I am confident that technical solutions exist or can be implemented, but the technical solution is only one part of the problem (as I see it). Producing abundant, clean energy is the supply side. Consuming energy that isn't a fossil fuel presents its own set of problems, led by infrastructure and a massive installed base. The world's installed base of trains, trucks, planes, and cars run on oil. Heating and cooling buildings (offices, factories, homes) is also based mostly on fossil fuels too, as does the whole plastics industry.

Even if fusion started working tomorrow morning, it would take a long time (50 years, most likely) to complete the shift from fossil to fissile to fusion fuel, or sun, wind, and waves. This requires a huge re-assignment of wealth and resources, and a huge organizational project.

The Axis and Allied powers massively reassigned productive resources to wage WWII, but even massive climate change doesn't seem to quite match a major war for motivation. There is a vast amount of wealth all over the planet invested in fossil energy production and consumption. Disinvesting and reinvesting will also take a long time--before large amounts of production and consumption can change.

BTW, the developing world has the smallest installed base; in some ways they are in a much better position to shift gears than the developed world is.

Everyone, pretty much, who believes in anything is at least a little susceptible to satire (or worse, travesty) because beliefs are also blinders. Of course, satirists also have blinders on, and in order to ridicule have to overlook solid virtues and very complex flaws. Besides, there is usually a pit of cruelty in the best jokes, satires, and ridiculing diatribes.

"Greens" as protectors of the environment have minor flaws, major flaws, and some compound complex flaws.

The biggest of these compound complex flaws -- it isn't their flaw so much as damned reality -- is that shifting from adding CO2, methane, etc. to decreasing the amount of CO2, methane, etc. in a short period of time (say, 40 to 60 years) effectively means not the end of life but the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it.

Not just slowing the increase, but achieving actual decreases of green house gases requires the immediate and radical changes in the way we make our livings, manage or societies, produce our food, obtain clean water, and so on.

40 to 60 years is barely enough time, and may be way short of the time required to re-engineer agriculture, heating, cooling, transportation, production, consumption, recreation, and perhaps reproduction as well. Since most large societies are making phlegmatic progress toward coping with global warming, at best, it's safe to say that we will all continue to dilly dally around until it is too late to re-engineer society ourselves, and the brute forces of nature will do it for us.

Recycling glass, metal, plastic, paper, yard waste, organic kitchen waste, etc. is a good thing and we should all do it. To the extent that it is offered as THE solution, it is of course a lie. What we have to do is consume less; fewer wasteful products, produce fewer wasteful products, produce food that is less of a burden in terms of CO2, and all that sort of thing -- and it still might not be nearly enough.

Greens are impaled on the horns of a dilemma: Honest descriptions of the problems and the solutions amount to doomsday preaching, and people don't like that. Presenting palatably manageable problems and solutions will get one heard, but will fall far short of what seems to be necessary. Actually, we are all stuck on the horns of that dilemma, whether we are Greens or not.

Wikipedia's biggest problem is maintaining what it has in good condition and regularly adding new high quality information. This depends on money, to some extent, but it depends even more on an enlarged core of dedicated volunteers. The energy of the existing core of volunteers is flagging (after years of editing) and the volume of information is increasing, requiring more attention.

I think its worth worrying about because Wikipedia has been damned useful to me. Again and again it has provided for free and easy what otherwise might have been expensive and certainly laborious to get.

Comparing SEP to Wikipedia is like comparing the Joy of Cooking which covers everything from fried squirrel to lemon meringue with Thirty Nine Steps to Perfect Spaghetti Sauce. One is very comprehensive, the other is very specialized. I've used the JOC for 35 years. The specialized cookbooks were given a suitable burial. Perfect spaghetti sauce is available in jars.

True enough, the Internet as a whole is an ungraded mix of everything from gold to garbage. Human knowledge has been the same mixed heap since people paused in their rock knapping to think about it. The Internet does not present unique problems. It presents the problem of discriminating gold from garbage much more extensively, but this problem existed a long time before the Internet and the WWW were conceived.

Wikipedia is not a truckload of the ungraded heap. There are editors, there are readers with specialized knowledge like Andrewk, and corrections can be made. There are alerts on many Wiki entries noting deficiencies. Naturally the articles don't have the sterling provenance of SEP or the Mayo Clinic web site. Of course one should not use a Wiki article to practice medicine on ones self, but one shouldn't use the Mayo Clinic articles that way either. ("He who treats himself has a fool for a doctor.")

Except: when we surf the web we have to be our own librarians, making distinctions among what seems solidly authoritative, what seems pretty firmly anchored in reality, what seems to be dicey, what seems to be mostly error, and what is 100% rubbish. The only way of determining the grade of what I am reading (if I start knowing nothing about the topic) is to compare sources, and try to discriminate between what is well argued and supported and what is not. Usually it isn't hard to tell the difference.

If the information is too ambiguous to grade, then one has to head over to a library, a bookstore, or talk to an expert (and even then...)

In the Manifesto Marx said, "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

That's a state that most likely neither Augustine nor Aristotle (and Aquinas) contemplated, but it's the state we have to deal with today. Big trade deals (NAFTA, TPP, TTIP) are negotiated in consultation with and for the benefit of the puissant bourgeoisie -- major stock holders in corporations, commodity producers, major retailers, etc. Gun boat diplomacy is conducted on behalf of the class that wants the resources the natives are reluctant to give up.

The modern state is likely to play the complicated role of protector-oppressor--protecting its citizens from some harms (foreign and domestic, collective and personal) but also subjecting its citizens to other harms by both commission and omission. A state might simultaneously provide public health clinics and devise methods of preventing some citizens (the usual suspects) from voting.

