The Ethics of Assassination

The Golden Rule.

Your post is mostly full of “justifications”.

In the law of the jungle, no justification is needed. We killed him because he was our enemy.

It was unlawful. As you clearly point out, international law forbids this. Therefore, it is illegal.

Also, don’t you think that forcing him to stand trial, then executing him according to international law would have dealt a more serious blow to “terrorism”?

As an anarcho-pacifist, I neither condone nor condemn the violent actions of others.

Instead, I seek to make people aware of consequences they are unlikely to be aware of. The unintended consequences.

Violence begets more violence. Wars escalate.

Osama bin Laden is just one man. Not even the most terrifying man in the world. There are worse.

I would not advise anyone to murder, under any circumstances. That is irresponsible.

Civilizationn is still adolescent. I try to encourage maturity.

The fact that people celebrated in the streets, that we as a country spend more on military machinery than anything else, and that anyone would even try to justify murder for any reason . . . is evidence of just how sick we are as a society.

I was saddened and disgusted by the bloodlust and cheering responses I’ve seen in the media and online to the Hollywood gangbuster style operation that took Bin Laden’s and other’s lives Sunday. Violence begets violence and murder is murder whether in war, by a “State”, or some other consensus.  Violence, murder and war will never be eliminated by hating the proponents or their actions. They will be obviated by being tolerant, peaceful, and loving peace. Ideology starts wars and ideology can end wars. John Lennon and Yoko Ono said “War is over if you want it” but most do not want it or there would be no wars. Humankind has not evolved sufficiently beyond the reptilian amygdala reactions that once may have served as a useful survival tool but is hardly useful today.

The inappropriate response to the 9/11 actions has cost over 2 trillion dollars and likely over 900,000 humans killed and another 1.7 million injured. Source: http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html All this to “balance” the damage (3000+ casualties and perhaps a couple of $Billion in real estate) perpetrated by 19 misguided zealots who believed they were doing God’s work and were in thrall to the ideology of others who believed that their ends justify any means. If we had followed John Kerry’s advice i.e.,  that these non-state actors were criminals and should be hunted down by police proxies (not the U.S. military and National Guard ) and brought to trial (not expediently murdered) most of this travesty could have been avoided.

We instead chose to invade a sovereign nation, Afghanistan, not an ideally governed nation to be sure, but a nation state that had done nothing to us, using Bush Doctrine as an excuse because they had the temerity to not deliver Osama in response to our threats. Then we invaded another sovereign nation who also had done nothing to us by falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 event and using obviously manufactured evidence that claimed he was trying to buy yellow cake uranium from Nigeria to create WMD and we know how that turned out. This was a hugely imbalanced retaliatory means to justify the ends. All that was accomplished was mega-misery and economic disaster for us and windfall profit for Halliburton and Blackwater.

Are we safer today because we have murdered thousands as well as Bin Laden? Are our military personnel better off with PTSD after 10 years of killing innocents abroad and multiple deployments so that their families can’t pay their mortgages? Are we better off after our drone operators with their video game mentality indiscriminately launch Hellfire missiles at God knows whom from command centers in Nevada? Are we safer for the torturing of captives (quasi-legal because some weasel wording government lawyer with a semantic sense of justice said it was OK) here (as we did Bradley Manning for his patriotic acts), Guantanamo, and in shadowy locations abroad? Are we safer due to our crack staff of TSA employees hassling Regis Philbin and Jesse Ventura? I doubt any of the steps taken beyond locking cockpit doors after the metaphorical horse has fled has improved our safety one whit, and our disregard for the rule of international and domestic law and overwhelming belief in American Exceptionalism has likely inflamed untold myriads and those chickens will come home to roost.

Bush’s preemptive doctrine and Obama’s ordering of this operation is no different in principle to Charles Manson’s ordering Sharon Tate’s execution or legislators ordering the execution of those on death row. It is never ethical to murder or deprive someone of his life – those who are deemed a danger to society (beyond a reasonable doubt) should be separated from it as humanely as possible and their circumstances reviewed periodically. Those who are engaged in a self defense drama are no exception, however that is between the dramatis personae not murder by proxy. The real reason people sanction these murders is due to FEAR that they might fall victim to the bogeyman but for the grace of God or happenstance. When people are afraid they will behave in a way that they believe will mitigate their fear despite ethics, morality, or the cost or consequences. I am heartened that at least here at IEET the responders iPan and Cathi are among the few who are not ethically challenged.

Peace to ALL,

Burt

In theory assassination has advantages over other military tactics as it makes leaders subject to the violence they foster. I’d rather see a few bosses die than thousands of soldiers and civilian workers. However, current events stand far from that utopian ideal. Osama bin Laden’s death comes as part of U.S. imperialism and the horrific war on terror that has destroyed so many lives over the last decade. I can only hope that this development with create political pressure to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

well said Burt. It was and is indeed a very costly game to pursue Bin Laden by invading countries, and one wonders at how islamic fundamentalist terrorism may not have escalated to the extent it has if the US followed John Kerry’s advice and left the matter to police. On the flipside, you could pragmatically argue that the two invasions have given the US access to natural resources, oil, but in the case of Afganistan numerous mineral resources, potentially well in excess of the cost of the war. But has it? I wonder what could have been if the US and its allies, instead of funding two wars without end, had instead channelled that money into the development of renewable energy. Well,  I guess thats a lot of “what ifs” to dangle around the death of a single man…

I have not been particularly saddened and disgusted by the bloodlust and cheering responses in the media, primarily because I haven’t been paying attention to them.

I did respond to an article by Paul Troop on the subject at http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/05/should-the-us-have-killed-osama-bin-laden/. Basically the conclusion I came to was that (after a night’s sleep to go beyond my initial, albeit complex, knee-jerk reaction) was that this event may help us to close the chapter on 9/11 and its aftermath, and to open a new chapter, which I described (perhaps somewhat bombastically) as follows: “towards a rejuvinated West, an arab spring, a democratic China, and a prosperous India”.

“The fact that people celebrated in the streets, that we as a country spend more on military machinery than anything else, and that anyone would even try to justify murder for any reason . . . is evidence of just how sick we are as a society.”

I don’t disagree. But as post-post would say, this is just SNAFU - Situation Normal All F*ed Up. We already knew we were sick as a society, that’s nothing new. No point in weeping about it. From that perspective I’m less interested in whether or not the killing was “ethical” or not - in any case it’s happened (@Burt: did you choose it do happen? ) - than in where we should be going from here. Hence my thoughts about opening a new chapter…

“The fact that people celebrated in the streets, that we as a country spend more on military machinery than anything else, and that anyone would even try to justify murder for any reason . . . is evidence of just how sick we are as a society.”

It’s like that almost everywhere, save for a few western European nations; and, maybe, New Zealand, or somewhere.
Or perhaps it is the same everywhere.
Many young people can’t get it how many eons it has been so, how imbedded in us it is. Oh, well, youth is wasted on the young

“Whether those heading organized efforts to wage war against us are military leaders, religious leaders or civilians, we are well within our rights to do whatever it takes to stop them. Killing Osama bin Laden is not unethical murder — it is the price organized terrorists who declare war against us must expect to pay.”

Bin Ladin could have been incapacitated with handcuffs or a tranquilizing shot or a gunshot to the leg. He is an old man and was unarmed. All disclosed evidence support that killing him was not necessary for incapacitation.

Caplan must then identify some morally relevant goal (not incapacitation) that could justify killing.

What? Bloodthirst? Retribution?

No plausible reason seems available, only shameful excuses.

“Osama bin Laden’s death comes as part of U.S. imperialism and the horrific war on terror that has destroyed so many lives over the last decade. I can only hope that this development with create political pressure to fully withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan.”

America IS imperialist, unfortunately so are many other nations, otherwise we wouldn’t need to blog about it, would we? I was joking BTW about youth being wasted on the young; youths can be very gullible yet considering how they are treated generally show great compassion and resilience. Their elders are misinforming & disinforming them; worst of all, youths are to this day sent to fight wars in protecting the property of elders—would anyone think war is about anything but to defend property and DARPA (which involves property as well)? when jingoists say ‘defense’ is to defend the Constitution they are conning sincere patriots, a Constitution in and of itself is utterly worthless, an abstraction.
All the same, tell me one reason I ought to care diddly squat about bin Laden, it is better IMO to hate than to shed crocodile tears. Who cares that Pol Pot is dead? or Stalin, Hitler? better to admit the cold-blooded reaction of “good riddance to bad trash”, than to pretend otherwise. We want to maintain our humaneness as much as possible while at the same time avoiding smarm.
As I remember it the 1976 law against Assassinations came about primarily in the wake of the Vietnam War, which is pretty obvious, however specifically because of a fad: a fad for JFK assassination conspiracy theory. In 1975 (the year south Vietnam was conquered by the north) government meetings were held concerning assassinations such as JFK’s, RFK’s, MLK’s, foreign assassinations and never-attempted assassinations (such as an exploding cigar plot targeting Fidel Castro). Yet the granddaddy of conspiracy theories and assassinations was JFK’s assassination, and it was a fad because a conspiracy was never demonstrated. What made many suspicious was how Jack Ruby was able to shoot Oswald in a police station—however it wasn’t anything to go by. Point is, much leading to the 1976 law was based on assassination-conspiracy faddism, and far beyond it was feel-good. For in foreign policy law doesn’t really exist as we know statutes to be. Lower-profile targets are selected instead of leaders, for example in Central America in the ‘80s leaders weren’t assassinated (for instance Manuel Noriega was abducted) yet you can be sure countless lower-downs were killed. Again, the ‘76 law was feel-good, to assure the public of ethics when in foreign policy ethics scarcely exist if they exist in any way at all.
Pete got it just so: “We already knew we were sick as a society, that’s nothing new. No point in weeping about it. From that perspective I’m less interested in whether or not the killing was ‘ethical’ or not - in any case it’s happened.”

It seems to me there are a range of ethical standards around the world relative to violence and retaliation. These range from strict passivism to eye-for-an-eye to might-makes-right and everything in between. One stance sees “justice” as reactionary while another stance sees justice as proactive, cooperative, nonviolent.
I, personally, was disturbed that Obama said “Justice has been done”. To me that is retributive justice and not how I see America.
But, I am also aware that he was not talking to me. He was talking to Hawks and perhaps to the radical Muslim world. As I continue to hear coverage, I keep that in mind.
9/11 is still an open sore. Going into war immediately did not give our country time to really grieve it, to process it. One journalist said that Bin Laden *as a symbol* had to die. Bin Laden, himself, sought to be a symbol. Perhaps with his death, we can truly begin to heal.
It is right for us to look at the ethics we want to shape for the future. The UN came out of (among other things) WWII. Maybe we can begin a new era of international peace agreements.

“He was talking to Hawks.” Do you mean by that the vast majority of Americans? I think going into war immediately was part of the grieving process. I certainly don’t agree with your journalist that Bin Laden “had” to die, but he was most certainly a symbol, and as you say dor he sought this.

“Perhaos with is death, we can truly begin to heal.” I would put it slightly differently. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the assassination itself, now that it has happened we have an ethical duty, all of us, to focus on taking whatever opportunity it does provide us to bring about healing.

But it’s good that some of us here are sickened and saddened. That’s emotion that can be channelled. We need to accept that this has happened and move on. But we don’t need to condone it. We can indeed see the act, and the subsequent celebrations, as a call to tackle the sickness within our own society. We can say loudly and clearly: “this was wrong”, and lobby for the US to subject itself to the jurisdiction of the ICJ, like other countries. We can start by trying to convince some Republicans.

This is a case of Prisoner’s Dilemma: Obama doesn’t want to be imperialistic, but he wants to keep his career, he has to pay lip service to imperialism so as to help his people—as you know
it is a very cliquish world.
Bin Laden? why should I care any more about him than Oskar Dirlewanger, who was tortured to death for days by Polish and French soldiers in 1945? Besides, if someone were to murder a member of each of our families, we would not be forgiving, would we?

@post-post

why should I care any more about him than Oskar Dirlewanger, who
was tortured to death for days by Polish and French soldiers in 1945? Besides, if someone were to murder a member of each of our families, we would not be forgiving, would we? 

You should care about the immoral concept of torture and murder (which I surmise you do given the content of your many posts at IEET) . About the humans who create the dramas in which they find themselves, you may care as much or little you will, but they were party to those dire events and chose the outcomes for their own reasons.

I believe I would forgive a murderer if a family member were to create an event that resulted in their being murdered. I forgive Obama and his triggerman for their less than ideal behavior and would hope that their consciences would prevent them from indulging in such behavior in the future. I would be sad for the emotional loss of their friends and other family members as I am saddened by the murders and cheering of any murder by anyone.

Peace

“Killing Osama bin Laden is not unethical murder — it is the price organized terrorists who declare war against us must expect to pay.” As with any ethical argument, its useful to reverse the protagonists and see if the argument still holds. Therefore, would it be appropriate for an Iraqi or Afgan to say “Killing Barrak Obama is not unethical murder — it is the price organized terrorists who declare war against us must expect to pay.”

We should reject both statements as ethically offensive. Violence perpetrated under the direction of any individual is disgusting and indefensible, no matter how much each protests the need for violence to achieve a greater good. We might skim closer to an ethical outcome if we were to allow a legal process to occur, to have brought Obama or Osama to an international court to allow them stand trial and be found innocent or guilty. But that process was not undertaken.

Arthur Caplans’ article and closing statement proves precisely why we need objective outsiders and third parties to assist us with ethical choices when we ourselves are too close to the dilemma at hand. Its the “tough talk” that get humanity into trouble in the first place. The ethical decision is often the most difficult one and therefore is best administered by others. This is the foundation of law. For that reasons, it disturbs me that the Board of Trustees of the IEET allowed Mr Caplan to make such statements under this organisations banner when his position is clearly more from a position of passion and righteousness than any ethical location.
I wish him and the board the best.

 

There is a fairly simple litmus test for whether or not any action is ethical or not:

If you must justify it after the fact, then it is of lesser ethical value.

A truly ethical action never requires justification for itself, because it is ethical.

So, if you find yourself making justifications for an action, particularly after the action has taken place, that is a key marker that the action was not ethical to begin with.

The less justification you need to explain an action, the more ethical it becomes.

people’s reaction to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden seems to be very dependent on where they lived during 9/11.

I live miles away on the West Coast and people here aren’t very rah-rah-rah about his death; in fact, they’re critical about the celebrations in the street, etc.  But my friends in NYC are very happy.

Those who lost friends and family members in 9/11 or were traumatized - as many were - are understandably joyful, even ecstatic, that OBL is dead. 

I respect their feelings regarding this.  They were very involved, their lives were impacted, and mine was not—so I am not going to pass any judgement on their emotional response.

post-postfuturist: I’m trying to understand your thinking. Do you believe the US has killed a large number of innocent people in its so called war against terror the last decade? Do you believe that the innocent people who where tortured or killed at Abu Ghraib (yes some where completely innocent) or killed by US drone plane bombings had lives of less moral weight than american lives? I belive that if the US continually gets away with murder and violations of international law then that will cause the US to continue to kill innocent people.

