First off, one thing that no one wrote out but that I assume many of you know is this: Government workers are more inefficient not only due to complexity but also due to less pressure in the workplace. Governmental positions are "comfy". This is because that their efficiency isn't directly tied to their continued "survival" as it is in a more profit driven workplace. — mentos987

I thought it was competition that made for efficiency in the private sector.

There is a lot of controversy over big government.
What does that mean? — Vera Mont

There is a lot of confusion about government. Take water for an example. A chap needs clean fresh water on tap, and sewage and waste water drainage and treatment. A chap needs not to have his neighbours' sewage flooding his home or his yard. or his clean water supply. So because water flows and moves from here to there, all this needs to be organised by someone and as long as it is done, one is willing reluctantly to pay for it. Whoever organises it, provides it, and takes a chap's money for it governs the chap. So when water and sewage is 'privatised' there is not less government, just less democracy. This ok to the extent that we all agree about what we need and don't have to care about the fine details. Except when the owner doesn't do the job properly, and then one needs to govern the governor.

We live in degenerate times. And our opposition leader is burbling on about growth, as the solution to all our ills, when any fool can see that we need to be dealing with climate change and flood mitigation, and growth is not going to happen and would not improve our lives if it did. Unreality prevails because reality is not pleasant, and actors are therefore our leaders.

It makes me wish this Fellow were eligible. I'd vote for him. — jgill

have people started to warm up to RFK Jr. yet? — Tzeentch

Kind of sad that all one can find to choose between for president are dynasties of wealth and privilege and old movie stars.

It seems a commonplace that rights and privileges arise together with duties. Thus in this case, the privilege of running for office entails the duty of respecting and supporting the institutions that enable running and decide the outcome. Just as the right to own property entails the duty to respect the property of others. This called a social contract.

Now it is open to any individual to repudiate the social contract, but in such case they become outlaws; one cannot both repudiate ones' duties and still claim one's rights, and expect the least respect or consideration from others. To be an outlaw from an evil society is a respectable position to take up, but don't expect any consideration from said evil society.

Trump is a whinging outlaw, demanding the respect and protection of the very social community he has disavowed. So fuck him and the moral vacuum of everything he says. And if America votes for such hypocrisy, Fuck America too.

Article 1 All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood

UN. Universal Declaration of Human rights.

A moral equality is stipulated. It is to be understood that we are not equal in talent, physique, intelligence, inheritance, education, power, social standing, opportunity, wealth, or personal morality. Nevertheless, every individual from the lowest to the highest socially is the source of values, and as such is infinitely valuable to themselves. and this is the source of the equality that founds the moral brotherhood of man. for a Christian -

And the King shall answer and say unto them, ‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me — Matthew 25:40

Thus the duty of the peasant is to feed his family, and the duty of the Emperor is to feed his people, and the duty of those that have much is to look after those who have nothing. And this duty arises immediately alongside the privilege of ownership. If you expect others to respect your property rights, you need to respect their right to exist. This is called a social contract. It is a mutual arrangement for organising social living, that allows farming and thus cities and civilisation.

I offer here the most definitive, authoritative sources of the West on your topic, and my best interpretation of them, which will no doubt be disputed here.

But I will be most interested in hearing from you how this very general formulation aligns with Lao Tsu, Confucious and Maoist philosophical traditions.

Myself, I wonder why this particular forum, which is mainly concerned with philosophy, ought to accomodate never-ending threads on vexatious topics such as Middle Eastern politics, which is famously divisive. — Wayfarer

May I humbly suggest that every site inhabited by humans needs a waste disposal system. If we did not have the controversial threads, the controversies would infect all the philosophical threads more than they already do. But there is no reason why we should put up with people who only come to use the facilities and never entertain us with some pleasantries at the very least.

I have no recollection of any real philosophy. I certainly remember aggressive posts and mainly negative posts. I had a brief look, but came up empty apart from anti-left, anti covid, anti philosophy; I don't feel like it is a great loss to the forum, but someone could show me some gems if I have missed them.

