Political NEWSPEAK for dummies. “Corruption” is when some people in positions of authority steal from the public in secret; “Incompetence” is when the ruling party steals from the public openly. “Treason” is when some people in positions of authority serve a foreign power in secret; “Incompetence” is when the ruling party serves a foreign power openly.
All humans share the same ancient ancestors: the original owners of the earth, the first people, who were roaming the earth 200 million years ago. All living humans are their descendants, lost or dispersed but still our brothers and sisters; we are all the original owners of the Earth. But there is something more important than common ancestry that unites all of humanity: our capacity to reason, to understand one another and generate common meaning.
The only kind of speech that can cause real harm to humanity is the irrational speech that we unwitting accept as reasonable and fail to refute.
The things the majority accepts today as uncontroversial and right will shock us tomorrow. The rational way to deal with the problem of moral ignorance is to face the irrationality of the day and reveal its contradictions. Irrationality has an infinite supply of guises, and suppressing just those guises that were historically discredited will do nothing to defeat those that are yet to be unmasked, let alone those we unwittingly harbour within us. We cannot delegate this task to people in power, as this would be a renunciation of our own moral responsibility to discern right from wrong.
The primary expression of Propaganda is the Mainstream. The secondary expression of Propaganda is the irrational Fringe, which can be designated as ‘Propaganda’.
The rational is never labelled. If any opposition to the state doctrine is consistently labelled/identified by the mainstream, it is the irrational. The rational is evaded at all cost, and when this fails, the rational is gently set aside as ‘controversial’ and the conversation promptly redirected to the irrational.
The mainstream is propaganda, the voice of the rulling power. If the mainstream were not the voice of the rulling power, it would not be the rulling power. The sole function of censorship is to protect the mainstream, therefore all censorship is propaganda.
I have argued that it is impossible to create consciousness by creating a brain outside of the process of biological evolution and embodied socialisation. Reflexive consciousness is not an individual property but a distributed property of a species/kind, and only in this social ‘cloud’ the sense of individuality exists, as a constitutive element of the reflexive consciousness of a species. The concepts that describe the physical world (including the concept of the human body) are believed to be encoded in the physical structure of each individual body, but those may be also relevantly encoded in the species as a whole, therefore never wholly determined by the constitution of the individual. This would reflect the social/distributed structure of meaning itself, which is the reality we are in. It is possible that only via continuous communication of some extra sensory kind, possibly biophotonic, this final harmonisation of consciousness and self-individuation ‘in the Same world’ is accomplished. While this hypothesis is empirically unproven it still serves as a metaphor for the purely logical requirements of self-conscousness, which is impossible apart from a community of beings of the same ontological kind, to provide each individual with a mirror in which to identify itself, as discussed in the section on consciousness here: philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO
philpapers.org
Michael Kowalik, Ontological-Transcendental Defence of Metanormative Realism - PhilPapers
If there is something (P) that every possible agent is committed to value, and certain actions or attitudes either enhance or diminish P, then normative claims about a range of intentional ...
Ukraine had no chance of victory against Russia. Giving them weapons and coercing Ukrainian men to fight is a means of their extermination.
Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
How to love your enemies.
The early hominin were not aware of their own faces until they conceived of the face of another and thus began to conceive of themselves in terms of another. At that point in the evolution there emerged the Anthopos - the ‘likeness of me’. This reflexive turn was the beginning of self-awareness, which is nevertheless only indirect, mediated by the essential ‘likeness’ of another. Self-awareness is a conceptual synthesis of others from the first-person perspective, a mental act of internalising the human kind as my-Self in a situation. The more faithfully we internalise humanity as the potential for conscious choice, the more conscious we become. For this reason, we cannot dehumanise or un-Self any wrongdoer without losing the awareness of a part of the Self, which may further degrade our consciousness.
