Scholar

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/campus-left-university-columbia-1968/678176/ Good article to put this into context.

One thing that needs to be understood is that, much like with pedophelia, if you suffer from suicide it is profoundly difficult to talk to anyone about it. It is truly taboo and this means that it is so much more difficult to help people with it. People wish they could just throw the therapists at all the mentally ill people and viola, no more suicide. But there is a far deeper problem going on here that we are completely ignorant of because of this taboo, because nobody is really allowed to actually talk about it, not in an honest way. Therapists won't solve this issue because it is systemic. You can try to hire more police officers, but if your society is corrupt to the core, you will not prevent criminality. You can try to catch as many child predators as you want, they will keep coming if the underlying problem here is not resolved. Stigmatization of these issues makes it impossible for us to resolve them. This is essential to understand. Our discomfort, immaturity and inability to engage with these with an open mind is what is allowing for the child abuse, for the suicide, and for all the other ills, to continue. Really, suicide in most cases is a failure of our collective responsibility. And people talking about it openly are a reminder, sometimes a very personal one, of that failure. But us making this a taboo won't suddenly make people any less hopeless.

I added a sentence to clarify why I am making these points.

I don't feel comfortable to go into detail on some of the points because I don't think that's the responsible thing to do in the context of this forum. But beyond that, I want to encourage people to think about this more deeply themselves. In general, when it comes to autonomy vs harm-prevention, people tend to focus either on one or the other. Freedom, in this case human autonomy, has an essential function to evolution. It confronts us, fundamentally, with aspects of our own human nature that we, prior to the freedom, had no opportunity to truly explore. This exploration will always involve mistakes and suffering, but it will expand our consciousness. In this case it very much confronts us with what it means that there are people who want to kill themselves, and who can do so any time they want. You have to consider that in this case, the person already has the autonomy to do what they seek to do. In a way this is just a symbol for how helpless we as a society to truly prevent people from doing so. It's easier to brush it all under the rug when it is happening unofficially. If people we truly free to kill themselves, maybe we would actually have to start caring about each other more than we currently do. Maybe we would need to fundamentally change how we coexist in society. I think this is mainly a discussion about whether or not suicide ought to be taboo, even if people are not aware of it. But a taboo in many ways prevents us from looking at the situation honestly and ever being able to find a solution that will actually work. We can observe the same with child predation and incest.

I know you guys hijacked the thread for petty and childish drama, as tends to happen, but I still want to respond to the topic at hand. I think as society becomes more sophisticated and mature, freedoms will expand. A fully conscious and mature civilization would in theory require no regulations as to what individuals can do with themselves and to each other. This cannot be fathomed because of how profoundly immature our society still is. But remember, it was not that long ago when civilizations had to mandate even the position in which you could have sex in, so that you wouldn't become a horny bastard who ruined society and got everyone enslaved by the tribe next door. The kind of freedoms we are given require of us greater responsibility, which requires greater consciousness and maturity. As far as euthanasia for mental diseases goes, I think people underestimate how significant the suffering from mental diseases can be, and how little we have to actually treat some of these conditions. The mind can create any type of hell, ideally, if we have systems to prevent individuals from simply committing suicide (which seems to be the case in the netherlands despite the attempt to smear the whole thing by the media) in situations that might be fixable, there is nothing that makes this different from someone who suffers from some physical condition that causes immeasurable pain and cannot be treated. But nonetheless, it is a complex ethical issue. I want to urge people to actually investigate the reasoning behind permitting such things with an open and mature mind. I also want to point out that these types of topics tend to evoke strong emotions in us, that make us unable to consciously engage with the substance at hand, and makes us reactive rather than open-minded. I think there is something that was given little importance in this discussion so far that in general is overlooked when it comes to controversial topics like these, and that is the value of autonomy. While it is true that certain freedoms will lead to negative consequences, it is also true that limiting freedoms means violating fundamental human autonomy and will. While harm reduction principles are important to consider, we must weigh them against the principles of liberty and dignity. Not allowing this means that you will inevitably violate someones autonomy, and not someone who was simply irrational and therefore not functionally autonomous. You will condemn such individuals to an undignified death or to a life of unbarable suffering. Or simply to prevent them from making the choice of ending their life. It's easy to ignore this, to not be aware of it, to only see the potential harms from this, which are certainly present. But if we do not recognize this reality, we will not be able to actually contend with the issue at hand. In the end, the more pressing manner is for us to find a way of living and coexisting such that we don't have so many people who feel hopeless in life, such that they want to kill themselves.

We have to abolish factory farming, it's feasible given that we don't need to consume animal products, and especially not on that scale.