I don’t hear 6C being mentioned as a probable scenario much. — Mikie

I am reading that directly off the graph I posted earlier. It is not a modelled prediction, just a bare "well that's what it was the last time". and here is the link again. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177

This is obviously based on indirect measurements, because direct measurements of CO2 levels in air bubbles in ice cores only go back 800.000 years, and our CO2 levels are off that scale, as you know.

So the nearest comparison you can see on the graph is about 16M yrs ago. That in itself is a scary number, because we are talking about a climate far from that which humans evolved in, and a time when the earliest apes were living.

Recent temperatures have exceeded model predictions by a scary margin, and masking by shipping pollution in the atmosphere has been suggested as a cause of underestimating the sensitivity to CO2 levels.

But I think there has also been a strong pressure towards conservatism in the reporting. We know how it goes, "don't give the sceptics a target" So always much climate action is assumed in the models, everything is conservatively estimated.

Along this trajectory, the middle Miocene (~16 Ma) marks the last time that CO2 concentrations were consistently higher than at present; Greenland was not yet glaciated at that time, and independent estimates suggest that sea level was some 50 m higher than today.

They don't say "that's where we're heading". But that's where we seem to be heading, or beyond. People are saying it, but the people who are saying it are not continuing their research into human futility, they are finding other things to do with what time is left. This is genuinely traumatic to those who have come to believe it, and that is why there is a great resistance to admitting how bad things are going to get, even to oneself. - and so not much is done, and we keep calm and carry on.

If we continue to act, — Mikie

I haven't noticed us acting, and nor has the climate. Not only that, but plans to act effectively are not even being talked about or put in place. Like bollocksGPT says, what individuals can do without change of policy is negligible. We are not going to stop it, and therefore we are going to suffer the consequences. We can each help a little to make it slightly less catastrophic, so inaction is not what I am suggesting, but preparing for a radical change that is coming and will be chaotic and unsurvivable for many is now my priority, and talking to people who want to live in fantasy is becoming less and less important to me.

Why do you imagine the climate can be stabilised at 2°C or 3°C? If we had been acting to change our societies economies for the last 20 years, it would have been possible, but there has been no movement away from an economy dependent on endless growth. None.

The best estimate of the climate record shows that the last time CO2 levels were at the current level, the global temperature was about 6°C higher, and sea levels were 40 m. higher. But we are still adding more CO2 at near record amounts, so that seems a likely climate scenario for the future, on the way to possibly higher temperatures. It is the biosphere that tends to stabilise the climate, and the biosphere cannot cope well with rapid change, plus we are busily polluting and depleting it already.

The weakness of reason is apparent in this thread; one can spend pages trying to convince one fairly educated and thoughtful person that there is a problem. Half the world is going to be dead before any real action is taken. It all sounds extravagant and shocking, and most will dismiss it. But if you read the graphs, it is clear enough. We are in overshoot.

Sounds like a load of bullshit to where you can't admit a double standard due to your fear of Jewish supremacy labeling you a certain way. — Vaskane

Sounds like psychobabble and ad homs in place of any interesting insight. I am quite content to be labelled by people with agendas on either side, and my anonymous internet bravery is positively troll-worthy. :grin:

7. **Optimism and Practicality**: Acknowledge that while it's a huge challenge, being proactive and optimistic is more constructive than feeling hopeless or denying the problem. — BollocksGPT

That has been tried.

and tried.

And now it is too late. Governments have met and done very little; people have spend their lives trying to protect environments and failed.

No one wants to hear the news, but the human population is going to crash, with immense suffering and the collapse of governments. Optimism is entirely inappropriate. An entirely different mindset is required, of mourning, resignation, and stoical compassion. It is time to consider what there is of value in our civilisation that we might be able to rescue some remnant of, for the future. Chat GPT will not be high on my list. It sounds like Eddy the ship's computer, when Marvin the paranoid android would be more useful and appropriate.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, here is a little irony of the programme series "Last Chance to See"

The subject of the final programme was due to be the Yangtze river dolphin; however, the species was declared extinct in 2007. Instead, he takes Fry to the Gulf of California on the eastern side of the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico to search for the endangered blue whale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See_(TV_series)

As to quantum weirdness, it may turn out that causation as we experience it is a statistical effect of the large scale of our experiences, and the minutiae of the world work by weirdness - superposition, entanglement, spooky action at a distance or time travel. But the result of whatever it is, is that keys tend to work locks unless they have been glued up or rusted or broken or the wrong key is used, and minds tend to exploit such regularities of the universe and call it 'causation'.

