Here I take you to mean existence must be perceived logically, not egotistically. With some nuance, I agree with this premise. — ucarr

Precisely. Any perspective of our consciousness being a higher state or more special than everything else in reality is a conjecture based in our emotional reaction to our own experience rather than rational argument about our function.

What's the relationship between entropy and consciousness? My spitball conjecture says: Consciousness drives some part of entropy. — ucarr

Consciousness is a development in evolution and evolution is a result of entropy leaning towards more efficiency. The concept is that life appears out of chemical reactions that utilize energy absorption for its continued reaction and in doing so start to develop more and more complex ways of doing that process. As it continues it becomes more advanced, forming higher cellular structures that streamlines the same kind of process between multiple parts. And as an ecosystem it spreads out this process of efficient entropy more and more.

The development of consciousness being more a part in the evolutionary system than entropy, but at a higher scale still moves towards even more efficient entropy, so it may be that entropy even has part in forming consciousness as higher conscious beings require more and consume more energy. Humans compared to gorillas consume a lot more energy because of our brains, so it makes sense, but we are also beings that create things that push entropic processes into high gear, so to speak.

Here we come upon a complex issue: the language of the above statement imbues the universe and its laws with teleology. The universe, having a goal, behaves with design towards spreading out energy as effective as possible. Also, the universe, because it prioritizes effectiveness over its opposite, has a value it adheres to. The implication is that the universe is itself conscious. — ucarr

Not necessarily. Our laws of physics have constants and variables that push processes and behaviors into specific leanings. Like the cosmological constant, which exist at the right balance to allow the formation of galaxies and even slightly changing would collapse out universe.

While these are often used by theology to "prove" the existence of God, there's no need for such explanation as it's no different than how specific parameters of matter cause things like the surface tension on water. All over nature and in the universe there are balanced parameters that in that balance produce a certain effect.

If we were to view the universe as any other "sample" of a chemical process, we can write out the parameters that dictate its behavior.

That entropy functions like this does not require purpose or meaning anymore than the meaning and purpose of the surface tension of water.

I usually try to view reality through this lens in order to not imbue my emotions onto explaining things. Viewing it in relation to other physical systems we know very much about and through that dispel any human arrogance or sense of insignificance to the greater whole. If I look at the universe as a petri dish of chemical reactions that functions due to certain parameters that govern its entirety, it starts to make sens why things happen without any meaning or purpose being applied to it.

Here's how I define entropy for myself:

entropy - the unidirectional increase of disorder within any dynamical system utilizing energy toward performance of a function. So, entropy is rooted within InputA→logical/operator→OutputB

The negation of inherent design within creation is a gnarly problem for sentients. This is so because sentients must perceive patterns in nature in order to live.

If you discern patterns in nature, you cannot deny that nature has purposes, as patterns and purposes are intimately related. In fact, if you say there’s a pattern to activity, you’re as good as saying there’s a purpose to activity. If there’s a logical sequence to activity, a sentient observer can only conclude there’s a goal-oriented progression including a start point, a mid-point and an end point. If you randomize this sequence, and all patterns along with it, the sentient being cannot practice life-sustaining behavior. Working backwards, we see that existence without patterns and purposes would not lead to the emergence of life.

So, teleodynamics - thermo-dynamics at the higher level of entropic systems organizing constraints on natural forces towards a future state of the system - or cognitive design by sentients, is about something not immediately present, but rather something predicted to emerge at a later state of the system. — ucarr

Natural laws can create ordered structures and sequences without any goal or intent. The standard definition of entropy does not imply function or design. Recognizing patterns in nature doesn't mean nature has intrinsic purposes, it simply reflects consistent physical processes.

Patterns, as we humans see and experience them are linked to our predictive coding organizing experience in ways that is easier to perceive, it doesn't give them value or purpose. We are good at it because it is beneficial for survival. We prefer symmetry and order because then we can spot disorder (something breaking it, like a predator in the bush).

if you say there’s a pattern to activity, you’re as good as saying there’s a purpose to activity. If there’s a logical sequence to activity, a sentient observer can only conclude there’s a goal-oriented progression including a start point, a mid-point and an end point. — ucarr

I'm not sure that's correct. I don't see how pattern to activity has the logical conclusion to be the same as purpose or having a goal. They do not logically follow each other. You can have patterns without any purpose or goal. You can have a randomly created constant that because of it produces certain patterns. Like how the patterns of fractals form due to certain mathematical values, but those values in themselves are meaningless.

I take you to mean entropy is an essential and iterative process.

Could it be the iteration of entropy and the complexity of mind are joined by the bi-conditional operator? As the iterations of entropy evolve upwardly, the complexity of mind evolves upwardly. From the reverse direction, as the complexity of minds increases, the vertical stacking of re-iteration rises.

Conclusion – there’s no conflict between the entropy-driven evolutionary process and the egotistical mediation of its resultant: sentient beings. — ucarr

A big problem with the reasoning of many who try to evaluate consciousness is that they look at it as some form of "order creation mechanism that produce order out of chaos". But this is again tapping into the biases of our consciousness seeing patterns where there are none. What we view as "order" does not equal order in the point of view of reality. We can see the dead process of a mountain being formed as perfectly symmetrical and beautiful in its "order", but it is as dead of a process as any other chemical system in nature and reality. We imbue value into a process because it looks beautiful to us, but it makes no difference to the universe.

Thus when we think ourselves as beings that through our consciousness can make order out of the chaos of the universe we act in arrogance in front of the more logical truth; that we act in accordance with that chaos. Our sense of "order" is only order in our perspective, but the processes of the universe and reality does not have such a perspective. We are therefor just part of the chaos machine, part of entropy and the entropic processes that happen through time. We take energy, absorb it and consume it, then dissipate it. All according to entropy.

We fool ourselves with the illusion of seeing order, but if we had the capacity to view the totality of the universe, from that elevated perspective beyond our comprehension, we would not.

And we don't know about any next steps of evolution of consciousness. It may very well be that the next step is our own creation of synthetic consciousness, being even more effective at entropic processes. Maybe the paper clip scenario is in fact a natural end game for entropy.

Isn't your argument relying on the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum physics? And Schrödinger's cat wasn't a proposed concept of how things work, but an example of the absurdity of how the logical end points of some interpretations of quantum mechanics lead to absurd outcomes. It was an example used as criticism of how some thought about it all.

The Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum physics has the least, or rather no empirical evidence behind it. It's, in my own words, an argument or interpretation out of the "arrogance of man". That we elevate our own sense of importance in the universe because the notion of ourselves as just being as basic as all other matter and energy drives us to despair. It's an emotional drive that tries to imbue ourselves with an attribute (consciousness) that elevates ourselves to deities of reality.

As I see it, there's nothing to support consciousness being "special" if we observe everything from the point of view of reality itself.

I think that leaving out evolutionary reasons for consciousness and the reasons for life itself is a grave mistake when trying to assess what consciousness is. People have a tendency to become bias to their own existence and skew explanations into the realm of religious belief. But if we look at a logical concept of why consciousness and life formed, we begin to see why it emerged from our universal laws of physics.

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The major process of reality is entropy. Energy, both released and trapped in matter, is simply spreading itself out over time. Without going into the physical processes of the relation between time and entropy, the universe is, by the laws of physics, leaning towards spreading out energy as effective as possible. Life, as a process, is highly effective at transferring energy. Both from the sun and from the matter of celestial bodies. There's an inclination towards the formation of life, by entropy itself. And the more energy demanding life is, the faster entropy moves. The complexity forming out of this is generally in line with speeding entropy up, and the complexity might seem oddly beautiful to us, but may just be iterative as anything else in nature. Consciousness then, is the spear tip of life adapting to energy consumption. Adaptation is a key component of consciousness.

And it's through adaptation that I propose consciousness stems. There's an interesting "coincidence" that we see advanced consciousness in mammals and some reptilians. The evolution of advanced consciousness seem to be linked to major apocalyptic events in which the remaining animals that survive require themselves to be highly adaptive to the post-apocalyptic environment they exist in. The more adaptive a species can be, the better they will prosper and spread. And those who required most adaptation among large animals were the mammals and remaining reptiles. Basically explaining why mammals and some birds show the highest level of intelligence in nature.

High intelligence in consciousness becomes a second step of evolution. The basic form of evolution relies on cellular adaptation out of chemical reactions. The next step is instinctual behavior that is changed over generations. The third step is the lifeform itself adapting to continuously changing environments. The fourth step is spreading adaptive behaviors between lifeforms. Through this we can see life evolving the consciousness we possess; featuring all steps within us and the fourth through advanced language and spreading of ideas.

