I have no particular quibble with the current definition. Yes, the current definition should reflect the current beliefs etc - that's almost a tautology.
I was only saying that current definitions which are socially constructed (as opposed to, say, empirically determined laws of physics) have no special claim to be the ultimate truth. Ten, twenty years down the road, they may well look very different, reflecting the social attitudes of *that* era. That's all I was trying to say.
I was not sure you grasped the difference between "physical law" and "socially constructed". The statements you made about the definition of "human", and the force with which you made them, seemed to indicate that you believed (some interpretation of) the current definition to be absolute and irrevocable, which is erroneous. Apologies if I misunderstood you.
I have too, and there is much to admire and wonder at in Buddhist philosophy. In my opinion they have got so much right.
However, if there is a Buddhism political theory I don't know of it. Unfortunately Buddhism doesn't seem to offer much help when it comes to government.
It's a desperate measure, I grant you (and perhaps even a futile one in many cases) to try to create simplified models of society in order to manipulate the future. The intelligence to do it well just doesn't exist. Not yet, at least. But we have chosen to put somebody in charge for the time being, as there is no workable current alternative - at least not one that is easy to get to. And they need conceptual models of how society works in order to do their jobs. You do the best you can with what you've got.
I don't want to be put in the position of having to defend authoritarian government because I don't believe in authoritarian government. I believe in sovereignty of the individual. However, we can't exists purely as a world of individuals; we all have responsibilities toward one another in some shape or form. That's what society is.
What makes you think I give a damn about religion?
I doubt very much that I am conformant to any of the stereotypical meme clusters you are familiar with.
Sometimes people suffer at their own hands, not because they want to but because they can't help it, or don't know how to stop. That is how my father died.
"Cruel to be kind" is not an oxymoron, as anybody who has survived substance abuse addiction, via the help of others, will testify. How much liberty can you enjoy when you are writhing in pain, comatose, or dead from total organ failure?
You are arguing for an absolute principle. But human lives are not made up of absolute principles. And $deity save me from those who would let me die in agony for the sake of their wonderful ideology.
Your last statement about his argument is correctly qualified.
The relevance of history is that a historical perspective will teach you just how evanescent such ethical or moral judgements are. Do you really think that the "current social attitudes" are in any sense the final ones? That the beliefs and priorities of Westerners today, at the beginning of the 21st century, will last forever? That would be excessively hubristic, not to mention highly unlikely.
The putative value of a human life has not only varied widely between different times and cultures, it even varies within the same culture, according to context. Attempting to set hard and fast rules over something so nebulous as the concept of "life" or "human" is always going to lead to a mass of contradictions and ambiguities. Just look at the debate going on here. I doubt if any two people arguing even share the same common definitions of the most important words being used. Agreement is impossible under such circumstances.
"Absurd" is only your subjective opinion. As I said, it's not physics. What *is*, and what *ought to be* (which is purely a matter of opinion anyway) are two completely different things. As long those who share your opinion dominate, your viewpoint will hold sway - but social attitudes change over time and are influenced by circumstance. You really should read more history.
The article I linked to was about how to implement a stable hard currency that cannot be counterfeited, in such an economy. The proposal uses artifically created isotopes of exotic high atomic number elements to label the coins, with face value nominally equal to the amount of energy it cost to produce those isotopes.
You're all completely wrong about the definition of "human". This word is already in current usage with the following definition: "having human qualities". In other words, it describes an attribute (which is at least potentially available to a rather wide range of objects, not all of them breathing) rather than a single category with sharp boundaries. And it is that misunderstanding that is the cause of all the above disagreements.
people in comas may be forgotten but they certainly are human with all the rights and freedoms that that entails. Circular reasoning! I can hardly believe you would make such an elementary error. They are only entitled to such rights and freedoms as long as society says that they are. If society were to redefine the noun "human" (including for legal purposes) so that included only those with the capacity for sentience, then these "rights and freedoms" would no longer apply to the incurably comatose. This is only a matter of law, ultimately. Not physics.
