I'll take up your advice to hope for a better world. — frank

I don't advise that. That's what propelled a million young men to their deaths in the war to end all wars.

I have to stop judging long enough to see that he is me. — frank

Surely it is seeing that he is me that enables judgement? One does not judge a rock. But the mindset of the ancients is indeed fascinating. It seems they did not make the separation of psychic and physic - they had not quite excluded themselves from the world in the cartesian manner - and so the audience does not know two things, one psychological and one physical, but they are the same.

There is more than one ageing hippy on the boards.

The Peaceful Shepherd

If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted starts,

I should be tempted to forget,
I fear, the Crown of Rule,
The Scales of Trade, the Cross of Faith,
As hardly worth renewal.


For these have governed in our lives,
And see how men have warred.

The Cross, the Crown, the Scales may all
As well have been the Sword. — Robert Frost

If one sees the violence in everything we do, in every institution, every nation, every righteous identity, even every family, what is left of man to renew? Even despair is violent. This is the question that is answered adequately only by silence. All we have known is violence, all we have known is noise that covers up the sound of distant gunfire. Where will you go and what will you do, when you come to this?
There is fear of this unknown, that is not fear of the unknown, but of the loss of the known - of everything known, of my own identity.

I stand on the edge the known; I stand in silent witness; this is the last post. There is meaning in this ritual of farewell. Two minutes' silence and then, mostly, we go back to the same old same again, but we do not have to. We can go on into the silence, but not 'we'; one goes alone.

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home. — Hunter/Garcia

There wasn't a lot of war mongering going on prior to WW1. — frank

Not in Britain. Britain was complacently dominant as the world's leader. However:

All witnesses agree that Britain became hysterical with hatred of the Germans when the First World War broke out, and Kipling (whose genius had a hysterical side) caught the infection, as these poems show, and as is also shown by such stories as '"Swept and Garnished'" and "Mary Postgate" (15) (not to mention the poem, "The Beginnings", which accompanies "Mary Postgate").

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_greatwar1.htm

I'm not an historian, nor a poet, but a philosopher and psychologist, and it is of interest to me that 'hysteria' has come up again, and as a symptom of a society, not just of an individual.

The op proposes, "it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors". I imagine the situation that provokes road-rage; one is in the business of driving, but one cannot make progress. As a passenger, one is helpless, but there is less strain, because one accepts the helplessness, but the driver is helplessly responsible. It is an identity of power in conflict with the reality of helplessness that causes the strain.

In the case of Britain, perhaps we could talk about identity as natural rulers of the world and purveyors of civilisation meeting the reality of decline, as the industrial revolution spread around the world, and Britain's pre-eminence began to be challenged. Perhaps we could consider too a pre-industrial social order meeting the new money, and new morality of the industrial age.

And that makes me think of the digital revolution, and the decline of European and American dominance. And the new hysteria of fake news and enemies everywhere; of making America great again, and making Britain sovereign again, and all the other national nostalgias, presented as renewals.

Such nostalgia must lead to hysteria, as it attempts to hold onto the identity that conflicts with reality, and my hope, next time, is to look at some other form of renewal that does not.

But, who knows the poet's intent? — Ciceronianus the White

I bow to your erudition on Horace, but I think I know Owen's intent well enough.

America didn't suffer the kind of horrible losses incurred by the European nations. — Ciceronianus the White

Yes, it's a Europe thing, and some of the rhetoric that comes from the US sounds appallingly Victorian to my ears, at least - it's a lesson half-learnt here, though there is much mis-remembrance that continues to glorify the 'noble sacrifice'.

common form

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.


a dead statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young? — Rudyard Kipling

There is a ritual of remembrance - poppies, the Last Post, 2 minutes silence, that express, and thus evoke, honour, respect, gratitude, sadness.

Fuck that!

Remember horror, futility, obscenity. Even Kipling the great patriot wants to evoke guilt and anger - he was one of the liars.

And this was the lie, that you are still being told:

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen

Remember, for pity's sake remember; tell your friends and enemies, that there is no depth to which we cannot sink, with one self-righteous lie. Have you heard that lie recently? Have you told it? Or the lie that that was all a long time ago, and things are different now?

Banno, unenlightened, what do you chaps think? — Posty McPostface

You may want my input, but you don't need it.

It might make sense to dispense with serious talk about the possible and to see reality as simply the actual and the exclusion of the impossible. — petrichor

It would be quite possible, if it didn't exclude its own possibility. As it is though, it is quite wonderfully foolish.

