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necrovore

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Posts posted by necrovore

  1. 50 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    Why is the current influx of illegal immigration being assisted to the extent they are? and by whom? They are given money and travel and spread out through the country, surely they did not make these arrangements themselves , in a free country where one follows there own self interest , someone must have an interest in importing people and relocating them, some reports say to the tune of up to 5k in cash/card and then the ability to draw $2100 monthly stipends along with room and board. There are also reports that in the areas that the migrants are passing international organizations and NGO's are handing out information on routes and destinations suitable for crossing. This is definitely not a spontaneous movement of like minded poverty escapees and or political amnesty seekers, and the fact that the same situation is happening in Europe , wtf is going on ?

    What cultural change sparked the ambitions of Northern African Muslims to become Parisian baguette bakery apprentices?

    I think this is an attempt to overthrow America, including its ideas, by indirect force. Technically, I think some of these people should be arrested for treason.

    However, it is partly our own mistake by making it an issue of "might makes right" to begin with.

    Normal immigration is not like this, and to confuse this invasion with normal immigration is the same mistake that Marxists make when they confuse a government-granted monopoly with capitalism.

    They cannot argue against a free system, but if we remove the free system from the table, and make it a matter of one force versus another, they can apply more force. There are more people outside America than in it.

    Throwing away the "ideals" will consign the human race to endless gang warfare.

    If we give up the "ideals" and rely on sense-of-life alone, which is relying on our feelings, it puts our feelings on an equal footing with their feelings, which gives them a hope to win that they don't deserve.

  2. I have said before that I support having a border (and a border patrol) as opposed to not having one, and criminals, terrorism, and contagious diseases were among the reasons I listed for having one.

    What I'm talking about is economic concerns. The government has no right to stop (or help!) people for economic reasons alone. That violates the separation of state and economics.

    It would be better to encourage that separation than to violate it further on the basis that it's already violated. It's impossible to maintain a contradiction in practice, so in a mixed economy, controls seem to necessitate further controls, and this cascades until you get totalitarianism.

    It's the philosophy of Pragmatism that says we should give up our ideals and concentrate on what "works." But Pragmatism itself doesn't work, and is part of the problem. Problems have to be fixed at their root, or they will keep coming back.

  3. 8 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

    Letting anyone in, including those wholly predictable to be net negatives, is stupid, self-sacrificial, immoral.

    That's only true from a nationalist (collectivist) perspective, where the nation is regarded as a "self" apart from its individuals.

    In a free country, no individual would have any duty to sacrifice for anyone else, whether immigrant or not -- and the law would make sure they had no such duty. So there would be no need to be concerned about "net negatives."

    In a free country, a person (whether immigrant or not) can't be a "net negative" for long, because they'd run out of resources and either become a criminal (and be subject to prosecution), become a case for voluntary charity (if they can find it), or die.

    I also don't trust the government to make the determination about who is going to be a "net negative."

  4. 9 hours ago, tadmjones said:

    Labor markets are also a product of the recognition of spacial aspects of reality. The ‘right’ to freely participate in labor markets is a consequence of the establishment of a civilized society based on the protection of individual rights. Citizens of a country or nation should expect the institution of government to work to protect their freedom to participate in ‘free’ market. Unlimited immigration into a geographic location changes the market constraints on supply and demand by legalistic means and negates ‘economic’ or ‘market’ forces.

    It sounds like you are saying that the "stability of the labor market" has to be enforced and that the government should enforce it. Such a belief amounts to using the "stability of the labor market" as a license to initiate force. (It's also a violation of the separation of state and economics.)

    There is no "right" to a "stable labor market." There is a right to offer labor for sale, or to buy it if it's available, but that's it -- prices will vary according to supply and demand. Plenty of things besides immigration can "disrupt the labor market," such as new inventions like AI, or even, historically, ditch-digging machines (which obviate the need to hire lots of men with shovels). Technically, with remote work, it's possible for foreigners to do useful work without entering the country, and that also would tend to reduce the price of the equivalent domestic labor. There is no right to ban such things (or immigration) to "preserve the stability of the labor market."

