Is spirituality minus the spirit still spiritual?

[—Participant]

Unseen wrote:

November 2017 – Lindsay Shepherd – Wilfrid Laurier University While serving as a teaching assistant in a first-year Communications Studies class, Shepherd showed a video to students featuring a debate between Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte on the subject of gender-neutral pronouns.

10/5/2016 – Jordan Peterson – University of Toronto

Professor Peterson released a Youtube video titled “Professor against political correctness: Part I,” in which he critiqued Canadian laws protecting various forms of gender expression. He also expressed doubt about the concept of the “gender spectrum” in general.

6/18/2020 – Margaret Wente – University of Toronto

Wente was due to become a senior fellow at the University of Toronto, but upon the school’s announcement of her hiring, students, faculty, staff, alumni, and donors started a petition in protest, citing “her history of inflammatory columns dealing with race and multiple accusations of plagiarism.”

That’s a long list of anecdotes, but at a glance I can say these three don’t make much of a case for you. Would that I had the time for a meta-analysis of the whole list.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

I hear ya, but I believe that raising the quality of life for the most unfortunate quartile benefits us all in ways you couldn’t even imagine. And inversely, keep them down and you pay for them 10 fold.

And I also believe there are catch-22 scenarios for many who simply need the experience to qualify but don’t have those life situations arise so that they may get that experience to become that qualified person.

As for predicting a person’s ultimate utility based on a resume and interview, well that’s a sorry method but it’s all you get most times, unfortunately.

Here is what most hurts “the most unfortunate quartile.”. (Most of us use the word “quarter,” but *Sigh!* I’ll try to endulge. 🙄)

When woke-ass, broke-ass Silicon Valley Bank gets bailed out, all the other banks are required by the FDIC to submit funds to cover Silicon Valley Bank’s loss. These other banks have to make up for this by charging their customers fees. This adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

This may also lead to restrictions on bank services and what minimum balances are required. Again, this also adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

When bank services are unavailable, people may have to turn to other high-fee, high-interest, high-risk, dangerous sources of financing, such as CoinStar machines*, pay-day loan services, pawn-brokers, playing the lottery, or, worst yet, loan-sharks from organized crime! This also adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

When taxi cab unions try to use the law to shut down Internet-dispatched ride and delivery services like Über, Lyft, ÜberEats, GrubHub, or DoorDash, this deprives the market of both useful services and employment opportunities, which adversely impact “the most unfortunate quartile.”

When States and localities have at least 2,700 requirements for occupational licenses that are irrelevant to competence and safety, but serve to protect established professionals from competition, that adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

License to Work: A Nationwide Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing
https://ij.org/report/license-to-work-3/

And when elite universities give preferential admissions to students because of heritage or sex, then the students fail or drop out rather than succeed in non-elite but still good 2-year or 4-year colleges, that creates self-doubt, anger, and hatred among failed students, successful students, and those never admitted. This adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile” and everybody else! Economist and Sociologist Thomas Sowell has written many articles and volumes on the subject of U.S. and global preferential admissions and hiring practices and their resulting disasters.

What you believe doesn’t matter against what actually hurts and helps “the most unfortunate quartile.”. Good intentions are not always the same as good results.

* (CoinStar doesn’t charge fees for coins given for charitable donations or for gift cards used in select stores or restaurants, so that’s great. But wrapping coins for a 20% fee in exchange for a cash voucher that can only be cashed or used in the CoinStar host store for a limited time is bullshit! Wrap coins yourself as you get them and take them to the bank first before using CoinStar for financing! With a cheap home Sharper Image coin wrapping machine, it’s worth the effort and the machine quickly pays for itself.)

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spacing
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Citing sources

[NoelParticipant]

So when I arise in the wee hours of the morning and I’m in the kitchen brewing us coffee, and I call out to my wife, “Ana! Are you WOKE!” Can I not use the word like that? I know that it’s not the King’s English but growing up in the South Bronx, fresh off the Eastern Airlines jet to Kennedy Airport, It’s how we used it. But with a thick Spanish accent on account of I was fresh off the boat.

“Hey are you WOKE? I couldn’t sleep last night.” “Today when I (a)WOKE, the morning blues hung over me….” (Cheated a little there with classic Chicago tune). “You WOKE my monkey, monkey ass up!” “When I WOKE you up as to your Atheist proclivities you were on your knees praying to FSM”. Okay, okay I’ll stop.

[DavisModerator]

It would seem you are asserting that wokeism is merely a fringe activity or a false narrative…without any evidence of your own. But surely you know that lack of evidence for something isn’t evidence that it is false, either

I’m just going to hope, Unseen, that this lapse in critical thinking skills, is just a temporary issue.

