I watched the Near-Death Experience video in full. I think her experience was a hallucination produced by her distressed and frightened brain. — Truth Seeker

Sure, but you have no proof.

There is no proof she experiences anything at all, as you could be hallucinating this whole conversation along with this video, or then there is a world as we commonly understand it but she just appears to be be conscious but is not actually conscious.

There is no box that you can put some matter inside and it lights up green if it's conscious or red if it's unconscious.

**A Rational Critique of Pre-Birth Selection of Life Events** — Truth Seeker

First this seems like AI output which is banned in the forum.

However, the reason I bring this matter up is because you find it entirely reasonable to be working on some sort of technical way to render mortal beings immortal.

Seems to me as plausible a theory in strict scientific terms these near death experiences of what appears to be immortality.

There are reports of the experience by people, which is the basic nature of science. The experiment is repeatable by anyone when they too die.

Absolutely scientific.

Though, to be clear, the reason for my postulating the immortality of the soul is in the process of determining a non-arbitrary logical structure to support a non-empty ethic.

However, since I assume people are conscious and souls are immortal it seems plausible to me that people may indeed have such authentic experience.

Of course, when I have similar experience after painstaking street heroine research nobody seems to assign any spiritual significance to my reports, and yet people dropping far large quantities of opioids on the operating room table is somehow entirely different and credible. Seems a complete double standard to me. (This is a joke, but there is also a point, that there seems to be a lot of opioids involved in the near death reports I've came across)

I don't think this is true. I have considered my ethical system both before being depressed and during depressive episodes. — Truth Seeker

And you feel there is nothing in the slightest to change?

I am at minus two on the mood scale right now. — Truth Seeker

Doesn't seem a complete crisis yet, hopefully the routine of knowledge seeking will see you through and also that you will find what you're looking for.

Thank you for your advice. I will do this. — Truth Seeker

Excellent. Life systems are quite remarkable.

It is not an achievable objective. I am still thinking about it because it is so fascinating. — Truth Seeker

But in the meantime there is existing life that in need of protection.

I have no way to achieve the objective of upgrading matter-based lifeforms that need to consume air, water and food into energy-based lifeforms that can live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

We definitely agree here.

This near death experience maybe worthwhile to listen to:

Thank you for clarifying. In a previous post I had quoted the following:

“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” – Albert Schweitzer, “Civilization and Ethics”, 1949.

My goal of saving and improving all lives is supported by the quoted words. — Truth Seeker

Yes, I also didn't emphasize that it's "my unifying principle" as it's a pretty common unifying principle that is ancient, with many variations such as treat others (all life) as you would have them treat you.

My super long essay is my is born from feeling to clarify this principle to myself as well as unify this principle with the more fundamental principle of searching for truth, as presumably if the principle of protecting life is true then one would first need to search for this truth to find it.

So the central question of my deliberation is why is searching for truth and protecting all life the same thing?

For, as mentioned above concerning numerical analysis, we cannot optimize for 2 different factors at the same time; the only exception being that the two factors are both necessary conditions to the same thing and so are never in conflict.

In addition to this, there is the question of why exactly searching for truth and protecting all life are good things in the first place.

I am sorry but I couldn't finish reading your super-long essay. I am suffering from depression. My concentration and comprehension and thinking are all affected by my depression. — Truth Seeker

No worries but if you want to my position on these matters in detail it is in the super long essay.

My concentration and comprehension and thinking are all affected by my depression. — Truth Seeker

I empathize, we live in troubling times, to say the least, and life is being destroyed and disrespected at a truly unimaginable scale, from Palestine to the extinction of species no one's even named yet.

However, if we did not get depressed we would never be motivated to fundamentally change anything.

It is also worth considering that it is only when depressed that it is possible to analyze our own ethical system, as so much in "normal life" is driven by emotional reactions it; so it is only when those emotions are gone that it is possible to think through carefully what exactly is right and wrong in a given situation, and what emotional reactions are justified and what are from social conditioning of one form or another, and most importantly what we may already know we have to do but emotions stand in the way of doing it, for fear of loss or humiliation. For to be depressed and feel nothing is also to fear nothing: a powerful tool for good or for ill.

Life has value, but predation is against that value. Predation involves prioritising the life of the predator over the life of the prey. This is selfish. This is evil. — Truth Seeker

You may need to reflect deeply on this and also perhaps study life systems in more detail to appreciate how life is and not what you wish it to be.

For predators are not harmful overall to the species they prey upon. Without predation of herbivores, for example, the population would grow exponentially and eat all the food and then die. Predation maintains ecosystem balance.

It is also again a bait-and-switch fallacy to equate a lion hunting a gazelle and our logging old growth forests for furniture as the same thing called "consumption".

A better word for what the lion is doing is nourishment within the cycle of life; there is no "destruction" happening. It is we humans that consume in the destructive sense as what we do is not sustainable and leads to ecosystem collapse.

Definitely we humans should stop consuming the natural world to engage in poisonous follies, but the cycle of energy and atoms in natural processes is not a process of consumption in this destructive sense.

No, pain and death diminish lives. So, they are to be prevented. — Truth Seeker

We keep coming back to this.

Earlier you seemed to agree that this was not an achievable objective.

Seems to me an example of the ideal fallacy of describing an ideal system, describing some characteristics of an ideal system and then assuming that it is therefore good to pursue that ideal in the real world.

For example, most would agree that ideally I could fly by simple act of will. Easy to argue that this is a true statement. An example of the ideal fallacy is then reasoning based on this assumption that because it is ideal that I can fly by my own act of will I should jump off a building in pursuit of this will-flying ideal.

The error in reasoning is that pursuing one aspect of an imagined ideal, in this case that I can just jump off buildings and fly away in my ideal world design, entails that approaches the ideal and therefore is good to do.

Other examples would be that "ideally people would not have any property, so therefore I should go and destroy their property," or "ideally all people would be self sufficient, so therefore I should never help anyone to encourage their self sufficiency," or "ideally authority is never wrong and therefore I should always do what authority tells me to do" or "ideally I would simply know things without needing to go through the proposed effort required to gain such knowledge, so therefore I will assume I simply do actually know or then God told me".

I am trying to figure out how to upgrade all living things into immortal energy beings who live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

In your case, you seem to be reasoning that "ideally people would not have any physical bodies and therefore should be liberated from their bodies".

That, in believing in an indifferent universe with no existence after death, your thoughts become essentially obsessed with creating your own immortality is perhaps reason to not dismiss my arguments for the immortality of the soul as a rational assumption in the above mentioned essay.

Without an indefinite timeline under consideration decisions become arbitrary, is the key problem.

I agree that causing pain and death is evil. That's why I am trying to change consumption-based existence to non-consumption-based existence. — Truth Seeker

In one comment you say you recognize disembodying not simply everyone but every living thing is not an achievable goal, and in the next comment you are entirely dedicated to achieving it.

If you want to get into the technical reasons it's not a practical objective, quantum information cannot be copied.

You could, at best, destroy the entire planet and build a simulation of the planet, running in a computer that consumes energy, presumably from the sun. There is zero reason to believe any simulation of consciousness would be actually conscious, zero way to test out if it is or if it isn't, zero way to confident any process whatsoever could transfer consciousness into a device of which we have zero confidence contains any consciousness, and also plenty of reasons to believe consciousness cannot be transferred by any available technology due to no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics.

Why the ideal fallacy is a fallacy is that things cannot be considered in isolation; the world is complex and all aspects (or then as much as is feasible) of how the world really is must be taken into account to improve the situation. We can move with each action ever so slightly towards ideals taking into consideration all the knock-on and systemic effects we can, but to simply take one aspect of is imagined to be an ideal situation and then reduce the focus of one's action to one aspect of the ideal and try to make that little aspect happen, has zero logical basis of why it would work and plenty of historical examples of the strategy not working.

I am so sorry that you were ill. I am glad you are feeling better now. — Truth Seeker

Thanks for the concern, I seem much better now.

How do you know what is good and what is evil? You didn't answer. Please answer this question. Thank you. — Truth Seeker

It is mentioned in the previous post as the protection of all life, as an example of a unifying principle; it is also what I happen to believe personally but I was not so clear about it.

It's also in the super long essay linked to previously: https://open.substack.com/pub/eerik/p/the-cromulomicon-the-book-of-croms?r=33um1b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Humans are also part of life and so also need care and protecting, it is also mainly through a better society which is the main mechanism to protect life (as humans are the main danger to both other humans and life in general).

The moral foundation being the ethic of searching for truth and so also resolving contradictions, and then the truths found being existence is ordered and good and a long series of other ontological and epistemological considerations to ensure the entire logical structure is coherent and non-empty.

The essay is so long in order to resolve apparent dichotomies such as the choice to continue to read (so what may appear as knowledge maximizing) but letting someone die of thirst; or then, the example considered in the essay simply the most extreme version of the scenario of the choice between continuing to read and the destruction of the entire planet or then dying and the planet not being destroyed.

It is bad that lions hunt. The whole system of consuming in order to exist is evil. — Truth Seeker

Here I disagree, if life has value then natural systems, including predation, has value.

If life is evil, it follows oneself is evil, presuming one is alive, and from that it follows that good beliefs and thoughts we would not expect to find in an evil life form, but rather the evil of thinking oneself to be good when one is not.

The logical framework developed in the above essay is that in order to make any decisions at I must assume that I have value and what follows from that is that other humans and life in general also has value, as I am alive and cannot know of any a priori ontological difference with others. I think I'm conscious and a moral agent and assign myself value, and you are similar to me so it is reasonable to assume you also are conscious and are a moral agent and have value. We are both alive and so it stands to reason that if we have value life as a whole has value in addition to anyways depending on life in general to sustain our own life.

Pain and death are apart of life and therefore also have value.

What is evil is causing pain and death to disrespect and destroy life, especially manipulating others to be harmed as that is an additional disrespect and abuse of the truth as well as life; or then to simply be indifferent to our duties to others and to life is not as bad but still definitely evil in this framework.

Immortality of the soul is posited to ensure different decision paths never arrive at the same situation, such as not existing, and therefore be pragmatically equal. That would be a crisis in my framework and so I assume it isn't true.

Apologies for the delay, I have been fairly ill and moral philosophy was beyond my ability to focus on for the last few days.

It's not ethical, but it is what happens. Just as people kill people. That's not ethical either. — Truth Seeker

Not-ethical can be interpreted as absence of ethical consideration (such as whether the moon is being ethical or not in orbiting the sun; it's just not an ethical question), but can also be used to mean bad.

Not intentional, but switching the meanings in the same context is the bait-and-switch fallacy.

When you say the lion is "not ethical" the meaning is clearly that there is no moral evaluation as the lion is not a moral agent.

However, when switching the consideration of people killing people, the meaning of not ethical is not a lack of moral evaluation but to mean the opposite of good, as in bad.

Over the last 10,000 years, at least 2–4 billion deaths from famine, disease, and disaster have human negligence, cruelty, or mismanagement as significant causes. — Truth Seeker

We agree that lot's of bad things have happened to people and lot's of people have done bad things.

However, a moral theory cannot be based on moral-recoil, as in an emotional reaction, at listing bad things.

For, you only have an emotional reaction to bad things because you already have a moral theory, whether explicit or implicit, in which those things are evaluated as bad and thus something to feel bad about.

This is what makes moral philosophy so difficult, because everything easily goes in emotional driven circles that are not arguments but simply beg the question. For example, an emotional reaction to murder does not, in itself, support a moral argument that murder is wrong.

The emotional reaction to wrong is due to the pre-existing belief that those things are wrong. In cultures where beliefs are different, the emotional reactions are different.

A classic example is that our Western culture has a strong emotional reaction to female genital mutilation and doing so to a child, or anyone, in the West is a crime. However, mutilate the genitals of boys to your hearts content and a whole army will defend your practice as actually a good thing. If male genital mutilation was not normalized, the reaction would be the same as for female genital mutilation. If people argued that the male genital mutilation was 'just a bit' and that why female mutilation is still bad as it's greater, well people would just respond that you could obviously mutilate female genitals just a bit too so the effect is exactly comparable, would that then be ok? Obviously the double standard cannot be maintained in any rational discourse. The moral recoil in the West concerning female genital mutilation and not male genital mutilation is because of the pre-existing belief that one is ok and the other not, due to normalization of one and not the other. Given this obvious history, the emotional reaction is obviously not a justification to condemn female genital mutilation and not male genital mutilation.

One would need an argument independent of emotional reaction to evaluate all genital mutilation as bad, or then justify male genital mutilation as ok and female not or then both are fine. In order to make any such moral evaluation at all one requires in turn a moral theory that can be used identify good and bad things.

The plants, the gazelles, the lions and the humans are being selfish. All autotrophs, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores and parasites are selfish. — Truth Seeker

I thought we just agreed above that things like lions hunting are not ethical questions. But if you meant above that you meant not ethical in the same way, that lions are bad (and therefore should be stopped?) please clarify.

Being selfish is evil. We should look after the interests of everyone. — Truth Seeker

Lions are not selfish, they will share the hunt with their pride. Plants will share their pollen with bees and other pollinators, and their fruit with all sorts of creatures and their leaves with the humus organisms and their sugars with symbiotic mycelium. Gazelles will look out for each other and feed their young.

It's not clear how selfish can apply to other organisms.

For humans, selfish refers to seeking gain at the expense of others, with a strong connotation that it is in a way that's not mutually beneficial; however, other species have evolved to survive as a species in balance with their native ecosystems (and if they invade a new ecosystem, by natural processes or artificial processes, they will co-evolve back into balance after some time).

Of course, this statement about other species is with the caveat of as far as we know no other species deliberates on choices in a moral sense thus making them also moral agents. As far as we know all other species only make decisions of a tactical and strategic nature to achieve innate objectives (stay alive, protect the group if they're a social species, try to mate, nurture young etc. with any exceptions being due to having different innate objectives happen to anyways be suitable to the ultimate evolutionary pressure of perpetuation of the species, and any anomalies evolutionary experiments due to natural variation exploring by trial and error differences that maybe advantageous in new conditions).

That's why I want all living things to be energy beings who can live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

Again, I'm not quite sure what the purpose this hypothetical comparison serves you.

Moral philosophy is about making decisions and so a comparison that is not attainable cannot be used to make decisions in the world we actually inhabit.

To summarize, you do not really present a moral theory. Even if I agree with many of your principles, the moralizing method of simply boldly stating principles and then feeling that "moral strength" is in the boldly stating things, and that evaluating the principles critically would therefore be the opposite of boldly stating things and so moral weakness, is the moral method of the majority of people, at least in the Wes, and so why discourse of real moral differences in Western society mostly reduce to each side simply shouting at each other (to reassure themselves that they are stating their principles the boldest, and thus most morally).

However, once it is realized that emotional reactions are caused by moral beliefs, as you note above "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," then such a method must be abandoned.

