It's messy. And it also isn't easy to make as strong a case for leaving for the left as there is for the right. There were leftists who wanted to leave and presented decent arguments, but they could not organize effectively enough as the right did.

Thing is, a portion of "leave" people were probably not thinking much about left or right.

Much like in the US, people who voted for Obama ended up voting for Trump, especially in the rust belt.

Probably. A large part of it feels to me like a "fuck you" to the establishment, which is understandable.

But many factors involved in that.

Yeah. I'm not going to pretend that the EU become an example of direct democracy overnight or anything like that. But I think the totality of its citizens should be able to elect people to represent them in a manner that actually affects economic policy and foreign policy.

Granted, that is not going to be easy at all, given different countries, cultures and the like. But a political (not solely an economic) "union" merits that name if citizens could have a say in what laws they'd like, to some extent. Right now, it's extremely little, in my opinion.

Well, that would be a step in the right direction. As far as I can recall, you can only do this for the EU parliament, which has no power though.

I'd prefer that by "democratic", the EU would follow the will of most of its participants when it comes to policy. That's still a long way off.

I'm not at you, but sometimes a spade is just a spade. — thewonder

We agree that reducing suffering in relation to babies being born through slight genetic manipulations. And you've said that that's not social Darwinism. OK.

But the feminists you are speaking about are a minute portion of the feminist movement, like a fraction. So why would you pay attention to them?

What is red? It's the eye's way of perceiving 750 (nm). It's like a way of looking at something, a perspective if you will. The ears perceive of 750 (Hz) differently. Translations, back and forth, between languages (of the senses). — TheMadFool

That's the wave length of red.

That's not the answer you get if you ask any person to point to you to something red.

If you ask a scientist, then they'll speak of wavelengths.

Red is the colour of blood, or certain apples or of fire hydrants.

Well.

I tried.

Oh they will.






When there's no food to eat or when they have to move to another country - if they even can.

Red is 750 nm (wavelength of red light). It's (750 nm) what red actually is. The color red is what 750 is in eye language. We can translate red (750 nm) into sound, a note that has a frequency of 750 Hz and this can be done for the other senses too. — TheMadFool

Red happens to be quantifiable to that wavelength. But a quantity is not a quality.

I have a hard time understanding how people could really believe the opposite. I mean surprise because all you have to do is look around your room or Google "red" and see a picture.

That's the experience. I mean, how is this a number?

We are speaking of two different aspects of phenomena.

He reformed the field to be more so concerned with the prevention of reproduction. I think that it's fairly clear that sterilizing people with genetic disorders in the interests of an ostensive purity is just kind of implicitly totalitarian, but, should anyone think that merely preventing them from reproducing isn't all that bad, I will ask as to just what it entails. — thewonder

Well this is (in my case now) abstract theorizing, but I think we should at least make the following distinction:

1) Those people for whom it might not be a good idea to have a baby from
2) The people who shouldn't have babies but had them anyway

The case of 1 would be along the lines of people that have rare genetic disorders that may guarantee a miserable life for there kids. Similarly those people who aren't in the condition to be able to take care of a baby at all, etc.

In no case do I think there should be a law to prevent 1. Or virtually no case that comes to mind. That's just life.

In the case of 2, we'd want to provide the best services available to prevent tragedies from occurring. There are existing laws that protect children, but these might need be amplified. How to do this is very hard, because it does enter and clash with privacy concern and over-reach of power.

When I am certifiably "insane", what reason do I have to consign myself to failure? If you can not answer that question, then you can not convince me otherwise. — thewonder

I don't think you should. Nor do I aim to convince you otherwise. I think you have abilities that compensate for whatever lack you may have. Many of the greatest artists were labeled "insane" too, so there's a lot of territory to explore as insanity covers many aspects of human behavior.

The point of the thought experiment is to uncover as to whether or not the theory can be abused. The caveat, "to support Social Darwinism", is there to sidestep this debate on Eugenics. It's just designed as a litmus under the assumption that, if an idea can be misused, then, it will be. — thewonder

Then I think you should modify the title of the thread or the gist of the OP, to something like: are there circumstances in which modifying humans or preventing diseases lead to consequences like eugenics, if taken far enough?

Or speak of a "gifted scientist", so as to not taint the discussion before it is had.

Because although now you are clarifying what you mean, in the OP it does seem as if you'd want someone to defend Eugenics in the social Darwinist vein.

