This is a quite different topic, but related: Who, in a given society, tends to revolt first: the lumpen proles at the very bottom of society, or the dissatisfied skilled workers who participate in a system where they have something substantial to lose?

I don't see welfare recipients, the homeless, the long-term unemployed who are not looking for work and not collecting benefits of any kind--the lumpen proles at the bottom--revolting. It seems to me more likely that workers who are several rungs up the economic ladder (identifying as working class) are the group likely to revolt. Some of these people think of themselves as "middle class" because of their material acquisitions, but a lot of the so-called middle class are just comfortable working class people.

Real middle class people are very much part of the administrative system and are not likely to revolt (because they would be one of the main targets of revolution).

SO, I don't think UBI is intended to prevent a revolt of the masses, it's to keep them minimally contented. It's a nuisance to manage their discontent and unhappiness, not a major threat. Groups that are any sort of real threat to the establishment are not bought off with a basic income. They are confronted and attacked by the police.

In any volatile situation, where revolt could grow out of riot, the police shoot to kill. lumpen proles (like George Floyd) have been treated pretty harshly by the police when they get out of line. It's not an aberration, it's policy.

Interesting information, thanks.

I have a distant memory of swathing wheat. Back in horse-drawn and hand harvested wheat days, the swaths of wheat (oats, rye, barley...) were 'shocked' -- gathered up in loose bundles (shocks) and stacked against each other for drying before being collected and thrashed.

Roundup results in weeds drying up. So I understand how it would help wheat harvests, causing the wheat to dry up. One of the articles mentioned the difficulty of applying Roundup close to harvest -- the machinery knocking down too many plants.

In wide open flatland production, American grain fields are very large and spraying them before harvest would probably not be cost effective. That's probably true in Ukraine and Russia, too. It's one thing spraying corn months before harvest; it's quite unappetizing to spray an herbicide on wheat a week before harvest, contaminating the grain kernels.

A number of cities have tried UBI programs and the results have been quite positive. The amount recipients are paid is nothing close to a living wage, it's a supplement, maybe $500 a month, no strings attached. Recipients report considerably improved psychological health, in that the supplement lifts them out of the "not enough to live on, but a little too much to die" level. They can budget more effectively because the extra money gives them more financial agency.

The amount of UBI would have to be higher if the amount were individuals only income, and not a supplement.

Thrift-minded employed people who have not suffered a financial disaster are able to save enough money to provide an operating financial cushion--a savings account. It feels good to know that things like a tire replacement, dental care. new shoes, and the like are not going to result in a crisis. UBI accomplishes the same thing.

I don't believe that a UBI distributed within a capitalist economy is the same thing as socialism, not even close. It would be a good thing, but socialism requires much, much broader and deeper changes in the operation of society.

Looks like satire to me. and effective at that.

to spray a field of wheat with Roundup, prior to harvest, because this procedure increases the efficiency of the harvest — Metaphysician Undercover

Roundup--glyphosate--isn't used on wheat. It's used on corn and soybeans, mostly. It's applied when corn is about 2 feet high, and when weeds are well-leafed out. It's a systemic herbicide, absorbed by the leaves.

In America, we're piling on debt just trying to provide social security and medicare to old people. — RogueAI

You may be very familiar with the points I am making here. Not everybody is.

The problem with entitlement spending is that Congress has not seen fit to keep these programs fully funded over time.

Federal entitlement program (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and others) comprise the biggest share of mandatory spending which is considerably larger than discretionary spending (too many programs to list). I was surprised that the pie charts displaying government income and expenses didn't include interest on the national debt. The interest is $658 billion per year, on a debt of $34 trillion.

US GDP is around $25 trillion, so the debt is larger than GDP. Not the end of the world, but not desirable either.

We have a national debt because the US Government has spent more money, year after year, than it collected in taxes. Could it have cut spending? Some of it could have been cut (discretionary spending). More taxes could have been collected. Moderated spending and a progressive tax schedule, especially for the corporations and wealthy individuals, would -- over time -- reduce the national debt. We have paid off the national debt before: We accumulated a very large debt during WWII, which (if memory serves) was paid off sometime in the 1970s. The post-war economy was booming and the tax rates were far more progressive -- that is, wealthy people paid a lot more taxes than they do now.

