Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
How to become more Human:
- accept that you do not belong anywhere,
- assume that there are no likeminded people,
(you just have not realised your disagreements yet),
- acknowledge that you have no tribe,
- accept that you are probably wrong about most things,
- but you need others to make sense of it all.
That is a good place to start.
- accept that you do not belong anywhere,
- assume that there are no likeminded people,
(you just have not realised your disagreements yet),
- acknowledge that you have no tribe,
- accept that you are probably wrong about most things,
- but you need others to make sense of it all.
That is a good place to start.
There is not more truth to gender politics (male vs female) than to Labour vs Liberal (or Democrat vs Republican etc) politics. It is just ONE party pretending to be divided in order to sustain perpetual conflict and mutual blame game, so that the ruling power can move unobstructed by the rage of the masses. You fall into this trap because you are conflicted within yourself. We are all related. We are all conscious rational beings. Reason unites us.
This paper is under review since Dec 2020. This is how long it takes to publish an academic paper via the regular queue, and the result is typically a rejection. The acceptance rate for the top 10 philosophy journals is around 10%, which includes the invited submissions. The submitted manunoscript can be read here. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3883011
Ssrn
The Golden Rule as It Ought to Be
The Golden Rule, most commonly expressed in the form "do to others what you would have them do to you", has attracted criticism for failing to provide
Sources of Authority
There are only two possible sources of authority: 1) consent of the ruled (can be implied or performative), 2) objective moral norms (for example, you see someone being murdered and you step in to overpower the killer). These two sources are not equi-valent. (2) always supersedes (1), so that even when you consented to political representation the mandate is not absolute; your consent is conditional on the representative’s adherence to the objective moral norms. Another way, something that is objectively wrong can never be a valid law or otherwise mandated. The challenge is of course to demonstrate, or better, formally prove, that a particular action or order is objectively wrong. This can be accomplished in at least 3 ways: a) by proving an inconsistency of moral commitments of the representative; b) by proving inconsistency of action or order with the mutually accepted norms; c) by proving that an action is a priori wrong or illogical.
There are only two possible sources of authority: 1) consent of the ruled (can be implied or performative), 2) objective moral norms (for example, you see someone being murdered and you step in to overpower the killer). These two sources are not equi-valent. (2) always supersedes (1), so that even when you consented to political representation the mandate is not absolute; your consent is conditional on the representative’s adherence to the objective moral norms. Another way, something that is objectively wrong can never be a valid law or otherwise mandated. The challenge is of course to demonstrate, or better, formally prove, that a particular action or order is objectively wrong. This can be accomplished in at least 3 ways: a) by proving an inconsistency of moral commitments of the representative; b) by proving inconsistency of action or order with the mutually accepted norms; c) by proving that an action is a priori wrong or illogical.
Doctors who assert that a young (vaccinated) person who died “had no underlying health conditions” do not understand the medical concept of health. Vaccines, being artificial modifications of the immune system, are contrary to the species-typical innate characteristics that underpin the only consistent standard of Health, and are therefore of themselves an underlying health condition. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2021/03/30/is-transhumanism-a-health-problem/
Journal of Medical Ethics blog
Is transhumanism a health problem? - Journal of Medical Ethics blog
By Michael Kowalik. In medical sciences, health is measured by reference to our species-typical anatomy and functional integrity – the objective standard of human health. Proponents of transhumanism are committed to biomedical enhancement of human beings…
Revising the utterly exhausted, tiresome illogicality of ethical veganism.
By eating animals we absorb them into our being, and thus elevate their meaningless animal existence as a source of energy for rational consciousness. Ethical veganism is perhaps best characterised as an ‘anthropomorphic emotional projection disorder’; nothing apart from rational consciousness can have moral status.
https://culturalanalysisnet.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/against-ethical-veganism/
By eating animals we absorb them into our being, and thus elevate their meaningless animal existence as a source of energy for rational consciousness. Ethical veganism is perhaps best characterised as an ‘anthropomorphic emotional projection disorder’; nothing apart from rational consciousness can have moral status.
https://culturalanalysisnet.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/against-ethical-veganism/
Cultural Analysis & Philosophy
Against Ethical Veganism
Ethical Veganism, which is commonly motivated by the minimisation of animal suffering or injury (an ideology which is often linked to the philosophy of ahiṃsā, ‘cause no injury’, central to Dharmic…
People who contradict themselves and do not want to know it are bad company. If you let them in they will betray you without even knowing, then blame you for it.
