The recent behavior of Trump and MAGA seems to solidify the fact that we’re dealing with a narcissistic dictator wannabe who takes advantage of a crazy christo-fascist cult powered by with a team of actual nazis within his inner circle.

What laws and regulations can battle that if their entire drive is set on a “second coming of christ” delusion? I don’t think people realize how dangerous such a movement can become, especially when they seem to now self-radicalize because of Charlie Kirk.

It also cements that the US is a christian fundamentalistic nation, exactly in the same vein as how we view many Islamic nations, forming laws and values out of whatever skewed idea in their religious delusions they push forward as their primary creed.

I have no doubt that most of the people at the Charlie Kirk event want to burn the rest of the world in holy nuclear fire. We’re witnessing a proper cult getting dragged out from the dark by someone bathing in their love.

And few seems to actually care. :shade:

Jimmy Kimmel's show suspension over the comments he made about about Charlie Kirk's death, and all the other people fired over comments about Kirk's death shows the state of free speech in America. — alleybear

And the irony is that the ones who use free speech the most as a defense for whatever vile thing they have to say... are the ones who silence Kimmel. It underscores that whatever delusion about "woke left" being against free speech is nonsense, it's the extreme right who's the ones being against free speech, and they just use free speech as a defense to get a free card to say whatever racist, homophobic, transphobic, hateful message they can.

It is exactly what Popper referred to when pointing out the tolerance paradox. That a group can erode the tolerance in a tolerant society to the point it loses its tolerance and no longer has free speech.

I don't know why this chain of events that Popper describes is hard for people to understand. It's like people don't understand how a promotion of intolerance leads to intolerance. It's not how people work. Otherwise, the whole field of marketing would not work. The fact that marketing campaigns can steer a whole herd of people to do what they want is the clearest evidence of how gullible people are and easily duped by words that "sound good to them". So when someone promotes intolerance, it "feels good to some people" which then slowly spreads like a cancer through society.

A free and tolerant society needs to be defended to uphold those standards.

So now that Trump's people threatened Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel "or else", we have truly arrived at the very definition of what censorship is (not how common folks use it). This is the proper definition of how a fascist state dictates free speech.

And the irony that the extreme right have been crying about the "woke left" and their cancel culture, but are now not only doing the very same thing by firing people who haven't even said anything extreme, but also, as a state, threatening a private company into silencing one of their talkshows.

Is it ok to call Trump, Maga and his people fascists now? Is it properly aligning with the textbook definition? Or will people still debate the true nature of Trump and his people and followers?

It is rather remarkable that people think that the words spread by anyone isn't enough to cause shifting values and morals in society. The harmful, destructive rhetoric keeps being spread in society, radicalizing people into violence. But when people demonstrate, speak out and become vocal about the opposite, with words in favor of human rights, of compassion and empathy, they're being actively criticized for it.

This assassination seems to whitewash what Kirk spread around, and it was not to spread love. He's part of the same side that spread hate, calls for violence, and for dividing people into us vs them. This side has no political color. It just happens to be more common on the extreme right in this time in history.

The point being, we could actually divide the world into two sides of legitimate good and bad. The good stands for respecting human rights and rejecting the concept of an individual as a means to an end. Those who argues for equality, the respect of each individual, respect for another group than them etc. ...and the other argues in opposition to that.

Arguing for the good side is arguing for the side that, with evidence in living standards and quality of life in the world, produces the best living conditions in a society.

Right now we're seeing a rise in the spread of hateful, polarizing rhetoric. Something that divides and makes enemies of neighbors. This rhetoric is eroding society and causing a lot of suffering and even deaths.

When speaking on a topic like this thread, I think it's important to be aware of which stance people holds in an argument. Which also means we can't ignore what someone like Kirk spread around. We can't whitewash what he did with spreading hate because he was the target of political violence, just as much as we can't ignore that the assassin acted out according to the bad side as well through his violence.

I think it's important not to get lost in these basic ideas about what is good and what is bad. The reality is that we can't justify the assassination, but we can't justify what Kirk stood for either.

Both sides of this thing were part of the bad and the way out is not cheering for either of them, but acknowledge the truth of why it happened, the reasons why, and help finding a path that moves away from the bad towards the good of humanity.

I don't think it should be this hard for anyone with a working intellectual mind to function by.

This is, candidly, absurd. Nazis systematically herded 6 million Jews to death camps, gassed them, and set their remains on fire with the aim of bringing about thei extinction of their race. — Hanover

Isn't this hindsight bias? You are comparing the end result of a shift in society with a society in shift. Nazi Germany started with "talk", with a rhetoric that slowly shifted how the public viewed jews. It wasn't "flipping a switch" and then they shipped them to extinction. A key question in this thread has been the problem of projecting where a society is heading, but there's no denying that the rhetoric of the extreme right erodes a large portion of the population's ability to show empathy and more and more opposing basic human rights. The indirect violence that this rhetoric causes, especially through much of it being supported by the very top of the government, means society could very well shift far into the extreme right, with more violence, more suicides, more suffering for certain groups in society. To compare the end result of the Nazi's transition into extreme right, to a time when we're balancing on such an extreme edge is a hindsight bias.

I saw him as a kind hearted sort with a sincere Christian faith, with views obviously inconsistent with my own on a variety of topics, but not the evil incarnate he's being painted as. — Hanover

So his ridicule of victims of other violent crimes, his homophobic, transphobic, and racist ideologies which he spread through his large reach into young people's hearts... were just him being a kind hearted Christian? Are you seriously arguing that?

There was no kind hearted attitude from him at all. Even the worst people in the world treated their own family and loyalists with kindness. But calling someone with his track record a "kind hearted Christian" is wild. His behavior wasn't even consistent with Christian values [insert Jesus face-palming here]

I respect the unhappiness it brings to have questioned the ethical propriety of one's sexual or gender preference, which is hardly distinct from those telling me Jews like me are destined to hell for my beliefs, but that doesn't justify my declaration of victimhood and my right to lash out. The world is full of disagreement and the anti-social way a murderer handles that isn't cause to reassess whether the anti-social psychopaths might have it right. — Hanover

I don't think anyone defends the assassin. What we're doing are assessing why this happened. Based on the info at hand it's clear that Kirk wasn't a random target. It wasn't a case of a lunatic who just kills the first well known person to step in front of them (as have been the case with some political violence).

So, since he wasn't a random target, why did this happen? The problem at the core is the fact that the world has become extremely polarized. But rather than polarized as a specific political stance, which can be debated in a normal fashion, it has become the very behavior of polarization that has taken root.

Any topic that enters the online sphere becomes a polarized topic, it doesn't matter at all what it's about. And since the algorithms of social media and channels like Twitch and YouTube push content that has a lot of activity, and activity being more common when it's a conflict going on, driving interactions; the behavior of people becomes extreme, without many of them really understanding why.

It becomes a wrestling match, it becomes a simulacra of a real debate; pushing the extreme as much as allowed to drive attention. In this form of attention economy, people like Kirk and even Trump becomes really popular.

The problem with this is that it radicalizes everyone. The polarization itself radicalizes and we get people on the right who are radicalized into violence against trans people, homosexuals, different ethnicities, while on the left people are radicalized more and more into fighting fascism.

It doesn't really matter if the world ends up in the same form of fascism we've seen before, the thing we're seeing now, with all the political violence going on... is the result of radicalization by the very behavior of people like Kirk.

He's not a debater, he uses the defense by the second amendment to make it valid to spread hateful ideas. It's a strategy that the extreme right is always using, it's the reason Popper developed the Tolerance paradox as a concept. A free and tolerant society eventually leads to intolerance because the freedom of speech legitimizes spreading intolerance if there are no guardrails defending against it. And its naive to think that this intolerance being promoted won't radicalize people and cause radicalization in its opposition.

So the problem at its core is not really the extreme right or left, it's that society is too naive in regards to how we stop intolerance to spread in a free society with free speech. As long as we handle free speech this sloppy, we eventually invite radicalized extreme people into power and lose that freedom. Because Kirk and the extreme right aren't interested in upholding freedom of speech for all people, they want freedom of speech for THEIR speech.

