Gravity
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I’ve been trying to convince my dear old mother to cancel her perpetual travel insurance for lack of utility. It only costs €30 annually, but she doesn’t travel as much as she used to.
I estimate about 1 in 20 probability of her actually traveling once in any given year by now, compounded by a 1 in 20 prob of anything going wrong and needing claiming during said travel, an unrealistically high estimate, but at best leaving only 1 in 400 chance per year of said insurance having utility, so she’d end up needing it once on average after 400 years, having paid a total amount of €12000 in insurance premium, and then the insurance would only cover a few hundred euros of damages in rare cases. Its a simplified calculation to illustrate the expected utility.
I’ve come to understand that in her case, merely having travel insurance promotes a cognitive bias making her believe the odds of actually travelling in any given year become greater, which provides some comfort to her, since she much enjoyed travelling in her younger years.
I expect that for the TEPCO people, being able to insure for meltdown damages promoted a cognitive bias making them grossly underestimate the actual probability of catastrophe.
Berlusconi states that bribing third-world officials for business deals is a part of the culture of corruption there, so why complain? That its criminal under italian law for italian businesses to offer business bribes is irrelevant, since businessmen like him can freely choose which laws to obey or disobey.
Its true he’s being realistic about open corruption in places lacking the pretense of a rule of law, but from that logic, if Italy itself degenerated further into a banana republic, it would presumably be okay to openly bribe italian officials for business deals.
Its especially painful to have him admit to funding the culture of corruption so directly in third-world countries, which only encourages despotic regimes to never reform.This really takes the cake:
Berlusconi has now openly stated that bribes are not criminal, being a necessary part of business, and by extension, a necessary part of politics. On the basis of this statement alone,
Berlusconi should be banned from public office for life,
and his businesses thoroughly audited.
Certainly the italians deserve better than this.The primary advantage of direct democracy would be to render the representative political party system obsolete, which seems to be the nexus of corruption in modern politics. I’m beginning to doubt democracy can ever be realised by institutional mediation of political parties, such as they are, intertwined with business and banking. Direct democracy empowered by the device of referendums would be far less conductive to corruption, and could diffuse special interests by decoupling money power from politics.
But the media system and the education system are not formatted to empower the electorate so directly, and deliberately infuse a passive view of democracy. These must be simultaneously reformed to realise a participatory citizenship which is active over all domains of political discourse, allowing a fully informed and enabled citizenry to produce their own political programs divorced from the technocratic dominion of expert opinions.
Something like that, yes?
Direct democracy does seem to be the ideal format for relegitimising the political process.
I’ve been reading ‘The Rights of Man’ by Thomas Paine, which focuses on the revolutionary construct of constitutionalism and representative democracy to allign the national political process against the absolute rule of aristocracy and monarchy. In Paine’s time the simple form of direct democracy was impractical for lack of a scalabe medium of political communication and feedback, and he did not envision the use of the internet for that function.
“Referring them to the original simple democracy,…It is incapable of extension, not from its principle, but from the inconvenience of its form;…”
“It is impossible to conceive a system of government capable of acting over such an extent of territory, and such a circle of interests, as is immediately produced by the operation of representation…. It is preferable to simple democracy even in small territories. Athens, by representation, would have outrivalled her own democracy.”As representative democracy was then a completely novel idea, superior to the administrative alternatives at the time, Paine was very enthusiastic, but he obviously underestimated its conductivity for corruption and the deforming pressures of special interest.
For the administrations and political deliberations of a populous nation-state, direct democracy was impossible at the pace of 18th century life, but now that communication at lightspeed and frictionless induction of political discourse is possible, direct democracy should become scalable to levels beyond the local.
“Simple democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary means.”
The direct democracy enabled by the internet would not be as elegant as the simple personal democracy of Athens, as it would require depersonalised secondary means, its technically complex infrastructure and embedded modes of production remain within the reach of manipulation by powerful anti-democratic forces.
But if this digital medium of discourse can remain relatively free from censorship and subversion, digital democracy may be a worthy alternative to the disasterously compromised representative forms, and make the dubious political party system obsolete.Grillo does have the correct anti-establishment style of presentation, breaking through the necrotic political party structure and bypassing the centralised media machinery to channel a broad social movement, regardless of shortcomings in the political program itself.
Ishkabibble post=6501 wrote:
…the technologies which supported monarchies and dictatorships in centuries past still exist today…It would appear that if the ‘free’ society fails, enough control mechanisms exist for authoritarianism to endure for at least our natural lifetimes.The traditional technologies of poverty and ignorance have always been universally employed by authoritarian rule, but the revolutionary discovery of national liberty expressed in the american and french revolutions, being inevitable socio-economic reactions to intolerable tyranny, may have created a lasting and indominable impulse of societal anti-authoritariansm, rendering the perfect political ignorance of liberty permanently impossible.
It seems impossible for a previously liberated revolutionary society to completely unlearn and remove the moral memory of democratic and anti-authoritarian mechanisms once constituted and having lasted in an institutional form for generations, making the sustainable intergenerational ignorance of liberty no longer tenable, while also establishing the permanent expectations of intellectual and political failure of authoritarianism as a form of government, which leaves only directed poverty as a transient tool for authoritarian control, but being now clearly apparent as directed violence.
But, absent ignorance, and having glimpsed the promise of an open society, then the absolute intensity and purposeful intent of violent poverty required to supress the spirit of liberty, once learned and remembered on a societal scale, is itself unsustainable, since the required supression mechanisms will eventually dampen all excess energy flux available for centralised power projection.
