This graph shows support for gay marriage in Estonia by age group and language (blue – Russian; red – Estonian).
The older people lived in one homophobic country.
Amongst younger people, Estonians tuned into Estonian language media, which I imagine is highly Europeanized, or even went straight to the source (English language media). Russians tuned into Russian media, which turned in an anti-LGBT direction in the late 2000s.
People are products of their media environment.
A similar process played out after WW2 in Europe with social and cultural trends in the west becoming synced with American developments while the Iron Curtain acted as a kind of ideological “deep freezer.” This variable development between Estonians and Russians within Estonia is that but in miniature.
I would not say this, because there is another step with questionnaires, which is to ask what it measures.
Questionnaires (although usually a little inaccurate due to question phrasing), are measuring what people think other people think is socially acceptable.
People’s belief about what is socially acceptable in their society, is not what constitutes any important quality of people.
These questions answers are measuring people’s perception of what they think is allowed for them to say (or write in questionnaire envelope). When we watch TV, we are a lot of time trying to see what other people in the country think or enjoy.
We probably only talk seriously to less than one thousand people in our life, mostly not very powerful, so for most people are trying to perceive what is allowed and not allowed is from attitude they see in television or media.
Most people have a mentality about these topics, like they are still in the classroom, on the first day of school. They hear rules from the teachers, and look at other students to see how much space to disobey.
Nowadays, after leaving school, most of our knowledge of opinion of government on any deeper topics, is coming from watching television – actually it’s their most refined communication to citizens of what is expected attitude on these topics.
No doubt their love of miscegenation and mass immigration has also changed with time. The Estonians are just yet another dumb Eastern European nation that become willing cucks for America, they signed their own death sentence because of some old historical issues with Russia, beyond stupidity.
OK, say you are president of a country, how do you stop Western cultural rot, without turning yourself into an Islamic State or North Korea? Keep in mind that a country has to make a living, and still has to trade with the West, something like Tokugawa isolationism mk. 2 simply is not a viable economic policy, and being sanctioned to death like Iran is not a barrel of laughs either.
If you are the President of a country, how do you stop Western cultural rot without turning into an Islamic State or North Korea? Keep in mind you still have to trade with the West. And while censorship of TV is possible how the heck do you censor the internet and do things like say, ban porn?
Why is Hollywood so good at packaging filth in a way that is appealing to the masses?
Some of the biggest trade nations are China and Saudi Arabia, I don’t see them declaring homosexuality as their state religion. Estonia on the other hand embraced the strange idea that to save itself it must destroy itself.
Saudi Arabia is a gas station. And looking at HK, Taiwan, and Japan, you can see China legalizing gay marriage within 10 years if the CCP goes belly up and China democratizes. And I recall Swedes being very anti gay as recently as the late 80s.
It’s much worse than just media exposure. Estonia was probably the most aggressive ex-Soviet country to purge itself from communist elites and to replace them with descendants of exiles from America and Sweden who had left in the 1940s. The country is basically ruled by a small cabal of Ivy League educated Americans and some native born morons who are too afraid to disagree with any of the Ivy League Americans for fear of looking like some sort of an ignorant redneck.
Here’s an example. This is the twitter of the previous President of Estonia, one of the descendants of exiles who was educated in American elite universities to be a democracy promoter:
https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas
He STILL has a picture of shaking hands with John McCain as his profile picture and pinned tweet. It’s nonstop neoconnery about Putler’s hacker divisions, bad orange man Drumpf, evil far right populist surge around the world while good Estonia is eagerly learning how to be a “liberal democracy” blah blah blah. The returning exiles that Estonia imported back to be their new elites are ALL carbon copies of this.
I keep asking Estonians what was the point of escaping Soviet Marxist brainwashing just so that they could invite people who have been brainwashed by American Marxist universities to rule over them but it never gets through. And it’s not like Finland is much different. The West is the definition of good and whatever the West does we must all do so that we get profiled as a Western country and not some Russian bloc country.
If the only choices available are the Hominterm or the Cominterm geriatric society, which would you choose?
‘Democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’, not ‘rule by Hillary Clinton and her deranged cronies’.
If China democratizes, expect something even more reactionary and nationalist instead.
The homintern rulers are not that young, in fact if you look at the Democrat leadership they are more of a gerontocracy than the Soviet Union ever was when it comes to age.
Estonia not just denies citizenship to a large proportion of people, but means there are people without citizenship of any country – an actual population of people without any citizenship of anywhere (so you can talk about double standards of the EU and its supposed human rights).
If you read what they are saying in Russian-speaking forums, they’re often saying people who live in Estonia – whether fairly or not – it is fascist government there.
On the other hand, they are, objectively quite successful economically -, and will probably exceed South-Western European countries in GDP per capita. Also, not all Estonians emigrants going to Western Europe are going to work as prostitutes or fruit collectors – they also have some emigrants getting highest level jobs.
Lol gay marriage is the agenda in Estonia? Yet 6% of Estonia’s population are still stateless aliens, despite being normal citizens living in their own country in 1991, or just being children of those normal citizens. It’s “some people are more equal than others” model of “liberal democracy”.
Are you kidding, look at what GDPR wrought, or the RIAA. Internet gambling in the US was strangled overnight.
Make the porn mongers liable in court, freeze their accounts, seize their assets, parade them and their families on TV, slam them in jail or just grind them through the justice system for a decade or two. Combine with local regulations on possession of porn, “with intent to distribute” if you feel nice about it, etc. Don’t forget to squeeze the financial system, make them pay dearly if they try to ‘launder porn money’. The companies will all quickly introduce region blocking and AML and all that to comply.
Now you have a nice society where porn NASes are only found in the secret possession of a shrinking number of fat basement dwellers. Congratulations.
Often, Hollywood is simply giving the masses the filth that they want. It’s good to have it packaged nicely.
Now Hollywood simply wants its pound of flesh for the service it’s been providing for so long…a quid pro quo of sorts…
Peace.
I don’t buy this argument, the jews, ahem I meant Hollywood, made many movies that pushed for things society did not want. The filth first came from Hollywood that made society accept it.
Gay marriage and the rest is not being implemented because of some groundswell of acceptance from the people but because of behind-the-scenes political operations and centralized control of things like media and the education system (to at least sand down any natural skepsis).
As an example, Sweden recently got a surprising new law, that transsexuals who have given birth now have the right to be called ‘fathers’ of their progeny. I don’t recall this being voted on, or even mentioned, before this victory was announced.
Although I don’t reduce everything to economics as some do, my experience is indeed that American popularity is indeed a large function of its prosperity. America has very good soft power and if nothing else, I’ve known quite a few EE who are immensely frustrated with their salaries and place in life and would gladly embrace any number of American causes if it would help them get a higher standard of living(which they feel society has denied them). Many of them are highly educated(and not just “educated”, we’re talking about doctors and computer engineers here) and so their contributions to the real economy and living standard is outsized to their number.
Nobody stuck a gun to society’s head to watch the gradually increasing filth. Society paid their own money willingly to watch the filth and be led down this road…
Peace.
Such a compelling result. I’d wager that Russians in “Estonia” tend to feel some pressure to be even more Russian than RF Russians, maybe they are stronger on the Homosexual Question than your average bear.
This supports the notion that POZ can be stopped and rolled back. It isn’t some natural result of relaxed Malthusian conditions, it’s driven by media policy. As with fiscal policy, foreign policy or monetary policy, a nation must have a deliberate Media Policy, where do you want to go as a nation? Set policy accordingly.
As for the Estonians, just sad. They’re no different from the Irish, bitching and moaning for decades only to throw it all away shorting after independence. Screw ‘em!
The regularity of that graph is powerful.
If only Russians’ social conservatism translated into more kids.
That is true, the question is to what extent they also internalise those views, the conformism coefficient.
What I see in the graph is that younger Russians in Estonia are in a generally anti-establishment mood. If ‘they’ are for it, then ‘we’ will be against. When social issues also become ‘who-whom‘ you have a prescription for conflict.
What about, what about… If Russians living in Estonia start having more kids on average than Estonians, instead of going to Russia?
China’s situation is very different than the USSR’s in the ’80s, for almost countless reasons. For one thing, the West still seemed like a reasonably attractive model in the ’80s.
Mark my words: gay marriage won’t happen in HK – the CCP has enough influence to prevent it from happening. They didn’t just build a $20 billion, 55km-long bridge to HK to let HK go globohomo.
BTW, China needs to think more strategically about entertainment. For instance, they recently halted further approval of video games, which will probably damage their domestic industry, and thus their ability to export. A lot of the things they discourage from movies, like ghosts, should not be seen as genuine moral concerns. Their TV focuses too much on WW2. I think their storytelling has in general gotten worse since the industry has transitioned away from HK.
Gay marriage can’t happen in China because it’ll lead to hilarious hukou abuse. Glory to the propiska!
This is interesting. I wonder how much of their content – being Chinese-focused – will have a broader appeal.
For instance, Turkey has been producing some interesting historical serials which are being well-received in the broader Muslim world because of shared history, shared religion, interest, etc.
I have been a pretty big fan of classic Japanese film from the 50’s – 60’s. And some of the Japanese animation (stuff like Studio Ghibli) has very broad appeal.
Will China be able to find a world-wide market? Like, do Japanese watch Chinese films (being just a small distance away)? Then again, with such a huge population, do they need to have any concern beyond the local anyway?
Peace.
It’s hard to boycott something in a globalized system. If they lose money in the US, they will make it up abroad. They can do near-simultaneous release to avoid bad word of mouth – it’s not like the old days, where you’d go abroad and there would be films playing that were new a year ago in America.
The enormous quantity of product and the many modes of distribution all go against boycott. They also form an impetus to push the boundaries to help differentiate the product.
So far as I know, they are buying tickets in a large part of the Muslim world, which is unfortunate. Saudi Arabia isn’t really much of a country, but I thought a place like Indonesia would at least try to blunt globohomo.
At the end of the day, the Muslim world has in place mechanisms to stop this kind of thing from happening. We have no open-ended commitment to unlimited freedom of speech so it allows us to get creative.
Now, if the Muslim world throws all of those prophylactic measures off in order to give into our base desires (which is what this kind of stuff appeals to – it really is you fighting your own animal self) and drink the kool-aid…then we have no one to really blame than ourselves.
Also, Indonesia is a very large country with quite disparate parts. For instance, the island of Bali is barely Muslim so they might be allowed different regulations than the islands of Java and Sumatra (especially the very conservative regions like Aceh). It is tough though in our technological day and age to figure these things out, but I believe certain things can (if not be censored altogether) made harder to get into the hands of people (if they really want it, they will get it) – especially kids.
Peace.
When they stop humping censorship, maybe.
The French and American revolutions are are much of the origin of Western ideas of “human rights” and French republicanists considered crushing minority languages in favor of French as a form of progress. Children were separated from their parents through schools and beaten if they spoke some other language in public. The Estonian treatment of its linguistic minority is very good by Western standards; the EU will never have strong advocacy for linguistic minorities because it would mean that France would have to start respecting minority languages and that will never happen.
The world wars were also a culture war of Western state philosophy where the Germans championed belief in ethnic ties and blood while the French and the Americans believed in liberal, civic nationhood of shared institutions and values. To participate in civic institutions and the debate over the values that we are supposed to share, you need to share a language with the state, so it is not only a right of a liberal state but a duty of a liberal state to enforce a single language. In this moral framework that currently rules the West, Estonia as a liberal democracy should enforce its single language for citizens but Russians can appeal to individual rights and keep speaking Russian at home as long as they learn Estonian to participate in the liberal democratic process.
To the West, the moral question that was solved with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 was whether ethnic statehood is legitimate and the answer of the West is “no”. (There was a special exception made for Israel but it seems like it’s running out as the Holocaust card is played out.) The reason Western elites were so shocked by the annexation of Crimea is that while Western elites would expect some Russian peasant to feel an ethnic tie there, they are shocked that Russian elites and the Russian state would share this sentiment which to them is the ultimate taboo and evidence that Russia has now rejected the moral lesson that we were all supposed to learn from the defeat of Adolf Hitler.
Note that I’m not a believer in this Western moral worldview and I’m completely fine with the annexation of Crimea for ethnic motivations (though I suspect Moscow is more concerned with the strategic value) but I’m just explaining why it is that Russia is seen as literally fascist by Western elites and the indoctrinated part of the population. (And by the way I don’t sympathize at all with concerns for supposed ethnic Russian plight in Estonia given that I visit Estonia pretty often, I’ve known many Estonians and Russians from Estonia and I know that this plight is imaginary.)
We are now stuck with the situation that both Russia and the West agree that “fascism” is the ultimate evil but Russia and the West don’t agree what “fascism” is. According to the West, the essence of fascism is believing that statehood has a link to ethnicity so Russian ethnic solidarity across the borders means that not only is fascism is rising among Russians, the Russian state has become fascist. The West has gone so far in its pursuit of its version of “anti-fascism” that demonstrating how much you lack sympathy for your ethnic cousins abroad is a moral virtue in the West now, for example all white English speaking peoples made a moral virtue out of hating white South Africans and siding with the blacks.