The adjective "Scotch" only applies to products of Scotland - eg. Scotch whisky, Scotch eggs, Scotch pancakes. the correct adjective for people (and parts thereof such as blood) is "Scottish" or, alternatively "Scots".
Damn right. And now when you go to the cinema to see a movie and you're at the counter buying sweets to munch during the film you ask for "a bag of Opal Fruits...er I mean Starburst" and they go "which one?" and you look and there's like three or four different bloody versions with different flavours. And you end up getting the wrong one that doesn't have any green ones. Or it has green ones but they're not the real green ones and they taste of piss. Fucking bastard product development bastards! Gimme back my bloody Opal Fruits!!!!
Seriously, when a company wantonly withdraws a much-loved product that has existed since your childhood for no apparent reason only to replace it with something inferior - that's a form of cultural robbery. Ditto changing the product name. It shouldn't be allowed. We need National Heritage status on some types of confectionery, IMHO.
The good ones, the ones who really do listen, are not quite as rare as you seem to be making out - but even if only 75% of general practitioners are of the lazy kind, that's a very risky situation for any patient with a serious problem.
Personally I have found dentists to be even worse. You walk in and try to start telling them what the problem is but before you can start to elaborate they've got their speculum in your mouth and the conversation is over.
In the UK the problem is partly explicable by time pressure. NHS practitioners have a limited time to spend on each patient. GP's expect an appointment to take about ten minutes. Dentists, fifteen.
Did you know... the words sabotage and saboteur come from early Luddite-type malcontents who threw their wooden clogs (called sabots) into the factory machinery to break it.
Flash ads on slashdot, yes, I noticed the same thing. I think we all know why; mozilla can block advertising images via the servers domain name, but it doesn't appear to work with flash stuff. So OSDN is getting around your open source browser's ad blocking features. Ironic, eh?
If they can do liver, kidney will be along eventually, for sure. What scares me is that the same technology might eventually be used to print brain tissue.
Think about it. If our understanding of the neural correlates of behaviour and "personality" continues to improve along current lines, it might eventually be possible to design a brain with a particular neural and even synaptic structure, which the tissue printer could instantiate. At that point, any software intelligence could be downloaded into custom flesh. We're all already familiar with the idea of uploading our consciousness into a computer; this would provide the reverse transformation, and not just for uploadees.
Re:Everyone already HAS a VCR!!!
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The VHS is Dead
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No you've got it all wrong. You must have forgotten all the quality programming that has come out of the BBC over the years. Because they are funded by the licence payer they do not need to flood the airwaves with populist rubbish like the commercial stations do. Instead they make a wide range of high quality TV and Radio programmes many of which have been sold overseas and achieved legenday status - programmes like Monty Python's Flying Circus, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf. I'm only listing the ones that I know have been seen in the US - there are many others: historical dramatizations like I, Claudius and Elizabeth I, televisualisations of Shakespeare plays and other literary classics, Dennis Potter plays and quality comedies like Steptoe and Son and Porridge. The commercial stations content is mostly quiz shows and cheap, unfunny, hackneyed, sitcoms made for the proles. Going in the other direction, it was the BBC that brought Star Trek to the UK, God bless them.
(If you get a chance to do so, try to see the BBC's 2003 dramatization of "The Mayor of Casterbridge". It's out on DVD in the US now.)
I have satellite TV in the house and yet I hardly ever watch anything but BBC. If the BBC stopped doing what they do, I would have to get rid of the TV.
You've seen children ensnared and lives destroyed by intoxicant drugs - and yet still support their free availability in the name of some abstract politcal ideology. That is just perverse. You don't even have ignorance or innocence for an excuse.
You blamed me for dividing the choices open to us into polar opposites, but it is *you* who are doing just this. It is *you* who are sticking fast to a principle in the face of suffering and destruction. *I* say Liberty should be achievable in the round, while yet honouring certain sensible exceptions for the good of society (not to mention the good of addiction-vulnerable individuals themselves, who are otherwise destined to self destruct).
The world is complex. For those running things, reductionism is a necessary evil. Only a complete fool would argue otherwise.
