Is the military becoming obsolete?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@robert – The need to cooperate is where expectations of behavior come from.

True. As it was from Day 1 so that we could make it to Day 2.

I recently explained to a student of psychology that he will only “get us” when he views human problem from an evolutionary perspective. Forget about the Woo, the Spirituality and bogus self-help books. Strip all that away and repeat after me – “We are apes”. 🙂

[jakelafortParticipant]

The need to cooperate is where expectations of behavior come from.

I thought yea and then i thought, did Robert filch that line from Simon.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Check your Google Translate. It is obviously on the fritz.

Charity is only possible because of surplus production, and Free Market Capitalism, to the extent that it is tried, is a proven champion at producing goods and services and wealth to overflowing. And it by production, saving, and investment that people lifted themselves from being “ne’er-do-wells, hobos, gutter snipe, and down-and-outs”.

As for Üntermenschen, or “Lesser Men,” that is the slur term for so-called “Non-Aryans races” and a creation of German National Socialism a.k.a. Nazism. That term has nothing to do with Free-Market Capitalism, which has no fixed classes and no arbitrary limits to prosperity.

As for Government programs, they cannot give anything that they do not first take from productive individuals either by taxation/confiscation or by inflation of the currency which takes away purchasing power of money. (The latter inflation is what created the boom of “The Roaring Twenties” which was then followed by “The Great Depression” which was caused by Government tariffs and restraint of world trade which caused bank closures and bank runs.)

And that’s economic history and no shibboleth or chimera.

• This reply was modified 12 months ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Removing misplaced text

[UnseenParticipant]

jakelafort wrote:

On the other hand free will or its permutations are kind of irrelevant. We always live our lives in a way that feels like free will. And we respond for the most part to others as though they are responsible and accountable for their behavior. So it is really insignificant in an issue like homelessness.

Let’s deconstruct “accountability.” It means, “able to be held to account.” Well, in that sense everyone is accountable as long as someone else can blame them and try to punish them or actually punish them.

Robert refuses to give up the blame game. A world where bad people are a big part of the problem. The “bad apple” theory. Only think: apples don’t go bad intentionally. Something turns them bad. We’re back to causality.

Why do people turn bad. In Robert’s world, “Well, they’re just bad. Don’t ask why.”

That’s an explanation which offers no solution to the problems we face.

Everything we do, including engaging in the blame game and the belief in good people/bad people, is at the end of a chain of cause and effect. We believe what we believe because of our personal life experiences, what we read, what our parents told us as we sat on their knee, what people we came to admire believed.

There is, as Robert admitted, no proof for free will, and yet he lets the belief control his world view. All of us do what we do because we can’t do otherwise, for reasons hidden from consci0us vies, and it’s because we do have brains and we don’t have souls.

[_Robert_Participant]

Yeah, Unseen you didn’t address my argument or provide anything like a solution beyond “everything goes” and an assertion that no one is accountable for their shitty behavior. Yet you can’t even define freewill. The champion of scumbags, rapists, grifters, thieves, scam artists, violent assholes, and murderous dictators. Oh, they just can’t help it, poor dears.
And as Reg suggests, if you want to understand people just look at our great ape lineage. Coming down from the trees onto the plains of Africa. No sharp fangs, no paw full of claws, no armored shield, no flight, no sonar or night vision, no superfast reaction times. Just each other. We do as they do. And when one gets out of line the greyback drops the hammer. And yes Jake, LOL, Simon is correct in that when us apes actually do cooperate the sky is not even the limit.

I’m sick of all the scumbags too.  All the security even a simple bank transaction requires is out of control. Fuck them all.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Robert i would still smash the skull of a Hamas freedom fighter haha with gusto and afterwards get all philosophical about it.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco i am aware of untermensch derivation and usage and how today in Germany it has gone the way of the dodo. Nobody names their kid Adolf either. I used the term to denote one of many who are down on luck or in some way lower echelon and subjected to the vicissitudes in a way the upper and middle echelon is not.

But boom and bust cycles i believe occur with and without government regulation. I could look it up but i am playing the ponies and FG has a big card today.

[UnseenParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

Yeah, Unseen you didn’t address my argument or provide anything like a solution beyond “everything goes” and an assertion that no one is accountable for their shitty behavior. Yet you can’t even define freewill. The champion of scumbags, rapists, grifters, thieves, scam artists, violent assholes, and murderous dictators. Oh, they just can’t help it, poor dears.

Justifying actions is playing the blame game in a world stratified according to personal worth.You’re morally superior to me but I’m morally superior to him and on and on. That’s a way to feel good about oneself but it offers dystunctional solutions to real problems. Point out, if you can, the successes the blame game can claim.

And as Reg suggests, if you want to understand people just look at our great ape lineage. Coming down from the trees onto the plains of Africa. No sharp fangs, no paw full of claws, no armored shield, no flight, no sonar or night vision, no superfast reaction times. Just each other. We do as they do. And when one gets out of line the greyback drops the hammer. And yes Jake, LOL, Simon is correct in that when us apes actually do cooperate the sky is not even the limit.

