Given the number of atrocities we've seen in the world, and in that same region, and given how little has generally been done about it, this seems like a pretty long shot thing to hope for, a sort of nihilistic millenarianism where somehow its better if more, less accurate, higher payload weapons go flying into an urban area because some unlikely cascade of geopolitical shifts might happen. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That just sounds crazy. I've been figuring the point was to just use shock and awe to make an impression... tamp down violence until the next generation gets it going again.

Whether you like it or not, he is right in this case. It is impossible to reach peace if 'we' - NATO members and the rest of the Western mates - don't recognise the sovereignty of Palestinians. — javi2541997

When was the last time the region was at peace?

Of course Putin the peace keeping expert can teach them how to achieve peace. — flannel jesus

:lol:

Yes, a rose by any other name. — Pantagruel

OK. Using that word is bound to result in the wrong impression for Americans who use it to talk about what happened in South Africa, but if it's useful for you, :up:

By the way, I corrected the book from "Manufacturing Consent" (which I haven't read) to "Necessary Illusions" (which I just did). The appendices of which are filled with documentary evidence. — Pantagruel

:up: My source was an article from some guy who used to work for the State Dept.

but Chomsky goes into a lot of detail about how the media has long ignored Israeli atrocities in the book "Manufacturing Consent". — Pantagruel

You have to dig for it, yes. I haven't read Chomsky's book, but the information is available elsewhere. They've systematically made survival difficult for the Palestinians who left Jerusalem to live in Gaza. Whatever the Palestinians did, the Israelis would undermine. If they tried to grow lemons, the Israelis would divert the water supply. If they tried to open small shops, the Israelis would increase taxes until they went out of business. Palestinians would end up in refugee camps and the Israelis seemed to think there would never be a price to pay for that.

Yes, Israel has royally screwed up with the support of the US. I'm just saying, it's not apartheid by the definition we usually use for that.

It's not really apartheid, though. Jews and Muslims go to school and work together in Israel. The Dome of the Rock is a sacred spot for all three Abrahamic religions, and Israel respects that.

Oh, you were being sarcastic. :up:

(Yes, Israel needs more weapons and ammo for Gaza!) — ssu

Really? I would have thought they'd have plenty.

But my suspicion is that peace is not the objective, but rather is something which we'd like to have -- but it's not why we're there. — Moliere

I agree. Look at it from the viewpoint of a Palestinian mother, though. She has a son in Hebrew U, and he has good prospects in Israel, one of the world's technological dynamos. The US, whatever its interests may be, is a stabilizing force in the region. No country in the Middle East would try to destroy Israel. They would destroy themselves in the process. This Palestinian mother can plan for her son's wedding instead of arranging his funeral, as would likely be the case if the US became entirely isolationist and let what happened to Syria happen in Israel.

I guess I'm just saying it's always been this way, whether it's the British, the Mongols, the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Sumerians, etc. Without a power center, civilization falls apart. Every time.

As @Count Timothy von Icarus pointed out, eventually the cause of today's violence is yesterday's funeral. That's it.

Palestinians don't want to dehumanize Israelis.

But I certainly expect Israel to continue acting the bully as long as they continue to receive military support. Which is why I'd feel better if we'd stop supporting Israel. But even that is a fantasy. The United States will continue to support Israel because of its "special relationship" (strategic place within the world). And Israel will continue to colonize. Given those two truths then the Palestinian has these options: Emigrate, bow, or die. And often times "bowing" results in death -- in which case, barring emigration, one might as well die standing. — Moliere

The situation in Israel is inextricable from the larger Middle Eastern spaghetti of sectarian conflict. The exit of the US probably wouldn't reduce bloodshed. It would probably increase it.

Excellent post as always. Thanks!

Sort of like life itself! — BC

Yep.

