Holy shit, COULD it happen HERE?

These two statements don’t go well together and further you seem to have conceded the point about the proletariat. No mention of how the right has viewed and used the proletariat. And the left is hardly in love with Zuckerberg as a whole. And I don’t see the right disliking him much. Only the conspiracy theorist end of the right is critical of him. And note: I do not use conspiracy theorist as a pejorative term, I would be classed as one myself. But it is disingenuous to class him as simply loved by the Left. He is a corporate billionaire. And I won’t accuse you of anti-semitism for attacking him.

And then this idea that anyone who does good is hated by the left. As if there was no arguments about what is good.

Yeah, it’s his kindness. There are no disagreements about his policies or how he interacts with people. The Left sees kindness and they hate it. I personally see most of the Left and Right as fucked, but you are just saying random shit.

Have you seriously not noted that most of the right has hated Trump all the way along?

K: learn a little history… Fascism is a right wing ideology… Hitler hated
communists and communism and sent to concentration camps “leftist” and “communist”…

as far as the "far left being more “fascist” then Communist, I don’t suppose
you could give us an example of this, especally since you don’t seem
to have any understanding at all, what fascism is…

Kropotkin

The more you come to grasp human interaction [in the is/ought world] as “I” do, the more your reaction to such things as Trump’s policies becomes entangled in both the head and the heart. In other words, however much you try to disentangle it, you’re still drawn and quartered “in the moment”. Also, I have no way in which to determine if my own frame of mind here and now is in fact a reasonable perspective. Let alone the most reasonable.

All I know is that if you are able to convince yourself that the “real me” is in sync with “the right thing to do”, this can console and comfort you. I don’t know how this “works” for Peter here and now. I only know how it once worked for me there and then.

And judging Peter is the last thing I would do. I am only curious to explore how his own particular “I” reacts to conflicting goods in such a way that he is not down in the hole that “I” am in.

Here things always get particularly tricky. It is one thing to discuss/debate objective morality [re fascism] in the philosophy forum. After all, it is easier here to yank the exchange up into the realm of “technicalites”: definitions and deductions. One set of words dealing with the consequences of defining another set of words in a particular [conflicting] way.

But over in the SGE forum, the discussions often revolve more around the actual existential consequences of, say, separating children from parents in executing a particular immigration policy from the Oval Office. Here the subjunctive frame of mind kicks into gear and you can find yourself dealing with what can become very powerful emotional and psychological reactions. Then it becomes the extent to which the objectivist “intellectual” can “fit” them into one or another moral and political dogma.

Perhaps, but to the extent that you can live with your “self” without enduring “the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty” can, for some, be consolation enough.

Okay, again, if this “works” for you [for all practical purposes] who am I to suggests that it ought not to work for you?

I can only note that it does not work for “me” out in the world of conflicting goods. Here and now. And yet other very, very intelligent men and women are able to arrive at the conclusion that one or another rendition of humanism enables what they construe to be rational men and women to embrace one or another moral/political agenda. Concluding that, among other things, fascism is immoral.

That’s certainly true. You are convinced that right makes might is a viable philosophy, but you are willing to concede that democracy and the rule of law is preferable either to the brute facticity embedded in might makes right or to a political juggernaut like the Nazis who gain power [democratically or not] and then use the political power of the state to dismantle democracy and the rule of law.

Out in the “real world” [historically] these transitions are always going to be enormously complex and convoluted.

On the other hand, there are others who are not in the least reluctant to employ “any means”. Why? Because for them the “kingdom of ends” revolves entirely around self-gratification. They range from the nihilists who own and operate the global economy [where “policy” revolves around wealth and power] to the individual sociopaths who channel a No God world into “what’s in it for me?”

Yeah, the “real world”. Which is why folks like Marx and Engels and Smith along with Freud and Jung and Reich are still so vital in understanding why mere mortals interact as they do. It all gets entangled in the profoundly problematic evolution of genes and memes in a world veritably seething in contingency, chance and change.

I don’t see a way around that. On the other hand, has anyone here actually found one?

Which [from my frame of mind] is really just a way of saying that you know that you don’t know how to resolve or reconcile this definitively but you act as though you do know.

Back again to what “I” think "I’ know about human autonomy and all that “I” would need to be know about the ontological nature of existence itself in order to know this.

We don’t really even have a clue as to where to insert the “human condition” itself into, say, the multiverse?

