But of course, nobody can report absolutely true figures about what are large global systems of systems. Maybe the DDT ban was worse than Hitler, maybe not.
Point is, there are simply no guarantees against human fallibility, and that includes human experts. There may not be limits to growth, but there are limits to knowledge and what we actually know for real, rather than what we think we know, even using all the best experts in the world.
And when an expert comes out and says that his or her field got it all wrong, they become controversial and attacked by others.
"We can't be sure", is perhaps the only truly modern insight.
Another example I heard of recently, Allan Savory says he and colleagues got it wrong when they decided that elephants were over-grazing and so 40,000 or some obscene number of elephants were shot on his advice. And today he realised, oh gee we got it wrong.
And now he thinks that actually, humans have a place in the ecosystem and food chain, and ruminants have their place, and if we let ruminants do what they do, which is graze on poor land, then we could solve climate change, and humans would eat what they are designed to eat, which is mostly meat.
So of course now you can find articles which attack his character.
Lots of people seem to think that humanity is facing some sort of crisis of selfishness. I tend to feel that humanity is facing a crisis of intellectual integrity. People just cannot stand that someone with a different view might actually be right.
And that's what's unfair. One lot are happy to invoke magic in the service of their favourite technology, but not allow it for other technologies.
So nuclear is always the real world nitty gritty pessimistic accident prone can never work nor be safe, whilst alternative energies are assessed by the optimistic future looking wizards and magicians who can deliver the utopia vision.
And meanwhile people have to get up in the morning and go to work, so they are going to be burning something, which will be natural gas.
To follow the analogy, today we have the added issue of many people preferring cheap sustainable clean safe beautiful air balloons. And some people questioning this saying, but how will you move 2 million passengers a year in air balloons? And other people saying, we'll make efficiency savings, so it isn't a problem.
VMs are to me a magical technology. At some point someone realised that working code was too important to allow to talk to something as base as hardware.
For me it is fridges. I'm told they won't last ten years. My expensive German fridge was failing at 8. I mean, the plastics were just cracking all on their own. Now THAT is planned obsolescence. My second iPad is at 5 years old and yeah Ive just replaced it. And for what it is worth, the new one is better. The fridge, on the other hand, is a fridge. But would like to know what use I could get out of my otherwise physically working iPad 1, which now has almost no apps, and was obsolete anyway by the time it left the shop.
Yes, it is conceptual/imaginary AND so long as the concept is used with reference to the real stuff, the real value, then it works, helping individuals and groups exchange according to their own brains and circumstances. I.e. Not centrally planned.
And at some point people can lose track of the real value and you end up with the subprime crisis and all that. And you end up with "banking" that considered itself an industry in its own right generating actual value like a factory making cars, as opposed to the original point of banking which was to support industry (I'm generalising to make the point).
I don't know how digital currencies fit in with this. If technically they can make possible more flexibility in financing real value generating endeavours, fine. If they are a thing in themselves, "money", then it's just Monopoly money.
Yes although a nation isn't just "all people look the same". That would be a tribe the whole point of what a nation does is to get lots of different people to live together as part of something which is above tribe and clan and feudal alliances. The modern person is a citizen, not a distant relation of one's clan. The modern state achieved this in a number of ways -- the character of its institutions, and a low level of corruption (you get hired because of qualifications not because you are somebody's nephew), and you do your job because it's the right proper way to do things not because you can use it to extort bribes, and so on. I'm sure the list of factors is long. But it isn't because "everyone is the same". If you need everyone to be the same then you're stuck at the level of single tribes.
It's because people's identity transcends tribe and king and religion, even though they still have their differences of tribe and religion and so on. The nation state works at a level higher than that.
Which is one reason why dictators who favourited just one section of their state never really achieved becoming true nation states.
