Auld Lang Syne, and all. Glugs a swig from a bottle of Summit Brewing Bohemian Style Pilsener. Brewed in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hoppy, hoppy, joy joy.

Oh, one other thing: Happy New Year. Auld lang syne and all that Robert Burns.

We twa hae run about the braes,---We two have run about the slopes,
and pou’d the gowans fine;---and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,---But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
sin' auld lang syne.---since auld lang syne.

You should denounce them - a traitor is a traitor. There is no excuse for immoral behavior. Probably I would be a traitor too, if I was in their shoes. But there's no excuse for me either. What is wrong, is wrong. — Agustino

One is committing immorality by forcing the other one to make a decision, the other one is committing immorality by sacrificing their family/friends for their own survival. Both are immoral, to different degrees, of course. — Agustino

There is something wrong with a moral system that allows too much slipping and sliding - rationalizing our way around moral failures, as you put it. There is also something wrong with a moral system that is rigidly black and white, and makes no exceptions.

Naturally, "a commandment like, "thou shall not kill" can not be provided by the law giver with amendments and lists of exceptions. No killing, no stealing, no lechery, no blasphemy PERIOD -- never, under any circumstances -- Is the way commandments get stated. Or laws, or moral principles. The amendments and exceptions are added by the scholars--and these are critical additions.

The scholars can say, "Never kill, except to protect the life of a spouse or child or yourself; never steal unless starvation is the alternative. If you are compelled to commit blaspheme to save yourself, it won't count against you.." and so on."

The scholars, in service to the spirit of the law giver, recognize that there are circumstances so dehumanized, so hellish, that no moral decision can be made by the victim. The concentration camp was one such place. Such places do not merely coerce one into violating one's morals, they obliterate the boundaries of all morality. Indeed, they obliterate the boundaries of the human as well.

Most of the bad situations we might find ourselves in won't be quite as bad as Auschwitz, Treblinka, or another Nazi hell hole. But we could still find ourselves in situations where the boundaries of morality and humanity were eroded enough to make moral decisions practically irrelevant.

Further, a moral system worth it's salt will provide for failure. Nobody is perfect, everybody is quite flawed. Failure to live up to the law giver's high standards will be epidemic and endemic. The wise law giver recognizes this, and provides for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Some people like the Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) expressed the hard assed approach to morality quite well:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.

You have offended him infinitely ... And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. ...

O sinner! consider the fearful danger you are in! It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of Divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder. . . .

I can imagine you in a Puritan's clerical garb, uttering these sermons of unbending wrath, atheist though you may be.

If that was all there was for the Abrahamic believer (or for anybody else), severe demands that are difficult to achieve and a God who was all about scorching wrath, religion wouldn't have any followers, except a few insane fundamentalists in the Christian and Moslem branches. These folk don't have time for mercy, forgiveness, understanding, exceptions, suspension of the rules when one is in hell, and so on. It's all about failures and punishments -- kind of an S&M set up.

And it doesn't make any difference whether one is an atheist or not. Atheists can be every bit as much a rigid hater and unforgiving bastard as someone from Alabama, the Islamic State, the Taliban, or Saudi Arabia. I assume your atheism resembles the psychological state of your pre-atheistic period of belief-- it must have been pretty grim. (See Bertrand Russell for a discussion on the relationship of one's religion to one's atheism.)

Since you, yourself, are going to fail at achieving perfection, you might as well install a system of forgiveness and mercy for yourself, and those who deal with. People will d-i-s-a-p-p-o-i-n-t you, I swear to Wotan. Get ready.

We see cultural differences survive political integration all the time — Postmodern Beatnik

Right.

When radio and television became significant cultural influences, it was predicted by some observers that Americans would lose regional differences in speech, and would tend to speak more like the network voices that were heard coast to coast. That didn't happen.

Neither because of, nor in spite of radio and television American speech patterns have continued their steady differentiation -- something they have been doing for a long time. Not only are words pronounced differently from region to region, different words are preferred, and in some cases, varying grammar rules are applied. Whether you prefer pop, soda, or tonic (all the same product) depends on where you are from. In Detroit, "block" (a piece of land surrounded by streets) is undergoing a vowel shift towards "blaeck", an 'eh' sound gradually replacing the 'ah' sound. Languages do this all the time, radio and television or not.

People in the Upper Midwest tend to have slightly differently cultural habits than New Englanders. Some observers think average New Englanders are more socially adept than average upper midwesterners. Why? Because of the shorter experience of multi-generational urban living in the Upper Midwest than in New England. In Minneapolis, for instance, a lot of residents (like me) are 1 or 2 generations away from small, rural towns and farms. Small town America (probably small town Anywhere) is more parochial and restrictive than large urban centers. Is everyone in small town America friendly and gregarious? Hardly. Partly because the population is small, one knows and is known by a lot of other people from the get go. People in small towns don't get to re-invent themselves--not without group resistance, anyway.

People whose ancestors (say, 5 generations back) lived in urban settings are generally more accustomed to mixing and matching people who, of course, they haven't known from birth.

