The Ugliness of the Dark Web

I recently poked around on the Dark Web. I wanted to see what the fuss is about. In case you don’t know what Dark Web is, think of it this way. The normal internet is what is called the Clear Web. That’s like the first floor of a house. In the basement is the Deep Web, which is a network of sites that don’t appear in searches of the Clear Web, but which consist mainly of databases, often maintained by governments. Below the basement is a tunnel through which flows sewage. It’s the Dark Web. 

Here you can find invitations to the slimiest commerce. You can search out hitmen. Don’t want to kill anyone, but just want to ruin their lives? Well, you can find someone who will for a fee, payable in bitcoin of course, frame them to look like pederasts. Yes, they will be discovered to be harboring illegal child porn on their computers. Or maybe you want to watch someone being tortured. That gives you the idea. Hacks, hits, and heists can be arranged via the Dark Web. 

My tour of the Dark Web was very brief. There is only so much shock (but not awe) to which I want to be subjected. I realized, through the experience, that I have overlooked the ugliness of this world. I used to note the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” that parallel Jesus’ prediction of miseducation, war, famine, and plagues (Luke 21:8-11) were seen around the world, and I thought no wonder the guy who wrote about those conditions ended his book with a prayer to his Lord to come back to earth. What else could possibly fix the problems? 

Then, I slowly began to notice that such conditions were improving. I briefly summarized my observations at http://gordonfeil.blogspot.com/2019/08/pros-and-cons-of-multi-national-business.html. War is waning. Famine is fleeing. Pestilences are perishing. The world is getting better. Life is what we make of it. It doesn’t need to be bad. 

My foray into the online sewer reminded me that life isn’t good for many people. It’s terror. It’s bleak. It’s hopeless. I was reminded that it is unlikely man is going to fix this world so that it is a place of peace for everyone. There is evil here, preying on the innocent, and in some cases growing evil from the innocence. I am reminded of the words attributed to the apostle Peter, exclaiming “what manner of people” we ought to be “hastening the day of God.” I am reminded of Jesus instructing his students to pray “Your kingdom come.” Yeah, my excursion into the Dark Web was sad and disgusting.

In Praise of Friendship and Family

You don’t have to be a religious person to enjoy and benefit from reading the Psalms. Even agnostics and atheists have found comfort in that classy collection of contemplative literature. The crises of life are addressed each in its own place there. Suffered betrayal?  Psalm 55. Dealing with anxiety issues?  Psalm 91. Struggling to understand why evil seems to prosper? Psalm 73.

I was this weekend considering Psalm 39. It’s a meditation on mortality. In the past few years I have lost several good friends from when I was a young man. My generation seems to be on the way out. The latest (last month) was Murray Polushin. Aside from having a special humor, he was one of the more articulate people I have known, well read and able to hold his own in a discussion with most anyone. He was able to dissect ideas and examine them critically.

I recall the time when Murray, who had just returned to Edmonton from college in the USA, was staying a few days with my then roommates and me in our apartment at Riverside Towers. We had another guest at the same time --- a super enthusiastic fellow named Tony Albert. Tony was a closer and did not like accepting No. Early one evening Murray and Tony started debating why it was that Americans seemed more prone to violent crime than did Canadians. They discussed this all evening and were at it when I went to bed around 11. I got up the next morning to get ready for work, and discovered they had been up all night and were still debating that same topic. When I got home at day's end, they were still going....I won't say strong.....they were flagging a bit....but they were still at it.

There is a continual stream of replacement humans coming along as babies are born and enter our lives or as adults wander in as strangers. They don’t really take the place of the ones we have long known because we do not have a history with them. I am not saying don’t build anything with them. Of course we should, but we should also treasure our old friends and also our families. We are social beings and need each other.

Moral Relativism

There’s a principle, revealed in the Bible, that we learn to understand the reason for an action by doing it (Ps. 111:10b). People without this realization can easily fall for the old nonsense that morality is arbitrary. It’s the idea of relativism: there is no moral authority --- no moral absolutes.

You do not need the Bible to figure out the fallacy that such a conjecture is. You just need to examine morality in various species. Among humans, there are some traits that are universally virtues and others that are everywhere despised. For example, show me a culture where cowardice is regarded as a virtue. There are certain things that no culture would suffer to be done to its little children.

Then, look at other species. Rats will only play with rats that play according to the rules. Dogs have a moral code, and bad dogs are shunned. Chimps like to know who the good chimps and the bad chimps are.

Morality develops according to the needs of the species. In many cases, rules are laid down to describe what is already happening in the healthy interactions. Cult members would do well to realize the foregoing principle. If a rule seems to have nothing to do with benefitting the population expected to keep it, then God is not likely behind it. Nor has it been developed as a description of healthy behavior.