Consciousness, with empirical evidence supporting the predictive coding theory, operates on primarily generating a hallucinatory representation of our surroundings, then using previous experiences stored in memory to predict events as we navigate through reality. This process is so complex and malleable that our experience of it appears as the experience we have as thinking beings. We believe ourselves to have free will and "thinking" but in general, we are only operating on an advanced prediction process in order to adapt to our surroundings. Rather than our adaption being moments apart in time, our advanced cognition makes it happen on extremely short timespans. We can adapt within microseconds. Evolution has driven chemical reactions, genetic changes, through instinctual behaviors changing over generations, to social changes (like in dolphins), to end up operating so fast in adaption that our experience produce the illusion of free will.

But in the end, we are still acting on simple prediction operations, generating an experience that fold in on itself, predicting its own predictions, thinking about thinking. As such, this feedback loop produces abstract concepts that evolve out to complex ideas that is being spread by language.

Essentially this feedback loop forms a new level of complexity, just as we see in any other system in nature. Emerging a state of operation that on its surface look more complex than the parts permit. But we are not more complex than any other system in nature and reality, we just believe we are due to the limitations of a system reacting to itself.

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So I don't think that consciousness relation to quantum physics has a special bond of meaning or is linked in the way you describe. Consciousness operate much more simpler than being a bridge like that. Just because our brain have quantum mechanical operations being part of our function, does not mean consciousness itself stems from a bridge between Newtonian and quantum physics. It only means that as anything else in the universe and reality, quantum processes are part of our being.

We are, in essence, only an emergent complex process that is a natural progression of the physical laws and processes of our universe. And in my opinion, it's important to be humble to the fact that we are not special, but part of a hierarchy of emergent processes, steps on a ladder in which we exist pretty high, but without knowledge of the steps above us.

I challenge you to try to justify, in your response to this OP, e.g., why Western, democratic values should not be forcibly imposed on obviously degenerate, inferior societies at least in principle—like Talibanian Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, China, India, etc. Some societies are so obviously structured in a way antithetical to the human good, that it is virtually impossible to justify leaving them be in the name of anti-imperialism. E.g., if we could take over North Korea right now without grave consequences (such as nuclear war), then it is obviously in our duty to do so—and this is a form of imperialism. Why would you not be a Western supremacist? — Bob Ross

Installing democracy in a nation in which its people follow other moral rules for their politics is impossible. Even if you forcefully destroy what they have and force them to vote, they will never find a stable ground to operate on. You are effectively not trying to install democracy, you are trying to reshape their entire world view, their beliefs and sense of normalcy.

Yes, we can argue that cultures can be evaluated out of their humanistic qualities. We can oppose a culture for how it treats its people. But change can only come from the inside. We can try and expose these people to our values, show them another way and if they want to follow that they will eventually change.

But enforcing it by force will attach that brutality to the values that's supposed to be installed.

In essence, if I invade a nation, killing anything that comes in my way and then try to communicate my message of peace and understanding, of free will and love. My entire course of action to do so creates a cognitive dissonance in the people I try to "help". They might agree with the love, peace and understanding, but at the same time your actions speak of violence. Will that people not see view the whole package of what you brought them? That you did not only bring the message of love, but also the force and violence as well?

Because we can also look within the western democracies that we have. As a swede I could view US politics as barbaric. With its inability to help its own people, the racial violence, the risk of authoritarian power and the risk of its military capability to initiate a new world war when some delusional president takes power.

Should the more balanced democracies within western culture gather together and invade the US, kill its corrupt leaders and corporate "oligarks", rip their constitution to pieces and install the better constitutional laws that we have, the parliament politics that better function as a representative democratic system and stay there until the US population have learned the better way of how democracy should be handled?

Because democracy in itself and the western values in general are in some places wildly in conflict with itself. And many democracies are ill-built to govern against manipulation and corruption within their halls of power.

The bottom line is that change has to come from the inside. The only way to truly change a nation to the better is to inspire better ideals. It is painfully slow, but it is also rock solid in the long term. Most attempts at "installing democracy" have failed miserably, with even more dire consequences like terrorism growing not only to fight back within their own borders, but also against he power that came there to "help".

What you are talking about when mentioning North Korea is not about installing "better values" and changing their culture to a "better system". You look at their existence as a danger to the world, with their nuclear capabilities and their threats of war. Invading to defeat that is not about "installing democracy" any more than invading Nazi Germany to get rid of Hitler's regime. That's another action entirely that has to do with offensive defense, not "helping" people.

limited though! — kazan

Impossible to in length write out all parameters of a system that governs against what I described in here.

And based on an assumption that there is a level playing field called democracy that only has one form/ universal understanding. Why democracy? — kazan

Democracy when functioning as intended in representing the people and without corruption, have always functioned better for the sake of humanity than any other form of system. The problem is that many nations are too naive or ill-built to protect it from corruption or manipulation of this system. The necessary steps to eliminate the rise of demagogues and manipulation is by the people confused to be fascist suppression and this confusion gets taken advantage of by the demagogues in order to rise in power until they can install real suppression in order to seize authoritarian power.

Democracy only shows its broken side when the protection of it that I speak off is non-existent.

And in times of immediate crisis, multi party democracies can not always act swiftly i.e. stop playing politics and start producing good governance.
Many limits to that one form of governing! — kazan

It all depends on what constitutional rulings that are in place.

As I see it, there's too much focus on philosophical debates about democracy vs something and not enough about what constitutes a good democracy and how the world can evolve democracy itself past the problems it always seem to face.

this conversation is drifting towards The Trump Thread, although that thread is of course ghosted by our own dedicated MAGA fanatic. — Wayfarer

It's kind of telling that we globally are tumbling down into two sides of some polarized positions. Is there a logical conclusion at the end of this? We either as humanity begin to understand this self-radicalization and abandon the binary conflict, or we further tumbles down and face a world war not between nations, but between two fundamentally constructed simulacras of meaning. If that were to happen, it would be as pointless as the first world war, but the consequence might lead to the eradication of stupid politics, a new system of politics which respect democracy, but abandon emotionally driven politics that give birth to demagogues.

I think there are lessons the world will learn in this century, that will teach everyone about the dangers of giving too much power to individuals and that politics needs a collective of opposing leaders as the composition of power. We already see how proper parliaments with a collective of many different voices, maybe not act fast, but act balanced and better for the entire people as well as the world.

The only nations of the world who pose actual threats to humanity are the ones where the concentration of power is just a small group or a single ruler.

This type of ideal of a single ruler needs to be eradicated, by revolutionary force, if necessary. It is an echo of barbaric times in history that masked itself as civilized. Modern politics need to rid themselves of individuals and install a neutral system of operation that channel the people's will and which protects against any attempt to control it by a single few. Any attempt at disrupting such a system has to have a rationally reasoned ground that everyone agrees upon, not just the majority.

I think there's too little debate and discussions on how to evolve politics. Everyone has just given up on doing so and keeps playing this game of "I hope democracy survives". :shade:

one has to understand that Anti-Americanism typically leads to a distorted view that supports the disinformation of a totalitarian state.

We don't have to pick sides, I think it's totally logical for example be against Israel's actions in Gaza and Russia's actions in Ukraine. Yet the Anti-American typically goes with the thinking of my enemy's enemy is my friend. — ssu

This entire thread can be renamed to Pro-American / Anti-American illusions.

Because the majority of sub-topics and arguments in here are generally only about that and nothing else. The biggest problem in this thread is that people project their emotional and political ideologies in the form of fallacious arguments about Ukraine, rather than out of facts or rational reasoning. So instead of being about the war, about Russian aggression and the ripple effects into world politics, for the most part it's mostly just anti-American evangelists coming into conflict with people trying to make arguments that the anti-Americans fallaciously argue is pro-American.

It's a thread riddled with reductionist, overgeneralization, genetic, and false cause fallacies.

Most of the back and forth between people in this thread has been extremely low quality and it's just running on empty these days.

I agree with everything there. Trump and everything we see is the symptom of the modern condition.

We’re no longer in the neoliberal era, it’s claimed. We’ll see. Biden was neoliberalism lite, Trump is just an idiot — so anything is possible. But what eventually emerges will be interesting to see. And how it disseminates to the masses via this strange media landscape. — Mikie

I think post-truth-ideals have taken over from neoliberalism. It's not a value system, but a sign of neoliberalism breaking down. The values of neoliberalism have programmed everyone to only be looking out for themselves; both as a sense of having a strong identity standing against the world, as well as stopping to care for anything. Everyone is in a bubble thinking they can exist without having to interact with anyone else but who they choose to. That they're not affected by climate change, economics, war and so on.

