From the Potsdam Agreement: Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.

Vera:

as long as the above has to be 'established' by war and destruction there's not much hope for the human race to make it out of the caves ... seems we're on the way to the next cave the way things are going recently in several war-zones

once we can convince the whole human race to live the above freely in peace and productivity we can start talking about human evolution again ... until then I go back to my hermit's cave and turn my back on the whole mess in disappointment and disgust

Vera, It just isn't workable to wish things better. When people are engaged in the initiation of violence, it can take force to make things better. That isn't a bad thing. The initiation of force is a bad thing, but that we can counter it is a good thing.

When a war is fought not enslave others, or to loot their property, or to wipe them off the earth, but to bring back peace and freedom, that is a good war.  If someone wants to say there is no such thing as a good war, I know what they mean and I agree with the sentiment, but would ask them to look at the alternative.

It makes no sense to talk about 'convincing the whole human race to live peacefully and productively' as the precondition for moving forward. We can look at what is happening now and know that it isn't going to work - that there are many who won't listen. No one is obligated to join in the political fray, and everyone is entitled to simply head off to their cave and be a hermit. But if it that is taken as the best path, then the world will belong to those who will never listen to reason when they are free to use violence.

There is biological evolution, but that isn't really a fast mover in the human realm. With volition and the competition between conflicting ideas, it is the evolution of ideological systems that will drive history. And the most effective way to ensure that the future belongs to who don't need to be convinced that peace and productivity are the only way to live is to ensure that those who support the initiation of violence aren't successful.

These are all constraints of stewing in our own juices, in a kind of limited surface 2D endgame.  

There is only remaining conflict; the option to 'flee' conflict is decreasingly no longer an option to mankind.   Our targeting of stasis on this limited surface planet is leading the species into an cul de sac; an end game.

A today purely imagined but once real enough America on a technological tear to take on the highground of space over the last 50 years would have left all these shitfighters in the dust.   Instead, we are applying the echos of all that technology to inneffectively and remotely make hovels bounce and engage in the mud with dark agers.    The impressed circumstance of this end game leads us to having to make impossible no win choices-- like bombing innocents to save other innocents. 

In that imagined taking on of the highground, modernity would not have the time or inclination to wrestle in the mud with dark agers; in today's world, apparently it is foremost on our List of Things To Do.

It is the forced choices of desperate beings on a sinking lifeboat.    It was mankind's choice, collectively, to cling to the lifeboat and not swim for other shores, no matter how distant.

We did have the ability to make that journey.   We were well on our way.   We collectively chose otherwise.

We collectively chose poorly.

Gradient drives everything, including, the life and well being of a species.

Lack of gradient is death.

There is no escaping that in this universe.   No wishing it away, or wishing it were otherwise.   We either run up hills, or we languish at the bottom.  Standing still is losing ground, for as long as we might.

regards,

Fred

What is my purpose in pointing this out?  It's not like I have a time machine at the ready and can go back and recover from those lost 50 years of bad choices.

No, that cul de sac, the modern end game, is our current reality, and an entire hemisphere full of utopic wishers otherwise is not going to blink away the universe as it is.

So here is where we are.   Stuck in a lifeboat with dark agers, engaged in an existential fight for the best seats in boat about to be swamped.

So get over it and kick these dark age fuckers out of the sinking lifeboat.   They are trying to swamp an already swamped lifeboat.   That is where we are.  Us or them, that is the way they see it, we have no means to disengage from the conflict, so prevail or swim.

regards,

Fred

Thanx Fred you cheered me up :D

I thought I was depressed with my bleak view of the human race, but compared to your life-boat I'm downright optimistic and hopeful with my hermit's cave :D not even war to establish a higher order can top the guts-and-gore of each individual scumbag going for his neighbors throat to capsize the life-boat so he can live just 5 seconds longer, even if he kills everybody in the process :D

alas I have to agree with you: 50 years down the road mankind will make the same stupid mistakes again - maybe on a grander scale then - have to have sth to look forward to ;)

don't get my hopes up: you really think the human race could have extinguished itself by then ;) that might be a reason to stick around just to see that :D

It's not primarily the universe and its rules that makes modernity fragile; it is man himself.    Reality impacts that process.  For example, simple math.   As in, on average, we are average.   And that is the unavoidable source of drag on man's impact on man's constructs.