For instance, the virtues and profitabilities of free speech, once familiarised, cannot be hidden or erased from the collective memory of a people, having once freed themselves. And since the intellectual weakness of authoritarianism cannot withstand civil discourse and disintergates under sustained criticism and organised political opposition, the necessary totalitarian supression of discourse and political organisation critical of authoritarian rule will dampen economic activity to the extent than centralised control mechanisms become ineffective and unaffordable, so any complex criminal center cannot hold, regardless of technotyrannical efficacy.
In some ways, Obama is a victim himself, being captured by the logic of the system. His first mistake was to accept the job, for which he is accountable. All his subsequent transgressions as POTUS are resultant from his taking the job, but may make him complicit to a lesser degree, especially if his handlers threaten him.
Obama, if possessing adequate volition, could still do great things for the federal budget and the republic in his 2nd term, by tasking himself, in conjunction with congress, to dissolving the worst of the federal bureaucracies and chartered agencies; DHS, the CIA, the Federal Reserve and the department of education.
To lessen the deficit, the pentagon budget must at least be cut in half, abandoning several hundred military bases around the world would help to lessen imperial overstretch and anti-american sentiments. FEMA, the NSA, FBI and ATF, being suspect bureaucracies susceptible to institutional abuses of power, must be reorganised and downsized to become more accountable, transparent and less corrupted.Apart from the direct spending reduction, removing the deeply negative labor productivity and menacing threat of the DHS and the TSA will lessen societal anxiety and distrust in government and enhance economic confidence. Scrapping the NDAA horror and the Patriot act would be paramount to reinstate the rule of law and stop the erosion of civil rights.
De-funding or outlawing the CIA, for their many crimes, abuses and overall uselessness or outright hazard for security, would not break their power at once, but legalising, regulating and taxing narcotics should destroy the black market for narcotics and remove their principal revenue stream. This would also diminish crime and narcotics use, cut policing costs, provide additional revenue and remove the militaries objective to police the afghan opium trade for the CIA’s profit.
Laying low the Fed and the wall street cartels will break the central monopoly on money and credit and allow the mega-banks to be cut down to size, while using the savings to fund massive programs of debt and tax reduction and localised reindustrialisation should greatly boost economic activity and productive capital allocation.
The department of education has a highly negative labor productivity. It only seems to provide corporate programming to brainwash children, retard their learning and ruin critical thinking skills, greatly reducing labor productivity and innovation overall. The whole thing should be scrapped to reduce spending, the socioeconomic damage it has caused will take a generation to dissipate.It would be less damaging to the economy to have the resultant hundreds of thousands of ex-federal employees, originating from negative-productivity bureaucracies, on wellfare, until new labor opportunities with positive value are created by reindustrialisation. Comprehensive programs of relocalisation and decomplexification are needed to rethink power generation and break energy cartels, to rebuild a resilient electric grid, to produce transportation infrastructure outfitted for mass transit and to reduce logistical complexity, to domestically build tens of millions of new cars with vastly increased mileage, and to decentralise and revitalise agricultural industry.
The department of agriculture should be downsized and maintained only to oversee the transfer from monopoly and monoculture industries towards a subsidy-less system than produces a non-toxic food surplus by smaller farm output. A purification program for agriculture and the meat-industry based on biotrophic consolidation must eradicate pollutant sources, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones from the environment and food supply, while limiting artificial fertiliser use, employing methods of land use to replenish topsoil, creating more sustainable water management, and diffusing the dangerous concentrations of political and economic power from agricultural biotechnology cartels into a viable free market for food. This program of reindustrialisation should provide millions of productive jobs for decades to come.
Then, after the intractably corrupted FDA and EPA are thoroughly purged or disbanded, federal mandate should remove certain edible poisons like high-fructose corn sugars and GMO’s from the food supply, or curtail their production, and eliminate water fluoridation and overvaccination to lessen chronic illness.
Plans should be made to lessen the impact of fukushima fallout, impose strict regulations on the negligent marketing and distribution of pharmaceutical toxins, psychotropics and anti-depressants, fund synergistic nutritional programmes and eliminate federally-funded medical fascism. These measures should cause an increase in general labor productivity of at least 5% within 5 years and reduce healthcare expediture by at least 10% within 5 years. This would save trillions and break the pharmaceutical and medical cartels.Meanwhile, under Obama’s auspices, the states should assemble a constitutional convention, to allow for legitimate seccession proceedings for any states who want out, to formulate a new sovereign and sound money system, or free market of currencies, to transition into after the Fed is abolished, and to proscribe new amendments facilitating additional checks and balances on federal power, so that no Fed or DHS will ever emerge again.
Maybe a redesign of the SCOTUS is necessary to increase their constitutional fortitude.Both the democratic and republican parties are now largely criminal organisations unable to mediate political discourse, and should be abandoned and replaced by several new parties, preferrably providing a system of multi-party coalition governance, which seems less corruptible, especially after commercial lobbying is banned in politics. Congressional insider trading should be totally outlawed.
A new amendment, supplementing and expanding on the 1st amendment guarantee to freedom of speech and of the press, may be required to adequately protect the domain of the free press from corporate colonization and control, independent journalism being vital for political discourse of the citizenry and to constrain political corruption. Oversized commercial media conglomerates and news cartels should be broken up to reduce their highly concentrated economic power and corrosive ideological influence over political debate.
To avoid further confusion, perhaps a new amendment should unequivocally specify which orginal amendments can never be repealed without destroying the republic, such as the 1st amendment, and which vital amendments counterbalance and safeguard these as an inherent duty, such as the 2nd, being more necessary than ever to protect individual liberty while the imminent threat of DHS and a totalitarian takeover persist. Indeed, if the federal government remains so large and unchecked, the threat of a totalitarian takeover will always persist.