The capacity does not exist, to be able to allow anybody freedom of choice in recreational drugs without endangering the weak willed, and thus society. So society has chosen to proscribe their use completely. Alcohol is *only* an exception because the people insisted that it be so. If prohibition could be enforced for longer than a generation, I expect the public's love affair with alcohol would disappear and the ban would thereafter be popular. As long as democracy extends to the proles, however, I don't see any such election platform appearing again.
In your arguments you gabble libertarian ideology and miss the point of your own examples. eg: Your athlete's other accomplishments are beside the point. She failed the strength of character test when she became an alcoholic. Alcoholism *means* that the person is unable to control theirself. If she regained that control and went on the wagon and stayed there without relapsing, that would be a different matter.
I've noticed a recurrent problem - you have the disturbing mental disability of being unable to perceive the use of duality as a concept, coupled with the obsession of identifying any dualistic themes no matter how faint or trivial. It's kind of difficult to talk to you if it's going to be like that.
Regarding Godwin: point of order - it's a cheap trick (and not in the least legitimate) to invoke Godwin on me, because I did not call you a fascist. I said that you were implying that I was a fascist. Now you've retaliated to this perceived breach of Godwin by calling me a fascist again!
May I point out that elitism isn't the signature of fascism. Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. I am unashamedly elitist in some respects, as the proles give me cause to be, but I am no fascist - I abhor corporatism and lean much more toward individual freedom *and* reponsibility. There is no contradiction in my desire to restrict drug use though, and it's only your immaturity that is preventing you from seeing that. You'll feel different about drugs when you have children of your own.
and have crack and alcohol addicts in the family--an educated, privileged and religious family. Yes. Proletarian vices are equally available to the weak in all walks of life. It's not about wealth, or even education. It's about spirit. Some are strong, and some are weak. If you had to choose one thing to say "*this* is what life is about, this is the true meaning of life" it could most meaningfully be said about this one choice - the choice between mastery of the self or taking the line of least resistance and giving in to one's animal instincts. The capacity to choose the former is the larger part of the mysterious x I mentioned earlier; that which elevates us above the animals.
As for the avaricious, the brutal and the domineering...I sympathize with your distate more than you know. But the harsh reality is that humanity's ability to self organize would have got off the ground if it were not for those loathsome historic individuals prodding and poking us along in their own self interest.
By the way I am no authoritarian; just the opposite. My dream is a society made up of sovereign individuals. I suppose I should call myself an anarchist for that reason. But that dream will never come to pass until a serious majority are ready to make that choice that I mentioned. Two reasons:
1. Revolutionaries do not languish stoned in front of the TV - no, how Gil Scott Heron put it more succinctly: "The revolution will not be televised".
2. Only those who have made the big choice are capable of sovereignty over themselves. Those who wallow will, ungoverned, either starve or else revert to barbarism. That's the problem with wallowing, generally. If the masses are essentially proletarian in outlook then universal liberty, equality and fraternity cannot exist because they exclude themselves.
Every previous revolution so far has lived up to its name exactly, by traversing 360 degrees. This is because the Low are only ever peripherally involved in the Middle's struggle to exchange places with the High (this is George Orwell's nomenclature, speaking as Emmanual Goldstein). Hence there can never be a revolution deemed successful by the masses as long as the masses are comprised of the Low. The Low don't have the stomach - or the heart, the brains - to defend their rights every moment of their lives. Easier just to turn on the TV, open a bottle or "skin up".
Note that in most contemporary visions of Utopia, the Low are nowhere to be seen. Because, as long as there is a proletariat, this is not Utopia.
The proletariat first needs to make the big choice, to wake up, to be responsible and take charge of their own lives. I think we are very far from that. "The poor are always with us" is because there will always be some who will give up and sink to the bottom no matter what they are given.
Going back to drug legislation, since this appears to be what vexes you: You yourself decried the casting of a situation as polar opposites. But this is just what you are doing here: in your terms, either we all have the right to do whatever we want to ourselves, or else it's fascism.
