*femme
*books

Adding video to channels (Books, Femme) - requested by Eklek.

Oppression and resistance, governance and disobedience, can be visualised as one single system and process. This appears to me to be throughout all of nature and physics. As above, so below, all the way down to the very last fundamental godhead of every single thing we measure and experience.

When you think about the question with this in mind, you start to see both government and resistance to government being equally as important to the whole system. This is how the whole thing moves forward.

Every now and again it shifts, reverses poles.

So my response to the extremely thought-provoking question in this clip, would seem to be this...

There never *can* be any artificially created constraint or set of limits as to how far resistance to government will go. It will go as far as it needs to and no farther, in order to remiss a growing influence from its opposite. The primary driving influence is *always* the greater good of the whole.

I strongly feel that Terence McKenna shared this view.

Like her question, don't like the answer.

Too pacifist, improbable and optimistic. Makes me all antsy and wanna kick me a farhad for stress relief.

Moving this video to Trancecoach's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*promote

Invocations (promote) cannot be called by Irishman because Irishman is not privileged - sorry.

>> ^legacy0100:
Makes me all antsy and wanna kick me a farhad for stress relief.

I have destroyed you before.

I agree, I admire her views but alot of her solutions are very idealized. I do agree on what Irishman said though, like nature human societies are based around chaotic systems that ebb and flow between content and dissent.

The strategy of resistence is awareness and organization.

I think it's dangerous and weakening to assume that politics has a simple explanation like "it mimics natural systems - it will always balance out".

Pacifists may be smug & comfortable in their morally pure mythological universe, but are they really sure that they don't need the protection of messy things like war? Or do they assume they can conduct a non-messy war?

>> ^Crake:
Pacifists may be smug & comfortable in their morally pure mythological universe, but are they really sure that they don't need the protection of messy things like war? Or do they assume they can conduct a non-messy war?

If you look at much of the history of war, there have been very few conflicts that were necessary for the continuation of a society. "Wars" have been based on territorial expansion, resource acquisition, national sovereignty, or ethnic/religious trifle, nothing that is truly a threat to any aggressor. Look at the wars of the last century, all could have been prevented or avoided, and were all needless wastes of human life and resources.

Pacifists may be unrealistically idealistic, but many of us can see what pointless wastes the wars of the past have been. They say if you don't learn from history you're doomed to repeat it, but it seems that regardless of the mistakes of the past, the leaders of the present seem incapable of learning from them.

that's a pretty bold statement, that all wars last century could have been prevented... sure, hindsight is nice, and history is messy, but unless you rule the whole world, how do you protect yourself from aggressors that aren't as peaceful as you?

That depends on the "aggressor" and the reasons for their aggression. There are always exacerbating circumstances to war, and it's usually something that could have been solved diplomatically. Say your neighboring country is going to invade to seize your resources. Is there no way for you to share those resources in exchange for something of theirs? Do you even make the effort to try or do you just start chucking bombs and killing people?

Pacifism is about seeking non-violent means to solve conflicts, and accepting the consequences of your unwillingness to fight.

In the war in Iraq, for example, who is the aggressor? The Iraqis? Saddam Hussein? Al-Qaeda? No, it's the USA. We gave Hussein the power to assume his position as leader, knowing he was a colossal uncontrollable prick, and when we get the opportunity, then we make up evidence that he's a threat to the world, invade a sovereign nation, and destroy the lives of countless people. All could have been prevented if we'd just stayed out of Iran in the 50's.

Look at the conflict in Israel, that could have been prevented with diplomatic action in the early 30's, by removing the political/economic reasons that led to Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent invasion of Poland, WWII and the holocaust, that led to the guilt that created Israel and evicted the Palestinians from their rightful land.

Now I'm not a foreign affair/national security/economic policy advisor, I'm just a guy on the internet. There are people far more qualified and educated on the nuances of politics than I am, I would just like to see them make the same connections that I can and do their utmost to avoid the disastrous consequences of their actions.

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Well, wars are fought over the most trivial of subjects. Most wars are fought over territories and how would you avoid them? Someone is always the aggressor.

You may be the best of pacifists, but if your neighbor has a gun and wants your house, then you won't stop him by saying "peace, brother".

" Look at the wars of the last century, all could have been prevented or avoided, and were all needless wastes of human life and resources."

How could they have been avoided? Do tell.

>> ^Crake:
I think it's dangerous and weakening to assume that politics has a simple explanation like "it mimics natural systems - it will always balance out".
Pacifists may be smug & comfortable in their morally pure mythological universe, but are they really sure that they don't need the protection of messy things like war? Or do they assume they can conduct a non-messy war?


Read up on Mahatma Ghandi.

Or maybe you should give Nelson Mandella a call.

