Every powerful group wants to expand and consolidate their power. Making laws in their favor might be the strongest way to do that. This can be done without making it obvious through incremental laws and slow implementation of the laws, obfuscation of the intent and distraction by the media and controlled political movements.
Any successful agenda will cause society to be more in favor of it and less opposed to it. If Jesuits have had a lot of power for a long time then we would have seen society move towards pro-Jesuit views and beliefs that allow Jesuits to more easily control people. So we would have seen society move towards belief in the authority of the Catholic church and away from individualism and atheism. But that's pretty much the opposite of what we have seen. We also haven't seen it become popular to believe Jesuits do a lot of good in the world and need to be protected from all their unjust persecution. So either Jesuits haven't had sufficient power to make societal changes like this or they are incompetent at using their power.
OK let me set the standard needed to convince me a certain person/group has a large amount of power. They need to able to make national laws in their favor despite strong opposition to those laws. Their messages need to be spread regularly by well respected people/organizations that are able to repeatedly drill it into a majority of the population. They and their messages need to be protected by those in power and rarely criticized by them.
The only part of this that I see for Catholicism is that it's rarely criticized specifically. But its alleged position on abortion and Christianity and traditional values more generally are often criticized by those in power. While you have a bunch of Catholics in power in America they don't usually promote Catholicism or Catholic ideas and don't appear to be conspiring specifically with other Catholics.
Think the early 2000's were good? You should have been around in the late 20th century. But part the problem with both was how naive and consumerist people were. As mentioned, the middle class wasted their money on material luxuries and instead of doing anything difficult to make the future better for their children they just followed the crowd and believed whatever the TV told them. People today aren't a lot better but at least they're less trusting of institutions and in some ways a worse economy has made them less materialist (and in other ways more selfish).
We are gradually moving closer to people being able to talk about changing society back to the way things were. Currently that discussion is mostly in terms of politics and economics, but to end the "dystopian Sci Fi horror" we have to get rid of the sci-fi part.
This is almost counting the same thing three times. You can also get way more than just three sixes - count the number of points on the interior hexagon, the number of intersections and the minimum number of lines needed to draw the star. If you count other properties you don't get sixes. The number of exterior sides and vertices are both 12, the number of line segments without intersections is 18, the angles involved are 60, 120 and 300 degrees.
I totally agree. But the percentage of people with such wisdom and discipline is in the single digits at most. Even those people can't be disciplined all the time. These systems are designed to exploit human psychology. Humans on the whole aren't capable of functioning properly with these systems. It's like expecting a whale to live on land. So while we as individuals can do our best to avoid the negative consequences for ourselves and use the internet wisely, we still have to oppose its existence out of concern for our brothers and sisters.
It gives access to more knowledge, but does it actually lead to people having more knowledge? If it reduces your attention span, memory and addicts you to wasting your time then almost certainly not. You may get access to information that would have been difficult to find prior to the internet, but this is likely at the cost of remembering less, reading fewer books (or high quality information) and if you are young, getting a lower quality education. You likely also get information overload where you don't have sufficient time to process individual pieces of information, leading to less cognitive development, less recall and more stress. There's surely lots of other consequences that I've overlooked including ones yet to be discovered.
I agree the internet (as with most technologies since 1900) was a mistake. Real life relationships and community have been shattered by it and people have become dumber. Social media only made it worse. I'm not convinced a decentralized internet would be much better.
Best thing to do is stay offline unless it's for something important, not leisure. Very hard to do in today's world however.
The protection lasted 20 weeks in the rats, which Gage thinks may translate to up to a year of protection in humans.
Get a vaccine every year for an illegal drug you will never come into contact with unless you're buying other illegal drugs. This is just going to encourage more people to try fentanyl.
After arguing with Redditors recently I know most of them would be angry that anyone could oppose such a thing. "This would save and improve so many lives" they would say, thinking we can play God with biology that we barely understand without any serious negative consequences. This from the same people that would abort their own defective children - the exact people from whom lives need to be saved.
I can't imagine having a conscience so numbed to crimes against nature to think that this stuff is OK. Especially considering less than 1% of the population would stand to benefit from this, at the risk of giving people other health problems and ushering in a eugenical society that designs its own babies - something which governments and doctors can wield as a weapon over parents they don't like.
There were hardly any atheists in the enlightenment. There's a famous quote from Isaac Newton about atheists being rare. Atheism only got popular after Darwin upon the groundwork laid by uniformitarian geologists. I don't think Jews had a lot of power then either, seeing as societies were very Christian-oriented so Jews were like outcasts and often had fewer rights than everyone else. The Rothschild bankers also weren't around until the very end of the enlightenment.
So AI is going to be simulating the enemies (inevitably going to be simulating everyone as in the Sentient World Simulation), planning the campaigns and carrying out the attacks autonomously. So there won't be much need for humans in the loop and we're setting ourselves up for the AI military to turn on humans as a whole.