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farmer
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I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 4:20 pm

I wrote a book (no, not that other book on the Joel Greenberg and George Santos crowd at seminolescam.com/laundering):

"Angels in the Mirror"

Belief in one's own moral superiority is a key ingredient of criminal insanity.
 
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Paul
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 4:55 pm

Is there an Executive Summary?
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 8:44 pm

Belief in one's own moral superiority is a key ingredient of criminal insanity.
If you don't believe your morality is superior, shouldn't you change your morality? Isn't moral indifference its own sort of sin?
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 8:51 pm

People try be moral, but accept that they are imperfect and fallen. To believe you can become morally superior, is the sin of vanity.

The first day of winter conditioning for the Central Florida football team began with a statement by the strength coach: “Nothing against the returning guys, nothing against that Gasparilla Bowl and beating Florida that’s awesome, but you know what? It’s going to be a hell of a lot better when we’re out here hosting the AAC Championship.” This is a fairly universal practice, where teaching begins with humility, with admitting your shortcomings and need for improvement.

Generally teaching any kind of humility about self, reduces social conflict. It teaches to blame your miseries on your own failings, and try to improve, rather than try to fix things by killing your neighbors and seizing collective control of everything.

Satan, the great deceiver, appeals to vanity, appeals to the idea that you are without flaw. Real learning, in the Christian tradition, begins with the idea that man is flawed, that man is fallen, begins with the truth that man is inherently evil. The Apostle Paul said “all have sinned”. The doctrine of original sin holds that men inherit and are born with a taint of past sins, and need to work against their own sinful nature. “Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person.”

It is the design of Satan to teach children that they were born without sin, or that you can reach a non-sinful state. Or to believe that all problems are the results of the sins of other who are morally inferior.
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 9:07 pm

I don't know what an executive summary is. I once described it as:
I present a thesis that humans have a tribal instinct to directly control outcomes as a conscious collective. That desire, to move decisions to the executive branch,  makes perjury a community act, not rogue. It's just an impulse to control the world around you.

Lying cops are a form of Marxism. Marxism is the collective will of the mob enacted through the executive branch without respect to individual rights, laws, or courts. Lying cops are the same thing, just seizing my innocent friend's life instead of businesses. Using liars to subvert courts and laws with tribal justice, is just another example of the primitive human collectivist impulse to kill your neighbors and seize control of everything. You dislike private property the same way you dislike private jury decisions. You dislike independent judges the same as you dislike independent business owners. Because you are a violent big-government fanatic.
The first two paragraphs of the first chapter, which are inspired by how people think on Twitter, gave me the theme for the book.

Suppose people were given a choice between two justice systems. In one, a person who everyone agreed they disliked, was tortured in the public square or in a stadium once a week. This would be preceded by an entire week of TV personalities talking about what a bad person he was. In the alternative system, people who had actually committed crimes like murder or theft would be secretly tracked down and arrested, in a process that mostly went on out of the public eye. People would choose the first justice system, because they could perceive its positive results and that they had control over it.

There is very little difference between this choice, and the choice between communism and capitalism. People choose a collectivist system where they can vote for a leader who promises on TV to provide them food and medicine, rather than leave it to private businessmen operating out of sight, supervised by "the invisible hand" of the price system. People choose a worse product which they feel they have collective conscious control over - communism - rather than a better product which does not directly involve them in all the choices. In both systems people eat, and both systems respond to the public demand and give people what they want. But one produces a terrible product, which system people nevertheless are drawn to.
When I first got the idea three years ago - inspired by a quote from AG Bill Barr - the book began with what is now chapter four and was called "Tribal Justice". The title more recently was "Return to Nature" which is now the name of Chapter 5. I don't remember why I switched to "Angels in the Mirror". But I decided to make it primarily a book about the law and criminal justice. Whereas "Return to Nature" would be more broad, and include things like sports and movies - leisure - and the general manifestation of human instinct from politics to cuisine.
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 10:09 pm

I think a distinction should be made between "moral superiority" in the sense of believing that you have more moral worth than other people, and "moral superiority" in the sense of believing that your moral values are more informed -- better -- than those of other people.

And there is almost of necessity a cross-over between the two.

But it isn't complete.

For example, I tend to measure moral worth by expected future lifespan, so while I would probably rate my moral values as being more informed than anyone significantly younger than me, if it came down to having to choose which of us should survive, it generally wouldn't be me.

Anyway, isn't "real learning, in the Christian tradition" ultimately an effort to get people to abandon their own sense of right and wrong -- which the bible of course tells us in Genesis 2:22 that we have -- and substitute the Christian church's for it? Isn't it the essence of Marxism to do exactly this, to substitute a singular, central judgement for that of every single independent actor?
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 10th, 2023, 10:38 pm

You are not distinguishing - as many people don't - between instincts and morals, which both give people a sense that some things are distasteful. The point of religion, is to substitute externally transmitted senses of distaste, for genetically transmitted senses of distaste. religion for instinct.

You are also not distinguishing between vantage points, that affect the quality of judgments. A central actor supervised by a collective, cannot tell me whether I eat too much as well as my own doctor or wife.

