Or eaten by a polar bear. That would be the story for the MAGA conspiracy theorists. — ssu

A swimming polar bear who adapted to the changing climate... just let it happen, please dear indifferent reality we exist in, let us laugh for once!

is in the middle of nowhere even by Greenlandic standards, 1500 km or so north from Nuuk. One of the remotest places where US servicemen are deployed, who likely will give a warm welcome to family Vance. — ssu

If they get lost on the way there... it would be the most poetic downfall for Vance and Trump's politics.

The sooner the USA fucks off from the world stage of international politics by making themselves irrelevant the better. — Benkei

That is the only thing positive that comes out of this. The feeling in Europe is chaos, but also a renewed comradery between nations. A sense of building something new together. It's unexpected, but nice to see happening.

However, the US will always be a major factor on the world stage and the idiocy leads to things like threats to Greenland and Denmark of annexing Greenland.

Fundamentally, I don't think anyone really cares if the US collapse as long as they screw themselves up and no one else gets hurt, but there's lots of tentacles out from the US that hurts people and if the US falls, the world will be thrown into chaos anyway, regardless of their "America first" politics.

So I much rather see Americans deal with the trash cans leading the nation. Remove them by force if they go too far. They're already standing on the edge of authoritarian abuse of power so all it takes is a misstep that hurts the US population in some way the population can't accept. Or maybe the US population is so docile that they'll just act all Germany in the 30s, crawling on their knees in front of the orange fatman, kissing his Bigmac-greased fingers or standing in-line to get groped while Elon Musk dances around with a chainsaw flamethrower. A population of mindless husks, zombies who're neither dead or alive, puppets of the orange man, the fat oozing from the yellow king.

So yes, let it all fall until the right people rises up, shedding their apathy.

And that is why I find it remarkable that everyone is so passive. With all that has happened so far, is the US able to wait 4 years in this manner? No one is doing anything, because the US people seem to respect the process of democracy so much that when its obviously broken in letting these people in and letting them do what they do, they are fundamentally blind to the dangers they've let into the house.

It's as if a cabal of Belphegor has been given the keys to power and the population is slowly becoming an army of sloths, drugged by their declining intellect through social media, failing their ability to distinguish truth from lies, danger from safety; all while Belphegor himself grows fat on their delusional love and hate - The critics are passively believing that speaking up makes a difference - While the followers praise him as the second coming of Christ.

A postmodern regime that if nothing is done will collapse into utter chaos. All while Putin laughs and promotes his troll factories.

No one is doing anything.

It happens that way for various reasons, including property and inheritance, which requires the control of reproduction. Even if men were dominant in many cases in earlier societies, in civilized society this was intensified and institutionalized. — Jamal

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that because of the nature of reproduction, men has always been powerless in their will to produce offspring since women could gatekeep this ability with the complexity of caring a child for 9 months. So men institutionalize suppression of women's rights, manipulate culture towards ideals that favor men in order to allow them psychological control over women in order to control their own lineage.

I would imagine that cultures which focused heavily on portraying mothers as something divine, in opposition, produced cultures of matriarchal power or influence and less violence against women.

Large societal culture and sociological behavior forms out of small beginnings, and I would argue that the emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped early societies formed certain cultural behaviors that evolved into larger cultures. The male-oriented authoritarian figure stems from their dominant presence and violence of warfare and suppressing women also had to do with controlling the women in places men won wars in order to dominate a conquered land into lineages of power through offspring. A powerful woman could reject this.

Most of how modern culture, or rather outdated modern views in both men and women, echoes these past behaviors. But the whole reason why we hear so much about it today is because we've put a spotlight on the problems with men trying to control women.

This is why feminism philosophy tend to rile up emotions in immature people, because it is a radical thinking that questions a programmed behavior that's been around for thousands of years, always perpetuated by emotional reactions and immature ideas of biological factors.

It's about the sense of powerlessness expressed in men through violent outburst. The existential dread of being spawning a need to control everything around; especially women since they hold the keys to continued existence through granting men children.

The violence stems from the evolutionary drive to reproduce and the lack of control an individual has over their own destiny. This is the source of men's violence against women and only though understanding how immature and childish such ideas are can society heal from this tension between evolution and self-awareness of continued existence.

What we see today is an awakening to these facts, but most of society is still stuck in these old narratives and ideas. There's no wonder that violence against women is more common in large cultures and societies that are intellectually underdeveloped or in which knowledge is suppressed by authoritarian leaders or religious rulers.

Violence against women was the norm of the old world, it was more common and generally accepted or ignored compared to today. Waking up to the reasons of this is part of the same movement of enlightenment that began in the enlightenment era; breaking down old concepts, re-examine them and forming new and more rational understanding of it all.

What we see today with the tension between men and women is what's normally happens when an ingrained culture is discovered to be outdated and bad; it's not easy to change, especially when much of society is structurally built around the ideas of the past.

Violence against women today is not a new phenomena, and it's actually less common than before; but it's talked about more. The very existence of this forum thread in a male dominated space of discourse is in itself proof of the intellectual awakening in this topic.

Anyway — Please let him just continue. It almost always guarantees a laugh whenever I check. — Mikie

This feels like animal abuse... poor animal going through the motions of trained behavior, like a circus animal that only the oblivious audience can appreciate.

