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Guest Post: Evil And The State
The next in a continuing series (most recently: The Nature and Origin of the State).
Submitted by Free Radical
Evil and the State
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil. – Thomas Paine
If the state is “an evil inflicted on men by men,” yet the preservation of society nonetheless “justifies the action of the organs of the state,” then the inescapable conclusion is that the state is indeed “a necessary evil.”
But how can this be? How can this or any other evil be necessary without rendering evil itself necessary? And if evil itself is necessary, then what of right and wrong, and thus of human morality? For surely the necessity of evil renders human morality null and void, as any action, no matter how heinous, can therefore be justified. Law is then whatever anyone who has the power to back it up says it is; might then makes right; and the state, which is inherently an instrument of might, is then the only legitimate authority, never mind that legitimacy itself is rendered null and void.
To escape this travesty of reason, then, we must show that however inevitable it might be, evil can never be necessary, which we can only do by defining what evil, broadly speaking, is. And we do so by (1) acknowledging the primordial fact that being is, (2) intuiting from this the primordial value that being is good, and (3) acting on the resultant impulse that more being is better. For from these it follows that (1) less being is bad, (2) nonbeing is worst of all,i and (3) evil is therefore that which fosters one of the other.
Understood in this way, it is clear that evil has no existence apart from being and the goodness thereof and is instead derivative of them. Thus did Augustine of Hippo, for example, argue against the
… conception of evil as an independent reality and power coeternal with good. … Evil, he taught, has no independent existence, but is always parasitic upon good, which alone has substantial being. ii
Co-eternity, after all, would mean one of two things: Either mutual dependence – in which case good would need evil as much as evil needed good – or mutual independence – in which case evil would have substantial being and thus the same ontological validity as good. Thus would evil either be as necessary as good or as “good” as good, leaving human morality in the lurch regardless (e.g., I steal because I need to or because it’s as “good” as honest work), leaving civil society in the lurch as well.
For human morality to be preserved, then, and thus the basis for civil society, we must assert, with Augustine, that evil cannot be co-eternal with good but must be parasitic upon it. And as we have already established that the state, having no existence beyond that which it is able to extract from (the good(s) of) society, is similarly parasitic, we can only conclude that because the state is evil, it cannot be necessary. It follows, then, that while the state is indeed “an evil inflicted on men by men,” the preservation of society in no way “justifies the action of the organs of the state.” Instead, it justifies whatever action society deems necessary to diminish – and ultimately eradicate – the state.
And as this includes the so-called “democratic” state, it is to this most insidious form of evil that we turn in my next submission: “Democracy and Its Contradictions.”
i To argue that nonbeing is better is simply to take nihilism to its logical extreme – i.e., to “believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.” Such belief is therefore not only antisocial but antihuman, anti-life, and anti-existence.
ii The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, New York, 1967, Vol. 3, pp. 136 and 137.
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I think it's the cnbc producers, but I'm not sure
p.s. i forgot to add : my 92 year uncle told me (unprompted) that he feels that the anti-christ is walking the earth. he says he feels it, as he felt it during the 1930's.
"THE US WILL FALL UNDER THE WEIGHT OF IT'S OWN EVIL."
The purpose of government is to secure the rights inherent in all men. Any other use of government, unless freely granted, is unjust. The question is, where do rights come from?
Either they are bestowed on us by our Creator or they are conveniences of man. If there is no God, then might makes right, as there is no completely objective way to determine rights.
A "right" in that case can only be created by someone or something in power. If that person / people / government changes, those "rights" can change.
Meaning they were never rights at all.
The only way a right can truly pre-exist the government, be universal, and be permanent is if the rights are gifts of God. I believe they are.
If not, then no decision is any more just than any other. I can save 1 million people or annihilate them. There would be no moral difference. You might not like it, but if I had the power to do so, I could and be completely "moral" in doing so.
The other problem with the authors point of view is in his misunderstanding of the phrase "necessary evil". Even a good and just government is a necessary evil. Meaning that the government as it exists now may be fine. But it can only protect our rights (our true, God-granted rights) if it has been delegated power. That power makes it dangerous in the hands of imperfect man.
It is that risk, that danger, that makes it a "necessary evil".
With a Christian (or at least a theistic) world-view, the solution is quite simple. And it is the reasoning used by the Founding Fathers. Without it, it requires mental gymnastics that ultimately take you to nihilism and despair (as in the author's case).
This logical journey, of course, doesn't prove the existence of God, but it does demonstrate a fundamental (and scary) implication for an atheistic world-view
I don't think I could disagree more. I have rights just because I am here and am willing to assert them. No ghost stories required. Just a small bit of rational thought and the rights get recognized equally both in and by those around me. Now the only problem is how to secure them. We don't need to do the experiment of "and now insert an existential threat and see how the mice in the cage respond."
So true.
"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." - Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
And the support for your tautological argument is....?
So much easier to junk than to engage.
Taking ghosts and spaghetti monsters out of the equation, at what point in evolutionary history did man acquire rights simply as a reward for existing?
Do other less-evolved simians have rights? If not, why not? If so, aren't you offended by zoos?
What about lemurs?
Etc.?
Do protozoa have rights?
If we evolve to become X-Men, will non-mutants have rights?
By your logic (rights as a function of existence), either all along the evolutionary chain have rights, or the most evolved have rights (i.e., might makes right). That is in essence your argument.
In other words, you had better become a vegan (or even an air-atarian) or accept that might makes right. Your argument leaves no other logical outcome.
I didn't junk you. I only junk people who advertise their services in threads.
I will not bother to engage your silly arguments about animal rights, protozoan rights, etc. Humans have rights.
I'm having a little trouble with your use of the word "logic" and/or any of its derivatives. Your invocation of a higher being called a "god" makes it impossible for you to argue anything based on logic or the lack of it. God-worshippers are ruled by emotion, not by fact. Logic, to thinking people, is restricted to use by other thinking people who live their lives based on logically derived best-available factual information. I am willing to stipulate that this state of the art of knowledge evolves, and the thing we call "truth" evolves with it. Religion, on the other hand, is anti-evolutionary, stipulating that facts are irrelevant.
Junk comment withdrawn.
Easier to refuse to debate over an assertion than to engage.
All you have said is humans have rights (but presumably, since it is "silly", animals do not). Why? Who makes that determination? Is it inherent? Why? Again, your argument is tautological. (And whether I am logical or not is irrelevant. You have stated you are a logical thinking person. I think the onus is on you to resolve the tautological statement).
My question is valid, whether or not God (or god or a ghost or a flying spaghetti monster) exists. If men have rights, there must be a reason. Why not apes? How did you come to the logical conclusion that men have rights? You have only stated that it is so.
I'm sure your logical, thinking mind can overcome my emotionally-addled assertion. Have at it. It would be nice to think rights are inherent, but I fail to see how.
As Emperor Josef said to Mozart, "You are passionate, but you do not persuade."
You are missing my point entirely. You have no rights you are not willing to assert. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this does not equate to "might makes right." Negating man's rights negates man's existence to meaninglessness. Claiming that man's rights come from some external source quickly degenerates into the state claiming that man's rights are granted to him by the state, and the religious people claiming they come from a ghost story, and the whole thing collapses into a bidding war for who will steal my rights from me, the religious right or the socialist left, since I don't have any rights to start with. I reject the premise.
Many of us do not need an external mystical influence to find meaning in life. I can assert that I have free will, and you can say you got yours from the flying spaghetti monster. The most important point is this: the purpose of religion is to stifle debate and close minds, and man achieves only when he uses his rational self as a guide. Reason does not need to degenerate into nihilism. However, no gods are required.
I've spent enough time on the internet and elsewhere in debates to recognize a bottomless pit when I see one. You might enjoy that, I no longer do. If you want to claim that means you "win", then go ahead and claim that and tell your friends at church you won an internet argument. I choose not to base my humanity on a story that was designed to not be challenged and to be unverifiable.
Why are we here? The fact that we are here is enough. When my government is in the middle of an accelerated degeneration into a fascist surveillance state run by a totally corrupt oligarchy, I am not going to waste time arguing with you about the origin of my rights. Am I worried that you might convince me I don't have any? Not at all; I am sure I do.
