Jim Miles

jimmiles

In Which I Explain Myself.

“It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” – Exterminate All The Brutes, by Raoul Peck.

  • Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System!

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    TL;DR: As a species, we used to need religion and other pleasant fictions in order to cope with the wild world that spawned us. Now that we Homo sapiens are the wildest threat on Earth, we need truth more than fiction. Religion was initially an adaptive invention of Homo sapiens. Eventually, religion became maladaptive, threatening our survival. We need to put aside dangerous religions, especially the monotheistic religion, since monotheism tends to breed violence.

    We don’t know when, how, or why apes experienced a cognitive revolution and became sentient, conscious, so-called wise ape-people (Homo sapiens: “Wise man”). We do know that consciousness brought to the newly sentient Homo sapiens mental abilities which enabled the species to ultimately dominate the planet. Abstract ideas now became tools and weapons.

    Contemplation of abstract ideas was a new tool unavailable to non-sentient species, but it came at a cost. Now the species could ponder death, not simply witness, grieve, and experience it. Now they could recognize violence, be impressed or disgusted by it, instead of just instinctively using it as another tool of survival. Now they could contemplate the meaninglessness of existence, and be crushed by it, or even driven insane by it. Unless, of course, they could find a way to cope with this unwelcome awakening. 
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  • Wasted Patriotism

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    If our Constitution formed the oldest democracy on Earth, as many boast, then why do our non-white, non-cis male, non-straight, non-wealthy, non-healthy citizens enjoy vanishingly few of its benefits?

    Why did democracies much younger than ours speed so far ahead of ours in spreading the benefits of their egalitarian societies to their most marginalized and vulnerable citizens?

    If the United States is somehow “exceptional,” it is exceptional only in this: we’re the democracy which hoards constitutional rights to the few. In comparison to the rest of the Free World, we are not free. Not great. Our patriotism is wasted, if it is spent on dead white men from forgotten cultures. 
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  • Religious Bullshit, Religious Gaslighting: A Few Thoughts About the Religious Right

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    Cartoonist Duff Moses — „Some are trying to inflame those people“ | Cicero Online

    The most dangerous thing about religion is how it can take a moderate case of youthful naiveté, the kind that asserts “I think I know what’s good for the world” and explode it up into a god complex. Most kinds of Christian-style religions elevate the God complex further, into full-blown assholery. These are those obnoxious true believers filling the ranks of the Christian nationalists, the militant advocacy groups usually choosing one or more of the words American, Freedom, and Patriot in their titles, and the general Trump-loving MAGA crowd. These are those who know what is best for you, and they feel a righteous duty not only to tell you but also change the law to force you to conform to their goals for your life. In a word, insufferable.

    I had many advantages growing up white, male, and middle class, in the USA. I squandered most of them, because my survival didn’t depend on me maximizing my privilege. I did, however, often indulge in the aforementioned youthful naive mindset, thinking I knew SO much better than everyone. Luckily, I was also shy, to a fault, so I didn’t gain a reputation for being an asshole.

    Then I embraced conservative christianity in my twenties Boy, did I become a god overnight! The speed of the mental transition is truly breathtaking. You can wake up one morning humble and full of all kinds of healthy curiosity and skepticism about your world, and by the time you go to bed that night, you can be utterly confident of the truth of one specific set of views about the whole universe, such that you just CAN’T WAIT to convince everyone you meet that you are right, and they are wrong, and lost, and sinners in need of your savior. 
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  • Editor

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    It’s about damn time I updated this thing. I don’t even know what to call this, because literally no one reads it, so… Whatever.

    I’m a few days from my last shift at Disney. My wonderful daughter Jana saved my sanity by hiring me, training me, and paying me to be editor of her wedding videos at Milestones Studios. She’s been in this industry for many years now, has polished her skills, and has a backlog of work, so she needs employees. I don’t know how I got so lucky. I blame my wife, Kimberly, the best person I have ever met, whose graces she passed on to both of our daughters.