We don't have to fear that culture will be homogenized by the global village. It is more likely to be homogenized (in as much as it is possible) by "free trade", economic imperialism, and other sorts of forced impositions.

Why should we want to be a global village? — Agustino

This Western bullshit regarding cosmopolitanism is just that - imperialist bullshit aimed at imposing the same way of life over the whole Earth. It's nothing more than a petty justification for totalitarianism. — Agustino

Marshall McLuhan, who coined this phrase "global village", didn't actually like some of the stuff he wrote so exuberantly about. I'm not sure what he thought of "the global village".

I think you have put your finger on the one aspect of the global village: imperialist bullshit. Those in the position (at this point in time) to impose their will on large populations across borders (heads of transnationals, presidents of powerful states, military honchos, etc.) look at the population of earth more like a conqueror than a colleague.

I suspect "citizens of the world" of attempting to evade their local responsibilities
— Bitter Crank

In the political philosophy literature, cosmopolitanism is used as a way of increasing our responsibilities, not decreasing or shifting them. In many ways, it is a response to the nationalist attempt to limit whom we are responsible to. And while utilitarians are cosmopolitans in theory, some (e.g., Singer) shift our responsibilities in practice. So non-utilitarian theories of cosmopolitanism could also be seen as pushing back against that sort of tendency (here I am thinking particularly of Charles Beitz, who argues for expanding the Rawlsian approach beyond the limits of individual states). — Postmodern Beatnik

I like the idea of cosmopolitanism; I don't think I've met many people who actually are cosmopolitan. I don't know much about it.

I tend to think of cosmopolitanists as the sort of people who work in USAID, NGO's, and so forth -- careerists basically, working in foreign aid or diplomacy. I suppose some of these people actually ARE cosmo types, and some people who have never been far from home might be inchoate cosmopolitans.

Oh, I quite agree with everything you say here. By my own guidance, everything about it was as wrong as you say it was.

So, why do we turn from the strait and narrow path which we normally follow? We turn aside from moral behavior the same way we turn aside from sane behavior: our thinking becomes disordered.

Moral disorder isn't an excuse, it's a diagnosis. I regret disordered thinking, or disordered morality, but at the time, it is very persuasive. Delusions can be resisted (provided they do not grow too fast too far), whether that be cognitive or moral delusion.

"My happiness above all else" is the sort of delusional, or disordered thinking that can get out of hand and land us into a moral swamp.

What's the moral of the story — Sapientia

Practice makes perfect? It takes balls to be a success?

I would say more, but one of the principles of successful crime is "Keep your mouth shut." Don't discuss the plan, don't discuss the heist, and don't discuss the haul.

For example, if I find something valuable which is likely to have been dropped by a stranger, and I think that there's a good chance I'll get away with nabbing it for myself at the expense of it's original owner, then I'm the sort of person that's inclined towards taking it. — Sapientia

A few years ago a woman left her purse on a bench near where I was reading on campus. When I got ready to leave, I noticed it, and picked it up. It had a cell phone (2001, candy-bar type) a $100+, and some uninteresting odds and ends. I intended to take the $100, and toss the rest, but I felt very ambivalent: guilty, greedy, and several other contradictory emotions. I kept it for a week, thinking that I would feel better about claiming the $100. I didn't. So I dropped it off at the woman's office on campus.

15 years later I still feel annoyed about not claiming the $100.

Guilt and vague fear overcame greed. I didn't give it back because I cared about her feelings, I gave it back to get rid of guilt feelings. That's what childhood education is supposed to instill: a stiff code of behavior and a guilt mechanism that will last a lifetime. I did't refrain from theft out of any feeling of caring. Had that been the case, I would have returned the purse immediately.

If I were really a "good person" I wouldn't be feeling regret about giving up $100 15 years later.

I wouldn't make a very good egoist.

My take on homosexuality is a bit different than WOD's. Maybe my views are a a bit old fashioned.

Personally, I don't have a problem with deviance. Where there is a norm, there is deviance. Viva le Déviance!

Kinsey (this goes back to the 1940s, 1950s) proposed that human sexuality was a continuum between exclusive homosexuality and exclusive heterosexuality. In between are an unknown number of the male population who are quite capable of performing in a homosexual encounter. (This is not to say that... oh, maybe 1/3, of males are willing to be receptive partners in anal intercourse, or are indifferent to being the receptive partner in oral sex. Getting a blow job is less of a challenge than giving one, and being expected to swallow semen.) Most straight men don't engage in gay sex.

However, a smaller share of the otherwise straight male population (6%? 8%? X%?) are capable of assuming all 4 homosexual roles (not all at once--they should be so lucky) for a period of time. An unknown portion of males can perform equally well with men and women. AND some otherwise essentially gay men are capable of performing heterosexually, and fathering children, without being bisexual. They just can. It depends, I suppose, on how specific their arousal system is.