Well if by attempting to create a healthier baby leads to this kind of thinking, which I haven't seen yet, then there's an argument to be made that gene alterations should be limited only to preventing illness.

Neither of those things, however, have anything to do with Eugenics. — thewonder

Fine. I will shelf my "improving" babies comment. As it has not gotten to a point in which we can say that this the equivalent to eugenics.

Yeah. I agree, even those born with the worst of diseases should be able to live in as painless ways as is possible. Once someone is given life, almost regardless of the situation they are in, will want to continue living. And that is a right that should be very much respected.

The only way that Eugenics can be salvaged is to turn it into something else entirely. At that point, why not just advocate for something else?

All of which is still besides the point, as the idea for this thread is to create a thought experiment to determine whether a theory can work in practice. — thewonder

Sure.

But then what would be a hypothetical of a "gifted eugenicist" society look like? Like babies only born with IQ over 140?

Yeah, these types of scenarios won't convince anyone, except those who already think some people are inherently better than others.

As I happen to have been declared "insane" and not to trust the Western intelligentsia, it's doubtful that you will convince me to consign to my own systematic elimination. To me, the concept of mental illness just makes the entire field untenable. — thewonder

Very little is known about "mental illnesses", not that they don't exist. We likely all have some kind of them to some degree or other. We clearly know people in real life who exhibit behavior that is not acceptable in public and maybe even in private.

But "eradication" of these won't happen. Too many variables in life can serve as a virtual guarantee that some of us will go a bit mad in certain situations.

Sure, though, family planning is a good thing, but is it Eugenics? Sir Francis Galton's theory was explicitly Social Darwinist and it did become a fundamental basis for late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century genocides. Sure, we salvaged Friedrich Nietzsche and even Martin Heidegger, but, when this theory, at best, amounts to social murder, what would the point of rescuing it from its abuse be? — thewonder

You'll always find people who believe in eugenics by another name, namely racists.

But as soon as you introduce the idea of improving a person, the slide to thinking in terms of superiority is not too far away. So it is a balance.

Obviously, as a social Darwinist doctrine, or as an idea that excludes all others are garbage, shouldn't even have to be refuted at all.

I mean, in a sense we are already heading in the direction, if only slightly. We already have medications and I believe we are beginning to get genetics advance that improves a child's abilities or at least preventing illness.

The negative side, the racist side, the deplorable side of eugenics is the idea that people already living are inferior than others. There's no reason to believe that.

That does not contradict the point that most parents would like a healthy baby.

Improving the quality of life of people should not be viewed as wrong.

It becomes problematic if in addition to that, someone says that these individuals are better in some nebulous sense. Especially if leaders begin to get behind such ideas.

That's fine in that you don't find what Russell says interesting or deep. I was only speaking about prose style.

On the other hand, to your credit, you tend to express yourself quite clearly, not in the convoluted way Husserl did. You can say that that's because he was ahead of his time. Maybe.

But then there are people, like Zahavi, who do explain Husserl very clearly.

I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, other that that you understand someone’s prose. — Joshs

You don't think there's a qualitative difference in writing quality between Husserl and Russell?

I'm not speaking about depth of ideas, that's person dependent, but I'd be surprised if you said that Husserl wrote better than Russell or Heidegger than Plato. Nothing against either Husserl or Heidegger, in fact I enjoy them, but not because of style.

Yes. If you do your best to explain and the person does not understand, then the onus tends to be on the person who doesn't get it. I agree with you.

There are, however, personal factors: what you find interesting another person will not or may find it trivial or boring or pointless. That's the way it is with people.

But at the very least, I agree with him that if you can't explain the basic idea or general thought behind something, I'm going to be suspect of your (not you specifically, but anybody) understanding of the topic.

This likely does not apply to mathematics.

:lol:

I mean, it's four words, not entire sentences.

No worries man, it happens to all of us, particularly if we're emotional on a topic, which happens a lot in politics.

No I mean, read the four words prior to where you quoted.

I agree with you. It's a shame they aren't better organized and coherent. They are important for the world.

You're not butting in.

That is emphatically not what I said.

But that's not a consequence of the function of the EU but a result of the gross underestimation of the risks of a viral pandemic, which underestimation we've seen in almost every country that hadn't dealt with MERS and SARS. — Benkei

It's true that the world was unprepared. Most of it. Not Taiwan or South Korea. But as soon as Biden came to office, the US did way better than the EU in organizing vaccine rollouts.