Run Over by AI

George Gilder presents an argument about A.I. that corresponds with what I posted at https://gordonfeil.blogspot.com/2019/06/ai-human.html. His point is that “replication is not consciousness.” He goes on to address the Elon Musk’s contention that A.I. will render a lot of people unemployable. Gilder states that Musk “is a fool in many ways” and then says that increasing our productive capacity, which is what A.I. does, is only good and frees up people for higher functioning work. In general, I agree, and have often said so. The problem is that many people are not capable of higher functionality. When the American army has determined that nobody with an IQ of less than 83 is to be inducted because there isn’t any way such a person could add value to the army, what does that tell you? I mean, if one in eight people are of such low potential that there is not even one task in the army that they could be trained to do effectively, what does Gilder think they will do when A.I. takes over whatever they are now doing? He refers back to the Luddites, which I have also done on occasion, to show the folly of the Musk’s contention, but I think Musk has a point.

I suppose that people who are displaced by A.I. and who do not have the capacity to learn advanced skills, could do domestic work for those who do. Having an abundance of personal masseurs and in-home cooks might make their employers more productive.

There is a huge social problem over the horizon….

Abortion Surgeon Presents his Case

The abortion issue is charged with emotion, and I find that emotion has a way of bending perspective. Excited people often see things with less than the objectivity possessed by the same people when they are more relaxed. That said, I think a fetus is much more than many people claim. And that opinion is not mitigated by the noteworthy video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZXQBhTszpU&feature=youtu.be. Take the 6 minutes needed to watch it.

Unawareness

You ever notice that things work best when we are not aware of them? For example, you don’t feel the best fitting clothing when you wear it. If something feels tight or abrasive, it isn’t functioning as it should. Another example: if you supervise workers, you’ll know that things are going best when you aren’t noticing any problems.  A house is functioning well when its occupants don’t notice problems: there is hot water, the roof is not leaking, and there is no vermin. Unawareness is what you want in so many situations in life. I have often said that a problem is only a problem when you think about it.

Unawareness isn’t always best though. Someone was telling me today about a gal that was evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent. The authorities showed up and gave her until the end of that day. The police got involved to make it happen. The woman was surprised, probably not that it would happen, but that it would happen that day. I am sure she had lots of warning, but she closed her eyes to the problem. There are some problems that simply do not go away just because we don’t think about them. Yeah, they might not be problems in the moment, but by ignoring them --- by kicking the can down the road --- we allow the problems to get bigger and to gather momentum so that when the chickens finally do come home to roost, the situation is much more problematic than if it had been resolved early.

I like procrastinating doing what I do not enjoy. And guess what? I have found that sometimes procrastination pays off. I find that often what I delay doing, until it’s too late to do it, never really needed doing in the first place. Yet, procrastination is to be used cautiously.

Conative Beings

It seems to me that people have a hard time living in the moment. For the moment? No problem. But in the moment? That’s more elusive. We are always striving for something else. We are conative beings. Here’s what we do. We go to play school to get ready for kindergarten. Then we go to kindergarten to get ready for grade school. Each year of grade school is to enable us for what comes ahead, presumably university or technical/trade school. We go through those post-secondary schools to get ready for a J-O-B. The job is to enable us to reach retirement ---- the end goal? Well, we get to retirement and a lot of things are no longer working….we don’t have the energy we once did.

If you do not know how to live in the moment, you will always be struggling for something that you will not enjoy when it arrives. If you can’t enjoy the present, you won’t enjoy the future when it becomes the present. We need to learn that we always have enough right here and right now to be happy, and we need to notice what we have, be grateful for it, and enjoy it. That requires practice, and it requires a change in attitude.

The Slippery Slope of Life

I recently stumbled across a photograph taken of a group of singles from late teens to mid-20s, taken in the early 1970s. The photo was taken outside a hotel ballroom. It was at a formal dance. I knew all 8 of the people. One not so well as I’d like (me!). I used to have laughs with most of them. But I reflect now on the disposition of them. One became my employee for awhile and ultimately had what I think has been a successful marriage. Two others, standing together, eventually married each other, and he started a business and was my client for a time. He committed suicide several years later. Next to him is another who also committed suicide. That’s 25% of the group! Well, maybe the second guy didn’t kill himself, but he did overdose on sleeping pills, and the number taken didn’t seem accidental. Next to him is a brother of the gal that became the wife of the first suicide. That brother married a pretty girl and later left her and their children. The other two: I don’t know what happened with one, but the other had a fairly successful career and marriage so far as I can tell. Nice to end with a success story.

If that happy group could had had the future unveiled just before that picture was taken, the smiles I see there would surely have been forced or turned into frowns. Life is what happens when we are making other plans.