This is not a Nietzschen a argument, it is not beyond good and evil, I use evil as a concept I assume everyone to know the abstract meaning of, regardless whether or not they reject it.
My statement is that a police, any functionary to guard a state/society from evils, almost MUST become evil.
That is in simple words, because he is not quite as good so as to stand unaltered facing the enormous evil that an accumulated unlawfulness of a state/society can muster and will confront him with constantly. He who stares into the abyss will be stared into by the abyss. And justifying - no this deserves a new paragraph -
Justifying his policing by the mere fact/given of that evilness of the unlawful, he becomes wholly indiscriminate versus the nuances of his own conduct – but discrimination of these nuances is the root of all goodness.
Goodness is in subtleties, evil in gross, generalizing, crude, stupidity.
“It’s illegal - therefore I am irreprehensible in beating it down.”
Flannel Jesus and Magsj serve as examples of that brutish, stupid influence on this forum. At home these cats are cool, nice rational beings. Here they are liabilities - having erased a much nastier term. What is it in them? Humanity.
You have to be practically an emotional saint to be good police. And as good as people get at their peaks, hardly anyone one is a saint for very long at a time.
A rational society can have no long standing policemen - corruption is cancerous. Once it takes hold, it spreads unchecked. I’d say for a state, three complaints and you’re out. In a forum, maybe 5. Fuck bad authority.
The problem is supply and demand. Almost no one wants to do those shitty jobs. If you start creating a big turnover, you run out of candidates pretty quick.
Don’t you think I considered that?
I choose for each forum a person whom I’ve learned over a sustained period to be extremely competent and unprejudiced at that field. People who can live without their ego basically, where it concerns that particular topic.
I’ve also made explicit that they are not to call upon a superimposed law but on standards of reason within context. The aim is to stimulate discussion, not to discourage it. Banning someone for merely saying ‘um, cunt’ is not likely to happen. No one’s that insecure.
Say banning for a week is analogous to ‘keeping someone off the streets’ - ‘making sure they can do no harm’ - showing them a bit of force to teach then a lesson’ analogous to a policeman making someone feel that for a week
If that’s a response to a single insult uttered to an official, that’s not quite fascism but getting there.
That comparison is lacking in a fundamental way, it’s just a rhetorical example to place my complaint in context - not a lot of people take forum philosophy as seriously as I do ( I believe it’s the future, if not already the present, of relevant philosophy ) but there are quite a lot who take it very seriously. FJ is not one of these people and neither is Magsj. They just hack into the process whenever they think they’re entitled to.
Banning MM for a week has consequences to a lot of discussions, lines of communications are cut. Conserving such lines these not ultimately the prerogative of ILP (although if you look at the introduction you’ll see that it considers itself foremost a community) but I’m betting FJ has not considered that for longer than a split second. He thinks he’s the pope or something, Like Magsj thinks she’s queen Elizabeth. I am extremely tolerant of authority compared to my philosopher contemporaries - but only because I think the only choice is between good and bad authority. Man can not have no authority, and unfortunately he can have bad authority. Where does that leave us? Not with Flannel Jesus, he’s too much of a **** for that.
You can’t utter insults at officials. I mean, even kids in school know that gets them in trouble.
The whole, “problem with authority” thing is a symptom of weakness and impotence.
If you’ve got a problem with authority, then you need to figure out how to get your way without getting sanctioned. That’s why smart people exist. For just those kinds of reasons. A dumb person would probably get banned because instead of being tactful and intelligent would instead just call a mod an asshole. I mean…hand em the pistol why don’t ya? Then you can get mad when they shoot you, but it wont make any sense to reasonable people.
The subject of this thread could be done without bringing particular people here into it and insulting them. Don’t do that. I guess this is an official warning, though I hate to constrain my caprice with rules like that.
Forget it, Smears your posts is so lamentable in itself that it just evokes a vista of a quiet town, beaten into silence and compliance by the officials and kept that way by the reasonable people and the smart people.
This is not about whether Flannel Mohammed is a Cunt or deserves to be called that, or whether he had the Authority-sanctioned right to act upon being called a cunt. This is about this thread, and the moronic way people seem to interpret it.
“You can’t a bad think about a bad authority - that is stupid and illegal”.
I can’t believe how sad that is.
You call yourselves Americans. No wonder actually then the country is in the shape it’s in
What is the abstract meaning of evil, Fixed Cross?
Wouldn’t you say that perhaps this is a biased statement? Sure, we are, as hungry, weak human beings, capable of becoming corruptible - thoughnot all. Since you are speaking of police, there are also a great many honest ones who become police in order to serve, who honestly believe in the law and what it stands for. Many are not even capable of becoming corrupted but many are, for whatever reason. And some choose that job because they are already corrupt inside and it is also a way of inflicting abuse and their despotic authority on others. It’s always good to give both sides of the coin, FC
Sometimes evil is in subtleties too, FC - we can’t always see it coming or even recognize it when it does. And evil may pass for goodness.