If economic collapse could somehow be reversed entirely, the oligarchy would lose their interest in a domestic police-state takeover to safeguard their assets.If Obama could forward this agenda, and survive the subsequent attempts on his life by aforementioned parties, I might honestly call him a great president, providing that he lets the courts judge on all his previous drone-killings, and that he accounts for the Libya treason and other transgressions. He should be justly imprisoned for these acts after his term is up, but history might still judge him favorably if he could accomplish even one of those tasks.
Obama did inspire me once, back in 2007, when he first announced his run for presidency. I had never heard of him before. His speech seemed anti-establishment, criticising the power of money and special interests in politics, and promising to fight corruption.
At the time, I wondered how long it would take the system to compromise him, or if he could genuinely make a difference. By the time of the election of 2008, I’d seen enough campaign rhetoric from his side to completely lose faith in his power to change the system from within. Its the media system too that makes it impossible to communicate real ideas in campaigns, but his political platform seemed fully compromised and emptied of integrity by then.Happy new year and best wishes to all, btw.
Obama may have helped to get openly gay people accepted in the military, arguably a minor advance in civil rights, but then he went ahead and signed the NDAA, after promising not to, being the most devastating setback in civil rights ever legislated in US history, regarding the barbarous indefinite detention provision.
That magnitude of damage to the rule of law cannot be undone, it gets him directly in the top 10 of worst presidents ever, just for that.The obamacare debacle is a despicable corporatist power grab towards medical fascism disguised as a social reform. All issues concerning coverage have actually gotten worse, people who couldn’t afford health insurance are now forced, by imposing a direct tax on the use of their bodies, to pay for an overpriced service they will still be denied for pre-existing conditions or by the arbitration of a death-panel. Brilliant.
Its expected that jobs above the 30 hour threshold for mandatory coverage will simply disappear and be replaced by 29 hour jobs. In the best-case scenario it will only collapse employment even further and not enrich the sickcare cartel as much as they hoped for while writing the obamacare legislation.Obama announced that the mischief wall street and the banks had done was unethical, but not illegal. Much of it was very illegal. But instead of properly denouncing the banks as criminal, or criminalising their unethical deeds, the white house issued instructions to the MSM to ignore all banker crimes in perpetuity.
Obama is a serial drone-killing treasoner and ideological fanatic who disrespects the rule of law at every opportunity, seizing dictatorial powers, despite being a constitutional scholar. Arguably, he’s done more damage, with greater cognizance, to constitutional integrity in one term than Bush accomplished in two.
And the more he does to you,
the less you seem to believe he’s doing it.
ObamaDrone! And he’s gonna do more…Obama’s presidency may in fact be the last presidency of the republic, destroying any pretense to american democracy, especially if the economic collapse accelerates during his second term, in part because of his ruinous economic policy, he might become directly complicit in the genocide of the people and the establishment of a technotronic tyranny.
Maybe his advisors and spin teams successfully insulate him from the true nature of the disasterous policies his corporate masters make him complict in. And there may be mitigating circumstances to his willful collaboration, the oligarchy and corrupt federal agencies would definitely threaten his family and children should he dare to betray them, for maximal leverage.
The Teleprompter Tyrant cannot possibly do anything with financial policy to become a great president, he’s done too much damage and too much evil to be great, but if he was to single-handedly outlaw the Fed for being a criminal cartel, or demolish wall street most fully, he might not end up as the worst POTUS in history, and perchance save some millions from starvation.
It is conceivable that, despite his previous collaboration, Obama may still help to prevent the imminent Enemy takeover or civil war by means of deliberate policy, if such policy can be formulated. Otherwise his greatest possible service might be to resign and take the VP and most of congress down with him, forcing a constitutional crisis to collapse the federal regime by denouncing them all.
Barry the Butcher is already amongst the worst corporatist puppets and treasoners in US history, altogether worse than Bush by being a more talented demagogue, smart enough to realise what monsterous agenda he is collaborating towards. Unlike Bush, who’s evil intent was clearly visible and openly communicated, Barry fools many more people into accepting the authoritarian agenda of his evil puppetmasters by lying about everything he does, and totally obfuscating his evil machinations in secrecy while promising tranparency.
He could partially redeem himself and martyr himself for the Republic by openly defying his owners, by merely speaking the truth about the criminal oligarchy, or dissolving the criminal DHS or the CIA by executive order, although they would immediately assassinate him for such an act, it would be worth it.
Opinions such as what poster Babble conveys do exist as a function of utter ignorance, yet it is also suspiciously possible that poster Babble is a paid provocateur and enemy weapon used to disseminate disinformation and to disrupt civil discourse. The federal regime is admittedly funding cognitive infiltration operations online to create confusion about the administrations factual malice.
The War of Central Aggression
HE has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary to limit his powers.
HE has dialectically demonised the Right to Bear Arms in Self Defense, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
HE has excreted a Multitude of new Orders, and sent hither Swarms of Agents to harrass our People, and grope out their Substance.
HE has affected to render the DHS independent of and superior to the Military and Judiciary Power.
HE has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Extremist Agendas.
FOR quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.
FOR protecting the Corporate Oligarchy, by a mock System of Justice,
from Prosecution for Crimes which they commit on the Inhabitants of these States.FOR imposing taxes on our bodies without our Consent.
FOR depriving us, in many cases, of the Benefits of Murder by Drone.
FOR transporting us beyond Seas to be tortured for pretended Offences.
FOR stealing away our Charters, abrogating our most valuable Laws,
and subverting fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.FOR bypassing our Legislatures, and declaring himself invested with Power to order executively in all Cases whatsoever.