Who will win? Well, probably the megaphone. I’ve noticed that Helsinki university now has lots of young Russians (many from Estonia) and Belarusians studying “human rights”, “international law” and such things that get their funding partly from Western NGOs. You can guess what this means. They are there to learn to repeat to the Western media that Russia is “fascist” and a “dictatorship” that needs “democratic values” like gay marriage and anti-fascism in the hope that Western money would help them fund a “color revolution” so that Russia could have “liberal democratic” leaders like themselves. If these people succeed, you, too, will soon be told that to oppose transsexual rights is fascism and that your grandfathers fought for these rights in 1941-1945.
Russia doesn’t seem to have the resources to counter this abroad so the only ways to avoid that will adopting isolationism in the hope that West liberalism crashes or turning towards Asia (and then you have to hope that the liberal West doesn’t manage to turn China).
Yeah, I guess…but then they’ll just enter a fetish niche.
I’m talking about making certain parts of Chinese history appeal to the broader public.
Like I said, I’ve enjoyed plenty of Japanese films (especially about the Samurai era since they cover so many broad topics about honor, loyalty, hope, etc.). The themes of some of Korusawa’s films were adapted into Western cinema like The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. Likewise, he was able to masterfully adapt Shakespeare’s King Lear into the beautifully-made “Ran”.
One of the best films I saw recently was 13 Assassins.
I don’t know how it would be done, but I’m sure some creative Chinese people will be able to. Maybe a serial about the life of a Ming-era extended family disrupted by the creation of the Great Wall since they live along its border? I don’t know. Or maybe even adaptations of other cultural stories, but within Chinese backdrop (like Korusawa did with King Lear and Macbeth*).
As I pointed out a while back, one of the most popular calligraphers in the Muslim world right now is Hajji Noor Deen who has brought the tradition of Chinese-Arabic fusion calligraphy to the broader Muslim world whereas before it was only something isolated to China for hundreds of years:
Peace.
*The ghost scenes in the “Throne of Blood” were done so well, they still give me chills.
For the record – in the second script that he does in that video, the proper translation is not “All thanks belong to Allah”, but rather “I put my reliance upon Allah”.
Fetish niche? How so? Like anime is somewhat nichey? Still influential and profitable. Nothing wrong with exploiting a specific angle, its one of the ways to get experience and build capital and social infrastructure for said industry.
The issue with an active bureaucracy(including one for censorship) is that they have a vested interest in keeping themselves involved, active and necessary. This means that they will go out of their way to find issues with artistic works and ultimately impede in any artistic creation quite a bit more than they need to. Sometimes its understandable, sometimes its not, but its always going to be an issue.
Until that changes, Chinese studios probably will get their most hope from partnerships from less bureaucratically involved countries, e.g. the Japanese writer/director Gen Urobuchi working with some Chinese studios(Shōji Kawamori was also doing something when I last heard). Japanese moviemaking has taken a plunge as well, incidentally; the unified noosphere seems to imply that all of the money in a specific field(unless prevented by logistics) tends toward centralization. For moviemaking and acting talent, this appears to be Hollywood.
Incidentally, this kind of censorship also applies to neoliberalism.txt approved movies. Except instead of a maybe organized bureaucracy, you get the wild mob to commissar everything for offensiveness. And I’m sure they are very woke and aware of their “necessity.”
The results should be entertaining.
OK – if that is what they are doing, then yeah – anything with a government bureaucracy involved will likely churn out nonsense. It is interesting, but I know Iran has produced some films that have won international acclaim (Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi* for instance) and I know they have a censorship process, but I don’t think the government gets involved in the actual production – they just filter the final result. Perhaps something the Chinese may want to adopt…?
That really sucks, I thank all the movies I’ve enjoyed lately have been foreign films from all over the world. Even the martial-arts survival-thriller (guilty pleasures) “The Raid” out of Indonesia was more enjoyable than some of the stuff out of the US:
That makes sense. I would be interested to see a collaboration from the Chinese with international directors/studios from places other than Hollywood; Egypt used to have a very active industry, Iran (as I cited)…
That sucks. Most recent Hollywood movies make me feel like I want my money back – which is why I don’t watch them. I might enjoy a well-done action scene or two from a clip on Youtube (there’s no doubt that Hollywood is heads and tails above practically everyone else when it comes to the “boom, blam” aspect of movies), but that’s about where my interest ends.
Peace.
*Interestingly, Majidi was an adviser on a project for the Chinese that Spielberg quit on:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/film-directors-defend-beijing-roles-105466
AFAIK that’s exactly what China does but its still annoying; as a writer I can tell you that I really would be rather irritated if anyone feels like “expurgating” my paragraphs, most of my words are there for a reason. Censorship of anything but the most informal sort is just toxic to art.
This isn’t me looking from the outside, Zhou Haohui, one of the best modern writers in Chinese noted this as well. Hao Zhou, who basically single-handed made the really rather beautiful Datong/Chinese Mayor documentary also had his time and work wasted by an overzealous bureaucracy.
I assumed by “humping censorship” you meant that once they allow sex scenes in Chinese movies, it would have broader appeal. And I meant basically that it will be like the humping in Hollywood movies, just with Asian actors (thus the “fetish niche”)…maybe I misunderstood your original comment.
I can see this…which is why I enjoy the classics (the black and white ones are some of the best)…even the very unique series like the blind swordsman “Zato-Ichi” (who else but the Japanese could come up with a successful “blind sword-master” protagonist?).
True – which is why they lose people like me (and possibly you) – but they probably don’t care as long as they can convince my kids…
Peace.
I meant humping in a more metaphoric way.
Ah OK.
I can certainly understand this perspective.
I think this is the point where (at least myself) would hate an overzealous bureaucracy, but I personally wouldn’t mind some sort of filter along the lines of (though maybe not exactly like) the Hays Office. I know most here likely don’t want something like that back.
Peace.
At least with video games, they’re meaningfully hurting themselves. Its still pretty converged, but quality does seem to be plummeting in Western studios, with triple A studios not doing well at all.
Russia?Singapore? are two obvious examples of countries that can do so. Obvious still some huge bad influences but Russia mainly rejects and accepts the parts of western culture that it wants to.
(And by the way I don’t sympathize at all with concerns for supposed ethnic Russian plight in Estonia given that I visit Estonia pretty often, I’ve known many Estonians and Russians from Estonia and I know that this plight is imaginary.)
You might want to expand on that, as from our Russian commenters here I have received the distinct impression that Russians there (and in Latvia as well) are being treated as 2nd-class citizens, if that.
Soviet Union tried hard to stop Western media influence. Travel to the West was very limited, and they had to deal only with typewriters, bootleg audio and later video tapes, Western radio (and TV in the Baltics).
No computers, no internet, no satellite TV, no tiny flash cards and thumb drives that can hold gigabytes of data.
Nevertheless, they completely failed.
No one beleived the official propaganda, everyone believed the Western one, and all that came from the West was worshipped like holy relics. And KGB were skilled professionals, do you think you will fare better?
Those aren’t the only choices, thankfully, though it’s an interesting Gedankenexperiment.
The choice that the Europeans have been making recently, for example, is to submit to Islam. So in almost all of northern, western, and central Europe, the ascendant Muslim colonizers will presumably impose harsh restrictions on pro-homosexual propaganda, a prohibition on public displays of homosexuality and other perversion (including homosexual-“couple” advertisements, and “gay pride” parades), and much more.
Too bad there don’t seem to enough non-Muslims in Europe with the common sense, moral scruples, and balls to do this. It shouldn’t be “necessary” to go Islamic to reclaim the public square for families and normal people, and enforce our former public-decency standards.
Because the Europeans are going to get a lot more than the above measures. Their new rulers could well criminalize even private perversion, as well as production/publication/posting/use of adult pornography, and more.
Modern Chinese system lacks any legitimacy other than growth and prosperity. This is good till the government delivers, but one day the crash will come, and then what?
If you look only at last century of China, you see the wildest swings – from feudal empire to pure anarcho-libertarianism (search for “Age of Warlords”) then to Maoism and then to technocratic capitalism with communist face.
What will come next? Western style democracy? Hard core nationalist fascism? Maoism 2.0? Second coming of elder brother of Jesus Christ?
No one can imagine, least of all the Chinese government, and this is why they are worried. The “social credit” and crackdown on Uyghurs are symbols of weakness, not strength.
This is the usual CIA-driven garbage expected of Karlin. Yes Russians turn to Russian media, the best in the world….but it isn’t “anti-LGBT” just pro-common sense and intellectualism and morals. There are numerous camp/probable homosexual celebrity personalities in Russia such as Kirkorov. In a country that reveres the arts and high culture there are many effeminate types in the public arena
There wasn’t even a ‘T” for any LGBT direction in the west, as late as 5 years ago
What if the Balts gave the Russians full citizenship and passports? How many would follow the example of native Balts and leave for London instead of sitting in some rundown Soviet Baltic towns? Face it, the Baltic treatment of Russian speakers was one of the biggest own goals in modern history 😉
Well they would be as succesful as the other Muslim countries 🙂
https://tribune.com.pk/story/823696/pakistan-tops-list-of-most-porn-searching-countries-google
Pakistan tops list of most porn-searching countries
https://www.salon.com/2015/01/15/why_porn_is_exploding_in_the_middle_east_partner/
Why porn is exploding in the Middle East
https://fightthenewdrug.org/sex-stats-who-are-the-biggest-consumers-of-internet-porn/
Who are the biggest consumers of internet porn?
Certainly true here in California, where outgoing Governor Jerry Brown is over eighty years old. Same for ancient incumbent US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is poised to win an absurd fifth six-year term over Mexican supremacist Kevin de Leon tomorrow (wow, what a choice – I’m voting De Leon just to vote against the incumbent scum).
But I think we’ll see a crop of federal and state officeholders here VERY soon who are somewhat younger and much more Mexican, less white. Non-ancient Mexican Ed Hernandez is going to win the Lieutenant Governorship tomorrow, incumbent Mexican Alex Padilla will be re-elected Secretary of State, and appointed incumbent Mexican Xavier Becerra will be elected to a full term as Attorney General. Ricardo Lara has a chance at the Insurance Commissioner spot against former Ins Commissioner Steve Poizner.
Meanwhile, non-ancient Asians will be taking or keeping two major statewide CA offices tomorrow: Fiona Ma will handily win the open Treasurer seat, and incumbent Controller Betty Yee will be easily re-elected.
So anti-white bigots are in their glory here. Gavin Newsome will be the only statewide white non-Jewish officeholder. And we can expect a Mexican governor after him, perhaps new Lt. Gov. Ed Hernandez.
That’s pretty fantastical.
The CCP has removed any possible competition, so it really has no threat from replacement and population support is widespread(confirmed even by Western sources). Crackdowns on separatists and efforts to deal with low societal trust are efforts at improvement. Everyone in China knows that collapse of the CCP will result in chaos, and while many may dislike the Party, no one wants a return to that.
Understood.
But public advertisements with homosexual “couples” or “families”, and public displays of affection by homosexuals, need to be prohibited, and they can be where the popular will exists. It will exist, I’d bet, in much of Europe, and in a much lesser area of the USA, not too long from now.
As a writer, you should be familiar with the concept of editors. Maybe you’re the self-published kind of “writer”?
Then you tighten the screws, rally around the flag, fight the bad influence of the saboteurs and looters, work for the glory of the nation and the family.
Why am I spelling out gradeschool obvious stuff here?
Editors are obviously quite different from government censors. In some ways, they’re almost co-writers although their extensive involvement with writing is something more modern. As a general rule, editors aren’t going to expurgate your work; they will comment and write in the margins, but allow you to make the final edits yourself.
The authority is also quite different; you can ignore your editor at the end of the day on any specific point but it isn’t that way with censors.
The assumption that all writers use editors is exaggerated. Dan Abnett of Black Library fame has quite a few books without editors, sometimes to very obvious grief, but its hardly unheard of.
In Russia, while a different trend
https://i.redd.it/3j1eborjr3v11.jpg
They are, but I suppose the consolation prize is that they get an EU passport and right to work in any member state as well entitlement to Russian citizenship.
Although porn obviously unpleasant at a deeper level, and public information about negative psychological effects should be more widely distributed – people who want to ban or control what people can see on internet are projecting mankind as kind of weak, mindless children, just as if you would have to control how much sugar people can eat, or what time they brush their teeth and go to bed at night.
In the macro view, societies where these rules and decisions are outsourced to external authorities, are producing weaker and more childish adults, who can rapidly disintegrate when encountering things they had been protected from, like American Indians drinking alcohol for the first time.
Whole distinction of being adult is to control yourself, manage what you consider pleasant/unpleasant, manage addictive things into a productive way, and not outsourcing this task to a substitute parent. Someone who cannot do this is still a child mentally, who needs parents to guide them. Maybe society could distribute symbolic adult status as a distinction only to be people who demonstrate control of themselves.
For example, Karlin’s blog is more addictive than any internet porn. But we are all adults here, who should have developed executive function. Your executive function could assess this place is a good way of converting procrastination into mental exercise, English writing practice, etc, and discover there are worse addictions.
Process of developing executive function, and making assessments like this about whether something is good or bad for you, is evolution of man from an animal. If people cannot do this, then perhaps they should lose their symbolic status as adults.