What this strikes me then is not a legitimate philosophical question as to whether Kirk's murder constituted self-defense, but instead in his opponents searching for some possible mitigation in the evil iof his murder. As in, a hateful bastard who is killed for his hate can't be just like this murder of Mother Thersa. Well it is. The rule is not to do unto others as you think they would have done unto you. — Hanover

By that logic, Kirk's logic of the aftermath of violent acts against the left would legitimize that he falls victim of violence against the right?

I think you are blinded by the idea that people defend the murderer, but explaining why this assassination happened is not the same as defending it. I think we are all much more intellectually capable than the shallow reporting of news, social media and officials. Otherwise you are just summerizing this by the measure of "good vs evil", which isn't very respectful of the complexities of reality.

My view, for what it's worth, is that murder is never justifiable. Violence takes place in an amoral realm in which survival is the goal on both sides. The will to survive can't be justified and requires no excuse.

Sometime before we descend into bloody apehood, we have a chance to see if there is some better way to do things, or if we're going to need violence, can we at least coordinate it so that it's not doing more harm than good? — frank

How does that rhyme with...

I'm a moral nihilist. — frank

Seems like you are arguing through a Kantian perspective, which is the opposite of a nihilist.

I would say that history shows lots of examples of situations which would have justified political violence. Events that would have saved a lot of good people. It's the prime example of how naive the Kantian perspective can sometimes be.

No one would deny that killing most of the upper elite of the Nazi party would have saved a lot of people, even if it happened before wartimes.

I think the more interesting question isn't if an obvious bad person who will obviously kill or cause deaths directly in the future deserves to be put out to save them, but rather what happens when someone is indirectly responsible for deaths and suffering.

I think there's very little talk about how hateful rhetoric slowly shifts society into a place where that hate becomes action onto those this hate was aimed at. Nazi Germany is always talked about in the context of what eventually happened, but society eroded its views on jews long before that and shifted society into a place where the suffering for jews became more commonplace.

No one really address the fact that when an influential elite spread hate speech that shift society, it actually hurts people down the line.

And if we are morally arguing that political violence to prevent innocent people from getting hurt, killed or suffer, is justified, then why do we not accept that for when hate speech rhetoric leads to such suffering and death? Is it because people are unable to logically connect hateful speech to people becoming radicalized under such speech, to those radicalized people actually carrying out that hate in action against the people that hate was aimed at?

Case point... Hitler never killed any jews himself, he never killed. Why do we consider him responsible? Because he orchestrated the thing, he pushed for it, he argued for it, he spread the hate, he influenced the nation.

So if the hate speech influence that leads to violence in society becomes the foundation for viewing an assassination of that influential person as morally good in order to stop that societal violence and decline into violence against a certain group of people; what does that mean? What context does such political violence against an influential person become valid?

I'm thinking some of that divergence can be attributed to the history of their foreign support/influence. Seoul went democratic/humanitarian/aspiring, Pyongyang went militant/crazy, etc. — jorndoe

Yes, but one needs to also ask, if nothing was directly influenced, could the entirety of Korea have come out leaving behind authoritarianism and not being divided? The probable reason for why they went so far in either direction might be because outside influence pushed the country to that extreme divide.

Point being... if the US would have leveraged diplomatic power through trade agreements and aid... the carrot rather than the stick... might we have had much more peaceful transitions to democracies in the world?

Subsequently, would the US have become an actual force for good? A nation that wouldn't be involved with military and getting criticized and instead through its economic power have actual soft power to influence without stepping on the freedom of each nation it involved itself in.

Sweden was long a great diplomat between nations in conflict, per capita I think we have more diplomats that made a difference in the world than most other nations. But we didn't have the economic power, so we could only act as mediators. If we had the economic power of the US, maybe we would have been able to change much more than the US which produced the consequences of fracturing nations, destroyed people, cultures and giving rise to terrorism.

But put me in a different context, e.g. in front of his family and, not being made of stone, I would have a very different attitude. Then, on here, I can take a purely intellectual stance. Same with Gaza, many on the right especially dismiss, by default, the suffering there, but transport them next to a pile of rubble with Palestinian children suffocating beneath it, and it would most likely be a very different story. Contexts drive us and mislead us about the issues and about ourselves. — Baden

Of course... but we also need to remember that when a person becomes an influential figure in politics, especially with extreme views that indirectly hurt people in society. What is the morality around that context surrounding an event like this? Does the suffering of the family take away from the suffering caused by his influence? Context change depending on perspective, but I think it's also important to remember that when it comes to political violence, it's no longer just about the act itself, but where it came from, what it leads to, and what it means to the political situation of the world.

Those topics are really what we're talking about, not really him as a human being, not really dismissing the suffering of the family and relatives. The killing of a human being is a tragedy... but the killing of him as a representation of his political views and hateful viewpoints, is another form of act and another form of context that has philosophical and historical proportions worth discussing.

The assassination of a Nazi functionary in 1934 by a Jewish sniper would likely have almost universally been condemned at the time. Now, I, and I suspect most of us, would consider the assassin a hero. — Baden

And this is a problem with any discussion about politics and war. It demands a great deal of understanding of society to be able to say that a current event is justified or not. It requires both an understanding of history and psychology as well as philosophy.

To be able to understand current events without being wrapped up in biases and fallacies produced by the herd of people pushing and pulling on culture, or lesser intelligent people influencing media and social media into extreme bubbles, is extremely hard.

The fact that this is about a real person who has really just been killed is unfortunate because it becomes understandably almost impossible to divorce oneself from the immediate tragedy of those who cared for that person. Maybe it's just all in bad taste to talk about it now. — Baden

I disagree to some degree. I think it's important to discuss it because a person like Kirk, so involved in spreading the kind of hate he did, will easily become a martyr for that hate, whitewashed through the shallow charade of people ignoring what he stood for in order to score political points. I also think that this forum is exactly the place to discuss something like this, because here we discuss the philosophical ramifications of what is going on in the world... rather than what the rest of the internet is doing at the moment surrounding this event. And because of this, I think that a truly civil discussion like this is extremely important to have surrounding something like an assassination of a public figure of this importance to the current political climate.

Are you asking when it's appropriate to add violence to your political activism? — frank

Was operation Valkyrie political activism?

This is the question, when is it justified? What is justified? Is it ever justified? As a philosophical question, it is valid one as there's been many times in history it was very valid.

I think the more interesting discussion in terms of this specific assassination is why we have a rise of political violence. What is causing it? Of course we all know why; the rising polarization and extreme rhetoric driving radicalization.

So the follow-up question becomes, how do we stop this polarization and extreme rhetoric driving radicalization?

The solutions require an examination of what we allow in society, while still remaining free. This is the global problem for free societies to tackle in the coming years, because if they don't, they will become so polarized that political violence becomes a common practice. A form of room temperature war rather than a cold or hot one.

Is that so? I didn’t know that. — Wayfarer

"Pardon" was the wrong word, rather wanted a patriot to bail him out. Then rejecting that the right wing rhetoric had anything to do with pushing acts like this.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/paul-pelosi-charlie-kirk-bail-conspiracies-b2214680.html

On top of that he also called Kyle Rittenhouse “a hero to millions", so...

Wow, you went back a bit to find that. — Sam26

Sorry, the thread popped up and it's a long read to go through everything so I was just thinking I would address the original premises. Maybe the discussion has taken such routes already.

It was mainly my reaction to that premise of how language and thoughts/beliefs are separated, which I don't think is true. If it's already been addressed or if it doesn't add any dimension to the discussion you can ignore it.

Second, not only are there beliefs that arise non-linguistically, but our thoughts are also not dependent upon linguistics. This it seems, has to be case if one is to make sense of the development of linguistics. For if there are no beliefs and no thoughts prior to the formation of linguistics (language), what would be the springboard of language? How does one get from a mind of no thoughts and no beliefs, to a mind that is able to express one's thoughts linguistically? It also seems to be the case that language is simply a tool to communicate our thoughts to one another, which also seems to lend support for the idea that thinking is prior to language. — Sam26

We are not certain that language evolved separate of thought. The idea that thoughts are not dependent on lingustics, ignores that language does not need to be a complex chain of communication (internally or externally), it can also be argued that the thought itself has a linguistic dimension, a linguistic structure.

