But I also dislike guilt, generally speaking. I think it's not so much a feeling of moral knowledge but a conditioned response which is used to control people. — Moliere

"Be good for Mummy!" Here it starts; the helpless dependent child is told to be what they are not.

I resist social control from the identity of the individual; I exert it from the identity of social being, and I feel guilt from an awareness of the contradiction. One cannot demand of the community that it transcend the human condition. One cannot go back to innocence, so the only resolution to the human condition is personal: —transcendent miracle, or sartori. Until then, I remain, frog/horse,

unenlightened.

I would want to distinguish that tradition from the "Christian tradition" per se. — Leontiskos

I would distinguish it as being the meaning of the Fall as told in the Old Testament, and therefore strictly speaking, pre-Christian. But I am no scholar of Judeo-Christian history.

Simply, there is no virtue in being un-fallen - innocence is the natural condition, and virtue arises from the fall along with vice as "knowledge of good and evil" - What philosophers call "moral knowledge". If you don't know good from evil, there is no virtue in doing good and no vice in doing evil, you just do what you do.

(When I were a lad this stuff were taught in school; kids these days don't understand the language and tradition properly in the first place, and then get all superior and dogmatic in their ignorance, mistaking it for virtuous rationality and freedom from superstition.)

Well that's not fair. — Moliere

True. Fair would be that once you have fallen there is no redemption. Without guilt, there can be no virtue.

We have eaten of the apple of self-awareness, and fallen into internal conflict between what we are and what we feel ourselves to be.

To say that man is a social animal expresses this conflict - between the individual animal and the community. I identify myself as this — I am a social animal — and thereby fall into paradox such that any claim to social virtue is the expression of animal individuality. "I am that fool who prides himself on his humility." Or else I am the worse fool who thinks he is already the god-king.

And so we fall into self-improvement, social improvement, and global improvement, as though through our internal conflict we can outthink that nature from which we spring. Yet one does not really have to go all the way to China; in our own Christian tradition, the individual conscience also reigns supreme. If you follow that internal voice, you cannot go wrong. (But on the other hand, you might well get crucified.)

Is the end of life, or the beginning of life for that matter, not a necessary part of life? In that case, the end of life cannot have a different value to to life itself. We who live, can celebrate the end of a life as we can celebrate the beginning. One can yearn for a child that does not yet exist, and one can mourn a child that has died.

But when philosophers ask the wrong question, they get into a muddle, and opposing life and death as though they are separable is the beginning such a muddle.

Those of us that understand that if there is intelligent life on Earth, it is certainly not human, have to face a catastrophe in which all certainties will be lost. There will be no last rites and no decent burial; our copses will rot in the burning cities as they are already doing. We turn on each other because that is what we have been taught, and that is all that is left.

The prospect of AI plugging itself into the electrical energy circuits it builds and maintains in order to reproduce itself is of course the merest projection of human greed onto the inanimate. Why would AI bother?

It has always been something we understood about ourselves, that we were prone to — one has to have something at the centre of one's life, and if it is no a god, then it will be oneself. Unless it is a void ...

A common way that hubris was committed was when a mortal claimed to be better than a god in a particular skill or attribute. Claims like these were rarely left unpunished, and so Arachne, a talented young weaver, was transformed into a spider when she said that her skills exceeded those of the goddess Athena, even though her claim was true. Additional examples include Icarus, Phaethon, Salmoneus, Niobe, Cassiopeia, Tantalus, and Tereus.[12]

The goddess Hybris is described in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition as having "insolent encroachment upon the rights of others".[13]

These events were not limited to myth, and certain figures in history were considered to have been punished for committing hubris through their arrogance. One such person was king Xerxes as portrayed in Aeschylus's play The Persians, and who allegedly threw chains to bind the Hellespont sea as punishment for daring to destroy his fleet.[citation needed]

What is common in all of these examples is the breaching of limits, as the Greeks believed that the Fates (Μοῖραι) had assigned each being with a particular area of freedom, an area that even the gods could not breach.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris

As for the green movement, you and I and a couple of friends, The Greeks have already told our story too.