 

[_Robert_Participant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Here is what most hurts “the most unfortunate quartile.”. (Most of us use the word “quarter,” but *Sigh!* I’ll try to endulge. 🙄)

Quartile is in fact the correct word for the context and people might object as to your presumption that just because you would not use the correct word that they would as well.

When woke-ass, broke-ass Silicon Valley Bank gets bailed out, all the other banks are required by the FDIC to submit funds to cover Silicon Valley Bank’s loss. These other banks have to make up for this by charging their customers fees. This adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

So woke-ass (whatever the fuck that means) SVB has a liquidity problem because the Fed raised interest rates so fast after years of artificially holding them so low as to pump up the stock market and provide cheap money to the wealthy and force retirees into stocks. So what “fees” exactly will my bank be charging me or are you just pulling this out of your ass? You do realize that SVB bank owns Treasuries that cover the losses and the banks that will cough up the cash will get those treasuries? As soon as rates go back down to Fuck-All-Savers levels those banks will be swimming in profits.

So, I guess using the word “quartile” is offensive to snowflakes, LOL. It smacks of elitism and ivory halls. The lack of banking regulations is what fucked up the situation. Banks should be held to higher liquidity requirements and all well managed banks hedge their investments against a run.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Robert,

The bank’s investment in low-interest, low-value T-Bills instead of loaning it’s capital for higher interest combined with the the high insurance of $250,000 per account is precisely why SVB is in the mess it’s in! That’s what created the bust!

What created the the boom that led to the bust was all these subsidies for “Green Jobs and Energy” crap along with COVID-19 payroll subsidies for all these risky Silicon Valley start-ups who deposited their subsidies in SVB! The “most unfortunate quartile” also pay for that!

It’s called creating a moral hazard or just enabling shitty behavior, which means you get more of it!

And it all happened because the Risk Management Officer was too interested in who ticked which box instead of warning signs of a collapse from a year earlier! And it was made worse with SVB’s donations to Black Lives Matter, $73 Million that could have covered 292 accounts at $250,000 per account! Get woke, go broke!

And the use of “quartile” isn’t offensive, just pompous. The real offensive thing is that morons like those in SVB got as far as they did at the expense of all of us!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Punctuation

[_Robert_Participant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Robert, The bank’s investment in low-interest, low-value T-Bills instead of loaning it’s capital for higher interest combined with the the high insurance of $250,000 per account is precisely why SVB is in the mess it’s in! That’s what created the bust! What created the the boom that led to the bust was all these subsidies for “Green Jobs and Energy” crap along with COVID-19 payroll subsidies for all these risky Silicon Valley start-ups who deposited their subsidies in SVB! The “most unfortunate quartile” also pay for that! It’s called creating a moral hazard or just enabling shitty behavior, which means you get more of it! And it all happened because the Risk Management Officer was too interested in who ticked which box instead of warning signs of a collapse from a year earlier! And it was made worse with SVB’s donations to Black Lives Matter, $73 Million that could have covered 292 accounts at $250,000 per account! Get woke, go broke! And the use of “quartile” isn’t offensive, just pompous. The real offensive thing is that morons like those in SVB got as far as they did at the expense of all of us!

Wrong again.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/gop-silicon-valley-bank-failure-black-lives-matter

Getting your “fun facts” from Fox News, I see. You can do better (and not be just another repeater of nonsense.) For people wearing the MAGA hat, many, many words seem “pompus”. Because they are morons. And then you complain about bank fees. You know like the initiative Biden is pursuing.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2022/10/26/the-presidents-initiative-on-junk-fees-and-related-pricing-practices/

BTW the bank was selling securities, way too late. That’s what triggered the run. They were lobbying for looser regulations. They were libertarians.

https://fortune.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-svb-ceo-greg-becker-dodd-frank-trump-rollback-systemically-important-fdic/

And if you think a bank can just take depositors money and just sell high rate, high risk loans you would be wrong. Their risk manager was a new hire, so again your facts are alternative. The previous one saw what was coming and bailed. But hey we don’t need no stinking rules, right?

[UnseenParticipant]

Autumn wrote:

That’s a long list of anecdotes, but at a glance I can say these three don’t make much of a case for you. Would that I had the time for a meta-analysis of the whole list.

As you say, it’s a long list. Some entries will be more debatable than others.

[UnseenParticipant]

Davis wrote:

I’m just going to hope, Unseen, that this lapse in critical thinking skills, is just a temporary issue.

Why not retreat into ad homenems when all else fails?

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

When woke-ass, broke-ass Silicon Valley Bank gets bailed out, all the other banks are required by the FDIC to submit funds to cover Silicon Valley Bank’s loss. These other banks have to make up for this by charging their customers fees. This adversely impacts “the most unfortunate quartile.”