“A truly ethical action never requires justification for itself, because it is ethical.”

Can somebody tell me what this means?

In one sense no action ever “requires” justification. It just happens. It is we who, because of our genetic and cultural heritage are constantly seeking justifications. OBL’s assassination does not require justification. We are just interested in considering whether, according to our respective ethical instincts/frameworks, it was justified or not. Obviously if you have a pacifist ethical framework then it cannot be justified, but that in itself tells us nothing that we didn’t already know, namely that you are a pacifist.

Overall my feeling on this is very much like Hank’s: we’re not very “rah-rah-rah” here in Europe either, but then we didn’t live through what the New Yprkers did.

@Peter

On the one hand, I’m pointing out that the very mental process of ‘justification’ is actually your conscience auto-correcting.

If you’re conscience isn’t telling you you did something wrong, i.e. justifying, then that’s an indication that what you did is ethical (or that your a sociopath - there’s a fine line between saint and sociopath).

Mentally speaking, the fact that your brain is inventing justification is quite literally your conscience at work, editing events to resolve cognitive dissonance.

Consider Jung’s stages of morality (rough though they are, they give us an idea).

Immorality
Morality
Amorality
Super-morality

The immoral accepts the social norms of his culture, but chooses to disregard them. That is, the immoral actually believe their actions are immoral, but choose to do it anyway. They ignore their own conscience.

The moral accept and adhere to their cultural norms.

The amoral understand that their is no absolute authority, and therefore no action truly requires justification. This is the ‘kill or be killed’, ‘nature is red in tooth and claw’, ‘social Darwinist’ phase of moral development. This is the most widespread stage of development in the world, next to the moral stage (most of the religious masses, for example, are waffling between morality and amorality). The surprise that comes for most people, is to realize that amorality is a more advanced stage than morality.

Super morality is a stage where a person realizes that self-interest and other-interest are not mutually exclusive. It is not self-sacrifice, nor is it self-absorption. It is holistic. It’s the real reason for the Golden Rule. I could not kill another any easier than I could cut off my own hand, because I am the universe. It’s a relaxation of the boundaries of self.

The most difficult transition is between amorality and super morality. It requires a longer sense of temporal relationships.

Like the amoralist, the super moralist does not require any absolute authority, or dictator to judge moral actions.

The super moral person simply regards the consequences of even the most trivial actions further in time than the amoralist is capable of.

The super moralist realizes that she is a dynamic energy process embedded within all the other energetic processes in the universe, and that there is no true causal isolation. It results more from a reassessment of the boundaries of the definition of self than any conception of “right” or “wrong”.

This is the only difference between the amoralist and the super moralist, who both agree that there is no absolute authority.

The super moralist see’s much further in time, and is less short sighted than the amoralist, and is therefore able to calculate the unintended consequences more effectively.

To my understanding, the only way to make the transition to super morality is to literally increase one’s capacity for temporal reasoning/perception, and this requires altered states of consciousness.

No amount of intellectual chatter can do it, at best that will only lead to amorality.

Drop some LSD, and watch the consequences of each breath, each neurological impulse, ripple throughout your reality. When you get accustomed to it, you will find that the highest principle in the universe is autonomy. It’s not even possible to usurp another’s autonomy, we only believe that we are capable of that, hence authority is an illusion. No matter how things appear in the external world, the universe itself preserves the autonomy of all, meaning we actually delude ourselves when we think we exercise authority over another.

This makes authority an energy inefficient activity.

But that’s ok, because it’s merely a growth stage as well. A larval stage, if you will. Humanity is about to grow up.

Or be still-born.

Choices?

Btw, my own personal moral developmental stage is somewhere between amorality and super morality.

I certainly haven’t fully made the transition, and don’t expect to until we are a post-singular civilization.

It take’s longer than one would expect.

All I’ve really done is glimpse far enough ahead in time to intellectually understand.

In actual practice, I still find myself behaving amorally sometimes, and at other times super-morally.

It’s extremely difficult.

Let me ask you this:

How many of you are willing to take personal responsibility for Osama bin Laden’s actions (let’s assume for the sake of argument that none of the ‘conspiracy’ theories are true - something I’m not wholly convinced of, but for the sake of argument….)?

Where were you when Osama was growing up?

Why don’t you take responsibility for his moral development?

Why weren’t you there to give him guidance and help him achieve a higher state of morality?

Why did you fail him in his hour of need?

Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do…..

(i.e., they don’t have the temporal sense to truly understand that butterflies are triggered by hurricane wings)

IMO it’s about decisiveness. You make up your mind: was bin Laden deserving of his assassination? probably, yes.
Now he can be with his 72 virgins in Paradise; so it is a win win deal, we don’t have him around any more; he is in Paradise. ‘Nuff said, bury the dead. What I want to do is make decisions more smoothly, take the Confederacy for instance, people will say there was justification on both sids. But poop or get off the pot. An executive decision had to be made, someone was executed.

@iPan [12:51 PM]

Again I am in substantial agreement with your analyses and I chuckle at your humor.

As to Acid usage (I wouldn’t recommend its ingestion by everyone as it interferes with consciousness’ physical reality foci and some have problems syncing their consciousness with their senses after tripping) IMO its chief value is demonstrating to those adventurous partakers from whence reality arises. If that doesn’t edify one then Ayahuasca certainly will but syncing physical reality with one’s former worldview after such an experience may be difficult if not altogether impossible.

@iPan [01:15 PM]

I take personal responsibility for aligning my personal reality with the mass reality that includes OBL’s actions. I was in the USA when OBL was born (I’m older than he) and I assume responsibility for his moral development (the OBL I have created) since I have been aware of his existence. I have been posting on the web regarding Moral Philosophy for some years and since he doesn’t understand English, (Google Translate has only become recently available) I can only say I have tried to raise the awareness of those who can read to embrace that which you state as Super Morality. I am disappointed that I indeed failed to align myself in a reality that didn’t include a reformed and repentant OBL but there are others which as you note (are less ideal – BTW OBL was an idealist who misplaced his moral compass) to fill his vacuum, perhaps they will reform themselves or remain object lessons for those who need their examples. Most haven’t a clue as to what they do and one should forgive their ignorance and project that they become less so regarding the interconnectedness of ALL. 

Formerly when IEET posted the member’s email addresses in the comments section, I was tempted to send you an off blog message. If you would be interested in communicating via email, send me a note to jazzbo9 at comcast dot net.

Peace,

Burt

“I believe I would forgive a murderer if a family member were to create an event that resulted in their being murdered.”

What is this, we are all so forgiving all of a sudden? how BIG of us. Anyone can say this, Burt: I believe I would forgive a murderer if a family member were to create an event that resulted in their being murdered, but the behavior is what matters- would you actually forgive? you “believe” so; however I don’t ‘believe’ what anybody says any more, everyone is lying part of the time. Yes, it would be better to care about a complete skank such as Osama bin A**hole, but it is also better to say you don’t care about him if deep down you actually do not care about him. Frankly, IMO he got what was coming to him, he got what he deserved—he dug his grave and now he is lying in it; and if you think this is harsh then he made his bed and now he is lying in it.
I don’t weep every time a sparrow falls dead off a tree. Smarm is revolting, it is for rightwing Christians to pretend they care.
And it IS about making a decision; you think to yourself whether or not you care about a bin Laden, then make up your mind; you don’t want to change your mind all the time, do you? Did the Confederacy deserve to be defeated? IMO, yes. Did bin Laden deserve to be assassinated? IMO, yes. That way you don’t attempt to be all things to all people; you don’t waver so much. And if you should discover eventually that you were wrong, then you were wrong. ‘Nuff said, bury the dead.

I hear transcendental meditation can achieve the same results as LSD, with less side effects.

I took the fast lane. It has it’s consequences as well. I guess I need to forgive myself. I didn’t find it “expedient” enough to spend 50 years learning to do something that LSD granted me in 20 minutes

@post-post
Let’s set aside forgiveness for a second.

I’ll accept anyone’s moral judgement the moment they can calculate to atomic precision the precise consequences of their actions for the next 250 years.
Until then, I am not able to place blame at anyone’s feet for anything.

They know not what they do.

This is yet another area where technology will help us ‘Obsolete The Problem’.

One, we will soon be able to simulate events to such a high degree of precision, that we will be able to know what the outcomes of even minute actions are in near real-time.

Two, social media is weaving us together into a global village.

If this second point were wrong, then what I am I doing here posting on the internet?

Naturally, bin Laden’s people had legitimate grievances; the Confederacy had legitimate grievances, Hitler’s people, Stalin’s, Pol Pot’s all had legitimate grievances; Attila’s, Genghis Khan’s, and Caligula’s peoples had legitimate grievances.
But who cares what a psychopath such as bin Laden thought? or any of the other mass nurderers? Bin Laden’s psychopathology was his worst enemy, not the U.S. government or its armed forces. Free will means one is even free to will one’s own destruction, so in this sense libertarians are correct: one has the freedom to fail; and bin Laden took advantage of his own psychopathic personality in effect to commit suicide, to fail, with a little help from the enemies he deliberately set out to make as his enemies.

BTW,
what are the legitimate grievances of bin Laden’s people? they aren’t stupid, they know the West didn’t care about Mideast nations being invaded during WWII, and they know the West doesn’t care about the region today- save as the place where a large fraction of its petroleum supply is shipped from. We see the Mideast as an oil spigot, while they perceive us as oil-junkies who for obvious reasons don’t want to drill more for oil in Alaska, through the Continental Shelf, and elsewhere.
Yet bin Laden knew what he was doing, he didn’t want to consider carefully the consequences of his violent acts, however he willed his own destruction by plunging ahead recklessly. At least bin laden died a less painful death than those killed via the many violent acts he instigated; and, Burt, you did not mention those victims of his acts, which was rather one-sided of you. There is something quite one-sided about your we-are-One Eastern spirituality, it is as extreme as Western individualism—can’t there be a balance?
As for Obama, he is trapped: what can he say or do? he can’t say: “America is an imperalist nation because of our size & legacy, however we’re no worse than the other great powers”? it doesn’t look good in the papers or on TV. And what can Obama do? resign the presidency so he can return to Chicago to resume being a community organizer?

Tool - Right in Two

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLjrD-oXkhA

Angels on the sideline,
Puzzled and amused.
Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they’re all confused.

Don’t these talking monkeys know that
Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys,
Where there’s one you’re bound to divide it

Right in two

Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
(and this is what they choose)

Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They forge a blade,
And when there’s one they’re bound to divide it,

Right in two.
Right in two.

Monkey, killing monkey, killing monkey
Over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs,
They make a club
And beat their brother… down.
How they survived so misguided is a mystery.
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability
to lift an eye to heaven conscious of his fleeting time here

Gotta divide it all right in two (x4)

They fight, till they die
Over earth, over sky
They fight, over life,
Over brawn, over air and light,
Over love, over sun. Over blood
They fight, or they die, all for what? For our rising!

Angels on the sideline again
Been too long with patience and reason
Angels on the sideline again
Wondering when this tug of war will end

Gotta divide it all right in two (x3)
Right in two

Right in two…

ipan, you have convinced us, now tell it to the land-sharks, the barracudas, who own this world; I don’t talk to them anymore because they do all the talking—can’t get a word in edgewise—IEET is a better way to communicate. IMO libertarians are slightly better to talk to than Republicans, extreme leftists, etc.; libertarians appear to be serious, though they cannot seem to get it how if you have a disingenuous public, you get a disingenuous state. Libertarians think: remove the state from the equation and… voila’! But first we need to develop a civilization, then we can know genuine liberty.
BTW, the 1976 statute prohibiting assassinations was a sop to make the public think foreign policy would become less predatory after Vietnam, Watergate, and the assassination committee hearings the year before; but no. Even the assassination hearings were a travesty because of conspiracy cranks who testified on Martin Luther King having been assassinated by KKK members from outer space or something. They couldn’t make up their minds whether JFK was assassinated by the CIA, or the Cosa Nostra, Castro, Russian agents, the Boy Scouts, Shirley Temple, Little Orphan Annie.

On personal responsibility.

I don’t share Burt’s views on the extent to which we create our own reality and are thus responsible for everything that happens. This is something the two of us have discussed at length on my blog. But iPan’s questions *are* relevant. To the extent that I choose to identify with my past self, I can also choose to take responsibility for everything I did and didn’t do that ultimately formed part of the causal chain leading to 9/11.

On immorality-moral-amoral-super morality.

Thanks iPan for making me aware of this, it’s a beautiful schema. I think I’m also somewhere between amoral and supermoral, although I certainly slip back into the other two from time to time (moral: sometimes I am unthinkingly outraged at the actions, sometimes I do things because I think I “have” to. immoral: sometimes I experience the cognitive dissonance of believing I should be doing one thing wile simultaneously doing something else).

One comment on supermorality: i think you and I both agree iPan that we want to aim for a future, post-singularity or whatever, where self-interest and other-interest are perfectly aligned. Perhaps it is then that autonomy and connection will also become allies, not opposites. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, and it’s because I don’t believe we’ll get there by pretending that we’re already there (i.e. like Cathi I don’t fully believe in the law of attraction) that I’m not a pacifist.

This is one hell of a debate! We really are the best.

“now tell it to the land-sharks, the barracudas, who own this world; I don’t talk to them anymore because they do all the talking—can’t get a word in edgewise—“

Good point. It’s frustrating.

I used to participate in sit in style protests, when I lived in Boston.

It gave me the impression that it was futile, so I switched to online activism.

I figure I can reach a wider audience that way.

Since I abstain from voting (non-participation in authoritarianism - although I might vote for the repeal of a law), it’s difficult to find any avenues to advance.

Anarcho-pacifism is such a conundrum. Which is probably why so few choose it. Can’t enforce my ideas on anyone. Can’t bring peace at the end of a gun, like everyone else seems to be trying to do.

I’ve also spent a little time doing volunteer work, though the town I’m living in now, a small affluent retirement community, has very few volunteer opportunities, compared to the big cities I’ve done volunteering in before.

What else can be done? Right now, my goal is to try to reach out to middle class, affluential intellectuals, the kind I suspect read this blog or frequent kurweailai.net in the hope that if I can affect someone who does have influence in the world, then maybe I can influence it’s course.

For example, Hank Pellisier. I know that he donates money to KIVA, and has done other charity work in the past. He is, in my estimation, the kind of person I want to influence. Middle class, affluent, capable of doing something with real results. If I can change his mind (or anyone else like him) in even a small way, and direct it towards positive, peaceful goals, then I will.

That is my entire motive here.

@Peter
Yeah, Jung’s stages of morality are a rough approximation, just like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are also a rough approximation (though I find both of them to be a little more on target than say Freud).

In reality, people are often simultaneously at more than one stage.

We can find ourselves cycling between morality, amorality, and super-morality.

It’s a gradient.

A pattern, and is not meant to be clad in stone.

But it does illustrate rather well.