How the bold statement morality self reinforces is that the starting assumption is being right without the need of explaining or justifying anything, and so critical evaluation is a process that either results in justifying the beliefs one already has, and so is redundant, or a change to one's belief.

However, if the starting assumption is one is for sure 100% right, then the prospect of changing one's belief is clearly 100% bad and must be avoided at all costs.

Therefore, if one assumes one must be right without needing to "know" anything about it, then the process of knowledge is a bad thing that must be avoided as it can only confirm what one already knows or then result in a change of belief that, according to ones current beliefs, are correct and therefore must never change.

The result is the continuous assertion of knowledge without any justifying argument that would justify the belief really does represent true knowledge.

This is what most people do, at least in the West, and it is usually impossible to explain to them their psychological self-reinforcing process that is structured to avoid critical scrutiny that would lead to knowledge.

In short, the modus operandi of Western culture is that doubt about one's moral moral beliefs are bad (because they risk only changing what is good) and therefore anyone creating doubts is also bad, and the only good reaction to a challenge to one's beliefs is simply stating even more boldly what those beliefs are and eschewing even more clearly the very notion some argument or justification is needed (and if one does boldly assert arguments and justifications, then in turn avoiding any critical scrutiny of those justifications and arguments).

However, the basic process of knowledge is subjecting assertions to critical scrutiny.

Why such a process is relevant to this particular conversation is that you assert a series of moral principles without justification. You simply define things as good or evil and then simply list things to have an emotional reaction to based on your definition, proposing the latter exercise justifies the former.

You're initial question is that you haven't achieved your objectives, of which a reasonable formulation of your question would be how to be more effective in striving towards, with others, your objectives .... but also how to be sure your objectives are the right ones in the first place?

And both questions go together, as if you want to be more effective (which is the only rational disposition given any objective at all) then you require a theory that can allow optimizing your actions with respect to different aspects of what must be one single objective that is required to make evaluations between different uses of time and resources available.

For example, stating all life should be converted to energy beings is not a unifying principle, even if it were preferable in abstract comparisons, as there is no way to achieve the goal.

The protection of life on the planet, including its current dynamic, on the other hand, can be a unifying principle that resolves strategic and tactical considerations. Of course, such a principle would need itself justification, but it is an example of a highest objective which can in turn both justify secondary objectives (as strategically sound) as well as resolve what would otherwise be competing principles.

Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did. — unimportant

As points out, it's fair to the post-Marx schools, even Stalinism and Maoism are reasonable evolutions of Marx's original theory.

When anti-communist propaganda is internalized and "West good" and "Soviet bad", then the West leftist beatnik apologetic response is that Stalin betrayed the true Marxism.

This framing depends entirely on the idea that state-policy-induced famines and genocides in the 1930 and 40s make your political system 100% discredited and the worst people to have ever lived, but genocides and state-policy-induced famines before 1930 and also after 1950 are perfectly understandable historical processes that say absolutely nothing about the fundamental merits of the political order, economic system and culture involved.

You can starve as many Irish to death as you want, kill as many natives all over the world, even run a brutal chattel slavery system for hundreds of years, as long as it was before 1930!!

People in the West are emotionally conditioned to have strong reactions to genocides, but only in this 20 year window, everything outside is basically meh, genocide shmemocide. Why there's a genocide on right now that the West is perfectly content with, as there's a simple algorithm to emotionally deal with it: check calendar, is it the 1930's or 40's? If no, then genocide is fine, probably even a good thing.

So, not to say the Soviet Union was great, but rather a fair look allows seeing both successes and failures (as any Western apologist will scream we must do to be fair if we're discussing the West's failing! Civilization! Civilization!) as well as how it made Marxist sense to the people who built the Soviet Union, including Stalin. Not to say Marx would agree if he were alive, just that, as @Moliere points out these people read Marx and saw themselves as extending Marx in a logical way.

To get to those extensions and developments of Marx, the problem Marxists had in the 20th century is that all the socialist (including anarchist) revolutions in the 19th century were crushed by adjacent imperial powers. The empires warred between themselves but recognized anti-rich sentiments was a common enemy so would easily unite to destroy any genuine socialist uprising and governance.

At the same time, these experiences in socialist uprising and governance demonstrated it was possible; people could overturn governments and could govern together in a new socialist way.

However, there was a global system of Imperialism and capitalism that would spring into action to crush any such socialist upstarting wherever it emerges on the globe, so in seeing this communists naturally started to think of how to solve this problem.

So, the new idea compared to Marx's original analysis, is various formulations of avant-gardism, where the idea is to take over a state and then garrison it against Imperial invasion and capitalist undermining.

Of course a strong militaristic state is in contradiction with the communist goal.

So it's easy to critique in theory that this obviously won't work. However, to take the point of view of these people, Tsarist Russia just killed and starved millions of Russians in a calamitous and incompetently managed war. China has endured "a century of humiliation" and the British pushing opioids on the Chinese (one potential explanation of why China isn't too worried about an opioid epidemic in the US right now). Western analysis of these issues always starts with the Soviet Revolution, Stalin takes control, or then Mao's cultural revolution.

Not to say I'm a huge fan of Stalin or Mao, they were both incredibly brutal, but no less brutal than the systems they replaced so when your learn the before and after, it makes a lot more sense how thing shake out. First, the previous systems were completely discredited in disastrous wars. Russian lines collapsed in WWI, the whole country mismanaged and hunger everywhere, and they only didn't "lose" because Germany also lost in turn against France and co.

When Russia withdrew from the war, ~2,500,000 Russian POWs were in German and Austrian hands. This by far exceeded the total number of prisoners of war (1,880,000) lost by the armies of Britain, France and Germany combined. Only the Austro-Hungarian Army, with 2,200,000 POWs, came even close.[131]

According to other data, the number of irretrievable losses in Russia ranges from 700,000[132] to 1,061,000.[133] Golovin wrote a huge work dedicated to the losses of Russians in World Wat I, he based on the documents of the headquarters and the documents of the German archive, working there together with German veterans, correlated the losses and came to the conclusion that the total losses are 7,917,000, including 1,300,000 dead, 4,200,000 wounded and 2,410,000 prisoners.[134] Later estimates have adjusted this number to 2,420,000 people.[135] Per Alexei Oleynikov total losses for the 1914–1917 campaigns look like this: — Eastern Front (World War I)

So things really aren't going well from the perspective of the average Russian.

In the case of China, the invasion of Japan was an incredibly brutal affair, for example:

According to Rummel, in China alone, from 1937 to 1945, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations — Japanese war crimes

So when you put into context what people are dealing with, you can start to empathize both with the idea that trying something new sounds like it can't possibly be worse as well as why the atrocities in their own right of these new systems "don't seem so bad". The Western presentation of events as everyone basically living an idyllic peaceful and suburban life style and then suddenly Stalin's in charge! The horror! Is somewhat less than accurate.

WWI and WWII are essentially apocalyptic events so any half coherent scheme to put society back together sounds worthwhile.

In contrast to Marx, he is building up his theory in a relatively peaceful Europe. Up until Napoleon, European powers competed outside of Europe for territory, resources and trade routes but had a sort of gentleman's agreement not to wage too much war on the European continent and trade instead.

There was no evidence at the time for what we would call today realpolitik (the European empires were all intermarried and part of the same in-group which mediated intra-European warfare) and as a short hand the later evolutions of Marx given the Napoleonic wars (a topsy turvy series of events in response to state-mismanagement and then socialist revolution) and then also WWI, are broadly speaking a realpolitik addition to Marx's analysis of capitalism.

Yup.

There are proletarians in the USA, but they are not beneficiaries of imperialism -- thinking here of migrant farm workers and prison labor as clear cut examples. — Moliere

Yes, definitely, and also why there's the most amount of prison inmates anywhere in the world per capital in the US is to keep this segment of the population under tight control.

Now, not that a revolution can't happen in the US, just that the cause would be too many people dropping out of any plausible sense of the middle class and so then the conditions become largely the same as in in the Global South.

A moment we are for sure approaching and maybe even really close to. The model of the West as a geographically segregated aristocracy that's not about to change the system, is more relevant to explain why all the socialist momentum in the West dissipates post WWII during the "good times".

Conditions today are definitely not the same, and so why a police state is emerging (or perhaps more accurately being revealed) to keep things in check.

↪boethius Zizek was mentioned briefly by you earlier, what are your thoughts on him? — unimportant

I believe another poster mentioned Zizek.

Based on what I know of Zizek's work, I put him in the category of Western intellectuals who wok on solving the problems of Western culture; so understanding exactly how Western culture is basically disintegrating and what might be done about it. In this respect I think he does a good job and also that Marxist-communism is the most reasonable foundation for this analysis, and is a framework he understands well.

Marx's most critical insights are in how selling labour power, rather than working for yourself in your own community (so using the majority of the product of your work locally), affects people's psychology and society, removing the meaning and self-respect of work while leading to social isolation. One of many prescient insights from Marx.

So, insofar as analyzing Western culture goes, explaining the history of psychological and social pathology the West has created, Zizek is pretty lucid in what I've heard or read from him.

Where I diverge from Zizek's general approach is that I do not believe the problems of Western culture can be solved within the space of Western culture. Solutions that don't exist and so Zizek doesn't come up with, rendering the whole project mostly pontificating on these problems but not getting anywhere (there's no political movement associated with Zizek's thinking).

In my view, Western financial power successfully turned the West into a sort of global geographically segregated aristocracy after World War II in order to destroy the remaining Western communist and socialist movements as a real political force; and once this happened, as Marx would predict, a class that benefits from a system has never been known to change it. The fundamental theory of revolutionary in Marx is that in order for a revolution to be possible, class oppression must emerge due to contradictions that build up in the social structure generally from gradual changes in the means of production, then, additionally, the oppressed class must become aware of their existence as an oppressed class and start reflecting on what to do about it, and then, maybe, you will have a revolution (the alternative being the whole society perishes).

I summarize, but the natural prediction one would make based in Marxism, in seeing a Western global upper class where "it's normal" that Westerners fly around the world to be served by a panoply of "exotic" cultures, on the cheap because people are mostly poor around the world and labour so costs low and additionally the costs of the pollution created in the process is paid mostly by these poor people, both now and in the future, is that this Western global upper class is the last place to look for any systemic change.

What's an intellectual to do who needs to sell books to this class of people? Well, you can definitely have a conversation but it's a conversation that goes no where. It's exactly the kind of conversation you'd expect talking about society with an average member of the aristocracy in Feudal Europe. There's a high level of education, so the conversation can be quite well informed, and there's also a lot of time available, so the conversation can be quite involved, but at no point is there the slightest chance any agreed conclusions, no matter how radical, translates to any commensurate action. Of course there will be exceptions, but it wasn't the aristocracy that carried out a revolution and teared down feudalism, it was people who did not benefit from the system.

For example, I once had a conversation with one of the founders of Sun Microsystems at a party at his house, and he was proposing pretty banal US libertarian ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and ecological problems shouldn't be worried about. I tried to explain the incredible risks we're taking in modifying natural systems on a global scale, and that from this basic risk-analysis perspective, which all corporate executives are intimately familiar with so he definitely understood my point, his only retort was that I shouldn't worry about the earth because, in his words, "bacteria and cockroaches will survive". I responded, "ok, but is that really an acceptable outcome of the human enterprise?". And he just got up and left!

That is the typical quality of conversation with the vast majority of any representative of a beneficiary class. It is always the same: actually disturb their intellectual comfort and they simply egress the discussion.

Of course, it confuses people in that the West has it's own internal class system where there are far richer classes than the average, but if you take the average, call them "the backpacker class" and disturb their sense of belonging in their cycle of working to go on vacation to feel "liberated" from the West for a short time with the help of "super good deals" from hostels in Cambodia or wherever; try to convince them that they are not wise globe trotters respectfully bowing at the portico of every culture on the planet, developing themselves spiritually or at least sexually, but instead benefiting from an imperial system of exploitation that's destroying every place they've visited, and, for the most part, they'll just get upset and defensive.

Of course there are non-beneficiary classes in the West, they are just not the majority and the police state and criminalizing poverty exists to manage the threat they present as a minority.

Therefore, the more productive conversation is with the people of the global south.

Whereas literally 100 books you'd need to get the average Westerner to read for them to start to understand how the system even works and that, yes, it is imperialism and exploitive and destroying the planet, only to arrive at a point, 99 out of 100 times, that the person will not really do anything about that (except safe emotional outlets the imperial system makes available) regardless of any amount of further analysis ... have the same conversation with someone on the bottom of the totem pole in the Global South and zero books are required and the answer is simply "yes, we know".

This is classic Hegelian master-slave dialectic (that Marxism is based in), in that of the two parties, the slave does not require any theory to understand that he or she is a slave and the system exploitative. The master will, on the other hand, entertain an endless series of theories in which the slave is the beneficiary of the system (benefiting from the hard and valuable work of managing resources so the slave and all his or her kind does not die; or then an animal benefiting as a sheep does from the shepherd; or as creating the right conditions for spiritual exercise of honest work that the slave could not self-direct for him or herself, and so on).

Therefore, the conversation to have with people who do not benefit from the current system is not endless theorizing establishing for the 1000th time that the system is really actually super bad, but rather technology transfer. And as a Westerner, this I have the power to do. I was once touring rural Gujarat with a politician, Jekubai, and some local business people, when we came across a family living by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It was so unusual, even for India, that we stopped to ask what was going on. They had been promised work and lodging to come to work on building a road, and instead were left to just live on the side of the road that they would work on, for nothing remotely close to the promised wage. I was on the tour mostly for my own interest, but was presented to people as a sort of journalist. There was a whole series of instructive experiences, such as burst sewage lines not mended and ongoing battles between entire villages and corporations trying to evict them and damns left unfinished to harass local populations and aquifers being destroyed by mining and so on. But meeting this family living on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere caused me the most introspection: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10D6G_sowr2_nltG3Du8oB9Fjr7iQJ6wE/view?usp=share_link

My conclusion in truly "seeing" the horrors of the system, was I needed to return to the West and divert technology, and the capital required to develop and transfer said technology, that would be truly useful to poor people. Hence the solar fire / lytefire.com . Of course, not about to allow my name to be used to launder money, but that too (frustrating money laundering from Africa to Europe) is something Westerners (in the sense of a the few Westerners capable of rational action and not path dependency on a lazy river of consumerism) can do to actually help. Lastly, if we could stop our own government committing genocide that would also be of some assistance to non-beneficiaries of the imperial system.

Working on how to convince Westerners to not be hypocrites is not something I have ever seen have productive outcomes, and this is how I view Zizek's work.

If you want a fact based "what's actually happening in the real world" counterpart to Zizek's intellectual analysis of the Western superstructure / psychosis during this slow motion social and ecological collapse: Chris Hedges is the guy.

