Agree. It’s a lot like the ‘free will’ exercise to me-- an interesting thought experiment that AFAIK doesn’t help too much in the actual living of a life.

Also, I propose that we arguably already know that we’re living in a simulation, and it makes no real difference. I.e., we’ve identified the wave-vs-particle effect, the four forces of the universe, a bunch of physical and chemical laws, and are continually refining our understanding of it all, via science, and possibly even metaphysics.

But far as we know, it’s all just building blocks, dimensions, and laws so to speak. A super-amazing simulation as it were. What’s wrong with that?

In a general way, likely yes.

But in a specific way, for example when you look at Jeff Daniels’ Newsroom speech to the college audience, there’s a ‘squeaky-clean,’ treacly level of nonsense that’s long been attributed to the US, that simply doesn’t jibe with reality. It’s got some parallels with the English Empire nonsense, but not necessarily so much with other super-powers. That’s the difference.

This is probably well known to many, but Steve Martin was a professional musician, magician and TV series writer before more commonly being known as a standup comic, actor, comedian, and later, film writer. Not to mention:

Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a professor instead of an actor-comedian. Being at college changed his life.

It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, ‘Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!’ Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.

Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think:

What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. --WP

I like the clip, but IMO they basically bailed out in the end by all the nonsense quoted from the ~3:25 mark on.

Jeff basically makes it sound like the US used to be incredibly self-aware, humble, kind, and well-administrated, but I think what most Americans don’t choose to understand is that since the very settling of the continent, it’s been a highly fraught, contentious situation, much of it characterised by greed, cruelty, violence, intolerance and self-righteousness.

Now yes, from what I understand of history, under FDR we more or less hit a peak of being a well-run, progressive country, on the level of many modern Euro countries more or less, but most of that was specifically in response to the utter disaster of the Great Depression and the need to adjust powerfully, swiftly and accurately. Meanwhile, IIRC during his presidency, there was in fact a right-wing movement intending to remove him by underhanded means.

So I like the hopefulness of the clip, but in the end I also find it pretty typical of Americans being largely unwilling to understand the hows and whys of the nation, going back to the early 1600’s.

Eh, sorry for the dang essay. :S

Yeah, I get you…

One thing that totally kills me is how the US just *screwed* with so many other nations over the years, mainly for profit, etc.

Now India and China are rising powers and you are going back to being a regular super-power.

NOT that I don’t think you’re mistaken, but at the same time, India & China are about as @(*&#-ed as it possibly comes when it comes to being considered ‘super-powers.’