General Politics Thread

Yeah, children and old people are naturally the most vulnerable but the intent wasnt to exterminate them for being in that age.

Someday, someday I will see a genuine agecide. Someone would try it eventually.

Also, a bit more general but, what were the best era for both the Right and the Left at international level? Not only the USA, but in other countries.

The closest you’re going to get the actual agicide isn’t going to be mass murder deliberately, it’s going to be one generation deliberately and spitefully causing another to die.

So the closest to a real life agicide will be what baby boomers have done to future generations, particularly when it comes to global warming.

Actully the closest other equivalent will be wars, where old people send younge people off to die in wars the older people started.

There’s plenty of systemic age based discrimination in society, generally by older people against younger people.

But that isn't done with the actual intention to killing all youth. It just happens that the affected are young.

It's basically "Get off my lawn" taken to a nightmarish extreme.

edited 25th Jun '18 7:01:32 PM by M84

It’s done knowing full well that killing the youth is a side effect, while that’s not the explicit goal it’s seen as an example cost for the benefits that they get.

So while it’s not the deliberate mass murder of the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, it does bare similarities to the mass murder via malicious negligent that the British Empire inflicted upon multiple colonised territories (particularly Bengal and Ireland).

"We don't necessarily hate you. We just don't care about you."

Comparing allowed/engineered famines with "just using" a army that happens to be filled for young people feels like really grasping to straws.

Aren't you supposed to be the self-identified Utilitarian?

What that has to do with it? Young people die in wars because they happens to be most of the army, comparing it to a Allowed Famine is non-sensical.

Utilitarianism is all about judging morality based on consequences, being a form of consequentialism. If you were really a Utilitarian, you'd think that old people getting thousands of young people killed in wars and such would be comparable.

But motivations are what matter in defining if something is Mass murder of a specific group, that is why people was divided if the Holodomor counts as a genocide or as Mass Murder (either way, Stalin still look like a asshole, but academical rigor).

Also. Utilitarians still considerate that soldiers dying is better than civilians dying. If you were wondering.

edited 25th Jun '18 7:51:38 PM by KazuyaProta

I had actually gone back to the global warming example there, the war one doesn’t work as well due to the wars not normally being waged for the benefit specifically of the older group, though with some war it does still work.

While the destruction of our planet’s ecosystem has very much been done deliberately so as to benefit older people, with the deaths of younger people being seen as a “meh” issue by many.

edited 25th Jun '18 9:51:15 PM by Silasw

Again. I'm not sure if classifying that counts as a Agecide, mainly because it started when the Evil Boomers© where actually young and most people dying for it are gonna be old people with few health-care (that old people would still be younger than the boomers, but of the same age as them)

I think the problem with calling it agecide is that it's just normal human myopia and selfishness in action, it's not some systematic effort to kill off people of a certain age and many of the people involved didn't actually believe that it was a thing.

Now of course I'm not sympathetic to willful ignorance but I think it's a tad silly to view it as agecide.

edited 26th Jun '18 4:52:56 AM by Fourthspartan56

More of less this

As I said from the start I’m not arguing that it actully is agicide, just that it’s the closest we have to an actual example. As most age based discrimination in current times is done by the elderly against the younge.

@Zephyr: Corporatism (aka mixed economies) is the definitive economic ideology of the political center, (along with the center-left and to a lesser extent center-right). A specific sort of totalitarian and jingoistic implementation of corporatism (as opposed to the right’s capitalism or the left’s socialism) also happens to be the cornerstone of fascist economic ideology.

But this wasn’t supposed to be about fascism or corporatism, either in its fascist or non-fascist forms. it was supposed to be about the limits of the left-right conception of politics, which by its limited nature invariably gives rise to false equivalences such as the claims that fascism was left wing, that Stalinism was right wing, or that ancient civilizations such as Sparta, China, and Egypt were somehow fascist.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Jun 26th 2018 at 5:49:48 AM

Ah I see, my apologies then for misinterpreting your position.