And I would add, there is always someone smarter out there. For example, taking something which is semi science and semi philosophy and semi beliefs, well, I used to be 100% atheist. I figured that out when I was 7. Then later in life, I ran into Buddhism, and some of what it teaches is a pretty sophisticated philosophy and ethics. Plus there's the problem of sentience. Now, from my position 40 years after deciding to be an atheist, I do find the "evolution" "debate" is on the one hand, a lot of anti-evolution myths being spread as a way to indoctrinate children into religion, but on the other, a scientism belief that humans are simply clever apes. And while I'd much rather listen to a modern scientist than a blind believer, the modern scientism does over-egg things and starts making blind belief claims of its own. So in that way, if a Buddhist turned up and said, hey the evolution thing is cool, and factual, and let's not forget, we have the issue of sentience. And that has implications for our philosophy and ethics. So maybe we can teach those questions? Not necessarily in a Buddhist-belief-membership way, but just as philosophy? And if you did that, SOME scientism people would complain that you are reintroducing "religion", even though it is not religion in the usual western sense of, blind belief in myths about a father figure in heaven. So, yeah, there's always room to improve. There are always smarter people out there. The people who point to blind believers and say, look how stupid they are, we should not let them anywhere near our children, have a point, and they too have blind spots of their own, often enough. See the trouble with religious questions is that they always reappear in a new guise. So you may as well try to deal with them using the best philosophies you can find, rather than insist everyone is no more and no less than a clever ape (whilst still insisting we should have ethics which are higher than apes). Now of course, it is the fault of the old religions in the West which dug in and refused to adopt a critical mindset, and they only have themselves to blame. And the big questions which humans ask, like why am I here and who am I, still exist anyway, and deserve critical scrutiny. And in that context, the whole evolution thing is a massive red herring. It has nothing to do with these psychological questions. And someone should be able to go into a school and say that.
That's interesting. I haven't followed the systemd controversy, but as you put it, it is a design idea that should have been toyed with for a few days and then thrown in the trash, just as *most* new ideas should be thrown in the trash. Most new ideas don't work.
"We judge people not by the quality of the ideas they put on the wall, but by the quality of ideas they throw in the trash." -- some professor.
The public doesn't know how to think about IT -- the rapid change and the extensive spread into our lives and into critical infrastructure.
On the one hand there is an eagerness to adopt and "put everything onto the computer" -- on the other there's no sense of time and pace and scale and change.
And I guess for a lot of medium sized organisations (whatever that means) the IT "works" and continues to "work" and so doesn't need replacing until it "doesn't work" -- but to actually replace it you have to "start" a few years before it "doesn't work". By the time you have a system that's leaked all its confidential data to random hackers and is no longer able to perform its core functions anyway, too late, you should have started replacing it a year ago.
I personally believe that that's their aim - to cause a divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Yes I gather vaguely that's what happened in Lebanon. But for it to "work" there needs to be a lot of youth who are ready to form militias along clan lines and take their "honour" codes seriously and feel they personally must go out and fuck up other people.
I think a reason that does not work in the West is that the "leviathan" is stronger -- the state is seen as the legitimate owner of violence and control, and most people just want to let the law and the police and army deal with problems.
Consequently these "provocations" go on and on and on but apart from a few idiots here and there, nothing happens.
It is mostly just fodder for endless editorials in the papers over whether this or that is "raising islamophobia" and so on. Ie. it is more entertainment to sell papers.
Basically, we goddess heathens in the West just don't give a fuck. Excuse my French. And that is kinda our, what do you call it, nobility? Two major world wars and we are not interested in fighting anymore.
A model is that human groups have a certain size they can maintain. A tribe is 200, a kingdom is 200,000, a nation is 2,000,000, and a planet is in the billions.
What makes a tribe and a kingdom different is how the group organises and what it organises on. So for a tribe, bloodlines and kinship are key, and knowing people around you. Contrast that with a city where everyone you see all day is a complete stranger. So how you relate to others, how you feel about others, how you organise your relationships, and what they are based on, is different.
Beyond 200, the tribe is unsustainable, as it is hard to feel close to 1000 people, as our brains just can't manage that. But we can, say in a kingdom, feel a shared group notion by all being allied and following the authority of the one king. And that works up until nation state levels of size, where you have many groups and it becomes impossible for an authoritarian to control their whole hierarchy. So then you get principles like democracy and personal freedom emerging, and 200 million can organise on that basis, and pay taxes into a shared pool, go to war if needed, as part of their "contracts" with society.
But here's the kicker, and goes straight to your point: when a level is unsustainable for whatever reason, when it is failing, people easily revert to an earlier level. That is why the Middle East keeps reverting to the tribal stage, because it worked, it worked for 50,000 years, and if the new "modernity" ain't working, then go back to something which is known to work.
Meanwhile, some people may discover or invent newer stages, newer ways of organising around new rules. That is after all the whole point, if I may say, about the climate change movement, in that they want to convince everyone that the existing nation states and industries have created problems and externalities which they can't solve, they are external, and so they will demand we move to a new higher way of organising, one that works for humans and the planet and all other species (see we are now into a "group" the size of trillions).
So yes, when industrial headlands are decimated (or whatever the roman is for 50 or 90) then people feel that the system is not working, and so many people easily go down to an earlier stage, which happens to be the stage of "kings" ie. authoritarian, protectionist, which is part or all of the various signs and signals that Trump has been giving to the electorate.
