(Pun intended.)
HOWEVER, NO EVIL OUGHT TO BE LEFT UNTURNED TO CONDEMN GENOCIDAL SINKERS, & THEIR INSANE NIHILISM.
***
In brief: Genocidal thinking itself is now promoted in some elite American universities, and widely disseminated by the New York Times. This is the highest imaginable nihilism. To decry it, one needs to foray further than Nietzsche ever did. So I introduce a new instinct, beyond the Will To Power, the Rage To Exterminate. This is an occasion to expose bits and pieces of a new theory of evil. Nihilism, deliberately stupid, is the worst. Indeed, against deliberate stupidity, evil itself contends in vain.
***
Abstract: LOVE HOPES FOR THE BEST, BUT SOMETIMES, ONLY EVIL, AT ITS BEST, CAN MAKE IT SO.
A number of leading American philosophers from superior universities, Singer and Mc Mahan, claim that massive genocide is an acceptable solution. Never mind that there was no drastic problem asking for this draconian solution. The mood is turning ugly in the USA. It is the first time in the history of civilization where salaried philosophers come right out in the favor of genocide. Even Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, never expressed himself that brutally, or clearly (Hitler said of Rosenberg’s work:"Nobody understands that stuff"). However, Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg.
Yes, salaried American professors are promoting genocide, like in killing all the Jews, all the Native Americans, etc. And yes, this is happening in 2010, that final solutions are presented as wise scenarios, all over the New York Times, as they have never been so clearly presented before. Even the worst Nazis did not dare going official with what they truly intended.
Is there, in these calls to genocide in the most prestigious USA media, a hidden message designed to steer the emotional systems of masses towards final solutions? Should we think about Iran? After all, after contemplating genocide, does not simply committing to one more war come as relief?
Are these calls to genocide related to the ethical evolution, or shall I say devolution of the American presidency? Indeed, the American presidency seems to believe that torture is nothing that the USA engage in, and that assassination of citizens without judicial examination constitute civilization.
Promoting genocide gives a nice backdrop to these practical considerations. It’s the cherry on the cake. Promoting it from the New York Times, and considering this definitive break with tradition to its full perspective, would suggest that genocide is the Novo Ordo Saeculorum, the New Order of the Ages (as the Great Seal of the USA has it).
I stoop down to the sinking that these philosophical critters confuse with thinking to address their murderous squeaking. History has proven aplenty that not taking philosophical vermin seriously has terrible consequences. It’s not because viruses are small and stupid, that they are not dangerous.
Unsurprisingly, those psychopathic professors justify their genocidal posturing by the evil they deplore out there, as psychopaths are wont to do. It’s only understandable that devils would vaunt evil, even in the guise of denouncing it. (Thus the demonization of Hussein allowed to invade Iraq.)
I turn their entire logic on its head. First, by condemning the proposed genocides, as the proposed hate crimes they truly are. It’s not because there is evil out there, those flames necessary to warm up the baby’s bath, that baby and bath ought to be thrown out of the window.
Secondly, when looking at history one can notice the following. The main psychological engine of genocide has consisted precisely into distorting evil into various misrepresentations, some caricatural. American kindness to Nazism before World War Two was justified by decrying out some evils which did not exist (France’s "belligerence") while minimizing others (the Nazis’ racist fascism). The reason for misrepresenting evil is obvious. The preferred tactic is to exaggerate a danger, thus activating the fascist reflex among the tribe, allowing the fascist mode of government to rule.
Pure evil is less culprit than is generally supposed. Patriotism and nationalism’s excesses are not grounded in raw evil, but love. In other words, evil and love can turn into each other. Love as patriotism killed about 5% of humankind, just around the Second World War. (Fascism always puts on the mantle of patriotism.)
Although evil is big, and evil is bad, evil is ethologically meant to be as big and bad, as much of a big bad dad, as needs to be.
Hence Humanity, and humanism, understood in full, are far from being just all about love, and the most gentle sea breezes, warming just so the coconut grove lining the shore of hope we can believe in.
Humanity is the most conscious projection of power onto the world. Love without evil is about as relevant as existence without fields (matter, gravitational, electroweak, strong, etc.) Evil is what brings the imagination into the world. (Parents defending their children to death are a prime example.)