No worries. I agree you have rights. In fact, I would argue you have these rights even if you do not assert them.
I agree the governmental actions are a problem, but I think you may have trouble saying why their corruption is a problem if you don't know why you have rights that are violated by their corruption.
Just saying you do is a weak foundation. It would be in your interest to think about it in preparation for when the fascists use the greater good argument against you.
I'm not saying you have to justify yourself to me. You don't owe me that. Neither do you need to support your assertion that I am emotional and unthinking. Nor do you need to support your assertion that the purpose of religion is to stifle debate and close minds.
You may make all the baseless assertions you wish. But I do wonder if you are quite the intellectual you imagine yourself to be.
Your logical arguments consist of stating opinions.
Still that is your right.
Negating man's rights negates man's existence to meaninglessness.
Did you miss that?
Your logical arguments consist of stating opinions.
All philosophical arguments begin from a premise that is little, if any more than an opinion. That is the problem with getting one's self tied up in philosophical debates. They are endless and circular. If pursued to their extreme they become nihilistic, don't they? We both begin with a premise: human life has meaning. You feel the need to tie that meaning to some higher power, as if man himself is incapable of individually understanding it for himself. I completely reject that premise. Yours is illogical because it cannot be proven or disproven. As such it constitutes an irrational belief system, summed up in the bumper sticker "Jesus said it, I believe it, and that settles it." Mine is subject to discussion and may or may not stand the test of time and debate. Which is more (il)logical?
The fascists have been using the greater good argument for decades, even centuries. So have the religionists. Both argue, as I pointed out above, that rights come from somewhere and are therefore subject to external and unwarranted arbitration, granting, suspension. I can give up my rights, or I can demonstrate that I am incapable of handling them by demonstrating my inability to conscientiously avoid harming others. But until I do that I have them, and since no one gave them to me, no one can take them away without my consent.
Your god and the state are mirror images of each other. Each demand subservience and promise rewards for it. Both use fear and guilt to achieve compliance. Capital L Liberalism is little more than a substitute religion. For most people, fear is the prime motivator in their lives. When you release your fear, which most seem incapable of doing, the world stops being such a scary place and you no longer feel the need to belong to something larger than yourself. And by belong, I mean in the sense that you align your inner self with the group; this is required by religions and by governments. The difference, in the West at least, is the level of willingness to use force to gain compliance. In the West, religions merely cast you out and damn your soul for eternity. Government will kill you.
In the East, both government and religion will kill you for failure to comply. The goals are the same, and the methods differ only slightly. You can keep them both.
You state that you have rights because you assert them. If someone were to assert rights which are in conflict with yours how would this be arbitrated?
You state that you have rights because you assert them.
No I didn't. I stated I have rights because I am here, and I only have the ones I am willing to assert. I mean in practice.
I would propose to you that the rights you claim to have because you exist are the rights you can conceive of intending to assert in the future. Hence for the purpose of theoretical discussion about theoretical events they are identical.
Which rights would you claim to possess by your existence would you then also never conceive of exercising? Why would you rule out the exercise of those right?
SWR - perhaps "might defends right?"
it'd be nice not to have to work to keep what we have/own, but it's clear that things of value are targets of convenience.
gotta keep it inconvenient.
Dude, first of all, he is totally right about theists operating out of emotion. I used to be among your ranks; I know how it is.
"All you have said is humans have rights (but presumably, since it is "silly", animals do not). Why? Who makes that determination? Is it inherent?"
Well, yes, it is inherent. Until you see a herd of dutch-belted cows protesting at city hall for bovine suffrage, you won't see cows with the same rights as people.
There is just something about humans that makes us a different kind of animal. Art, music, architecture, science, philosophy, and Zero Hedge can all be thought of as symptoms of this disease.
The question as to whether or not G-d exists...is impossible to answer. You can't prove he does or doesn't. You can't prove he is a he. You can't prove that Scientology isn't the one true religion. You just can't because there is no way of falsifying these claims. You cannot experimentally verify any of it. Therefore, in order to adopt it into your worldview, you must believe in it.
"If men have rights, there must be a reason."
Which brings us back to the beginning. We have rights because we assert them.
Saying you have rights because you assert them is the definition of tautology. It is because I say it is.
The problem with that, and the requirement to assert the rights is problematic in and of itself. A mentally handicapped person cannot assert his rights. Does he have none? I think that approach has been tried before.
As to there being "something about humans", that is subjective at best. Suppose we evolve telepathic abilities. Could we not just as well say, there is "something about telepaths" that makes us special. Those mere humans just don't cut it and cannot be considered to have the same rights as we do.
It really is no different than your comment about humans.
On the other hand, your approach is more elegant. I have decided to assert that I am right and you are wrong. Now you may not state otherwise, without violating my right. You must agree it is my right. I have asserted it.
Your argument is circular. You have stated it as a fact, and your proof is that you have stated it.
On a side note, if you are no longer among the ranks of theists, why do you write "G-d"? Hardly seems necessary. Just curious.
Men have rights to the extent that they recognize the rights of others. Same for animals (they don't), protozoa (they don't), and little green men (hopefully they do). Animals have rights against other animals to the extent that they defend them. A boar has a right to his terretory in that he will charge you to defend it. But the boar does not recognize our rights, so there is no reason for us to recognize his, and our superior weapons win the day.
Same thing happened with North American natives, sadly. Had they recognized property rights, they would never have degenerated into tribalism, nor would they have been wiped out by white settlers. The same goes for the Aztecs, who recognized property rights, but failed to recognize a person's self ownership (when they kidnapped warriors and children from nearby nations/villages for murder, which raised a great deal of resentment, whcih the conquistadores used to conquer the whole of the land).
Yes, I have thought long and hard on this. I have also thought on the rights of children. These are posessed by the parent until such time as the child claims those rights for thier own. This allows a child to claim their own rights in the face of an abusive parent as soon as they are able to articulate those rights.
You clearly have thought about this, and it is far more persuasive than someone stamping their feet and saying "It just is!".
I'll put more thought in on this as it is thought-provoking. I think though that you are describing 2 things at different points. 1) voluntary cooperation (the right is a reward for that cooperation), and 2) might makes right (in the case of animals).
Voluntary cooperation is beneficial, but still seems a bit tenuous. I think a right should be universal, and independent of my cooperation. The penalty seems problematic. At what point in not recognizing your right do I lose mine?
What if I do not recognize your right to property, but don't do anything about it? Do I lose my right to property? Do I lose it to everyone, or only to you? What if I speak out against your right to property (using my right to free speech)? Do I lose my right to property? Do I lose my right to free speech? Can anyone rob me or shut me up? Can you? Do I lose all my rights?
I think your ideas come closer to what's correct, but are still too pragmatic and situational (at least as far as I understand your point). I think rights are universal to all. Someone may abuse the rights of others, but still has rights himself. However, a group of people (whether an individual, a gang, or a government) may see the need to prevent further violations which would necessitate action against the perpetrator (violating his rights).
It's not merely semantic. I think the rights are always there, and may be forfeited, but are rights nonetheless. They pre-exist the cooperation you claim as the source of the rights. I guess our difference is I think you are describing the effect of the rights, not their cause.
If the rights are a result of cooperation, then they could be expanded to any items so long as there is cooperation, could they not? Socialistic ideas could be a right so long as there were agreement. Sounds more like a contract than a right.
I would argue that rights are independent and require no action on the part of any others. They may be forfeited (practically-speaking) if I do not recognize your rights, but I had those rights before I ever met you. (Sorry this is somewhat rambling. I'm thinking aloud).
Still, your idea is well-stated and worth further thought. I don't agree, but you make some very strong points.
you should look further into it, Anonymouse. society has to be organized so that the right of the individual to own himself is inviolable. anything short of that gives those who would use it the lever they need to live off the labor of others. government by a coercive agency is not axiomatic, but as long as we believe it is, slavery will be.