FOR Levying War against us,
without prior and clear authorization of an Act of Congress.FOR accepting sovereign presidence over the UN Security Council
while holding an Office of Trust under us.FOR politically persecuting dissenting speech against him.
FOR his identity fraud, being the bastard son of a communist agitator
or a stateless enemy combatant pretending to be eligible.HE has multiplied our debt, plundered our Treasury, ravaged our Economy, crushed our hopes, and foodstamped the Lives of our People.
HE is not yet, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries, supplementing such smaller Armies already positioned,
to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny,
already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy,
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Administrations,
and totally unworthy the Head Puppet of a civilized Nation.HE would constrain our fellow Citizens captured in the Collapse to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
HE has excited Supersecession amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Banker Savages, whose known Rule of Usury, is an inextinguishable Debt, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.
To be clear; this checklist of committed offences by the regime does not yet enumerate such open hostilities against the people which would automatically legitimise a violent revolution or constitutionalist coup against the federal government at this time.
However, regarding the prerogative to Kinetic Constitutionalism, the Criminal Oligarchy now in control of the federal government, using Barry the Butcher as a vessel of treason, is openly preparing to collapse and overthrow the old republic and genocide the citizenry.
By now, the department of Homeland Security has been clearly revealed as a hostile occupying force intended to persecute and imprison the populace, to target all political resistance against tyranny and dictatorship, and to facilitate the systematic extermination of the people during the economic collapse.Using an econometric unit of energy flux density [joule/$/sec^2] to quantify the value of production does rely on arbitrary EROEI boundary conditions. This becomes problematic when accounting for the embedded energy of tools and the energetic leverage of innovation, but no more so than with monetary valuation.
The first law of gravitonomics:
All economic activity is leveraged on the facilitation [labor] and maintenance [capital] of a food surplus.
corollary;
All social control is leveraged off the facilitation and maintenance of a food shortage/scarcity.The first statement is falsifiably true.
But it seems to indicate a gross misvaluations of labor and tools employed in food production, which should be valued more than their price affords.Providing that hierarchical division of labor decouples capital surplus from food production [grain tokens], and providing that all social control constrains economic activity and limits aggregate surplus, the corollary is also true.
So in logical terms, we’ve established that if [God=God],
then [0≠0] and [∞≠∞]
Now, if [universe=universe] as a function of God,
then [0≠0] or [∞≠∞].If God and the universe cannot logically exist as two separate identities in the same cardinal infinity, we might then peruse the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; if [God=God], then [1=3]
1) There is God [hypothetically, as a logical function of Himself];
2) There is God’s creation as a function of God [creativity is logical];
3) There is the dynamic force between God and His creations, mediating three functions [the Holy Gravity]1)Morality is a function of God.
2)God is a function of morality.
3)Both at once, in equal proportion.Its preferable to assert that [the idea of] God is a function of [the idea of] morality before asserting that [the idea of] morality is a function of [the idea of] God.
Its preferable that God is a function of morality before
that morality is a function of God
[the geometry of hierarchy is a function of Gravity].Ill elucidate when I figure out what it means.
Ive designed an overunity energy generator powered by logical paradoxes, namely a logic circuit proving that [0≠0], the gravitonomic paradox processing device, or zero-field capacitor. It should work, its patent applications consistently burst into flames upon contact with logic, but I’m having trouble writing a suitable programming language without binary code.
A secondary function of overunity may be harnessed by allowing the device to thermally convert the printouts of its own patent application.
I did confuse some terms there, the problem is that the systems of free volition are categorised first by accepting or dismissing the premise of a deterministic universe, and there are several possible systems for free volition, caused by God or not, in both determinist and indeterminist universes, I’ll clarify.
ashvin post=5946 wrote:
1) God foreknows and predestines everything, and there is no human free will.
2) God foreknows everything, predetermines some things and there is human free will (ex. God knows exactly what will happen if you go somewhere, but that doesn’t mean you are destined to go there; he only predestines the major aspects of his plan, such as Jesus’ death on the cross)
3) God foreknows everything, predestines everything and there is still human free will.Option 1) is definitely hard theological determinsm which is most self-contradictory in regards to moral agency.
Option 2) would be compatibilist if it is still a deterministic universe, as God only predetermines some things. The important question is whether only non-physical things are indetermined or also physical things.
If any of the indetermined things have a physical quality, maybe quantum indeterminism, it would rather be an indeterministic universe with some degree of randomness and free volition to dynamically influence things. Metaphysical libertarianism is the dominant mode of thought there, but much of it seeks free volition by other means than God.
There are interactionist dualist positions that seem only mildly self-contradictory in regards to moral agency here.Option 3) is some kind of compatibilism, since God predetermines everything physical and mental, this only allows for a deterministic universe with God’s plan as a hidden variable or immutable causal force, even influencing quantum level fluctuations, yet free volition is still possible at some level.
This option is moderately self-contradictory in regards to moral agency.Option 2) seems most reasonable for biblical interpretation, and the bible would allow for a system of free volition in an indeterministic universe, providing that this system may produce moral agency. Some forms of dualism may also include the soul as a moral agent without necessarily defining it as a property of God.
I suppose God could be placed in both determinist and indeterminist universes, depending on option 2 or 3, but if free volition is also to be placed in conjunction with God as a function of moral agency, it narrows the available options in the fully deterministic universe, I think only some system of compatibilism would suffice there.
Compatibilist arguments of free volition under causal relations would focus on option 3, since only that option clearly defines all physical things as immutable causal factors in a deterministic universe, but still allowing for free volition, compatibilsts mostly substitute God’s plan with other sets of determined factors.