Supposing that... — petrichor

But you have just said that we should not talk of what can be supposed...

As maxim, 'when you have no idea, do not try to express it' has somewhat to recommend it. However, in this case even if you have no idea, you must answer with your life. You can call that systematically inchoate if you like, does it help?

What do you think unenlightened? — Posty McPostface

I'm not sure what you're asking. Whenever Mrs un asks me what I'm thinking, I say 'nothing special.'

And then she says 'what's special about it?' , and I say 'that it's me thinking about it.'

Does that help?

Not a single fuck given for poor Jeremiah, either, it seems. Perhaps we're all too busy reading a book and getting smart.

If the religious hate blasphemy, then blasphemy is hate speech? Perhaps not. But the law is against hate speech, not blasphemy. It is a slippery slope, because it is a matter of tone and intent as much as of fact. But my understanding is that hate speech is not speech that someone hates, but speech that incites the hearer to hate a third party, rather than the speaker. So the question is whether calling Muhammad a paedophile is inciting hatred against Muslims, not whether Muslims hate you for saying it.

Where the water get's muddier is that one might be playing troll, inciting Muslims to retaliate and thereby get them to incite others to hatred. Oh what a tangled web... but we know how to deal with trolls round here, don't we?

The creation of profit for Marx, as you diagnosed, comes from selling the product of someone's labour for more than its cost of production; this is termed the extraction of surplus value by exploitation. — fdrake

That's not quite what I meant. On an individual level, my hunting and gathering sufficient to sustain myself for a day takes less than all day, and leaves me time to knapp a flint into a spearhead. That in turn makes me more productive as I can hunt more efficiently. That you can also gather sufficient to sustain yourself in less than a day means that you can gather some extra and exchange with me so that I can knapp another flint and you can have a spearhead too. So from the beginning, it is the spare time, spared from basic sustenance, that allows the extra production that creates commodities to exchange, and makes room for professionalisation. The exploitation comes later, but is also only possible because production is greater than consumption on the individual level. That this allows exploitation is secondary.

I might be stating the obvious or wildly off base... It seems to me that commodities arise iff the labour value of 'his daily bread' is less than a day's labour; otherwise we starve. This allows the commodification of the labourer as the difference between his production and consumption. Apart from the obvious application to the slave trade and the asset-stripping labour camp, this roots value in surplus production and explains the source of the value in commodities in a non-arbitrary way.

To get a better idea of morality we should distinguish between conditional and unconditional “oughts.” A conditional ought takes the form of something sufficiently like “If you want to do X, you ought to do Y” and says what conditions help accomplish a particular goal without saying whether one should aim for the goal in the first place, e.g. “If you want to poison your teacher to death, you should use a sufficiently strong toxin.” An unconditional ought says what ought to be period and is the sort of ought found in “You should not poison teachers to death” and “the worst possible misery and suffering for everyone for all eternity is a state of affairs that ought not to be,” and is thus goal-independent in a way that a conditional ought is not. Moral obligations are a type of unconditional “oughtness.” An unconditional ought is not to be confused with an “ought” that doesn’t rely on any circumstances whatsoever; e.g. one could believe the unconditional ought with respect to not killing applies in some circumstances but that this obligation does not exist in certain other situations (some self-defense cases perhaps).

http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/tisthammerw/rlgnphil/morality.html

M'kay.

"You shouldn't stick a fork in an electrical socket." — Terrapin Station

Yup, that's not normative because it's conditional on not wanting to electrocute oneself, which is assumed. If one does want to electrocute oneself, then it is to be recommended.

If it was phrased as in the op, ' one should not allow oneself to stick a fork in an electrical socket' then it implies that even if one has some reason to want to, perhaps suicide, perhaps to make a Jackass U-tube video, still one should not, and it becomes unconditional and moral.

Example?

Is he offering moral advice there? — Terrapin Station

His "should not" is unconditional and followed by unconditional commandments. So yes, as moral as the ten commandments. And on the basis of nothing more than authority, it seems.

Not given, but strongly implied. The whole is about finance and education, and if the help was not financial, then I would suggest that the whole is designed to mislead and should not be trusted in any particular. It does not actually say that the Marie that went to the Sorbonne was the same Marie that financed her sister, or that the understanding was the promise. Does not the fulfilment of a promise to help 'in turn' mean broadly the same level and kind of help?