I disagree a bit with WOD: I don't just happen to be gay, just like black people don't "happen to be black." Black people are black because their parents are black. Gay people aren't gay because their parents were gay (they almost certainly weren't) but something shifts the distribution of sexual preference from 100% straight to something less than 100%. I'm interested in what that something is.

You can rest secure in the immense remoteness that you will wake up gay tomorrow. 99.999999% of the time, people who go to bed straight, wake up straight. (If your partner's adultery makes you unhappy, you'd be a lot unhappier waking up as a gay man. Why don't straight men behave like gay men? Because straight women don't let straight men behave that way.)

I am not married BC.

We all have things we can't tolerate,

From the girlfriends I had in the past, only one cheated on me, and I left her as soon as I found out. — Agustino

True enough, we all do have a string of things we can't tolerate.

So be it then. Sign a prenuptial agreement when or if you get married, specifying that the marriage will suffer sudden death if your partner can be proven to have strayed from the strait and narrow. She may wish to impose conditions too. For instance, "One notice of late payment on the light, water, gas, telephone, mortgage, or credit card bill and you are OUT." That way you'll both know in advance what you (plural) are getting in to.

She might also meter your time on philosophy forums, as well. "Sorry, 5 minutes too long. I thought i made it clear that philosophers are no damn good. Pack your bag and get out."

We never killed someone because he ate the wrong meat. — Agustino

What's for dinner? Beef, you say? In that case, we're going to beat you to death right now.

Anti-beef-eating Hindu zealots killed a Moslem man for allegedly eating beef, and there have been similar incidents.

You may have seen this video of an Afghan woman being beaten to death by an enraged mob for allegedly burning a Koran. (The court found her innocent of the charge -- after she had been beaten to death in front of a mosque. Way to go, guys.)

Nothing to do with adultery of course (except that in some parts of the world women get stoned to death for adultery).

Your very hard line on adultery is the kind of thinking that can lead to this sort of enraged violence. You seem to be fixated on this issue -- don't know why. Was your wife unfaithful to you? If so, you might be allowing your personal feelings to be directing your thinking here. That's a very human thing too. God knows my thinking has been directed by anger on more than a few occasions. At times my mental dungeons were very well stocked with people I've felt wronged by.

Why should I care that you are happy?

Admittingly, helping others become happy and seeing other people happy tends to make me happy. But there is a difference between that and valuing other people's happiness more than your own.

What could possibly be more important than your own happiness? — darthbarracuda

Haven't you resolved the problem already? "...helping others become happy tends to make me happy." There you are.

Your hypothetical egoist's obligation to disintegrate the super-fat homeless person in order to clear her merry way to work doesn't add anything to the problem or the solution. It just takes us down a rabbit hole where we have to consider several absurd things before breakfast.

Egoism tells me we are responsible for our own happiness. Egoism is only somewhat right. "Somewhat right" because we must live in relationship with other people, and other people contribute to our happiness (or not) and we to theirs (or not). We are "obligate social beings". But Egoism is right in asserting that it is our job to manage our relationships, our interactions, our sense of wellbeing, in as much as we can -- which is something less than 100%.

Systems of morality arise out of our real natures, not absurd Never Never Land agents who are robotic egoists who ruthlessly pursue narrow goals, disintegrating fat people who get in the way. Our real natures are socially and psychologically interconnected. My or your individual happiness can't be separated out from the web of relationships we exist within.

A moral system worth anything will direct us to balance our and others' happiness. We can't morally have it all, and we can't morally deny ourselves everything, either. Why not? Because, maintaining our relationship to others (and maximizing happiness) is an essential moral task. One of the moral objections to suicide is that when you deny yourself everything (including life) you cause suffering and deny some measure of happiness to others with whom you are in relationship.

A moral system worth anything will also assume a certain degree of moral failure--the very thing that moral systems attempt to minimize. So, sure, we will have difficulty balancing everybody's separate needs and wants. And we will have difficulty controlling our own endless wants and wishes too.

Given that "the world" consists of many communities, each having its own committed citizens, different values, interests, strengths, weaknesses, languages, cultures, and so on, it seems fatuous to claim citizenship in the whole world. I suspect "citizens of the world" of attempting to evade their local responsibilities--like the "trans national corporation" does. Some "citizens of the world" I have met seem more like parasites viewing the whole world as a potential host.

We haven't gotten anywhere close to 7+ billion people thinking like they belong to one big village.

That said, "One World Consciousness" is a form of cosmopolitanism I think we are in desperate need of, and not just because of global warming (though that is one big reason for having it). We are 1 species; we have no place else to go (now or in the foreseeable future), and we now understand that world-wide systems, such as climate, economics, agriculture, fisheries, etc., leave no one unaffected.

We understand the appalling consequences of a nuclear war; we understand what will happens when a fungus wipes out an entire crop -- potatoes, wheat, corn, rice: famine. We understand that some new virus won't stay put, unless intensive efforts to limit it's spread are undertaken (Ebola, for example).

We see ourselves much more as "one world" than we once did. Or maybe like an ocean liner without life boats: Different classes on board, but if the ship goes down, all go down with it.