With this traditional understanding of efficient causation, however, one can then validly affirm that, “the person letting the bowling ball slip from their hands (efficiently) caused the change in the form of the cushion that lied just underneath,” for the first occurrence as (efficient) cause extends prior to the time-span of the second occurrence as effect (despite the teleology previously mentioned remaining intact—to here not address the formal and material causes which could also be argued to occur). — javra

Teleology is perfectly well accounted for if it is simply understood that the intended result is imagined in the mind. Thus it is not the effect that precedes the cause, but the imagination. I put my key in the door because I imagine it will unlock it. But the cause of my imagination is that it did so yesterday, not that it will do so today. Someone may have squirted glue into the lock.

Cause is not always prior to effect — Banno

In that case, though it presumably is. The cushion had no depression prior to the introduction of the bowling ball. Unless it did, in which case the bowling ball did not cause it. A brick lying amid the shattered glass and nothing moving, need not deceive us into imagining that the chucked brick did not cause the window to break. And we understand that an explosion is a causal sequence of reactions that cause each other very fast so as to produce a cumulative effect, which we treat as one momentary affair for convenience.

sometimes it is impossible to decide which event is the cause and which the result. — Banno

Then in such a case there is no objection being made to what I said, except that sometimes it is impossible to see things clearly.

The priority is acknowledged in the very search for a first cause and not a first effect. But it is a mistaken search because it looks beyond the realm of causation for a cause of causation. Or else it attempts to derive a feature of existence from the logic of talk, an even more erroneous effort. Kant tried, but Hume rules!

I guess the Armenians aren't out here flaming down people with the Anti-Armenian League propaganda. — Vaskane

Yes indeed. Successful genocides are quickly forgotten, because history is written by the winners. And this is a thread about Gaza today. I have forgotten the Armenians, because the language has forgotten them. You would cause a deal of confusion, — and god knows there is enough already — if you started to try and talk about The Genocide, and insisting it was something that happened elsewhere and to other people than the places and peoples we are discussing. This is called "context". In a discussion of Armenian history, it would be entirely appropriate, here it is an irrelevant and confusing dispute.

And now i am bored already, so carry on at your pleasure.

But you completely discount the event in which it was coined The Genocide of Armenians which Armenians still refer to it as "the Genocide." — Vaskane

Yes, I discount it, because even to the extent that it is in common parlance as you speak it it is qualified as "of Armenians", it does not rule out that there may have been other genocides of other peoples. Every people think of themselves as 'The People'. My parents talked about The War; their parents talked about The Great War, to distinguish it from the little difficulty with the nazis, that my parents called "The War"

Define something however you want to fit your case, man. — schopenhauer1

No, man. I do not define something however I want, and I have not really made a case for anything except the allowance of common usage in this thread. I think you must be confusing me with the international court or something. Rather it is you who are trying to change the definitions. I observed that there is a futile argument over the mere words, and sought to resolve it. I wasn't even addressing you particularly.

Now when it comes to "open air prison", that is an emotive and unclear term, that may have some legitimacy in describing the feelings that some, maybe many Palestinians have about their situation - that they cannot get out, and cannot work to improve their situation. But it is not a clear or exact description of anything, and probably not very useful therefore to a political or philosophical discussion.

I see you skipped this post, which I believe the strongest against your case:

Would it be "off topic" if by comparing them it might reveal that the definition becomes too wide? — schopenhauer1

Too wide for your narrow mind? It seems to function s a legal definition. I am objecting to the ruling out of language in common use — can you explain your objection to my objection?

