Philosophy Now Forum

"All "ownership" implies is that a thing is yours, not somebody else's. It's perfectly legit, as John Locke said.

It's only Marxists who try to make an evil out of "ownership." And they're always wrong when they do. "Ownership" is a neutral term."

Well I mean most materialists since Hobbes are moral relativists who accept a more Machiavellian philosophy of politics, so of course 'might makes right', and the individual/class that has control of, and can defend, some physical property, can be said to 'own' it.

All that goes without saying tho bruh. You know big K was an atheist utilitarian-consequentialist who didn't believe in objective moral truths and values.

Rather what the Ms are concerned with is the nature of the acquisition of property; who is involved in the production and control of the property, and how is the value of that property distributed among those involved in it, etc.

For the Ms, private ownership of some means of production operated solely by the workers themselves, isn't redundant enough to make any sense. Why wouldn't the workers, as a class, not want to eliminate CEOs, bosses, managers, etc., from the chain of production if that meant higher profits for the workers? There is no pity here. No time for that shit. The proletarian is no sentimentalist. What he sees is the functional uselessness of the 'owner'.

It makes more sense to eliminate a bezos and divy his billions up between all the employees (who produce and distribute all Amazon products and services), than it does to let him keep the billions and continue collecting profits only because he 'owns' the company.

The Marxist perspective is logical and objective in its analysis and there is nothing prescriptive about the theory... except for the occasional encouragement to the working classes to start a revolution.

Big K was simply describing a kind of situation that might develop if you had this kind of economic arrangement/agreement for a period of time. Eventually the workers will identify as a common class who have the same interests by default, and as a class they gain political power and gravitas. Wanting to fundamentally change the nature of economic society but not really knowing how.

The 'ownership' that you are saying big K called 'evil', is nothing unnatural and Karl knew that. Free markets were evolutionary effects of the development of economies over time. All that is acknowledged. In fact he complimented and admired capitalism to some extent, but he also saw the inherent flaws or conflicts created in its kind of system.

Naturally from such conditions you could wager a theory that working people might revolt during economic crises. And they have, more times than we can count.

Coincidence... lucky guess... dialectical logic sans hegel? Was the beard on to something... well... revolutionary?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 1:04 pmBecause you dismiss Christianity so cavalierly. And it never occurs to you how many people of great intellect, over thousands of years, have devoted themselves to understanding a message you dismiss with a wave of your hand. It's as if you don't even understand the challenge, let alone see the difficulties for your position.

Oh, I don't and never have disputed the intellect that many Christian apologists had in defending and systematizing the faith. The scholastics were in fact precursors in establishing the kind of logic later required in science, namely, its discipline. What I object to is your hypocrisy and lies in argumentation of which you've been reminded so many times, all to no avail and your perennial crusade against those who don't accept the word of the bible literally as you have as somehow deficient.

What I find incomprehensible is your absolute certainty, beyond the limits of sanity, that believing in Jesus is going to procure your continuance into an afterlife! Can one imagine a hope more pathetic and pitiful, more counter to what life and reason accepts as logical? Are you really so brain-addled to regard yourself as being one of god's elites that through your belief in him your demise will be different from mine or anyone else's? What! For having lived a normal human life span of 75 or 80 years! If that isn't demented the word should be delisted as meaningless! The ramifications of that necessitates the total collapse of both logic and morality...especially morality, presumably all that which humans value most.

When the precincts of sanity are breached there no-longer exists any absurdity that can't be contained by it. What it allows becomes ultra vires to everything denoted as rational.

Religions are systems devised by humans and systems eventually wear out regardless of how brilliant its founders and expounders. Where is the belief in god now compared to what it once was? God has become a ghost except to the poorest and least educated on the planet. But even to say that god is dead doesn't imply that traditions based on those beliefs are likewise dead. Their continuance remains a ritualistic psychological necessity without necessitating the full measure of belief as once existed. What's the difference between performing one's duties to a ghost as compared to the beliefs it once served when those beliefs depended on nothing more than the urgency to believe?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 1:04 pmA person who does that knows nothing, and has only prejudice to go on. That's the obvious explanation.

Wow! Look who's talking! For the most outstanding example there is on this site, look in the bloody mirror to see what prejudice looks like!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 1:04 pmWell, much could be said about that. One thing is that not all putative "pastors" are, and Kierkegaard had plenty to say about the failings of the Lutheran clergy. But even among those that are at least somewhat genuine, it has zero effect on how much attention their sons pay to what they say. Your father might be a dentist, a bridge builder or a policeman...it doesn't make you one.
So let Nietzsche stand or fall on what he, personally says about Judaism and Christianity. That's the real indicator. And even a basic reading shows that what he says is typically ignorant, dismissive and shallow. But in order to know how superficial Nietzsche's understanding really was, you'd actually have to have read the Bible yourself. That's the only way you could tell whether he "gets it" or not.
You don't know. You haven't, obviously.
So there's your proof.