I'd be curious to know if you have any books to recommend on this topic. — Thorongil

Two books have influenced my thinking on the topic:

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
The Anatomy of Crime by Adrian Raine

Pinker's book focused on the issues of violence among stone age hunter-gatherers, DIY justice, honor societies, the benefits of government, etc. I found most of this stuff in the first part of the book; it was a very thick book, and the print was not comfortable for me to read, so I didn't get too far into the book.

Raine's book is useful for thinking about the origins of psychopathies, and brain function and criminality. Just for example, a very large share of men in prison had head injuries as children--not necessarily repeated concussion of the sort that occurs in sports (though that creates problems too). They may have gotten hit by a baseball bat, had a fall, been in a car accident, etc. it isn't that head injuries lead straight to prison, but that they create problems for the individual which, if not dealt with (like through rehabilitation) may result in criminal behavior.

I'd buy these second hand or get them at the library. They were useful, but once you get the main idea...

Chris Stringer says there is evidence in our collective genes of prehistoric warfare. I'm glad I don't live in world where violent death is always nearby, but aren't there quite a few people in the world today who do live that way? — Mongrel

As a matter of fact, there are quite a few people who live that way. Some observers have noted that

a. where distrust of the central city/state authority is high...
b. where DIY justice is fairly common...
c. where there is some sort of on-your-sleave "honor" system...

...there is much more violence. In the US there is much more violence in the southeast, and in ghettos--both places where a, b, and c apply. (and it isn't just blacks, of course. The American Mafia was founded by Sicilians who had little love for the State, and carried out DIY justice, vendettas, and all that Godfather / Sopranos business.)

In New England, there is a "Puritan" tradition of the collective project of building the City On The Hill, more 'public humility', and stronger social taboos against acting outside the lines of authority to settle disputes. All this "state-friendly" tends to prevail across the northern tier of states.

The south was culturally shaped more by privileged Cavaliers (spoiled rich brats from England) and the New England culturally shaped by privileged, and dour, Puritans.

I don't think the Puritans thought of the state as a "necessary evil". God and the State, I suspect, had common aims in their minds.

Anthropological studies of violent death seem to favor St. Augustine. In social groupings prior to the development of governments with actual power, the death rate from violent deaths appeared to be quite high. (This is based on an examination of skulls stored in museums, or described in the literature of the field. What percentage of the skulls showed the wounds of a violent death (like blunt force injury, etc.) The statistics of violent death are much lower where centralized states existed. (A state doesn't need to be huge, just an effective manager of the population.)

People do seem to be more prone to resorting to violence to settle grudges where no governments exist. States provide the means of achieving justice without bashing in the brains of your enemies. States also provide police of some sort to stop angry people from bashing in a lot of brains.

Do it yourself justice is a "social sin" that the state strives to suppress.

But then, one could say that the creation of the state in the first place occurs because man is inherently political. This doesn't contradict Augustine. One of the objects of politics, seems like, is to control id-driven "sinful" individual behavior. Keep a lid on things, so that we can all go about our civic business more conveniently.

Explosives are inherently violent -- that's what explosives are for -- to produce a violent release of energy, to blow things up. Guns and bullets are also inherently violent. Pulling the trigger causes the rapid release of energy which drives a metal object down the barrel and out, more or less in a straight line, which is a convenient way of killing somebody.

Being violent doesn't make TNT and guns/ammo bad things; it just means they are violent, and not neutral objects. If you carve a small gun shape out of a bar of ivory soap -- that's not a violent object. It's a carved bar of soap.

Products are messages. Handing out condoms in a bar conveys several messages to a patron: you are a sexual person; you might have sex tonight (or soon); you should use condoms. Handing out guns before a riot would convey a much different message: people threaten you; you need to defend yourself (or you need to go on the offensive); guns are effective methods of defense or attack (whether they are or not...). Shoot, shoot to kill. Condoms and guns, as objects, convey very specific messages. Most products carry some sort of message.

We buy stuff because, among other reasons, the objects carry messages about us, the buyers, that we wish to associate ourselves with. A very small gun that fits nicely in a woman's purse carries a different message than a double barreled shotgun. An expensive electronic gadget (instead of an economical model) usually says something about how we value ourselves. "Oh, no; I really need the function and pizzazz of a really fine mobile phone. Pulling out a cheap phone at a conference just doesn't cut it."

The "meme" theory of politics, mass murder, etc. doesn't really explain anything, and it doesn't open any avenues towards the solution to what you or I identify as problematic behavior.

Is Pokemon Go a meme, a fad, a commercially successful game, a conspiracy, or an illusion? I don't know. Haven't played it. But if it were to be identified as a meme, what could you do about it?

DNA, of course, maintains cellular continuity. Our neurons in the brain don't turn over, apparently, but some new ones can be added, and the connections among the neurons change as we learn and forget. What specific individuals perceive and remember varies from person to person. Ten eye-witnesses of one event sometimes have very divergent accounts of what they "saw". Sometimes people don't see anything, even though it is happening right in front of them.

It's possible our mental continuity is weaker than we would like to think. It's quite possible (probable?) we aren't experiencing what the quite similar person sitting next to us is experiencing. Worse, it's possible that we aren't even experiencing what we think we are experiencing. Still, we feel that our identity as such-and-such-a-person is stable now, was stable yesterday, and will be stable tomorrow, within a reasonable confidence level.

Memory ties identity together over time. We know this, because when people lose their memories (like from alzheimers disease, they forget their children, their spouses, and eventually, who they are. They don't know, anymore. Their identity has disappeared for them--and if it has disappeared for them, hasn't their identity disappeared for us to? Who is a person who no longer knows who they are? Memory isn't perfect, even in very healthy people with otherwise excellent brain function, and therefore our identities can't be "perfect".