Another utilitarian argument trying to justify vaccine mandates for healthcare workers: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229 The authors assert that “Healthcare workers have professional obligations to promote the interests of patients that entail exposure to greater risks or infringement of autonomy than ordinary members of the public.” I would like to see the proof of this outrageous claim. Does this preclude doctors from playing golf or going on holidays while there are patients awaiting care? Perhaps start with golf before injecting people against their will.
I have submitted a letter in response to the above article:
Fundamental values are not defeated by utilitarian calculus
Utilitarian ‘ethics’, as employed in this article, implicitly rejects all absolute values and associated rights, allowing for limited transgression of rights (including the right to life) for the sake of contemporaneous ‘benefits’ outweighing the ‘costs’. I maintain that this is a self-defeating paradigm; without absolute values there is no objective measure of benefits and costs, therefore no rational basis for the judgement of proportionality. In short, the utilitarian argument is logically circular and vicious. Once the veneer of proportionality is revealed as objectively ungrounded, utilitarian ethics amounts to little more than a public relations strategy for legitimising arbitrary exercises of power.
The argument from proportionality (benefits vs costs) does not (and cannot) justify arbitrary violations of the right to life or the removal of the right to free medical consent, for the following reasons.
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. (This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240).
2. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion. Crucially, by accepting any medical treatment imposed by coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Acquiescence to medical coercion is always unethical, even if the mandated intervention were a placebo.
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated (or a privileged treatment of the vaccinated) amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a result of this coercive treatment.
As Sanjeev Sabhlok, an Australian economist and politician, recently wrote: “Governments are not authorised by law - by analogy - to burn down additional homes and kill unaffected people in order to save those who might be at risk of being engulfed in a bushfire.”
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT, Australia.
Fundamental values are not defeated by utilitarian calculus
Utilitarian ‘ethics’, as employed in this article, implicitly rejects all absolute values and associated rights, allowing for limited transgression of rights (including the right to life) for the sake of contemporaneous ‘benefits’ outweighing the ‘costs’. I maintain that this is a self-defeating paradigm; without absolute values there is no objective measure of benefits and costs, therefore no rational basis for the judgement of proportionality. In short, the utilitarian argument is logically circular and vicious. Once the veneer of proportionality is revealed as objectively ungrounded, utilitarian ethics amounts to little more than a public relations strategy for legitimising arbitrary exercises of power.
The argument from proportionality (benefits vs costs) does not (and cannot) justify arbitrary violations of the right to life or the removal of the right to free medical consent, for the following reasons.
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. (This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240).
2. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion. Crucially, by accepting any medical treatment imposed by coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Acquiescence to medical coercion is always unethical, even if the mandated intervention were a placebo.
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated (or a privileged treatment of the vaccinated) amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a result of this coercive treatment.
As Sanjeev Sabhlok, an Australian economist and politician, recently wrote: “Governments are not authorised by law - by analogy - to burn down additional homes and kill unaffected people in order to save those who might be at risk of being engulfed in a bushfire.”
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT, Australia.
Objective Ethics
There are always quick but unethical solutions to perceived systemic problems. People who support such radical solutions consider themselves as more enlightened, psychologically and morally more refined than the ‘ignorant masses’. They see themselves as doers of what ‘needs to be done’ without moral superstition, but they are also ignorant of the fact that unethical solutions damage humanity (including themselves) on a level more fundamental then practicality or utility. Certain ethical norms and the associated sentiments are not merely cultural artefacts, not just moral superstition, but are underpinned by ontological dependencies without which the existence of rational consciousness is not possible, and to violate these dependencies damages consciousness itself. Ethics is a field of study concerned with identifying and formalising these dependencies.
There are always quick but unethical solutions to perceived systemic problems. People who support such radical solutions consider themselves as more enlightened, psychologically and morally more refined than the ‘ignorant masses’. They see themselves as doers of what ‘needs to be done’ without moral superstition, but they are also ignorant of the fact that unethical solutions damage humanity (including themselves) on a level more fundamental then practicality or utility. Certain ethical norms and the associated sentiments are not merely cultural artefacts, not just moral superstition, but are underpinned by ontological dependencies without which the existence of rational consciousness is not possible, and to violate these dependencies damages consciousness itself. Ethics is a field of study concerned with identifying and formalising these dependencies.