If tasked with finding a system that may provide free agency under God, most people would propbably choose a compatibilist system in a deterministic universe, but there are solid options also in an indeterministic universe, its just that God would then actually be playing dice with the universe, but only for the important parts.
I like the deterministic modes where the gravitational field itself is a moral agent or dynamic medium of moral agency.
ashvin post=5946 wrote:
The fact that we can even have this discussion is proof that God exists and we were created in his image.Its positive proof that the idea of God exists, at least as a provocative thought experiment and a moral ideal, if nothing else.
According to Voltaire; “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him”. Voltaire would have meant this as a moral heuristic, that the idea of an omniscient creator could ideally inform moral agency or was a necessary aspect of philosophical consideration.
Even if this idea of God did not describe an objective reality, the faithful belief in this idea would create a subjective reality with similar moral consequences.The biblical allegories often pose a moral dillema, where some element of necessary suffering enables moral agency, to avoid a greater suffering.
The weird things is that not all biblical suffering is evil, and sometimes the very attempts to avoid suffering cause greater suffering further on, and are thus revealed as evil by invoking sin. So in this way, the applicable definition of necessary suffering is that it must ultimately be justifiable in some plan of God’s [although the ultimate objectives of this plan mostly remain unrevealed as a test of faith], and that to avoid this suffering has definitive evil consequences, leading to some avoidable sin.Also, the kind of evil suffering caused by sin is most esthetically displeasing, ugly, whereas necessary suffering is not as ugly and can sometimes even have a quality of beauty.
Sometimes the bible seems to use the juxtaposition between necessary and avoidable suffering as a dialectic tool to lower cognitive discounting rates, while the common confusion of necessary suffering with avoidable suffering is essential to tragedy as a literary style.
I did not make any distinction between natural and moral evil, I figured that the mythical garden of eden had no natural evil, and everything afterwards experienced by humans in nature was influenced by the compounding of original sin.
From my understanding of the story of original sin and the expulsion form the garden, it seems that nature’s wrath and human mortality were not pre-existent natural evil but a direct consequence of a moral evil committed with eve’s apple and all.ashvin post=5946 wrote:
1) God foreknows and predestines everything, and there is no human free will.This option would conform to hard [theological] determinism, with all causal factors determined by God directly, but it logically eliminates the possibility of moral agency in good and evil and the concept of sin entirely, and God would know this. That there would remain an illusion of moral agency would be cruel and unreasonable, especially if people were sent to hell without cause, or only because of that apple thing.
I find that biblical allegory does treat free will as essential for moral agency, while also assuming that the moral good is always knowable by God’s word. The bible itself seems to strongly disallow for option 1.There’s a clear conflict between the absence of free volition and orginal sin; logically, at least this first sin must have been voluntary, and not predetermined, to carry any moral agency and the consequence of reprehension. If not, God and the snake would seem to be on the same side.
ashvin post=5946 wrote:
2) God foreknows everything, predetermines some things and there is human free will
3) God foreknows everything, predestines everything and there is still human free will.
I tend to lean towards #3, but I don’t think we need “compatibilism” to explain how that’s possible.Options 2 and 3 are both compatibilist systems. Compatibilism is not an self-contained explanation but a category of logical systems which provide a variety of explanations, mostly framed in [quantum] physical and cosmological configurations, as to how modes of free will may possibly be compatible with determined and immutable causal factors, such as God’s plan.
Only a compatibilist system may allow for option 2 and 3, incompatibilist systems simply disallow for [immutable] causal factors such as God’s plan to exist simultaneously with free volition of any kind.
So the bible really indicates option 2 and 3, and the most solid compatibilist arguments of free volition and causal relations focus on option 3. God’s plan would be a special subset of causally determined factors with an absolute moral dimension, but not always leading to only one possible outcome.
Conversely, some incompatibilist modes of free will require a degree of indeterminism in quantum physics, necessarily not determined by causal factors or God’s plan, to provide a factor of random chance, a kind of random number generator somehow compiled into free volition.
The modes of free volition of the interactionist dualist variety, incompatibilist, also allow for the intergration of the non-material mind or soul as an information processing unit and moral agent, to eliminate causally determined factors of physicality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_determinism
I find it challenging to integrate a given mode of free will into a gravitational field, as nothing in gravity is random at all, and the neural correlates of consciousness all seem subject to gravity very much.
So I’m working towards some form of metaphysical libertarianism or interactionist dualism for now, or any coherent incompatibilist mode providing some degree of free volition and moral agency, but I’m not ready to dismiss all possible compatibilist systems, some of those have good arguments too.Ash
I appreciate your writings, and this topic does interest me from a philosophical perspective.But actually, I find the possibility of free fate to be as much a profound mystery as the existence of necessary suffering, it seems that one can only be understood in deep relation to the other.
ashvin post=5864 wrote:
We frequently fall back on the idea that humans were created with free will, and evil was simply the price God had to pay for giving us such a capacity.
Although there is a lot of truth to that line of reasoning, it is also a simplistic and incomplete argument. Ultimately, the free will argument alone is not a satisfying answer to such a deeply emotional question.That depends on how emotionally one approaches the free will argument, especially when framing it in the mode of God’s will in creating or permitting suffering and evil, whether He had any choice given the possible parameters of free will applicable to Himself, and given that all things divine must be reasonable.
There are several free will arguments applicable to the question of suffering because there are several philosophical systems which provide free will by distinctly different means. Some are fully incompatible with determinism or divine intent of any sort, while some are compatible with various determinist modes. The meaning and modes of suffering may also vary between these systems. Suffering may be a more complex device in the compatibilist modes of free volition, including a more irreducible aspect of necessary and unavoidable suffering.