The main reason given by my fellow vegans for wishing for non-existence is the abundance of suffering on Earth which they find very distressing. We vegans seem to be more sensitive - perhaps that's why we go vegan when more than 99% of humans currently alive are not vegan. — Truth Seeker

But suffering is part of life. There's no joy without suffering, no life without death. The entire reality we exist in is formed around this cyclical dual phasing. We are part of this reality, this nature as all beings, only we are aware of this cycle in a way no other animal is.

But that also gives us a responsibility to handle this knowledge; it is both a burden and a blessing to have it. Not to see the suffering of others, but to form a balance and harmony with the reality of it. We can't reject our existence in that sense, we need to harmonize with it. With all concepts of it. Life, death, the cycle; entropy perceiving itself. So... perceive it and don't waste this experience of being. We can fight for all to experience it as well, to gain the well being of experiencing reality; but we cannot disconnect anyone or ourselves from death itself, or their part in the cycle.

We are all food for nature, in some form or another. Like the bacteria in our guts slowly eating us through life only to fully consume us in death. They've cultivated us as their cattle, nurtured in symbiosis until the final feast of their lives.

I think we humans have an arrogance problem. Both in terms of belief in our importance and of our own responsibility. We either believe ourselves to be above nature and the universe, cultivating religious thoughts of our own importance. Or we view ourselves as responsible for processes that are naturally occurring phenomena of an animal, believing that because we can perceive ourselves as consuming nature, we have a responsibility not to.

I think we should find a harmony between our perceptive self-awareness and natural state; to accept who we are in a responsible manner; not praising our egos into power or blaming our awareness into oblivion.

IIRC, Hesse wrote in Steppenwolf that the character gained a measure of comfort by deciding on a date to commit suicide, because that gavr him a date his suffering would end. So not as much "I will feel peace" as "I will no longer feel pain." — Patterner

Yes, as I mentioned, when it comes to actual physical pain and suffering, something that may be impossible to overcome, for instance with certain diseases, all of this has another dimension in that the suffering stops. However, almost all cases of "pain ending" or "suffering ending" is attached to the notion that there will be someone perceiving that relief after it has ended, but there isn't one. You don't only end the pain and suffering, you end it all; essentially nuking your entire being rather than just ending the pain and suffering. And many are so suppressed by their pain and suffering that they view themselves as only being that. But everyone who's pushed past such phases in life has always regretted such ideas of ending themselves.

I haven't read Steppenwolf, but imagine that he decided such a date and when the date came, the man had changed and didn't feel the pain anymore.

Physical pain that persist to the point of unrelenting suffering is closer to euthanasia, which I don't view the same as with the psychological pain people experience. It's another ethical and existential question really.

That's rough. But the outlook is aligned with what I've been saying. Rough times can produce the illusion that non-existence is a "relief", but it's only a relief in the experience of someone who can perceive it; the only way to perceive a relief from it is to somehow persevere through it and be able to perceive it as an existing consciousness. Anything else is an illusion of relief by the need to be someone relieved of it, without accepting that this someone is nothing.

This is a question that can only be answered by the context of nonexistence. To answer fully, one must understand the perspective of never having existed, and so the question somewhat becomes absurd.

If we answer that we wished we never existed, we're wishing for something in which we cannot perceive the other side of that question. Does a non-existent being wished to exist?

I also think the question needs to be asked in context. Like, for a person in great physical pain, tremendous suffering, the context changes the nature of the question.

It should be asked in the context of neutral experience. If I, as a neutral perceiver of reality would answer the question, I would say no, I would not want non-existence.

Because the negative of being robbed the ability to even contemplate that question through non-existence, makes existence more valuable as a concept as it gives me the ability to contemplate the question. Therefore, existence is preferable.

On a personal level, also no. The terror and absolute horror of death is the horror of non-existence. I think that people overvalue "non-existence" as something able to be perceived as some "place" of non-suffering existence, but it's not, there's nothing, an absolute void of the being itself.

I think people who wished for that state has set a context around that wish that has nothing to do with the concept of existence vs non-existence. Either it's about relief from pain and suffering, for which there exists ways within life to overcome, even if society is often bad at handling people who suffer. Or it's framed as a message to others, like a threat or promise to other people that my non-existence will either "show them" or "heal them", which is a concept that is simply nonsensical when following it to its logical conclusion.

No, I'm really opposite the notion of non-existence. I would never wish for it as even entertaining the idea of my mind slipping into non-existence in death is an absolute blackness of horror. The only negative thing about my existence is the awareness I have of the concept of non-existence. It gave me perception of my original state and the horror is losing everything back into it, oblivion.

This is part of why I dislike religion so much. Even if someone isn't religious or spiritual, so many people have still been indoctrinated into a concept of non-existence being perceivable in some form. That is a "state of being" when it's nothing at all. So when people say they want to end their lives to end their suffering, they fundamentally still believe that it is an end to something in the way we perceive ends as a living being, in that we experience something ending and then beginning anew.

That we can perceive the relief of our existence ending, when there's nothing there to perceive it. I rather perceive my suffering than perceiving nothing at all.