If we look back at what would arguably be a logical development of our cognitive abilities. Here we have an ape, using its instincts and pre-determined evolutionary knowledge of the surroundings and themselves, like any other species. But the demands of nature around this ape put so much pressure on him that his evolution starts to change through generations, demanding better and better ability to adapt to changing conditions. Slowly, evolution develops a more complex mental map of his surroundings, giving him the ability to understand context better, understand causality better. In order to adapt, the ape needs to utilize this understanding of causality and this is fundamentally an understanding of context over time.

Context over time is essentially linguistics, even if it goes on internally within the mental map of reality inside the ape. It is a form of understanding that requires a start and an end, like a sentence. It requires a context over time and a mental projection of possible context over time.

Add to that the importance of communication between apes, another result of evolution evolving the capacity for adapting to changing conditions. If the conditions are so complex that an internal context over time isn't enough to save entire groups of apes, the collective of apes forms the evolutionary trait to communicate this context between each other and thus language is spoken.

Beliefs require a context over time, it evolves out of the questions asked about reality around the ape. The question of why hunting the herd gives you food gives rise to the context over time being the herd giving you food. A belief forms of the herd's connection to you and your group of apes. And the need to adapt to changing conditions makes your context over time try to formulate a complex mental understanding of why the herd gives you food. A question, needing an answer. A language of forming more and more complex mental models of reality.

Language and our consciousness, our ability to reflect and create these mental models of reality might not be separable. I'm not in the camp believing that language formed cognition, but I do think that our complex language formed as part of the whole experience of the evolutionary trait to adapt to our environment. Without it, we couldn't form any context over time and thus we couldn't produce mental models that predicted our next moves, which is what separates us from pure instinctual planning or repeated behavior.

Brazil has a functioning judicial system. Good to see. May he rot in prison, that piece of shit. — Mikie

Wasn't the US supposed to be the beacon of light for free democratic societies in the world? Trying to install it in other nations by the means of anti-communist wars...? Fighting for the "good".

...how's that going? :sweat:

It is obviously an atrocity of the first order. Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist at the NY Times, pointed out that Kirk, with whom he would disagree about almost everything, was practicing real political debate: going out into college campuses all over the US and taking on all comers. His was a model of civil discourse.

Except for one thing.

I can't reconcile how this purportedly fine upstanding citizen could go into bat for the candidate that denied, and tried to subvert, the 2020 election, including whipping up a mob who ransacked the US Capitol Building, and was caught on tape discussing how to fake an election win with fake electors. I don't understand the depth of delusion that allows these apparently earnest and educated activists to pretend that the current President is anything other than an authoritarian egotist who poses a mortal threat to the American body politic. Of course, this kind of political violence, and gun violence generally, is a mortal threat to public order. But then, so is the current President, who appealed for an end to this 'divisive hate speech which is tearing us apart' and then added, 'which is only ever practiced by radical left lunatics.' — Wayfarer

The problem with the reactions right now is that people whitewash Kirk's behavior and what he has actually said over the years. Even his most vocal critics plays a part in creating this martyr of him.

It's the usual way of people totally unable to keep two truths in their heads at the same time. That an assassination is awful, but so was Kirk.

He spread some rather extreme views, called out for deaths of people, wanted to pardon Pelosi's attacker. There's no denying that someone spreading such hate opened up to the risk of being hated back, to the point of violence.

I mean, there are no trans animals in nature. — Outlander

You need animals to dress up to show it? This is unfortunately part of the public lack of knowledge in the area of transexuality. As Sapolsky says in this video, we viewed homosexuality as a psychopathology and then discovered, no, it's not. And here we go again in history, viewing transexuals in the same way society viewed homosexuals before society matured into actual knowledge (well, the intelligent ones in society anyway)



So, what Kirk and people like him spewed out is pure transphobia. It's exactly the same as when society had widespread, "state-supported" homophobia and it leading to suicides, stigma and extreme suffering for homosexuals just wanting to live in peace and be respected as any other person.

And as I'm usually arguing, society never cares for the indirect suffering caused by a shifting attitude in society because of a high tolerance for hate speech and phobic bullshit spreading around.

We're living through the same maturing society towards transexuals as society went through in the 80-90s for homosexuals. In the end, we will have lots of people who once spewed transphobic hate in public, to be viewed by history as awful.

Who wants to be considered equal to the homophobic haters in the 80s who were part of the crowd who made life a living hell for homosexuals back then? Anyone?

The reason for homophobia and transphobia is because people are drawn to it to feel safe. They feel safe having a group in society they can blame for anything. Who becomes an enemy that are responsible for any troubles they have. It's the behavior of the actual weak and pathetic, who make zero contribution to society which improves the life and safety for all.

Society doesn't get more tolerable and good by allowing such hate to be spread. The free speech argument by the right wing magas who usually spews out this transphobia is not in favor of free speech itself, it's a blanket defense for them to be able to spread this hatred.

I want to focus on this notion of "balance", in particular, because that seems to be a concept in play in these discussions -- if we could trust one another well enough that what the other does, even if I wouldn't do it, then "balance" is at least adjacent to a good goal.

But we don't live in a time where "balance" is possible.

I don't know if the violence is warranted. That's the question, in the face of the absurd world we live in. — Moliere

I think balance is impossible as long as people view freedom of speech as some abstract axiom without any defining societal parameters.

As it is now, it is used by the hateful to legitimize hate speech. And as Popper's tolerance paradox describes, this practice slowly erodes society into becoming intolerant. This is exactly what we're seeing in the US. Freedom of speech used as blanket defense to spread intolerance.

And since this is what's going on, there's no way to balance because there are no tools to balance with. So we end up with measures that tries to balance things through violence instead; an escalation of the divide through a desperation to balance the scales.

If you spread intolerance hard and long enough, and if no one actually oppose and stops you, then you will eventually get a violent push back.

Think of it as a rubber band being stretched. If nothing stops you, no one blocks you from stretching it further, eventually it will snap back at you and hurt you.

I think Kirk is an example of how far society can push its intolerance before things start to snap. The people, especially those negatively affected by the hate of the intolerant, want actual pushback on the hate, but if the state and society at large instead stupport that hate, then you push these people into desperate measures.

Think of it this way, if you are a person who are in the crosshair of society's accepted hate. Spread by people like Kirk. And you plead for society to stop being like this and you just get more hate. Going on until there's a point where the state itself starts to implement policies that would classify you as sub-human, who want to deport you, even though you're not from anywhere else, who starts to limit your freedoms, who wants to put you in segregated areas away from other people, who want to chemically assault your existence with either taking away needed medicine or try to medicate your "problem" away... and this just keeps going and going and no one does a fucking thing to balance it back... when do you become the rubber band snapping back?

If we are to balance things in society, we need to first acknowledge hate speech for what it is; that it is a call for intolerance, a call for dividing society into accepted and not accepted people. If we accept it for what it is, then we understand that freedom of speech is not a valid defense for it because it's rather a call for destroying part of society, not improving it.

Freedom of speech could be considered true only for that which attempts to improve society. If banning trans, or other people in society is part of an argument for improving society, it needs to be backed up with actual evidence as it is an extreme claim. If such evidence does not support such claims, it can't be defended by freedom of speech and instead falls under hate speech, thereby becomes an attempt to destroy society and is thereby illegal.

If we actually apply the already existing laws on hate speech to actually function properly, Kirk would never have been able to continue saying what he was arguing for. He would have needed to change his debate tactics and rhetoric to be actually factual rather than performative propaganda. And he wouldn't have been the kind of target he became.

People like Kirk push the limits more and more because there's no one on the other side pushing back. There's no laws, or laws used, that prevent him from eroding tolerance in society.

And if you rally for intolerance, then you will rally those who are intolerant of yourself. Further, if people get hurt by your intolerance, then they will hurt you back.

So, a first step to balance things out is to actually apply hate speech laws as they're supposed to.

After that, block politicians who try to go into elections with hate speech as part of their strategy. If you want to protect democracy, don't let anti-democratic politicians into positions of power that lets them change laws. That should be fucking obvious really.