Communism was something that previously stood as a counter-weight to the neoliberal change. But since the fall of the Soviet union and placing communism's tyranny on full display as a failed system, it's more or less died out and neoliberalism could rage freely. We have the playbook for communism, we know how it played out, but we haven't truly for neoliberalism until now. We're starting to see the terrors of what it really did to our culture. And in the hindsight of the future I believe we will look back at the peak of neoliberalism just as we look back at the peak of failed communist empires obscuring the tyranny and terrors at its core. We will have an historical context showing identity enforcement and the tyranny of isolation that failed to organize people into movements for the betterment of humanity. Failing to organize the world into dealing with something like the climate change for instance.

Trump's authoritarianism is a clear sign that neoliberalism is ending. I'm only hoping it inspires a new world order to form around less authoritarian views as people get fed up with that form of fallout from the ending neoliberalism. And that the world finds a better equilibrium between the liberal values of freedom and the necessity of collaborative collective projects and systems that help people and improves life for all.

I don't think that's really a dream scenario, because I'm seeing how fed up people are with how things have been run over the past 50 years. No one wants a communist state, people don't want authoritarian leaders, they don't want a state boot, but they also don't want the soulless capitalist neoliberal machine just grinding them into mindless dust in which the existential dread of being reach a climax of absolute meaninglessness. People crave for a system that actually works, something well-planned and intelligent.

It might not look like it with all the trash and unintelligent brain rot that's going around, but you can see it in people's eyes... they're tired. They want meaning. Some go back to religion, only to find themselves in the same mess of incoherent ideas that it had. But some look for more collective coherence, something that connects people beyond the superficial realm of online trash that is algorithmically controlled social media.

People need big projects, big movements, stuff that connects and builds towards something profound or that gives a sense of it.

One example of how neoliberalism has reached its end and is about to fall is young people's interest in only short form TikTok-style media. The entertainment industry became democratized with the rise of YouTube and short form media to the point that it took the formula of commercials as the main media format. TikTok and Instagram reels functions like commercials, one after another of short form content. It flipped the idea of watching a show with commercial breaks into the commercial format being the main form of entertainment. But there's very little substance in this format, not because it's uncreative, but that it doesn't have the time to form deeper meaning. It's like looking for answers to existential questions in the commercial breaks on TV.

But young people have started to behave lost, finding themselves dissolution and without a sense of actual meaning. We're seeing a peak of this soulless consumption of the neoliberal market and that soullessness is beginning to become clear to everyone. There's a reason why we see trends like the vinyl records making a comeback. It's not because of some hipster-nostalgia, but for the purpose of slowing down and be more personal with things like listening to music. People are leaving social media or don't care for it as much anymore; they're mostly using it as a main form of communication with friends and family, but not as an identity sign post.

This form of anti-behavior against the plastic shallow nature of neoliberalism will build something new, it's a movement that is yet to have a specific form and core idea, it's a reaction that I think is the seed for what's to come after neoliberalism as a system of values truly crash down.

I think this the wrong place to discuss this. I think you want reddit.com/r/getting with teacher. — T Clark

Yeah, I don’t really understand the reason for it here. This is too personal for a discussion like this. Sure, it can be philosophical, but then make it so, not some advice as no one here can advice the specifics of case to case morality that has consequences beyond the theoretical.

That is just eugenics for the disabled. — Hyper

That's why I wrote out both paths, not to propose it is, but as a form of question. You either attribute acts in society that happens out of the psychological problems people have as immoral, and in that case you use moral values to judge acts out of the psychological state they're in.

Or you make no moral value apply and accept that there are only different psychological states which produce certain behaviors.

The problem with morality overall is that people want to talk about if an act is moral or not, but all acts comes from the psychology of a person, and that psychology can be defective.

Where do you draw the line between a decision that is psychologically affected and one that is not? Because the fact is, there are no acts that aren't psychological.

So, are you calling psychopaths disabled? ADHD? People suffering from trauma? PTSD? Alcoholism? Stress syndromes?

What about what we call "normal states of mind"? What is a normal state of mind?

If all acts are psychological, then what is a disability? And what can be judged as moral and immoral?

Well there's certainly a distinction between the concept of pain and the sensation of pain. They are both brain states but they're different kinds of brain states. — Michael

While the two can be different on paper, both are composed of brain states. Both are perceptive and internalized products of physical processes. Just like magenta doesn't exist, it is the interplay of the biological being that is us, with the photons of specific wavelengths that forms our perception of magenta.

In essence, all is part of the physical as a holistic physical thing. There are no dividing lines in physical reality, only due to the human psychological process of categorization, which is automatic and fundamental to human cognition.

So our act of categorizing and dividing up things is for us to make sense of it, but in reality, there is only one whole of interplaying energy and matter.

Because of it, all exist. Illusions that we experience as the perception of reality or concepts of abstract things are merely illusions, they don't exist as we see them in our minds eye or conceptual process, they're only illusions we attribute as existing because that's how we operate as animals. My perception of reality, my concepts and ideas are only as as real as me hallucinating something into a belief of its existence, but it doesn't exist.

The only thing that exist and is the actual reality of my illusionary experience, is my brain state producing it.

I don't think the concept of sight is of much comfort to a blind man. — Michael

Yet, if his eyes don't work, his brain will still have the capacity to form a neural map that produces an internal image. And the concept of sight will still be something he internalize, even if the abstract nature of it for him produce a wildly alien internalization for the seeing person.

I distinguish sensations from concepts. Colour is like pain, not like justice. — Michael

In what way does your concept of justice distinguish itself from your perception of pain? The sensation of pain or perception of magenta is just as much a construct of your brain as your concept of justice. The brain doesn't distinguish between the two, its merely forming different neural pathway maps based on what is going on. Like, what happens if you condition someone to feel pain when thinking about a specific concept of justice? Then you have a neural map that is both an internalized concept of justice as well as pain, inseparable as a perceptive thing.

Certainly my concept of justice exists as a physical brain state, but when we talk about justice we're not talking about people's brain states. — Michael

No, but the brain state that produce concepts of justice is akin to magenta not existing as an actual physical color. It's a state of physical reality that produce a perceptive reality in us, but that reality isn't a thing, it's just a product of the physical, i.e there is a physical state that constitutes the effect of your internalized concept of justice.

Does magenta exist?

Well, one definition of "real" is "existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious, or theoretical; actual". — Michael

If the imaginary could be summed up as the result of a physical specific state of our brain and its present energy distribution, would that not mean it is also existing? And since theory and fiction can only be something when interpreted or imagined by something, they become a form of physical reality through it? Even though the perception we have of it isn't what constitutes the actual physical of them, just like our perception of light isn't the be all end all of the properties of its physical nature.

At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is. — Wayfarer

Just like how quantum mechanics basically only form a defined and measured reality when probabilities are in relation to something (the measurement/instrument, surrounding elements defining it). I.e The only things that isn't, is that which is in total detachement to everything in reality and everything that is, is that which bonds with something else.

Kind of like a powder of iron dust on a table, they have no defined form in their spread out state of possible forms to be part of, but moving a magnet through (reality/measurement/known states), gravitate the non-states to becoming part of a known state (being part of and in relation to the magnet and its form).

So the teenage girl-screwing creep is out of the mix — oh, what high standards the GOP has! — Mikie

It's very telling of the entire republican party being so ignorant and bad at speaking out against these creeps and behaviors of Trump and his closest circle of people that the entire party is immoral.

How much proof is needed?

If you are a republican, are you supporting this or not? If not, then speak up, if so, then you're just as immoral as them. And if you're against it, but fear them, then bite the damn bullet and organize together into a new party. Take the loss if that leads to a loss in the next election through diluting the voters between the two factions. Eventually your moral faction of the republican party will gain in popularity and snuff out the immoral trash of the other. The Lincoln Project already tries this, support them, gain their strength instead.

Republicans turning a blind eye towards the immorality makes them complicit in the immorality. Either take a stand against it or embrace it, either way, the current state of republicans is that of immoral bad people. Doesn't matter where you stand politically, that conclusion is solid.