But note that is still a stage higher than pure tribal warlordism which is even more confined than kings. Tribal warlordism is just one tribe thrashing the shit out of all the other tribes. And that's ISIL. But you know, tribes worked for 50,000 years and it is just in our psychology. The camaraderie, the brotherhood, the romantic glory of conquest, and the raging blood lust.
It is like watching The One Hundred, and Earth devolved to tribes. It is just like that.
In Pygmalion the father is willing to sell his daughter, and the posh people ask him, "have you no morals?" and he replies, "can't afford them" (words to that effect).
It is just like that, in that, if life conditions deteriorate, people often revert to earlier stages, as they can no longer afford the more "civilised" order. And that's human social systems. It is how they work.
The point is, the earlier systems are there, kinda dormant in us, ready to be activated if needed. So this is observational and interpretation -- how the mechanism actually works is going to be something in our wired brains and capacities, I would guess.
In a liberal sense, you want life to be nourishing and fair with education and good opportunities, so that in a conservative sense, everyone can work on their own character and develop themselves into becoming a better person, more attuned to society and the planet.
Yes there's many ways they differ, also structurally.
A lot comes down to whether the person experiences their thoughts as plain truths, or whether they experience their thoughts as possible notions which can and should be tested, or whether they experience their thoughts as simply an ongoing stream of mental patterns whose context and meaning shift endlessly.
You can give three people, one of each type, the same book, say the Old Testament, and they will experience the book in completely different ways. Another way to say it is, there's pre-modern reading, modern reading, and post-post-modern reading. (I skip post-modern as that's often a fuckup).
Likewise, a Westerner who takes the bible literally, and believes in a literal God, is quite a different situation to say, a Tibetan who practices visualising deities as a sort of psychological exercise where they use their own imagination to transform their own mental daemons, and know full well that that is what they are doing.
Which isn't to say that all Tibetans are the latter and all Westerners are the former. But there is an issue that the Easter religions tend to reach into this, "you are just imaging it all" aspect much more often than do the Western ones, which is why, often enough, a Christin might convert to Buddhism.
And yes, even at the literal stage, they teach different things, and the Christians and Moslems might literally emphasis "being of service" and community more than say the Buddhists do (I think even the Dalai Lama said something to this effect).
But what most people here are objecting to about "religion" is the people who take it literally. Basically, the "pre-modern" people who haven't learnt to question and think with reason.
The numbers are guesstimates for the globe. For example, survey Muslims in a western country, and 50% say something like, homosexuality should be banned. Now it's up to you whether you class that as "fundamentalism" or not. And consider also a country like Egypt, which has a liberal urban elite, and maybe 70 million in more rural lifestyles with more archaic attitudes. And this isn't to demonise Muslims, it is just to point out that yes, whilst actual terrorists are a tiny percentage, there are beliefs and attitudes amongst the hundreds of millions of people and yeah, Trump is a dumbass for "banning Muslims" but a reason he gets away with that is that liberals shy away from asking what do large swathes of these archaic monotheistic religions actually believe and want?
It is a question of numbers, and development, and themes.
Buddhism, maybe 30% is fundamentalist, and amongst those, what they believe in unquestioningly is usually tame. Christianity, maybe 70% is fundamentalist, and amongst those, what they believe in is usually less tame, with some outright human rights problems. Islam, maybe 80% is fundamentalist, and of those, maybe 2% believe in violent conquest, and 5% believe in political conquest, and 50% have human rights issues, and the rest are just quaint victorian style proper living.
So "Islam" does get a lot of attention.
As for "all religions are the same", that is a fine and rational view, except that, there are maybe only 10% in all the religions, who subscribe to that view point -- so they are certainly not fundamentalist -- they believe and actually value a global peaceful community, accepting others, accepting that there are many paths to "god". So there, people from all religions see that all the prophets and saints and sages of all the religions are all pointing to a similar truth.
But because only 10% across the board see it that way, they don't have much influence, and meanwhile, the rest see this "all paths" idea as either misguided or wrong or blasphemous or whatever, depending on their degree of fundamentalism.
Buddhism is an interesting one because their original precepts didn't block a process of continual change across the ages. Christianity just sort of did itself in with trying to maintain empire and ended up in religious wars across Europe. Islam is supposed to be, believed to be, version 3 (Christianity was v2 and Judaism was v1) and is still largely in the "let's keep it exactly as it is" mentality.
Frankly, the West went down the monotheistic route, and if your worldview Is based on there being only one true god, then that excludes everyone else and always puts others into the sinners and heathens bucket, and who wants to be ruled by heathens?