That's not what a strawman is, and I never said anyone is conspiring to create super viruses. I am saying these are the consequences of the system in place.

https://heavy.com/news/man-set-himself-on-fire-trump-trial-video/ His manifesto: https://www.newsweek.com/read-max-azzarello-manifesto-about-lighting-himself-fire-trump-trial-1892368 All of you guys who have called that other insane person who set themselves on fire infront of the Israeli embassy a hero, well, these are the consequences of such attitudes. This doesn't do anything but cause more harm and suffering. Nobody will be convinced by this, in fact, quite the opposite. And the only people who will be motivated by such actions will be mentally ill people who will now feel like they have a good excuse for finally kill themselves. Social media is frying people's brains and it is genuinely becoming the Nr 1 national security risk for most developed countries. This is only the beginning, it will get far worse before anyone will regulate the technologies that are actively eroding the fabric of society.

Primarily due to animal agriculture, a super-virus is simply a matter of time. The conditions within factory farms are optimal for the evolution of zoonotic diseases that can cross the species barrier. This has been known for decades, yet consumptive habits nor regulations do anything to curb this issue in a significant way. Factory farms basically are incubators for the most nasty bacteria and viruses possible. If you wanted to create a virus that wiped out half of mankind, you would do so by building factory farms. If you wanted to create antibiotic resistant bacteria that could kill hundreds of millions of people, you would also just build factory farms. All you really need to create the most potent biological weapon possible is factory farms and time.

Your dreams indicate immaturity. We need to be very careful, especially in todays climate, about upholding our ideals of civility. It might be the most crucial time in history to do so, because of how high the stakes are. Civility is not guaranteed.

Your argument is fundamentally flawed because we do not even punish such people with life in prison. It wouldn't be a greater deterant than if you simply put them in prison for life. Your logic is just silly. You only get negatives, while achieving nothing that you could not achieve with deterants that are in line with fundamental priniples of humanity, civility and moral progress. Even ChatGPT is more sophisticated than you are on this question, which should be embarrassing. Especially people such as the most vile criminals are essential for us as a society to transcend such flaws in our nature. We must understand them, we must allow them to to exist so as to demonstrate our core values as a soiety, and we must allow them to redeem themselves. If you just execute everyone who is evil, how will we ever learn how these people came to be? Their self-understanding, as would be achieved through self-reflection, is of essential utility to us. There are various other arguments for why the death penality in the contemporary context is simply inappropriate, but that would require you to think about what you say before you say it. Alternatively you can go and ask Claude for some guidance.

Because you can't just make special exemptions on a fundamental principle of civility based on some socialist ideal you have because you listen to too much Hasan. The entire idea of killing defenseless people, which has never shown to have any impact on preventing crime, is something we are moving away from as a developed society. Putting them in prison for life would be more than sufficient. There is literally no point in contradicting our fundamental values as a society so that we an feel validated about "punishing the rich". Especially in a context in which we don't even put these people in prison! How about you start putting them in prison instead of going for executions and opening pandora's box? Mayber we should make a very simple clear cut law that executes people who advocate for the usage of psychedelics and moral nihilism, which leads to an increase in suicidality and social harm.

That's exactly the language fascists employ. What you don't realize is that you are actually the parasite, and that, by your own logic, you should be eradicated. But of course, you don't agree with that, because you are a parasite, whose nature is ignorance and malice, and therefore believes that you won't be one of the people who should get executed. You're lucky most of mankind has transcended this laughably undeveloped mentality, so in the end you are privileged enough to never get to experience the consequences of your ignorance. But you are free to circle-jerk on here with all the rest of the socially and mentally defunct people on this forum.

The funny thing is, by giving power to the state to execute people, realistically, you are giving the most powerful and wealthy the power to execute people, because they are the ones who will have most influence over the system. It's kind of how democracy in the US no longer is about reflecting the views of the population, but rather, political figures and various interests instilling in the population certain viewpoints that will benefit them. Like how half of your society was convinced that they cared about denying climate change, when they never did, and never would have if the politicians wouldn't have implanted those issues in their brains.

That's what the chinese said.

This is precisely the lack of humanity I am speaking of. By condemning this individual to unnecessary death and suffering, we deny our own universality. This is to say that this person is jimwell's incarnation, and that he will be the next incarnation, too. So, in essence, he is wishing death and suffering upon himself, because his lack of development blinds him to the nature of individuation.