So the scale of judgment is different - instinct versus religion - and the information which is measured according to the scale is different - the mob dynamics of social quorum, versus concrete local observations.

The instinct is to make central collective judgments as in a tribe. The moral is to allow independent local actors. Those different loci of decision making then apply different judgments in their different spheres.

So the Marxists seek to fulfill instinct as conscious central collective decisions, where one instinct and decision is to process information and act as a single entity. The Protestants seek to pursue universal religious teachings in their own private struggles. Having one religion doesn't mean a single decision actor or information set.
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 12:27 am

Meh.

If you are alone in the universe, is there any such thing as morality? Or does morality only come into existence when our actions impact someone else?

And if it's the latter -- as I believe it is -- then cannot one have moral norms without them being externally imposed? I don't like to see other people -- or even other creatures -- suffer, and I don't think that sentiment was imposed upon me by external forces. Yes, empathy might be instinctual, or genetic, but isn't it the basis of morality?

Are you making a sort of "guilt/shame" distinction, where guilt is what you feel on your own when you have violated some norm that you believe in, but shame is what you feel from the bad reactions of others to something you have done, whether you agree with them about it or not?

So what do you mean by "morality" if you assert that it is externally transmitted?
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 11:46 am

Marsden I remember you to be a person who aggressively lacks empathy for those whom you find distasteful. Morality would be important if you found yourself alone in the world. Some Turkish girls who stayed at my house had a moral to not eat pork or meat that was not well done where you could still see red. If everyone else were wiped out, leaving you without the capability to produce antibiotics and other drugs, you would be well-served by this moral to not eat under-cooked pork. Your instinct might lead you to believe the red center of the pork chop looks tasty, and there is nobody to know you ate it. Some aboriginals in New Mexico had a moral to I think burn a blanket that a mouse ran across. This might have prevented hantavirus or conferred some other benefit, which benefit you do not need to know if you simply reproduce the moral.
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 12:50 pm

Now, Stephen: my empathy is in not liking to see others suffer. And that includes not suffering from having misguided worldviews. ;-)

You are defining "morals" in an unusual way. There is a scientific reason not to eat undercooked meat, or to fear a blanket that a mouse has run across. That you might arrive at the same conclusions about these things through mystic lore rather than through actual understanding is kind of marginal. What does throwing salt over your shoulder when you've spilled it do for you?

Now, mystic lore, in the absence of deeper understanding, delivers benefits: some of it may line up with scientific knowledge; at some point in the past, it likely was informed by some event or series of events. And of course scientific knowledge is its own form of mystic lore; it's basically mystic lore plus skepticism.

Anyway, you seem to be trying to rationalize ... something. Maybe abiding by a moral rule when your natural impulses rebel against it? Maybe rejecting one set of moral rules in favor of another?

So maybe the real question is, how should one go about deciding what moral code to follow?
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 2:13 pm

As I say in my book (page 55), people generally cannot discriminate between morals based on quality. They either blindly imitate them, or substitute their instincts. On page 48 I mention selecting between "trusted sources" to parrot:
That mechanism is trusted sources which have survived inheritance or some other refinement mechanism, such as the Bible, and peer-reviewed scientific articles. There are innumerable layers and variations, such as testing sources by shibboleth, where a person who is found to agree with existing beliefs, or displays a certain flag, becomes a credible source for a new belief.
Is global warming mystic lore? Can the average person who believes he should act on it prove the process?
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 3:33 pm

Global warming is mystic lore that has been subjected to skepticism, and that has -- among reasonable people -- survived it.

We live in a very complicated world, and we rely on systems that we -- as individuals -- don't understand. In some cases we have experience that shows that a system works, and that should be sufficient. I don't know exactly how flush toilets works -- apparently they need some sort of venting in order to allow pressures to work out, and it took a long time for that to be figured out -- but I know that they (generally) work, so I don't think it's unreasonable for me to accept that they work without understanding exactly how or why.

In other cases we don't have experience to demonstrate the reliability of a system. In some of those cases we have a meta-system that maybe we can rely on.

As an example, the recent pandemic. Probably most of the people on this forum can generally understand the epidemiological models for infectious diseases, but I expect that all of us are -- or were -- clueless about the values of the significant variables for COVID-19 to put into those models.

So functional contemporary societies have systems to fill in the blanks on those matters.

As we saw, those systems are not perfect: as with any new occurrence, there was a lot of noise and uncertainty. How easily did the disease spread? HOW did the disease spread? What were its physical effects on people? How deadly was it? Etc.

Among reasonable people, it is understood that these systems are fallible, and that they reasonably lean toward addressing worst case scenarios in the face of uncertainty.

Among not-so-reasonable people, the failings of these systems are indicative of their incompetence or even of their participation in some grand and malicious conspiracy.

I take issue with your parallel treatment of the Bible and peer-reviewed scientific articles. The context of the Bible is that you are not supposed to question it; the context of peer-reviewed scientific articles is that they are supposed to be all about questioning and skepticism. They're really not comparable.
 
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farmer
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 5:10 pm

Do you believe the human genome was intelligently designed by skeptics?
 
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Marsden
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Re: I actually wrote a book on Marxism in local politics and criminal justice

May 11th, 2023, 5:24 pm

No.

Do you?