We are stuck on a treadmill at this point. We can dismount, but it will require some big changes.

a rising tide lifts all boats — Shawn

A rising tide lifts all boats and drowns all those without a boat.

Just saying...

Nice! I like that. Here's another in like vein:

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

..................Richard Brautigan, Poet in Residence, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California 1967

"The American Dream" is a phrase coined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 bestseller The Epic of America.

According to an article in JSTOR, the publisher didn't think "the American Dream" was a sellable title with a severe depression underway. J. T. Adams is not related to the presidential Adams family.

He put it more succinctly elsewhere in the book: a “dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.” This contemporary review of Epic notes that Adams alluded to the idea in fifty or more passages in the book. The unnamed reviewer thought Adams believed the dream to be “our greatest contribution to the thought of the world.”

According to Google Ngram, peak American Dream (at least the phrase's appearance in print) was during the Clinton Administration in 1994.

And those extensive intentions are what, in your perspective? And in what context of copyright do those intentions exist? — Christoffer

#1. Make money.

I do not know what percent of the vast bulk of material sucked up for AI training is copyrighted, but thousands of individual and corporate entities own the rights to a lot of the AI training material. I don't know whether the most valuable part was copyrighted currently, or had been copyrighted in the past, nor how much was just indifferent printed matter. Given the bulk of material required, it seems likely that no distinction was made.

Perhaps using the English speaking world's copyrighted material to train AI is covered by "Fair Use", but perhaps not. IF an AI company sells information containing content from the New York Times or National Enquirer without paying royalties, that would not be fair use. If an AI produces a novel which has a remarkable similarity to a novel by a known published author, that may not be fair use, either.

Social media makes money out of the communication between people. It isn't copyrighted and people voluntarily provide it, whether it be slop of pearls. The many people who produce copyrighted material haven't volunteered to give up their ideas.

AI is breaking new ground here, and legislation and courts have not had time to sort out the various ownership issues.

There is a matter of trust here. There is no reason we should trust AI technology and its corporate owners.

The system itself lacks the central human component that is the intention of its use. — Christoffer

The processors in AI facilities lack intention, but AI facilities are owned and operated by human individuals and corporations who have extensive intentions.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

The Matrix film has been cited many times here in support of the "unreality of reality". It's a work of fiction; it's entertainment; it isn't philosophy lecture. Still, the idea that the world is an illusion goes back to Plato (the cave). Well, sure enough, not everything is as it seems. That's life. It doesn't add up to one big computer simulation.

I

What if solipsism is true and I am the only being that actually exists — Truth Seeker

Then you have bigger things to worry about than objectivity vs. subjectivity.

Solipsism isn't the issue here. What is at issue is a) a sweeping generalization (these get made about a million times a day around the world); b) why are you excluding objectivity? 2 + 2 = 4. Objectively true. Pigeons can fly, camels are mammals; objectively true. We know it's objectively true because we organized the animals on a chart. Maybe separating pigeons and camels was a subjective act when it was first done, but it's objectively true now, because we say so. You can read the chart and see what it says. Objective!

You look at a snake and quite objectively observe, "That snake isn't going to fly anywhere." If you hand the checkout at Target a $20 bill for the total purchase of $30, the checkout will objectively observe that $20 isn't enough. Either you will objectively find $10 more in your wallet, or the checkout will call security over, and they are quite objective, as well. They'll take you into the back room and shake you down for the missing $10.

We don't know anything objectively. We may believe that we do but this is a delusion. Everything we know is subjective. There are two kinds of subjective truths: — Truth Seeker

You open by claiming that believing objective knowledge is a delusion. If all knowledge is subjective, how can you assert that objectivity is delusional? Maybe that's just your particular problem, not shared by other people.

As a rule of thumb, sweeping generalities ("we don't know anything objectively") should be viewed with suspicion.

It might be. but I'm sure you Australians, even you, have your own parochial views you will want to air.

In the 1950s we were expected to memorize some things like the multiplication table. It remains a useful bit of rote learning, I before E except after C" is a useful rule, but is neither weird nor foreign nor the height of forfeiture--something to explain to a caffeine-addled heifer on codeine at one's leisure while one seizes the day.