Please cite a mention by me that indicates I am not an agnostic in regards to questions this big.

“You” [to “me”] just seem to be less fractured and fragmented than “I” am [re fascism] out in the is/ought world. I’ll either come to understand why or I won’t.

Or:

"Did logic ever play a role in rightist politics, or is rightist politics quite simply that which must escape logic to survive? "

Now all we need do is to focus in on an actual issue that leftists and rightists are at odds regarding and note the extent to which logic does in fact play a role in determining which policies all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to embody in the behaviors that they choose.

You pick one.

Here’s a good place to start: amazon.com/Fascism-Big-Busi … dpSrc=srch

You know, for some of us.

I can certainly feel uncertain about the choices made and choices I need to make. It just doesn’t involve objective morals. I am not omnicient, life is complicated, mistakes can have disastrous results.

Again, this
‘works’

  1. define ‘works’ 2) does whatever you do ‘work’ 3) do you have any reason to believe what you are trying to find ‘works’ and ‘exists’

Let’s take this one small step at a time. Define works. And we can move from there.

To me adding in the struggle to find objective morals, and trying to resolve the world’s conflicting goods to the burdens I already have would work less well and include some kind of confused hubris about my powers, let alone the liklihood of achieving that. So I experience my NOT doing that as working better than if I did.

Then back again to the extent to which your own “I” here is construed by you to be [more or less] an existential contraption.

With someone like Mr. Reasonable, for example, I attempt to make this distinction by differentiating the choices he makes when buying and selling stocks, as opposed to the choice he made to pursue this behavior in the face of arguments by others that capitalism is either inherently immoral or, historically, will “dialectically and materially” give way to socialism culminating in Communism. A so-called “scientific” assessment of political economy down through the ages.

In other words, there are choices that we make in which we are able to calculate if they were in fact mistakes. Or certainly if they led to disaster.

But how do we determine if in fact morally we ought to have chosen other behaviors instead?

How is that not profoundly [problematically] embedded in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy?

Well, you want to pursue some objective. To, for example, make a lot of money. So you choose to play the stock market. That either works for you in attaining your goal or it doesn’t.

Someone on the radical left confronts you one day and tries to convince you that capitalism itself is wrong. It exploits and dehumanizes people. It must be overthrown.

Does her argument work on you? Well, here too it either does or it doesn’t. But suppose we take the argument to the philosophers, the ethicists, the political scientists. Suppose we ask them to use the tools at their disposal in order to determine if it ought to work on all reasonable and virtuous men and women.

What then?

And defining a word is one thing, noting how the meaning that you give to a word can be employed out in the world of actual human interactions, another thing altogether. Or so it seems to me. What is its use value, its exchange value when confronting conflicting goods?

The same for all of the other moral and political conflagrations that cleave some be bringing them together or cleave others by tearing them apart.

From my frame of mind, this has less to do with hubris and more to do with recognizing the limitations of philosophy out in the is/ought world. One in which it is assumed that there is no God.

This thread merely focuses in on those limitations with respect to the discussion/debate revolving around fascism as a governing body. It can work for some in the sense that it accomplishes what they construe to be the right thing to do. Either/or.

But what of question, “is fascism a rational, virtuous or even noble pursuit?”

And how existentially does any particular individual come to one rather than another assessment of this?

What if we do live in a world in which mere mortals are basically daseins ever clamoring down through the ages over conflicting goods?

Would that disturb some? Would it take big chunks out of their own comfort and consolation?

And, if so, how would they react to someone like me?

Worse, what if they actually came to think just like me about these things…these relationships?

Trust me: It really, really, really sucks. An essentially meaningless world on this side of the grave, and oblivion on the other side of it.

Of course many react to me as they do! I only wish that I could be one of them.

I believe I said a couple of times that I understand the Is/ought distinction and also asked you not to keep explaining it to me.

Notice above how I asked for a definition of works and then asked two yes/no questions. You did define works in relation to is type issues. I don’t see answers to the other two questions.

And your answer to question 1 does not help me understand what you mean when you assess me by saying
it works for you.

You manage to sum up my approach/life, with this clear statement, but cannot seem to define it or answer it in relation to you. Or question 3.

Your practical example of what it means to ‘work’ for me or you, doesn’t fit the generalized way you assess whether it is working for someone.