If so then we never have warrant for political violence, since no one has perfect knowledge of the future. — Moliere

What we do know is what leads society into anti-democratic, intolerant behaviors. And so if we are naive and stupid as a society to let the intolerant, racist, homophobic, transphobic, psychopathic, narcissistic, imperialistic authoritarian lunatics into a position to change laws... then we know where that leads. History have already showed us this and if we think that's not a problem for society and our democracy... then we are absolutely, fundamentally stupid. Because then the only way forward is violence, and we invited that in by being actively stupid or passively naive.

In general the question is the justification of political violence: whether we choose the ballot or the bullet as a political and ethical question, and the various justifications about that. — Moliere

When rule of law doesn't function and democracy is being manipulated... what purpose does the ballot have?

The fact is that almost everyone speaks out in horror against this assassination, but I would argue that there are far more people than people think who behind those words have no problem with it happening.

This is how polarized things have become. In which people play some charade of thoughts and prayers, but view each other as mortal enemies.

So when does this "cold war" become an actual war? When does it become something in which people openly accept themselves to be on a side that shoots the other, rather than playing the charade?

Is the current situation in the US, and even globally, between the far right and most people left of that far right... enough of a divide to spark warranted violence to balance things back from that extreme?

If the political extreme is whatever sparks consequences of death for people in a society, be that direct or indirect (suicides or being left to die), is it warranted to violently fight back at the extreme that caused it? If society can't use rule of law and democratic methods to fight that extreme and that extreme worms its way into actual government... does that warrant revolutionary violence against this status quo?

In hindsight we look back at regimes and wonder why no one fought back before it became this regime. But I would argue that the time before those regimes look almost exactly as how it is now. We can't know if the US marches towards an authoritarian regime before it actually happens.

So is this a time that we in the future will look back on and wonder... why didn't anyone do anything before it was too late?

Will the assassin who tried to kill Trump be viewed as a hero who failed if we end up in a dictatorship under Trump? Like operation Valkyrie?

To define what warrants political violence as being good demands perfect knowledge of the future. Maybe many previous successful assassinations actually prevented something we didn't know would happen, no one knows.

It's why I think The Dead Zone is a really good philosophical experiment for this topic.

I think that it's pretty obvious why this happened. Kirk was part of the rightwing fascists who argues in defense of the second amendment for the purpose of legitimizing hate speech, to move the goal posts of values in society towards hate of certain people in society. He was arguing for violence, literally, through his point of gun deaths necessary to defend the second amendment, but his and others rhetoric was never about defending everyone's speech, it was about defending THEIR speech.

Kirk and people ideologically similar to him are the very same responsible for banning books and silencing people who speak of things like trans rights. It was never about defending the second amendment, it was about transforming society into silencing certain groups of people in favor of the Maga based right.

If you argue for violence, for hate and for polarization, you will eventually get violence, hate and polarization. This isn't about the identity of the killer, it doesn't really matter who that is, because the killer is the symptom of the world that people like Kirk slowly push into reality. This is not literally that "he asked for it", but in some form he did.

I'm always amazed that society has such a bad ability to understand long term consequences. How the dominos fall. How is it so hard for society to grasp that the hateful rhetoric of the far right, spearheaded by Trump, Maga, Farage, Bannon etc. eventually leads to a world that honors that rhetoric?

If anything is to blame for the deaths of Kirk, as well as the deaths of all the unnamed people caused by radicalized right wingers, it's the general hateful rhetoric that dehumanizes and polarize society.

What we're seeing is just the consequence of all of this boiling over. The delusion that this rhetoric is just an expression of freedom of speech, when it's in fact the very definition of hate speech that cause actual consequences for people.

It's easy for the general public, far away form such violence, to just talk about the rhetoric being freedom of speech, but Kirk might be the most noticeable consequence of this dehumanizing, polarizing rhetoric that's been going on for years now.

We shouldn't fall into the trap of looking at this assassination as some isolated event. This is a symptom of our polarized times.

Fighting polarization is the way to mitigate the risks of political violence, and fighting polarization requires us to stop being so naive to the effects of hate speech; of its capacity to move the goal posts of the general public into slowly hating others more and more.

Stop the hateful rhetoric, stop the dehumanization of groups of people in society, stop the dehumanization of political sides. People need to stop being so fucking naive and stupid about these things that erodes society.

I'm not surprised whatsoever that someone like Kirk got killed. If anyone was surprised by it, they don't have a clear understanding of how our modern world behaves.

Though, his argument for the gun deaths in defense of the second amendment was primarily for "the other side" to die so he and others can continue spreading their hate. The defense of the second amendment by people like Kirk has always been a strategy to legitimize hate speech.

This is what happens when such hate is spread vast and wide. If they argue for polarization and violence, they will get polarization and violence in the end. It's like people don't understand that hateful rhetoric leads to hate.

Did he truly think that what he argued for would lead to a better world? That reducing certain groups of people in society to sub-human levels would lead to a better society?

One doesn't have to cheer or laugh at something like this. It just shows exactly where the hateful rhetoric of the grifting fascist right leads, and it's not towards an open, empathic and safe society.

No, it's not. Trump is immune. Even before SCOTUS established this (and before they became corrupted), the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel had determined that a sitting President cannot be indicted. So the only way Trump can be held accountable is if he were impeached and removed from office.
The House of Representatives is controlled by Trumpists. They publicly rationalize everything he does. So although a judge determined Trump's action was illegal, Trumpist Congressmen say the judge got it wrong. It will be appealed, and they will continue to say the courts got it wrong unless and until SCOTUS affirms it. — Relativist

Yes…. and if people oppose the idea of this being actual rising fascism, they’re delusional. I’m still waiting for people to ignite some actual rage in opposition to all of this. There still not enough of anti-fascist rage going around. Instead, people, even on the side of criticizing Trump and his followers, treat them as a sort of legitimate political side.

But I find it pretty simple; whenever the democratic mechanism gets dismantled and the laws and regulations doesn’t work on a leader who abuse his power for whatever reason, he and his loyalists should be removed, with force if necessary. And if it can’t be done by the agencies meant to protect the nation, then it’s up to the people to do it instead.

I’m still waiting for the people to rage enough that it starts to become dangerous for Trump and his loyalists. Because that could fuel political actors in opposition to take much stronger action and not fiddle around without actual opposition.

But maybe they’re holding back because they want Trump to screw things up enough to win the mid term. And then when they have that power we will see that rage come down on Trump harder than we’ve ever seen on the US political stage. Well, one can only hope that’s the long game they’re playing. If not, then the people itself will need to do something.

And per tradition, I’ll ask, what’s the people of the US doing about it?

We can’t blame narcissistic psychopaths for their attempt at seizing power, but we can criticize the people for not removing such people from positions of corrupt power.

People saying that this isn’t possible are essentially enablers of these people to wield their power without consequences.

For instance, the troops deployed in LA was judged to be illegal. If a presidential order and actions on those orders are illegal, then US Marshalls should arrest Trump. Simple as that really. That’s how non corrupt governments handle people who abuse power.

Yet, since that’s not happening, then the people are responsible for upholding the laws of the nation. Maybe the people should remove him from power by force then? Some would argue that this would be similar to Jan 6, but it’s not, since it’s based on the fact that Trump has acted illegally against the constitution and that the systems of government are unable to uphold that constitution. In that case, there’s no other choice for people than getting their hands dirty and out all the people involved with this corrupt takeover and abuse of power.

A democratic leader who acts illegally has revoked their contract with the people of that democracy. That person should be taken down by force if necessary. How else would the US survive as a democracy than to protect itself from those who want to destroy democratic systems?

There’s a point when these people can’t hide behind the fact they were elected democratically. Almost all dictators were ”voted” for democratically. Would people stand in the middle of Nazi Germany’s peak and honestly defend Hitler for being democratically elected after he seized power and created an authoritarian regime? I don’t think so.

Don’t underestimate US stupidity. They may win again… with cheating.

I think the problem is that both sides view Trump as someone with a plan or agenda. All I see is someone who’s going with the flow, following a trend, fully focused on placing all eyes on himself through different forms of embarrassing, improvised behavior, in front of all the cameras.

World politics is pushed around by the consequences of one man’s narcissistic ego trip to feel good… there’s no plan, it’s a child playing with his toys and people try to react within the confines of law, reason, and society to confront and battle him.

It’s more embarrassing to see the world deal with Trump, than the man himself.

