Bush and Cheney promised war that would not end in our lifetime, or our children's lifetime, and I and many others took that to mean it's intended to be eternal. With varying intensity, but no moment of no war or potential external threat. Bush also said we're either cool with that, or we're with the terrorists. So while 1984 will not be built in one day, but it was pretty much completely outlined in one day, and we're on track.
'Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air raid, which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself […]. '
'Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge, which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.'
Nostradamus predicted it would last 27 years, with the “Union of the great Trumpet” eventually emerging victorious, followed by “1000 years of peace”.
As a child I tried to decipher what the “Union of the great Trumpet” is, since it corresponds to no alliance I know of, and hypothesised that it would be the alliance of U.S.A., Europe and Russia. Since it’s known that Nostradamus misspelled Hitler as “Hister”, now I’m wondering if “Trumpet” isn’t a misreading of Trump. Nostradamus was French, so Trump might easily be transposed to “Trumpet”.
(I’m not in any way affiliated with the president of the United States.)
> Since it’s known that Nostradamus misspelled Hitler as “Hister”,
Is it known? Because that's a pretty big leap. Hister refers to a river in Germany. In fact in his actual passage it refers to 'Hister' as a place, not a person.
Most are vague enough to be completely useless, I agree, but this is pretty clear. I guess your documentary wanted to have some sensationalist content, a-la 'ancient aliens', but no, it is not 'known' that Nostradamus predicted anything let alone WW2 after misspelling Hitler. In fact he references 'Hister' a few times in his writings, referencing a pretty large river in Germany.
> The type of personal integration we attain – or the effective lack thereof – depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings.
> The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the child’s efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil.
-- Arno Gruen, "The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"
How come others have to have "objective" morals, but for you "seems to me" is perfectly fine? Of course it's subjective, that doesn't take away from it at all, since any opinion that it being subjective is a problem is subjective as well.
> Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.
Up to extracting gold teeth from people murdered in concentration camps, or is there a limit for you?
> [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?]
> Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication...
-- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical.
It seems unfortunate to you, because you are not aware of the thought and research that went into this insight, and the roughly 100 million dead people.
Not partaking in evil IS the result. Any further ulitarian calculations are just rationalizations. You cannot predict the ultimate outcome of any course of action fully, but you can treat others like you want to be treated. If you wouldn't others to look the other way if you got disappeared, don't look the other way when people get disappeared. Period. Not because of how it affects world history, but because of how it affects you.
It's not our job to "fix China". It's like some abusive alcoholic -- it's basically their problem, but if you go out drinking with them, and hold their beer when they kill random strangers, and then continue the conversation like nothing happened, you're helping making it worse, and are direct party to normalizing it.
Companies don't have to pull out of China, they'd just have to speak up and never shut up, and China would kick them out. And maybe one day, when the hangover is particularly bad, there might be a hazy memory of an upright person saying "call me when you realized this isn't working".
When people protested against Hitler, it was with slogans such as "murder isn't politics". Likewise, cooperation with murderers isn't business.
If we completely drop the utilitarian approach, then we must admit our goal is not to help or improve, but to act morally superior. Righteous grandstanding on the world stage has a track record of failure to inspire change, or even causing conflict. If our goal is simply to keep our hands clean then perhaps we shouldn't take an interest in human rights or business.
You cannot personify nations for many reasons, the foremost of which is their sovereignty. No country is beholden to another beyond war and economic sanctions. The amazing period of peace and prosperity the Earth is experiencing since WW2 can be directly attributed to the establishment of diplomatic channels and using them..
People can and do say that about any business or nation or whatever "specifically" being criticized. Why not criticize all of them? Because comments are limited in length, and because the subject at hand is cheapo PR for Google? Even if you were to criticize "all, fairly", you would have to start somewhere, and there would always someone saying "why not start with Y first", and when you criticize Y someone else says "why not start with X first".
Especially since people asking that generally know nothing about the people who criticize a thing, and what else they might criticize in other contexts. It's not like they're busy criticizing some bigger evil and criticism of $thing_under_current_discussion blocks their noble work. At worst they're doing nothing, yet expect others who are doing something -- even if that's just making one decision against one product or company, rather than zero, and making one comment about their own personal actual stance, instead of about synthesized hypothetical persons -- to take some time out of their day to answer pointless "questions".
To me fear of death is a sign of not really having been born yet. If you can't make 50 years worthwhile, you can't make 50000 years worthwhile, and if you can't cope with being limited to 80 years or so, you will not be able to cope with the heat death of the universe. It also stands to reason that if you feel it's impossible to give up 100 years of grown personality and memories, it will be even harder and more painful to give up orders of magnitude more of that. It seems like power in that those who want it the most deserve it the least because they are the worst at using it.