Giving the state the power to execute individuals (especially politically relevant ones) is a sign of lack of development. There is no reason to execute individuals, under any circumstances, when we have the ability to restrain them. The killing of a defenseless other is in essence a barbaric act, as it is senseless and achieves no utilitarian gain. It would showcase that the judicial system is uncivilized. But most importantly, it would give the state power it should never have. On a more fundamental level, the restraint to not kill individuals who even commit the greatest atrocities, akin to Andres Breivik, shows that society will not allow individual actors within it to degrade it's own humanity. By maintaining civility, we maintain the core and pillar of civilization. The prohibition of killing defenseless individuals serves to remind us that this very act is unconscionable, even if we think we have good reasons for it. If everyone who thought they had good reasons for killing others would kill others, civilization could not function. Perhaps even more important is that, the employment and support of capital punishment means that a society has not learned the profound importance of forgiveness as a foundational value that fuels human progress. And of course, we have various harm-reduction arguments like executions of innocent individuals being inevitable given human error and corruption. Due the irrevocable nature of capital punishment and there being no recourse or ability to correct such mistakes, it is not justifiable to continue this practice, as it serve no proven end, other than the gratification and corruption of individuals who seek revenge.

“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

But that is the whole point. Not everything that is in atrocity or bad equals a genocide. That's just incredibly stupid, and it has nothing to do with "accepting" certain definitions. These words have meanings, they aren't to be used arbitrarily. There are other words that describe various forms of mistreatment, you don't have to use the most morally loaded word, that we specifically have to describe the basically worst type of thing a nation can do, so that you get your political brownie points for being such a victim. That's not how it works, and it just delegitimizes the concept of genocide. I don't see how your example connects here. It is, defacto, a jewist state. It was created for the jews, by the jews and is maintained by the jews. There is nothing idiosyncratic about it. Using genocide to describe everything you don't like, however, is just assinine. Also, I never dismissed "all usages", just virtually 99.9% of these usages. If there are some scholars who discuss the nature of genicide, that is different. But this isn't what we are discussing here.

I don't think this is true. The word genocide had a clear meaning, namely, to attempt to eradicate (or remove) a certain population based on certain traits, intentionally. This is, more or less, what our understanding of genocide has been in the past an present. As far as I know, as defined by the UN, intentionality is key here, and that is what needs to be proven. I don't agree that leftists call this a genocide because they have an idiosyncratic understanding of genocide. In my view there are three main reasons why they use the most morally loaded word possible: 1) So they can frame anyone who disagrees with them as genocide denialists or supporters, and therefore dismiss and shame them. 2) So they can enforce ingroup compliance, given that individuals who might not totally fall in line with their views would fall risk to be viewed as denying or downplaying the probably greatest moral atrocity mankind is capable of committing. 3) So they can justify radical actions that otherwise would be unjustifiable or viewed as dysfunctional. To frame this as if it was a nuanced difference in viewpoints or positions on genocide is inappropriate. There is no discussion on the essence of genocide, the word is used solely because of it's moral weight. When they use this words, they clearly ascribe intent to the Israeli government. This is essential to their narrative, and this narrative falls apart because they cannot actually make a reasonable case for this.

Sure, the burden of proof is on the people who assert this is a genocide. No such proof was provided.

The idea that we can transfer the notions of human intelligence over to these models, and then try to compare them via tests is a little absurd. I feel like you guys should immediately see how profoundly silly that is. ChatGPT doesn't have an IQ, it is something totally different than the human brain.

Who is to say they wouldn't be at 10 million and would be building spaceships if Hamas would using the insane amount of foreign aid they get to actually establish a properly functioning society and economy, instead of building tunnels they would use in a senseless war against Israel, while letting their population starve and be bombed with no possibility for shelter?

I would say a heightened sense of morality is a byproduct of being a more developed human being. The condition for growth is freedom. A sense of morality is always bound by the restrictions and limitations of the perspectives of any given point on the growth of a system/individual. This means, you cannot just presupposed morality and assume that it will lead to growth. Freedom is what allows us to develop and refine our sense of morality, through increases in sophistication. The problem with focusing on the sense of morality is that it can simply lead to self-righteousness and the holding onto contemporary moral norms. You can observe this in progressive movements well, whom themselves fairly quickly crystalize into dogmatism and attempt to establish a new ruleset by restricting individuality rather than by encouraging growth. The pitfall of this is that you limit the growth of human beings, because you do not give them the opportunity to learn, but rather attempt to instill into them a blind following of what you perceive as an essential norm.