The super morality zone entirely boils down to definition of self, and the extent of one’s temporal perception.

I don’t think one can “talk” one’s way into a more refined sense of morality, and this is why I briefly mentioned LSD.

Of course, there are more *sane* methods. Transcendental meditation. Hands on work with volunteering to help the needy, and the like.

Psychadelics are just a short-cut to seeing some pretty weird causal effects, and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone without careful research and planning first.

In any case, right now I believe that social media and the internet are our best candidates for a supercharged catalyst for change.

I hope you are familiar with Jamais Cascio and Clay Shirky.

If not, check out Clay’s “Here Comes Everybody”. I’m pretty sure it’s the social media paradigm that will act as the catalyst for the radical changes we need.

Without social media, we are just lugging along like we’ve always done.

With social media, the revolutions happen on a faster cycle. That’s all it really does: accelerates the pace of change.

Thankfully, I don’t have to jump through hoops to present evidence anymore: we have working examples today: WikiLeaks, the Middle East, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Since Arthur mentioned the ‘76 law (though international law isn’t quite law, it consists of rules that are bent/broken) against assassination, a question is why with already-present obfuscation would the public want to fill its collective mind with conspiracy theory? The ‘76 law came about in large measure due to conspiracy theories of the ‘60s- ‘70s.
Not all of the public are empty heads waiting to be filled—it must have deeper roots than merely dumb-proles who yearn for bread & circuses, in escaping, falling for conspiracy theory phantasms.
The assassinations that helped lead to the ‘76 anti-assassination law have already been touched on, since that now ancient era new phantoms have arisen in the wake of 9-11 and subsequent wars: controlled demolition; the Bush administration’s alleged complicity in 9-11. One might deem these imaginary conspiracies entertainment, yet they exacerbate the illusions in the collective mind.

@post-post

Burt: I believe I would forgive a murderer if a family member were to create an event that resulted in their being murdered, but the behavior is what matters- would you actually forgive? you “believe” so; however I don’t ‘believe’ what anybody says any more, everyone is lying part of the time. Yes, it would be better to care about a complete skank such as Osama bin A**hole, but it is also better to say you don’t care about him if deep down you actually do not care about him.

I don’t believe in victims so if anyone (family notwithstanding) is murdered or worse, I empathetically feel for the “victim’s” friends and family as well as the putative perpetrator. Yes, it is easy to say “I forgive” because from my viewpoint all actors in a drama chose to be a part of it but these dramas are only germane to the primary parties (those actually physically involved in the drama – all others are voyeurs of a sort and create the drama in their minds) and all parties choose the role they play within it. We get what we choose. In every drama there are passive actors and active actors and while both are responsible I would say that the active party is more to blame than the passive one.

For example take John Lennon’s murder: Mark David Chapman was the active party and he chose to stalk and kill John Lennon. John Lennon attracted his killer because he was convinced that he would be murdered by a crazed Beatle fan and was psychically looking for a way out of physical reality so he actualized the event. I fault John Lennon for using MDC for his ticket to ride off into the non-physical sunset and I blame MDC for insinuating himself into the drama and providing the tools for John’s exit. Lennon - ever the showman - apparently needed to stage a globally dramatic event for his exit and seized the day. It’s easy for me to forgive both of their less than ideal actions because it’s abstract and only matters in principle although I miss JL’s music and ideas. (I imagine he would have played social media and the internet to the hilt.)

I don’t care that OBL is dead anymore than I care for anyone who decides to leave physical reality – they are elsewhere and beyond my reach – I only empathize with those who are affected, even though it is their choice to be affected. I cared that he was a mentally disturbed (albeit idealistic in his own way) less than ideal actor in the mass reality. I do care that he (the passive actor in this drama) chose to be murdered by Obama’s henchmen which reflects poorly on Obama the active party who now has a blot on his metaphorical soul. I care about the violation of universal moral principles that is the sum total of my involvement in this matter.

Yet bin Laden knew what he was doing, he didn’t want to consider carefully the consequences of his violent acts, however he willed his own destruction by plunging ahead recklessly. At least bin laden died a less painful death than those killed via the many violent acts he instigated; and, Burt, you did not mention those victims of his acts, which was rather one-sided of you. There is something quite one-sided about your we-are-One Eastern spirituality, it is as extreme as Western individualism—can’t there be a balance

Just a further note although I believe I answered your concerns above: I agree that OBL knew what he was doing and willed his own destruction. He has much to answer for here and now and the hereafter. His “victims” chose to be victims each for their own reasons and were the passive parties in those dramas. I did not mention them because they are not part of this present drama.

We are one in superposition in physical reality and I believe each individual one of us contains one’s whole universe within one’s consciousness. I only object to the principle that murder and mistreatment of individuals whether they choose it or not is OK under any circumstance and should be avoided. I offer you the same opportunity as iPan to communicate via email if you so choose.

Peace to ALL,

Burt

Good news:

I was watching The Daily Show (May 5th show, online episodes are 1 day behind) today, and they did a segment on a new trend:

Christian and Islamic churches/mosques are inviting each other to come worship/practice their respective religions at the other’s place of worship.

(the segment also features a fundamentalist christian making an idiot of himself trying to convince people that these churches were “inviting satan in”)

The world will find unity. There’s still some years of suffering ahead, we’re not through the woods yet.

But these are good indications that people are finally letting go of their fear of each other.

Hegemons beware.

Burt -  you wrote this:

“His “victims” chose to be victims each for their own reasons and were the passive parties in those dramas.”

You say you believe that, but why?  What logic can you provide us that supports your viewpoint?  It sounds like pseudo-religious gobbledygook to me, and it rather cruelly blames unfortunate people for their fates. I’d like to know where you got that notion, I haven’t heard anything like it since the EST Training promoted that type of thinking in the early 80’s.  Just let us know why you believe it and where you got those ideas?!?!  You’re saying all casualties in 9/11 chose that fate?!?!

iPan…thanks for the thoughts. I’ve never tried transcendental meditation as such (or psychedelic drugs for that matter) but I find other forms of meditation/self-hypnosis/mindfulness really helpful.

“John Lennon attracted his killer because he was convinced that he would be murdered by a crazed Beatle fan and was psychically looking for a way out of physical reality so he actualized the event. I fault John Lennon for using MDC for his ticket to ride”

There’s a grain of truth in the above, however it is the sort of amateur psychology I indulge in, reducing a complicated case to the elementary penguin: you are conflating it almost to happiness being a warm gun; because Chapman (or so he said he said) by making Lennon feel like he’d never been born, he then knew what it was like to be dead?
So it was Pataphysical? bang bang Chapman’s silver bullet went into his chest, bang bang Chapman’s silver bullet made sure he was dead?

But nothing to get hung about.

Burt is alluding to something like the “The Secret”.

There may be some truth to it, but I don’t find it particularly relevant when deciding my own course of action.

From a 4 dimensional perspective, we may in fact choose every circumstance in our lives.

This is comparable to ideas like “oversouls”, where this incarnation in life is but one of several movie-like reviews of a lifetime, there for the personal development of the “oversoul”.

If true, I don’t see it as mattering much to me until I attain a 4 dimensional perspective anyway, so I treat those kinds of ideas as “wait and see”.

The approaching Singularity will allow us to know with certainty, but until I get there, I don’t spend much time pondering it.

Here and now, I know that no human is capable of really predicting the outcomes and effects their actions will have on the world beyond maybe a few days at best, and therefore it is illogical to assign blame.

It’s proportional. A think that maybe we can blame a person to the degree that they are able to predict the consequences of their actions.

I would place more responsibility at the feet of an SAI, for example, that was capable of simulating complex environments in detail over a significant period of time.

The human brain is actually capable of such simulation - we call it our temporal sense. Our ability to predict the trajectory of a thrown object say - if I toss a ball towards you, you are able to catch it because you are able to simulate it’s trajectory through time.

This sense of temporality in humans is very immature. Most humans can’t predict past a day or two (if that).

When they get better at it, then I might consider allowing for more blame, but until then, I have to conclude that no one understands the choices they make.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger: “No one in this room ever had a self…”

http://k21st.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/prof-dr-thomas-metzinger-no-one-in-this-room-ever-had-a-self/

If we take Metzinger at face value, then who exactly are we blaming, when there is no self?

Makes sense, ipan.
Even what Burt wrote concerning the Lennon assassination makes a small amount of sense, albeit Burt might be basing what he wrote partly on Mark David Chapman’s many interviews with authorities, media outlets, and with an author or two for a book.
Chapman did present the events as a fascinating spiritual odyssey; however Chapman’s account of his state of mind is not reliable as his thoughts obviously cannot be corroborated, and Chapman was a psychopath to begin with.

@Hank (and others) in relation to your question to Burt, if you’ve time have a look at http://peterwicks.wordpress.com for a long dialogue I had with Burt on this issue (in the context of a thread on the pros and cons of utilitarianism). Burt can expound his views himself of course, but basically he seems to be taking a very strong and fundamental view that we create our own reality, even including what happened before we are born. I was curious enough to want to continue the dialogue in order to ascertain why he holds those beliefs and how they work for him. We never came to an agreement but I found it a stimulating debate.

@Hank Pellissier[05/07 at 01:49 AM]

You say you believe that, but why? What logic can you provide us that supports your viewpoint? It sounds like pseudo-religious gobbledygook to me, and it rather cruelly blames unfortunate people for their fates. I’d like to know where you got that notion, I haven’t heard anything like it since the EST Training promoted that type of thinking in the early 80’s. Just let us know why you believe it and where you got those ideas?!?! You’re saying all casualties in 9/11 chose that fate?!?!

I realize that my POV (that we are responsible for everything that occurs in our reality) is controversial and appears to “Blame the Victim” which is the case except that I don’t believe (obviously) in the concept of “victims”. Every person that is “victimized” has traversed spatio-temporal coordinates that resulted in arriving at the place one experienced whatever one does. There were infinite possibilities to avoid the drama and until an event has been fixed (i.e., Schrödinger’s waveform has collapsed) it is mutable and need not be dire.

An aside: I was once recruited by a Scientologist to join their org. and after several hours of “discussion” I was sent to the upper echelon of the “church” and after further discussion was accused of being sent from EST to disrupt their bailiwick. I had never heard of EST and it was only later that I found out what EST was. I was kicked out of the building and told never to return.

I believe that all things fair in physical reality and no one has any innate advantage over anyone else and if there were victims it would negate that premise. ALL 9/11 casualties chose that fate for their own reasons to make a mass statement. Obviously it depends on one’s belief system. If you believe in GOD then He called them home. If you believe in an indifferent universe that operates at random then they were unlucky. I choose to believe that everyone is the master of his own reality and each gets what he creates.

post-post [05/07 at 09:19 AM]

There’s a grain of truth in the above, however it is the sort of amateur psychology I indulge in, reducing a complicated case

I like the Beatle references (as you noted) and I think that most events that seem complicated can be reduced to simple concepts.  I know absolutely nothing about MDC other than what was reported at the time of Lennon’s death drama. I am not interested in his rationale for his actions and wouldn’t add to his cash or cachet I just presented the event’s analysis in terms of my worldview.

iPan  [05/07 at 11:57 AM]

Burt is alluding to something like the “The Secret”.

Interestingly enough, my son gave me a copy for my birthday in 2006. He said it was what I’d been preaching to him for years so I read it and was amazed to see that it did subscribe to many of my ideas. Not exactly or in depth but from on a cursory level it does mirror many similar concepts.

This is comparable to ideas like “oversouls”, where this incarnation in life is but one of several movie-like reviews of a lifetime, there for the personal development of the “oversoul”.

Another idea that is similarly encompassed in my worldview and I believe that our consciousness is an intensely focused portion of our larger consciousness beyond physical reality.

Peace to ALL,

Burt

“I just presented the event’s analysis in terms of my worldview.”

That’s the problem, you didn’t go deep enough into the Lennon assassination so one is given to wonder why you brought Chapman’s case up. You may be a tiny bit correct that Lennon was partly to blame for his own assassination (though it is quite undiplomatic to say so in a public forum); nevertheless, if you don’t want to study what happened then referencing the assassination is meaningless.
After reading much of what transpired before Lennon’s assasssination, there is something to your theory of victim-responsibility yet you blow it out of proportion—it is only valid is certain cases, such as the Lennon assassination. And since Lennon had no accomplices, confided in no one concerning his assassination plan beforehand, only flawed post-facto recollections of an uncorroborated lone-nut psychopath are available.
Again, you brought up the Lennon asassination, and then later revealed you knew nothing about it.

“And since Lennon had no accomplices…”

... that is, meant Chapman had no accomplices.

Burt, if someone mentioned the JFK assassination as being an example of a conspiracy, but later said they knew nothing about the assassination, they merely presented the event’s analysis in terms of their worldview, wouldn’t you wonder why they would have wanted to reference the JFK assassination in the first place? What you did was present an intriguing, if extremely exaggerated theory; then you later wrote you don’t have anything to back the theory up with thus negating the purpose in presenting the theory—rather a pointless exercise.

@post-post [05/09 at 08:14 PM]

That’s the problem, you didn’t go deep enough into the Lennon assassination so one is given to wonder why you brought Chapman’s case up…referencing the assassination is meaningless. …there is something to your theory of victim-responsibility yet you blow it out of proportion—it is only valid is certain cases, such as the Lennon assassination.

If you read more closely I stated that I was adducing the Lennon assassination as an example of passive vis-à-vis active drama participants. I chose this example because it was a well known event and one that I cared about due to my admiration of John Lennon’s work (more his philosophical bent than musical). I don’t need to go into the minutiae of any “victimizations” I operate from the premise that “victims” are complicit in their own “victimizations”. In any drama that includes putative victims and perpetrators, each is responsible for his role in the drama but if one were to weigh the responsibilities on a metaphorical balance, I maintain that it would tilt in favor of the active role being slightly more responsible. In my worldview the theory of victim-responsibility as valid for ALL cases which as you note is an unpopular and undiplomatic position to hold in a public forum. I am not trying to be popular and I understand the emotions involved with traumatic events (if one wants to be flamed in public forums on line – apply that philosophy to a rape event – it’s worse than murder. Incidentally if I were in a personal conversation with a “victim” or someone whose primary reality were involved, I would not insist that she take responsibility for the event – that wouldn’t be empathetic even though I believe it to be the case – sometimes discretion is the greater part of interpersonal dialog).

“And since Lennon had no accomplices…”

MDC was his accomplice – again I am not offering a forensic analysis of anyone’s motivations for choosing as one does. I’m offering examples of how events that are seemingly random have explanations that implicate the willful (consciously or subconsciously) participation of those involved in the drama - even those dramas in which it seems inconceivable that one would choose such an event. It seems inconceivable because most people cannot conceive of themselves willing such apparent horrors. My worldview demands that each of us is responsible for everything in our experience. Luck doesn’t exist, free will does and there are no victims.

Peace to ALL,

Burt

If someone were to murder your son you almost certainly would not be so… philosophical about it.
Always depends whose ox is gored.