Imagine love and evil as two singularizations of the same action Quantum Wave. Love and evil are entangled, and it’s each others’ business to keep the other in check. Quantum random walk between the alternatives are moderated by conscience. Otherwise criminal madness sets in.
Singer and Mc Maham, as some (mis)interpretations of Buddhism, choose the Dark Side, pure evil. They cannot say it is good, so they say evil is bad, so bad that we have to do away with it, and to do away with it, we have to do away with humankind.
The struggles of conscience seem to them as the highest chore, to be avoided at all cost, even that of the reign of pure evil, and its ultimate achievement, total and complete annihilation, as in the Bible’s "apocalypse", and its Muslim translation, in the Qur’an.
Thus people such as Singer and Mc Mahan are fundamentally anti-thinkers. Most of Heidegger’s work is an example of anti-thinking, and Nazism itself, another. It’s typically the sort of thinking cows would express, if only they could write, a succession of turds on the landscape evoking a path to nowhere only dung beetles find allure in.
The rise to prominence of genocide is no accident. As the USA tries to bite more than its increasingly puny self can chew, increasing savage methods are being promoted (such as using huge lies to invade countries, violating the laws of war relative to occupation, torture, assassination instead of judicial examination). Of course Obama has turned into a perpetrator of these, instead of terminating them as one had every right to expect. Philosophy and history will judge this drift of the USA against the flow of civilization. But let’s start with Singer and Mc Mahan.
***
***
GENOCIDAL THINKING IS BACK IN FASHION:
The USA seems to be ethically imploding. The New York Times runs a series, on line, "The Stone", "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless". So here comes Peter Singer, honorable professor, as far as the American establishment is concerned, and recognized philosopher at Princeton.
Verily, Singer is just a parrot of a small part of Nietzsche‘s philosophy, but since Singer is much less intelligent than other, more famous parrots of Nietzsche, he misunderstood Nietzsche completely, and just as much, and in the exact same way, as Adolf Hitler, a famous politician who believed in "One Germany", did (although he was not born there).
Singer wrote “Should This Be the Last Generation?”, June 6, 2010. Indeed why to discriminate against minorities, by just applying genocide to minorities? That would be unfair. Singer proposes to annihilate all. A new moral imperative from the USA: destroying humankind. In its entirety. This is literally genocide, the killing of the genotype. This time, the entire human genome, as it were smallpox. Singer’s “thought experiment”, or rather, suggestive question invites us to compare ourselves to small pox.
As Singer puts it: "very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself… we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence…If there were to be no future generations, there would be nothing for us to feel to guilty about. Is there anything wrong with this scenario?"
Yes, what is wrong is that Hitler is dead, and left no survivor, aside from Singer and his kind. Some of the ethically aware among us, may not feel guilty about slavery, or various holocausts, but we still regret them, although we did not perpetrate them. In Singer’s “scenario”, though, we are called to perpetrate genocide. No less. And then that idiot wonders "Is there anything wrong with this scenario"? Some people call Singer "lucid", because he is "mild mannered". So was Himmler.
Just as Hitler, or Himmler, Singer claims to be acting out of justified compassion. The first two were out to take care of the German people, and German speaking oppressed minorities, whose pain they were trying to reduce. The weasel weasels, but still devours prey.
Singer’s idea is to do to all men, what Hitler tried to do just to the Jews, the Gypsies, a few million Slavs, and various other groups he did not fancy. I guess Hitler was thinking small. To justify himself, Singer clings to the "19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself. "
Ah, if Schopenhauer said so. I guessed he read Buddhism too much, and chased too many young skirts. Schopenhauer spent 20 years making court ordered payments to a woman he had beaten up because she talked too loud on his doorstep.
Schopenhauer knew better than engaging in vicious cycles. As he said with characteristic depth: "Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties… Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." Thus, if Singer’s mentor identifies women to snakes, instead of more edible eels, it is only normal that one would not wish to give importance to the fruits of their entrails. So no more children, says Singer. With "philosophers" like that, who needs the most moronic Nazis? Well, apparently the USA needs Singer, tenured at Princeton, in the "Center for Human Values".
Apparently, for the New York Times, doing away with the human race is "both timely and timeless". Maybe we could start with the enemies of America. So many to kill, so little time.