Cassandra was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her elder brother was Hector, the hero of the Greek-Trojan War. The older and most common versions of the myth state that she was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her love by means of the gift of seeing the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favours, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word. As the enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, he added to it the curse that nobody would believe her prophecies. In other sources, such as Hyginus and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Cassandra broke no promise to Apollo, but rather the power of foresight was given to her as an enticement to enter into a romantic engagement, the curse being added only when it failed to produce the result desired by the god.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra

We used to be hunter-gatherers. So, don't grow food. Hunt it instead. — Tarskian

Look forwards, not backwards.

If we do that, we need to get rid of billions of people too. Who volunteers to leave first? Not me. — Tarskian

I will be leaving soon enough. So will you. That is going to happen, and the population will reduce to a sustainable level. Because an unsustainable level is "unsustainable". So your fatuous argument is to exclude the proposed middle of an agrarian society because 'no reason' in favour of a complete collapse to an imagined hunt that neglects the accompanying gathering. Or else the machine paradise...

Teach your brats to cook, to grow food, to work wood and metal. And how to get along with the neighbours, which is by having all these useful skills that can help them stay alive. The machines are no longer your friends.

Any bias towards the truth doesn't readily accept appeals to authority while completely ignoring the counter evidence, which you'll never witness on MeidasTouch or in the prosecution's case. This leads me to remain suspicious of any professed claims towards facts or balance, especially when it comes from the open prison of some European nanny-state. — NOS4A2

You paranoia is not admissible.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/landmark-supreme-court-ruling-throws-doubt-on-new-uk-fossil-fuel-projects

tldr: fossil fuel extractor have been claiming their projects are carbon neutral because the product will be used by someone else somewhere else. Someone likened it to tobacco companies saying their product did not cause cancer as long as it was not burned. The law has decided otherwise. A small hurrah!

It is perhaps apposite to say something semi-philosophical about "bias". It is surely the duty of the media, and ordinary mortals not to be even-handed as between truth and falsehood, but to be maximally biased towards the truth. If every true statement is balanced by an equal falsehood, then no communication can happen at all.

The difficulty, of course, is in deciding between competing stories and competing story-tellers. And in this context, the rules of evidence developed by the legal system along with the sceptical methods of science serve as the best models of a pragmatic way of seeking the truth.

And to bring this to a short conclusion directed at the topic in hand, If one looks at the court cases that Trump has been involved in, the general result is that he loses, whenever the actual facts are tested in court. Jury after jury, after grand jury finds against him whenever the rules of evidence are applied, and not the rules of Noddy in Toyland.

Not that justice is inevitable, and wrong decisions are never made, and as soon as I start seeing any real evidence of kangaroos or other marsupials dominating the US legal system, I reserve the right to admit I was mistaken. In the meantime, there is no balance to be found between Fox News and Meidas Touch; the former is a propaganda machine and scandalmonger, and the latter is a politically biased but fact based reporter of the terrible state of the US.

MeidasTouch is correct in pointing out the dangers President Trump poses to democracy, and undeniably effective in spreading that message to its social media followers.

Your link, NOS.

After a lot of stuff about their ad campaign, some maybe-waybes about their fund-raising and stuff. Criticism of the actual content of their reporting:— a big fat zero. I don't have to defend Meidas touch as individuals when the main accusation is ...

But being on the right side of the Trump fight does not make an organization above scrutiny. And when MeidasTouch faced questions about how it used the $5 million donors entrusted it with to beat Trump, its response was straight out of the Trump playbook.

Perhaps Trump could sue them for unauthorised use of his playbook. :razz:

So who is lying? — NOS4A2

Trump is lying, and some people believe his lies because they really want to. People like Trump because they like what he says. I thought you might have had something a bit more interesting, but that's all there is I guess. 4 years a president then 4 and the border problem is still the problem he is going to solve in his second term.