We must necessarily distinguish between necessary and avoidable suffering. In biblical terms of moral allegory, basically all avoidable suffering is evil and sinful, and caused by some sin or compounding of sins. Only avoidable suffering can be sinful and subject to reprehension, while all necessary suffering is by definition not sinful or morally accountable except unto God, notwithstanding limited understanding of neccesity.
There is still the remote possibility that all human souls personally choose to be born into this world, somehow emanating from a higher plane and physically manifesting by their free volition, bound to be governed by more severe rules of material determinism. This would make mortality itself a voluntary condition of the spiritual being.
It could also be that free evil is a prerequisite function of free volition of any sort, and that it is logically impossible even for God to create free will in the material or spiritual realm without the possibility of evil suffering. This line of reasoning is only as simplistic as the model of free will defined.
It is untrue that an omnipotent being such as God could freely choose to ignore reason itself if that were more suitable to His designs. If His existence is to be logically explicable at all, it must be bound by certain rules of universal logic He himself cannot change, without changing the nature of the divine. If God had made a rock so heavy He himself couldn’t lift it, that rock would be God, or He would no longer be, logically.
Form another perspective, a particularly narrow definition of free will, it is free will itself that is inherently evil, and people more easily desire sinful evil of their own accord, so that only submission to the righteousness of divine will is truly sinless but also comparatively unfree.
Also, even without God, but permitting the conditional existence of evil, it is a moral responsibility anyhow to discern avoidable suffering and to avoid it by means of a moral heuristic, to delineate good and evil in the best possible way, and this wisdom pertaining to avoidable suffering seems possible only by the experience of necessary suffering, so that one pain may lessen another by some great mystery of normative utility.
The buddhist conception of suffering is also decent and practical; all existence is defined by suffering, the cause of suffering is desire and attachment, freedom from desire thus lessens suffering. This also appplies when releasing attachment to life itself, yet death is so unpopular.
And why is the existence of joy not a mystery of equal magnitude?
Certainly its evermore inexplicable as an experience, but inherently not seen as profoundly unjust or unnatural, so no one ever complains about the equally deficient and unaccountable allocation of joy.The dichotomy between good and evil and the concept of sin do require a moral heuristic delineating the certainties of free fate, so causing accountable moral agency to suffer the choice of sin.
In the KJV, a word search reveals 216 instances of the verb ‘to choose/chose/chosen’ and 23 instances of the noun ‘choice’ throughout the old&new testaments. God himself does much of the choosing in the old testament, delineating fated parameters of the moral good.
Job
{34:4} Let us choose to us judgment:
let us know among ourselves what [is] good.Apparently, God consistently chooses good things as the best possible things, serving a unique type of omniscient and transcendental utilitarianism which may possibly be justifiable in regards to the measure of necessary suffering, unlike every other type of utilitarianism.
In the bible, what is morally good is only knowable because God demonstrably ordaines such a good; any choice not made by God thus carries a knowable moral weight or accountable moral agency within a defined moral heuristic, pertaining to the concept of avoidable suffering.
In philosophical terms, any system of moral agency that is in accordance with God’s plan must be formulated in a compatibilist mode of free volition, allowing for some measure of freedom in willful action bounded by parameters of foreordained determinism.Philosophical or theological systems that include the concept of necessary suffering sometimes lapse into a fatalist mode of dysfunctional determinism when causing unjust and avoidable suffering to be [deliberately] misinterpreted as necessary and proper suffering. This kind of reasoning has often been abused for ideological apologism and may result in political apathy [such as the american rapture theology].
The doctrine of original sin is curious in that way, as anyone who chooses to be born is inevitably subjected to sinful suffering, thus resulting in the counterbalancing doctrine of moral redemption by free volition.
Some years ago, the catholic church abolished the institutional precept of purgatory for unbaptized children as an automatic consequence of original sin. After centuries of teaching this merciless consequence, the church reconsidered that God would not be so unreasonable, and this precept also wasn’t a big selling point for the church in regions with high infant mortality.
This remarkable change indicates a calculated moral relativism in biblical interpretation which shouldn’t be possible in an exact moral heuristic, it also proves the fallibility of the institutional church as an absolute arbiter of morality.Considering the concept of sin, and that official church doctrine provides an imperfect insight into moral agency, it is an individual moral responsibility to closely examine what kinds of suffering are positively avoidable, and by what means they may be optimally avoided, and also to define which parameters of necessary suffering, resulting from modes of determinism/God’s plan, are partially knowable or absolutely unknowable.
Diverse philosophical systems of moral agency, including those which produce free volition without divine intent, are also helpful to eliminate superstition and fallacious interpretation of scripture.ashvin post=5750 wrote: Gravity, does this model predict that our current Universe creates itself in the past from the future?
I don’t know.
I do prefer to contemplate cosmological models where free will may exist apart from the existence of God, as these models are often less complex and contain fewer paradoxes than those providing free will solely as a function of God.
I consider cosmological models that disallow free will as inviable, it would be useless to be forced or randomly moved to contemplate such models as a function of the pointless deterministic or chaotic universe which they result in.One thing is clear; the omega point multiverse is distinct from other multiverse models because it has a definitive moral or philosophical dimension. Every possible universe resultant from the omega point is causally interrelated by a singular moral heuristic, whereby all possible universes capable of sentient life must allow for free will [as a function of the God system/!]; or all possible universes must contain sentient life and allow for free will [!].
Im not sure if this moral heuristic of multiversal free will is actually intended in the model itself, but it would necessarily be true. This must be why it seems more of a philosophical model rather than a scientific one, even if it were falsifiable.