Basic point of the analysis being that the global revolution, if it is to come to pass, will be mostly carried out by non-Imperial-beneficiaries mostly in poor countries. People in the West can help productively with enough theory and experience of the world to avoid being counter-productive (such as knowledge and technology transfer concerning the technologies that matter, such as solar thermal), but it will not be "the West" doing anything of real significance collectively in a positive direction.

Just because something occurs in nature, it doesn't make it ethical. — Truth Seeker

Yes, but we are also in nature. A moral theory must demonstrate why what happens in nature (and really anything we could possibly do at all would be "happening in nature") should not happen in human affairs. What makes us different from lions that their hunting, even of their own kind, is fine and natural, but that does not apply to us?

People can consider the moral and legal implications of their actions. — Truth Seeker

But we can also consider the implications of the actions of lions and stop them. And, as we just established, we don't really know what anyone else is really thinking or knows, perhaps lions also consider the consequences of their actions or then the vast majority of humanity does not and are the same as lions. For example, perhaps the lion considers the consequence of killing the gazelle is that she will be able to eat. Perhaps most humans do not consider the consequence of their actions of wanton consumption that others elsewhere will not eat.

Humans are moral agents, but lions are not because we have the capacity to think about the moral dimensions of our actions. — Truth Seeker

But this is the crux of the problem. What makes us moral agents? Simply being able to consider consequences does not in itself provide any moral information.

A theory is required to go from the consideration of consequences, which I agree is the start of the problem, to what consequences are actually good and bad.

Nearly all lay moralizing is simply the discussion of consequences with the assumption that everyone already agrees on how to judge the outcomes. It's not really a moral debate but rather a strategic debate on how to achieve shared objectives.

To do moral philosophy is to ask how those outcomes are known to be good or bad in the first place.

I am all too aware that there are billions of people who are convinced that their religion is the best way to live. I am a vegan, egalitarian, agnostic atheist. For them, my position is wrong. Just as for me, their position is wrong. — Truth Seeker

Would it not be good to find out who is correct?

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare. — Truth Seeker

This is exactly my point a few comments ago, that it is moral betrayal that really cause suffering. Pain, even very intense, that has no moral element, just an accident, can cause very little suffering over the long term, whereas moral betrayals that involve no physical pain at all can cause life long suffering.

The point of really understanding that, is that simply avoiding suffering cannot be the basis of a moral theory, as it is moral beliefs derived from moral theories we inherent or adopt that gives rise to the possibility of suffering.

I didn't know that. Can you please give me an example? — Truth Seeker

People propose proofs of mathematical conjectures all the time, both experts and amateurs, that turn out to be wrong.

I'm not sure what the most erroneously proven conjecture (i.e. someone believing they've proven it but the proof is wrong), but some famous ones that get claimed to be proven on a regular basis are Riemann hypothesis, the twin primes conjecture, Goldbach's conjecture, Collatz conjecture, P=NP, and other Millennium Prize Problems not listed there also get significant attention (but some are quite technical so don't get much attention from amateurs, who generate the most wrong proofs).

Probably the theorem with the most wrong proofs is Fermats Last Theorem, and so a good example of a huge number of wrong proofs not providing any actual evidence the opposite is true and no proof is possible, as Fermats Last Theorem has since been proven.

As interestingly, there are plenty of conjectures that nearly all mathematicians believed must certainly be true, but later proven to be false. So in terms of positing inherent knowledge about anything, these examples are cause for some doubt.

In researching some examples, there's a super good answer to exaclty this question by a one KConrad on stalk overflow:

Mathematicians used to hold plenty of false, but intuitively reasonable, ideas in analysis that were backed up with proofs of one kind or another (understood in the context of those times). Coming to terms with the counterexamples led to important new ideas in analysis.

1. A convergent infinite series of continuous functions is continuous. Cauchy gave a proof of this (1821). See Theorem 1 in Cours D'Analyse Chap. VI Section 1. Five years later Abel pointed out that certain Fourier series are counterexamples. A consequence is that the concept of uniform convergence was isolated and, going back to Cauchy's proof, it was seen that he had really proved a uniformly convergent series of continuous functions is continuous. For a nice discussion of this as an educational tool, see "Cauchy's Famous Wrong Proof" by V. Fred Rickey. [Edit: This may not be historically fair to Cauchy. See Graviton's answer for another assessment of Cauchy's work, which operated with continuity using infinitesimals in such a way that Abel's counterexample was not a counterexample to Cauchy's theorem.]

2. Lagrange, in the late 18th century, believed any function could be expanded into a power series except at some isolated points and wrote an entire book on analysis based on this assumption. (This was a time when there wasn't a modern definition of function; it was just a "formula".) His goal was to develop analysis without using infinitesmals or limits. This approach to analysis was influential for quite a few years. See Section 4.7 of Jahnke's "A History of Analysis". Work in the 19th century, e.g., Dirichlet's better definition of function, blew the whole work of Lagrange apart, although in a reverse historical sense Lagrange was saved since the title of his book is "Theory of Analytic Functions..."

3. Any continuous function (on a real interval, with real values) is differentiable except at some isolated points. Ampere gave a proof (1806) and the claim was repeated in lots of 19th century calculus books. See pp. 43--44, esp. footnote 11 on page 44, of Hawkins's book "Lebesgue's theory of integration: its origins and development". Here is a Google Books link. In 1872 Weierstrass killed the whole idea with his continuous nowhere differentiable function, which was one of the first fractal curves in mathematics. For a survey of different constructions of such functions, see "Continuous Nowhere Differentiable Functions" by Johan Thim.

4. A solution to an elliptic PDE with a given boundary condition could be solved by minimizing an associated "energy" functional which is always nonnegative. It could be shown that if the associated functional achieved a minimum at some function, then that function was a solution to a certain PDE, and the minimizer was believed to exist for the false reason that any set of nonnegative numbers has an infimum. Dirichlet gave an electrostatic argument to justify this method, and Riemann accepted it and made significant use of it in his development of complex analysis (e.g., proof of Riemann mapping theorem). Weierstrass presented a counterexample to the Dirichlet principle in 1870: a certain energy functional could have infimum 0 with there being no function in the function space under study at which the functional is 0. This led to decades of uncertainty about whether results in complex analysis or PDEs obtained from Dirichlet's principle were valid. In 1900 Hilbert finally justified Dirichlet's principle as a valid method in the calculus of variations, and the wider classes of function spaces in which Dirichlet's principle would be valid eventually led to Sobolev spaces. A book on this whole story is A. F. Monna, "Dirichlet's principle: A mathematical comedy of errors and its influence on the development of analysis" (1975), which is not reviewed on MathSciNet. — KConrad answering Widely accepted mathematical results that were later shown to be wrong?, Math Overflow

There's links and also notation that does not copy over, but I hope this is a good example of the process of actually proving things, even in a context where the conditions and methods of proof are agreed, is not so easy.

Pain is painful. That's why I don't want to be in pain. In the same way, other sentient beings don't want to be in pain. If I see someone being tortured by someone else, I would intervene to protect the victim of torture from the perpetrator of torture because torture is painful for the victim. — Truth Seeker

Pain is not sufficient to build a moral theory. The gazelle does not want to experience the pain of being eaten by the lion, is therefore the lion "immoral" for causing pain or we humans who could "arrest all liens" immoral to allow these wanton lion attacks to continue?

Avoiding pain is simply a description of what organism generally do, but that does not establish a moral theory. If we do not stop the lion, if predation is natural between animals, then why stop human predators preying on other humans? Lions don't only kill gazelles but also other lions in struggles for power, why would it be any less natural for humans to likewise kill both gazelles for food and other humans for power?

One requires a moral theory to be able to categorize some pain as good and bad. Exercize is painful but we categorize it as good pain. Gazelles being eaten by lions is painful but we categorize it as morally neutral pain; lion is just being a lion, she can't do other than pursue her nature.

So there are these fundamental issues, but even if a moral theory is presented that pain is a sensation that really is "bad" and should be minimized, and why it's different between humans and doesn't apply to animals and so on, there is an even bigger problem.

For society to function requires people going straight into pain (a firefighter into a burning building) and risking their lives for the good of the community. It is this leap, avoiding pain for oneself to avoiding pain for the community as a whole over time and even accepting great pain to oneself to achieve that, is not resolved by the principle of simply avoiding pain nor simply empathizing with the pain of others.

There is already an ethical framework. Causing deliberate harm to living things is evil, and saving and improving lives is good. It's my ethical framework. This is why I am a vegan egalitarian. This is why I save and improve lives. A crime is called a crime because it causes harm. — Truth Seeker

But where does this ethical framework come from? And why is it superior to others who likewise claim to have an ethical framework which proves what they do is good and what others do is bad?

And again, a crime causes harm ... but if the crime is not actually justified then the real harm is a false accusation. So without actually knowing what is really a crime then any alleged criminal circumstance the alleged perpetrator could be the real victim and the purported victim the real perpetrator. Plenty of things were crimes in the past that are no longer crimes and the new view is that the alleged perpetrators (such as being gay) were the actual victims for being accused falsely. How do we actually know anything is a crime?

The basic problem is that harm requires a moral framework to determine, so you cannot argue something is bad because it is harmful without first having a theory that identifies harm.

A situation of crime is (for the most part) someone claiming to be harmed and therefore it's a crime due to the harm. But in nearly all cases the harm is already agreed by society to be harmful; to not be in a loop, the question of why society believes it to be harmful and is society correct about that, needs to be demonstrated.

Worse, most feelings of harm are due to society believing they are harmful, and in a society in which the action is not viewed as bad people often do not experience the harm. Vikings thought is was perfectly acceptable to challenge anyone to the death and then kill them at essentially anytime; vikings did not experience these fights to the death as some sort of social harm but in fact necessary for the health of viking society.

I have examined the top twelve religions on Earth. My favourite is Jainism, but I am not a Jain because Jains believe in souls and karma and the reincarnation of souls according to karma. I see no evidence for the existence of souls, karma and reincarnation. — Truth Seeker

There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of religions. If disproving religions to your satisfaction was relevant to prove anything about the fundamental ontological questions you would need to go through every single known religion. You can't just do 12 and then generalize from that small sample.

However, my basic point is doing so, even addressing all religions everywhere, doesn't prove anything about the ontological questions religions addressed in the past without modern understanding or tools.

Very few people are vegan egalitarians. Most humans don't agree with me, or else most humans would be vegan egalitarians. I am convinced that being a vegan egalitarian is the best way to live. Please see https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan if you want to know more about the reasons for going vegan. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism if you want to know more about egalitarianism. — Truth Seeker

But the religious people you have issue with also claim to be convinced their way is the best way to live.

How do you actually know you're not making some similar mistake in reasoning just about different things. Religious people too point to all the bad done by atheists and also other religions to justify their religion.

So knowing is the key problem. But if existence is filled with evil, then on average one would expect to fall in the category of evil people who mistakingly believe they are good.

My morality comes from empathy, compassion, evidence and reason. Causing deliberate harm to living things is evil. Deliberately saving and improving lives is good. — Truth Seeker

Key word reason. What's the reason empathy is a good quality to have in the first place? And assuming it is good, how does empathy translate into decisions in complex situations?

For example, without an ethical framework to begin with, why not empathize with the perpetrator of an alleged crime and their desire to get what they want? Who's to say it's a crime and therefore empathy should therefore be with the victims? If there's no good reason it really should be a crime, then the real crime is a false accusation and empathy should be with the alleged perpetrator.

If you have the feelings you do due to evolution, and therefore evolution is good because your feelings are good, well what exactly is the next step in evolution? Anyone can argue pretty much anything new (from random killing to slicing up brains to "upload" the neural pattern into a computer) is the "next step" in evolution. Evolution just helps explain how we got here, anything whatsoever can happen and then evolution explains again why we're now in a situation of that thing having happened; at no point does evolution imply anything should have happened that didn't, or should not have happened but it did.

More fundamentally, why would an indifferent cosmos bestow upon you the right feelings and virtuous character, when you see plainly for yourself it is lacking in so many others or you would not be addressing the problems that concern you?

Where are we again?

I am so sorry. We live in an evil world where the evil prosper and the innocent perish. — Truth Seeker

and also:

Existence is ordered in an indifferent way. That's why there is nothing fair about who lives how and who dies how. Here is a list of **biological design flaws** in humans and other species that strongly suggest **evolution through natural selection**, rather than **intelligent design**. — Truth Seeker

Yet in this indifferent and unfair existence where evil prospers, you happen to have the right and good feelings, right and good reasoning, that imbue you with the correct morality?

So many others are in the wrong and don't know it, mistake themselves to do good when they do not, yet you are in the right and do know it and make no mistakes in your self-evaluation?

I don't need to prove it to you. I have proved it to myself, which is enough. — Truth Seeker

Which is what I mean by not really possible to prove anything, as in the context I make that statement you're asking a proof from me, so proof in the context refers to proving it to you, which, seems we agree, is not really possible.

It is always possible to maintain a standard of doubt that is insurmountable.

For proofs to be socialized, i.e. agreed to as proofs by multiple parties, there must be prior agreement on premises and a framework of proof in which proofs become possible; i.e. there must be agreement on a standard of doubt that is possible for parties to overcome. For example, you can prove to me it's raining outside if I'm willing to accept time stamped video evidence or then going outside and seeing and feeling for myself the rain; but if I doubt your video evidence is authentic or then I doubt my own senses as maybe hallucinating both you and the rain, then it's not possible to prove to me anything.

So, in the context of you asking me for proof, I can't really prove anything if there's not existing agreement on logic and evidence you would find acceptable.

At the subatomic level, reality is chaotic. Things happen randomly. However, at the macroscopic level, quantum chaos averages out due to quantum decoherence. — Truth Seeker

There is no chaos at the subatomic level.

Quantum mechanics is linear, for there to be chaos requires non-linear equations.

What is not deterministic is observation of quantum events, but that's not chaos.

However, this has nothing to do with fundamental chaos. You can have a system that has order (laws and continuity and predictability and so on) that has chaotic phenomena inside it, such as turbulence, but that is not fundamental chaos. By fundamental chaos I mean no rules of any kind, no structure of any kind, everything is fluke, the "sensation" of coherence but random hallucinations bound to occur in a sufficiently large chaos for a sufficient amount of time (and even time is not a structured order on this chaos).

Existence is ordered in an indifferent way. — Truth Seeker

If existence is ordered in a fundamentally indifferent way, then it would follow that existence is indifferent to there being any order over chaos.

If we simply ignore that problem as it's inconvenient, if existence as a whole is indifferent why would it follow that parts of the whole would not likewise be indifferent and so there is no judgements to make about anything. Existence isn't good or bad and therefore no part of existence is good or bad.

Joshua 10:12–14, Bible (New International Version)
“On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: — Truth Seeker

Ontology is not reducible to Christianity.