Some people believe, myself among them, that there are some things it is best to resist for the good of society at large. If the distribution of drugs can be hampered by government intervention, that is a good thing in my opinion. Drugs are dangerous. Not because they will kill you, but because many people are weak enough that drugs are enough by themselves to seduce them and crush what remains of their spirit. There is a huge cost to society in that.
To take the most egregious type of example: individual liberty notwithstanding I don't see that the rest of us owe it to you, to let you drink yourself to a painful squalid, undignified and utterly pointless death like my father suffered. If I can stop you doing that I will be glad to do so, no matter how much it may prick your sense of injustice.
I say that celebration involves intoxication for adaptive reasons, that such behaviour is both animal and noble without clear distinction--and you imply I want a crack house on every corner.
Unfortunately, experience suggests that allowing the former inexorably leads to a preponderance of the latter. You forget that the proles care nothing for mysticism - only for how long they must wait until they can get off their faces again, so they can lie drooling in the gutter.
On the other hand I do not believe anyway that chemical intoxication is an absolute pre-requisite for religious experience. If it were then religious experience could have no more real objective value than the rantings of any madman. Further, for those who *must* seek derangement while in search of enlightenment, fasting was the usual method in many cultures.
Nice poetry, though; quite compelling. Interesting person, this Mevlani. I shall add him to my children's curriculum.
You attack a straw man. I did not claim that x encompasses all humanity. I defined x as being what is human as opposed to being animal. That is, x stands for those traits we carry that differentiate us from all other animals. This was obvious, and your clumsy attempt to distract attention from the point I was really making, only exposes your inability to answer it.
The rest of your reply is only a mixture of ad hominem irrelevance and ad hoc, sophist handwaving attempting to justify the worship of self gratification. Now I'm as weak as the next man when it comes to pleasures of the flesh, but at least I don't attempt to make up some comfortable, phoney justification for it. Strength and discipline are to be admired; weakness and depravity are to be deplored. Any culture that doesn't recognize this is doomed.
Binary? You are looking for a false dichotomy, the "excluded middle". But there is no false dichotomy. The argument I made is framed in terms of an abstraction which deliberately divides human nature into two components for the express purpose of comparing one aspect with its opposite. It's hardly a new idea, is it? Every major system of thought in human history that I can think of is based on the same idea. Yin/yang. Thesis/antithesis. Body/soul. Id/ego. Good/evil. etc. etc. It comes up again and again in every culture in history because it contains such a basic and fundamental truth. So your knee-jerk rejection on the basis of false dichotomy is bogus. There is nothing false about this particular dichotomy - it underpins everything that we ever learned about ourselves.
And ideology is like halitosis: it's always someone else's problem.
Look to the mote in thine own eye. The dominant ideology of late 20th/early 21st Century Western civilization is about enjoyment. And it *is* an ideology, because anybody who proposes other modes of living routinely gets shouted down by the proletariat. Debate has been shut down; nobody wants to know about alternatives. Human nature (taken as a whole), as it is expressed today in the West (and in all the decadent empires which have passed away), zeroes in on the comfort zone. How fucking noble.
If the human race were to become extinct, what would you prefer the rest of the universe to remember us for? For our music, our literature, our poetry, our scientific achievements? (In all of which struggles, by the way, many of the greatest achievements have been made in conditions of privation and adversity, while few have been made in conditions of luxury and debauchery).
Or would you prefer that we were remembered for the behaviour you were defending earlier? To wit: our fondness of easy living, promiscuous sex, disabling our brains with chemicals and other escapisms?
If it's the latter that you would choose, then I am utterly opposed to your style of thinking. And if everybody chose that, then such a memorial would need to be written sooner rather than later.
In any case though, I really don't have time to argue about it. I'm no educator, and greater men than I have had more profound things to say on the subject. Read some classical philosophy instead.
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My words are a description of what does happen, not a prescription for what should happen.
Its an empirical observation. As opposed to wishful thinking and selective blindness, which is what you are guilty of.
This would be too obvious to mention, if you were capable of thinking straight. I won't waste any more time on you, so you can flame away on your own.