Are the imperfections of memory, and identity, the reason many people hold on to many mementos of their past--the first grade report cards, early toys, and all that 'stuff' from their life? Does it help assure them of who they are? My own belief is that none of this stuff is necessary as long as one's memory is working reasonably well. when memory fails, these mementos aren't going to help very much. One has to remember the significance of the memory aids.

I'm sorry, but I am not in a position to support Mars at this time. Maybe I could support a stapler, but we should have long since gone paperless, and staples are obsolete.

An action MAY be moral, or not, independently of our intentions, but not necessarily. If you intend to do something immoral and do it, I don't see why the act should be said to "stand independently of intentions". Or, maybe intentions don't matter sometimes. If you take care of dozens of poor people in order to get good PR, and for no other reason, you have still done a good thing, even though your intentions were lousy. And if you did a bad thing to fulfill intentions you think are good (like ending the suffering of terminally ill people without the dying asking you to do that) I don't think it makes any difference how noble you thought your intentions were.

Are you conflating 'culpability' with 'intention'? You may have intended to wish your daughter a happy 10th birthday by texting her a message while driving, and you are culpable for running over another 10 year old girl because you weren't paying attention to driving your car.

All very good points.

Sex (specifically, xx and xy) is not as precise as we might like. Sex evolved to achieve xx with xy mating. That's all it had to do. It could be imprecise as it happened to be, as long as mating occurred. In the excessively brain-mattered humans, the imprecision of sex has caused all sorts of odd-ball things, high heels being the least of them.

By the way, WWI helped make high heels popular with non-elite women in the US. Soldiers who had seen prostitutes (whores, sex workers, stimulation enhancement technicians) in Paris wearing high heels, thought they looked sexy, and urged their wives back in Des Moines to get a pair, pronto. High heels make for a shapelier leg.

Marlon Riggs film, Tongues Untied (1989) -- about black gay men -- does a nice job with identity. Riggs and his several speakers delve into consciously making an identity as black gay men, apart from straight whites, apart from straight blacks, and apart from white gays--none of whose identity is appropriate for them, given their reality.

Winde Rienstra's "Bamboo Heel," 2012. Made from bamboo, glue, and plastic cable ties.
The designer states her shoes exist on the boundary of clothing and art object. (IOW, rubbish.)
(Brooklyn Art Museum)

the problem with uber-liberals is that they are so focused on not offending anyone that they completely lose any legitimacy. — darthbarracuda

If uber-liberals learned how to become more offensive, would they then be more legitimate?

I would be happy to do an in-service for uber-liberals on how to be really unpleasantly offensive. Then they could gain legitimacy.

my point here is more about the fact that some acts of mass murder are not motivated by political ideology, but carried out by crazed individuals who are copying what they've seen in the media. The behaviour is becoming normalised; it's like a 'life choice' for a particular — Wayfarer

I think you are right: Some mass murderers are not motivated by any ideology at all, but are the result of rationally disordered thinking. The murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary falls into this category. Various other violent outbreaks were of similar origin. (It seems like these are more common in the US. I suspect this is owning to Americans being less ideological, not crazier. Europeans are at least as crazy as everybody else.

Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City) however, seems to have been an ideologically motivated bomber.

As to whether mass killing is becoming normalized, no. An aberration in behavior that appears more often than we would like is still abnormal. The action of a disordered mind isn't "normalized".

A better example of normalization would be politically oriented bombing such as the IRA conducted in Great Britain. Bombs weren't the only weapons the IRA used, but they used then a lot for 30 years. Bombs have the advantage of separating the bomber safely from the explosion (if all goes according to plan) and even of warning the occupants of a bomb about to blow up. Gunman can't shoot and not be present, and so far as I know at least, no gunman has warned a city that 10 to 100 people will be shot later that day, or in 15 minutes. Surprise is a critical component

Of course, people can mix disordered thinking and ideology. Sometimes that seems like a given.

Gender begins in Biology. Males produce sperm, women produce eggs and bear children. Women also lactate. Ever since mammals were invented (what, 65-75 million years ago?) males and females have had different roles. This was an inflexible rule for all humans, up to very recently. Freud thought that "Biology is destiny." During the second wave of feminism, the idea that "Biology is not destiny" was put forward. This has become a contemporary article of faith. "Well, I can be whatever I want to be."

Coming out of the same time period as the second wave of feminism was the principle that "Nature bats last". Humans may load the bases, but... nature bats last. Man proposes, nature disposes.

Granted: there is nothing in biology that says evolution designed the well-dressed apron-wearing housewife in heels whose only job was to take care of the home, breed, raise children, and be her husband's sexual service. Before the first wave of feminism, never mind the second, women were performing a whole host of hard jobs that women in advanced economies aren't anxious to do: Carrying all the water a family would use--from source to home (maybe a mile or more, 1 gallon = 8 pounds), barefoot construction work, milking cows, spinning and weaving, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, cooking...

So: we know women can work, have hard muscles, and carry on.

Some among the third wave of feminists, especially, aren't seeking a liberation from the last vestiges of gendered limitation to unlock more resources for humanity. It's more like they are seeking a very individually interpreted "I am going to have it all" kind of fantasy. The single woman deciding to raise children alone (not because of necessity, but by choice) is an example of this narcissistic fantasy.

She can do this if she wants to, I suppose, but why would she? There is much evidence that children benefit from living in a family with male and female parents; that boys and girls have men and women to model appropriate gendered behavior. There is evidence (since the 1970s) that families with two incomes do better than families with only one income. Alas. Obtaining the benefits of father mother/male female role models and double income means that the liberated woman has to put up with this male who won't orbit in perfect sync with her, and who will be a "jerk"--not be her sycophant..