As for people who find something attractive about innocence of groups like Muslims, Amish, Haredi Jews, who are living protected their entire life from negative products of modern society? There is some truth to this attraction, as their simple life reminds us of earlier stages of history. But sexual abuse is actually quite high in these protected communities, and people protected in this way are quite useless and weak if removed from their authority figures.
Wow this comment was very good. I wonder if I can get in Harvard writing essays like this 🙂
But that’s not what’s proposed here (at least not by people like me). I’m saying a society where a great majority of people has decided to ban these things and elect leaders to draft the regulations to do so are in no way similar to what you are stating (an external authority figure). Rather the figures (drafting these restrictions) are themselves the representatives of the people, merely acting as proxies for what the people want – restrictions on what they deem harmful for society.
I live in many cities around the US – I can’t think of one where there wasn’t a rule that you could NOT bring alcohol onto public parks (we’re not talking about selling – merely possession). Well, one could argue; people are adults – can’t they figure out that it is a bad idea to have alcohol around children and that alcohol might eventually lead to a fight or something else? But overwhelmingly people have chosen to hire local legislators and civil servants that put these kinds of restrictions in place because they actually don’t trust the voluntary inhibitions of certain adults – not all adults, just the ones that don’t have their own developed self-control – due to the potential harm it brings to society.
Are you against laws being drafted through democratic means? Why?
Peace.
What is good that the purported “innocence of groups like […] Haredi Jews” is being talked about and covered to some extent by media.
25% To 30% Of Israeli Prostitutes’ Customers Are Haredi, Activists Say
https://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2011/10/25-to-30-of-israeli-prostitutes-customers-are-haredi-activist-says-789.html
Hasidic Pilgrims and Ukrainian Sex Workers: Prayer and Pleasure in Uman
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-prayer-and-pleasure-in-uman-1.5375280
The haredin (orthodox Jews) who crowd the Tel Aviv brothels
http://adishakti.org/_/haredin_(orthodox_Jews)_who_crowd_brothels.htm
Sex slur enrages Russian Jews
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/sex-slur-enrages-russian-jews-1602284.html
“The prostitutes say their main clients are ultra-orthodox Jews and Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank. In interviews with anthropologists they said they preferred Israeli Arabs, whom they referred to as “white Arabs”, to the ultra-orthodox – known as haredim, which means God-fearing – or West Bank Palestinians. Russian Jewish immigrants who enter prostitution usually do so as call girls, who are reputedly organised by the Georgian mafia.”
Exactly – Haredi Jews have semi-arranged marriage as a virgin, with someone who is probably their second-cousin, live in little protected life with 8 children and no job, and completely separate from outside community, and not allowed to sit next to, look or touch other women. It’s like American Indians encountering alcohol for the first time. (Since their wives work – maybe they even pay for prostitutes with their wives’ money).
I discussed this topic with Talha last month.
In Israel, this year they will criminalize customers of prostitution. They had also tried to block default viewing of pornography by parliament.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/porn-sites-blocked-adult-websites-israel-law-bill-ban-opt-in-out-a7389271.html
Gambling is also illegal in Israel.
All policies you would already expect, in a stupid, populist, Middle Eastern country.
On the other hand, cannabis is being decriminalized in Israel, and maybe this will result in some shift in the future: Netherlands is now allowing online gambling after some years of liberal policy in all the other areas.
I wonder about future of Israel – if it will culturally absorb into the Middle East, or can retain some deeper, political philosophy of the West. Currently they are travelling in two different directions at the same time. In economic areas, they are moving towards a Western model, while in social areas they are becoming more Middle Eastern.
Government is an external authority figure, regardless if its power is from a hereditary ruling family, or from voting your candidate into White House or Kremlin.
Question we should outsource adult decisions – whether to visit porn website, whether to say rude comments about some group of people on the internet, whether to pour vodka in your beer and drink coca cola with sugar every day, just because the government think – often correctly – it is a bad decision?
Some people will take the bad decisions, and some people not. Some will take a bad decision and learn from it, and other people not. Stronger people can often develop from having access to bad decisions, and not taking them, or from learning from them. Many of us have learned alcohol is bad when vomiting into the toilet bowl, and it helps you grow up.
So if you repair your own car, this is a problem, as you can damage lives of other people (who are not responsible). And if you want to go fishing in a polluted river – then the government has an obligation to warn you there is pollution in the river. `But if this information is available to you, and you still want to go fishing? That is your decision as an adult. Yes you can eat polluted fish and maybe learn from it, maybe die – the universe gave you free-will.
I spent a couple of days in Estonia so, naturally, I’m an expert. Some observations.
At the same museum there was an OT exhibit on Ingrid Bergman. One of the displays said that her infamous affair with a married man led to a moralistic backlash against her in the US because people there more sexually uptight than in Bergman’s native and, I guess, more sophisticated Europe. I found it noteworthy that a museum mostly dedicated to Estonia’s bad experience under communist Soviet occupation used the same snide language one would expect from a Western leftist.
A local guide on a tour of Tallinn told us – mostly Western Europeans – with great enthusiasm that their PM, or ex-PM now, named his daughter after some pop singer called Rihanna. You’d think a small nation with their history would be more defensive about preserving their own culture. Not a good sign.
Estonians really want you to know that they are very advanced. They have e-citizenship and online voting. People don’t seem to carry cash, paying for everything using their phones. I’m probably a minority here but when people drop previous ways of doing things so quickly I think it’s a sign that they are very conformist (natural cucks) with a desire to escape themselves and their past.
My outside perception is that Lithuanians are the most naturally conservative of the three Baltic states, Estonians the most liberal.
But if you try to feed fish to your friends without telling them its polluted, or sell your fish in a market to innocent, unaware customers – this is where government should come and punish you as much as they like, hopefully preventatively. Because now you damage other people without their responsibility.
Democracy has never yet meant rule by the people. What on earth makes you think China would be different? In China it would end up being rule by a pro-American pro-homosexual pro-feminist pro-diversity elite, just as it’s been everywhere else.
If China democratizes it will go down the toilet the way every other “democracy” has gone. Democracy is poison.
What you need is the political will. Censoring the internet would present no difficulties at all to a government that actually wanted to do such a thing. Banning porn would present no difficulties at all to a government that actually wanted to do such a thing.
You’d have to ban all American movies and TV programs. In fact you’d have to ban all American popular culture. And ban social media.
Of course the U.S. would then impose sanctions. That’s no problem really. It would encourage the country to be more self-sufficient. There’d be a drop in material prosperity, which would be a very good thing.
Of course if sanctions don’t work the U.S. would then try to overthrow your government. So you really need to have nukes. Iran is getting sanctioned because Iran foolishly has not yet developed nukes.
It goes without saying that the most important step in preventing western cultural rot is to crush any manifestation of democracy.
I don’t think that’s the case. In the period from 1934 until the end of the 50s Hollywood had bowed to pressure from groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency and had stopped producing filth. And the period from 1934 to the early 50s was the most prosperous period in Hollywood history. Hollywood made decent movies and the public loved them.
The decision in the 60s to start producing filth again was made by Hollywood without consulting the public.
Mass media does not give people what they want. It gives people what they are told they want.
I guess it depends on whether you think society is composed of rational adults capable of taking responsibility for their own actions, in which case you’re correct, or whether (like me) you view society as made up of retarded children who cannot be trusted to blow their own noses without supervision.
If small children are given access to unlimited supplies of chocolate and ice cream they will consume so much that they make themselves sick. Adults are pretty much the same, but with adults it’s booze, drugs and porn.
It’s interesting that as long as religion still had some hold over their society Americans seemed to be able to control their appetite for filth and degradation. Once Christianity collapsed they simply indulged themselves.
This sounds cynical, so I add my more sentimental view.
If someone can damage another person intentionally or unintentionally, without another person’s responsibility, this is where we all know is evil, and which society has obligation to prevent or punish (with all violent power we give to governments to restore order).
On the other hand, our free choice about what we do, is one of our most important things, and we all know this from childhood and experience every day. It’s why prison, which even then only regulates part of life, is a punishment. And, if you have a cat – you can see how important free-choice is even for primitive, but noble independence which is the characteristic of cat’s lives.
People take good and bad decisions about themselves, about what they eat, drink,, what time they go to bed, if they listen to Bach or Kanye, vist church, visit porn site or Karlin’s blog. If you take the bad decisions about yourself, reality will punish you without any need from society – it’s precisely how we know, in some more objective way than society’s prejudices, these are actually bad decisions. And having access to good and bad decisions, and sometimes learning from bad decision, is how people become adults, stronger, more conscious, rather than being weak children.
Society/government has role in people’s self-decisions, which is to provide maximum available, objective, information currently known about consequences of decisions. (And society has role, to educate children to prepare them for future independence, and access to maximum knowledge and skills for learning themselves). Cigarettes should have a warning about their correlation with cancer rates, and if people smoke them where it can damage other people’s lungs which do not have responsibly, this is a crime. But if person knows a risk, makes their own calculation, and smokes still where other’s cannot breath smoke?
Yes, yes, everyone should drink from the same well of information so we will have the same memeplex for the entire world and no one will be able to escape to make different conclusions.
All people should be wise, shouldn’t they?
I am in favor of delegalization of (1) gambling and (2) prostitution.
With all due respect, Confucianism served as a pretty decent memeplex for the Sinosphere, well at least you have to concede that it is better than Brokeback Mountain or the Communist Manifesto.
I’m not the best in tech, but how can you censor the internet? Especially if people start using VPNs? Just seems impossible to say, ban porn or internet gambling since the internet does not have a single off switch.
Its not that hard.
The users are using the same engines as the enforcers, after all. So if I wanted to ban porn, for example, I’d just search using keywords the same as any user would and you can find that really easily through simple logging.
Then you would delist the sites from the search engine if the search authority(such as google) is friendly, remove their hosting providers, or if you really wanted to be hardcore, simply outright launch attacks on the website(traditionally denial of service). In our scenario, since they are illegal, you’d be allowed to also compromise and “zombify” the website as the FBI has done before and use it to identify all entrants of the website. VPN is decent but not perfect against government tools.
It wouldn’t be too possible to eliminate anything completely but if you deny access to 90% of users, its effectively the same. Delisting from common search engines alone is probably enough.
Neocons love, love, LOVE Estonia. More than any other place on Earth. I’ve been reading their love letters to Estonia for two decades; they sound like something teenage girls would write about Jonas Brothers.
So I won’t be surprised if Estonians love neocons back.
opposition to gay marriage corelates with low iq.
[Russian media, which turned in an anti-LGBT direction in the late 2000s]
Turned?! Nothing turned.
The Passion was enormously profitable, but Hollywood wouldn’t ever produce it.
Just be certain to make explicit reference to your “holocaust grandma” (and how it’s profoundly affected your life purpose blah blah).
I don’t think we are that far apart in our opinion here, D4D…
Remember what I mentioned in one of my posts regarding the Hays Office:
“The code was supplanted in 1966 by a voluntary rating system.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hays-Office
I can certainly see your point here. My point was that inside all of us is a potential libertine. They simply try to appeal to and manipulate our baser desires.
Peace.
Why call the Philippines a banana republic? GDP growth is actually very good at past 6 percent for the past few years, and it gets a lot of dollars from remittances and BPO revenues, I mean its human capital should be the same as Indonesia or Paraguay/Ecuador, and I do not see people here calling Indonesia a Banana Republic.
What about the much practised man love Thursdays in Muslim countries roflmao. Maybe taking the advice of loving your fellow man a bit too much to heart?
Good luck getting rid of the oldest profession.
No, non-conformism correlates to low IQ. If your ruling elite decided to teach you a lesson and forced you all to eat literal cow manure for breakfast, the “high IQ” individuals would be the first for a second helping.
Yes in principle and in practice. In most things in life Führerprinzip actually applies, you don’t have doctors asking their patients and nurses to vote on a diagnosis. You don’t have the head chef asking his staff to vote on what meals should be cooked. Corporations certainly do not have a one man one vote system with their shareholders.Do you think people like Zuckerberg or Soros sincerly care about what their workers think?
“Democracy” practically means to having your state run by an unaccountable elite that pay off politicians and control the mass media, which means increasingly more and more nations being run by the international jew. At least in a dictatorship people know who really is in charge.
The Philippines has been a terrible economic laggard. When the ‘tiger cub’ economies of Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia were soaring, the Phlips was stuck in a rut. It seems to have finally turned the corner in the last decade or so, and I hope the trend continues.
Opposition to gay marriage correlates with common sense, more precisely.
Your comment incidentally also shows why gay marriage never has had, nor ever will have, popular support and why, after a dozen or more failures in the voting booth, it had to be forced into existence by non-democratic means. (Because 90% or more of the population does not have high IQ, since you ask.)
Nah.
Is it true that those who are disgusted by homosexuality are closet homosexuals themselves? I saw in a survey that more than half of Japanese are in favor of gay marriage, so there you go. And civil partnerships are a gateway drug to gay marriage legalization.
I don’t know if that’s true. Looking at the graph above for Estonia only, if voting was restricted to the 18-only set, it would pass above the 50% watermark in support for gay marriage. Its obviously become a popular opinion there among the youth for whatever reason.