I have no particular quibble with the current definition. Yes, the current definition should reflect the current beliefs etc - that's almost a tautology.
I was only saying that current definitions which are socially constructed (as opposed to, say, empirically determined laws of physics) have no special claim to be the ultimate truth. Ten, twenty years down the road, they may well look very different, reflecting the social attitudes of *that* era. That's all I was trying to say.
I was not sure you grasped the difference between "physical law" and "socially constructed". The statements you made about the definition of "human", and the force with which you made them, seemed to indicate that you believed (some interpretation of) the current definition to be absolute and irrevocable, which is erroneous. Apologies if I misunderstood you.
Just saying something does not make it so.
I agree with that statement 100%. But I don't see how you got there from the quotation, or from your substituted version. Looks like a non sequitur.
I have too, and there is much to admire and wonder at in Buddhist philosophy. In my opinion they have got so much right.
However, if there is a Buddhism political theory I don't know of it. Unfortunately Buddhism doesn't seem to offer much help when it comes to government.
It's a desperate measure, I grant you (and perhaps even a futile one in many cases) to try to create simplified models of society in order to manipulate the future. The intelligence to do it well just doesn't exist. Not yet, at least. But we have chosen to put somebody in charge for the time being, as there is no workable current alternative - at least not one that is easy to get to. And they need conceptual models of how society works in order to do their jobs. You do the best you can with what you've got.
I don't want to be put in the position of having to defend authoritarian government because I don't believe in authoritarian government. I believe in sovereignty of the individual. However, we can't exists purely as a world of individuals; we all have responsibilities toward one another in some shape or form. That's what society is.
What makes you think I give a damn about religion?
I doubt very much that I am conformant to any of the stereotypical meme clusters you are familiar with.
Sometimes people suffer at their own hands, not because they want to but because they can't help it, or don't know how to stop. That is how my father died.
"Cruel to be kind" is not an oxymoron, as anybody who has survived substance abuse addiction, via the help of others, will testify. How much liberty can you enjoy when you are writhing in pain, comatose, or dead from total organ failure?
You are arguing for an absolute principle. But human lives are not made up of absolute principles. And $deity save me from those who would let me die in agony for the sake of their wonderful ideology.
That's an argument that is totally lacking in substance, IMO. You might as well just say "but I don't like it".
Your last statement about his argument is correctly qualified.
The relevance of history is that a historical perspective will teach you just how evanescent such ethical or moral judgements are. Do you really think that the "current social attitudes" are in any sense the final ones? That the beliefs and priorities of Westerners today, at the beginning of the 21st century, will last forever? That would be excessively hubristic, not to mention highly unlikely.
The putative value of a human life has not only varied widely between different times and cultures, it even varies within the same culture, according to context. Attempting to set hard and fast rules over something so nebulous as the concept of "life" or "human" is always going to lead to a mass of contradictions and ambiguities. Just look at the debate going on here. I doubt if any two people arguing even share the same common definitions of the most important words being used. Agreement is impossible under such circumstances.
"Absurd" is only your subjective opinion. As I said, it's not physics. What *is*, and what *ought to be* (which is purely a matter of opinion anyway) are two completely different things. As long those who share your opinion dominate, your viewpoint will hold sway - but social attitudes change over time and are influenced by circumstance. You really should read more history.
The article I linked to was about how to implement a stable hard currency that cannot be counterfeited, in such an economy. The proposal uses artifically created isotopes of exotic high atomic number elements to label the coins, with face value nominally equal to the amount of energy it cost to produce those isotopes.
You're all completely wrong about the definition of "human". This word is already in current usage with the following definition: "having human qualities". In other words, it describes an attribute (which is at least potentially available to a rather wide range of objects, not all of them breathing) rather than a single category with sharp boundaries. And it is that misunderstanding that is the cause of all the above disagreements.
people in comas may be forgotten but they certainly are human with all the rights and freedoms that that entails.