On a very basic level, if I feel myself to be entitled to live forever, then I couldn't rightfully deny that to anyone else. So at some point this would mean less new births. If it didn't, it would mean an even more crass explosion of the human footprint, an even more extreme choking out of other lifeforms -- and it could very well mean both. But that would suck, since being healthy and alive isn't just great because I can see 5000 million particles rendered in 3 lines of CSS, or watch the clouds go by, it's also because of the flora and fauna, and because of other people. Beings that surprise me, that come into the world and "become". Knowing there will be future question marks born is something way more sublime for me than "attack ships on fire" or having this one video that got 7234 million views.
Life isn't just me, it's also a river in which I am a drop. If I want to not be a drop, so I can keep seeing the river, well... if everybody does that, there is no more river, and if I want to reserve immortality for just myself, I am an asshole. I don't mean to brag, but I figured that out as a kid, and no immortality advocate I read or heard or saw so far managed to put a meaningful dent in it.
Yes, I am for medicine, I think it's great when people can live longer and stay healthy longer (even though we then ignore their wisdom when it's inconvenient, e.g. [0]), but no, I cannot draw you an exact line, except that I know "immortality" as extreme and as espoused by technophiles or emperors or preachers does not interest me, at all. If anything I'm curious about the biographies of the people looking for it; they point at some clouds that may or may not have a moon behind it, but I can't help but look from the finger to their arm to their shoulders to their head. I feel that's where the majority if not all of the action is.
Last, but not least: even if you managed to completely overcome all aging and disease, assuming no asteroids and other surprises: the only way to ensure you will live "forever" is to severely restrict the agency of anyone else but you. Other humans acting would be a potential threat, in infinite time it would become an infinite threat, while at the same time you have an infinite lifetime to lose. Nothing might be too crazy and machavellian, and like junkies people might just keep going down the spiral long after they lost all joy in it.
Personally, I think the optimal aim is agelessness. There are issues with immortality, as there is with any unlimited concept.
I think what most people fear is a fixed time limit. I want to be the master of my own destiny, and not have biology telling me when to go. if we become ageless, people still die from trauma and suicide, but we lose that pressure of knowing we have such a limited time. That might be good for altruism, long term outlooks, and delayed rewards. Plus it addresses another major issue: the slow decline into frailty.
I think by becoming ageless we can gain many advantages of immortality and avoid many of the problems.
All these issues can also be overcome with a "live and let live" attitude, and expanding ones empathy beyond oneself, and tentatively even beyond the present. At least to me, the main difference between me living for 1000 years, and me and 9 other people living 100 years each, is that 10 people would probably be more interesting, even though I would only get to see a tenth of it.
Like that Roman dude said, the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, so it seems with life. To have or to be... if only I could live 1000 years, if only 10000, if only 100000... is it so absurd to at least consider it possible that we would treat it just like we treat RAM and CPU now?
Sure, it's apples and oranges in a way, but satisfaction really is something that happens in the mind and not just the external circumstances, so I don't see why we wouldn't be able to consider any amount of time "not long enough" at some point. Doesn't mean we would, but if we did, we would have gained nothing, other than less diversity of persons.
> We feel free to express ourselves because we are ready to fade into emptiness. When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something, we cannot express ourselves... So we have enjoyment, we are free.
-- Shunryu Suzuki
> Of short duration are those who praise as well as those who are praised, those who remember and those who are remembered. And even that happens just in one corner of the world, and even there not everybody agrees with one another, a single person doesn't even agree with themselves. This whole Earth however is but a dot.
-- Marcus Aurelius
This does not change meaningfully, to me, if you replace Earth with Universe and short duration with 10^10000 years. It's the same basic problem, and even I am constantly in flux, not ever the exact same person I was an instant ago. So why not get over that? For me letting go of some things doesn't mean giving anything up, it's more like having the hands free to receive better things; I like the tiny actual place I have in reality more than an imaginary big one that requires all sorts of ballast and images, layers of abstraction and alienation.
> If you can't make 50 years worthwhile, you can't make 50000 years worthwhile, and if you can't cope with being limited to 80 years or so, you will not be able to cope with the heat death of the universe.
If we reverse this logic, if 50 years are enough, then so are 5 years or 5 months or 5 days. Or is "50 years" a magical number where the rules of the game change, so that the fourty-nineth year can make a difference but the fifty-first can't?
Even the quote itself just demonstrates the not seeing the woods for all the trees I mentioned... as if throwing a baby on the floor would make it grow up, instead of the other way around.