Mr. Karlin indicates that this is straightly due to societal promotions of values either pro or against LGBT proliferation/acceptance, which I think is true. Most people just agree with whatever that’s popular, and I think it wouldn’t be too hard to find a biological tendency for familiarity bias especially in things that usually don’t affect a person directly in life. E.g. is yellow or white cheddar better for mac and cheese? For most, that’ll be a meaningless question, and they would just follow whatever elite opinion has been set for that.
No, I don’t think so(although IIRC there is some evidence for that for extreme homophobes). Disgust to homosexuality is to a significant extent instinctual consistent with the documented Knobe Effect.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20576388
Ultimately I agree with AK that its in this case, its mostly just an artifact of elite opinion, which everywhere is heavily shaped by the American consensus. Of course, it should be noted that active opposition has material costs, if an university professor expressed anti-LGBT views in Japan, he could probably forget about ever getting speaking engagements in the West.
It’s true. Also if you have a phobia of spiders, you secretly want to fuck them.
Freud explains that this is because your mother actually was a spider and you wanted to have spider-sex with your father.
This is what I’m getting at. When there was semblance of religion, there could be more of a consensus in society as to what constitutes moral right or wrong and how to go about restricting or promoting certain values and institutions.
My personal take is that you can’t really try a top-down approach. Like when they tried during Prohibition. If you have 80-90% of the people that don’t believe in the moral impetus behind the law and are going to violate it – you are simply going to bring harm to society. If however, those that espouse the law are in the vast majority then you can reasonably restrict would-be violators. So a lot of spiritual ground work needs to be done before things can get back on track…
Peace.
Though I don’t doubt some level of sodomy is present in every Muslim country (like other sins such as adultery, imbibing alcohol, etc.) – a couple of points:
1) I’ve traveled through Muslim countries and know plenty of Muslims that have spent time there if not lived there for the majority of their lives. I have never heard of the institution of “Man Love Thursdays” being practiced with respect to Muslim countries so if you have some evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
2) Assuming it is present, is this thing advertised publicly and openly? You have to understand they way Islamic societies set them selves up; they will restrict things like people having gay pride parades, opening up gay dance clubs or cross-dressing publicly, but will pay zero attention to some guy having incestuous gay sex with his brother or uncle (or both) in his house. One action is between him and God and the other action involves society by virtue of him bringing it into the public.
Peace.
I agree with Karlin in this case. Presumably they do so from a gushing treatment by mass media and the education system, and perhaps with a bit of the whip when contrary viewpoints are shown. What’s a naïf supposed to think? If so, I note, not really by democratic means.
Google fu?
I did – the only thing I see is that it is a euphemism for Bacha Bazi which is: 1) specific to Afghanistan Pashtun culture (hardly ubiquitous across the Muslim world) and 2) something that the US invasion brought back to life after Taliban had almost completely eradicated it by punishment of death.
Peace.
Disgust for homosexuality is certainly socially conditioned, as witnessed by the many societies which indulged in it so lavishly despite having easy access to women, like ancient Greece.
I grew up in a very conservative religious household and in my late teens I felt a quite genuine disgust at homosexuality. As I became more intelligent and mature, this disgust naturally vanished, and today I could care less.
In Victorian England, people found heterosexual sex quite literally disgusting and shameful because they were socially conditioned to do so. And yet an extremely prolific underground porn industry flourished, suggesting there is certainly a link between suppressing sexuality openly and an intense secret fascination with the subject.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that someone disgusted by homosexuality is secretly gay – but a society that suppresses homosexuality is probably threatened by sexuality in general and I would expect it to have a harsh attitude towards heterosexual sex as well, which we see is the case.
People who wish to dominate nature are generally very threatened by sexuality in general – and that’s why all the Abrahamic religions make such a fuss about sex in general, because they view nature as hostile and something to control.
In Asia all of this is just a non issue. Sexual morality is merely for public decorum and social order, but is not taken seriously as “divine laws” or something to be “disgusted”by. You can have as many mistresses as you want and visit prostitutes daily and no one cares so long as you don’t publicly parade this and keep up the facade of a normal family. Transvestites are an accepted and traditional part of life and highly visible – especially in Thailand – and no one freaks out about this or think a it spells the imminent demise of the family like we do in the West.
Talhas description of the Muslim approach is somewhat similar and Islam has traditionally been more accepting of sex in some ways, as we see with polygamy, harems, and heavenly virgins, but in other ways obviously has the classic Abrahamic hang-ups as we see with things like the hijab and stoning of gays.
The sander approach is probably the Asian public/private approach.
As with everything, we in the West are extremists who don’t know how to integrate the various sides of life.
We are either Puritans and prudes or obsessed with sex and put naked girls on all our billboards. We either find transvestites completely repellent and unacceptable or we promote them frantically as the new normal that is superior to normal sexuality. Gay sex is either completely suppressed or likewise celebrated as superior to family.
As always, the land of extreme distinctions, unintegrated polarities, and divisions.
You know that there are one million child sex workers in Thailand right? Are you typing this from some whorehouse in Bangkok?
Keep in mind – the punishment is flexible (at least according to the Hanafis and does not necessitate death) and that specific punishment (of death – by stoning or otherwise) has to be earned; (as Prof. Jonathan AC Brown pointed out) you have to sodomize someone in such a public way that four people witness penetration (not some guy on top of another, but anal penetration)…which is a really, really stupid thing to do in a Muslim society.
Again, penetrate all you want and with any object on hand…just do it in your own house.
Peace.
I appreciate that flexibility and I think that’s a very civilized approach actually. The concern in Islam seems to be about public decorum and social order as well, or at least substantially.
Lol I think I was thinking of the Taliban or Isis 🙂 But that’s not typical.
I appreciate that a society may have an interest in promoting family norms and the like, but as with all things, I favor a light touch.
Another loser Western chauvinist who can’t take any criticism or bear to hear other cultures praised…
I bet you’ll marry an Asian bar girl in the end and become a WN “thought leader” 🙂
Of course, but some forms have more buy-in from the populace than other forms – unless you are a hardcore libertarian, of course.
As far as your other comments along these lines, there is much to agree with since I also don’t want the government babysitting people regarding how much red meat or soda they consume. And I would not propose to force rules on a society publicly that doesn’t overwhelmingly already believe in those rules privately. That is why Prohibition failed so miserably in the US – most of the people enforcing the law didn’t even believe in it. One has to put in the hard effort to lay the moral groundwork first among society – otherwise one is putting the cart before the horse.
Similarly, I would make exceptions for people who belong to a different moral framework than myself – which is why I would totally support prohibition on a Muslims population while making exemptions for non-Muslim minorities. Why? Because their own moral framework does not prohibit it. If Yazidis want to make porn about themselves and distribute it among themselves – that’s up to them, or if they want to stream on-demand porn into their houses – their religion, their people, their future. I would really only be concerned in stopping it from getting into Muslim houses and turning men into monkeys like it is doing across the Muslim world. And even though a Muslim man might be watching it, you cutting it him off from it would not be violating his own code of morality because he acknowledges it is wrong, but just has a weakness.
And there is of course shared morality and restrictions; like the parks prohibiting alcohol that I mentioned which seems fairly universal.
How does one set up such a system that can take these nuances into account and in our current technological age? I’m not sure.
Peace.
Yeah – you really have to be asking for it to get killed for gay sex according to the classical Islamic law. Otherwise things like men kissing in public, or cross-dressing or something can be restricted by other means. If you go to the Muslim world, it is totally normal in certain places for men to walk together somewhere holding hands in public and it is as innocent as when I hold my son’s hand when leading him across the street.
Gay or homosexual was simply never defined as an “identity”. The only thing of concern was what acts you are committing publicly. What you do in your own home is still a sin, but between you and God. Sodomy itself is a sin (even between men and women), thus a perfectly normal looking Muslim married couple could be committing enormities on a daily basis in he privacy of their own bedroom – again, between them and God.
What is interesting is that there are rulings in classical manuals about men that have sexual feelings towards other men leading prayers and the validity of praying behind them. Why? Because everyone has their proclivities and their own weaknesses (for some it’s alcohol, some gambling, etc.) – that is part of the customized test everyone gets called life.
But again, try to bring a Pride parade to the streets of Istanbul and…
https://media3.s-nbcnews.com/i/newscms/2017_25/2051571/ss-170625-istanbul-pride-march-banned-07_9be62921532e80c02758c26d087e9cd2.jpg
Peace.
Sigh…sending young athletic men in uniform to break up a gay pride parade – Turkey is just rubbing salt in these guys’ wounds isn’t it?
Ke(k)bab…
http://pepethefrog.ucoz.com/_nw/4/36444022.png
I think that’s a very sane and balanced approach that makes clear (to me) Islam’s half-way position between East and West. This kind of sane flexibility, attempt to balance inner vs outer, public vs private, rather than establish one state as final seems fundamentally Eastern to me and unfortunately isnt something that can be implemented in the West – instead we must limp along in our unstable and dysfunctional way from extreme to extreme.
The problem is that implicit Western metaphysics rejects balance or harmonizing of opposites on principle. Instead it posits that one state is the most desirable and we are all tending toward, and then proceeds to duke it out as to which state is the best one.
This is implicit in all the arc of history stuff and theories of progress – it is an arrow pointing in one direction.
So that eitherhomosexuality is elevated as normative or heterosexuality is – and the wrong side is then crushed and suppressed. Likewise either whites are on top or minorities are – and the wrong side is then persecuted.
Operating from within the premises of Western culture, there was no chance that “social justice” would lead to anything other than minorities being the “new whites” (normative, on top, etc) rather than any genuine social harmony or fairness (balance).
It is implicit in the whole apocalyptic good vs bad fight mythology – just fill in the blanks. But there is never a recognition that good and bad are relative, coexist, and depend on each other. If we had that idea than something approaching social justice might actually be achievable, and likewise tolerance of gays and trans people without needing to elevate them to the new normal to replace the old one.
What sort of loser would be so unenlightened as to think that child prostitution is evil?
Actually for a moment I thought they were the gay pride parade! 🙂
Just to clarify this, this doesn’t necessarily mean the equality of each state in whatever political economy we establish, just the harmonious interdependence (we don’t think history is leading towards the complete obliteration of the “wrong” side even if one side is on top).
For instance, it may be perfectly normal and healthy for a white dominant country to marginalize Jews and minorities to some extent, and vice versa, but the millenarian search for complete racial purity, or extermination, or outright persecution, with the aim of one side completely obliterating the other or at least crushing it or subjugation it with pitiless harshness seems to be the millenarian disease the West has been suffering from for some time and accounts for the dysfunctional lurch from one extreme to the other that characterizes our politics.
But then from the pov of a larger political economy, that of the the whole globe, if the East strives for a healthy harmonizing of opposites there would have to be somewhere that developed dysfunctional extreme one-sidedness to the maximum, which means there is no reason the West should change and that seen from the whole disease and health may be interdependent, which leads ultimately to the mystic vision that that there is a higher harmony operating in the world and everything is perfect as is.
So – the West will continue to lurch from extreme to extreme and engage in apocalyptic battles between good and evil with the blanks periodically being filled with different protagonists – and this is well and good from the standpoint of a higher economy.
Is sexual orientation basically a spectrum? Rather than an on/off? Is being gay sort of like alcoholism or porn addiction, which can be treated? Can sexual orientation be modified, is gayness caused by a germ, which would explain why children turn gay after being molested?
I read in an article that gay and bi men are 20 tines more likely to be child molesters than straight men.
Lol, I am gradually evolving to a viewpoint from which there is literally nothing to say since nothing needs to change, unless it is to convey that message.
I understand the old Eastern sense that Westerners talk too much – we do!
There is nothing really at stake.
AK, love posts like this, please keep them up.
iSteve used to do more HBD data posts than he does these days. Fill the gap!
I hope you arrive at the viewpoint that you need to say nothing as soon as possible
Some more than others
West is not consistent when it comes to ethnic rights (as you claim). Yes, it is the ruling public face of the Western liberalism to denounce any ethnic group rights. But West has a hierarchy: special people are on the top, below are assorted people of colour and non-Christian religions, Anglos, then down to main Western nations like French/German, below are smaller European ethnic groups, even lower are any potential allies of Russia, and at the very bottom the Russians themselves.
This is the ethnic hierarchy and it is also reflected in culture, movies, etc… Sexually identified groups are exempted, so e.g. a trans from a lower ethnic group is elevated above his/her/it standing, often all he way to the top today (but that might not last).
West has sided with the higher ranking ethnic groups consistently, from the Balkans to Middle East to Russia borders, it has been very consistent. To say that there is no ethnic component to Western strategy is simply not true when you look at what they do (not at their vacuous PR statements).
Since this is unlikely to change, the odds of convincing lower ranking groups to support this hierarchy in the long run are low. People put up with a lot, but they do know when somebody just doesn’t like them. That’s why the latter day escalations and hysteria from the Western elites, they sense that it is ending.
Its true I do talk too much. I think I had to talk myself to the point where I saw the futility of talking.
I guess I’ll still talk, but just for the fun of it.