I wasn't expecting people to come out and say, "l love Trump because his a bigot, a racist and a misogynist, and so am I." So I'm not very surprised it didn't happen.

Personally I much rather hear your own original opinions than theirs and the Biden campaigns, but I fear there aren’t any. — NOS4A2

Of course there aren't. I don't have any experience on which to base my opinions, so i have to rely on theirs. My opinion is that Trump is a miserable self-hating person who projects his hatred onto others, and thinks that everyone else is as horrible as he is. But i never met him, so it is based on the horrible things he says in his recorded speeches all the time with no factual support.

In contrast, The meidas people, while they are obviously anti Trump, make much use of court transcripts, reports in Trump supporting media, and so on. They are clearly biased, but they don't lie all the time unlike most of the Trump supporters and Trump himself.

They told me to say.

But I'm so glad you have your independence, and plenty of unbiased sources!

You’ll just say whatever they tell you to. — NOS4A2

Of course I will. The difficulty though is working out who is they and who is we.

I'll just say he's decided he prefers the shark to the electrocution.

How do we find out what is the best way for us? — Janus

The first thing we find out is that the best way for us is not identical with the best way for me.

My question is: why focus specifically on tips? — Relativist

Because you are addressing a service industry workforce, obviously, and that is what you think they will want to hear.

Or does anyone think that Trump is a super generous tipper who wants to help the poor folk?

Some interesting material here for those, like me, who are a bit bemused how Trump is popular at all, etc.

In my mind, what this means is that a good college education is of greater value for becoming open-minded and non-conformist. Then again, some people also take some drugs while at college — Shawn

You may be right, but my experience is not that at all. I learned much at college but almost nothing of any use from the courses. On the contrary all my formal education seemed designed to create the "ideal" conforming angst-ridden robot, that is all governments can cope with.

How can a break from reality bring one closer to reality? — Shawn

I thought that would be clear, sorry. The worst feature of insanity is lack of insight. Most people think that sanity is normality and so they like what the neighbours like, believe what the television tells them, do what the priest tells them, and so on.

To be amenable and flexible is part of sanity when it is a conscious choice, but when it becomes unconscious and rigid conformism, it is a madness of false identification and leads to horrors. Magas, Nazis, cultists, fanatics and zealots of all persuasions all suffer from the loss of reality in favour of ideology. This is sadly the mental condition of normality, that confers on the sufferer a complete confidence in their distorted thinking. Psychodelics in particular serve to break down the identification somewhat - with luck, the cracks that are made in the psycho-ceramic's everyday insane certainty will allow a glimpse of reality to reach the sufferer.

To take the acid test is to made aware of one's insanity; to make a habit of it is the exact same insanity.

There's a reasonable chance that you and I are old. — T Clark

My big sister bought this.

I'd like to add to my OP, that I don't quite understand the 1960's that well. I know it was the counterculture movement; but, I don't understand why it became a fascination with drugs... I mean, it was about peace, love, and political activism; but, why the popularity arose to drugs? — Shawn

Have you seen the movie, Pleasantville? It explains the '60's rather well. There was a desperate need to escape from the American Dream, because it was covering up the American Nightmare of Vietnam and became the prison of suburban convention.

There [Pleasantville],fire does not exist, and firefighters merely rescue cats from trees, and everyone is unaware that anything exists outside of Pleasantville, as all roads circle back into it. David tells Jennifer they must play the show's characters and not disrupt Pleasantville, but she rebelliously goes on a date with Mary Sue's boyfriend, Skip Martin, the most popular boy in school. She has sex with Skip, who is shocked by the experience, which leads to the first bursts of color appearing in town.

Bill Johnson, owner of the malt shop where Bud works, experiences an existential crisis after realizing the repetitive nature of his life. David tries to help him break out of his routine and notices an attraction between Bill and Betty.

