Thoughts, Observations and Questions.

Conscience is mostly conditioned in using inherent fears and hopes.

Welcome back, then.
I been above average, as far as I can tell.

A good society is made of good individuals.
An emphasis on virtue would seem to be the answer.

Really?

Conscience:

In the past, when I have tested my conscience, I don’t remember any fear or hope prompting my intention to see what would happen or my after the fact physiological reaction, what did happen, which ranged from self-disappointment to self-disgust. Describe this fear or that hope for I surely don’t understand how that type of self-awareness can be conditioned into existence.

What are your guy’s thoughts on transhumanism and artificial intelligence?

I see these things as manifesting in the near future.

Dan

But what virtues would they be? Any virtues or particular virtues which would uphold/sustain a good society?
"Good* is kind of a flimsy word.
I also think that good is according to one’s own perception and often “ego” and it has been known to burn people at the stake, for instance.
So-called good people have also been known to do NOTHING when evil rears its ugly head and thrives.

I’d say that a good society is actually made not of individuals, but of partners, partnerships, clans.

individualism has ruined every civilization where it took hold. Humans are worth nothing to each other if they are oriented primarily on their individuation. All that makes a human society work is if humans desire to spend their lives in service of a higher cause.

In such a society, there is a lot for freedom of individualism. But individualism is like the cherry on the cake, it has not power to create, to serve, it isn’t valuable. Its just a symbol, not a thing.
Each overly individuated person will eventually kill himself or move back into some fold - or create his own community.

You see this, for example, in Hollywood, where a lot of aspiring individuals live, who, when push comes to shove, all turn out to really want to be cattle in a stable, and are supremely happy when they only have to moo and be shoved around by some institution.

Some individuals worth their salt did exist. Casanova comes to mind. No philosopher is an individual, and no artists or politician - profoundly creative people have their soul intertwined with the peoples of the Earth.

The latter part of the above may be true but this does not mean that they are not individuals. I intuit that if they were not, they could not be as profoundly creative as you say they are. They all express themselves from within a different core and life experiences.

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The Inter-connectiveness of the artist within his universal community is not the same as being part of the “herd” or something like the Borg.
I intuit that without his own personal individuality and unique personality, the artist could be nothing but a sardine in a can of sardines.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Advanced Robots

youtube.com/watch?v=kbaDdg4LA9k&t=1076s

Morality as a form of beauty

Many people today claim that morality is subjective or relative, but it’s, actually, the case that morality is objective.
Many people also claim that beauty, in particular, physical and artistic beauty, are subjective, when, in reality, they are objective.
People may have slightly different preferences in regards to what attracts them most, but these preferences are negligible as pertains to
whether or not beauty is subjective or objective. There are certain universal characteristics that stand out across, essentially, all
cultures as to what is beautiful or aesthetic. For men, having an athletic, muscular body (v-taper, six-pack abs) is generally what
women find attractive. A voluptuous, curvy body is generally what men find attractive in women. People don’t arbitrarily decide to make
up what they find appealing or aesthetic in other people or things - it’s something innate they recognize. So, too, with morality, certain virtues, such as
compassion, kindness, love and integrity are universally recognized as being aesthetic or noble. This is because these virtues express something inherent to
existence itself. They are manifestations of the highest reality: God.

This is useful, a phenomenology of morality.

i stopped calling anyone a ‘narcissist’ with pejorative connotations a long time ago, due to a moment of insight that suddenly seized me, at which point i shouted ‘eureka’; the measure of the excessiveness of someone’s pride, or vanity, or grandiosity, is not something that can be assessed by another person. if such an attempt is made, all that will be revealed is the criticizer’s vulnerability to the threat of his own shortcomings by comparison. the very notion of narcissism, whether clinal (as in the DSM) or out of some philosophical narrative, springs directly from resentment and in some cases ressentiment. and here’s why.

that someone appears excessive in the above things, isn’t an indication of how he truly feels about himself. it may be that to you he appears obnoxious, arrogant, what have you, but what if that person, while maybe feeling superior to you, still isn’t satisfied with himself? ‘ah’, you say. i think i see where this is going.

joe is an awesome athlete, and quite proud of his talents. so much so that he would not hesitate to say ‘i’m better than you’… but what we don’t know about joe is that he, himself, thinks he could be better, could improve, and that by comparison to still others (but not you), he thinks he’s woefully inferior.

now which is any evidence of the true measure of joe’s vanity and/or pride here? how we feel when we resent the fact that he thinks he’s better than us, or how joe feels when he examines himself and realizes his disatisfaction with himself and desire to improve?