Regarding Arthur Caplan’s remark that “the prohibition of assassination in international law is that when it was enacted, long, long ago, it was intended to protect heads of state — not leaders of terrorist movements.”  I think he is firmly on point and would like to add a few thoughts of my own.  Mostly I sketch out my thoughts out of a need to ventilate and clear my head, but perhaps others would care to read them.

OBL was not “assassinated” in any reasonable sense of the word.  He was a warlord, a mujahadeen, a paramilitary tactician and propagandist, a combatant who enjoyed posing with weapons, and a leading figure in a violent movement that had not only declared violent jihad against the U.S. and its allies, but had successfully carried out multiple operations with undisputed ferocity and carnage around the world.

Critics of the non-capture of OBL have juxtaposed his killing unfavorably against the cases of Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, Serbs who were caught and tried at The Hague because of their involvement in ethnic cleansing pursuant to a so-called “greater Serbia.”  However, the cases are not parallel. Milosevic and Karadzik were both acknowledged civilian leaders; both had also been the subjects of prior indictments (for crimes against humanity and genocide) by a UN-convened tribunal at the time of their capture.  OBL was not the legitimate national or local leader of anything. He was a self-appointed terrorist organizer and a direct combatant; such combatants have no immunity from being targets.  The United Nations had not issued an indictment against Osama bin Laden before his death—and such an indictment would have raised a serious question of jurisdiction were OBL to have been captured and spirited out of Pakistan rather than killed. 

Although at the present time time a UN rapporteur and various politicians and lawyers are invoking international law to inquire into the killing of OBL, no official case had been filed against bin Laden by the international community prior to his death.  The UN Security Council, whose business it would have been to issue a resolution concerning the disposition of bin Laden in the event of his capture, never acted upon this matter.  In fact, a week after the events in Abbotabad “the UN Security Council on Monday welcomed the death of Osama bin Laden, which it called a ‘critical development’ in the fight against terrorism.” (The Telegraph, Wednesday, May 11 2011)

In other venues I have read about the former chancellor of Germany huffing about “violations of international law” and a human rights lawyer using terms like “cold-blooded assassination” to describe bin Laden’s death (Reuters, “Concerns raised over shooting of unarmed bin Laden, burial,” May 4, 2011).  But OBL was not a legitimate political figure; he was a self-appointed commander within al-Qaeda, an organization that cannot by any stretch be recognized as either a genuine political entity or a community whose members are deserving of protection.  On the subject of political legitimacy and militant Islam, the German political thinker Hans Magnus Enzensberger has noted that the Islamist program is really one of absolute negation: “Strictly speaking, [Islamism] is a non-political movement, since it makes no negotiable demands.  Put bluntly, it would like the majority of the planet’s inhabitants, all the unbelievers and apostates, to capitulate or be killed.” (Signandsight.com, “The Radical Loser,” August 11, 2005)

Al-Qaeda, the chief exponent of Islamist activism, does not have any political legitimacy that would allow it to invoke the measures of the Geneva Conventions or international law.  The same applies to its leaders.

Agreed, negativhalo, but there exists another side to it, a reason our enemies fight so hard against us: they know we do not respect them, they know we think of the Mideast as a petroleum spigot. What matters in your argument is national interest/national security—or insecurity, for the line between defense and offense is blurry and our enemies know it. They are not retarded.
However I don’t like to criticize America because then I’m made to feel an ingrate; national interest means ‘my country right or wrong’ to some degree—what is a nation, is it an altruistic construct? not very. Nations are perceived almost as sports teams, America is as the Chicago Bears; America must crush the opposing team with both an offense & defensive strategy that can’t be beat. Go Bears!

“However I don’t like to criticize America because then I’m made to feel an ingrate; national interest means ‘my country right or wrong’ to some degree—what is a nation, is it an altruistic construct? not very. Nations are perceived almost as sports teams, America is as the Chicago Bears; America must crush the opposing team with both an offense & defensive strategy that can’t be beat. Go Bears!”

I’m a Netizen. The internets is my nation.

I owe no allegiance to United States, Inc. and actively seek to undermine it through sedition (primarily through attempts to infect the ‘memeplex’ - nonviolently, of course).

I find exceptionalism and nationalism distasteful.

Tell it to the corny a-holes that run America, some of them even think it is “God’s country”. God is a nationalist??
And it derives from religion, too; they confuse having the mind of a child with having the heart of a child—America’s politics are worse than childish, politics today is infantile celebrity-politics.

@ post-post  [05/10 at 11:38 PM]

The reason that you believe that I would be less philosophical about my son’s or any family member’s death (my wife’s death would be more traumatic) is that you project your feelings into the imaginary scenario and conclude that you would not be as philosophical about the event as I purport to be. The context of the event also matters as to how one reacts. I previously stated that I believed that I would forgive the murderer who was complicit with the “victim” in the drama and you implied that my position IYO was likely lip service and anyone can say anything but it is the behavior that matters. I agree with your analysis it is behavior that matters.

As this is in the subjunctive we cannot know how I would react. The reason I said I believed that I would forgive and not repay violence with violence is that ideally that is how I would hope to behave. I have no doubt that if my ox (son) were gored and I were physically present as it occurred, it’s possible (if not probable) in the heat of the moment I would react violently due to being blinded by my amygdalic emotions which would bypass my frontal cortex’s reasoning. I would hope to be less reactive but I am human and do not always live up to my ideals.

If the event took place in secondary reality i.e., I was not physically present, I would be devastated but would be able to process the secondary information (all information that is not coming from the local sensory environment is secondary and not real to us) and realize that he had slipped the surly bonds for his own reasons and that was his choice. As I believe all freely decide whether to exist in physical reality or not, it’s fairly easy to be philosophical about the departed – which doesn’t relieve the extant parties from their responsibilities vis-à-vis their roles in the drama. They will have to deal with whatever ramifications transpire from the event.

@ negativhalo [05/11 at 02:50 AM]   OBL was not “assassinated” in any reasonable sense of the word.

That statement appears to imply a semantic sense of morality which excuses any behavior by definition. OBL, ostensibly unarmed, was murdered by a Navy Seal who may or may not have been ordered to kill but it certainly wasn’t self defense. Hot blooded or cold blooded execution, politically legitimate or illegitimate figurehead, he was a flawed and likely mentally disturbed individual. Civilized and morally ethical nations that claim to operate under the rule of law and individuals who purport to be Christian do not summarily execute unarmed individuals who commit heinous acts with out the benefit of a trial.

@iPan I find exceptionalism and nationalism distasteful.

I as well.

Peace to ALL…

@post-postfuturist:

I think we are a bit far afield from the ethics of assassination, but I have been pondering your comment and decided to commit it to pixels, despite the fact that my comment veers off-topic:

Political respect is not the same as personal respect.  In politics, respect doesn’t exist without leverage.  I may not like that; perhaps you don’t like it, but there it is. 

Also, if we think of the Mideast as a petroleum spigot it is because the leaders of the Mideast countries have developed their economies to be mere petroleum spigots.  If Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Iran had diverse economies that included quality manufactured goods, computer hardware, innovations in materials or biotech, software apps and media that elaborate on existing trends, published academic research findings or any other useful exports, they could put those on the market, trade among one another, or become more self-sufficient.  But those countries don’t offer any of that (nor do they even get along well with each other except on such never-ending negativities as denunciations of Israel or lamentations over the diminished stature of Islam). 

It is the Mideast petro-nations themselves who have seen fit to remain oil monosuppliers. Far from doing them a disservice by purchasing their oil, we are keeping them alive via their single life-supporting artery.  If the nations of the West were ever to discontinue petroleum purchases, most of the the petroleum-producing countries would collapse into complete disarray.

Far from being exploited, the Mideast only flourishes when they emulate Western consumers—hence the importance of exports from the West such as BlackBerry and iPhone, Twitter, YouTube and other Web apps that have been crucial to the current Mideast ferment known as the Arab Awakening.  Even al-Jazeera has thoroughly embraced the manner of reportage, production values, presentation style and grooming of the Western news media.

The reason that the Mideast belatedly needs to copy the West is that the Mideast countries did not take a long view of their own national interest.  If they wish to stride into the future, they will need to do so in partnership with the West (unlike al-Qaeda and Irania theocracy which, like all fundamentalisms, aspire to make time run backwards). However else Islamist partisans may rationalize their countries’ plight—foisting it on the spectre of Western imperialism—the problem stems really from a legacy bequeathed by the decrepit Ottoman Empire, reinforced by contemporary militant Islam: a lack of intellectual curiosity, opposition to cultural dynamism, tolerance for a bloated ruling or priestly class, and a prevalence of dead or under-utilized capital among the working class.  These factors are what have devolved their economies into the “petroleum spigot” model you mention.

I won’t get any further into the fashionable flapdoodle that strains to blame the “imperialistic” U.S. for these countries’ woes.  A case certainly can be made for an intertwined world where the U.S. plays far-reaching and meddling role.  However, in the case of the Mideast it is short-sighted leadership and a delayed realization that the world is hurtling forward while they are standing still that foments their turmoil today—not some notion that the U.S. is disrespectfully using them as a petroleum spigot.

regarding OBL’s death, I believe that if he had been captured alive, there very well would have been the horrid scenario of Al-Queda taking hostages to exchange for their leader, with the possibility of the hostage’s heads getting cut off if demands were not met.  More bloodshed as a consequence of his remaining alive. 

Instead of all that, his passing has been rather peaceful.

Burt, IMO you take extreme postures, the sort of rigid positions Scientologists take. Not ALL victims bring about their own demise; though some foolhardy persons do. Then there are gray areas: Lennon’s assassination is a gray area because though he did not provoke his assassin as a foolhardy person who is killed in a brawl for instance does, Lennon said and did certain reackless things (contributing funds to the IRA), he had a violent temper (he assaulted many people); and sang during the intro to the song ‘Come Together’ “shoot me”.
But that’s it.
You are constructing a case concerning the Lennon assassination that is based on circumstantial evidence not proving your case beyond a reasonable doubt—let alone beyond any doubt. Naturally you mentioned the Lennon assassination in passing, but your methodology is flawed, and your premises are fabricated from a rigid Scientologist-like thinking. Yet as IMO is true for conspiracy-theorists, filling your mind with one ‘thing’ prevents something worse from filling it—better a Scientologist’s thinking (for example) than a Mansonite’s.
Evey man to the devil his own way.

Burt—I must echo what post-past has said. 
Lennon is one thing,
but you claiming 9/11 victims chose their fate is vastly worse,
and I suppose you apply the same theory to Jews, Rwandans, Armenians and others who died in genocides? 
If so, it is far worse than merely silly, it becomes immeasurably cruel.

“regarding OBL’s death, I believe that if he had been captured alive, there very well would have been the horrid scenario of Al-Queda taking hostages to exchange for their leader, with the possibility of the hostage’s heads getting cut off if demands were not met. More bloodshed as a consequence of his remaining alive.”

Correct, Hank.
If Burt wasn’t so dogmatic he would be able to comprehend the crucial expediency of what you wrote above. Burt lacks a sense not of justice, but of proportion of justice; he is too black & white, when gray has to be accepted though not liked—in international relations expediency is the norm, not ethics. Burt’s dogmatism is similar to anti-abortion dogma in tone, negating its moral suasion.

It is shades of gray yet decisions had to be made in real time, not academic time. Obama had to play with the cards he was dealt with, hobbled by the tenuousness of human foresight—Obama had to make decisions based on many factors and chose what he thought were the best decisions at the time he made the final ‘Go’ decision. Academics have the luxury of endlessly considering shades of gray, however an executive has to execute and in the case of OBL it meant executing a person. Question that comes to mind: was OBL thoroughly evil? he was evil but not Evil, whatever that may be. What negativhalo wrote,
“[p]olitical respect is not the same as personal respect. In politics, respect doesn’t exist without leverage”,
IMO is not veering off-topic as he thinks it is, it is at the heart of it because ‘political respect not being the same as personal respect, political respect not existing without leverage’, is not a positive—in this case it objectifies residents of the Mideast to an unacceptable extent. What I’ve always disliked about scientists is their often thinking of the Earth as a laboratory and its denizens nearly as lab specimens, which has contributed to the West seeing the Mideast as well-nigh nothing more than a resource to be exploited. Now, some of us might agree with most of what negativhalo writes on this matter, but the residents of the Mideast perceive it far differently than we safe in the West do. Again, it always depends whose ox is gored: what is of value to us; what is of value to the Other; what is sacred (and not sacred) to both ‘sides’. And beyond this, do jingoists in the West actually want the Arab world to gain leverage or do they deep down want to retain the status quo? that’s the first question to ask; unfortunately, though, it does not appear anyone is going to be able to formulate a satisfactory answer.
OBL? many of us are relieved he was killed—however such only says something very negative about him but nothing much positive about the West. It only means our institutions are better, not us.

So the war goes on.

“If so, it is far worse than merely silly, it becomes immeasurably cruel.”

Having debated Burt’s views with him at length, I find this wide of the mark. I don’t detect any trace of cruelty in Burt’s thinking, or his motivation for thinking it. Clearly it has the potential to greatly offend people who have suffered loss or misfortune, but ultimately it is not the Burts of the world that create such misfortune. If I have one gripe with him - and this is essentially the whole debate I’ve been having with him (since he is opposed to utilitarianism) - it is that his “dogmatic” views may be limiting his willingness/ability to do more good in the world than he can by merely respectful and non-violent. 

At the heart of our debate has been the issue of whether supposedly “good” ends can ever justify less than ideal means. The implication with regard to OBL’s assassination of answering this question in the negative is clear: it cannot possibly be justified, because it involves violence. Those of us (myself included) who see some merit in this action are implicitly accepting that good ends can, in some cases, justify less than ideal means.

for Peter—here’s the definition of Cruel:
1. Causing pain or suffering
2. Having or showing a sadistic disregard for the pain or suffering of others

Burt’s unsympathetic attitude, IMO, probably falls into the first and might fall into the second category - he certainly has the “disregard” altho, you’re right, his intention isn’t sadistic.

But still, for me, his stance makes him appear as callous as the Holocaust deniers or those who deny Armenians were massacred, etc., perhaps even more so since he believes these populations willed their own destruction.

I think his “cruelty” - or lack of - is something for victims to decide, since they are the ones who would be emotionally hurt, or not, by his remarks.

I mentioned the EST training in an earlier post.  EST believers think they “create their own reality” and are responsible for everything that happens to them.  This promotes self-empowerment, but it is ultimately as silly as Burt’s contention.

The notion that all murdered and maimed people were essentially “just asking for it” seems very determistically-primitive, like a low-level feudalistic Hinduism that supports the caste system and believes bad people are reborn as worms.  I think any analysis of Burt’s ideology would just indicate that we have already given it far more attention than it deserves.

I think you guys are misinterpreting Burt’s stance.

Imagine, in the near future, we create an interactive video game that is fully realistic and immersive. It can simulate pain to any degree you choose. You can even forget who you are while you are playing a character in this game, making your memories inaccessible for a short time, in order to fully immerse yourself in the world that this game creates.

