Hello Neocon, thanks for your considered response
Besides some slight irritation, it seems that you understood I was just trying to prove that you were using faulty logic, and not meaning to judge you as a person. Nevertheless, I could tell that responding to you point for point would lead to just more of the same, as was in your last post to me, which would be discouraging not to say boring. You could probably say I was doing the same thing, but it’s my turn now, so let me try putting it to you this way.
My first contention was that your premise offered no choice at all and was therefore incapable of speaking to the issue to which you presumed to speak. I proved it in my first post and am not about to go through all of that again thank you very much. The fact that in your response to me you started talking about all sorts of choices supplied your own proof of my point, which I claimed was the invalidity of your initial premise, because it didn’t have any choices. I showed, using straight up verbiage that anyone could understand, that by your own logic your usage of the words war and evil was interchangeable and that under these conditions there is no getting away from the logic that your premise suggested that all that is required for war is evil. This is what’s known as a fact, whether you choose to believe so or not. I supplied what is known as proof of foregone conclusion, which is what you get when logic is used backwards. You needn’t ever have written all that in the posts to which I initially responded. You could have just said that Saddam is Evil, therefore War against Iraq is Justified. But you didn’t say that because as your second post showed, this is not what you meant, so why did you say it to begin with. In the light of this I thought it would be tedious to go through each of points in your response to me in the same way.
It may be that as you say you... do not believe that war is the answer in most cases when threatened.
Message 20264627.
which is precisely what I would have thought, so I was surprised that you made out like it was inevitable. Something had gone astray.
In the absence of reason, logic and the facts, emotion is laid bare. Not to say that an emotional response is necessarily bad, in and of itself, but what often happens is that someone with your abilities can easily take ideology and convince others that it is knowledge, which it isn’t, it is speculation at best. The difference between ideology and knowledge, and between good speculation and bad speculation, is the use of logic and reason. For some reason we humans love to speculate, but on the other hand, if you are going to present something using logic, or at the least, make out that this is what you are doing, you’d better get it right, because if you don’t some of us are going to feel tricked and deceived, and I take it to be self evident that us humans apparently don’t like that. So we object and try to set the record straight.
It is normally quite difficult for people to be completely rational despite what they think is desirable, and their self image. I can tell that you are no exception, which is a good thing since it at the least, it reveals some measure of humanity. On my part, to keep apart your argument from your personage is to break things down which is to use the scientific method, which can be a tricky business, and I make the effort for the simple reason that I believe something can be learned from this. It was curious to me why, when you clearly show some inclination towards an interest in these tools, you misused them so badly. This is a dangerous practice that does nothing to assure the intended result, like hammering in a nail with the wrong end of the hammer, so to speak. You apparently didn't notice that I never contradicted your conclusion because I don’t presume to know the ultimate truth of your answers or your conclusion, which should always be a matter of investigation, not preordination, even though you falsely accused me of being one of those kinds of people, what ever that means. Do you honestly lump everyone who disagrees with you into the same boat, which I can tell you will sink, under the weight of such aggregation. I was just pointing out that the way you got to your destination was wrong, if you’re interested in using logic and reason that is.
I don’t say my way or the highway, but I do say that we need to use logic and reason correctly, and doing so involves the proof that we have done this, for as we’ve discovered this is an efficient way of finding the truth. Granted this is not easy because in this case we have to use words, which are already one degree removed from that which they are trying to describe, which is our reality. Not only can we not make any observable objective measurements in regards to our opinions, which is why things like polls can be useful, if limited, but in addition we have to use something which is removed from reality to prove that we have a proof that can be considered true. It is generally accepted that it is upon this basis that we may be able to point to the truth of our opinion. There are specific challenges under these conditions, which is why ultimately the word is still out as to whether we can ultimately ever find this ultimate condition we call absolute truth by using this method. This bothered that other chap Gödel, as Mq keeps pointing out, which is why he came out with his theorem.
Of course I’d be bluffing if I didn’t say I’ve tried my hardest to do this successfully, but as you can see from your posts, under the conditions you posit, all sorts of things can go wrong. This is precisely why we rely on proven principles wrt logic & reason, where what we’ve found, and can agree on I hope, is that this is the method that gets us as close as possible to the truth. Of course in the real world it’s an entirely different story altogether, and even if this scientific method is incapable of producing the absolute ultimate truth, in most cases it gets us close enough, which is why the things that we build in the physical world actually work, which brings us to where we are today.