Where did women get this idea? Most likely they got it from men who viewed women as subservient bitches. Not a great model.

Whatever happened to Agustino? Needs not met, probably.

And yet it does resemble the wave of anarchist terrorism in the late 19th century. — mcdoodle

None of this is exculpatory, but it is important to remember that Europe hasn't been all sweetness and light since the death of Hitler in 1945.

Let's not forget the Baader-Meinhof Gang, AKA the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells of the late 20th century.

[edited text from Wikipedia following] They engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shoot-outs with police over the course of three decades. Their activity peaked in late 1977, which led to a national crisis that became known as the "German Autumn." The RAF has been held responsible for thirty-four deaths as well as many injuries throughout its almost thirty years of activity. Although better-known, the RAF conducted fewer attacks than the Revolutionary Cells (German: Revolutionäre Zellen, RZ), which is held responsible for 296 bomb attacks, arson and other attacks between 1973 and 1995.

The Revolutionary Cells is perhaps most famous internationally for hijacking an Air France flight in cooperation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations and diverting it to Uganda's Entebbe Airport, where they were granted temporary asylum until their deaths during Operation Entebbe, a hostage rescue mission carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on 4 July 1976.[4]

There were also a few bombs set off in Great Britain over the course of 30 years.

"According to the Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN), a research project at the University of Ulster,[6] the Provisional IRA was responsible for the deaths of 1,823 people during the Troubles up to 2001. This figure includes 'republican' killings not attributed to any group. It is just under half of the total deaths in the conflict. Of that figure..." [Wikipedia]'

France was at war with Algeria:

"Though exact death tolls don’t exist, there are estimates that hundreds of thousands to more than a million Algerian Muslims died in the war, with tens of thousands of French military and civilians perishing in the conflict" before the ceasefire in 1962. (Life Magazine)

Yes, it's possible; a good life is attainable.

A good life begins by affirming the possibility. Having affirmed the possibility, the next step is to guide oneself toward its attainment.

There are no guarantees, though maintaining the position that a good life is not attainable would seem to be the best possible path toward failing to achieve one.

Our identity is made for us, but it is ours none the less, and is either beyond remodeling after a certain point, or remodel-able only through the most strenuous possible efforts (and maybe not even then). — Bitter Crank

What makes you say that? — Moliere

That "our identity is made for us" is an observation of other people, particularly children. One sees the parents actively contributing to the child's identity; one sees differences in newborns--they aren't all alike. One sees familial commonalities, and commonalities based on community.

That it is hard to remodel identity is a first hand experience. I have felt like the same person for a very long time (not 70 years, since I wasn't thinking about "who am I, anyway?" straight out of the womb). I don't know at what age I ceased being passive clay and started being more self directed. Too far back for reliable memory. But I have felt continuous. Changed? Sure. I've lost quite a bit of fire-in-the-belly I used to have, but the kinds of thinking I find myself doing have been going on for at least 50 years.

Nature/Nurture, Constructionist/Essentialist... We have different approaches here. You give more weight to nurture and favor a constructionist approach. Your approach is as workable as my more nature and essentialist approach. They are equally workable because in fact, both processes are always engaged in permutations often too complex for us to follow in detail.

It's possible, have to admit, that identity may not be equally fixed for every person. It's fixed and been solidly anchored for me. Bedrock stable identity may not always be a virtue or an advantage. There were times I wished I could construct a different identity -- it just didn't work.

DNA sets the table. It doesn't program us, it gives us basic capacities, among which is the capacity to respond to experience. How well we can respond to experience is directed by DNA. What else but genetic instructions would guide the construction and function of the brain?

I would still say there's such a thing as not choosing who you are. — Moliere

I agree: we don't get to choose our parents. Neither do we get to choose the in utero environment; we don't get to choose much of anything for quite a while once we are born--and during that time others are making choices for us, willy nilly. Clearly, the child has been fathered by a multitude of different influences.

One could claim that it is all experience and DNA doesn't matter, if it weren't for evidence to the contrary. The lives of individual cells (gut, brain, skin, etc.) respond to the environment, but how does a cell manage it's response? DNA is always active in cells, giving instructions, suppressing one thing, expressing something else, even directing the cell to dispose of itself.

How well a neuron makes connections with other neurons (in a cascade of connections) is controlled by DNA and shaped by environment. We sadly or mercifully don't remember telephone numbers given to us at the bar because alcohol interferes with memory. We might try to remember this hunks number, but alas, our blood alcohol level is so high we won't even remember who gave us the number if we did write it down. (My number collecting days goes back to when people still smoked in bars and one had match books on which to write numbers...before cell phones that could document the whole thing.)

One person takes a sun bath and gets a tan; someone else does the same thing and gets skin cancer. Why? DNA.

Our identity is made for us, but it is ours none the less, and is either beyond remodeling after a certain point, or remodel-able only through the most strenuous possible efforts (and maybe not even then).

I take it that identity is not something basic to our psychological makeup, even as individuals. There are more basic operations of the human mind than our identity, such as perception, memory, desires, or inclinations. — Moliere

I take it that identity is the core of our psychological makeup, and I agree there are more basic operations then identity. The most basic component of the mind are the genetic instructions that produce our bodies and shape the kinds of experiences we each can have. Sensory apparatus, memory capacity, desire--a host of features--rest on DNA.

Physical experiences, imagination, acquisition of knowledge (and exactly what knowledge is acquired), insights, social interactions (and exactly what social interactions), exactly what is learned (and not learned) and so forth contribute to a kernel of identity that is present from the beginning of a life. Children are evidently NOT blank chips which can just be encoded by parent, siblings, school, the community, religion, the military, et al--though everyone wants to take a crack at it. Each child is different at the beginning of the growth and maturation process and each one comes out the other end as unlike all the others. Among other things, each one's identity of "who I am" is unique--for better or for worse, stronger or weaker, pure or corruptible, controlling or live-and-let-live, shallow or deep, and so on.