Anyway, moving on to another topic, there are interesting ramifications to consider when it comes to developments in neuroscience that have occurred in the past few years. While we certainly aren't there yet, in a not so distant future it may be possible via a combination of increasingly sophisticated brain imaging acting in concert with the ubiquitous data-collection of the digital era to accurately and reliably measures many parameters of human thought and behavior previously though impossible to reliably access.

This in includes things such as a persons intentions, attempts at deception, along with their preferences and biases. This is of course most relevant to society's criminal justice systems, and raises numerous ethical questions.

While the mere terms conjure images of Dystopian science fiction, when and if such technologies come to fruition, it might be worthwhile to seriously consider the validity of concepts like Thought Crime/Pre-crime, provided of course that the correctional system is prepared to internalize some of the other crucial insights about criminality and "evil" which arise from neuroscience and cognitive science. Namely that there is no such thing as free will, and all human actions—and by extension all forms of anti-social behavior—are a consequence of the physical state of the nervous system, and are best addressed as such, rather than through the archaic emotionally charged lens of "justice".

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Jun 26th 2018 at 12:01:22 PM

That sounds extremely interesting, though frankly I imagine there will be a massively powerful push-back against such notions. Not only does it fly in the face of traditional views of morality and justice (as you mentioned regarding the latter) it does so in an extremely disturbing manner.

Though if/once that can be overcome I imagine such technology could be incredibly useful in maintaining social order and building a better society.

You don't need arrest someone for Thought Crime tho. You can just come and try to convince them to not to do (that's in the case of stuff as murder, most are something done in the moment). Also, no one here is supporting it, so doubt how it is gonna be "against traditional morality".

Of course. It would need a better trained police.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 27th 2018 at 3:59:40 AM

It feels intuitively wrong, but I have to wonder if that's due to contemporary culture more than anything intrinsically wrong with a justice system based on the premise of neurological determinism. People living 200 years ago would certainly have found modern morality disturbing on numerous levels.

Read the Brown political review article (from Brown University); even today the predictive power of data-mining combined with brain imaging is staggering, with Eagleman's et al. achieving a 95% accurate forecast of recidivism rates in their study. You seem to be struggling with the notion that our understanding of human behavior could ever reach a point where such determinations can be made accurately, when in reality we're shockingly close to that point already.

Edited by CaptainCapsase on Jun 27th 2018 at 11:23:02 AM

Nice Strawmen. Obviously we can predict behavior accurately. But Thought Crime is something that for its very nature have to be treated differently than actual crime.

Also. I adore how people act that knowing about Neurological determinism means a BIG STUFF. Physicians know about freaking Particle determinism that means determinism in literally everything.

Determinism don't really override responsability for actions. Is way more complex than Free Will/Nothing is your choice.

A deceptively simple looking question: considering foreign observers can see the numbers as good as anyone else (49/51 splits in decisions, etc.) does that amount to anything in rebuilding burned bridges? ^note If one needs context, I just read the last post in British Politics (as of this keystroke) "I feel like even though the EU is going to suffer with a no-deal Brexit, too, they'll still be quite content to watch us stew afterwards. They'll have to spend time making up for the economic damage on their side, but the damage will most likely be worse (and harder to repair, considering the very large bridge we burned) here. And the worst part is that even though all of this is looking more and more likely by the day, the Brits and the Government are still going to blame the EU for their suffering." Naturally, I'm also thinking of my own country with its current millstone in office.

Second thought: I suppose it can depend on the skill of the diplomats involved. I suppose another way to ask is, are indicators like that likely to amount to anything?

European observers of American politics are waiting for 2018 and 2020 to make decisions regarding the future of trans-Atlantic decisions. Right now the most plausible outcome is a Democrat controlled house and GOP senate, which passes the buck onto 2020 in terms of whether Donald Trump is re-elected, which barring a scandal forcing his resignation rates a bit better than 50:50 in terms of the odds.

If the GOP retains the how by the hair of their chins or if Trump wins re-election, efforts to hedge against the United States will begin implementation in earnest, pushing us further towards a major paradigm shift in international relations.