You call that proof!?

Stupid question! Based on all the lies you convinced yourself of as being true and god-endorsed, of course you would!

https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2016/ ... 0criticism.

Since your mind is a thorough expression or reflection of biblical content as if it it were the primal document delineating the whole paradigm and meaning of creation and existence then Nietzsche's words make complete sense...

“The Christian idea of God – God as a god of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God the world has ever seen; this may even represent a new low in the declining development of the types of god. God having degenerated into a contradiction of life instead of its transfiguration and eternal yes. God as declared aversion to life, to nature, to the will to life. God as the formula for every slander against “the here and now,” for every lie about the “beyond.” God as the deification of nothingness, the canonization of the will to nothingness!”
“And all the while, this pathetic God of Christian monotonotheism instead, acting as if it had any right to exist, like an ultimatum and maximum of god-creating energy, of the human creator spiritus! this hybrid creature of ruin, made from nullity, concept, and contradiction, who sanctions all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and exhaustions of the soul!”.

The human race could as easily have existed and been equally and sooner productive if the human urge to create gods - especially as proclaimed in its Christian format - had been much less a priority. Will to Power can have many inferences. One of its greatest is its religious implementations where its overlords encapsulate the very definition of that will. The consequences of allowing one's will to reverentially kneel to that of another defaults to self-enslavement and abasement. As a power organism, the will subtracted from you enforces another and that hardly ever for the better.

Christianity is more akin to a devil's bargain which may explain why the devil is so prominent within the establishment.

promethean75 wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 11:36 pm The Marxist perspective is logical and objective in its analysis...

Not even today's neo-Marxists, as devoted as they are to Old Karl, say that.

They call his Marxism "vulgar Marxism," because even they admit he got his analysis wrong. It wasn't scientific, or logical and it turned out, historically, not to be objectively true at all. That's why they've had to rewrite his theory, incorporating new things like Cultural Marxism and Race Marxism; not because he was successful, but because he manifestly wasn't.

For example, his whole historical description of the progress from tribalism, through monarchy and feudalism to capitalism and then to Communism proved not to be right at all...not in the case of the Marxist places like Russia and China, and not even in the countries he wrote his theories for, like England or Germany. He messed up. And today's Marxists know it. That's why they have to try all these new tricks to "save" Marxism.

Big K was simply describing a kind of situation that might develop if you had this kind of economic arrangement/agreement for a period of time. Eventually the workers will identify as a common class who have the same interests by default, and as a class they gain political power and gravitas. Wanting to fundamentally change the nature of economic society but not really knowing how.

As I say, and as you can see yourself, that's not what happened...not in any case at all.

What happened instead is that people who tried to follow Marx ended up killing over 100 million people in the last century alone. And the countries that tried his economic policies, without exception, spiralled into economic collapse.

He doesn't have a great record of being right.

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 3:25 am What I find incomprehensible is your absolute certainty, beyond the limits of sanity, that believing in Jesus is going to procure your continuance into an afterlife!

Then, I suppose, you've made your choice.

And later, you get to find out whether or not it was the right choice.

But everybody's owed a choice, and you've declared yours. So I will honour that right to choose.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 3:59 am

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 3:25 am What I find incomprehensible is your absolute certainty, beyond the limits of sanity, that believing in Jesus is going to procure your continuance into an afterlife!

Then, I suppose, you've made your choice.

And later, you get to find out whether or not it was the right choice.

But everybody's owed a choice, and you've declared yours. So I will honour that right to choose.

The probability of an afterlife is so minuscule no other decision is possible...so help me god!

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:13 am The probability of an afterlife is so minuscule no other decision is possible...so help me god!

That last phrase is the best hope you have. Repeat it often, I suggest.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:38 am

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:13 am The probability of an afterlife is so minuscule no other decision is possible...so help me god!

That last phrase is the best hope you have. Repeat it often, I suggest.

What's the matter! You don't like my pale imitation of Martin Luther?

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:13 amThe probability of an afterlife is so minuscule no other decision is possible...so help me god!

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:38 amThat last phrase is the best hope you have. Repeat it often, I suggest.

What's the matter! You don't like my pale imitation of Martin Luther?

Whatever choice any of us makes no one will be the loser since no loss will be felt.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 3:56 am

promethean75 wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 11:36 pm The Marxist perspective is logical and objective in its analysis...

Not even today's neo-Marxists, as devoted as they are to Old Karl, say that.

They call his Marxism "vulgar Marxism," because even they admit he got his analysis wrong. It wasn't scientific, or logical and it turned out, historically, not to be objectively true at all. That's why they've had to rewrite his theory, incorporating new things like Cultural Marxism and Race Marxism; not because he was successful, but because he manifestly wasn't.

