you, also, have missed the point entirely.
What does the ‘problem’ word here mean to you, exactly?
But, what is ‘the problem’, exactly?
What is ‘a problem’, exactly?
Come to work this out, fully, and then get back to me.
What even is a ‘problem’, to you, exactly?
If you give the so-called “official” enough money, will they still decline plausible action?
Now there is a REAL ‘problem’.
What does every question or problem ‘today’ come back to, exactly?
What precisely do you mean by “every question or problem”?
The topic of this thread could be interpreted as the thread was going to lead us to the very thing that all questions and problems come back to.
Here what I mean is whatever first definition you use for the words ‘question’ or ‘problem’, and all of what that definition refers to.
While there is a lot of truth to what you said, especially in regards of how these extreme situations progress, i think you skip on the very beginning of the story.
Nobody is extreme by default.
The same way everyone championed gay rights 30 years ago until they were finally allowed to marry, an overwhelming majority of people also supported i.e. immigration.
And then things happen.
The lgbtq community decides that the best way to appreciate everyone’s support is to throw it back in everyone’s face and claim that they have a right to access everyone’s children.
A substantial part of the “refugees” couldnt give less of a shit about the people who decided to feed and house them, and on it goes.
But these at this stage everything can be still swatted away.
Until the powers that be decide to “help” by forcing the worst choices of both worlds onto everyone, making sure that the friction is so high that it causes fire, like with biological men in women’s sports, like the bathroom issue, like the two tier policing of immigrants where some judges and activist literally approach with “they cant be expected not to rape”, so your sons and daughters are free game.
So sure.
You are correct.
None of these problems would exist if both sides could understand the humanity of the other side.
None of these problems would exist if the powers that be would consider us all humans instead of just numbers for their own reelection and solidification of power.
But as things stand, like people like Peter are, a lot of people take into consideration only the humanity of the underdog, the winner of the victim Olympics, and then tell the everyone else to go die, and if you do, they gonna deny it ever happened or make excuses about it.
There is no quicker way to make sure violence is going to happen, than acting like this.
Than wronging someone, stomping on the wound and when they cry out in pain also gaslight them about the wound not existing and them having to suck it up.
Bob: I believe that many of history’s greatest failures arose not simply from fanatical commitment to an ideal, but from a profound failure of moral imagination and the inability or unwillingness to imagine the full humanity of others, alternative ways of living together, or the long-term consequences of one’s actions. That does not mean ideals played no role; rather, ideals often became vehicles through which failures of imagination were expressed.
I’ll give you several examples.
First, dehumanisation is an imaginative failure. Before mass violence becomes possible, victims almost always have to be imagined as something less than fully human: vermin, traitors, parasites, heretics, infidels, enemies of the people. The inability to picture another person’s inner life is what makes extraordinary cruelty psychologically possible. It is easier to kill an abstraction than a neighbour.
Second, many perpetrators were remarkably unimaginative people. Far from being visionary idealists, many were bureaucrats, functionaries, and ordinary citizens following routines. Hannah Arendt famously described this in her discussion of the “banality of evil”: evil often flourishes not through demonic genius but through thoughtlessness—the refusal to think from another person’s perspective. The bureaucrat processing deportation orders may never imagine the family arriving at a death camp.
Third, dogmatism narrows imagination. Totalitarian ideologies encourage a single permissible narrative about reality. Once one explanation claims absolute authority, curiosity dies. Alternatives become literally unthinkable. Imagination is replaced by repetition. This is true whether the ideology is religious, nationalist, racial, or revolutionary.
Fourth, wars often emerge from failures to imagine alternatives to violence. Diplomacy requires imagining how one’s opponent sees the world, what compromises might exist, and how future generations might judge present actions. Leaders who cannot imagine any outcome except victory or defeat often stumble into catastrophes that later appear tragically avoidable.
Fifth, fear itself contracts imagination. Under perceived existential threat, human cognition becomes narrower. People think in binaries: us or them, survive or perish, loyalty or betrayal. Complex societies become reduced to simple stories. This psychological narrowing has accompanied many genocides and civil wars.
There is also an irony here. The ideologies themselves often claimed to be extraordinarily imaginative—a thousand-year empire, a classless utopia, a purified nation, a restored caliphate, a divine kingdom. Yet these grand visions were frequently impoverished imaginatively because they allowed no place for ambiguity, dissent, or the irreducible complexity of human life. They imagined a perfect future but failed to imagine the suffering required to reach it.
This is why literature, art, and storytelling are often regarded as antidotes to violence. Martha Nussbaum has argued that literature cultivates the moral imagination by allowing us to inhabit lives unlike our own. Similarly, Iris Murdoch saw moral growth as learning to attend lovingly to the reality of others rather than projecting one’s own fantasies onto them.