One of our problems with marriage these days is that a lot of people are entertaining VERY STUPID IDEAS about it. Like...

- Single women who think "I can raise a family all by myself and it will turn out just great"
- Married women who think "And we'll all live happily ever after."
- Men, single or married, who haven't really thought through what marriage entails.
- Couples who sign on the dotted line who think "Our love will last forever and nothing can go wrong."
- "Oh, money doesn't matter." It fucking matters a lot. Poverty is hard on marriage.
- All the sentimental claptrap and just plain hooey that society frosts marriage with.

Don't get me wrong: I think long lasting stable marriages are a social good, a desirable institution, and it should be protected. (Note to Agustino: Punishing everybody who fails isn't "protection" It's just more stupidity about marriage.)

But people who enter marriage need to be realistic, especially after the warm glow and rosy light fades -- maybe in a year or two, maybe longer, maybe less, maybe before the damned wedding is over.

Long term relationships (gay, straight, or otherwise) are not easy. Economic hardship; emotional upheaval; difficult pregnancies; difficult children (yes, Virginia; some children are difficult; some of them are little sons of bitches); too much clingy dependency; too much time together with no particular common interest; too much work; too little play (for both partners, together); bad sex (yes, Virginia; some people become unimaginative, dull, boring, uninspiring, etc. sex partners); chronic illness; bad housing. All kinds of things.

Many couples stay together through all these challenges (gay and straight ones both). But, a good share of marriages fail for one reason or another. It doesn't matter why. (No, Agustino -- it doesn't matter. That's why many states now have 'no-fault divorce'. If it didn't work, it didn't work. Punishing people won't make it better. It won't. It can't. It doesn't.)

There are ways of supporting marriage -- mostly things the American State is not willing to do and that the churches don't seem to be very good at in their own way. For instance, Income support for nuclear families would help. If they can't make ends meet, poverty isn't going to improve the marriage. Free pre-post natal care. It helps if pregnancies go well, and if problems are taken care of rather than neglected. Pre-marriage counseling (where couples are told the blunt and unappetizing facts of life) would help -- it might even forestall some marriages from happening.

Bureaucratic regimes like child support seem to be a good idea, but in practice it sometimes adds another layer of injustice for both the estranged parents. If we really thought children were important, we wouldn't have the hit or miss system of child support that we do. The state would support the children. (Milton Friedman -- hardly a left wing liberal -- and others thought that a minimum income would be a good thing. If the State was really interested in its families, in its children, it would do this.

Just to repeat: Punishing people for failed marriages is not going to help, Agustino. It just won't.

Bitter Crank, according to Agustino, you are a deviation from heterosexuality... — discoii

Damn right I am, and proud of it.

Agustino, 10% of all humans are estimated to be homosexual, and that's a very low ball estimate. Historically, people have fucked both men and women, and there are many, many examples of this not being an issue whatsoever. — discoii

Now, now; let's not get carried away here. If at least 10% of men are gay, who has been getting my share all these years?

"Polymorphous perversity" seems to characterize human sexual behavior; people are capable of all sorts of sexual behavior either through opportunity or necessity. But sexual identity doesn't follow occasional behavior. A gay man who has sex with a woman once doesn't thereby become "heterosexual" and a straight man who has sex with another man once doesn't thereby become "homosexual" or even "bisexual".

Just like I attribute the lack of genius in today's world to:
too much social pressure, commercialisation of sex, high levels of misinformation, too much comfort, too much counter culture. — Agustino

This is rank nonsense.

Real, bona fide geniuses are always rare (at least, that's a characteristic I like to apply to "genius". But even when they are born, they may not flower. Einstein also built on the foundations of previous thinking, previous discoveries, the essential pieces of which were available to him by way of his own education. Had Einstein been born 100 years earlier, he would almost certainly have not been able to come up with relativity and everything preceding it in one fell swoop.

Had Shakespeare been born in 1264 instead of 1564, he might have have written something terrific, or maybe not. Neither the arts, the place, the times, nor the language were in a position to allow a multi-faceted genius to flourish in the way Shakespeare did.

My guess is that most geniuses come to naught because they are born in the wrong time and the wrong place. Wrong place, right place, they are still a rarity.

"Genius" isn't just a matter of a high IQ. It's also creativity, the capacity for very extended concentration and focus on very difficult problems (whatever field genius is expressed in), necessary information, and a certain amount of peace and quiet.

Are these all geniuses? Newton, Galileo, Pascal, Michelangelo, Bruno, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kepler? Could be - I don't know. Cervantes? Steinbeck? Heidegger? Picasso? Steinbeck? I rather think not. It isn't damning an artist or a scientist or a cowboy to hell to deem them less-than-genius. You know, there isn't any standardized metric for "Genius". It's somewhat a matter of opinion.

This raises the question, "Just what, exactly, do geniuses do? How many are there? How important are they? What good are they? and..." but that is another thread.