I think the rights are always there, and may be forfeited, but are rights nonetheless. They pre-exist the cooperation you claim as the source of the rights.
In other words, it just is. See?
At what point do you lose yours? Well, you don't really. Not among humans at least. Humans generally recognize that humans both have and recognize rights. This is why we don't eat catatonic people, even if they are little more than meat.
Of course, you lose some rights when you commit aggression. This is the principle behind judicial penalties, like prison time, fines, and execution (justified or not). This is generally well defined. If you find yourself among alien beings who have never known or met a human before, you will need to be more careful. If you violate their rights, you might wind up as food, or as a victim of pest control. Once they recognize that humans are sentient and productive, they will likely incorporate us into their own rights structure, meaning both humans and aliens would be considered to have inherent rights in the eyes of the participants from either race. Such beings might have access to rights that we wouldn't understand (imagine multi-dimensional beings that require extra space apart from what we perceive as their bodies in order to move), or might not have some of the rights we recognize (such as territory--imagine a race of nomads of any fantastic description).
Socialistic ideas can NOT be a right, because they inevitably involve force against those who do not wish to cooperate. Volunteer organizations can carry out socialistic agendas, like ensuring access to food and education, and they do it very well, because they respect the rights of all.
Nice job on summarization though. I like you you termed them cooperative rights and defensive rights.
This discussion could be a breakthrough in terms of the nature and source of rights.
It's a good discussion. Not that I expect to resolve it here, but it is interesting.
I would point out that your alien scenario didn't work out so well in "Mars Attacks"
flawed logic, the premise is, nonetheless, more truth than the history taught down at the local public forum for government indoctrination.
This is a silly post. Don't try to take an idiom/cliche/metaphor and try to analyze the words literally. Government bureaucracy is amoral, not evil. The people running it or the policies can certainly be evil, however.
Government is based on force of arms and coercsion. For you to have your precious government someone else has to lose their rights. That is the source of the evil that flows from the state. It always starts out with good intentions but eventually devolves into an ugly monster like what we have today. You can't have something based on violence grow up and flower into a cuddly bunny. What inevitably happens is it turns into a beast and consumes everything within reach.
Poorly designed systems will inevitably turn its participants evil. See the Stanford Prison Experiment for details as to how the process works.
This is spot on... The state is an unnecessary evil. All governments are based on coercsion and therefore start out and end in a moral gutter.
This is second rate political analysis. Barbara Tuchman had it right years ago, "What is government but an arrangement whereby the many accept the authority of the few?" If it is evil, then the many stop accepting that authority, pace Egypt. The obvious point is that in most places at most times, this transfer of authority is made because the many need the functionality provided by the state. Our political and economic lives are very complex and the state that provides the context for their realization. It was Cardinal Richelieu, the great stateman under Louis XIII, who first invented the modern state, and whether we like all aspects of what he came up with, it has been with us ever since. Nor is it going anywhere.
People don't realize that the use of aggressive force on others is NEVER good. Initiation of aggression is ALWAYS evil.
Yes, let run with this logic. Humans are aggressive animals by nature, therefore they are evil by nature, evil can never be tolerated not even for "the greater good". So the only moral thing to do is exterminate humanity, other animals are also aggressive so we should probably exterminate them first before we turn the lights out on ourselves.
See, I can make fucking stupid arguements from idiotic twisted logic too!
no, you just make stupid fucking arguments.
Your logic wasn't twisted, you just started from a false assumption. Humans are among the least aggressive animals on the planet.
When you base an argument on faulty assumptions, you get a faulty logical outcome.
Marx was a smart guy, but he started from a faulty assumption, and he wound up causing tens of millions of deaths (at least). He posited two types of people, proletariat and bourgeoisie, or rich and poor. This was not the case, as people traded places from being rich to poor and vice versa quite often. If he had started with two types of people, savers and borrowers, he would have revealed a great deal more about history, and would have derived Austrian Economics. I would suggest you read fofoa's article on the subject: http://fofoa.blogspot.com/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
It is the nature of Apes to fight over bananas; and Women.
Define "apes", then define "fighting". After that, cite case evidence from the wild.
Pretty sure you are just making baseless assertions.
Great to be reminded of first principles
Democratic societies make laws based on a collective conscience. If these laws are not good for the people and/oris not applied equally than that society will break down.
There is no such thing as a collective conscience. Laws are nothing more than the majority who participate in their enslavement being able to tell everyone else how to live. It's violent, evil, and ugly. The reason some people enjoy it so thoroughly is that they feel less guilty than if they were to perform the violence directly themselves.
That's idiotic. So all laws are there to enslave? There are no good laws? Anarchy does not work either.
Worked for hundreds of years in Somalia.
As we have a seperation of church and state, those who followed the system of law known as Xeer seperated state, church and law. This prevented the state from co-opting the law for it's own gains. Without that ability, no central authority could ever be established, and any attempts to do so from the outside were doomed to failure.
I'm really pimping this link today, but I really like what I see there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeer
According to our Founding Fathers:
George Washington: It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.
Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.
"The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." --Thomas Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy, "Political Economy," 1816. ME 14:465
Fifth: The Constitution was designed to work with only a moral and righteous people. “Our constitution,” said John Adams (first vice-president and second president of the United States), “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 7
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison proposed the plan to divide the central government into three branches. He discovered this model of government from the Perfect Governor, as he read Isaiah 33:22;
“For the LORD is our judge,
the LORD is our lawgiver,
the LORD is our king;
He will save us.”
Thus defining the 3 branches of government.
Either that, or he knew he could stifle debate and gain alignment by encouraging people to turn off their rational brains and go with their emotions.
Great thinking, while your at it why don't a golf ball and create an entire universe out of it.
Sad day when quotes from the Founders get junked.
it's your selective bias (pro-god) in your post. they also said many things about the inherent nature of our rights. where are those quotes?
this is where i diverge from my agreement with glenn beck. good man, many many many good points and contributions to understanding today's mess and threats. but there is no need for a god or any of 'his' books or quotes (written by who?) to justify 'natural' co-respect and common law precepts.
they were human (fallible), passionate, generally aligned against a common enemy/cause. Even the 'bogus' arguments in the 'correct' bias were embraced. nothing new here (e.g. todays' same-sex partners will gladly surrender to a liberal nightmare for their right to be as they are - an example, not a judgment.)
founding father or not, the 'rightness' of his belief does not indicate and 'rightness' in his argument.
FWIW, I don't think the junkers were junking the FFs... cheap appeal to emotion in an otherwise interesting discussion.
(read the federalist papers if you want proof that today's arguments about 'the way it should be' are pretty much old-hat in the big scheme. go back to aristotle/socrates if you really care to be convinced.)
+1. It is "logical" for men to respect each other's rights, as the alternative is the strife that results from not respecting them. Call it enlightened self interest. My rights are more easily asserted when I respect the rights of others, as I spend less time in combat.
Tolerence/respect is implied as it is part of Christianity; however, the topic was the setting up of laws for a society and I gave ample proof of the foundations for our country. The Constitution starts out with "We The People" and rights to first individuals; second gives states freedoms to act within it's bounds, and third to the federal government. These are obviously being reversed. Again, the intent of the Constitution was to give the highest amount of power to the individual. Ever notice when government steps in and gives rights to one group of individuals it takes away the rights of others.
we are in agreement on that.
i would assert that if, in the last sentence of your above post, you change the word 'government' to 'religion' (as practiced, not necessarily written), that the statement would still hold true.
any organized religion is government. period. and as-often-as-not, it isn't *really* a voluntary choice to participate.
i've got no problem with the bible as an inspired guide to co-existence. i'm sure the koran is rich with such wisdom too... it's merely the priest who guides and controls the conversation/policies that scares the shit outta' me.
it's when those in power believe that we *all* have to play by *their* rules, "or it won't work", that we start to see that *their* rules must be inherently flawed, and perhaps their agenda isn't so pure.
Agreed, the Founders shared this fear as most if not all had experience with a Theocracy. While they permitted the states to declare an individual relgion they did not allow the Federal government to do so. I think they had the same differences on Church organization we do today, what they did not disagree on was the Ten Commandments and the wholesome characteristics taught in the bible.