Like the poem Aubade by Philip Larkin (here read in the series Devs)

...not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anesthetic from which none come round. — Philip Larkin

Imagine coming to an internet philosophy forum to promote propaganda that everyone laughs at, day after day. — Mikie

Unfortunately, the science of marketing psychology shows how effective constant hammering of bullshit actually is for indoctrinating others... though attempting it on a philosophy forum might be a tall order.

A warrant should always be present when conducting infringements on people's properties or information. It's foundational in order to behave as a state of law rather than a state of power.

So, never mind that Trump's hare-brained tarrif wars are tanking the share market. Never mind that his war on US Aid is greatly excacerbating the worldwide spread of tuberculosis. Never mind that he's trampling civil liberties and constitutional norms. What's really important, is trying to help out that 'great patriot', who is doing so much to 'make America great', by doing an advertisement for Tesla on the White House lawn. The world's richest man, who possesses more wealth than almost everyone else in the USA combined, can sure use a bit of Presidential philanthropy himself. Never mind complaints about once again debasing the office of the President for crass commercial ends. — Wayfarer

With all that's happening... I'm wondering if there's not a lot of gathering data on everything they do. So many things are so obviously corrupt (as in the video I shared previously), that I'm wondering if people wait for the mid-terms and then rage hellfire onto everyone involved in all of this.

The thing is that Trump acts like a child, if no one tells him to be careful he's just going to do whatever he feels like and he doesn't seem to care for laws and regulations. So there will probably be tons of violations gathered and filed.

I think he feels invincible; being elected regardless of all the legal battles and being sentenced guilty last year, it probably fueled his narcissism so much I think he feels untouchable. And that's a good thing - because that may push him into a recklessness that comes to bite him in the ass later on.

If there are no consequences, then that's proof the US is a fundamentally corrupt state. Even if we say so, it's not before it's obvious that the people might do something about it.

In the name of making America great again, Trump is undoing the very things that made America great. — Banno

Primarily because the slogan never had any real meaning. It's just marketing, it's just like a cult who bullshits good sounding incoherent rants and the followers just eats it all up.

Nothing Trump says is real, it's made up in the moment in order for him to get an ego boost. He's basically like a child craving attention...

...but society tries to analyze what he literally says. So, is he the stupid one or is society stupid for playing along that game?

Don't agree. The US system has its problems, but it has held up for 237 years - until now. And now a convicted criminal and secessionist with an emormous ax to grind and hatred of government has been put in charge of it. He may well succeed in destroying the constitutional order, but it's not the time to try and devise a new model. What's important is not letting Trump destroy it. The kind of cynicism 'the whole thing is broken' is only going to make it easier for Trump's nihilism to come out on top. — Wayfarer

Trump and his kin isn't a one-off. We've seen a constant escalation of his type creeping its way into the top. And democrats seem to be totally oblivious to the problems in society popping up under their terms.

You can't just put hope into democrats, they will probably win the next term, put the nation into some pause while these idiots now in power return in force again after that.

It's a downward spiral, two steps back - one step forward. There's no solution in the status quo of the side who wins on doing essentially nothing.

If democrats keep dancing around their liberal centrism, they're part of perpetuating the status quo.

In other words, Vote Democrat. — Wayfarer

Temporary band-aid - It's not a solution. It's just putting the feet on the breaks into a stand-still for a moment only to continue down this path later.

This is a fundamental problem within the very essence of US culture.

Yes, I guess that's another possibility -- dream and body may switch roles, mutually reinforcing the experience. At one point the bodily sensation informs the dream, then at another point the dream that unfolds influences the body. — J

Yes, it's very interesting what happens to our conscious experience when our body are unable to regulate the chemicals that suppose to keep us sedated during sleep.

Another syndrome that happens because of this is sleep paralysis. I've suffered this experience and it is terrifying. Basically it lets dream experiences into our real world, a hallucinatory state in which I'm more in the awake state than sleeping, so the opposite of sleepwalking, being paralyzed while experiencing dream experiences forming hallucinations within the room I'm sleeping in. And since sleep also controls breathing, a state of fear doesn't register in the same way and leading to the same reactions in breathing, so you feel out of breath, which in turn led to the many artworks featuring suffocation in the state of sleep paralysis.

If dreaming is the result of our predictive coding being cut off from sense information and instead relies on virtual sense simulations to form consistent experiences of dream sequences, that forms the experience we have in dreams. But if the body have problems subduing the normal predictive coding behavior, getting actual sense data, I would assume that there becomes a point of confused state between the two; you have both simulated senses grounding the generated experience of reality, as well as actual senses coming through from your body in bed.

Maybe this has to do with how the different regions of the brain controls the body. That the region for motor control and the region for bladder control doesn't function on the same principles and therefore when the brain is scrambled between two states of sense data and tries to predict behavior and actions, it takes two different actions.

And you know, some people wet themselves during sleep, so maybe it's just a matter of automatic self-control that is programmed in our long term memory due to how emotional values attached to memories create stronger biases. That the emotional intensity of wetting yourself is so strong that compared to just "kicking", the bias forms two different intensities in whether or not to let the body act.

Sorry if I didn't engage with the X or Y event, but I think the science may hint at the reasons.