The early hominin were not aware of their own faces until they conceived of the face of another and thus began to conceive of themselves in terms of another. At that point in the evolution there emerged the Anthopos - the ‘likeness of me’. This reflexive turn was the beginning of self-awareness, which is nevertheless only indirect, mediated by the essential ‘likeness’ of another. Self-awareness is a conceptual synthesis of others from the first-person perspective, a mental act of internalising the human kind as my-Self in a situation. The more faithfully we internalise humanity as the potential for conscious choice, the more conscious we become. For this reason, we cannot dehumanise or un-Self any wrongdoer without losing the awareness of a part of the Self, which may further degrade our consciousness.
Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
Digital Idenity is not YOUR identity
The claim that the ability to prove who you are is a “fundamental and universal human right” is absurd and false. It is false because it is not on the list of ratified human rights. It is absurd because there is no possible universal standard for expressing a “true” identity apart from just being yourself, which is trivially true for everyone and everything. Everything is alway only identical to itself (the Law of Identity), and any additional feature (like a number, microchip, tattoo etc is necessarily not you), nor is any part or feature of your body (like fingerprints or a retina scan) your identity. What the authors of the linked page are trying to assert is that there is a human right to assume a false identity, which is a very strange (insane) proposition. In short, a Digital or biometric ID is a false identity, a fundamental lie, a violation of the law of identity, therefore nonsense.
https://id2020.org/digital-identity
The claim that the ability to prove who you are is a “fundamental and universal human right” is absurd and false. It is false because it is not on the list of ratified human rights. It is absurd because there is no possible universal standard for expressing a “true” identity apart from just being yourself, which is trivially true for everyone and everything. Everything is alway only identical to itself (the Law of Identity), and any additional feature (like a number, microchip, tattoo etc is necessarily not you), nor is any part or feature of your body (like fingerprints or a retina scan) your identity. What the authors of the linked page are trying to assert is that there is a human right to assume a false identity, which is a very strange (insane) proposition. In short, a Digital or biometric ID is a false identity, a fundamental lie, a violation of the law of identity, therefore nonsense.
https://id2020.org/digital-identity
ID2020
ID2020 | Digital Identity Alliance
The ID2020 Alliance is a global partnership maximizing the potential of digital ID to improve lives.
The following paper at first reads like a parody, but then the author slowly brings the reader to his side. I like the narrative tension. The argument is all the more interesting in the current ‘cultural/media’ climate, where we are told that sexuality is at least in part subjective, which leaves the door open to regarding any violation of bodily autonomy as a sexual violation. At the same time one wonders whether there is something psychologically and culturally unique to sexuality that does not fit the proposed analogy of the needle. Nevertheless, the author seems to argue that this distinction is morally irrelevant, and the comparison to sexual harassment was only used to make a point about bodily integrity. https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/1/231
JAMS
Non-Consensual Vaccination and Medical Harassment: Giving Vaccine Refusers Their Due<sup>1</sup>
This article argues that non-consensual vaccination is morally impermissible, for the same reasons for which sexual assault is not permissible. Likewise, mandatory vaccination is morally akin to sexual harassment, and therefore is not to be allowed.
BREAKING NEWS: Daniel Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, has affirmed Labour’s commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals by mandating that by 2030 all Victorian households will transition to a new, ultra-sustainable heating technology. Residents will soon be required to heat their dwellings by rubbing their hands together really fast. “Our sustainable development policy prioritises not only sustainability but also affordability. We will support Victorian families by making rubbing your hands together completely free,” sensationally announced the Premier.
Free speech consists in having equal access to the contemporaneous means of public communication, irrespective of the content of speech. Based on this definition, universal free speech is impossible, since political/corporate power is associated with privileged access to the means of public communication, rendering everyone else’s speech systemically restricted. In addition to any systemic asymmetries, public speech may be further restricted by means of targeted censorship. Freedom of speech is ultimately about power, and whenever it is granted to the little people by the ruling faction it is only to advance its own interests.
Speech is meaningful and valuable only if it is used for communication, and to the degree that it can be used for communication. The degree of access to the means of public communication is then the only limiting factor of the value of speech and the only logically consistent measure of the ‘freedom of speech’. Every other measure so far presented (the right to be heard, the number of words spoken per minute in an empty room etc) results in absurdity.
No amount of wealth can free your mind. It can only amplify your delusions.