It is a fine line, we are not walking it well.
good thoughts.
Q: did the founders see the 10 commandments as guidelines or policy?
i assume our answers would differ on that.
and to that question, there was not nearly so much agreement amongst them as you imply.
the goal of self-governance was not fought to surrender their hard-earned freedom to a bishop or his equivalent. rather, it was so they *could* surrender it, if that was their personal want.
cheers
I like your link TM.
My personal definition of evil is stupidity.
Stupid is evil.
Evil is stupid.
Love it. Complex multicellular organisms arguing against complex multi-cellular societies. Suck it up and quit whining. Good and bad are the primordial biological binary code of attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken, but there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Life is a bootstrapping process of creation and consumption and the vast majority of you whiners are doing better than ninety percent of the other humans on this planet. Just wait until Mexico completely implodes and see how many of you bitch about the government not stopping them from bringing those guns we sold them back across the border and robbing good Americans, Dammit!
Morality is a complex code by which groups of individuals co-exist. It is the unwritten social contract, of which government is the physical construct. Read some history, biology, science, etc. and get your heads out of your asses.
"Morality is a complex code... of which government is the physical construct."
Are you able to prove this? I don't think so.
I have a theory that history supports conclusively. Civilization was getting along just fine, people were able to find peaceful ways to resolve disputes (see medieval Iceland for a recent example), and then these gangs showed up, saw easy pickings and set themselves up as "protectors." Written history is pretty much a chronicle of gang wars, theft, murder and fraud.
What is needed is for civilization to recognize these gangs for what they are and create new organizations based on mutual associations, not force, to defend it from these gangs.
This article is an attempt to realize the first step.
""Morality is a complex code... of which government is the physical construct."
Are you able to prove this? I don't think so."
"What is needed is for civilization to recognize these gangs for what they are and create new organizations based on mutual associations, not force, to defend it from these gangs."
Why bother. You are doing it for me.
Between black and white are not just shades of gray, but all the colors of the spectrum.
slavery pretty much doesn't care about your spectrum. but you are doing a good job obfuscating that, so keep up the good work, your owners really appreciate it (they really don't give a shit, but i thought a little encouragement for you would be nice.)
*edit* oh, and i knew that you could not prove your assertion. its just an assumption you made, an assumption that continues to enslave us. thanks.
Jeez, I don't mean to pop your bubble here, but civilization was largely built on slavery. And while concern for others right may have led the charge against slavery, it likely wouldn't have succeeded without the energy of an industrial economy which found forced human labor inefficient. It's likely that much of the items we import from other countries were manufactured in conditions we would consider to be slavery, with only the thinnest veneer of legality.
People cooperate within their social, cultural and national systems. When it behooves those controlling those systems to extract something from an external source, they don't have much trouble convincing their fellow citizens to go along.
Government has the same two tools as any other organization; Hope and fear. If said organization provides you with hope, it's viewed as good. When it coerces you with fear, it's evil. People like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. do what they do because they give enough people hope, that those people are willing to instill fear in other people.
If someone is telling you that generic "government" is "evil," they are trying to control you. It makes as much sense as saying a rock is evil. It depends on what it is being used for.
There is always a balance between polarities. If a little of something is good, lots of it isn't necessarily that much better and dark clouds often have silver linings, even if it's just rain.
If you don't think morality is an evolved social and cultural code that expresses itself as the collective institutions we build in order to co-exist, where do you think it all came from?
The basic problem with saying it's all thanks to God, is that this creates an enormous cudgel for those who do hold power, as they can say it must be God's will they have this power, so you have no right to question God and they can do whatever they want, since it's God's will they have this power. It is what is known as The Divine Right of Kings and George Bush used that logic to explain his actions. Unfortunately, given his level of naivete, this made Dick Cheney God.
thank you for the well considered reply. i disagree that in this question, that balancing between polarities is desirable. this is all about black and white. if a person is not allowed to fully own his life, then he is either partially or fully enslaved. i admit there is a practical difference between being partially or fully enslaved, but is there any philosophical difference? if those that would claim ownership over an individual, accord him some freedom, that really just signifies that he is wholy their slave. its like being pregnant, one is either free, or one is not. balancing between polarities, in this case, is just about different degrees of enslavement.
and no i do not think that morality is an evolved social and cultural code. values, traditions, etc, are, but not morality. In War and Peace, the protagonist searches over nearly 1000 pages to find out where the sense of right and wrong comes from. he finally concludes that we are just born with it, all of us.
the most basic natural law, and the only natural law, if you think about it, is that no man may own another. those who would prefer to live by the labor of others, instead of their own, would have us believe that the collective has some claim on our labor and our lives. they must convince us of this to legitimize their theft of our labor.
but its a hoax. the collective can have no claim on the individual, because the collective is made up of individuals, and no single one of them can have a claim on the life or labor of another. as a group they accrue no additional rights. they do not become "more" equal.
there is no evidence that society needs the state to be viable. there is no evidence that society was not flourishing already before the first gang came along and set itself up as the state. the state is and has always been a tool used by the elites to control and enslave the common. whether in ancient Egypt or the modern US, the state doesn't exist to protect the citizens, it exist to exploit and control the citizens for the elites. the whole idea that the state is a natural part of civilization is a hoax.
It's not just the "state." We are defined by our limitations and limited by our definitions. None of us are wholy autonomous, nor are any of us totally controlled. Remember it was Marx who said that the state would wither away if the workers owned the means of production. Without some binding social contract, it leaves that much space for the warlords to take over and they have been around since Tyrannasorus Rex's were chasing around tryceritops(sp). The fact is that when the pie is big and growing, society is more generous and the governing systems more benevolent. It's a matter of physics, more than sociology.
Any society need public spaces and private spaces, much like a house has personal areas and family areas.
Groups of monkeys have hierarchies. When was this magical time when we all just picked berries and sang around the campfire, with no pecking order?
It not like I don't want to believe it never was, but my suspicion is that life has always been a bit unfair and a struggle, with winners and losers. And when the system gets unstable, it collapses, to the detriment of most and takes a long time to build back up again.
Not to say life doesn't have its joys, but the price we pay for being able to feel in the first place is that much of it is pain.
nonetheless, there is no justice where all men are not equal, and the only way for all men to be equal is that none may forcibly own any part of another. hierarchies will evolve in any society, it is the freedom to walk away from an unsatisfactory hierarchy that differentiates slavery from freedom.
there is no way to prove that society needs common areas. it is much easier to prove that common areas detract from society. nothing that is worth having is not worth paying for, even if your payment is only suffering through some advertising, which is how radio and over the air TV fund themselves.
life is unfair, but human society does not have to be. it only is now because people continually apologize for the slavers and say "its the way its always been, its the only way it can be!!" i hope you realize how much effort you are spending justifying the enslavement of the human race.
*edit* plus it is fallacious to assume that in the absence of a state, society could not codify norms, morals, standards, etc. if government provides X and then government is gone, where do we get X? whether X is shoes, water, or defense of rights, there are other ways that society can provide it without granting one agency the right to use force.
It really is a bit more complicated than that. "All men are created equal" sounds great, but is it reality? Reminds me of the old saying,: God didn't create men equal, Sam Colt did. Presumably, all men are equal in front of the law, but that, dear sir, is a function of government. God manifestly doesn't create us all equal. Whatever that would mean to a God anyway.
As for society doesn't need common spaces, does it occur to you that we have a system of public roads? There are times and places where the roads are private, or reserved for the privileged and most definitely people are not treated equally in their use of them. Now, some states are starting to sell their highways to investors to turn into toll roads. Maybe the one you use to drive to work might fall in that category and you can have the privilege of experiencing a commons being privatized. Would you like your God given equality arbitrated in a private court system?