It's interesting how narrow minded business people are. The current idea that drives DOGE, Musk and Trump is to improve efficiency. But corporate efficiency relies on a replaceable workforce.

You push costs down, push salaries down in order to maximize what you get out of the workers. You put pressure on your workers to give up on unionized rights, try to manipulate them into valuing the company as a "family" and how their complaints is a negative impact on fellow "family members".

That is the foundation for how CEOs and companies operate. The only thing standing in their way are regulations and union power.

And then you have society, which doesn't run on these metrics. It's the opposite really. The wealth of a nation isn't really counted in how much capital the top leaders have. It's within the pockets of its citizens. The more citizens who has filled pockets, the more they can spend in the economy. It's the people who drives the national economy. So in order to improve a nation, the best way is to not try and take advantage of "workers" because there's no profit in doing so. You can't "fire a citizen" that isn't complying, they will just become a burden on society if they don't participate. And it's not possible to just force them into participating and work, because if they don't have a sense of purpose in what they're doing, they will eventually not be able to participate, regardless of force upon them.

Essentially, it's like having a company in which you try to fire the workers who are bad for your profit, but they stay in the office and continues to consume resources in that office. And while they're doing that, you try to get their children to work for you, but they have to take care of the previous ones let go, so they're down on their knees and eventually also just become people who stay at the office consuming your resources.

This is why a nation cannot be run like a business. It doesn't operate at all like one and is rather dependent on thinking the opposite. To spend money on the people is to profit as a nation.

This means that the well-being of the citizens is at the heart of a healthy economy and national identity. Good health care, good social securities, good security from crime, good infrastructure, good funding of culture, taking care of the sick, weak and old etc.

Since all the workers at the office will always be in the office regardless of working or not, you, as a CEO, are forced to rather make sure that as many of them as possible are healthy and happy enough to want to work for you. The better the conditions for these people, the more likely they will participate and the less people are there just consuming resources.

I think that Reaganomics made people forget this truth about a nation. When people started viewing other people as a disposable workforce in all areas of life and not just the workplace, it influenced politics and pushed business owners into running the nation, trying to operate on the same principles as a company.

And when they faced the fact that the workers "couldn't leave the office", they have been trying to "solve" this problem using continuous strategies that may work for businesses, but not for a society.

Essentially, ignoring the needs to the people, cutting back on health care, on social securities and helping the people seems to be a way of trying to "ignore the problem" and letting them literally die off in order to get rid of them. That's the only way to "fire them" from the office.

These politicians are so indoctrinated into the way of how businesses operate that they are unable to understand how society prosper and becomes healthy. And they've entangled themselves so deep into a web of this thinking that everyone at the top keeps holding actual improvements to society back.

They simply aren't wise enough to be able to improve society for the people.

Musk, DOGE and Trump is just the latest tip of this spear and the most obvious signifier of this mentality. But it runs deep within all politicians in the US.

The only way to change this, is to change the fundamentals of the US, to focus on running society as a society and not as a business. Remove all of these idiots who try to operate society as such.

Or else, this way of running the nation will just deepen until the people have had enough. But since this mentality runs so deep, a revolution will probably just be a new run of the "Animal Farm", leading to new people operating under the same principles.

This is probably the underlying reason why the US doesn't operate like governments in the EU. Why the EU tends to install more regulations and why politics seem to be more stable and work far better. The EU nations generally don't view society as a company. Probably because of its long history with rising and falling empires, all constantly verifying what kinds of society that works and what doesn't. Letting society install guardrails to govern against those who would lead a nation in a direction historically proven to be destructive.

The US has always operated on transactions with other nations. Their entire existence is a rebellion against an empire, to be "free" to operate on business principles, and we're seeing the emergence of the end result of this mentality. The self-made nation. The CEO politics. So in a sense, Reaganomics just became a catalyst of a political journey that's been taking place since the civil war.

The US isn't an empire. It's a pseudo-business who doesn't understand that its actually a society. An office space with workers who may soon unionize a rebellion but lacking an actual philosophy of a true nation.

The US is pretty much doomed to fall as a nation eventually. Under its own weight of misunderstandings of what a nation and society actually is and what it needs.

No, it's not that it's unclear (although, I could wrangle it in that direction). It's that I think the 'view' described is erroneous to a rather extreme degree :) It was quippage, not argument. — AmadeusD

It is extreme to the point of provoking thought. I elaborated more in the second post, but imagine a scenario in which the US goes so far in the wrong direction that people has to do something about it. When is it time to think about such questions? Now, or in the chaos of such a situation? It would also be a point of provoking thought for the purpose of increasing the knowledge to prevent things from going in the wrong direction.

At the moment, Trump granting Musk entry and power within the government and letting him grant access to unauthorized personnel is considered breaking the law. That's the foundation of the lawsuits being drawn up. If Trump tries to block these lawsuit investigations, that will be a direct obstruction of the law. And with the track record of how things have been going, Trump seems much more inclined to go by force than anything else, threatening democrat officials if they try to object towards his policies.

When is the time to think about these things for real? Do you actually think nothing is happening at the moment?

My comment can be translated into your question. What hte heck is being talked about there? Nonsense, at best. — AmadeusD

What is unclear about it?