If banks were allowed to go bankrupt in a total economic collapse, one bank would necessarily survive, since banks can collapse only when unable to cover the inbalances in their mutual liabilities. The one winning bank would then become the owner of all other banks, and without competition would thereafter be free from any risk of default. It would essentially function as the sole printing press that lends newly minted money out at interest. This one bank would have to be nationalised, as it would in effect be already exercising the monetary sovereignty of the State. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-england-says-top-uk-064150430.html
Yahoo
Bank of England says top UK banks no longer "too big to fail"
LONDON (Reuters) -The Bank of England said on Friday it was satisfied that Britain's top banks could be shut down without putting at risk the stability of the financial system or disrupting customers, but it found shortcomings at three major lenders. In its…
Journal of Medical Ethics has published my critical response to a recent paper in which the authors attempt to justify vaccine mandates for healthcare professionals on the basis of overall benefits vs costs. https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus
I have come to a tentative conclusion that hypnosis/trance is not a rare state induced by mental health professionals, but the dominant state of the population. It seems that the overwhelming majority of people (perhaps all) are continuously in a trance and they partially come out of it only in some unfamiliar, disruptive situations. For example, when we enter a new space and we hear the ticking of a clock, we are aware of it, but soon this information is suppressed, we lose the awareness of the constant. This may also be the case with ideas and beliefs; we cling to those beliefs that make sense, or give us comfort, and we subconsciously resist any disruptions to this structure. Those who mostly control the stimulus that creates our world view (news media, entertainment, education) are in a sense designing our hypnotic state.
A: UTILITARIAN THESIS
Lives do not have absolute value, therefore it is permissible to sacrifice a few lives to save many lives.
What makes the many lives valuable?
The absolute value of life.
B: REVERSE UTILITARIAN THESIS
Life is valuable, therefore we have the moral obligation to save many lives, even if this requires sacrificing a few lives.
What makes the fewer lives less valuable than many lives?
Lives do not have absolute value.
GO BACK TO A:
Lives do not have absolute value, therefore it is permissible to sacrifice a few lives to save many lives.
What makes the many lives valuable?
The absolute value of life.
B: REVERSE UTILITARIAN THESIS
Life is valuable, therefore we have the moral obligation to save many lives, even if this requires sacrificing a few lives.
What makes the fewer lives less valuable than many lives?
Lives do not have absolute value.
GO BACK TO A:
This kind of propaganda has only one purpose: to dehumanise you, to persuade you that rational consciousness is just a program, that you are just a biological machine with the same moral status as other machines. The truth is that Strong (Reflexively Conscious) AI is impossible: https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/1455. On the other hand, narcissistic programmers might even believe their own nonsense.
Every nation, tribe and ethnicity has a mythology of oppression committed by some other nation, tribe or ethnicity. Disunity and resentment between nations, tribes and ethnicities could not be exploited without it.
Wanting to be included does not make one inclusive. On the contrary, inclusiveness requires acceptance that sometimes you are not ennoscriptd to be included, and that this is not your decision to make. People who demand to be included not only lack dignity, but are hypocrites.
A friend tells me that a relationship counsellor told him and his wife that sometimes people just grow apart and should part ways. After 15 years together, two kids together, you have not “grown apart”; you have the most intimate relationship you could ever have, you know your partner better than anyone else in this world, so if this is not good enough then you will not find anything better out there, you will not even have the time to build an equally deep connection with anyone else. If you two are not satisfied with one another then perhaps you are missing something crucial, failing to see what is in front of you, devaluing the degree of intimacy you have already accomplished. Counsellors are not trained to tell you this.
The conflict in Ukraine (or any other country) cannot cause inflation in Australia. It is mathematically impossible. Let us say that a war somewhere has interrupted the supply of some irreplaceable commodity that Australians commonly use. This will naturally increase the price of this particular commodity, but this price-rise can be accomplished only by diverting money from other commodities and products and services, making those commodities, products and services cheaper. The net result must be ZERO excess inflation, all else being equal. The simple formula at the foundations of monetary economics is the equation of exchange: M.V=P.T (the amount of money in circulation * velocity of money = price level * total volume of goods and services traded). Since velocity of money (the frequency with which the same dollar is spent) is approximately constant in a stable economy, the only two variables that affect the national price level are the GDP and the volume of money in circulation (the money supply). If GDP is relatively constant or growing, the inflationary pressure can come only from the growth of the money supply. 97% of the money supply is typically generated by the retail banks in the form of bank credit, so the more “loans” (this is actually a misnomer: bank credit is not a loan in the sense of a perfect transfer of purchasing power from one entity to another) banks issue the more money is created for the economy. Another source of new money is the government spending. Over the last two years an unprecedented amount of money was injected into the economy by the government, created as credit from the same banks. Inflation is always a policy decision, not an accident.