Just to update on this issue.

One of the data controllers actually doing their obligations under the GDPR is the Finnish Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, as they ultimately "own" government health and welfare data that would be sent to the data breach (i.e. into the possession of anonymous individuals in the US).

The ministry notified the Data Ombudsman within 72 hours as the law demands and continue their own "process", which hopefully is also what the law demands (further investigation into the breach by the data controller once notified, and then notifying victims of the data breach if there is risk to harm to their rights and freedoms). Which is what makes the GDPR such a potent law that it obliges reacting to risk and not proof of harm.

Under the GDPR, I can't leak your ID either intentionally or due to some security vulnerability and then sit back and claim no one's proven any harm has actually been done yet, and even if that is proven then no one's proven it was due to this particular data breach, and not some other breach or simple carelessness on the victims part.

The judges not reacting to such an obvious data breach that so obviously puts children's lives in danger (just allowing the child welfare corporations to be spoofed due to zero email security is incredibly dangerous), was already obvious corruption and judge participation in organized crime and child trafficking, but now it's even more obvious due to other government organs reacting the data breach.

Which pretty clearly establishes the corruption of the judges.

And how many perfectly legal companies are involved in child trafficking? — Sir2u

Yes, child trafficking is illegal.

Or, are there illegal groups acting as legal companies to commit crimes? — Sir2u

In this case the companies described in the OP are breaking the law, violating the GDPR, having zero email security on their official domain and then sending all their information to an anonymously owned parallel domain in the US.

So, they are legal structures, the companies themselves, but the companies and at least some people involved are doing illegal things. In the same way that you are legally a person, perhaps even a legal citizen of a country, but can go onto commit crimes nevertheless.

If you're in the US, the laws being violated are equivalent to HIPAA.

It would not be too strange to find an individual practitioner who doesn't know what they are doing, doesn't realize their alternative magnet based therapy falls under HIPAA if they request people's medical info to optimize the magnetic chakra pulses (i.e. just because you are practicing alternative medicine does not mean you can practice alternative laws), but if you found a whole group of corporations employing trained experts that weren't HIPAA compliant in super obvious ways, that's simply not credible to entertain as a incompetent accident. So I have no hesitation to make the accusation that the reason this corporate group setup their informations systems in a non-compliant way ideal for trafficking children, is because they are trafficking children.

Now, there is an investigation by one data controller involved, so we will presumably know more at some point.

To save you, perhaps others, a bit of time, you're confusing liability with actually being held accountable.

Liability is simply the potential to be held accountable and where. So discussions of liability are about what you could possibly be sued, fined or imprisoned for, and where exactly that can occur.

So where you will find no-liability is with sovereign immunity and its various extensions. For example that Trump cannot be sued for "official acts", or congress and parliament members can't be sued for the laws they pass, ambassadors running people over, are all manifestations of sovereign immunity.

But even so, there's then a confusing international legal system where people and states can nevertheless be held liable for acts they had sovereign immunity for within their own territory.

Who always has liability are regular people for what they do as well as regular corporations and their management, aka. board members (maybe somewhere there's special "sovereign" corporations that are not liable).

Now, even after the question of liability is perfectly clear, that doesn't mean accountability exists in practice.

As you note, corporations get away with a lot of shit all the time; however, the explanation for that is corruption of regulators and the legal system that's supposed to hold them to account, and not that they have no liability to begin with.

And even so, with corporations there's often some sort of process, a lawsuit does get heard after many years of legal wrangling but they manage to win by some subterfuge, or then they get some tiny inconsequential fine that's categorized as "the cost of doing business".

Someone who'e not liable at all for an action means there is no legal process of any kind that ever even begins. For example, in a liberal democracy you simply cannot sue parliamentarians for voting in a way you disagree with; members of parliament have zero liability for their votes on legislation.

The world is a lot bigger than that, the EU is a small part of it. — Sir2u

Ok, well keep looking in the rest of the the big ol' world for a place where limited liability corporations don't have a board of directors.

Maybe not an EU corporation but as you said, this is supposedly, according to your reference of the US and children being taken into Finland from somewhere else. affecting the whole world. — Sir2u

Yeah I guess keep looking outside the EU if there's even one example of your claim.

Maybe you could look into the Vatican, they rarely answer to anyone. — Sir2u

The Vatican is not a limited liability corporation.

Wow, bit of a comedown from: — Sir2u

There's no comedown. Compromising people's data is itself harmful. If you disagree send me your ID, medical information, anything other data you'd consider private.

This harmful act of compromising child data in combination with zero security implemented allowing anyone to misrepresent these corporations anywhere in the world, even more harmful things can be done.

Since anyone could misrepresent this fraudulent corporation anywhere in the world, the only way to find that maybe to diffuse notice of this information vulnerability.

So I ask again, is there any evidence of any of these crimes being commited through the methods you are explaining. — Sir2u

There's evidence of other crimes involving (beyond the reckless GDPR breaches) these corporations are involved in Finland, as I've mentioned several times. It's not public information yet.

Now, as I've stated many times, the only way to see if this insecure system has been used for abductions elsewhere in the world is through getting the notice out.

Some bodies have been responsive to my notice and are investigating right now, which would usually indicate they found something preliminary, but I don't have more details and it is extremely normal that I would not be kept appraised of any investigation details (as I'm a private person).

All I can do (vis-a-vis child abductions and trafficking in other countries) is create a notice that a child welfare corporation (actually 2 of them) can easily be impersonated in a data setup ideal for child trafficking, and describe what this vulnerability allows.

I've been pretty clear with this message: DATA breaches are themselves harmful, there's other evidence of wrongdoing in Finland that is private information currently, and this completely unsecured and non-compliant setup can be used for a long list of crimes.

I have no issue providing a lot of analysis of these basic points because it's possible such analysis encourages someone to send the notice themselves in their own country, leading to records being checked and potentially child trafficking being frustrated.

For example, it may matter to someone that incompetence is really not a good explanation for why a non-compliant system would be setup in the first place, by an entire corporate group of child welfare corporations. If you're not familiar with how corporations work, what the laws are, how liability works, if limited liability corporations even have any management, etc. then it maybe difficult to evaluate.

How this all applies to the subject of the OP, is that the companies concerned definitely have a board of directors and by not implementing the GDPR those board members make themselves personally liable to be sued by any victims of the data breach for their negligence as well as being fined by the state; fines up to 10 - 20 million Euros, but even a 1 million Euro fine would be a lot of money for the typical professional on a corporate board.

To make and operate a limited liability company you typically need lawyers to do a lot of things, board members typically concern themselves with how much money they could be liable for if the company is run negligently (as well as breaking what laws could land them in prison), and then typically seek advice, typically starting with lawyers, to be confident that won't happen. For, nothing obliges anyone to sit on the board of a corporation, so if you thought it was all reckless improvisation you can just resign and your legal problems are solved if you haven't caused any damages yet.

The rational reason to join the board of a corporation dealing with sensitive information and not have the slightest concern that even step 1 of information security has been carried out, that no information expert of any kind has been involved in designing and implementing information systems and their supervision, would be to commit crimes with this non-compliant information system.

The other explanation available would be being irrational and taking on massive liabilities without knowing the first thing of how a corporation should be managed, not seeking to know from anyone who does know, and just flying by the seat of your pants in taking responsibility for processes as sensitive and critical and prone to litigation as child welfare and protection processes.

There is no legitimate and rational business process that would lead a corporate board to implement information systems for sensitive information in a way that clearly and obviously violates the law in literally step 1 of their implementation (non-transparent ownership and ownership by an individual of the domain used to process children's information, and zero email security on the domain that is officially owned allowing impersonation) and compromises people's private information and put children's lives in danger of these information vulnerabilities being exploitable to impersonate Finnish child welfare and protection to fraudulently gain custody of children anywhere in the world.

You might say that "well, me and my friends would definitely be that reckless and stupid if we ran a corporation" but that begs the question of are you and your friends running a corporation right now, not to mention a corporation that houses vulnerable children?

More relevantly to the matter at hand, even if someone was genuinely unconcerned with liability of any kind and would go through similar events with zero sense of possibly being held accountable for one's actions, that is not a good defence for others breaking the law in such situations.

Standing up in court and saying "Well, Jimbo over there doesn't give a shit about the law, would break exactly the same laws I did without a second thought, he's just that much of a fucking madlad, and never in a million years would it even cross his mind that the law even exists, much less could even potentially lead to some sort of accountability for the consequences of his own actions; therefore, gentlemen, ladies, as Jimbo has no sense of responsibility and genuinely feels he could never be held accountable for his actions in a similar situation, no matter how reckless and damaging they are, I too should not be held accountable. I rest my case." I guess has some sort of logic to it, could persuade some people (definitely some members of our little philosophic community), but mileage may vary.

To save time for anyone interested in how things actually work.

All companies of all forms are liable. The type of company determines who is liable. A single proprietor and partnerships usually have unlimited liability for the owner(s) / manager(s).

Why limited liability (.ltd) corporations are so common is because, as the name suggests, liability is limited. What this means is that the managers of a limited liability company, even less the shareholders, are not personally liable for the decisions they make on behalf of the company (such as in day-to-day management typically by the managing-director, in board meetings by board directors, and in shareholder meetings by shareholders).

The basic meaning of this is that a limited liability company can go bankrupt and no one involved is personally on the hook to pay the outstanding debts.

There is, however, a critical caveat to be off the hook for debts or other damages the company has caused others, which is exercising "due care". Due care is basically a catch all for not being criminal or a complete moron basically.

As you may imagine, if you've been embezzling money out of the corporation you can be held personally responsible for that, likewise if you cause damages due to negligence you can be held responsible for that.

Where the liability is limited is for bad outcomes of business decisions that were legal and did make some sense at the time, such as taking out debts to launch a product and that product just doesn't sell leading to bankruptcy.

Since we're talking about Finland, this manifests in the law as the first and only duty of management:

PART I: GENERAL PRINCIPLES, INCORPORATION AND SHARES
Chapter 1: Main principles of company operations and application of this Act
Section 8: Duty of the management

The management of the company shall act with due care and promote the interests of the
company. — Limited Liability Companies Act

As for the idea corporations don't need a board of directors at all, we'll soon see if there's even one country in the world where this is true, but in Finland it is definitely not true:

Chapter 6: Management and representation of a company
Section 1: Management of a company

A company shall have a board of directors. It may also have a managing director and a
supervisory board. — Limited Liability Companies Act

Section 8 Members: deputy members and chairperson of the board of directors

There shall be between one and five regular members of the board of directors, unless otherwise provided in the articles of association. If there are fewer than three members, there shall be at least one deputy member of the board of directors. The provisions of this Act on a member also apply to a deputy member. — Limited Liability Companies Act

Do you really think that this applies international? — Sir2u

Let's just start with the EU as qualifying as "international".

Can you name one EU limited liability corporation that does not have a board of directors?

Have you any idea how many countries have massive companies without a single member on the board of directors. — Sir2u

Please inform me. Can you start by naming just one massive limited liability corporation that has no board of directors?

And that does not include a bunch of oversees companies that operate internationally and are not liable to nor answer to anyone. — Sir2u

Again can you name one oversees company of whatever form (limited liability, partnership, single proprietor) that are "not liable to nor answer to anyone"?

But we're talking about Finland, so after answering these questions please clarify how it relates to Finland.

Are you saying companies in Finland are not liable to anyone in Finland?

As for the rest of what you wrote, it still does not answer the question! — Sir2u

I did answer your question.

Compromising someone's data, violating the law that is the GDPR and a bunch of other laws, is by definition harmful and causes suffering (one must worry how one's data maybe abused).

If you disagree, just DM me your ID, medical history, anything else you consider legally private information, thus making the point that you don't feel others having a copy of your sensitive information is in anyway harmful.

Other forms of harm have also occurred but I can't so easily disclose specific details of individual cases at this time, hence to focus on the legal violations that can be demonstrated using only publicly available information.

Since the information setup can be used to steal information and create fraudulent child transfer processes anywhere in the world, the only way to discover fraud in other countries, especially poorer countries with less robust systems, is that a victim of the fraud encounters this notice.

There is no possible downside to spreading the information, in particular to authorities in different countries who can check if they are possibly a victim of a scheme involving the fraudulent representation of these companies we are talking about.

This is what I tried to tell boethius to perhaps allow his points to get across better but he dismissed it and continues with is disjointed ramblings. — unimportant

I'm not a propagandist, I'm first and foremost here to subject my own analysis to critical scrutiny. The worlds of ethics, concepts and facts is quite varied, diverse and complex and so any one thing is often related to a great many other things; and so maybe literally Hitler literally describing his propaganda methods of choice isn't the best guide to explore and understand matters.

But I guess thank-you for outing yourself as a self described propagandist following Hitler's advice and footsteps.

Also notable, you confirm your unwillingness to engage in critical debate by mentioning and criticizing me but not using the forum's mention link that would automatically inform me of your comment. You want to criticize me without being sure I have the opportunity to address your criticism and yet you call me bad faith?

Remarkable.

As to the question of why government criminal conspiracies and networks so often involve pedophilia, I would not attribute most of that to the machinations of intelligence operations, though of course that happens too, but crime is anyways happening all the time and intelligence agencies are involved in very little of it overall.

The reason pedophilia and government corruption (or large institution corruption such as the Catholic Church) is so associated I would argue is not simply confirmation bias that such scandals get the most attention, but that such conspiracies are the most stable and so survive the longest with the most advantages both against legitimate law enforcement as well as other criminal conspiracies wanting to dominate the same processes but for different criminal reasons.

For, the major weakness of a criminal conspiracy over time is its internal coherence. For example, even if the criminal conspiracy under consideration is well run with no leaks or weaknesses, for example just embezzling government money in a super sophisticated way or then compromising border security to run drugs and these sorts of crimes, the criminal involved may anyways get caught doing other crime, then they find themselves faced with doing time and have the option of using their leverage of their knowledge of this other organized crime they are involved in. Criminals are not necessarily the most stable and law-abiding of people and so often it's this extracurricular crime that gets criminals in trouble and motivates them to rat on their criminal colleagues.

So there are these accidental weaknesses in most criminal schemes which there is not really any good way to prevent.

The exception to this rule is pedophilia. It's very unlikely for someone to confess to being involved in pedophilia and child rape in order to avoid prosecution of other offences.

So accidental discovery of a pedophile network is unlikely due to chance encounters with law enforcement about other fucked up shit the members of the conspiracy do in their spare time.

Then there's intra-conspiracy extortion. Another pathway to breaking up a criminal conspiracy is when members of the conspiracy start extorting each other. The means of extortion in a criminal scheme is simply threatening doing the above and going and cutting a deal with law enforcement. Even if this doesn't happen, this lowers the trust and mutual respect required for team work to happen effectively, so even if the ratting out doesn't happen the conspiracy will likely cease to function effectively (members may start destroying evidence and making sure not to create new evidence so they are squeaky clean).

For the same reason someone is unlikely to confess to pedophilia and raping children to plead down other offences, they are also unlikely to threaten to do so.

In other words, pedophilia and child rape are crimes that form the long term basis for trust based cooperation.

Through a process analogous to evolution and natural selection it is therefore pedophilia based conspiracies that have an advantage for long term survival. The potential effectiveness of any cooperative venture is directly proportional to mutual trust. Take a military unit where people trust each other implicitly and absolutely compared to a military unit where everyone suspects everyone else of being either dangerously incompetent or even enemy spies; the former organization can attain high levels of effectiveness while the latter not so much.

So, over the decades, if a pedophilia and child rape ring within government survives it will become more, rather than less, robust and stable over time. The pedophilia and child rape ring will be acutely aware of who threatens them and they can use their existing positions, power and connections with organized crime outside government to remove or otherwise neuter those threats. They cannot only use their network to rape children, but make lot's of money in selling that service to others but also just any criminal scheme that the are in a position to execute on, such as simply embezzling government money, taking bribes, protecting the drug trade and taking a cut, and so on.