I have frequently made the point that it is absolutely false that the West is racially egalitarian and that this notion, perhaps derived from Christianity, is at the root of the problem.
The idea that the West is ‘pathologically altruistic’, etc, because Hajnal Line, and pathologically fair and honest etc etc…
Complete misunderstanding of the situation…
The correct term to describe the West is clearly ‘self-hating‘ which is quite a different thing from pathological altruism or fairness…
There is a clear racial hierarchy – it is just inverted…
The West oscillates between hating itself or hating others – but it cannot live without a devil to hate, there must be some evil force, usually concentrated in a race or nation, that needs to be defeated if utopia is to be ushered in.
develop unpozzed alternative media, including social media starting with:
1) a local version of facebook, twitter etc – a lot of social media revolves around family connections which would be naturally inward looking if you could separate it from the poz
it would need to allows robust levels of free speech so SJW ideas can’t become a monopoly of what kids hear growing up.
2) unpozzed children’s entertainment – it might be too hard to prevent teens exploring but you can give little kids a solid foundation. find out what parts of western media the kids are drawn to (Dr Who? Harry Potter? Disney?) and then make an unpozzed version.
#
this would only slow the poison but i’m assuming the west can’t survive like this for long (and if it does we’re doomed anyway so it won’t matter)
Hollywood is basically Satan tempting the least wholesome parts of human nature. Given modern technology I’m not sure how easy it is now to seal people off when half of the problem is their own bad side but maybe one way is to provide relatively less pozzed alternatives for those urges.
For example vampires used to be the bad guys in vampire movies with a subtly wholesome message (parasitism is bad) and so you can have trad heros fighting them and doing all the action hero stuff that people like – meanwhile in pozworld the vampires have gradually become the heroes.
Mostly correct. And?
Thanks.
This doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to understand. They packaged the things the people wanted, better made than found elsewhere, and the things they wanted together. Resulted as anyone following would’ve expected.
The calligraphy certainly looks beautiful, but I always wondered: can the normal Standard-Arabic-literate person read all of it, or is it something you need to put in years into “calligraphy fan” to?
I, for one, would welcome a Irano-Chinese movie about the Battle of Talas.
Wasn’t the Taliban doing it on the DL?
The guy holding the cylindrical object looks quite fabulously suspicious.
Of course. As Orwell said, some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them.
Your extra IQ points have to work some serious overtime to wrap your head around this particular one.
Toppling brick walls onto your partner is some hardcore BDSM.
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/678883/Afghan-says-surviving-execution-proves-his-innocence.html
I may oppose censorship on political grounds, but it’s not necessarily “toxic to art”. Restraints are what make art. Sometimes they’re self-imposed, sometimes they come from outside. Either way, the craftsman works within them.
Frank Gehry says that his most difficult job was the one in which the client gave him complete freedom. He didn’t know where to start.
Of course, with Gehry, he doesn’t know where to end, either. But his point here is valid.
When you join NATO and become a vassal state of the USA, you accept the whole package, gay marriage and gay parades included. USA enforced globalism is unmitigated evil.
You’ve got me confused. I had thought that Mr. Karlin considers “anti-LGBT” to be a good thing. Are you suggesting that is not the case?
Re: “Faggots [sic] not allowed” sign on coffee shop window:
I’m curious, would they refuse to serve even someone whom they knew was homosexual but who was sufficiently discreet about it that it would not be apparent to others?
To some limited extent, but consider the quality of modern comedy having to follow “woke” guidelines versus classic comedy for one example. Regardless of politics, its just not very good. I see your point and its certainly applicable when working with a patron, but less so with the inchoate and shifting “opinions of importance” that bureaucracy classically delivers.
I guess he wasn’t very discreet if they knew.
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/patriarchal-sexual-law/
That said, I agree about the lack of an “evangelical” perspective and a focus on the “practical” result, thus the Japanese saying of kusai mono ni wa futa o shiro(if it stinks, put a lid on it). It has its advantages, as well as its disadvantages – issues with shame culture meant that a lot of problems were avoided or hidden rather than solved.
But I think this is a design feature not a bug. The idea that all problems havesolutions is utopian and goes together with the Western notion that one state must win out in the end. Solutions for all problems is part of the good vs evil apocalyptic vision.
The Asian vision, based on harmonizing of opposites, seeks to manage problems rather than finally solve them, as solving implies eradicating one aspect of the situation and all aspects of a situation are seem as legitimate on some level and part of a higher harmony.
Confucianism did some things very well(filial piety and general focus) and other things very poorly(innovation and larger unity). Part of its strength came from how like Christianity, it could be and has been variously interpreted by this scholars to mean many things, including contradictory positions.
But even as early as the 1600s, Zheng Chenggong(from a Japanese origin) expressed his frustration that the Chinese would not honor the Emperor or any concept like the Japanese did in the same passion, as Confucianism set them to focus on their family so when he demanded that they fight for the Emperor even at risk of losing their families, few would be motivated to do so, they just didn’t find the Emperor all that divine. This is pretty amazing – even superstitious as they were, it just didn’t seem that important – the Emperor might be the magic son of heaven, but he’s still less important to than dad and ma(or maybe just a little bit more).
This was obviously frustrating and can creates its own low-trust issues, since while the source of low-trust is stable(family > all) and well-run small units of family can mean a pleasant society, it still that there’s no unified force for advancement or power. Arguably its one reason why Japanese society is actually much more collectivizing with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment credited to Confucianism is the focus on metrics and examination as a form of “source of truth” above traditional relationships(even family), so that advancement was heavily tied to presumably fair metrics rather than nepotism. This is an incredible, perhaps even defining force of civilization in China(and East Asia) but it actually originally sources from Mohism, with the argument among others of “if carpenters use levels and traders use scales, why do not rulers have any means of measure?” Such ideas were later integrated into what we consider as Confucianism these days, with academic performance melding into Confucian notions of virtue.
This really depends on the style – certain forms are easier to read than others. It can get quite complex and become very difficult (though very elegant):
https://s3.amazonaws.com/tasmeemme.project.mi.thumbnails/resize_805x9000/000/68000.jpeg
But Hajji Noor Deen’s style is generally very legible (and I’m not even a native Arabic speaker).
I am certain that some in the Taliban were practicing this, just as I’m sure LAPD’s Rampart division was massively corrupt and took bribes and other nefarious acts – but there is a difference between actual policy and those who surreptitiously use their authority to break the law.
You have to understand – one of the main reasons that the Taliban came to power was that they ended these kinds of problems in the civil-war plagued situation in Afghanistan. They may well have been brutal, but they established law and order:
“‘Like it or not, there was better rule of law under the Taliban,’ said Dee Brillenburg Wurth, a child-protection expert at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, who has sought to persuade the government to address the problem. ‘They saw it as a sin, and they stopped a lot of it.’…In Kandahar during the mid-1990s, the Taliban was born in part out of public anger that local commanders had married bachas and were engaging in other morally licentious behavior….During the Taliban era, men suspected of having sex with men or boys were executed. In the late 1990s, amid the group’s repressive reign, the practice of bacha bazi went underground. The fall of the Taliban government in late 2001 and the flood of donor money that poured into Afghanistan revived the phenomenon.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/afganistans-dancing-boys-are-invisible-victims/2013/12/30/bb8e8a5a-7c2b-11e1-8f65-4cbb23028e62_story.html?utm_term=.01fc128c5a4a
Peace.
Dag yo! That is even more strict than much of classic Islamic law on the subject (minus the stoning for adultery of course, no one beats that). Had no clue, but very enlightening – thanks for post.
Peace.
Its a dodge when there really is a solution, or seeking to find one helps the advancement of knowledge, even down blind alleys:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/salon-demographics/
Legalism is very..legalistic.
I think it really depends on ones implicit metaphysics.
I think solutions always create new problems – so in a sense I don’t believe deep down the structure of reality admits of there “really being solutions”. I think when we “really” create solutions, we also create new problems.
Don’t we see this with everything? We solved hunger to create obesity. Even penicillin is slowly leading to super-bugs.
So you and I just have different implicit metaphysics – deep down we think the structure of reality is just built differently.
I think we have to learn how to swim, while you think we have to get onto dry land where our footing is secure. Its just a fundamental difference that depends on our intuitive understanding of the deep structure of reality.
While legalism certainly is a feature of Chinese culture, Confucianism and Taoism have always been the dominant strains and have characterized the classical ages of Chinese culture.
I think a culture is defined by its dominant modes not its marginal modes. There was a substantial mystical current in the West, but Western mainstream culture has always been significantly less hospitable to mysticism than Asia.
Nevertheless, I agree its useful to point out that China has a not insignificant legalistic strain and the West a not insignificant mystic strain.
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
Point is, at the end of the day, society has to function and not just “let things be.” You don’t get the Imperial Examination, what are the worthwhile normative values, how to identify virtue, etc. without serious and extensive thought being put into how to get a lot of people to work together minimally killing each other and without starving.
Taoism is present but always has been a bit fringe, though like most Chinese things, it has been syncrenized into the general flow.
Fair enough 🙂
But what is ignorance and what knowledge? To a Buddhist, Western scientific knowledge would be the definition of ignorance in a certain sense.
Ignorance may – may – be the belief that the “deep structure” of reality admits of final solutions rather than the recognition that every positive is interdependent with a negative, like the front and back of a coin, that they form a whole together and cannot be disentangled.
Its not that we should not address our problems – but that we should address them in a more sophisticated way based on the understanding of the fundamental polarity and interdependence of things in this world.
This would lead to solutions that are more like “swimming” than standing firmly on dry land, and something very different than the Western dysfunction with its extremism.
But – as I said, the West needs to be the West. It does not need to become the Orient. And fundamentally changing the West would contradict my own position as laid out here.
So – no “fundamentally” changing the West into a faux-Orient. But within the framework of the distinctive cultural assumptions of the West perhaps a counter-current can establish itself and exert some influence even if only in the margins. This would be “swimming” with the problem rather than solving it.
The West needs to contain an Orient within itself while remaining the West, while the East needs a West within itself while remaining the East.
Sure, but Confucianism supplied the necessary ballast, not legalism – and Confucianism has strong affinities with Taoism and may be seen almost as an “exoteric” Taoism.
Taoism is far too substantial to be defined as fringe as it was massively influential in the arts and even beyond – were there any Chinese poets or painters who weren’t Taoists?
While it’s true to say Confucianism always overshadowed Taoism, I don’t think Taoism can be seen.as anything less than the second major tradition in Chinese culture, permeating nearly every aspect of the culture.
“Letting things be” – what is meant is more like working withthe natural flow of events and subtly guiding them exerting minimal effort rather than trying to impose one’s will on events without regard to their natural flow, which is ineffective in the long run. Abd this, it seems to me, can be the basis for a healthy political economy.
No, Taoism when taken to its ultimate conclusion is not to influence anything at all. Laozi’s conversation with Confucius indicated that he thought that it was a waste of time to find “wordly” solutions to anything.
Taoist rejection of “wordliness” also makes them heavily associated with “magic cults” and secret societies such as the White Lotus. In many ways, its highly esoteric nature is a natural outflow for elite members looking for something other than the rat race. As with medieval monasteries, they had outsized artistic influence and plays well with animistic influences that are pervasive in Eastern cultures(a variation of this being ancestral worship).
That said, Taoism is self-selecting against its influence in society since it encourages desertion from the political structure – heavily encourages hermitage. This meant that Confucianism has always been state-promoted, while the influence of Taoist thought has been through its ability to impact scholars through books like Zhuangzi.
Influencing things through minimal effort is not a bad idea at all, though. Its all part of the typical calculations for return and investment, etc.
Whole point is people shouldn’t be pressed to be like this. People should be allowed to live all their own weird lives, and with their own strange ideas for themselves and following their eccentric obsessions and divergent decisions – as far as they do not damage other people’s responsibility. It’s in this way that man is climbing above, being simply, weak cattle, and we have developed most of our culture – precisely from the nonconformism and eccentricism of certain men, with the executed Socrates being probably the most archetypal example of our civilization.
Look at Talha for example. It’s fine if he wants to follow his strange religion, despite that everyone else here would say is misguided and absurd. Maybe he can even find out some knowledge for mankind from choosing this pathway for himself.
Problem is if he believes others, who are perhaps more advanced them him (perhaps less advanced than him), should be pressed to follow his weird path, which may be suitable for him, but clearly is not for others. But this pressing occurs in most majority Muslim countries (with some minority of cool exceptions like Azerbaijan), and it seems evidentially to have a very negative effect on those countries, which are generally far weaker, more dysfunctional, and contributing less than the rest of the world.
I agree – which is why I don’t believe people should be pressed to follow my path. See my comment about Yazidis being allowed to have full access to on-demand porn (and swap wives as much as they like, hell they can marry their couches); their religion, their community, their future…
Peace.
People are not an island. The end result of liberal advocacy of “individualism” is a globalist monoculture and much like crop monoculture, it is both boring and makes it much more vulnerable to any diseases that strike it out.
The only way to avoid that historically was with knowledge separation that was once done with distances and reduced communication. Without that now, we need to either recreate it with space travel or have other means of having separate communities with their own beliefs.