Now, imagine once you are actually inside this game. Prior to actually entering the game, you chose some particular course of events or circumstances (a “scenario”) in order to role play those experiences, without the advantage and aid of knowing you had done so prior to entering the world.

Ok, I think I took a long time to explain a concept you already understand.

Now, imagine that some people view our world, right here, right now, in the same light. That we are all characters in a simulation, having chosen to live the particular circumstances that we live.

There are suggestions from physics that imply this might be the case. Many people have experiences that lead them to these conclusions (so called ‘transcendent experiences’). From a 4-dimensional perspective for example, it’s highly plausible that we have chosen, written even, our entire life experience from start to finish, before we chose to experience it from the 1st person perspective.

What Burt is saying is nothing more than the idea that we all ‘create our own reality’. There’s nothing cruel about it.

Whether any of these ideas are true or not, I leave for another discussion.

I just wanted to clear up that their is no cruelty at all in what Burt is saying.

@Hank…The issue of how much attention one should give to views with which one disagrees, or indeed which one finds “cruel” or “silly”, is an interesting one. I guess it very much depends on the context, and I’ll certainly admit that it has limited relevance to the topic. On the other hand one of the things I like about this blog is the extent to which somewhat off-topic comments seem to be well tolerated as long as they at least have some relevance to IEET’s overall mission.

I’ve given a LOT of attention to Burt’s views over the last month or two because (i) I enjoy a good debate, and (ii) given that he was only one of two people commenting on my blog (the other one being dor) I hardly wanted to chase him away!

So what do I conclude from all this attention? I certainly don’t share Burt’s views. I have also made the point that they have the potential to offend. I guess the value I see in them - apart from the obvious role they play in providing a moral compass for Burt and his family - is the extent to which they can stimulate creative thinking. I don’t know about you, but I find that ideas like this that are in some sense “off the wall” but also contain elements of truth often help me to refine my own ideas. Where they become dangerous is when they become very widespread and when people become emotionally invested in those beliefs. And then, of course, we’re back to the subject of religion…

@iPan…If the benchmark for “cruelty” is indeed “causing pain or suffering”, even inadvertently, then I guess we are all cruel. I’m not sure how close your interpretation is to Burt’s actual beliefs (I’d be interested to read his comments on that), but I agree that to my understanding the core is this general, philosophical idea that we create our own reality. One of the points I have made during our dialogue is that this idea is not necessarily inextricably linked his idea that our *only* responsibility is to obey the precepts of his “Universal Morality”, and that this precludes the pursuit of supposedly “good” ends through less than ideal means. I think one can hold either position with or without the other, since one is a belief about the nature of reality while the other is basically a question of values.

Personally I find simulation ideas interesting, but somewhat like conspiracy theories: reality is certainly more complex than we think, but any particular idea about *how* it is more complex, unless backed up by concrete evidence, is almost certainly going to be wrong. From this perspective I basically agree with post-post’s description of Burt’s views (about reality) as “dogmatic”: he tends to repeat them in various ways but without ever quite coughing up the evidence to back them up. One thing I find interesting is that in Burt’s thinking there *does* seem to be a link between his views about reality and his opposition to utilitarianism (which is more directly relevant to the subject of whether OBL’s assassination was ethical), and it’s mot immediately clear to me why this should be.

Whatever it may signify, it is too remote-causation for me.
A guy provoking a rioting mob resulting in his being beaten to death is direct—you can observe the actions leading up to his death; though the killing is still murder/assassination.
Whereas Burt’s remote- causation of someone’s murder would involve the following:
“From a 4-dimensional perspective for example, it’s highly plausible that we have chosen, written even, our entire life experience from start to finish, before we chose to experience it from the 1st person perspective.”

Yet a computer able to track all the actions leading up to a murder/assassination does not exist now—or does it?

Back on-topic:
Burt is technically correct on bin Laden’s assassination from a strict (IMO rigid) moral perspective not dissimilar to Gandhi’s. Exulting in bin Laden’s assassination contains the seed of schadenfreude—we’re glad he was killed rather than any of us being killed. We are fascinated by characters such as bin Laden because however negative some, many, of our actions are, bin Laden’s were so much worse that we feel personally & collectively vindicated; thereby bin Laden becomes a reverse-Christ, an expendable figure on whose shoulders one might say the sins of the world are cast.
All the same, I share the sense of relief bin Laden was assassinated, the sense of positive results deriving from the assassination. In 1989 I was in Finland when Romania’s dictator was assassinated, feeling the same relief. On a train the day after the assassination the passengers were celebrating, and though their schadenfreude was not justifiable IMO their feeling of relief was.

post-post [05/11 at 08:30 PM]

Burt, IMO you take extreme postures, the sort of rigid positions Scientologists take… Naturally you mentioned the Lennon assassination in passing, but your methodology is flawed, and your premises are fabricated from a rigid Scientologist-like thinking.

Here are some of my extreme postures:

To keep on topic: Bin Laden was murdered – whether one is glad that he’s gone notwithstanding.

I believe in pacifism.

I believe that violence is immoral.

I believe that vengeance is immoral.

I believe that everyone is responsible for everything in their experience.

I believe that if everyone believed that they are responsible for everything and acted accordingly there would be fewer problems.

Almost no one wants to believe in those tenets or take responsibility for what happens to them. My methodology is to follow the ramifications of that premise. The Lennon assassination was mentioned as an example of passive vs. active responsibility which conveniently fails to be addressed. No case other than JL was responsible for his death and MDC was more responsible. Rigidity results only in the assigning of responsibility. Where is the flaw? Can you show where it is wrong other than you don’t believe it? I get that you don’t accept the premises and that is fine, but the logic that flows from them is consistent. BTW all premises are rigid that’s their nature. The scientologists found my worldview incompatible with theirs and a threat, hence my expulsion from their playground.

If Burt wasn’t so dogmatic he would be able to comprehend the crucial expediency of what you wrote above. Burt lacks a sense not of justice, but of proportion of justice; he is too black & white, when gray has to be accepted though not liked—in international relations expediency is the norm, not ethics. Burt’s dogmatism is similar to anti-abortion dogma in tone, negating its moral suasion.

So the post-postfuturist has the goldilocks sense of justice? Values are black and white and I reject expediency in principle, it’s not that my values are dogmatic; they are principles by which I try to conduct my behavior. You really believe that I am unable to comprehend emotive reactions to my positions? I am aware that when negotiating in real politick one takes what one can get to mitigate conflict that can result in violence, wars or worse. This is a blog about ideas and ethics not life and death. When discussing idealistic principles philosophically in the abstract one need not resort to expedience. My disquisitory tone in this type of venue obviously rankles and if I were attempting suasion I would be less expository and more tentative. I assumed from the caliber of thought here that one could dispense with those frills and get to the point. 

@Hank Pellissier  [05/11 at 09:42 PM]

and I suppose you apply the same theory to Jews, Rwandans, Armenians and others who died in genocides? If so, it is far worse than merely silly, it becomes immeasurably cruel.
Yes, the application is consistent with my theory. Those involved in genocides chose to make a mass statement to humanity at large to draw attention to untenable conditions. Each individual has unique personal reasons for making the choice to exit physical reality and also allied himself with the others en masse. It seems silly because of a belief in happenstance or being in the wrong place at the wrong time and that those individuals had no control over their circumstances. The cruelty arises from empathy with the “victims” i.e., imagining oneself in the horrible drama or imagining what it must have been like for those who lost loved ones in the event. It would be cruel to insist to someone in person who is emotionally involved with an event, that they or theirs caused the misfortune because their emotions are causing them disquiet. Rubbing metaphorical salt in their psychic wounds only exacerbates their feelings of pain. 

here’s the definition of Cruel:
1. Causing pain or suffering
2. Having or showing a sadistic disregard for the pain or suffering of others

My positions are not the cause of pain and suffering in anyone. One creates one’s own pain & suffering by choosing to respond to information in that way. One is responsible for one’s reactions to any abstract stimuli as I mentioned to post-post futurist above: Secondary information is not real, its reality is imbued by its recipient. I feel no joy in the physical or mental suffering of others and seek to mitigate it wherever possible. I am neutral to abstraction – it isn’t real – the holocaust is an abstract event to those not personally involved (I don’t deny that it’s an historical event or a grossly heinous act – I could be sent to jail in Belgium for up to a year just for writing those ideas.) Today, I tried to investigate EST and didn’t find its tenets easily available but it morphed into a course called Landmark Education which has parts that look as if they might comport with the “Create your own reality” premise but couched in jargon to be packaged for sale.

@iPan  [05/12 at 12:31 PM]

Thanks for the support – I think your analogy is pretty good. The 4th dimensional (I prefer n-dimensional) explanation is close to my beliefs as how this is accomplished within the laws of physics.

@Peter [05/12 at 10:35 AM] his “dogmatic” views may be limiting his willingness/ability to do more good in the world than he can by merely respectful and non-violent.

Thank you also for your defense. I maintain that the example of my actions and philosophical stance does the most good in practicable terms in the world. My purpose in life is not to spend it as an activist attempting to right wrongs. I give moral and financial support to those who wish to devote their lives to a noble cause if it remains within UM for the most part. If all were respectful and non-violent there would be little need for global emendation. I work in primary reality and deal with that which comes directly into my path. Our responsibility is to deal with what is real not imagined (although one can imagine the unreal into reality by focusing on it) which is here and now. 

Where they become dangerous is when they become very widespread

Where is the danger in believing in UM? Or that one creates one’s reality?

reality is certainly more complex than we think,but any particular idea about *how* it is more complex, unless backed up by concrete evidence, is almost certainly going to be wrong. From this perspective I basically agree with post-post’s description of Burt’s views (about reality) as “dogmatic”: he tends to repeat them in various ways but without ever quite coughing up the evidence to back them up.

There is no concrete evidence which can be adduced to “prove” that reality is not of the naïve sort but many “hard-nosed” types such as physicists, scientists, and Shakespeare believe “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio”, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Speaking of dogma, where does your “certainty“come from? I cough up this for evidence: I back them up by living my philosophy. ALL reality is subjective to everyone, interpreted by their consciousness using the brain as its interpreter and all experience is actually electrical patterns which is modeled by the brain. There is no direct way to apprehend physical reality it is all a translation. I can’t prove it but neuroscience states it and none can refute it.

@post-post [7:05 PM] reading as I am posting, No argument in the result just the method.

Peace to ALL

PS:
Burt’s position would be acceptable if video recording of remote phases in a murder or assassination were possible. One can document a brawl directly resulting in death—the murder/manslaughter being slowed down via video to observe each step. But how would one document a remote-caused assassination such as Lennon’s? for instance starting with, say, Lennon’s 1966 opinion of the Beatles as “more popular than Jesus”, how could one go step by step through the countless thoughts and actions leading 14 years later to Lennon’s assassination by a ‘born-again’ Christian? so it isn’t that Burt is necessarily mistaken, it is his being unable to back his theory up by way of documentation.
BTW, it is also important IMO to know why it is bin Laden became so popular among his followers:

“Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social conditions are set.”
—Franz Neumann

“So the post-postfuturist has the goldilocks sense of justice?”

No, might be worse than yours yet it only makes me worse—but you not much better.
Never mind the rest of us for now; if you can provide documentation of your position on bin Laden’s assassination (or to you, murder) then we will pay more attention.

@Burt…We all need some kind of certainty in order to live. You have yours, I have mine. And as we’ve discussed on my blog, ultimately what we believe is a choice, just as much as what values we choose to live by.

One of the problems I have with your beliefs about reality is that it’s not clear to me how the whole idea of basing one’s beliefs on actual evidence even enters the picture. After all, if we all create our own reality, then we are choosing not only what we believe to be true, we are choosing which beliefs actually *are* true. In which case there’s really no need to study evidence at all: we can just decide something is true.

We can all agree (I hope) that reality is always more complex than we think, and we can be wrong about absolutely anything. Yet most of us (call us naive realists of you will) work on the assumption that there is actually a real world out there, and adapt our beliefs about it based on evidence. In fact I think you do to (otherwise you could not act effectively in the world), but you have this idea, which you don’t want to question, that ultimately it’s all your own creation. I also still have the impression that your conflating your beliefs about and experience of the world (which are indeed electrical patterns in your brain, more or less) and the actual external, physical world that we all inhabit. OBL really was assassinated (well killed anyway) in that real world, and it is *because* of this that he has also been killed in each of our subjective worlds. We have each created our respective subjective worlds, but not the external one of which our subjective worlds are models.

As for why your views would become dangerous if they were to become widespread, I think this is fairly obvious. If we are never willing to “do evil that good may result” then nobody’s going to be there to make the tough decisions that keep us safe. If you can imagine, just for a minute, that there actually is a real world, which you did not create, but which you inhabit and which you can influence, and which is also inhabited by sadists and psychopaths, then you might start to realize that we actually do need police, armies, spies, bureaucrats and all those other people some of us love to hate, and if those people were suddenly to stop doing their jobs because they conflicted with UM then we’d all be in deep sh*t.

Fortunately I don’t think this is likely, and as I commented in reply to Hank I think such views can be a helpful stimulus to creative thinking.

post-post [05/12 at 08:46 PM]

how would one document a remote-caused assassination such as Lennon’s? for instance starting with, say, Lennon’s…how could one go step by step through the countless thoughts and actions leading 14 years later to Lennon’s assassination… so it isn’t that Burt is necessarily mistaken, it is his being unable to back his theory up by way of documentation.

There can be no documentation or cause and effect. There is only superposition and the cause and the effect are one when the waveform is collapsed by each person. MDC could claim any reasons for his actions and without being he, they are hearsay. JL is not able to tell us anything either we only know that the spatio-temporal coordinates of both individuals coincided and Lennon collapsed simultaneously with the waveform of that event. This is the way all events are processed in our observing consciousnesses. Quantum Mechanics backs this up with plenty of documentation.

BTW, it is also important IMO to know why it is bin Laden became so popular among his followers

ALL charismatic entities attract a following because they espouse certain ideas, a percentage of which resonate with those whose beliefs comport with those ideas. These pass for truths in the minds of the followers and so they are (truths). These truths convey a sense of trustworthiness in the entities and so all of their ideas are accepted without much question. It is usually ignorant people (those without access to pertinent information and those whose critical thinking skills are in need of honing) who constitute the bulk of the followers. There are others who share the ideology for their own reasons and see the charismatic’s power as a means to their ends.

post-post  [05/12 at 09:59 PM]  (IEET’s Blog entries should be numbered)

No, might be worse than yours yet it only makes me worse—but you not much better.

This is not zero-sum; your values and mine are simply our values. (They may be better or worse relative to a constant but without a reference their value is neutral)  My theory of justice is there is no need for justice as ALL is fair and just. Putative justice is nothing more than vengeance, harking back to Hammurabi’s code.

From UsLegal.com. The definition of Murder

A person commits the crime of murder if with intent to cause the death of another person, he causes the death of that person or of another person.