see what just happened there? to call someone’s pride and vanity excessive can only mean ‘we are offended by his confidence’. it cannot mean we’ve identified some unjustified and over exaggerated sense of importance or value in joe’s mind. joe really becomes quite modest when he is critical of himself. it’s only compared to you that he is better… something you resent. and he shall not be aware of his superiority, for that would be narcissistic and unfair!

the doctrine of narcissism, along with being so many obscure and ambiguous narratives in clinical psychology, is nothing more than a blanket-statement to categorize anyone who tries to distance himself from the herd. the same goes for that pseudo-diagnosis ‘sociopath’. sociopathology is the resentment doctrine of narcissism taken to the fifth power. it’s rests fundamentally on the grey area between organic disease and ‘mental disorder’. because psychologists can’t argue on a scientific level that an alleged organic condition of sociopathology is a trait that can’t promote the ‘fitness level’ in strictly biological terms, they resort to moralizing… and call it a ‘mental disorder’.

be weary of anyone who calls you a narcissist, and remind them that despite your superiority to them, there is always more room for improvement in yourself. instead, look for those who are fellow narcissists… exceptional people with extraordinary talents, and are certain enough of themselves to not even notice the arrogance of others. not because they don’t notice, but because they can’t notice, on account of them not being able to feel threatened or resentful of someone else.

few things are more adorable then two modest narcissists working together to improve themselves even more.

it would really come down to this; if you can say you’ve found someone who genuinely feels that they have no room for improvement, then you can say you’ve found a narcissist. good luck with that. see even the most clearly undeserving of the vanity they have - [insert any Crap artist, for instance] - still are not completely satisfied with themselves and whether secretly or not, are not as great as they really want to be.

and if there is nothing worth the merit of one’s pride, which we find excessive, what exactly is the problem? we’ve merely found a fake narcissist, and this is even worse! it is an insult to the true narcissist!

this plate of scrammbled eggs is a perfect opportunity to show you how easy it is to get everything wrong when you attempt to do philosophy.

for any direction, left, right, up, or down, all issues come eventually down to morality. so if there is something about the ‘left in the west’ to be criticized, it would need to be a problem that the right, up, and down didn’t also possess. and since the right, up and down also experiences the problem of morality, such a statement can only mean ‘that morality is not like this one, and therefore it is wrong.’ and how is this done? by presuming that morality has different sources, when in fact, it does not.

the next step would be to try and argue that morality is derived from religious doctrine. this, too, is false. morality is a biologically evolved ‘mechanism’, and consists of a combination of behavioral tendencies that have been inherited because they’ve proven to increase the fitness level of the group. the entire range of human behavior, from compassion to violence, has served in some way to be conducive to this, or else it wouldn’t have evolved and would not be present in the spectrum of human behavior.

what he’s done is isolated a small set of such behaviors, called attention to the fact that they are taught to be virtuous by [insert some religion], and forgotten that such behaviors do not have their origins in the teaching of [insert some religion]. the [insert some religion] only proselytizes set x of human behaviors, claiming they wouldn’t exist without [insert god of some religion] creating them.

so this gentleman first tries to vilify the ‘left’ by saying they’re ‘only about morality’, when in fact wherever he’s from is ‘only about morality’ as well. second, he tries to delineate something specific about moral behavior down to a specific religion (which he vilifes, as well), calling it responsible for the virtues he is criticizing, without realizing that those virtues are held in high regard by any practicing culture, be they left, right, up or down, simply because they are ‘intrinsic’ to human behavior.

so for example, he might say ‘compassion practiced by christians or marxists is bullshit, while compassion practiced by pagans is not.’

it’s neither here nor there if a specific culture believes their virtues are ordained by god. so one wouldn’t say ‘culture x is wrong because they believe their compassion is ordained by god’. one would have to say this particular kind of compassion is in question, and proceed their argument from there. and let me save you the trouble of trying to do this and just say; you won’t be able to do that, either.

the rabid foaming at the mind continues:

this is not philosophy… well i mean it is because it’s got all the necessary informal fallacies to be called such… but it’s more of a hyperbolic rant expressing that beautiful existential plummet into frustration and despair. and i say it is beautiful because it certainly is; it is one more exhibit i would present to the court of the crimson king to prove that man is, indeed, a wonderful mistake. and i do this as an indifferent artist who might shake his finger at the gods and shout ‘look what you’ve done to this poor creature!’ for it to even be possible that someone become so entrenched in such a mental abyss of confusion and rage, and have to live it for decades, well… that’s quite the grievance to be lodged against the gods.