It's willful engagement in behavior that is likely to produce an unsafe condition of elevated likelihood for birth defects. "Life is better than no life" would not be a way to justify drinking alcohol during pregnancy or competing in a boxing competition while pregnant. Why would it be any different in this scenario? — Outlander

Adding to this, I would also argue that there is a psychological dimension to this as well; we evaluate the mental health of people's decisions. Outside of religious and elitist ideals of pure blood delusions, when people live close to each other, such as within a family, and form sexual attraction, it generally arise out of issues in forming social normality.

The Westermarck Effect shows that people growing up together forms aversion towards attraction. It's seen both between biological siblings and those who aren't biologically linked. But genetical similarity can also produce attraction, seen in relatives who never grew up together and meet as adults.

So, human's seem to form aversion of incest through the Westermarck Effect, a socially formed programming of their attraction mechanism that prevents incest. And incest that is occurring may happen due to a problem or issue with that process forming properly.

A good explanation for it might be that humans were generally living closer together as a family and the Westermarck Effect formed properly because of it. But civilisation broke up these structures faster than evolution could keep up, and so distance between family members screwed up that programming to properly form. Either families split up, family members were too distant to each other, or other psychological traumas prevented it from forming.

From an evolutionary perspective, incest does not make sense, and so nature has a lot of functions to avoid incest from happening. Many animals have strong scent cues to avoid it, but human's generally form it through social structures and processes programming our brain and chemistry.

But just like many things in modern society, we break against the norms of our species evolution through culturally formed behaviors, and thus we have broken up family structures of our species into a culturally formed structure, dependent on societal behaviors rather than what we developed as animals.

We have less social programming in our modern world to avoid incest. And the latest findings that incest is far more common than previously thought, support that conclusion.

So is it morally wrong? If we're applying our behavior to the conditions of our species, many animals will perform incest if there's no other mating partners available, but seen as how many people there are in the world, we can only conclude that incestual behavior is a psychological defect of failed social programming among relatives; primarily by our modern society standards not aligning with our natural state of evolutionary programming.

It then comes down to if we can apply morality to such a psychological defect, or which defective behavior that we would consider immoral. It could be said that every psychologically deviant behavior that is destructive in society is immoral as every one of them are formed as psychological defects, and in that case incest is immoral. But if we aren't considering psychological deviant behavior as immoral and more of an involuntary mental illness, then it is a form of mental illness formed out of a failure to form our natural avoidances of incest. Just like we have other mental illnesses that's formed in modern society because we're not aligning with what is natural for us as a species, for example how modern society increase our stress levels to such dangerous levels that it produces brain damage.

It is rather worrying that incest is so common in society as it is. The 1 out of 7000 is very telling, but that's only counting the times when incest leads to childbirth. There's such an obvious obscured number in those statistics seen as incest are more common without producing a child. So the statistical number might be a lot higher. But in my conclusion, not that surprising.

.How many will follow Gaetz and not even make it through the beginning of the nomination process? Hegseth seems like a good bet. — Fooloso4

Trump is in a peculiar position as nominating these morons sends a signal to his Maga crowd that he's fighting back against the "deep state", but it will only lead to these positioned people screwing up and show that what Trump is doing is fundamentally incompetent and that everyone is a clown that ruins everything. But if he backs out of it, he's gonna show himself being weak and that the "deep state" is winning, and for a narcissistic fascist like Trump, showing weakness is loss.

So what will the clown do? :chin:

What I don't understand is why Trump voters are so eager to have more inflation. — ssu

Because they don't know how inflation works. They don't know these things, and since they don't know any of it, they're gullible enough to listen to someone speak in a charismatic way and be emotionally charged with passion for something they only think is good because their leader said so.

If he stood there and promoted eating shit is healthy for you I would guarantee some people would do it just because he said so. People are generally absolute morons because it takes effort to not be one, and lazy people won't put in the effort. While education helps some, a lot of people are generally just incapable of overcoming their idiotic state of being. It's too ingrained by other morons around them as an epidemic echo chamber of bad influences.

Yeah, I also think that there's no reason for it to be obscured to people not logged in. Even if you have to log in, the story is already "out there" in public, so stories being visible to outsiders is not a weird thing.

The only thing I guess is that AI spiders captures those texts, but that might just make things become part of the cultural whole much more than being obscured.

I think it would be a good thing.

You do not know that. The approval of Democratic donors is not the same as the approval of "the people". — Fooloso4

It's as much representative of the people as an election itself. You think they would donate to someone they wouldn't vote for? And on top of that, what other metric do you have to measure this?

Not unless it is done democratically. How would that work? — Fooloso4

By checking against facts. For example, politicians inflate numbers all the time to make their statements sound better, only to retract when stakes are less high. By demanding facts to be represented correctly you can install a strike method to make sure continuously lying politicians stay to actual facts.

Demagogues can win democratically by just playing the part, scheme and hide problems. "Democratically" doesn't mean anything if there's no protection of truth surrounding it.

How would you make sure that anything "democratically" is handled with care to protect itself? Hitler got to his power "democratically".

It is anti-democratic! I don't know what the forum would look like if it were democratic, but my guess is that I would prefer it the way it is. — Fooloso4

While there's no democratic election of the moderators, I would say that if some mod were to abuse his power and people rise up to that, the other mods would surely democratically decide to strip that mod of those powers. And for bannings, they're done together with a stated reason for it, and if that reason isn't according to the rules, then that too could be contested. So far the reason why things on this forum works is because to become a mod you need to show that you have the virtue of keeping the quality of this forum. And it works well.

But then, apply that to the scale of society, it's impossible to keep it from being infested by corruption and bad actors. Through democracy it works better to cycle leaders and make the people decide who they trust. But such trust can be manipulated.

So how do you get similar quality, but through a democratic system, without having the ability to safeguard against bad actors? Banning the ones who lie and scheme, taking down the leaders who try to manipulate the masses to hide the fact they're not on their side.

It is not the same principle. One is a government regime the other is a forum. — Fooloso4

You don't know what an analogy is? We are talking about different governing systems, on how to improve the quality of representative democracy. We ban people on the forum in order to not infest the place with low quality trash that's only there to feed the ego of the person behaving like that.

In the government, politicians should not be there to feed their ego, to work for themselves, they are there for the damn people, to represent the people who put them there. That's the whole point of democracy. And if politicians lie and cheat people to get votes, then it's not a democracy anymore, it's a demagogy.

To argue for better protection of the democratic system is to argue for a way to keep such manipulators and liars out of halls of power. To effectively ban them from being there. The people they were supposed to represent can choose another one who can behave according to the rules and regulations of such a protection system, just like we have rules on this forum. Banning such people do not remove the representative power of the people, it protects the whole system from abusers of power.

Right, it is not. Rocket science is much less complicated. — Fooloso4

I don't think so, I think people are lost in definitions and ideologies. People seem unable to look at a system without wearing lenses of their personal value systems infecting how they read certain words.

Democracy is not a single thing that cannot be evolved. There's lots of room to improve a democratic system to rid itself of corruption, demagogues and improve the quality of its people-representative function as a governing power.

Donors who gave to Bernie over other Democrats only shows that Democratic donors favored him, not that he had the support of the people. — Fooloso4

The map shows people's donations. There's no candidate voting by the people, the people can only vote on what the Democratic party puts forward. If the people were to vote for a candidate, it would have been Sanders.

But that is not what we have. The question is how to democratically make it a representative democracy? Banning people from the halls of power is anti-democratic. — Fooloso4

Banning people who actively lie is a protection of the democracy. Banning people who try to manipulate and abuse their power is protecting democracy. If you tolerate the intolerable, it's going to erode everything and you lose democracy. You're not banning representation of the people, you're not banning based on political leaning or politics, you ban people who abuse their power and through that focus politics to function as representative of the people's vote.

Just reacting like that to the concept of "banning people" is like the freedom of speech ticks that people misuse as some kind of defense for whatever they like. You need to have context, otherwise it's like when someone is banned off this forum, people would complain that this is anti-democratic, disregarding that censorship has to do with state censorship, banning people off this forum is there to protect the standards of quality that this forum has. It's the same principle. Getting rid of the demagogues require getting rid of the people who act as demagogues. And that requires laws and regulations to do it in order to protect the quality of democracy that should be considered obvious. It's not rocket science.

Unless I am missing something, if donations are any measure then Harris would have won. — Fooloso4

How do you figure that? It's not about winning the election but who's the Democrat's candidate running for office. Without Sanders, she's third, and that's including all the public exposure she's got as a VP.