That's why I spent some time explaining that historical explanations for natural phenomena you don't accept, like river gods, don't imply anything about the underlying question about the phenomena.

You don't accept ancient religious answers to ontological questions, fine, doesn't mean those ontological questions can no longer be discussed or then the opposite is therefore true.

For example, in mathematics (a context in which there is agreed criteria for proofs), things are erroneously proven all the time, doesn't mean the opposite is therefore proven due to these mistaken proofs. Many people over the years have believed they've proven all sorts of things, but turns out they were wrong. These mistaken efforts don't resolve whether conjectures can be proven true in the future or not. Why would they?

Even if a tour of religions was relevant to the fundamental ontological questions, you'd need a tour of all religions, not just a couple.

Agreed.

Sanctions will be a natural part, but note that's it's only Western sanctions. Iran isn't similar to the Hermit Kingdom (North Korea). — ssu

Is North Korea even so isolated now?

My understanding is that by ejecting Russia from the Western trade system they have quickly integrated with all the existing sanctioned countries.

One of the most mind boggling aspects to the Western policy with Russia, that sanctions only work against a small network of countries. Russia isn't small and to even have a chance that sanctions are meaningful would require the rest of the world to go along, not to mention China and India.

If the MAGA people cheer on how inept and totally useless the UN or other international organizations are, do note that then simply "the South" goes it's own ways. As I've said earlier, we are on track to go to an international order that was present in the 18th Century (as even the 19th Century had functioning international cooperation and organizations). — ssu

It's so wild that the US is now attacking institutions it created for its own benefit.

However, I doubt the global south would exit the UN, as it's clearly useful as a forum of diplomacy (especially if Israel stops murdering diplomats). Global South is more focused on creating parallel economic institutions, such as to substitute the IMF.

But do you reference the 18th and 19th century in it's relatively peaceful international relations, such as between European powers not having yet discovered the true power of industrial warfare, or in its ruthless colonial competition aspects? (just with non-European colonial powers competing for resources in this century)

First of all, is an Iran that has great relations to it's Arab neighbors the optimum situation for Israel, or is an Iran that still is a "rogue state" that can be bombed every once and a while better? I fear that for Bibi, the war prime minister, the latter is a better option. — ssu

Then once Iran has the bomb they can be like "See! See! We were right all along! If only we bombed them harder!"

Then, as you note with North Korea, Iran doesn't strike anyone with nuclear weapons and the issue is forgotten about, but sanctions permanent due to having nuclear weapons.

This is false. When I slap myself, I feel pain. That proves to me that pain is real. — Truth Seeker

You haven't proved it to me though. Maybe you're a chatbot, maybe you don't feel pain and are lying, maybe you're a figment of my imagination etc.

You could say that you proved it to yourself, but again if you're a chatbot, or lying, or don't really exist, that hasn't happened either.

Not convinced. All the gods are evil and imaginary. — Truth Seeker

How did you prove that?

I am so sorry. We live in an evil world where the evil prosper and the innocent perish. — Truth Seeker

This is true, but if it is good to do good, then that is unaffected by how much bad there happens to be.

European Christians, and Arab Muslims colonised and killed hundreds of millions of humans worldwide for centuries and got away with murder, rape, forced conversions, torture, theft, slavery, etc. This is why Christianity is the number one religion and Islam is the number two religion on Earth. Now they are getting away with neocolonisation and causing the climate crisis through 300 years of burning fossil fuels. If you haven't read the whole Bible and the whole Quran, I highly recommend that you do so: https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com — Truth Seeker

I have zero problem with the history.

If the technological conditions are war allows a culture to expand, and certain types of religion help that culture to stay both cohesive and warlike, then we should not be surprised that violent religious fanatics take over the world.

That historical result, however, does not resolve the core issues. Bad people also use principles of physics to do bad things, doesn't mean those physical principles are false; so too if bad people do bad in the name of god, or an eternal soul, or any idea whatsoever, does not therefore imply those principles are false.

The philosophical question has nothing to do with religion.

Is existence ordered or complete chaos?

If ordered, is existence ordered in a good way or a bad way or then perhaps indifferent way?

If ordered in a good way, what are good decisions in a good cosmos? If the universe is ordered in a bad way, are any good decisions possible in a bad cosmos, or indifferent or chaotic cosmos?

That people have made over time religions to answer fundamental moral, metaphysical and epistemological, and natural questions, and then some have gone on to do super violent things using whatever answers they find to keep a violent society cohesive, does not somehow eventually prove through that historical process that the original questions are somehow meaningless or then don't have answers to them or then the answers don't matter.

People made exactly similar stories to answer natural questions as they did for moral or theological questions, yet no so called "rationalist" goes around listing off all the crazy stories of storm gods and so on in order to demonstrate no answers can be correct and particle physics is therefore as meritless an answer to natural phenomena as is storm gods and river spirits.

If there is no order, or the order isn't good, then by what measure can you judge these religions you have issue with to be bad?

For example, the critique of liberated nihilism that there is no good and bad, don't be "fooled" by religion, religion is bad, look at all the bad things, makes no sense if good and bad are denied as a premise. If there's no good and bad, or then only personal good and bad, then it's not bad to be religious if you want to, even in a violently fanatical way.

To judge religious people, or anyone, one must be in a position to judge, to have proven what is right and wrong, and that is not so easy. But feel free to posit an ethic that is independent of cultural heritage, for, if part happens to be true (certainly not all, as most of the moral heritage is religious), such as not randomly killing people or going on world conquering crusades for that matter, there must be some reason that it's actually true other than simply being received wisdom (especially if one is rejecting the largest part of received wisdom globally, which as you note is to be religious of one kind or another).

If your moral ideas do not come from a cultural heritage at all, then from where do they come and why are they true?

For, to critique moral systems, religious or otherwise, on the outcomes of those systems, either historically or contemporaneously (putting aside the issue of what actions genuinely follow form those systems--i.e. who's really a true adherent), one requires a moral system to make those judgements about those outcomes.

Moral system A is bad because people B who believe system A do bad things, requires a moral system C in which to demonstrate those are bad things. "Skeptics", who say there is no moral system they accept, commit the most base fallacy by then going around claiming anyone's dong anything bad at all. From a morally neutral system, all outcomes at all times are likewise morally neutral. If we evaluate the doings of lions from an internally morally neutral system such as science (it is not externally morally neutral as to do science requires a moral system in which fabricating evidence is bad), then whether the lion catches the gazelle or then the gazelle manages to escape are both likewise morally neutral outcomes. From such a morally neutral perspective, whether a religion conquers and subjugates the entire world in a violent theocracy is a morally neutral outcome, same as the lion catching the gazelle (it happened, we can see the reasons why, same as we can see the reasons why it might not have happened, but it did).

Not just human life. Other sentient biological organisms suffer and die. I don't want any living thing to suffer and die. I want all living things to be forever happy. — Truth Seeker

I'm going to be honest, beyond some abstract comparisons, this seems to me an unachievable goal.

Also debatable if the natural cycle of life is a bad thing. If life has beauty and value then so too the predation, pain and death that is a natural apart of life.

And if not a bad thing, the alternative point of view is that pain is not suffering in itself, but comes from moral wrongs carried out by people that has nothing to do with a lion eating a gazelle.

For example, when Martin Luther King, Jr. stated "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends," the underlying moral framework is that the lack of action by people who claim to be friends, causes more suffering (the wrong will be remembered) than the actions of outright enemies. For, an outright enemy is closer to a natural process of fighting a lion, but being abandoned by one's community, in which there are stronger moral bonds, causes a deeper moral rift and thus more suffering.

To push the example to the extreme, imagine showing up on an island with an uncontacted tribe and taking a poison arrow to the chest that causes incredible pain but you survive. Although definitely an unpleasant experience, it would be unlikely to cause extreme psychological trauma because there's not really any moral problem. Maybe you were trying to do good by going to the island for some reason, tribe is just doing what it normally does and you completely expected they may do, so there's no betrayal in any moral sense.

There is no such thing as the afterlife. If you can prove there is an afterlife, please do. — Truth Seeker

There is no way to really prove anything.

However, I do believe there are good reasons to believe there is an afterlife. I elaborate the argument in this essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/eerik/p/the-cromulomicon-the-book-of-croms?r=33um1b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

The main problem the essay tries to solve (if we take a shortcut and ignore problems such as needing an ethic to begin with in order to have problems, so there is no ethically neutral position in which the problem of what is the true ethic can be addressed, as an ethically neutral position would have no problems at all; dilemmas the essay seeks to solve), is to harmonize the search for truth and the love of humanity and life and acting in the interests of all life rather than oneself.

What we may call "pretty usual ethics" values truth, life, fairness and justice, empathy and compassion for others, and does indeed call upon people to make the ultimate sacrifice to save others (such as fire-people saving children in a burning building; if not "binding" certainly a good and heroic thing to do and not considered stupid and foolish). And, indeed, more can be added to the list of "usual ethics" shared by nearly all cultures.

As we have already discussed, it's not possible to optimize for different things and when there are different things under consideration such as learning the truth, protecting others and all life, seeking justice, and so on, either they are in conflict with one another or then harmonized and in fact represent merely different facets of a single value.

For, it can be argued on the surface that if I am searching for truth and I am reading one of my books, if you were to come to me dying of thirst I would be wise to not give it to you and so let you die as I search for truth and my reading is more important.

The value of truth seeking is a fairly easy ethic to arrive at, as I suspect you may agree @Truth Seeker, but a great many important truths are much harder.

It is easy to see that what our culture, and indeed most cultures, proposes as good moral principles are those very principles necessary for the culture's survival and perpetuation into the future (cooperation, fairness, sacrifice for other when necessary to ensure the groups survival), but seeing this explanation for where ideas come from does not actually resolve if those ideas are correct. The question remains of whether it is good for society to survive or indeed oneself.

To really get to the bottom of these things is a long journey and the structure and nature of all existence becomes necessary to posit at a context to resolve these sorts of questions. For there are alternative hypothesis available, such as caring only for oneself and having no appreciation for whatever is done by others, both present and in the past, for your benefit without payment and feeling no obligations in turn; that the fate of society, humanity, all life is of no concern to oneself and those that do concern themselves are fools that cause themselves trouble.

This is awesome! Thank you very much for sharing. I look forward to exploring them. — Truth Seeker

I am very appreciative, don't hesitate to ask any questions as they occur to you.

That's unfortunate. Did the money laundering stop, or is it still going on? — Truth Seeker

The coverup, at super high levels including the prosecutor general of Finland and also the President and PM, continues to this day: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SXU6VkygIWM14S4O-IQQUhlz41qYBjFH?usp=share_link

I'm under investigation for "defamation to the auditor" which is not even a legally possible crime (why "proper channels" exist: total immunity from defamation). You could commit fraud in what you communicate to an auditor, but defamation is not legally possible. Why police just keep me under investigation for 4 years now to harass me and also pretend like the case could potentially be defamation, instead of overwhelming evidence of money laundering; evidence they explicitly refuse to collect, but in a trial I can just submit the evidence myself. So, police can't charge me or then the evidence appears in trial, but can't drop the case without admitting the only possible way to drop a defamation case concerning accusations of African diamond money laundering would be that the accusations are supported by evidence and reasonable to make. Why Finnish police are helping to launder money is because they are involved in human trafficking and narcotics smuggling. This was literally the first thing the chair of Transparency International told me (that my case of police refusing to investigate obvious evidence is similar to an existing case of theirs where police refuse to investigate an obvious case of human trafficking and child abuse; and the explanation for that is that police are involved in human trafficking and child abuse); the chair could not get approval from her board to do anything for an entire year and then was replaced by a person from Brussels (for sure 100% organized crime representative from Brussels).

But yes, the money laundering is unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected doing business in Africa. What was unexpected is all other board members and executives who did not originally participate in the money laundering, helped to cover it up and send me endless threats and bribes including I'll "be destroyed" and also 1 million Euros to drop all "claims and pursuit", even after they agreed there is significant money laundering!

I foolishly believed that people I thought were genuinely concerned for alleviating poverty in Africa and empowering people with a source of energy they could build and control themselves would not tolerate our work being used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of African diamond money for Isabel Dos Santos.

That I was alone in my disposition, made me very alone indeed.

Like...?
Even if there were we would still need to define those words to understand what each other means and to avoid talking past each other. — Harry Hindu

You interject into an ongoing conversation where people clearly seem to understand the meaning of anarchism in a way that makes sense in this context. If you really "didn't know" you could do 1 minute of internet research ... which you do, skipping over dictionaries and wikipedia and other entries to "just so happen to find" a dictionary that does not include the definition of anarchism as a political-philosophy.

In addition, the basic principle that dictionary definitions are required to exist in one, or even several dictionaries, for the meaning to exist is absurd. Dictionaries do their best to record common and current uses of a word, but are not exhaustive nor authoritative. For example, if you ask google for the definition of "christian", it provides a definition "a person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Christianity," which would not settle the debate of whether baptism is required, and if so what kind it meant by the dictionary, is the "true christianity".

Which is exactly what I did. I'm asking for definitions of not only anarchy but of marxism/socialism in a thread named, "Differences/similarities between marxism and anarchism?" — Harry Hindu

This is false. You interject by asserting your dictionary definition of anarchism as the only definition and went on to elaborate a theory that if a meaning does not exist in the dictionary then it is therefore purely a private language that is not useful to communicate with anyone.

It's just not possible to view doing so as good faith debate.

But if I am mistaken and you have something more to contribute to the conversation than your dictionary lookup, feel free to do so.

Life on Earth, as it has been and currently is, comprises much suffering, injustice, and death. — Truth Seeker

Certainly human life as we know it, but in terms of healthy ecosystems generally speaking, predation and a struggle for survival agains the elements is apart of life.

The energy beings would not need to consume any sunlight or heat either. They would be eternally self-sustaining. I imagine them to be all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. I am all too aware that these beings don't exist outside my imagination. — Truth Seeker

Well maybe there is such a place to aspire to in the afterlife.

For the time being, however, I would propose we have this life and the life on the planet to tend to.

How can we implement widespread use of solar power for generating electricity and heat? — Truth Seeker

I've been working on this for 20 years, and I've collected some of the old open source material in this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16eIpgNP7vvBcm_P6nfFzywqjcHuTV9qD?usp=share_link

These two videos are also useful:

https://youtu.be/CXJgAmft2jI
https://youtu.be/q3WeRU8geSs

There's also a lot of material on lytefire.com, a company I founded to prove the economic viability of the technology (as it was only possible to raise the funds needed as a company; not even other non-profits trust non-profits to deliver technology), but then certain management differences emerged, around staying true to the original open source strategy (idea was to raise funds, develop tech, then open source once proven commercially), but mostly on whether it was a good idea or to to help launder African diamond money. I was against it, but turned out a minority opinion.