On average, we are not man at his best.   On average, we are man at his average.    And the Tribe is nothing if not its average.

regards,

Fred   

We didn't invent the concept of 'average', we discovered it.   It was always there in this universe as soon as this universe had any gradient at all.   Without gradient, the concept of average is moot; it is a convergence to sameness without gradient.

Ability, honor, height, weight, intelligence, compassion for others, wealth,  adherence to the Golden Rule ...-nearly- whatever we can imagine, there is a gradient of it to be found in mankind.   There is always a bottom half, a top half, and one of several ways of defining average, median, or mean.   'Mean:'   now there's a word.   

That's the essence of much of modern politics isn't it?  We react politically to where the mean is, but we respond according to where the median is.  Depending on the distribution of whatever, that impacts the politics of the mathematical politics, and my odd use of the word politics four times in this sentence is an entirely consistent abuse of the much abused word politics.   This 'political' tension between inherently divided people about the median -- half on one side, half on the other -- is abusable by politicians to gain power and advantage over the whole seething mass of us.

The definition of freedom is freely up for grabs.   It includes at times the freedom to climb hills unimpeded by other than natural barriers.    It includes the freedom to not be inundated with grappling hooks thrown by others,  using your strength and ability to climb the same hills as a substitute for their own.    It includes the freedom to throw grappling hooks.   It for sure includes the freedom to be pandered to by politicians who will claim to sell you those grappling hooks.   For some, freedom won't be here until the local supermarket stops charging folks for bread.  Freedom for some means, freedom from hills to climb, that effort being for others.    Freedom apparently includes the freedom to believe such things independent of their consequences.

At least part of our pandering politics is based on the theory that there is no migration about the Holy Median.   We are cemented into place on our struggles up and down life's hills, that is a given, and all that is left is for politicians to swoop in from on high and level hills.     But at least one definition of freedom includes the freedom to move both up and down those same hills.

Is there a median definition of freedom?   Because on average, that appears to be the freedom we end up with.   And yet that gradient exists, and so, it drives our politics.   Gradient drives everything.

Crudely put, some of the top half wants the freedom to keep climbing.   Some of the bottom half wants the freedom to not have to climb.    Some in the middle look anxiously back and demand of those abovve them, 'why don't you carry them with you?"   And those they claim they depend on uniquely for these needs provide safety nets and government programs but it does not ameliorate the gradient in the least.  At best it eases the way, but at worst it makes such stations acceptable,  reducing the need to climb hills and increasing the need to ask others for more of that which makes struggling only for more help from above acceptable to them.   A compassionate knife to the spine, that which allows mankind to walk erect.

Safety nets are not enough in the current political wind; the new 'normal' stinking up the breeze coming from the left is 'equality of outcomes.'     The concepts of bottom half and top half is not an imperial concept; it is a mathematical reality in the presence of gradient.   The bottom half is pandered to with the storyline 'you are being left behind by the top half.'   The temporary/transitional condition of being in the bottom half is sold as a deliberate result of the actions of the top half.   This argument creates an endless to infinity treadmill on which the top half is demanded to impel all of mankind forward, forever, the goal never being realizable.   It is a cruelly irrational basis for politics, and yet, it is fully the basis for half of modern politics.   There is no getting off of that equality treadmill until we are all equally at the bottom of every hill.   And then what?  

I suspect that this is why there is a bias of susceptibility to this theory in the young.    We literally start with nothing, and transition through life to climbing up hills.   It takes both time and effort to climb hills, and so, an age bias in the gradients.    Do we not all notice that those who were old were also once young?  And if they are very lucky, those who are young will someday be old?   We notice that more when we are old and it has been proven to us.

And so, the age bias in climbing up hills and asking for life to be the Endless Thirteenth Grade.   Why can't Mom and Dad take care of me forever?

regards,

Fred

if you enjoy that (and I do admit to rare instances of euphoria based on such 'successes'), then go for it - enjoy it all you can ... but can you imagine the freedom, the individuality, you could carve for yourself if you didn't have to dig yourself out of a landslide of crap first? if you didn't have to 'carve' at all, but simply take the gradients to a divergence unimagined thus far? that even leaves comparison to some median or 'mean-ness' (great wordplay - thanx) in the dust?

of course that's not reality - so back to the 'guts-and-gore' of daily life - at least we can have some (sarcastic) fun with it ;)

Thanks, Bill  :-)