Hi Jake, as I already suggested in the other thread, philosophy is not politics nor activism... — ChatteringMonkey
Has philosophy ever influenced politics? And in what way and magnitude? — Aleksander Kvam
Have you read The Ending of Time? — unenlightened
Everybody is interested in everything, except the gun. That's fundamentally irrational, and demonstrates the weakness of philosophy. — Jake
How does it help, to focus on the gun? Why not focus on the mouth and the hand? — unenlightened
Would you try to teach them how to be enlightened, argue for a radical transformation of human psychology etc? — Jake
We can't do much about the problem because 1) we insist we can't do much about the problem and 2) we spend almost all our time focused on other much smaller issues. — Jake
How long do you expect this process to take? — Jake
I do agree that human psychology is the root of the problem. I'm just making the point that we don't have time to fix that first, if it even can be fixed. Such a process would take centuries at least, and we just don't have that kind of time. Imperfect flawed human beings are going to have solve this one, if it is to be solved. — Jake
But the solution is trivial; take the gun out of your mouth, get rid of the weapons. One doesn't need to be perfect to understand that, and it needn't take centuries. So one has to ask why such an obviously sensible course is not being followed. — unenlightened
Given that we're not capable of addressing this threat through reason alone, some event is going to be required to engage our emotional energy. As example, imagine how the group consensus might dramatically shift if a terrorist sets off a nuke in some major city. — Jake
Imagine that hackers added a button to this forum which would allow every reader to erase the entire forum and the backups too. This issue would immediately go straight to the top of focus for the mods, right? Obviously, that's because if they don't get rid of that button it's only a matter of time until somebody clicks it and then all the other threads vanish. Thus, it's not rational to focus on the other threads until the button is gone. — Jake
I don't imagine it would change the consensus at all; if anything, it would demonstrate the need for 'us' to have nuclear weapons - because 'they' have them. — unenlightened
The mods already have this button, it is the power that confers authority. — unenlightened
That said, a terrorist nuke may be our best hope. We're in a race between a limited event like that and The Big One. — Jake
It would change the group consensus in that the round the clock media coverage (which would dwarf 9/11) would focus everyone on the issue. — Jake
Whether that focus would have positive or negative results is indeed unknown, agreed. — Jake
You are now arguing that nuclear weapons are the way to get rid of nuclear weapons. — unenlightened
You really think that the media possesses the power to bring about world peace? — Hanover
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