Mental Health and mass shootings

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bradman
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bradman »

i'll be damned. How many times over the years have i heard, read about, and tried to understand Hegel. All to no avail. Yesterday was the first time some of it sunk in. :) Thank you.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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bradman wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 10:56 am i'll be damned. How many times over the years have i heard, read about, and tried to understand Hegel. All to no avail. Yesterday was the first time some of it sunk in. :) Thank you.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

Hegel, like a lot of these European superbrains, is written in a sort of poetry and in a foreign language besides, and it is not the easiest body of writing to get one's head around. A lot of it comes from the German consciousness, in which heroes (Das Held) emerge to engage the process and triumph, until the next go-round anyway when whatever they've contributed becomes the status quo and therefore a target.

The consensus, which the Professor would understand better than I do, is that his most basic theory of history was pretty much of a good fit with the actual facts we know of. New ideas really do generate opposition, and ultimately antitheses. This antithesis becomes the new thesis, and round and round we go.

This process is why, IMHO, history is an even gloomier study than economics. It rarely, if ever, ends well. Hegel was not content to leave it all at the process level, and/or try to quantify it the way they would in physics. He made it an evolution toward the Christian state of grace by any other name. I believe he called it something that translates as The Absolute. History would ultimately resolve itself, millions of dead bodies later, and we would ultimately achieve a Get Out Of Humanity Free card and live from then on in an infinite state of grace.

The major contribution, if you can call it that, of Marx was to secularize Hegel's theory of dialectics and remove that God thing. Hence the name, "Dialectical Materialism."

The result was supposed to be a secular sort of Millennium. After this whole movie franchise called history finally played out, the state would wither away. The duty of all good Marxists was to help the process along. "This is the final conflict/ Let each one take their place. The international ideal/ Shall be the human race." (L'Internationale, the Communist anthem)

As we see from history, though, the state did not wither away. It just morphed into Stalinism, created a world panic and yet another new boogyman, gave the usual suspects another excuse to start WWII, as if they really needed another one beyond economics and anti-Semitism, and started the whole process going around again.

History is a bitch goddess. She gives you an understanding of why the same old shit keeps happening, but she also tells where you stand, which is that the process is bigger than you are. The key takeaway is that humans should not try to stop the process. They should learn how to surf it.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bradman »

gounion wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 11:15 am Zowie is the smartest guy in the room.
And i like his style. Just look at the last post. It's something to learn from.

Me, i'm still working on this........
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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ZoWie wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 12:07 pm Hegel, like a lot of these European superbrains, is written in a sort of poetry and in a foreign language besides, and it is not the easiest body of writing to get one's head around. A lot of it comes from the German consciousness, in which heroes (Das Held) emerge to engage the process and triumph, until the next go-round anyway when whatever they've contributed becomes the status quo and therefore a target.

The consensus, which the Professor would understand better than I do, is that his most basic theory of history was pretty much of a good fit with the actual facts we know of. New ideas really do generate opposition, and ultimately antitheses. This antithesis becomes the new thesis, and round and round we go.

This process is why, IMHO, history is an even gloomier study than economics. It rarely, if ever, ends well. Hegel was not content to leave it all at the process level, and/or try to quantify it the way they would in physics. He made it an evolution toward the Christian state of grace by any other name. I believe he called it something that translates as The Absolute. History would ultimately resolve itself, millions of dead bodies later, and we would ultimately achieve a Get Out Of Humanity Free card and live from then on in an infinite state of grace.

The major contribution, if you can call it that, of Marx was to secularize Hegel's theory of dialectics and remove that God thing. Hence the name, "Dialectical Materialism."

The result was supposed to be a secular sort of Millennium. After this whole movie franchise called history finally played out, the state would wither away. The duty of all good Marxists was to help the process along. "This is the final conflict/ Let each one take their place. The international ideal/ Shall be the human race." (L'Internationale, the Communist anthem)

As we see from history, though, the state did not wither away. It just morphed into Stalinism, created a world panic and yet another new boogyman, gave the usual suspects another excuse to start WWII, as if they really needed another one beyond economics and anti-Semitism, and started the whole process going around again.