Singer writes: "Should This be The Last Generation? But, If one wrote "Should This be The Last Generation Of Jews?" judicial authorities in several serious countries would react strongly to this violation of anti-hate crime laws. It is rather curious that the famous Singer suggests to do away with all blacks, all Jews, all Arabs, all Muslims, and all Australians (Singer’s homeland), and all children, and do it in the most prestigious media of the USA, while being revered in Princeton. Is Princeton a neo-Nazi university? And what about the laws protecting children against those who advertize that it would be a good idea to kill them? Because that is what Singer is saying, barely hidden by devious, weaselly verbiage.
***
KILL THEM ALL, THEY WILL SUFFER LESS: THE BIBLE AS PURE GENOCIDE, NO GOD NECESSARY!
Not content with proposing the holocaust of the entire human race, the New York Times found another mass murdering terminator, Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a visiting research collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
In the “The Meat Eaters" Mr. Mc Mahan claims that "It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species… The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.”
So Mc Mahan claims that species are not moral persons, and so have no moral rights. Interesting in a country, the USA, where the superior, so called "supreme", court, recently decided that corporations were moral persons, and had the right to give money for fascist or plutocratic political causes, lest their right of free speech were taken away from them.
This reminds me a bit of the Tea Party candidate with the "fully functional human brain mice”, but in a much more sinister way. Stupidity rules, and takes itself seriously. "Replace by new herbivores"? Why “new”? Apparently Mc Mahan never heard of the hundreds of people killed by elephants in India? Much more than by sharks, leopards, tigers…
Mr. Mc Mahan tries to flatter himself by posing as an "heretic", one who chooses. Implicitly: one who chooses to not follow the dictates of the Biblical God, as ordered by the catholic hierarchy at the beck and call of Roman emperor (self proclaimed as the "13th apostle", no less!).
However, in truth, Mc Mahan, far from being an innovator (as emperor Constantine and Saint Augustine were) is just a vulgar parrot. Indeed what Mc Mahan chooses to do is actually to quote the Bible, to justify his pathetic attempt at reason, when he is just at sea. Here professor Mc Mahan finding justification in the Bible: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” (Isaiah 2: 4 and 11: 6-7)
Mc Mahan takes the Bible at face value: "Isaiah was, of course, looking to the future rather than indulging in whimsical fantasies of doing a better job of Creation, and we should do the same."
"We should do the same": Mc Mahan-Isaiah has spoken of the future. Why? Well, it’s in the Bible. Prophets can’t be wrong, otherwise they would not be called prophets, but they are called thus, so they are right (I just made an imitation of Mc Mahan’s and Singer’s exalted verbiage, which they confuse with ethical thinking). Mc Mahan then anticipates the objection that he is "playing God", by saying that there is no God.
I went into the details of this because it shows how Main Stream Thinking (Princeton professors) make genocide honorable, using, naturally enough, that genocidal book par excellence, the Bible. And this demonstrates what I long claimed; the interest of the Bible’s main mission is as an encouragement to genocide. "God" is just a backdrop, representing the emperor.
The basic argument of Singer and Mc Mahan is that avoiding pain ought to be the ultimate metaprinciple. To avoid pain, one ought to do anything, and genocide comes in handy. (hey, maybe Hitler got something right!) Humankind hurts, therefore humankind ought to die.
Either eliminate humans (Singer), or eliminate carnivores (Mc Mahan; carnivores include man in a fundamental way, as the rise of man was possible only through meat; by the way coyotes are omnivores classified as carnivores…). But, in any case, eliminate. Brandish a final genocidal solutions as what works best.
Those for-profit philosophers are contradicting themselves, though. If they thought that there is so much pain, they ought to swallow enough barbiturates, and put an end to their own suffering. And if their own suffering is not that great, why do they want to kill us all? Instead, by writing monstrosities in the New York Times, they make the rest of humankind anxious, knowing such monsters are teaching the youth in American universities, draped into the mantle of alleged "ethics". The ethics of elimination of what Obama calls "band that perverts religion", no doubt.
See how it all fits together, in the end. Obama has called for the physical elimination of American born citizens, without indictment, and, a fortiori, trial. Obama exhibited the same sort of cool detachment as the suspects above, Singer, and Mc Mahan: we have a problem, problem causes pain, so let’s exterminate problem.