I believe that there is a very easy way for Trump to stop the war in Ukraine: he must initiate an all-US referendum with suggestions to prohibit big sports for transgenders, and establish that there are only two genders, men and women. If such a referendum is performed, Russians will experience a cognitive dissonance – they will realize that democracy leads to prohibiting gender diversity – and their worldviews will evolute, so they would stop supporting Putin and his war. This is so simple… — Linkey

So the simple solution to stopping the war in Ukraine is to let Trump ban trans people from sports? :rofl:

And why would the Russian people get cognitive dissonance by that and not everything else that contradicts Putin? Why would that information specifically be something they manage to accept as outside information when the whole problem of information in Russia is that it’s constantly flooded with contradictions to make the people so confused as to grab onto the only reality that is tangible, which is the here and now for them locally.

They wouldn’t get that dissonance. All of that just sounds like a way to justify what Trump is doing in the most far out scenario possible :lol:

[

I think we’ve been down this road before. I don’t agree with it. It’s true that Trump has been Biden 2.0 in regards to Gaza and Ukraine. But on other consequential matters— especially climate change and nuclear proliferation — Trump is not the same. And those differences matter. — Mikie

Yes, some people treat things very simplistic, as a set of only one policy against another, rather than a web of politics that comes with the elected. Trump is absolute chaos and screws up so many things for the US and the world that the bad of Biden would probably have been preferable to this mess Trump is creating.

The core problem is that US politics overall tries to cater to rural America more than urban areas. Rural America is gone, there’s no industry to sustain it. The hard working man that builds his own house is a dream that ended long ago, but these relics in politics still believe it to exist. They try to win votes from people in these areas on the idea that rural America will return to its glory days of industry. But there’s nothing to be gained from it. They get the votes, but these regions are more or less on their death bed and the abandonment of urban voters will backfire so hard when these relic politicians die off.

Both parties, but especially the republicans are facing extinction in the form they exist under now. Mamdani is a good example of how fed up many are with the stupid, corrupt, disgusting politicians.

The old ones need to die and die fast. The entire congress, senate, democrats and republicans are filled with 75-90 year old demented fools, believing themselves to exist in the mid-1900 political landscape. Out of touch, out of their minds.

And the only reason these people haven’t been pushed out of politics yet is because they have so many capitalists feeding them money while younger people doom scrolls TikTok more than actually getting into politics.

A revolution doesn’t need to be armed, it could just be people pushing these old relics out the door and updating politics to the actual times.

Compassionism only works if all follows compassionism, and all can only follow compassionism if all are equally able to suppress their emotions in face of violence acted upon them.

It is a condition that is unattainable for society, even if it’s a virtue to live by. But it becomes as naive as turning the other cheek, because the psychology of people, the sociology of groups are far more complex than able to be governed by individuals showing absolute compassion.

It is fundamentally not compatible with human nature on a large scale, and is instead a privilege of the ones able to maintain absolute empathy in all situations, which most people do not.

It becomes a utopian ideal that is unattainable in practice as not all problems can be fixed by such a mindset.

I’m reminded of an organization in Sweden which speaks for world peace and who constantly oppose Sweden sending weapons to Ukraine to help them fight back against the invading Russia. This organization is fundamentally correct in what they strive for, but their absolute stance is a naive approach which ignores that stopping help to Ukraine would undoubtably lead to continued atrocities by the Russian forces, with the rapes and murders of civilians that we saw at the beginning of the invasion. The group’s compassion does not help people at all, and instead would just leave an open playing field for those who fundamentally oppose compassion.

That humanity doesn't have free will, that we are bound to the consequences of the genes and environment we grow up in, does not mean we shouldn’t have boundaries that mitigate dangerous individuals, groups and nations. That knowledge only informs the need to have a society that mitigates the possibility of forming such violence, but we cannot just accept the violence that is already happening or accept such individuals through compassion. Because the compassionate act should reasonably be towards the innocent victims of the violence and preventing them from being harmed, and that might sometime require that we act in opposition of compassion, against the violent aggressors with violence. The act of compassion in this case, is to destroy the aggressor with violence to protect the innocent.

This is why morality cannot be boiled down to a simple manifest of absolutist empathy or compassion, because it becomes a naive ignorance of the complexity of human psychology and its effect on society as a whole.

Or they'll demand cheap fossil-fuel based energy to run AC and heaters. — RogueAI

First, ACs won’t be enough in some places. Second, if any breaks, they die, so the risk is too high or it’s impossible to leave and transport goods between AC powered buildings, so the society collapses anyway. Third, continued use would just make the problem worse until the plastic outside of their units melt or material catch fire and they die anyway.

Bottom line, they can’t escape it by burying their heads in the sand. Prevent it in time, die in the heat, or flee to some other place that cannot fit millions of people. It’s a disaster however things go...

At this point, what else is left to do? I think Malm was right — although he doesn’t advocate killing anyone, he does suggest destroying property and fossil fuel infrastructure in his book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” I think this approach was catching on in 2021, but then at least the IRA passed. Now there’s nothing. Perhaps it’s time. — Mikie

It will start to happen the more politicians keep doing nothing and the oil industry getting more support by politicians. And if such actions as described in that book doesn’t work, then it will move on to more extreme levels.

For some in the world, climate change is indeed an existential battle. It’s probably going to be a walk in the park for someone like me living far north, but there are so many regions of the world that may become akin to an alien planet when degrees start to creep up to 60-70 degrees C. Add to that the humidity problem in which bubbles of humidity makes 19 degrees C feel like 31 degrees, the result could be absolutely catastrophic for some.

We are talking about millions if not billions of people in some cases. What happens if they are forced to move because of the basic necessity of avoiding to die in the heatwaves or general heat in their home nation?

They’re not going to be some small rebel group doing terrorist attacks out of desperation, we could be seeing millions of people taking what they own to make or buy weapons and start demanding residence in other nations. And people who face extinction will fight until they are extinct. That level of commitment to a cause cannot be fought with high tech military.

So the next large conflicts of the world due to climate change might be huge and I don’t think people realize that this will be the single largest consequence of climate change… people believe things will get a little warmer and that people up north can start to grow wine in their yards. Like, people are fucking stupid.

Now that the Christian right has merged with the MAGA cult, an area of agreement has been the burning of fossil fuels. It intersects with hypermasculinity and savage capitalism. (Really it’s just the donors are largely fossil fuel companies, who happen to own the media as well. The Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch can be thanked for a lot of this.)

For some reason, once Trump picked up on the climate denial piece, he ran with it. In the same way he did with tax cuts. Contrary to any evidence whatsoever, they’ll now go on believing that man did not evolve, tax cuts jump start the economy, and climate change is a hoax. It’s now locked in — dyed in the wool.

The bad guys have won. And unlike the movies, no matter if there’s a comeback or a swing in power, it’s already too late. The time to act was decades ago, and the time to mitigate the absolute worst effects were these last 10 years. And the one and only piece of legislation that addressed the issue is now dead.

This is not a political party— it’s a death cult. Literally. — Mikie

Just cements the concept the US is just another religious fundamentalist nation, like Islam fundamentalist nations in the Middle East. One step from installing laws based in religious texts rather than moral philosophy.

And ignoring climate change will just lead to a world in which the rural Americans die off in heat waves and other extreme weather. So let the death cult kill themselves, I really don’t fucking care anymore about people who constantly flood the world with absolute bullshit and shoot themselves in the foot.

But it will also ignite violence from those who feel like victims of these politics. We will probably see rebel groups starting to kill oil industry figures and politicians who keep perpetuate anti-climate politics.

Add to that all nations of the world that might end up in conditions that are unlivable. Becoming globally homeless and in turn start organizing themselves as military forces to fight for other places where they can live.

These people might even ignite sympathy from many in the world finally realizing how catastrophic the climate change problems truly are and when such forces start invading nations like the US, many might even just cheer on while they push forward.

And these people won’t be some little rebel group, they might end up being millions of people with nothing to lose as they have no where to go. It will either end with a mass slaughter of millions of people because nations have no other choice when getting invaded, or these people will win and force themselves into taking over large regions of other nations.

Nations who try to mitigate climate change might use that fact as a way to argue against these groups invading them and direct them towards nations who can be blamed for the situation the world has ended up in.