For example, his whole historical description of the progress from tribalism, through monarchy and feudalism to capitalism and then to Communism proved not to be right at all...not in the case of the Marxist places like Russia and China, and not even in the countries he wrote his theories for, like England or Germany. He messed up. And today's Marxists know it. That's why they have to try all these new tricks to "save" Marxism.

Big K was simply describing a kind of situation that might develop if you had this kind of economic arrangement/agreement for a period of time. Eventually the workers will identify as a common class who have the same interests by default, and as a class they gain political power and gravitas. Wanting to fundamentally change the nature of economic society but not really knowing how.

As I say, and as you can see yourself, that's not what happened...not in any case at all.

What happened instead is that people who tried to follow Marx ended up killing over 100 million people in the last century alone. And the countries that tried his economic policies, without exception, spiralled into economic collapse.

He doesn't have a great record of being right.

Not even something good about Marxism? Unreformed capitalism treats workers as if they are machines, or things, not people like themselves.
There was a time before owners became capitalists, when owners were people like the people who worked on their farms or workshops; they all ate round the same kitchen table, sang the same songs and danced the same dances. Landed gentry, at that time were the out of touch class, not the owners of the farms or workshops.

Technology intervened, as it does, in that quite peaceful arrangement of society. Big machinery came to the farms and workshops and the machines determined the pace of work the machines served the masters not the workers. Marxism is a way of ensuring the workers are not treated as an inamimate force such as natural resources, but that workers share in profits they earn by their work.

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 8:06 am
Whatever choice any of us makes no one will be the loser since no loss will be felt.

I planned to watch the surgeons operate on me my while I was under Anesthesia..
But the plan failed, when nothing showed up.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 3:59 am Then, I suppose, you've made your choice.

And later, you get to find out whether or not it was the right choice.

But everybody's owed a choice, and you've declared yours. So I will honour that right to choose.

But only you will find out. You cannot tell another person they will get to find out. Because only you will know you are in the afterlife. Not the ones here in the land of living.

Since you are so certain that God is and that he has your best interest at heart. Then your good, nothing more to choose, nothing more to say or do...your certified eternal life.

So why are you even here debating with other people when you already know the truth? what's the point in that? what more have you to gain from telling other people that they have to make the right choices, when they already know what choice they are going to make.

Why even waste any of your energy writing on this forum endlessly reading through other peoples ideas....if your already certain as to what the living truth of reality is.

People do not need your sermons...because that's all you are basically doing here, which is a dumb waste of energy.
How about you Get a life...and stop wasting precious time on this forum thinking that there is some more truth to be found here...when you are already with the truth that is Jesus.

The reason I am on this forum is because I do not pretend to KNOW the absolute truth. But if you do ...then it's really non of your business being here lecturing other people on what to think and choose. That's their job..not yours.

.

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 7:43 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:38 am

Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 4:13 am The probability of an afterlife is so minuscule no other decision is possible...so help me god!

That last phrase is the best hope you have. Repeat it often, I suggest.

What's the matter! You don't like my pale imitation of Martin Luther?

It's very nice.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 10:53 pmNo. I was providing you with specific examples, by way of the link. If you read what the guy says, you know I'm right. If you didn't...well, I can't help you there.

As I said a few posts back, and I say it again in relation to you, it is non-productive to set up hardened binaries when it comes to sussing out the wide range of ideas, perspectives and opinions that circulate around us. My argument is less an argument [for or against Chomsky] and more a recommendation about a methodology one could choose to work with -- one more inclined to fair, balanced criticism -- that can help us to better understand the types of conflicts that we face, with increasing intensity, every day.

I have read many different critiques of Chomsky's outlook and I have myself both been swayed by his own tendency to operate in hard binary categories, and I have also veered away from them in a type of reaction that is similar to the message in the article you submitted as well, for example, to the critiques in David Horowitz's The Anti-Chomsky Reader. So if I now say, as I do say, that I have done my part and made my efforts to distinguish the correctness or incorrectness of his critical position, I can do this because I have spent time an immersed myself in consideration of the issues.

So again I must note that I do not find your method a good one and your judgments, though of course justified in various ways, are lopsided and in that sense prejudiced, and because prejudiced (an intellectual defect) simply not enough useful to me.

The reason I said:

AJ: You're avoiding admitting the integrity of your own assessment of Chomsky by an appeal to authority argument.

What I mean is that if your argument against Chomsky's positions, or his general stance, has integrity, you would not need to refer to someone you seem to want to reference as an authority. I glossed the article rather quickly and, of course, I have read all sorts of similar critiques before. Do I disagree with them? Definitely not. But what I said is that Chomsky is very good at one notable thing: Explaining how power-systems function.