Since they can have high confidence the other pedophiles in their network are exceedingly unlikely to confess to child rape, they can work in a highly organized, methodological and long term fashion.

Criminal conspiracies that do not solve the classic prisoner dilemma and variations or intra-conspiracy extortion dilemma (which is just a threatening the prisoner dilemma to maximize gain within the conspiracy) described above, will be unstable and ephemeral. The other long term basis for criminal conspiracy, as Vin Diesel in Fast and the Furious informs us, is "family", but this criminal foundation has the weakness of everyone involved being obviously linked whereas pedophilia does not have this weakness. An entire government process could be completely filled with pedophiles and it would not be obvious that there is a connection between anyone, much less everyone, arousing natural suspicion, compared to a situation in which everyone involved, from police and prosecutors to judges and witnesses etc., are apart of the same family, which would seem curious to most people; so pedophile networks even have an advantage over family based criminal networks.

If you have a long term advantage, over time you will likely dominate the space concerned. Of course that doesn't mean any given pedophile that launches into crime has an advantage, just the smart ones that manage to build a cooperative network and get over the first hurdles in doing so.

Also, to address the point of why they have an email setup with zero security, both on their official website and this anonymously owned .com domain that they process emails on, but exploiting this vulnerability to send fraudulent email would take some computer skills, this is not a paradox of contradiction but easily compatible.

Corporate crime is almost always committed with layers of plausible deniability built in. Even if negligence is not a defence to allow criminal processes under your supervision, it's still better to be facing negligence charges than co-conspirator charges.

"Oh I'm just dumb, I didn't think" is still better to be able to say than facing clear and unequivocal participation in a criminal scheme.

So, in this case, if the key criminal role of the management of these corporations is to create the vulnerabilities in the first place and then those vulnerabilities can be exploited by criminals committing the criminal acts themselves that have some degree of criminal separation, then this maintains some plausible deniability that the vulnerabilities are created intentionally to participate in human trafficking.

What is meant by "degree of criminal separation" is that the criminals who then actually make fraudulent emails and actually go traffic the children are working for someone (who in turn maybe working for someone) up to a top boss that can then deal directly with criminal corporate managers in Finland. The "criminal laborours", for lack of a better term, would then not need to even know that the vulnerabilities were created intentionally for the criminal operation to function, but for all they know they are exploiting accidental vulnerabilities. Criminal management in Finland can then be compensated in off-shore accounts or with other money laundering methods.

Likewise, people who actually work for the child welfare corporation in Finland can be completely unaware that information they handle is being stolen for the purposes of human trafficking. For example, you can setup parallel devices that download all the information and you could even tell your employee about these parallel devices and that they stay in the office as a backup; indeed, you could explain that as precisely due to the sensitive nature of the processes this is a necessary security measure in case they lose their device.

As importantly as all that, Finland is a high technology sophistication country, so everyone who does anything remotely professional has degrees and certificates and so on. You need training and a certification to work as a waiter/tress in a restaurant.

Description of the training

You will graduate as a waiter/waitress from the Further Vocational Qualification in Restaurant Customer Service. During the training, you will learn to describe, recommend, sell and serve restaurant food and beverage products. You will be able to serve customers in a spontaneous, friendly and responsible way and to act in accordance with the company’s business idea and service culture.

You will also be able to explain to customers the ingredients and preparation methods of the food dishes sold. You will be able to serve customers with special dietary requirements and to process payment instruments. You will learn to make sales accounts and operate profitably, as well as to use various working methods, appliances and equipment. — Waiter/waitress training, Omnia.fi

So if you need training and certification to be waiter/tress at a restaurant, imagine how much training and certification software engineers have who build GDPR compliant systems for handling ID, medical and court information have. A lot.

In this sort of professionalized environment it creates a further problem of how to recruit a competent software engineer into your criminal conspiracy.

Your choices are:

1. Hire competent and non-criminal competency and try to carry out your criminal scheme behind their back. But this creates the enormous risk that the slightest thing that goes wrong, a single error message or someone making contact to report some odd thing on their network (such as a bounded email or information transfer or what have you), could result in an investigation and immediate uncovering up crime. If you higher some actual IT firm that dates responsibility for the data, they may do their jobs. Even if you circumvent their policies they may change policies at anytime in a way that reveals the previous circumvention.

Really this choice is a non-starter since if you have the skills to defeat highly trained forensic data experts that work for companies that actually manage ID, medical and legal information, then you have the skills to do things yourself.

2. Recruit a expert into your criminal conspiracy. Problem here is that easier said than done. Information experts don't necessarily need the extra cash, if they did they might not choose child trafficking as their extracurricular criminal activity of choice. Furthermore, even if you did find such an expert to setup and manage your network in a way that was not obviously in violation of the GDPR and participate in carrying out and covering up all the criminal activity, you'd be working for them as they would know everything, have backups of everything and possess all the leverage they could possibly want to rat you out. Such a person could extort you at anytime for any amount, so playing things out you may end up losing your cut and still be ratted out, so what's even the point of doing crime in that case? So, hard to find such a candidate and even if one did exist you may want to stay in charge of your criminal operation which requires staying in control of the data systems necessary to carry out the crimes in question, leading to the last and best option if you are not yourself an computer and information expert of some kind.

3. You improvise the data processing setup in such a way that allows your criminal partners to use out-of-country cyber criminals to carry out the crimes exploiting the security vulnerabilities, without even knowing this is by design. Cyber criminals are of course available for higher globally; the issue above is finding someone actually qualified in Finland for data GDPR compliance that you will trust with a birds-eye view of the whole scheme. With very little IT skills you can setup an official website with Wordpress (what this "corporate group" we are discussing actually does) and have zero email security opening the door to be fraudulently misrepresented by your criminal partners elsewhere (also what they actually do). Likewise, with very little IT skills you can setup email on another domain that is registered outside the EU (and so far less compliance checklists to go through as just an "private person"), in this case to an anonymous individual in the US, and so simply bring all the data outside the EU and GDPR scrutiny of even the service provider (and entirely outside the supervision of any competent IT company, which is not even involved at all). Suspicious logs maybe subtle, such as downloading information to suspicious devices and making the occasional odd contact to legitimate conversation (a fraudulent conversation could be a mix of actual emails that don't contain crime and fraudulent emails to pass the criminal information).

This irregular and non-compliant setup will still be noticed by police, prosecutors and judges in charge of the legal cases of these child protection process, but they can be compromised in various ways (from bribes to extortion).

Unlike hiring some highly skilled IT person that would have all the information, have the skills to launder their cut and disappear if needs be, but most importantly be the single most valuable person to any actual police investigation, having backups of all the data and communications etc. (possibly also recordings and other things competent IT people can easily do), compromised officials are far more easy to control, can have very little knowledge of what the scheme even is (just that if they don't do what they're told they won't get their money ... as well as arrested or even murdered, capiche), and would have little to no leverage if ever there's a legitimate investigation, so you can be more confident they really do work for you and not the other way around.

In fact, my guess would be this kind of criminal enterprise starts in the public sector by high-up pedophile officials, such as your typical Finnish appellate judge, who then slowly grow their criminal conspiracy over the years, maybe starting small with just covering up child rape crimes purchased on the "normal" blackmarket, creating a clique of officials that carry out and then coverup rape crimes against children while also then creating relationships and links with organized crime; at some point it is realized a lot more money could be made by everyone and a lot more children could be raped by those involved if the government say ... I don't know, ... just spit balling here ... contracted out child protection tasks to a private corporation that can operate without scrutiny (normally social workers in Finland work directly for the government so therefore use information systems managed by and overseen by the government IT people with all sorts of robust systems and scrutiny in place).

It would be difficult to conceive of and execute on this plan purely from the private sector (we're going to setup this company and this non-compliant GDPR system to do crime, then get government contracts and simply assume anyone who needs to be compromised can be compromised at any given time), but would be easy to conceive up and execute on from the point of view of public officials that have both a birds-eye-view and means of compromising the processes involved and are already involved in this kind of crime and now want to streamline things. This transfer of government money to a private corporation dealing in highly sensitive processes with essentially zero public supervision of what they are doing, also enables your more ordinary embezzling and laundering of government funds.

Furthermore, often red flag reports go to some choke point, so only that point needs to be compromised to reassure everyone below them that "nothing to see here" for the scheme to go unnoticed (so even if lots of people may notice a red flag that doesn't mean they all must be compromised). If you are unfamiliar with how the internet works and how the GDPR works and just find it odd that this company uses an email that has no corresponding website, and is not their official website, if some judge, or police chief or data controller told you that they know already, not to worry about it, most people wouldn't think further about it as it's "not my problem anymore". In fact, most people when encountering an irregularity outside their domain of expertise can be just confidently told the irregularity is in fact a good thing and required for greater security of these highly sensitive processes. So, police or other government employed child welfare officers involved could be just told things are done this way for "added security"; they'd have little way to know that makes no sense and their usual habit would be to not discuss their cases so it would be unlikely to randomly come up in conversation with people who would find that problematic (so from their perspective they carried out their anti-fraud training, reported out an email discrepancy as is their training, their job is done on that).

To take targets of the scheme in foreign countries, for example, in getting an email error message of some kind (say you write back to a fraudulent email and it bounces) you could be phoned up and told any number of things that will in fact increase your confidence this error message represents more rather than less security: for example that precisely because it's highly sensitive child information that this easily triggers all sorts of security systems that then make these sorts of error messages so that we can be sure everything is working as intended, or then simply the system is down precisely because the information is so sensitive and everything is regularly audited! Which is an essentially unsolvable problem in security that all anti-fraud warnings can themselves be transformed by fraudsters into an advantage when dealing with untrained people (a la "we're special, this whole process is special, therefore special things happen in these special processes and you can trust our special knowledge to guide you through this special day, and then once you know what we know you'll be special too").

Is there any actual evidence that any children have suffered because of what you explained? — Sir2u

First of all, compromising people's data is itself harmful, which then, in itself, causes the suffering of needing to worry about how one's data could be used for ill, once one is made aware of the data breach (as required under the GDPR). If you knew your ID and medical history was stolen that would cause suffering even if the data theft is never exploited to commit further crimes against you.

Of course, I am aware your meaning is suffering beyond compromising the data in itself, but I just want to fully clarify that violating people's privacy, sending their data to the some anonymous individual, is harmful and causes suffering in itself.

This totally illegal setup has been running for at least 7 years compromising hundreds, likely thousands of people's data, so really not good.

Further crimes against children by the network involving the above company have also been committed; however, I can't as easily report on confidential information of ongoing investigations and / or court cases.

The data breach part of this criminal network, however, is public information so anyone can re-publish it anywhere and draw attention to it.

As to what exactly these corporations and their criminal network are doing; I only have insight into a small part.

However, what I can say about the whole is that there is no legitimate business process that would result in this sort of information processing setup.

These are corporations that can only exist with boards of qualified corporate managers liable for what the corporation does.

Chapter 22: Damages
Section 1: Management’s liability for damages

A member of the board of directors, a member of the supervisory board and the managing director
is liable to compensate for any injury or damage that they have, in violation of the duty of care
referred to in chapter 1, section 8, while in office, intentionally or through negligence caused to
the company.

A member of the board of directors, a member of the supervisory board and the managing director
is likewise liable to compensate for any injury or damage that they have, by violating other
provisions of this Act or the articles of association, while in office, intentionally or through
negligence caused to the company, a shareholder or a third party.

If the injury or damage has been caused by violating this Act in some other manner than by
merely violating the principles referred to in chapter 1, or if the injury or damage has been caused
by violating the provisions of the articles of association, it is deemed to have been caused through
negligence, unless the person liable proves that they have acted with due care. The same
provision applies to injury or damage that has been caused by an act to the benefit of a related
party. (512/2019) — Limited Liability Companies Act

The last thing you want to do as a corporate manager is be involved in breaking the law, as that's always by definition intentional or negligent violation of your duty of care.

Violating the GDPR, even in subtle ways, has famously large consequences:

GDPR fines are administrative penalties that can be imposed on organizations that violate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These fines can be substantial, reaching up to 4% of a company's annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is higher, for serious infringements. There are two tiers of fines, with the lower tier reaching up to 2% of annual revenue or €10 million.

Fines Structure:
Tier 1: Up to 2% of annual global turnover or €10 million, whichever is higher.
Tier 2: Up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is higher. — Google GDPR fine summary

So any corporate manager, even more-so for something as serious as child welfare services, will know about the GDPR, informed by their lawyer or then it being constantly in the news. It was the absolute biggest news in EU corporate management for years, while it was debated, then passed, then the 2 years before coming into force and then the constant high-stakes legal cases resulting from the GDPR.

The first thing a corporate lawyer will tell you as a corporate member of the board is that implementing the GDPR for processing sensitive information requires expertise, having regular data audits, and no expert consultant or data auditor of any kind would not immediately identify all the serious security concerns in themselves of the data setup described in the OP as well as the long list of GDPR violations. This is really basic stuff.

But that's anyways how corporations work, that liability is transferred to qualified experts about as much as possible (so that the corporate managers cannot be held responsible for intentionally or negligently causing harm if they hired an expert to do it; an expert that then has insurance to cover their own negligent damages they might cause; why everything get's so expensive so quickly doing things the corporate way).

Ignorance is not a defence of corporate board responsibilities (such as to avoid being fined and / or sued under the GDPR) and it's simply not a hypothesis in this case worth entertaining.

Any legitimate corporation that is created to handle incredibly sensitive information will have at least 1 board member talk to their lawyer to go over the liability of the position which will result in immediately identifying handling the data as a major source of liability and disagreeing with a plan to just have somebody improvise the whole thing ... and also remain anonymous for the part where they improvise the email setup in the US.

A typical legitimate board member of this kind of corporation, if it were legitimate, would be very accomplished in their career, regularly consult with their own legal council about legal issues and take their responsibilities of due care seriously.

In addition to that, these corporations do government contracts to provide social services, so there would be another round of due diligence (and supposed to be regular review) from the government to get these contracts.

Point being, the hypothesis that a corporate board of child welfare company "accidentally" created a data processing setup that happens to be ideal for trafficking children is super amazingly implausible, and anyways is not a defence for the GDPR breaches as well as any damages that occur anywhere in the world. For, this setup makes the board members of these corporations not just liable to whoever's data they handled but also to anyone that is damaged by their child corporate welfare corporations having zero security measure implemented to avoid fraudulent emails representing their corporation.

"Limited Liability Companies Act" and "we didn't know about the GDPR" are not remotely plausible legal defences for corporate board members.

Therefore, we can be extremely confident this data processing setup was created and then shielded from scrutiny for the purposes of committing crimes (which there's specific evidence of more crimes than the criminally negligent data handling, but the above is another way to arrive at the same conclusion).

That it can be used to impersonate Finnish child welfare services and gain custody of and traffic children anywhere in the entire world is reason to disperse the notice as widely as possible (which if you live in a country, you can do; most countries have reporting channels, even anonymously, and just sending the notice could intercept a child being trafficked right now).

Such child abduction and trafficking crime can also be committed without even involving the corporations that created these vulnerabilities; any cyber criminal can discover these vulnerabilities and then exploit the with their criminal network.

Various documentaries have been made about similar practices taking place in the Netherlands, and political parties have tried to garner attention for it. Predictably, the political establishment isn't interested. I wonder why? — Tzeentch

In this case, that their email not even corresponding to their official domain and instead a 404 error page is red flag that anyone with anti-fraud training would discover pretty much immediately.

So we can be sure that government officials (police, prosecutors, judges, bureaucrats of various kinds) are involved in covering up this illegal operation, either because they are in on it or then manipulated by others who are in on it to ignore the red flags.