It is not just a question of technological development, but then on reaching critical mass of capacity and skill in real locations on the planet, in addition to integration with complementary technology. Small wind, PV and hydro are excellent technologies for relatively small amounts of off-grid electricity; where solar thermal competes in making electricity is if there's an economic need for a lot heat, such as green houses or in textile / paper making, and so an inexpensive steam engine can produce some electricity and the exhaust steam power these other processes.

The critical part for developing the needed suite of technologies as well as integrating with other technologies to optimize actual solutions for real people, is the software simulation.

What's in the folder above is the termination point of the open source software. So it's this software (or more precisely developing something from scratch that does the same thing and more; as this was early days in my programming career) that is the key, as without software simulation building solar thermal technology is hugely expensive trial and error.

For, even if you have the capacity to build the technology, without software simulation it's just guesswork not only what to build but if there is even any deployment of the technology, even solar thermal technology in general, that solves the problem economically in real world conditions. With software you can get close enough in terms of the required performance to make fabrication a reasonable risk to take.

There's not only technical and environmental elements to simulate, but also things such as a reasonable work day. A lot of renewable energy projects fail because things are just not thought through (not because the engineers don't know thinking things through would be reasonable, but because executive can go tot the government and present ideal or laboratory conditions that "prove" things will be economically viable). For example, a baker needs to get to work and start baking, and baking quite a lot of bread, so a device that can get to the temperature and thermal-momentum required to bake one loaf of bread at high-noon on a absolutely clear day, is of no use to a baker. A solar oven that heats in the morning when the baker gets to work (so sun is low), and heats a commercial scale oven with high power and thermal-momentum to bake professionally to run an actual business, is what is required with enough extra capacity to deal with some haze and some clouds to bake most days.

So the software is essential to make plausibly reasonable simulations of an actual business case.

As important, software simulation is absolutely critical to develop any new application, as many applications cannot be adapted from equipment that runs on gas or electricity, and needs to be developed specifically to integrate with a specific solar thermal device. So software is critical and making software available open source to engineers with expertise in those application domains (pasteurization, desalination, absorption fridge, ceramics, paper, metals, textiles etc.) allows them to build up the simulation of the application and run various total optimizations and economic simulations, enough to be confident enough to build a prototype.

The more applications that exist the more valuable the technology becomes (and by technology I mean solar thermal technology generally speaking if there are superior designs for a given context; ideally the software would model all available designs and provide comparisons), in the same way that the more appellations for a mobile ecosystem are available the more valuable the mobile device (and also that a critical mass of key applications are required to drive exponential growth).

One caveat I may not have emphasized, but focusing on solar thermal is both a core component of a global viable strategy for the humanist-ecological movement, but also something amenable to my skillset of numerical analysis and prototyping.

Such a strategic analysis does not imply there's not other things to do, such as direct poverty alleviation, stopping genocides, governance, organic farming and a myriad of other things. Just so happens that solar thermal is particularly underserved by the larger community of do-gooders and I suited to try to increase the realization of its potential.

However, where it is fundamental compared to other clearly also-good things is that energy sources structure and condition society, so a viable strategy to address everything must start with energy. Food obviously is also an energy source but we've inherited plenty of sustainable food growing practices, so have a good starting point from our inheritance in terms of food. Exosomatic energy (energy we use outside our metabolism) on the other hand we've never been sustainable above a relatively low population density (in which burning trees is not an issue), and so it's solving this exosomatic energy problem that is the limiting factor (in the sense we don't have existing traditions that offer solutions) for true sustainable and peaceful living (as there is no "need" to steal another's sunlight).

So I while I would argue it is critically important, that does not imply it's the only good thing worth doing. Still important a long list of things and people with skills and circumstances amenable to those things should do them, but the movement as a whole also needs a feasible vision of how to ultimately solve these long list of problems. With solar thermal energy a technically feasible social organization and as important a feasible scaling pathway can be rigorously proven.

Therefore, I would propose the development of local solar thermal based economies, in particular in the global south, as the key element required to attain your objectives by the whole community of people striving for a peaceful and sustainable world without poverty and slavery.

Why wouldn't energy beings who don't need to consume air, water and food to live be better than the autotrophs, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores and parasites we currently have? — Truth Seeker

I view life as we know it a good thing, so the diversity and predation and so on goes along with life as we know it.

Now in some sort of super abstract discussion, it's certainly a compelling argument that being some sort of autonomous demi-god is better than being a mortal human.

However, such an argument would not exclude life as we know it still being a good thing. Energy beings of one sort of another can presumably co-exist with life on earth (for example by living on the surface of the sun).

So such "what if" considerations, don't reduce the value of life on the planet as it is today and our responsibility towards earth life.

↪boethius Thank you very much for pointing out how other renewable energy sources compare to solar power. I agree that solar is the best option. — Truth Seeker

There's lots of nuance, but the main part is the amazing abundance of solar energy available everywhere.

The problem is that local solar energy doesn't "plug in" to the grid and powering cities very well. Solar heat does not really transport directly at all over any considerable distance, and to do so one would need to convert the heat to electricity and then transport the electric energy over a grid.

So if you just imagine in your mind a solar device 100km away making heat to make steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator to then make electricity that flows through a long series of electronic wires and devices, to boil some water to cook rice, and then imagine just using the suns energy where you are to cook the rice, it's easy to appreciate the economic difference.

The obstacle is that cooking the rice where you are with the sun requires a different social organization than what we have now. Building up such a solar economy where people currently are mostly still rural and don't have a grid requires a foundational capacity and skills building.

However, once a critical mass of technology and skills is achieved in a local economy and it's clearly simply a better way of life (creating income, conserving trees, providing all sorts of comforts that low cost energy enables), then it can spread exponentially throughout the planet. Solar thermal technology requires only mirror (glass and a silver or aluminium layer), steel and aluminium (also wood and bamboo are possible for structure), so has no resource bottleneck for exponential growth.

Doesn't mean other technologies aren't useful in specific niches or where available, nor does it mean a grid isn't adding value where population density is high enough. The cost of the grid scales with capacity after a relatively small one-time investment to layout the basic structure, and also scales with storage capacity needed to use primarily intermittent renewables. So simply lowering the capacity needed due to most energy bering captured and used on location (in particular heat energy) solves a lot of grid problems; likewise simply reducing dramatically the capacity of transport from most food and materials being harvested and used locally, solves most transportation problems.

If you look at essentially any super industrial renewable energy proposal to power Western economies today, the resource bottlenecks are enormous, and then even more enormous if the proposal is to scale that solution (which we clearly don't have as like 20 COP meetings with zero deviation in emissions demonstrates) to the global south. However, simply improve poor people's lives in the global south with solar energy, we can do literally tomorrow at not only radically low cost compared to massive industrial proposals but after a critical mass it is self perpetuating (just as plenty of poor regions simply spontaneously adopt solar water heating as it's just cheaper).

I'm talking about the US foreign policy establishment, aka "the Blob", the neocons, etc.

It's not a homogeneous group, but since it is interested in maintaing/re-establishing US primacy, it's options are bounded by the realities of geopolitics, which leaves a very narrow margin of deviation. — Tzeentch

I did not mean to imply there's no variation in your model.

However, my argument is there is plenty of margin for deviation.

Obama's diplomatic policy is a deviation from the strategy of trying to contain Iran (by stick and / or carrot) to the extent of preventing development. Iran did not negotiate itself into some permanent economic hobbling in the JCPA.

Then these recent actions by Israel, there's little evidence they are carried out on behalf of "the Blob" as defined apart from the Zionist faction in the blob acting on behalf of Israel.

For example, if Israel knew about the planned Hamas attack, which seems exceedingly likely, and allowed it to happen in a catastrophic way and moreover kill their own citizens as part of the Hannibal directive, the agency there is Israel and not the US policy blob. Then if Israel used the Hamas attack and subsequent Hannabling as a pretext for genocide, my argument is that that is Israeli and Zionist agency. Likewise the attack by Israel on Iran is Israel-Zionist agency.

Plant of other parts of the blob do not see any advantage of escalating conflict in the Middle-East, for example Obama's policies represents a large coalition of the blob; if this coalition thought war with Iran was a good thing they would have attacked Iran under Obama's presidency.

In terms of maintaining/re-establishing US primacy, the genocide in Gaza is absolutely terrible policy.

Likewise war with Iran.

Now, the great power and influence, but not unlimited power and influence, explains the situation.

Zionist have enough power and influence within America to prevent America from preventing Israel committing more genocide, but not enough power and influence to get the US to fight Iran on behalf of Israel at immense cost to the US.

And, indeed, why this is happening now is that Zionism is at a pretty high maximum for power and influence as well as there being a window closing of US military power. The dollar could collapse in the short to medium term, China and Russia could simply accelerate their relative gains in economic and military power (especially if we imagine Ukraine completely collapsing and Russia outright winning) as well as Iran's continued development (made easier by being in the same sanction boat as Russia), or then conflict break out in East-Asia or elsewhere, putting into disarray any plans to have the US attack Iran. So, it's very much a likely closing window of opportunity from the Zionist point of view and therefore a now-or-never decision (in addition to Netanyahu getting older and clearly the final solution to the Palestinian problem and outright assassinating the Iranian leadership he wants as his legacy).

The model that Zionism is cashing in its political capital to try to achieve regional goals with US resources, military or diplomatic, fits the data of the genocide and attacking neighbours and then Iran.

However, that the US balks at getting into high intensity warfare with Iran where there would be US casualties and no end in sight, fits the data that this faction is in conflict with other powerful factions.

As a result the policy is not some coherent strategy with little deviation, but is extremely chaotic.

The Biden administration was well aware the genocide harmed democrat reelection chances and there's no reason to believe the friction and half measures to try to mitigate the genocide was not genuine friction, but the Biden administration simply chose genocidal Zionism (whether for ideology, blackmail, money, whatever) over their own reelection, for the simple reason that it was mostly filled with Zionists!

However, if there was coherence to the strategy then the US would have continued to escalate with Iran and be in a high intensity conflict right now.

A "bit of bombing" and a "bit of assassination" doesn't achieve any strategic objectives.

The only purpose for limited bombing that has no chance of eliminating Iran's nuclear development capability would be to delay the development of a nuclear weapon in order to prepare an invasion. The way the bombing was carried out (with dozens of trucks removing material from the enrichment plant ahead of time) makes that delay even less likely.

There's simply no appetite among the American people for high intensity war with Iran, it's high-risk and low reward in terms of "US hegemonic interests" that go far beyond Iran, and Zionism ran into this limit in using US resources to achieve Zionist objectives.

Now Israel is in a terrible strategic position, with a terrible economy and risking demographic flight, which could end the entire Zionist project. So if the point of the whole strategy, if coming from US empire, was that genocide in Gaza and attacking everyone would shore up the strategic position of the US proxy in the region, that is not what is being achieved.

And the genocide not only doesn't serve US Imperial strategic interest, it doesn't serve Israel's either.

The motivation is to get the land and also enjoy a psychopathic killing, torture and rape spree, not some strategic improvement to Israel's military position.

Indeed. Lots/most philosophers will take the general meaning of a word then run with it and just explain how they are going to be using it (hopefully). — unimportant

Yes, but we unfortunately we are not even at the stage of considering the textual or historical context of the use of a word, but are only considering dictionary definitions as a starting point of discussion.

I wasn't arguing about which dictionary we use, only that we use a dictionary to guide our use of terms. — Harry Hindu

This whole thing about dictionaries is obviously bad faith. There's plenty of concepts and meanings of words, in philosophy and elsewhere, that do not appear in the dictionary.

The good faith thing to do is either ask what's the definition of things for our purposes here, or then good faith research such as starting on the wikipedia page for anarchism or then a visit to the library to see if there's any philosophical resource on the issue.

However, for good faith participants that are interested in the discussion, it is of some interest the etymology of the word anarchism as adopted by a philosophical school.

Originally it comes from Greek "anarkhia" which literally means "without an archon".

As the Anarchist Library informs us:

Let us look, however, at other cases from ancient Greece in which the word anarchy is used in a more distinctly political sense. There is, for instance, the single occasion when a Hellenic population appears to have matter-of-factly used the word to refer to its own situation: the Athenian ‘year of anarchy’, 404 BC. This is something of a curiosity, since the circumstances of that year were anything but anarchic. As a matter of fact, Athens was at the time under the very strong rule of an oligarchy — The Thirty — installed by the Spartans following their victory in the second Peloponesian war of that same year. Moreover, there was literally an Archon in place, installed by the oligarchs, in the person of Pythodorus. However, according to the historian Xenophon (c.430–355 BC), the Athenians refused to apply here their custom of calling the year by that archon’s name, since he was elected during the oligarchy, and ‘preferred to speak of it as the “year of anarchy”’.[7] Despite its counter-intuitive appearance, this first popular application of the word anarchy is very telling. It resonates with a mass symbolic defiance, refusing the recognition that a ruler was supposed to receive in everyday language. It was this defiance which led to the restoration of democracy in Athens the following year. — Anarkhia — What did the Greeks actually say? Uri Guron, Anarchist Library

Which is a nice symbolic example of the tradition of the "anarchist spirit" of defiance to non-democratic authority, even if not directly coined due to this anarkhia in the ancient world.

Where anarchy gets adopted as a political term is that by the enlightenment anarchy is used to simply mean the chaos and madness that would result if the existing order were to collapse.

People arguing for order under feudalism were not arguing for order as such compared to disorder, they were arguing for only 1 just and divine order of the feudal world as it existed at the time. Anything other than the one order defined by god was bad and by definition evil disorder and chaos.

As this feudal language was used in the time of feudalism, it made no sense to contrast the feudal order under the divine right of popes, bishops, kings, and lords and some alternative order. Order meant one very specific order or then orderly little sub-orders nestled in the overall feudal order (such as an order of priests or knights).

Order simply meant feudalism as practiced at the time. Feudal intellectuals didn't view or talk about themselves as feudal in contrast to other ways of doing things; the status quo was simply the common sense and divinely ordained way. No one referred to the pope or a king as "the person being deferred to in this decision making process ... for now, could be different later if we think of something more just or efficient under one view of justice and efficiency or another".

So, anarchy would be and is the state of absence of the feudal order.

However, this begged the question for some of whether an absence of the feudal order, and even some democratically approved analogous feudal structure (president instead of a king, for example), would really result in chaos and madness as assumed?

Adopting the term anarchist is to then really emphasize the boldness of the assertion that humans can live without obedience and discipline to a hierarchy, but maybe radical ideas like not beating children could actually work.

I agree. I love trees, in fact, I love all autotrophs. I wish all organisms were autotrophs. In fact, it would be even better if all organisms were energy beings who could live without consuming any air, water and food. — Truth Seeker

Glad we share an interest in trees. Highly debatable if it were better that there was no life as we currently know it.

