Diplomacy

A: Republicans: "All lives matter!"
World: "Cool here are some refugees from Syr..."
Republicans: "lolol not those lives"

B: not all Republicans voted for Trump, let alone support these type of statements. There must be another word that can be subbed here instead of Republicans

A: You are right, no need for the word Republican there.

I disagree. There is some need for the word Republican here, because, of all the Republican elected officials in office who criticized Trump before the election, almost all of them -- not all of them, but almost -- immediately got a brand-new, supportive attitude about him as soon as he won. If you're thinking, "It's like they were sure he was going to lose, and they were just distancing themselves from a loser, instead of sincerely distancing themselves from policies they could never support," Then I agree. It's a lot like that. It's exactly like that.

I'm talking about Republican Senators and Republicans in the House of Representatives. If you look at all Republicans, including former office holders and never-office-holders, it's easier to find criticism of Trump. The thing is, if Trump is to be regarded as unfit to rule, it doesn't matter how many rank-and-file Republicans and Republican governors and mayors want him out -- it's going to take some Republican Senators and Congresspeople in order to impeach, convict and remove him.

That's why it's so important that so many Republicans in the Senate and the House became so much more supportive of Trump as soon as he was elected.

Also, of course, it means that they were either being completely insincere before, or they are completely insincere now: either, before the election, they didn't really think he was unfit to rule, and only said so because they were sure he was going to lose -- or, they really thought he was unfit now, and they still think so, but getting some bills passed and appointments filled is more important to them that the President is -- all of those things they said he was: despicable, unbalanced, dangerous, utterly unfit to lead...

Of course, the diplomatic thing for me to do right now, as a Democrat, would be to forget about that insincerity for now, and practice some insincerity of my own, and be friendly to the Republican Senators and Congresspeople who criticized Trump before the election, because we need them in order to impeach, convict and remove Trump.

So: nevermind what I said before: there's no need for the word "Republican" in that joke. Do I mean that? No, I'm lying, because this is politics. But maybe, if I think it over, I'm actually not lying, because politics is very important, and the main thing right now, the political priority, is dealing with Trump. And maybe those Republican Senators and Congresspeople will seem much more like allies again very soon, when they can't pretend to like Trump anymore. And maybe I'm actually having a little bit more understanding for their shifts in position. I mean, if I want to whip out the l-word, there's the President and his people lying much more egregiously on a daily basis than any Senator or Congressperson of any party does in the average month.

You know how I'm always talking about moral relativism in relation to philosophy and especially in relation to Nietzsche? Well, it also applies to the actual real world, like this. What is truth? Good question, Pilate! Good question!

Deep Thoughts About "Game Of Thrones"

So I've been watching "Game of Thrones" for a couple of years now. I'm well aware that many people who've seen the entire series and were reading the novels it's based on before the series started have been intensively discussing it for a long time. HBO even hosts one of these discussions online. I don't think I'm going to make a big splash with the hardcore fans with this little post. (Although it would be nice, of course, if it turned out to be this post which finally made me rich and famous. It'd be nice if any of the posts on the blog turned out to be the one that did that.)

Before becoming a fan of "Game of Thrones," I hadn't been a big fan of anything in the fantasy genre. It took me a little while to get into the spirit of the show. I resisted it at first for being ahistorical. I felt like telling the whole world that "Game of Thrones" was WRONG because it was obviously set mostly in Western or Central or Eastern Europe apart from Greece and Rome and its culture was non-Christian and literate, and none of those parts of Europe became literate until they became Christian and, and... and then I told myself: none of those areas actually had dragons either, for example, or armies of skeleton zombies. It's not supposed to be historically accurate, it's an alternate world. It's fantasy. Took me a while to get that.

In the last couple of episodes, a couple of remarks about Cersei and Jaime Lannister, America's sweethearts, caught me off-guard: Olenna says to Cersei that she wonders whether Cersei is the most vile person she's ever met; and Brienne tells Jaime that she knows that there is some honor in him, as if it were plain that most of what there was to see of him were evil; and Edmure asks Jaime how he manages to tell himself that he's a decent person, saying that we all need to tell ourselves that we're decent.

Those remarks took me off guard because I hadn't been thinking of Cersei and Jaime as loathesome people. Not at all. Then I thought back a while and remembered that I had loathed Cersei back when she blamed Tyrion for Joffrey's death, and that since then Tyrian had left King's Landing, leaving Cersei less opportunity to behave loathesomely to him, and that Cersei had been through a lot of suffering at the hands of the Sparrows, who just by contrast made her look much more sympathetic (to me at least).

