Following the money is, more often than not, applied only post hoc after deciding who the target of blame should be. — Isaac

And who is the target of your blame for this reprehensible post hoc deciding?

So you agree that it applies impartially to West and East, North and South, Capitalist and Communist, saint and sinner. :smile:

But then you want to try and make a partisan point of it. :sad:

Really? do you have a recent war to which it doesn't apply?

Here's a nice little podcast for you.

https://shwep.net/podcast/platos-parmenides-and-metaphysics/

a reason why Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas region, — Apollodorus

Ports and oil, I'd imagine, using Deep Throat's principle, 'follow the money'.

Talk of ethnicity, democracy, denazification, de-islamification, or removal of oppression, always seem to become important near oilfields.

Besides, this reasoning is quite universal. — ssu

Yes. Exactly my point. War is always an agreement.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle. — Lewis Carroll

And for Putin, starting a war has been the way to get that popularity up. — ssu

I think he would have been even more popular if Ukraine had submitted.

So. Add up all the avoidable death in the world - the invasions, the starvation, the civil wars, the poor health, pollution, suicides - just how many are on Russia's hands and how many on America's? — Isaac

Too many.

To think this is a question with any significance is to espouse a dogmatic ideology that necessarily creates its negation as the eternal enemy. This is an exercise in futility that the world can well do without, that has taken over from religion as the banner under which wars and other power games are commonly prosecuted. "Your body pile is higher than mine, therefore we are the good guys." Another bad argument.

I would hazard a guess that no one here would suggest that flattening cities, killing civilians, fighting in trenches on a potato a day, or letting mountains of grain rot while people starve is a "good thing". A good many folks here, though, suggest that if you think X you must be in favour of [insert horror here].

Such arguments are not a "good thing", either. Wars happen because folks think that war is better than submission to [insert arsehole here] This applies even to aggressors, who also think that war is better than submission to [insert limitation of their power]. Thus war entails agreement to fight, and agreement that war is better than submission. Start your discussion with this agreement in mind, that the war is necessary, and the lessor evil. both sides would prefer to have their own way peacefully, but...

If I can say "I understand X" and can at the same time say "X is incoherent," how does that play out? — ZzzoneiroCosm

A hard hat is recommended when standing under anything that does not firmly cohere.

Are you sure?

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/15/operation-leaked-emails-intelligence-coup-boris-johnson/?fbclid=IwAR0AxHvhLxxd1ctbnuG3UMXCKv8mcSQPpp7KqT-jmYPMO0vBolXbcek4fy0

Religious people swear using religious terms, God's teeth, by the holy mother of god. One uses terms of significance to add emphasis, and if you don't got religion, scatology is the next best thing. That which is potent must be covered, and not spoken of, and thereby the word itself becomes potent and transgressive. And sometimes talk must exceed the bounds of convention, by dust-mite. The word of power to speak to Alexa and Google on this topic is "taboo".

I'm in the same boat. But It is a test with an 'attenuated' live virus that is of the monkey pox family at least, and recent enough to have a connection with this outbreak. I think.

@Frank might be able to put us straight?

Government is nothing but words, with the implicit threat of violence.

Here is a more recent test experiment that just might be connected.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(22)00027-1/fulltext

Hopefully, some urgent contact tracing is being done.

The masses are essentially innocent in the hands of expert psychologists and mass-manipulators. — ZzzoneiroCosm

This is not a very jolly thread is it? I'll try and inject a sliver of optimism.

The treachery of psychology is abhorrent and inexcusable, and has multiplied the level of deception in society. However, the internet is undermining the universality of the lie. We become aware of the lie and we become angry. But becoming aware is the first step. We do not know who on this site is a propagandist, and it is a common accusation, and potentially a divisive tool of the propagandists themselves. But this state of global paranoia is an improvement on - for example - the situation during WW1, when the masses were willing turkeys lining up for Christmas for King and Cuntry or Kaiser, or Freedum and Demoncracy, or whatever the flavour was in your grandparents innocent ears. Yes folks, this is the age of gold.

