Why do we call it ‘self-reference’ when a finger points at the chest to which the hand to which the finger is attached, and the sound ‘I’ is emitted from the head attached to that chest? Where is the ‘Self’ in all this non-identity?

The intention to say ‘I’ is always absent from the pointing: a finger cannot point at an intention, nor can an intention point at itself as anything that is not that intention. Also, ‘identifying with’ something else is not ‘self-referring’.

Whatever idea of Self we may have, that idea is never identical with that which has that idea. We can circumscribe the conditions of that idea, but we can never pinpoint its source.

Why would a “Neo-Nazi” disrupt a genuine expression of Nazi ideology: nativist supremacism? Possibly to disassociate Nazism from its old image, which was a PR disaster, or to obscure the fact that Nazi ideology is the current norm, that we have a Nazi government.

A ‘just war’ is when stupid people in two countries kill one another, consensually, for the greater good.

Hypothesis. The Wakefield MMR/Autism paper was managed by the vaccine industry. They realised that the autism signal associated with vaccines could no longer be hidden so they singled out MMR as the possible cause in order to justify a large ‘autism study’ focussed only on MMR. This singular focus allowed them to retain the confounder of all other vaccines. They knew that MMR+’other vaccines’ would have roughly the same rate of autism as ‘other vaccines’. They effectively changed the theme from “vaccines cause autism” to “only MMR causes autism” and then compared vaccinated against vaccinated. They even asserted that MMR reduces the risk of autism, so it probably is not as bad as ‘other vaccines’, and that is why MMR was singled out by the Wakefield study. It is unclear whether Wakefield was a patsy or an informed collaborator, but the effect was the same.

My current view is that the question of ‘emergence’ of reflexive consciousness (‘I am’) is a wrong question, impossible to answer consistently, which leaves only one possibility: it is not ‘I’ that emerged from the ‘world’ but the ‘world’ that emerges from ‘I’, and that ‘I’ is essentially a multiplicity. Another way, there is always only ‘I’ that identifies as both Me and You, You as Me and Me as You, where the differences between Me and You are secondary to, emergent from and constructed on the basis of the same ‘I’. Nevertheless, the constructions of Me and You may differ in the consistency of reflexive relating (as My self-relation being mediated by You), which determines the degree of identity of Me and ‘I’, therefore the degree of existence as ‘I’.

How did consciousness evolve in the animal world?

Animals are aware of patterns, they recognise frequently repeated images, and the most consistently present image may be the appearance, smell and behaviour of other species of the same kind. Familiarity with the image of one’s own species gave rise to a degree of predictability, but may have gained even stronger pattern-consistency once reduced to ‘faces’, and then internalising this familiarity as a form of a collective self, of the species, of the tribe, of the pack: a collective ‘I’. Each member of the group thus organised could then differentiate the most familiar individual (the one one who occupies the first person point of view) from this collective ‘I’, but retain the ‘I’ as a means of individual identification with others. Nevertheless, the ‘minds eye’ that occupies the first person point of view can never be grasped as an object, is awlays ‘behind’ the perspective no matter which way it looks for itself, and it only finds itself in the collective ‘I’, relying on other beings of the same kind as a mirror for itself.

This is an elaboration on the broader discussion of this topic included in my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1763717216

It is conceivable that democracy is only nominally about the majority rule but is essentially a moral test: those who are willing to impose their preferences on others by the arbitrary standard of being in the majority are implicitly denying that preferences can be objectively right or wrong in their own right, thus negating the rationality of their choices and the authority of their own preferences. It then follows that this collective self-negation has representative priority over the negated preferences. If this is right then the abusive, humiliating, deceitful and exploitative governments are not a failure of democracy but express its proper function, provided it is applied only to those who vote.

A minority can never defend itself against the will of the majority by means of representative democracy, but by declaring itself as not represented and rejecting the premise of representation, it invalidates democracy, and thus becomes powerful as a disrupter of the premise of democratic authority.

The majority of people agree that those who refuse to style their moral judgement according to the authoritarian prejudices of the majority must be subjugated. Democracy is a form of group tyranny; it never had legitimacy beyond the renunciation of moral status that voting entails. Trump and Putin (in fact all democratic governments) accept this renunciation as their mandate to subjugate, albeit most rulers are less transparent about it than Trump and Putin.

VOTE (etymology): from Latin votum, a vow, promise to a god, solemn pledge, dedication, (therefore voluntary bondage).

We are all Indigenous. We are not Aliens.

The paradox of representative democracy: when a political party gains absolute parliamentary majority it becomes a de facto dictatorship.

If the only legitimate authority is to do what is objectively right, then voting is at best superfluous, because every person already has the moral authority to do what is morally right, and no authority, under any circumstances, to do what is morally wrong. We must therefore understand voting (for representation) as an attempt to legitimise what is morally wrong, and this is already a form of collusion that implicitly legitimises the oppression of self.

Democracy is not the antithesis of tyranny, but a process of legitimising it via performative consent.

People vote because they already believe it is the right thing to do, then they suffer the consequences and have no recourse against the tyranny they have thus legitimised. Some people don’t vote, because they believe it is wrong, and nothing changes except they preserve their dignity and do not collude in legitimising the tyranny they live under. Everything is as it should be.

There are inherent deficiencies in human reasoning that make any political system open to corruption. These inherent deficiencies can be mitigated by argumentative, public deliberation, so any system that facilitates and incentivises public deliberation is arguably the least corruptible. A form of direct democracy where any issue can be floated and every issue is open to public debate, a kind of social media platform where every citizen has an account and can directly influence policy, subject to the rules of discourse (no opinions but reasons), is probably as close to perfection as humans of the day are capable of organising themselves.

A crucial insight of Kant: “…morals is not properly the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy but of how we are to become worthy of happiness.” (Critique of Practical Reason 5:130)

No amount of wealth can free your mind. It can only amplify your delusions.

When the bank creates new units of money and ‘lends’ them to a customer (as ‘credit’), the purchasing power of those new units is not the property of the bank but is expropriated from all money holders by inflating the money supply, in the same way as counterfeit money inflates the money supply and thus expropriates value from all money holders. Another way, the credit issued (an asset claimed by the bank to justify charging interest) does not belong to the bank but to all money holders whose purchasing power of savings was diluted by the new credit tokens.

Once the customer spends the credit amount on goods and services, then pays back the principal plus interest, thus extinguishing the credit tokens, the interest paid still belongs to all money holders from whom the purchasing power of the loan was covertly ‘borrowed’. But the process does not end there: the banks must now issue even more credit to sustain their scam, that is, to enable the payment of future interest, so in effect the purchasing power expropriated from all money holders is not ‘borrowed’ but taken permanently, and in ever increasing quantities. This has the secondary effect of inflating some asset prices, especially real estate, so any profits derived from credit-driven asset ‘value’ growth are also fraudulent. The people who got rich from the growth in real estate are actually driving YOUR Mercedes; the banking system stole it from you, little by little over the years, and gave it to them:)