Let’s stay on this. I don’t need to know, again, that you believed X when you were younger. I don’t need to know is/ought distinctions or what would happen if objectivists suddenly understood you.

  1. What do you mean when you sum up my approach/life by saying ‘it works for you’?
  2. Does what you are doing work for you?
  3. Do you have any reason to believe that what you are trying to find will ‘work’?

First of all, while this thread is now basically an exchange between the two us, any number of others may well be following it. So, I am making my argument to them as well.

Why is that important to me?

Because only by bumping into an assessment that nudges me up out of the hole I’m in [re fascism and other conflicted value judgments] am I likely to benefit from these discussions.

That’s really all I have left to cling to as the clock ticking toward oblivion gets louder and louder and louder.

Secondly, all I can do on this thread is to grope to understand your own “I” in relationship to something like fascism; and to note in turn how you have somehow managed to configure a “sense of self” here that appears considerbly less fractured and fragmented than my own.

All the while acknowledging as I do that this critical distinction is not something the moral and political objectivists are likely to factor into the behaviors that they choose.

Instead, they derive their own comfort and consolation the old fashioned way: through the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

In other words, the tried and true existential font down through the ages historically. Sometimes God, sometimes not.

Okay…

2] “does whatever you do ‘work’”?

Obviously:

a] What am I doing? Why am I doing it?
b] Can I calculate/measure whether I have in fact accomplished the task I set out for myself? Did the behaviors I choose work?

Example:

I choose to come into ILP because I calculate that if I note the hole that I am in, others may well be willing to share with me the reasons that they are not in that hole themselves. Did that work? Yes. Over the years many here have offered up alternative narratives/agendas.

But: Have I in fact come upon an assessment able to yank me up out of the hole that “I” am in? No, not yet. So, in regard to that, the behavior that I chose [to come here] did not work.

And, in part, because “here and now” I am still convinced that this…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…is a reasonable understanding of human is/ought interactions in a No God world. Perhaps even the most reasonable.

3] “do you have any reason to believe what you are trying to find ‘works’ and ‘exists’”?

Back again to #2.

Something can be calculated to work if everyone can agree on what it is that constitutes “working”? Does the technology/methodolgy employed by penal institutions to execute prisoners work? Well, yes or no, right?

Do the arguments employed by those on either side of the political spectrum work to establish the most rational policy here…or a policy said to embody the “best of all possible worlds”?

You tell me.

Then maybe we are just “stuck” here. How can I make it any clearer then to note the historical facts that everyone can agree on regarding fascism, and the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no philosophers, ethicists or political scientists have yet been able to establish definitively that fascism works better than all other governing bodies.

Does it? How would this be demonstrated? And how would the anti-fascists demonstrate that it reflects instead the worst of all possible governing bodies?

As for “I” in all of this, I was raised in a truly reactionary community. I was a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. The folks I lived around constituted precisely the sort of white working class demographic that flock to Trump today. I don’t recall the word fascism coming up in my neighborhood but I suspect I would have embraced it.

Then the Army. Then Vietnam. Then Mac and John and Steve and all the folks that reconfigured “I” from a right wing fanatic into a radical leftist. Then John and Mary and Barrett and “rival goods”. Then existentialism, deconstruction, semiotics. Then nihilsm.

Then the fucking hole.

OK, fair enough. Now I know what’s happening.

Then I should probably bow out. I will not produce a solution to conflicted value judgments, not in the sense of a method to resolve which right.

OK

Is ought, you mean?

Ah, objective morals, monad self.

OK

OK. I can get that, i guess. It was challenging when I started to feel distance from the left. I identified with them. I don’t really now. For most of my life this did not mean I thought in terms of objective morals. But still I identified, felt aligned with them. Preferred how they interacted with children - me being one for a while - and the world they seemed to want to create. Don’t get me wrong, I still tend to prefer to hang out with lefties. There is more of a home there, but perhaps one difference between you and me is I always felt alienated by every group: religious, philosophical, political, cultural. And that included the left. I never thought there was a simple relation to the USSR. I didn’t think Reagan was wrong about the evil empire, though I thought he was evil also. Or really, you could translate that into preferences, but I found little to like about soviet relations to its own peoples and the left’s dismissal of Reagan there seemed anti-right rather than noticing the object of the remark.