But yes, information presented without a cohesive narrative, or historical contextualization ends up being only potentially useful. Learning how big a frog's genome is, by itself is a big SO WHAT? Learning the names of each gyrus and sulcus in a brain is not very useful unless one learns what they do and how these various parts relate to an animal's actual life.

Juvenile students generally can not supply a narrative or context themselves, at least one that is appropriate. An educated middle-aged adult can receive new information and devise a mental structure which makes sense of it. High school students have long complained about having to study literature. "What is the point of reading this stuff? What is the point of learning history? I don't care what happened 200 years ago or what a poem really means."

I'm not sure to what extent English Lit and History teachers themselves have a solid narrative in the heads which enable them to deliver facts in a meaningful (and interesting) context. College literature and history classes are offered as big chunks which may be studied completely out of sequence. The students are assigned big blocks of material to read (or skim) through; the lecturer will add information about say, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). How much understanding about depression, or melancholy, a student will depart with is doubtful -- because in several days the class will move on to another big chunk of text. Who influenced Burton and who did Burton influence? Who claimed to have benefitted from reading the Anatomy of Melancholy, back in 1621?

What is the over-arching story of the American Experience, 1620 to 2024? at 77 I feel like I have some idea, and it isn't what I was taught in high school. It isn't that what was taught was just a pack of lies. Rather, a lot of topics were left out. The Erie Canal opened in 1825. What were the political, social, and economic consequences? What was traveling on early railroads (or even ones in the early 1900s) like? How did the more sparsely settled South become so politically powerful, and stay that way into the mid-20th century?

In any case that reaction requires that your mind invariable acknowledges or absorbs the ideas and thoughts presented to you. Otherwise how can you reject them? — Benj96

I don't know whether the 'viral meme' behaves like a virus invading the body -- where the immune system has to register the agent of invasion before it can create antibodies. A novel rhino virus variety triggers a cascade of immune responses which produce the cold we suffer from. Next time, the same virus will not get very far.

I've imbibed a lot of Nazi propaganda by reading about the history of National Socialism in Germany. Reading about the history of race riots and racial discrimination in the United States has resulted in my exposure to a lot of racist ideas. Reading about the 19th century expansion of the United States across the continent has inoculated me with many ideas about the success of settler colonialism. If one reads the history of the British Empire, one will get exposed to a host of ideas about how the world can be run that give short shrift to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A trip through the history of the Romanovs in Russia will provide one with the inside story of despotism, enlightened and otherwise.

Rather than making me MORE susceptible to Nazi, racist, imperialist, settler colonial thinking, reading about the appalling behavior has strengthened bias (antibodies) against these ideas.

I've read these various histories as a mature (old) adult which is a good thing. Perhaps I would not have developed resistance to these kinds of ideas had I encountered them in 1936 Germany, 1920 Oklahoma, or 1880 London. I did encounter the ideas of settler colonialism as a child in 1950s Minnesota (and later) and the way we conducted westward expansion seems like gold plated history. Perfectly sensible. (Yes, I am now quite aware of the genocidal nature of the expansion).

But the Nazis, the white racists, the British colonialists, and the American establishment wasn't inoculating people with bits of viral thoughts. They were all indoctrinating the populations with train loads of propaganda, education, printed and media information backed up with material force.

One can break down a global system of propaganda (to which Germans were subjected) into little darts of data. For instance, a gross drawing of a Jew in Völkischer Beobachter, or a detail about how a Jew defiled an aryan woman. Or, how a Chicago newspaper describes a black slum in 1957, describing the blacks as causative agents in their deteriorated housing.

Minnesota school children learn about the federal government hanging 38 members of the Dakota tribe in Minnesota in the largest mass execution in United States history, on December 26, 1862, following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It was presented as a victory for white settlers against the murderous Dakota people. One hopes this presentation has changed by 2024 in all Minnesota History classes.

Take the millions of Trump loyalists (MAGA). They are skeptical of the electoral system, the government, the science establishment, and so on. Their conservative political beliefs are strongly correlated with conservative religious belief. They didn't get this way on the basis of viral media posts or years of sustained Trump actions, speeches, and appearances. It takes a long time to achieve their state of mind.

The same thing is true of Bernie Boys, or any number of recognizable political, social, religious, or economic class groupings.

