tadmjones
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Posts posted by tadmjones
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1 hour ago, human_murda said:
So minorities in Islamic theocracies experience a worse enforcement of rights than the majority? Totally not happening in Israel.
Are Arab Israeli citizens maltreated in Israel by its government? Does Israel practice apartheid within its borders/jurisdiction?
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2 hours ago, stansfield123 said:
Religious ideas did succeed through a process fairly similar to "plain Darwinian evolution". Yes. And, once you admit that, you can't then turn around and say "However, if you root your ideas in divine revelation, the correctness of those ideas cannot be checked and is just a matter of chance.". That's a contradiction: Darwinian evolution isn't an arbitrary process. It's not rooted in "divine revelation". On the contrary, it's a process that works sublimely well. The products of Darwinian evolution far surpass any technological achievement we have.
From an atheistic or physicalist frame , how is it one can claim 'Darwinian evolution' "works", or works well, sublimely even?
Random genetic mutations are practically the extreme example of the arbitrary or blind chance. Shouldn't the idea of evolution be tied to the idea that 'it' is an explanation of change in biologic lineage? The evolutionary 'pressures' that instantiate in creatures exhibiting 'higher amounts of fitness' are not an end of the means of the 'process', unless the 'process' is goal directed.
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Maybe just the KJV , the article cites WSJ as its source.
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14 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:
Why?
I'm just trying to figure out what was being traded. Maybe they were exporting Amish sheds.
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But there is no disputing the fact that Biden's family members have triggered such reports. They also have been shown to use various shell companies and other financial instruments to facilitate payments from foreign entities. What products or services are they providing? Cookies, colas, software, or steel? What is it they are selling ? Curiouser and curiouser it looks , no ?
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Israel and the western governments are sinful in the sense that sin means ‘missing the mark’. The failures to meet the mark should be judged in the context of the aim, the overall arc of actions taken toward an aim. And that means the mark or aim is the standard to judge the actions and missteps or failures of attaining the end.
A goal or mark can be for evil or for good , failure to attain an evil end isn’t sinful in that it should be condemned.
The idea that Israel should be isn’t an evil to be perpetrated on humankind. In as much as the goal of establishing Israel as nation is a good end , the fallibility inherent in human projects means there are guaranteed to be shortfallings. Identifying and trying for corrections are what principles are for , yeah?
Israel turned a desert into a veritable paradise, some of the actions taken toward bringing that goal into being may be sinful but the goal isn’t in any real sense evil.
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But hypotheticals like that , even somewhat potentially hyperbolic, mess up a nice neat Dungeons and Dragons style of directing moralizations and assigning condemnation.
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Brief and somewhat truncated. Israel/Palestine problems have their earliest origins in 1948 , even prior but before 48 there wasn’t such a thing as Israel.
It looks like Hamas is just about to end its utility and will be ended , and good riddance, obviously for the death and destruction visited on anyone in its name.
But that isn’t yet the ‘end’ of a Palestinian problem, for Palestinians or Israel.
Regardless it really is an Israeli problem and something that has almost no effect on me, thank god.
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Information is identity? A way to view or conceptualize identity with a bent toward epistemology as opposed to a consciousness independent frame of reference ?
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16 hours ago, whYNOT said:
"Creating a monster". The clip to supply background. But did you think tmj the then Israeli Gvt. could have foreseen the consequences and is now complicit in/culpable for Hamas' terrorist nature? Any sinister motives, like this speaker suggests? Or indeed, satisfied with the results? Guilty true, of political maneuvring and social engineering as any Gvt's. are prone to do.
I don't think they were out to scupper a 2 state, but just to reduce PLO's/Arafat's power monopoly with an alternative party
Allowing Hamas to exist , indeed using its existence as a political weapon, does make the Israeli government culpable in Hamas' attack Oct 7, but the Israeli citizens are not.
If the investigations into the draw down of the security around the incursion area prove anything more than severe negligence , I'd say the Israeli government is complicit in the whole of the atrocities of that day. But the Israeli citizens were not.
Hamas should be wiped from the planet, but even then Gaza would still be a uniquely horrible situation , yeah ?
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54 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:
Isn't the key element of human consciousness free will? If so, can a deterministic machine that mutates, in a sense be guided toward "free will" by its environment? Similar to human evolution.
In that sense then, DO would be right in that we didn't craft it, nature or nature's god did through random chance( which is a weird concept in the context of determinism).
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I always vote for both !
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As for the title of the thread is it fair to say that Rand was a dualist, eg there are entities of either physical , material stuff(s) and those of mental stuff(s) and they are ultimately reducible to incommensurate kinds?
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The Israeli government at one time allowed Hamas to form or allowed them to move into Gaza as a political tool that would be useful internally and internationally in ultimately ending a ‘two state solution’ solution.
Do those actions qualify as state sponsored terrorism?I am not making an argument that is necessarily the case , just trying to apply the rigidity of the moral standard to a particular.
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Is there an underlying schema that determines the function(s) of the processing, is there a fundamental level ‘below’ which the processing rests or is process the thing ?
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I am not well versed in correspondence ‘theory’ so perhaps the following observations may not pertain to a rigorous understanding. But..
If knowledge is a correspondence between awareness, consciousness, or experience, the ‘in here’ portion or side cannot be a mirroring of the ‘out there’ side, because of the cause and effect nature of entropy, no?
