Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently

MLK, Martin Luther King was the leading proponent for blacks having equal rights.  Yesterday I learned that this figurehead, that is the only person to have his own national holiday in the United States, and is known for fighting for the moral rights of others, wasn’t quite all he measured up to be.  Turns out he slept around with tons of women.  He was being followed by the FBI and tracked to the point that they video recorded him cheating on his wife, and then sent the video to his wife. 

Also turns out he plagiarized the crap out of his works/speeches, including a portion of his “I have a dream” speech.  Apparently something like 60% of his master’s thesis was plagiarized from one source and the remaining percentage from another source.

Last but not least he was surrounded by and believed in communism himself, minus the atheism portion, which in spite of his rampant cheating went against his preacher beliefs.  The point was made, and I’ll share it here, that it would be like having a mother Teresa or some other figurehead surrounded by hyper Al Qaida informants.  Communism has killed hundreds of millions of people.  Way more than Nazism, not that either are acceptable, but it is just to illustrate how crazy it’d be to believe in and listen to those kinds of advisers.

Another thing that I hadn’t really thought about until listening to this philosopher is spanking and taxes.

As a society we don’t like evil.  We can bear it however when it is dressed up and made to appear ok. 

One example is the millions of photos taken during the Iraq war.  There aren’t laws forbidding them being shown, but our mainstream media doesn’t show them.  Nobody shows/talks about the depleted uranium rounds that were shot at tanks that have now radiated into the air and caused leukemia levels to skyrocket in Iraq.  We as Americans are happy we won the war, but we don’t want to see…at all, at what cost.

Another example may be voting for socialist ideals/candidates, but when shifted slightly we see how ridiculous it is.  For example lets say we put into practice socialist ideals when it comes to body parts.  How do you figure you ask?  Say someone is born blind or with two bad kidneys.  A socialist would say that all should be equal and what would be fair is to take one of my/your eyes/kidneys and give it to the unfortunate person.  Why this clashes so much with reality is that as beings and owning our own body we inherently understand self-ownership and “human rights”.   Yet when we impose taxes, by force of imprisonment at the barrel of a gun, taxes by the way represent US and OUR time and effort, we’re stealing from people what inherently belongs to them.  We’ve made it ok though because we’re ok with taking from those who can’t protect themselves from the very beginning.  Thus back to spanking.

When a child is spanked we are taking away from them.  We’re enforcing our will on them and they are helpless to prevent it.  We green light this form of punishment as a society and so it should come as no surprise that we also roll over/accept later on in life as adults that it is ok for our government to take away from us without us being able to do anything about it.

The good news is that spanking is slowly going away.  In the LDS church we often talk about and are taught that the family is the nucleus of the home and society in general.  What we allow or don’t allow in our homes will inevitably trickle down to our local, state, and federal governments.  If we want to stop being exorbitantly taxed then we must stop the rampant inequitable punishment that is occurring within our own four walls.

As info on tax revenue and fiscal health on a state basis see the following for a paradigm shifting experience.  The following 7 states don’t have a state income tax (HUGE amounts of extra income):

·                       Alaska

·                       Florida

·                       Nevada

·                       South Dakota

·                       Texas

·                       Washington

·                       Wyoming

The 5 states in the best fiscal condition from 1^st to 5^th are as follows:

Alaska (no state income tax), South Dakota (no state income tax), North Dakota (shale oil boom currently), Nebraska, and Wyoming (no state income tax).

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/17/state-in-the-worst-fiscal-condition-is/

You would think that the states that didn’t have all this extra revenue in the form of state income tax would be at the bottom of the list, but indeed they flush out the top three out of five spots.  To me it just shows that these states are showing restraint and are much more careful with their funds then those that have much more abundantly.

The last paradigm-shifting thing I’ve come across is marijuana and the war on drugs.  For years I’ve been told it is the worst thing ever and makes potheads and kills your brain cells.  While this may be the case I also know that alcohol alone kills 4 times as many people as all the users of drugs each year.  I know that the number of deaths from marijuana are almost 0 in the United States whereas I know the number of deaths from cigarettes and the cancer they cause is astronomical.  Were you to ask someone though which one is safer they’d tell you that a cigarette definitely is over a marijuana cigarette.  They’d be wrong. 

I wonder what other things I’ll come across that I think are ok and good and normal or are bad and evil are quite the reverse.

Share with me what paradigm shifting things you've learned about recently.