I get the impression that all the European Governments have recognized that and are working hard to adjust. They'll likely work out what they can do and how to do it before long. Whether they can "put him in his place" is another matter. There'll be a lot of damage that can't be repaired - ever. — Ludwig V

The range of industry partnerships that can be achieved within EU could just cut any trading of these things towards the US. If we also organize trade deals with Canada, essentially free trade, we gain access to a massive set of resources. If the EU establish these things we can cut off the US entirely without much setbacks to the economy, but it would tank large parts of the US economy, especially if the trade moves from being between Canada and the US to Canada to the EU.

Trump is acting according to "art of the deal". He's trying to push others because so many others are relying on the US. He can push Europe, Ukraine, everyone at the moment until he gets pushed back.

The fact of the matter is that the only way to stop Trump internationally is to push back. To not give in to his behavior. If he push hard, others need to push harder, to make sure he realizes he might lose something. In his eyes, he's not losing anything by losing relations with other nations, he's focused on "owning" the deals with these nations. He's behaving as a company in deals with other companies, not as collaborating nations.

As such, other nations cannot act on diplomacy as usual, they need to adopt the dealmaking behavior of Trump. And if they do it correctly, they will put him in his place.

....Even if you refuse to accept the unapologetic pivot to a fascist Russian modeled mob kleptocracy, the US is fucked. For decades.

Then why don't the US citizens who don't want this... do something about it?

Can I please know from what position you're watching this film? It's not one i've seen. Definitely not a documentary. — AmadeusD

What are you talking about?

Pragmatism and opportunism have bred terrorism and antagonistic views across the world against the West; let their hatred pour over the USA idiot in charge - the EU should leverage that undercurrent and position itself as a trustworthy partner not out to police the world but to facilitate cooperation and peace. — Benkei

I'm quite surprised that through all this I've felt a certain amount of increased energy. In the last Trump run, things just felt like geopolitical depression, but this time he went so far that Europe seems to collectively wake up to a new kind of elevated spirit.

If it goes on like this, it would end with a collective "fuck the US" and at that point I'm not sure the US will be able to get back to the relations until they crawl back on their knees.

We can argue that the economic power of the US is too large for this to happen, but if Trump takes it too far there's not gonna be a choice. And if the industry and collaboration across Europe increases and reaches a point of self-suficiency it didn't have before, we're not really gonna rely on the US even past this phase of toddler politics Trump wallows in.

Trump is effectively just operating on "the art of the deal". He's pushing everyone in order to own any deal. Europe, at the moment, is trying to play by his tune and I think political leaders in the EU need to wake up to the fact that Trump doesn't surrender to anything if there's nothing to lose. He will push until he gets pushed back.

So even if there are risks involved with going against Trump, I think Europe should just give him the fucking finger, even if that may crash the market a bit. Because that crash may lead to a boom when native industries start to form stronger trade deals within the EU.

A key point that fuels industry is diversity, it's proven in so many research papers that anyone disputing it is just ignorant. And the EU has more diversity than the US due to the fact its a union of nations rather than federal states. Increasing the free movement and industry within, beyond the current operation, may lead to an industrial boom. The US, even with immigration included, is too inbred into patriotic nationalism to function on gains in diverse thinking. And the EU has been too dependent on the US to seek collaboration with their neighbors.

I think there's just a matter of time before the EU organizes a European military, a federal investigation agency (akin to the FBI), joint industries spread across nations rather than centralized in specific nations etc.

And I kind of feel ok with how things are going in this regard. The war and Russia is the key area of risk and that's the only reason I'm worried; but outside of that, it's kind of refreshing to see European leaders being invigorated to collaborate more rather than less. The US essentially pushes us away from Brexit mentalities and that is a good thing.

Let's just tariff back against the US and they'll find out just how much trade is actually benefiting the US. I'd say, let the MAGA cult and Trump supporting voters of the US rot until they get rid of toddler politics. Let us drink fine, but through better trade, less expensive French and Italian wine while the US citizens grow fat and stupid on suger and suger-replacing chemicals. Let our EU regulations safeguard the citizens so they can live decent lives while the US citizens die from infections out of losing healthcare or die from not taking vaccines because Kennedy told them so.

Let the US suffer - If the US abandon us, then let's abandon the US. Why should we care for the stupid toddlers that vote and run that broken nation?

Soon, the dept crisis will swallow the US economy and if Europe builds enough security against that downfall, we will win the art of the deal in the end.

Yes, that's the choice. Though there's good reason to think that the French were too disunited to make a collectivve decision and it was more a matter of who won the war. That's the nightmare waiting at the bottom of the cliff. Perhaps the law will get there in the end. — Ludwig V

I think that the problem that has occurred in our modern times is that the materialistic and individualistic lifestyle programmed people into being too disjointed to ever mount any form of pressure that amounts to anything but some small protests on the street outside of people in power who couldn't give a shit what "lesser people" says about them.

Society has essentially programmed away the people's sense of community identity, programmed away any revolutionary spirit that could amount to actual threats against people in power. And while some would point at Jan 6th, there's clearly a difference between people in power rallying uneducated manipulated and indoctrinated people to be meat spears in trying to conduct a coup, to that of the people themselves rallying against people in power in order to fight for a better life and not being abused by these people.