    The manufacture of these false "rights" are what gives rise to antitrust law and lots of other problematic legislation, because false rights conflict with and diminish true ones.

  5. Yes, we objectively have a border crisis. So does Europe.

    Ours is of course our own fault: first, we shouldn't be giving welfare to illegal immigrants. Second, we should be enforcing the laws, including in the cities, and not, e.g., allowing people to shoplift "as long as it's less than $900." These two policies alone attract the wrong sort of people.

    Third, we do need adequate border police as well. What we are facing is an invasion, and the only reason the invaders aren't armed is because they don't need to be.

    Fourth, however, legal immigration is absurdly difficult because of the bureaucracy, and that needs to be corrected, because discouraging legal immigration (and legal employment and trade, etc.) encourages illegal immigration (and employment and trade, etc.), and this creates organized crime in much the same way that alcohol prohibition did. (When you're engaging in illegal activity, you can't call the cops, so you call the mafia instead; they play the role of "cops" and "judges" between people engaging in the illegal activity -- but disputes become a matter of "might makes right" and there's no rule of law. Unfortunately the present régime seems to be supporting the organized crime rather than supporting the repeal of the Prohibition, but that is just another example of how the Left would rather use force than reason. The Left is much like a mafia, themselves.)

    There are some people who think that culture has to be enforced and that the government should enforce it. Such a belief amounts to using "culture" as a license to initiate force. It should be noted not only that we don't have the "separation of state and culture" that we should have, but that the immigrants typically don't have it either, and so they will want to enforce their culture, and currently there is no principled opposition to this, there is only "might makes right," or, our culture versus their culture. The invasion of a hostile culture is much more of a problem in Europe than in the US (because in Europe the invaders are more hostile, bringing Islam and the desire for an Islamic state), but it is a problem even in the US -- and it's easy to see again why the Left aligns with it, because they want to annihilate the good parts of Western culture, and immigrants who seek to enforce their own culture give the Left another way to do that.

    The correct solution, however, is not to "enforce our culture, or let them enforce theirs." We need a proper separation of state and culture (as part of a rights-respecting government), which means no enforcement, either public or private, of any culture at all, which means that peaceful immigrants could live here, but invaders could not hope to colonize our country by force. If we did have such a separation, the good parts of Western culture would survive, because they are aligned with reality itself and do not need enforcement. The separation, like any protection of rights, would not properly be subject to vote, but a government would still have to take care that it does not have so many immigrants that they become able to overthrow it completely (or infiltrate and subvert it). It would make sense to require that immigrants seeking citizenship support the separation of state and culture, to the extent such a requirement is even possible, but such a requirement would only make sense if we supported it ourselves.

  6. 19 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    Aren’t abstractions only ever functions of a person or more specifically a product of an action only possible by consciousness.

    The act of abstraction can only be performed by a consciousness. However, the content of an abstraction -- if it is well formed -- is a product both of the objects being abstracted over and of the consciousness making the abstraction.

    Concepts are like maps. Maps don't draw themselves, we have to draw them, but they have to be accurate (about the important stuff) or they're useless.

    (I suppose when I said "function" I was thinking more like a math function, which is a relationship.)

  7. On 1/10/2024 at 10:37 AM, DavidOdden said:

    If you want tasty bacon, it (the experience) is a value to you.

    I'd say this is another place where you need to observe the distinction between whether something is actually a value for you or whether it just feels (or tastes) like one.

    Another example is that life-saving surgery hurts because your body's pain mechanism (which hopefully can be dulled with anesthesia) has no way of knowing that what is happening is surgery or that it's life-saving.

    The body's pleasure-pain mechanism is a sense, just like sight or hearing, and so it has to be interpreted in order to be useful. (The physical pain mechanism goes a little further because it can trigger reflexes which cannot be consciously overridden, and in fact some reflexes may occur even if you are not conscious at all; this is why anesthesia is necessary sometimes.)