As Jennifer influences other teenagers, parts of Pleasantville become colorized, including some of the residents. Books in the library, previously blank, begin to fill with words after David and Jennifer summarize the plot to their classmates. When Jennifer gives a curious Betty an explanation about sex and tells her how to masturbate, Betty has an orgasm that results in her colorization and a fire in a tree outside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasantville_(film)

One self medicates because one is in a state of such confinement in one's own mind, and such alienation from reality, that intoxication actually brings one closer to reality for a short while. It is not a new thing, though the particular drugs were new; "In vino, veritas." the Romans used to say. Unfortunately, the conventions of drug-culture and self-indulgence quickly become as grey and confining, (if not more so), as the dreamworld they seek to escape.

Here is a pig singing about it for you.

I'm also not sure it makes sense to talk about the US ever being great. — T Clark

You guys should make like Britain and just incorporate greatness into the name just as you incorporated the unity — "The United States of Great America". It's that easy!

It seems plausible to me that any large Communist regime will inevitably end up in tyranny. Again, that's my "seems to me" opinion, not a solid claimi. — T Clark

It seems plausible to me that any large regime will inevitably end up in tyranny. Again, that's my "seems to me" opinion, not a solid claim.

Revolutions usually happen when the 'government' The Tzar, king, despot, oligarch, and his coterie become completely careless of the ordinary folk. 'Communism' is simply a label adopted by, or imposed upon, recent populist uprisings. 'Democracy' is a label adopted by governments that want to prevent revolutions.

Russia before the revolution was a medieval society of nobles and serfs. The same is true of China. Such a system is destabilised by the industrial revolution, just as the system of slavery became destabilised in America.

The common mistake is to suppose that anything very much is different between one system and another - exceptionalism. There are better and worse governments to suffer under, and generally wealthy governments are more generous to their people, and when there is little growth, they become meaner and meaner. The reality is that no one is going to make America great again for ordinary people.

This is a story about the folks who lived around Trump's Scottish golf course. I wonder, since it is distant from the party politics, if folks might be more open to seeing the rights and wrongs of it? If you can access it that is.

If we accept the observation that we only ever experience Sensory Data; — Treatid

I never experience sensory data. It is a mere abstraction that imagines the smell of coffee to be "the same" as birdsong and "the same" as a bunch of words including "Sensory Data".

But doesn't the fact that specific thoughts arise for a particular individual (and are unique to that conscious individual) indicate the ownership of thoughts? — Heracloitus

Disclaimer: I know little about Buddhism.

There is a point of view, behind the eyes, and a point of hearing between the ears, and there is a sensitive body, that has various instincts for self- preservation. And for a human there is also thought, imagination planning rehearsing dreaming remembering, replaying, recounting.

I don't think Buddhism denies these facts of individuality. But when you speak of consciousness, it seems to me that you are not speaking of any of these things, but rather these are all things that one might be conscious of.

It is as if all the world is a great play that consciousness watches - the life of the hero, told from his point of view. But the performer is always hidden under costume and makeup, and the audience is silent and passive sitting in darkness.

And which is the individual, the performer or the watcher? They seem to be the same, and this implies that one is the whole world: the play, the performer and the audience. Or as it has been very simply put, 'your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it joins you to it.' Or even shorter, J. Krishnamurti said, "You are the world".

Sure they do, but you have to look up from your
phone occasionally and look around and smile at anyone who's looking at you. — Agree-to-Disagree

Nobody ever looks up from a phone, and no one who is on a phone in public is likely to be noticed at all except as an arsehole talking to someone who isn't there like a schizo. The point of being in a public place in this context is to be present to the world, and engaged in an activity, but open to the presence of others. I gave many options apart from a book, and none of them was a phone for good reason.

These days people don't approach others in public I'm afraid. Despite most people desiring to be approached more. — fdrake

Sure they do, but you have to look up from your book occasionally and look around and smile at anyone who's looking at you. If they smile back, you say "I love this book..." and then they want to know what book, and...

