Normal
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Humanity is one because Truth is one. Reason unites us. Deliberate in good faith even with madmen and tyrants… and the Good will follow.
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Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
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).
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We are all Indigenous. We are not Aliens.
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The paradox of representative democracy: when a political party gains absolute parliamentary majority it becomes a de facto dictatorship.
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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.
Forwarded from Normal Chat
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.
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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.
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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)
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Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
No amount of wealth can free your mind. It can only amplify your delusions.
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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:)
Did you know that RBA (the central bank of Australia) is running a deficit? It has negative cash flow because 1) it pays interest to banks on all the cash they keep, and 2) it pays interest on deposits the banks keep at RBA for purposes of settling overnight debts with one another. It is unclear why interest is paid on these accounts, since they are a service provided solely for the convenience of the banks and the associated funds are not borrowed or used for any other purpose (you do not earn interest on your transaction accounts). As to why they pay interest on cash held by the banks (but not to you, for your cash), is another mystery. All of this is costing the public a few billion dollars per year: free money for the banks, just because, and you pay for this.
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Little People who endorse democracy do not understand what Power means. However you vote, the ruling power remains in power, and the result of the vote is just to legitimise that power having a claim over you. Nothing changes because of your collusion in democracy, except you.

If you cannot imagine how ‘right decisions’ could be made without democracy, then the ruling power determines what you are absolutely, which also means that you are not rational consciousness but a product, a thing, which also explains how they treat you.
Even though we are unable to prevent the ruling power from acting on us, we need not legitimise it by giving a performative consent to political representation. The refusal to legitimise it is imperative to preserving our moral status vis a vis that power. Political power is morally defeated by not reducing ourselves to what it needs us to become in order to legitimately claim us.
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No two events/situations are identical in any measurable property, so for two 'minds' to identify different events as 'alike' or 'of the same kind', or involving 'the same thing/being/phenomenon', presupposes a common standard of identifying sensory differences as belonging to the same identity, which is already metaphysical (not sensed but thought, as 'meaning') and social (a common thought). Another way, the pure difference of the physical/sensory is conditional on metaphysical identity (of the same 'mind' and the same 'being' at two different times), which is thus logically prior to the alleged conditions of its evolutionary emergence.

If all meaning is intrinsically social and metaphysical then mutual recognition of 'another mind' is a precondition of the meanings we are capable of identifying as being, including the being that 'has' a mind.
Once you cease to identify in terms of ideology, class, ethnicity or culture, the common sources of your prejudice vanish, and all that remains are other beings who may be capable (to various degrees) of rational deliberation and of creating common meaning with you.
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We can only make sense/meaning together insofar as we meet as rational beings, and nothing else, as every other identity limits our rational capacities.
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When environmental theorists lament the loss of natural habitat due to farming and overpopulation, they do not see themselves as the problem but only other people. They imagine living a more prosperous life with a nicer view and fewer little people getting in the way. They are lying about their motivation because they lack the capacity to rationally justify their claim to more quality, land and resources than what is available to other people. If they could justify their special entitlement, their moral argument should begin with that, which would win them some credibility, but this would no longer be environmental theory.
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If some aspect of action is not morally definite (but vague or ambiguous) then it is not a moral issue. ‘Ought’ implies ‘Can’, so if we ought to act in a particular way then it must be possible to determine what that particular way is, which implies the possibility of precision/perfection with regard to the moral content.