Revolution, even by force, does not have to be bloody. The force can also be not to comply with what the enforcers of the people in power inflict on them. Just look at Gandhi's revolution.

If enough people were to occupy places in a way that the state stops functioning properly, in opposition towards the ruling government, then when the government turns to violence, every drop of blood from the people will be a loss for those currently in power.

If everyone who oppose Trump were to organize for something like this, it would have an effect.

But the people won't do it.

If there's anything I hate more than dictators and abusers of power, it's the apathy of the people just doing nothing. Just turn inwards into their own echo chamber, into the comfort of social media spaces were they can complain about everything in a way that makes no difference whatsoever.

Apathetic people deserve any abuse that people in power inflict on them as their apathy rolled out the carpet for this abuse.

Your attempt of bait-rhetorics won't work. You're only on this forum to DoS climate debates. As long as mods tolerate this, there won't be any good discussions on the topic. You win, or whatever the fuck you attempt to do.

Let's face it. Law that cannot be enforced is dead letter. Government that does not respect the law is tyranny. What next? — Ludwig V

This is why the US is broken. No laws seem to have any effect on the people in power. It doesn't matter how many times lawyers, officials, police, artists or philosophers point towards laws being broken or manipulated.

If the law doesn't have any effect on people abusing their power against the citizens and nation, and no one who's on the side of enforcing the law does anything to uphold the law; the only action left is to remove the power abusers by force.

It's either that, or accept being ruled by these abusers. This is a pretty binary choice for the people. The French at the end of the 18th century could have just accepted the status quo... or not.

You are an evangelist if you think that there is no disagreement about anything to do with climate change. — Agree-to-Disagree

Disagreement does not equal scientific data and research being wrong. There are lots of uneducated and low intelligence people who disagree with facts all the time, which leads to "the existence of disagreement", but that doesn't make the uneducated and stupid in the right about anything. Such an idea is just an attempt at manipulating the debate. There are tons of people who believe in flat earth and who would use the same type of argument in an attempt to validate their stance.

A lot of my posts are about whether the proposed solutions to climate change will work. — Agree-to-Disagree

A random sample quote from you:

What proof do you have that the current temperature is not just a "normal" temperature for an interglacial? — Agree-to-Disagree

That's not something someone who agrees with the science would say. It's something that climate science deniers usually says; a rhetoric aimed to bait a non-scientist to get lost in evidence data that requires the knowledge of climate scientists. It's a rhetoric that works against everyone but climate scientists who can provide and answer due to their deeper knowledge of the subject. Because it doesn't matter if the actual evidence is provided; the interlocutors do not know how to interconnect specific data with the holistic understanding of the subject and through that the denier claims victory without actually having won any argument. These rhetorical strategies are dishonest and hollow, and for anyone observant of such behavior, a clear indicator of who the person is and what they attempt to accomplish.

Mikie is getting the titles of threads changed to suit his agenda. — Agree-to-Disagree

What agenda?

I will be creating a new thread to discuss whether changing the titles of threads is dishonest and unethical and a form of censorship. — Agree-to-Disagree

He started a thread that has been hijacked by climate science deniers to the point an actual discourse is impossible. For you to call that unethical, one can turn it around and ask if it's ethical to spam a thread to the point the OP gives up on even trying to continue it. Who are you to place yourself on a moral high ground like that? Isn't that rather delusional and arrogant?

And a further point, the destructive use of censorship is something done by official institutions and governments. It is not applicable to other individuals, especially not within a construct they've created. If they create a place of discussion about something and someone doesn't follow the intention of that space, it is not censorship to silence those who disrupts things for the people there. This use of the concept of censorship in your rhetoric is another form of dishonest manipulative rhetoric aimed at painting your opposition as dishonest. You attempt to bootstrap yourself to a higher moral ground. But as always, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been involved in online debates. It's also rather clumsy to attempt to use that rhetoric when the entire right-wing culture at the moment have proved just how dysfunctional that rhetoric is by Musk's treatment of the concept of censorship on X. It should be obvious to all nowadays that the idea of censorship and free speech by certain people in society follows that trend of claiming to be arguing for free speech and opposing censorship, while then trying to control the flow of communication to align with their own ideology.

In that regard, it would also be a form of censorship to spam a discussion so much that people can't have a proper discussion anymore. I would argue that this form of rhetoric is a hidden form of silencing people far more than the people trying to govern discourse manners - A rhetoric in the same operation as DoS attacks towards websites. This type of DoS rhetoric functions in the same "denial of service" way, pushing so much noise into discussions that it becomes impossible for honest interlocutors to have a proper discussion. Essentially drowning out the flow off discussion with the noise of bullshit.

So I would be careful lecturing others on unethical behavior like you want to attempt.

Climate change alarmism meets this definition of evangelism. — Agree-to-Disagree

You are basically only on this forum to spread disinformation about climate science. You basically interact with no other thread or category other than spam threads which focus on climate change and climate science.

I don't think anyone fit the category of forum rules against evangelism better than you do. Your only defense is that mods don't seem to care about topics in the lounge.

But I would argue that if a member is only ever posting on one subject, over and over, to the point of the creator of the thread having to change the title and intention of the thread to reflect your hijacking of it, that would warrant mods to take action.

