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41 results for “fredbartels”
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Contemplating a new sign for tomorrow's weekly protest.
Make
America
Grotesque
AgainTrump Feeds The Furies
•Racism
•Sexism
•Corruption
•Inequality
•War Mongering
•Injustice
•Disease
•Inflation -
A beautiful mid-May morning. The marsh grass is greening up on the way to retina tingling neon green it will reach in June.
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WITHOUT
WORKERS
BILLIONAIRES
WOULD BE
WORTHLESSHappy #laborday2025
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There is a great deal of flexibility in what we attend to. Attending to something larger than ourselves is a sure sign of healthy community. What are weekly religious services if not primarily reminders to #MindTheCommunity.
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A Part’s Guide To Living in Communities.
Tentative title for the book I’m working on about understanding communities as life forms, of which we are the parts.
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The base components of organisms are cells. The base components of communities are people. Both cells and people can specialize to perform a huge variety of roles. The essential major difference as components is that cells play one role while we play multiple roles and can rapidly switch between them. This leads the life forms created with cells and the life forms created with people to be very different beasts, but both life forms nonetheless. Let’s consider how this works.
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What are the components of healthy well functioning communities? This is huge question comparable in complexity to the similar question regarding cellular organisms. There are, of course, organized systems (as with cellular organisms) and the identification and understanding of these components is a way to productively work through the complexity of communities. I’ll be investigating these systems in the weeks ahead.
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Neoliberalism weakens and sickens communities.
Weak communities are susceptible to the siren song of fascism.
To avoid a descent into fascistic hell we need to reject neoliberalism and build strong healthy communities. Exactly what Joe Biden is trying to do.
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Our communities can be beautiful, wondrous, warm, supportive, delightful, sometimes wacky, and even magical. As they are the most highly evolved life forms on the planet this should not surprise us. Why would we not want to consistently #MindTheCommunity?
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Evolving communities create interior milieus that protect and support their parts. All life forms do this, communities are no exception. The more we help our communities know themselves the more they will help us be our best selves.
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Our communities need to wake from their unconscious slumber.
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It is pleasant being part of a community. I sit in a climate controlled environment while just outside the window the temperature is near freezing. Sanitation workers collect our solid waste. Our liquid waste flows away in pipes and is treated at a local sewage treatment plant. Electricity, gas, digital information and clean water flow through pipes and are immediately available as needed. Mail and products are delivered to our door. Services are available as needed. Sweet!
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It’s absolutely essential that our communities come to know themselves as rapidly as possible. How we help make that happen is the great challenge of our time.
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To think that we are the pinnacle of evolution is the height of self delusion. Of course evolution would use us to build even more complex forms of life.
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We are embedded in communities and have been for millennia. Our communities create the niches within which we carry out our lives. The terrible phrase “survival of the fittest” means for us, fittest to thrive in the niches we inhabit. Since these niches are life forms, and life forms favor cooperative parts, it’s possible we face a steadily increasing more pleasant future.
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Our communities are amazing creatures. They allow us to live safely and comfortably in environments that could easily kill us. Nurtured and embraced by our communities we can develop talents and skills that would be impossible to manifest otherwise. We really are blessed to be parts of these evolving life forms.
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The concept of God is a wonderfully creative conceptualization and affirmation of community. Of course the concept evolves (see @robertwrighter’s The Evolution of God) as our communities evolve, along with our understanding of them. Still, the idea of a being/force that connects and cares for us is a brilliant and very human sensitive first take on comprehending that we are parts of larger life forms that should care for us. We neglect it to our detriment.
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Reading “Earth” by @davidbrin. It’s a novel about a lot of things but mostly about living on the planet sustainably… or not. It’s a challenging book that is causing me to rethink all the seemingly ever growing quantity of stuff that we seem to accumulate as we go through life. We love all the things that make our lives comfortable and enjoyable, but maybe, to keep the planet habitable, we need more private sufficiency and more public luxury.
We definitely need to #MindTheCommunity
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If you’re part of a healthy thriving community count your blessings, and do all you can to keep it that way. Through community we transcend our limitations.
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Our communities have been evolving for millennia. They have become incredibly complex life forms. We have the technology to make them much better. I’m not sure we have the wisdom.
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Communities are essentially immortal.
A primary evolutionary pressure communities face is attracting and keeping parts.
The primary living parts of communities, us, need to constantly balance selfish and altruistic goals.
Communities that help parts gracefully and pleasantly balance their inherent tensions are likely to attract and retain parts.
Communities will evolve in the direction of being more attractive to (desirable?) parts. This is good!
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The Wilsons’ famous axiom, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary” goes a tremendous way to explaining the human condition. We are balanced in tension between selfishness and altruism. We absolutely need both and get in trouble when we move too far towards one or the other. We need to live our lives in tension and doing that gracefully is what it means to be civilized.
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Did a night flight from NYC to Seattle a couple of days ago. I had a window seat and it was clear most of the way. It’s a transcendent experience to look down on all the communities ethereally defined by their lights. It is quite astonishing how rapidly our communities are evolving and it’s hard to imagine what they’ll be like in the centuries ahead.
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How can we use information technology to help our communities better know themselves?
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Looking through old pictures in my photos this evening. An image of an Allium from August 2022 seemed worth sharing. It speaks to how individual parts come together to create a beautiful whole.
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It’s difficult for us to really comprehend community. It is the water in which we swim. We are surrounded and infused with it from birth. The language we use to think comes from it. We are amazingly complex life forms that have been slowly evolving for eons, but we’re also small parts of amazingly complex life forms that have rapidly evolving for millennia.
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Our communities provide us with a vast palette with which we can develop and express our humanity. We are parts of immortal life forms which exist to protect us and allow us to flourish and help us transcend our individual limitations.
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Looking forward to this conference about all things Noospheric. https://event.fourwaves.com/n2conference/pages
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It is within community that we can build good lives for ourselves. Without community we are exposed to nature and it’s vast uncaring indifference. We must treasure our communities because they allow us to become the humans we want to be.