Identity is always complexly multiply dimensioned, not entirely fixed, not entirely fluid. There are questions one can inquire of a person: "Do you put on different masks for different situations, or are you the same person from one situation to another" for example? Whether one has a closet full of masks or only the one face isn't 'good' or 'bad' but it reveals an important difference. "When may one lie and when must one tell the truth?" is another. There are many.

It is a mistake to say that one's identity is "gay" (or something else). I am Gay, and a couple dozen other attributes that are about as non-negotiable. I "let go of grudges", I am "risk tolerant", I am thrifty. These are parts of my identity that have been there for as long as I can remember. DNA might very well determine whether we are gay or straight, risk tolerant or not, and how much we are able to forget. Out of things that DNA can determine come features of identity that DNA can't determine, like "being a Republican" and "a fundamentalist evangelical" which are tied to low ambiguity tolerance, a streak of authoritarianism, and at least mild stupidity.

Plane crashes, whether they involve 300 or 3, tend to get press. Why, don't know. Media have been reporting small aircraft crashes involving 1, 2, or 3 people, and whether they involve fatalities or not, where they might not report car crashes involving 1, 2, or 3 passengers.

Editors in newsrooms have to decide what's interesting, important, and relevant, and what's not. It isn't just a question of which stories make more money. I guess editors identify more with the horror of falling out of the sky than getting gored by one's trusty Ford.

We aren't good at assessing relative risk, whether it is driving vs. flying, terrorism vs. accidents at home, the risk of dying from disease vs. the risk of vaccination (a child recently died from diphtheria because his parents thought vaccinations were risky), the risk of being sent home from the hospital too soon vs. the risk of being infected with nosocomial infections from staying in the hospital too long, etc.

Terrorism, as generally understood, is the action of the disempowered attempting to gain power. — unenlightened

I didn't think the invasion of Iraq was a good idea -- ditto for the invasion of Kuwait, ditto for the war in Afghanistan, or Vietnam. It was bad policy and bad human behavior--"shock and awe" bombing, and like actions. Our poor management of Iraq after we had collapsed the government caused a lot of additional problems, on down to the present.

If an imperial power can't competently invade, take over, and then control a country, it should leave it alone. We did ok on the Invade part, but performed poorly on the take over and control part -- which is critical. Had we done a better job of taking over and controlling Iraq, everyone would have been better off.

The invasion, competent or klutzy, did not cause inter-sectarian hostility between Sunni and Shia'a Moslems, or hostile exclusionary policies towards Christian Arabs and other minorities there. Previously suppressed hostilities came out into the open. We should have kept a lid on that sort of crap. Still, we were not instructing or forcing anyone in the Middle East to blow themselves up, blow up a car loaded with explosives in a food market in a targeted neighborhood, blow up a mosque, and so on.

The extreme Moslem radicals are terrorists and a threat to everyone, be they Moslems, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or something else, because of their extreme ideology. They are as likely to blow up their own cultural heritage or the world's heritage (like the libraries in Timbuktu, or the pre-Islam ruins in Syria, or the great Buddha statues, etc.

Thus the shooting of an already subdued black man by the police is not called terrorism, whereas the 'retaliatory' shooting of police officers more likely is. And yes, I am saying that the former is more culpable than the latter. Not that I support either. — unenlightened

The police are charged with maintaining the safety of society. Some people actively threaten the safety of society and if they resist arrest or persist in violence, will be killed. The acts of protecting a society and the acts of threatening a society are not equivalent.

Naturally, no one likes being pulled over by cops, or be suddenly confronted by an investigating officer, and so forth. But that's what the police do. We want them to that, even if we don't ourselves like being the object of policing.

In fact, police shoot more white men than black men, if it makes you feel better. Granted, though, policing falls heavier on black communities than white communities, while at the same time, not increasing the safety of black residents with respect to each other.

Blacks kill each other at a much higher rate than whites or cops kill black people. The gross amount of violence in Chicago this year is largely limited to black violence in black neighborhoods. A case can be made that the black on black killing is actually "caused by the police" (or more precisely, not sufficiently prevented). IF the police forces were doing their jobs more effectively, they would apprehend the black men who do the shooting. They are not, and in many ghettos, murderers operate with a fair amount of impunity, killing again and again (they're not series killers, they're more like hired guns). There certainly is such a thing as oppression, but the virtue of the oppressed is not therefore superior.

The black community and the police are locked in a mutually self-fulfilling prophecy: The blacks don't trust the police, and don't cooperate with the police; the police expect hostility and resistance from blacks and they get it. Police/community relationships tend to be negative. Encounters which may not involve major crime can turn deadly quickly.

What about the 5 Great Extinctions--Ordovician-Silurian extinction occurred about 439 million years ago, then the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian-Triassic extinction, the Triassic extinction, and finally the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction? Life doesn't always just keep going on, and on and on...

Actually, I've always had a good time in Chicago, going back to the 60s when Old Town was in its hippie hay days and as recently as last fall.

↪Mongrel I say that each person is responsible for each other's actions. I hit you, I am responsible for you hitting me back, or you hitting another. I refuse your need, I am responsible for your despair. — unenlightened

Neither extreme position "we are always responsible for others' actions" NOR "we are responsible only for our own actions" dissolves the opposite. They both apply. But it isn't appropriate to apply the standards for judging interpersonal actions to the much more complex history of relations between large groups of people over long periods of time. "You and me" doesn't map onto the relationship between "Tibet and China" or any other large and ancient relationship.