Definitions are semantic – the bottom line is he was unarmed and gunned down in cold blood by an illegal alien. Call it what you will.

Peter [05/13 at 11:26 AM]

One of the problems I have with your beliefs about reality is that it’s not clear to me how the whole idea of basing one’s beliefs on actual evidence even enters the picture.

The reason that it isn’t clear is there is no “actual” evidence. The evidence is a product of your electrical impulses. Truth is what one believes it to be – it is purely subjective. One not only can decide what is true, one does decide what is true - there is no objective truth out there. The closest one can come to objectivity is tautology. You believe there is an “actual” external world out there and our subjective models are based on that external world but it is exactly the opposite. The external world is a mockup of our subjective world.

If UM were the norm then there wouldn’t be sadists and psychopaths. This is again FEAR in the driver’s seat – you are afraid for your safety and would trade doing “evil” (which doesn’t exist) to ensure your safety - he who would trade evil for safety will reap evil and have no safety to paraphrase Ben Franklin. I have to leave work and don’t have time for anymore. I was partially into a reply on fear for your blog when I got into this thread. I’ll try to post it next week.

Peace to ALL

“There can be no documentation or cause and effect.”

Perhaps with powerful enough AI there can someday? IF you could eventually develop a program collating every action of bin Laden’s leading up to his assassination. If you were to examine a video of a barroom brawl leading to a murder you would see the proximate cause of the killing, if all the action were to take place in front of the camera. You would see on the video the prelude to disagreement-> the anger-> the menacing-> escalation-> the assault-> the murder. Naturally what is left out is the entire previous lives of the brawlers—however the proximate cause of the murder is on record—assuming we trust our senses, because Peter brought up something else: our filtering of reality; our minds are filtering devices which are less reliable than artificial filters. How do you know bin Laden’s murder or assassination did not occur in a parallel universe? how do you know it wasn’t an extraterrestrial TV sitcom from countless light years away broadcast before the planet Earth was created? you opened a can of worms with your interesting hypotheses; your hypotheses are unusual for IEET, comparable to going to China and telling people there eating rice is an illusion. Yet why are your hypotheses more valid than any other? you do not demonstrate such. You HAVE made my guilty conscience aware how not caring about bin Laden is cold-blooded; but do you, Burt, actually care about bin Laden? because if you really deep down harbor no compassion for him then you are being smarmy- pretending you give diddly about bin Laden. I wrote you appear to have a higher morality than I because you are a devoted husband and father, but naturally I wouldn’t know you from Adam, or bin Laden himself. As far as is known at this time, you might be merely venting some frustration by calling bin Laden’s assassination “murder”.

Burt, you are correct, but forget about bin Laden’s murder, look at this; his property rights have been violated:

“U.S. Navy SEALS discovered an extensive collection of pornography inside the secret hideout of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden… the pornography found in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of ‘modern, electronically recorded video.’ “

Burt, the UN World Court will have to appoint an investigation committee to begin the process leading to arraignment of those responsible for theft of bin Laden’s property. What IS the world coming to?

@Burt…thanks I look forward to your reply on fear next week.

In the mean time I’ll just respond quickly to the following: “If UM were the norm then there wouldn’t be sadists and psychopaths.”

I don’t believe this. To some extent sadism and psychopathy are genetically determined, so having UM as an ethical norm wouldn’t stop everyone from displaying these behaviours. It would need to be accompanied by other measures, such as eugenics. Not that I’m necessarily advocating that: it might be better to put up with some degree of sadism and psychopathy in society. We should try to avoid fantasising that they can be eliminated by commitment to a moral creed.

On a related point: “he who would trade evil for safety will reap evil and have no safety”...will this comes back to the issue of evidence. If you don’t even believe in evidence (“there is no “actual” evidence”) then what basis DO you have for insisting on your beliefs about reality? Why, to come back to Hank’s point, should we give your beliefs any attention at all? If, by contrast, there is a real physical world, which is not “just” a mockup of our subjective world, then we CAN talk about evidence, and the evidence suggests that “trading evil for safety”, if by that we mean taking measures that may be harsh and not quite “UM” but are well-designed to deal with a specific threat, can be very effective, and conversely that evil and misfortune can befall the most innocent. Which is not to say that “evil begets evil” has no truth in it, but like the “law of attraction” (see Cathi’s post from a couple of months ago on this) it becomes dangerously false if taken too far.

It is no use, Pete- I’ve talked to a thousand of his sort over the decades. Better to beat him at his own game. We know what actually transpired on May Day (May Day, now there’s a conspiracy for you): however it shall remain a secret between you and I, Pete, because we are of the Elect.
To discover the real story of the assassination of bin Laden, Burt will have to join my sect and purchase the sacred book. For I, the Imperial Grand Dragon of the church of We Accept Canned Goods, am writing a work titled the Secret Mysteries Of The Cosmos And How To Save The World, available only in hardback, $59.99. Unfortunately, the book is due to be published too late; it wont be released until after Armageddon.

But that’s the way the cookie crumbles, Burt.

“Peace to ALL” may possibly be the source of your error: we would have to evolve so much more than we have it is scarcely worth thinking on unless one is a Newton-Einstein+. IMO looking ahead beyond fifty years is an abstraction. Virtually every day I venture out into the dirty world, the non-academic realm; ALL observation indicates peace to all is more than fifty years away, Burt. It appears the original popularizers of h+ way back when erred in mistaking a fad for a trend, they extrapolated the Age of Aquarius zeitgeist of that time into a trend, into the distant future; and now we are in the future distant relative to that time. But the Age of Aquarius has vanished. Right now it seems more as the Kali Yuga.
We can’t merely use the same ploy of ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’—it might not cut the mustard anymore, or bring home the bacon, or deliver the GOODS.

@post-post…I agree with much of what you say, but how’s this for a thought: the value (respectively positive or negative) of a statement lies in it’s potential (i) to respectively enhance or undermine our understanding of reality, and (ii) on the one (positive) hand to be either positive and self-fulfilling or negative and self-negating, or on the other (negative) hand to be either positive and self-negating or negative and self-fulfilling.

In this context I still think Burt’s ideas have positive potential in both sense: in the first sense as I replied to Hank they can help to stimulate creative thinking, and in the second sense some of them I think we can *extract* value (extropy?) from them by highlighting how good it would be if some of them were true, and how dangerous they can be when people take them too seriously.

In the same context I see the (positive) value in some of your statements as residing in the fact that they are negative and self-negating: e.g. “The Age of Aquarius has vanished.” Not that the Age of Aquarius was perfect - it included a lot of silliness - but we don’t really want it to vanish altogether, right (and in fact there are still vestiges of it around). So what about trying to launch a revival: towards a better, enhanced, less silly New Age of Aquarius?

You have convinced me, Pete; however when I talk to such as, say, Seymour Kleirly in person, I have to have wear tennis shoes and be ready to run. The violently reactive, defensive, are those we have to concern ourselves with—not those who are seriously interested in h+. Or Extropianism. Or Aquarius.
Back on-topic: Burt was right about being compassionate towards bin Laden yet compassion ought to be for the special ops guys who assassinated/murdered him, as well.

Overall, Burt is too nebulous to understand—for positive or negative.

Pete, I want to stay on-topic more than in the past; however before returning to bin Laden’s assassination/murder, an examination of Burt will be revisited. Not his ‘worldview’, his ‘philosophy’, his ‘metaphysic’-  for Burt almost certainly would not wish to be limited to any hermeneutic. This is what makes Burt interesting, his thinking itself is not rigid as it had appeared at first; rather it seems his morality is too high. Too strict.
To get a handle, do we reject Christianity? not entirely as most of us have one foot in the secular, the other in the metaphysical. What makes Christianity often unacceptable is a necessarily one-size-fits-all morality created over three thousand five hundred years ago; at least that long ago. It does work for some, though, for in a world of flux (even what seems as quasi-chaos) families can protect themselves by retreating into the black & white of Christianity and its ethics to buffer themselves from the moral shadiness of the outside world. But can’t there be a balance concerning ethics? one of low morality is a miscreant or at best a reprobate; one of excessive ethical fibre is a prig, a martinet, a prude. Now, I don’t know Burt at all well enough to consider whether or not he is a prig or a martinet; since he does not reveal enough at this site relatable to the technoprogressivness of IEET, it remains a nonstarter. Burt wrote there can be no documentation; however it cuts both ways: if Burt cannot provide documentation for his comments on bin Laden’s demise, by Burt’s own lights neither can I be expected to document my hypothesis concerning the chains of causation, the causal links, resulting in the assassination/murder. By default it comes down to judgment call: at the time it appeared the expedient, though not moral, thing to assassinate bin Laden.
Not blogging at your site, Pete, I scarcely know Burt. He is interesting, unfortunately without knowing him it is extremely difficult to pay much attention and go beyond a superficial glimpse of his IMO somewhat vague & incomprehensible comments at IEET.

At any rate, perhaps Burt can find it within his heart to forgive both Obama and the military personnel involved in bin Laden’s death?

@post-post…I also find Burt’s views interesting. First of all they are clearly *his* ideas: he hasn’t picked them off the shelf from some organised religion, so one is discussing with the source so to speak.

From my own utilitarian perspective I don’t think it’s possible be too ethical; but I do believe it’s possible to have an overly limited view of ethics that is actually counterproductive in terms of doing good in the world. This is the gripe I’ve tended to have with Burt concerning his morality; regarding his views about reality I agree with you: if he doesn’t even accept the need/relevance of evidence or documentation, then basically we just believe whatever makes us feel good.

Actually I’m looking forward to his reply on my blog on fear, because one of the motivations he has cited for holding his beliefs is that they release him from fear. I don’t believe this, for the simple reason that I believe (based on evidence) that fear plays a fundamental role in our experience of life, and without it we wouldn’t survive long.

But indeed let’s make an effort to get back on topic. Given that neither of us have any reason to accept Burt’s views either about reality or about morality, we are left with what I think are broadly similar perspectives on bin Laden’s death: it probably wasn’t legal, it raises a lot of ethical questions, but on balance it was probably the right thing to do? (And in contrast to Obama, I don’t think we need our heads tested just because we are thinking about this…)

post-post [05/13 at 10:19 PM]

You would see on the video the prelude to disagreement-> the anger-> the menacing-> escalation-> the assault-> the murder

The trail of causation is built of discrete actions and do not in and of themselves constitute anything but links in what could be labeled a chain of causation but are not necessarily cause and effect. In any event the chain could have been broken at any point by any of the participants and there would be a different event. Each discrete action stands alone and it is a choice to continue on a path to violence or not but disagreement does not cause murder. 

Yet why are your hypotheses more valid than any other? you do not demonstrate such. You HAVE made my guilty conscience aware how not caring about bin Laden is cold-blooded; but do you, Burt, actually care about bin Laden

My hypotheses are simply hypotheses - there is no such thing as a valid hypothesis – the validity is in the consistency of the ramifications which flow to support the hypothesis. I don’t care about OBL per se as I wrote before. I care about the manner in which we chose to oblige his death wish. I care about those who are saddened by the loss of a human even though the lost chose to be lost but in an empathetic sense. I care abstractly when principles that I hold to be universal are violated but ultimately because I believe everything is fair and just, the caring is only that I feel sorry for those who don’t know that the violations only demean themselves. As to his property – his body was the major property right that was violated.

Peter  [05/14 at 01:05 AM]

To some extent sadism and psychopathy are genetically determined

I’m of the opinion that a predisposition to violence, psychopathy, or sadism is a learned behavior and nothing to do with genetics. It is fashionable today to blame any deviant (from the norm - not the moral deviance that is connoted by the term) behavior on our genes. I will be surprised if genetic makeup can be shown to account for cultural misanthropy. 

If you don’t even believe in evidence (“there is no “actual” evidence”) then what basis DO you have for insisting on your beliefs about reality? Why, to come back to Hank’s point, should we give your beliefs any attention at all?

The evidence is subject to one’s reality filters and constructed in the mind and one see’s what one’s beliefs allow. My beliefs about reality are derived a priori and attempt to explain heretofore unexplainable events and phenomena – they really aren’t so unusual, Buddhists subscribe to many of them and so do other philosophers. If my beliefs are so outré that they do not strike a chord in your worldview, by all means pay no attention to the beliefs behind the curtain (of ignorance). I have yet to have anyone debunk them other than to say they don’t believe them.

evidence suggests that “trading evil for safety”, if by that we mean taking measures that may be harsh and not quite “UM” but are well-designed to deal with a specific threat, can be very effective, and conversely that evil and misfortune can befall the most innocent.

A specific threat = FEAR. Fear proffered by the threatener and fear by the threatened. A vicious cycle and in my belief system nothing befalls the innocent because they chose any befalling for their particular reasons.

post-post [05/14 at 8:05 PM]

“Peace to ALL” may possibly be the source of your error: we would have to evolve so much more than we have it is scarcely worth thinking on unless one is a Newton-Einstein+. IMO looking ahead beyond fifty years is an abstraction. Virtually every day I venture out into the dirty world, the non-academic realm; ALL observation indicates peace to all is more than fifty years away, Burt.

I agree humanity has a long row to hoe – as long as there is physical reality and entities who need to learn lessons, peace for ALL will remain an elusive ideal – my “Peace to ALL” is a projection of my wish for the Planet and all its inhabitants. I only expect to have peace in my personal reality because I am peaceful and love peace. I don’t hate war - I see it as a less than ideal manifestation of frustrated psyches who believe that killing others will bring about the desired ends. Doing a little evil to affect a putative good.

Burt was right about being compassionate towards bin Laden yet compassion ought to be for the special ops guys who assassinated/murdered him, as well…Overall, Burt is too nebulous to understand—for positive or negative…; rather it seems his morality is too high. Too strict…at the time it appeared the expedient, though not moral, thing to assassinate bin Laden…At any rate, perhaps Burt can find it within his heart to forgive both Obama and the military personnel involved in bin Laden’s death?

I wrote before that I forgave Obama for his ordering the murder of OBL and I forgive his misguided murders by drone and his arrogance when he said that many of us “should have our heads examined”. The military personnel chose their careers with the knowledge that they might have to murder under the aegis of orders. This is a less than ideal application of idealism (I believe many military and police etc. are idealists – merely misguided) and while I forgive their behavior it is still immoral in my opinion.

Not blogging at your site, Pete, I scarcely know Burt. He is interesting, unfortunately without knowing him it is extremely difficult to pay much attention and go beyond a superficial glimpse of his IMO somewhat vague & incomprehensible comments at IEET.

Want to know more - morality/reality is only one of my many interests? – Again I invite you to contact me directly [jazzbo9 a t Comcast dot net]

Peace to ALL and No FEAR

“because one of the motivations he has cited for holding his beliefs is that they release him from fear. I don’t believe this, for the simple reason that I believe (based on evidence) that fear plays a fundamental role in our experience of life, and without it we wouldn’t survive long.”