Who are the good Jewish people you would like to see running the country? That's not a rhetorical question -- really, who/how? I've no doubt that there are Israelis who could do a better job than Netanyahu, but I suppose the dominant coalition in power keeps that from happening. — BC

There are Israelis who are less hardline. I think violence keeps the hardliners in power so they don't have much incentive to make peace.

One can be pro-Israel and still admit a difficult, maybe insoluble problem: the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel as a state displaced the people who had been living under the Ottomans for several hundred years, and under the British a while before 1948. Palestine has changed hands every few centuries over the last 2500 years, so the current transaction fits the long term pattern -- a pattern in which absolutely no one is going to find any comfort. — BC

Yes. The Palestinians originally welcomed the influx of Zionists, but those Jews didn't want peace with them. They wanted them to leave. After WW2, some Jews wanted to forcibly transport the Palestinians to Jordan, but the memory of being forcibly transported themselves kept them from doing that.

So now it's just a giant mess.

As in, now Israel will never get the Muslims to care about them now that they've gone and done this? Seems the strategic angle would be that the Palestinians would try to gain the affection of the Israelies, considering they have the power to destroy them. — Hanover

Not all Palestinians are Muslims. Some are Orthodox Christian. Some were Jewish, but I guess all of them were absorbed into the Jewish section of town. Palestinians who immigrate to America say that the Israelis have been abusive on an on-going basis, like collections of Jewish guys beat up Palestinian guys and leave them for dead. None of that ever gets into the headlines and it's been like that for decades.

I wonder if things would be better if the good Jewish people would take over the government. Netanyahu is an asshole, and I think whoever is at the top controls the vibe of the whole community.

Not sure what you mean by "fed," but you could probably say "yes," in a few ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All fascinating information. Thank you. When you say we can probably say "yes" in a few days, do you mean the present situation is likely to wake up Salafi jihadists, and Saudi Arabia will support that?

ISIS is defeated but Sunni jihadism is alive and well and the attitude from them is still that Hez and Iran represent heretics who need to be cleansed from the Earth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is that fed by Saudi Arabia? Just curious.

Sure. I've long found Meno's paradox to be a powerful argument for innateness. The topic is a little more nuanced than some take it to be. :grin:

Hezbollah will fire some rockets, but Hezbollah also governs and has domestic goals and seems a lot less likely to jeopardize those for adventurism, especially since the memory of the civil war and occupation has faded. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh. So it was just retaliation. They don't actually have the ability or desire for war.

Yeah, sure. All that trite bullshit. Just not today. — Banno

:nerd:

Oh, be my guest. But making shite up is not philosophy. — Banno

There's more stuff in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Probably.

I take this as discouraging mysticism. — Banno

Why discourage it?

Will the violence stay in Gaza? Or will the region be pulled into war?

:up:

When one says that they've never dealt with a number over 57, does that mean that we do not know if addition will work when trying to add things to sums greater than 57? Or does it just mean that we haven't bothered to add that high but have the knowledge that addition will definitely continue to work? — ToothyMaw

The thought experiment is pretty contrived to get the point across. I think he picks 57 for the sake of explaining his criteria for a rule-following-fact. But there probably is a number above which you've never added. Your knowledge of addition is not under threat. The aim of the thought experiment is to examine your intentions regarding past rule following.

Kripke admits that you would tell the skeptic she's crazy.

Kind of like Sartre? "I am the situation"

Cool!

I think this guy probably took a large amount of LSD before he started writing.

That could very well be what's going on, actually. I said "smoothed out" because the example wave being fed into E4 is a series of marked-unmarked-marked-unmarked equally spaced out (where both the marked and unmarked square waves are equal in length), — Moliere

What do mean by "marked?"

A square wave would be used when you want something to blink on and off, like the hazard lights on a car, or the turn signal.

Well, Austin will have a lot to say about this in his 31-page "A Plea for Excuses, which I highly recommend, but it might be hard to see his purpose in pointing out that "intention" and "volition" are only brought up in special cases (not all the time) as when things go sideways ("Did you intend to do that?"); — Antony Nickles

You've brought this up before, the idea that there is no intention in language use. Not sure what to make of it.