    I think it's a mistake to say that something is a value to you merely because you want it or merely because it brings you pleasure.

    9 hours ago, Grames said:

    Rand stated that there three theories of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective and the objective.   It looks to me you are just now realizing what "intrinsic" value actually means in practice.  An object's intrinsic value has its value as part of its identity because there is nothing to distinguish intrinsic value from any of its other attributes.  Mass, volume, color, flammability, holiness ... its just another entry in a list of attributes.

    The way I think of it is:

    • Intrinsicism holds that abstractions (including "value") are functions of the object only, and not the person.
    • Subjectivism holds that abstractions are functions of the person only, and not the object.
    • Objectivity holds that the abstraction is a function of both.

    Or, as I put it before, you have to identify all the variables.

  8. A table is a concrete, but "value" is a high level abstraction, and a function of many variables.

    The fact that something is a function of many variables -- and that a person is one of the variables -- does not make it less objective. It does mean that you have to define the variables.

    The price of something in a capitalist system is where the highest bidder meets the lowest asker, and can vary over time as supply and demand appear and disappear and strengthen and weaken. The fact that it's variable doesn't make it non-objective.

    Even allowing that an object may have different values to different people in different situations, the value of a specific item to a specific person is objective, depending on that person's situation.

    This is an example of how "selfishness" requires determining whether something is actually in your self-interest, which is a question of fact.

    There is no room for primacy of consciousness to enter into the actual value of an object to a person, because the actual value may be different from what the person wants it to be or thinks it is (or what other people want it to be). This is why people sometimes have "buyer's remorse" (the object had less actual value than they thought it would) and also why people sometimes pass up really good deals (because they don't recognize the value it would have to them, and this includes new inventions which are famously rejected at first because the old way seems fine). This is also why someone else may think an object would have high value to you when it really wouldn't (which is why you have to really know a person in order to buy them a good gift).

    If people refuse to recognize the value of an item, that will reduce demand and cause it to sell at a lower price, but this is still a recognition of objective facts, in this case, the facts of whether people are actually buying or not, regardless of why. If people do something for a wrong reason, the fact that they did do it is still objective.

  9. 58 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

    It can't be stressed enough: the "Jewish" identity is both a race and a religion.

    It should also be emphasized that the political Left wrongly conflates the two; i.e., they hold that your race determines your ideas (including religion), or perhaps that your race ought to determine your ideas, which is to say, if you don't share the ideas of your race then you're a traitor to your race, or, to put it another way, "if you don't vote for Biden, you ain't Black."

    This is the kind of thinking that makes things like genocide -- killing people solely because of their race -- seem necessary. If ideas are determined by race, then the only way to kill an idea is to wipe out the race that it belongs to. This can also be played the other way, and used to say that, since committing genocide is immoral, the only thing you can do if people are ideologically motivated to kill you, is to accept it, since their ideology is a product of their race and rejecting it would supposedly require committing genocide, and morally (according to this theory) it's better to be a victim of genocide than a perpetrator.

    If you want to live, that choice requires proper self-defense, not acquiescence to one's own murder. So it's important to keep race and ideas separate. It's not race but ideas (including religious ideas) that cause people to want to kill each other. So sometimes the ideas need to be changed or eliminated, and if people can't be talked out of those ideas, they will act on them, and then force may be necessary in self-defense -- but a race as such is never a threat to anybody.

    People whose ideas motivate them to kill large numbers of others tend to form or find governments that either look the other way, or actively assist them in killing. A government that does either is committing an act of war. It is proper for another government to recognize it as such, in self-defense and the defense of its people.

  10. On 9/16/2022 at 6:03 PM, necrovore said:

    I was addressing the idea that "there is no possible reason the FBI would have raided Mar-a-Lago, especially knowing it would have rallied Trump's supporters, unless they knew they were going to find something incriminating Trump," because there are other reasons they could have raided.

    Looks like I found one: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dc-establishment-deeply-concerned-trump-may-have-copies-his-declassified-binder

  11. 1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

    What is it in the New Testament that applauds selfishness in material matters?