I’ve actually never known either of these two people to be brutish or stupid but by your standards, FC, tell me, what would you call the influence which YOU are NOW perpetrating here by that above statement which you made?
No one is a saint but one can only hope that balance and reason would win out at some point. When we fight fire with fire, I wonder - are there any winners though this is not about winning or losing, though I think that it is probably more the basis of your thread along with a catharsis but I may be wrong in this.
Many things are cancerous, FC. Sometimes we just don’t see them coming.
If philosophy and a particular thread and posts are so important, than why does someone go out of their way to antagonize and to insult? Sure, things get heated up. Sometimes we make the decision to say what needs to be said if something is really important to us but at the same time, as adults, don’t you think that we also ought to realize that there may be consequences and so we accept those consequences going in. If we can’t do that, then we watch our mouths and what we write. We’re supposed to be adults here. If someone knows the rules, why break that rule knowing that you might be banned for a few days or a week? Are our egos so large that we feel we have the right to say whatever we choose and we’re going to get a pat on the back from mommy or daddy for it?
This IS a philosopher forum and there are many highly intelligent (though often not so highly emotionally intelligent) people here. I think that ilp gives a lot of leeway though some might not want to recognize it, authority issues and all that. But let’s face it, there are expressions and words that are or can be turnoffs here. A lot is left alone but maybe you don’t see that. Like I said, if a thread is so important and someone does not like the idea of it being cut short or put on hold because someone has been banned, then that someone needs to “police” his own self (put the leopard to sleep) so someone else does not need to do it.
By the way, just because you choose to rule or to conduct a forum in a particular way doesn’t mean that everyone else has to in the same way. It also doesn’t mean that it would work out in the same way. And there are some forums in which you cannot even utter a word or phrase that is out of place.
As an afterthought here:
There is another way you can look at this, FC. Perhaps the insecurity is actually on the part of the one who uttered that phrase. Otherwise, why say it? And there IS the delete button to be able to go back and to change one’s mind. If it is "affect’ one is looking for, there are more rational and intelligent ways in which to use words. And let’s not forget that respect works both ways. Give some to the one who is being addressed in that way too.
The problem comes in when the police only answer to the police, just as with every tyrant and dictator. In the USA, police can only be judged by other police under the guise of “jury of peers”. Thus in the USA today, policemen quite commonly murder people and whether they get any kind of punishment at all depends only upon the embarrassment factor for the police. The most punishment for murder in the USA, as with Israel, is a few months suspension, sometimes with pay - a vacation. The federal government has become the same. The moderators on forums often do that same thing.
I think that is what he is referring to as “evil”, the oppression from unrestrained authority, the “absolute power that corrupts absolutely”.
It is anti-constitutional because a constitution is a restriction on a government.
I"m just saying that the way you’re trying to win wont work. You have to be tactful and choose your battles.
If you think that’s lamentable, then yeah…you have a childish problem with authority.
The truth is that I probably get away with more, and have more freedom that most people, and it’s because I break all kinds of rules, as a way of life, every single day. Rule breaking is my bread and butter.
I get away with it, because I choose my battles. What is there to gain from insulting someone who has power over you? Wouldn’t it be better to trick them? Or to sneak past them? Then you could gain something without having to fight a cliche petty fight about authority and you could have the authority over yourself to do what you want.
The world rewards intelligence, it’s not intelligent to call a cop a cunt, even if he’s a cunt.
You can say negative things about me here in SGE because I'm the moderator here, and if somebody reports you for saying something negative about me, I don't give a crap and you won't get in trouble.
As far as I'm concerned, other mods are just regular posters here in SG&E, in the sense of them being accountable for what they do, and them being protected from personal attacks. I think some of the things you said go beyond "Moderator X is bad at moderating because" which I might accept and into "Moderator X is a shit head" which I won't accept.
Smears, I am as as little banned as you are. I get away with what I say so you can assume you don’t have to lecture me on the law. I respect authority as a concept and in many cases as a practice, and I respect the main core of the moderator staff. But some of the young mods aren’t as proficient at what the Greeks called ethos as is required to understand philosophy. Which is a kind of war, war against stupidity.
Let me put it this way – in an aristocracy, you would’t believe how harshly people talk to each other. For a commoner it’s probably literally going to cause him a heartattack. We don’t have to go there all the way but a little less plebeaian would be nice.
The mods should keep the most productive people and ban those whom ruin the forum.
There is a set of rules, but the rules are not the end in and of themselves. The rules all should have the purpose to enhancing and cleaning up the experience.
This is actually about how moral a person is on the inside, and how wise they are.
If you gave them a country to rule over, what would they do?
Meritocracy is my ideal. Wherein the nicest people get the most authority.