This metaprinciple of extermination advocated by Singer, Mc Mahan, and unfortunately, or so it seems, and more worrisomely, by Obama himself, is nothing new. Extermination, and especially mass extermination has been the last resort of politicians, since ever, and it has been used, since ever. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Roman emperor Justinian used it to massacre millions of Christians he viewed as heretics, thus causing a monster war with the Persian Sassanids, and making the bed of Islam, two generations later. That, in turn caused the destruction of the 2,000 year old Persian civilization, and the near total destruction of the even older Creto-Greco-Roman civilization, saved ultimately by those Germans known as the Franks.
The Nazis had their own philosopher of extermination, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg. Although he was never as clear as Singer and Mc Mahan, but actually completely obscure, Dr. Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg. That Hitler said "Nobody understand that stuff", speaking of Rosenberg’s work, did not save him.
***
PAIN CAME BEFORE CONSCIOUSNES, AND BECAUSE IT WAS GOOD:
Life on Earth is one system, and predation is how it avoids terminal imbalance: pare down the herbivores before they kill the last grass, algae, tree, or phytoplankton. Thus, destroying predation is destroying balance and then life, all of life.
And pain is irrelevant to that splendor that life is. Pain is life’s friend. Faced between average life with average pain, and death, all conscious animals, most of the time, prefer life, with the pain associated to it, to simple, merciful, death. Death is not what life does, what life strives for, it is what life rises above, what it contradicts.
Not always, of course: buffaloes cornered in water by lions have been seen committing suicide rather than waiting in water forever. In general, although conscious animals view life as a value, but they do not avoid their own death at all cost. To protect the young, or family, group, pride, pack, territory or leadership, they often commit for the "ultimate sacrifice".
Thus Schopenhauer’s contention that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured,” does not hold water. How did Schopenhauer compare devouring 10,000 times versus being devoured once? He should have interviewed a lion in the savannah, somewhere. Differently from Schopenhauer, I have exchanged view points, or at least glances and shouts, with wild, free lions, lucidly exerting their free will and caution.
Besides, so as not to destroy the predators predating, by uselessly violent struggles, prey animals are blessed with endorphins which are released profusely when they are put to death, so they do not suffer as much as Schopenhauer thought, the one time they get devoured. And certainly not as much as genocidal "philosophers" deserve to. Natural evil is not a monster, but more like an equilibrium. Stupid monstrosities such as Singer’s and Mc Mahan’s divagations, are a new type of synthetic evil, funded, just as Schopenhauer’s , on a total misrepresentation of nature.
Singer says, among other things, that rats are more aware than humans, because he is not aware of what a rat is, that a rat is made to be eaten, and that, for saying such absurdities, most human cultures would have put him, Singer, on the menu. Right away.
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IT TAKES ONE BAD TO TERMINATE THE OTHER, & THE RAGE TO EXTERMINATE IS NOT ALWAYS WORSE
What else do we need predators for? First, what is a "predator"? (Besides being the name of a flying robot used by the USA to kill people they don’t like, plus whoever happens to be there, far from battlefield?)
"Predator" etymologically comes from plunderer, taking booty. But, when buffaloes, the most dangerous animal in (wild) Africa for humans, charge, it is not because the buffalo wants to acquire booty. Similarly, when France and Britain declared war to Hitler, they had decided to act as two lions when they decide to eliminate a hyena. Not for food. France and Britain did not intend to predate on Germany, just like lions don’t intent to eat hyenas. France and Britain were not out to acquire something material, but to eliminate Nazism, a spiritual movement they found intolerable.
France and Britain wanted to terminate the Nazis, just as buffaloes or elephants, when they charge lions want to terminate the lions. France and Britain acted on an important ethological drive: the RAGE TO EXTERMINATE. Nietzsche brought us the Will To Power, which I salute in passing, but the Rage To Exterminate is still something else.
The rage to exterminate is a great motivator, and it does not reduce to Nietzsche’s Will To Power. The rage to exterminate is what kept, historically speaking, the human-ruled planet in balance.
Buffaloes and elephants attack lions because lions are dangerous to them and their young. Lions and hyenas fight each other for the same reason, plus their competition about natural resources, namely prey. This is also found intra-specifically: lions fight lions to death to access territory and pride control (or even sex and food). Wolves do the same.