    This point of view doesn't come out of the New Testament; it comes out of the Enlightenment.

    My understanding is that the first Puritan colonists almost died when they tried to take religion seriously, and only found success when they discovered productive work, an idea which developed into the "Protestant work ethic."

    John Locke and some other Enlightenment philosophers thought that reasoning, based on reality, would ultimately lead to God -- to their conception of God. They argued that, if God made reality, to study reality was to study God. So they thought that if things could be derived from reason and reality, that was the same as if they came from God, and they thought of individual rights that way (as coming from God because they come from reality and the conditions necessary for human survival). They had a lot of confidence in the idea that they could have both reason and religion, but it turned out to be wrong, making a choice necessary.

    There are still a great many Christians, especially in America, who discard logical consistency out of a desire to have it both ways. There are others who have decided that reason is error-prone, that reality is imperfect, and that both are corrupted by the Devil, so they side with religion (and the Bible) against reality. (Besides, if you can find out about God directly from reality, then "mistakes" in the Bible become evident, and the Bible itself becomes unnecessary, along with Christianity, and many Christians find that unacceptable. They'd rather say it's reality which is "mistaken.")

    Sometimes I think there are two distinct interpretations of Christianity. One says that "Jesus sacrificed himself so you don't have to," that it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the other says, "Jesus sacrificed himself as an example, so you should sacrifice yourself, too." I suspect John Locke (and the whole American system, which is largely based on his thought) would have aligned more with the former than the latter, but the debate seems to rage on to this day. (Or maybe it doesn't; it looks like the "example" side has been mostly winning.)

  12. Knowledge is hierarchical: you have to crawl before you can walk, algebra comes before calculus, and you can't invent the transistor until after you have discovered electricity.

    The hierarchical nature of knowledge would also affect philosophy. Sometimes philosophers have to learn from their predecessors, including from the mistakes of their predecessors.

    Because the human lifespan is limited and the amount of thinking a human can do is limited, there is a limit to how far one human can go intellectually. It's easier to reach any point if, due to the work of previous intellectuals, you get to start out halfway there. (You still have to verify their work, but that is much easier than having to invent it from scratch.)

    Environment and society also make a difference; someone who comes up with a new idea will fare better in a free society than in a dictatorship, for example.

  13. If I had neighbors who were firing rockets into a foreign country, that's an act of war, and I would expect to run the risk of being killed by the foreign country's retaliation, even though I didn't do anything, and even if I ran an orphanage full of children or something.

    I would also expect my own government to protect me (and the children) by either stopping the neighbors and possibly extraditing them, or incarcerating them locally, which might be an option -- or formally attacking the foreign country to prevent them from retaliating. (This latter is unlikely. A government would probably prefer to start a war itself rather than let my neighbors drag it into one.)

    It doesn't make any sense to claim that the other country is "monstrous" in some way for defending itself but that one's own country is not "monstrous" for provoking it by attacking them (or refusing to stop attacks upon them) in the first place.

    The initiation of force is wrong, but retaliation is not.

  14. 1 hour ago, DavidOdden said:

    programs and light bulbs don't have the capacity for self-generated action.

    Maybe I don't know what you mean by "self-generated action" here. There are a lot of phenomena which cannot start themselves but, once started, can go on by themselves. Fire is an example, and fire isn't even alive.

    If you mean "free will," if you mean that a consciousness can choose its next action, then that's more complicated. My own free will is self-evident to me. Other people's free will isn't self-evident per se but it follows logically both from the fact that people speak, write, and act as if they have free will, and also from the fact that I am human and I have it, and other people are human too, so they must have it, too.

    The argument from "all humans have it" doesn't apply to a machine. However, the argument that an entity could speak, write, and act like it has free will, while not having it, does not make sense, because the argument from humanity depends on the argument from words and actions. If nobody's words or actions were consistent with the idea that they had free will, then I'd be justified in concluding that I was the only one who had it. But clearly, people's words and actions do support the idea that they have free will.