OK. I will acknowledge, affirm, and attest to the potential virality of images, words, slogans, phrases, and ideas. Social media is set up to facilitate this kind of rapid dispersion. Rapid dispersion isn't new, of course. It's just faster now with electronic media than it was before radio, television, and lately the internet.

Well... "distraction" has maintained a stable status as an effective way to disarm people. Especially if you have an underlying dogma or agenda you wish to incept slowly and gradually into the target audience. — Benj96

Absolutely, but incepting large, heavy, complicated ideas into an audience is time consuming and requires a lot of varied repetition.

The pro-palestinian campus demonstrations look like a sudden eruption. The anti-Vietnam war demonstrations also seemed to erupt out of nowhere. In both cases, there was a fairly long period of fermentation before eruption. The pulverization of Gaza (as wars go) is in the present moment, but the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is many decades long. The decision to set up tents on campus or occupy buildings in the past couple of weeks might be sort of viral. Spring is a popular time to raise a ruckus. Likely there were some actual coordinating efforts.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was viral in nature. I live in "fly over" land, so east/west coast events arrive here late. When it did arrive, it was clearly a re-enactment of televised events in New York City, The local Occupy Minneapolis City Hall Plaza was a refreshing piece of political theater, but not substantive.

"Went viral" is an annoying viral phrase. The Oxford Dictionary people add a few new words every year which went viral and got used a lot. I'm out of the loop, so I haven't often not heard these expressions often, or at all.

Did you intend to omit a negative vote?

Why do you think that the ordinary people who compose any government would be better than parents at designing and operating the schools that you are proposing?

refusing to learn would be a punishable crime — Scarecow

How can you tell whether someone is REFUSING to learn, or merely does not understand the lesson?

Schools don't do a good enough job at forcing kids to learn. — Scarecow

Schools are definitely not doing a good enough job, but FORCING people to learn something is difficult. You can lock up scholars in the little red school, but you can't make them learn grammar, spelling, reading, arithmetic, social skills, or trigonometry (which, by the way, is not a general life skill).

It's brainwashing made easy. — Scarecow

No need for your regime. Mass media has already figured out how to make brainwashing easy.

With no outside connections, kids in these institutions would be incredibly susceptible to propaganda. — Scarecow

On the other hand, a lot of propaganda comes from outside connections.

My proposal would prevent messy family dynamics. — Scarecow

It would not! Human dynamics are, by nature, messy.

Hey, I'm all in favor of education reform, and when I look at the chaotic conditions of some communities and the dismal results from some schools, a draconian regime like yours has a certain appeal.

Back in the late 1960s I worked at a Job Corps for 18-21 year old boys. We were located in a rural area. The 100 or so corpsmen lived on the "base" and spent half their time in education and half in the work-skills program. Leaving the place was difficult because we were kind of isolated and the corpsmen didn't have much (if any) money. We fed, housed, educated, and trained them. The successful ones moved from functional or absolute literacy to 6th or 7th grade reading levels in a year. The time limit on being in the corps was about 18 months.

Having control over these adolescent education-system failures enabled us to accomplish some educational goals. But the motivation to learn much of anything was missing from some corpsmen. Why? These were not children of privilege. They were children of deprivation and disadvantage. Academic (or any other kind of) success story wasn't part of their life-experience.

If it's that simple, that hearing a phrase infects my brain with a meme or idea, then I can stop this discussion in its tracks by saying, "Don't think that viral ideas are bullshit."

Still think that ideas are viral?

It seems to me social media algorithms are tailored to these principles of highly personalised, highly relatable and outrage or community invoking sentiments. — Benj96

Social media algorithms are designed for an audience whose mental lives are spent on the surface of a shallow pond. That put-down applies to a lot of people. Their shallow depth isn't the creation of social media -- people have been shallow for a very long time. People are not stupid, but depth takes sustained effort, which is difficult for many people. Killing saber toothed tigers, domesticating wolves, figuring out how to get agriculture started, milking cows, mining coal, greeting every "guest" who walks into a Walmart... it all keeps us busy. No time for Plato and Aristotle.

As for instant outrage, yes. Social media is very good at masturbating the masses.

You may have gotten the impression that I do not like social media (like Facebook, twitter, shitter, x, et al. Quite right. I don't.

Most of my days are filled with joy despite my position that life is inherently without meaning. — Tom Storm

Perhaps 'nihilism' [the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless; extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence; the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order] is a contradiction in terms.