But in the case of Jaime it was harder to explain away my surprise at and resistance to the charge that he was a loathesome person. Jaime had helped Tyrion escape Cersei's plot to have him legally murdered; when Brienne brings up unpleasant things he's done, he responds by saying that he'd rather not talk politics with her, and it's clear that there is some common ground and respect between them, and that he'd prefer to emphasize the positive side of things; when Edmure reminds him of some awful things he's done, Jaime replies: We're at war. I'm sorry if it's inconvenienced you. He recalls that Edmure had had him imprisoned, and Edmure's sister had hit him in the head with a rock, but that he didn't hate her at all. On the contrary, he admired her very much. Her fierce loyalty to her children reminded him of that of his sister. Which means: loyalty to his children, because he and his sister Cersei are secretly a couple. How much of a secret it is, is not clear at this moment with Edmure, just as it is unclear at other times with other people.

Anyway: Jaime does not seem devastated when someone implies that he's a dreadful person, even someone like Brienne, whom he likes very much. Instead, he seems to believe that life is simply too complex and full of plots within plots and causes entangled with other causes, for him to neatly divide people up between the good and the evil, the noble and the loathesome. A woman hit him in the head with a rock while he was in prison, and he greatly admires her. He didn't stop looking at her and considering her side of things when he got hit with that rock. On the other hand, a moment after he expresses that admiration, he cold-bloodedly threatens to do truly terrible things. On the third hand, those cold-blooded threats end up preventing a lot of bloodshed.

Jaime is a moral relativist. If he thinks about good and evil at all, he sees that they are a matter of perspective.

And, perhaps, so do the people who make the show. And maybe that has to do with why I like it so much: a character can do something horrible, and it's not sugarcoated, not justified away in an unrealistic manner; but still, that character can have a good side. The characters are complex, like real people. And not just one or two of the characters, but dozens if not hundreds. You can like a character generally but still be appalled by some of the things he or she does, and you can dislike a character generally and still be moved when bad things happen to him or her.

Except of course for the thoroughly evil and monstrous Ramsay Bolton, who must be destroyed in order to save the world, literally. And the zombies may be in a separate category.

Does Democratic Rule Equal Social Justice?

The question cannot be meaningfully answered as posed in the title of this piece, because "democratic" and "justice" are both subjective terms.

The influence of the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith is still very strong in the US, with its notion that everything will be wonderful and all will live in abundance if only businesses are left alone to do as they see fit. "Laissez-faire" translates pretty much to "leave it alone," and "it" is business. Smith argues that if businessmen were just left alone to do what they do, an "invisible hand" will guide them to act to the benefit of mankind. Making their businesses more economically successful and creating a more just world with less squalor and poverty will be one and the same.



Amazingly, nearly two and a half centuries after Smith began to spread his ideas of the all-beneficent, all-curing invisible hand, people still behave as if it actually made sense, despite massive evidence to the contrary having accumulated in the meantime. In this as in so many things, it's impossible to know how many people really think it makes sense and how many say they do because they see a chance for personal gain. Ronald Reagan's plan of "trickle-down economics" is very Smithian: cut taxes, and cut social programs paid for by those taxes, and poor people will not suffer, because the resulting growth of the economy will benefit them more than the social programs did. In 1980, running against Reagan for President, George Bush Sr referred to the trickle-down idea as "voodoo economics;" later in 1980 he became Reagan's running mate and got on board with the Gipper's economic plan. People naturally assumed that Bush's criticism of trickle-down economics had been sincere, and that his apparent change of heart was a matter of political calculation, but in politics as in economics, who knows who's being sincere when, and for what what reason? Maybe Bush was in favor on trickle-down all along, and only criticized it in order to attack Reagan and try to win the nomination. Who knows.

For advocates of laissez-faire, trickle-down, liberatarian economics, taxes and government regulations concerning business are tyranny, they are un-democratic. For others -- let's call ourselves what we are: socialists. Let's stop being afraid of that word -- unrestricted businesses can be a prime source of tyranny, driving down wages, forming monopolies, fixing prices, profiteering from pollution and wars and other man-made catastrophes.

I'm a socialist, but I'm not asserting that every corporation is unmitigated evil. Mitt Romney was wrong, of course, when he said that corporations are people, but if what he meant to say was that individual people make up, control and operate businesses, and that these individual people can choose different ways of going about their business, and that therefore every business should be regarded as an individual case, just as every individual human being should be, then of course he was right. Still, by and large, over the course of the 2 and a half centuries since Smith, corporations have provided an immense amount of evidence that they should be watched carefully by governments, and regulated when necessary, because if Smith's invisible hand really does exist, if it's unregulated, much of the time it's giving most of us the finger, not looking out for us.

