5 April, 2024 10:39

Now — with a few simple clicks approximately 4 billion people can put whatever they want "out there". From death threats, heart sickening words, to calming pictures of puppies. What sick person hates puppies?

I literally can / could say anything with a few finger pushes. Make videos. Thousands and thousands ….and if I really wanted sheer volume I can use what are called "robots".

Either machines programmed to churn out words/images/videos, or hire 1000s of people.

Recently, Amazon tried to push "automated" check outs in physical world stores. Turns out they had hired 1000s of people in India to process [and of course track] the purchases.

So it seemed that the stores had no check out in-person persons.. but the people were in India. Capturing all that Data.

Data is Oil. If you understand how useful Oil is as a resource, and the wars fought over it, then Data is bigger than that.

Sure one cannot truly use data [only] to power a Oil based machine such as a car, but there is data that goes into all aspects of the car [and how it works].

It is all Information. So, one should question who /who there are many voices screaming about "the dangers" of … reading and learning. Many many many voices telling their listeners.. the ills of University degrees [that they decided are pointless].

The ills of … learning and reading and asking god forbid questions. Only listen to them.

It is super important that they [the ones you tuned into] tell YOU what to think / be afraid of.

So what can we do? We cannot read every book.

Anyway. Information / knowledge, asking questions, examing the logic behind the statements, the source(s) of the statements…. does it hold True (with a capital T). There is only 1 small group of people in all of human history who took their time /efforts to compile BY HAND writing with Ink… all that they could. To put it on paper.

And then to make a culture of discussing it – and re-discussing. And re-discussing. It is not as if the words change — but YOU the reader [and times] change.

Situations are situational. So, yes we turn to books written in the 500s !!! And we study them and comment on them and share it with others. We — "click" on links within the Texts to go "to another website" [a different book altogether] to read "that" page and those authors.

Basically the 2 Talmuds are millions of interconnected web pages. So. We created an Internet. That we still access.

So the Internet is not the illness. Social sharing is not the Illness.

Yes teens kill themselves in part due to easy push button tech. But guess what? People killed themselves before … there just was no way to easily share that to 4 billion people.

We cannot "go offline". And also, we can ignore or not read or not share.

We can be in the Allegory of the Cave and just see only what is in front of us. Forever not knowing that the images in front are controlled by Somone behind (Plato wrote this over 2000 years ago).

Nothing new under the Sun. Kohelet had all the wisdom and it bummed him out that an idiot dies the same as the wise.

The final [2nd to last] is to Know There is God.

The Beginning of Wisdom is Knowledge of God

[Some use the word "fear"] —

If we [ IF ] we absolutely truly "knew" God we simply would never sin. RamBam and others say this.

I lost my thread that started this thread. A rock hit the stream and I got slightly moved.