To declare that life is meaningless is to take a position on the meaning of life. It's unavoidable. A very generously defined "normal person" can not exist without some sort of self-guidance that will amount to a moral system; he can not exist without some sort of 'meaning' developing.

Perhaps the Russian-style nihilist is possible: "I do not approve of the established social order." There is a lot for even non-nihilists to disapprove of.

Maybe you mean, "There is no external source of meaning in the world." No imagined deity, no disembodied mind, no cosmic force provides meaning. Human minds are the sole source of meaning".

As for nihilists "jumping out of bed glad to be alive" I think it is difficult to maintain the joy. I used to associate with a particular group of socialists who were something like the Russian nihilists. They had reached the point where they approved of NOTHING in capitalist society. They were not good socialists, they were bitter old men.

A problem with the term nihilist is that it is absolute and without nuance. It's like "anarchist" in that way -- when used by adolescents it has an extreme, unmodified meaning.

Whether nihilism is a good term or not, carry on with your program of joy.

I know what depression feels like. How do nihilists feel? Are there happy, productive nihilists who bounce out of bed in the morning, glad to be alive, despite the absence of meaning?

We have murdered a lot of people over the last five thousand years over religions and politics and we are still at it. — Truth Seeker

Now you have stated an opinion I don't agree with, and we were getting along so well! :smile:

There surely is a lot of disagreement over religion and politics, but when it comes to war, I think the stakes are almost always material: Who is going to have control over resources (land, water, minerals, labor, etc.)

Take, for instance, the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire by the armies of Islam. There clearly was a religious overlay: Islam vs. Christian. There had been earlier religious overlays to the Roman expansion throughout the Mediterranean Basin, and then to the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. Power politics too. But under the religious and political overlay was the on-the-ground reality of land, and who controlled it. Land is a very material concern: Who gets to concentrate the wealth that farmers, miners, urban centers, traders, etc. create?

Some wars are murky: What was at stake in WWI? The years of stalemate in the trenches, the appalling number of dead, the static lines of battle... it's hard to see what the Central Powers vs. the Triple Entente were after. It seems like the balance of German land and population was one problem. German industry was very successful, but a lot of German soil was not great for agriculture (too much clay, too wet, to chilly...

France was in much better shape agriculturally, and was on a par with German industry. Great Britain didn't have to depend on its small island for food and markets: it had the Empire and it ruled the seas. Control of the seas enabled GB to blockade Germany, which helped starve the Germans into submission.

WWII is much clearer: The politics were crystal clear, and the material aspirations of the Nazi regime were front and center.

The rich need to downgrade their high-ecological-impact lifestyle — Truth Seeker

Absolutely. The rich -- the wealthiest people -- consume a very disproportionate share of goods. It isn't the they eat so much -- the rich are more likely to be svelte than obese. It's their consumption of materials that matter -- the 30,000 to 50,000 square foot mansions lavishly furnished, the landscaping, the cars, the planes, the yachts, the chrome, the plastic, and the petroleum it all takes.

Obviously their assets should be liquidated as soon as possible -- like, today.

We don't want to leave out the impact of military activities, or exploiting space with thousands of rocket launches burning fuel in the upper levels of the atmosphere.

Then there is the dominance of the automobile and the absence of effective public transit (especially in the US).

I like meat, but you are right -- I / we should switch to vegetarian / vegan diets.

In a study published this week in Environmental Research Letters, researchers found that the food system was responsible for as much as 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

This makes sense. One of our appalling practices is growing corn for alcohol to add to gasoline. That aside, animals (including ourselves) are not all that great at converting plant matter to animal protein:

Feed conversion
(feed/edible weight)
4.5 for chicken
9.4 for pork
25 for beef

When Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb (1968) the world's population was about 3.7 billion. Today world population is a little over 8 billion. True enough, we are not running out of space, and mass starvation has not ensued. 'Population' per se isn't the problem. The issue is sustainability in a rapidly warming planet. If world population were 3 billion today, and everyone was consuming goods, energy, food, transportation, and so on the way the the G7 countries are, the sustainability problem would still exist.

In 1968 global warming was not an issue, outside of a small circle of friends in climate science.