But that Will To Exterminate is even more prominent in people, to keep the earth in balance. Human beings are no simple predators, or carnivores. They are not just brainy Tyrannosaurus Rexes, or killer apes.
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HUMAN BEINGS ARE ALSO STEWARDS OF THE EARTH, AND HAVE TO APPLY FEROCITY FOR PURELY ECOLOGICAL REASONS.
The Will To Exterminate is animating Singer, Mc Mahan… and made Obama forget the constitution he used to teach. They don’t know it, because the Will to Exterminate has not be recognized yet as fundamental drive. However, it is even more important than the Will To Power (that wolves, or elephant seals have), or the Will To Survive (that buffaloes and elephants have). Interestingly, chimpanzees seem to some of have it (they are obsessed with eradicating the chimpanzee group in the next valley over).
As the Will To Exterminate blossoms it brings in the darkest most violent neurological structures and hormones, and it tends to persevere ever more diabolically. Thus the Roman sentence "Perseverare Diabolicum" (it is diabolical to persevere… implied: in one’s error). The perseverance is hard to avoid, because once the neurological structures are built, they tend to persist.
And they tend to persist all the more, because eliminating the maximum of human beings is an absolute good for the planetary ecology. By the way, Singer says nothing less, or more, while thinking of himself as very creative, just because he does not know the past. So what he confuses for a deep reasoning is actually the deep ethological instinct of extermination Homo Erectus was completely animated with. People think Singer is a philosopher, but he is just a living fossil from a terrible past.
Perseverance and its tie-up with extermination, is not just philosophy in the clouds: NATO is persevering diabolically in Afghanistan, a decade late, if you count naively, or four decades later, if you count intelligently, precisely because the Will To Exterminate is so powerful. The more the adversary resists, the greater the perseverance, the greater the Will To Exterminate.
It’s not all negative. The Will To Exterminate, humankind’s ultimate weapon, can sometimes also be the weapon of progress, because humankind is all about progress. Progress in all ways. Spiritual, moral, technological, scientific, philosophical, poetical…
Not all humans are about progress, indeed. Some, devoured by the Will To Exterminate, express the ecological necessity of destroying other men as the ultimate value. Sometimes they do this in sneaky ways, say by just promoting stupidity beyond any reason (the adulators of Reagan, such as the desperate Obama, spring to mind).
In the worst cases, such as Nazism, one needs to exterminate the exterminators in turn. The Will To Exterminate can, and must, sometimes be applied to the exterminators themselves (now, of course, in Afghanistan, it is mostly NATO which is exterminating, and has long been exterminating, and the Afghans, defending; as I said, the USA attacked there in the 1970s, and even earlier, if one takes into account the ISI-CIA alchemy of violent interference).
We need terminators to eliminate fools, the Mickey-mouse world falsely installed in their tiny minds, and other dangerous fantasies they want us to drown into. This means that we need, within the most advanced intelligence, the most advanced capability and inclination to inflict pain on the elected target of our ire. Humanity is not about avoiding Evil, but about inflicting it appropriately, never forgetting that ultimate value, progress.
That the worst revolutions, and the worst excesses have made that discourse before, and they were wrong in their circumstances, does not mean that it is wrong always, or that it is not the basic discourse of human evolution. Because it is. In the human species, extermination has driven evolution. That does not mean that all and any extermination is good, but it means that it is always there as an instinct. Certainly nastier, and much more powerful than, say, the sexual instinct.
When France and Britain declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939, the Will To Exterminate, the infliction of pain came to the rescue of the highest moral principles. "Blood, sweat, and tears" were further promised by Churchill, nearly a year later. In the name of a greater good. Even buffaloes understand this. Extermination and infliction of pain and violence can be the best next action to engage into.
But some Princeton professors do not understand this, because they have no interest in understanding this. Their fame comes from having a reputation for intelligence and scholarship, while not understanding what even buffaloes understand. So doing, they become living miracles: so dumb, and yet so smart about being dumb! So good, and yet, so evil at implementing their goodness.
(Singer is not always stupid; he was against G. W. Bush’s Iraq war). As I said, the same objection can be made against some Buddhist formulations, and against pacifism, when it reaches the rarefied heights of complete idiocy, where only the most stupid organisms represent life.