The only way we can test reason and logic is with reason and logic. The conundrum is how does one do this, how do you know if you’re using these tools properly or not, as opposed to believing that you’re using them properly when you aren’t. Until you come up with a better method, I am going to use reductio ad absurdum because at the moment this is the generally accepted scientific way, because by dissecting things and pulling them apart, we think we will be able to logically tell how things work. Funnily though, what we’ve discovered is that we discover more and more, the smaller things become, despite there being less space for all this extra stuff to fit into. Logically this is impossible, so something is wrong either with reality itself, or with this concept of reality. What do you think is going to change in this instance, reality or your idea of it. Dare I posit that they are one and the same. We’ve realized that so far the smaller we get the more spaciousness there is and you either accept the scientific proof of this or you don’t. This is a fundamental consideration because it is going to affect your concept of reality, which as you indicated before, is something, that eventually will change most peoples minds. With a fixed principle as a starting point, "there IS always evil in the world.", changing one’s own mind is difficult enough, let alone changing someone else’s, which is of another order altogether. To do this normally you’re going to have to prove something as incontrovertibly true, and even if you can, it can still be very difficult to get people to believe you. Hence the endless squabbling, the rare consensus.
Since truth is clearly a big deal to us humans, in order to achieve what we can recognize as a straight record eg wrt notions of morality, we need consensus which we search for in debate and this requires the application of strict forms of logic. This may change in the future, but I doubt it and hope that it doesn’t. If on the other hand, it does, it would mean that we had reached an hitherto undreamed of understanding of life, which is great, moreover, it sort of describes reality as we know it anyway. As we progress down the road of scientific advancements we will come to accept more and more things to be true or not. Things like the world is flat, there is always evil etc.
Culturally, we'd like to believe that we have convinced ourselves that we need proof to show that things are true. It is not always so easy to do this with words, given the operational condition I mentioned above, but nevertheless this remains an insurmountable ideal, which I think you trampled all over in your post about the lesser evil, which is sort of ironic, in a blinding kind of way. But there is good reason for this as you will see later. Since you are not a pacifist and think that there will always be war which you have reassured us all there will always be, (barring your later contradiction) you assert a permanent nature to evil, is this your idea of original sin. By conflating the words war and evil, you ascribe a causative power to the latter, but all you can do is assert this, not prove it. I’m sorry but insistence on something won’t make it true no matter how hard you try. To prove me wrong you have to successfully refute my logic. You admitted to choices in your response to me, which was a direct contradiction of your initial premise, and if those choices exist, it necessarily follows that they exist by way of the factors of true and false, which of necessity negates your initial premise.
You might think this is all too much ado about nothing but it isn’t, because what becomes of solid logic and reason are the things we call principles, and principles are what make us better, it’s actually a very practical thing. The common mistake is to think we have identified one when we haven’t, eg there is always evil in the world or to sometimes think that they don’t count or aren’t there because we cannot see them, this can lead to thinking that they are nothing, and this is the road to ruin, the tragedy of the human condition. They make us better because if properly applied we can employ them to achieve much, while apparently doing nothing. For example we take it as true that 1+1=2 because this can be proven and there is no point in reinventing the wheel so to speak, every time we use a little math. Of course I think this at best a half truth too, because there is always ever, only one, but this works good enough for govt work, despite it’s limitations. To say anything more than this would be OT here so I’ll stop right there on that one.
The meaning behind the existence of our principles is that we’ve been through dilemma before and we’ve worked out the best way we think there is to do something about it. What this means is avoiding foregone conclusions based on emotion and instead using sound principles of reason and logic like the ones upon which this country is built. This is what it means to avoid the lesser evil, so when I see them getting trashed I get upset. The more that people like to think of themselves as rational, the more blind they become to the unobserved. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing there, it just means that they can’t see it. It is in this way that the afflictive effects of this condition are maximized. As a Neocon ideologue, I found this quite intriguing because normally what makes a visionary is the ability to see the unseen, which definitely isn’t rational, and under such conditions I was troubled by your question the question is, is it sometimes necessary to embrace the lesser evil, in order to avoid the greater? because your premise had already answered this in the affirmative, without any investigation. I was concerned by just how much of this stuff you were willing to tolerate, perhaps I was being overcautious but it wasn't quite clear to me under your formulation where the tipping point lay regarding your division of evil, into the lesser or the greater types.
What’s clear is that the nature of the debate over this war is precisely due to the fact that, post 911 many felt that the principles we’d been using no longer applied. Proof of this assertion can be found in Bush’s speech where he tried giving a new definition of imminent threat. I don’t have that link handy, but the result was that this didn’t go down so well and created all sorts of problems for the admin, because the principle he was trying to enunciate, was something that he felt from within, but it had not yet really been properly spelled out using logic and reason. At least not to everyone’s satisfaction. The exact determination of this locus or of the tipping point refered to above can be extraordinarily difficult and while it's often a matter of interpretation, to help us out, we normally use ethics as a guide to the application of our principles. What to do though when these are not fully developed, abandon reason and logic, as you did in your initial argument, is this the best way. These kinds factors taken in combination with Neocon position papers, made him, for lots of the worlds people, sound like the most dangerous cowboy on the planet.