Very well - but I've argued, and you haven't responded to the argument, that the bourgeoisie doing this behind closed scenes was better than the revolutionaries doing this openly. — Agustino

Nobody does this behind closed doors -- neither the bourgeoisie nor the communists, because the millions of recipients know what is happening. (It's like "secret bombing"; certainly no secret to the people getting bombed.) And it's not better being done by the Bourgeoisie or the Communists.

I have always read that section of the Communist Manifesto as a criticism of bourgeois hypocrisy about the family, and not as a proposal to emulate the bourgeois hypocrisy.

What Marx was saying (this in 1844, remember) was that the bourgeoisie (big factory operators) didn't give a rat's ass about the family, and were perfectly willing to exploit men, women, and children for sexual or productive purposes. The bourgeois accused the revolutionaries of the day of wanting to do away with the family, but in fact, the bourgeoisie was already doing precisely that thing.

Agustino, If you didn't like Stalinist/Marxist/Soviet/Eastern European style of oppression, believe me, you really shouldn't like the old fashioned, western, Christian, morally rigid, repressive, oppressive, vindictive, punitive approach either.

Lots of people are in a reactionary mode with respect to morality. They hate "old fashioned morality" because it is the cold dead hand of the past. It was inflexible. It was intensely judgmental. It was restrictive, repressive, life-denying and punitive. (It was, and it is. The past is never past.)

What you are objecting to in the Ashley Madison site is the result of a confluence of various developments. Radical changes in the economy have produced a lot of economic instability and a decline in working class and middle class economic conditions which has undermined the family. Upheaval is, surprise surprise, socially disruptive.

Technology (everything from the transistor to the birth control pill) has also brought about destabilizing changes. The internet and the smart phone have created new fields of economic activity. Ashley Madison (for heteros) or Grindr (a hookup site for homos) are examples.

Take Grindr: Feeling the need to get laid? Like some cock? Don't want to go to a bar and sort through the dismal offerings? Your smartphone Grindr app will notify you if other Grindr members are in the vicinity--any vicinity--in the store, in the office, in the theater, in the neighborhood...wherever. A quick check of profiles, a message or two back and forth, and the party is on.

I'm beyond the age where Grindr is going to be of any use to me, but had it been available 40 years ago, I'd have been on it, most likely.

Is it dehumanizing to so-thoroughly commodify and routinize sexual access? Not in itself. After all, people have long used non-electronic means to do the same thing. I used to visit a park which was sort of like Grindr al fresco. Just show up at the right time and voila! Sex.

There are some good things one can say about the old fashioned family and about old fashioned morality. And there are a lot of bad things one can say about it as well. "That old-time religion" was a capable dehumanizer and alienator itself. It was oppressive, punitive, and stultifying.

Some of the benefits that were attributed to old-time religion and family are more properly attributable to economic growth and prosperity. People do better in stable, prosperous circumstances. People with jobs and economic security who see that there is a future in working and getting ahead commit to family creation and stable community. When things fall apart, when the center does not hold, people are reluctant to risk investment in family and community.

It's not a sudden change, Agustino. The changes you are lamenting were in the works for all of the 20th century, and longer. The sharp decline in religious participation began in the late 1950s. By the end of the 1960s the volume of the American religious establishment had been significantly deflated. And the deflation hasn't stopped. You are (un)fortunate enough to be living in an important transition period.

is there a case to be made that morality is something to be overcome — darthbarracuda

It may be that the morality that has been imposed upon one is something to be overcome. For instance, a gay person may need to overcome the morality which brands their very being as intrinsically disordered and sinful.

Some people who have decided to pursue a career of crime must overcome all sorts of moral restrictions if they haven't already done so. (The decision to engage in crime presupposes the dismissal of at least some moral restrictions.)

Whether overcoming a set of moral guidelines is an achievement or a disaster depends on the consequences.

Some thinking rational minds might settle on selfishness as a wise policy, maybe even a virtue. Actually, quite a few people settle on selfishness as a virtue. There are, of course, other values that one might settle upon: selflessness; compassion; love, sacrifice, valor, humble labor, and so on..

What would be irrational is to maintain an approach to life (selfishness, compassion...) that was contrary to one's best understanding of what is the best approach. It would be contradictory to do so, self defeating, counter productive. For instance, a person whose commitment was to peaceful existence, pacifism, non-violence, and so on would exhibit irrationality if they volunteered to become a career soldier. Similarly, a person who believed that self-fulfillment and material success was a virtue would be poorly served by becoming a monk, wherein both self-fulfillment and material success were strongly discouraged.

I'm not going to praise people who practice selfishness as a virtue; I don't think selfishness is a virtue. (Selfishness is, at times, expedient and appropriate; but that doesn't make it a virtue in my book.)

So if I privately shagged a dog, and told other people I did (because why not - I want to express and talk about my sexuality freely), would they not disconsider me? — Agustino

My dog has very refined sensibilities. If you insult her by taking liberties she may employ her big sharp canine teeth to correct your indiscretion.