But it doesn't stop there does it, and it's a perfect example of the shit you find if you just dig the tiniest bit.
> However, Tsiolkovsky’s interests did not lie just in the fields of engineering and rocket design; he was also interested in social reform. In 1928 he published a book called The Unknown Intelligence in which he argued that humans would colonise our galaxy and introduce the philosophy of panpsychism, a sinister form of anthropocentric perfectionism with a eugenic streak. Tsiolkovsky believed that atoms have their own form of intelligence and that if all the lower forms of life were eliminated, then the suffering of the “human, higher atoms” would be lessened, as they would not have to go back to the bottom of the pyramid of existence but would be reused again in the highest form of matter — humans. To achieve this, Tsiolkovsky suggested sterilising all fauna and aquatic life, and most of the flora on Earth, leaving only those plants necessary for nutrition. His plans did not stop there, but embraced the full extent of eugenics: he proposed using the same remedy to eliminate all “imperfect” members of humankind, so that only the best, healthiest and most intelligent people would be allowed to reproduce. Their offspring would then go on to create a higher caste of Nietzschean Übermenschen and, ultimately, reach the much longed-for goal of immortality.
Nietzsche would have laughed his ass off I guess.. just consider the opposite of the Übermensch, the last man:
> The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
> 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth.
How do you get from that to sterilizing all life on Earth so you don't have to be a bird or a dog every now and then? That's so incredibly impoverished, and fits perfectly into what I outlined.
> We have more life than we know what to do with. We have life far beyond the point where it becomes a sick caricature of itself. We prolong life until it becomes a sickness, an abomination, a miserable and pathetic flight from death that saps out and mocks everything that made life desirable in the first place.
> You ever look at their faces? ... “I’m pro-life!” [makes a pinched face of hate and fear; his lips are pursed as though he’s just sucked on a lemon.] “I’m pro-life!” Boy, they look it, don’t they? They just exude joie de vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial Pursuit all night long.
-- Bill Hicks
> The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
-- "Sophie Scholl - The Last Days
> If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.
-- Vincent van Gogh
> A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
-- D. Elton Trueblood
There, that's some quotes with some actual wisdom behind them, with actual brains and guts. A petty "me me me" isn't the solution to age-old problems, it's regression. Even after 3 decades of gobbling up sci-fi stories, even though I don't "lack imagination" to consider "uploading brains into virtual worlds", but simply imagine additional things, I can't unsee the people and their ticks. I can't unsee how we treat the poor and voiceless today, and how we show no signs of letting up. This new age transhumanism religious stuff, and it's nothing more, comes from the worst and the weakest, not the most noble humanity has to offer. I stand by that, and am still open for counterexamples, but require no more examples of it.
"the only way to ensure you will live "forever" is to severely restrict the agency of anyone else but you."
Such a lack of imagination. What about virtual worlds where you're ego would be uploaded, leaving no physical remains to be fed? What about changing you're body for something that don't need to eat food? What about the tremendous immensity and ressources of space that await colonization? What about being able to go to deep sleep and live 50 years every 500 or so? I could go on "forever".
I considered all of these and more before making my comment, and still made it as I made it. It's still there for you to reply to, and then maybe I can entertain you.
> there have been many attacks, but not since Xinjiang turned into a total surveillance state
It might seem that way when you ignore attacks on people by the surveillance state. From the invasion of privacy en masse, to people being disappeared, thus robbing them of even their deaths in a way not even the most heinous terrorist attacks do. It's like nuking a city and then saying you "stopped all car thefts" in it.
It's just as fundamentalist and religious, only with a party line that can shift on its own, vs. preachers who shift their interpretations of fixed scripture, for the same result.
Also, monuments destroyed in medieval times? Really?
> The start of the Cultural Revolution brought huge numbers of Red Guards to Beijing, with all expenses paid by the government, and the railway system was in turmoil. The revolution aimed to destroy the "Four Olds" (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) and establish the corresponding "Four News", and this can range from changing of names and cutting of hair, to the ransacking of homes, vandalizing cultural treasures, and desecrating temples. In a few years, countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards.
> it might take materialist brainwashing ('re-education') to reverse religious brainwashing.
They're not even getting "materialist" brainwashing, whatever that would even be, they're getting totalitarian brainwashing. Within the framework of totalitarianism, where there is no truth except the truth enforced by coercion, what you say makes sense: only a stronger lie can combat an existing lie, and anything grounded in truth or voluntary insight is lava.
It's still essentially arguing wether a turd or a puddle of puke constitutes better tasting food -- any no doubt existing differences are meaningless, they should never make you pick one or the other.
> "Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world."
-- Hannah Arendt