Be yourself in a public place. If you are unusual but not creepy you will attract the interest of those who might be interested. It might take more than 5 minutes. Hey look Mum, that guy's reading a book/ feeding the birds,/playing the mandolin/whittling a spoon/doing tai chi. Anything you fancy apart from "searching for a soulmate" That's too creepy and predatory!

Not sure why you've suddenly started linking railway death statistics. — Tzeentch

Right. Understood.

"Thou shalt not kill" seems like a perfectly realistic moral obligation, for example. — Tzeentch

Thou shalt not kill 1, or thou shalt not kill 5? In this context, that seems a particularly foolish comment. It happens rather frequently to train drivers that people are killed by the train they are driving.

Of the fatalities on the railway in 2019/20:

Six occurred on a level crossing
17 involved people trespassing on the railway
283 were suicides or suspected suicides

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/looking-after-the-railway/delays-explained/fatalities/

I think you're throwing the term around too loosely, and in the process either claiming the existence of moral obligations which are impossible to fulfill, or 'obligations' which are so vague and subjective that they lose all their meaning. — Tzeentch

And I think you are confusing moral obligations with legal ones. Of course moral obligations are impossible. And if you try very hard indeed, you get crucified for your pains.

A while back a concert was bombed by a terrorist in Manchester UK, and there was much criticism because the emergency services (police fire ambulance) did not immediately rush in, for fear of a second bomb or other terrorist act. Some people died as a result of the delay. Emergency services routinely put themselves in harm's way for others, but the senior persons in this case thought the danger for their crews too great to intervene immediately, and crews stood by for some time to see what developed.

As it happened the lone bomber was dead. Dilemmas happen, and sometimes even the experts get it wrong.

reducing this to statistics is not a solution as I could save the wrong person. I could save a Hamas leader or Bibi and I'd rather not. — Benkei

I think introducing another calculation as to the moral worth of the individuals is a completely false move. This is what doctors are expressly forbidden to do, but their oath is to do their best for PolPot and Mother Theresa without distinction. The War Crimes Tribunal is the place for such judgements, not the railway line or the hospital.

Well, you were challenging my comment and I worked with what you gave me. — Tzeentch

Yes. I challenge the idea that we have no obligation to strangers. We have a small obligation to do something if we reasonably can to make another's situation better if they are in difficulty. The trolley situation as played out in 's video would be traumatic precisely because one would feel that one ought to intervene and take responsibility, as the the only person able to. But behind it is the real question as to what the train operator's policy ought to be and what the the professional switchman should do or not do in that situation. The stranger would not be blamed for making a wrong decision or freezing in the unfamiliar emergency, but the switchman and the rail company need a policy, based on a moral principle. And of course, the workers on the line also need to know that policy to protect themselves from random track switchers.

So if you work for unenlightened railways, or if you like to trespass on unenlightened tracks, you should be aware that trains will never be switched unless the line is thought to be clear, and no-one who is not in danger should be put in serious danger by anyone else to save others. If you are on the tracks, you are putting yourself in danger, and workmen should always be alert to the possibility of trains, and not stand on the tracks to make phone-calls or have a chat about what an arse the boss is, especially with headphones on.

Apparently there exists a moral obligation to save people from dying, even if it requires the murder of bystanders, but this obligation is limited by distance and now seemingly also does not include acts that exceed the effort of a lever pull. — Tzeentch

No, I'm on the other side of the lever pulling in theory, but i think in the moment I would be tempted. Try to keep up.

There is no obligation to act whenever there is no action one can take. If breaking the the tv would stop the war, I'd feel obligated to break the tv, but it wouldn't. I can respond to something on the tv by various means, usually involving my bank account so as to pay someone else to do something. But if I did that too often I'd have to sell the tv and then I wouldn't even have that option. What can you do heroic countless times a day if only you felt you ought ?

There are no levers on a television.

All of us are after all bystanders in countless numbers of situations which are just begging for a hero. — Tzeentch

I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, people are not dying in front of me countless times, or even ever in my longish life.

I can't help it if I'm lucky. — Bob Dylan