The East kept with polytheistic and non-theistic and so their religions are more easy to change. Who cares what god you believe in if "god" is merely just another perceptual dream ornament within your vast field of being and presence? Along with the cat?
So the differences in the content of the religions does matter, as well as, what percentage of people are prone to literalist readings, and what proportion are rationally developed and know they are always "interpreting" whatever they read.
I think an issue is that we now have something like 5 levels of society in the sense of, social conditions, life conditions, environments, and they each have their own sense of judgement and values. The Labour Party should actually be something like three different parties. The Tories should be at least two parties. And so for a while we flirted with these other versions, like Lib Dems, and Greens, and UKIP, and so on, but now we've sprung back to two main parties.
The five levels or social conditions, with their own values, judgements, politics and aspirations, are just a consequence of the increasingly complex globalised world we live in. Maybe someone in their heart wants to be socialist, or socially conscious, but there's three versions of that, and Corbyn most naturally fits one of those, whist Blair fitted another version, and the traditional base was the third version.
The fact is, these five levels or forms of society, are realities, not ideologies, as they are just how the world has come to be and function. They are all present for a reason. And most of our systems are intermixed and linked. For example, the NHS is a state thing, but it still buys MRI machines from private companies. Another example, people in poor rural areas have different sets of needs to people in urban areas, even though they may both vote "socially".
But we have a first past the post system, and nobody much appreciates these distinct societal stages/worlds, which can lead to these sort of bizarre results where people try to fit square pegs into round holes.
I always thought he should lead the Green Party. Posh jam and windmills. But now Labour get to be real opposition, his idealism will be shown up as ramblings of the nutter who wanders the streets of Oxford. Still, that's entertainment. The country has bigger problems. Heck the Western world has bigger problems. But the beauty of it is that everyone muddles along, and doesn't complain too much. Muddle muddle muddle. Jam, anyone?
IIRC they said ages ago that people struggle as soon as they hit a file manager. So, being simpler, the iPad was something even grandma could use.
But in the subsequent years, nobody invented anything better, and we're all still emailing round attachments like it's 1992. And services like DropBox are becoming their own ecosystem.
I'm always reminded of the story of some very left wing US acquaintance who, upon hearing of 9/11, was telling all their UK friends that "we have to bomb someone!!"
Values come from context and life conditions.
One of the very tricky things about the energy debate is that many of the people who have strong views about this, can currently turn the lights on, make breakfast, and get to work.
This gives politicians and companies a lot of leeway in playing with things like wind power and biofuels.
Subsidies or no subsidies, green or fossil, old or new, we are not conscious of the real numbers and whether we'll be able to turn the lights on.
Likewise, we cannot really be conscious of climate change because the "real effects" are nowhere to be found, really. They only appear as hand-wavy interpretations of this or that storm or melt.
Likewise people can argue over the global warming pause till the cows come home.
So it is all rhetoric. Like this thing that India and China are moving really fast as possible... which is a rhetorical point simply to counter the older rhetorical point of, what's the point of CO2 cuts if China and India don't do the same?
This arguing has been going on for 15 or 20 years now, and one of these days, it might actually start to matter. Or maybe not.
And before anyone takes offence at my nonchalant attitude here, remember that, well by coincidence, Prince Charles in the UK, who given his position, you'd think would be well informed to comment on this, said exactly 8 years ago that, we had just 8 years to save the planet.
And even though very little has been done -- he was talking of ending capitalism, "the age of convenience is over" -- here we are today, and either nothing really happened to the planet, or, if he was right, it is now too late anyway.
I disagree, AC. By hitting "Like", you're intentionally distributing whatever you "liked" to whoever is in your network. The effect is the same as posting something yourself. I think it's defamation, and again, I agree with this court. I'd love to see that same decision enforced all over the world. It would really make people think twice before spreading all sorts of garbage. And if they didn't think twice, they'd be sued.
I agree the "like" is promoting the message, and/but there's a more crucial issue.
How do we promote intelligence and truth and sanity and liberal humanistic values without resorting to authoritarian fascist nazi tactics?
Because the more we go down the route of banning people's expression and making them pay for expressing the wrong thing, the more we go back to the Middle Ages where blasphemy was punished and so kept the ruling powers in control.
So what I'm saying is, you're wrong, yet I don't think you should be punished for expressing your wrong views.
Slashdot Mirror
DDT, for example.
But of course, nobody can report absolutely true figures about what are large global systems of systems. Maybe the DDT ban was worse than Hitler, maybe not.
Point is, there are simply no guarantees against human fallibility, and that includes human experts. There may not be limits to growth, but there are limits to knowledge and what we actually know for real, rather than what we think we know, even using all the best experts in the world.