Reg gets it. You don’t. Our ape ancestors and brothers don’t lapse into the blame game. If some member is a problem, it just gets dealt with. No moralizing required.

There is a way without the moralizing and blaming in a better sort of society. When members of the community threaten us, we take them out of the community. Isolate the dangerous ones somewhere where they can’t harm us. And we use this time to try to understand them so that, if possible, we can rewire their brains to behave more functionally and safely. No moral superiority needed. Just a sense of self-preservation.

All too often, once we categorize people as bad and lapse into the blame game, the only option turns out to be punishment and, unless we execute them, we eventually release them back into society unchanged. Wouldn’t it be more functional to understand fix them?

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

I recently explained to a student of psychology that he will only “get us” when he views human problem from an evolutionary perspective.

This is an interesting article proposing a number of fundamental evolved motivations.  I think there are more.  But they all boil down to the goals of thriving, surviving and reproducing.  Where the goals of the motivations are joint (i.e., reproduction; inclusive fitness) it generates a moral domain (e.g., parenting, pair-bonding, helping family) because then it is necessary to regulate a collaboration.

[_Robert_Participant]

Unseen wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:

Yeah, Unseen you didn’t address my argument or provide anything like a solution beyond “everything goes” and an assertion that no one is accountable for their shitty behavior. Yet you can’t even define freewill. The champion of scumbags, rapists, grifters, thieves, scam artists, violent assholes, and murderous dictators. Oh, they just can’t help it, poor dears.

Justifying actions is playing the blame game in a world stratified according to personal worth.You’re morally superior to me but I’m morally superior to him and on and on. That’s a way to feel good about oneself but it offers dystunctional solutions to real problems. Point out, if you can, the successes the blame game can claim.

And as Reg suggests, if you want to understand people just look at our great ape lineage. Coming down from the trees onto the plains of Africa. No sharp fangs, no paw full of claws, no armored shield, no flight, no sonar or night vision, no superfast reaction times. Just each other. We do as they do. And when one gets out of line the greyback drops the hammer. And yes Jake, LOL, Simon is correct in that when us apes actually do cooperate the sky is not even the limit.

Reg gets it. You don’t. Our ape ancestors and brothers don’t lapse into the blame game. If some member is a problem, it just gets dealt with. No moralizing required. There is a way without the moralizing and blaming in a better sort of society. When members of the community threaten us, we take them out of the community. Isolate the dangerous ones somewhere where they can’t harm us. And we use this time to try to understand them so that, if possible, we can rewire their brains to behave more functionally and safely. No moral superiority needed. Just a sense of self-preservation. All too often, once we categorize people as bad and lapse into the blame game, the only option turns out to be punishment and, unless we execute them, we eventually release them back into society unchanged. Wouldn’t it be more functional to understand fix them?

No, they have “categorized” themselves as criminals. If you are behaving as an agent against the tribe of humanity, you will be stopped from further victimization as the first step. To allow it to continue is a moral breech against future victims.  As far as “rehabilitation”, sure let’s spend tons of valuable resources on people with a criminal history. Do you believe they can change, because you were just making the opposite deterministic claim? What a jumbled argument you have presented here.

 

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

Enco i am aware of untermensch derivation and usage and how today in Germany it has gone the way of the dodo. Nobody names their kid Adolf either. I used the term to denote one of many who are down on luck or in some way lower echelon and subjected to the vicissitudes in a way the upper and middle echelon is not.

Sounds to me like you might be equating Free-Market Capitalism with Nazism, which a simple reading of the Nazi Party 25-Point Program and the actual economic performance of the Nazis would clearly show to be false.

But boom and bust cycles i believe occur with and without government regulation. I could look it up but i am playing the ponies and FG has a big card today.

Localized boom-and-bust can happen with speculative products like tulips and Beanie Babies and Secretariat on the race track, but it takes Government inflationary monetary policy and Government micromanagement of the economy to make boom-and-bust go national and global.

By the bye, just judging from statistics on obesity, heart disease , and Type 2 Diabetes, plus all the back-to-back grocery carts of all manner of junky groceries that people come in my line to buy with their Medicare/Medicaid-funded insurance cards–yesterday a Father and Son with 7 cases of burgers and a dozen ribeye steaks–I would say that damn few people are starving in the U.S.A.

However, if those who consume at the taxpayer’s trough outnumber and outweigh the taxpayers forced to fill the trough, that can change very fast and with horrific results.

[UnseenParticipant]

_Robert_ wrote:

No, they have “categorized” themselves as criminals. If you are behaving as an agent against the tribe of humanity, you will be stopped from further victimization as the first step. To allow it to continue is a moral breech against future victims.  As far as “rehabilitation”, sure let’s spend tons of valuable resources on people with a criminal history. Do you believe they can change, because you were just making the opposite deterministic claim? What a jumbled argument you have presented here.

Rehab programs, I’m sure, can claim many more successes than merely the warehousing of miscreants. When all a system does is take a criminal off the street for punishment, I think you’ll find instances of real reformation are rare. And while programs aimed at reformation probably have a less than 100% success rate, the products of such programs often do successfully reintegrate into society.