Doesn't need to be an intelligence operation though.

All I can say is that western intelligence agencies like the CIA, MI6 and Mossad have been linked at various points in time and on multiple occasions to global pedophile networks.

Too crazy to be true(?). — Tzeentch

Absolutely not too crazy to be true and we have abundant evidence this happens.

However, at the moment nothing requires involvement of intelligence agencies to explain. Just "regular crime" also happens of, for example, pedophiles making a child protection agency and then making money in organized crime and compromising public officials to shield their organizations from scrutiny; once enough public officials are compromised then other public officials that weren't involved in the original crime tend to conclude they need to help coverup the incredibly embarrassing truth in order to protect their own political future, so the coverup tends to sprawl out precisely due to it being uncovered if it has reached a critical mass.

TDLR: a Finnish corporation has setup their information processing system to be perfect for both stealing child information as well as being impersonated due to zero email security on their official domain. This combination of theft of real child protection cases (and all the kinds of paperwork you could possibly need) and allowing impersonation of their official domain, is ideal for abducting children from orphanages, foster organizations, even adoption, or straight abduction, and moving them around the world with fraudulent documents. Many targets would have little training and means in anti-fraud and would also "want to believe" children are going to a better life in Finland.
Children could be in transit using fraudulent documents and misrepresentation of these companies right now. Since the scheme can operate in any country in the world, the only way to protect children from this security vulnerability is to spread this information globally, starting for example with law enforcement and child protection reporting systems in every country.
So please if you live in a country report this information to at least the proper channels if not other concerned parties. The vulnerabilities and law breaking the above represents are immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the DNS system and the GDPR, however if you're wondering what an AI like ChatGPT thinks of all this, I've done that basic sanity check for you:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6883c7e7-8bc4-8013-a982-62af7cb9e4c1
Feel free to submit the same prompts to the AI of your choice.
ChatGPT's conclusion abot all this:
"""
Final Thoughts
This setup creates a perfect enabling environment for child trafficking, including:
Digital identity laundering
Institutional impersonation
High-value data extraction
Complete lack of traceability or lawful oversight
If even one actual communication involving children’s data or welfare occurred through this .com domain, it is grounds for:
Immediate investigation by Finnish and EU authorities
Suspension or criminal scrutiny of anyone authorizing or tolerating the setup
"""
The base DNS records (DNS standing for Domain Name System) can be sourced directly from ICANN (the organization in charge of these records so the internet and world wide web functions as it does):
https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup
Email server records, called "MX records" can be sourced from google's tool:
https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/
Which will report "record not found" when clicking on MX.
But there's a bunch of tools available to make these inspections.
The errors produced by another popular tool https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth/ summarize the complete absence of any email security whatsoever:

Category Host Result Status
Problem mx uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi DNS Record not found Status
Problem mx uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi No DMARC Record found Status
Problem mx uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi DMARC Quarantine/Reject policy not enabled Status
Problem dmarc uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi No DMARC Record found Status
Problem spf uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi No SPF Record found Status
Problem spf uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi No DMARC Record found Status
Problem spf uomasosiaalipalvelut.fi DMARC Quarantine/Reject policy not enabled

↪boethius I have begun reading some of the classic Marx/Engels texts and what I am finding is that they assume a high level of knowledge on the reader's part about capitalist economics. — unimportant

Definitely things will be a lot clearer of what people are even talking about with reading the classic texts in a discipline. Highly recommended.

Partly Marx is addressing himself to other intellectuals who he assumes is familiar with all the texts he's familiar with, such as Ricardo and Hegel and he's using references and language and conceptual frameworks that Western intellectuals at the time would be familiar with; and partly there's a lot of words and concepts that everyone is familiar with at that time but now require more erudite historical knowledge to fully understand.

For example, everyone, for all intents and purposes, at the time Marx is writing are familiar with Lords and the bourgeoisie. The class distinctions were super obvious and people were very concerned with being identified with their class and their subgroup within their class.

Why analysts today still use the word bourgeoisie is first there's no good modern counter-part, as to say "upper class" is to include also aristocrats, but the whole point of the bourgeoisie is that they are rich but no aristocrats. So in modern language they are the 1% who aren't still actual kings and lords. King Charle's is part of the 1% but not bourgeoisie, likewise the pope is reasonable to say is part of the 1% but is not bourgeoisie.

Bourgeoisie also has more reference than just wealth (without being also still feudal), but there's a whole culture and world view that develops along with it: clothes, mannerisms, opinions, history, myth and so on; most importantly an ideology that optimizes their dominance that they can, through their dominance, push on the rest of the world; when very different cultures start to look "Western" what those cultural elements, world view and opinions actually are and come from are the Western bourgeoisie culture. There's obvious things like clothes and architecture, but more importantly is the way of thinking such as wealth always being caused by hard work (why wealth is deserved, and why the bourgeoisie should be in charge and not aristocrats who did not "earn their wealth"; i.e. wealth is always deserved except if you're an aristocrat, but even then only before the emergence of capitalism as since wealth is always deserved existing aristocrats, such as King Charles, "earn" their wealth through the hard work they do bringing in tourism, perfectly honest well deserved wealth of a modern hard working enterprising modern king; so that kind of obsession proving an anachronistic king in the contemporary age is economically justified, rather than even consider any theory of governance and justice and so on, is archetypical bourgeoisie sensibilities; the question of the effect of having a king on governance would not even occur in bourgeoisie culture as everything that exists under capitalism has an economic explanation and everything with an economic explanation is justified, except when they disagree of course, then it's a case of "it may work for them over there, but it wouldn't work for us here and there's an economic explanation, and thus justification, for both cases").

One pretty good heuristic for systemic corruption in an organization (private or government) is increase in debt levels.

Corrupt people do not think about the future and simply takin on debt is the easiest way to satisfy all corrupt stakeholders and avoid inter-corrupt competition.

Consider Finland's national debt growth (Directly from the Finnish government debt page):



Compared to Finland's most direct peer that is Sweden (also direct from their government page on national debt):



Notably, Sweden is a lot less racist than Finland, so this difference in debt outcomes is compatible with racism being a core driver of law-enforcement and political corruption.

Of course increases in debt is not only caused by corruption, so there would be a lot to discuss, but it is one feature shared by all countries with corruption problems that debt increases. Corrupt people generally don't moonlight as brilliant financial planners.

Just to add a couple of key points.

The system of corruption is not planned in any coherent sense, but it's mostly reactive. There's this large illicit capital base that invests in actions (including careers of key people) to both avoid accountability and keeping the money flowing. The people who control this capital are not necessary allies but their interests are aligned in making sure money is easy to launder and there's never any real investigation into how billions of dollars are moved through the financial and corporate system without almost any being found.

So, when there's a threat the corrupt network of people either purposefully benefitting (think attorney who's business is washing money) or then people who are compromised, one way or another, and realize any actual impartial investigation would reveal their part in the corruption as well.

With time either organized crime would be mostly "dealt with" and go away or then all threats to illicit capital will be removed. Once you get rid of one nuisance prosecutor or judge it's even easier to ensure they aren't replaced with anyone more of a nuisance; indeed, most people are cowards anyways and won't "make waves" so just the process of getting rid of the nuisances will result in a compliant system anyways.

The system is not stable with large illicit funds.

It's also immensely profitable to corrupt the government ... it's not even really a tax on illicit capital, as once the government is compromised to ensure the safety of illicit cash flows, the same system of corruption can be used to embezzle government funds.

Even better, a corrupt government can be manipulated into war, which is the most profitable conditions for organized crime: allowing vulnerable children without fathers to be even more easily kidnapped and sold into the child-rape industry as well as endless cash and weapon systems to "go missing" in the fog of war.I

It's simply commonly accepted fact that half the money sent to Ukraine is stolen and laundered as well as a large proportion of the arms sent to Ukraine. When the Western media deals with this issue it's simply shrugged off as a cost of doing business if we want our war.

The Ukraine war is both one of the most profitable events in the history of organized crime as well as supercharging corruption and organized crime in Europe.

From the outset European governments know Ukraine is going to lose (that the West is not going to risk escalation with Russia, so the only available policy is prop up Ukraine until is loses), knows propping up Ukraine and encouraging their no-diplomacy position will result in hundreds of thousands dead, know sending money and arms to the most corrupt country in Europe and number 1 in the world in illegal arms trafficking even before the war is just pouring tax payer wealth directly into the most ruthless organized crime networks on the planet, know there will child abductions and organ harvesting on a large scale, knows literal organized crime Nazi groups need to be armed and financed in order to prop up Zelensky, and that all this is at the immense harm to European economies.

So what's a better explanation? That policies ideal for organized crime and that don't accomplish anything else except politicians weakening their own countries and harming their own population, are due to politicians just suddenly having the statecraft acumen of toddlers and "Putin meanie" is the absolute extent of their diplomatic skill now, or that these politicians work in the interest of organized crime, and none of the money sent to Ukraine and then laundered is found because law enforcement also works for organized crime?

Point being, the evidence for regulatory capture by organized crime is extremely obvious and abundant and offers the best explanatory theory of the policies we see as well as what we don't see (it's simply admitted as a "necessary evil" that a lot, if not most, of the money sent to Ukraine will be stolen by Ukrainian elites because they are obviously super corrupt ... so why not any policies to try to mitigate that? Or then mitigate the weapon being stolen and sold on the black market? Or the to mitigate the child-rape industry? Etc.).

↪boethius That's so disturbing and horrific. — Truth Seeker

It is extremely disturbing, and unfortunately people don't want to see the evidence for it.

One additional note that I forgot to mention is that our Western political systems were intentionally designed to ensure the corrupting influence of the wealthy elite.

The wealthy elites who designed liberal democracies didn't want the monarchies and feudal system of aristocratic rights (that they no longer saw a reason for and just stood in the way of business) and to overthrow feudalism they needed the support of the people and revolution in the name of the people ... but they didn't exactly want the common people to have any actual power.

Liberal democracies therefore were designed by wealthy elites to serve the interests of wealthy elites, but they of course viewed themselves as honourable and rational and that they would "do good" with power over governance (same exact thing kings and aristocrats believed before), but of course a system in which wealth has the most power is naturally vulnerable to the power of illicit wealth.

Illicit wealth also naturally corrupts the entire business community without really needing "to do" much actual corruption other than invest illicit money that's been cleaned and have your people sit on corporate boards as part of the investment package. Most business people are naturally easily corrupted by simply offering them what they want.

So there's lots of vectors of corruption, both big and small, and the best way to visualize it as all summing to a sort of corrupt pressure that reaches a tipping point and the whole system switches over into a corrupt mode in which even the corruption that is uncovered there is no accountability, after which it's a point of essentially no return until the system collapses.

Why is there so much corruption in Finland, despite its high HDI? — Truth Seeker

I'll write a fuller account later, but the short version is the combination of several factors.

The sort of "zeroth factor" is the context of the global narcotics trade, and now also human and arms trafficking trade, which in turn mostly reduces to racism.

The war on drugs is an obvious failed policy, but it is implemented and maintained because it disproportionally harms black people as tool of control post-segregation. The foundation of a tyrannical system is always criminalizing normal behaviour in the targeted groups requiring systemic repression.

Unfortunately even for white people who like to see this racist system in operation, the long term consequences of drug criminalization is the generation of massive amounts of illicit cash in the global financial system.

The first thing this illicit wealth does is invest in ventures (such as political careers) that are going to protect it and the next thing it does is invest in more criminal schemes that require large upfront capital (i.e. present a barrier to entry, same reason large venture capital firms want to invest in high-capital startups with a large barrier to entry into the space).

For example, the child sex-trafficking (i.e. child rape, torture and murder on an industrial scale) industry could not be booted up organically as it's too expensive to get going. Wheres the drug trade is fuelled by drug use being a natural human activity and so easy to find both users, traffickers and dealers who "believe in it" essentially and also like the money, the same is not true for kidnapping and raping children. You have to pay people a lot more money to go against their nature to traffic in child abuse, so it requires the foundation of an existing criminal organization and high startup costs, for a long list of reasons.

As importantly as needing the criminal capital base to start trafficking child rape slaves on a large scale, law enforcement systems must also already be compromised (thanks to decades of investment in law enforcement careers). There's a strong natural instinct for most humans to protect children, so to organize child abuse on a large scale in a not-corrupt system you're going to be caught. It is essential for law enforcement to be working for the child rapists for such an industry to exist for any length of time. Child rape is not a criminal network that is hard to dismantle by non-corrupt law-enforcement. Whereas for drugs it is a very natural activity and therefore if you arrest 10 drug dealers you'll just have 10 new ones the next day, not so for child rape slave pimping; there is not a near infinite supply of child rape slave pimping and people willing to work at each step in the child-rape supply chain.

Whereas the average sober person turns a blind eye to drug dealing and doesn't narc on the party, the average person does not protect child rapists from accountability.

It's very adverse criminal circumstances that requires a lot of capital to get going and deep penetration of law enforcement and political offices to protect. The core problem of running child rape slaves as an industry (compared to "closed child rape systems" such as in the religious organizations you rightly condemn) is you need clients, therefore it's incredibly easy to compromise these networks with undercover agents. Whereas the demand and essentially moral support for drugs is high enough that police cannot win such a war of attrition against the mafia and cartels, the police would win such a war of attrition against child rape slave pimp networks. Under non-corrupt circumstances it's simply not an easy feat to regularly kidnap children and pimp them out for rape, torture and murder. For such an activity to endure, the protection of police chiefs, police in charge of money laundering, organized crime and specifically the child kidnappings, in addition to the special prosecutors oversee these investigations and judges who oversee them, and finally the politicians that could order special investigations when this corruption comes to light, all must be essentially working directly for organized crime.

Which sounds like "a lot" but could represent literally 20 people in a whole country that need to be compromised for organized crime to run essentially unchecked, so after decades and decades of the corrosive influence of just the "normal" drug money, it is not surprising that the entire organized crime investigation chain can be completely compromised by organized crime.

So above is global circumstance of organized crime which creates the capital and pressure to compromise as many law enforcement systems as possible in which to operate freely.

The conditions particular to Finland are:

First, that low levels of petty and mid-tier corruption attract large scale corruption because wealth is safe also for criminals. Crime bosses don't want to launder their money into unstable countries for the same reason no one else wants to store their wealth there.

Second, if you do launder your money successfully into a developed country with a good international reputation, such as Finland or other nordics, that money will be far less scrutinized when moved on elsewhere internationally (as presumably you don't want to live in Finland but on the Azure coast).

Therefore, stable countries known for low-corruption are extremely attractive for large scale money laundering precisely for those reasons. Successfully laundered money is safe from being stolen by corrupt officials or then endless demands for bribes as well as just safer for basic economic stability reasons (that if you launder your money into a Finnish corporation denominated by Euros, it will more likely retain its value compared to laundering your money into Chile denominated by the Chilean Peso).

These factors are not sufficient in themselves to cause large scale corruption, just explains the "demand" for laundering money through Finland and similar countries, just as a casino having a lot of cash explains why bands of witty and handsome thieves would want to steal said cash.

Just as a casino can have systems preventing all its cash being stolen, so too can countries have systems preventing large scale money laundering.

All of the above explaining essentially the demand by criminal networks to corrupt a country like Finland and for what purpose, mainly the cleaning of money. When money is washed through the Finnish corporate and banking system, it is white as snow. Anyone you might suspect of laundering money in Finland is going to be equally white and in our global system white people are largely immune from investigations started due to reasonable suspicion (their whiteness cancels out most if not all evidence). Some far more tanned banker in Italy is not going to just willy-nilly accuse a white person in a nordic country of suspicious banking activity simply due to evidence. World just doesn't work like that.

So, for the same racism that creates the drug trade in the first place, money is far cleaner when washed through white countries.