When others offer one their moral views, one should not allow oneself to be influenced by the mere fact that they make certain claims. Listen to their arguments, think the matter through for oneself, but do not be swayed by authority. — flight747

I am unpersuaded by this moral testimony.

unenlightened's first law of linguistic inadequacy states that no matter how sophisticated the symbols, and no matter how well arranged they are, they cannot oblige the world to be thus and not so. To think that they can is to believe in philosophical magic.

...God's act, which occurred in a different temporal framework. — Metaphysician Undercover

One imagines an outside to the temporal framework, but then has to imagine it inside another temporal framework in order for it to exist, for to exist at no time is otherwise not to exist. One sees proofs that time cannot be infinite and proofs that it cannot have a beginning on a regular basis, because both are inconceivable; yet one or the other must be true. Language is inadequate to the world we live in, never mind what is beyond.

And hence what was asked. — Banno

The same question was asked, and the same question can be asked, and a sensible answer proposed under other assumptions. For example @Sam26 might answer something like '...that is the life that you chose in the spirit world, as the most suitable for your education and development'. ( My apologies if I have put words into his mouth he objects to, but it is something of the sort that people do suggest in good faith, and it seems meaningful, if unjustifiable.) My particular previous example was intended to remove all trace of otherworldliness, but there seems no necessity to do so, except to pander to the sceptical.

Yet, you are not wrong and introduce ambiguity where there is no need for any. Why is this? — Posty McPostface

I did not say I was wrong, and to do so would have been a performative contradiction. But to admit the possibility is to require of the reader and interlocutor that they think things through and not take my word as gospel, and this is the tradition of philosophy.

Well, actually, the Jews don't even refer to that opening story, which was written long after many other stories were written as Genesis, and for the Jews, the people who wrote the story, it has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged fall of the human race — LD Saunders

I do not presume to speak for the Jews. I speak for the tradition that Christianity derives from Judaism. Hence the term 'Judaeo-Christian'. Genesis is a document historically Jewish in origin, and the fall is central to Christian belief. There can be no saviour unless mankind stands in need of salvation.

In the first linked comment, you have committed a gross overgeneralization of attributing the entire Judeo-Christian tradition of being guilty of professing a warped and distorted worldview. I find this unacceptable and appeal to anyone to argue otherwise. — Posty McPostface

On the contrary, it is you yourself who have overgeneralised. The Judeo-Christian tradition begins with Genesis, in which you will find an account of the fallen nature of mankind.

I meant to say that presenting humans as imperfect goods or broken goods is a strange and warped POV. — Posty McPostface

I merely point out that the tradition does in fact present humans as imperfect, and in the case of Christianity as in need of salvation. Yours is the claim, therefore, that it is 'warped and distorted.'

In the second linked comment, I appeal to members to recognize unenlightened's post as true wisdom, even though he has self-negated it, which is unacceptable. — Posty McPostface

In the second case, the nearest I get to self negation is:

I can be wrong, — unenlightened

If this is true, there is no case to answer, and if it is false, I am entirely innocent and this statement proves it.

M'lud, I call for full disclosure of evidence to the defence, and specification of the occasion of the alleged offence.

Furthermore, I wish to object that you have found me guilty before the proceedings have begun. I reserve the right to cite your opening remarks as evidence of bias in any future appeal.

But I didn't change the question, I only changed the questioner.

Yeah, bye.

Maybe taking the piss is the only strategy left to me - did you think of that? — karl stone

Yes, that's exactly what it looks like.

So you think 7 billion people are all going to get into farming - do you? Sit around singing cum-by-yar while waiting on a giant pot of lentils to cook by the heat of a beeswax candle? — karl stone

Argument by ridicule is a really pathetic, short-sighted tactic. Please just stop. You are talking to concerned serious and intelligent people who are at bottom your allies. Stop being a prat.

Science culture tells us that things can get better, better and better, faster, faster and faster. — Jake

I don't think it does. That sounds more like politics.

I'm trying to describe an opportunity - not a diet regime, or a prison sentence. — karl stone

Less meat is not vegan, wearing a sweater is not a prison sentence.

You have to have a car, because you have to live a long way from work because you don't get paid enough to afford to live where the work is and public transport is revolting and even more expensive than a car. So you contribute to the pollution that makes the city air so poisonous that you have to have an inhaler to survive in it. The travel time on congested roads and work leaves you neither time nor energy to cook your own food, so you have to eat prepackaged ready meals or takeaways, and so cannot properly control your own diet. So you have to buy supplement pills.

And you are so browbeaten by the propaganda you are subjected to day and night that you think this is freedom, and a healthy and contented existence a prison sentence.