How do you explain Marxism's total hate for the family then? Most of what socialism is has evolved from Marxism afterall. — Agustino

What Marxist hate for the family are you talking about? What passage in Karl Marx's writings leads you to think that Marxism hates families?

Are you talking about the abuse of the individual and the family common in dictatorial, authoritarian, regimes? Or, are you talking about the abuse of the individual and the family common in exploitative capitalist regimes? Look, large scale regimented organizations -- corporate, governmental, military, or ecclesiastical -- tend not to nurture individuals and families, regardless of what their ideological orientation.

True - but then the people involved should divorce first, and then engage in whatever relationships they want, instead of pretend to maintain their marriage contract while they break it. It's not adultery itself that is wrong - but the deception that goes along with it. — Agustino

Being the pessimist you are, you surely hold to the idea of a profoundly flawed, lying, cheating, stealing, sneaking, and conniving humankind whose very nature it is to be hypocritical: thinking one thing about themselves, but actually doing something quite contrary. Original sin, in other words. In some ways, original sin is the most valid idea in all of Christendom.

It's one thing if people are just too stupid to behave properly. They can be taught, trained, and schooled. It is quite another to have high expectations for people to behave morally -- especially in behavior powerfully driven by gonads which have no interest at all in morality. (A stiff dick has no morals.) No amount of education has ever prevented people from sinning in all of the various and sundry ways to which we are prone. No amount of force has ever worked either in this area.

Had we more leisure, more imagination, more energy, more money, more time -- we'd probably get more sinning done. As it is, most of us spend our days working, striving, persevering -- despite the whole thing being a monstrous hoax, possibly.

And, you know, sexual sins are no worse than other sins. Sin is sin--if that is what we are talking about. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. Your particular sin may not be sexual; perhaps it is related to gluttony, greed, jealousy, or sloth -- I don't know, there are various possibilities. It doesn't matter, because sin is sin. Lust as much as larceny.

Not only is sin sin, but we are incapable of not sinning, Left to our own devices, we will sin. I will, you will, he will, she will. Everybody.

So, apparently there is no hope. But WAIT! Here comes the calvary over the hill, just in the nick of time. Why, it's God Himself! At least in Calvinist theology, we are dependent on the action of God (Christ) to redeem us from the sin we are doomed to commit. We can't help it. Without the intervention of Christ, we are totally and irrevocably 100% screwed. On our own strength, we can not "be good".

It is God's problem. If God decides to save X, Y, or Z from the depths of hell, they are in the Good Grace of God. If God does not so choose, nothing, NOTHING, can help them.

This is, see, a nice pessimistic way of looking at morals and behavior. One can lament naughty behavior, but then realize we can't help it. You can't help it either. If you come off as a self-righteous prick, it is original sin at work and you are powerless. If I come off as a sanctimonious liar, that is my doom. I am powerless.

This is the theology I was raised on, and I haven't been able to rid my self of it altogether. On a good day, my compromise is to acknowledge that people behave abominably, which is most unfortunate. But what does one expect from bright apes, if not occasional lapses into appalling chimpanzee behavior.

None of these states have been in existence for longer than a few decades at most. Western democracies are well over 200 years old, and were never perfect then as now, though they have made vast improvements, such as abolishing the slave trade. — Thorongil

The Agreement which defined the modern Middle East is a century old, now, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the people who lived (and live) there. The borders were drawn for the convenience of two colonialist western democracies--the British and French Empires.

But there were three problems with the geo-political order that emerged from the Sykes-Picot agreement.
First, it was secret without any Arabic knowledge, and it negated the main promise that Britain had made to the Arabs in the 1910s - that if they rebelled against the Ottomans, the fall of that empire would bring them independence.
When that independence did not materialise after World War One, and as these colonial powers, in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, continued to exert immense influence over the Arab world, the thrust of Arab politics - in North Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean - gradually but decisively shifted from building liberal constitutional governance systems (as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had witnessed in the early decades of the 20th Century) to assertive nationalism whose main objective was getting rid of the colonialists and the ruling systems that worked with them.
This was a key factor behind the rise of the militarist regimes that had come to dominate many Arab countries from the 1950s until the 2011 Arab uprisings.

I'm always in favor of liberal democracy, but how?

Agreed. There are some bad actors in the middle east who are high on our list of allies. Saudi Arabia is, IMHO, a lot more trouble than they are worth. So are some of the other sheikvilles over there. Turkey is playing a double game, and should stop it immediately. We should be doing a lot more for the Kurds.

What would help Tunisia or Lebanon, for instance, is economic vitality. A liberal democracy requires a minimal level of prosperity (seems to anyway). People behave better when there is enough food, clothing, shelter, and cultural goods to go around. Economic assistance is something we could do ethically (we could find a way of doing it unethically, of course). We spend generously for military solutions and spend niggardly when it comes to civil society and trade building. We are one of the least generous western countries for foreign aid.

Economic assistance isn't a guarantee that all will be well forever, but it beats bombing the shit out of people.

True enough, the options proposed are options in action. BUT... what about an ethical judgement?