And when an expert comes out and says that his or her field got it all wrong, they become controversial and attacked by others.
"We can't be sure", is perhaps the only truly modern insight.
Another example I heard of recently, Allan Savory says he and colleagues got it wrong when they decided that elephants were over-grazing and so 40,000 or some obscene number of elephants were shot on his advice. And today he realised, oh gee we got it wrong.
And now he thinks that actually, humans have a place in the ecosystem and food chain, and ruminants have their place, and if we let ruminants do what they do, which is graze on poor land, then we could solve climate change, and humans would eat what they are designed to eat, which is mostly meat.
So of course now you can find articles which attack his character.
Lots of people seem to think that humanity is facing some sort of crisis of selfishness. I tend to feel that humanity is facing a crisis of intellectual integrity. People just cannot stand that someone with a different view might actually be right.
And that's what's unfair. One lot are happy to invoke magic in the service of their favourite technology, but not allow it for other technologies.
So nuclear is always the real world nitty gritty pessimistic accident prone can never work nor be safe, whilst alternative energies are assessed by the optimistic future looking wizards and magicians who can deliver the utopia vision.
And meanwhile people have to get up in the morning and go to work, so they are going to be burning something, which will be natural gas.
To follow the analogy, today we have the added issue of many people preferring cheap sustainable clean safe beautiful air balloons.
And some people questioning this saying, but how will you move 2 million passengers a year in air balloons?
And other people saying, we'll make efficiency savings, so it isn't a problem.
VMs are to me a magical technology. At some point someone realised that working code was too important to allow to talk to something as base as hardware.
For me it is fridges. I'm told they won't last ten years. My expensive German fridge was failing at 8. I mean, the plastics were just cracking all on their own. Now THAT is planned obsolescence. My second iPad is at 5 years old and yeah Ive just replaced it. And for what it is worth, the new one is better. The fridge, on the other hand, is a fridge. But would like to know what use I could get out of my otherwise physically working iPad 1, which now has almost no apps, and was obsolete anyway by the time it left the shop.
Yes, it is conceptual/imaginary AND so long as the concept is used with reference to the real stuff, the real value, then it works, helping individuals and groups exchange according to their own brains and circumstances. I.e. Not centrally planned.
And at some point people can lose track of the real value and you end up with the subprime crisis and all that. And you end up with "banking" that considered itself an industry in its own right generating actual value like a factory making cars, as opposed to the original point of banking which was to support industry (I'm generalising to make the point).
I don't know how digital currencies fit in with this. If technically they can make possible more flexibility in financing real value generating endeavours, fine. If they are a thing in themselves, "money", then it's just Monopoly money.
Yes although a nation isn't just "all people look the same". That would be a tribe the whole point of what a nation does is to get lots of different people to live together as part of something which is above tribe and clan and feudal alliances. The modern person is a citizen, not a distant relation of one's clan. The modern state achieved this in a number of ways -- the character of its institutions, and a low level of corruption (you get hired because of qualifications not because you are somebody's nephew), and you do your job because it's the right proper way to do things not because you can use it to extort bribes, and so on. I'm sure the list of factors is long. But it isn't because "everyone is the same". If you need everyone to be the same then you're stuck at the level of single tribes.
It's because people's identity transcends tribe and king and religion, even though they still have their differences of tribe and religion and so on. The nation state works at a level higher than that.
Which is one reason why dictators who favourited just one section of their state never really achieved becoming true nation states.
And I would add, there is always someone smarter out there. For example, taking something which is semi science and semi philosophy and semi beliefs, well, I used to be 100% atheist. I figured that out when I was 7. Then later in life, I ran into Buddhism, and some of what it teaches is a pretty sophisticated philosophy and ethics. Plus there's the problem of sentience. Now, from my position 40 years after deciding to be an atheist, I do find the "evolution" "debate" is on the one hand, a lot of anti-evolution myths being spread as a way to indoctrinate children into religion, but on the other, a scientism belief that humans are simply clever apes. And while I'd much rather listen to a modern scientist than a blind believer, the modern scientism does over-egg things and starts making blind belief claims of its own. So in that way, if a Buddhist turned up and said, hey the evolution thing is cool, and factual, and let's not forget, we have the issue of sentience. And that has implications for our philosophy and ethics. So maybe we can teach those questions? Not necessarily in a Buddhist-belief-membership way, but just as philosophy? And if you did that, SOME scientism people would complain that you are reintroducing "religion", even though it is not religion in the usual western sense of, blind belief in myths about a father figure in heaven. So, yeah, there's always room to improve. There are always smarter people out there. The people who point to blind believers and say, look how stupid they are, we should not let them anywhere near our children, have a point, and they too have blind spots of their own, often enough. See the trouble with religious questions is that they always reappear in a new guise. So you may as well try to deal with them using the best philosophies you can find, rather than insist everyone is no more and no less than a clever ape (whilst still insisting we should have ethics which are higher than apes). Now of course, it is the fault of the old religions in the West which dug in and refused to adopt a critical mindset, and they only have themselves to blame. And the big questions which humans ask, like why am I here and who am I, still exist anyway, and deserve critical scrutiny. And in that context, the whole evolution thing is a massive red herring. It has nothing to do with these psychological questions. And someone should be able to go into a school and say that.