Problem here would be the weakness, not the access. And in dynamic situation, sometimes lack of access (e.g. American Indian and the alcohol) is longterm cause of the later weakness.
There’s also an epistemic problem of how we (society) know what constitutes weakness. This could be resolved with empirical trial and errors. But also that what is weakness for one man, might be strength for another – where the most successful model, probably requires a person to learn for themselves.
There’s a lot of problems of deciding when or if a person should be viewed as an adult who should take their own decisions, and how to prepare children for this responsibility. And how to regulate wider advice available for them. But once this is possible, then people should be on their own tracks, where they have accountability for their own decisions.
Government/authority’s main role should be to enforce very strongly order which prevents one person from damaging another without their responsibility. But a person who does things society might think “damages themselves”, or illuminates options which might help others to “damage themselves” (which would be the crime of Socrates) – this has always been one of the main engines of development.
Not really. Whole of European civilization’s development, from Athens onwards, is built on this model, and almost all our heroes would be demolished, and some were physically demolished, attempting to go their own direction.
This is quite a different topic, and related to technological development. In the modern world, national cultures developed their own unique views on the world, precisely through their great men breaking from imported models.
There is weird interaction with the imported models though. Russian culture, at least the parts we most love today, is almost completely this interaction of importing other civilizations’ model, taking some years to digest, and then breaking it up into the new Russian way.
Neoliberalism.txt was neither the model for historical European culture nor are historical examples of individualism the same post-technologically aided noospheric unity. Its not really possible to develop along unique lines: imported models or otherwise in any form of independence these days, and the intrusion of foreign NGOs only further extends this issue.
Anything that encourages said independence is to be encouraged.
But your support for neoliberalism.txt is noted.
Daniel, this is a serious mistake. Taoist texts are replete with descriptions of action that does not go against against the grain – most famously the butcher in Chuang Tzu who described to the king how his skill is so masterly because he is do careful to cut with the grain and not against it.
Taoism is a thoroughgoing mystical naturalism – action is a natural and spontaneous process, and enforcing an artificial passivity is an effortful attempt to interfere with natural processes and can hardly an example of “letting things be”.
It cannot be stressed enough that “letting things be” cannot by definition be a philosophy of enforced passivity, which is effort by definition and a form of repression and interference.
The Chinese term is “tsu-jan” – which means of itself so, naturally arising. This is not a philosophy of “repression”.
Now, a religious form of Taoism – the Taoism of the magical cults – did arise and is much closer to what you describe, and as so often happens came to represent a philosophy completely at variance with the original texts – as when magical Taoism becomes about the search for immortality when the classic texts embrace death ecstatically as a natural process and envision immortality as being part of these processes and not opposing them.
As for Taoism encouraging hermitage, this is its extreme form and one of its legitimate expressions, but at the same time Taoism along with Zen and Mahayana Buddhism developed a philosophy of engagement with society rather than complete retreat based on action following the principles of going with the grain, non-interference, and acceptance (i.e detachment), and even considered this a higher level of perfection than hermitage.
How many scholar elites, artists, officials, and intellectuals had their garden retreat where they practiced painting, calligraphy, poetry, and appreciating nature while not retreating from the world…
Sure – we are helping him out. He acknowledges it is wrong, has a problem and we (as his brothers) are intervening for him and saving him from doing stupid things, ruining his marriage, destroying his family, etc. Because we – as a community – have to deal with the ramifications of all that also; families don’t fall apart in a vaccum.
We already determined that; it is a sin. Why? God says so. Others are free to determine their own epistemic foundations for defining what constitutes weaknesses. Like I was mentioning, I don’t care to define that for other communities. Just last night, in the chapter of taxation in al-Hidayah, we discussed how a non-Muslim trader (who owns pigs) is not taxed for those pigs when he passes by the toll-collector because our community does not deem it to be any category of wealth* while others do.
There is no “we (society)” as far as I’m concerned without “we (mini-societies)”.
I agree, but we disagree on what constitutes “damaging another without their responsibility”. A man watching porn or visiting a prostitute or etc. (when he knows that it is wrong and improper) can destroy his family – that has repercussions on his children; what did they do to deserve a broken home?
Peace.
*Interestingly, the Hanafi school will actually tax their wine (the Shafi’i school does not for the same reason as the pigs) because the wine can be turned into vinegar and thus has the potential (in its nature) to become a source of valid wealth for a Muslim as well.
This is not the impression of Laozi’s conversion with Confucius, but that shows how every philosophical tradition can be interpreted into almost anything, much like how Ming Neoconfucianists simultaneously “discovered” that Confucianism encouraged trade(to benefit the people) and isolation(to prevent corruption). We know who won that argument but it just shows that a lot of it is just redefined as needed.
I’m familiar with tsun, of course, but ultimately this doesn’t actually mean that much. What is “natural”, for example? Almost anything you want to to define it at, ultimately. Its natural for a fish to swim. Maybe its natural for a man to strive, natural to intensively fertilize and natural to intensively work the fields: there’s certainly no lack of it in ancient China.
https://www.soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/01aglibrary/010122king/ffc0.html
Its useful, of course. I think biology offers some of the best solutions for efficiency(and sufficiency) and its often worth observing biological systems. There’s a lot of lessons from nature. But in itself, it doesn’t really mean that much.
I cannot understand how the same technology which is the basis for global connectivity as well as the basis for developing space travel will become the basis for creating isolated communities on other planets.
Space travel would be a development of the global culture of hyper-connectivity that is based on modern technology.
The world is small now because of technology, not physical space. Expanding into physical space would not address the causes of the shrinking world but would be an expression of those causes.
I find your notion of isolated communities also Taoistic 🙂
The same way that sailing ships create isolated communities.
I am highly sympathetic to your idea that the ideal culture is one which permits eccentricity and weird lives to flourish, but you must realize that cultures firmly grounded in religion and traditional values and hierarchy have the foundational security to permit eccentricity and weirdness and that un-anchored cultures such as ours are afflicted with a profound sense of insecurity which leads to conformity and repression of eccentricity and weirdness.
At no time in history has it been more difficult to be an eccentric hermit, adventurer, drop-out monk, or just weird person as now, and no country is more homogenized than individualist America, whereas traditional England, hierarchical, religious, and socially stratified, was famously hospitable to all manner if weirdness and produced wonderfully eccentric people of genuine individuality.
Anyone who knows Japan knows that this intensely “repressive” and traditional country is magnificently productive of weird and eccentric types.
The fact is that you are making the mistake of going to a one-sided extreme which inevitably destroys what you wish to promote – tolerance for eccentricity and weirdness comes from the fruitful integration of security and freedom. Extreme freedom (in terms of no clear social rules or anchors) creates insecurity and thus intolerance of eccentricity.. And obviously extreme repression squelches it.
Until we learn to appreciate the harmonizing of opposites we will only occasionally stumble into a way of life permissive of weirdness, as a stage on the way to one extreme or another when the two polarities are adventitiously integrated.
Writing undefined, probably incorrectly understood jargon is not transmitting to me any information. This whole paragraph, had no content for me to either agree or disagree with.
Between countries, there are currently incredibly large differences under superficial similarities. Only talking to real Americans for a short time – and you can realize they are a radically different viewpoint, despite all the knowledge of American cultural products we have.
Current situation is a strange one though. Imported models can be like very different people trying to go to the same clothes shop. It can further accentuate the differences, where it’s very obvious who is trying to wear things they neither fit nor understand (with this lack of understanding sometimes resulting in expression of underlying originality). Some fat (let’s say American) woman’s underwear is on sale. A Russian man walks into the shop and buys this underwear, thinking it is a new kind of hat.
We had an interesting discussion about this topic a few days ago, in comments of Karlin’s post about Romanian writers.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/petre-tutea-on-russians/#comments
Until technology caught up. In hindsight it was clear that sailing ships was just part of a movement to create s connected world.
If you want isolated communities Lao Tzu has a chapter on that, and it isn’t based on technology…..
This is actually the ultimate “esoteric” insight of Taoism and Buddhism…and when fully grasped leads to a transformation of consciousness and seeing everything in a new light, but not necessarily to any change in behavior.
That is why I say there is no need for anything to change – you wanna strive, strive, you cannot escape nature. But your attitude towards striving can be one that is liberated or one that is in chains. Striving can be play and come from a place of security, or serious and come from a place if fear.
These traditions are about insight – liberation from illusion, not change in the physical world.
English stratify by themselves. This is nothing created by imposition of authorities, but to some extent rebellion against it, and a longterm result of different kinds of spaces which structured into their system.
In Russia, for some many year, we have homogenized in centralized schools. In England, someone goes to Eton, another to Harrow. Each developing individual, cultural differences, unhomogenized by government officials. (Although this will not be the situation in a government school).
In England, even are schools developed especially by nonconformists educators, which create different educational styles.
You can see ones like this- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartington_Hall
“Dartington Hall School, founded in 1926, offered a progressive coeducational boarding life. When it started there was a minimum of formal classroom activity and the children learnt by involvement in estate activities.”
Americans are not unanchored – but they are perhaps a psychologically unstable culture. They are one of the most particular and idiosyncratic people in the world, whose only redneck chauvinism (paradigmatic in CNN and NYT model) makes them believe their ideas and culture are universal.
Even within their own country though, they are not particularly homogenized. It’s simply one of their cultural ideals to homogenize (clearly a result of the American Civil War of 1861-1865), which has creates all the different arguments and anger between different regions and viewpoints which we can see today. New York Times for example, is generally very angry towards Alabama, for being so different to them.
Apparently you haven’t read the main blog post, or confuse the LGBT indocrination as some sort of enlightenment rather than the monoculture of liberalism.
Americans are certainly weird ny global standard but quite bland and homogenized among themselves – there isn’t a proliferation of eccentric types and challenging – or even having an attitude of flippant unseriousness towards – the mainstream culture of technology, consumerism, growth, competition, and striving is met with a tremendous backlash.
It may be you find a tolerance of deviance within very restricted limits – but fundamentally challenging the mainstream conception of the good life can be met with fierce repression.
Perhaps you don’t notice this because you are comfortable within the mainstream limits – but this isn’t comparable to the kind of tolerance of lifestyles in say the Middle Ages, where you could be a beggar, a monk, a wandering minstrel, a vagabond, a mystic, or a merchant, a priest, a knight, a Lord – in other words extreme establishment respectability coexisted with extreme drop-out culture and a range of lifestyles that encompasses the two poles of human life.
How can I extract an argument for this comment from which to agree or disagree? It’s just some “buzz” jargons (“monoculture”, “liberalism”, “enlightenment”) placed into a sentence.
In the Middle Ages, most of us would be peasants, impossible to leave our master’s land.
Americans may use social pressure to homogenize themselves to follow a certain profession or “good life”. But this is not the same as government authority preventing people from choosing a better (or worse) decision for themselves. This is the pretty important distinction. So perhaps Timothy Leary is the counterexample, as the government has suppressed his point of view. But you can read about similar American characters like Hunter S. Thompson who can live completely bizarre life in America, as full eccentrics.
I would like if limits for people would be reduced. At the same time, when people are damaging others without their responsibility, then punishment could even be increased more than currently. The important thing is very strong order against damaging others, but full range of options for damaging (or benefiting – depending on the calculation) yourself.
Serfdom ended in the later Middle Ages, and it was a period of greater freedom and fun than today’s regimented technocratic system – it was not called Merry England for nothing, and a tremendous amount of propaganda was needed to get people to believe that today’s system is freer.
Its very interesting to read how at the beginning of the industrial revolution tremendous propaganda and social pressure was needed to convince people that the new system was better. There are some good books on this.
Dmitry, I want to analyze a system in its totality to determine how free it is – a system that has government laws on morality and behavior but is socially accepting of a wider range of lifestyles is actually freer than a system with no such laws but which in is socially intolerant, and in fact bosses and family and friends exert tremendous economic and psychological pressure to conform.
What difference does it make if you are a serf officially tied to land or a wage slave who has no choice but to be at the mercy of bosses who fire you for anything…a serf may actually be freer as the lord has obligations to him…
Point is, we should look past labels and surfaces and easy linear relationships and appreciate unexpected paradoxical relationships – like a formally repressive society may be informally freer than a formally free society – and appreciate the sometimes surprising reality lying beneath the surface….
I’m not saying I’m right here – but simply pointing to laws on the books isn’t going to determine the issue of how much freedom there is…
Thailand may be the world’s largest whore house but prostitution is actually illegal there….!
Japan “formally” doesn’t impose unfair tariffs on American cars but somehow they always get delayed at customs….
We Westerners tend to get caught up in what is formally true and not appreciate the surprising shadow side of life, where often the real action is…
It’s a strength in science but misleading in the human realm. It would be great if we could juggle both methods of thought better, as both are useful.
That’s not quite how the world works…
Unless your standard for “very” is something approaching a pure Platonic ideal, that is.
Dmitry, you may consider that you have to achieve your goals in a world full of grim humorless authoritarian types who are full of fear and want to squash freedom and fun and control everything…there are many such people on this site… which calls for a certain amount of strategy.
Such people are not going away and can be quite dangerous, and we have to share our world with them – and perhaps we don’t even want them to go away 🙂
The Puritan will always be with us.