Those are your rules for word usage. Not mine. — Vaskane

They're not rules of mine, but my understanding of polite careful speech. You say what you like and the site owner will let you know what his rules are. My writ does not run here, I merely opine.

Possibly. But it would be off topic to discuss them all here. But Note the magic word "intent". This is why attention to the rhetoric of the belligerents is important. One can look for both a disregard in practice between combatants and civilians and a corresponding disregard in political rhetoric. But it is a legitimate suggestion whenever there is widespread conflict and large civilian casualties.

Whatever rules you have for your restrictions on language are your our rules that don't mean much to me. I'll continue to use the word to describe the Palestinian situation if I wish. — Vaskane

You can talk gobbledegook if you like, as far as I'm concerned mate; I'm describing common usage and objecting to those who wish to rule it out of bounds.

my basic argument was already made here, — schopenhauer1

What is your argument though, that current usage is wrong because we need lots of words to uniquely ly describe the Holocaust? It's a very weak argument, given that genocide has an agreed definition in international law, and the unique term already exists for what the Nazis did. I describe how these terms are used; no one talks of "The Genocide". So you are simply wrong, the English speaking community including international bodies and common parlance do not follow your preferred usage. you don't get to dictate the language.

It does matter, because now you are making someone "defend a genocide" — schopenhauer1

I didn't say it doesn't matter, I said one cannot rule it out on principle, but one has to look at what is happening and what is being justified by what rhetoric. If a genocide is happening, then either one tries to defend it or one condemns it. One cannot look at some other event and claim that because the death toll was higher there, this event cannot be counted.

On this tendentious use of language.

The Nazi atrocity against the Jewish population has a unique name : the Holocaust. This term should not be used of other slaughters.

However, 'concentration camp' was used already of the internment carried out by Britain during the Boer War.

'Genocide' has been defined by international treaty, and legitimately used of events in various places such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar.

So to the language police, "Do not exceed your remit!"

The idea of 'causation' presupposes time, because a cause is defined as prior to its effect, and causation is a temporal process.

Therefore, it makes no sense to posit a cause of time, as that would necessitate a time before time, which is a contradiction. The idea of causation has a field of application within the universe and cannot be applied beyond it as in a "cause of the universe".

Thus notions of 'a being' 'outside time and space' 'acting' to 'create' are all allegorical and cannot be taken literally. Events happen eventually in time, and events outside of time are ... hush, nothing can be said at all.

I have been a computer programmer for about 40 years. — Agree-to-Disagree

Then you know the difference between a chat bot and a climate model.

So you are blowing smoke like a well paid climate denier.

This is a level of disinformation that you really should be ashamed of, and if I were a moderrator I would be banning you for proselytising.

Thank you for your response. S↪unenlightened o what is this thing called "Free Will"?
Seems to me that free will is the ability which everybody has to choose
how to serve their Master, whether ego or conscience. Still enslaved. — Piers

You were talking about freedom; now you are talking about free will.

Do you know what Ego is? Do you know what Conscience is? — Piers

I think they are ideas that come to dominate the mind. Ideas always function by division and opposition, and that is why one part of the mind looks at the other as other and calls it 'master' or 'slave'.

There is no freedom in thought, only this division, and no freedom in choice, which is just conflict, and no freedom in will, which is determination itself. But putting all that aside, in the silence of a mind that is alert and responsive there is freedom, because the division and conflict is ended.

That third challenge is hilarious. — Michael

Oh, that is sweet!

Here is a village local to me, where the sea defences are not going to be raised, and where one cannot get a mortgage. Over on the east coast of England, there are problems with coastal erosion, but this is sea level rise pure and simple. There are of course atolls and deltas already suffering devastation elsewhere, but it's somehow more real when it happens to decent civilised property owning people like us.

https://metro.co.uk/2021/11/11/residents-defiant-as-village-set-to-be-abandoned-to-rising-sea-levels-15582361/

Sorry about that. It's frustrating dealing with the global scepticism at times.