Now that's not the case, due, in large part, to the denialism of large swaths of the US population. But there's no reason why Europe could not have organized itself much better to respond to a crisis. It's a fault in the organization of the EU, it need not happen this way.

Why take him so seriously? Greece and the other member states were collectively fucked by the banking industry, which claimed if Greece failed on its bonds it would cascade through Europe. Everybody feared that spectre and the resultant disintegration of the EU. Of course, Greece also got itself in that mess in the first place by window dressing its accounts through the use of off market swaps (courtesy of Goldman Sachs). — Benkei

Why take him seriously? He went to the EU to argue that they couldn't pay back the money they were being lent! They did not listen to him, and said what I quoted to you. What happened then? Brutal austerity. That's not a law of nature. It need not have occurred.

So really, who cares what he thinks? He probably makes some fair criticisms, I have some of my own especially around the introduction of the EUR but let's not pretend — Benkei

One only "cares" about people who seem to make some sense on what they're saying. That's the only extent to which anybody should care about what anyone says. Yes, he's overly critical in my estimation, but if you read about how the EU formed and how they dealt with the crisis based on the observations of an insider to the IMF, it's interesting and tragic.

I'm not saying the EU is ALL bad. Not having to carry passports over borders, being able to move freely and having a common currency is comfortable and good. But again, normal citizens don't have a say about what laws pass in the EU, or at least, very rarely.

Flawed democracies in the EU: — Benkei

Of course. There's no unflawed democracy at all. And the US is FAR from a political paradise. But they tend to treat each member state in a healthier manner than EU countries treat each other.

It depends on how deep you want to go with this.

If you want a good intro to his talking about innate ideas and the like, I'd recommend you see Michel Gondry's documentary about his ideas, called Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

It has some nice illustrations about how our innate faculties react to very small changes in the environment.

It's available for free here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv66xFD7s7g

His comment is simply that the way we recognize houses is innate in us. Another alien creature could have the concept HOUSE which differed in what properties are essential to it, such as a HOUSE being though if in terms of seeing an interior first, then the front side.

We do the opposite when we think of houses.

As for the Post-Modernist comment, he has in mind people like Derrida, Lacan and the like, which he thinks are gibberish.

He only demands that people explain these ideas the way a physicist or a biologist could explain some aspects of what they work on in simple terms. Here's an article he wrote about postmodernism:

http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

I really enjoyed the Chomsky audio. I've been thinking I should put some effort into his work. — T Clark

That's my specialty actually.

If you want specific recommendations on different topics, I'll be glad to give you some recommendations.

Yes, it has all these separate governing bodies and all these fancy sounding internal organizations. How much influence does the average European have over any of this?

Virtually nothing. Yeah they can send some people to parliament, if they even know about it. It often (not always) boils down to ECB dogma.

As Schäuble told Varoufakis when Syrizia won: ‘Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy."

Member states cannot decide how much money they should print given the specific economic situations they find themselves in - outside of a select number of countries.

Parliaments are nice, and I like that they can form coalitions to pass laws. Did the EU function well in the 2009 crisis? What about the pandemic, did the member states help each other out?

It was Cuba and China, not Germany or France, who helped Italy.

In short, the EU has a long way to go to become democratic.

Again, Mody and Varoufakis describe this very well.

But I do agree that information on how the EU works, should be made easier to gather.

It's person dependent. Some people have an innate capacity to understand certain ideas better than others, perhaps the topic at hand resonates with a specific individual.

Having said that, on the "negative side", I do think that some of classical figures are very obscure. I very much think Kant was extremely profound, but the dense verbiage used and the fact that he (often) did not refer to ordinary objects to elucidate a conceptual difficulty, makes it harder.

Then there are cases in which I have to strongly suspect that, despite finding a few ideas of some interest, the verbiage is intentionally dense for appearance of profundity.

I think the prime example here is Hegel. Even secondary literature on Hegel is just overwhelmingly complex and dese. And once I unpack the ideas, to the extent that I can, I don't see much that excuses his vocabulary.

On the "positive side", there are plenty of philosophers who wrote clearly and said interesting things. Plato, Descartes, Hume, Reid, Schopenhauer, James the popular side of Russell and so on.

Even when they are clear, which some of them are very clear, the ideas are complicated, because speaking about say, mental phenomena is extremely complex and multifaceted and nuanced. So that may be an important reason as why philosophers are "hard". The topic is very hard in a special sense.