If the ‘in here’ side of the equation equals the ‘out there’ side of the equation , the states of entropy would be equal and there ain’t enough ‘in here’ anywhere to contain all the ‘out there’. And especially if all abstraction has a physical base, no?
The ‘in here’ must be delimited in some fashion from what is ‘available’ ‘out there’, that feels a little Kantian.
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I don’t recall any Objectivist treatises on physics, do you mean interpretations of quantum physics published by self identified ‘Objectivists’?
And by the same token do you mean you take your standards of foreign policy from Rand’s interpretation of specific events or accept statements of standards from self identified O’ist uncritically, especially as they delineate specific events?
Perhaps O’ist forums are not places for discussion , debate , just a search space for the ‘correct’ positions?
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By no Iran we would mean no Iranian regime headed by Islamic fundamentalists, yeah?
Various Israeli and Iranian regimes have had more allied positions toward each other in the past. Even after the Iranian revolution Israel provided aid to Iran in their war with Iraq.
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As to a 'permanent' solution , for Gaza at least, Curtis Yarvin floated an out of the box proposal and seemingly only 2/3 tongue in cheek.
The idea would be to relocate the whole of the Gazans to another part of the planet, say give them an island camp in Indonesia or some such and have the Israeli government set up a type of perpetual lease agreement for the territory.
Ethnic cleansing coupled with reparation style remunerations in perpetuity is on its face better than genocide(not that what Israel is doing is genocide, just that without a two state solution one group has to go).
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1 hour ago, AlexL said:
Do you claim that this is the identification that the Israeli government makes? Care to prove?
No(and by that I mean I have no idea what the Israeli govt gives as identification ), I am claiming that identification if accepted as true would give license to parties to act within that specific paradigm.
The offensive only nature of an underground tunnel system is not an objective fact, it is an opinion/ description and the promotion of that position can (is) being used as propaganda in the west to align public support in a specific direction. Agreed?
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Is the whole of the infrastructure of Gaza City an offensive asset? If that identification holds somebody should raze that fucker , eh?
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2 hours ago, AlexL said:
No.
You are certainly aware that these tunnels are used also for storing weapons, including rockets and missiles. As well as for housing Hamas leadership and operatives.
You are also aware that Hamas fired dozen of thousands of rockets and missiles from Gaza into Israel. in the last weeks, but also before that.
So, let's connect the points to understand how it works:
Hamas leadership sends small groups of operatives to collect weapons from the tunnel storages, to pop up at the surface from the many hidden tunnel shafts, fire the rockets/missiles then disappear back in the tunnel network.
If this usage of the tunnel network is defensive, what would be an offensive usage???😁
The lethal harassment of the civilian population by Hamas is a means of warfare by terror as opposed to confronting the military assets of the Israeli state.
The firing of the rockets is obviously offensive, but even your description shows the defensive capacity/utility of the tunnel as providing the protection of the operatives and materials.
My argument was not about the proper classification or identification of military tactics or assets , but about the propaganda value of that identification or description ‘legally’ correct or not.
What is more of a threat to the Israeli people the tunnels in Gaza or the missiles in Gaza? Or those in Lebanon or the West Bank ?
If the tunnels are seen as a primarily offensive asset/threat then military action by Israel against the ‘tunnels’ and the tunnel operators is more palatable to the West than direct military action directed at Lebanon or in the West Bank.
A tunnel system is in essence a defense against harassment that can be exploited to offer offensive capabilities, especially in a system that terminates within your own territory.
In western media the offensive nature of the Gaza tunnels serves the same purpose as the democratic nature and territorial integrity of Ukraine, in that the are both sorta/kinda true-ish , but the appearance/acceptance of them as literal true is the propaganda aimed at garnering approval of the various state actors.
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9 hours ago, Grames said:
It is the year 2023. "Purely physical" now includes information theory: bits, bandwidth, coding and compression theory and all the rest of it. It is not a problem to assert consciousness is purely physical.
Do you mean that the concept of 'purely physical' now includes abstraction being in the same category as 'physical'?
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Rand could be described as a 'radical for integration' right along with the other famous similar self-styled moniker of 'radical for capitalism'.
And I think the critiques of O'ism that tend to paint it as a 'politically' or 'morally' focused system come from a lack of understanding of what are the strongest points ie epistemological.
Israelo-Palestinian Conflict: 2023 Edition
in Terrorism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Posted
I think you are confused about the distinctions between : Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, Jews and Israelis.
I don’t have any say in the matter and not much personal concern, but I think the region would be ‘better off’ if Jordan gains control of most of the West Bank and Gaza gets incorporated into Israel ‘proper’. The current population of the strip can make individual decisions to either give up or ‘renounce any Palestinian citizenship’ and try somehow to assimilate or relocate.
It seems evident the idea of establishing an actual Palestinian state in that immediate region pretty much died at last as recently as the seventies.
And yeah three or four generations ago a lot of people were fucked out of their inheritance , but it is past due time for this aberration of quasi internment on a population scale to end , otherwise you are condemning future generations of Gazans.
It would be ridiculous to claim Israel’s prosperity is an outcome of their treatment of Palestinian’s , it is more the case their prosperity has been hindered in the continued dealings.
All said in my humble opinion.