At some point we have to break off tracking claims and counterclaims.

Jews and Palestinians can debate who got to a particular strip of land first till hell freezes over, but the the alleged victories or defeats of 2500 years ago can't now be the basis of land claims. Maybe the baloney islamic state blames the Crusaders for their hatred; or maybe the much later French and British occupation of the Middle East, or maybe the recent (and ongoing) American military program (going back to 2003).

Everyone is responsible and everyone is guilty--back to Pope Urban II in 1095 who started the first Crusade? No.

I don't like the Islamic state, and I don't like Western Christian groups who have similar ideas:

IS seeks to eradicate obstacles to restoring God's rule on Earth and to defend the Muslim community, or umma, against infidels and apostates.

The group has welcomed the prospect of direct confrontation with the US-led coalition, viewing it as a harbinger of an end-of-times showdown between Muslims and their enemies described in Islamic apocalyptic prophecies.

Once people latch on to "holy causes" such as this, they generally start behaving very badly. They are to a large extent, "a-historical". Agree with them or not, the Palestinians at least have real historical grievances against the modern state of Israel. Pakistan and India have real historical grievances. Sham states that are trying to bring about the apocalypse can't have historical grievances, almost by definition.

Grievances they have; grievances for which I and my fellow Americans are not responsible. (We are responsible for some bad actions and outcomes, just like every country is, but we are not responsible just because some bunch of religious zealots decides to target us.)

The article by William R. Polk which Saphsin (above) cited and quoted is a better approach than just throwing a blanket of individual interpersonal responsibility over international relations.

It is not that hard to understand the state of mind that sees the world to be run by a tyrannical, exploitative, monstrous cabal equivalent to the Nazis, against which every and any means of resistance is morally defensible. — unenlightened

In what way is this state of mind which
a. sees the world run by a tyrannical, exploitative, monstrous cabal
b. sees any means of resistance as morally defensible
not itself rather like the Nazis? And where is the "within" wherein the poisonous regime might be dismantled?

Islamic States is not an anomaly. Running roughshod over other peoples, causing much deliberate and collateral damage is a human modus operandi. Our fellow 'paragon of animals', those with whom we share the 'apex of creation', pretty much all behave the same, given the opportunity. It's who we [humans] are, it's what we [humans] do.

Fortunately, it is also in our collective common interest to rein in roughshod horses as often as possible, be they ours or someone else's, lest we end up in Armageddon or some other sort of final "kill them all" solution.

So... how do we rein in Islamic State? How, without or within?

Scarcity is the motivating force behind action.
Fatigue is the inevitable end-process of any motivated action.
The Sun cannot sustain itself indefinitely...

If Abundance and Energy were the aspects of reality, then no action would occur, because nothing would need anything. — darthbarracuda

This is all true, though we need not concern ourselves with the very far distant demise of the solar system as a life-friendly environment. The planets and sun won't disappear, but they won't be the same. The earth will be a dead planet, the sun will no longer sustain life. We, as a species, will almost certainly have extinguished long before then, along with most of the other extant species. Life began 3.5 billion years ago, life has been continuous since it began, but almost all species have extinguished along the way. We will too--long before life becomes impossible.

You and I think scarcity is reality, but there are some people (oddly enough, certain marxists and certain Trumpences`, who deny that scarcity is a factor in human life. "We can always overcome scarcity one way or another." True hogwash. Theoretically, the earth contains within its mass more than we will ever need, but the second element, Fatigue, has to be taken into consideration. We do not have enough energy to extract everything useful from the mass of the earth, and still live here.

Animals do get weary--I'm getting tired out, for sure--and our human systems fatigue as well. Society fatigues, wears out, get's tired, dull, stupid, and extinguishes. So do ecologies.

I don't get it either.

How do you think gendering words began (back in the unmapped mists of long ago)?

Here's a bit of a lesson on American Sign Language -- how is gender expressed? Now, it makes sense that man, woman, aunt, and uncle are expressed with gender, since they have different gonads and roles. But a frying pan? A shotgun? A carrot? A knothole? In some languages gendered words are as thick as hairs on a golden retriever. Why? What function did this serve, once upon a time?

SELECT SUBTITLES IN OPTIONS

I do believe that in terms of flexibility of employment, males have it better off. They are just able to do more with their size and strength. — darthbarracuda

There is perhaps not as much support for this idea as you or I might like. In many regions of the world, women perform a lot of heavy labor--construction, manufacturing, agriculture, carrying water, etc. It is true that men, on average, have larger skeletons and larger muscles, and this is an advantage for performing heavy labor, but it isn't an absolute differentiator in ordinary work situations.

In an unindustrialized world where there are no machines, male size and muscle mass is more of an work advantage, but that isn't the world we live in now.

But instead of getting all worked up about who's what and what's legitimate, we should just get rid of genders entirely. Enough of all this "gender-fluidity" bullshit - you want to identify as a man, a woman, a transgender, or a tree then go ahead and identify as whatever you want to identify as. Nobody should care that much, and we shouldn't try to put a label on everyone. Genders have become a symptom of special snowflake syndrome. Just get rid of gender entirely and call yourself a human being who has a certain genitalia. — darthbarracuda

I'm as tired as you are of gender fluidity bullshit and special snowflake syndromes. Both of them are luxury goods that wealthy, reasonably peaceful societies can afford and enjoy. People living close to the edge of survival can't screw around with this sort of stuff.

That said, our pandemic of narcissism which is amplified by social media (and leads to blizzards of special snowflakes) doesn't seem to be abating. Stable gender definitions are useful organizing tools for individuals and societies.