Yes, it is true that lack of effort can be correctly pointed out. But if in good faith I try to read Hegel or Deleuze and get little for my efforts, then the accusation isn't pertinent: it's not worth more time.

Finally, even if Descartes and Schopenhauer are quite clear, if they don't resonate with you, then they don't resonate with you. No problem, there's plenty of other stuff that will catch your attention in philosophy.

Yeah. It should be amended significantly every X amount of time. They had no idea about what we would be dealing with back in the day. Nor the moral progress we've made in many areas.

Maybe. The constitution should be updated though. It's not as if it were God's word or something.

But, point taken.

:lol:

Oh man, getting a wake up call for that message might turn me into murder mode for several minutes.

But yeah, I'd agree.

Yeah. Fox.

I think there should be a law that says that opinion or preference can't be given as fact.

Ahh, I see. There's plenty of good arguments for such a view, Schopenhauer comes to mind. Spinoza too and Parmenides. Also the Upanishads, etc. etc.

It's quite respectable actually.

I try to be mindful of other people's belief. Though if they just give standard Christian dogma, I suspect, more often than not, they haven't thought about the topic much.

Nevermind the fascist point. I had something else in mind.

But the again EU is anti-democratic, and they also want and army... — Wheatley

Yeah. It's ironic.

Not that NATO is much better. I mean yes, the US is somewhat democratic, more than the EU now, I'd argue, but it doesn't matter, I mean they can just bombard you with propaganda and people go wild and want to go to war.

Insane.

I'm lucky, in that I don't think death is the end, with nothing thereafter. — James Riley

You believe in an afterlife of sorts?

The idea that Trump is not hawkish is, if true, limited to foreign states. I have no doubt he would not heistate to turn his brown-shirts loose on Americans if they threatened his ratings with his sheep. — James Riley

Not for no lack of trying. He wanted to provoke a war with Iran by assassinating Soleimani. Iran did not take the bait, despite having ships near there territorial waters.

Not to mention this insane turn in policy with Taiwan, which, if continues as is, might well destroy us all. And I'm not exaggerating.

Yes. Varoufakis and Mody document this quite well.

I agree, they should unite in a kind of "United States of Europe", but the current system they have is crazy. They impose austerity on each other and central bank don't give a damn about anything but inflation.

After two World Wars, one would think they've learned fighting each other is no good.

Yes, that's what they do talk. In that same article you provide it says:

"Currently, there is no such army, and defence is a matter for the member states." and "NATO has been described as the "biggest obstacle" to a European army."

I don't what you are talking about with the fascist question.

Well, let's wait to cross that bridge.

Having said that, there's little reason to suspect the EU will do much of anything. What could they do? Sanction the US or get out of NATO? They rely on NATO for defense.

If they had balls, they'd try to improve relations with other big powers, instead of following Washington in many aspects of FP. There are exceptions true, but the EU needs a dose of actual democracy.

The EU itself, as it currently exists, is extremely anti-democratic, relying on fanatical market bureaucrats. Maybe Trump winning again they'd talk about doing something, and then they'd do nothing.

Many thanks for sharing that, someone here will identify with what you're saying.

I have my share of disorders too, though not as bad.

It's nice to hear that some of this speculation is genuinely interesting, as it should be. I think Plato onwards would have been pleased that this can be helpful.

And if they use a gun, we will blame the gun. — James Riley

Very true.

In fact, a lot of the philosophy I took time to read only made my depression and anxiety worse (Schopenhauer). — Albero

Interesting.

I've always found Schopenhauer's philosophy to be therapeutic. Even being depressed I felt in good company, and when still feeling shitty, but less intensely so, then I would smile at his descriptions and think to myself, yeah it's bad, but not that bad.

Mainländer, on the other hand, should never be read when feeling anything but fine-to-good, otherwise it's very brutal.

It can be, if they are grasped by the arguments and problems.

But it can be very dangerous too, if such a person is feeling depressed, then bumping into the thought of Camus, Schopenhauer, Mainländer or Cioran, among others, might well be the push the sends them off the cliff.

So it's a gamble. But with these types of problems, most things are too. With psychology or psychiatry, if you get stuck with a wrong professional, it can really fuck you up. It's still a work in progress...

it seems obvious that it must exist — TiredThinker

Because it is.

Just one note, there are no final proofs in nature. We can't prove almost anything. We constantly revise what we know and we can't do much more than this.

It all seems to boil down to minimizing annoyances and grievances that will definitely arise whether more on the lonely camp or the social camp.