Sustainability is an emerging problem. Warming is disrupting climate, ecology, agriculture, oceans, mammal, bird, and insect populations, fresh water supplies, and on and on. Despite the pledges in numerous climate conferences, heat-trapping gases continue to rise, and warming continues, pretty much unabated.

It isn't a question of too many people. It's a question of how many people will have a chance at a decent life, and how many will suffer from intolerable heat, drought, flooding, new diseases, economic decline, crop failure, fishery collapse, etc.

Malthus didn't know about the Haber–Bosch process (around 1900), which produces nitrogen fertilizer from the air, or Norman Borlaug's 1950s-60s Green Revolution research in plant genetics -- both of which greatly increased food production in the 20th century. "Past performance does not guarantee future results" as economists say.

What do you think will ensure global cooperation instead of global annihilation? — Truth Seeker

Short answer: I don't know. That said...

World-wide free trade was thought to be helpful for global peace. A global government (League of Nations first, United Nations second) has been tried. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) has worked so far, but living on a knife edge is a losing gamble in the long run. Global unity has been brought about through universal global threats -- but only in science fiction novels. Now that we have a real global threat (severe climate change) we see new opportunities for instability and conflict.

Over population is thought to be a threat to world peace, or long term survival, but world population before WWI was about 1.8 billion. Before WWII it was about 2.3 billion. The world's two most destructive wars, then, were way before our present (too many) 8+ billion.

We are capable of cooperation, certainly. Humans have cooperated a lot over the last 12,000 years, since the beginning of more settled communities. But we have also fought a lot. A lot of ancient hunter-gatherers died from their brains being bashed in (so says archeological evidence).

We are an intelligent species. Unfortunately, our smart cerebral cortexes are balanced by volatile limbic systems which react with the fight or flight response to real or imagined threats. We are an imaginative species, so we can see threats where they may not actually exist, everything from ghosts, evil spirits, monsters under the bed, angry gods, and so forth to little dictators with nuclear arsenals (North Korea). Given a little encouragement with propaganda, we can see threats behind every tree. And beside all that, there are real, bona fide threats.

I do not think we can expect to have peace and cooperation over the long run. Our best bet is to downgrade our weapons so that we can survive and prosper after our inevitable wars.

Depressing opinion? Depressing fact? Yes.

I worry that we will destroy ourselves and all the other species with our conflicts. — Truth Seeker

As well you should.

Speculation about nuclear war suggests that not being able to determine the facts (is that a missile, a bird, a plane, or superman...) might trigger a nuclear holocaust rather than a difference of opinion about which nuclear power is a superior society. But delusions might also be the determinative factor.

We have come fairly close to launching nuclear weapons based on facts (that were not correct).

I think that if we could work out what is fact and what is opinion, it would help us get on with each other better. — Truth Seeker

Or maybe recognize that disagreement over fact and opinion just goes with the territory.

A fact or an opinion? It just doesn't matter that much what other people think.

At the time it seemed reasonable to wonder why Denmark needed upgraded F-16s. Given an aggressive Russia, it makes more sense.

Some years ago it seemed like Ukraine could not withstand a sustained Russian attack. It's not clear whether--over the long run--they can, without a significant and reliable increase in military assistance. How likely that is... The EU and NATO are not unitary bodies, but are made up of individual countries with varying perspectives on all sorts of topics. How long the EU, NATO, and the US can maintain unity isn't entirely clear.

Whether I (we) am (are) willing or not makes no difference, because we operate within a system which decidedly increases some people's opportunities at our collective expense. Society's goods (material and cultural) are not fairly and evenly distributed -- and they never have been.

Most of the time I accept the status quo with a measure of equanimity because some of the advantaged people (some artists, performers, surgeons, etc.) share their good fortune with everyone by the way they live their lives. On the other hand, some of the advantaged people are plugs in the bowels of grace, and it it would be a good thing if they disappeared. Most advantaged people are in between the extremes.

Then there are the disadvantaged people. A good share of those who did not receive advantages live (lived) exemplary lives and we can be grateful for their existence. Some of the disadvantages wouldn't have done anything good had they been showered with cash. It just isn't in them to do great things.

Life is not fair. I don't like it, but that's the way it is.