That's interesting. I haven't followed the systemd controversy, but as you put it, it is a design idea that should have been toyed with for a few days and then thrown in the trash, just as *most* new ideas should be thrown in the trash. Most new ideas don't work.
"We judge people not by the quality of the ideas they put on the wall, but by the quality of ideas they throw in the trash." -- some professor.
The public doesn't know how to think about IT -- the rapid change and the extensive spread into our lives and into critical infrastructure.
On the one hand there is an eagerness to adopt and "put everything onto the computer" -- on the other there's no sense of time and pace and scale and change.
And I guess for a lot of medium sized organisations (whatever that means) the IT "works" and continues to "work" and so doesn't need replacing until it "doesn't work" -- but to actually replace it you have to "start" a few years before it "doesn't work". By the time you have a system that's leaked all its confidential data to random hackers and is no longer able to perform its core functions anyway, too late, you should have started replacing it a year ago.
Exactly. They are confusing de-facto standard with gold standard.
What people seem to be missing is that the iPad is not a laptop.
But I get that. My mom still complains that I'm not Richard Branson married to Pamela Anderson.
:-D
I personally believe that that's their aim - to cause a divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Yes I gather vaguely that's what happened in Lebanon. But for it to "work" there needs to be a lot of youth who are ready to form militias along clan lines and take their "honour" codes seriously and feel they personally must go out and fuck up other people.
I think a reason that does not work in the West is that the "leviathan" is stronger -- the state is seen as the legitimate owner of violence and control, and most people just want to let the law and the police and army deal with problems.
Consequently these "provocations" go on and on and on but apart from a few idiots here and there, nothing happens.
It is mostly just fodder for endless editorials in the papers over whether this or that is "raising islamophobia" and so on. Ie. it is more entertainment to sell papers.
Basically, we goddess heathens in the West just don't give a fuck. Excuse my French. And that is kinda our, what do you call it, nobility?
Two major world wars and we are not interested in fighting anymore.
A model is that human groups have a certain size they can maintain. A tribe is 200, a kingdom is 200,000, a nation is 2,000,000, and a planet is in the billions.
What makes a tribe and a kingdom different is how the group organises and what it organises on. So for a tribe, bloodlines and kinship are key, and knowing people around you. Contrast that with a city where everyone you see all day is a complete stranger. So how you relate to others, how you feel about others, how you organise your relationships, and what they are based on, is different.
Beyond 200, the tribe is unsustainable, as it is hard to feel close to 1000 people, as our brains just can't manage that. But we can, say in a kingdom, feel a shared group notion by all being allied and following the authority of the one king. And that works up until nation state levels of size, where you have many groups and it becomes impossible for an authoritarian to control their whole hierarchy. So then you get principles like democracy and personal freedom emerging, and 200 million can organise on that basis, and pay taxes into a shared pool, go to war if needed, as part of their "contracts" with society.
But here's the kicker, and goes straight to your point: when a level is unsustainable for whatever reason, when it is failing, people easily revert to an earlier level. That is why the Middle East keeps reverting to the tribal stage, because it worked, it worked for 50,000 years, and if the new "modernity" ain't working, then go back to something which is known to work.
Meanwhile, some people may discover or invent newer stages, newer ways of organising around new rules. That is after all the whole point, if I may say, about the climate change movement, in that they want to convince everyone that the existing nation states and industries have created problems and externalities which they can't solve, they are external, and so they will demand we move to a new higher way of organising, one that works for humans and the planet and all other species (see we are now into a "group" the size of trillions).
So yes, when industrial headlands are decimated (or whatever the roman is for 50 or 90) then people feel that the system is not working, and so many people easily go down to an earlier stage, which happens to be the stage of "kings" ie. authoritarian, protectionist, which is part or all of the various signs and signals that Trump has been giving to the electorate.