A philosophy is not an argument, but a way of thinking about things. This is the way I think about philosophy anyway. An argument can sometimes be made that one way of thinking about things is better than another, but such arguments are not usually compelling. This may explain the appearance of futility discerned by the op. But there is much potential for a slower and more diffuse influence, such that questions that seemed to have a clear and definite right answer come to be seen as not even being clear and definite questions.
Thinking about philosophy in terms of questions with many possible answers, and those answers as ways of thinking and ways of living, may prove more fruitful than focusing on arguments and definitions.

It's not the new covid, its the new AIDS, aka 'gay plague'. We old fogeys who have had the smallpox vaccine have nothing to worry about even if we enjoy our orgies still, and of course milkmaids will have had cowpox so they'll be fine too. A plague of boils to the rest of you though.

We're desperately short of proper communist propaganda on the thread, so here is my humble contribution to restoring the balance somewhat.

https://labourheartlands.com/jacques-baud-the-military-situation-in-the-ukraine-update/

if one can just "will" their way to unalienation, — schopenhauer1

How did you build that straw man from anything you read in my post, when "will" with or without scare quotes is not in my post? Self-realisation is not achieved by will-power, and no one but you has made any such suggestion here. I understand that you disagree with me and probably I don't understand Marx properly, but c'mon, don't just make stuff up.

The problem is that a good deal of work required for social reproduction “offers limited scope for the kind of self-realization Marx had in mind.”
Such work is inescapably repetitive and boring, physically exhausting, or simply unpleasant on account of the conditions under which it must be performed (think, for example, of the work involved maintaining a sewer). It is, in other words, inherently alienating. Marx believed that alienated labor will be eliminated under communism. But the truth is that it will be a feature of all modes of production.

https://www.academia.edu/43293587/The_Importance_of_Others_Marx_on_Unalienated_Production

Speaking as one who has from time to time worked to maintain a sewer or two, it does not seem to me to have much to do with it being hard work or unpleasant or repetitive; what alienates is being divorced from the social necessity of the work.



The above is surely a description of alienating work overcome by the fellowship of patriotic common cause? Changing my baby's diaper is not alienating to the same extent as changing my granddad's. Self-realisation, in this sense is a personal development in a social world that makes drudgery non-alienating. Thus in the Zen monastery, only the Zen master has the self-realisation to be qualified to clean the toilets, the acolytes would be alienated by such work. Nothing alienates the enlightened.

Death is a symptom of many diseases.

"Is the patient breathing and conscious?"
This is the first question they ask on the emergency medical line.

To be alive is to be interacting with the environment - sucking it in and squeezing it out, and to be conscious is to actively respond to pain, to noise, to voice, to touch, to light in the eyes, etc.

Computation is not necessary.

Philosophers tend to conflate intelligence and consciousness.

As though a chess grandmaster is more conscious than a waiter. The usual class bias!

Yes you have to resist your more base thoughts — universeness

Is that not a base thought?

So, from a philsophical point of view, facing the question “What to do with evil”, I think a good answer is working on philosophy to make it dynamic, permanently self-critical and in dialogue with experience and subjectivity, avoiding conclusive answers, conceptualizations that can make us disconnected, forgetful of personal human experience. — Angelo Cannata

I see that the evil in the world is in me, and I ask what to do about the evil in me, as if what I might do is unaffected by, and separate from, the evil. In other words, I imagine myself good in operating on my evil. Reminds me of the Zen saying: "If you have a thought in your head, throw it out. If it is so persistent that you cannot throw it out, then take it out." Am I the good that is left when the evil is removed or is the good what is left when I am removed?

I understand what the Chinese Room is doing...correct me if I'm wrong. It's dispelling that the computer may SEEM like it's doing something that requires complex thought, but it isn't. — GLEN willows

The way I would put it is that thought is not consciousness, but a mechanical process of symbol manipulation that one is sometimes half conscious of, rather as I am half conscious of the kettle coming to the boil in the kitchen, but don't mistake it for the essence of consciousness.