I am not sure that is entirely true. It may be that people do not understand Sander's proposals, but a proper understanding of a candidate's position has never been a requirement for voting. — Fooloso4

He's being countered and bullied by both the Republicans AND the Democrats. He doesn't get as big of a stage and he's never been an elected candidate that gets all the attention to speak nationally. And it's not about understanding his position, it's about understanding his politics. The people actually understands him and likes his proposals because of it, every time he's spoken it's relatively crystal clear. Compare that to the non-vision gobbledygook that the other Democrats constantly spew out. And he has the ability to change his rhetoric depending on the crowd. When he speaks to working class voters he's doing the most basic 1 to 1 logic of policy to result based on their questions.

So, you are not in favor of democracy. — Fooloso4

Yes, I'm more in favor of democracy than most, that's why a representative democracy should actually work as one and have true representatives, not manipulators, liars and demagogues. To force the representatives to form policy out of facts, research and what the people ask for, pitting that against other politicians who have other conclusions about how to solve issues. What we see in politics, especially in the US today, is not actually democracy and everyone who thinks that, are fools.

We really don't know how many people would have voted for him. The label "socialist" still scares a lot of people. I do think, however, that targeting wealth disparity might be a winning message. — Fooloso4

The map over donors from the public towards candidates is a pretty clear indicator of what the people want. What the Democratic party then does is just ignoring this and go for the elite at the top (those criticized for being out of touch with the people).



The fear mongering using "socialist" is just the right playing their cards. Sanders modell his politics after Scandinavia and people buying into the socialist fear mongering gets quite the cognitive dissonance when living conditions in Scandinavia are brought up to be among the world leading. But they're not socialist nations.

What Sanders is capable of doing is to sell in the politics and policies to the people with just basically asking them what they want and then telling them that's what these policies will do. "You can't take care of your sick relative and need to have three jobs to even support basic living conditions? Here's the welfare system to support it, free health care, sick leave, vacation weeks, constitutional workers rights etc."

He says things as they are and gives people what they ask for. The problem in the US is that Democrats are too afraid of losing voters on the right, who themselves want better living conditions and they do it by just catering in to the same lies and narratives of the right rather than go harder into left economics and give people what they want.

And we see more and more people just saying the same things that the Democrats have been following for years now: "do the same tactics as the right", "try to speak the Maga language" and more of such nonsense, pushing the party more and more to the right by the day.

Instead of just facing reality and distinguish themselves as a left leaning party. Here's the left economics focused on supporting the people.

The absolute hilarity of the right trying to cater to the working class while still increasing the people's living costs while funding the military to such an excess it nearly breaks the economy, much rather than taking a microscopic part out of that to fund a really functioning and good health care system, better education, support for the conditions of the working class etc.

...things that overall, over time, produces the foundation for future industry, entrepreneurs, engineers and workers who can build an improved future.

This short-term self-indulging elitist politics need to stop and it will stop when parties like the Democrats choose someone with a properly intelligent vision that the people can gather around. When are people going to realize that politicians go by their own interests, in the direction of money ans building their own wealth of power rather than caring anything for how to actually care for a nation and the world?

This is why I want to ban anyone from halls of power who's not a true representative of the people and who constantly lies. Statements in politics that aren't factual should lead to removal of their power. It would get rid of not just clowns like Trump, but all clowns on both sides.

No, but many countries have religious bias of one kind or another. And that's just one factor. Political ideology is a more compelling one. Pretty much the whole world has been trending rightward since the 1980's. The most pervasive influence, however, is the commercial one. Persuading the consumer to buy things, wars, the status quo, attitudes and opinions is good for the top economic layer. And they're global. — Vera Mont

The clearest increase from the 1980s is probably the rise of neoliberalism and individualism. The attention to what things that matters to people change with that as they're more focused on self-expression of the ego rather than values and opinions in relation to the world around. The notion of the collective, of being part of something might fuel a need for knowledge in relation to that, but knowledge for the self only extends to what benefits the self, and thus expands over into interests. What interests people today are not big ideas about existence in relation to others and the world around, and instead more about the self and only the self as the end point of any knowledge.

Through that individualistic value, reading isn't interesting if it's not for the benefit of the self. Only that which emotionally aligns will be read, and therefor text that expands knowledge, challenge ideas and norms gets ignored. Reading a lot often relies on being open to new ideas, and if being open like that has diminished culturally, then interest in reading has diminished as well. Maybe the rise of social media has only been a catalyst and fuel onto a fire that was lit in the 80s? Algorithms that push the exact psychological profile of the ego that doesn't care about much else than the self.

For example, I want to know some details about Sweden. If I searched on Wikipedia, I would discover basic info such as the capital city, GDP, extension, etc. But if I decide to take a book of Scandinavian studies, my knowledge about Sweden will be deeper, better, and higher in quality. Sadly, it seems that people only want to focus on the surface. — javi2541997

Yes, good knowledge requires perspective out of a larger amount of information from many sides of a topic. We can read short notes on politics and history of a nation, but that doesn't mean we actually understands that nation, the spirit of the people, what they believed or how history played out. Reading detailed and longer stories about people in a nation can give a lot more insight into what that nation is about than a Wikipedia page -- it's like the difference between walking down a tourist street buying commercialized trash with the nation's flag on them, and go into a bar in a less known district to chat with locals.

I think emojis are a good internet tool. I like to use them—you can perceive that I use them a lot on TPF. — javi2541997

I think my lack of using them on this forum makes me look more serious and harsh than I really am :sweat:

they should read texts and do poetry. But for real. Not just to pass exams. — javi2541997

Yes, this is a problem. There's a lot of research done on children learning, but many schools form curriculums and policy out of ideals and personal values rather than following what the science says. Like one basic thing is smaller classes. It's a well proven thing to increase the quality of education for each child, but politicians and schools are extremely bad at adjusting this. Increasing the funding for schools, increasing the salary for teachers and pushing for more teachers will make for smaller classes.

Otherwise we get these shortcut strategies in which everything is studied for exams because that can be scaled up rather than making sure each student get enough help to actually learn grammar.

But this is also on the parents. Shoving an iPad into the hands of kids rather than spending time with them, reading stories to them, engaging in their imagination etc. will only produce consumers who cannot contribute or engage socially or intellectually.

Furthermore, let's be honest. People always valued science over language. It is a terrible mistake, in my opinion. — javi2541997

I would say that it's terrible in the form of language being extremely important in order to understand science. People won't understand science if they don't have enough language skills to communicate it. The why when doing science can sometimes become abstract, otherwise there would only be two types, the ones who don't understand anything in science and those who can only follow protocol.

So language is a basis for everything and understanding it fully and in complex ways enrich all other knowledge.

We—the millennial generation—are guilty, not just education and culture. I would like to know if you were thinking about a private or public educational system, or if this is not relevant at all. — javi2541997

I would put blame on all parents from the mid 80s until now. It's the broader culture that forms the values that dictate how parents take care of their children and what pressure is put on schools.

I don't think private or public education matters so much, even though private education can be pressured more by obnoxious parents. And that's a big problem as well. Parents have been getting more power in controlling schools, putting pressure on schools not to give bad grades to their child. This type of helicopter parenting culture has been rampant over the last decades and it makes the children get less out of the education.

It takes a village to raise a child, as it's said. Parents need to understand that schools are part of nurturing the children and that also goes for abiding to rules and structure of school. Primarily, this is an underrated aspect of what a school is. It's basically a micro-cosmos of society, with citizens, laws and obligations. That structure forms self-disciplin, to function within society. If parents erodes this to push for their children to be treated "special", then those kids will be unfit to function in society.

I think that flows into the discipline of learning as well. If you don't form a basic disciplin, why form a disciplin of using language for communication? Instead, that leads to using language as merely expression, which is what internet-lingo is more than functional communication.

If language is always pure subjective expression rather than communication, it does not need proper grammar or structure, and I think that's a major part in what is happening here.

The more time children spent looking at moving pictures, the less they read. — Vera Mont

Not necessarily, as seen in this study. I don't think TV as a passive medium is much of a problem, it's been around for long. The problem is the incentive to read and the ability to spend time focusing on it. Parents shove iPad's into their children's lap in early ages and keeps doing it whenever the child is bored and restless. But it's this restless and bored state that is where the interest in reading needs to grow. Reading stories to them, spending time with them writing and using text. But the children also needs to be able to handle boredom, and not constantly be put into a passive state.

