Teever

Perhaps one of you is living in a much more humid and/or hot environment that causes issues with the writing process.

In other words they're sort of like a cultural Rosetta Stone that lets you interpret and understand totally alien cultures or understand nuance in ones that you have a better understanding.

The link that you provided has a quote from Campbell himself pointing out the impact different religions have on the stories that the people in those cultures tell:

> One finds different orders of story. For example, in fairy tales it’s usually the finding of the bride — or sometimes stealing the bride — and the sacred marriage motif. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it’s the atonement with the father motif — and there the woman becomes either the guide to the father in the form of Mary, or seductress in the form of Eve and her children. In the Christian tradition one is not to experience the apotheosis. You are not to think of yourself as the Christ, whereas in the Buddhist tradition that’s the way.

An interesting thought that just struck me is how something like Campbell's work (and the work of Joyce that inspired it) has impacted the crafting of fictional narratives going forward, with his research and analysis perhaps permanently changing fiction because of the meta-awareness of story telling that it imbues on storytellers. Another way to look at that is that Campbell's work is like a sort of atom-bomb on the creation of cultural artifacts with ones being made prior to it becoming like a sort of 'low-background steel' and ones that come after it being markedly different simply because of the existence of the publishing of his research.

If the answer to that question is simply "the same thing they've done for the past few decades" then the reasonable conclusion to draw is again -- that the American people are collectively fine with the state of their country and the growing inequality and shrinking democratic power that the individual American has.

There are a myriad of responses that the American people could have to this growing problem, that range from legal to illegal, from scrupulous to unscrupulous but the American people collectively choose the path of least resistance, they choose the status quo.

America looked at Jan 6th and collectively decided that doing nothing was the best course of action. No further response was needed. Just clean the riff-raff out of the capitol and get back to business as usual.

If you're an American look around and remember that what you see as good as it gets, and that it's all downhill from here because that's what everyone wants.

At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.

People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.

Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.

An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.

Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.

consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.

All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.

It doesn't seem right to interfere with the reasonable use of someone else's property.

An interesting question to ask: Is the world a better place because of the existence of Star Trek and the influences that it has on society?

How can we improve society with fiction?

It feels like almost over night we went from not doing enough but caring about carbon emissions and the impending calamity that they will cause to just... not, and and completely forgetting about them and what's about to happen. No real discussion about it in the media, no government policies, or lip service to the topic, just radio silence. The only real environmental discussions that rise up are about water usage near data centres, no bigger picture stuff.

It's really disturbing how a handful of people can just decide that this is the direction of the global economy and resource allocation, there's no democratic discussion about this or input from experts on climate, economics, or domestic security and self-sufficiency.

I don't really feel like we live in any close to a democracy in western countries anymore, it just seems like the locus of control is firmly outside of the average person, institutions, or even the moderately wealthy. It's just a few deranged people with more dollars than sense steering the ship into the rocky shore of a desert island.

So if we look at this from that perspective, granting that the world is far from a utopia, who in our society is the closest to the kind person that the fictional character Jean-Luc Picard represents?

It sure ain't the usual suspects that we talk about here all the time, or whatever the dweeb villian of the week that just so happens to be Andy Yen this week, so maybe let's not talk about them for a bit.

Who is this[1] in our society?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LGHtc_D328

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

The combination of these government interventions amongst others is what enabled the rapid development of these fields which lead to the computer revolution that we all enjoy This is an amazing thing to be sure, but it isn't an example of free-market forces at work.

It's an example of a government reading the global conditions in which it found itself in and successfully responding to those conditions by regulating and investing in key industries to ensure the dominance of the nation that the government manages. No doubt there were problems with these government interventions but they are on the whole an amazing success story for America and the world as a whole.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen didn't dream up their ideas for computing in a vacuum, they were fortunate to come of age in a time and place that gave them access to state of the art computers in their youth and later as young adults when Gates attended Harvard where they developed their BASIC on a PDP-10 that was funded by DARPA.

> Yes, I've heard the story that X was the result of A+B+C+D+E+F+G and B was done by the government, and so the government gets all the credit.

I'm not saying that the government gets all the credit here. I'm simply saying that the success story of the American tech industry is one that is the result of seeds planted by the government decades ago and one that we all enjoy the fruits of. Government regulations, investments, and purchasing contracts play a large role in why you and I can use and enjoy free software in our every day lives.

I've heard it said that the broadcasting of graphic battle footage on the nightly news during the Vietnam war played a large role in the public losing support for that conflict and that the US government learned from this and provided a much more sanitary and managed view of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and again Iraq during the 1990s and 2000s.

From what I've seen on subreddits like /r/combatfootage/ or /r/credibledefense/ that doesn't seem to be possible anymore. There's a tremendous amount of video from the conflicts in Syria, Sudan, and Ukraine and the administrators and moderators of these places seem to allow the distribution and discussion of these videos.

Right now it's pretty common to see Ukrainian and their supporters refer to Russians as "orcs" (I'm assuming Russians say similar things about the Ukrainians on social media too) with little to no push back from admins or moderators despite this being blatantly dehumanizing language which is often against the rules in these online forums.

I predict that moderators will expose further biases and double standards towards Americans should graphic videos of American soldiers dying becomes a standard feature of our social media landscape and will punish people for this kind of disparaging commentary about invading American soldiers.

It was dismaying to see this flagged so fast. When I reached out to the moderators about it they felt that it should remain flagged for reasons that seemed dubious and inconsistent imho.

At the same time I'm not sure that the computer industry is a good example for your claim due to its roots in the Bell telecommunication monopoly and the massive subsidies from the US military that lead to the wide availability of the cheap personal computers that most of the open source software that you are talking about originated from.

If anything the rise of American tech giants and the proliferation of cheap computers is directly attributable to decades of intervention by the US government and not a free market success story.