↪boethius Thank you very much for sharing your insights about numerical analysis. I am certainly anti-fossil fuel and pro-renewable energy. Solar is not the only option. Wind farms, wave farms, and geothermal power plants are also good options. — Truth Seeker

Yes, there are other renewable technologies, but there will likely only be one that is significantly underperforming, therefore the optimum choice to develop.

To connect with trees, a tree when used for fuel is a solar energy device turning the suns energy into chemical energy. As a solar energy device a tree is less than 1% efficient, for a long list of "losses" if the goal is to burn the tree; likewise for all biomass sources.

Even worse, as a ecosystem degrades biomass production efficiency gets less and less, orders of magnitude less when the ecosystem can't even support plant growth over most of the surface most of the time (such as a desert). So using trees unsustainably is an exponential process of ecosystem degradation.

There are roughly 2 billion people that rely on biomass as their primary energy supply and billions more that rely on fossil fuel as a primary energy supply, which is obviously also not good (but better than deforestation, these local uses being pretty minimal compared to Western emissions from cars; although particle pollution is still a big problem from uncontrolled fossil burning, but biomass burning has the same problem).

But just take the 2 billion people currently relying on fossil burning, upgrade them to a solar thermal device and solar efficiency of their technological setup is now around 50%, so 50 to 1000 times the increase in solar efficiency compared to the previous technology of burning biomass.

If the technology can be made with only common materials (which solar concentrators can; just mirror, steel / aluminum, and even wood/bamboo construction) and built and maintained locally, the potential is truly revolutionary. And this solar revolution has already happened spontaneously in many places in the global south where it becomes simply common sense to use a solar water heater for example. Solar water heaters are super simple but limited in temperature; higher temperature solar thermal devices allow for the same kind of revolution where it becomes common sense as simply obviously cheaper, but each temperature bracket requires more skills and sophistication.

We can get into the limitations of all the other renewable technologies in detail if you so desire, but in short: all the technologies that produce primarily electricity (wind, hydro, photovoltaic) simply don't really address the fundamental energy problem which is heat based. Most energy consumed is to heat things; and even more so if we're talking about primary energy needs; things that need electricity, such as lights and electronics, simply don't consume much, few watts, especially in a low-income region whereas heat needs are in kilowatt -- doesn't take less energy to cook rice simply because you're poor, but you can make do with very little lights or computation and still derive significant benefits.

Then there's complex issues around the grid. We take the grid for granted in the West, but grid ubiquity is due to burning coal. It's way better to burn coal in a far away power station and "pipe in" the energy by wire, and if the coal is plentiful and cheap then that pays, in terms of energy to-do-it and energy derived from it, the cost of making the grid. However, without burning "cheap coal" (in brackets to ignore their external environmental costs), grids don't make much sense to move thermal energy around. Whereas there's a huge incentive to get coal smoke out the city, there's similar pollution reason to put a solar device far from where you're living.

There's a lot of technical details and history, but the basic thesis is once renewable energy is being considered as the primary input into society, the Western grid connected way of life doesn't make much engineering sense. If we have the technology to get energy from sunlight, then putting these solar devices far away and transferring the energy over long distances makes little engineering sense.

This is particularly critical for poor places that do not at the moment have a high capacity, high reliability grid. Because even when you have a grid, more energy simply can't be dumped on it; increasing the capacity is massively expensive.

Grid capacity is usually financed on 30 year amortization periods paid by governments. And building up capacity is a slow process; a few percent growth in capacity per year. Then there's the problem of copper supply and battery storage if we want to transition to renewable energy.

However, off-grid systems can be up and running basically instantly. If they provide the same value, there's really no need for a grid. However, off-grid electricity is limited in its value production. Most primary economic activity requires huge amounts of heat, which can be supplied by solar thermal.

To compare to just wind even ignoring it doesn't provide low-cost heat: The first problem is that there's not so much wind in the tropics where large numbers of people live, especially poor people. The second is that the efficiency of wind turbines increases to the 3rd power of the wind blade diameter, so there's massive efficiency gains in building huge wind turbines. So to realize the recent gains in wind turbine technology requires a large amount of capital not just to build the wind turbines but also to build the grid and a long list of grid balancing requirements to deal with variable wind inputs into the grid, and none of this is helpful to the vast majority of poor people on the planet. Likewise there is similar issues for all the other renewable energy sources.

However, solar energy can be accessed tomorrow pretty much anywhere in the world with technology you can carry around, available in even more intensity in the tropics and is not limited in total supply such as wind and hydro (which, even assuming all the grid problems are solved, fundamental limits are rapidly reached; for example, extracting all tidal energy on the planet would be 2 terawatts, whereas humanity consumes about 20 terawatts; sun represents about 170 petawatts).

On top of these basic engineering efficiency considerations, there's massive systemic benefits to decentralized systems. To take one example, solar thermal devices are completely immune to an electromagnetic pulse from a solar flare or nuclear weapon; if primary energy needs and economic activity are powered by solar thermal devices then a massive EMP would not cause much problems at all. The spread of disease can be far easier controlled in a decentralized system, and quarantine, if necessary, would be by village and not people staying individually in their apartments with massive long term harms to society. Most of all, however, is in a decentralized system in which energy, food and most materials and their transformation are mostly sourced locally, volume of transportation can be radically reduced, which is the main cause of our ecological problems (just moving billions of tons of stuff around the globe is not sustainable in itself, even if you did have renewable energy to do it).

↪boethius Thank you very much for your fascinating post about trees and the problems with human immortality. I learned some new things, which is great. — Truth Seeker

My pleasure, trees are really an extraordinary life form and taking care of them is foundational for a sustainable way of life.

As we don't yet know how to make humans and other species immortal, let's put that plan aside for now.

How do I get everyone to love everyone? If everyone loved everyone, there wouldn't be any wars or crimes or poverty or injustice or exploitation. Why doesn't everyone just love everyone and be vegan egalitarians? We should share resources equitably, and everyone should receive according to need and contribute according to abilities. If we can do this, all 14 worldwide objectives would be achieved. — Truth Seeker

I didn't read ahead, but hopefully my expose on trees is some use and interest to the conversation.

However, obviously we agree medicine is a good thing all things being equal, and so making medicine available to people is going to extend human life on average.

But poverty and pollution are far bigger killers, and cause of suffering, now than a lack of access to medicine. Most people alive today do not owe their lives to modern medical intervention, and so pursuing medicine is diminishing gains in terms of helping people on the whole. Why the focus on medical research and medical access in poor countries is because corporations profit from that and the corporations and imperial policies that make ad keep those people poor aren't put into question in the framework that medicine will make their lives better.

I have also put a lot of thought into what is "the best" that can be done, both from the perspective of some general strategy or collection of strategies of the humanist-ecological movement broadly speaking, as well as my own individual strategy to maximize my contribution.

Since I studied math and numerical analysis, I am conditioned to view objectives as the increase or decrease in a single variable. The first thing you learn in numerical analysis is that simply waiting for the computer to finish the job and just sit there staring into space is almost always cheaper than trying to think of a more efficient program, not to speak of solving anything analytically like some sort of deranged self-flagellating priest of mathematics seeking purity at the cost of his own flesh and sanity!

The second thing that is taught is that for optimization to be an approachable problem a single variable must be defined that we are optimizing for. So if there are several different measurable or otherwise quantifiable metrics of consideration, they must be combined by some function into a single variable of which the change, up or down, is good or bad in the context of the problem and of which the purpose of the algorithm is to push to some global or local maxima or minima. If all goes well the process even says something about the real world.

To translate this mathematical insight into more profane terms, I once had a friend (before he started helping to launder money for international illegal diamond cartels) that wanted to do good and also be rich and saw no issue with being able to pursue both goals maximally.

Now, while doing some good and being quite rich are compatible, unde most conditions under consideration for the exercise, I explained that they cannot both be maximized, if by "being rich" meant spending money on enjoyments and pleasantries (leading a "rich life")above what is required to pursue the first goal. One can do good insofar as it makes one rich (but equally willing to do bad insofar as it makes one rich), and one can make money insofar as it helps to do good (and lose all one's money insofar as it helps to do good), by maximizing both is not possible.

Every dollar that comes in one must choose whether it goes towards the good works, granting they are good works, or then goes towards personal enjoyment. If the personal enjoyment is required to do the good works (like sleep) then that is money going towards the good works and it is just the special case where the money being spent on yourself maximizes that goal. If it's to useful to starve as continuing to live is the best way to continue the good works in question, then obviously some capital must be spent on eating and drinking and even keeping up good spirits and creativity. There is no reason to assume suffering would be required, though it cannot be excluded either depending on the conditions. If it was good to hide jews from the Nazis, and doing so resulted in getting arrested and tortured by the Nazis, then in these circumstances it was necessary to risk suffering to do good; but assuming that's not the case, reducing expenditures on ones own creature comforts only insofar as it maximizes the good works is by definition the maximum of the good works. Simply imagining the life of a multi-billionaire with all its normal pleasantries and imaging plenty of good works is not maximizing those good works. It may not be maximizing the life of a billionaire either, but the point is there is no rational way to determine which dollar goes to what (every dollar that comes in one must choose whether to help others or whether to help oneself beyond the point of what is efficient to help others, which is just helping others but in the special case described), and so the life would be arbitrary and thus meaningless.

Now, this is clearly not your dilemma, but by seeing how "living the life of a billionaire" (in how we normally think of it) and "doing good" cannot both be maximized as a matter or principle simultaneously, even if health and comforts in themselves are fine things and can be subordinated to a single goal of maximizing good, so too does the same problem arise in considering all the good things that we could list would ideally occur.

For, it is not such a difficult task to list the ideal characteristics of a system. Ideally food is healthy, tastes good, instantly available, free of any cost and changes in an ideal way to keep those good ideal characteristics at every meal.

Where optimization comes in is how to navigate all the ideal characteristics we would wish for and stay clear of unwanted consequences in a rigorously defined way. For example, higher quality food generally costs more. One may say if we're optimizing the food then cost is not an issue, but obviously it is as other necessities in life also have a cost and so spending all ones funds on food does not optimize overall health. Even if we were to solve the most optimum lifestyle for health ... well what would be the point if all resources and time were consumed by that objective? What about other objectives? Shouldn't we be productive and pursue health insofar as it makes us more productive and able to accomplish some goals? For example, ensuring the society we're optimizing our health in itself stays healthy and sustainable.

So, we have a numerical model of what goes into a meal, imbedded in a numerical model of what goes into a healthy life style, imbedded in a model of productivity, imbedded in a model of what goes into a healthy society and environment.

The point of going through this exercise that a component (such as a single meal) cannot be optimized without larger and larger context and ultimately the context of the whole, is not only instructive in how optimization works, but also how over-optimizing a single component is going to lead to pathology. If someone was only concerned about food quality they are going to spend all their money on food which is going to cause more problems than it solves.

I have to go now, but the end point of these deliberations is that getting to the full context reveals fossil fuels and the centralized economic systems that result from their exploitation is the root cause of nearly all our problems. Local solar energy is the one thing that addresses our problems but is underdeveloped from its potential, and so it is not the only thing to do (as there are always diminishing returns in doing any one thing) but the one thing that can spread exponentially and radically alleviate poverty in a sustainable way, while also removing the "need" for resource wars as the sun shines everywhere.

I am sorry that I don't understand. How can the ageing of most species and the non-ageing of some species be an optimised evolved trait? They are the opposites of each other. — Truth Seeker

Natural death evolves when older individuals in a species are a hindrance to the younger individuals. The old must die to make way for the young essentially.

Trees are the best example of these sorts of evolutionary pressures to evolve natural death, as they grow to similar sizes and have the same basic features and conditions (i.e. "eat the same thing" of relying on photosynthesis, minerals and nitrogen fixing etc.), yet some trees grow to be thousands of years old, others essentially immortal, and some have a natural death after only about 70 years.

With non-tree organisms there's a lot of confounding factors like size and metabolism and diet, but trees are a sort of special case where confounding factors filter out.

Obviously trees can live a super long time, so if that was an evolutionary advantage in all cases then all trees would be super long lived.

The advantages of natural long life or natural short life are also easy to see with trees.

There is the clonal advantage of not needing to bother with sexual reproduction at all:

Wollemi pine
According to Cris Brack and Matthew Brookhouse at the ANU Fenner School of Environment & Society: "Once you accept that a common, genetically identical stock can define a tree, then the absolute "winner" for oldest tree (or the oldest clonal material belonging to a tree) [in Australia] must go to the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). It may be more than 60 million years old. The Wollemi pine clones itself, forming exact genetic copies. It was thought to be extinct until a tiny remnant population was discovered in Wollemi National Park in 1994... There is also substantial evidence that the tree has been cloning itself and its unique genes ever since it disappeared from the fossil record more than 60 million years ago." — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Then there's "stemming" trees which have the advantage of capturing resources over a vast areas and occupying the soil, even though individual "trees" are shorter lived.

Quaking aspen
Covers 107 acres (0.43 km2) and has around 47,000 stems (aged up to 130 years), which continually die and are renewed by its roots. Is also the heaviest-known organism, weighing 6,000 tonnes. — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Then there's long lived trees, without stemming or cloning, in the more normal sense of a single trunk that live thousands of years:

Wollemi pine
Patagonian cypress
A new 2022 estimation of 5,484 years expands on a previous minimum age based on incomplete tree rings of 3,654 — List of oldest trees, Wikipedia

Of which the advantage is monopolizing space in the canopy.

Point being, there are plenty of trees covering most ecosystems that can live a really long time, way longer than short-lived trees in the same ecosystem.

Compared to the shortest lived trees of similar size, so like a birch, is about 60 yeas.

One advantage of a shorter life span is that the species can evolve and adapt more ably. If evolution is largely constrained by generations, the shorter the generation the quicker it's possible to evolve to new conditions. Trees can produce a lot of seeds so "probably" young trees of the same species are going to grow in the space where an older individual dies. Though that's not even a universal tree strategy, as trees in rain forests have evolved ways to keep distance to avoid epidemics of diseases and pests; for in a more biodiverse environment the pests and diseases are evolving quicker too.

Another advantage is that shorter lived trees usually grow faster and do that by being less dense and so are weaker and more likely to be felled by a storm, eaten by birds and insects and beavers, and burn in a fire and so on. Species that anyways don't have long-term survivable conditions have no evolutionary pressure to be able to survive long term anyways, so can put energy and information creation and preservation (that also takes energy) into other things.

I could go on about trees, they're pretty fascinating, but I hope this is sufficient to explain why very different characteristics may co-evolve in different species of the same general kind in the same environment. There are pros and cons to different characteristics and natural death span has lot's of positives from an evolutionary survival and adaptability point of view.

Trying to make humans immortal is more likely to be a recipe for extinction than continuing on as we're doing. We know the current way "works" and balances all sorts of factors (including younger generations learning from the mistakes and biases of the old), whereas trying to make humans immortal, or as immortal as possible, may go terribly awry in all sorts of ways.