Somehow the two waves get "smoothed out", — Moliere

You mean added? When you mix two frequencies, you get a waveform that is a composite of four different ones: you get A, B, A+B, and A-B. This is superheterodyne theory. It's how AM radios work.

So if A is the radio carrier frequency, we want to piggyback audio frequency B on it by sending A and B through a mixer and then filtering for A+B.

Not sure if that's what you mean or not.

The novel was like a lightning rod that collected nebulous elements of your psyche and generated a jolt that you became aware of. Dreams can do that too. There's a link between art and dreams, in that both tell truths through fiction. So this novel found a home in your psyche because you needed it, or something like that.

I just recently had a striking dream about Kripke's skeptical challenge, where I had some kind of sideways vantage point on the way people create meaning. Kripke's work is intellectual. The dream was visceral.

then I think we are at an impasse. — Janus

Sounds good. :up:

Your comment might be useful if it was augmented by some explanation as to how this discussion relates to the private language argument. — Janus

From the OP:

This challenge comes from Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) — frank

:grin:

This whole subject is a non-subject as far as I can tell, and no one has been able to come up with anything to convince me otherwise, — Janus

It's probably the most widely discussed angle on the private language argument. :wink:

I agree, and would add that this understanding of the self as "asserted" (as it were along or against the backdrop of our practices and culture) is what creates the possibility of the moral realm. — Antony Nickles

Assertion is a voluntary action, so it kind of requires a self of some kind, doesn't it? If you mean the self is drawn out of events post hoc, I think I agree? Likewise, morality is always a post hoc construction (I think) where we judge an event according to some standard or rule. That event was screwed up, so it's bad, and anything in the future that's like that would also be bad. But we can't really judge events in the future because we don't have access to them. We only have access to hypotheticals and past events.

So the self goes forward in time, propelled by a drive to live, even if it's a little organism with hardly a nervous system at all, if it moves by itself, we say it has volition, one of the cornerstones of selfhood.

That, past trying to set out what we "ought" to do and beyond deciding on a goal, the sense of a place where we are lost at the edge of our culture or that our society as it stands has lost our interests, is the limit of knowledge, where we must, as you say, "materialize" our future (self, culture). — Antony Nickles

Exactly.

Curiously, something as murky as the self, is crucial for things like criminal law, which depend on such notions. Also, our moral intuitions come into play, in terms of, if John hit Bob, if John is provably sleepwalking, we can't blame him for such an act. But if he merely angry, then we do penalize him, etc. — Manuel

So there's a conundrum. If John was sleepwalking, he did it, but he's not responsible. But what if we're always sleepwalking in a manner of speaking? Always playing out the same habits and grinding the same axes, or maybe only doing what we think we're supposed to do. That's a kind of loss of selfhood.

It could be that this is one of those problems in which our folk-intuition cannot do without, but which we cannot uncover through the most strenuous of efforts. Something can be an actual phenomenon, which we cannot delve into, nor explain, as I think is also the case of free will. — Manuel

Or infinity. We can't fathom it, but it's always there lurking in the contours of thought. When I think of the self I seem to fall into thinking of it as the primal dividing line: between me and not-me. All other division seem to follow, me and the perceived, the real and the not-real, the good and the bad, something and nothing, etc.

It would be awesome if this kind of conflict could be resolved by this kind of discussion. But in the real world, it's settled by bloodshed. When it's over, we'll all know who owns what.

Plus, if you're a determinist, you don't stand apart from the rest of the universe. Whatever impels the universe in general impels you. You sort of disappear into a monolith.

I think the domain where the idea of you, as a thinking, feeling actor on the world stage is the most potent is the moral realm. When you're victimized or when you hurt others, that's when you materialize in four dimensions to feel the pain, regret, or for some, the joy and dopamine of being hurtful.