I can remember sitting in a theater watching a movie where a cia agent/diplomat character tells a liberal trying to find his child that it was easy for him to judge US foreign policy while at the same time not really paying attention to it and accepting benefits from it. That there was something facile about the fathers position. I felt sympathy for that judgment, though I disagreed with the policy in question. The entire mainly ivy league audience hissed at the CIA agent. I thought then and think now that these mainly very priviledged people liked the idea of hissing, but in the end were happy and snug in policies they claim to hate on occasion. I’ll bet most of them went for Bush 2’s start of Gulf War 2.

I found that all groups had strong taboos and social punishments and seemed unable to quesiton their sources, whether the Nation, the Times, or whatever WF Buckley read.

I hated the way the Left was happy to indoctrinate children. I certainly noticed that the right did this too.

I found it odd that the Left had trouble criticizing hilariously poor systems of belief like the psychiatric/pharma worldview.

In the left’s hatred of religion, I saw all sorts of baby bathwater smugness, the same certainties I could find in the scientific community, based on very little and very little understanding of the phenomena they poo pooed.

Very little actual experiential curiosity. A lot of hearsay certainty by all major groups. My respect went down on all sides.

There were a variety of norms to choose from or around me and in various ways they all made me feel like a weirdo. I might have agreed about many policies with one, but tempermentally I did not fit in. My sense of psychological health. My sense of humor. The depth of my emotions. I just kept encountering limited norms. I don’t think most people want to notice what they really feel - I know how that phrase will hit you but there are degrees of cluelessness around introspection - or through what process they came to their opinions. IOW ceongnitive dissonence, potential hypocrisy, ‘negative’ emotions, confusion, anomolies are regularly denied by most people, as far as I can tell. And then do not feel the urge to explore that.

So, my alienation from categories and groups has been there a long time and this goes way back into childhood. Nothing like childhood trauma to make you curious about the anomolies around experts. I noticed at a very early age that there was a systematic cluelessness and pardigmantic idiocy amongst supposedly scientific experts. Not individual errors or areas that need improvment, but systematic problems. That made me come at all kinds of expert ‘knowledge’ with skepticism.

It is frustrating. I would love to be able to go to an association or church and just hang with my fellow Xs. But it has been this way for a long time.

I have during that time met people who also notice anomolies, don’t fit categories well, and have a vague tribe who I do not get to spend enough time with. And then there is my wife. Took a lot of really messed up relationships to find someone who I can tell all my reactions to. Who knows she has her own cellar with beasts and monsters in it, can sit with contradictions in herself for a long time, better than me.

My focus has then been for a long time unification in myself and finding people who I do not experience I must actively hide much from. Always a matter of degree, but I have found people where there is such a degree of acceptance between us that it is qualitatively different.

And while I try to find the truth, whatever that means, in traditional ways, I am very experientially based. Dewey, apprentice, exploratory. I don’t expect so much change to come through reading or dialogue, though it can sort of aim some of the experiential work.

I follow anomolies, things that do not fit what experts tell us is the good and the real. I see no mainstream paradigm that adequately explains what I can repeatedly experience, not all of it.

And all the various major belief systems out there tell me, in one way or other, to not have the feelings I have. I decided to test whether they were right, treat their judgments of the limbic system as falsifiable. I think they are wrong. Though this is more lived than asserted. I stopped trying not to feel what I feel in all the ways everyone from the scientific community to the various religions to pharmapsychiatry to the new age to the business world to folk beliefs to ‘common sense’ say that one must. It is amazing how much these seemingly different groups have overlapping, often nearly the same judgments of the limbic system. Going in precisely the opposite direction to all their objectivisms about emotions, I find myself less crazy, quite grounded, not violent, able to be rational and more able to make the life I want, at least around those parts I can affect. IOW their judgements do not seem to be grounded in reality and the people I am intimate with have, over a long period of time decided not to accept these actually not supported by research judgments to lock emotions down.

I can imagine this sounding like an objectivism, but I see it as a decision not to listen to all these ‘truths’ about how I am suppose to judge, lock down, eliminate, suppress as a rule my emotions.

I mention my history since it is relevant regarding fragmentation and fracturedness.

So while I certainly look at the world and am horrified and do wish to make nudges in directions I prefer and this includes nudges coming from empathy about all the horrors out there, my efforts are not trying to prove this or that is the objective good, though that might be a tactic in some interaction.