I think perhaps most mods also have a different opinion on climate change. — Mikie

Are you saying many mods are climate science deniers and effectively won't ban evangelists of climate science denial because of this? I sincerely hope not.

Since the climate change threads are allowed to become a cesspool of denial and misinformation, I’m no longer posting on them— I’ve moved any serious discussion to private group chat. Feel free to message to join if you haven’t been invited already. :up: — Mikie

I still don’t understand why the mods let evangelists keep infecting the lounge. I understand it’s more lose in there compared to the proper philosophical pages, but if there’s no moderation at all it just becomes infested with posters who are only here for the purpose of evangelical propaganda for their disinformation rants. They just infect every topic so there’s no point in any discussion.

Forum rules state

Types of posters who are not welcome here:

Evangelists: Those who must convince everyone that their religion, ideology, political persuasion, or philosophical theory is the only one worth having.

If someone is having an unpopular stance that’s fine, as long as they take as much care in their arguments as everyone else. But this constant spams of bullshit everywhere just makes the lounge impossible to be in.

Shouldn’t there be at least some minor standards? Where obvious evangelists and spammers get banned even from the lounge? If someone is a member here to clearly only post in a single thread over and over, that shouldn’t be allowed. That’s not what this site is about. These are spammers.

The Republican Party is utterly culpable in this matter. — Wayfarer

The old republicans need to realize that there's no republican party anymore. It's just MAGA and Trump loyalists. The sooner they realize this, the sooner they could organize into a new republican party. Maybe even brand it as such, "new republicans" to win on sounding "edgy new".

Key point is that people need to realize that republicans are gone. The ones in power in that party are these MAGA fanatics and Trump loyalists.

Everyone needs to wake the fuck up to this.

It has been pointed out, that while Associated Press and Reuters have now been banned from White House briefings, that the official Russian state media had a reported in the Oval Office today, to conveniently broadcast Trump and Vances brow-beating of Zelenskyy to the whole Russian federation. How convenient for them. — Wayfarer

If it turns out that Trump is collaborating with Putin... remind me again, how does the west treat Russian spies who infiltrate positions of power?

Could you explain how it is? The US has a giant nuclear arsenal with the ability to deploy them with ICBMs, medium range missiles, submarines, and Air Force bombers. Why does the US need NATO? I'm asking. — frank

You think warfare is only military means and explosions? People listed all those things as well for Russia and then it turned out the military strength wasn't enough. Then we can also look at how a single Swedish submarine sunk one of the USs largest cruisers during a Baltic exercise.

And looking at the innovation rate of China, what would happen if China went to full scale war with the US after leaving NATO?

NATO is not just a numbers game for military spending and hardware, it's an alliance of collaboration, of spreading out into the world as an extended shield. Imagine a US crippled by internal politics, not in NATO, cut off from intelligence collaborations.

And also add all other things I said, that the consequences of being in NATO is also affecting collaboration outside of NATO as the collaborative security also means higher safety trading and collaborating between NATO members in other areas.

If this was a RTS (strategy game), you're the type of player who would just produce as many soldiers and vehicles as possible and then be surprised by someone utilizing their resources better to hit your weak spots rather than just using brute force. Like the single submarine taking out the cruiser because it was technologically superior going against hubris.

It's a perverse way to go: to say to fight corruption, one enables rampant corruption. To say one is improving the lives of the ordinary people, one makes everything even worse with few insiders going from corruption to outright looting and kleptocracy. To say one is for freedom of speech, one implements the most outrageous word-policing that is fitting to an authoritarian state.

Yet Trump supporters are totally fine with this, because they have blocked away any criticism towards their leader. This is the way that conspiracy theorists work: they think that everything has been this huge conspriracy, and what they want is to have the conspiracy of their own as they don't believe that the antidote to conspiracies would be openness and stronger democratic institutions. People are sheeple, so it is necessary to use propaganda. Now the correct propaganda of the anti-deep state people. Conspiracy theorists are the enemy of a democracy, because they don't believe for starters that a democracy could or would be possible. — ssu

I'd wish the conspiracy theorists all unite under their own flag, make a unity of bullshit and fascism so it's easier to categorize them as extremists and fight them. Right now, they're so scattered and so undefined that it's impossible to fight against it while they're also too stupid and disorganized to ever do any serious harm. They simply act as a big iron chain to society, holding back good progress, holding back improvements and holding back fighting climate change.

They're a sickness that holds society in bed, making everyone apathetic and without energy. Honestly, I hate them all and despise their disgusting stupidity. The negative consequences to society over time is larger than people seem realize.

I see what you're saying, but the US put trillions into NATO because it was defending itself by containing communism. The US isn't defending itself through NATO now. It's just exercising global influence. I think most Americans would question the wisdom of continuing to take that role. What's in it for us? — frank

The US has at the moment the historically delusional idea of isolationism. The collaborations through NATO is not contained within the operation of NATO. It's like installing tax incentives on something which boosts an influx of tourists, the tax incentive is essentially a loss of tax income, but it boosts the economy anyway through the resulting tourism.

What I mean is that economy doesn't work like you're hinting at. Trillions into NATO over its entire lifetime is nothing compared to the unquantified income of how other transactions have been between the nations within this alliance.