I'm just making the point that ultimately I'm having to trust other people's word for it, and I'm increasingly seeing problems within academia that make me unwilling to extend that trust. — Tzeentch

Here is where i have a problem with trusting you and the honesty of your scepticism. When I look at the venality of academia, I see three possibilities.

First, a systematic distortion produced by vested interests with power and money is possible and has happened. Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Guns, big Defence. There is no Big Wind, or Big Solar, so I discount that in this case, only the opposite distortion by Big Oil is remotely likely and the evidence of their activity is not hard to find and works to undermine and minimise, not to exaggerate.

Second, there is a natural tendency for any discipline to big itself up and make itself important. But geologists and climate scientists already have a massive market for their ideas and predictions in the commercial field, and are not making themselves popular with predictions of collapse. On the contrary, the more pessimistic predictors are losing their jobs.

Third, there is always a market on the internet for the odd maverick or contrarian feeding any conspiracy theory, or other special interest. But this of its nature cannot apply to the consensus of climate scientists.

So I am asking you for a proper justification of your scepticism in this case, rather than just innuendo. Who is distorting and why is it so widespread and systematic, and how is it profiting anyone?

Astronomy is complicated, hard to understand and based on indirect and estimated measurement, extrapolating from sparse evidence using complicated statistics. These are reasons to be cautious and flexible about its findings, but one does not hear accusations of grift about the big bang or cosmic inflation.

That seems right...ice absorbs less, and reflects more, heat than liquid water...the so-called "albedo effect: — Janus

That's a separate thing, though also significant. The latent heat thing is that you have to add some heat to ice at 0°C to turn it into water at 0°C, and that extra energy is called latent heat. It is the energy required to break the chemical bonds that form the crystalline structure of ice. The same thing happens with boiling water. You have to keep adding heat to turn the water into vapour, and the water doesn't get any hotter, it just vaporises. That's why the potatoes don't burn until the pot has boiled dry.

So all the time extra energy is melting ice, that energy isn't raising the temperature. And there's lots of ice to melt. So it's only just begun.

The albedo change is a positive feedback loop that produces one of the notorious 'tipping points'. As ice melts, the planet darkens and absorbs more heat. It is generally accepted that we are heading for an ice free N.pole in summer, in a few years rather than a few decades. And then the Greenland ice sheet is going to be exposed on all sides and looking vey lonesome.

Sea level rise may show up much more in low-lying areas for obvious reasons, but also it has to be taken into account that it is understood not to be uniform over the planet, so what you observe locally may indeed not exhibit the more radical changes being experienced elsewhere. — Janus

What mainly has to be taken into account is that so far it is mainly sea ice we have been losing, and sea ice loss doesn't raise sea levels unless the ice is well grounded. Most of the small rise so far has been due to the expansion of water with rise of temperature, and some glacier loss. But it's only just begun.

Greenland ice is going to take some time to melt, but it is almost certainly going to melt. Those interested in fake physics will foolishly believe that melting ice absorbs a great deal of heat because of the latent heat associated with a change of state. Those doom merchants will think that there is another reason why things have not quite gotten as bad as they might otherwise have. Latent heat is one of those things they used to propagandise us with in physics lessons back in the 60's.

It starts getting trustworthy when you can't get property insurance. Insurers won't take your money is reliable early warning of catastrophe.

Wall Street Journal. — Mikie

Grift central!

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

"Global warming" redirects here. For other uses, see Climate change (disambiguation) and Global warming (disambiguation). This article is about contemporary climate change. For historical climate trends, see Climate variability and change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#References


Why not look into your confusions a bit before jumping for the nearest conspiracy theory?

What do you do? — tim wood

I cannot work out from your analogy whether I am an Israeli or a Palestinian, but whatever, those dogs better watch out, eh? Or are they vermin?

My kids used to be called 'Paki' because folk cannot tell the difference between Afro Caribbean and Pakistani. Not surprising then that some random Joe cannot distinguish Israeli from Jew. When carpet bombing the audience with hate speech, some collateral damage is unfortunately inevitable.

Thing is, from where I stand, it's not the category errors that are the problem, it's the hate. Palestinians are Semites too, but where is that in the racist/antiracist labelling scheme?