Circular reasoning! I can hardly believe you would make such an elementary error. They are only entitled to such rights and freedoms as long as society says that they are. If society were to redefine the noun "human" (including for legal purposes) so that included only those with the capacity for sentience, then these "rights and freedoms" would no longer apply to the incurably comatose. This is only a matter of law, ultimately. Not physics.
Cut the guy some slack. He's fighting a war against willful ignorance, and it's a noble war.
The adjective "Scotch" only applies to products of Scotland - eg. Scotch whisky, Scotch eggs, Scotch pancakes. the correct adjective for people (and parts thereof such as blood) is "Scottish" or, alternatively "Scots".
Damn right. And now when you go to the cinema to see a movie and you're at the counter buying sweets to munch during the film you ask for "a bag of Opal Fruits...er I mean Starburst" and they go "which one?" and you look and there's like three or four different bloody versions with different flavours. And you end up getting the wrong one that doesn't have any green ones. Or it has green ones but they're not the real green ones and they taste of piss. Fucking bastard product development bastards! Gimme back my bloody Opal Fruits!!!!
Seriously, when a company wantonly withdraws a much-loved product that has existed since your childhood for no apparent reason only to replace it with something inferior - that's a form of cultural robbery. Ditto changing the product name. It shouldn't be allowed. We need National Heritage status on some types of confectionery, IMHO.
It's exactly the same in the UK.
The good ones, the ones who really do listen, are not quite as rare as you seem to be making out - but even if only 75% of general practitioners are of the lazy kind, that's a very risky situation for any patient with a serious problem.
Personally I have found dentists to be even worse. You walk in and try to start telling them what the problem is but before you can start to elaborate they've got their speculum in your mouth and the conversation is over.
In the UK the problem is partly explicable by time pressure. NHS practitioners have a limited time to spend on each patient. GP's expect an appointment to take about ten minutes. Dentists, fifteen.
Gold Pressed Latinum?
Did you know... the words sabotage and saboteur come from early Luddite-type malcontents who threw their wooden clogs (called sabots) into the factory machinery to break it.
Flash ads on slashdot, yes, I noticed the same thing. I think we all know why; mozilla can block advertising images via the servers domain name, but it doesn't appear to work with flash stuff. So OSDN is getting around your open source browser's ad blocking features. Ironic, eh?
If they can do liver, kidney will be along eventually, for sure. What scares me is that the same technology might eventually be used to print brain tissue.
Think about it. If our understanding of the neural correlates of behaviour and "personality" continues to improve along current lines, it might eventually be possible to design a brain with a particular neural and even synaptic structure, which the tissue printer could instantiate. At that point, any software intelligence could be downloaded into custom flesh. We're all already familiar with the idea of uploading our consciousness into a computer; this would provide the reverse transformation, and not just for uploadees.
No you've got it all wrong. You must have forgotten all the quality programming that has come out of the BBC over the years. Because they are funded by the licence payer they do not need to flood the airwaves with populist rubbish like the commercial stations do. Instead they make a wide range of high quality TV and Radio programmes many of which have been sold overseas and achieved legenday status - programmes like Monty Python's Flying Circus, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf. I'm only listing the ones that I know have been seen in the US - there are many others: historical dramatizations like I, Claudius and Elizabeth I, televisualisations of Shakespeare plays and other literary classics, Dennis Potter plays and quality comedies like Steptoe and Son and Porridge. The commercial stations content is mostly quiz shows and cheap, unfunny, hackneyed, sitcoms made for the proles. Going in the other direction, it was the BBC that brought Star Trek to the UK, God bless them.
(If you get a chance to do so, try to see the BBC's 2003 dramatization of "The Mayor of Casterbridge". It's out on DVD in the US now.)
I have satellite TV in the house and yet I hardly ever watch anything but BBC. If the BBC stopped doing what they do, I would have to get rid of the TV.
You've seen children ensnared and lives destroyed by intoxicant drugs - and yet still support their free availability in the name of some abstract politcal ideology. That is just perverse. You don't even have ignorance or innocence for an excuse.