In the final analysis one decides what is right and what isn’t. My contention is that how you get there matters and this involves the proper application of our principles. I suppose it was a bit much of me to ask you to properly apply the principles you so cherish, when one of them, a big one for Neocons, is that on 911 the world changed. Objectively all that this points to is that on 911 we were struck by an external event, perhaps beyond our control, and it is this that points to the twin horns of the dilemma we face, which is the dual nature of reality, whereby consciousness is internal, while action is external. Now as I said earlier in cases like this either the world changes or we do, and normally we do so via our principles which we use to make the world a better place, but unfortunately, wrt to the perceived new threat we are facing, they have not yet been fully developed imo. This is just the way it is, the world waits for no one when it comes to these kinds of things, not even for GWB whose doctrine to this day remains under quite some pressure.
Thus would you be trapped by this deficiency from the start, and your ability to defend yourself would be limited. Making full and proper use of our principles, and our ethics, even when they are well developed is difficult at the best of times, think for example of the apparent flexibility in the application of the injunction not to kill. Terrorists who deny the sanctity of innocent human life, violate what we like to believe is one of our most closely held ethical principles, which is something we do not take lying down, but that doesn’t mean that I’m letting you off the hook if you get my drift. Just how much we can bend em is a matter of dispute but in all cases to maximize their efficacy they have to be properly thought through. The world may not wait for us in this regards, but in your case you've had plenty of time to think about logic and reason and I’m afraid no matter what you say after you say such a thing as "there IS always evil in the world.", in reality, unless you can prove this, it just don’t cut the mustard. In any event since you did contradict this premise by providing some choices in your response to me, at this point I'm ready to let it go.
Actually, fighting the Nazis was not common sense. All manner of alternatives could have been formulated, for example….. We fought the Nazis because it was too awful, and too dangerous, to let them win, but we were not forced to the wall.
Unfortunately, again, your method contradicts your assertion. Fighting something because it is too awful and dangerous to let them win sounds pretty much like you’ve already decided that you’re up against the wall, so I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. In any event in such circumstances it sounds like common sense to me. The evidence of common sense can often, but not always be found in consensus, it’s what provides the basis of our morality, which for good reason, is something that we try to enshrine in our principles. The daily din regarding this war proves the lack of consensus over it’s morality, whereas in the case of WW2 the entire country was mobilized. Just because there were a bunch of alternative policy actions does not mean that common sense did not prevail, such things are not mutually exclusive.
But the larger truth, which you fail to grasp, is that Hitler should have been stopped long before it seemed urgent to fight him…… The problem is that people like you were always there to argue that there were alternatives, and that war was not the answer, thus practically dooming us to a major conflict.
Actually what I fail to grasp is how you can deduce this from anything I’ve written. Sounds like another one of your assumptions to me. I think you are insisting on forcing the Iraq / Hitler connection when the historical consensus so far is that the former was a war of choice, while the latter wasn’t.
I did not say "there will always be evil in the world". I said "there IS always evil in the world." For as long as we have historical knowledge, and for the foreseeable future, that is true.
Firstly I fail to see the difference between my characterization and what you actually said. Again, assertion alone does not make something true. Insistence that the future will be the same as the past might make you feel better, but it does not equal proof, I have a hard time believing that the entire future, which is something I cannot even imagine, is going to be a copy of the past. Evil is an internal condition, and if you doubt this, please bring me some to show me, I’ll more than gladly pay your aifare, and as such is something that can change, whether it does or not is something else. Pointing to the historical knowledge of something, or to external historical events, does not prove the permanent nature of evil and establishes no causative relationship whatsoever.
The point of my locution about the lesser evil is not to subsume all instances of the lesser evil, but to emphasize the one under discussion, and its character as a choice. According to my premise, all that is necessary is a state willing to use military intimidation to get its way. It is the decision of those states that are subject to extortion or occupation to go to war or not, and, even if there is a war, it is the choice of states on the sidelines to enter in, so your point is silly.
I’m afraid on this you are quite wrong. Your premise quite clearly was that "there IS always evil in the world." . Surely you can see that that is all that is required for the emergence of the conditions, lesser and greater evil, that you cite. You cannot say that something exists, but then say that your premise requires something to show up in any particular form to be true, unless this was your premise from the beginning. This is just not logical. You may think it was silly of me to point out your faulty premise, but my entire argument depended on it so I had to. It was at this point in the proceedings that I quit responding to your response on this basis, and took the broader approach above, although I can't really say that I knew where I would end up, as soon as I got started. |