I could go more into the nature of how reality is a function of its limits creating definitions, which we then try to expand, but you don't seem too open to anything which might detract from your vision of utopia. Hope you find it though.
its not more complicated than that. the only thing that complicates it is the vile leviathan that you erroneously believe upholds the law. its not about reality, its about truth. the truth is that we all have the right to own ourselves. do you realize when you argue against that, you are arguing for slavery?
you are the close minded one my friend. i had to cast off all the beliefs that you still hold to see the truth. yes i would like to drive on private roads. yes i would much rather take my chances with a private arbiter.
those who cannot understand will resort to mockery and derision. i have not mocked you.
You think one cell in your body tells all the others what to do?
*Belly laugh*
Let me guess. You think the "queen" of an ant colony tells all the others what to do, too. That's knee smacking funny right there.
Here's a hint for you--simple rules produce positive outcomes for all those who follow them. Make yourself a government with a law code that stretches literally millions of pages, and what do you think you get?
uh, confusion? injustice? special treatment? contradictions? uh... how about a whole class of clones created & maintained to interpret all the bullshit - for a nice fee? uh, let's see... what else? a self-perpetuating sytem that feeds those that can afford to pay for it? a little help, fellas... I know I must have missed at least one....
No more than there is a single seat of consciousness in the brain. Which is a field effect of the right brain parallel processor weighing options and the left serial processor navigating trajectories. Just as in organic politics, where the optimal options tend to rise to the occasion. The problem now is that we have this tendency towards absolutist belief systems, which are not very flexible and tend toward narrow mindsets that become ever more brittle. So rather than gradual evolution, our political processes tend toward stagnation, punctuated by occasional explosions.
Bottom up energy motivates and is defined by top down order. When the energy fades, the shell of order implodes. When the energy exceeds the order, it explodes.
" Make yourself a government with a law code that stretches literally millions of pages, and what do you think you get?"
One which is likely to implode. On the other hand, if it's a biological organism and we are talking dna, it could be quite stable. The reality is that our sociological evolution is a few hundred million years behind our biological evolution.
I must have missed the day in biology when they explained how the brain creates DNA.
Oh wait, it doesn't. DNA is more analogous to individual people's brains. There is no centralized center that controls all the cells in the body. Such control is not possible. The cells work together on their own. This is the same way that ant colonies work. The ants aren't forced to go gather food, or to tend to the young. They just do, and they do it in an amazingly efficient manner, more efficiently in fact than is even possible with central planning.
Hey, you're getting it. That's why life is bottom up, with good and bad, ie. attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, is the binary code. The elementary on/off switches of our subconscious. In single organisms and small group societies, there is pretty efficient feedback between brain cells and say, hand or foot cells. Now we are trying to develop those feedback loops in ever larger groups of people and it's taking several millennia to make any real progress, which is actually quite fast in evolutionary terms. Obviously there are lots of dead ends and cancerous mutations on the way. We seem to be headed towards a particularly serious contraction, but hopefully in the grand scheme of things, it's more of the end of the beginning for humanity and not the beginning of the end.
Morality is a complex code--? Do unto to other as you would have them do unto you--is a complex code??? I would suggest you gather your thought together before posting. I further would suggest you might want to consider where your head seems to be located. MIlestones
If it were only that simple. People and all life forms, are always going to be looking for that slight edge. Jesus said to turn the other cheek, but he still went after the money changers with a big stick and got crucified for it. There is always going to be the push and the pushback. We exist because of this disequilibrium, otherwise it would be a big flatline on the universal heart monitor.
Without motion, nothing exists. With motion, nothing exists forever. Death is nature's way of pushing the reset button, yet for us, it's evil.
One of the few quotations I remember:
From Plato's The Trial of Socrates;
"Fear of death is a pretense of wisdom and false wisdom at that, as it is a pretense of knowing the unknown. For who knows what men in their fear believe to be the greatest evil, may not in fact be the greatest good."
Our lives start in the future and fade into the past, but the essence of life moves onto the next generation, much like the day fades away, as the sun moves onto tomorrow.
The spirit is the essence, not the ideal.
can you do book 7 of the Republic(!)? please?
the cave thingy? it's tough for me, but this lady online puts it this way:
Plato's parable of the cave is a metaphor for ignorance and knowledge. Imagine, says Plato, a cave in which prisoners are chained in such a way that all they can see are shadows thrown on a wall in front of them. All they know of life are these shadows. They would think that these shadows were reality, having known nothing else. If one of them were freed, and allowed to emerge into the daylight, he would see things as they are, and realize how limited his vision was in the cave. He would be quite unwilling to return:
Yet to his fellow-prisoners, he would seem the fool, not they:
I'm not really into Plato and the whole ideal forms thing. It's top down and linear, reality is not so much some path towards enlightenment, as it's a tapestry of crossing paths and highs and lows. We are evolving toward ever more complex organisms and societies, but complexity is like the chicken and simplicity is the egg. It goes in cycles. Now I have to cycle off to work...
When you grow out of the pettiness and narcissism of the juvenile mind and self-image based upon other's perceptions you come out of one of the caves of human ignorance. There are many caves. Once you come out of one of the caves you will never go back because it holds nothing for you beyond reminiscence.
The more caves you come out of the lonelier you get because you aren't part of the "team" anymore. Think of people who leave gangs or families or corporations or religions of their own will. They are no longer part of the culture out of choice and are ostracized as much as not wanting to belong in that particular "cave" anymore.
Escaping the more common memes of human thought and culture is liberating yet lonely and those you leave behind don't understand and think you a fool, a lunatic, the town idiot.
There is a bit of the other side to that though. While those caves had their bloodthirsty gnosticism, rational thought tends to be linear and reductionistic. So instead of being little organisms stewing around in our dark corners, we have been turned into little compasses that point in the direction of greatest attraction. Which currently is that idea that money holds some value beyond its contractual guarantees and so these obligations can be dispensed with. We escape one delusion to fall for another, as there is no law against delusional thinking.
The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell.
The problem with monotheism is that the universal state of the absolute is basis, not apex, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. The proper metaphor would be the child, not the elder. Age simply tempers this primary awareness. Trying to define a moral, intellectual and spiritual ideal simply provides a frame for your particular tribe.
Guess I'm going to hell, but at least they have the brains.
"Brodix" - As in the cyl. head?
Interesting and challenging comment. If you have thought about going to hell, I doubt that would be your final destination when the day arrives. No axe to grind, no pulpit to scream from, just an opinion.
It's my middle name. I know horse racing much better than car racing.
I think that when we die, the bubble pops and we get smeared out across eternity and infinity. That's why I like to keep the surface of my bubble as clear as possible and not covered over with mementos. So that when it pops, there will be fewer surprises.
When this node explodes and the networks snap back into the shadows, whatever of me it takes won't be afraid of the dark. Between the horses and the motorcycles, I've gone through most of my nine lives.
hey, brodix, did the guy who got outa the cave escape into essence? from sumkinda chains? does that work?
Maybe he was attracted to the light and repelled by the dark. That elementary awareness is not always too particular what it's aware of. I work with racehorses and they are very aware, but not too smart.
The state is institutionalised violence. Those who join it voluntarily as it's servants are perpetuating evil. If only a few of these would only be so willing to lay down their lives in not resisting the force of the state, it would soon perish. Resistance only strengthens the actor.
Govt. is a necessary evil. Evils should be kept as small as possible.
Rights must come from an entity above government. Anyone who gives you your rights can also take them away.
bob dylan dreamed he saw st augustine (fr. sing365.com):
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
Searching for the very souls
Who already have been sold.
"Arise, arise", he cried so loud
With a voice without restraint
"Come out ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint
No martyr is among ye now
Whom you can call your own
So go on your way accordingly
But know you're not alone".
I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried.
pretty styooopid, huh?
thomas aquinas, canonized, for some reason, agreed with the hip bish:
Unde, cum sit hoc esse mali, quod est privatio boni, per hoc ipsum quod Deus cognoscit bona, cognoscit etiam mala; sicut per lucem cognoscuntur tenebra... (Summa Theologiae).
pretty much the same as augie, but they had diff. job descriptions.