But note that is still a stage higher than pure tribal warlordism which is even more confined than kings. Tribal warlordism is just one tribe thrashing the shit out of all the other tribes. And that's ISIL. But you know, tribes worked for 50,000 years and it is just in our psychology. The camaraderie, the brotherhood, the romantic glory of conquest, and the raging blood lust.
It is like watching The One Hundred, and Earth devolved to tribes. It is just like that.
In Pygmalion the father is willing to sell his daughter, and the posh people ask him, "have you no morals?" and he replies, "can't afford them"
(words to that effect).
It is just like that, in that, if life conditions deteriorate, people often revert to earlier stages, as they can no longer afford the more "civilised" order. And that's human social systems. It is how they work.
The point is, the earlier systems are there, kinda dormant in us, ready to be activated if needed.
So this is observational and interpretation -- how the mechanism actually works is going to be something in our wired brains and capacities, I would guess.
In a liberal sense, you want life to be nourishing and fair with education and good opportunities, so that in a conservative sense, everyone can work on their own character and develop themselves into becoming a better person, more attuned to society and the planet.
Yes there's many ways they differ, also structurally.
A lot comes down to whether the person experiences their thoughts as plain truths, or whether they experience their thoughts as possible notions which can and should be tested, or whether they experience their thoughts as simply an ongoing stream of mental patterns whose context and meaning shift endlessly.
You can give three people, one of each type, the same book, say the Old Testament, and they will experience the book in completely different ways.
Another way to say it is, there's pre-modern reading, modern reading, and post-post-modern reading. (I skip post-modern as that's often a fuckup).
Likewise, a Westerner who takes the bible literally, and believes in a literal God, is quite a different situation to say, a Tibetan who practices visualising deities as a sort of psychological exercise where they use their own imagination to transform their own mental daemons, and know full well that that is what they are doing.
Which isn't to say that all Tibetans are the latter and all Westerners are the former. But there is an issue that the Easter religions tend to reach into this, "you are just imaging it all" aspect much more often than do the Western ones, which is why, often enough, a Christin might convert to Buddhism.
And yes, even at the literal stage, they teach different things, and the Christians and Moslems might literally emphasis "being of service" and community more than say the Buddhists do (I think even the Dalai Lama said something to this effect).
But what most people here are objecting to about "religion" is the people who take it literally. Basically, the "pre-modern" people who haven't learnt to question and think with reason.
It is all quite complicated, but not.
The numbers are guesstimates for the globe. For example, survey Muslims in a western country, and 50% say something like, homosexuality should be banned. Now it's up to you whether you class that as "fundamentalism" or not. And consider also a country like Egypt, which has a liberal urban elite, and maybe 70 million in more rural lifestyles with more archaic attitudes. And this isn't to demonise Muslims, it is just to point out that yes, whilst actual terrorists are a tiny percentage, there are beliefs and attitudes amongst the hundreds of millions of people and yeah, Trump is a dumbass for "banning Muslims" but a reason he gets away with that is that liberals shy away from asking what do large swathes of these archaic monotheistic religions actually believe and want?
It is a question of numbers, and development, and themes.
Buddhism, maybe 30% is fundamentalist, and amongst those, what they believe in unquestioningly is usually tame.
Christianity, maybe 70% is fundamentalist, and amongst those, what they believe in is usually less tame, with some outright human rights problems.
Islam, maybe 80% is fundamentalist, and of those, maybe 2% believe in violent conquest, and 5% believe in political conquest, and 50% have human rights issues, and the rest are just quaint victorian style proper living.
So "Islam" does get a lot of attention.
As for "all religions are the same", that is a fine and rational view, except that, there are maybe only 10% in all the religions, who subscribe to that view point -- so they are certainly not fundamentalist -- they believe and actually value a global peaceful community, accepting others, accepting that there are many paths to "god". So there, people from all religions see that all the prophets and saints and sages of all the religions are all pointing to a similar truth.
But because only 10% across the board see it that way, they don't have much influence, and meanwhile, the rest see this "all paths" idea as either misguided or wrong or blasphemous or whatever, depending on their degree of fundamentalism.
Buddhism is an interesting one because their original precepts didn't block a process of continual change across the ages. Christianity just sort of did itself in with trying to maintain empire and ended up in religious wars across Europe. Islam is supposed to be, believed to be, version 3 (Christianity was v2 and Judaism was v1) and is still largely in the "let's keep it exactly as it is" mentality.
Frankly, the West went down the monotheistic route, and if your worldview Is based on there being only one true god, then that excludes everyone else and always puts others into the sinners and heathens bucket, and who wants to be ruled by heathens?