in five hundred years, every detail of that misanthropic study above, everything thought to be a great danger to humanity, to the quality of life and integrity… every emergency declared to be a threat to the dignity of man, will be so long gone as to not even be mentioned in history books anymore. if one could look back upon the continuum of that species man and find that meager seventy+ years of that single life that spent its time worrying about everything in a nervous and raging fervor, you’d not have enough time to blink your eye before it was over.

if you feel that you might be such a life, i would direct you toward the blue light, and hope that you might find it before it’s too late.

your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to improve widget production, lower child mortality rates and reduce military expenditures:

anti-dialectics.co.uk/AAA_Socialist_Economy.htm

now you might claim you don’t want to do this, but you really do. deep down you really do. you just don’t know where to start, that’s all. so, we will be conducting a series of aptitude tests to determine the strengths and weakness of each ILP member, who will then be assigned to their respective positions to perform the necessary tasks to reach our goal.

the guy who wears a dead rat on his head (trump) better fire mueller before mueller brings the whole cesspool down in a blaze of glory, wouldn’t ya think? by the time mueller gets done, that worthless fuck’s whole cabinet is gonna be indicted and on their way to prison. but did it really take the country this long to realize what a despicable piece of human waste was put in the white house? do they not see all the secret handshakes going on? unbelievable.

the house judiciary committee is drilling the fuck out of the acting AG at this very moment. i’ve never seen a guy squirm so much in my life. he evades the questions, then drags out ambiguous answers hoping to run the clock down. as if we don’t know what he’s doing.

nah. this isn’t a witch hunt. a witch hunt would be giving these scum bags too much credit. this is an extermination of a nest of cockroaches.

and why all the long, drawn out judicial formalities? why not just bring in a team of galleanists and be done with it? bada bing, bada… BOOM. no more cockroaches.

‘prolegomena to a critique of common core math’ -
the old lady (1rst edition without addendum)

vocaroo.com/i/s0rF5Qjk2ryP

she was still a deputy when i was there in 2013. i remember her from the grey unit solitary confinement block. the deputies rotated shifts every couple weeks, so i had seen her several times. but i can only recall one instance vividly. she was working third shift, and after showers she was in charge of cleaning-supply rounds. the cart is pushed un front of your cell door and through the tray slot you’re passed various cleaning supplies. on this particluar occassion i asked for the broom, and was given an old, frayed urine soaked straw broom. this wasn’t her fault though; it was the broom on the cart and she wasn’t in charge of stocking it. i remember this as clear as day; ‘come on, callahan, look at this broom, man. would you sweep your floor with this broom?’ she looks at me through the plexiglass window and shakes her head in agreement. she says ‘hold on, i’ll get another one’. i nod. she brings me back a brand new broom. ‘thanks callahan, you’re the boss’. she smiled. i don’t remember anything else of her other than her escorting me to the shower. you’d stand backward in front of the cell door and slip your wrists through the tray slot behind you. she’d cuff me, call control to open ‘hotel 16’ (H16), and walk me to the shower.

she musta made it to sgt. in the years to come, although i can’t imagine why a girl like her would take a job in that hell. if only i could have had a premonition… some clairvoyant glimpse into the future: you’ll be dead in four years, callahan. get the fuck out of here while you can.

i remember that white trash piece of shit, craig, too. he wasn’t from my block when i was in general population, but i saw him on the other yard a few times.

where they fucked up was allowing callahan to enter the block by herself. they aren’t supposed to do that, ever, but the place was run by incompetent staff and the administration didn’t give a shit about anything. not sure what the internal investigation turned up, but i’m sure a few strings were pulled and the admin got off the hook. just listen to that idiot redneck public safety official talk; ‘these are uh… uh… a difficult work environment at bayest.’

let’s look at that again.

‘these are uh…uh…a difficult work environment at bayest.’ is that even proper english? what was the imbecile trying to say? ‘this is a difficult work environment, at best’? i dunno, i’m askin’ you.

there’s something very profound to be noted about the fact that the place where one is put for breaking rules, breaks countless rules itself (if you only knew). i call it that grand hipocrisy that forfeits any authority of the state. having experienced this first hand, it is not inappropriate that i call myself an anarchist. well that and other reasons… but that’s the big one. that’s a critical part of my personal philosopher’s ‘manifesto’. but don’t fuckin’ get me started on my prison stories. we’d be here all night.