The last factors to explain the situation is why Finland is particularly vulnerable to corruption.

The main problem is that Finland has essentially no democratic oversight of law enforcement and the judiciary.

The whole point of democracy is to solve the problem of corruption and incompetence that emerges when people in power have no accountability. So that's basically the system in Finland and would explain why Finland has more large scale corruption compared to its peers, to the extent now of "un-developing" and sinking in all the development rankings.

Unfortunately, Finnish culture is also ideal for large scale corruption as there is a near universal and unlimited acquiescence to authority in Finland. Basically imagine if Nazis (which most Finns were extremely sympathetic to the Nazi ideology of their ally in WWII) found themselves in a democracy. For most Finns questioning authority is taboo, doesn't matter the evidence. The more evidence the more taboo in fact.

And the reason for comes down again to racism. Finns are incredibly racist, don't hesitate to call black people "niggers" in Finnish, and police beat down on immigrants and therefore most Finns simply tolerate, mostly deeply love, the system of corruption and second-class citizenry that enable the police to harass immigrants. Even if the average Finn wanted to put an end to police corruption, there's no direct way to do it as there's essentially no democratic oversight of police, prosecutors or judges in Finland. So a combination of most Finns wanting corruption, as long as it doesn't target them and instead harasses immigrants, and there being no mechanism of democratic oversight anyways, makes the country vulnerable to being essentially entirely captured by organized crime. So it's a "careful what you wish for" kind of situation in that decades of cheering on police corruption against immigrants has now led to large scale systemic corruption and the eroding of the mechanisms of government and institutions that provided the white population a good quality of life to begin with and the whole reason immigrants are not welcome here.

And this is not an exaggeration; every once in a while police go too far in their white supremacy and get caught being involved in literal neo-Nazi organizations, which is not because the justice system isn't a white supremacists organization as a whole dedicated to Himmler's vision of society, but because police are supposed to be a bit smarter than literally dressing up as Nazis. However, with few exceptions all Finnish police would dress up like Nazis if they could.

And when you have a police force nearly entirely dedicated to racism and organized crime, they easily dispatch with the career of anyone (politician, journalists, etc.) that would frustrate their organized crime and racist activities, and they can also easily compromise fully their allies (mostly by supplying child rape slaves to key elites).

Which to tie everything together, this new phase of corruption is worse than what we had before due to the development of the child rape slave industry. For, with drugs, you could easily compromise (and then boost the careers of) key politicians, prosecutors, judges, police, journalists, with drugs, but there's a sort of natural limit to the corruption a normal person would engage proportional to the nature of the extortion. So, a sort of "average" person, for lack of a better word, who knows organized crime has images of him or her snorting cocaine, is going to go along with a lot of corruption due to that extortion (and also donations to their campaign funds) but there will be a limit. Contracts to one business rather than another, sure, why not, but the line maybe drawn with covering up murder or then abducting and raping children. Normal people will have some limit to the corruption they'll enable simply to hide drug use, afterwhich they may simply quit or worse start exposing the corruption as an insider, as you can recover from drug use by "going to rebab" and realizing some things (even in the decades when it was far more stigmatized than today).

However, no one recovers career wise from raping children, there's no "child rape rehab" after which you can go on talk shows and hit rock bottom and then had to turn your life around to fawning attention (due to being male and white of course, and obviously going to jail was never a possibility), therefore it is the ideal corrupting activity.

The whole reason a few (of hundreds out there) of these elite child rape networks have been exposed is because it's not pervasive part of Western governance and there is going to be a few cases that happen to get exposed (then the system learns how to avoid that happening again) due to random chance as well as due to infighting between these corrupt networks (at some point the extortion gets used in such a corrupt system).

Why things seem now at another level of corruption tracks entirely with the growth of the child-rape industry, as people compromised by child rape have no natural limit. "Quitting and going to rehab" is not an option; they can be extorted to stay exactly where they are and also keep taking promotions; and likewise there is no limit to the corruption such as person will engage in, including obviously child rape itself.

Analysts have noticed, and questioned without being able to see the obvious answer, that everything has become really stupid, that there's not even an attempt to try to make obvious corruption make any sense, and there's also zero accountability: journalists, police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, literally zero mechanisms of accountability left in the system.

One final note, it's not that the average person can easily be compromised with drugs or raping a child, but it's a combination of sufficient people can and then the obstacles in their way can be removed. Once you corrupt police and prosecutors you can just make up fake cases against the people that represent some accountability in the system (wherever they are), destroy their careers.

These "big" corrupt moves are in the context of a system that is also corrupting overtime that makes all the decisions in the system vulnerable to influence. For example, a lot of large corrupt outcomes are due to a series of seemingly insignificant corrupt decisions due simply to pressure; in particular the career advancement of people who are 100% compromised is going to depend on a long series of smaller decisions. Those decisions can be directly influenced by various forms of pressure which the target may not even realize is corrupt (such as just spreading rumours and then going and confiding that the alternatives have been accused of this or that, you know "you've heard things"), in addition to things entirely outside the system such as letting corrupt police you're invested in make the odd drug bust or solve some robbery, then they appear like geniuses.

Once corrupt people advance to the top, without top-down accountability and without even trying to hire competent people of integrity, these systems quickly thoroughly corrupt anyways and idiots start doing all sorts of corrupt things all by themselves (plant evidence to catch "who they know are guilty", or taking a little bit of entirely deserved repayment for fabricated expenses, and just doing favours for friends and so on), and this pervasive corruption then makes small forms of corruption even easier as spreading a rumour has limited affect on non-corrupt critical thinkers (may still bias them, but is of limited corrupting influence) but implying knowledge and evidence of some corruption people chose to do all by themselves has a very large corrupting influence.

So, it's not a case where you need literally the whole government to rape children on camera, you just need maybe a dozen key people to do so (whether "tricked" into thing the child was older or just into raping children) and then move those people into bottleneck positions. For any corruption case to go forward in a country may require 1 of as few as 6 people, so as long as those 6 people have raped children or been involved in covering it up, then you essentially control the entire country (the only other weaknesses being the legacy media, but they can be corrupted too and even more easily as you can just buy these institutions with laundered money and aligned "legitimate" business allies, and put your people in charge).

I wouldn't pat you on the back if you had taken the bribe. I think doing the right thing is important. — Truth Seeker

Always excellent to hear anyone against the taking of bribes.

Of course, there are some of us, and attitudes will change generally once the consequences of corruption are lived on a grand scale, which is already happening but I expect things will have to get much, much wore for Western society as a whole to become less tolerant of corruption.

I am reading a book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Forgive-Good-Proven-Prescription-Happiness-ebook/dp/B003SE6Y28 that I bought today. I love it and recommend it most highly. — Truth Seeker

This is great to hear. A good book is generally always excellent for the mind.

I haven't read it, but the title "Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness" definitely seems exactly some wisdom that could be of great help to you right now.

For, what we control are our actions and decisions, and what are the best actions and decisions right now to take is a question that is independent of any grudges or past wrongs (of which there is nothing to do about).

Forgetting what is no longer any use is as important to focusing on what is currently useful in order to sharpen the mind and will towards right actions.

Why, not surprisingly, talk therapy has been shows to be not so effective for a lot of people, and even counter productive, if there is nothing really to do or analyze further about whatever it is.

Of course, if there's something to actually learn from some past circumstance, it's certainly useful to talk about it, but otherwise it's generally more useful to focus on what there is to do now.

Not sure if that's what the book is about, I'm just going with the impression I get from the title, but it does very much seem like a good message to me, and particularly suited to your current reflections.

Please report back when you have completed this literary adventure.

How does despair help any living creature.

Consider the possibility you are in a quite normal situation of your knowledge about problems outpacing your application to those problems.

The only sense of meaning possible once one is aware of how serious our collective problems are, how much suffering evil people cause, is to be finding the best option to address those problems, given ones situation and skillset and general disposition, and then carrying out those options.

Any actual good change to our social systems is incredibly slow and both the risk and the small nature of our individual contributions is precisely why moral problems are problems. If it was easy to make the world a better place just by wishing it so, then that wouldn't really be a moral problem in any meaningful sense. Might be an intellectual problem of what a better world truly is, but any improvement in our understanding we could simply wish immediately to be the case in such a scenario.

Navigating the objective conflict of interest (in terms of consumption of resources and simply staying alive) between oneself and others is what renders moral issues in the world we actually live in so tense and difficult.

Now, you list your objectives in your opening statement. Very far reaching objectives, as ideal as you can formulate.

But as for your actions, you list only things pre-approved by society as a good thing that gets you a pat on the back. Which, insofar as they really are good things, is perfectly fine to do. Society wouldn't last very long if it approved of only good things. A lot of people go around not randomly murdering people and I'd say we all recognize that deserves a little pat on the back.

However, when one recognizes society is sick, as you clearly demonstrate you understand, then doing only that which society celebrates ultimately only reinforces society's profound sickness.

And without acting to find out the real causes for things and call those things by their true names (like the true name of corrupt cops is putrid swine maggoty pigs) then your despair simply measures the extent you participate in and ultimately contribute to a rotten system while knowing it to be the case but fooling yourself about it.

The only way out is a radical leap into the unknown in search of truly effective action that overcomes critical scrutiny.

I do not fuck with fascist police because I am particularly brave, but because taking a bribe to coverup money laundering does not overcome crticial scrutiny.

And yet, nearly every member of our society would pat me on the back for taking the money and demonstrate zero concern for what organized crime is doing to children and other victims all around the globe.

Nearly all in our society would then demonstrate their own sense of bravery by showing they do not care about such consequences and care even less about critical scrutiny of anyones actions, mine or theirs.

However, if people not caring about critical scrutiny is not a decision making foundation that resists critical scrutiny. It is easy to join them or then feel a sense of security in not being criticized, and indeed patted on the back, but most members of our society, but insofar as you yourself can still think still know yourself that your decisions don't overcome critical scrutiny.

The only possible result is negative emotions about oneself for knowing one could subject oneself to critical scrutiny where others don't, but choose not to.

I think you did the right thing by blowing the whistle. Well done. — Truth Seeker

It's self evident that exposing reasonable suspicion of money laundering is the right thing to do.

That our Western society no longer views it as self evident is basically why our society will collapse.

However, there will be survivors and passing on the message that it turned out letting hundreds of billions of dollar of laundered money circulate unimpeded and doing absolutely nothing when clear evidence of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of this money laundering corruption by public officials is exposed, wasn't good for society, and most people respecting money launderers, even in public office, because they have "money" in their criminal job description (and people like money) is not a sound basis for a body politic.

You are so brave. I hope you triumph against the corrupt. — Truth Seeker

It's not bravery. Police can't do much. The can put me in their little van hole. They can put me in jail for a day. They have to give me free food.

It's just unusual for people to take issue with corrupt police. What's normal in our society, unfortunately, is to suck corrupt cop dick, no matter how putridly corrupt, rather than spit on their names, their badges, make it clear that respect is earned and being a corrupt sack of shit sexually harassing girls and trafficking drugs and humans and helping to launder money and coverup the perverted crimes of corrupt elites, is negative a million points on the respect scale.

You present me a cop that has earned some reason to respect him and I'll do. You present me a corrupt little sack of crap why would I respect him just because 99% of people would kiss his badge and suck his nuts.

Simply not choosing to defile myself with a single word of deference to corrupt swine pigs is not bravery, it's just an aversion stinking myself.

What can these little hitler loving skin heads that go around calling themselves officers of the law actually do to me?

In 4 years the answer is consistently nothing. These swine pigs are as useless at covering up their crimes and the crimes of the elites as they are at not-beating-their-spouses (cops statistically beat their spouses the most, the worthless maggots).

Who is actually responsible for covering up the money laundering and would do an actual good job of it?

CEO's! that's who.

Had I taken it upon myself to coverup these illicit financial events, no one would have ever heard about them again. Forever lost to the entropy of corporate email compaction.

I am so sorry that I can't right all wrongs. — Truth Seeker

Nothing to apologize for. You got to go easy on yourself a bit in terms of what's feasible to accomplish.

The movement to simply convince people slavery was bad and there isn't lower kinds of humans, or then not even humans, took thousands of years. Imagine being an abolitionists (which there were) 2000 years ago!

That our consequence is quite small is precisely what makes our choices moral tests.

For if something is good to do, it is good to do even if the good is only a little, even if the odds are that it will fail, even if the attempt is likely at great personal cost.

It is precisely the difficulty, the consequences far after we're dead, the dependence on others to also make a stand without any guarantee anyone will, that makes the difference between moral decisions and mere wish.

My attitude is to view moral stands as a form of extreme sport. Extreme Jobing I call it.

For, plenty of activities are more dangerous, more difficult, more painful but as long as labeled "extreme sport" then a perfectly normal, sane and laudable activity for people to engage in.

Fucking with fascist police is just as exhilarating as base jumping off a mountain, but the difference is far more people benefit from fucking with fascist police than just the personal experience of jumping a long way.

For example, police had me in their little van hole for a few hours. Got to go the whole way without a seatbelt (which the van hole doesn't have for some reason). Absolutely off the hook adrenaline rush.

As for Finland.

While Finnish authorities coverup money laundering (including the Prime Minister and President involvement in money laundering and child trafficking), the country drops 12 places in child wellbeing.

Finland's ranking in a new Unicef comparison of child wellbeing in wealthy countries has dropped sharply to 17th place, down from fifth in the agency's previous report published in 2020. — Finland plummets in Unicef child wellbeing ranking

Why does this happen?

Because the country has been captured by organized crime to launder money.

So, if you empathize with police, prosecutors, judges, politicians, corporate board members, auditors and attorneys, and feel just soooo bad at the very possibility that they could ever be held accountable for their own actions, such as participating in organized crime.

Which I get, these people would feel really super terrible if ever held to account for being corrupt morons.

Well, you need to weigh that empathy against literally the entire child population that suffers the consequences of corrupt government authority and policy. Hundreds of thousands of children have a worse life generally, and many die of suicide or drugs or or abuse or human trafficking, and many traumatized for life due to failing systems, all because adults in Finland (hundreds that I've talked to in all sorts of positions, including politicians that might not be part of the money laundering) are comfortable with clear as day evidence authorities are laundering money for organized crime.

For once law enforcement and the judiciary and the highest political offices are laundering money for organized crime, the very next thing that happens is putting corrupt people in charge of all sorts of important positions such as child protection position to use state power to kidnap and traffic children, but mostly just launder as much government money as possible from as many departments as possible into this money laundering network. A syphoning off of tax payer money that results in a worse service to the taxpayer. Again, anyone who pays taxes in Europe should be pretty pissed of authorities, not just in Finland (as authorities in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, UK, France, Italy, Germany, in the least, are also helping to launder African diamond money) and including the European Public Prosecution Office (who does not followup on clear fraud against the European Central Bank, as they too, and so every European, are defrauded in the scheme on secured loans from the ECB for PPA's that are totally fraudulent I was the only person responsible to deliver the power for those multi-million Euro Power Purchase Agreements, so can 100% tell you that is for sure fraud).

So it's really quite terrible the tolerance of money laundering in society. People keep saying they don't like children being raped ... but are absolutely fine with Europe outperforming the rest of the world by a factor of x2.5 in laundering money that finances the child rape industry. For me I really don't get it, but seems money laundering has been so glamorized by Hollywood that most people think it's sexy and actually a good thing.

I first had depression when my younger brother died due to a doctor's error on 9 February 1988. I would love to go back in time and prevent that from happening but I can't. — Truth Seeker

Unfortunate event, and understandably leads to existential crisis.

I have already signed petitions against the war in Ukraine and Gaza. I have also signed a petition against the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord. The petitions didn't stop the war or return the US to the Paris Climate Accord. — Truth Seeker

Political engagement is not reducible to signing petitions.