***
LOVE ENTANGLED WITH EVIL IS CALLED HUMANITY:
Economy means house-management. What about human-management? It is curious that we have no word for it, since it is the main obsession of philosophy, politics and, per force, civilization. Would its homonymy be the neologism homonomy? Is that humanity, in full, the entanglement of love, and evil, and conscience?
We saw above that tough, cruel, brutal, violent, inhuman decisions had to be taken to save humanity. Inhuman bombing and strafing by aircraft all over German cities was very effective to destroy Nazism. That was OK, because it was OK, said Satan, to kill children.
Bodies of school children in Braunschweig, Germany, after a bombing raid.
***
Berlin was 33% destroyed by aerial bombing. Cologne: 61% destroyed by aerial bombing. Dortmund: 54% Dresden 59%. Dusseldorf: 64%. Essen 50%. Frankfurt; 53%. Hamburg: 75% destroyed by aerial bombing. Munich: 42% destroyed by aerial bombing. All these cities had more than half a million people. Many of these cities got further destroyed by ground fighting.
Evil motivates us to do what needs to be done, and that love, alone, cannot compel us to do. Think Hiroshima plus Nagasaki: 400,000 killed (maybe), 3 millions saved (or much more).
So if evil, in the abstract, is a tolerable, even indispensable characteristic of our human ethology, if Evil, the inner part of our psychobiology that is mean and cruel, can be OK, what is not OK? Abstract evil allows us, gives us the emotional motivation, to cut through love, or indifference, when they preventing us to do something which, if not done, would ultimately kill love.
Without the help of Satan, of the Dark Side, it would have been impossible for the crews wasting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or those doing aerial bombings all over Germany, to do their duty. It was not just the duty of the West, and democracy, but that of civilization. However, viewed from our heavenly side, it was so disgusting, that only a taste for evil allowed to do it.
Some of the brutes performing their evil deeds may call what drives their conscience "God". And that is why the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is so mean, cruel, jealous, and more than a bit demented in his drive to extermination (see the book of apocalypse in the Bible, and the end of the Qur’an). Otherwise the most arduous ethical tasks would never get done, and this explains that Christo-Islamism is by far the world’s greatest religion (by comparison there are only 500 million Buddhists).
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CHURCHILL AS EVIL INCARNATED, FOR THE BEST:
Churchill’s activities in 1940 are revealing: no mountain was high enough, which he could not climb, but neither was any evil, that he would not muster to his help. Absent Churchill’s evil activities, the going would have been tougher (although a Nazi victory had become unlikely after the enormous losses Hitler’s armed forces sustained during the Battle Of France).
1) Churchill ordered the head of the Royal Air Force to send all his squadrons to France, keeping only the minimum needed for survival of England (his subordinate lied to him, and kept more than needed).
2) Churchill (and de Gaulle) ordered the unification of Great Britain and France (it failed by happenstance).
3) Churchill ordered the preparation of toxic gas and of the poisoning of wells throughout South East England (in contradiction with international treaties that even the Nazis respected).
4) Churchill ordered the destruction of the French fleet (lest it fell in Nazi hands, but also to encourage the others). British Admiral Somerville was asked to carry the orders, and did so, calling it: "…the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us…we all feel thoroughly ashamed…" Instead it showed the world that the British were even nastier than the Nazis (the nastiness was accidental, due to a miscommunication, as both French and British commands had agreed to send the fleet to the USA… but the point is that the nastiness looked good…).
What is not OK, is stupid evil. For example going into Afghanistan to support a corrupt fundamentalist theocracy (that of Karzai), while calling the opposition "a sorry band of men, which PERVERTS RELIGION, " is too dumb for easy analysis. The ways of the stupid are mysterious, and they take great umbrage when they are told they know nothing. But then, at some point, instead of tolerating stupidity, we have to crush the stupid so much that they can’t impose their stupidity anymore. So we have to be mean, at some point, with the insufficiently mentally endowed. We need a touch of evil. Thus it is a greater evil to not have a touch of evil. That is where we lose Buddhists, holier-than-thous, Obama, and those who appease at all cost. Obama needed a touch of evil to get a health care plan that made sense, or for opposing his generals, obsessed as they are, by conquering the next valley over, or for understanding that he banks were rolling him in flour, before putting him to fry.