I feel like this would remove confusion and drama and also lead to a much more open society in which roles are not placed upon anyone, and labels aren't used as a reactionary device. — darthbarracuda

What causes confusion is gender fluidity, not gender stability. Another confusing tactic is misapplying terms. For instance, being "anti-military" isn't a gender issue, even if a lot of men and women are pro-military.

Being part of the gay community since the late 1960s, I have been in a position to observe some of this increasing fluidity first hand. In the beginning, it was gay liberation for gay men and gay women. Then it became gay and lesbian liberation. Then gay, lesbian, and bisexual liberation. (Transvestites -- aka drag queens -- were a theatrical concept more than gender definition.) Then gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender liberation, transgender taking on a very broad definition. At this point I guess it is GLBTQ + anything someone wants to tack on. All this happened over just a few years, pleasing some people and dismaying others.

A lot of this hyper-differentiation comes out of a kind of academic marxism which is obsessed with difference. Obviously, the gay community was a more likely place for all this to play out than your average Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce.

What strikes me is that most people stick to the basic gender definitions. The number of people who are actively involved in gender change (transitive) is very small. The business of separate sanitary accommodation for trans-persons is a tempest in a toilet bowl. There just aren't that many, and there aren't likely to be that many.

The small number of actual transgendered persons doesn't prevent a lot of special fluid snowflakes from fastening on to the issue as if it was equivalent to WWIII.

My solution has been to turn over, tune out and turn off most of this very peripheral, epiphenomenal crap.

After we divide states into "nothingness" and "somethingness", we can divide "somethingness" into

a. good something
b. bad something
c. indifferent something

The state of "nothingness" is neither good, bad, nor indifferent. It's empty. If one has never had a migraine headache, one can not think of "not having a migraine". Once one has had one, "migraine headache" becomes a bad something, and it's absence becomes a "good something". I haven't been shot. Being shot is a nothingness. I have broken bones several times. The prospective nonexistence of the cast is definitely a something to look forward to.

The perfect lemon meringue pie has been eaten. There is nothing left. You didn't arrive in time to get a slice. It's a nothing to you. To the lucky 6 who did eat it, it is a good something. Your suffering is nothing to us 6. We, after all, don't have your problem.

Larpenter Avenue, the street Philandro Castile was stopped on, is an E-W thoroughfare, running from downtown Minneapolis to a large park on the east side of St. Paul. It's bordered by 2 or 3 little "suburbs" which are more like neighborhoods of St. Paul. Both of these suburbs--Falcon Heights and St. Anthony--have very solid property values and numerous amenities. I doubt if either one needs income from traffic fines. Both are roughly 85%-90% white.

the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area is quite large and facilities of all kinds are scattered all over the place. One has to travel across many municipal boundaries to carry on a normal life. The main avenues of urban travel are Interstate 35 and 94, and state highways 61, 52, 55, and 36. These are patrolled by the MN Highway patrol. Minneapolis and St. Paul police patrol their cities' streets, along with county sheriffs. Smaller suburbs frequently share police costs. I don't think fines figure into local budgets in a significant way.

Speed traps and ticket factories are usually found in really small rural Minnesota burgs where property tax income is very low.

I have no information on whether Mr. Castile revealed that he was a registered concealed gun carrier in any of his earlier stops. If he did, it apparently wasn't an issue.

What I have heard on NPR is that the best procedure for gun carriers who are stopped by the police is:

1. roll down your window
2. put your hands on the upper half of the steering wheel
3. tell the officer you carry a gun, or have a gun in the car, and where it is
4. ask the officer what he (or she) wants you to do next.
5. keep your gun and car registration someplace other than your back pocket -- like on the visor or in your shirt pocket, where reaching for it doesn't look threatening.

I don't drive, and the Second Amendment anti-personnel missiles I carry on my bicycle are always visible. Police seem to be OK with that.

It is difficult to maintain perspective in the FaceBook of first-person streaming of police shootings and their aftermath.

Per the Washington Post... In 2015 he police shot 965 persons; 564 were armed with a gun, 281 were armed with some other weapon; only 90 were not armed. only 4% of those killed by police fire were unarmed. The Washington Post found that the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: they were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled [another significant problem], or they ran when officers told them to halt.

The killing of Fhilando Castile might not have happened if he were white; it might also not have happened if he was unarmed (he was armed with a gun, legally). It might also be the case that his record of 55 driving citations (some dismissed) played a role in his being stopped in the first place.

Meanwhile, a 2 year old was killed and a 15 month old was injured by stray bullets from one of two shooters firing away at each other in North Minneapolis (our 'ghetto'). The connections between 32 year old Philando and the dead 2 year are guns.

Carrying a gun may be legal, but we see over and over that it is ill-advised. The presence of a gun alone can lead to adverse outcomes that wouldn't otherwise occur.

None of this alters the fact that proportionately police kill more blacks than whites, while numerically killing more whites than blacks. That is a real problem, but it isn't the case that blacks come into contact with the police on a random basis. Blacks tend to be involved in crime much more often than their population would predict. Whites on the other hand, are involved in crime about as often as their population would predict.

Coming in contact with the police in any negative context raises one's risk. Being armed, male, and black increases personal risk more, because the police identify such characteristics as increasing the threat level.

Leadership and follower-ship are overdue to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
— unenlightened

I just want to note that I'm sympathetic to this line of thinking. — Moliere

Nice idea, but...

The emotive aspects of human thinking and behavior don't allow for the abolition of either "follow the leader" or "lead the following". It isn't that individuals can't be dispassionate, it's that they can't be dispassionate enough to still be dispassionate in groups. We're stuck with leadership and followership, like it or not.

