maybe going off the realm of politics and into philosophy a bit but either way it's something we've got to be very very wary of in the 21st century and hopefully we don't go down the same path the 20th century did - because with robots and AI we might not be able to make it to the other side like we did in the 20th century.

I'm not sure it's directly just to get famous - I like Yuval Harari's idea that it seems innate in humans (especially in the West where we largely no longer have to worry about where the food is coming from day to day) to want to imagine their life and their place in the world as this huge sweeping narrative in which they play a big part and will have meaning and triumph to a better place - religion used to fulfil this role in people's lives and it still does for a large proportion of the world but as the world has become more secular people have had to try and get that same sense of meaning in different ways - Communism and Fascism were both the most obvious examples in which people were convinced they were part of a movement which would lead humanity to a Utopia. But some people do the same through business or providing for their children and trying to bring them up to create a life of huge significance - but people also do it through campaigns such as hers when they try to create meaning for themselves by searching for a profound realisation that really isn't there and then campaigning to get their ideas out there. I don't think it's a search for fame per se as much as a search for meaning and to be a part of a grand narrative. If you've ever seen the show BoJack Horseman then that's great at representing this and how even a character who is given everything but who is still constantly chasing meaning and the latest epiphany. And I think we've all done it - thought about what it would be like to lead something or be a part of this huge sweeping narrative which gave you as an individual "meaning". I actually think I finally became content and had a huge weight lifted on my shoulders with life the moment I realised that the search for meaning and my life to be a sweeping grand narrative was all a load of rubbish and that humanity and the universe will end eventually anyway so any imprint you have on no matter how huge will be forgotten in the end - even Jesus and Mohammed will be forgotten by humanity in the end, so too will Rameses II, Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan or Napolean and everyone who's tried to be part of the sweeping narrative - All you can do is just try to treat other people well and enjoy your time while you're here, the meaning to your life should be just how you interact with your friends and family and your society as a whole.

The sole perpetrators of racism are white? So when Fascist Japan leading up to and during the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII - which led to upwards of 25million Chinese people being murdered - created massive propaganda campaigns of Chinese people being inferior and backwards they weren't being racist becaise they were Asian? Their genocine of Hui Muslims wasn't racist either because they were Asian? Emperor Hirohito and Hideki Tojo weren't racist because they were Asian? What the actual ****?