Other multiverse models allow for causally decoupled verses, inherently existing without moral purpose. Some verses may allow for the random possibility of sentient life, either with or without free will, but most possible universes would be devoid of life. The accidental existence of God in any one universe would not necessitate the existence of the same God in other verses.
ashvin post=5750 wrote: Gravity, does this model predict that our current Universe creates itself in the past from the future?
It seems to predict that, especially as Gravity is a recursive algorithm.
Actually, it only predicts that at least one possible inhabited universe will become a source universe in which the process of life produces all other inhabited universes in causal interrelation within a moral multiverse.
It is a formulation of the final anthropic principle, stating that sentient life must necessarily come into existence in at least one possible source universe, and once it comes into existence, such life will never die out, as a function of a pre-destination causality paradox. This process subsequently produces a maximal multiverse of all possible causally interrelated universes originating from a single source universe, by purposeful intent.Any methodology of testing the veracity of this model should require a quantifiable process of consciously forced universe collapse by sentient life using some mechanism such as the posited baryon annihilation, thereby allowing for the theoretical possibility of such life subsisting until the end of time in a given universe, defeating entropic decay. I mentioned this model because it allows for the non-zero possibility that accelerating universe expansion could be forcibly halted and reversed, even within this universe.
If there is only a single possible universe initially, and not yet a multiverse, this initial source universe must contain an irreducible logical paradox to possibly exist by creating itself retroactively.For the multiverse to be a moral agent in this model, sapient life in the source universe must make a conscious moral choice to construct an infinite God system encompassing all possible universes. In the initially godless source universe, moral free will is only a function of the pre-existence of God by means of a pre-destination paradox, but all subsequently caused universes would include free will as a paradox-free function of the resultant God system.
If the omega point is possible as an infinite information/energy system, it must constitute a form of life no less complex than the multiverse it yields, conforming to the knowable mathematical properties of God in any theist conception. This would also seem to require that every universe within the multiverse is a causal function of the same God.
Such notions as the final anthropic principle, relating to the omega point model, may someday prove beyond a doubt that life is important, and that the Bigger Bang is economically viable. Life in the universe would definitely seem less trivial if it could possibly reverse universe expansion and force a cosmogenic collapse of its own accord.Ive reconsidered that logical paradoxes in a source universe cannot extend into multiversal interrelation unless every universe contains the same paradox, the only possible paradox, and that all possible universes are inhabited by sentient life capable of understanding paradoxes in relation to their own existence.
Hey, Ash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Omega-Point-Multiverse.png
This model provides a non-zero positive chance [converging to 100% probabilty over all universes] that sapient life contained in the multiverse will succeed in constructing an infinitely complex energy/information system which is mathematically indistinguishable from God, which would then generate the multiverse [including all possible paradoxes pertaining to self-generating existence].
There are cosmological configurations in which the percieved accelerated expansion of the visible cosmos is merely an optical illusion. The universe may be expanding at a stable rate but not actually accelerating. The quickening could be a localised artifact caused by the concurrent presence and imminent [absolute deterministic] demise of sensible perception on this planet, providing that there is no other sensible life within the boundary of the observable universe, there are abberations possible in space-time energy density which could produce the observed acceleration effect. The causally decoupled universe beyond the event horizon would then not necessarily be expanding at a quickening pace and may contain life.
The dollar has some use yet, until the Fed has fully spent it, but the most undervalued paper assets will soon be the Bill of Rights and the [re]Declaration of Independence.
On Orlov’s scale of societal collapse, there would be a linear sequence of financial, commercial, political, social and finally cultural collapse.
But this sequence is not proceeding in a linear fashion. The US is far advanced in social and cultural collapse, while the dollars percieved integrity may postpone financial, commercial and political collapse, its the disintegrating structures of the rule of law domestically which may prove the definitive blow to the US empire, resulting in massive civil strife.In regard to overconsumption and misallocation, the criminal oligarchy considers the US population as superfluous assets needing liquidation, now that the extraction of their labor value is complete.
All economic activity is leveraged on the facilitation and maintenance of a food surplus, and the US is hardly able to produce any food surplus internally without the trappings of empire. Otherwise the centre cannot hold and will consume itself.PointOneSolutions post=5734 wrote: So they’ll declare martial law, or maybe something else but you can bet your ass that they will not hyperinflate their wealth away.
Honestly, the US is mostly under martial law already. Military checkpoints are appearing everywhere, and combat units are being prepared to engage the citizenry on all fronts. DHS is heavily entrenched and armed to full capacity, moreover with the appropriation of 1.4 billion bullets and the 30.000 [weaponised?] drones to be unleashed.
Now battallions of indoctrinated homeland-jugend to be deployed.
These are permanent FEMA corps, making the militarised Emergency Management a permanent feature, while domestic military command and control functions are largely transferred to FEMA directly.
The widespread political persecution of lawful dissenters for protected political speech and political activism denotes a demonisation campaign of anyone deemed a constitutionalist, in preparation for round-ups and purges.If a nationwide state of emergency is declared, likely as a result of fullscale economic collapse or hyperindignation, most scenario’s project open civil war between the hellspawn ‘government’ and that part of the population who will resist the takeover. A civil war could then result in dollar hyperinflation or perhaps hyperdeflation, depending on fate.
If at any point full disarmament of the citizenry is attempted too openly, civil war will almost certainly be triggered, as prudence would dictate kinetic constitutionalism.
Only a select few combined disaster scenarios, such as those involving a pandemic bioweapon release, might interfere with the emergence of a coherent resistance of the citizenry and some portion of the military against the enemy takeover.If there is no civil war, in either swift or prolonged collapse, the hostile occupying force now in control of the government will otherwise most certainly proceed with systematic extermination of the US population, the evidence for genocidal preparation is everywhere to see. All the infrastructure for mass concentration of [displaced] populations is in place, having an obvious dual use under guise of natural or manmade disaster contingencies [collapse and pandemic scenarios included]. Its undeniable that if the FEMA camps have a combined capacity for interning up to 50 million people, in cascading logistical collapse, there would not be sufficient food supply to keep interned people alive in those camps for ‘re-education’, if that was ever the enemy’s intent.