History is a bitch goddess. She gives you an understanding of why the same old shit keeps happening, but she also tells where you stand, which is that the process is bigger than you are. The key takeaway is that humans should not try to stop the process. They should learn how to surf it.
i'm working on the third paragraph. i got stuck on the second one.

Had the same problem K thru 12.

Something would be said that caught my attention.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

Hegel and a British historian named Toynbee were convinced that history was cyclic. In fact, the ten thousand or so years that we know about do tend to show the same shit happening over and over again for the same reasons, so our observations and nonverbal seat of the pants input do fit well with the theory.

A more recent contribution is the study of the human psyche itself. If humans are not really fallen creatures, consciously made out of simple chemicals found in common dirt by an angry god who is pissed off that we acted on the sex drives engineered into our bodies, then why is everything so fracked up all the time?

Why do people consciously make decisions which they suspect are bad for them? Why do they do it anyway because it serves the order of things as they perceive it, when it is in violation of simple common sense? Why do we politicize simple suggestions from learned people who have spent 20 years getting qualified as medical doctors that wearing face masks might be a means of mitigating a pandemic that started in China? Why does that suggestion become so odious that people are willing to camp out in trucks in the dead of the Canadian winter and paralyze the capital for a month? Why is this not the first time that a society has responded to a simple biological pandemic in this weird and complicated manner? Why won't it be the last time?

Why does someone with a background of a drifter who has broken laws in several countries put on a new suit, change his name, and convince a completely unremarkable and normal district in a perfectly rational state that he should represent them in Congress? Why do we let charlatans manipulate our consciousness with proven misinformation to the point where it determines who gets elected as our president? What's our problem?

Why do a fair number of us think that equipping everyone over 18 with a weapon of war will prevent shootings? Why do we consider people who have a certain talent to entertain us to be superior beings? Why do some people kill themselves when their favorite singer or actor dies?

These are the questions of our age and we need all the insight we can get, because right now things are very badly broken.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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Ah, OK, I guess this was the thread where Hegel popped up.

So, here's my Cliff Notes version of FW Hegel. Thesis produces antithesis, resolves to synthesis, synthesis becomes new thesis, generates new antithesis, rinse and repeat, the motor of history. :D

He had two groups of students. The Left Hegelians included Marx, Engels, and Feuerbach. The Right Hegelians - well, I can tick off the names, but you won't recognize any of them. :D Essentially, they took their names from this division in the French National Assembly where Jacobins sat to the left of the king and aristocrats to his right. The Left Hegelians thought this was primarily a material clash between modes of production, social classes, and their contradictions, hence dialectical materialism, whereas the Righties tend to view it mostly idealistically, possibly leading to an end of history at the absolute end of this process. This even led a more recent right-Hegelian guy named Francis Fukuyama to write a book by that title ... the End of History.

Marx is irritating in the original. Just read his theory of Oriental Despotism. I'm admittedly oversimplifying, but essentially he felt "Asiatic" or "Oriental" societies were incapable of progress (unlike England or Germany), it was why Marx thought his proletarian revolution could never take hold in any Asian country. And then China implemented Maoism in 1949. Yeah, he got so much wrong.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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ProfX wrote: Fri May 26, 2023 2:27 pm Ah, OK, I guess this was the thread where Hegel popped up.

So, here's my Cliff Notes version of FW Hegel. Thesis produces antithesis, resolves to synthesis, synthesis becomes new thesis, generates new antithesis, rinse and repeat, the motor of history. :D

He had two groups of students. The Left Hegelians included Marx, Engels, and Feuerbach. The Right Hegelians - well, I can tick off the names, but you won't recognize any of them. :D Essentially, they took their names from this division in the French National Assembly where Jacobins sat to the left of the king and aristocrats to his right. The Left Hegelians thought this was primarily a material clash between modes of production, social classes, and their contradictions, hence dialectical materialism, whereas the Righties tend to view it mostly idealistically, possibly leading to an end of history at the absolute end of this process. This even led a more recent right-Hegelian guy named Francis Fukuyama to write a book by that title ... the End of History.