Here is the latest research on the CO2 roughly since the dinosaurs, still recent history in geological terms, but going back a lot further that the direct measurements of atmosphere bubbles in Ice cores, that stop at about 800,000 yrs.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5177

The handy graph there shows estimates of atmospheric CO2 for the last 66,000,000 yrs. The current level is about 417 ppm, a 50 % increase from preindustrial levels and last seen some 16 million years ago. This is a change way beyond the cycles shown on the ice core graphs shown many times on this thread. 16M, years ago, there was no ice on Greenland, and sea levels and average temperatures were much higher, as I mentioned above.

But we are headed for higher temperatures than that, because the suddenness of the change is causing a mass extinction and disruption to the environment, and we haven't even begun to reduce the rate of CO2 we are adding.

i want a real answer so i can be readily convinced. I'm willing to ignore the money trail if I can get a solid explanation for why, in the 4.5 billion years of naturally caused climate change, it is only in the past 150 years that human activity has become the overwhelming cause of the current trend. But i get nothing but evasions. I know why. I should follow the money. — Merkwurdichliebe

Over 4.5 billion years there have been many influences on climate. Obit wobbles are one. vulcanism is another continental drift is another, and life is another, The moon has receded from Earth over time so that tides have lessened, asteroids have had strong brief influence, the sun cycles are also important.

Over geological time, the sun's output has increased, however the long term effect of living organisms has been to lock up CO2 in the form of carbonates - limestones and chalk, which are the remains of shelled critters and the like, and oil and coal, the remains of ancient buried vegetation. This stuff has accumulated over the billions of years, some of it being recycled through subduction and vulcanism, and a lot just sitting there buried under layers of sediment.

So the overall effect of life locking carbon into the earths crust, has been enough to negate the increase in insolation. More or less. As i said all these other stuff has been going on as well and I'm not running a full course on climatology here.

The particular human effect has been twofold; firstly by various methods of exploitation pollution, farming fishing etc, to disrupt the ongoing processes of CO2 absorption of the living environment, and secondly and much more significantly, by extracting carbon in the form of coal and oil, and releasing it back into the atmosphere. This has never happened before. It has happened on a huge scale in a very very short time by geological standards. Current CO2 levels are at a level last seen when there was no ice at the N. pole or Greenland, and sea levels were about 50 m. (160 ft) higher than current levels, and global temperatures about 6°C. higher.

We are spending the carbon savings of the planet over billions of years at the rate of about half of the planet's total in a century and a half. And that is why it is humans on this occasion that are having a huge effect on the climate.

Bruce Perry gets honourable mention in my old thread on trauma theory.

I agree with the general thrust of the op, but I caution that parents are not the sole source of trauma. there are many links in my thread if anyone wants to educate themselves on their own trauma score, or on the general theory. And everyone should try and educate themselves, because we all educate and influence children through our participation in society. Here is one quote from the end of my thread that has to be important and has not been considered here thus far.

When children are truly free to walk away from school, then schools will have to become child-friendly places in order to survive. Children love to learn, but, like all of us, they hate to be coerced, micromanaged, and continuously judged. They love to learn in their own ways, not in ways that others force on them. Schools, like all institutions, will become moral institutions only when the people they serve are no longer inmates. When students are free to quit, schools will have to grant them other basic human rights, such as the right to have a voice in decisions that affect them, the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, and the right to choose their own paths to happiness.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201304/the-most-basic-freedom-is-freedom-quit?fbclid=IwAR3g1JEFem_0ICV5TrWPSwMPpZHZl7cYLESq2w0P-Kvl7a-HAVTnLZloTMw

Here's a simple principle to reduce trauma in schools and other institutions.

Committing to a major change to the way that humans live is a risky experiment (as is continuing to use fossil fuels). — Agree-to-Disagree

Yeah life is a risky game. I wouldn't play it if I had the choice.

But your suggestion seems to be to ignore the best prediction we have and all the evidence we have, in favour of some unimagined factor that will work in our favour rather than making things even worse. I call that wishful thinking.