***
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE GOOD? CERTAINLY NOT PREFERING KILL TO WILL!
SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE WHILE CREATING A LOT OF THE UNIVERSE AROUND US IS WHAT HUMANS DO, AND HAVE DONE, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, EVOLVING INTO IT, AND THROUGH IT. This is the essence of humanity, and thus, it’s ultimate good. I THINK, THEREFORE I CAN (hopefully without messing things up too much). We if I don’t think enough, we can’t do enough.( Obama’s problem.)
How do humans create so much of the universe? By constructing first a putative universe in their brains, inspired by the observed universe. In other words they create first a model in their mind, naturally it’s a flawed model, something which is not, but a real little universe, made of quantum and neurological connections.
They may well use Quantum Logics and quantum Random Walk to do that, because Quantum processes can be in two places at once, making them a tempting mechanism to entangle what is happening and what might have been, or could well be. Quantum potentialities go hand in hand with free will.
The ultimate stupidity is the unconscious. However being conscious means one will experience pain. Let me explain. It is pretty clear that the simplest animals, such as Aplysia, a sea slug with 600 neurons, experience pain. Is that bad? No. Pain actually is good for Aplysia: it keeps it out of harm’s way, and that is why pain was invented, as Aplysia’s ancestors evolved. So, if pain is good for Aplysia, most of the time, why should not it be good for us, some of the time? But then what is left of philosophies which make pain avoidance their metaprinciple, and prefer kill to will?
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NO PAIN, NO BRAIN: CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT PAIN IS ONLY RUIN OF THE BODY (AND THE SOUL).
Although it can suffer, it is not clear that Aplysia is conscious, whatever conscious means. "Conscious" probably means that it can invent stuff. Namely go from a neurology which is purely reactive and descriptive, to one where an imaginary universe embodies itself, the putative universe.
It is clear that Aplysia knows pain, and maybe pain is the only thing it knows, whatever "knowing" means. Thus pain is more fundamental than consciousness, and a fundamental part of knowledge. Of course Buddha did not know what Aplysia was, and, a fortiori, never engaged a dialogue with it, modulo mild electric discharges. But now we have talked that way to Aplysia, and Aplysia responded, and instructed us. There is more wisdom in gaining other animals’ wisdom, than in imposing ours, without having listened to them first.
Hence, when Princeton professors want to exterminate us according to their mission, or more exactly, their front, of simple minded goodness to eliminate the pain, as an overarching principle, they are, de facto, deploring consciousness first.
Conspiracy theorists will notice that Princeton and Rutgers are private, "Ivy League" universities. These elite universities attend to the plutocracy. The plutocracy prefers its victims to be unconscious; thus Singer and Mc Mahan theorize in accordance with their pay masters: by attacking pain, they attack consciousness, and thus the adversaries of plutocracy, and you can bet that they are not even conscious of that.
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ATTACKING PAIN, PER SE, IS TO ATTACK CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF, AND THAT IS UNCONSCIONABLE. LITERALLY.
Ultimately life and consciousness are ultimate goods, the ultimate goods. Pain originated as a way to help life and consciousness, an unavoidable way to them, a protector and parent. Actually a lot of neurobiology may have risen from pain circuitry. But it still plays this role, even in the highest way. When pain comes from the catastrophic rise of CO2, it will be a way to warn against further catastrophe, a way more persuasive to most than intellectual reasoning. Hurting the beast brings up the soul, in those who did not have enough of it to start with.
In any case, viewing the elimination of pain as an ultimate good is, itself, one of the greatest evils, because it is promoting the annihilation of what makes consciousness possible.
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ONE WORLD, ONE MIND; EVIL AS RAW ECOLOGY:
More prosaically we need predators, because predation is a great source of mind and poetry. We evolved with them, through them, in a mental exchange with them. Without predators to worry about, and admire, we are not fully us. A sea full of sharks, a bush, full of lions, concentrate the minds as only the proximity of putative death can. While relativizing and putting back in their tiny places inferior values.
The human species is not just omnivorous as pigs are omnivorous. Pigs love to kill (warthogs have been known to kill lions, with their razor sharp tusks propelled by their mean dispositions). But pigs did not evolve as killing machines. And only because they were killing machines. We did, though. We can’t live on tubers, acorns and mushrooms alone.