The East kept with polytheistic and non-theistic and so their religions are more easy to change. Who cares what god you believe in if "god" is merely just another perceptual dream ornament within your vast field of being and presence? Along with the cat?
So the differences in the content of the religions does matter, as well as, what percentage of people are prone to literalist readings, and what proportion are rationally developed and know they are always "interpreting" whatever they read.
I feel like reality is punishing me because I never bothered to finish watching the Borgen box set. Now life imitates art.
Now excuse me whilst I go rewatch Veep and Yes Minister.
I think an issue is that we now have something like 5 levels of society in the sense of, social conditions, life conditions, environments, and they each have their own sense of judgement and values. The Labour Party should actually be something like three different parties. The Tories should be at least two parties. And so for a while we flirted with these other versions, like Lib Dems, and Greens, and UKIP, and so on, but now we've sprung back to two main parties.
The five levels or social conditions, with their own values, judgements, politics and aspirations, are just a consequence of the increasingly complex globalised world we live in. Maybe someone in their heart wants to be socialist, or socially conscious, but there's three versions of that, and Corbyn most naturally fits one of those, whist Blair fitted another version, and the traditional base was the third version.
The fact is, these five levels or forms of society, are realities, not ideologies, as they are just how the world has come to be and function. They are all present for a reason. And most of our systems are intermixed and linked. For example, the NHS is a state thing, but it still buys MRI machines from private companies. Another example, people in poor rural areas have different sets of needs to people in urban areas, even though they may both vote "socially".
But we have a first past the post system, and nobody much appreciates these distinct societal stages/worlds, which can lead to these sort of bizarre results where people try to fit square pegs into round holes.
I always thought he should lead the Green Party. Posh jam and windmills. But now Labour get to be real opposition, his idealism will be shown up as ramblings of the nutter who wanders the streets of Oxford. Still, that's entertainment. The country has bigger problems. Heck the Western world has bigger problems. But the beauty of it is that everyone muddles along, and doesn't complain too much. Muddle muddle muddle. Jam, anyone?
Quite so.
It's not innovation, it's giving in to people.
IIRC they said ages ago that people struggle as soon as they hit a file manager.
So, being simpler, the iPad was something even grandma could use.
But in the subsequent years, nobody invented anything better, and we're all still emailing round attachments like it's 1992.
And services like DropBox are becoming their own ecosystem.
So damn it, chuck in a file manager and move on.
I'm always reminded of the story of some very left wing US acquaintance who, upon hearing of 9/11, was telling all their UK friends that "we have to bomb someone!!"
Values come from context and life conditions.
One of the very tricky things about the energy debate is that many of the people who have strong views about this, can currently turn the lights on, make breakfast, and get to work.
This gives politicians and companies a lot of leeway in playing with things like wind power and biofuels.
Subsidies or no subsidies, green or fossil, old or new, we are not conscious of the real numbers and whether we'll be able to turn the lights on.
Likewise, we cannot really be conscious of climate change because the "real effects" are nowhere to be found, really. They only appear as hand-wavy interpretations of this or that storm or melt.
Likewise people can argue over the global warming pause till the cows come home.
So it is all rhetoric. Like this thing that India and China are moving really fast as possible... which is a rhetorical point simply to counter the older rhetorical point of, what's the point of CO2 cuts if China and India don't do the same?
This arguing has been going on for 15 or 20 years now, and one of these days, it might actually start to matter. Or maybe not.
And before anyone takes offence at my nonchalant attitude here, remember that, well by coincidence, Prince Charles in the UK, who given his position, you'd think would be well informed to comment on this, said exactly 8 years ago that, we had just 8 years to save the planet.
And even though very little has been done -- he was talking of ending capitalism, "the age of convenience is over" -- here we are today, and either nothing really happened to the planet, or, if he was right, it is now too late anyway.
I disagree, AC. By hitting "Like", you're intentionally distributing whatever you "liked" to whoever is in your network. The effect is the same as posting something yourself. I think it's defamation, and again, I agree with this court. I'd love to see that same decision enforced all over the world. It would really make people think twice before spreading all sorts of garbage. And if they didn't think twice, they'd be sued.
I agree the "like" is promoting the message, and/but there's a more crucial issue.
How do we promote intelligence and truth and sanity and liberal humanistic values
without resorting to authoritarian fascist nazi tactics?
Because the more we go down the route of banning people's expression and making them pay for expressing the wrong thing, the more we go back to the Middle Ages where blasphemy was punished and so kept the ruling powers in control.
So what I'm saying is, you're wrong, yet I don't think you should be punished for expressing your wrong views.