The feeling of a moving present or `now' seems to form part of our most basic perceptions about reality. Such a present, however, is not reflected in any of our theories of the physical world. In this short note I argue for a tenseless view of time, where what we call `the present' is just an emergent secondary quality arising from the interaction of perceiving self-conscious individuals with their environment. I maintain that there is no flow of time, but just an ordered system of events.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224905185_The_nature_of_the_present

So the elimination of the present, which is what physics does, entails the elimination of 'process' in favour of "an ordered system of events" and the elimination of flow and dynamics in favour of a static world of 4 dimensions.

"the interaction of perceiving self-conscious individuals with their environment" is nothing but such a static orders system. Thus at every moment I am equally conscious, while at each moment I am located in the particular moment of time by the state of memory and imagination that constitute knowledge of past and future respectively.

Science here achieves the god's eye view from 'outside time'; it is a view shared by some mystics:

Time is the enemy of man. And that enemy has existed from the beginning of man. And we said why has man from the beginning taken a wrong turn, a wrong path - in quotes. And if so is it possible to turn man in another direction in which he can live without conflict? Because, as we said yesterday, the outer movement is also the same inner movement, there is no inner and outer. It is the same movement carried on inwardly. And if we were concerned deeply and passionately to turn man in another direction so that he doesn't live in time, but has a knowledge of the outer things. And the religions have failed; the politicians, the educators, they have all never been concerned about this. Would you agree to that?

https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/cleansing-mind-accumulation-time

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/15/operation-leaked-emails-intelligence-coup-boris-johnson/?fbclid=IwAR0HWxt43EWJNiPriGvmzJM9qJUjm3Bctm2QiFMxGocFxsnRz9o7H7thfWc

How they got brexit done, and why Britain has a cockwomble as prime minister.

How would you respond to the claim that “even primordial sentience needs to be innately aware of truths (conformities to what is real) in order to survive; — javra

I would say that a yeast cell, say, has no language, and no means of representation that could correspond to reality or not in a way that I would connect with the notion of true or false. It responds directly to ingest sugars and oxygen and excrete CO2. Yeast cells have direct access to reality and immediate responses.

A cat has similarly direct access to reality, but is also informed by memory and habit as well as a more complex repertoire of instinctive responses.

Here is where truth and falsehood begins:

we adopt (varieties of) 'truth-telling' in order to build trusting bonds with one other; wherein 'truth', such as it is, is mostly pragmatic — 180 Proof

Above is the story of The Monkey who cried 'Snake'. And it is surely obvious that trust is the prerequisite for untruth, not the effect of truth-telling???

But then establishing the truth of it? Some of us are still trying to establish the truth of “I am”. — javra

Very sensible. First is it true? then, (if I am), am I good? and am i beautiful? can be considered.

On what grounds – "principle" – does one "really believe" truth if "truth is the first principle"? — 180 Proof

One believes that truth is the first principle of language because otherwise it doesn't communicate, and there would e nothing to learn. Then one comes across the boy or the politician or the priest who cries wolf, and one learns scepticism. Therefore truth is prior to doubt. Mummy says the wheels on the bus go round and round, and that reveals the truth and meaning of language and the world, all day long.

Maybe, just maybe, Truth = Good = Beauty. They're the same thing?! — Agent Smith

What is = what ought to be = what is desirable?

If you can honestly say that is your experience, then I think you must be enlightened; I am unenlightened.

If truth isn't the first principle, one cannot really believe the second and third principles.

It's a long time since I read any Rollo May, I always thought of him as a decent conservative trying to understand these wild modern radicals - as personified by fellow existentialist R D Laing, for example (as quoted here).

My own view though is that what is being diagnosed here is the necessary condition of every psychological theory, for every generation. This is because one's psychological theory is the lens through which one understands and relates to, oneself and other people. As such, to a considerable extent it modifies the psyche itself, just as the particular character of one's own psyche will influence how one interprets that of others.