A system which denies their vision of the “good” (sic) life is one that will be unstable, and such people are often happy with mere formal recognition of their “rights” to deny others fun…
We see our current system already tilting towards tyranny because it was too formally free…
A good society must operate on multiple levels, the formal and informal, the inner and outer, etc..to satisfy each type of persons claims and even the many conflicting desires of any human being..
The problem with the West is that we have become all outer and no inner, all formal arrangements and no informal arrangements, all light and no shadow…
We have lost our inner life, and such a society is not healthy or sustainable…
Yes, NY has weird standards for the globe. Maybe try Boston?
Going to earlier discussion it has still at least some flavor of the British Isles.
Firstly and if nothing else, a critical distinction must be drawn between homosexuality, per se and buggery, i.e., anal penetration.
I highly recommend this 2001 piece by John Derbyshire: How Perfectly Disgusting
Selected, highly relevant excerpts follow (all bold-text emphasis mine).
It really doesn’t feel that way when reading certain Greek works, though, e.g. Athenaeus: The Deipnosophists.
I do not see how this makes clear it isn’t socially conditioned, and I also don’t see any quotes about Asia or the Middle East.
]
I wonder if this was the feeling in China or ancient Persia, societies that did not despise the feminine.
The West has always had a problem with the feminine and that is part of its dysfunction. Modern feminism is a manifestation of the ancient Western contempt for feminine qualities. A society that over-values masculine qualities is bound to spawn a movement of women wanting to be men sooner or later.
I wonder how things were in societies that did a better job integrating their feminine side and did not fear it so much.
Maybe its the same thing, I don’t know.
As usual, cultural criticism that only discusses the West and then draws conclusions about the ‘fundamental’ nature of mankind doesnt say much.
However, we have not determined that.
We have determined some, which can see are clear. For example, to murder someone, to sexually assault someone, to rob someone, to drive car in a way which can damage others.
But has for example, Giordano Bruno sinned?
I know this is not your argument. But look at dietary laws. In Judaism and Islam, it is wrong to eat pigs or to eat shellfish. In Christianity, you can eat anything, except in some days. While in Buddhism, you cannot kill any animal for food.
I agree that concept of sin is probably a good one, and is deeper for us than any religious acculturation. In addition, religion might show development of morality in man, by problematizing concept of diet for us. But in which of these dietary laws are you doing the least sins?
From a rational perspective, the “most likely to avoid sin” dietary will be Buddhist. This goes quite well with our more deep (deeper than religious) intuition, that killing other animals is probably not a nice behaviour.
Maybe it is not nice if your parents are divorcing. But it’s also not nice if your parents cannot give you the best genes, or your parents are arguing, or your parents are poor.
On average, children of divorced family will surely be less happy, than of together parents. But still, many, many happy and successful children can come from those families, if parents still complete their duties.
It’s quite clear what is the duty of parents – to feed and raise their children. It’s not realistic the idea, they have to live perfect (externally) lives, and that it should be illegal for them to make a decision (e.g. watch porn, or let’s say expend time posting comments on Karlin’s blog instead of having romantic dinners) which may or may not have any causal relation to their marriage situation.
We have – you haven’t. You still seem to be under the impression we are using the same epistemic basis. Why? Your definition of the word “sin” differs from ours.
Don’t know – apparently he did for the people that killed him.
Depends on first principles. If they differ, then the conclusions will differ.
Why? In Islam, on the Day of Eid ul-Adha we are required (in the Hanafi school at least, others consider it praiseworthy) – if you have the money – to slaughter an animal and are then supposed to share the meat with family and especially the poor (many of whom only eat meat a couple of times per year). This is one of the happiest days in the year for the poor in the Muslim world. So from one perspective, killing an animal and distributing meat to the poor is considered a virtuous act. From another perspective, you have killed another living being which is wrong – a sound conclusion. Of course, we take the name of God over the animal before sacrificing to acknowledge we are seeking His permission and have no right to take its life otherwise (which is why we couldn’t eat the animal if some random guy just took a shotgun to its head).
From a rational perspective; if we weren’t supposed to eat meat, we wouldn’t have a set of canine teeth – which are obvious clues to us being omnivores.
Nobody said they have to live perfect lives. But the social costs of pornography usage are well-documented:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2010/03/1215/
There is no debating the statistics. One can only debate if the cost of the damage to society is worth the benefit one gets from it.
And for that, I think it is best left up to the social collectives to decide that on their own – for members of their own group. I don’t really care to modify the behaviors of groups that don’t believe in the same first principles and don’t have the same epistemic basis as me.
If I ran a system with different millets; the atheist millet could make it a requirement among themselves to live stream each others’ bedroom antics to each others’ households and swap wives and husbands – have fun. Their non-religion, their people, their future.
Peace.
You think you have (and you use pronoun “we” to dissolve your own responsibility into a herd). But “think you have” is not the same as “have”.
You might think you have built a safe bridge, or that you can fly (or “we think we can fly” – if you want to reduce your responsibility for yourself) – but this does not mean you actually built a safe bridge or can fly. For these we need verifiable, empirical, objective knowledge.
In which case, murderer could say “my definition of sin is different to yours” – and he would not have sinned.
If something is sin or not, is not determined just because someone who kills you thinks you are doing sin.
Relativism is not relevant. It simply means that “other people are also doing it or thinking something”. But the real question, is whether this accurate or not. Have you sinned or not, if you kill an animal? Personally, I eat meat. But you cannot remove your own responsibility from this question by pointing at some other people or a book, and saying “it says in this book it is ok”, which is all you are – ultimately – trying to do.
Many things have costs. Drinks like Coca Cola which contain sugar, will be more objectively easy to prove. The question is whether person who drinks sugary drink or visits certain websites, is responsible for that decision.
Now you want to convert the discussion into one about parents damaging children. But if a father drinks sugary drinks and dies from diabetes? Or this father watches porn and this can in some way undermine his relationship with his wife, and therefore his children’s success? In terms of damaging children, it will be easier to see causal correlation of damage for the former than the latter case. But in neither, is there direct causal relation to damaging the children of the father.
I rarely agree with you but I do agree that the West is annoying full of individuals who seem incapable of understanding anything except in terms of extremes. Its often feels like some form of advanced retardation or pathological obsession, as they surely have to see how impractical and counterproductive it is, but they can’t stop doing it.
I don’t believe there is historical evidence for this claim. And I can imagine that if we use a time machine and would leave you in an epoch without penicillin, after some weeks with pink glasses, you will be praying every day we would return and carry you “back to the future”.
In the majority of cases, it will be much, much, much better.
In America in 2018, (I am sure!) your boss cannot arbitrarily kill you for example. But let’s say you are living up to first half of 19th century Russian Empire – well your master can kill you if he (or she) likes. In the “she” case, and if my teacher was not inventing this story – didn’t Turgenev’s own grandmother murder one (or more than on – I can’t remember exactly?) of the family’s serfs?
Well here is an example of “libertarianism by lack of state capacity”. Until the 20th century, this was how people’s freedom occurred in many ways. It’s one of the main real reasons why Russian Empire had more of certain kinds of freedom than Soviet Union did – not out of choice, but out of lack of state capacity to enforce laws in earlier epochs, which decreased by the 20th century.
Since theoretical (if not actualized) state capacity is continuously increasing, it becomes only more important to regulate state’s intervention in our personal decisions now, than in the past.
Pork can be turned into charcoal, you know.
And soap. The Hanafi school has rules about the validity of the usage of soap that was once a pig. But it did not meet the same requirement as with wine to vinegar.
Of course, Imam Zuffar (ra), dissented and stated that you tax both – but the fatwa is not on his opinion in the school.
Peace.
Do Slavic languages lack linking verbs?
Well, I think these questions are rather too large to be settled on this forum, and would take reading many books and living in non-Western countries for extensive periods in order to come to really make a judgement on these questions.
I offered you a different perspective, and I duly note that you rejected it – which is perfectly ok. As a good Western liberal, you opt for formally defined arrangements with clear definitions and are uncomfortable with the informal, paradoxical, and shadow side of life, which I find more fascinating, and often to be where the real action lies.
This is not unexpected and I don’t begrudge you this, but even though this is your preference I was hoping to develop in you an appreciation, at least, for the interesting shadow side of life and the surprising way things can be almost the exact opposite of their formal character.
But to be fair, I have not yet met a Westerners who can appreciate this mentality, and its existence in the West has been declining since perhaps the late 19th century, to where today, Westerners can only think in formal categories that have a 1:1 relationship to reality.
This is why I often say the modern West suffers from a peculiar “stupidity”, especially when it comes to humans and human affairs, although it is obviously very technically capable, even though this “formalism” is also leading to a decline in creativity.
And all this is OK, well, and good. The West has to be itself and go through its own mini cycles and work out its own ways of doing things.
We have according to the parameters that we find coherent and sound. We have not according to the parameters you find coherent and sound. It’s an issue of disagreement of axioms and first principles. And it’s OK – we say you’re wrong, you say we’re wrong – we’re all adults here.
Agreed. When hashing out religious doctrine and claims becomes equivalent to building a bridge, let me know. If you think it is the same, then again…back to disagreement on first principles.
Correct – according to his belief, he would not have sinned – and we would execute him just the same.
Again, let’s go back to first principles. If one claims a human is just a higher order primate, then what are we having a discussion about sin for in the first place? We don’t discuss monkeys eating other monkeys or other animals as having any moral repercussions.
I haven’t. I have investigated the truth claims of the book and people of a particular tradition and find they are sound. I never dropped any of my responsibility. I don’t feel eating meat is a sin if you slaughter it in the right way and ask God for permission – there is nothing incoherent about this position as far as I’m concerned.
I’m not asking for Hindus and Buddhists to eat meat. And this especially makes sense if people are in a reincarnation cycle where that cow could be your grandma that passed away a while ago. that seems coherent if you accept their first principles.
I agree. And this is where each community that agrees on some basis on first principles should get together and decide what constitutes conduct that a society can interdict and what it can’t. For instance; watching porn is a sin and damaging, drinking soda is not a sin yet still damaging. Each community decides the cost-benefit ratio according to the standards they agree upon.
I find it interesting that you seem bothered by the idea of different communities electing different standards by which to draft laws that govern their own people. Like, I’m not bothered by Buddhists streaming porn into their temples – but you seem bothered by the idea that Muslims would want to halt porn being easily available to other Muslims.
Peace.
From the outside, it does seem a kind of retardation, and I think it is a cognitively limited mode of operating that has its basis in a particular metaphysics.
If you accept the Western metaphysical assumption of absolute divergence of good and evil rather than these values being relative and in need of being harmonized, and that the world is tending towards the absolute triumph of “good” and eradication of “evil”, swinging to extremes is simply inevitable.
The only thing that changes is what fills the categories “good” and “evil” – yesterday it was the homosexual, today the heterosexual. Yesterday woman was seen as evil (the temptress, seductress, ensarer of man) today it is man who evil.
But man and woman depend on each other, and neither are evil.
Again, not “we have”, but “I have”.
This use of impersonal “we”, is wanting to remove responsibility for views, or outsource it to more people.
This paragraph is simply saying “it’s relative”. In other words, not useful noise.
If person x says “1 +1 = 2” and person y says “1+1 = 3”. The important question is, who has the truth, which is not answered by – “different people think differently”.
Internal consistency “coherent and sound” is not quite the issue, except insofar as extracting all possible conclusions from the statement required to make it coherent with others we believe, can allow us to disprove (or, if finding it consistent, increase probability of truth) of that statement.
And let’s say person y executes person x because in his theory, saying “1+1 =2” is false and saying false things is a sin. Has person x sinned?
This is good.
Well this is better. “Human is different to animal” – this statement may or may not be true. Let’s say it is true. Does being different imply human can kill animals?
I’m not saying I know the answer to this question (personally, I eat meat) – but it’s a decision which you will have to be responsible for, and not by saying “in my acculturation they say, ect, ect”, which is only a way to remove yourself from the question.
We are talking about governments here, presumably of America. If a group of people want to make a contract between themselves, to not eat meat, or to not drink coffee (or any personal decisions they want), this is perfect. If same group wants then to coerce other people (who did not agree to the contract), to not eat meat or not drink coffee, we have a problem.
So far this question of “sin” or not has not been proven. However, I will agree with “damaging” and for argument we can say it is a sin. (By the way, I think damaging your body physically, which your parents have made for you, could also qualify as sin). Question now – should society be allowed to stop adults, who have full responsibility and access to knowledge of consequences, from doing something which only effects themselves directly, because it is “sin” and “damaging”.
Is this making people stronger or weaker, when we try to cover everyone in a safe bubble and don’t allow them to choose to take mistake which only effect themselves? Is this consistent with how people have developed in human history?
Different communities electing different standards is perfect, but then belonging to community has to be a voluntary decision which each person decides, with full knowledge, at whichever stage – age 18 or age 21.
Muslims can halt porn to other Muslims, but only if each of them has agreed to renounce their own responsibility to make the decision.
Let’s say an island in Pacific Ocean with 11 adults. 6 decide to never eat mangoes. 5 decide to eat mangoes, peacefully, by themselves. Can morally, the 6 prevent the other 5 from eating mangoes and burn all the mango trees? No. But 6 can create a mango-free community, destroy the mango trees on their personal property.