    Further, the only way to tell whether free will exists is by inferring it from words and actions.

    Some people say that AIs don't actually have free will and are faking it. Sometimes this can be seen to be true (e.g., if an AI gets stuck in an infinite loop or something). And it's easy to write a simple program that displays "I have free will" on the screen, but that doesn't mean the program has free will.

    Determining whether something has free will requires seeing its words and actions over time, and in a variety of circumstances. It's even more telling if you can ask questions and see how it answers. (That's kind of the idea behind the Turing Test, but the test can be gamed because of its limited scope.)

    Suppose somebody said that some rocks obey the laws of physics, but other rocks only look like they are obeying the laws of physics, and are actually faking it. There is no basis for such a conclusion: it's arbitrary. The same thing would apply when saying that AIs don't have free will but are faking it.

    If you have evidence that a particular AI is faking it, that's fine; bring it forth. But you can't say they're faking it in general, especially without evidence. If you could, then you could also say it about certain kinds of people, which historically has led to atrocities and wars.

  15.  

    Thats fair. However, does that mean that consciousness then could be purely physical? If so what does that mean for volition?

    Volition is also an axiom -- a corollary axiom, rather than a fundamental one, because the idea of "volition" depends on consciousness. It is self-evident, and you also have to use and assert it in any attempt to deny it. You have no choice. :P

    Everything that exists, including consciousness, acts according to its nature. How consciousness gets its nature is an open question -- but, philosophically speaking, it doesn't matter.

    If you learn that a wall is made out of protons and neutrons and electrons, that doesn't make the wall go away. It's still there. You just know more about it. The same sort of thing applies to consciousness. If we learn what consciousness is made of, it is still there, and everything we already know about it is still true.

  16. 2 hours ago, stansfield123 said:

    "God's rules" are the result of men observing reality and reaching conclusions about it. Not in a perfectly organized, 100% logical manner, but the source is exactly the same (reality ... what other source could there be?), and the methodology used is roughly the same.

    If it wasn't, the outcomes wouldn't be the same either. Judging an idea based on the outcomes it produces is the ultimate test of it, after all.

    "Judeo-Christianity" doesn't root itself in reality, it roots itself in divine revelation. It's essentially believing that abstractions come from God, that God handed the correct abstractions to Adam and Eve, and that those ideas have been passed down through the generations ever since.

    Maybe long ago there were a bunch of elite high priests who thought that if they passed off their rational conclusions as divine revelations, and encouraged the little people to obey them blindly without asking pesky questions, then everything would work better. (There are people in Washington DC who think that way today.) However, things do not work better that way: society fares better if everybody knows how to think, just like it fares better if everybody knows how to read. The high priests often end up not being any better than anybody else, and sometimes they are worse (because criminals are attracted to positions of power).

    Divine revelation can succeed through plain Darwinian evolution: if your civilization's divinely revealed ideas just happen to be correct, your civilization will last longer, and be able to spread more, than if they are wrong. However, if you root your ideas in divine revelation, the correctness of those ideas cannot be checked and is just a matter of chance, and bad or mixed ideas can be "enforced" just as easily as good ones. Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's right; the bad ideas may survive as parasites on the good ones, and very old civilizations can still have bad old ideas which cause unnecessary problems, but religious societies will refuse to change bad ideas, even if reality shows them as such, unless a divine revelation comes along that they will accept.

    The idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality has existed in the West in various forms ever since Aristotle. At some level people need it in order to survive, but sometimes it is counted on without ever being formulated as an idea at all. (I suppose in that case it is not deliberate...) When it is formulated, it is apparent that it is not really a religious idea, and in most periods of history it has been unpopular and derided, especially as a means of working out highly abstract ideas (which are the most important). The most common objection seems to be that people are too stupid to figure out reality on their own and therefore should give up the attempt and trust the high priests.

    This is where Objectivism is radical: it takes the idea of deliberately basing conclusions on reality to its logical conclusion.

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