If you mean by real culture specific art forms and the like, well, sure, the US does. Disneyworld, Hollywood blockbusters, advanced marketing techniques, action figures, comic books…I am sure we can come up with more.
I disagree. They are certainly not nature. They are patterns and traditions that people engage in with eachother. Americans tend to think they are not culture, but if you watch them disassemble a culture, you can see that a replacement is taking place.
Sure Manifest Destiny is a part of our worldview.
Sure, though it’s not ours, per se, it came from ideas in the English Empire and earlier than that from Rome.
Yup.
I don’t think we have that right. I do think it is a part of our culture. To such a degree we don’t think of it as culture and are shocked when others think we are imposing something foreign.
If you, dude, are like insinyatin’ at me some relativist, yo, muthafucka, thought we’s been tru dat long time ago. I just don no what the foundation of your non-relativism is, bro. Ya feel me? Yous got some value free, man hand it over to the scientists shit process hits me like a non-observable experiment we don talk about of the Gap and I ain’t talkin’ genes.
You like a cap in your ass? --Why not?
You like being a slave? --Why not?
You like a slap in the face? --Why not?
You like a pain in your neck? --Why not?
The answers the same, when you can’t ask anymore. 'Cause if you say you like pain/suffering, I’ll be like, “wwwhuuaattt?!” —And you don’t. I could have told you that 100 thousand years ago.
YOu got my body in those, directly bein asswhiped somehow. And even in there there are cultural differences, S and M, various rituals, and so on. So wihtout a context, we have some direct attacks on my body. Given no context we assume I did not ask for those things and nothing justified it. Fine and dandy, with the provisos mentioned about culture - generally not including caps in the ass, though some cultures might think it was good if life was spicy where this might happen a lot more often than you or I would like.
But much of life just aint so neat, your body reaching out not through ma bell and causing my c fibers to scream. We got effect tracking issues all over the place and culture playing a huge role in those effects and how they are interpreted or even felt as pain.
I can only imagine your system being useful if you allow yourself a lot of play with intuition, otherwise, many there is no way to control all the variable, as one does when deciding if there is a planet there. Scientists man, they go to the lab and they use controls and they whittle out other factors, and they uses large samples and test and repeat.
We can’t do that stuff for most moral issues.
And then given that those scenarios can then come into cultural contexts and end up being greatest good for greatest number type acts, it seems to me that humility would lead to an inablity to weigh in on so many issues.
Let me know if you get my point, even if you think it is off, which I assume you do.
As I’ve told you in many different places—everything is context dependent. If you get pleasure from being whipped like a slave in chains by a woman in leather… THAT’S PLEASURE, not pain. At least, whatever the mix, you’re getting a greater balance of a kind of pleasure. It’s not for everyone, but if that’s your thing… go for it. Kinky, that’s fine. Context-dependent.
Context-dependent is not subjective, it’s objective. If you need me to clarify this… again… I’m happy to.
Trust me, I love that now the main criticism against me is that it’s hard to solve some problems… and not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the method or what it implies. Because I’ll solve 99% of the cases, quite easily. Actual moral dilemmas are the film on deep water. And you can say the same thing about any objective discipline, math, science, logic, etc. Hard problems are hard, no doubt. Yom sayin.
So yeah, the native Americans got a pretty raw deal.
But really, even disregarding the moral norms of the time, would it really have made sense to have everybody couped up in Europe? To have explored the Americas, chatted with the locals and then never coming back without permission? Without making any moral calls here, it was bound to happen, if the natives could not defend themselves or assert their claim to their territory, barely occupied the land. Political Realism, basically, can’t imagine the New World just being left to it’s own devices as sparsely populated as it was with all the industrialized world concentrated in Europe.
So it’s maybe not moral on a fundamental level, but I think it probably could not be helped. There was too much to be gained by the Europeans and if one particular nation in Europe declined to settle, some other less righteous nation would and put them at a disadvantage.
Is there really a discussion in that you are listening to ideas and concluding anything?
When you look at the words and you yourself translate what is sent to your brain, they are your words you are reading. So you really don’t listen to anyone. You hear only your own words. And since all we can do is interpret what is being said, and this hasn’t helped us in concluding anything, is there anything that can be concluded? So, whatever instrument we are using to interpret with is not the instrument to conclude with and there is no other instrument so there is nothing that can be concluded ever. Finished.
It might be a shock to some people, but Native Americans didn’t believe in land ownership. When Jamestown was settled by the English in 1607, way before the Industrial Revolution, there was room for expansion in Europe, so it wasn’t a question on lebensraum. Western expansionism didn’t really start until the 1840’s and Manifest Destiny became a catch-phrase in 1845, with the annexation of Texas–which started the Mexican-American War, by the way. It’s now known as Nation Building and continues to play a leading role in American foreign policy.
Do we have a moral right to interfere with the structures of culture and politics of any sovereign state, particularly those of cultures we don’t know and may never understand? If so, what gives us that right? Is it a God-given right; if so, isn’t that mixing religion with politics?
Are we confusing morality with political ideology?
I’d say politics is an extension of philosophy and morality. Different scales of magnitude or applications of the same science, so to speak. This ‘might makes right’ attitude nations have historically had between each other may seem like a primitive or immoral ideology, but it was a reality. A state to serve it’s function is to be a benefactor of it’s constituents. Which you can construe to say that a state exists to serve itself, because it’s strength is derived from it’s people.
The tyrant or king cannot be as such if it’s powerbase is dead or some foreign power dominates them. Neither can the most enlightened, egalitarian government.
So the duty or moral obligation of the state, to it’s people is to act in their interests, even at the expense of the interests of others outside it’s nation. This is sort of the idea of political realism, how this translates into individual morality, I wonder if it isn’t human nature, or instincts to form such tribal ideas of ‘us vs them’ since humans rely on societies, groups and allegiances to prosper.
So what might constitute a grave crime or immoral act within a society is perfectly moral or expected or absolutely necessary in the paradigm of groups of people interacting with the outside world.
A tribe of 20 people got together and established what things shall be done, and what things shall not be done, in the tribe.
Twenty tribes of 20 got together and established the same for their region, wrapping the emerging national norms in art and finery, making it an object of everybody’s veneration.
Twenty regions were able to come together as one country, thanks to having similar norms.
The exact moral norm of a historical period is of little interest.
You accidentally dressed the fundamental question of sovereignity in extraneous moral garb: if another tribe is sovereign, our conventions of right and wrong do not apply there. If our tribe believes in “universal human values”, then we are the philosophical enemy of every sovereign nation that would like to stay that way.
This is so, independent of whether our “universal human values” are beneficial or harmful, culturally rich or desolate, and whether we are good people or evil people. The presence of a belief in universal values applicable to all humankind is the tell-tale sign of the ambition to form super-nations, uniting the world under our norms, destroying the very idea independent moral organization.
But they did believe generally that this tribe has a special connection this particular piece of land. Manifest destiny was a force, with or without that name, long before the 1840s. I can take your resources because I am better than you are. I can take your land, I am entitled to it. I can demand you move, because God gives me that right over you. That had been going on for a long time, and was especially clear whenever the ‘civilized’ came into contact with indigenous groups.