Another adult sails to the island. He now has to decide if he will join mango-free group or the mango group – this is his decision. Both sides can present their arguments and all available knowledge on benefits and costs of mangoes.
Maybe this man joins the mango eating community. After a time, he discovers that mangoes are disgusting and cause him to vomit and feel unhappy. Now this man changes his opinion, and joing the mango-free community. What is his position in this community? Well, actually he might be stronger than them, as he has developed real wisdom from his mistakes with the mangoes.
The question is, if you eliminate official governmental control will it just be replaced by unofficial social pressure which can be worse (wrong opinions can make you unhirable and friendless even though you broke no laws).
Nature abhors a vacuum and all that…
Does human society require some kind of sanctioned order…
I understand Dmitrys desire for there to be no sanctions whatsoever, but it seems utopian and shallow in that it ignores how the world really works. I.e it is abstract.
Assuming a world where society always creates some kind of sanctioned order, will removing official rules merely create a worse unofficial tyranny? (As we perhaps see happening today, and perhaps out of anxiety created by no official guidelines…)
And would creating clear official rules allow for a certain amount of unofficial leeway?
If you study historical systems, and pay attention to what’s happening today, it is by no means clear that discarding clear official rules leads to the greatest freedom…
But Dmitry does not wish to consider such interesting twists and paradoxes and wishes to see a 1:1 linear relationship to reality..
Lol we have arrived a “redneck argument” style. Choose two arbitrary labels “Western” and “Eastern”. Western = bad. Eastern = good.
Find someone you disagree with. Call their view “Western”, including of people from over the border with Asia.
This is nothing related to Western or Eastern. Man, unlike animals – and for whatever reason one might create mythology about – has been given the gift (or curse) of reason.
Perhaps that fact could fit somewhere with Talha’s idea, for why we can eat other animals.
I would certainly posit this.
That was one of my huge issues with Libertarian thought. It was just waaaay too idealistic and theoretical about how human beings work.
The existence of something like blasphemy laws (in certain Muslim countries) actually keeps things from blowing up into mob violence (Pakistan is kind of an outlier in that sense – they have laws and still manage to blow up*). When a people know their very strong feelings of having their most important beliefs insulted have some judicial recourse, then they are calmer since they have an outlet.
Just think about how so many of the Whites here are pissed off that they don’t really have much legal recourse when it comes to people insulting them for their identity…you can almost hear the pot simmering – plenty want to go from point A to point ethnic-cleansing without much in between.
Peace.
*Well, some idiot in Pakistan just assassinated another Muslim scholar (way to go guys):
https://twitter.com/ArsalanISF/status/1058379052736790528
No – we have. Because there are some things not in dispute in the Muslim community; like whether eating meat is permitted.
It’s quite enough when it comes to religion. Religious claims are not things you try to sort out on some kind of an empirical paradigm. That is why they are called; “faith”, “belief”, etc.
If the question was about something that could be worked out empirically: for instance, “Is the city of Paris located in France?” Then we could all agree on the answer.
In that particular example, yes…according to us.
If a human is just another animal; then it is no different from one animal killing another animal – happens all the time. My cat kills birds and eats them – morality doesn’t come into the picture.
Of course. I consider myself morally responsible in the matter – which is why I wouldn’t eat carrion meat or from a cow that was pushed off a cliff, etc.
My idea is not completely workable in America in its current state. It is however workable from state to state; which is why Utah has some of the most restrictive alcohol laws.
Yes – if it is in the public sphere. We do it all the time – which is why prostitution and other actions are interdicted. We actually have police departments called “vice” squads.
We’ll make that decision, thanks. Just like we really don’t care how other groups care to police themselves or not on things they consider sins or not.
Excellent – a mango and mango-free millet! Good fences make good neighbors.
Peace.
I’m not sure I understand. It seems reasonable to define attitudes that have historically characterized the West as Western for shorthand, etc.
I am not sure if you object to these labels specifically or if you object to the ideas that idea-clusters should have labels to assist in discussing them?
For what its worth, I recognize that countless Asians have what I call the Western attitude, and vice versa. After all, I’m a Westerner with what I call the Asian attitude.
It seems scarcely worth pointing out that each attitude exists in each region to some extent and I am merely using shorthand to describe what has historically characterized different cultures.
I certainly don’t mean it is any kind of racial “essence” or anything like that – but sometimes I forget that not everyone has read all my comments.
If you prefer, u can call them “idea cluster 1” and “idea cluster 2”, and them if it’s important to the discussion, I can describe where they appeared most prominent in which era.
I think a healthy culture has a good balance between official and unofficial rules, which creates security and freedom, which are both part of the good life.
I think the shockingly draconian prison sentences, barbaric and cruel, that are common in America – 20 years in prison for that white couple that used the N word and waved confederate flags at a black barbecue, 2 lives essentially destroyed – comes from our lack of security because we have no clear guidelines on how to behave and we feel we are on quicksand.
I am very sympathetic to Dmitrys ideal, but I am also interested in practical treasures that will really work based on the realities of human psychology.
My own spiritual ideal is of extreme freedom beyond “good and evil” as in Zen – but from a practical pov, I recognize that I may paradoxically be able to live more freely in a society where this kind of frightening freedom is not the norm.
To be fair to Dmitry, official rules can also become oppressive and repressive, and this is a very real danger. This is likely to happen in societies where there is zero unofficial sanctions and therefore the formal realm is trying to do double duty, according to my theory.
That is why we must avoid extremes and harmonize opposites in a fruitful union.
It’s still “I have”. It’s your decision and choice. No-one is with a gun in front of you, saying “if you don’t eat meat I will kill you”.
If you want to use religious language. Imagine you die, and before God. Was it a sin to kill animals for meat or not?
Perhaps there was a mistake and killing animals is a sin (really, this is a kind of question beyond our current knowledge, and I will not speculate).
Will God say “it’s ok, some other people were doing it, and just copied them, so it’s not his responsibility”. Of course issues of moral responsibility, are always related, very directly, to you, and impossible to outsource.
And if you wanted to judge people morally, you would introduce “trick questions” precisely created in this way – “everyone else is saying it’s morally correct to do x”. That is exactly how moral person would be distinguished from the immoral one.
If you live in a world where all you have to do is follow certain texts and what other people say in establish “religious institutions”, then there would be no way to distinguish good from bad. But you can be sure, if (if!) such a model of reality is the correct one – then why were you mysterious given free-will and reason.
This is an artificial distinction, which we currently (but only recently) use for political reasons so we don’t endlessly fight, about areas of knowledge where we are very limited (or even believe where there may be no knowledge).
However, look for example at Christian system. You die – then you will either go to heaven or hell. This is a factual claim. Such heaven or hell would be real, or more real, than the cells of your body.
Problem is our knowledge of such thing, or even whether it could be true, is incredibly limited. For this reason, I would say Epicurus humbleness and delimitation around life, is actually very wise about the whole topic, and it’s a little sad that Epicurus didn’t become the more popular viewpoint historically.
However, even in our current, very limited situation, a person could read various “hints” or “indications”.
We have a very individual freedom, which is something very strange, and does not “fit” into current physics. It’s also very “strange” how particularly individual this is, and all your decisions located very privately in each soul. A suspicious person might say almost like a “game” (without sounding too much like Elon Musk) and your life set up precisely for this reason.
We can know for a fact this is not true. Regardless of your biological condition, you are set up in such a situation where you have to take responsibility for this decision, and it appears to have a moral quality in it, and (even worse for us) we were born at a historical stage when other options were are presented to you.
Personally I eat meat all the time (although if I had to choose to kill animals myself, I would probably find the decision less tempting). In terms of moral “depth” of decision, it is obviously more serious than whether to drink sugary drink or visit an unsuitable website. As it involves killing something which is conscious and wants to have a normal life.
As for cats. They are really not much less conscious and emotional than us. They even have some concept of happiness, sadness and friendship. But, – probably fortunately for them – they were not given moral freedom.
We are talking would be the correct system, not what is exact situation of America in 2018.
Who is “we”? America? Sure, American government can increase its intervention in personal life and choices of its citizens, and with rising state capacity, the potential to regulate its citizens will only increase and increase. Our discussion is about what is correct set up and where there is “right” for government to take decisions for people, not what will actually happen.
fwiw, I’m not from Asia; I’m born in the US and while I’m very familiar with my culture(having spent quite some time there), it probably would not be correct to indicate that I am totally accultured to Chinese culture, especially the modern version.
If I believed that it was, I wouldn’t be doing it. Again, if I killed an animal I wasn’t supposed to or for fun or whatever, then I do believe I will be asked about it – which is why I don’t do it.
I agree – each person will answer for their own deeds, no doubt. The reason I use “we” is because I am comfortable speaking on behalf of Muslims on this matter since there really isn’t a difference of opinion.
Well, one makes the decision to follow certain texts and religious doctrines or institutions so even that decision is a decision one comes to on their own. If they have confidence in the institutions and texts, then it makes little sense to me to nitpick every single detail – that just seems silly to me.
Correct – posited without empirical evidence, but rather rational or inductive evidence; the two are not the same.
Agreed.
That is interesting. You outsource the killing of animals to others not having concluded whether or not it is morally correct?
Interesting…”who” gave us moral freedom if it is indeed granted?
Cool – then I believe I have been quite clear; each collective of people should be able to live along semi-autonomous regions comprised of people that have the same beliefs that allow them a good amount of freedom as to how to draft laws for their community’s freedoms and restrictions. The only worry then will be when they interact with people of other communities, but that can have a separate level of negotiation. Most people are concerned with what affects them on a day to day basis in their neighborhoods – if they want to hold an annual Bugger-your-own-brother Day in their community’s downtown – well, good for them.
Peace.
Also guys, it’s been a good couple of years hanging out with the (reactionary) alt-right or whatever the exact term may be. I’ve got to move on – going to be more busy in my local community and will be taking a massive step back from online activities in general.
I’m indebted to you guys for sharing your knowledge and perspectives with me and challenging my beliefs. I learned a lot during my time here.
Forgiveness is sought for those I gave offense to in a moment of zeal.
May God bless you guys and your families in this life and the next.
Good luck, Talha.
I’ve also been planning to move on, as there isn’t really anything more for me to say to here. I just haven’t quite managed to do it yet 🙂
Habits can be hard to break…
And I think the alt-right or nrx or whatever they are has to be left to be themselves in the end…
Good luck breaking the habit 🙂
See ya around…
I hope you aren’t leaving permanently? I also think it a good idea to disengage a bit from UR, though I’ve been on here a bit in the past few weeks with idleness from being a bit sickly.
You have nothing to be forgiven for in my case at least, but if you think you need it it is granted and I ask the same in turn.
Well, go with God, and may your own blessings be returned upon you, and don’t take any wooden nickels.
RSDB
Good luck, though I think you’re leaving because we are making you doubt your faith. With Islam being the hardest religion to defend, I can’t blame you.
But is your belief correct or not? What does deeper intuition say?
That’s what is important – not your belief.
I’m not saying I know answers (perhaps I will go to hell, or be reincarnated as a cow for every steak I eat). But the point is, it would be your moral responsibility for everything, not something you can outsource to a book or other people (to outsource decisions itself would also be immoral from any intuition you were born with).
Exactly – but I don’t suggest it is a good position.
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” – Socrates
It’s fine, if – which is the important part – people are voluntarily choosing to belong to the community. But if someone doesn’t want to be part of the community – will you let them leave?
I wish you good fortune. But people you talk to now here are not “(reactionary) alt-right”.
Obviously some of those are here, and they are the easiest to talk to, because you will (like almost anyone) feel yourself to be better than them, which is self-gratification and support for your own position. Those people are usually damaged, morally and intellectually empty, which is why they are gullible for the their worldview – so it’s easy to boost your self-belief, even if you may be very wrong yourself. Talking about your beliefs with more normal people – is a lot more challenging.
I actually like Talha, because he has some inclinations for talking about metaphysical topics, about which I think all of us are idiots. To be honest, it’s more interesting to me to talk about this topic (religion, philosophy), than about politics, since it is actually challenging to think about.
If I know him in real life, I would agree to study some Muslim texts with him if in exchange he would read some book on Epicurus, Kant or Schopenhauer.
Talking about your beliefs with more normal people – is a lot more challenging.
Does this mean that you are making a self-assertion that you are “more normal”?
You’ve tried to leave before and it didn’t work. IIRC my first exchange with you concerned your statement that you were leaving and then you didn’t.
In any case, good luck and thanks for the good info, especially on Islam.
I’m on my way out as well. I’m just trying to keep the door from hitting me in the ass.
Talha came here for PR reasons on behalf of his religion, and maybe to preach Islam.
Never trust a Muslim to be sincere!
While this may be true in general, I hardly think it’s true of UR. If anything alt-rightish White Power! types seem to have a kind of weird attraction to Islam, rather than the other way around.
And in this thread of course, “Dmitry” does not fit that category, but, much as I like what little I can tell of the fellow from his comments, he’s kind of a walking advertisement against atheism, as the other atheist commenters on this blog have pointed out now and again.
There is no door.