The human species evolved through epigenetic pressure towards making meat its source of energy, because meat is a superior source of energy (even the biggest whales use meat as energy; the tiniest meat, under the form of plankton, sure, but still meat). The earliest bones found with human made cut marks stand at 3.4 million years, a 2010 discovery. Those marks are apparently older than Homo Habilis, previously thought as the earliest tool maker. That would mean that meat eating was a solid pressure in human evolution, from way back, and that it mixed with tool, weapon, and knife usage.
Everything indicates that the difference between chimps and the human lineage is all about meat, and thus is at least 6 million years old.
Our energy guzzling brains evolved us, through millions of years, into the stewards of the land, and the lords of good and evil, each defining the other. Do away with evil, and you do away with goodness too.
Mc Mahan, the Rutgers-Princeton master thinker suggests to go kill all the sharks, all the sea turtles, sea serpents, and sea eagles. Kill all the cows, because they eat slugs and insects in their pernicious pseudo herbivorous ways. don’t forget to kill all the sea lions, and all the elephant seals, all the whales (much of plankton is made of small animals). Nazism, generalized, Hitler made coherent with himself: nothing like it, no doubt the present and more of the future of the USA.
We, the predators and carnivores will argue that doing away with stupidity is our first and proximal mission, and everything else is secondary. Such is the deepest nature of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. It is dishonest to claim that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is not a carnivorous predator. It’s our reality, we have to take it into account, if we want to keep on living. Just eating grass will not change this, and the ecological weight on the planet is commensurate with just eating meat (it’s less, but still commensurate, so either feeding mode is a problem of the same nature). Singer’s and Mc Mahan’s solution, to eliminate life itself, is no solution, not anymore that one would have solved Fermat conjecture by deciding to do no more mathematics. Singer and Mc Mahan have a problem, so they suggest to jump off the bridge collectively. It would be more moral to engage in nuclear world war, or , even more moral, to have the USA take over the world. And of course these milder solutions may be why the absurdly criminogenic propositions of Singer and Mc Mahan are given such a big soap box.
Since as predators and carnivores we are used to adversity, and we welcome their hatred, we will not be disheartened, because, to impose our superior morality, no evil will stand in the way, as the Nazis, should they still be around, could testify.
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TOLERATING PLUTOCRACY STARTS BY GETTING USED TO HELL AS THE ONLY CONTEXT AND CONCEPT:
Even the Nazis never advocated publicly, no Nazi ever advocated publicly, the "final solution". But now American professors from the highest ivory towers indulge themselves that way, and the most prestigious media give them amplification. All indicates that that ethics is sinking ever more in the USA. When do we hit bottom? Torture, assassination, advocacy of genocide: why so much impudence against civilization? Well, because civilization is losing. Losing to plutocracy, that is.
The war in Afghanistan plays a devious role in this. The USA, NATO, the West are losing in Afghanistan. They are losing, and it was a deliberate plot. They don’t mind: it is becoming the plan, increasingly so.
Various agents, starting under Carter, consciously, decided to use Afghanistan as a trap for the USSR. What they did not say was that it was a trap also for the USA, the West, democracy. What is boosted? Fascism, and thus plutocracy.
Suppose that Al Qaeda, the godchild of the Pakistani ISI, got its hands on one of the 200 Pakistani thermonuclear bombs, and exploded in a major Western city, say New York. The reaction of the American establishment would be to impose instant fascism, the dream regime for plutocracy. So, logically, plutocracy, through its influence in Washington, should have used American taxpayer money to finance the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. And that is exactly what it did (last under G. W. Bush).
Creating a semantic context where extra-judicial governmental violence, torture, and assassination are tolerated and genocide accepted as a possible, even "ethical" solutions, are part of this general effort. They are both implied threat and distraction. The increasingly satanic ambiance benefits the plutocracy, this nebulous association of the richest and most powerful. Because it makes their activities expected, accepted, acceptable, it makes the flames and heavy clouds of hell, torture, assassination, genocide, into what the respected and supposedly respectable preaches. It’s hell, it’s now, and let nobody say in the future they did not know that it was going on. Because it is. Just look.
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Patrice Ayme
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Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 