Marx is irritating in the original. Just read his theory of Oriental Despotism. I'm admittedly oversimplifying, but essentially he felt "Asiatic" or "Oriental" societies were incapable of progress (unlike England or Germany), it was why Marx thought his proletarian revolution could never take hold in any Asian country. And then China implemented Maoism in 1949. Yeah, he got so much wrong.
All I know of Hegal is the Monty Python song. :lol:
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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The Bruces' Philosopher's Song
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruces%27 ... phers_Song

Martin Heidegger was the only one of them sill alive when they composed the song. :mrgreen:
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

All I remember from that song is that Immanuel Kant was a real pissant, and not exactly stable, while Wittgenstein was a beery swine who could drink you under the table. :-)

I got going on this stuff because someone in this thread said that history was cyclic. It is, and the really interesting part for me is that every generation thinks its cycle is the one that will end the process when humans finally work out the one perfect government system.

This discussion isn't all from recycled 18th and 19th century thought, since Toynbee didn't kick the bucket until 1975. However, I'm more interested right now in what the marriage from hell of technology and entertainment has done to us when combined with "the wheel of history." McLuhan had vague insights in that direction, but he was awfully full of himself and, in my own opinion, rather shallow.

What I mostly notice about modern life is that I can barely keep up with this month's version of Photoshop, and now it seems to have wired itself into my startup boots so that as soon as MickeySoft stops advertising itself and the main screen comes up, I get popups from Adobe needling me that it's time to go to full AI and have my answers to prompts turn my photography into timeless art while I go to the bathroom. How are we going to understand a culture that replaces itself three times in the average (and shortening) life expectancy?

It's enough to make me go back to painting. Talk about a thesis generating its antithesis. I'm the last person you'd expect to be a Luddite, but, uh, it's tempting.

I find all this stuff relevant to mass shootings due to the reality that these shootings are the latest incarnation of the process, and therefore they may well be the perfect expression of the times we're in. A properly functioning culture does not spend this much time formulating its own demise on social media.

We met the enemy and it was us.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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Crib notes!? is there going to be a test? Cuz that was the day i usually skipped class.:mrgreen:



After all that reading i ended up here......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
"Two Concepts of Liberty" was the inaugural lecture delivered by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958.
+
Liberty (according to merriam-webster dictionary) refers to:

1: the quality or state of being free:
a: the power to do as one pleases
b: freedom from physical restraint
c: freedom from arbitrary or despotic (see DESPOT sense 1) control
d: the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges
e: the power of choice
Isaiah Berlin's positive and negative liberty can be thought of as "freedom to" and "freedom from".

Negative liberty Berlin initially defined as freedom from, that is, the absence of constraints on the agent imposed by other people.
Positive liberty he defined both as freedom to, that is, the ability (not just the opportunity) to pursue and achieve willed goals; and also as autonomy or self-rule, as opposed to dependence on others. [5]
+
Now these names are familiar.....
Positive liberty
"is involved in the answer to the question 'What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?'"[6]
Positive liberty may be understood as self-mastery. Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, and that both forms of liberty are necessary in any free and civilised society.[citation needed]

Negative liberty
"liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: 'What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?'"[7]
For Berlin, negative liberty represents a different, and sometimes contradictory, understanding of the concept of liberty, which needs to be carefully examined. Its later proponents (such as Tocqueville, Constant, Montesquieu, John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill,[citation needed] who accepted Chrysippus' understanding of self-determination)[8] insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of rationalists and the philosophical harbingers of totalitarianism.[citation needed] This concept of negative liberty, Berlin argued, constitutes an alternative, and sometimes even opposed, concept to positive liberty, and one often closer to the intuitive modern usage of the word. Berlin considered negative liberty one of the distinguishing concepts of modern liberalism and observed

"The fathers of liberalism—Mill and Constant—want more than this minimum: they demand a maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimum demands of social life. It seems unlikely that this extreme demand for liberty has ever been made by any but a small minority of highly civilized and self-conscious human beings."[9]
For every action...
Criticism
In contrast to Berlin, Charles Taylor argues that the Hobbes-Bentham view is indefensible as a view of freedom. Faced with this two-step process, it seems safer and easier to stop it at the first step, to insist firmly that freedom is just a matter of the absence of external obstacles, that it, therefore, involves no discrimination of motivation and permits in principle no second-guessing of the subject by anyone else. Taylor suggests that this is the essence of the Maginot Line strategy and it is very tempting, as a line of argument. But, claims it is wrong, we cannot defend a view of freedom that does not involve at least some qualitative discrimination as to motive, that is which does not put some restrictions on motivation among the necessary conditions for freedom, and hence which could rule out second-guessing in principle.