Meanwhile, teachers had classes of 35 and more students, due to the post war baby boom; they were required to take courses in the new methods in their spare time; they were expected to lead extracurricular activities and supervise lunchrooms, schoolyards, sporting events and dances, and their routine paperwork tripled inside of a decade. When were they supposed to provide extra help for the slower students? — Vera Mont

Yes, this is something that research have showed is one of the biggest problems and also one of the easiest to solve if society took this more serious. As I mentioned to Javi above, smaller classes is a must. All children are different in their timing for certain abilities and just increasing class sizes just makes for generalizing everything and mostly focusing on mass tests for grades rather than spending more time with each child.

If society can't gather around the finer details of educational complexity, then at least put some money into making classes smaller. It's obvious all over educational research.

As the general population's reading and math skills declined, news and public affairs outlets adjusted their vocabulary, the structure of their articles and the level of detail in their reports. Over time, information was gradually reduced to generalities and sensations. Schools, too, had to lower their standards in order to keep promoting students, up and out to make room for the new ones.

Since states are in charge of setting curriculum and administer the main funding of schools, poor states and poor neighbourhoods have poor public schools. Additionally, as the standard of living of low-paid workers stagnates or declines, parents have less time to spend with their children; there is little privacy in cramped homes to do homework, and books are generally absent. — Vera Mont

Yeah, this is a downward spiral. We don't see much of this up here in Scandinavia since there's a great deal of welfare systems mitigating low-income family's problems, but the gradual reduction of language complexity in official use of language is a global phenomena.

We must be careful not to mix together the evolution of language over time with a decline in complexity though. It's easy to look at new ways of using language and think it's getting worse, but language used in news outlets show something else and that's, as you mention, the decline in complexity in its substance. It's more sensational, more descriptive than contemplating. It doesn't put events reported on, in more complex context, instead generalizing. Only in investigative journalisms and carefully crafted essays do we find a better curated use of language, but those parts are rarely read by the casual reader and is more common for the intellectual reader, who's already well-versed in reading and writing.

A major thing to keep in mind is that the decline is broad, over many cultures. It's easier to understand the mechanics in places like the US, in which privatization generally forms understandable reasons for why reading and writing declines, but in nations like those in Scandinavia, we also see these declines in reading and writing, without the same kind of societal problems.

So there's a global cultural reason for why this is happening and it's increasing faster than before, meaning in historical context children did comparably well until the rise of internet and social media.

The primary thing I can see is how language is used outside of school. It both affects the ability to learn more advanced language in school, while that knowledge expands into the private sphere outside of school. They're interlinked for the holistic quality of language in a person.

As the religious factions push for less science and more scripture; conservative local governments and school boards ban or reject more and more books, and forbid the discussion of a range of disapproved topics, bar critical thinking instruction and unrevised history courses, there is a homogenization of thought which doesn't require analysis or comprehension of complex ideas.

A polity that thinks in slogans and jingles is easier to control than one that arms itself with facts. — Vera Mont

While I agree, it doesn't explain the broader decline globally, since not all cultures share the same level of religious conservatism.

The intelligence of a collective group or population can change. This has been discovered by historians. Reading comprehension, depth in understanding, and ability to construct complex written or spoken narratives can be undermined by technology, among other things.
So, then the question becomes, can a reduced intelligence be the cause of a downfall of a culture? Yes! We've seen over histories that cultures/kingdoms had risen, reached their glorious era, then vanished — L'éléphant

One thing I'm usually promoting is that society needs to return to valuing science, expertise, knowledge and wisdom. That we treat knowledge and the knowledgeable as virtuous and something to reach and achieve, something that people look up to. The post-truth ideals going around has much to do with the poorly educated and less intelligent to lose faith in the wise in society. So no one cares to become wise, no one cares about gaining knowledge because there's no status in doing so. And there's no wonder they think like this since the ones running society are usually scammers tricking people into believing they have knowledge when they don't, and the disappointment when these scammers fail people over and over makes people lose trust. This lost trust ends up making collateral damage onto the perception of knowledge and the actually wise.

The people do not have to be intelligent to function as a society, they just need to understand how to spot who's intelligent, knowledgeable and wise from who's a scam artist playing that role.

And if people gain trust in the wise again, then knowledge will gain popularity and be something people want to pursue.

What society as a whole needs is to get rid of the post-truth scam artists eroding the status of knowledge. The media literacy of being able to understand who's who and not fall for scammer narratives is key to healing society's relation to knowledge.

4 years of this clownshow and people will be begging for literally anything else. Which is good. — Mikie

Problem with that is that then the Democrats won't make much effort to do anything and we will have four years after that both cleaning up after Trump and not doing politics that actually benefit the people.

Democrats need a strong counter to what Trump offers, not in "spirit", but in actual work. As mentioned earlier, Bernie had the support of the people, so that's a good hint at what type of Democrat the people actually want. They now have four years to find and build up a candidate that can inhabit his abilities and policies. Form a good marketing campaign for it and tour around listening to people who will get screwed by Trump politics.

A good video on the subject of how society transforms into post-truth. As I've mentioned, the key is the erosion of truth within society more than the language of its leaders. Post-truth language from leaders only works if the definition of truth has already eroded away. You cannot defeat what you cannot define.

Flexible governments survive where rigid ones fail. — frank

Yes, but I didn't say government, I said system, as in the system that protects the democratic process. Rigid enough so that no one could overthrow the system just by being elected.

It's strikes me as very strange that you think you're a supporter of democracy when you think people are too gullible to make their own choices. — frank

People are gullible to make choices if manipulated. Real choices are reliant on truth and honesty from the people giving out that choice. This gullible nature has been established by enough research into both psychology and social psychology. If we can agree on this being true about people, especially in social groups, then it should be obvious that for democracy to function as it is intended, there shouldn't be any possibilities of political actors to manipulate this gullible nature and instead force politicians to stand by truth and facts.

If all political agents do this, then we focus society to democratically function by the idea of Wisdom of Crowds. Rather than become a demagogy.

It is naive to not recognize the gullible nature of people while forming protections against those wanting to destroy democracy. Otherwise we risk being blind to those who use democracy to destroy democracy.

Maybe. Monarchy is a very robust form of government, even more so when linked to a state religion. We'll pretty much all go back to monarchies as climate change sets in. Democracy is just a tool. It's not a good in itself. — frank

Democracy is a form of power. The problem is that people can only think in binary or extreme forms. It's either authoritarian or it is democratic etc. We are either under full control of one or a few or we are absolutely under the tyranny of the gullible morons of the masses. But I don't think that is true at all, that kind of absolutist thinking is for the shallow simple minded people who think in polarized forms.

Democracy is far better than authoritarian systems as the authoritarian systems easily becomes corrupted or form abuse of power. But democracy needs to have a system that does not collapse onto itself. It needs to get rid of grifters and manipulators, get rid of psychopaths and power hungry career politicians. The only politicians who should be allowed in such halls of power should be those with absolute interest in caring for the people, humanity and society. Anyone of them who's just there to gain their own power should be defeated in a show of societal force that prevents people to even dare to try and seize power.

It should be dangerous as hell to try and seize power in such a system. To the point of absolute annihilation. If that is true for all in such a society, then no one can wield power for their own benefit against anyone, and society truly governs itself with representatives rather than individuals.

I'm not sure why you think this. All ancient democracies ended in tyranny. What makes you think we would be different? — frank

Not sure what you mean, I'm agreeing with you on the point of people craving for a form of tyranny. As long as that tyranny takes the shape of being on their side it is an alluring idea for the simple minded ones.

I would say though, that there is one form of tyranny that is required even though people have problems with handling the parameters of such ideas. And that's the tyranny against intolerance and anti-democracy. I think that there should be an absolute intolerance against even the slightest notion of change that does not aim to improve democracy and the quality of it. Any attempt by an individual or small group to increase their own power outside of democratic means should be a straight to jail situation. A rigid form of system that can only be changed by a large amount of all its citizens, say 90% of all people need to be behind it to make substantial changes. Because any change that is substantial cannot be by the tyranny of the minority.

In such a system, Trump would be removed long before he's even close to running for president, by the reason of how he talked about the US and its politics alone. If any politician even utters any form of anti-democratic idea to the public they should be disqualified and banned from halls of power.

I'm of the opinion that a government should be run by only the competent and one way to make sure of it is to ban anyone who can't form policy and politics that aren't for the benefit of the people and the nation. They need to show that they are stable individuals who work as actual representatives of their voters for the purpose of steering the ship with confidence and not malice. If people are angry about something, it does not help them whatsoever to align with someone who wants to basically take their voting power away from them. Sorry to say, but people are generally gullible and stupid and the only way to guarantee that they don't shoot themselves in the foot is to make sure that there's never ever any candidate who can take advantage of their gullible nature.