Things could also be a lot worse. For example, right now we have ecological destruction on a grand scale and also a live streamed genocide and the Western political system enables these terrible things to occur.

However, it could be a lot worse if people universally believed that it was good to destroy ecosystems and also good to carry out genocide.

Instead, most people on the planet do not value ecological destruction and mass torture and murder of children and others, so as terrible as things are we are in a far better position to be strategically than if we were in the position of needing to convince people on the basic principle of the value of nature and human life.

With respect to previous horrifying things like chattel slavery it took literally thousands of years simply to convince most people that this wasn't such a great thing.

There's actually more slavery today, so the world is not very good practically speaking at ensuring basic human dignity as well as for other species, but we have progressed at least to people mostly wishing there wasn't slavery.

I am so sorry. I didn't know what it was like to live in Finland. I have never been there. — Truth Seeker

Finland has many good aspects too, and I'm a Finnish citizen so I am co-responsible for what's going on here. There's (mostly) clean lakes, and (mostly) free health care and (mostly) free education and (mostly) comfortable and affordable trains.

That's awful. Finland is supposed to be the second least corrupt country! Please see: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 I am so sorry this happened to you. — Truth Seeker

These statistics are mostly complete bullshit, measuring things like amount of investigations and convictions.

In a thoroughly corrupt system there are no investigations and convictions of major corruption.

I'm literally the "senior supervisory manager" of a 280 million diamond mine energy project for Angola, and I say it's money laundering as the senior manager of the whole thing, backed up with the commissioning papers that place me as senior supervisory manager (along with accounting ledgers, contracts, endless fraudulent statement) and police and prosecutors not only keep deciding there will be no investigation, but keep writing that there's "no evidence" or "no indication" at all. Which is truly mind blowing level of gaslighting.

Even crazier, they place me under investigation for defamation for accusing people of laundering money since 2021, and a defamation investigation is by definition an investigation into the validity of the accusations. An investigation is not into particular accusations but into circumstances and the law, as is common sense, is that an investigation is neutral as to what crimes were committed and by whom (the whole point of an investigation to try to determine what happened), so it doesn't even make any legal sense for police and prosecutors to write down there won't be an investigation into circumstances in which there is already an investigation. The only legally sensible thing to write down is there is already an investigation into the circumstances ... and that's it.

Unfortunately police thought judges were corrupt enough to be able to coverup money laundering (involving judges and prosecutors) and then judges could just put me in the slammer for calling them all corrupt.

Now, Finnish judges, on the whole, are absolutely worthless class of people that I have no respect for, but unfortunately for police (who just make shit up basically), judges do have to deal with actual evidence. Just because police don't collect evidence doesn't matter in a trial; you don't need police to collect evidence you already have and as chair of the corporation for 10 years I don't need any corporate offices to be raided because 99% of everything in the office is in my own personal archive. This is where police being absolute morons works against them. They don't collect evidence, don't accept my repeatedly offering to confess to the crimes I'm suspected of, but that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist already.

Hence, the only solution their tiny worthless minds could come up with is just having me under investigation until the statutes of limitations expires (so in 2026).

As wild, most normal Finns, as well as Westerners generally, or not alarmed at prosecutors saying there's no evidence at all when there's literally thousands of messages and documents, but my word as supervisory manager of the whole diamond mine energy project should anyways be enough to establish plausible suspicion if I say it's money laundering (including the prosecutor general, because not-investigating, even though there's already an investigation, doesn't resolve anything and you can keep complaining about each decision not to investigate, which requires another review).

However, it's not a sorry-for-me situation, I don't want corrupt police, corrupt prosecutors and corrupt judges running the country into the dirt and trafficking children for organized crime, their political and elite networks.

I am quite pleased that police and prosecutors and judges are stupid enough to try their corrupt moronic bullshit on me, self document their crimes, and just have to accept my accusing them of laundering money (because covering up money laundering is also money laundering) and trafficking children for years without being able to put me in prison.

And it also just disturbs the system a whole archive of obvious serious organized crime just sitting on the public internet for years and nothing done about it.

I'm never even asked to stop accusing people of laundering money in public the time for the investigation to complete. Which would be quite usual in most circumstances: there's an investigation, I should respect that and let the investigation take its course, if there's money laundering then the investigation will reveal that (and the whole purpose of making accusations public is to motivate an investigation).

Why don't police even ask me to stop accusing people in public of laundering money and trafficking children? At any point in their 4 year investigation? Because they know my response will be "how about you make me, you dirty swine money laundering pig" and they don't have a good followup move for that.

You might say that obviously they could just charge me with insulting a police officer. True, but I can defend myself against that charge to that it's not an insult but a perfectly accurate description of corrupt police officers which is trivially easy to prove with the corruption these police have self documented. You might say, "but surely corrupt worthless judges that deserve only to be spit on and then burn in hell will just dismiss your defence" ... but it just gets too complicated as the evidence is all in documents and easy to submit in a trial (it's not some story that could be subject to endless objections and he-says-she-says etc.). Also ... I'd still be calling them corrupt money laundering morons from prison, I can appeal, at least twice, so that doesn't really solve the problem even if they had some way to organize a circus court involving more of their worthless colleagues.

The situation is actually absolutely optimum that after 2 decades of senior management I use my skills to continuously insult, and more importantly expose as criminals, corrupt police, prosecutors, judges and politicians.

It's the best use of my skillset at this particular moment in time, so I'm glad these worthless corrupt morons came to me with their bullshit, because if they didn't they'd still be corrupt worthless morons harming a long list of people (less able to defend themselves), I just wouldn't be able to do much about it.

And anyone who thinks I maybe exaggerating the harm to society of police, prosecutors and judges laundering money:

NEWS: $750 billion in dirty cash is laundered through Europe per year

AN estimated $750 billion in illicit funds flowed through the financial system in Europe in 2023, according to a new study.

The finding comes from a report by Nasdaq Verafin, a Canada-based company which provides fincrime technology such as fraud detection software. It said the dirty cash is equivalent to 2.3% of Europe’s GDP.

The report also found that, globally, $3.1 trillion was laundered in 2023. It said this meant that, “Europe represents nearly a quarter of the total flow of illicit funds globally”. This is despite the fact that Europe has under 10% of the global population. — report By Paul O’Donoghue, Senior Correspondent, AML Intelligence

Europe outperforms the rest of the world in money laundering to GDP by a factor of x2.5!!

Why?

Because nearly all corporate CEO's in Europe would take a 1 million Euro bribe to shut up about money laundering and if they didn't most of the rest would be intimidated by skin head fascist police investigating them for defamation instead of investigating obvious money laundering.

But our choices are either CEO's should stop helping to launder money in Europe or then we all accept things like the corruption of our political class resulting in support for genocide, incompetent government policy, endless harms by fascist worthless police, I spit on their badges and names, (such as sexual violence against children and abetting organized crime) on endless victims.

So, be the change you want to see in the world, is my attitude.

Time for CEO's to stand up, let our voices be heard! We're not going to take it anymore!

Whenever I hear about someone exposing corruption and paying a personal cost for doing so, my reaction is never "oh, no, should have kept his mouth shut" but instead "fuck yeah, fuck up those fascists pricks".

In this particular situation, happens to be my turn to fuck with the fascists, and it's an honour and not a burden.

The more depressed I am, the worse I feel, and the harder it is for me to do things. I have been at minus five on the mood scale many times. — Truth Seeker

Or perhaps the harder it is to keep doing things that led to your depression in the first place, but the easier it becomes to make some radical change.

For example, you say you're devoted to the protection of life. There is a genocide going on right now, perhaps consider connecting with people who are at least protesting it, not to mention all the rest of the madness going on in the US and world right now.

Day-dreaming of technological immortality seems, from my point of view, a distraction.

Not only the technical problems are super amazingly likely to be impossible to solve (no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics) but it would not be actual immortality but just life extension and you'd be back quite rapidly to being anxious about death even in such a situation. Stars die, blackholes evaporate, but odds are some improbable fatal event would happen far sooner (1 in a million year freak fatal accidents will happen on average once every million years; and the problem with freak accidents is that there's a bunch of them; so even if you pushed your safety systems to 1 in 1 billion year fatal accident rate, you're likely to have 1000 such 1 in a billion year risks, resulting in a likely life-span of a paltry million years).

Even more likely, the mind cannot be maintained in a sane state over long periods of extended-life time (even if that was possible) and madness would be the result; a hellish madness that you may then just have to wait an expected time of one million years for safety systems to fail.

Now, simply assuming consciousness is immortal as we know it exists and there is no experiment that can prove it ever stops existing, or then my approach of requiring indefinite time lines to resolve decisions making so just going ahead and assuming those requirements.

Only if solipsism is false and other living things actually exist. I think solipsism is false even though I can't prove it to be false. — Truth Seeker

It's of course a faith. But your confidence solipsism isn't true is likewise faith.

Why limit yourself to only adopting this one assumption on faith due to its convenient nature to function, when assuming not only are people conscious but have immortal consciousness is of additional convenience to function?

You might be brought out of your day dreaming stupor and be able to focus on grasping the task at hand.

There is life all around us, if we're responsible to protect rather than destroy life then there is much to do.

I am a vegan egalitarian because I care about other sentient organisms. Are you a vegan egalitarian? — Truth Seeker

I was vegetarian for some years in France and as organic as possible.

However, in moving to Finland I did not feel I was maintaining the same health on a vegetarian diet.

It's not ideal, but I am not against predation and animal husbandry on principle (for the cycle of life arguments above), population density in Finland is low so animal husbandry is not as destructive as elsewhere, and we have far bigger problems to address so I decided is was best to be fully effective. The problem being little grows in Finland so most fruits and vegetables at the supermarket are imported, not so fresh, not so nutritious, super little organic options compared to France, and also really expensive.

At the moment I live far below the poverty line due to being harassed by police with a 4 year investigation as retaliation for reporting super obvious money laundering to police. 4 attorneys told me that's exactly what would happen "if you report money laundering to police, they won' investigate that but will put you under investigation instead and destroy your career" and then recommended I take what they agreed was a bribe to not-report-money laundering. However, my response to these attorneys was "big if true" and we should probably alert society to these alarming facts that seem common knowledge to the bar association that Finnish police and prosecutors and judges are in the money laundering business and not the stopping-money-laundering-business. And I had a lot of interactions with all sorts of attorneys and auditors in the many years before this, and they never sent me a memo titled "by the way, law means absolutely nothing when it comes to money laundering, all anti money laundering compliance is theatre so society thinks the legal community is looking for laundered money, but really what we do here is suck money laundering dick all day long, especially judges in Finland in exchange for being supplied child victims to abuse by organized crime," so what pisses me off the most is it's just false advertisement; no where in the bar association of Finland material does it explain attorneys can advise on what crimes to commit because police, prosecutors and judges in Finland are involved in those same crimes.

Long story short, the only way to survive in Finland on a tight a budget is a substance called "makkara", which is rumoured to contain meet. So, not ideal, but I need to compromise to survive in harsh conditions and continue my battle with police based organized crime here in Finland. In short, if makkara is required to be able to standup to police, prosecutors and judges both helping to launder money and sex traffic children, then that's a compromise I'm willing to make.

I am, in general, not caring much in the slightest about personal legal choices, but rather on political systemic change. The solution to bad laws, such as the true cost of meat not internalized in the purchase-cost, the ethical standards of the industry (which are better in Finland than elsewhere) or then the ethical implications of meeting eating full stop (which certainly has merit), is changing the law and not personal choice. I view "ethical consumerism" as practiced by most ethical consumers a placebo for political engagement and actual responsibility. That being said, it's of systemic importance to show good things are feasible so when ethical consumerism is combined with political action then that's effective, but for the most part corporations promote ethical consumerism to blunt political action; but the factor of primacy to optimize for is political effectiveness.

I watched the Near-Death Experience video in full. I think her experience was a hallucination produced by her distressed and frightened brain. — Truth Seeker

Sure, but you have no proof.

There is no proof she experiences anything at all, as you could be hallucinating this whole conversation along with this video, or then there is a world as we commonly understand it but she just appears to be be conscious but is not actually conscious.

There is no box that you can put some matter inside and it lights up green if it's conscious or red if it's unconscious.

**A Rational Critique of Pre-Birth Selection of Life Events** — Truth Seeker

First this seems like AI output which is banned in the forum.

However, the reason I bring this matter up is because you find it entirely reasonable to be working on some sort of technical way to render mortal beings immortal.

Seems to me as plausible a theory in strict scientific terms these near death experiences of what appears to be immortality.

There are reports of the experience by people, which is the basic nature of science. The experiment is repeatable by anyone when they too die.

Absolutely scientific.

Though, to be clear, the reason for my postulating the immortality of the soul is in the process of determining a non-arbitrary logical structure to support a non-empty ethic.

However, since I assume people are conscious and souls are immortal it seems plausible to me that people may indeed have such authentic experience.

Of course, when I have similar experience after painstaking street heroine research nobody seems to assign any spiritual significance to my reports, and yet people dropping far large quantities of opioids on the operating room table is somehow entirely different and credible. Seems a complete double standard to me. (This is a joke, but there is also a point, that there seems to be a lot of opioids involved in the near death reports I've came across)

I don't think this is true. I have considered my ethical system both before being depressed and during depressive episodes. — Truth Seeker

And you feel there is nothing in the slightest to change?

I am at minus two on the mood scale right now. — Truth Seeker

Doesn't seem a complete crisis yet, hopefully the routine of knowledge seeking will see you through and also that you will find what you're looking for.

Thank you for your advice. I will do this. — Truth Seeker

Excellent. Life systems are quite remarkable.

It is not an achievable objective. I am still thinking about it because it is so fascinating. — Truth Seeker

But in the meantime there is existing life that in need of protection.

I have no way to achieve the objective of upgrading matter-based lifeforms that need to consume air, water and food into energy-based lifeforms that can live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

We definitely agree here.

This near death experience maybe worthwhile to listen to:

Thank you for clarifying. In a previous post I had quoted the following:

“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.” – Albert Schweitzer, “Civilization and Ethics”, 1949.

My goal of saving and improving all lives is supported by the quoted words. — Truth Seeker

Yes, I also didn't emphasize that it's "my unifying principle" as it's a pretty common unifying principle that is ancient, with many variations such as treat others (all life) as you would have them treat you.

My super long essay is my is born from feeling to clarify this principle to myself as well as unify this principle with the more fundamental principle of searching for truth, as presumably if the principle of protecting life is true then one would first need to search for this truth to find it.

So the central question of my deliberation is why is searching for truth and protecting all life the same thing?

For, as mentioned above concerning numerical analysis, we cannot optimize for 2 different factors at the same time; the only exception being that the two factors are both necessary conditions to the same thing and so are never in conflict.

In addition to this, there is the question of why exactly searching for truth and protecting all life are good things in the first place.

I am sorry but I couldn't finish reading your super-long essay. I am suffering from depression. My concentration and comprehension and thinking are all affected by my depression. — Truth Seeker

No worries but if you want to my position on these matters in detail it is in the super long essay.

My concentration and comprehension and thinking are all affected by my depression. — Truth Seeker

I empathize, we live in troubling times, to say the least, and life is being destroyed and disrespected at a truly unimaginable scale, from Palestine to the extinction of species no one's even named yet.

However, if we did not get depressed we would never be motivated to fundamentally change anything.

It is also worth considering that it is only when depressed that it is possible to analyze our own ethical system, as so much in "normal life" is driven by emotional reactions it; so it is only when those emotions are gone that it is possible to think through carefully what exactly is right and wrong in a given situation, and what emotional reactions are justified and what are from social conditioning of one form or another, and most importantly what we may already know we have to do but emotions stand in the way of doing it, for fear of loss or humiliation. For to be depressed and feel nothing is also to fear nothing: a powerful tool for good or for ill.