Taylor, therefore, argues for a distinction between negative and positive liberty that highlights the importance of social justice. Therefore, if social justice is a major part of equality, then liberty is not a synonym of lack of obstacles, but being able to grasp those obstacles, to discuss and work to overcome them.[14]
The End of History and the Last Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_o ... e_Last_Man
Criticisms
Jacques Derrida
In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), Jacques Derrida criticized Fukuyama as a "come-lately reader" of the philosopher-statesman Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), who "in the tradition of Leo Strauss" (1899–1973), in the 1950s, already had described the society of the U.S. as the "realization of communism"; and said that the public-intellectual celebrity of Fukuyama and the mainstream popularity of his book, The End of History and the Last Man, were symptoms of right-wing, cultural anxiety about ensuring the "Death of Marx". In criticising Fukuyama's celebration of the economic and cultural hegemony of Western liberalism, Derrida said:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the 'end of ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable, singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.[8]
+
interesting thought though.........
Some argue[who?] that Fukuyama presents "American-style" democracy as the only "correct" political system and argues that all countries must inevitably follow this particular system of government.[3][4] However, many Fukuyama scholars claim this is a misreading of his work.[citation needed] Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort. He has said:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.[5]
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ProfX »

I like the EU, I certainly agree this is a good development for human beings, but I find the idea of there being an endpoint to history to really be strange.... easy to proclaim at any point on the human journey, until Arthur C. Clarke's monolith arrives. :D

But anyway, yes, negative liberty tends to be the only kind that modern-day libertarians or 'classical liberals' value, whereas positive liberty tends to be the kind emphasized by who we usually call liberals in the U.S. (like most folks on this board). Negative liberty = we remove all constraints and obstacles on you. Like nasty government regulations. Positive liberty = we also help you obtain the resources to achieve your goals. Like public support for transportation. ... or education. It is true these two kinds of liberty clash with each other, but then in other ways they reinforce each other.

Like the famous speech by FDR on the four freedoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

The first two could be considered negative. Freedom TO speak, and to worship. We remove obstacles like censorship and suppression of religion.
But the second two are positive. Freedom FROM want, and FROM fear. Well, "freedom from" these things require actions like providing resources to people, and disarmament. That requires social or redistributive justice, progressive taxation perhaps, and maybe the idea that we DON'T allow everybody to tote around military grade weaponry.

I agree with Isaiah Berlin we need both for a civilized, functioning society. It's why I don't consider myself a libertarian, but I think we need those two kinds of liberty.

Enjoy your ride. We humans only get a few trips around the sun on our spaceship earth. Make the best of them.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

Interesting stuff, professor.

Positive vs negative liberty may on some level define the current dialectic of our time. It's really an ancient concept, related to the idea that your right to take a swing ends at the other guy's face. Both sides of the current political debate in the US profess to be for liberty. However, back in the real world, the current thesis seems to be that a free society uplifts its most disadvantaged or discriminated-against members, and the antithesis seems to be that freedom means essentially might making right, where if one wants to carry around a military rifle to ensure their safety (or something), or if one wants to marginalize racial or sexual classes that make them personally uncomfortable, then the people's right to do that shall not be abridged.

In my own opinion of the gun rights issue, the synthesis is reasonable gun laws based on an idea of defining the point where self-defense turns into the capability to make everyone less free by putting a society literally under the gun.

This was actually very briefly achieved, following a very traumatic period in which many political leaders were assassinated. At that point, the process of history immediately restarted the dialectic from a different but related thesis. It dovetailed with the evolution of a somewhat more adolescent consciousness, since the mass culture had come to value adolescence. This new thesis was, of course, the infamous "You'll get my automatic rifle [translate "dick substitute" -Z] when you pry my cold dead hands off it." No reason, no justification, just the idea that a man and his rifle are the basic unit of society. Today, with mass shootings at an all time high, we see the reality, which is that humans living in a civilization are not ready for unlimited firepower added to daily social interaction. That inconvenient truth has yet to achieve synthesis level, guaranteeing another messy go-round in "the wheel of history."

