Me and my AI

  Me: I had a dream that seemed to include Edward Snowden as a character. He was raising the point about the hypocrisy of a system that prosecutes someone for murder while perpetuating murder itself on a far greater scale. Current events of the day before the dream include reports of Israel rescuing four hostages from a Gazan refugee camp, killing more than 40 Gazans in the process, mostly women and children.  The dream seems related to the current events. It occurred to me yesterday, while I was still awake, that some people see the hundreds or thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails, being held for years without trial, as hostages. Recent events in Israel / Gaza, and in Ukraine, seem to support the view that the world would be a better place if taxpayers in every nation had the option of withholding tax money from uses that they believe to be harmful / counterproductive, provided that they shift the funds to uses that *most people* believe are better uses of the funds. ...

JC  I saw Robert Reich on YouTube, asking why people support Trump. I thought the question could be put in a more general way. The question, rephrased to reflect traits of humans in context of dysfunctional societies, would be, "Why do people, when living in a sick society, polarize, and why do they embrace disruptive figures?" Members of tribes that were not functioning well, 300K yrs ago, would polarize, just as people living in sick societies today tend to polarize. They lose confidence in the established order. But in times past, the different groups would correspond not to competing political ideologies, but to one or another neighboring tribe. The tendency facilitated disintegration of the ailing tribe and absorption of its members into better-functioning neighboring tribes. Now, we don't have the ability to disintegrate, with our constituent parts (individuals) joining neighboring, healthy societies. The global system is tied into a single system. Or, more realisti...