    I’m rambling.

    I’m assembling my portfolio, and now include in this blog’s about menu a link to it. Check it out, especially if you need a wedding captured in video and/or stills by the best in the biz.

  • The Courage To Understand

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    “It is not knowledge we lack.

    What is missing is the courage

    to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

    – Exterminate All The Brutes, by Raoul Peck.

  • Hurricane Of Lies

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    “And I leave behind this hurricane of fucking lies,”

    Green Day – Jesus Of Suburbia

    I gave it a good two and a half decades, but I finally left my religious life behind. I moved beyond what had become painful cognitive dissonance. I yearned for reality, scorning the lying map by which my Christianity obscured it. There’s nothing more dangerous than a lying map. It can only mislead you.

    Delusions, once recognized, became instantly tiresome. It didn’t take long to toss them aside.

    Ten years after I shed the self-deluding lies, I fear my country is drowning in them. They’re only slightly different in form from those in which I had trapped myself. But they have the same paralyzing effects: science is rejected, fellow citizens are shunned, and the refuges of calm logic and rational reasoning are abandoned, distrusted. 
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  • Moral Superiority

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    Recently I visited De Leon Springs State Park, in Central Florida. The part of that excursion that sticks with me is the historical information supplied in the surprisingly non-traditional visitor’s center. It documents a sad tale of the different peoples who lived on the land surrounding it: native peoples and African slaves. But then it departs from the normal sleepy park museum presentation to become a frank exposure of the hypocrisy of a State not willing to come to grips with the damage its industries have done to its water supply.  
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  • The Scotram Cult of Paraguay

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    John Scotram, a self-proclaimed prophet, believes that he is the angel Gabriel. And he claims that Jesus is coming again on May 6, 2019. UPDATE 5/14/19: He didn’t.

    Gerhard Traweger, Robert Dickinson, the angel Gabriel (aka John Scotram, not his real name), Ray Dickinson

    Left to Right: Gerhard Traweger, Robert Dickinson, the angel Gabriel (aka John Scotram, not his real name), Ray Dickinson

    The SDA Church has spawned many small groups of terribly earnest believers, some of whom interpret their breakaway from the parent church as fulfillment of Bible prophecy. They become, to themselves if not to anyone outside their insular bubble, the One True Church. Ever since the SDA Church made this claim about itself, it has spun off innumerable tiny congregations, which then make the same claim about themselves. 

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  • Reddit is My Happy Place

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    I’m always confused when people shit-post about Reddit, since I’ve had the most positive interactions with other Internet users there than any other social media site. Based on my seven years on it, I’m pretty sure there are more serious, intelligent, and helpful people hanging out on Reddit than on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Where else can you find actual scientists or engineers or IT professionals or artists or authors or whatever your interest area is, ask them a question, and get a serious answer? Why don’t you check it out today?

    Here’s how Reddit looks to me; this is my feed of subreddit subscriptions. A subreddit is sort of equivalent to a Twitter hashtag or Facebook group or Instagram following.

    (I received nothing in exchange for this endorsement, and neither does Reddit.)

  • Threatdown, Human Species Edition: Climate Change vs Religion

    jimmiles
    Blue Marble
    The only home we have ever had, and in our lifetimes, will ever have.

    I’ve wavered between two opinions for the past few years. It has to do with the delicate place in which the human species finds itself. We perch, as it seems, on the razor’s edge of extinction by climate change phenomena we are causing. I am very much a fan of humanity and would like to see us thrive, prosper, and one day leap across the divide to other planets and colonize the galaxy. (I dream big; blame Isaac Asimov).

    The first opinion I hold is that climate change itself is the greatest threat to our existence. Given the alarms being sounded by the planet’s scientists observing and measuring our global climate, this is not a particularly original or controversial opinion. Lucky for us humans, it is an imminently (though not easily, as it turns out) preventable disaster, a slow-motion train wreck with time still to stop it before impact. 

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