Thus to crudely illustrate, my parents lived at some particular time and had psychological understanding X, and in order to understand my parents and their time, and particularly their imperfections and failings, I have to take a critical view of theory X - "Well at the time people thought X and so they didn't understand ... blah blah..." This is theory Y, an obvious improvement on X. Thus the lifespan of any psychological theory is about 25 years.

Existentialism managed to escape academia to a greater extent than many other modern philosophies, largely because of the literary skill of its champions - Sartre, Camus, Iris Murdoch and others - who embedded its ideas in narratives. That's really the key to making any philosophy take root among ordinary people. But even existentialism gradually became lost once again in thickets of jargon impenetrable to all but the specialist. So it failed to become a practical social philosophy - and when it tried to become more political and mobilised, it became sucked up by the vortex of Trotskyism (in Sartre's case) and Nazism (in Heidegger's case). — Jules Evans

https://www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/modern-philosophies-as-therapy

Philosophies have a longer life than psychologies. But one sees in this short paragraph something of the interaction of philosophy, psychology, politics, and daily life, and how impossible it is to arrive at a complete and stable understanding of them.

How can we know that we can have hallucinations? It seems to me that we could only know that if we could distinguish hallucinations from the real. Which we do, and have to be able to do in order to get the sceptical argument started. The sceptical argument relies on our knowing the real from the hallucinatory and then declares that the distinction it is founded on cannot be made. Silly, yet somehow convincing to many.

You ain't no Robespierre, and I ain't nobility. I am a worthless philosopher, and you are a peasant.

Noblesse oblige. It is incompatible with liberty.

for all l care — Wittgenstein

Peasants do not have to care.

The UK queen devotes herself to serving the people her whole life; politicians only serve a term or two, and civil servants merely 9 to 5 weekdays, soldiers serve for a few years. Anyone who is not a servant at all is of very little value. Musicians, artists and sportsmen have a little entertainment value; philosophers are not even interesting for the most part, and invariably misleading. If you will not serve, you are a waste of space.

Anna Politkovskaya — Olivier5

Putin has publicly demonstrated many times that he basically does not understand what a discussion is. Especially a political one – according to Putin, a discussion of the inferior and the superior shouldn’t take place. And if the subordinate allows it, then he is an enemy. Putin behaves in this way not deliberately, not because he is a tyrant and despot ad natum – he was simply brought up in ways that the KGB drilled in him, and he considers this system ideal, which he has publicly stated more than once. And therefore, as soon as someone disagrees with him, Putin categorically demands "to stop the hysteria." (Hence he refuses to participate in pre-election debates, which are not in his nature, he is not capable of them, he does not know how to make a dialog. He is an exclusive monologist. According to the military model the subordinate must keep silent. A superior talks, but in the mode of a monologue, and then all the inferiors are obliged to pretend that they agree. A sort of ideological hazing, sometimes turning into physical destruction and elimination as it happened to Khodorkovsky). — Anna

This has the ring of truth. And if it is true, there is nothing to be done short of complete military defeat at any cost. It certainly makes more sense than the cries of delusion, stupidity, and pathology that are projected rather too easily in his general direction.

Having said that, I'm not sure all the contributors here understand what a discussion is either. :worry:

It may be worth asking where are the most erroneous judgments are made. — Jack Cummins

It's probably worth thinking a bit about what a judgement is and when one makes one. It looks to me that judgement is what is called for when the limits of knowledge are reached. It's associated for example in driving skill with anticipation. One judges the speed of other traffic and anticipates where they will go and where one will be in relation. In the circumstance of driving, good judgement means not maximising correct judgements but minimising rather eliminating disastrously wrong judgements. But if you are playing a taxi computer game, a few lethal accidents more or less is unimportant. Thus good judgement is something different from getting it right all the time or even most of the time. this is what I was hinting at with my previous example.