However, it is important not to overstate the case. Some atrocities were driven by sincerely held ideals. The perpetrators of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, or the Cultural Revolution did not generally see themselves as simply lacking imagination; many believed they were creating a better world. Yet even here, the ideals became lethal precisely because they excluded the imaginative capacity to recognise the dignity of those who stood outside the vision. The problem was not that they possessed ideals, but that their ideals overwhelmed empathy and curiosity.
One might therefore distinguish between visionary imagination and moral imagination. Visionary imagination asks, “What kind of world could exist?” Moral imagination asks, “What is it like to be this other person?” History suggests that the former without the latter can become dangerous.
Perhaps the deepest lesson is that civilisation depends less on everyone sharing the same ideal than on everyone retaining the imaginative capacity to see their opponents as fellow human beings. The worst atrocities become possible when that capacity collapses. Ideals may provide the justification, but the absence of moral imagination often provides the permission.
K: as usual, Bob breaks this down beautifully…
one of the primary questions of ethics and morals comes from
the failure to see human beings as human beings… Those who
practice bigotry and prejudice do not or cannot see people
as human beings… they see human beings and they think
other… the very dangerous thought that there is us
and there is them, the other… us vs them… therein lies
much of the world’s problems… and this is a failure of morality/
ethics… a failure to treat people/human beings as equal,
not us vs them, but just us… and that is a moral/ethical
stance… and we fail being ethical and moral if, IF we
treat people as others… gays are morally and ethically
wrong because being gay is forbidden by god…
us vs them… gays are morally wrong.. that is statement
one, and there is a god that judge them, that is statement two…
and both statements are dependent on the existence of god…
traditional ethics and morals are dependent on their being a god,
but as I have pointed out a number of times, that is an assumption
that cannot be verified or shown to be true… there is no evidence
or facts that show us that god does exist… and as usual, we are
left with a ''now what?"…
This was the question that drove Nietzsche… what does morality/ethics
look like in a no-god world… and within that lies the problems I have
laid out because our answers today must work with the notion that
we exists within a no-god world… I have laid out, elsewhere that
the new morals and ethics must come to terms with existence being
a no-god world… in a no-god world, how do we express ethics
and morality? In a no-god world, is homosexuality wrong? I don’t
see how… and being trans, how does being trans in a no-god world
become ''wrong?" Ethics and morals become a different beast given
the premise of a no-god world…
I have stated that I hold the idea or concept of ‘‘WOKE’’ as being
a moral, ethical statement…no different than the ‘‘sermon on the
mount’’ or Kant’s ‘’ treat others as you want to be treated’'…
I see the world in terms of ethics and morals, not in terms of
money or fame or titles or material possessions, or power…
the trinkets of existence that define our modern era…
or to say this another way, we are focused on the wrong thing…
instead of focusing on the trinkets of existence, we should be
focused on what it means to be ethical/moral in the modern world…
or as Socrates said, we should be engaged in our soul, not
on our tax bracket… Which is to say, we should be thinking
about what it means to be ethical and moral today…
and how do we work out the ethics and morals that we are in so
need of, given the no-god world of the last 250 years…
as I have said before, that philosophy over the last 250 years
has been a question of morals and ethics… from Kierkegaard to
Nietzsche, to every major philosopher into the 1960’s…
Heidegger called himself a moral philosopher as did
Wittgenstein and Sartre… or said another way, the
many different atrocities over the 20th century, by many
diverse different countries, must give one pause as
to the existence of god… only with a loss of
traditional ethics and morals, can the many diverse
atrocities be committed… those atrocities can only be
committed if we lose sight of human beings… we turn
human beings into others, us vs them, and with each
denigration of human beings into others, makes it easier
to commit the next generation of atrocities…
us vs them is an excuse to negate others within actions
such as genocide and laws against people, just for who they
love or how they dress… the theory is the same…
us vs them is a negation of other human beings and their values…
which I have already defined as nihilism… this negation or
nihilism lies at the heart of modern day ethics and morals…
or has been noted, it is easier, far easier to destroy then it
is to build, to be creative… and people usually, usually
take the easier path in their lives and destruction is
the easier path… to negate, to deny, to turn people into
other, to negate people by turning to an, us vs them attitude…
that is the nature of traditional ethics/morals…
the question becomes, how do we go from the modern day
attitude of us vs them, against the new way in which we hold
that human beings have value and worth, that we treat
people with respect and dignity… regardless of who they
love or how they dress or the color of their skin…
or we can return to the atrocities of the 20th century which
came about because we did forget to treat people with
dignity and respect, all people…
Kropotkin
@Nausamedu
@Bob
@Peter_Kropotkin
The liberals always fall back onto the Jewish holocaust which is ironic considering the endless thousands of people Jews have killed themselves throughout the Middle East since 1947. (Probably close to millions if you added them all up.)