There are different kinds of Ls and Fs, though. At one end of the spectrum there are "top gestapo leaders" who maintain their position through violence. There is also the slavish follower who gravitates to this kind of thug rule. At the other end of the spectrum are the leaders who inspire by examples of the good, the just, and the true, and whose followers are finely transformed. Hitler, or Stalin, serves pretty well as anchors for the worst negative extreme. Jesus does well as the anchor at the opposite end.

Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich are first and second echelon followers of Hitler. The Nazi hierarchy was a branching pyramid of leaders and followers, from Hitler on down to party members. Jesus didn't establish any sort of hierarchy. Jesus, the Apostles, Paul, and the string of followers was initially flat, in terms of structure. "Flatness" took on a third dimension fairly soon, as the the early church grew.

Most of the world's leaders and followers are in the middle, well away from the extremes. Leaders generally climb well established structures (party, corporation, civil service, hierarchies of various kinds) and at each level there are followers who owe a given leader quite limited fealty. Followers, in most cases, understand they are largely responsible for themselves and for what they do.

A chair of a state, county, or provincial political party likely owes his position to both higher party officials and lower party members. Given competition from below for leadership roles, and controls from above, leaders are insecure enough to keep them from becoming minor despots. Followers have lots of interests besides those of the party,

When 10, or 100, or 1000 unaffiliated people get together for a novel purpose without an established hierarchy or structure of any kind, we find a lot of jockeying of individuals into position -- some climbing, others shoved into the position. Most of us are not emotionally or intellectually equipped to operate effectively in a consensus circle of decision making. a few people who can serve as group catalysts might get the group to make consensus decisions, but the approach is usually too unwieldy to allow for quick responsiveness.

So, to make a long story short, we're stuck with leaders and followers. We can do better and worse, depending.

Your capitalization of "You" is odd by the way — Hanover

Perhaps David is confusing You with G-d, which is really odd.

What obliges us (which I'm assuming implies "us humans")? Or do You mean "us philosophically-inclined people"? In any case, isn't that obligation merely part of Your own sense of morality, which likely doesn't apply to many people? Or do You mean, we literally have to because there is no way to not, as it is the way humans process and deal with morality? — David

"Us philosophically-inclined people" are definitely obliged to examine and defend any definition of good, but not everyone is philosophically inclined. Believers in a faith system do well to examine and defend what they believe as a means to achieve the good. Just because one was raised as a Christian, Jew, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Hindu... whatever, doesn't mean one has engaged in examination and defense of one's beliefs. Examination and defense in a dialogue with other believers is better, with skeptical believers, or non-believers is best.

What do You think would would happen if people, rather than defend their beliefs attempted to reconcile them with others', holding neither above the other before evaluation of which is more reasonable or correct? Is that even fundamentally possible, or is the root of our very decisions about which beliefs are better than others, the determinant, the judge in our heads, so fundamentally decided by the beliefs that are already held that there is no reconciliation? Perhaps, this is more of a psychological question than a philosophical one, but I'd still like to hear peoples' stances. — David

I don't believe there is any point in trying to reconcile disparate beliefs. Catholics and Protestants might reconcile beliefs or practices with the help of a few rounds of beer. Christians and Hindus are too dissimilar, as are Jews and Buddhists, Sikhs and animists, and so on.

Most religions have picked up pieces of theological flotsam and jetsam from other religions over the course of their histories, but I'm not in favor of contemporary syncretism. Jesus and Buddha are both worthy of study by believers of any faith, but but we don't have to make a smoothie of them.

My personal experience has been thus: Having been raised by enthusiastic and committed believers, the principles of Christianity has been too deeply installed to be altogether eradicated. Protestant theology is my "operating system" regardless of what I have come to believe. This is not a comfortable arrangement, but there's not much I can do about it (believe me, I've tried).

I think even philosophically inclined people do better to accept that they possess a given cultural history (whether they like it or not) then to suppose that culture can just be switched out like so many memory chips. Even those raised in wishy-washy suburbias devoted to Walmart consumerism and the 3 car garage have an installed cultural base to acknowledge.

Maybe our native culture is a rut from which there is no escape, but we can certainly build on, even transcend the culture we started with. It's hard work, though.

am I doing this forum right? — David

You are. Some put up a post and rarely follow up, others engage steadily with responses.

So, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that God does exist. — Hanover

Fine by me.

What anchors the good to reality if not God? — Hanover

Are you suggesting that God is the source of good, actively anchors the good to reality, or that God is the hook on which we hang our definition of good?

Is it just man's declaration of what is good? Or, is the good good regardless of what demented person might call it bad? Unless you're willing to admit that the good is just some manmade invention subject to redefinition at will (and rejecting the view that our understanding of the good evolves over time, getting ever closer to the truth with the passage of time), it strikes me that you are a theist. — Hanover

Whether one believes that God is the source of good, actively anchors the good, or is a hook, we are still obliged to examine and defend any definition of good. God told the Israelites to kill everyone in town, including the babies by bashing in their heads against the stone wall. He also said to love mercy. Believers have to examine and defend the words (which are written by various someones...) in the Bible. If God says that Israel's burnt offerings are disgusting, and what he would really like are a few more genuinely contrite hearts, one has to examine and defend it. If one believes that it is immoral to commit adultery, for instance, because God said so, one will have to examine and defend that position.

If I decide on a list of 10 principles that I think are good, and you come up with a completely different list, both of us have to examine and defend what we think is good. There are several definitions of "good" circulating among the 7 billion + people. Most of the people think they are right. (People generally don't adhere to definitions that they think are wrong, bad, or stupid.) People examine and defend what they view as right. This leads to conflict, but there is nothing new about that.

Your god is what is good, just, and pure, and that god is what the Christian and the pious atheist both worship, just calling themselves different names. — Hanover

That's a nice formulation. I will examine, and maybe defend it.