Nobody here said that politics mimics natural systems - what I'm saying is that the whole system already IS a natural system, it isn't somehow outside of nature. Of course, 200 years of western culture has tried to persuade most of us that it is.

I don't think that there has been a single smug & comfortable pacifist in all of human history.

And yeah, people need to get themselves over Nietzsche and start thinking for themselves again.

Hollywoodbob, by your logic, India should never have followed Gandhi and seceded from the British Empire, since it lead to the Kashmir tensions and nuclear standoff between Pakistan and India. How far back should you go in your time machine to prevent present or past tensions? the big bang?

I submit that if you have something nice, someone else will want to take it, and just giving it away is not a solution, since it never "balances out" anything, as long as you still have something to take. Either be strong enough to defend your stuff personally, or strong enough to instate rule of law collectively. Or starve.

If that's Nietzsche's opinion as well, maybe I should read up on the fellow.

[edit]

*ahem*

"Fellow ANC member Wolfie Kadesh explains the bombing campaign led by Mandela: "When we knew that we going to start on 16 December 1961, to blast the symbolic places of apartheid, like pass offices, native magistrates courts, and things like that ... post offices and ... the government offices. But we were to do it in such a way that nobody would be hurt, nobody would get killed." Mandela said of Wolfie: "His knowledge of warfare and his first hand battle experience were extremely helpful to me."

Had Britain never colonized India and WWII never happened, those events wouldn't have occurred either. But I'm sure there's other events since India's independence that had a causal relationship to the ones you mentioned. Any number of which being averted would have had an effect on them. I'm not particularly familiar with the events you speak of, but, I can say for certain that they were not inevitable, because nothing is. The road to war is often a long and drawn out one and every option has an alternative that would lead to a different path.

It's all about causality management. If a government would stop and think "if we do this, will it come back to bite us in the ass" most of their meddling would be avoided. We can't change the events of the past, but we can look at their histories and see the choices that led to them, examine the alternatives that would have prevented them and learn what options will best serve to prevent needless loss of life in the future.

Life is far more precious than possessions. No object or place is worth taking a life for.

"The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you."

From Ender's Game, a very good book.

Ultimately, the decisions that we as individuals, as nations, and as a species make on a day to day basis become matters of philosophical quandary. I sleep so that I'm refreshed for waking. I eat so that I'm nourished for activity. I work for money to maintain a lifestyle. I read this book or partake in this sport or befriend this or that individual, group, or nation because it will purportedly increase or better my (or our) position(s). The decision to go to war--to commit violence--is no different. Yet, one's philosophical perspectives on the meaning of such violence (again, as individuals and as nations) will serve under the constructs that constitute that philosophy. In other words, if we live and die for today -- with no heed to the sustainability of future generations -- then we (as other documented societies have done in the past) will outstrip our resources and secure our inevitable collapse. However, if we see life as a collective endeavor, which includes all the countless generations that preceded, and the countless more to come, such that our momentary role is to serve as custodian to one another, the planet, to life itself, then the manner in which we attack one another may take on a very different attitude, as we realize that no war has ever directly increased our "success" in this endeavor--rather, only the meaning that such "wars" have seemed to offer.

If we gain a larger perspective that sees life as ongoing and continuous, not limited by resources but only by our attachment to life working in a particular fashion, then our manner of going to "war" may be very different, indeed.

>> ^HollywoodBob:
Life is far more precious than possessions. No object or place is worth taking a life for.


That's a crock of shit. This is a pie-in-the-sky hippie dream that has no relevance in the real world. In the real world human life has no significant value. We assign it value on where it's born, the color of its skin, the money in its bank and so on. Life in general, in itself, is not very important. Every war ever fought has shown us that.

>> ^gwiz665:
>>^HollywoodBob:
Life is far more precious than possessions. No object or place is worth taking a life for.

That's a crock of shit. This is a pie-in-the-sky hippie dream that has no relevance in the real world. In the real world human life has no significant value. We assign it value on where it's born, the color of its skin, the money in its bank and so on. Life in general, in itself, is not very important. Every war ever fought has shown us that.

My belief that no place or thing is worth killing for, may be idealistic, but that doesn't make me wrong.

That society assigns arbitrary value to life, is just one more flawed facet of society. And that many people embrace the idea that their life (and that of the people in their nation/religion/social group) is worth more than the lives of strangers, is just sad and pathetic.

As long as we as a society continue to believe that the lives of others are of no consequence we'll never grow as a race.

Aw man, I was doing quality trolling and you completely not fed me by being all serious.

Alright, I'll get a bit more serious then. The view that any human life outweighs any patch of land or any "thing" (object, possession) is indeed an idealistic one, and even noble. I would like that human lives were worth more than land, oil or other resources, but apparently the general populace does not. We go to war over the most trivial things, but that is the nature of humans.