Now, one way to examine this question is to examine another source entirely. Take for example Edward Bernays who wrote in Propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

What I would say, in relation to the idea-content in this paragraph (by the man said to be the father of the public relations industry in the US and by extension in the world) is that I would recommend that all people, certainly children and youth, should be introduced to the examination of the question and problem of power-relations and also of manipulation through the various media which I do not have to name.

Would this mean, let's say automatically, that I am a Marxist activist with a specific Communist agenda intent on tearing down the structures that operate in the United States? Perhaps in your type of overheated brain this must follow. But it seems to me that an examination of the sort of system that Bernays describes must be examined by thoughtful citizenry. The most obvious example I could submit here would be to imagine that the psychological and ideological method which Bernays refers to were described as part-and-parcel of a Communist or a Nazi propaganda-machine whose intention was to corral people and direct them to specific lines of action. So, it is often the case that we can, and with thorough dedication, examine the propaganda- and manipulation-systems of others, while we avoid examining, with equal thoroughness, our own. It is a basic and known human flaw, is it not? To see the splinter in another's eye and avoid seeing the beam in our own. [Matthew 7:5 "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.]

It is obvious that a critical analysis of *power-systems* is necessary. Yet the question of who does it, and why it is done, is also necessary as well.

I can't help you there.

I understand that you believe that you have help to offer. And it is generally understood that a desire to help is a good thing. But I believe that I can with personal integrity say that I do not think you can help in this area. That is in carefully and fairly thinking things through with a judicious mind-frame. My impression, still forming of course, is that you are in need of help. So I might suggest that to some degree you give evidence of a curious tragic flaw that must, at one point or another, become more fully manifest. Can you receive this critique? Absolutely not! Remember: all (critical) bullets miss! They must miss. And this is because, at least in one specific area, you are 'absolutely right'. This assertion (which I assert is defective) bleeds out, to all appearances, into other areas.

So in this sense you make yourself an 'object lesson'.

IC: But it does entail the conclusion that moral language is fake.

AJ: No, in fact it doesn't.

IC: Yeah, in fact...it inevitably does. Sorry. It means when anybody says "good" or "evil," all they mean is "I want to control you."

This type of exchange reveals I think a certain intransigence. But what more interests me is the declaration about the use of notions of good and evil in programs of social and ideological control. It is a curious assertion from a bona fide fundamentalist Christian!

In respect to James Lindsay and his work which I regard as relevant and well-grounded (the definition of 'complicity' that you submitted here), I would respond by saying that when I speak of 'complicity' I mean it more in the sense I indicated with this quote:

"The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights is doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passions to conquer matter and master the world".

Complicity in the sense that I use the term -- and I clearly say this -- is simply an observation that the more one gets enmeshed in *worldly affairs*, the greater the danger, as in Mark 8:38 "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

However, and with that said, I am not closed to other extensions of the sense of the word. For example (and again I refer to Jung's 1945 essay After the Catastrophe and his meditations on the German catastrophe) he delves into the sense, for him psycho-spiritual, of the contamination of guiltiness that extended out from those events, when finally it all collapsed. I found his thoughtfulness in regard to 'complicity' to be painfully self-aware and mature. What happened in Europe was obscene by any definition. And the issue of 'complicity' is brought only more so to the surface when the entire situation is examined, let's say, psycho-spiritually. (But again I do not dismiss the 'material' type of complicity as I already mentioned).

I look forward to reading more of your impulsive sophistries when you find the time to do so .

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 10:01 am Not even something good about Marxism?

It's hard to see good in a theory that has a 100% record of destroying economies and killing people.

Unreformed capitalism treats workers as if they are machines,

Marxists mistake "capitalism" for a creed, because Marxism is. It's not. Unlike Marxism, it has no historicism, no teleology, no call for belief or demand for revolution; It's just a means of doing business. And all means of doing business have their liabilities, and need to be watched.

There was a time before owners became capitalists, when owners were people like the people who worked on their farms or workshops; they all ate round the same kitchen table, sang the same songs and danced the same dances. Landed gentry, at that time were the out of touch class, not the owners of the farms or workshops.

Yes, there was sunshine and roses every day. And fish jumped, and corn grew, and the Hobbits would visit in the evening, and everyone would sit around smoking pipes and sipping port.

Ah, those wonderful, old days...

Technology intervened, as it does, in that quite peaceful arrangement of society.

"Technology" has always been with us. It's what humans do.

This is cartoon historicism. It has zero to do with what really happened. It's a Marxist myth; no more.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 2:30 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun May 15, 2022 10:01 am Not even something good about Marxism?

It's hard to see good in a theory that has a 100% record of destroying economies and killing people.

Isaiah Berlin, a tried-and-true Liberal, has some interesting things to say about Marx. And Berlin is a wonderful speaker. Worth listening to.