Best way to get away from fear is to use the Shroud of Turin as a security blanket—but only when camping in the Bermuda Triangle!
At any rate, if bin Laden’s murder was illegal & immoral, then how far do we go in being pacifistic? maybe we ought to become Jains and stay indoors all day so we don’t accidentally step on and kill innocent little insects? we don’t want to hurt anyone.

“Want to know more - morality/reality is only one of my many interests? – Again I invite you to contact me directly [jazzbo9 a t Comcast dot net]”

PS,
this is offtopic; although it IS worth mentioning the importance of how before contacting someone directly it helps to know if one has enough in common with them: does “jazzbo” mean you are a jazz fan? do you like John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Miles, Hancock? if so then it might be worth it.

“The evidence is subject to one’s reality filters and constructed in the mind and one see’s what one’s beliefs allow. My beliefs about reality are derived a priori and attempt to explain heretofore unexplainable events and phenomena – they really aren’t so unusual, Buddhists subscribe to many of them and so do other philosophers.”

OK Here’s a final attempt: derived a priori FROM WHAT??? Isn’t “derived a priori” in any case a contradiction in terms? (If they are derived from something, then that thing presumably comes first.)

Assuming the answer to that question is embodied in the second part of your sentence, i.e. your beliefs are derived from your attempt to explain heretofore unexplainable events and phenomena, then please tell us, once and for all: what are these unexplainable events and phenomena, which your beliefs, in good application of Occam’s razor, explain better (more simply and/or comprenhensively) than those you describe as “naïve realism”? And also, what predictive power do they provide that naïve realism doesn’t?

I’m not interested in bunking or de-bunking: I’m just trying to extract something useful from your beliefs, to see if there is any good reason at all to pay further attention to them. We are all largely ignorant of the outside world - there is far more to be known than we can ever know (at least until such time as our intelligence merges completely with some kind of extropic universal intelligence, so that we and the universe indeed become one), and we do not necessarily become less ignorant by focusing indefinitely on beliefs that we have already studied, thought about, and found wanting.

Against my nature, will bring this back on-topic: Burt reminded of how important it is to have compassion even for bin Laden. To me, though, such is merely a standard because I do not harbor any compassion for bin Laden, albeit Burt has planted a seed in this respect—a microscopic seed. As a smoker or alcoholic who knows his behavior is not only wrong but also virtually suicidal, knowing it is wrong to objectify & demonize bin Laden doesn’t mean I will not continue the coldblooded attitude any more than a confirmed drinker or smoker will discontinue their self-destructive behaviors.
The above is a flawed analogy but all the same schadenfreude, un-compassion, and the anger and hate involved in demonizing bin Laden are self-destructive.
BTW, it isn’t that smarm is to be entirely rejected; as hypocrisy, smarm is the tribute vice pays to virtue, yet the plain fact is I do not care any more about bin Laden than Manson, Son of Sam, Pol Pot, or Jack the Ripper—they are or were sacrificial objects, negative-Christs to be crucified in satiating our bloodlusts.

post-post  [05/16 at 08:14 PM]

At any rate, if bin Laden’s murder was illegal & immoral, then how far do we go in being pacifistic? maybe we ought to become Jains

It’s up to the individual to decide how far one wishes to exercise his pacifism. If violence can’t be avoided (and it most always can be), some may resist resorting to self defense and opt to be injured or die violently if that is their choice. Pacifism is a continuum from the Jains to Pol Pot – it depends on one’s worldview and one’s commitment to it.  If one feels in imminent danger and is unable to override the fear response thru will or habit and resorts to violence, then one will have to sort out the consequences when (or if) one is able to reflect. No one is perfect and there is no penalty per se (other than what one creates to edify oneself regarding the post dramatic fallout - what you might term the chain of causation). If one is less than ideal (and we all are) the key is to recognize one’s less than ideal behavior and resolve to behave more ideally in future.

post-post [05/16 at 11:14 PM]

does “jazzbo” mean you are a jazz fan? do you like John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Miles, Hancock? if so then it might be worth it.

Yes, I used to be a professional musician (Keyboards, Bass, Guitar) and love to play and listen to jazz. John McLaughlin is one of my favorite guitar players. I was fortunate enough to see The Mahavishnu Orchestra live on their 1st tour (they were the opening act for the Byrds) and was totally blown away. “The Inner Mounting Flame” is in my top 10 greatest albums of all time. I also like Larry Coryell and saw 11th House twice. I have most of Mile’s work from the ” time “young” Tony Williams joined the band up to Doo-Bop (Miles’s hip hop collaboration) – once in 1972 while waiting to get in to his “On the Corner” band’s show, I was blocking the club entrance and Miles literally lifted me out of his way with a raspy “Hey man!!!” in my ear. Herbie? What can I say – one of my top 3 favorite keyboardists of the old lions (Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea being the other 2) I was just listening to the Empyrean Isles last week. I have about 1400 or so jazz cds in my collection and get to see live jazz prolly 4 or 5 times a year. The most memorable show I’ve seen recently was Hiromi’s Sonic Bloom with David Fiuczynski on guitar do you know him? – now there’s a tour de force.

Peter  [05/17 at 07:49 AM]

OK Here’s a final attempt: derived a priori FROM WHAT??? Isn’t “derived a priori” in any case a contradiction in terms? (If they are derived from something, then that thing presumably comes first.)

I hope your final attempt isn’t final: By a priori I mean that given the ontology of life in physical reality, humanity’s emotions, idiosyncrasies and raison d’etre along with the underlying physics that mankind has uncovered to apprehend its structure, without empiricism, only using thought and reading the works of the many minds who have attempted to decode its meaning, I have distilled my beliefs into a worldview that works for me. I believe that it espouses idealism, morality and justice (fairness). The supporting cosmology is consistent with many beliefs of modern science as well as ancient and Eastern ideas. Its predictive power is no better or worse than naïve realism except it predicts that as one believes so will one’s experience be and so far that has been mine. Phenomena such as gravity, time, and consciousness are some concepts that resist explanation so far and I believe that physicists will need to invert their investigations toward the inner realities to understand those mysteries. Why does a gaggle of electrons, protons, and neutrons arrange itself into a pattern that is self reflecting and calls itself “Peter”? I find too much order in physical reality to believe that it’s random and without purpose.

I’m just trying to extract something useful from your beliefs, to see if there is any good reason at all to pay further attention to them.

It would be useful to examine utilitarianism in light of those who are its “victims” no amount of epicyclical bandages (rules) or emendations will correct the wrongs committed in the name of “good”. 

there is far more to be known than we can ever know (at least until such time as our intelligence merges completely with some kind of extropic universal intelligence, so that we and the universe indeed become one), and we do not necessarily become less ignorant by focusing indefinitely on beliefs that we have already studied, thought about, and found wanting.

There is a good deal to know and once known and lived according to the correct precepts, there will be no need to experience physical reality, one will know one is one with the universe as one will know one is the universe. If one finds beliefs wanting, then they will be discarded as not useful to one’s worldview. One needs to observe reality from a meta view, holistically and see what is not apparent from the parts. Don’t forget to study the forest as well as the trees.

Peace to ALL  

“Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea being the other 2”

Before getting on-topic, here is an anecdote you might enjoy, a true story, Burt: in late 1977 or early ‘78 in a music club in NYC a well-dressed man sat down next to me to watch a punk-rock (remember, this was ‘77 or ‘78) singer on stage. He said “I’m Chick Corea’s manager, I’m having a hard time deciding on a concept and title for Chick’s next album.” He must have heard I was an idiot savant.
A few minutes later I pointed out the tubby punk singer wearing a derby onstage. “Doesn’t he look like the mad hatter from Alice In Wonderland?”
“Thank you!”, he exclaimed. Next summer Chick released his ‘Mad Hatter’ album, and eventually at least one or two Mad Hatter recording studios were built in LA & NY.
As for bin Laden, we ought to forgive him—but perhaps we can find the compassion to do so only because he is dead?

@Burt…I think I won’t continue this discussion on this thread, not least since it’s way off-topic, but feel free to continue it on my blog. Also: I’ve made a new post (“a vision of the future”), I’d be very interested to receive your views on this.

@post-post…What’s the point of forgiving someone who’s dead?

post-post [05/17 at 08:39 PM]

Great anecdote -

As for bin Laden, we ought to forgive him—but perhaps we can find the compassion to do so only because he is dead?

This is related to fear. It is hard to forgive anyone whom we fear. If one hates or dislikes someone’s actions (it’s those actions which are the reason we say we hate the person) and it’s easy (to some) to divorce the actions from the actor and say I dislike your behavior but I forgive you (parent/adult/child transaction).

When we fear people whether rationally or not it is also their actions that we fear (we fear they will act in ways that are not consistent with our wellbeing.) Many find it difficult to forgive someone whose actions are abhorrent to them especially if they believe that they might experience those actions or worse (the imagination runs wild) in a personal drama. Once the person is dead there is no reason to fear him and compassion feels magnanimous because innately we know (mostly) it is the correct course of action and there is no percentage in holding animosity toward an imaginary foe (although many can’t appreciate the distinction and harbor grudges to their detriment).

It’s a question of choice – choice to forgive people because they were well intentioned (in their own minds) and their actions were less than ideal and one personally has nothing to fear from them or to choose to torture oneself with negative energy, animosity and “what ifs”.

Sorry – my workload doesn’t permit much of a response at this time –

Peter I haven’t forgotten you and will get back to you soon … I bet you can predict what my utopian ideal is.

[05/18 @12:10PM] The point of forgiveness (as always) is for one’s own psychic growth.

Peace to ALL  

Burt, we can probably agree rehabilitation, not punishment, is the ‘answer’ (best option); but we have not reached the stage in our evolution wherein the hotheads that run the world would even think of attempting rehab rather than punishment. Rehabilitation has a late-21st, not early 21st century ring to it.

It is partially cloaked in “closure”: for instance when Timothy McVeigh was executed a decade ago the families of his victims naturally said they received closure from McVeigh’s execution. George F. Will added a jaundiced view to it: “McVeigh’s execution is popular because he is guilty and white.”
However we both know the main sensation derived from McVeigh’s or any other executed person’s death is revenge-satiation. Bin Laden’s assassination/murder is quite comparable to McVeigh’s in that respect.

“The point of forgiveness (as always) is for one’s own psychic growth.”

This can only be a side benefit, otherwise it is meaningless. The point of forgiveness is to heal a relationship.

post-post [05/19 at 11:04 AM]

I agree with everything you said except the rehab timeline. Many give the concept lip service but I don’t think along the current probable vector of mental evolution, humankind will ever embrace rehab as a substitute for punishment (some would prolly argue that rehab is punishment) but I would like to believe you are right and I am wrong. (There’s your jaundiced opinion from one who is hardly ever pessimistic – I believe we choose to experience these secondary reality dramas so that we have the opportunity to understand the whole event for use in our “spiritual” evolution – as long as they serve that purpose – they will likely continue.)

Perhaps in the Post-Post Future the mass consciousness will shift and enlightenment will obtain. That is one of the challenges we denizens of physical reality are trying to overcome for our psyche’s growth. As I said before, justice is meted mainly for revenge although it sometimes helps those who are affected by the drama with “closure” which IMO only buries those emotions until one nullifies them with true forgiveness which can only come with empathy and understanding.

Peace to ALL  

“As I said before, justice is meted mainly for revenge although it sometimes helps those who are affected by the drama with “closure” which IMO only buries those emotions until one nullifies them with true forgiveness which can only come with empathy and understanding.”

“IMO”? if it is based on empathy and understanding, then isn’t forgiveness genuine and not opinion?

PS,
BTW, Burt, not that you are incorrect concerning bin Laden’s assassination/murder, I just don’t know. Didn’t mean to actually write the causal chains were linear, it would more accurately be described by chaos theory—the unexpected changes not to be documented by neat causation from a to b to c, and so on.
Bin Laden’s death can’t be documented neatly as the following shooting was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vToUmb5r2A&feature=related

Peter [05/19 at 03:28 PM]

This can only be a side benefit, otherwise it is meaningless. The point of forgiveness is to heal a relationship.

The only benefit of forgiveness is to the forgiver so that one may free oneself from carrying the baggage of ill feelings and negative emotions toward those who a played role in creating perceived wrong. The forgiver may have had primary part in the drama in which case he is responsible for the co-creation and needs to forgive himself for creating the event as well. In the case of a secondary role, the tort really has no direct implication on one’s reality except the mental space/angst afforded to the perceived perpetrators and events.

The forgiven may benefit from choosing to dispense with the guilt associated with their dramatic role if indeed there is any. Forgiveness may heal relationships, but that is a side benefit. Its true purpose is to assuage the forgiver’s animosity. Meaning is imbued by each of us and if forgiving oneself is meaningless to you due to your belief that its raison d’etre is limited to healing relationships then that is truth to you i.e., your belief.  What about healing the relationship between one’s best self and one’s less than ideal self?

post-post [05/19 at 08:40 PM]
 
“IMO”? if it is based on empathy and understanding, then isn’t forgiveness genuine and not opinion?

A closer reading of that statement is in order. I said that getting “closure” for those who desire shutting a mental door on a difficult event via a meting of so called “justice” does not in and of itself rid them of the animosity toward those upon whom justice was served. All too often after the drama’s ramifications are considered settled, i.e., justice was done, those who sought justice compartmentalize their feelings anent the drama and move on without dealing with those emotions which may bleed into other events exacerbating the dramas. 

It is my opinion that without true forgiveness which requires empathy and understanding (empathy for the putative wrong doer and understanding of all parties’ motivation in creating the drama), not just “closure” due to whatever justice they could achieve either via proxy, personally, or the state.

The chain of causation is whatever combination of events (personal choices) conspired to have each of the actors arrive at the proximate scene of the drama. In the Oswald/Ruby drama, we know that Ruby may have intended to kill Oswald whether due to “Son of Sam” voices, conspiracy, vigilantism, or possibly spur of the moment pique after he “caused” himself to arrive at the Dallas Police HQ contemporaneously as Oswald was being transferred elsewhere and used the opportunity to murder Oswald. Oswald “caused” himself to be arrested for the JFK assassination whether consciously or unconsciously by design (some would say happenstance – lucky DPD and unlucky Lee). 

The documentation provided by film only portrays events, not the reasons or causes that precluded them. We see Ruby shoot Oswald and that is all. Beyond that nothing is implied and everything is inferred.

Peace to ALL

Bin Laden’s demise cannot be described linearly—it was a cascade of events beginning long ago. When? don’t know. On 9-11? when bin Laden was born? when Israel was founded in 1948? when the Ottomans were overthrown by the Young Turks? when the Wahhabi sect began? when Mohammed was born? or when the Quran was written? or in 632? When Abraham was born? or at the dawn of monotheistic religion? When homo sapiens began to walk upright? when evolution began? who knows, there is no accounting for causal linkage. In the clip above you cannot see why the Oswald shooting occurred, but you can see HOW.
In bin Laden’s case, the how of his assassination/murder was not corroborated, as differing accounts were put forward; and the participants were naturally not objective. Bin Laden’s death was predictable, to capture him meant his allies would have taken hostages in retaliation. IMO he ought to have been captured, yet opinions are a dime a dozen; conspiracy theories are as common as the tinfoil in a wingnut’s hat.