Hopefully at some point we will grow out of our childish possessive urges, but it hasn't looked up in the last, say, 100.000 years.

I would argue, and I base this mostly on myself and people I have observed through media and around me, that the value of a given human life is calculated on many factors. It is not a constant, as would be ideal. We value relation (blood), proximity, racial relation (mostly because they remind us more of ourselves), and celebrity (we feel we know them). I'm sure there are other factors, but the point is that these "values" are calculated by people at all times, and after that they are weighed against the value of other things. This is how the patriot act was (and is still accepted), how the present war in Iraq was accepted and basically how every thing we later see as bad are accepted at the time. We make a cost / benefit analysis in our head to weigh the different values.

Any life may be sacred (for lack of a better word) to you, but that certainly does not make it sacred to everyone else. Most people, I think, would gladly sacrifice a million people to save all the rest from death (cancer or what not), but probably not if they themselves, someone very close to them or someone they directly associate with were involved. It's the same reason it's much easier to push a button and kill a hundred men, then to pull a trigger and shoot a guy.

Anyway, thats my cynical, dystopian view of people.

Doesn't self defense overrule the value of another person's life? If that person is trying to kill/rape/enslave you, isn't his life worth less because of his actions? Doesn't this apply to aggressor nations as well? Or should you just lie back and take it, in order to preserve his holy life?

>> ^Crake:
Doesn't self defense overrule the value of another person's life? If that person is trying to kill/rape/enslave you, isn't his life worth less because of his actions? Doesn't this apply to aggressor nations as well? Or should you just lie back and take it, in order to preserve his holy life?


Aggressor nations like the one that invaded Iraq and Afghanistan?

Obviously there's nothing wrong with defending yourself.

The problem is that too often "defense" forces are used for offensive reasons, and in America's case, not even for our country's best interest.

^And when does the use of violence in self-defense become aggression?

We might shout at our child, or even grab him or her violently, if we sought to keep him or her from running out into the middle of a busy intersection. But that doesn't mean that you can then spend the next few hours wailing on him or her by the side of the road.

I think that the question of violence is a difficult one for mere humans (and human collectives at that) to fully reconcile for the reason that it is so ambiguous in its ultimate interpretation. It is not as black and white as some would have us believe ("you're either with us or against us," and the coalition of Good against the Axis of Evil). Rather, context and circumstance seems to play a role and, unfortunately, that requires us to surrender to the only viable option: liberate / awaken ourselves, and do our best to help others to do likewise..

"one person at a time...."

@ Gwiz
Sorry for not feeding the beast, I try hard not to encourage trolling. I come here for a good deal of analytical discourse.

Chalk it up to an over active sense of empathy, but I take the wholesale slaughter of innocent people very seriously, and few things pain me more than seeing the lives lost by pointless wars, that had there been just a little forethought given to the obvious mistakes of the past could have been prevented. I've lost many friends and relatives to war and seen lives destroyed for nothing more than ridiculous grudges. And it just makes me sick when people give the political/economic interests of their country more weight than the lives of people in other nations. The concept of collateral damage lessens us all.

@ Crake
You wouldn't necessarily have to kill someone attacking you? Adrenaline produces a fight or flight response, how about running away.

You mean retaliatory defense? Like when a tiny group of people commit a singular act of terror, and you bomb the hell out of the nation they are based in, killing thousands more innocent people than the attack that prompted said retaliation?

Or do you mean preemptive defense? Like when another nation's leaders talk smack so we bomb the hell out of their innocent citizenry and then invade and occupy that nation?

Or do you mean strategic defense of economic interests? Like sending illicit troops into nations to start a civil war, or deposing democratically elected governments to install puppet dictatorships?

All that does is make your nation look bad, and give plenty of cause for other nations to hate you.

There are many ways to defend your nation that don't require spreading animosity. I think a nation's best means of defense is not agitating other nations, doing good works, helping the less fortunate, and doing their best to make the world better for all. But that's just another bullshit idealistic hippie dream.

Gee this turned into a debate about American foreign policy fairly quickly. i'm talking about self defense though, and America is nigh invulnerable, so it's kinda irrelevant to my point about the concept of war in general. But let's take the example of Pearl Harbor for instance. Japan was convinced that they had to create a peaceful Co-Prosperity Sphere around the pacific, and to them that meant killings thousands (potentially millions) of Americans. I'd say trying to stop them from doing so was a fairly unambiguously proper thing to do.
Now, I know you'll want to turn THAT example around and talk about the nukes and collateral damage again, but you still haven't given any alternative course of action, except Doing Good Works. Tell me, can you tell the difference between a beggar and a mugger? Would you recommend dealing with the two in the same manner?