Bored with politics? Lets start a philosophy discussion going! I will talk moral philosophy today. Today I will talk about moral objectivism and relativism.  But as always we must first make distinctions!

originally posted at Docudharma
Getting Started
Barack Obama said something today that I think is beautiful from a framing perspective:

I mean it's like these guys take pride in ignorance! It's like they like being ignorant.

(hat tip to ruff4life)

I believe this is the counter frame to the Elitist Democrat.

Nobody wants to be ignorant, and depending on leaders who are proud of their ignorance and demand ignorance from their followers cannot be good for the running of a country.

Ignorance is simply not good public policy.

One of the main reasons that I really enjoy politics is that I love philosophy. Some people love nothing more then the idea of sitting around discussing philosophical tenets, while others would find watching paint dry or getting their fingernails pulled out as a more welcome option then a discussion of philosophy.

This diary, I hope, is for those people in the first camp. In a prior diary a few days (weeks maybe?) back a discussion came up and this is a continuation of that topic.

<More after the break.>

I just wanted to share this story I recieved, on this Sunday, for those of use who find our lives to be too hectic and too filled with stress at times.

With the loss of rational proof of God's existence, we now turn to Occam's Razor in an effort to rescue some sort of proof of God's existence. Occam's Razor, in a nutshell, states that, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. While we rejected the conventional rational proofs of God's existence, we left open the possibility that he still exists. And then comes Occam's Razor -- if all other things are equal, then the simplest explanation is usually the best -- and the simplest explanation is that God caused the Big Bang which caused the Universe to begin.

First of all, this diary isn't about any specific war. It's more of an examination of the moral and ethical decisions behind going to war, and the best manner in which to conduct it.

I recently wrote a paper in Philosophy on "Just War" theory, and it has me thinking about the moral and ethical questions involved in war.

Under what conditions is war justified? Is it justifiable as a threat? If a country is plunged into war, how can it be conducted?

At what point can "victory" be declared?

Nietzsche talks about how Christian fundamentalism is outdated. And Bishop Spong goes even farther, arguing that theism is no longer a valid way of understanding God. In that regard, he carries on the meme first promoted by Nietzsche that God is Dead. But, that said, it is much harder to prove a negative than it is to prove a positive. The fact of the matter is that despite the advances of science and technology, the Big Bang that started it all is still shrouded in mystery.

Nietzsche was to Christianity as Marx was to capitalism. He was one of the fiercest critics of Christian fundamentalism as Marx was to capitalism. His problem was that far from creating a better world, Christianity created a state of slavery where doctrinal conformity was strictly enforced and entire cultures and religions were stamped out.

Islam was a reaction to this sterile conformity. Rather than the One Emperor, One Church, One State motif of the Byzantines, Islam presented itself as a religion of peace, where Muslim, Christian, and Judaism could live side by side. It sought to settle the quarrel between Christian and Jew by proclaiming that it didn't matter whether Jesus died on the cross; the only thing that mattered was submission to God.

     Neo-conservatism blasted into the American political scene with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  However, its roots wind back through the U.S. political landscape to include Marxist social theory and the teachings of Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli.  Many of the individuals whose names have become household words today were introduced on the world-wide political stage during the Reagan/G.H.W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, "Scooter" Libby, and others.  This essay bares the core of neoconservative belief, contrasts those beliefs to statements written by this nation’s founders, and highlights the political spin neocons use when quoting documents from America’s past.            

I really don't know a damned thing about Kant. Something about reality, duality -- maybe.

Any kind of study on the functionality of individuals, society, and governments has to deal with the area of compassion. As we have learned over the past 70+ years of the New Deal, compassion is essential for governments, society, and individuals to function. Without it, people will have no stake even if Dennis Kucinich were running for office. Without it, people would be killing and being killed, and society would not function as people would be quarreling over little things. Without it, people cannot be happy in this life. Nietzsche himself said that people have to operate based on consequences, and the consequences in this case are clear enough.

Some of you here might know of me/my ideology, others not. In any event this diary has been a long time in formulation so I hope it makes some sense. People have been asking me for my thoughts on this topic and so I hope it does make some iota of sense.

I have given the issue a lot of thought.

What makes a conservative "different" from a "progressive" To me there is not one answer that could cover every and all situation since of course not all progressives nor are all conservatives the same. But I do think there might be an overarching theme, something that might cover the chasm of what separates the two groups.

Sure, some on the progressive side will say "Conservatives are evil, evil I tell you" that is how they differ from us... well those on the right will answer with "Progressives? They’re anti-American evil-doers" and be done with it. Case closed. Or is it? I do not think so. Even if everyone on one side thought everyone on the other was evil there has to be a reason for it.

<More after the break>

Continuing our full-fledged assault on Christian Fundamentalism (by which I mean the right-wing orthodoxy that has permeated the world), we make forays into some more of Nietzsche's work. First of all, we discuss his work, "Beyond Good and Evil."

Fundamentalism has codes of conduct that have served humanity for the last two centuries. But the problem is that in more cases than not, it has served as a restriction as to what we can and can't do and has prevented us from reaching our potential.

One of the distinctions I make in my research on interpersonal communication is distinguishing between what we call "representatives," and "expressives." A representative is the kind of speech act that has traditionally been the most salient concern of linguistic philosophers,* that is an assertion which can be assigned a truth value based on a method of verification available to a set of beings with requisite sensory apparatus, logical processing capability, and opportunity for observation -- normally meaning cognitively and sensorily normal humans. Formally, positivists say that the meaning of a statement is equivalent to the means by which it can be verified.

Nietzsche laid out a full-fledged assault on the basis of fundamentalism and called for the reevaluation of everything that we would think of as moral and right. And a similar reevaluation is totally called for thanks to eight years of abuse of power by the Bush administration, the cumulation of forces interested only in appropriating wealth and power to themselves at the expense of the common person.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

Warning:  Contains abstract, philosophical references that may cause boredom.

Several decades ago, as a young political science student, I was impressed by a little classic called The Logic of Collective Action, by Mancur Olson.  Olson explained why large groups of people who share a common interest in securing public goods often fail to act collectively to attain them.  For example, consumers may have a common interest in making sure that the automobiles they drive are safe, but for decades, Ralph Nader and a comparatively small group of people had to work very hard in order to mobilize enough public opinion to successfully impose stricter federal safety standards on the automobile industry.

I swore that when I had kids, I would NEVER give as an explanation because. My mother was famous for it. Me: Why??? Mom: Because. If she really wanted to make the point (and a power play), she'd say because I said so. arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Well, I never had kids. But I did end up with a few step kids. At first, any interventions on my part were always accompanied by explanation. I was a quick study though. I realized they didn't care WHY. They'd ask and ask and whine and complain and ask WHY again a thousand times. But they never really wanted to know why. They were only interested in what they wanted and finding a way to actualize it. They used my explanations as an opportunity to stage never-ending debates, refuting all of my very sensible and very adult-correct thinking.

Mothers. They do know what they're doing. It just takes years to figure it out. There's not much after the old because I say so.

The following is a discussion of Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgements Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 November 13; 104(46): 17948–17953. Authored by Ballew II C, and Todorov A. and can be found full text here

...participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded.... Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s ...competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races ...The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

More below.