Wow - thanks for that lucid quote. I'd dang near forgot that one
well, jeez, cosmo, you see the privatio boni, there? that's the "privation of the good", ok? hey, i can't read it, either! go to the greek or the english if you're hungry 4 aquinas. i just put the google on: greek word for sin in the new testament. first pop: The Greek word for sin, ?μαρτ?α, is one of the most common found in the New Testament. From it comes the formal name for the doctrine of sin, Hamartiology.
third pop: There is basically only one Greek word in the New Testament for "Sin": "hamartano" - In the Greek it means: to "miss the mark."
here, again, same idea, i would say. nothing 'evil' in missing the bull's eye, is there? takes practice. ask the zen archer. but, i think if ya shoot bad enough, long enough, or just stop even trying to "shoot straight", you might get a 'cosmic' reputation for BEing a "bad" shot! i think many of the parables are about trying to get the sight(s) aligned to at least hit the side of the freaking barn.
Brodix
TopCallingTroll
Annonomouse-Superb and spot on additions. Love me some arguments against natural rights theory. We do need an article that poses a question to natural rights, althought i haven't read anything better than the points you've raised here. I would love to see all the idiots come out to play in that comment section.
Consider this:
Space in infinite.
Energy is neither made nor destroyed it simply changes form.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The figure 8 of infinity means that the beginning meets the end and the end meets the beginning. Ultimately, evil is good and good is evil.
Schroedingers' cat theory would mean that there are near infinite parallel universes in which everything is completely evil, completely good, and everything inbetween.
The only seperation is time, and the dimension you are currently in.
Enjoy the sunlight on your face tomorrow.
Define space.
Energy can be destroyed by turning it into matter. You you want to postulate a closed system, you must include both.
True enough.
Prove it.
Prove it.
Define time and dimension, but only after you have proved the above.
Pretty cloudy here.
In the intellectual argument about morality, as also in the cabala, there is no room for LOVE. As trite as it may be, it is THE solution.
Please define love, and what impact it has on anything being discussed here. Please be specific.
Sorry TM, a bit late. But you have taken my point-it seems to have no impact on anything being discussed here. But it is the ultimate law given by Christ , amongst other spiritual teachers. Love God, and your neighbour as thyself. Dictionary.com (based on Random House) def #9-"affectionate concern for the well-being of others: the love of one's neighbor"
This article is absolute shit. Evil is evil is evil, and we are surrounded by it, in government, banks, big pharma, corporations in general. The author himself in writing this is an evil cunt, trying to justify the evil we see around us, playing out everyday.
I understand evil banks (mark to magic), the FED, zillion dollar bonuses for extracting the last penny from the middle class.
I undestand evil government ... too many reason to list
I can understand big pharma in pricing a life saving drug at a price 1000x more expensive in the US than in Mexico, precluding Americans from living
But, 'corporations in general' ... this leaves us nothing
yo, pirate ebworthen: that was a pretty cool cat. and, yes, there is dimensionality involved in the meta-physics of this idea of 'evil', i would think, too. but augie and the thom were keepin it 3-D!
tread carefully here, X-bones, if you would, please. are ya sure Schroedinger meant what you say, above, or is it just a subjective opinion that this is the "answer" to good and "evel", which i liked, above.
evel couldn't jump the canyon, but he sure cleaned up launching off the ramp, wasting his rocket-cycle, and pulling the rip-cord! that guy was a pirate to believe in and his orthopods had undying faith in him, esp. after that fabulous wipe out @ caesar's!
and are you sure that the figure-eight REALly means what you say? infinity is a slot car track? sorry, bro. couldn't resist the temptation. isn't infinity more about the nature of time than good and "evel"? or, more appropriately, space-time, i.e., the "fourth dimension", which includes time, and the fifth, which includes all time? i think. shit, i don't know, exactly, but to me, i think of a dog (not a cat, just to be a shithead, myself, for a change(!)) and his master. or her master or mistress, if she's a bitch. let's go w/ a BiCH w/ a bitch, ok?
now, the BiCH and the bitch may understand each other pretty well, sometimes. when the former grabs the leash, the latter knows she is not gonna get schooled for shitting in the house, today! but does the bitch know what the BiCH is thinking? fuk no! NObody knows what a true BiCH is thinking. ever! unless she has a twin. now we're talkin the REAL goodness of BEing, eh? sunshine, indeed! does a lower "dimension" understand one higher. a little, maybe, but we're not talkin mr. ed, here, wilbur.
start with a point. no dimension.
drag the point of the pencil across the paper. you have now created a line, an infinite # of points.
drag the line up the page. you have now created a plane, an infinite # of lines.
drag the plane up off the paper. you have now created a solid, an infinite # of planes.
drag that solid into the 4th dimension, and you have something that is a) pretty hard to grok, and b) about good and "evel", and how they "necessarily" turn into one another? so nothing matters? maybe i'm premature...again. fifth dimension? still not, IMO. how does extra-dimensional geometry display values? as you may conclude, it does not, for me.
roll one for me! i just don't see it. i need all the help i can get! smooth sailing!
"... isn't infinity more about the nature of time than good and "evel"? or, more appropriately, space-time, i.e., the "fourth dimension", which includes time, and the fifth, which includes all time?"
Yes, exactly slewie the pi-rat, thank you.
How can all time contain good and evil? It can only contain both. How can it contain both? They must co-exist in balance. How can they exist in balance across all space-time? By existing in infinite numbers of combinations within each dimension and point in space and in balance.
With balance then, comes the question of "so nothing matters?" There you have the point where light enters the picture. According to Einstein the only way to stop time would be to travel at the speed of light. Some would argue that light is God, Yaweh, etc. Some would argue that light is simply love itself. We could say that light is not darkness or void, and we could then say that the beginning was the light, and the ending was darkness but to begin again there must have been light so there could never truly be void.
If this is the case we should pursue the light and believe that even an infintesimal amount of light is both good and time, that the void and evil (dark) exist to help define the light and give it meaning and purpose so we must suffer it. However, in the beginning and the end and inbetween, light prevails.
are you gandolf? you just sit at the tiller and think wind, mage-wind, and it works? you never have to tack?
i still don't see how science and/or math generates values, except maybe einvalues, whatever they are~~~not good and evil. good & evil events, for sure, like the light cone guys and the space-time EVENT horizon stuff, whatever that shit really means. but doncha hafta DO it? thinking about getting laid isn't the same as getting laid. trust me. i don't think all the wormholes or cornholes in the uni are ever gonna help me out here, either. abstractions and values are one thing. or two. maybe. spongiformicus non interruptus, here, bro, but that's not the same as getting the clap, for pete's sake!
somebody's hungry and you got a nice, big loaf. you gonna share it with her or not? yes? good. great, if you're lucky. no? bad. really bad if the BiCH freaking starves to death. it's not about the bread. it's about you and yer loaf and whether you share it or not.
isn't it?
ya either share it or ya don't. ya gotsta actually collapse the quantum field and bring it to ground. or, no event for the uni. no karma, either. oh, shit, that was a mistake, i'm sure.
and if ya wait too long to share your nice, big loaf, the BiCH dies, and the field collapses for you. i dont give a rat's ass (sorry, mom) whether you thought about keeping her alive, or not. she dies, and she depended on you to help her, b/c you GOT THE LOAF, i say it's bad. bad karma, bad juju, bullseye? bullshitsky!
not only is that a stain. it's in your shorts. get it? shorts.
put the fuking food commodities on cash. wwfamine.com is not cool. i don't care how much "wealth" it generates for the rollers. unless yer a bankster, of course. or an 'investor' protecting his/her wealth? shit! i'd rather be a bankster. at least they've got an excuse. it's their job to fuk everybody up. it's their job to fuk eveybody over.
what, exactly would your excuse be, bro? you were on a slot car track where nothing matters? dude, get REAL!
still friends, i hope...
you like light. read the prologue to John's Gospel. even better, perhaps, read alghazali's Mishkat Al Anwar, the Niche for Lights. the gazelle, aka the alchemist of happiness, is not post-modern enuf for you, probably, since he was smokin and jokin almost 1,000 years ago.