If people cannot imagine a society in which both freedom of speech, and an intolerance against the anti-democratic authoritarians can co-exist, then they're not really thinking beyond the shallow.

I think it might be you who discounts the possibility of a US dictatorship, not Americans. A lot of Americans want it now. — frank

What I meant was that the idea of speed running society to preferable changes by overthrowing democracy is what childish minds think leads to a better world. I'm not saying that such childish minds exist all over society, but it says something about the knowledge and intelligence of the population if such ideas remain into adulthood.

Well, so far he is not the president. Although it is within the powers of the office, his choice of people like Gaetz, Kennedy, and Musk, and threats to remove military leaders who are not sufficiently "loyal" crosses a line. Replacing people who are competent and can serve as a check against his self-serving interests and destructive tendencies with people who are not but are willing to do whatever he wants is crossing a line. — Fooloso4

Exactly, the line seems to exist all over the place, pushed and pulled by the preferences of the one evaluating its placement. But the interesting thing is when a line gets crossed that fully rally the people against an authoritarian leader.

When I hear Trump "joke" about a third term, I'm thinking of the movie Civil War in which part of the reason why that fictional conflict started was both the president dismantling the FBI and going for a third term. It eerily echoes what Trump is talking about. As I said, he's most of the time just bullshitting for likes and attention, it's part of his shenanigans, but even so, if he were to act on his authoritarian fantasies, when would the people be like "that's too far" and arm up a coup?

The only thing that makes a civil war unlikely is if Trump is bullshitting. If he's not, all he says are grounds for how such a conflict would happen. I don't think that the population would just stay silent and take it if it were to happen that he acts in violence against the people. I don't think the military would follow orders of it either. But it is interesting to speculate at which point the people would collectively wake up into organized rebellious opposition against him.

Primarily since the people of a nation like the US are so far in thought from such actions. If something like this would have happened in France, a person like Trump wouldn't be able to sneeze in the wrong direction before the people storm against it.

That's Project 2025, which is a plan for removing all opposition to Trump in the government. His VP endorsed it, but Trump hasn't. His VP embraces "dark Enlightenment" principles, which basically says the Enlightenment was bullshit and we need to go back to monarchy. — frank

Partly why I'm not so worried about Trump, but more worried about what he's bringing with him. What he is legitimizing.

For some years now I've also believed the US has problems that would best be addressed by a dictator, such as changing social norms that result from neoliberalism. I'm starting to understand why Lenin was opposed to democracy. Lenin was a monster, btw, I'm just saying I'm seeing the dimensions of the challenges he faced. — frank

I think such thoughts are young thoughts of rebellion. The allure of quick fixes in frustration of the status quo. In reality, people need to be careful constructing the new house, and see to it being properly built with the care of wise builders.

For many voters the lines have already been crossed and Trump will get us back on the right side. For others Trump crosses the line. With Trump the line continues to move. The US survived Trump the first time around and so many think we can survive Trump 2.0. That there is no real danger. We can survive this or that, and one thing after another it is no longer clear where the lines are. This is authoritarian creep. — Fooloso4

Yes, and so far no lines are crossed. The potential scenario of Trump taking authoritarian power in a way that crosses the line of what the US generally stands for; pushing the boundary of what people generally deem normal for what the US is, might be pushed so far that people don't realize it's already over.

But for the ones who notice, when is the line crossed? Because there has to be line clearly drawn and people knowledgeable enough to know when its crossed.

I don't think there is one. He was elected for a reason: because he represents what the majority of Americans want the USA to be. This isn't evil or unnatural. History repeats itself. — frank

As I mentioned...

it was a long line of exploiting democratic institutions in order to gain power legally. — Christoffer

He could very well dismantle everything through legal means until it grants him the power to take the next steps. Seen as many Maga zealots would fight for him, he could install them as his own agency/force to do his biddings.

Him being elected were for reasons that, if we listen to the voters, are all fair game. I'm not talking about the election, there wasn't anything illegal or wrong with that. I'm talking about how he will wield his power over the next four years. Where is the line drawn if he goes too far? When would people, hypothetically, realize a line has been crossed and action needs to be taken so as to prevent things from escalating into a situation in which it's impossible to take action at all?

By that time it may be too late to remove him by force or any other means. He has made it clear that he will be firing military leaders who do no demonstrate sufficient "loyalty", that is, obedience to him. He will have eliminated government agencies, made the Department of Justice an instrument of his will, effectively curtailed the powers of Congress to act against him, and have a Supreme Court that promotes theocratic rule and an even larger majority if there is an opening. — Fooloso4

So, where is the line being drawn? There are many instances in that description where I would think that people had enough and remove him by force.

Or are people that gullible, naive and blind that it would get so far before people act? Disregarding the status of Hitler within the context of history, if we look at his rise to power, it was a long line of exploiting democratic institutions in order to gain power legally. All while the opponents struggled within their own parties. The narrative of Trump's rise to power is similar to Germany in the 30s. Like then, the depression produced an extremely dissatisfied group of working class people, which is similar to the post 2008 financial crash. On top of that, the pandemic and economic turmoil at the moment, most people viewed Hitler as a savior.

The interesting thing is how no one opposed Hitler until it was too late. So when is too late? How far is a line drawn until people realize that things have gone too far?

Most of Trump's worst statements are dismissed as jokes. In the same way as Hitler's opposition dismissed him as a buffoon. So maybe Trump just is a buffoon and we just get 4 years of shenanigans that can be laughed at while his support sinks and we get another 2020 election with some half-assed democrat that the people don't really like or support.

Or, with the much greater grip on power this time around, he slowly installs ways to hold on to power and step by step dismantle the institutions that are there to block anyone from gaining authoritarian power.

People generally don't notice the small steps until its too late. But even if many notice it and talks about it, when is it enough to organize any kind of removal by force against him?

When is the line so crossed that a large portion of the population is organized and standing behind a coup removal of him because the normal process of removal has been dismantled?

The US seems to naively think that fascism and totalitarian power is a thing that simply "don't happen here". Something that happens elsewhere. But when taking into account how most aspects of Trumpism looks eerily similar to how other states went from free democracies to authoritarian, the pieces are on the board.

If that is just a coincident that this buffoon of a clown happens to have similar pieces on the board as authoritarian leaders who took power, remains to be seen.

But the question remains... where is the line drawn?

Well, if you're talking about practical enforcement then it's whoever the armed forced listen to. — Michael

Basically, I'm wondering, how far can Trump stretch his power until the population and other government authorities had enough. Around 27 years ago, a blowjob was too much for the public and politics to handle, but now we have a president that seems to push things further and further. So when will people say enough is enough? What's the line? The actual line that is. At which crossing it would result in removal by force.

A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of both houses and three quarters of the states. — Michael

What governs that ruling? I mean, what governs the form in which amendments are decided?

I'm just saying, what would stop someone if they would do anything to stay in power? What rules actually applies, especially having the supreme court in your pocket and hints at uprooting other fundamentals?

Well, he certainly can't be elected again. That would require a constitutional amendment which ain't happening. — Michael

Trump basically has dominance over most parts of the US government. So why won't that happen if people support him in it? It's not a natural physical law that it wouldn't happen and right now it seems he doesn't have much blocking him if he wanted to change it.

What would the US population think if this came to pass?

https://people.com/donald-trump-mentions-third-term-house-gop-meeting-8744857

I like Sanders and I like a lot of his policies. You and I just disagree about what policy approach is the right one given political conditions in the US now. — T Clark

Did you check the video? I'm not really arguing out of what I would like to see, but it seems that this is what the people want to see. The most supported candidate among the people were Sanders, he's able to talk to the people, not stand there and "pretend to be human" which other candidates do like if they were aliens who landed and tried to "speak human".

Policies doesn't really matter, it's how the politics are communicated to the people. Democrats don't understand how to do that and get lost in how to talk to people.

Like when Sanders talked to the Fox news crowd, he didn't shout complex policies in their faces, he asked them what they wanted, then gave them answers to it. Easily understandable answers that were basically much more left than what democrats offer today, but when it came in the context of the audience's worries and wants, they understood them rather than giving a knee jerk reaction.