> "The end of history"

Speaking personally, I don't see an end to history, at least not until humans become extinct for whatever reason, whether war, environmental pollution, or the natural life span of stars. I'm leaving religion out of it, because the religious concept of an afterlife and/or a Second Coming has shown a total failure to offer any definitive data that would help us organize this life. People look for a Get Out Of History Free Card, but I don't think they will ever find one. The best we can do is to mitigate the problem by finding new ways to live together on what's become a very small planet indeed.

I think what's really bugging us at present is the technology thing. We have let the evolution of technology control our lives. It's a full time job in many fields, mine included, just keeping up. We see these cycles where whole industries come and go in decades instead of centuries.

I have fantasies of just going off, renting a studio in Greenpoint, and painting or noodling around with still and motion pictures until I die. Practically, though, it'll continue to be a daily grind of trying to keep up well enough to offer a well-thought-out product of my talents to the market for such things. The job is ever less about doing whatever talent you were born with, and ever more about just keeping up with the tools. The tools own us. They define our lives. This is getting old, and it's making us crazy.

No one's written the book about this and I am not the one to do it, but I cannot find a Get Out Of History Free Card, and I don't think there is one in the current game.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

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i have fantasies> We got back a little bit ago. The weather is so nice that we're going for a no bug cruise. A night time ride where its just chilly enough to put the bugs in there place and not on my teeth. :D

Paint. Paint.

There's little or nothing we can do about the rest.

In the mean time i hope the conversation holds.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bird »

I appreciate the conversation.

It seems, if I understand correctly, that the question is “why”. Why do humans in one place act in a particular manner as opposed to humans in another place?

Perhaps there is something to toxic theomythology. Man is a social creature yet man creates “institutions” that are inherently unsocial. Man creates mythology to enshrine “why” based upon particular self-belief structures of those self-deemed as creators/“wisemen” which are translated into being religiously or secularly approved morality.

For me the base is tribalism or groupism if you prefer. Social bonds running headlong into infinite “freedom.” The psyche cannot adjust. Josh Hawley’s book about an alleged crisis of masculinity trots out familiar tropes but actually completely misses the point. The system deemed T.I.N.A. in which we, especially in the U.S., live is diametrically opposed to the concept of social creatures. The schism is too great to repair. Perhaps the only thing that can resolve the internal conflict is an external force that poses an existential threat. Climate change may be that threat. Yet if the response is to make slight changes to preserve some philosophy that cannot resolve the question of group vs unlimited alleged “freedom” then the planet will shrug its shoulders and shake itself until humanity is gone. Perhaps by then some small group of people will have found a way to move off planet but even that group will carry the schizophrenic problem with it.
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

Humans evacuating to another planet would still be humans.

They would have to adapt to the new world. They would try to make the new world more like the one they left, even though humans are extremely adaptable. They don't use this ability, because they are more concerned with family, tribe, country, duty, honor, etc. They are wired by human nature to create abstractions, based loosely on territoriality, reproduction, and perpetuation of the species, but still subject to debate.

Maybe the new planet would turn out to have a strange purple slime that would occasionally come out of the ground. Maybe touching it would kill you instantly. There would immediately be a bitter debate on whether strange purple slime should be routinely weaponized or simply kept away from people. There would be problems with people sneaking out and finding the slime, then using it for aggression. There would be a necessity for a Government Slime Corps. They would be trained and allowed to carry slime in various types of relatively safe containers, ready to empty these all over the oncoming enemy on the orders of people chosen to lead them. Devices would be developed that would use various means of remotely dispersing slime.

Slime would fall into the wrong hands, and other people would get scared and start their own little illegal stashes. The result would be an extended and very divisive debate on the right to keep and bear slime. One side would say that slime must be kept out of civilian society. The other side would say that the only cure for bad guys with slime is good guys with slime. There would be a bitter debate on the control of slime, which would sometimes degenerate into slime threats. The bitter and very emotional discussion of all this would become the major content of whatever communication medium had been developed in that decade to replace all the older ones. A few people would develop psychological resentment or self-worth issues, and start randomly sliming birthday parties, grad nights, religious worship, their old schools, etc.. This would serve to make the discussion ever more emotional, and ever less productive.

Once again we would be reminded that people are people.