My own sense is that we are damned if we do, damned if we don't. Not just the US. There are no ethical alternatives BECAUSE

An ethical action would demand a "good outcome".
An ethical action would require the "means" to achieve the intended good outcome.
An ethical action can't have overwhelmingly undesirable consequences.
An ethical action has to have a long term future.

What was wrong with our two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan was that:

An ethical outcome wasn't defined. We were there for... "something" but what, exactly, escaped me -- many others as well.
If we had an ethical objective, we didn't have (or employ) the means to achieve the intended outcome.
In both cases -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and Syria as a present and future case, "effective means" will have very undesirable consequences.
We don't have a clearly defined outcome, means, or way of avoiding highly undesirable consequences.

We could, as somebody suggested, carpet bomb Syria back into the stone age. Or we could just use small nukes (neutron bombs, for instance, and tactical nukes) and eliminate large blocks of both territory and population, including Assad and his group. We could invade, using a huge drafted army, occupy Syria (and while we're at it, whatever else needs a good jerking around) en masse and force them at the point of the gun to rearrange their society.

From what I've seen, a good share of Syria has already been bombed pretty thoroughly. Nukes -- well, there is that small problem of World War IV which would be fought with rocks. Using nukes would probably result in everybody being bombed back to the stone age. We probably won't draft another army for anything except actual self defense, since a draft and a couple of million men and women serving in the dried out Middle East would probably start riots here. The "all-volunteer army" avoids mass opposition.

And no matter what course we took, the background assumption is that we would know how to bring about a long term positive outcome that everybody would be happy with. We know no such thing, as we so vividly demonstrated in Iraq and Afghanistan. We smashed Humpty Dumpty and we couldn't put it back together again.

I think the base assumption of right-wing politics is to live and let live, whereas left-wing politics attempts to force everyone in a single pattern of acceptable values. — Agustino

The implicit "relative values" that you ascribe to the right seem more appropriate to the "left" and the narrow, single pattern of values seems more appropriate to the right -- at least the way I think of left and right. But let's not debate that, because thinking leftists and rightists both maintain wider margins in their definitions. The caricatured left and right aren't the real left and right.

I know people who fall on the left and right (using anybody's definition) who are a lot like their opposites. You do too, most likely. There are leftists who are quite rigid in their morals, have strong family values, and so forth. And there are right wing folks who are not models of conservative probity and propriety.

The state of the family as it exists in 21st century America is not good. Many children are conceived and delivered by breeding pairs who are thoroughly unprepared to properly parent their offspring. They just don't know how to maintain a relationship, they don't have adequate incomes or the potential to earn them, and they don't know how to nurture healthy children and prepare them for a healthy stable life. This goes for both the male and the female in the pair.

The more urgent obligation these idiot parents have to their unfortunate children is a far more pressing issue than childless adults jacking their partners around and having extramarital affairs.

What do you think - should organisations promoting deceitfulness (think for example Ashley Madison which aims to be a dating website for people already in commited relationships, guaranteeing to keep the identity of their members secret) be outlawed, and people engaged in such activities punished by law? — Agustino

Sites like Grindr or Ashley Madison and a million other sleazy sites exist because pointing-and-clicking adults wish for them to exist. And then too, capitalism reduces everything to the cash nexus. (KM)

True, marriage is a contract, and my understanding is that in the US military, adultery is a violation of military rules -- not that a lot of time is spent on enforcement, but never the less... In the larger civilian sphere, sexual activity is covered by the expectation of privacy, meaning the state does not interfere with (is not supposed to interfere with, anyway) individuals' behavior or activities in non-coercive, consensual sexual activity.

The state has pursued other sites for arranging and facilitating fraud and deception. Both site operators and individual users who downloaded illegally obtained music and video were prosecuted. (All of them were not prosecuted, but some were.)

There is another consideration that would/should/might discourage the state from pursuing sites and participants who wish to, or have committed adultery: a flawed relationship can not be forced to be good and whole by legislative, judicial, or ecclesial authorities.

I much prefer the idea of long-lasting stable mutually agreeable marriages when and where children are present. Parents have a binding obligation to their children, and they (parents) should put up and shut up to the best of their ability. My preferences not withstanding, neither the church nor the state has found a way of making people be good parents, putting up with the deficiencies of the marriage, and shutting up about it, and dutifully and cheerfully doing their duty to their children.

One other thing: Adultery is not unforgivable. Even if it isn't a good idea, the failures of one or both partners can be amended, reformed, and wholeness re-established.

One dead after Christmas Eve shootout at packed North Carolina shopping mall. Jolly. What fun!

On this night before Christmas, the stores are all dead;
Hardly a creature is stirring from houses or sheds.
I passed on the pudding for brief yule rhymation;
I'll soon resume most lives of quiet desperation.

Tomorrow two five is the holiday factual;
But I find the eve of the holiday actual.
Tomorrow roast church, then usher the fowl;
Once that is over, I'll sit back and loud howl.