At some point, the world needs to outlaw oil. The world can debate oil for decades more, but at some point the problems are going to become actual reality and the oil industry will not have the power to fight back at people literally firing at them.

It’s like all the arguments against mitigating climate change are economical, but at some point the economy will crash so hard due to climate change that we’re just postponing everything. Politicians who need to fool the masses in order to keep their power are the ones responsible. No politician want to be blamed for economic crashes due to extreme decisions to fight climate change, but they will some day need to do it, so all politicians just hope they’re not the ones having to do it.

It’s pathetic really. Everyone is pathetic. Everyone deserves what’s coming.

I don't say he was right. But I'm not at all sure he was wrong. It's all much easier from an arm-chair and with hindsight. — Ludwig V

Exactly. What if he didn't drop the bomb and Japan surrendered after a year more of fighting? And would that have ended the imperial ideals? Both Germany and Japan basically became more peaceful than any other nation involved in WWII.

The moral issue here is that I'm not, and I don't think anyone is, arguing for massive destruction as a solution to anything. But I'm observing what happens to the collective psychology of society when something does happen.

That people tend to be shaken out of past thinking and advocate for better morality for real, with actual applied philosophy to the new ethics.

It's like the world tries to operate on moral discussion, theories and philosophy on an intellectual level, but it's only when something dramatic happens that the world actually progress forward.

Maybe because the ones opposing better morals, conservatives in moral thinking and politics become so unpopular that the debate, over night, shifts in favor of the progressive morals that it essentially becomes law.

However, in some cases no one knows what the morals of a new paradigm is. No one really understood the morality that came out of the the nuclear bomb. It was a totally new way of thinking about morality in world politics.

I would argue that we're in the same kind of state right now. With the extreme rightwing populism and demagogs eroding democracies I think we need to see something like Trump trying to install an actual dictatorship in the US in order for western democracies to install new frameworks for how to block such people from ever gaining power through democratic means.

Or how climate change will need a massive event of mass deaths before the world start to wake up for real to change society in order to mitigate the problems.

Climate change is really the most obvious one here. I also think that a massive destructive event in climate change would not only change how we mitigate climate change, but also the morality of how we deal with global industry. That we might even start to force nations to stop certain destructive energy politics out of moral reasons in ways previously considered unthinkable. That industry and politicians won't be able to argue for "the economy" or such things when speaking of destructive industries.

We would essentially need a massive catastrophe due to climate change before we can build a world that is ecologically sound and rational. The world seems to not be able to do this on its own.

That's true. But can we ever calculate that the creation balances the destuction, morally speaking? If only there were a way of ensuring that no-one will use that thought to justify some total horror in the future. I wouldn't trust any human being with that decision. If it has to happen, let it happen without, or in spite of, human agency. — Ludwig V

No, it's not moral to make it an intentional act. It's not an act that can be forced upon the world because that would obscure the moral lessons that come out of such an event.

If you intentionally do something with the intention of "teaching a lesson", you become the center of the immorality. The destructive event needs to be something that rises up from the thinking of all people so that all people start to question the status quo.

Like:
- The allowance to let climate change continue until a catastrophic event.
- The perpetual increase in firepower during a world war (nuclear bomb)
- The lack of scientific scrutiny in areas like eugenics, popularizing thinking that leads to the holocaust.

These three all show a society stuck in a perpetual thinking, debating, discussing something that is unable to move out of bad morals into actual moral understanding. Only the events that rised up or will rise up from this will teach an actual lesson about the topic.

- If the world sees a climate catastrophe that kills millions, we will start to change the world into better ecological balance immediately, silencing those who try to oppose it.
- If the constant increase in the military power reach a bomb that is so powerful it could destroy the world, we understand the concept of MAD and start to work against war in ways not seen before (like the UN).
- If the lack of scrutiny in science leads to the holocaust, we will start changing the ethics of science to not allow such nonsense as eugenics to dividing people.

If, however, someone tries to do something as an act of teaching morality through massive violence, that will only end up with the same effect as terrorism. Did 9/11 make the world think morally about the conditions of people in the middle east and help them to a better life? No, it enraged the world like a stupid mob to start slaughter them instead, forming new factions of terrorists in IS.

You cannot intentionally create a catastrophe, because then you become the center of the destruction, not the thinking of all.

The fear of atomic warfare has never prevented small wars in the years since then. But it seems that people are beginning to think that it is OK to threaten it. I suspect that complacency is a factor, but miscalculation is all too easy, so I'm not at all secure about it. — Ludwig V

But without the thinking about the bomb after WWII, we would probably have had a WWIII between Russia and the US. The cold war relied on the morality that MAD created. It became such an existential threat that even the most stupid politicians weren't stupid enough.

However, the lessons learned will erode further and further as memories of history fade away... when new generations that don't actually understand the horror of the nuke start to form world politics, we might see them used again...

...but that will probably form a new paradigm of MAD morality, and the cycle continues. Just like wild fires.

I am not sure that it is possible for time to end. That is partly because I am inclined towards a cyclical picture of the universe and see the idea of 'nothingness' before or after the existence of life in the universe as rather dubious. — Jack Cummins

Why not? Time is only one dimension we experience, it doesn't mean that anything outside of the reality of our experience wouldn't allow for a timeless existence.

I think this is the fallacy of how we think about our own mortality. Rather than thinking about what happens after death, think about what happened before you birth, where were you? We view the time before out own experience of life as nothing special (in most religions), but there are tons of narratives dedicated to where we go when we die.

The same goes for the universe. We only argue in terms of what we can perceive, experience and define; we think about these things inside of the definitions that allow us to think.

This is why we struggle with what came before the big bang, because it cannot be defined within the conditions of what allows us to think about it. So it becomes a cognitive paradox for us that we cannot solve. The same goes for what happens after time ends. We cannot, by our very function within time, think about what that would be.

Best way I would argue would be to think of it like the block universe theory. That the past is a form of solidified spacetime in which time is a direction just as much as space. Like an axis in which events change in space, but it doesn't move. If possible to walk along this axis you would see space change in its 3 dimensions, but you can only walk back and forth along this axis, like scrolling though a video.

That the future is an undetermined probability function that ends up in a defined state when the present comes in contact with it. Entropy causing the collapse into a state which is defined in relation to everything else in the universe and directly adds to that past block of time axis.

We only experience the collapsing state so we experience time as we do based on this thin edge between possible states and the past solid block of a time axis.

And we can view this past block as a timeless entity. And it may be that its this that exists when time ends, the block ends, it becomes, within a higher existence, a "blob" of spacetime, solid, unmoving.

Like a fuse, burning from one state to another, from high energy to low in a violent present, and then its just the end state, still, unmoving. Maybe the ash blows away, degrades into another state within a higher dimensional existence, part of some other definition of time that is not how we define time, but still moving as a larger entity.

No one knows because this is far beyond the limits of current scientific knowledge. But I think the block time theory, especially if combining it with the quantum physics of the collapsing probabilites, have a lot of logical merit. And it makes a lot of sense when thinking of how time actually functions in general relativity, bending and shifting, but always going forward along its axis.

What I don't understand about this situation, is the fact that if he read the Bhagavad Vita, and caused the death of in Hiroshima, as estimates range from 90,000 to 166,000 deaths, while in Nagasaki, estimates range from 60,000 to 80,000, then did this weigh heavy on his conscience about the negative karma he earned by his statement about Shiva? Was he aware that such negative karma results in a very long life of struggle and torment by your reincarnation cycle? Whatever the case may be, I am just wondering about a guy also causing potentially rockets with atomic bombs, which were actually created also potentially assuring the death of many other people. — Shawn

He wasn't Hindu, so I doubt he thought of karma in this way. He also wasn't responsible for how nukes were to be used, as demonstrated by the scene with Truman. I think the film shows the balanced perspective of him being focused on the science while also struggling with how to navigate a world he knows less about. He's naive in all cases regarding politics and war and this naivety later became his strength as he argued against the use of nukes in a way that politically was viewed as naive.

I think Oppenheimer is someone who demonstrates perfectly what hindsight bias is about. That while living in the moment of something, people generally have no clue how to process anything. And it's only in hindsight that people ask "why'd you do it?" "Why did you think like that?"