My belief in some level of consciousness among the various species is that brains evolved their capacities over geologic time scales, and our brains are only a recent iteration. Perception, memory, organized behavior, "thinking"*** and so forth are present in both birds and bees and in us--at levels more or less appropriate to the species. Except for us -- we have way too much brain function which we need to defend ourselves from excessive abilities.

Do the various species possess consciousness? It seems to be difficult to explain consciousness in ourselves (how it works, where it is located, and so on), so it will be difficult to explain how the dog laying at my feet is conscious, or the squirrels cleaning out the fire feeder, or the crows collecting in the trees... possess consciousness. Maybe it isn't explainable by us, paragons of animals, and if so our inability to explain it doesn't deprive us of consciousness. I think but I can't witness myself producing thought from many billions of neurons.

I'm late to this discussion, so somebody has probably said this already.

*** A science fiction writer spoke these words through a character: "You have to stay alert! In the jungle, everybody is thinking." 'Everybody' being all the predator and prey species.

Perhaps he should have stuck with tent making.

Well, sure; we aren't supposed to 'keep score" such that 5 good deeds allows a couple more bad deeds.

The most decent people I've known tended to fret over every minor infraction — Vera Mont

Yes. The most corrupt behave abominably. But fretting over trivial infractions (and confusing etiquette with morality) isn't healthy either. Endless fretting can exhaust people, and hobble their ability to focus on the basics of loving their neighbors.

Paul says a lot of things I don't much like. I like the idea that one's good deeds should outnumber one's bad deeds. That is something we flawed creatures can manage.

Whether by official definitions of sin, or my own expectations for moral behavior, I'm a sinner. I have sinned. Just guessing, but all 8 billion of us fail to meet either an official standard of goodness or our own, whatever that may be. We are flawed creatures who try to be good most of the time, except when we are not.

Norman Greenbaum's contribution to sin or sinlessness was published in 1969, his only hit "Spirit In The Sky.

Never been a sinner, I never sinned
I got a friend in Jesus
So you know that when I die
He's gonna set me up
with the spirit in the sky — Greenbaum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZQxH_8raCI

I love the song, and I like his assertion that he is sinless and never sinned. It belongs to a period of Hippiedom in which this sort of deep positive self-regard could pass without deep frowns and raised eyebrows, at least among the Hippie peers.

Such a statement would definitely not fly in the Protestant / Catholic milieu in which I was raised, in which we are rotten to the core with sin, a view which is not altogether helpful.

Do you believe most people generally trend towards wisdom/ lack of delusion with age and experience? Or is this you referring to your specific case. — Benj96

I believe people are more alike than they are different. We are all subjected to competing influences as children -- on into adulthood -- that become determining factors as we age. Times and circumstances change for individuals and different influences come to the foreground. An individual may push towards greater wisdom (aka, a wider, more perceptive perspective) or one's delusions may become exaggerated.

We hold ourselves individually responsible for what happens to us (it's in our cultural DNA). To some extent, we are responsible. But one of the benefits of the wider perspective is recognizing where we were, and were not, the prime movers in our life history, and that's just the way it is.

So no, there's nothing special about my specific case. I am grateful things didn't turn out as badly as they might have.

The Trolley Problem is a question of the 'greatest good for the greatest number of people". Somebody is going to die, one way or another. It's interesting, but it's been done to death.

Stick with your original post and don't change it anymore.

"Your money or your life"

You probably have never heard of Jack Benny; too bad if you haven't, great if you have. He was first popular on radio, then later television. Here's the punchline of a radio comedy skit about having to make an existential choice:

I should have clarified. The people in this situation aren’t attacking you but you are still forced to choose between killing them or sacrificing yourself. — Captain Homicide

Wait a minute. You've 'clarified' the matter out of existence. IF they are not attacking you, then there is no justification for an attack in self-defense. What the hell are they doing?

A man was just convicted of second degree murder in Minnesota. There had been an altercation at a river park in Wisconsin, Names were called, threats were made. The convicted person (a guy in his 50s) fell into the water, and when he stood up he brandished a knife, which he proceeded to use to kill one of the people who had been yelling at him.

The judge noted that the convicted man could have -- and should have -- left the scene of the conflict when he climbed out of the river -- nobody was stopping him from departing. Nobody was threatening his existence, however abusive the verbiage being tossed around might have been. It was homicide, not self-defense.