If I can’t treat those I love well, I doubt I will save the planet.

I don’t think that is the case. I can’t figure out what works for me via everyone. Shit most people thought slavery was working.

I thought when you said ‘it works for you’ referring to me, you meant somethign more personal. You can’t have meant that everyone thinks it works. Nearly everyone is quite ignorant of what I do, think, feel and how I approach making things better. When I returned the question, I mean, t does what you do work for you?

Everyone has not yet agreed about anything. Not even scientific conclusions.

I gotta make choices when I wake up in the morning. I can’t wait for everyone, especially since I don’t respect many of everyone.

Sure, I get that. I am asking if your approach to life is working for you. The seeking to find a way to resolve conflicting goods via rational argument. That in combination with distraction. And then if it seems like it will work, maybe some day. Looking at it as a choice. You respond with the world’s experts not being able to prove or disprove the bestness of fascism.

It seems like you are evaluating how you approach life by looking at the arguments of experts about huge political systems. To me these are in different categories. Which does not mean that your concerns about the inability of experts to resolve such HUGE issues should not be important to you. It just seems like trying to figure out what to eat for dinner tonight based on Confuscism vs. Mormonism. And not cooking anything while the debate goes on. Let’s say there is a solution. That one day the types of people who get drawn to the right and the type of people who get drawn to the left finally together somehow come to agree on THE GOOD. That sounds like generations away if ever. Vietnam puts you at the youngest possible 18 in 1975. So 1957, so now youngest possible 61. Likely your body has been through some shit, even if, say you got no Agent Orange, direct traditional wounds or severe PTSD. Working class possibly threw some problematic dietary routines at you for a while. It seems not unfair to say that the chances of these broad categories coming to unity, in your lifetime are small. Not because of a decade here or there, but orders of magnitude away from that. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years and I would say, aren’t, in the main, trying so much for objective morals. Some may argue within morals, more or less leaving alone as an axiom that there are, and others more focused on pragmatic approaches to heuristics. Objectivists, in the main, are not trained in philosophy, so they likely lack the tools to examine their own arguments very well. It would be a bit of a miracle if it happened in your lifetime.

To me that response you make above to is it working and will it work seems so abstract. If you were Bernie Sanders, before his campaign collapsed via Hillary and DP back room shit…no even then, even before it fell apart, it’s so abstract.

Ah,this will come off as me saying you should be doing something else. But it was as if I asked a person what he was up to and if it was working and the answer was a quote from Hegel commenting on a particular war.

But you want someone to give you the tool that will convince everyone how to choose objectively between two moral positions on any issue.

I do not possess that tool, nor do I have a direction to nudge you in where I even remotely intuit the answer might lie. Stanford Phil Encyc has this article…

plato.stanford.edu/entries/mora … gy/#NatFac

I’ll leave it here.

Karpel Tunnel wrote

Hate only comes from the Washinton, DC. right, right America at large loves Trump.

All soooooo true.

Right vs. Left
Shame vs. Guilt
Corporate oligarchy vs. Statist bureaucracy
Advertising vs. Hollywood
Materialism vs. Goodism
Classical vs. Romantic
Pretends to be strong vs. Pretends to be weak
Willng to fuck over millions of people for a corporation vs. Willing to deny the fucking over of millions because of a dream
Shallow cardboard heroes vs. Jesus figure heroes
Cocaine vs. Marijuana - that is two different delusions, one a cold much ado about nothing narcissism and the other a stinky passive ‘love’ neurosis
Worship dead lefties vs. Worship dead lefties - yup they both do
OT Christians vs. Mindfullness trainers
Fantasies have the feel of infomercials and Bruce Will movie trailers vs. Fantasies with the feel of movie of the week tearjerkers and, as a guily pleasure, Bruce Willis movie trailers.

Both will go to war to support soldiers put in danger to make someone a buck.
Both have political correctnesses and both are stupid enough to think the Left invented the only one
Both have their own version of self-hatred and they hate the other’s version.
One shames their kids, the other guilt trips them
They are both addicted to being seen as the two options
Neither one can see through the BS of pharma’s war on emotions
Both are addicted to their digital devices and distraction
Neither one can deal with diversity and will pound everyone into boxes, though they have different boxes
Both Incapable of seeing their own contribution to the idiocy and suffering
Both easily manipulated by the sharks WHO COULD NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EITHER RIGHT OR LEFT VALUES
and love when you guys pick one side
like Fixed Cross
and present yourselves like victims
which both sides do.