It's one of the behaviors of people that I dislike the most as it's a projection of false intellectualism and introspection. Like when everyone says they would not have been a Nazi in 1930s Germany, when in all likelihood they would have been, statistically speaking. In the same way that people today struggle with knowing where to stand in current ongoing issues of the world, but will eventually end up in hindsight bias whenever reality reveals itself to them (often by the true intellectuals).

May I ask, what are your views on the matter of causing death through something destructive, and how according to any ethically bounded theory, what this actually results in? — Shawn

In ethics, I don't think any such level of destruction works. Neither Kantian or utilitarian works. Maybe utilitarianism works if we view the deaths of 100 000 as a mean to save the entire species, but it's still problematic.

But then again, we can think of wild fires. Such a destructive event has been somewhat hard coded into biology to rid an ecosystem that has become broken. Many forests thrive after a wild fire because of the eradication of built up bacteria, fungus and many invasive species. Life didn't end with the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

These highly destructive events throughout earth's history have over the course of longer time spans been beneficial to nature. They reset and in the long run help restore. It's both beneficial for evolution to continue improving biology to stand against the extremes of nature, while making sure no entity wipes out nature as a whole. We might not have had earth so filled with organic life if it weren't for all destruction that helped shape it. Scientists speculate that one of the reasons life began at all was through the fact of repeating large scale events that changed a static environment over and over.

Life forming out of, and finding stability, in finding an equilibrium with the ever changing environment.

So, destruction, just like Shiva's role, is both an end and a beginning. Shiva both destroys and creates.

Is there an ethical thought through this? Could a man-made destructive event also be beneficial, even ethical?

If a war is on-going, without any change, with soldiers that keeps dying and if continued will keep dying in numbers that far exceeds that of a one time destructive event. Would it be ethical to do it? Like a wild fire that cleanse an area from sickness and a slowly dying ecosystem, it cleanses the psychological lock that forms out of the hate that fuels the ongoing conflict.

How many highly destructive events in history ended up forming a long lasting peaceful society afterwards?

I think the shock of destruction is what fixes it. It may be that the destructive event is a wild fire of the mind. When an ongoing unstable condition exist in society, it's primarily due to cognitive bias between two groups who cannot get out of that condition. The day to day atrocities, pain and suffering caused by a psychological condition in which neither part can get out of it. And that a highly destructive event might shake people to the core so much that a better world forms out of it, destroying the never ending conflict once and for all.

That the end to something bad in the world isn't necessarily due to a "successful" highly destructive act, but that this act wrecks havoc on the minds of people involved in this conflict, forcing them out of their biases.

Like how WWII was so traumatic for the world that most of the peace we had since then is a direct result of people being shaken to the core so much they abandoned their previously held ideas to shape new ones for a better world.

And it's why people now fear that when the last of the witnesses of that event in history dies, we will see a rise in new atrocities and conflicts because people's minds again start to build up an unhealthy ecosystem of thought.

That people need to be shaken to the core in order to find ethical footing again. Just like works of art asks moral questions, humans need to test their moral grounds intellectually and emotionally in order to become truly moral. That we cannot just form a theory and act morally, it needs an emotional grounding in the real world... and when we stumble as a society, we actually need something massively destructive to shake us back into self-reflection and true understanding of morals once again.

What are the other pros and cons? There's a small danger of creating echo chambers, of course, if there were no public interaction. And it doesn't add to my mentions or comments count... — Banno

I’m not a fan of PM discussions simply because I think ideas should be discussed in public, because that’s how knowledge moves society forward. While private discussions are more comfortable, I don’t think that comfort is supposed to be part of the practice of philosophy, simply through the idea that philosophy rely on conflicting ideas to be tested.

It could be nice to test an idea that isn’t well fleshed out first before going into a public discussion, but I feel like private discussions kind of defeats the purpose of this place, which is to be a public forum. Private discussions then becomes more of a fulfillment of the self and the ego, rather than what philosophical discourse is supposed to be.

I think the problem primarily boils down to that there are only a few on this forum that seem to have the capacity and ability to actually discuss ideas, especially when conflicting with their own point of view. And so many discussions become filled with low quality, biased reasoning, with barrages of fallacies that just bloat everything.

In my opinion, the standards should be higher. It doesn’t have to be about making an argument based on academic practices, formats, or such, but rather a standard of examined thought that excludes emotional outbursts, heavy bias and obvious fallacies. That constant repetition of flooding philosophical discussions with thoughtless ramblings warrants a warning or even ban if ignored. More than the current standard.

I think the tolerance bar is too high and it serves only the people acting on that level, often dragging things down to their level rather than them being forced to get their act together.

But it comes down to where the mods want things to be and I won’t argue that they do a bad job because how to set the bar is extremely hard. Compared to other places online, this place is pure heaven in terms of behavior. I just think that the tolerance bar needs to be lowered a little.

@Jamal Maybe threads could be marked by the writer? As an intent by the poster for what type of discussion they want? Like, if someone wants a more open discussion where people are free to express however they want, that could be “Open”. And if they want something focused heavily on logic/math or something, maybe “logic/analytical”, and if someone wants the discussion to be more focused and with heavier scrutiny, maybe “Focused” or “High level”. Or maybe just three levels; “Open”, “Medium, “High”, for free discussions, to more casual but focused, to those with longer written arguments featuring links to actual papers and high level discussions, warranting the highest level of discussion.

Maybe? At least that would warrant an easier way to mod the threads so that people who want a higher level discussion can get rid of those who are mostly here for a lower level of open discussion, while not erasing that option for those people who want to discuss more casually? :chin:

Incredibly sad! I cherished her comments and feedback in the past short story events. Few felt as honest and personal in opinions and ideas, with gravitas. She will be missed. :worry:

I don’t think Trump is stealing for a fight here, but the hawks around him surely are. They’ll be saying now is the time to take Iran out, they are weak and Hesbollah are on the back foot.
Trump will go along with it and try to use it to his advantage. Plus it gives Netanyahu cover for the genocide in Gaza and keeps him in power. If Isreal is at war with Iran, he can cancel elections. — Punshhh

Yeah, the only good thing from Trump is that he actually oppose the concept of war since he’s more interested in business deals than military geopolitics. The problem is that he’s too weak when shit hits the fan and it seems that people around him pressured him to accept all of this, that’s why he went from ”talks with Iran” to a big shrug over night, people around him put him in place and made him a puppet in this matter.

But even if this is all Netanyahu, which is most likely, it could drag the US into it. With so many militaries, resistance groups and terrorist groups weakened, it may be the only point in time to conduct a major invasion. With Israel leading the charge, the US might utilize it to not get blamed for initiating the war and rather ”act to stabilize the region” as an excuse to obliterate the problem of Iran.

We’ve seen that the US has indeed strengthen their presence of bombers close to Iran.

Marines, the regular armed forces, to be deployed. — ssu

Just inching things closer into a proper authoritarian regime. I guess no one cares? :chin:

Taiwan is too important to the world to just let an invasion slide. The diplomatic pressure on China to not do it is pretty strong.

What we see China doing is pretty much in line with what authoritarian governments do all the time; they bloat their ability to show strength. You can basically go back to the art of war and find strategies they follow;show weakness when you are strong and strength when you are weak.

A key point to remember about China is that there's no such thing as private companies. All companies have shared ownership in some form or another with the state and the state influence company policies. And since China has been aggressively investing in other nations, they have massive influence over western nations dependence on China.

At the same time they have lots of power over social media, able to effectively conduct information war much better than for example Russia. Strategies involving spreading conflicting information to undermine people's ability to do critical thinking around news, while promoting Chinese interests and appearance.

A key point have been media and films. Conditions for many Hollywood productions to receive funding from China involves changing plot elements to make China look better. One recent example that was extremely obvious was an episode of Love Death and Robots that basically used a Chinese main character who teamed up with an African character under the umbrella of "shared background and interests" to then combat western looking people. Which clearly speaks to their recent interest in investments in Africa and portraying that relationship under a good light.

The best way to make sure China doesn't invade Taiwan is to make sure they depend on the world more than the world depends on China. There's lots of naive politicians in the world who seem oblivious to the strategies China use to gain power.