he does a pretty nice job w/ the "Light Verse" of the Koran (xxiv.35) which i shall not quote here, out of respect for others who believe or know. it's a shorty; my copy is 98 pp, the first 41 of which are intro by the translator, w.h.t. gairdner. he talks about darkness, too. bigtime. and he's pretty close to augie and thom rather than yogi fukudananda. waiting for the lightning, here... look, i like science, the Rig, and the Upanishads as much as any incomplete idiot, and that after 10,000 trips we'll be able to think straight in spite of ourselves. but this guy is so good, i take him to the dentist's office so i can face the chair of hellish torture.
you and i,together, wouldn't have enuf Juice to light his hooka. really.
you give me your word about something. i expect you to keep it. you decide it's a hassle and decide "screw the slew". that may be ok w/ you, but it just might not be ok w/ me! i might forgive you for it. i know i should and i probably would, especially if i was out of bullets, but why would that be the best solution? b/c you did something the wasn't good for us.
good and evil are about psychology. behavior. action. values. where you stand on something and how you play around that, with other people, the environment, money. FOOD.
aren't they?
we hardly ever hit the bullseye, but i don't think that excuses us fron trying to learn how to aim and maybe do it better next time. arrows flying all over the place; people getting augured right and left. if i don't get hit, i don't care?
really? wwfamine.com is a good idea? when all we hafta do is change the margin rules and see if it helps the situ? or cash out en masse and stop playing the fukers' games where WE can never win? paper or silver and gold doesn't matter? i'll stand w/ jefferson and jackson. i'm may be a shithead, but i'm an American shithead, and if i don't know the difrference between shit and shinola, a month b4 my 65th b'day, i'm NOT gonna blame it on anybody but slewie. trust me.
slewie - I'm with you.
Karma yes.
Modern society often sees math and science as escapes from morality and ethics. Too many worship formulae and qualitative certainties as the only reality when in fact they are simply tools; the hashmarks, the blueprints, the arcs scribed long ago before time began and after it ended.
What exists between this space is good and evil, light and dark. To pursue dark is to pursue the void, the unsolvable equation, the incongruent angle, the hell of self-deception and delusion. Selfishness rather than altruism. Taking instead of giving. Hoarding instead of sharing.
Good and evil are about choices.
I'm an American shithead too; gold and silver and Jefferson and Jackson yes.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a pretty simple idea; however, it is the simple things that much of humanity often struggles with.
I'll look up your readings, haven't read them, and light the hookah and keep an open mind. Thanks.
may allah bless america. with forgiveness and bigger, less expensive onions. amen.
From personal experience, love is that spooky action at a distance thing, but Einstein still had the whole time as a fourth dimension wrong. We don't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Time is an effect of motion. It's the collapse of probabilities into circumstance which creates time. There is no way to know all potential causing any event before it happens, so actually the future is cause and the past is effect.
Much like we see the sun going east to west and spent millennia trying to explain why, we experience past events leading into future ones, but can't develop a basic explanation for how it works, because like not understanding it's the earth which is actually moving, it is the events constantly reformulating themselves within the context of the present, not the present which moves from one to the next.
As representative of the present, the hands of the clock should be still and the face should move past them.
Yes, I've been banned from various physics forums.
well, shit, bro, they're scientists!
time is the great subjectivity. gurdjieff.
nonetheless, due to the decay function of temporality and our 'options' REALly running out on the dumbass clockwork orange sectional hooey, the heart of the Faustian Fallacy may take a little licking, but is still ticking. so are we sports fans, so are WE.
time to try the doodoo?
slewie,
I try to maintain a little linearity, cause going off the tattered edge, you don't always come back completely whole.
No, I'm not much of a sports fan, as I work in the horseracing industry and it's bs.
That said, it's all a game, but you have to find what the rules are, before you get beat over the head. http://www.michelleshocked.com/chords_how_play_game.htm
The Bible records in the Book of 1st Samuel that the people cried out for a king so they could be ruled by someone other than God (go figure). The 'necessary evil' of which you speak is moral since man is evil and must be restrained by force (or threat there of) to prevent his evil actions (rape, pillage, murder, hayhem). I suggest we go back to rule by God and implore Him to dish out his justice to the bankers and our corrupted Washington politicians.
It might be the sugar coated explanation.
Hard to know what was going on in those days and the social mood.
Fact is that a government makes people much more effective to perform rape, pillage, murder and mayhem. So your story about restraining men from evil actions might be as well the story used to justify the progression to a much more effective organization to allow rape, pillage, murder and mayhem. An institution that people might have resisted.
You will have a hard time finding occurrences of the institution of a government restraining people from rape, pillage, murder and mayhem. A piece of cake reversely to see how the institution of governments and the betterment of the State have rendered people much more effective to rape, pillage, murder and mayhem.
We'll never know how much worse it can be since the Gobermunt is here to stay. However, life in a Max Max world wouldn't be too pleasant.
we can attach gods and morals to this argument 'til we're blue in the face, but it seems clear to me that the rules that these 'gods' applied to the 'worlds' they created... pretty much indicate that the biggest guy/group gets what he/they want, and the faster/crafty beasties survive to dodge these thugs another day.
i know the various bibles don't put it that way, but most of the dioramas at the natural history museums do... and the folks that do that science aren't constantly trying to extract a 10% tithe from me and mine.
i hope i'm fast/crafty enough...
"if you can get the cows to attack each other
whenever anybody brings up the reality of their situation,
then you don't have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly.
These cows who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the Farmer
will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership.
And the intellectual and artistic classes - always and forever dependent upon
the Farmers, will say to anyone who demands freedom from ownership
"You will harm your fellow cows."
The livestock are thus kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility
for the destructiveness of the violent system
to those who demand real freedom."
~Stefan Molyneux
only the good die young.
YouTube - Billy Joel - Only The Good Die Young
jeeez! is this guy colbert's idol????
oh oh, 000,000,0000 listen to r music!
YouTube - The Doobie Brothers?Listen To The Music / Live at Budokan '93
and, now that we're smokin a little, well bro's:
straight to hell in the ZH handbasket!!!
YouTube - Easy Rider - Fraternity of Man - Don't Bogart Me
hey, shit happenz!
Daily double. trifecta. superfecta. pic 4. i wanna mouse in my pock-ette.
Yet another of thousands of overly abstract attempts to justify what someone "feels" is obvious. In doing so, it totally misses the point.
The "state" is a fiction. Let's say that another way, so nobody can mistake my meaning. The "state" does not exist. Period. No further clarification needed.
But humans have had their brains destroyed by the predator class since they started walking on two legs, and this practice has been taken to mind-boggling extremes over the past few generations as the majority of humans stopped dealing with a wide variety of [real, physical] reality first hand in activities like farming, for instance. Now they perform some microsopically limited function, often just mindlessly scribbling a pen or tapping keyboard keys and pushing papers around, and have zero clue whatsoever about the nature of reality. But more importantly most humans have no freaking clue whatsoever about the nature of fiction. So let's be clear.
All organizations are fictions. They do not exist. And, in fact, since fundamental laws were written quite some time ago before anyone was as detached from reality as most supposed geniuses of today, all organizations in fundamental law were correctly identified and called "fictitious entities".
This is really quite clear, but needs to be elaborated these days, since must humans are so detached from reality to be clearly insane.
When JoeSchmo decides to open a bakery, he thinks up a name for his activities, like "HeavenlyDelights". That is a fiction. JoeSchmo exists, but "HeavenlyDelights" exists only in his mind. This is exactly the nature of fiction, just like SantaClaus and ToothFairy... they exist only as "mental units" or "mental configurations" in one or more human minds, not as something real in the external world.
The first order of fiction-creating is rather innocent, and is called DBA ("doing business as"). This term DBA makes very clear that "HeavenlyDelights" does not exist, and we his customers are in fact dealing with JoeSchmo. In other words, "HeavenlyDelights" is nothing more than a term, a word, a phrase, an idea. Do not confuse the building that contains the bakery equipment is not "HeavenlyDelights". That building is a building, nothing more. In fact, everything in that building is whatever it is. In point of fact, "HeavenlyDelights" exists only in the mind of its "owner" and its "customers". The sane customers understand this. Sadly, the majority of humans today, do not understand this, at least not clearly.