Life has value, but predation is against that value. Predation involves prioritising the life of the predator over the life of the prey. This is selfish. This is evil. — Truth Seeker

You may need to reflect deeply on this and also perhaps study life systems in more detail to appreciate how life is and not what you wish it to be.

For predators are not harmful overall to the species they prey upon. Without predation of herbivores, for example, the population would grow exponentially and eat all the food and then die. Predation maintains ecosystem balance.

It is also again a bait-and-switch fallacy to equate a lion hunting a gazelle and our logging old growth forests for furniture as the same thing called "consumption".

A better word for what the lion is doing is nourishment within the cycle of life; there is no "destruction" happening. It is we humans that consume in the destructive sense as what we do is not sustainable and leads to ecosystem collapse.

Definitely we humans should stop consuming the natural world to engage in poisonous follies, but the cycle of energy and atoms in natural processes is not a process of consumption in this destructive sense.

No, pain and death diminish lives. So, they are to be prevented. — Truth Seeker

We keep coming back to this.

Earlier you seemed to agree that this was not an achievable objective.

Seems to me an example of the ideal fallacy of describing an ideal system, describing some characteristics of an ideal system and then assuming that it is therefore good to pursue that ideal in the real world.

For example, most would agree that ideally I could fly by simple act of will. Easy to argue that this is a true statement. An example of the ideal fallacy is then reasoning based on this assumption that because it is ideal that I can fly by my own act of will I should jump off a building in pursuit of this will-flying ideal.

The error in reasoning is that pursuing one aspect of an imagined ideal, in this case that I can just jump off buildings and fly away in my ideal world design, entails that approaches the ideal and therefore is good to do.

Other examples would be that "ideally people would not have any property, so therefore I should go and destroy their property," or "ideally all people would be self sufficient, so therefore I should never help anyone to encourage their self sufficiency," or "ideally authority is never wrong and therefore I should always do what authority tells me to do" or "ideally I would simply know things without needing to go through the proposed effort required to gain such knowledge, so therefore I will assume I simply do actually know or then God told me".

I am trying to figure out how to upgrade all living things into immortal energy beings who live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

In your case, you seem to be reasoning that "ideally people would not have any physical bodies and therefore should be liberated from their bodies".

That, in believing in an indifferent universe with no existence after death, your thoughts become essentially obsessed with creating your own immortality is perhaps reason to not dismiss my arguments for the immortality of the soul as a rational assumption in the above mentioned essay.

Without an indefinite timeline under consideration decisions become arbitrary, is the key problem.

I agree that causing pain and death is evil. That's why I am trying to change consumption-based existence to non-consumption-based existence. — Truth Seeker

In one comment you say you recognize disembodying not simply everyone but every living thing is not an achievable goal, and in the next comment you are entirely dedicated to achieving it.

If you want to get into the technical reasons it's not a practical objective, quantum information cannot be copied.

You could, at best, destroy the entire planet and build a simulation of the planet, running in a computer that consumes energy, presumably from the sun. There is zero reason to believe any simulation of consciousness would be actually conscious, zero way to test out if it is or if it isn't, zero way to confident any process whatsoever could transfer consciousness into a device of which we have zero confidence contains any consciousness, and also plenty of reasons to believe consciousness cannot be transferred by any available technology due to no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics.

Why the ideal fallacy is a fallacy is that things cannot be considered in isolation; the world is complex and all aspects (or then as much as is feasible) of how the world really is must be taken into account to improve the situation. We can move with each action ever so slightly towards ideals taking into consideration all the knock-on and systemic effects we can, but to simply take one aspect of is imagined to be an ideal situation and then reduce the focus of one's action to one aspect of the ideal and try to make that little aspect happen, has zero logical basis of why it would work and plenty of historical examples of the strategy not working.

I am so sorry that you were ill. I am glad you are feeling better now. — Truth Seeker

Thanks for the concern, I seem much better now.

How do you know what is good and what is evil? You didn't answer. Please answer this question. Thank you. — Truth Seeker

It is mentioned in the previous post as the protection of all life, as an example of a unifying principle; it is also what I happen to believe personally but I was not so clear about it.

It's also in the super long essay linked to previously: https://open.substack.com/pub/eerik/p/the-cromulomicon-the-book-of-croms?r=33um1b&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Humans are also part of life and so also need care and protecting, it is also mainly through a better society which is the main mechanism to protect life (as humans are the main danger to both other humans and life in general).

The moral foundation being the ethic of searching for truth and so also resolving contradictions, and then the truths found being existence is ordered and good and a long series of other ontological and epistemological considerations to ensure the entire logical structure is coherent and non-empty.

The essay is so long in order to resolve apparent dichotomies such as the choice to continue to read (so what may appear as knowledge maximizing) but letting someone die of thirst; or then, the example considered in the essay simply the most extreme version of the scenario of the choice between continuing to read and the destruction of the entire planet or then dying and the planet not being destroyed.

It is bad that lions hunt. The whole system of consuming in order to exist is evil. — Truth Seeker

Here I disagree, if life has value then natural systems, including predation, has value.

If life is evil, it follows oneself is evil, presuming one is alive, and from that it follows that good beliefs and thoughts we would not expect to find in an evil life form, but rather the evil of thinking oneself to be good when one is not.

The logical framework developed in the above essay is that in order to make any decisions at I must assume that I have value and what follows from that is that other humans and life in general also has value, as I am alive and cannot know of any a priori ontological difference with others. I think I'm conscious and a moral agent and assign myself value, and you are similar to me so it is reasonable to assume you also are conscious and are a moral agent and have value. We are both alive and so it stands to reason that if we have value life as a whole has value in addition to anyways depending on life in general to sustain our own life.

Pain and death are apart of life and therefore also have value.

What is evil is causing pain and death to disrespect and destroy life, especially manipulating others to be harmed as that is an additional disrespect and abuse of the truth as well as life; or then to simply be indifferent to our duties to others and to life is not as bad but still definitely evil in this framework.

Immortality of the soul is posited to ensure different decision paths never arrive at the same situation, such as not existing, and therefore be pragmatically equal. That would be a crisis in my framework and so I assume it isn't true.

Apologies for the delay, I have been fairly ill and moral philosophy was beyond my ability to focus on for the last few days.

It's not ethical, but it is what happens. Just as people kill people. That's not ethical either. — Truth Seeker

Not-ethical can be interpreted as absence of ethical consideration (such as whether the moon is being ethical or not in orbiting the sun; it's just not an ethical question), but can also be used to mean bad.

Not intentional, but switching the meanings in the same context is the bait-and-switch fallacy.

When you say the lion is "not ethical" the meaning is clearly that there is no moral evaluation as the lion is not a moral agent.

However, when switching the consideration of people killing people, the meaning of not ethical is not a lack of moral evaluation but to mean the opposite of good, as in bad.

Over the last 10,000 years, at least 2–4 billion deaths from famine, disease, and disaster have human negligence, cruelty, or mismanagement as significant causes. — Truth Seeker

We agree that lot's of bad things have happened to people and lot's of people have done bad things.

However, a moral theory cannot be based on moral-recoil, as in an emotional reaction, at listing bad things.

For, you only have an emotional reaction to bad things because you already have a moral theory, whether explicit or implicit, in which those things are evaluated as bad and thus something to feel bad about.

This is what makes moral philosophy so difficult, because everything easily goes in emotional driven circles that are not arguments but simply beg the question. For example, an emotional reaction to murder does not, in itself, support a moral argument that murder is wrong.

The emotional reaction to wrong is due to the pre-existing belief that those things are wrong. In cultures where beliefs are different, the emotional reactions are different.

A classic example is that our Western culture has a strong emotional reaction to female genital mutilation and doing so to a child, or anyone, in the West is a crime. However, mutilate the genitals of boys to your hearts content and a whole army will defend your practice as actually a good thing. If male genital mutilation was not normalized, the reaction would be the same as for female genital mutilation. If people argued that the male genital mutilation was 'just a bit' and that why female mutilation is still bad as it's greater, well people would just respond that you could obviously mutilate female genitals just a bit too so the effect is exactly comparable, would that then be ok? Obviously the double standard cannot be maintained in any rational discourse. The moral recoil in the West concerning female genital mutilation and not male genital mutilation is because of the pre-existing belief that one is ok and the other not, due to normalization of one and not the other. Given this obvious history, the emotional reaction is obviously not a justification to condemn female genital mutilation and not male genital mutilation.

One would need an argument independent of emotional reaction to evaluate all genital mutilation as bad, or then justify male genital mutilation as ok and female not or then both are fine. In order to make any such moral evaluation at all one requires in turn a moral theory that can be used identify good and bad things.

The plants, the gazelles, the lions and the humans are being selfish. All autotrophs, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores and parasites are selfish. — Truth Seeker

I thought we just agreed above that things like lions hunting are not ethical questions. But if you meant above that you meant not ethical in the same way, that lions are bad (and therefore should be stopped?) please clarify.

Being selfish is evil. We should look after the interests of everyone. — Truth Seeker

Lions are not selfish, they will share the hunt with their pride. Plants will share their pollen with bees and other pollinators, and their fruit with all sorts of creatures and their leaves with the humus organisms and their sugars with symbiotic mycelium. Gazelles will look out for each other and feed their young.

It's not clear how selfish can apply to other organisms.

For humans, selfish refers to seeking gain at the expense of others, with a strong connotation that it is in a way that's not mutually beneficial; however, other species have evolved to survive as a species in balance with their native ecosystems (and if they invade a new ecosystem, by natural processes or artificial processes, they will co-evolve back into balance after some time).

Of course, this statement about other species is with the caveat of as far as we know no other species deliberates on choices in a moral sense thus making them also moral agents. As far as we know all other species only make decisions of a tactical and strategic nature to achieve innate objectives (stay alive, protect the group if they're a social species, try to mate, nurture young etc. with any exceptions being due to having different innate objectives happen to anyways be suitable to the ultimate evolutionary pressure of perpetuation of the species, and any anomalies evolutionary experiments due to natural variation exploring by trial and error differences that maybe advantageous in new conditions).

That's why I want all living things to be energy beings who can live forever without consuming anything. — Truth Seeker

Again, I'm not quite sure what the purpose this hypothetical comparison serves you.

Moral philosophy is about making decisions and so a comparison that is not attainable cannot be used to make decisions in the world we actually inhabit.

To summarize, you do not really present a moral theory. Even if I agree with many of your principles, the moralizing method of simply boldly stating principles and then feeling that "moral strength" is in the boldly stating things, and that evaluating the principles critically would therefore be the opposite of boldly stating things and so moral weakness, is the moral method of the majority of people, at least in the Wes, and so why discourse of real moral differences in Western society mostly reduce to each side simply shouting at each other (to reassure themselves that they are stating their principles the boldest, and thus most morally).

However, once it is realized that emotional reactions are caused by moral beliefs, as you note above "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," then such a method must be abandoned.

How the bold statement morality self reinforces is that the starting assumption is being right without the need of explaining or justifying anything, and so critical evaluation is a process that either results in justifying the beliefs one already has, and so is redundant, or a change to one's belief.

However, if the starting assumption is one is for sure 100% right, then the prospect of changing one's belief is clearly 100% bad and must be avoided at all costs.

Therefore, if one assumes one must be right without needing to "know" anything about it, then the process of knowledge is a bad thing that must be avoided as it can only confirm what one already knows or then result in a change of belief that, according to ones current beliefs, are correct and therefore must never change.

The result is the continuous assertion of knowledge without any justifying argument that would justify the belief really does represent true knowledge.

This is what most people do, at least in the West, and it is usually impossible to explain to them their psychological self-reinforcing process that is structured to avoid critical scrutiny that would lead to knowledge.

In short, the modus operandi of Western culture is that doubt about one's moral moral beliefs are bad (because they risk only changing what is good) and therefore anyone creating doubts is also bad, and the only good reaction to a challenge to one's beliefs is simply stating even more boldly what those beliefs are and eschewing even more clearly the very notion some argument or justification is needed (and if one does boldly assert arguments and justifications, then in turn avoiding any critical scrutiny of those justifications and arguments).

However, the basic process of knowledge is subjecting assertions to critical scrutiny.

Why such a process is relevant to this particular conversation is that you assert a series of moral principles without justification. You simply define things as good or evil and then simply list things to have an emotional reaction to based on your definition, proposing the latter exercise justifies the former.

You're initial question is that you haven't achieved your objectives, of which a reasonable formulation of your question would be how to be more effective in striving towards, with others, your objectives .... but also how to be sure your objectives are the right ones in the first place?

And both questions go together, as if you want to be more effective (which is the only rational disposition given any objective at all) then you require a theory that can allow optimizing your actions with respect to different aspects of what must be one single objective that is required to make evaluations between different uses of time and resources available.

For example, stating all life should be converted to energy beings is not a unifying principle, even if it were preferable in abstract comparisons, as there is no way to achieve the goal.

The protection of life on the planet, including its current dynamic, on the other hand, can be a unifying principle that resolves strategic and tactical considerations. Of course, such a principle would need itself justification, but it is an example of a highest objective which can in turn both justify secondary objectives (as strategically sound) as well as resolve what would otherwise be competing principles.

Just looking back at this again and still trying to get a more clear picture of how the Maoist or Stalinist, or whichever other you wish to enter here, vision of communism differs from the original Marxist one, if it did. — unimportant

As points out, it's fair to the post-Marx schools, even Stalinism and Maoism are reasonable evolutions of Marx's original theory.

When anti-communist propaganda is internalized and "West good" and "Soviet bad", then the West leftist beatnik apologetic response is that Stalin betrayed the true Marxism.

This framing depends entirely on the idea that state-policy-induced famines and genocides in the 1930 and 40s make your political system 100% discredited and the worst people to have ever lived, but genocides and state-policy-induced famines before 1930 and also after 1950 are perfectly understandable historical processes that say absolutely nothing about the fundamental merits of the political order, economic system and culture involved.

You can starve as many Irish to death as you want, kill as many natives all over the world, even run a brutal chattel slavery system for hundreds of years, as long as it was before 1930!!

People in the West are emotionally conditioned to have strong reactions to genocides, but only in this 20 year window, everything outside is basically meh, genocide shmemocide. Why there's a genocide on right now that the West is perfectly content with, as there's a simple algorithm to emotionally deal with it: check calendar, is it the 1930's or 40's? If no, then genocide is fine, probably even a good thing.

So, not to say the Soviet Union was great, but rather a fair look allows seeing both successes and failures (as any Western apologist will scream we must do to be fair if we're discussing the West's failing! Civilization! Civilization!) as well as how it made Marxist sense to the people who built the Soviet Union, including Stalin. Not to say Marx would agree if he were alive, just that, as @Moliere points out these people read Marx and saw themselves as extending Marx in a logical way.

To get to those extensions and developments of Marx, the problem Marxists had in the 20th century is that all the socialist (including anarchist) revolutions in the 19th century were crushed by adjacent imperial powers. The empires warred between themselves but recognized anti-rich sentiments was a common enemy so would easily unite to destroy any genuine socialist uprising and governance.

At the same time, these experiences in socialist uprising and governance demonstrated it was possible; people could overturn governments and could govern together in a new socialist way.

However, there was a global system of Imperialism and capitalism that would spring into action to crush any such socialist upstarting wherever it emerges on the globe, so in seeing this communists naturally started to think of how to solve this problem.

So, the new idea compared to Marx's original analysis, is various formulations of avant-gardism, where the idea is to take over a state and then garrison it against Imperial invasion and capitalist undermining.

Of course a strong militaristic state is in contradiction with the communist goal.