In several scenario’s, only a timely and proportionate civil war or constitutionalist military coup may prevent a successful and complete genocide of all targeted groups [at least 40-60 million people, basically anyone with a functional moral memory, especially the veterans], and the subsequent establishment of a supertyranny, although full military conquest/liberation of the US by either side would result in >90% casualty rate of the population.
Of course these scenarios are oversimplified with only two sides, red and blue teams under a singular ideological divide [not democratic/republican], while there will likely be geographic and racial subdivisions of the participating combatants, multiple state insurrections and secessions are also possible.
Perhaps the collapse will be so instantaneous that the police state would not activate and commence purging but instead become unravelled, the DHS and military personnel would desert, go home to protect their families rather than follow orders.
Something completely different may happen instead, but as I see it, many plausible scenario’s [admitting the full reality of tyranny and its dark synergy with economic collapse] leave the US with no more than 100 million people left alive by 2020. I pray none of the worst scenarios happen, the collapse itself will be dire enough.Of course, its quite absurd to think that the money power involves anything else besides banking cartels influencing legislature, it doesnt require occultism as such, nor would any luciferian cults need a money power to gain influence, but still, if luciferians were a significant group, some of their methods of infiltration might use compatible agendas.
Many of the older money elites are deeply occultist, though, such as the rothschild banking dynasty, but those are not necessarily alligned with luciferianism, and merely constitute a criminal oligarchy of the regular variety.
Its interesting to see that the pattern of political persection which would result in demonising either banking sociopaths or luciferian occultists is similar to the observed pattern of persecution of the jewish people.
Much of the nazi-propaganda simply involved classifying jews as a sociopathic or psychopathic group, which would be easier if one were to mistakenly believe jewish peope were somehow associated with banking or the mythical money power, precisely because it does sometimes seem reasonable to associate banking with anti-social functions.Anyway, targeting any particular group of people outside of relevant professional settings is useless and counterproductive for any reform agenda. Bankers and colluding politicians should be held to account for organised crime, and the monetary system must be redesigned to eliminate any possible leverage to such a money power.
However, certain functions pertaining to occult hierarchies do incorporate elements of jewish mysticism which utilise esoteric methods of social control. Freemasonry is saturated with esoteric knowledge derived from jewish mysticism, and if such secret societies are commonly associated with conspiracies concerning money and banking, it would be easy to mistake the element of jewish mysticism therein as a controlling force.
From a criminological perspective, it seems less objectionable to assert that the money power is a globalised occult phenomenon run by dominant sociopaths rather than associated with any particular ethno-religous group.The contemporary mechanisms of monetary control have been purposefully compartmentalised within subsets of esoteric knowledge, and the controlling parties could easily leverage power through the social infrastructure of occult hierarchies for nefarious purposes.
The monetary system is so deliberately obfuscated and esoteric that Triv has to explain its inner workings to the uninitiated, while it should be fully accessible public knowledge.Also, when it is suggested that jews control the media, it must be noted that many CEO’s of media conglomerates are indeed jewish, but these people likely appropriate such positions because they associate with a pervasive money trust alligned by the political platform of zionism, which would select for political skillsets of dominant sociopathy rather than religious affilliation.
Discourse on political zionism and the policies of Israel does prove difficult by preprogrammed association with anti-semitism, yet the extremist elements of zionism have nothing to do with the jewish people.And we know the blasphemy of them Rothschilds which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Santa.
Im mystified about the money power myself, and wonder which organisational structures and institutions it may encompass, whether this group has traditionally included industrial oligarchs as well as european royalty.
Its unclear to me to what extent esoteric societies are integrated into such money power, whether money power effectively leverages the malice of financiers, arms-traders and industrial complexes into an occult framework with eugenicist objectives, or merely alligns monetary motivations of banking cartels between political boundaries by controlling legislature in many countries at once.
Besides the evident ideological agenda for the centralised control of money and credit as embodied by central banking, when discerning a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by this money power, exactly what types of crime are committed according to criminal law? Are these financial crimes like extortion or embezzlement of public funds?
For the constitutional component delineating the power of the purse, it has been suggested that if congress was unauthorised to engage a third party for the function of issuing coin, then the federal reserve act may be construed as a political crime of seditious conspiracy between congress and the colluding parties of the feds charter.Im also intrigued by this idea that the libertarian platform is controlled opposition, although the evidence that von Mises was intellectually compromised by Rockefellers money is not strong.
But if it is controlled, then is the entire libertarian framework of sound money deliberately misconceptualised to make it impossible to correctly diagnose the real problems in the monetary system, forcing prescribed alternative systems into a controlled gold-based paradigm unable to diminish the money power? Or is the framework of sound money essentially correct and capable of lessening the money powers influence, but its proponents unable to act politically because discourse is directed by embedded agents of the money trust?It seems that there is a correlation between banking crises and resurgence of anti-semitism, whereas banks are correctly identified as abusive entities, they are often mistakenly assumed to be jewish-controlled.
Hannah Arendts book ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ points out that the priviledged caste of european court jews in the 19th century were traditionally involved in financing the emerging nation-states by conduits of banking establishments, and so jewish people as a group became culturally misassociated with banking and credit systems. The nazi-syndicate capitalised on this prejudiced association of enemy money power with judaism for their demonisation campaign.