Frack them both

You two should have a nice little chat about Jews and Israel, now that things have a cuddly base.

Sure, I can relate to that. There were always misgivings on my part regarding the extent to which my mentors [sacred or profane] reflected the Whole Truth about right and wrong, good and bad behaviors. But to the best of my recollection that revolved more around perfecting “one of us” rather than in critiquing “one of them”.

But that simply reflects the manner in which I construe your “I” and my “I” here – re moral and political value judgments – as profoundly problematic identities embedded existentially in experiences that might have overlapped in some respect but were entirely different in other ways.

In other words, dasein as I understand it on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

But, most crucially of all, I recall that either through God or political ideology, I felt this strong psychological sense of being grounded in a narrative/agenda that gave my life a true sense of meaning and purpose.

But: it was the wholly unique experience I had with John and Mary, coupled with my immersion, intellectually, in existentialism, that set into motion a frame of mind that began to crumble/crumple more and more with each passing year.

You, apparently, were never quite as embedded in that sort of “comfort and consolation”.

I, on the other hand, managed, to the best of my recollection, to buy into objectivism hook, line and sinker back then. The flavor mattered less than the fact that one way or another I was hooked. And, let me tell you, when you lose that feeling by tumbling down into the hole that I’m in now, it is still always there to remind you of what you no longer have access to. At least not here and now.

So, sure, there is always the possibility that this “psychological bent” is still propelling me. I’m no less “hooked” on nihilism derived [perhaps subconsciously] from the manner in which I have hooked myself on being in the hole I’m in.

It’s all [still] just a way to convince myself that I understand the world around me “better” than others who don’t think like me.

I would never deny that.

Well, the “degree” to which you have accomplished this seems beyond my reach here and now. I can never really be certain that any particular thing that I think [re the is/ought world] is not somehow just embedded in the constellation of existential variables that predisposed me to believe this instead of that. Only those who are down in this hole with me might come to grips with the ambiguity, the ambivalence and the sheer uncertainty in which “I” is now fractured and fragmented.

And yet somehow in this way…

…your own particular “I” has landed on more stable ground. But how could I ever really even begin to grasp how you accomplished this given [no doubt] the extent to which your own experiences simply do not overlap mine.

From an earlier post, here is my own “history” in a nutshell:

I grew up in the belly of the working class beast. I worked in shipyards and steel mills. I was drafted into the Army and spent a calamitous year in Vietnam. After being discharged I matriculated into college [in the tumultuous 70s] and for the next 6 years there was practically nothing I did not try at least once. I then spent nearly 25 years in a veritable alphabet soup of radical political organizations. I was married, divorced and raised my daughter as a single parent.

How many other folks here even come close to this? So, of course the manner in which they construe “I” out in the is/ought world will no doubt be very, very different from mine.

Slavery working or not working depends on what can be calculated. If you employ slaves in order to prosper and then through slavery you do in fact prosper how has it not worked for you?

And back then there were any number of folks able to make what they construed to be reasonable arguments [moral arguments] for embracing slavery. Some even rooted in God and religion.

My point here revolves around the assumption – and that’s all it is – that while my own political prejudices here and now are embedded in the personal belief that enslaving other human beings is wrong [as a political prejudice] I have no way in which to demonstrate philosophically that slavery is necessarily wrong; and that all rational and virtuous men and women are therefore obligated to reject it.

Same with fascism. Same with all other conflicting goods.

No, my point here always involves making a distinction between whatever any particular individual might think about capital punishment [as an existential contraption, as a political prejudice] and that which philosophers are able to establish as the moral obligation of all rational human beings.

If philosophy is thought by many to be the search for wisdom, what then are the wise men and the wise women to make of capital punishment as a moral issue? What argument, analysis, assessment etc., works best here?

As opposed to those who are hired to create a device that actually will work successfully in executing the prisoner.

How are these different things?

Then we are back once again to the fact that in this regard, you have somehow managed to feel less fractured and fragmented than I have. Still, on the other hand, with respect to the hardcore moral and political objectivists among us, you seem closer to me than to them.

It works, sure. But only to the extent that I am still able to find some measure of fulfillment [pleasure, satisfaction] in the food I eat, the music I listen to, the movies I watch, the exchanges I sustain etc.