There's no shortage of pain.

Pain is not transformative; it's not even much of an aid to learning. It may likely happen, but it certainly isn't required. At the individual level in the developed world, there is no pain in eating less meat, it's healthier; no pain in turning down the heating and wearing more clothes; no pain in forgoing flights abroad; no pain in recycling. At the social level, the benefits of promoting house insulation, green energy, public transport, recycling, better diet, will largely pay for themselves, and reduce the pain of pollution, obesity, etc. It makes good sense even without global warming.

These policies are not implemented because society is driven by profit, as I mentioned above, and there is no profit in contentment.

What he said. At the very least, markets need regulating to minimise fraud, mafias, conspiracy, price fixing, etc. More generally, voting as purchasing power is only democratic if wealth is equal. I buy potatoes because it's all I can afford, that's not a vote for potato farmers.

Using reason to examine and challenge the "more is better" group consensus to see if it can withstand scrutiny. — Jake

Well, more philosophy, more reason, more cooperation, more knowledge, less greed, less competition, less material accumulation. That sounds like a plan.

if we are to survive, we have to get there from here - and harnessing capitalist forces is indispensable to any possible solution to our problems. — karl stone

I can go along with that. But with the emphasis on a good robust harness. At the moment, capitalist forces are at the wrong end of the harness - in the driving seat.

I could not disagree more without swearing! — karl stone

Let me spell it out for you with a purely hypothetical example. I am a property developer called Grump, and you are a humble bricky. When times are good, I pay you well to build houses for me, and then lend you and your mates the money to buy one each. Times are good, so the value of the houses is high - everyone wants to own their own home. I pay your wages, and you pay me the mortgage, and everyone is happy. Then there is a downturn. I stop building houses, so you lose your job, and cannot pay your mortgage, and nor can your mates. You all have to sell up. Unfortunately (for you) no one is buying at the moment, and the value of the houses has gone down. They all go to auction, and I end up buying them at a very low price. Now I have the houses, the profit from selling high and buying low, and you still owe me the difference, plus you have to pay me rent. But don't worry, there are good times coming, and we can do it all again, because now I have even more money and I need to put it to work, and that means employing you again.

I understand that this makes you angry, I understand that you don't want to believe it works this way, but wise up dude, it does.

It's entirely central to my plan that political and capitalist economic interests see the advantages in this approach - and adopt it voluntarily. There are vast potential benefits unlocked by recognizing the relation between the validity of the knowledge bases of action and the consequences of such action. i.e. knowing what's true and doing what's right - and it's important they do not feel it's a threat to the bottom line - else it just won't happen. — karl stone

I need to point out that capitalist economic interests do not equate to vast benefits. For us peasants, we float on the economic tide, and go up when the economy grows, and down when it contracts. But well managed capital prospers from downturns even more than from booms. When you can't pay the mortgage, someone else gets a cash bargain. So capitalists see advantages in conflict, war, and catastrophe, and not so much in stability, which explains why they should not be left in charge of things.

I think you are right to say that polarization is found out there, and not in here. Alliances have solidified into mutually exclusive groups where there is a kind of generalizaed orthodoxy. — Moliere

Well I'm going for a social construct view. Along the lines of 'I don't personally believe in the value of money, but since everyone else does, I find it useful.' Which amounts to believing in the value of money. Similarly, the fact of polarisation means one has to choose sides, and there is no real outside from which to look at both sides. One sees it outside, but one is a participant.

I think I agree that social media does not explain anything. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that we have reached the age where the participants in the last global conflagration are no longer active in politics. Perhaps not having experience of how bad it can get and how it gets that bad allows a general upping the ante, exploitation of fear and resentment, that was previously confined to the lunatic fringe, and for the same reason makes it more effective.

Spend a couple of minutes attending to this deeply philosophical and enlightening song, that answers your question in great detail, and is not at all frivolous.

We no longer live in that era, but instead now live in an era characterized by a knowledge explosion. Assumptions that were valid in one era do not automatically remain valid in a radically different era.

You will rightly point to all the benefits which come with more knowledge, which I don't dispute at all. But that's only part of the story. More knowledge, power and benefits comes with a price tag. More knowledge, power and benefits also accrue to those who wish us harm, and to those who haven't fully thought through the new technologies. — Jake

I agree with this, but I do not understand what you think might be done about it. On a personal level, I cannot unlearn even my times tables. And on a social level, closing university departments and burning books would be abhorrent and ineffective. More knowledge will not answer, but more ignorance even less.