Without thinking much about it, people think their deposits are safe because the money is put into a super-secure safe with a 2-foot thick door and a squad of armed guards with rottweilers guarding the safe. What actually makes money safe in a bank is confidence that they can get it back out anytime they like. If that confidence is ever shaken to the core, the entire banking system will fall apart because for every $100 deposited, $90 is used to generate profits for the bank by investing in mortgages, commercial loans, etc., all hedged with supposedly super-safe (conservative) investments like government bonds and conservative stock funds. In other words, most of it simply isn’t there.

I think the Federal Government was forced to make sure all depositors, large and small, were able to get access to their money with an assurance they could leave it in the bank safely for two reasons. The first is to maintain the all-important illusion that money is safe in banks and, secondly, to avoid treating large depositors as little different from the bank’s stockholders, who bought in knowing that there was always the risk of losing it all and are thus justifiably SOL. We don’t want depositors shying away from banks because banks drive innovation and development with their investments. The alternative is for large depositors to keep their money under their mattress, figuratively, where it doesn’t work for the economy.

There is an alternative, of course, which is to induce larger banks to buy up failing smaller banks. They thing is, we try like hell to avoid consolidation of the bank industry into ever fewer, more powerful, “too big to fail” banks which will be literally too big to save.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by  Unseen.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

One good thing about a fridge, cupbords, and a “panic room” full of tin cans, Ball Jars, Mason Jars, and Food Saver vacuum bags of your favorite edibles, plus tool boxes and pockets of multi-tools with openers and knives: none of it depends on anyones promise to pay.

They’ll fill you if you fill them, they’ll fill you longer if you eat less, they take care of you if you take care of them, no interest spent or given, but lots of culinary interest, no income tax on it, no capital gains tax, one time sales tax in my State, but no increase once bought, It’s all a can’t lose investment! 😎

[DavisModerator]

It’s called creating a moral hazard or just enabling shitty behavior, which means you get more of it!

 I wish sometimes you’d reflect your claims and statements back on your own ideology. You might remember a decade and a half ago, all sorts of banks going bust because of the moral hazards set up by an unregulated or underregulated economic system, with powerful banks that didn’t invest in “Green crap” but in fact invested in stuff like blood diamonds, sweat shop factory garment industries and companies that dumped toxic garbage into 3rd world nation’s drinking supplies. All the most severe moral hazards one can think of. They all went bust because they were doing what they were incentivised to do by the kind of markets that your libertarian paradise would lead to: extremely risky short term gains at every one else’s cost and for some their eventual destruction for those who aren’t bailed out.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Hosing the lower echelons-it is a snap.

Leave mega corps alone so they can snap, crackle, pop.

How Big Food Corporations Take Advantage of SNAP

[unapologeticParticipant]

Hi, I’m new. Starting this thread from the top:
“Is spirituality minus the spirit still spiritual?”
If you want to “Don’t worry, Be happy” fine, but find some other word for it that doesn’t contain the word ‘spirt’.
I have never felt the need to be “part of something greater than oneself.” I don’t understand that need.
Sure I have occasionally joined things greater than me (boy scouts, anti-war movement, atheist movement),
but when I think of how I feel, I feel small. Not a good feeling. But what does feeling have to do with it.
Now that I’ve mentioned it, since you are now atheist, atheism is that “something greater than oneself” that you are looking for.
That ‘Something’ is just a state of mind, it could be anything. Just don’t let it be a lie, like the supernatural. And stop calling it ‘spiritual’.
“social-self-development-cooperation” To long, try again. “Trippy” works for me.
Simon said “If it means something different to everyone then it describes nothing.” I agree, that’s why I never use the word “love”.
Robert said “Neanderthals appear to have believed in an afterlife based on burial sites.” I don’t believe that.
I think archaeologists who happen to be christian are biased by their own beliefs.
Burial practices may only be sympathy for the dead, not necessarily afterlife belief.
Even as an atheist haven’t you ever left flowers for a dead friend?
I have only read the first 45 posts in this thread, then skipped to the end. It seems this thread has drastically changed. (What the hell is WOKE?)
Did anyone suggest a word to replace ‘spiritual’?

PS, The spell-check here keeps trying to make me capitalize “christian”. Somebody needs to fix that.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

unapologetic wrote:

Did anyone suggest a word to replace ‘spiritual’?

I don’t use the word, because I don’t need to.  The only “spiritual” thing I do is meditating.  I consider this to be a spiritual practice, as it is widely called, because it’s to do with self-cultivation and purification – trying to remove the bad or counter-productive parts of myself.  I think that fits with a normal use of the word.

There is also the technical term “spiritual bliss” which is a kind of joy attained during meditation, which I almost never get.

[Author]

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