Twinkling lights, jingling bells, and sugary over load,
Tons of force fed cheeriness the prophets so foretold.
Noël and New Year cheers send I to you from here.
Let nice vibes fill up the rest of this God damnéd year.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hitler-and-the-socialist-dream-1186455.html

Hitler's policies implied a lot of governmental control over the economy - at least in terms of economics, he was clearly not laissez faire. — Agustino

Neither you nor the Independent have convinced me one wit that Hitler was a socialist in anyway more than having that one word in his party's title. I don't think Joseph Stalin was much of a socialist either -- certainly of no kind that I would care to associate with.

Socialism is a process: not an event, not a political party, not a person. What Marx was talking about was the self-liberation of the working class. Lots of amped up and impatient people want to skip over all sorts of necessary steps and jump-start the Revolution. The revolution of the working class can not begin until the working class is ready to do it en masse by and for themselves.

Ghastly dictatorships, rule through violence, ruthless exploitation of human resources, genocidal drives (or, at the very least, ethnic cleansing) and so on all have many exemplars. Workers' self-liberation through revolution, not so much.

Hitler wasn't even a very good social democrat in his politics. Subversion was his game from the get go. He didn't persuade Germans to accept Nazism, he threatened their persons with dire consequences if they didn't--and he delivered. The Nazi Party was a thug-scum operation from the beginning--the SA was organized early on to take political debate to the street with the help of Nazi fists and truncheons. The SA set up private dungeons for short-term storage of good Germans who might not be getting the point through subtler arguments.. A few days in their little lock-ups usually convinced Germans that resistance was futile. Then there were the concentration camps proper, of which there were many hundreds. Most of them were for the purpose of maintaining political power, not racial purity.

Stalin was despicable. If he wasn't quite as bad as Hitler; even if he was a lot better than Hitler, he was still appallingly cruel, vicious, paranoid, ruthless, and drenched in blood. Maybe Soviet methods needed to be ruthless, cutting as many corners as they were on Karl Marx's idea for workers self-liberation. Russia scarcely had a working class when the Soviets opened up for business, so a lot of ground had to be skipped over (meaning, lots of people had to be forced to cooperate or be shot).

Interesting.

Seems like a successful and worthwhile renovation, even if it has covered over and softened the edges. Worse, far worse, atrocities have been committed. It's better to cover up a still-long useful building with a glass curtain than to tear it down. This looks more like preservation than repurposing.

Some very sturdy but now defunct department store buildings have been given that treatment. Huge floor space, concrete and brick, but homely. They can be gutted (fairly) easily and serviced with updated utilities at a reasonable cost. "The building" is still there, but for all practical purposes, it isn't the same thing.

Low-rise, wide concrete structures of this design can sometimes look like pre-fab slab buildings, even if they are not. (I'm not sure when they started using pre-fab slabs in office buildings.) Nothing wrong with prefabricated slabs, just that it's early uses didn't rise above the aesthetics of low cost parking ramps. These days a lot of attractive elements are prefabricated (even on 60 story building exterior elements).

We don't seem to be doing all that well as philosophers when it comes to left, right, conservative, liberal, democratic, authoritarian, and so on.

Crusty, carnivorous conservative capitalists exploit people with gusto. True. So do svelte, vegan, liberal capitalists. I prefer the friendlier face of liberal capitalism, but on pay day one is just as exploited by the friendly-faced capitalist. There is a difference between cryptofascist KKK conservatives and earnest Catholic conservatives who tend to the demands of the Gospel, for instance. And so on...

Political, economic, social, religious, sexual, blah blah blah ALL occur in a spectrum of forms. Individuals, by chance, necessity, or design, mix and match. So do societies. We are always (almost always, anyway) confronting a gradient of mixed human phenomena.

There is too much meme slinging going on. However much it may work as a rhetorical technique in PR, political campaigns, or war, it doesn't serve us well here.

Hitler was a socialist — Agustino

Hitler wasn't much of a socialist.

True, early on he took over a little German political group which maybe had some socialist-type intentions, but that was more opportunist than anything else. The neglect of socialist programming became a small issue in the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), AKA, the Nazi Party.

"Does Technology have the Capability of Solving All of our Problems?"

I understand the attraction of finding a solution to all our problems. Gee, wouldn't that be nice? But there is an infantile desire lurking there:

"If only I could get back to the womb (or at least be 3 months old and breast feeding)! Everything was just great back then. No problems, my few needs promptly disposed of. The womb was warm, wet, dark, and comfy. Then reality came along! Birth into this wretched cold, dry, bright, and uncomfortable world. Solid food. Toilet training. Having to sit in school all day. Getting an advanced degree. Working under this fucking dictator at work! Life is terrible!!! Wahhhhhhh."

No, technology is not going to solve all our problems. First, We have to invent technologies that can solve all our specific problems without causing more problems along the way (not so easy). Second, we have to learn how to be less of a problem to our selves (very hard). Third, if we did solve all our problems, what would we do with our time? We'd start creating new problems to solve!