Such an alliance becomes a security to do further business between nations as it is as much a prevention of war against NATO members as it is between NATO members. Effectively it becomes a somewhat better deterrence than both threats or the UN.

Society isn't a company in which everything is a basic balance sheet. It's operating on so many hidden parameters that anyone just looking at costs fail to see the benefits and future gains. It's not something that can be looked at in quarter-term results.

And how do you know that the US isn't defended through NATO? The very point of NATO is deterrence, it's not just defense whenever there's an actual war. What if leaving NATO actually opens up the US to threats far greater than things have been if they would have stayed in NATO? That the fact that a military strength like Russia didn't go that well in Ukraine shows that there's a lot of hubris in the idea of just military might. Comparably, look at all the American hubris throughout history, Vietnam war, Gulf war etc.

On top of that, NATO isn't just military collaboration, it's intelligence. The members share intelligence information that isn't visible as pure military. And the US also has a lot of defensive bases that are part of defense lines for the US as a first line of defense further away from the US borders; these are NATO collaborations. So without NATO, intelligence information might be cut off and these defensive lines disappear.

I don't think most Americans understand anything about NATO. And showing by how the US citizens voted, I don't think most of them have even basic understandings of foreign politics or how the world actually works in trade and collaborations.

But if NATO disappears, then there will just be a new alliance among the other nations. It's too effective as deterrence and security to just be removed, regardless of the US involvement or not.

But the US shouldn't be as naive as to think they're untouchable if they leave NATO. It's more than just a numbers game.

I see that evaluation - whatever you mean that in regard to human behaviour - is very important to you. I don't quite understand why. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm following in the direction you're taking the discussion by choosing to answer on certain parts of what I wrote.

In order to 'evaluate' anything, you first need a standard against which to measure it and some unit of measurement. — Vera Mont

But morality is fluid, changing between cultures and through time. How can you have a standard with such a fluid foundation?

And why is it fluid? Because we evaluate and dissect our morality in every generation. And that is impossible without the ability to empathically understand other people's point of view.

How such standards and norms are defined is according to the precepts and world-view of the culture: what a society expects, accepts and tolerates from its members. Moral and legal systems differ, as do human attitudes from one historical period to another. That is why I find your demand to evaluate behaviours and their motives so perplexing. — Vera Mont

Culture, world-views and society change massively over time. It isn't static.

How can you find a stable moral ground while society is changing without careful evaluation and dissection of the moral values that are changing?

What is perplexing is that you point out that morality is different between cultures and through time, but then state that it is at the same time a standard world-view that should define the norms. How can you both have a constantly changing morality and at the same time letting it be a standard norm? It becomes a paradox in which society should always adhere to the societal standards and norms of morality, but at the same time these norms and standards are constantly changing.

Isn't it then true that since morality constantly change and this morality is informing the societal norms and standards, that in order for it to change in a rational and thoughtful way, people need to carefully evaluate societal morals in order for them to change over time in a thoughtful and responsible way?

That cannot be done without fully understanding the emotional realm of morality, which requires an empathic understanding of all people.

We don't. Every society sets up a system of laws to regulate its members' behaviour, and every society fails to prevent crime, interpersonal conflict, injustice and abuse. — Vera Mont

It fails because it still operates on mob mentality. A problem with democracies has been that crime and punishment becomes voting issues, and so we have outsourced an academically sound topic to that of the mob screaming for solutions and politicians promising solutions that are satisfying for the crowd/mob, not those that are effective in preventing crime.

Laws are only able to guide those already law-abiding, and only able to invoke justice after a crime, not prevent them. As plenty academic studies have shown, laws mean nothing to those who do crimes, because that's not how the human psyche and emotions work.

Crime prevention requires understanding the situations and emotions which leads up to crime, and adjusting society to prevent those paths taken. But this is not emotionally satisfying for the mob/crowd, who operates on the bloodlust of revenge, which in turn informs political decisions that supposedly are there to deal with crime.

The mob and public is not intellectually and emotionally mature enough to stand behind actual solutions. This has been proven over and over. There are so many researchers who comment on bad political decisions for crime prevention over and over that it's become satire. The public is immature in this area.

Inside and outside are hardly abstract concepts. (and I didn't say appearances inform our moralities; that's far more complicated than everyday assessment of another person's actions). We see what other people look like, what they do, hear what they say and judge them accordingly. We can imagine how they feel if it's similar to how we might feel in their place.
In general, human do not treat one another as if all that understanding and bridge-making were very effective. — Vera Mont

It is abstract because you refer to it as some standard within a system that is constantly changing. What is a standard and norm within something that is constantly changing? A person within this system might adhere to the norms and standards around them, but a citizen in Nazi Germany did so too. It's not enough to just conclude morality to come from this illusive "standard" because that standard is constantly shifting. In order to find good morals when living in Nazi Germany, only those with functioning empathy were able to see through the indoctrination narrative that skewed the morality of the public. As I mentioned, the public is generally stupid and emotionally immature; that's true for both Nazi Germany and modern times.

Only through empathic understanding can we truly evaluate and arrive at good moral standards that consist through time rather than change by doctrines.