- Ban Chinese investments as such investments comes with the Chinese government influence and insight.
- Ban Chinese investment in western media.
- Ban TikTok.
- Put further diplomatic pressure on China with earmarked trade deals that if China moves on Taiwan they immediately gets cut off from world trade.
- Help build up Taiwanese defenses with automated anti-air and anti-sea defenses around the island, making a large scale invasion extremely unlikely.
- Support the people in China with technology that bypass Chinese censorship.
- Invest in heavy cyber-defense and counter-cyber operations.

All I can see is a world that is as oblivious to China's intentions as they were to Russia's before the invasion of Ukraine. Better to prepare for what is needed to counter China before they invade Taiwan and make sure Taiwan has enough support so that if they get cut off from the world geographically, they can hold their own while the world diplomatically push China away.

While China can do lots to hurt the world if the world helps Taiwan, if the world is ready they can cut China off from so much trade that their economy collapse instantly. They already have huge problems with their national economy that if trade gets affected, it would crush them.

And with how important Taiwan is to the world when it comes to components for computers (semiconductors), the impact on the world would be extreme if we just let China take Taiwan. An economic and infrastructural chaos we're not even imagining. Regardless of what idiots in politics say, you can't just "start up a new fab lab". Intel has been trying in the US, but they're no where close to the capacity of TMSC. We already saw a disruption during the pandemic in which just a slight pause in production the economy of semiconductors created absolute chaos in the world industry. It's not just computers, it's EVERY thing that has semiconductors in it, which is basically everything that exists around us.

People don't realize the impact the destruction of Taiwan's semiconductor business will have on the world and it's in the worlds interest to defend Taiwan. Politicians and the public are too oblivious to all of it.

I'm wondering why anarchism is often placed closer to the far left than anywhere else. It's rather its own direction, a dismissal of all government. So I guess it should be possible to ask the question against most other directions in politics and not just marxism.

Fair enough, I was fundamentally objecting to the genocide claims since they are part of the great replacement narratives from white supremacists.

That there are cases of racist violence would be wild to argue against though. Especially since it's an understandable echo of the apartheid era. It takes time for a society to heal, especially one resting on so much violence in the first place.

But its the genocide angle that becomes problematic, because it's not what is happening and it's used by white supremacists around the world. They take advantage of singular cases of violence, point towards it and inflate it to support their great replacement narratives.

And when a president repeats these things, that's extremely problematic. Either he's too stupid to understand that he's been fed this narrative, or he's a white supremacist himself, which isn't far fetched. It's not something he would put on signs.

There actually has been violence against white farmers in S Africa. Rage against whites is understandable there. There's no need to deny it. — frank

First, can you make a clear distinction between the general violence that also affects black people and that of violence based on racist motives? Second, if such a statistical difference is large enough, does it constitute genocide against white people?

By your logic, we should then call the higher level of violence against black people in the US to also be called a genocide. And seen as a lot of such violence in the US is also conducted by the police, you have an even worse situation of systemic racism causing the violence and deaths; it should then be called state sanctioned genocide of black people in the US.

That’s not a slippery slope, because you basically take the fact that white farmers have indeed been killed, but you ignore the general situation in the region and just repeat the white supremacy propaganda narrative that has been constructed around it. Why? And the comparison I did with the US also rests on a comparable situation that white people are being targeted more in South Africa than black people, which still isn't proven to be the case when looking at the actual statistics. So it's not really a comparable situation either; it actually makes even less of a case for white genocide happening since the situation statistically is worse for black people in the US.

So I don’t really understand how you use the fact of violence against white people, without any context to it (the actual statistics of violence in the area), and conclude genocide? That’s not proof, that’s a wildly skewed interpretation of the data, seemingly influenced by the conspiracy narratives that’s been spread around online rather than forming a conclusion based on evidence.

This is the problem with these online conspiracy narratives in society, they seem to burrow into people’s minds so hard that the basic way people engage with news and information is to first believe the narrative and then ask others to prove against it, rather than demand evidence of the narrative’s claims first and be skeptical.

Basically, being skeptical today seems to be about buying into a narrative first as some form of substitute for actual skepticism, claiming the belief in that narrative is the skepticism. Instead of what skepticism is about, questioning narratives and demand evidence first, demanding rational thinking rather than biased thinking.

I’ve not seen any evidence of white genocide, have you? On the contrary, I’ve seen more evidence against it and more evidence that the idea of it happening in South Africa is a construct of white supremacists spreading these ideas into right wing politics. It was basically formed out of the apartheid era, an echo promoted by those who lost power when apartheid ended.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Find out the facts first. — frank

But it is. The whole genocide of whites is part of the replacement conspiracy theory and it's being used in propaganda by white supremacists all over the world. What facts are you looking for? I don't think there's anything confusing about this. The attacks on farmers are part of a general problem in the area, but white supremacists reframe it to be a genocide that is partially backed up by the government, all of which is untrue.

The claim of a white genocide in South Africa has been promoted by right-wing groups in South Africa and the United States and is a frequent talking point among white nationalists.[6][7][8][9][10] There are no reliable figures that suggest that white farmers are at greater risk of being killed than the average South African. — Wikipedia

White supremacists have seized upon some of the farm-related violence in South Africa since the end of apartheid to peddle a propaganda campaign that exaggerates and distorts the situation to imply that South African whites are imperiled. They also insist that unless action is taken, whites in Europe and the United States will face the same sort of “genocide” at the hands of non-whites and immigrants. — ADL

AfriForum is not the only Afrikaner group which has lobbied in the US.

Another one is the far smaller and more extreme Suidlanders (Afrikaans for Southlanders), whose members Simon Roche and André Coetzee carried out a six-month visit to the US last year.

They met various far-right activists, including David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Trump supporter, as well as other white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers, according to South African journalist Lloyd Gedye.

"This network has allowed the Suidlanders to spread its message of 'white genocide' around the world," he wrote in the Mail & Guardian newspaper.

This includes Australia, where several right-wing rallies have been held this year with protesters - many of them white South African migrants - holding up placards such as "Recognise the genocide" and "Stop the murders".

The message has resonated with Australia's former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton who said in March that he was looking at giving South Africa's white farmers access to fast-track visas because they were being "persecuted" and needed help from a "civilised" country.

This prompted outrage from the South African government.

Mr Fikeni told the BBC that international support for South Africa's white farmers was not surprising, and tied in with the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, and the rise of right-wing parties across Europe.

"The anti-establishment is growing across the world, partly because of immigration pressures. There are those who feel local cultures are being invaded, who want whiteness to be maintained in its purest form," the political analyst said. — BBC

For all its consistent permacrisis of crime, corruption, and inequality, South Africa has not been rocked by the White supremacist terrorist violence we have seen in the Global North. But when stories of White genocide retain a hold on the imaginations of certain kinds of White people, already convinced of their unfair dispossession by a regime of “reverse racism” and raised in a febrile atmosphere that emphasizes traditional masculinity and gun ownership, then the ground is fertile for radicalization and for White supremacist thought and action to burst out of the comparatively small communities of Whiteness and onto the national stage, with potentially devastating consequences. — SFS

This conspiracy theory has been propagated by some fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It has been circulating in global far-right chat rooms for at least a decade, with the vocal support of Trump's ally, South African-born Elon Musk. — Reuters

What more facts are you after? What else do you need to understand where this thing is leaning? I'd argue that whenever someone claims genocide, there has to be significant evidence for it, not against it. Because such a claim is extraordinary, and as such needs extraordinary evidence.

If you accept this narrative at face value and ask for evidence against it, then you are essentially just falling for this narrative rather than putting the claim under scrutiny. That the white genocide in South Africa is connected to the great replacement theory is a known fact by researchers of right wing extremism globally.

So I don't know what else you need? How is that connection "jumping to conclusions" when it has far more support than the opposite claim.

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I don't think we could describe what's happening to whites in South Africa as a genocide. There's just a lot of violence, most of which does not affect whites. — frank

Because the genocide angle is a right wing conspiracy theory and not real. As you say, it’s violence in general, and right wingers use the high crime rate and murder rates to construct the narrative of white genocide. It’s within the same basis as replacement theory; white supremacy bullshit. This is how a population gets radicalized, with narratives that the people are too lazy to look up actual data on and too uneducated to understand that data. So they start with “maybe there’s something to this” and then slowly shift in opinions.