SJW's, Identity politics, Alt-Left and Alt-Right

[Eric the Green]

(09-18-2018, 01:45 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(09-18-2018, 12:41 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: While there was some tribal warfare, war as we know it was invented by the original Sargon of Akkad (I've never heard of the new one).

A relevant image from an anthropology book, War before civilization:



Primitive war certainly was not organized well, and the warriors did not have high-tech weapons. But there was more violent deaths among hunter-gatherers than in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

I don't know about that book, and I might look at this further. But the population of these societies was certainly not on the level that could have resulted in many millions of war deaths.

Quote:

Quote:But we had no business deposing Saddam, as evil as he was. He was on the road to reform.

Show me your sources!

For now, I just remember from the news that he was dismantling his weapons and releasing political prisoners. His Sec. of State Tariq Aziz just asked us to leave them alone. They were no threat, so therefore there was no justification for any invasion.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne...jails.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/0...index.html
https://www.un.org/press/en/2003/sc7664.doc.htm

Quote:

Quote:We had no business "spreading democracy around the world" through war to create a "new American century." Neo-con imperialism caused untold needless deaths and debilitating injuries in Iraq and the USA. ISIS was the direct result of US intervention in Iraq, not of our pullout. We don't need neo-cons at all. We do need a well-conceived foreign policy that is not isolationist, because American power can be a useful check on rogue nations and tyranny, and defending our own freedom from attack is needed. An alliance system is needed, with multi-lateralism and the UN. But rampant preventive intervention and imperialism causes many more problems than it solves. We need the 2T ideal of a world without war; I stand by it.

A world without war is world without tyranny. Democracies almost never go to war with each other.

The UN is a fine thing in theory, but it lost all moral authority by treating dictators and democratic leaders in the same way. Also, it did not prevent Saddam from gassing the Kurds. It didn't prevent Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons. It didn't do anything to make North Korea close its gulags.

What the current 4T could accomplish is to reform the UN to make it more moral, like its Missionary founders wanted.

As David suggests, I think such a mission is beyond the current ability of the UN to establish. I wouldn't mind it, but much more consensus is needed, given the number of tyrannies today. Still, the UN is useful and it's always better to go to war multi-laterally than alone, because then the world is with you and it has greater legal sanction. Greater success by revolutions among the people is needed. The US acting together with others can help them. It didn't quite work in Libya, but it may yet work out there if the people there can make it work. Imposing democracy from outside doesn't work; the people need to rise up. But they always will whenever the astrological cycles come around. They always have, every time, right on time; ever since the Fall of the Bastille. Ours is an age of revolution, and it's powered from the bottom up.

Quote:I don't like it when core millennials live their lives on Inslagram and Faceborg (my nicknames for social media, you may be familiar with what "slag" means in British slang)

No, not familiar.
Right.

Quote:You'd like Stapledon In Last and First Men he described how future humans built gargantuan brains, which turned out to be disasters because they lacked bodies and hearts. They had only intellects and could not experience love, which gives life meaning. Not necessarily sexual love, but also love of all that is beautiful in the universe. The Earth's final civilization in Stapledon's fiction was normal human beings, only with bigger brains, longer lifespans and "Martian units" in brain cells which gave them telepathic abilities. Those units were probably something we'd now call nanobots. Imagine that, a Missionary person foresaw nanobots!

Max Moore is a boomer so I guess he shares Stapledon's life-affirming sentiments. But many millennial extropians probably do want humans to become machines.

If you're curious about extropianism, you can read the manifesto:
http://vency.com/EXtropian3.htm

Political extropianism could be the big thing for the new idealist generation! The cows of liberalism, conservatism and leftism have been already milked.

I don't think those cows have been milked, but who knows. Extropianism will need a lot more PR!