So it's easy to critique in theory that this obviously won't work. However, to take the point of view of these people, Tsarist Russia just killed and starved millions of Russians in a calamitous and incompetently managed war. China has endured "a century of humiliation" and the British pushing opioids on the Chinese (one potential explanation of why China isn't too worried about an opioid epidemic in the US right now). Western analysis of these issues always starts with the Soviet Revolution, Stalin takes control, or then Mao's cultural revolution.

Not to say I'm a huge fan of Stalin or Mao, they were both incredibly brutal, but no less brutal than the systems they replaced so when your learn the before and after, it makes a lot more sense how thing shake out. First, the previous systems were completely discredited in disastrous wars. Russian lines collapsed in WWI, the whole country mismanaged and hunger everywhere, and they only didn't "lose" because Germany also lost in turn against France and co.

When Russia withdrew from the war, ~2,500,000 Russian POWs were in German and Austrian hands. This by far exceeded the total number of prisoners of war (1,880,000) lost by the armies of Britain, France and Germany combined. Only the Austro-Hungarian Army, with 2,200,000 POWs, came even close.[131]

According to other data, the number of irretrievable losses in Russia ranges from 700,000[132] to 1,061,000.[133] Golovin wrote a huge work dedicated to the losses of Russians in World Wat I, he based on the documents of the headquarters and the documents of the German archive, working there together with German veterans, correlated the losses and came to the conclusion that the total losses are 7,917,000, including 1,300,000 dead, 4,200,000 wounded and 2,410,000 prisoners.[134] Later estimates have adjusted this number to 2,420,000 people.[135] Per Alexei Oleynikov total losses for the 1914–1917 campaigns look like this: — Eastern Front (World War I)

So things really aren't going well from the perspective of the average Russian.

In the case of China, the invasion of Japan was an incredibly brutal affair, for example:

According to Rummel, in China alone, from 1937 to 1945, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations — Japanese war crimes

So when you put into context what people are dealing with, you can start to empathize both with the idea that trying something new sounds like it can't possibly be worse as well as why the atrocities in their own right of these new systems "don't seem so bad". The Western presentation of events as everyone basically living an idyllic peaceful and suburban life style and then suddenly Stalin's in charge! The horror! Is somewhat less than accurate.

WWI and WWII are essentially apocalyptic events so any half coherent scheme to put society back together sounds worthwhile.

In contrast to Marx, he is building up his theory in a relatively peaceful Europe. Up until Napoleon, European powers competed outside of Europe for territory, resources and trade routes but had a sort of gentleman's agreement not to wage too much war on the European continent and trade instead.

There was no evidence at the time for what we would call today realpolitik (the European empires were all intermarried and part of the same in-group which mediated intra-European warfare) and as a short hand the later evolutions of Marx given the Napoleonic wars (a topsy turvy series of events in response to state-mismanagement and then socialist revolution) and then also WWI, are broadly speaking a realpolitik addition to Marx's analysis of capitalism.

Yup.

There are proletarians in the USA, but they are not beneficiaries of imperialism -- thinking here of migrant farm workers and prison labor as clear cut examples. — Moliere

Yes, definitely, and also why there's the most amount of prison inmates anywhere in the world per capital in the US is to keep this segment of the population under tight control.

Now, not that a revolution can't happen in the US, just that the cause would be too many people dropping out of any plausible sense of the middle class and so then the conditions become largely the same as in in the Global South.

A moment we are for sure approaching and maybe even really close to. The model of the West as a geographically segregated aristocracy that's not about to change the system, is more relevant to explain why all the socialist momentum in the West dissipates post WWII during the "good times".

Conditions today are definitely not the same, and so why a police state is emerging (or perhaps more accurately being revealed) to keep things in check.

↪boethius Zizek was mentioned briefly by you earlier, what are your thoughts on him? — unimportant

I believe another poster mentioned Zizek.

Based on what I know of Zizek's work, I put him in the category of Western intellectuals who wok on solving the problems of Western culture; so understanding exactly how Western culture is basically disintegrating and what might be done about it. In this respect I think he does a good job and also that Marxist-communism is the most reasonable foundation for this analysis, and is a framework he understands well.

Marx's most critical insights are in how selling labour power, rather than working for yourself in your own community (so using the majority of the product of your work locally), affects people's psychology and society, removing the meaning and self-respect of work while leading to social isolation. One of many prescient insights from Marx.

So, insofar as analyzing Western culture goes, explaining the history of psychological and social pathology the West has created, Zizek is pretty lucid in what I've heard or read from him.

Where I diverge from Zizek's general approach is that I do not believe the problems of Western culture can be solved within the space of Western culture. Solutions that don't exist and so Zizek doesn't come up with, rendering the whole project mostly pontificating on these problems but not getting anywhere (there's no political movement associated with Zizek's thinking).

In my view, Western financial power successfully turned the West into a sort of global geographically segregated aristocracy after World War II in order to destroy the remaining Western communist and socialist movements as a real political force; and once this happened, as Marx would predict, a class that benefits from a system has never been known to change it. The fundamental theory of revolutionary in Marx is that in order for a revolution to be possible, class oppression must emerge due to contradictions that build up in the social structure generally from gradual changes in the means of production, then, additionally, the oppressed class must become aware of their existence as an oppressed class and start reflecting on what to do about it, and then, maybe, you will have a revolution (the alternative being the whole society perishes).

I summarize, but the natural prediction one would make based in Marxism, in seeing a Western global upper class where "it's normal" that Westerners fly around the world to be served by a panoply of "exotic" cultures, on the cheap because people are mostly poor around the world and labour so costs low and additionally the costs of the pollution created in the process is paid mostly by these poor people, both now and in the future, is that this Western global upper class is the last place to look for any systemic change.

What's an intellectual to do who needs to sell books to this class of people? Well, you can definitely have a conversation but it's a conversation that goes no where. It's exactly the kind of conversation you'd expect talking about society with an average member of the aristocracy in Feudal Europe. There's a high level of education, so the conversation can be quite well informed, and there's also a lot of time available, so the conversation can be quite involved, but at no point is there the slightest chance any agreed conclusions, no matter how radical, translates to any commensurate action. Of course there will be exceptions, but it wasn't the aristocracy that carried out a revolution and teared down feudalism, it was people who did not benefit from the system.

For example, I once had a conversation with one of the founders of Sun Microsystems at a party at his house, and he was proposing pretty banal US libertarian ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and ecological problems shouldn't be worried about. I tried to explain the incredible risks we're taking in modifying natural systems on a global scale, and that from this basic risk-analysis perspective, which all corporate executives are intimately familiar with so he definitely understood my point, his only retort was that I shouldn't worry about the earth because, in his words, "bacteria and cockroaches will survive". I responded, "ok, but is that really an acceptable outcome of the human enterprise?". And he just got up and left!

That is the typical quality of conversation with the vast majority of any representative of a beneficiary class. It is always the same: actually disturb their intellectual comfort and they simply egress the discussion.

Of course, it confuses people in that the West has it's own internal class system where there are far richer classes than the average, but if you take the average, call them "the backpacker class" and disturb their sense of belonging in their cycle of working to go on vacation to feel "liberated" from the West for a short time with the help of "super good deals" from hostels in Cambodia or wherever; try to convince them that they are not wise globe trotters respectfully bowing at the portico of every culture on the planet, developing themselves spiritually or at least sexually, but instead benefiting from an imperial system of exploitation that's destroying every place they've visited, and, for the most part, they'll just get upset and defensive.

Of course there are non-beneficiary classes in the West, they are just not the majority and the police state and criminalizing poverty exists to manage the threat they present as a minority.

Therefore, the more productive conversation is with the people of the global south.

Whereas literally 100 books you'd need to get the average Westerner to read for them to start to understand how the system even works and that, yes, it is imperialism and exploitive and destroying the planet, only to arrive at a point, 99 out of 100 times, that the person will not really do anything about that (except safe emotional outlets the imperial system makes available) regardless of any amount of further analysis ... have the same conversation with someone on the bottom of the totem pole in the Global South and zero books are required and the answer is simply "yes, we know".

This is classic Hegelian master-slave dialectic (that Marxism is based in), in that of the two parties, the slave does not require any theory to understand that he or she is a slave and the system exploitative. The master will, on the other hand, entertain an endless series of theories in which the slave is the beneficiary of the system (benefiting from the hard and valuable work of managing resources so the slave and all his or her kind does not die; or then an animal benefiting as a sheep does from the shepherd; or as creating the right conditions for spiritual exercise of honest work that the slave could not self-direct for him or herself, and so on).

Therefore, the conversation to have with people who do not benefit from the current system is not endless theorizing establishing for the 1000th time that the system is really actually super bad, but rather technology transfer. And as a Westerner, this I have the power to do. I was once touring rural Gujarat with a politician, Jekubai, and some local business people, when we came across a family living by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. It was so unusual, even for India, that we stopped to ask what was going on. They had been promised work and lodging to come to work on building a road, and instead were left to just live on the side of the road that they would work on, for nothing remotely close to the promised wage. I was on the tour mostly for my own interest, but was presented to people as a sort of journalist. There was a whole series of instructive experiences, such as burst sewage lines not mended and ongoing battles between entire villages and corporations trying to evict them and damns left unfinished to harass local populations and aquifers being destroyed by mining and so on. But meeting this family living on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere caused me the most introspection: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10D6G_sowr2_nltG3Du8oB9Fjr7iQJ6wE/view?usp=share_link

My conclusion in truly "seeing" the horrors of the system, was I needed to return to the West and divert technology, and the capital required to develop and transfer said technology, that would be truly useful to poor people. Hence the solar fire / lytefire.com . Of course, not about to allow my name to be used to launder money, but that too (frustrating money laundering from Africa to Europe) is something Westerners (in the sense of a the few Westerners capable of rational action and not path dependency on a lazy river of consumerism) can do to actually help. Lastly, if we could stop our own government committing genocide that would also be of some assistance to non-beneficiaries of the imperial system.

Working on how to convince Westerners to not be hypocrites is not something I have ever seen have productive outcomes, and this is how I view Zizek's work.

If you want a fact based "what's actually happening in the real world" counterpart to Zizek's intellectual analysis of the Western superstructure / psychosis during this slow motion social and ecological collapse: Chris Hedges is the guy.

Basic point of the analysis being that the global revolution, if it is to come to pass, will be mostly carried out by non-Imperial-beneficiaries mostly in poor countries. People in the West can help productively with enough theory and experience of the world to avoid being counter-productive (such as knowledge and technology transfer concerning the technologies that matter, such as solar thermal), but it will not be "the West" doing anything of real significance collectively in a positive direction.

Just because something occurs in nature, it doesn't make it ethical. — Truth Seeker

Yes, but we are also in nature. A moral theory must demonstrate why what happens in nature (and really anything we could possibly do at all would be "happening in nature") should not happen in human affairs. What makes us different from lions that their hunting, even of their own kind, is fine and natural, but that does not apply to us?

People can consider the moral and legal implications of their actions. — Truth Seeker

But we can also consider the implications of the actions of lions and stop them. And, as we just established, we don't really know what anyone else is really thinking or knows, perhaps lions also consider the consequences of their actions or then the vast majority of humanity does not and are the same as lions. For example, perhaps the lion considers the consequence of killing the gazelle is that she will be able to eat. Perhaps most humans do not consider the consequence of their actions of wanton consumption that others elsewhere will not eat.

Humans are moral agents, but lions are not because we have the capacity to think about the moral dimensions of our actions. — Truth Seeker

But this is the crux of the problem. What makes us moral agents? Simply being able to consider consequences does not in itself provide any moral information.

A theory is required to go from the consideration of consequences, which I agree is the start of the problem, to what consequences are actually good and bad.

Nearly all lay moralizing is simply the discussion of consequences with the assumption that everyone already agrees on how to judge the outcomes. It's not really a moral debate but rather a strategic debate on how to achieve shared objectives.

To do moral philosophy is to ask how those outcomes are known to be good or bad in the first place.

I am all too aware that there are billions of people who are convinced that their religion is the best way to live. I am a vegan, egalitarian, agnostic atheist. For them, my position is wrong. Just as for me, their position is wrong. — Truth Seeker

Would it not be good to find out who is correct?

"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." - William Shakespeare. — Truth Seeker

This is exactly my point a few comments ago, that it is moral betrayal that really cause suffering. Pain, even very intense, that has no moral element, just an accident, can cause very little suffering over the long term, whereas moral betrayals that involve no physical pain at all can cause life long suffering.

The point of really understanding that, is that simply avoiding suffering cannot be the basis of a moral theory, as it is moral beliefs derived from moral theories we inherent or adopt that gives rise to the possibility of suffering.

I didn't know that. Can you please give me an example? — Truth Seeker

People propose proofs of mathematical conjectures all the time, both experts and amateurs, that turn out to be wrong.

I'm not sure what the most erroneously proven conjecture (i.e. someone believing they've proven it but the proof is wrong), but some famous ones that get claimed to be proven on a regular basis are Riemann hypothesis, the twin primes conjecture, Goldbach's conjecture, Collatz conjecture, P=NP, and other Millennium Prize Problems not listed there also get significant attention (but some are quite technical so don't get much attention from amateurs, who generate the most wrong proofs).

Probably the theorem with the most wrong proofs is Fermats Last Theorem, and so a good example of a huge number of wrong proofs not providing any actual evidence the opposite is true and no proof is possible, as Fermats Last Theorem has since been proven.

As interestingly, there are plenty of conjectures that nearly all mathematicians believed must certainly be true, but later proven to be false. So in terms of positing inherent knowledge about anything, these examples are cause for some doubt.

In researching some examples, there's a super good answer to exaclty this question by a one KConrad on stalk overflow:

Mathematicians used to hold plenty of false, but intuitively reasonable, ideas in analysis that were backed up with proofs of one kind or another (understood in the context of those times). Coming to terms with the counterexamples led to important new ideas in analysis.

1. A convergent infinite series of continuous functions is continuous. Cauchy gave a proof of this (1821). See Theorem 1 in Cours D'Analyse Chap. VI Section 1. Five years later Abel pointed out that certain Fourier series are counterexamples. A consequence is that the concept of uniform convergence was isolated and, going back to Cauchy's proof, it was seen that he had really proved a uniformly convergent series of continuous functions is continuous. For a nice discussion of this as an educational tool, see "Cauchy's Famous Wrong Proof" by V. Fred Rickey. [Edit: This may not be historically fair to Cauchy. See Graviton's answer for another assessment of Cauchy's work, which operated with continuity using infinitesimals in such a way that Abel's counterexample was not a counterexample to Cauchy's theorem.]

2. Lagrange, in the late 18th century, believed any function could be expanded into a power series except at some isolated points and wrote an entire book on analysis based on this assumption. (This was a time when there wasn't a modern definition of function; it was just a "formula".) His goal was to develop analysis without using infinitesmals or limits. This approach to analysis was influential for quite a few years. See Section 4.7 of Jahnke's "A History of Analysis". Work in the 19th century, e.g., Dirichlet's better definition of function, blew the whole work of Lagrange apart, although in a reverse historical sense Lagrange was saved since the title of his book is "Theory of Analytic Functions..."

3. Any continuous function (on a real interval, with real values) is differentiable except at some isolated points. Ampere gave a proof (1806) and the claim was repeated in lots of 19th century calculus books. See pp. 43--44, esp. footnote 11 on page 44, of Hawkins's book "Lebesgue's theory of integration: its origins and development". Here is a Google Books link. In 1872 Weierstrass killed the whole idea with his continuous nowhere differentiable function, which was one of the first fractal curves in mathematics. For a survey of different constructions of such functions, see "Continuous Nowhere Differentiable Functions" by Johan Thim.