One wonders why liberals defend Jews still at all. It’s clear Jews play an important role in their liberal moral framework and ethos.
MrAuthoritarian:
The liberals always fall back onto the Jewish holocaust which is ironic considering the endless thousands of people Jews have killed themselves throughout the Middle East since 1947. (Probably close to millions if you added them all up.)
One wonders why liberals defend Jews still at all. It’s clear Jews play an important role in their liberal moral framework and ethos.
K: feel free to show me where I have defended the Jews or even
for that matter, defended or attacked Palestinians… I haven’t done
either… your post is factually wrong…
Kropotkin
it has often been discussed, the question of the ‘‘human condition’’
and what does that mean… and for me, I am of the opinion
that the ‘‘human condition’’ is really a question of ethics and morals…
because ethics and morals are not an individual question, but
a collective question… with one person, say a Robinson Crusoe,
there is no question of ethics or morals… a single person alone
has no need for ethics or morals… ethics and morals begin with
the second person…with the addition of Friday, the question
of ethics and morals becomes real for Crusoe… the question
of the ‘‘Human condition’’ begins with the second person…
Kropotkin
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Though conservatives have supported Israel even more than liberals.
And Israel is losing support now from both parties and groups.
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This is the only response i have in regards of the entire topic of Jews.
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There is a profound interconnectedness of all life—both physically at the cellular level and socially as human beings.
Existence is not a solitary, ego-driven endeavor. Instead, it is a unified, interdependent whole.
Biologically, a single cell cannot survive isolated; it relies on a complex, cooperative ecosystem of neighboring cells to maintain homeostasis and function.
Just as biological cells are inextricably linked, human survival depends on mutual support, cooperation, and recognizing that our well-being is directly tied to the well-being of others.
This broad perspective suggests that attempting to separate yourself from the collective, or acting as if you are fundamentally independent, goes against the natural, functioning state of life.
It is an ethical and logical principle:
The survival of a cell depends upon the survival of the cell next to it. and your survival and my survival depend upon the survival of our neighbor.
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Yeeeeeah, but we always conveniently forget about the hayflick limit, the immune system and the 600’000 other means by which those cells gonna get killed the moment they are of no benefit to the system, pose a risk or god forbid are actually faulty or infected.
We can go with these nice little analogies about how the multi cellular systems, the biosphere and the foodchain are built upon each species present in it, threatening with a domino like collapse when you just remove one or two key species/cells from it, but what we do not contend with is… you know… how death and elimination is an integral part of the system.
And yet his comparison is correct. Just because people die doesn’t mean others are born and yet others are living.
It’s not a great analogy to figure out how to relate to each other. The body is pretty ruthless. Immune reactions can kill off healthy cells near the infection or problem area, for example. In the immune system and brain, even if you are healthy but not as active as others, you may get killed off. After the infection excess T-cells are killed off - which would be sort of like killing a high percentage of soldiers returning from war. If you are outcompeted or no longer necessary, bye bye. We can look at other processes and see something more palatable to certain moralities and look at yet others and find support for different moralities. Some processes seem to be analogous to ruthless government, some to communal supportive. We could justify all sorts of interpersonal/societal relations with the body.
Nature is not totally chaotic—not a blooming, buzzing confusion. Change occurs at all scales, but when it comes to biological systems, such as ecosystems and organisms, the change is systemic. Ecosystems display recurrent patterns involving feedback loops and are stable through extended periods of time. Similarly, individual animals and plants are homeostatic. Earth is a superorganism because life processes create the very conditions that support life. Such observations give rise to the idea of a balance of nature
From an anthropocentric perspective, nature derives its value from being a potential human resource. The only argument for conservation is prudential: Use nature prudently so that you do not impair its ability to sustain continued use! (Given this view, I wonder why a person should not regard other people strictly as resources too . . . if he thinks he can get away with it!)
The emphasis was on the killing Bob. Not on dying.
Those “highly cooperative ecosystems” KILL everything that is of no use, is a risk or becomes faulty.
Nothing on this planet shares the same lofty ideals of morality and pragmatism humanity does. Not even your own body, because its a one way ticket to rot, collapse and self-deletion.
Cooperation always happens for mutual benefit and under strict conditions, and the moment they are not fulfilled its either abandonment or outright killing.