We can even develop interesting game theory scenarios to underline how dangerous it is. For example, someone adopting the explicit goal of causing the extinction of humanity is a rare event, but not impossible; such a maximally destructive individual with a limited life-span will face very adverse conditions for achieving their objective; the goal is rare, he or she will find few allies, very special circumstances will need to be created to ensure the extinction of all human life with any assurance and those circumstances will take considerable time and effort to create, so difficult that it is likely impossible for one individual to accomplish in a natural human life time span. Make that person immortal! In obviously super sophisticated technological conditions, able to work in the shadows for centuries if not millennia to find that "very special sauce of circumstances" that would kill every living human. Given enough time and consistent application of a single person's faculties, such goals are no longer discountable. Immortality is not a goal we would have any reason to believe extends the life, exploration and enjoyment of humanity as a whole.

But again, it is not even worth considering extending human life as a project apart from general health and well-being, in conditions that are not sustainable. If our environmental and ecological conditions were sustainable then we could argue the morality, theology, practicality of trying to extent people's lives beyond the natural bound that evolution has resulted in.

*Please note: Any teleological language to describe natural processes is because it's more understandable, and easier to use teleological language but then remind everyone at the end that trees do not themselves have "a strategy" of evolution; evolution happens to the trees regardless of what they think about it.

In that case, why do some organisms age (e.g. humans, cows, dogs, etc.) and some organisms don't age (e.g. planarian flatworms, hydra, Bristlecone pines, etc.)? — Truth Seeker

It's an evolved trait that optimizes over time for the survival of the species.

In terms of chromosomal continuation all species are functionally immortal in terms of their chromosomes until they go extinct. From the perspective any chromosome you have right now, there's an undivided chain of chromosome divisions all the way back to the common ancestor, and it all happens inside a cell membrane of one form or another. Of course, most chromosomes die when the individual of a species dies but all chromosomes in your or any other organisms cells today "doesn't know that", so to speak. How exactly a species chromosomes perpetuates into the future then evolves to best able to do that. Turns out that having individuals that procreate and then die is an efficient evolutionary strategy (to use teleological language).

Rate of mutation is also an evolved trait. There is an optimum rate of mutation that balances harm to the species due to the vast majority of mutations being harmful and the benefit to the species that some mutations are required to evolve.

On its own, making humans immortal won't be enough to achieve all 14 objectives. We would need to build spaceships to transport organisms to other planets and star systems so that we can spread life across the universe. — Truth Seeker

Step one in such a plan would be to ensure the current biosphere of the planet we're currently on is sustainable.

The idea that colonizing the moon, Mars or anywhere else in outer space somehow mitigates the danger we've created to our own survival on our own planet is preposterous.

If Elon Musk actually succeeds in sending people to Mars and having them live there permanently, such a colony would be entirely dependent on supplies and technology and people from earth for likely hundreds of years.

Therefore, if things are not sustainable on earth there is no point in trying to leave earth and colonize elsewhere. In the situation that the earth biome really was collapsing it would still be far easier to setup a sort of space colony on earth (under the sea, or in a bunker, or just out in the "desert of the real") than in outer space somewhere.

If we stopped being selfish and instead shared resources equitably (i.e. everyone receives according to needs and contributes according to ability) there wouldn't be any poverty. — Truth Seeker

Yes, so therefore that's the primary problem and making people immortal would be a secondary problem, even if it was a good idea which is debatable.

Many illnesses are preventable, and many more are treatable. Again, sharing resources would make healthcare accessible to all. I have been trying for 37 years to get everyone to love everyone, but I have failed because people don't listen to me. If everyone loved everyone, there wouldn't be any wars or crimes. Why doesn't everyone just love everyone and be vegan egalitarians? We should share resources equitably, and everyone should receive according to need and contribute according to abilities. — Truth Seeker

Improving society is a slow process. I don't see why you would expect it to go any quicker than history would lead us to believe.

Evolution is a deeply flawed process. Here is a list of biological design flaws in humans and other species that strongly suggest evolution through natural selection, rather than intelligent design. These features reflect evolutionary compromises, historical constraints, and trial-and-error processes typical of evolution — Truth Seeker

Evolution as such is not a flawed process as it's a natural process that did not have any design criteria to begin with. Saying evolution is a flawed process is like saying a volcano or the sun is a flawed process. Natural processes are the conditions in which we find ourselves and to assign flaws to those conditions doesn't really make any sense.

We humans can make processes to change our conditions to meet some criteria and those processes we make can be flawed given our objectives.

For our customary human goal of good health, clearly our knowledge and technology can help us change natural processes, such as diseases, with processes that can be flawed, such as side effects.

Not only is it extremely implausible the idea we could make flawless medicine but diseases too evolve.

But the project of human health through medicine is simply unsound in the context of critically damaging our ecosystems. First for the obvious fact that if we do not tend to the conditions necessary for our own survival, pursuing pristine health through a calamity makes little sense, but secondarily most of our diseases now are caused by the same agents that damage the ecosystems and it is cheaper anyways to address these causes than to continuously treat the symptoms. The focus on medicine (that the pharmaceutical corporations love) is a distraction from the political organization question that is the cause of so much disease from both pollution and poverty.

You're absolutely right: in most animals, DNA chains shorten during cell division, specifically at the telomeres - the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides, telomeres shorten, eventually leading to cell ageing (senescence) and organismal ageing. — Truth Seeker

This is really not how it works.

Cells can add more telomeres to chromosomes to keep them healthy. Of course, in a chronically unhealthy person that cell maintenance will degrade so associations between telomeres health and overall health would not be surprising (though even this has weak evidence; as DNA health is a core task that cells may continue to do even in adverse conditions).

However, the best evidence that telomeres doesn't simply shorten until there's none left and you die is that there are vastly different cell division rates in the body, so if the hypotheses was true then organs with faster division (like intestinal walls) would be far more likely to fail first and people who die of natural causes would overwhelmingly die of organ failure associated with fast cell division.

Instead of that, people die of all sorts of organ failure, and one leading cause of death is heart failure and heart cells don't divide at all in adulthood. Likewise, neurons don't divide at all in adulthood.

The premise that making people live longer achieves your objectives I also think is highly questionable.

First, because there is a long list of more pressing matters of war and poverty and illness, that we have the knowhow to address already but it is a matter of political organization.

Second, it is completely nonsensical to even consider extending human life without first being assured we are taking care of the environment and our economic activity derived from the environment sustainably.

Third, natural age is an evolved trait that nature has found to maximize our chance of survival as a species, and the wisdom of trying to reprogram evolution on these fundamental points resulting from hundreds of millions of years of genetic optimization is highly questionable.

Extending the life of the boomer generation, for example, seems incredibly foolish from the perspective of concern for humanity and the wellbeing of all life on the planet. Natural age may simply be nature's way of getting rid of such generations before it's too late.

Why “however”? What do you want it to contrast to? — neomac

The use of the word "however" is to to contrast with the fact that parties seeking their own gain at the expense of some collective gain (family, organization, business, institutional, government, country, empire, or what have you) usually don't advertise that, but will present their plan as in the interest of the group.

So, party A pursues B and party C pursues D; however, party C will usually also claim to be pursuing B.

Perfectly fine use of the word however.

Your expectations are based on reality or on your moral standards? — neomac

The current state of the conversation is descriptive. People can be described to act in the interest of "something". That something could be anything.

For example, some people act in the interest of their pet, dedicating their whole life to their pets welfare. For this particular conversation, people making (contributing to) US foreign policy are unlikely to be dedicated to the welfare of their pet to the exclusion of all other interests.

National interest is and can’t be anything else than what results from people’s self-serving interests on a national level AND given certain power relations between them. — neomac

It obviously can.

You can easily have a situation where the "certain powerful people" self-serving interest would be to plunder the national treasury and make off with the winnings. This is obviously not in the interest of any sensible concept of "the nation".

The fact of the matter is that people don't necessarily do that even if they can, as other people and even "the nation" as they conceive it has value and meaning apart from the maximization of their own store of value.

In order to analyze how policy is made we must take this obvious fact into account.

Of course, simply recognizing that some parties involved are acting in their own self interest to maximize material gains in the process (for example increase the value of a defence stock they are invested in) or then acting in the interest of another nation (perhaps simply because they are a spy or then duel nationality and are unable to serve two masters equally well) or a religious group or whatever, are going to be inputs into government decision making that likely conflict with any sensible definition of national interest.

For example, if one's reason to have a war is that it will increase defence contractor stocks, it's very unlikely that war just so happens to be also great for the national interest.

If someone else's reason to have a war is to fulfill prophecy; again, unlikely to happen to line up with any sensible definition of national interest.

Of course, what exactly is the national interest, even for people trying to be genuinely focused on that, is up for debate, but what is not really debatable is that people who have completely different objectives than the welfare of the nation, defined as the welfare of the people in the nation or then imperial strength or then any plausibly objective definition (i.e. definition apart from their own personal goals), are unlikely to just-so-happen to happen upon goals that are in the national interest (again, under any sensible definition).

However, in pursuing their ulterior motives they will present their motives as in the national interest, as they must convince and bargain with people in conversation where national interest and national strategy is the mediating discourse.

For our purposes here, if a certain powerful American Zionists puts the interests of Israel above the interest of the United States, they are unlikely to simply state that. They are far more likely to state that their Zionist objectives just so happen to be the plausibly objective interests of the United States. So, let us imagine a Zionist wants regime change in Iran at the expense of the United States, knowing full well the US won't derive any net benefit from that (would be just a really costly war), but it would result, in their estimation, in improving Israel's strategic position in the region, they are unlikely to put the argument to non-Zionist American decision makers and analysts, as well as the media and regular people, that American should embark upon an extremely costly war that will harm America but benefit Israel. Rather, they are likely to come up with arguments to try to convince people that what they want happens to be in the interest of "America".

As I said you are framing a situation not in terms of competing interests, but in moral terms. This reflects your allegedly “impartial” (or “virtuous”?) interest. Yet your views are exposed to the same “bias” you are accusing others to be victim of or purposefully embracing: namely, viewing national interest in light of your self-interest. Your “populist” views are putatively aligned with those of the mass of powerless nobodies which are victims of the putative abuses of evil elites. — neomac

At this point in the discussion you are interjecting into, the debate with @Tzeentch and @Benkei is descriptive of whose interest is even being served by recent policy.

@Tzeentch presents a description of the decision making process as coherent grand strategy since many decades, whereas @Benkei and I disagree the policy changes and decisions in the middle-east represent some sort of coherent US grand strategy over many decades.

@Tzeentch and I have debated this for quite some time, when the genocide first started. While both agreeing a genocide is definitely happening, @Tzeentch is of the view that Israel is acting on behalf of US Imperial interest in that "eliminating" Gaza and shoring up Israel's strategic position, while also creating chaos in the Middle East, is a logical next step in a rational US grand strategy in line or then formulated (or then "formulatable") by impartial imperial grand strategists.

I disagree with @Tzeentch, I view the genocide in Gaza as absolutely terrible for US Imperial interests (defined as preserving and expanding imperial power relative to other powers) and the policy to support and cover for Israel's genocide is due to Zionist influence in American government. That Zionism is a powerful faction, they want the genocide in Gaza and they are expending their political capital in order to achieve it vis-a-vis other factions and coalitions in the United States that disagree with them.

By factions I mean in a broad sense including entire institutions, such as the Pentagon even if the Pentagon itself is of course made up of myriad subsections (there is also resulting collective positions from all that sub-factional dynamics).

My analysis of the current situation is that Zionists "went for it" and tried to push the United States into a high-intensity war with Iran and the faction that stopped that from happening (for now) is the pentagon (because they know it conflicts with US imperial interest, represent far more costs than gains, have other regions they worry about, such as East-Asia) and (I would guess) managed to convince Trump in the situation room where it's mostly pentagon people in the room that war with Iran is incredibly high risk and don't recommend it (if they did, I have a hard time imagining the war wouldn't be on full blast right now). For, war with Iran as concept is easy to talk about, but when you get into the nitty gritty of how to actually make war with Iran, that they fought Iraq for 8 years and are not push overs, have bunkers everywhere, mountains and a surface area of 1 Rocky Mountains + 1 France, and the ballistic missiles capacity and so on, it's obviously not an easy task and many dead Americans would result tin the attempt.

At the same time, I believe Israel was threatening to escalate to them using nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian enrichment plant. Trump bombing the plant with conventional weapons (but not killing anyone) and then Iran's symbolic counter attack, enabled Trump to simply declare a ceasefire.

The reason I was so concerned about Israel escalating to nuclear weapons is because they have no diplomatic off-ramps by design, literally opening the war with assassinating negotiators; precisely so that the US would be inevitably sucked into an expanding conflict.

Trump simply announcing a ceasefire basically short circuited that escalation process, and the bombing removed the reason for Israel to use nuclear weapons.

To summarize, in my model of what's happening, the constant escalation by Israel represents Zionist influence in America essentially cashing in their chips at a combined optimum of the combined factors of their influence in American foreign police and American power relative Iran. A sort of 'now or never' moment for Zionist whose objective is to push Iran into a failed state, as well as carry out genocide while the US can still cover for that.

To this discussion, @Benkei adds the additional information that the previous nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated by Obama was clearly part of a strategy of detente with Iran, that drops sanctions and allows them to develop and normalize, and not some sort of 5-D chess move knowing Trump would come in and tear up the agreement, then Israel embark on a genocide under Biden to be finally in a position to attack Iran in a second Trump administration.

Obviously Obama would be aware that if detente doesn't work American could go to war, but the calculation at the time was clearly that a peaceful arrangement with Iran was more in America's interest, even Imperial interest (allow that pivot to Asia), than another Middle-East war that kills plenty of Americans.

For, even if American Imperial violence hasn't stopped qua violence, there are a lot fewer American soldier deaths since many years now, and I would very much suspect that policy and decision makers with any sense of US interest are very apprehensive about any proposal that involves US soldiers returning in boxes at a high or steady volume.

I'm not completely sure if you're disagreeing with me.

By interest I mean people's perceived interest they are working on behalf of, which is (usually) a mix of personal and collective interests of one form or another (family, company, institution, country etc.). For example, someone working in a company may have the interest of the company in mind in making decisions, what the company to succeed, but also want to advance their career; sometimes these interests are aligned (doing a good job advances your career) and sometimes in conflict (advancing one's career requires spreading rumours about someone who's actually more competent; of course in this person's perception; someone else may have "honesty is the best policy" perception as to their personal interest to advance their career).

In terms of how government decisions are made lot's of individuals representing explicitly and implicitly lots of mixes of interests go into these decisions.

However, all of them are going to say what they propose is in the national interest.

To take the war in Iran, American-Zionists who want the US to attack Iran for Israel's benefit, claim this is also the US national interest as well.