You blamed me for dividing the choices open to us into polar opposites, but it is *you* who are doing just this. It is *you* who are sticking fast to a principle in the face of suffering and destruction. *I* say Liberty should be achievable in the round, while yet honouring certain sensible exceptions for the good of society (not to mention the good of addiction-vulnerable individuals themselves, who are otherwise destined to self destruct).
The world is complex. For those running things, reductionism is a necessary evil. Only a complete fool would argue otherwise.
The capacity does not exist, to be able to allow anybody freedom of choice in recreational drugs without endangering the weak willed, and thus society. So society has chosen to proscribe their use completely. Alcohol is *only* an exception because the people insisted that it be so. If prohibition could be enforced for longer than a generation, I expect the public's love affair with alcohol would disappear and the ban would thereafter be popular. As long as democracy extends to the proles, however, I don't see any such election platform appearing again.
In your arguments you gabble libertarian ideology and miss the point of your own examples. eg: Your athlete's other accomplishments are beside the point. She failed the strength of character test when she became an alcoholic. Alcoholism *means* that the person is unable to control theirself. If she regained that control and went on the wagon and stayed there without relapsing, that would be a different matter.
I've noticed a recurrent problem - you have the disturbing mental disability of being unable to perceive the use of duality as a concept, coupled with the obsession of identifying any dualistic themes no matter how faint or trivial. It's kind of difficult to talk to you if it's going to be like that.
Regarding Godwin: point of order - it's a cheap trick (and not in the least legitimate) to invoke Godwin on me, because I did not call you a fascist. I said that you were implying that I was a fascist. Now you've retaliated to this perceived breach of Godwin by calling me a fascist again!
May I point out that elitism isn't the signature of fascism. Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. I am unashamedly elitist in some respects, as the proles give me cause to be, but I am no fascist - I abhor corporatism and lean much more toward individual freedom *and* reponsibility. There is no contradiction in my desire to restrict drug use though, and it's only your immaturity that is preventing you from seeing that. You'll feel different about drugs when you have children of your own.
and have crack and alcohol addicts in the family--an educated, privileged and religious family.
Yes. Proletarian vices are equally available to the weak in all walks of life. It's not about wealth, or even education. It's about spirit. Some are strong, and some are weak. If you had to choose one thing to say "*this* is what life is about, this is the true meaning of life" it could most meaningfully be said about this one choice - the choice between mastery of the self or taking the line of least resistance and giving in to one's animal instincts. The capacity to choose the former is the larger part of the mysterious x I mentioned earlier; that which elevates us above the animals.
As for the avaricious, the brutal and the domineering...I sympathize with your distate more than you know. But the harsh reality is that humanity's ability to self organize would have got off the ground if it were not for those loathsome historic individuals prodding and poking us along in their own self interest.
By the way I am no authoritarian; just the opposite. My dream is a society made up of sovereign individuals. I suppose I should call myself an anarchist for that reason. But that dream will never come to pass until a serious majority are ready to make that choice that I mentioned. Two reasons:
1. Revolutionaries do not languish stoned in front of the TV - no, how Gil Scott Heron put it more succinctly: "The revolution will not be televised".
2. Only those who have made the big choice are capable of sovereignty over themselves. Those who wallow will, ungoverned, either starve or else revert to barbarism. That's the problem with wallowing, generally. If the masses are essentially proletarian in outlook then universal liberty, equality and fraternity cannot exist because they exclude themselves.
Every previous revolution so far has lived up to its name exactly, by traversing 360 degrees. This is because the Low are only ever peripherally involved in the Middle's struggle to exchange places with the High (this is George Orwell's nomenclature, speaking as Emmanual Goldstein). Hence there can never be a revolution deemed successful by the masses as long as the masses are comprised of the Low. The Low don't have the stomach - or the heart, the brains - to defend their rights every moment of their lives. Easier just to turn on the TV, open a bottle or "skin up".
Note that in most contemporary visions of Utopia, the Low are nowhere to be seen. Because, as long as there is a proletariat, this is not Utopia.