There is a way out of this mess, albeit a less than perfect one. We all know what it is, but we're too attached to life as competition to do it.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bradman »

It was a helluva weekend. One of the best i've ever had...........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0TOuVVAwQI
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by Motor City »

bradman wrote: Mon May 29, 2023 10:56 pm It was a helluva weekend. One of the best i've ever had...........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0TOuVVAwQI
Interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBn6w5BSxjs
Blaze Foley 3 Songs Live (circa 1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YzbeEVt89Y
Blaze Foley Duct Tape Messiah

The Documentary Film
In Memoriam
Blaze Foley
Dec. 18, 1949 - Feb. 1, 1989

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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by Motor City »

Something to consider on the topic


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdsaJqKtiTY
LAND - Official Trailer

From acclaimed actress Robin Wright comes her directorial debut LAND, the poignant story of one woman’s search for meaning in the vast and harsh American wilderness. Edee (Wright), in the aftermath of an unfathomable event, finds herself unable to stay connected to the world she once knew and in the face of that uncertainty, retreats to the magnificent, but unforgiving, wilds of the Rockies. After a local hunter (Demián Bichir) brings her back from the brink of death, she must find a way to live again.
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bradman
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bradman »

For a week now i've gone round and round with the last few posts. Read them, surf, and then read 'em again.

For some reason i always end up back in familiar territory with Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, the likes of Kant, and the definition of the Social Contract.

It helped when i finally put a timeline to Hegelianism but wasn't really diggin' on it. It seems like to much of a religious aspect to it.

i'd kinda given up hope when i ran across this guy....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls

Which makes me wonder. Are the Young Marxists going to fuck it up again?
I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. [Will Rogers]
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ZoWie
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

Hegel was of his time, when it was still not acceptable to develop mainstream theories of history that were not influenced by European missionary Christianity. Marx and Engels secularized it.

I don't know that many young Marxists. They are around, mostly in fringe communist parties. They are useful when it comes time to take to the streets, since they work hard and don't cause as many rumbles with the cops as anarchists do, but this hasn't really been relevant for some years now.

The cutting edge, when there was a cutting edge, which there isn't at present, was closer to anarcho-syndicalism as adapted to environmentalism. It never really caught on in the US, where people were largely more interested in their cell phones. You see it a lot more in Europe, where its contributions have been mixed at best, and often detrimental to the cause. What kind of asshole throws ink on old master paintings on public display for everyone's edification, just because they think that oil companies are destroying the environment? Let's just say that it's not an effective tactic and let it go at that, before I go off on a tirade.

The main argument IMHO for a cyclic view of history is not so much academic European philosophy as the fact that it fits the narrative that has been recorded, however sporadically, for something like 2500 years now. My basic formulation of the philosophy goes something like, "Look how the same old shit just keeps happening, always for the same dumb reasons, and usually with the maximum number of dead bodies as a result."

Out of that comes a desire to understand why the same old shit keeps happening. In the current go-round, it seems to be manifesting itself as fear of equality vs demand for same. There appears to be no common ground yet for a synthesis, so everyone's time is taken up with identifying enemies and complaining about them in this year's version of the common dialog. All this bad behavior and denigration of the Other scares us all, and we are currently doing what scared people do, namely fight or flight. Everything would be working a lot better were it about how best to cope with maldistribution of wealth and destruction of the natural balance, but it seems to be all about fear of alternative views.

I'm still working on the reason for all this sound and fury, but meanwhile it sure does look cyclic.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
bradman
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by bradman »

Damn it. that's going to take another week of surfing the wave.

i really do appreciate it.

So far, i'm thinking "freedom" needs an upgrade. If we can't improve on the definition of "liberty", well then it should be scrapped for a better word.
I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. [Will Rogers]
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ZoWie
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Re: Mental Health and mass shootings

Post by ZoWie »

It was defined at length in the various writings of the founders in the 18th Century, but of course they were people of their time. They couldn't anticipate later developments in military organization, or the fact that advancing technology would produce weapons with kill zones measured in miles instead of feet.

Right now there's considerable interest in how constitutional law deconstructs in the face of changing times. A sentence that was commonly understood in the 1700s is now filling whole shelves full of legal books with dueling interpretations. It's reached the point where the law as it is administered by certain courts has come into conflict with common sense.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
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