As a response to Leo's blog post about the potential harms of liberty - The reason for why liberty and freedom can cause harm is always lack of development/consciousness in any given individual or society. The less developed and conscious an individual is, the more harm he will cause when given freedom. This is because with liberty necessarily comes responsibility, as a result of the wider range of actions that can be taken. Responsibility is the ability and willingness to make the decisions necessary to navigate any given free space. In another sense, we can describe this as liberty being the degree of freedom within a society, and laws being the degree of restrictions. Absolute freedom would lead to absolute chaos, unless there is absolute intelligence/wisdom. Evolution is the growth of intelligence and wisdom through a combination of restriction and freedom. This applies to evolution in nature, evolution in society and evolution in individuals. Both are essential aspects: Freedom is necessary to evolve forward through exploration of the unknown, to inform and expand consciousness, and restriction is necessary to maintain the order required to not dissolve into entropy. Now, in regards to human liberty and societal evolution, freedom will necessarily lead to mistakes that cause harm. This harm is necessary to guide us into a higher levels of complexity/consciousness. Openness to mistakes and errors is necessary for evolution to be able to take place. Examples where this applies: DNA and evolution. Evolution through DNA funtions primarily through random mutations. Random mutations are freedom, but too much random mutation at a time would lead to the disorganization of the given organism. Harmful mutations are a necessary consequence of freedom, because freedom means exploration, and exploration leads to errors, because you cannot predict that which is unknown. Child growth. The way children grow into more sophisticated beings is through a balance of degrees of freedom and restriction at any given point of their evolution. If we restrict the child too much, such that it cannot make any mistake, and therefore not be harmed, we necessarily stunt it's growth because it is unable to explore reality in such a way as to learn and grow from it. We must give the child an appropriate degree of freedom for it's stage of development, such that it can make mistakes without them becoming fatal or unproductive for growth. In regards to societal evolution this means that at any given point of our human development we must consider that any degree of liberty will require from us an equivalent degree of responsibility. For societal progress to take place we require, at any given point, just a little more liberty than we are responsible enough to handle. This is because, by the nature of what progress is, it's consequences are fundamentally unknown. We can attempt to make predictions, but these predictions are not enough to navigate through potentially infinite space. In the end, we will have to navigate through space by setting our foot into the unknown and risking harm to ourselves. As we harm ourselves, we learn and we grow. This occurs at a societal scale. This is why harm-reduction principles, as an absolute, are counterproductive and naive. Society must allow a certain degree of harm for progress to be possible. On the other hand, given too much freedom in the context of too little development, and growth can be stunted. We give adults, for example, more liberty than children, because children are not capable of adopting as much responsibility as adults. They have not made enough decisions in their lifetimes, and experienced their consequences, to be able to navigate the degrees of freedom that we experience as adults. A simple example, as Leo provided, are drugs. Give drugs to a developed human being, and he will benefit from them. Give them to an undeveloped human being and he will ruin his life with it. The fact that drugs are being legalized is one of the indications of the growth of the given society. Now, of course, there are more and less developed individuals in society, so the less developed individuals in society will suffer from the new degree of freedom they are exposed to. In the end, we must balance the suffering caused by freedom with our respect for individual autonomy and the necessary degree of freedom for social evolution. Each expansion of freedom will cause a spike in suffering, as people explore the new, unexplored landscapes. This is why technology causes so much suffering and harm, the more powerful it is. This is, simply, because it allows us new freedoms that we did not have access to before. We make mistakes, we suffer and we learn, without hopefully, destroying ourselves. Another example for this is incest. Given an irresponsible and underdeveloped society, incest, despite it not being inherently harmful or negative, will lead to harm, because individuals are not developed enough to navigate the potential risks that are present in those interactions. We can see this in the middle ages or contemporary middle eastern countries, in which incestious marriages are not necessary prohibited. There, multigenerational inbreeding, especially fueled by arranged marriages, leads to a higher frequency of negative genetic outcomes among the society. Apply the same standard to a developed nation, and the effects can be reversed. A lifting of penalization and stigmatization of such acts can lead to people getting better help in the context of abuse, while also respecting individual autonomy. This can happen because, by and large, individuals in such societies are more aware of the potential negative consequences of incest. Like with the drug example, in one context it makes sense to restrict the autonomy of individuals using stigmatization and criminalization, and in another context this type of approach ceases to be necessary, effective or appropriate. Systems of restrictions exist specifically because of lack of intelligence and wisdom. Given ultimate intelligence and wisdom, you can give an individual complete freedom and autonomy, and they will navigate it without causing unnecessary friction. And, in the most fundamental sense, all of reality is precisely this. It is completely frictionless motion, informed through ultimate intelligence and wisdom, and totally free. That is what reality is, ultimately, which is why it works so well. In a very real sense, the criminal mindset plays a necessary and important role in societal evolution. Criminality, to some degree, will always be necessary for growth, because we fundamentally cannot know how our laws and morals are limited. There must exist minds that are willing to break the norms to explore the future. And this, in reality, will express itself in both dysfunctional contexts as well as benefitial ones, much like the mutations in DNA. We cannot simply weed out the unhealthy mindsets from the healthy mindsets, because we cannot ever know if what we consider to be an unhealthy mindset, might not be actually a healthy mindset. To us, they will appear equivalent, and therefore, an attempt to eradicate one side of the coin completely, will lead to the eradication of progress. You can have no mutations, but that will simply mean that you will never change. The tricky thing, as always, is to find the balance.