4. A solution to an elliptic PDE with a given boundary condition could be solved by minimizing an associated "energy" functional which is always nonnegative. It could be shown that if the associated functional achieved a minimum at some function, then that function was a solution to a certain PDE, and the minimizer was believed to exist for the false reason that any set of nonnegative numbers has an infimum. Dirichlet gave an electrostatic argument to justify this method, and Riemann accepted it and made significant use of it in his development of complex analysis (e.g., proof of Riemann mapping theorem). Weierstrass presented a counterexample to the Dirichlet principle in 1870: a certain energy functional could have infimum 0 with there being no function in the function space under study at which the functional is 0. This led to decades of uncertainty about whether results in complex analysis or PDEs obtained from Dirichlet's principle were valid. In 1900 Hilbert finally justified Dirichlet's principle as a valid method in the calculus of variations, and the wider classes of function spaces in which Dirichlet's principle would be valid eventually led to Sobolev spaces. A book on this whole story is A. F. Monna, "Dirichlet's principle: A mathematical comedy of errors and its influence on the development of analysis" (1975), which is not reviewed on MathSciNet. — KConrad answering Widely accepted mathematical results that were later shown to be wrong?, Math Overflow

There's links and also notation that does not copy over, but I hope this is a good example of the process of actually proving things, even in a context where the conditions and methods of proof are agreed, is not so easy.

Pain is painful. That's why I don't want to be in pain. In the same way, other sentient beings don't want to be in pain. If I see someone being tortured by someone else, I would intervene to protect the victim of torture from the perpetrator of torture because torture is painful for the victim. — Truth Seeker

Pain is not sufficient to build a moral theory. The gazelle does not want to experience the pain of being eaten by the lion, is therefore the lion "immoral" for causing pain or we humans who could "arrest all liens" immoral to allow these wanton lion attacks to continue?

Avoiding pain is simply a description of what organism generally do, but that does not establish a moral theory. If we do not stop the lion, if predation is natural between animals, then why stop human predators preying on other humans? Lions don't only kill gazelles but also other lions in struggles for power, why would it be any less natural for humans to likewise kill both gazelles for food and other humans for power?

One requires a moral theory to be able to categorize some pain as good and bad. Exercize is painful but we categorize it as good pain. Gazelles being eaten by lions is painful but we categorize it as morally neutral pain; lion is just being a lion, she can't do other than pursue her nature.

So there are these fundamental issues, but even if a moral theory is presented that pain is a sensation that really is "bad" and should be minimized, and why it's different between humans and doesn't apply to animals and so on, there is an even bigger problem.

For society to function requires people going straight into pain (a firefighter into a burning building) and risking their lives for the good of the community. It is this leap, avoiding pain for oneself to avoiding pain for the community as a whole over time and even accepting great pain to oneself to achieve that, is not resolved by the principle of simply avoiding pain nor simply empathizing with the pain of others.

There is already an ethical framework. Causing deliberate harm to living things is evil, and saving and improving lives is good. It's my ethical framework. This is why I am a vegan egalitarian. This is why I save and improve lives. A crime is called a crime because it causes harm. — Truth Seeker

But where does this ethical framework come from? And why is it superior to others who likewise claim to have an ethical framework which proves what they do is good and what others do is bad?

And again, a crime causes harm ... but if the crime is not actually justified then the real harm is a false accusation. So without actually knowing what is really a crime then any alleged criminal circumstance the alleged perpetrator could be the real victim and the purported victim the real perpetrator. Plenty of things were crimes in the past that are no longer crimes and the new view is that the alleged perpetrators (such as being gay) were the actual victims for being accused falsely. How do we actually know anything is a crime?

The basic problem is that harm requires a moral framework to determine, so you cannot argue something is bad because it is harmful without first having a theory that identifies harm.

A situation of crime is (for the most part) someone claiming to be harmed and therefore it's a crime due to the harm. But in nearly all cases the harm is already agreed by society to be harmful; to not be in a loop, the question of why society believes it to be harmful and is society correct about that, needs to be demonstrated.

Worse, most feelings of harm are due to society believing they are harmful, and in a society in which the action is not viewed as bad people often do not experience the harm. Vikings thought is was perfectly acceptable to challenge anyone to the death and then kill them at essentially anytime; vikings did not experience these fights to the death as some sort of social harm but in fact necessary for the health of viking society.

I have examined the top twelve religions on Earth. My favourite is Jainism, but I am not a Jain because Jains believe in souls and karma and the reincarnation of souls according to karma. I see no evidence for the existence of souls, karma and reincarnation. — Truth Seeker

There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of religions. If disproving religions to your satisfaction was relevant to prove anything about the fundamental ontological questions you would need to go through every single known religion. You can't just do 12 and then generalize from that small sample.

However, my basic point is doing so, even addressing all religions everywhere, doesn't prove anything about the ontological questions religions addressed in the past without modern understanding or tools.

Very few people are vegan egalitarians. Most humans don't agree with me, or else most humans would be vegan egalitarians. I am convinced that being a vegan egalitarian is the best way to live. Please see https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan if you want to know more about the reasons for going vegan. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism if you want to know more about egalitarianism. — Truth Seeker

But the religious people you have issue with also claim to be convinced their way is the best way to live.

How do you actually know you're not making some similar mistake in reasoning just about different things. Religious people too point to all the bad done by atheists and also other religions to justify their religion.

So knowing is the key problem. But if existence is filled with evil, then on average one would expect to fall in the category of evil people who mistakingly believe they are good.

My morality comes from empathy, compassion, evidence and reason. Causing deliberate harm to living things is evil. Deliberately saving and improving lives is good. — Truth Seeker

Key word reason. What's the reason empathy is a good quality to have in the first place? And assuming it is good, how does empathy translate into decisions in complex situations?

For example, without an ethical framework to begin with, why not empathize with the perpetrator of an alleged crime and their desire to get what they want? Who's to say it's a crime and therefore empathy should therefore be with the victims? If there's no good reason it really should be a crime, then the real crime is a false accusation and empathy should be with the alleged perpetrator.

If you have the feelings you do due to evolution, and therefore evolution is good because your feelings are good, well what exactly is the next step in evolution? Anyone can argue pretty much anything new (from random killing to slicing up brains to "upload" the neural pattern into a computer) is the "next step" in evolution. Evolution just helps explain how we got here, anything whatsoever can happen and then evolution explains again why we're now in a situation of that thing having happened; at no point does evolution imply anything should have happened that didn't, or should not have happened but it did.

More fundamentally, why would an indifferent cosmos bestow upon you the right feelings and virtuous character, when you see plainly for yourself it is lacking in so many others or you would not be addressing the problems that concern you?

Where are we again?

I am so sorry. We live in an evil world where the evil prosper and the innocent perish. — Truth Seeker

and also:

Existence is ordered in an indifferent way. That's why there is nothing fair about who lives how and who dies how. Here is a list of **biological design flaws** in humans and other species that strongly suggest **evolution through natural selection**, rather than **intelligent design**. — Truth Seeker

Yet in this indifferent and unfair existence where evil prospers, you happen to have the right and good feelings, right and good reasoning, that imbue you with the correct morality?

So many others are in the wrong and don't know it, mistake themselves to do good when they do not, yet you are in the right and do know it and make no mistakes in your self-evaluation?

I don't need to prove it to you. I have proved it to myself, which is enough. — Truth Seeker

Which is what I mean by not really possible to prove anything, as in the context I make that statement you're asking a proof from me, so proof in the context refers to proving it to you, which, seems we agree, is not really possible.

It is always possible to maintain a standard of doubt that is insurmountable.

For proofs to be socialized, i.e. agreed to as proofs by multiple parties, there must be prior agreement on premises and a framework of proof in which proofs become possible; i.e. there must be agreement on a standard of doubt that is possible for parties to overcome. For example, you can prove to me it's raining outside if I'm willing to accept time stamped video evidence or then going outside and seeing and feeling for myself the rain; but if I doubt your video evidence is authentic or then I doubt my own senses as maybe hallucinating both you and the rain, then it's not possible to prove to me anything.

So, in the context of you asking me for proof, I can't really prove anything if there's not existing agreement on logic and evidence you would find acceptable.

At the subatomic level, reality is chaotic. Things happen randomly. However, at the macroscopic level, quantum chaos averages out due to quantum decoherence. — Truth Seeker

There is no chaos at the subatomic level.

Quantum mechanics is linear, for there to be chaos requires non-linear equations.

What is not deterministic is observation of quantum events, but that's not chaos.

However, this has nothing to do with fundamental chaos. You can have a system that has order (laws and continuity and predictability and so on) that has chaotic phenomena inside it, such as turbulence, but that is not fundamental chaos. By fundamental chaos I mean no rules of any kind, no structure of any kind, everything is fluke, the "sensation" of coherence but random hallucinations bound to occur in a sufficiently large chaos for a sufficient amount of time (and even time is not a structured order on this chaos).

Existence is ordered in an indifferent way. — Truth Seeker

If existence is ordered in a fundamentally indifferent way, then it would follow that existence is indifferent to there being any order over chaos.

If we simply ignore that problem as it's inconvenient, if existence as a whole is indifferent why would it follow that parts of the whole would not likewise be indifferent and so there is no judgements to make about anything. Existence isn't good or bad and therefore no part of existence is good or bad.

Joshua 10:12–14, Bible (New International Version)
“On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: — Truth Seeker

Ontology is not reducible to Christianity.

That's why I spent some time explaining that historical explanations for natural phenomena you don't accept, like river gods, don't imply anything about the underlying question about the phenomena.

You don't accept ancient religious answers to ontological questions, fine, doesn't mean those ontological questions can no longer be discussed or then the opposite is therefore true.

For example, in mathematics (a context in which there is agreed criteria for proofs), things are erroneously proven all the time, doesn't mean the opposite is therefore proven due to these mistaken proofs. Many people over the years have believed they've proven all sorts of things, but turns out they were wrong. These mistaken efforts don't resolve whether conjectures can be proven true in the future or not. Why would they?

Even if a tour of religions was relevant to the fundamental ontological questions, you'd need a tour of all religions, not just a couple.

Agreed.

Sanctions will be a natural part, but note that's it's only Western sanctions. Iran isn't similar to the Hermit Kingdom (North Korea). — ssu

Is North Korea even so isolated now?

My understanding is that by ejecting Russia from the Western trade system they have quickly integrated with all the existing sanctioned countries.

One of the most mind boggling aspects to the Western policy with Russia, that sanctions only work against a small network of countries. Russia isn't small and to even have a chance that sanctions are meaningful would require the rest of the world to go along, not to mention China and India.

If the MAGA people cheer on how inept and totally useless the UN or other international organizations are, do note that then simply "the South" goes it's own ways. As I've said earlier, we are on track to go to an international order that was present in the 18th Century (as even the 19th Century had functioning international cooperation and organizations). — ssu

It's so wild that the US is now attacking institutions it created for its own benefit.

However, I doubt the global south would exit the UN, as it's clearly useful as a forum of diplomacy (especially if Israel stops murdering diplomats). Global South is more focused on creating parallel economic institutions, such as to substitute the IMF.

But do you reference the 18th and 19th century in it's relatively peaceful international relations, such as between European powers not having yet discovered the true power of industrial warfare, or in its ruthless colonial competition aspects? (just with non-European colonial powers competing for resources in this century)

First of all, is an Iran that has great relations to it's Arab neighbors the optimum situation for Israel, or is an Iran that still is a "rogue state" that can be bombed every once and a while better? I fear that for Bibi, the war prime minister, the latter is a better option. — ssu

Then once Iran has the bomb they can be like "See! See! We were right all along! If only we bombed them harder!"

Then, as you note with North Korea, Iran doesn't strike anyone with nuclear weapons and the issue is forgotten about, but sanctions permanent due to having nuclear weapons.

This is false. When I slap myself, I feel pain. That proves to me that pain is real. — Truth Seeker

You haven't proved it to me though. Maybe you're a chatbot, maybe you don't feel pain and are lying, maybe you're a figment of my imagination etc.

You could say that you proved it to yourself, but again if you're a chatbot, or lying, or don't really exist, that hasn't happened either.

Not convinced. All the gods are evil and imaginary. — Truth Seeker

How did you prove that?

I am so sorry. We live in an evil world where the evil prosper and the innocent perish. — Truth Seeker

This is true, but if it is good to do good, then that is unaffected by how much bad there happens to be.

European Christians, and Arab Muslims colonised and killed hundreds of millions of humans worldwide for centuries and got away with murder, rape, forced conversions, torture, theft, slavery, etc. This is why Christianity is the number one religion and Islam is the number two religion on Earth. Now they are getting away with neocolonisation and causing the climate crisis through 300 years of burning fossil fuels. If you haven't read the whole Bible and the whole Quran, I highly recommend that you do so: https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com — Truth Seeker

I have zero problem with the history.

If the technological conditions are war allows a culture to expand, and certain types of religion help that culture to stay both cohesive and warlike, then we should not be surprised that violent religious fanatics take over the world.

That historical result, however, does not resolve the core issues. Bad people also use principles of physics to do bad things, doesn't mean those physical principles are false; so too if bad people do bad in the name of god, or an eternal soul, or any idea whatsoever, does not therefore imply those principles are false.

The philosophical question has nothing to do with religion.

Is existence ordered or complete chaos?

If ordered, is existence ordered in a good way or a bad way or then perhaps indifferent way?

If ordered in a good way, what are good decisions in a good cosmos? If the universe is ordered in a bad way, are any good decisions possible in a bad cosmos, or indifferent or chaotic cosmos?

That people have made over time religions to answer fundamental moral, metaphysical and epistemological, and natural questions, and then some have gone on to do super violent things using whatever answers they find to keep a violent society cohesive, does not somehow eventually prove through that historical process that the original questions are somehow meaningless or then don't have answers to them or then the answers don't matter.

People made exactly similar stories to answer natural questions as they did for moral or theological questions, yet no so called "rationalist" goes around listing off all the crazy stories of storm gods and so on in order to demonstrate no answers can be correct and particle physics is therefore as meritless an answer to natural phenomena as is storm gods and river spirits.

If there is no order, or the order isn't good, then by what measure can you judge these religions you have issue with to be bad?

For example, the critique of liberated nihilism that there is no good and bad, don't be "fooled" by religion, religion is bad, look at all the bad things, makes no sense if good and bad are denied as a premise. If there's no good and bad, or then only personal good and bad, then it's not bad to be religious if you want to, even in a violently fanatical way.

To judge religious people, or anyone, one must be in a position to judge, to have proven what is right and wrong, and that is not so easy. But feel free to posit an ethic that is independent of cultural heritage, for, if part happens to be true (certainly not all, as most of the moral heritage is religious), such as not randomly killing people or going on world conquering crusades for that matter, there must be some reason that it's actually true other than simply being received wisdom (especially if one is rejecting the largest part of received wisdom globally, which as you note is to be religious of one kind or another).

If your moral ideas do not come from a cultural heritage at all, then from where do they come and why are they true?

For, to critique moral systems, religious or otherwise, on the outcomes of those systems, either historically or contemporaneously (putting aside the issue of what actions genuinely follow form those systems--i.e. who's really a true adherent), one requires a moral system to make those judgements about those outcomes.

Moral system A is bad because people B who believe system A do bad things, requires a moral system C in which to demonstrate those are bad things. "Skeptics", who say there is no moral system they accept, commit the most base fallacy by then going around claiming anyone's dong anything bad at all. From a morally neutral system, all outcomes at all times are likewise morally neutral. If we evaluate the doings of lions from an internally morally neutral system such as science (it is not externally morally neutral as to do science requires a moral system in which fabricating evidence is bad), then whether the lion catches the gazelle or then the gazelle manages to escape are both likewise morally neutral outcomes. From such a morally neutral perspective, whether a religion conquers and subjugates the entire world in a violent theocracy is a morally neutral outcome, same as the lion catching the gazelle (it happened, we can see the reasons why, same as we can see the reasons why it might not have happened, but it did).