crazy man. i can see her right now in my mind passing that broom through the tray slot as if it just happened.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKWheNzeiI8[/youtube]

lol cohen’s turned snitch on his porn star buddy trump who wanted all the sluts paid off so his wife wouldn’t find out? but why would that matter? trump’s wife is only in it for the money. these two clowns don’t ‘love’ each other. shirley they both know this… or is it just one of those things rich plastic people don’t talk about when they marry?

wait a minute i just realized something. this ridiculous circus scandal involves my president. MY president. this guy is supposed to be a shining example of honesty, truth and integrity, iddin’t he? i mean he’s the fuckin’ PRESIDENT, people.

look at cohen. know how you can tell the guys a piece of shit? his mouth. see how he has a natural frown when his face is relaxed? never trust a man with jowls unless he’s an italian gangster.

in other news, the barbie doll ivanka attacks the new green deal, stating that people want to ‘earn’ what they’re given (a shot at raising minimum wage). she followed the conservative text book script perfectly; distract the working classes from the fact that business owners are doing nothing themselves to ‘earn’ anything, and that exploited workers ought to be happy to always need more money… since that gives them the incentive to ‘better themselves’ and look forward to a raise.

but i wonder how familiar ivanka is with ‘earning’ anything. is she qualified to speak about ‘earning’?

Friend, ally, valued compatriot, there is a subtle definitional difference you may have overlooked: narcissism isn’t merely excessive pride so manifested as cockiness in a natural knack or talent wrought from disciplined diligence, but rather it’s the arrogance of pride in skill that’s not actually possessed.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNYZYxLSgPQ[/youtube]

05:31
and most chillingly, narcissism is why
05:36
Trump is so stupid. The President of the
05:38
United States, the planet’s most powerful
05:41
human, in a data-driven world full of
05:45
shifting information, can never learn
05:48
anything. Narcissism makes you
05:50
unteachable. You can’t correct him
05:53
because that would mean he was wrong and
05:55
that’s impossible.
05:56
He’s infallible like the Pope or Oprah.
06:04
Trump’s brain is like a cell phone with
06:07
a full mailbox:
06:08
you can call but you can’t leave a message.

As KidRock said, it ain’t bragging if you back it up.

But shitting on the chess board and claiming victory is a whole 'nother kind of animal.

A gorilla is cocky.
An ankle-biter dog is arrogant.

When you know your shit = cocky
When you don’t know you’re shit = arrogant

The definitional difference is subtle, but the actual difference is profound.

Good stuff! The author is quite perceptive. I want to highlight this:

[i]It is important to distinguish two basic forms of socialism:

  1. ‘Socialism from above’, Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Chavezism

and,

  1. ‘Socialism from below’, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s view[/i]

(Not sure Lenin should be included, but nevermind)

The first is dictated or forced socialism while the second evolves naturally.

The first is authoritarian and the second is democratic.

The first is Right and Red, the second is Left and Blue.

By their colors ye shall know them :wink:

bruh you have no idea. this chick is to philosophy what deep blue is to chess and diane sawyer is to journalism. met her nearly a decade ago at revleft.com when i was still a card carrying marxist. we ended up hooking up in the opposing ideologies forum, both of us banned from the regular forums; her for her assault on their sacred philosopher ‘that wind-bag hegel’, and me for expressing fascist sentiments. sentiments i still sorta have which prevent me from carrying my card any longer. i simply cannot believe the state will ever ‘wither away’ at the end stage of a revolution, or that a revolution can be sustained without any central party dictatorship. this is what characterized me as a totalitarian communist, which might as well mean i’m a fascist. the commies wouldn’t buy it and tried to beat me up… so i was like fuck ya’ll i’m an anarchist then, and i turned in my standard issued army green cuban revolutionary uniform and bought a mad max costume. and i’ve never been back since. what the fuck was i supposed to do? these people think a government will just spontaneously organize and hold it down while three quarters of the world is trying to destroy them? that’s why mao and stalin were necessary, hombre. that stateless state marx talks about is highly unlikely to ever happen.

what i’m saying is that lenin’s vanguard party is something i think will always be necessary… so that while indeed a revolution might be generated ‘from the bottom’, it won’t hold any ground without a central proletarian dictatorship quickly materializing. and if that’s the case, it no longer matters whether or not it comes from the top or bottom; it ends up becoming the same thing… at least until every country on the planet is part of it. as long as there is an enemy still prowling the earth, a central party has to be established to oversee the fight against the parasites of capitalism and imperialism still lurking about.

this whole stateless state won’t happen until the entire planet is revolutionized.

and this will take a loooong time. capitalism/comsumerism has dumbed everyone down so much it might take another century before humanity begins to grow up and the working classes pull their brainwashed heads out of their asses.