@Burt…If you’re only goal is to practise UM, then indeed the only benefit you will perceive in the act of forgiveness is to the forgiver. If by contrast you want to create utopia, then this may be less, or at least no more, important than other benefits. Even if the utopia you want to create is a world in which everyone practises UM, there may still be more effective ways to bring this about than merely leading by example. Forgiveness can play a role in encouraging others to do so. Even coercion can play a role, for example in cases of people who’s behaviour is so destructive that they are inciting fear and hatred in others.

In contradiction to my earlier statement, I do think that the act of forgiveness can be meaningful even if it has no practical effect on the one forgived (e.g. because he is dead). Nevertheless my idea of acting in accordance with one’s “best self” involves genuine empathy and care for others, rather than adherence to a set of rules. The benefit I think such forgiveness can provide is to enhance our ability to do this by reducing our sense of resentment about the past.

Saladin: Will you yield the city?

Balin of Ibelin: Before I lose it, I will burn it to the ground. Your holy places, ours. Every last thing in Jerusalem that drives men mad.

Saladin: I wonder if it would not be better if you did. You will destroy it?

Balin of Ibelin: Every stone. And every Christian knight you kill will take 10 Saracens with him. You will destroy your army here and never raise another. I swear to God that to take this city will be the end of you.

Saladin: Your city is full of women and children. If my army will die, so will your city.

Balin of Ibelin: You offer terms. I ask none.

Saladin: I will give every soul safe conduct to Christian lands. Every soul—the women, the children, the old, and all your knights and soldiers, and your queen. Your king, such as he is, I leave to you, and what God will make of him. No one will be harmed. I swear to God.

Balin of Ibelin: The Christians butchered every Muslim within the walls when they took this city.

Saladin: I am not those men. I am Saladin. Saladin.

Burt,
you are correct on rehabilitation, today’s rehab is punishment; and if we evolve to genuine civilization, then we wouldn’t need rehab.
But where we disagree is: not ALL victims bring on their victimhood- such is absolutist on your part.

Peter [05/20 at 11:57 PM]

The benefit I think such forgiveness can provide is to enhance our ability to do this by reducing our sense of resentment about the past.

That is essentially as I stated – and a good example of how the past may be changed.

post-post  [05/20 at 08:13 PM]

Bin Laden’s demise cannot be described linearly—it was a cascade of events beginning long ago. When? don’t know. On 9-11? when bin Laden was born?...homo sapiens began to walk upright? when evolution began? who knows, there is no accounting for causal linkage.

There is no accounting for causal linkage because there is none per se. When OBL was born, his history began, and on May 1, 2011, his history ended. One could argue that the causal links were the sum of his life’s events and not be incorrect. One could also argue that there is no causal linkage except the culmination of the event that took place on May 1. The cause of death: Murder by a cadre of illegal aliens who invaded his home. Causal links are “just so stories” that we like to make up so that cause and effect appear to have a basis in reality which they don’t until an event is fixed in one’s “official” history (i.e., an observation collapses the wave function)  the links are merely dimensionless dots on the path to each event. The only true linkage is the penultimate act prior to fixing an event in one’s reality – the act that could have been avoided before the die was cast.

post-post [05/22 at 11:26 AM]

But where we disagree is: not ALL victims bring on their victimhood- such is absolutist on your part.

Yes it is an absolute position. You choose to give a pass to those who are involved in co-created dramas by believing that those “victims” were randomly ensconced in whatever reality they experienced their victimhood. I don’t believe in random events, everyone has free will to choose which path he follows to life’s events. No one arrives anywhere without making decisions that dictated the trajectory of the events that occur each time a choice is made.

If there were no free will, then everyone would be a victim of the puppeteer of biology, physics, or heredity and as we all are victims equally, then no one is a victim – it’s merely preordained.  If there is a God who controls our fates then we are all his victims and again it’s preordained. If everything is random then we must rely on luck to keep us from victimhood. Got victimized? It was bad luck, you might have avoided it but that pesky lady luck on a whim decided to mess with you so you were powerless to do anything else. Achieved success? You could have blown it but again that sweet lady luck steered good fortune your way - it was she not you. There is no basis for luck in reality; there is only one’s actions and their results. There’s no other way, it’s either we, god or randomness who is in control. There is much too much order in physical reality for things to be random so I reject that premise. I don’t believe in God per se, I’m an autotheist so God is I (and we, as everyone is a creator on this level) so I reject the Almighty Puppeteer. All that is left is we and as hard as that may be to wrap our ideas around that’s the only thing that makes sense especially if the multiverse is as fair and balanced as it appears to be. How could it be otherwise? If it isn’t, one had better keep one’s head down if one wants to remain active in physical reality.

P.S. The only “victim” that is of any concern to anyone is oneself – it’s all well and good to take the credit for successes but when less than stellar events occur we don’t want to accept the responsibility for our creations. One loses nothing by accepting responsibility for one’s fortunes and misfortunes except perhaps ego bruising when we are unable to shift the blame to someone else.

Peace to ALL

“There is much too much order in physical reality for things to be random so I reject that premise.”

Chaos theory ought to cause you to revise this.

The only crinkle in I see in what Burt is saying is the amnesia effect.

So, let’s say for sake of argument that his metaphysics is essentially correct.

Even so, we are all ‘victims’ (lol) of amnesia, and therefore we don’t know that we ‘chose’ to be here.

The point being what good does this metaphysics do here and now to help people to be more ethical?

Burt is correct in writing we ought to perceive bin Laden as having been a sentient being, and not as a varmint to be exterminated (if such is something along the lines of what Burt was saying). Bin Laden’s peculiar brand of pan-Arab nationalism isn’t much less ethical than our “America is the greatest country in the world—God’s country” nationalism.
Most people appear to think events are linear, when they are a cascade of quasi-chaotic happenings; I still maintain, though, if a super-computer were to hypothetically record every event in bin Laden’s life plus every event in all those connected to bin Laden, we would then have a fairly good idea of what transpired—though we would only be able to glimpse the cognitive processes of the actors by examining their behaviors.

Thanks post-post, this turns back to what I have said before about being able to ‘simulate’ the consequences of one’s actions down to the atomic scale.

An exaggeration, in part, to illustrate that in an absolute sense, to hold another accountable (that is if we’re leaving expediency and fudging results behind), then we have to be able to be aware of every ‘unintended’ consequence.

Of course, in the macro world, we already do this to an extent, but not to the extent that I feel it’s rational to “point the finger”.

I view the entire mental process of blame as irrational (and I do it too! all the time - le sigh).

No (wo)man is an island, no one is truly separate from the entire causal chain and history of the universe.

If we must blame something, blame the big bang, for without it, none of us would be here.

It’s the big bang’s fault, we should put that guy in prison

Most important (IMO naturally) is to know except in the material sense we will never live in a decent world; in fact people are so reactive, attempting to improve situations can worsen them—try for instance telling a teenager to behave.
Although Burt has demonstrated how one SHOULD care about bin Laden, I do not—it is a matter of indifference illegal alien military personnel shot him in the face or even if they had instead buried him alive or had him drawn and quartered. Frankly, I don’t think Burt cares about anyone other than his wife & son and a few others:
bin Laden’s death only has significance to Burt as an abstraction whether bin Laden was shot or had choked on a piece of cheese.

post-post
You give me the impression of being a very hurt person

Although the metaphysics that Burt proposes are indeed highly plausible, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across similar worldframes, and there is fairly solid scientific evidence to back it up.

My question always revolves around what to do in the heat of the moment.

When the gun is pressed against your head, how do you respond?

Expediency.

Because, we can all talk about hypothetical situations, and idealistic worlds, but when the oppressor is shoving his dick down your throat, what are you going to do?

I’ve been mugged once. And acted surprisingly (to myself anyway) pacifistic towards the event.

Regardless, when push comes to shove. People get hurt.

How to prevent it in the first place.

How do we realize on a massive scale what Burt is communicating to us?

Abstractions are nice, but how do we implement them?

BTW

If you really want to explore the most profound aspects of ethics, I highly recommend studying the last 20 years of Skinny Puppy.

If you are of particular fortitude, then do this while on extreme doses of LSD or psilocybin.

(Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for incrued neurosis, but is you want to stop by and work it out…..)

fined words fade above the snow
the carved out psychic stitch
the carver’s all who wave surrender
through all tempers looking back
the skin begins to crack
those ever double jointed blamers
i’m closed off no power the will inside no peace, no feeling all disease around security
eyes divide the cycles
find a call who’s never caught
belief heals over time decision
find the vice grips never freed
a crease upon one’s debt
and never paying forward
hate what will we want with hate
what will be left today
when nothing’s left to beg the moral
fate what is it left to say
who will be left to play
when ugly crippled eyes remain
i’m closed off devours the meat inside of me in freeing all afraid of life eternity
eyes burning of sorrow craving inside no teeth holding on nothing is left to be believed
fear what will we want with fear
the time bomb coming near
when nothing’s left to have or hope for
pain what is there left to say
an ancient plan to pay
with blood and shit tomorrow
shame we will be one in shame
until we play the game
that in the end will bring disorder
race what will be left to say
when nothing is the same
and all this shit goes under
sticking out behind the mask
kiss the mercantile abscess
rubbed behind each fertile blood
the fingernails are dirty
face the combination loss
then go towards the final cost
crippled debts gloss put over the soul unconvincing
i’m closed off devours the meat inside of me in freeing all afraid of life eternities

“I’ve done the math, enough to know, the dangers of our second guessing”

- Tool

See, this is why I keep bringing up the ability to see deep time.

They really do not know what they do.

This is why we must forgive them.

Because we can simulate further into the future than they do, and we always win.

We have chaos on our side.

And another point:

I cannot, help, being human, to examine Arthur’s intent.

The original article here seems more like a propaganda piece, and less like an inquiry into morality.

Maybe I’m a “victim” of the “epidemic” of “paranoia”.

However, upon examination of the language used in the OP, I can’t help but feel manipulated.

And against that, I will persevere.

Why hasn’t Arthur contributed to the comments? Why hasn’t he responded?

My one expectation is this: let’s be honest.

“Why hasn’t Arthur contributed to the comments? Why hasn’t he responded?”

Because the author has better things to do—this thread is a tiny tiny fraction of his life. But to me it is important, as ethical questions large & small have arisen; Burt makes you think albeit it is petty to mention the illegal alien status of the SEALs who attacked bin Laden’s compound. Would bin Laden have asked the gunman who shot him: “before you shoot me, let’s see your passport and visa”?
Burt possesses a comprehensive ‘worldview’ (though he wouldn’t appreciate being limited to a worldview), unfortunately like all of he gets bogged down in the chaff at the expense of the wheat, he could have stuck to the obvious facts of America’s inflated notion of itself as “God’s country” (an insult to the Prophet and Allah), and the ‘greatest country in the world’—the subtext being we have the bigger guns and will crush anyone who gets in the way of our national interest and dynastic ambitions, etc.
IMO America is a great (i.e. big) nation, not a good one.

post-post  [05/23 at 09:30 PM]

Chaos theory ought to cause you to revise this.

Chaos is theoretically deterministic and thus orderly even though it appears disorderly – I said there is order and I reject randomness. Consciousness is not deterministic and therefore not chaotic. In any case chaos in certain circumstances may give rise to order – it was the orderly nature of physical reality that allows chaos to spawn that order. 

iPan [ 05/24 at 10:44 AM]

The only crinkle in I see in what Burt is saying is the amnesia effect. So, let’s say for sake of argument that his metaphysics is essentially correct. Even so, we are all ‘victims’ (lol) of amnesia, and therefore we don’t know that we ‘chose’ to be here.
The point being what good does this metaphysics do here and now to help people to be more ethical?

Yes we are all amnesiacs and it is not a simple task to discover why one chooses a particular life/time framework in physical reality. If one could consciously remember each foray into physical reality (which isn’t linear and all time is now) it would be too confusing to sort which memories come from which physical foray (past and future relative to the present.) Reputedly some adepts (Dalai Lama is one) who can distinguish other existences from their present lives. If people knew that their present life was a function of their past and future lives (these all exist in the omnipresent now) perhaps they would try to behave more ethically or at least understand that because each of us is our universe that any immoral or unethical behavior is only detrimental to ourselves.

post-post  on 05/24 at 03:43 PM

Most people appear to think events are linear, when they are a cascade of quasi-chaotic happenings; I still maintain, though, if a super-computer were to hypothetically record every event in bin Laden’s life plus every event in all those connected to bin Laden, we would then have a fairly good idea of what transpired

Even if events were quasi-chaotic and computer could keep track of every event from the initial conditions anent OBL’s birth (theoretically if his umbilicus were tied off too long or short or his prepuce was cut crooked – things might hve turned out differently), because consciousness (and therefore human behavior) is NOT deterministic. (Jazz is not deterministic or chaotic (although some find it so) music and that is presumably why we (you & I) enjoy it.

iPan [05/24 at 05:41 PM]

If we must blame something, blame the big bang, for without it, none of us would be here.

The Big Bang never happened. Check link: Eric Lerner’s The Big Bang Never Happened

post-post [05/24 at 05:48 PM]

Frankly, I don’t think Burt cares about anyone other than his wife & son and a few others:
bin Laden’s death only has significance to Burt as an abstraction whether bin Laden was shot or had choked on a piece of cheese.

You are correct – I only care with abstract emotion about those who are not close to me – family, friends and heroes warrant deeper feelings. I do not care that anyone chooses to vacate a physical existence because I assume that they chose the circumstances of their departure. I care about the active parties in the drama because that is who affected the event to a greater degree.

As I said before there is no difference in principle between Charles Manson ordering Atkins and Watson to extirpate Sharon Tate or Obama ordering the Seals (the illegal aliens was a sarcastic jibe at Obama’s implementation of the Bush Doctrine) to invade a sovereign nation (we’re ‘Merkins dammit) without notice or permission and kill rather than arrest OBL. If any nation tried that here there would be hell to pay.

iPan  [05/24 at 09:09 PM]

Although the metaphysics that Burt proposes are indeed highly plausible, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across similar worldframes, and there is fairly solid scientific evidence to back it up.

Thanks for your support.

How do we realize on a massive scale what Burt is communicating to us…Abstractions are nice, but how do we implement them?

It isn’t our job to implement abstractions. The best we can do is to espouse ideals peacefully and try to live up to them. Anything else is sure to involve unintentional less than ideal consequences.  You seem to be doing OK in this regard.

If you really want to explore the most profound aspects of ethics,..If you are of particular fortitude, then do this while on extreme doses of LSD or psilocybin

If you really want to explore the most profound aspects of reality, psychedelics may be a shortcut. I have experience with shortcuts and would advise others to proceed cautiously as the winding road climbs gradually down the mountain, a shorter path may traverse steep and rocky terrain.

Peace to ALL