If you don’t believe people can reform and you merely set up a program of warehousing and punishment, that is a system designed to fail. On the other hand, there are prominent examples of people reformed through prison programs designed to give them life skills and ways to deal with the issues that drove them to crime, such as illiteracy, learning disabilities, and poor examples of authority figures (abusive parents or teachers, for example).

This whole idea of bad people and naming and blaming goes nowhere.

I don’t know why it isn’t clear to you that realizing that people behave as they do for reasons is a more productive idea than “They’re just bad people.”

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco, you read funny. Am i on the money?

Not equating free market capitalism with nazism.

Nice fairy tale about how free market economies are bereft of depressions. The Panic of 1873 was blamed for setting off the economic depression that lasted from 1873 to 1879. This period was called the Great Depression, until the even greater depression of 1893 received that label, which it held until the even greater contraction in the 1930s—now known as the Great Depression. Back in the day only regulation was on slavery and that was not as we all know universal.

I think a lot of the great big fat people who are poor live in areas with mcdonalds but without grocery stores. In any even Americans are a great big fat people. We are great big FAT MUTHA FUCKERS.

I want some government regulation on these mutha fucking companies hosing us with shrinkflation. I am sick to hemmorrhoids after paying for lower quality products and getting less of em. No warning on the labels that you are being shrunk. Also fucking cable companies with monopolies constantly hosing customers after agreeing to a verbal commitment and then raising their rates. We need free market to challenge these prick bastards.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

I don’t read funny. Ünternenschen and the implications of that term are not a thing with Free-Market Capitalism.

I mentioned the cause of The Panic of 1873 a year and a day ago on this very Forum. See below:

https://atheistzone.com/groups/sunday-school/forum/topic/sunday-school-19th-february-2023/

The Federal Government subsidized railroads with tax dollars and land confiscated from the Indigenous tribes, resulting in a railroad boom and a boom in interconnected banks and businesses. When railroad executives and Congress critters were caught out in corruption, this resulted in bank runs and bank and business closures that rippled nationwide.

The Panic of 1893 was also the result of Government legislation in the form of The Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which required the Federal Government to purchase and issue Silver and Silver Notes. This resulted in digging new Silver mines and Silver mining towns and filling the safes of banks. When holders of Silver and Silver Notes attemptedd to exchange them for much more rare Gold, this exhausted the Gold Reserves, which made the Silver worth less, resulting in more bank closures and bank runs and more shut downs of businesses that rippled nationwide and worldwide.

The ripple effect included the creation of the later Love Canal chemical spill, also triggered by the local School Board’s eminent domain on Dow Chemical property against all of Dow’s warnings against building on the property. See below for the details on the Panic of 1893:

Panic of 1893–Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

And The Great Depression was preceded by the creation of The Federal Reserve in 1913, which unleaded easy extension of money and credit. “The Roaring Twenties” was the boom, but the bust came when foreign businesses making loans from U.S. banks couldn’t pay their loans when they couldn’t sell their products in the U.S. because of high tariffs and import restrictions. The result was more bank runs, more business closures, and unemployment and soup lines everywhere.

Again, it takes Government taxes, regulations, subsidies, and interventions in the enonomy to create fuck-ups this big.

As for Shrinkflation, that is the product of the inflation of the currency to fund the “Stimulus” created by Trump and expanded even further by Biden with new coverage of food and non-medicine items by Medicare/Medicaid,

When government expands the money supply, it increases demand for everything which, according to The Law of Supply and Demand, raises prices.

This includes raising prices on the costs of ingredients for products. This rise in ingredient prices, combined with competitive pressure to keep prices down, means that manufacturers have to make up their expenses somehow. So they lower the portion size for their products or uses substitutes for older ingredients. That explains why old goat Biden has a smaller bag of Werther’s and a smaller bottle of Boost

As long as manufacturers are honest with the weight and capacity stated on the package, they are not the problem, but the Government’s inflationary policies are the problem. The solution is for Government to stop “Stimulus” of the economy. It’s killing us!

I fully sympathize on the cable companies, who are able to charge what they charge because Government grants them a monopoly franchise in their particular locations. I only use a basic $25 Wi-Fi package and use the Internet connection to get YouTube and stream anything else I want. I only pay for services like Netflix, Showtime, and Paramount+ too as I wish or can afford it. The cable companies cannot convince me to take up Hundreds of Dollars of subscription.

Once I get my own Wi-Fi hotspot I may drop cable all together.

Curiosity Streaming offers very cheap documentary and education programs for two-digit prices per year, plus Tubi and PlutoTV have a fast variety for free with minimal commercials that are pretty neat. This and a second HDTV antenna that picks up 60 digital stations gets me all the TV I want and need. Some antennas can pick up digital channels from and 850 mile radius, so I may get one of those too.

Improving technology created by Free-Market Capitalism may be the last hurrah for the Government-created cable monopoly, just as Information Technology helped bring down the Iron Curtain. Must wait and see…

• This reply was modified 11 months, 4 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Crucial correction from "can" to "cannot"
• This reply was modified 11 months, 4 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling

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