The fundamental problem in the US is that no center or right wing policies will fix the actual problems that the US is facing. The economic inequality is increasing and people are getting poorer and more uneducated while working conditions destroy people. It's a death spiral that needs fixing, otherwise the US will become adjacent to a third world nation featuring a rich elite and a majority of poor people. It can be spotted in things like height.

While it's tempting to promote the same old tactics of promoting the free market to adjust this themselves, it doesn't happen. It's not how such problems are fixed. And it's easily to communicate this to the people as it's their own situation that's talked about.

The core problem for democrats is that rather than promoting a political stance, they're just trying to sound like the "good guys". But that doesn't help when there's nothing tangible for people to hang onto. It's very telling when the rightwing conservatives talk a lot of nonsense, but people listen to that because "at least they want something".

Like, are people so starved for a direction in politics that "whatever direction" is the most popular choice?

It's actually a trend among the more left leaning politics of the world that they mostly try to cater to right-wing ideas in order to win votes. They've been so focused on trying to "gain back votes" that they've forgot what actually gave them votes in the first place.

The most telling is that throughout the western democracies, the working class and the poor has always been supporting the left because they were on their side. But today, these people vote for the right, without the right having any actual tangible solutions for them. Where's the actual politics for the working class? For fighting actual economic inequality?

The left of the western world seems to have become rich posers who're basically the same as hipsters who try to look like they're hard working poor people in clothing and lifestyles, but are in fact rich upper class. The left has become a form of comic con for the working class, pretending to be on their side without ever being it. Using progressive politics as a form of lifestyle aura in order to look like they care for the struggling people. It doesn't work, clearly.

The left of the world need to find their roots. We live in a time in which actual left politics are needed, in which the working class is screaming for solutions. But the left are too afraid to get their hands actually dirty.

So what if you lose votes on the right? They don't matter if you lose a larger hand on the left because you left them in the dirt.

1. Inalienable rights—e.g., the right to life, liberty, and property. Everyone has certain rights because their nature is such that they are a person.

2. Freedom of religion. Everyone should be able to follow their own notion of what is good, as long as it doesn’t impinge on other peoples’ rights.

3. Freedom of speech and press.

4. The right to not be unreasonably searched.

5. The right to not self-incriminate.

6. The right to bear arms.

Etc.

Liberals are moving away from these core values in the name of social justice. — Bob Ross

Do you mean liberals or left-wing politics? Because left-leaning politics have nothing to do with it. Just look at Scandinavia:

1. How does that come in conflict with anything in left politics? What type of liberties do places like Scandinavia not have for instance? Because we have all of those liberties.

2. This is also not coming into conflict with actual left politics. It's true for places like Scandinavia as well.

3. If we're looking at actual statistics of this, Scandinavia ranks higher than the US, so it's not the political leaning that's preventing this.

4. This right is better followed in Scandinavia than in the US.

5. Not a problem in Scandinavia.

6. This one is the only thing that differs, because it actually has nothing to do with human rights, it's a constitutional law based on types of weapons that aren't remotely alike what exists today. The problem with this is that the research is clear on the connection between amount and availability of firearms and deadly violence. That if reduced, deadly violence is also reduced. To put into perspective, if you flip this and instead say "the right to not be a victim of gun violence", which is more akin to an actual citizen right as a protection, then such a right is fundamentally broken by the status of deadly gun violence in the US. The sixth amendment does not correlate with fundamental human rights or values of liberty, it's a made up concept of liberty that no other nation with similar values of liberty shares. The arguments for it are arbitrary and does not have a fundamental impact on the freedom of the people. The only notion of freedom it is connected to is within the context of civil war and uprising, so at its core, the importance of it is only valid when all other constitutional laws are broken. Basically it becomes meaningless and gets an irrational amount of importance in a context it does not have.

Liberals are moving away from these core values in the name of social justice.

Would you say that Scandinavia has more social justice than the US? In what way do you define social justice? How come Scandinavia have more left politics while still having more freedom of speech and protections of citizens rights?

Fundamentally, in what way do you connect actual left politics with limiting those core values? Disregard the sixth amendment because, as I described, it's not actually a fundamental component of liberty, none of the other amendments are worse in Scandinavia, they're even better protected, and yet, the politics are on the left.

So I really don't understand why right wing and conservatives use these things as arguments against left politics. There's no connection. The US could have a major welfare overhaul and mitigate economic inequality, protect workers rights, free education etc. and still have strong protections of the constitution.

The whole idea that left politics try to destroy the constitution is just fiction. It's a made up conflict and propaganda narrative to produce fear among right wing conservatives that the left will take away your rights. But looking at Scandinavia these rights are even better protected and followed and they still have better living conditions for more people due to the left politics being the core political stance.

Most of the US democrat vs republican debates and conflicts are generally about made up bullshit. It's why democrats stopped voting for democrats, because they don't offer any actual left politics. While the republicans spiral down into absolute nonsense through Trumpism, with policies that have nothing to do with reality based on conspiracies and Christian fundamentalism.

Basically, people in the US have gotten lost in politics through focusing on nonsense rather than discussing real issues. If you listen to both sides... where's the actual politics? Everything is a performance perpetuating these inflated fictional narratives rather than dealing with actual problems. If you think "social justice" is a real threat, it's not. It's not infringing on the constitution, it's not a real issue, it's a ghost story that you've bought into.

And who wins on these ghost stories? Keeping the people debating fictional issues rather than fixing real problems? The ones who can rise to the top by not making too much noise. Because when you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, who actually try to promote real left politics, he gets overthrown by his own party because he's "too much". While Trump's protection of billionaires work great for right wing politics so if he can hypnotize the working class with his nonsense, the billionaires don't have to fear real left politics threatening their dominance. Both sides trying to do as little as they can in order to just keep the problems away from their careers.

It won't hold.

The biggest problem with democrats is that they are unable to market and speak to the working class. They aren't creating a political core that can be gathered around, there are no slogans or easily summed policies and democrats openly fight among themselves about policies that mean nothing to the regular voter.

I don't think the progressive support need to be dampened. I think the opposite is true, the problem is actually that democrats need to get away from the center because it doesn't offer anything. The working class have problems or feel that they have problems that need some solutions and the center liberal position will mostly just perpetuate things as they've always been.

I think you need to check this video I posted in the election thread. He sums things up pretty well. Look at the map of support for Sanders, that's what the people want, not what politicians want. The liberal democrats have been failing for so long now, losing support because they cater to lobbyists and center liberals with no actual insight into what politics that the people want.



The people want support in their life. The politics Sanders stand for is basically to install basic living conditions found in Scandinavia, or at least half way to it. If the democrats actually took a step to the left rather than waddling around in the center (as they've already have been for long now), then they would actually show people solutions.

Democrats suffer from the basic thing of "trying to satisfy all you will satisfy no one". They gained so little from catering to trying to win republican voters that they lost democrat voters.

Just stand up for something instead of trying to dilute everything down to nothing.

You asked me for substance. I gave you substance. — Tzeentch

No, you pointed at Chomsky without the substance of connecting your argument to it. Manufacturing consent is outdated in today's world. The media landscape has been fractured and become much more complicated with the introduction of individually formed media online. So it requires further philosophical thought to expand it into modern relevance. Which is what all those philosophers I mentioned have done, and which you ignore.

If you think I view your offhand dismissal of Chomsky as anything other than clownesque posturing I'm afraid you are wrong. — Tzeentch

Why are you so black and white binary in every thought you write out? It's like you don't even realize how ironically polarized you are in a thread about polarization. If I say that Chomsky ISN'T ENOUGH to describe the modern condition, that doesn't mean he is irrelevant, it means that he alone can't describe our modern society and the post-truth condition of it.

Your arguments rely on a single thesis without including consequent thought and arguments made after it. As I've said, you're not doing philosophy, you're doing dogmatism and appeal to authority. You aren't engaging with the text in the discussion, you're just saying opinions that are loosely based on your favorite philosopher on the subject and just points to that without ever actually making an counterargument to what I say, while ignoring the references I provide. It's infuriatingly annoying to have a discussion with someone who's not even engaging with what is actually written and who is unable to understand nuance.

You simply prove that you're not really interested in anything I have to say, which is why I haven't been taking this conversation particularly seriously. It begs the question, if you're not interested then why do you keep writing these cramped replies? — Tzeentch

Not interested? You're the one who's ignoring the points being raised. You're the one clowning around here with these non-answers and then have the arrogance to say that those who actually write arguments aren't interested.

Making one-sentence appeal to authority statements isn't philosophy, it's lazy and ignorant.