But all of that unfolds in a world construed by me to be essentially meaningless on this side of the grave; and with the grave itself [oblivion] getting closer and closer and closer.

As for this…

…I can only take it one day at a time. As an existentialist. As someone still able to assume that each day can bring a new experience, relationship and source of information and knowledge.

Assuming of course that any of this is not only what it ever could have been in a wholly determine universe.

No, I want someone to describe to me how, out in the world of conflicting goods, their own experiences have allowed them to create a sense of self less fragmented and fractured than my own experiences have left me.

You have made that attempt and I appreciate it. As have others.

And, sure, who knows: Down the road I might come upon a frame of mind that startles me such that I actually begin to imagine it as a path up out of the hole I’m in now.

After all, what else is there here but to keep on keeping on?

Here we go…

thedailybeast.com/armed-tru … t?ref=home

Still, is Trump just the anomoly here or is he the start of a whole new [and sustained] chapter in American politics?

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine a really calamitous lurch to the right until something on the order of an economic collapse begins to unfold. Or some catastrophic war.

K: type in state polls about trump and notice that in every single
state in America, that his polls numbers have dropped since
may 2017 to I think, June 2018… and that includes states that
are reliably red… in every single state in the United States…

so, no, America at large doesn’t “love” IQ45………and his overall
numbers are and have been pretty fixed at 51% negative and 40%
positive… it might fluctuate from month to month, but it usually
hangs around 51% negative… and I might remind you that IQ45 lost
the popular vote by almost 3 million votes… so, he isn’t even very popular,
little less loved…

Kropotkin

Peter, the fact that you still trust the fictional polls says it all. The polls are run by the leftists, thus they’re false. Duh!

K: but I thought the leftist ran Hollywood, or maybe that was the jews,
but Jews seem to be awfully busy running running the world’s economic
system to be involved in some petty movie industry………but wait, I remember
reading about how Shira law was taking over in the United States and how entire cities
was under Shira law and if you weren’t muslim you didn’t go into those area’s but if
Muslims were taking over the United States, what happened to the Jews?
I thought it was the Jews who were taking over the United States…
and I thought it was the liberal elites were were taking over, but wait…
are the liberal elites Jewish or Muslim? I forgot… Maybe the big wall charts you
have that keep track of who is running the world today will tell me who I am
suppose to be against today… Is it the Jews, the liberal, the liberal elitist, the Muslims
or perhaps it the blacks who seem to be taking over… and they are clearly
muslim because anyone who is black is clearly muslim like Obama… who was born
in Kenya or some other foreign nation like Hawaii…or maybe, maybe
it is really the aliens from space how are hiding behind the Jews or was it the liberal elites?
into really running the world and I wonder how the Jews or muslims or whoever is
who think they are running the world is getting their orders from the space aliens who is actually
in charge leaving the Jews or the liberal elite or the muslims to think they are in charge
when it is really the space aliens who are in charge…because we all know
that the moon landings were faked, oh, wait, faked, that is why we have fake news
today because the moon landings were faked in 1969 and that directly lead to
the fake news we are having today… I saw some very suspious activity
in the sky tonight and I am pretty sure it was the jew/liberal/liberal elite/
muslim getting their orders from the space aliens who use lights in the sky to
transmit their orders to earth…

it is all very, very worrisome… I lay in bed at night and wonder how anybody
can sleep when it is so obvious that the space aliens have
taken the polls and turn it against the single greatest man in the history of the
world… Donald, I AM GOD, trump…I heard that Trump can walk on water
but it is the space aliens who control the media, or was it the jews, was it
the libeal elite, anyway, whoever ran the media that keep this wonderful news
from us… how DONALD, I AM GOD, TRUMP can walk on water…it is the aliens
and their fake news that keeps us from hearing about this…the answer is right
in front of you if you weren’t a commie loving, nigger loving, jew loving, space alien loving
traitor to america… it is clear to the rest of us REAL AMERICANS that its the jews,
liberals, liberal elitist, muslim, space aliens that is keeping america down from
from learning the truth about the man who can walk on water…

if only you would become wise and smart like me, you would know the truth…
says wendydarling……

from a Jew loving, nigger loving, liberal elite loving, muslim loving, space alien loving,
unamerican traitor failure…so sad…

Peter you’re not supposed to say the n-word.