So, everyone is always talking grand strategy and sometimes that's in earnest (as earnest as they can, such as the authors of the Brookings paper discussed above) and sometimes it is obviously a lie.

A "healthy" Empire, the plausibly objective interest of the Empire as such manages to assert itself over special interests that wish to plunder the Empire or otherwise consume its capital base (including diplomatic capital) for their own ends. An unhealthy Empire everyone comes to divide up the spoils and get away with their pickings.

I was just about to cite this very paper as an example of people trying to be objective.

The paper essentially makes the point that diplomacy is the only option likely to succeed.

I don't have time to make detailed citations right now, but of the situation we are in (American people simply don't back an invasion so the only attack option is bombing), the authors are very lucid of the likely consequences:

Disadvantages (of just bombing stuff scenario)

- Iran’s determination to acquire a nuclear weapons capability would probably not be reduced by such an attack and, especially in the short term, could well be increased.

-The hard-line Iranian leadership that presently struggles to maintain political support at home might be strengthened by a nationalistic reaction among the Iranian people against what they would doubtless perceive as an unprovoked American attack.

- Even massive airstrikes might only set back the Iranian nuclear program by as little as a year or two, and this seems more likely than the more optimistic possibility that this policy option would delay Iran’s program by three years or more. Given the track record of U.S. and international intelligence in accurately assessing the nuclear programs of foreign states, any attack, even a sustained American operation, might fail to destroy a substantial fraction of Iran’s nuclear program. The United States cannot strike what it does not know about, and there is good reason to think that Iran has or will soon have major nuclear facilities—including alternative uranium hexafluoride storage/production and uranium enrich- ment plants—that have not been identified. — WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran - Brookings Institute

Which is exactly what the media is arguing with Trump about presently.

Furthermore, even if the program was delayed by 3 years, which is viewed as essentially the best case scenario, what does that delay accomplish outside a followup invasion? Obviously bombing them is going to motivate them even harder to get the bomb and make diplomacy far more difficult, if not impossible (as we see), to get them to agree to give up their nuclear program (which they've stated pretty clearly they will never ever do). So if the plan is diplomacy, simply doing some bombing in the manner that has been done is not part of any rational diplomatic strategy. If there's no appetite to invade Iran, then bombing (even successful) doesn't delay the nuclear program for the purposes of organizing a successful invasion.

Without a followup invasion, what exactly is the point in simply delaying Iran getting the bomb? With the high possibility bombing: A. causes that to happen as Iran may simply not develop a nuclear bomb if not attacked (as has been Iranian policy for 40 years) B. the bombing is not even effective so don't really delay anything and C. creates domestic and international sympathy for Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon.

All the bombing accomplished is removing the nuclear material (that we for sure know about) from international inspection.

No worries. Slightly off topic but maybe others have the same question. The old forum had on the front page all the main forums and last-post of each forum, which encouraged posting in the less active forums (as your post would stay on the main page until it was a bit awkward no one responded yet). That each forum was on the front page had the bonus that sub-forums could then be listed (without showing the last post so as not to trigger people) but people looking for scriptural debate or then current-events knew exactly where to go to get their fix. Mostly scriptural debate was catholics arguing with protestants so was pretty amazing. There was this one catholic called Mariner who absolutely brought the fire; totally lit.

It's in the lounge, it's under "all categories".

The lounge is where political stuff is put so that it doesn't show up on the front page. On the old forum there was a current events sub-forum to the political-philosophy forum, and you could see the link to the sub-forum but last post wasn't shown, which was a less confusing way to achieve the same thing of not showing current events last posts ( / controversial flamewars) on the front page.

Same thing was done for scriptural discussion sub-forum to the theology main forum.

Oh, and this is nonsense too. I'm repeatedly trying to start a conversation about actual geopolitical realities - ergo the 'root causes' - but you've been pretty much categorically ignoring them. — Tzeentch

I have little time these days, but I am "fully in" the geopolitical theorizing.

However, has extremely good points.

A better framework that brings the two arguments together, as I argued for quite some time on the Ukraine thread, is "grand strategy mediated discourse".

Decisions are made by individuals in a network, which are usually best modelled by factions we usually call "special interest" today.

In these decision making processes everyone uses strategic language. For example, if you represent the arms industry and all you want is to sell more arms and have more wars and tensions to sell more arms for short term shareholder value, you're not going to just say that; rather, you're going to translate your interest to sell more arms into grand strategy language.

It's called rationalizing.

Of course, some parties in the decision making process will actually care about a US empire "as such"; for example, a lot of analysts are hired to analyze the world and the interests of "the US" and simply do that job. However, even then, what they come to define as "US interest" is going to be shaped by more powerful players that may have self serving definitions. So, simply because you're an analysis and your identity is serving US interest, doesn't mean you therefore come up with some plausible definition of what US interests are. If it becomes the institutional status quo that defeating Iran is US interest, then you'll start just repeating that as that's what's expected of you.

Point being, "US strategy" is not an accurate model of what drives decisions. All sorts of interests go into policy and government decision making, of which genuine concern for strategy is only one component, and even within this component of some plausibly impartial attempt at "US strategy" there will be a diversity of opinion.

So there are genuine attempts to argue for "US interests" within the establishment, but everyone else is going to present themselves as doing the same thing.

In this case of the 12 day war, the main faction pushing for a US war with Iran in the US establishment is obviously the American Zionists (often duel citizens). Now they want a US war with Iran for Israeli-Zionist interests but they nevertheless present that as US interest.

They've pushed hard for a war with Iran before, and didn't get it, so that in itself informs us there's other factions that disagree that a war with Iran is in US interests and / or their own interest (such as own political or economic interest). For example, the arms industry wants to sell weapons, but they don't benefit from a war's that are too big and chaotic. What they want are arms races, specifically technology driven arms races where they make the most profit, not actual resolutions to conflicts or wars so big that it disrupts the global economy (people need money to be able to buy your stuff). Arms industry doesn't want to get nuked same as everyone else.

Then there's the pentagon, US intelligence agencies, and other US institutions. Pentagon may simply have no viable plan to defeat Iran, so they may hear the rhetoric but then those analysts who identify as objective try to formulate as plausibly objective view of Iran and plausibly objective evaluation of a giant war with Iran. If the results aren't good there's going to be pushback from any general that either also identifies as representing some sort of objective US interest or then doesn't want the embarrassment of losing a war.

There's also diplomatic factions within all these institutions that don't see war as the primary tool to advance US interests, but rather diplomacy is (war being a last resort).

We put all this together, and the original plan to invade Iran was clearly as a next step to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran is in the middle. For that to happen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have had to go well, they don't.

Obama's elected, there's a giant push to carry out the attack Iran plan, but Obama disagrees that's a good idea, goes with diplomacy instead.

As @Benkei points out, there's no evidence this change in policy to negotiate a resolution is somehow a cynical ploy to keep Iran from developing. Definitely it's a plan to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but the only way to do that is a process of phasing out the sanctions.

One of the fundamental reasons to favour diplomacy (in which Iran also gets some of what it wants, that's how diplomacy works) is that war with Iran would be simply too costly for the US and may not even succeed in at least regime change in the short term. The US may simply lose a conventional war with Iran simply because it would be too costly to win (require a draft for example). Iranians fought an 8 year war with Iraq, so there's no good reason to assume invading Iran would be easy and it could turn out to be so difficult that the US gives up. In addition to the prospects of very clearly failing to topple the Iranian government, there's all the regional chaos Iran could cause; straights of Hormuz and all that.

I could go on, but the point is there's lots of inputs into decision making. Obama decides diplomacy is in the US interest. Then Trump gets elected, undoes Obamas deal not to then immediately start a war with Iran, but because he hates Obama so much. Of course, Zionists don't want a diplomatic resolution with Iran, they want war even if it greatly harms the US (they see Israel as winning in that scenario), so they get to work on increasing the tensions with Iran. However, overall they are losing, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't going well, and Trump starts the withdrawal from Afghanistan process; that's really not good if you want to attack Iran.

The war we just saw, notably, was not started by the US, but directly by Israel. This isn't the Zionist preference, but a plan B of starting the war themselves and assuming the US will join in.

That also didn't work, so shows the limitations of Zionist influence in the US government.

And here the courts got an ample amount of this rhetoric after the Hamas attacks. Yet I think the real threat is ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. — ssu

The current Harvard estimate is 400 000 Palestinians "missing", in addition to starvation and all manner of trauma, in particular to children, from physical wounds, concussions to every possible developmental disorder.

We, the West, have essentially been torturing about a million children for about 20 months, and by simple proportions 200 000 children are among those "missing" but could be a higher proportion if children are less likely to survive the weapons used.

Ethnic cleansing of simply moving the Palestinians I don't see how that could be a worse crime, since if they are still alive the situation could be reversed by the world or then at least compensated.

For example, had the Nazis moved the Jews and other undesirables to the camps but didn't starve and kill them, they would have suffered a lot less and then returned home. So I don't see how ethnic cleansing, that is not also genocide, is a worse crime than the suffering we are seeing live streamed.

That they know their suffering is live streamed and the world does nothing is an additional trauma.

But for their proxies in Gaza being annihilated, their nuclear facilities being devastated, their being under attack by the strongest military force on the planet, their enemy being a 3,000 year old civilization that is relentless, and that they agreed to a cease fire, Iran's got them just where they want them. — Hanover

Palestinians did not protect Iran, but Iran tried to protest Palestinians from genocide. First of all.

The nuclear facilities are civilian facilities, everything important was already moved out or can anyways be rebuilt. At least one influential faction in the Iranian military has been pushing for the development of nuclear weapons, they wouldn't do that in civilian facilities.

The civilian program (in terms of weapons development) is only needed to develop enrichment designs, not even equipment. This stuff isn't very large, it can easily be built anywhere (such as a military bunker), and Iran has Uranian mines so all it needs is understanding the enrichment technology, which they have done by developing about 6 generations of centrifuges.

Each generation of centrifuge is more efficient than the last, and more efficiency means you need either less machines or less time, and in both cases less energy.

They already have enriched to 60% which in terms of time and energy is 80% the way to weapons grade (the enrichment is more efficient the more enriched you go).

The limiting factor for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon since decades is not technology but diplomacy.

Iran needs to project stability and rationality to its partners, such as Russia, and that's done by being stable and rational. Now, simply capitulating on civilian nuclear development is not stable and rational and is terrible diplomacy vis-a-vis Russia as Russia maintains non-Western states have the same sovereignty and can develop civilian nuclear programs (Russia also sell civilian nuclear programs); and it doesn't even increase stability because having the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon and counter-strike Israel is a better deterrent than having no capacity. However, rushing to develop a nuclear weapon out-of-the-blue is also not stable or good diplomacy. Russia would likely join in sanctioning Iran as it's simple destabilizing and would lead to accelerated proliferation (Saudi Arabia getting the bomb etc.) if not a nuclear first strike by Israel.

So, for decades Iran has pursued the most stable diplomatic position of developing a civilian nuclear program that also serves as a deterrent to war with Iran.

By striking Iran in an act of illegal aggression, moreover assassinating top commanders and scientists, it removes the diplomatic obstacle for developing nuclear weapons.

Iran can now easily sell the narrative that it's Israel and the US that are out of control, not responsible actors, and they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves from these maniacs, same as North Korea.

The US' advantage in applying diplomatic pressure on Iran was in presenting themselves as the "responsible adults" and Iran as the reckless party that shouldn't have nuclear weapons, and we're simply not going to talk about Israel's nuclear weapons.

This war completely reverses that diplomatic status quo.

Even worse, by having this war, Iran can remove all the nuclear material it had under observation in a civilian program to hardened military sites for the development of nuclear weapons. So that physical obstacle, that the Uranian is being watched and to remove it would trigger a diplomatic and then likely military crisis in which no one has sympathy for Iran, is also removed.

Oh, I don’t agree with that. I think the disabling of the Iranian nuclear capacity is crucial. My point rather was scepticism about Trump’s motivation. — Wayfarer

It is in no way disabled.

The main capability is the designs needed to enrich uranium; those obviously aren't destroyed.

Iran has developed multiple generations of homegrown enrichment designs and expertise. This sort of technology is really finicky and you need trial and error to optimize things.

In addition, there's no indication that Iran's stockpile of 60% enriched uranium is destroyed, so it's safe somewhere. Enriching to 90% only requires 20% of the energy using the same centrifuge technology (you just run it for longer to get to 90%), which all indications are Iran moved to safe locations before these strikes.

Iran also has its own uranium mines. So, it has the knowledge and expertise needed to enrich uranium to weapons grade and also has the uranium.

Therefore, the only ways to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon would be by agreement or invasion and occupation.

Dropping bombs, but not invading, is the best way to guarantee Iran develops nuclear weapons.

Every Israeli that leaves Israel and doesn't return is a fatality in economic terms.

Israel hans't banned people from leaving (except rich people on boats) because people are excited to stay. That's the biggest win Iran is achieving in terms of security metrics. Less Israeli population, less power, less skills, less threat in the future. And this economic cost of missiles blowing up infrastructure, laboratories, ports, disrupting normal life, removing the "sense of Western style safety", is in addition to the economic costs Israel had already incurred due to operations in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, along with boycotts due to those actions.

Israel is a small country that has millions of citizens with duel nationality that can easily leave, in addition to something like a million ultra-orthodox citizens who don't serve in the military and many don't really work, then there's the Arab population that are there but not necessarily committed to the Zionist project.

I don't know what information you have been following, but Israel's initial decapitation strike did not work; commanders were replaced, Iran retaliated. Sure, people died but their replacements maybe more effective.

Then Iran has struck Israel with missiles and drones every single day since. If Israel owns the skies over Iran, why aren't they able to disrupt and suppress that?

Iran defeated US and Israeli missile defence, about 5 layers, day 1 and even that level of performance (that does not prevent missiles falling) cannot possibly be sustained.

The reports are Iran has successfully moved all of its enriched uranium and critical enrichment equipment to safer locations.

Israel can strike Iran too, sure, but nothing of critical military importance (which is all under ground).

And considering everything important is under ground, what would actually have a chance of seriously disrupting Iran's military capability would be mass bunker bustering. If the US is now out of the war after dropping 6 giant bombs on non-military-critical civilian infrastructure, that means Iran is basically military safe.

Israel can destroy civilian infrastructure, including prisons for some reason, but that doesn't degrade Iranian military capability and is basically just wasting ammunition, and Iran can destroy civilian infrastructure too.

Maersk has paused going to Haifa; that is a pretty big disruption.

And in the long term view, this sort of war is far more damaging to Israel's economy than it is Iran, not simply because Israel is smaller in size and population, but Israel is driven by the high tech sector and there's not only destruction of laboratories Iran has already achieved but this sort of long term disruption causes many "knowledge workers" to leave, along with lots of other duel citizens. Iranians, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere and the oil will still be in the ground when the war ends.