This gets a bit more complicated when JoeSchmo has a partner. We still know "HeavenlyDelights" is just a name, but in any transaction are we dealing with JoeSchmo or his partner? Or 50:50? Or what? This confusion does not make "HeavenlyDelights" pop into real, physical existence, but it does create confusion that later becomes planet-wide, species-wide insanity when the number of players rises, and the quantity and repetition of propaganda goes through the roof. And this is the phenomenon that becomes perfect fodder for predators to abuse, consume and control just about everyone.
This problem is so pervasive, and so common in daily modern life, that the only way an individual can retain control of his brain, and not become insane, is to keep their eye on the ball. This rare sane human bothers to asks himself whether any of the dozens or hundreds of kinds of "name" and "label" creating and attaching actually creates a real, physical existent to come into existence.
After a few years of doing this, he understands what I'm saying here... that the entire hoard of human apes planet wide is completely and utterly insane, bonkers, wacko, totally freaking clueless! And in fact, these poor creatures lack even the most fundamental capacity that distinguishes "sane" from "insane" --- the ability to distinguish the "real" (existent) from the "unreal" AKA "fiction" AKA "abstraction".
At first, something seems wrong. How can this be. How can a bunch of "nothings" have such enormous effects and consequences? The answer of course is this. A fiction is not nothing! That's right. The fiction is real, and exists. The fiction is that "mental unit" in your brain. And any "mental unit" has the power to motivate your choices, your behavior and your actions just as surely as any other "mental unit". That is, unless every one of your mental units has a big, fat, red stamp on the folder that holds it alerting you to its status: REAL or FICTION or UNKNOWN or etc.
Then you understand it, and all becomes clear. This is the scam of the predator class, and always has been since apes started understanding language and started jamming pure garbage mental units into their brains when they heard some assertion pop out the mouth of some other apes. No longer were "mental units" formed as a consequence of first-hand observation of the real world, or first-hand thought followed by endless, repetitive provisional inference. Nope, now we're playing mental poker where every card is a wild card!
What fun! Now human predators had a way to just about totally control their prey. Before they had to plant and water and tend their seeds to eat. Now they can make up a total pile of BS and convince morons he is "pharaoh" or "emperor" or "god" or some such fabrication... and convince the poor fools who did not understand that nature of the "corrupt mental units" game to do the work for them, and feel priveledged to do so! What a great scam!
I could lay out the whole history, but the entire history of man is almost entirely illustration. So pick your own favorite and do the careful thinking to see how this "fatal flaw in human consciousness" has been responsible for the entire history of man, whether through fictional gods, fictional rulers, fictional societies, and not fictional governments, corporations, organizations, etc.
The "state" does not exist. The predators who hide behind that defective mental unit exist. The buildings erected to contain the predator accomplices exist. The handcuffs on your wrist exist. All those real, physical things do exist. But they are simply what they are: humans, buildings, handcuffs, etc.
There is no "state". In fact, there can be no "state", not in any sense humans mean it now. It is all 100.0000000000000000000000% fraud. It is all literally insanity.
And the vast majority of adult play the role of 4 year old children who believe the fiction "SantaClaus" really exists, really lives on the north pole, really has a massive toy factory operated by elves, and really flies to 1 billion homes in one night to leave toys to good boys and girls. Adults are identical to brain-damaged kids, only the motivating fictions are changed.
Repeat after me.
The state does not exist.
The state does not exist.
The state does not exist.
Once you understand I'm not kidding... I'm not exaggerating... I'm not spinning... I'm not being metaphorical in the slightest... take some time and figure out how you should deal with your new-found understanding that the entire population of planet earth is one gigantic insane asylum?
And only the predators know that, it seems.
The "state" is only a fictional cover story to confuse you enough to let the predators scam you, control you, and fleece you of most of productive output.
What are you gonna do about it?
"There is no "state". In fact, there can be no "state", not in any sense humans mean it now. It is all 100.0000000000000000000000% fraud. It is all literally insanity."
Yes, well, um, fraud and insanity exist, so suffice it to say that you contradict yourself in the extreme.
Repeat after me:
The state is the ultimate fraud and insanity.
The state is the ultimate fraud and insanity.
The state is the ultimate fraud and insanity.
The state is the ultimate fraud and insanity.
The state is the ultimate fraud and insanity.
This article over-thinks the issue too much.
All one has to do is ask if violent theft is necessary for a free society to prosper.
If the answer is no, then it is clear that a coersively funded State is uncessary.
All this good/evil mumbo jumbo obfuscates the gun in the room.
If you believe that the guns in the room are necessary, you've signed your own death warrant. Free Radical makes a lucid argument as to why the guns aren't necessary.
And it's because they are evil.
there will always be room to argue whether the presence of force serves as provocation or deterrent.
yes.
and the context-specific answer will always be determined by the character of the soul behind the 'trigger' - not the existence of the trigger.
your black/white fundamentalism is most unsettling in this swirling world of grey. context and character *do* matter. that's why our system of broad-stroke policies are failing us so miserably - throughout the world.
sadly, context-based judgements are far to complex and expensive for silver-bullet minded cultures. so we say things like 'guns are evil', and that's simply that.
many voted for hope and change... they just forgot to think about what it really meant.
That was an answer to me? My "black/white fundamentalism" is "why our system of broad-stroke policies is failing us so miserably"?
The US Government's policies (which certainly aren't mine) are failing because this particular territorial monopoly on the use of force -- i.e., the naked aggression of this particular state -- has become so grotesque that it is now one gigantic house of horrors. And you think voting for a silver-tongued, neighborhood-organizer, who wouldn't know a real job if he stepped on it, is suddenly going to turn the world's greatest roque state into Romper Room?
Sadly, "context-based judgements [as if there were any other kind] are far too complex" for mealy-mouthed wimps who don't understand the difference between guns and who's got them. And forget their souls (whatever that means); it's actions that do the talking.
Never mind, then, that you deserve what you get. It's what your relativist cowardice costs the rest of us that matters.
hmm. ascii is interesting stuff. what i (mis) read struck a nerve with me. it looks like you believe that guns are evil. whether it's what you meant as i read it now in question... but what you wrote seemed pretty clear. power is power. not good or bad. gun, fist, poison, mis-information, etc.
seriously, i could have written most all of your response, as i agree completely (if i read it right) with those assertions, as well as many of your above posts.
except your statement that 'guns are evil'. (and that i could have voted for the silver-tongued dude - not.)
*them* having guns, and us *not* having them is the evil. (and, sorry, we can't put the gun genie back in the bottle...)
there exists little motivation for their restraint. and the founding fathers were very clear in the importance of being able to temper leadership, as being critical to the prevention of *everything* we are seeing now. again, i must have mis-read you above, but, again, guns are not the evil.
i completely fear my government and appreciate that all of its power comes from the real and practiced use/threat of violence against dissension. and there is *no* place in amerika that we can 'get away'. texas might be close.
FWIW, i have no faith in 'the rest of us', so you make a large presumption about my place in the scheme. i suppose that's fair after reading 50 words, but it is woefully mistaken.
i see our only rational choice as (roughly) move out of the way until it breaks, and fight to the death if they corner you. rebuild from the ashes with constitutional precepts, and try again. sounds like cowardice, but i prefer to consider it the wisdom of picking your battles. this system will break - not if... when.
to try and fix this mess from the inside against the forces that believe it is a profitable/rational/sustainable system, and against the sheeple who blindly fund/trust that machine - is like building a wall of sand on the low-tide line and expecting to see it there in the morning.
i wish us all luck, as i believe much change is on the doorstep - whether this is good or bad change depends entirely on your trust in the systems as they stand, and the hedges you put in place (if any) in response to that level of trust.
again, apologies if i misread your intent. but personally, i rather like the idea that there are millions of guns owned by every-day american citizens (not "authorities"). anything to temper the monster (that our government has become), to "think twice" is a very good thing.
to be honest, i'm assuming those millions of guns will be collected from us soon. so you may get your wish soon. then what? hunger strike?
cheers