The proletariat first needs to make the big choice, to wake up, to be responsible and take charge of their own lives. I think we are very far from that. "The poor are always with us" is because there will always be some who will give up and sink to the bottom no matter what they are given.
Going back to drug legislation, since this appears to be what vexes you: You yourself decried the casting of a situation as polar opposites. But this is just what you are doing here: in your terms, either we all have the right to do whatever we want to ourselves, or else it's fascism.
Some people believe, myself among them, that there are some things it is best to resist for the good of society at large. If the distribution of drugs can be hampered by government intervention, that is a good thing in my opinion. Drugs are dangerous. Not because they will kill you, but because many people are weak enough that drugs are enough by themselves to seduce them and crush what remains of their spirit. There is a huge cost to society in that.
To take the most egregious type of example: individual liberty notwithstanding I don't see that the rest of us owe it to you, to let you drink yourself to a painful squalid, undignified and utterly pointless death like my father suffered. If I can stop you doing that I will be glad to do so, no matter how much it may prick your sense of injustice.
Unfortunately, experience suggests that allowing the former inexorably leads to a preponderance of the latter. You forget that the proles care nothing for mysticism - only for how long they must wait until they can get off their faces again, so they can lie drooling in the gutter.
On the other hand I do not believe anyway that chemical intoxication is an absolute pre-requisite for religious experience. If it were then religious experience could have no more real objective value than the rantings of any madman. Further, for those who *must* seek derangement while in search of enlightenment, fasting was the usual method in many cultures.
Nice poetry, though; quite compelling. Interesting person, this Mevlani. I shall add him to my children's curriculum.
You attack a straw man. I did not claim that x encompasses all humanity. I defined x as being what is human as opposed to being animal. That is, x stands for those traits we carry that differentiate us from all other animals. This was obvious, and your clumsy attempt to distract attention from the point I was really making, only exposes your inability to answer it.
The rest of your reply is only a mixture of ad hominem irrelevance and ad hoc, sophist handwaving attempting to justify the worship of self gratification. Now I'm as weak as the next man when it comes to pleasures of the flesh, but at least I don't attempt to make up some comfortable, phoney justification for it. Strength and discipline are to be admired; weakness and depravity are to be deplored. Any culture that doesn't recognize this is doomed.
Binary? You are looking for a false dichotomy, the "excluded middle". But there is no false dichotomy. The argument I made is framed in terms of an abstraction which deliberately divides human nature into two components for the express purpose of comparing one aspect with its opposite. It's hardly a new idea, is it? Every major system of thought in human history that I can think of is based on the same idea. Yin/yang. Thesis/antithesis. Body/soul. Id/ego. Good/evil. etc. etc. It comes up again and again in every culture in history because it contains such a basic and fundamental truth. So your knee-jerk rejection on the basis of false dichotomy is bogus. There is nothing false about this particular dichotomy - it underpins everything that we ever learned about ourselves.
And ideology is like halitosis: it's always someone else's problem.
Look to the mote in thine own eye. The dominant ideology of late 20th/early 21st Century Western civilization is about enjoyment. And it *is* an ideology, because anybody who proposes other modes of living routinely gets shouted down by the proletariat. Debate has been shut down; nobody wants to know about alternatives. Human nature (taken as a whole), as it is expressed today in the West (and in all the decadent empires which have passed away), zeroes in on the comfort zone. How fucking noble.
If the human race were to become extinct, what would you prefer the rest of the universe to remember us for? For our music, our literature, our poetry, our scientific achievements? (In all of which struggles, by the way, many of the greatest achievements have been made in conditions of privation and adversity, while few have been made in conditions of luxury and debauchery).
Or would you prefer that we were remembered for the behaviour you were defending earlier? To wit: our fondness of easy living, promiscuous sex, disabling our brains with chemicals and other escapisms?
If it's the latter that you would choose, then I am utterly opposed to your style of thinking. And if everybody chose that, then such a memorial would need to be written sooner rather than later.
In any case though, I really don't have time to argue about it. I'm no educator, and greater men than I have had more profound things to say on the subject. Read some classical philosophy instead.