I say that many of us are socialists and should stop running from the term. That's because minimum wages, universal health insurance, regulations against pollution and against monopolies, universal education, universal nutrition and so forth are all socialistic. Like most of the rest of the countries on Earth since the US was founded, the US follows a combination of laissez-faire and socialistic policies, and there's a constant debate and power struggle between the 2 tendencies, which we also call conservative and liberal. Same thing. As long as you keep in mind that in most countries, "liberal" doesn't mean what it means in the US, it means "libertarian." One of many good reasons to call ourselves what we are, socialists, is to help Americans and non-Americans each understand what the other group is talking about.

To return to the title of this post: does democratic rule equal social justice? We will make more sense in our political debates, we will have a greater chance of getting along with each other, if we realize that we don't all define terms like "democratic" and "justice" in anywhere near the same way. And the example of how businesses are treated is just one way in which those terms are defined differently by different people. They're also applied in very different ways to issues of gender, ethnicity, freedom of speech, education, etc, etc. Some would say that I'm a moral relativist and that I'm attempting to thrown open a door to social, political, economic and other kinds of chaos. I would reply that, yes indeed, I am a moral relativist, and that all I'm trying to do is draw attention to the vast levels of chaos which already exist, chaos to which most people's eyes are stubbornly shut. Which is not surprising, it's a scary sight. Still I draw attention to it in the hope that seeing the chaos somewhat more clearly will be a beginning of a chance of reacting to it somewhat more effectively.

Sean Carroll's Analysis Of Morality Agrees With Mine In Some Points -- I Think

Sean Carroll -- Sean M Carroll, that is, the physicist at Cal Tech, not Sean B Carroll, the biologist at the University of Wisconsin -- is a prominent scientist and also an outspoken atheist, which may sound as if he a New Atheist. I'm not sure whether he is, though. He has repeatedly publicly criticized positions of prominent New Atheists, which, as I pointed out in this blog post, New Atheists just don't seem to do, being much too busy attacking religion, The Cause Of All Evil Since The Beginning Of Time in their estimation.

In the case of this article, Carroll finds himself at odds with New Atheist superstar Sam Harris on the subject of morality.

And in agreement with me, I think. I study philosophy in the way which involves learning other languages so as to be able to read Nietzsche, Spinoza and Sartre, and so forth, in German, Latin and French, and so forth; whereas Carroll seems to favor the approach which requires learning English words with 5, 6 or even more syllables, many of which, frankly, I don't understand: "consequentialist." "Deontological." Horrible, horrible words like that. But I think we both agree that Harris, and, for example, John Stuart Mill, completely miss the inevitable subjectivity of morality. Mill and Nietzsche and Sartre and Harris and Carroll and I all would very likely want the same things, I think, in the vast majority of cases of what are commonly called moral choices. But Nietzsche and Sartre and Carroll and I grasp the complexity of the world somewhat better than do Mill and Harris, and the inevitable difficulties involved in "making everything right," and the necessity of putting quotation marks around phrases such as "making everything right," and so forth.

The Following Is All Pretty Simple And Basic

Good and bad are relative. Not just that one and the same action is good for one person and bad for another: not just that these rural families were put onto the electrical grid and the cost of those losing their homes forever because now those homes lie at the bottom of the lake made by the dam which is producing that energy. Not that this electrification was all good or all bad for any one particular person, either: a person displaced by the dam may find it to have been both good and bad for him because he misses his own home, but he thrives in the city to which he has been relocated in a way he doesn't think he ever could have done back home. (Not that he knows for sure.) One thing can be both good and bad for the same person.

To stick with rural families and water: the same unexpected rain which cancels the Sunday baseball game for which Bob had bought tickets and driven his family quite a long way into town, an outing they had been planning for months, and they won't be able to attend the Monday doubleheader with which the team is making up for the rain-out to some its fans, but the same unexpected rain from the same storm might save Bob's parched crops, and allow him to keep his farm and head off the foreclosure, from the sadness of which he had been trying to distract his family with the outing to the city and the Sunday ballgame.

The heedless bicyclist on the sidewalk might knock me down and break my arm. Very bad for me, but it might be that at that moment I had been a very heedless pedestrian, all up in my head, concerned with moral relativity instead of traffic, muttering to myself and gesticulating angrily at theologians who weren't present instead of watching where I was going, and so the heedless cyclist, who knocked me down because I wasn't paying enough attention to jump out of his way, might have been the only thing which prevented me from stepping off of the curb and into the path of a speeding bus which would've killed me. In which case it's very good that the bicyclist knocked me down and broke my arm. Regardless of whether the cyclist or I ever had any idea that the accident which happened had prevented a worse one.

In short, reality is much too complex for concepts such as sin to do it any justice. And that's very plain to see. But wait, saying that it's simple and plain to see may be an oversimplification. It's plain for me to see because I've read authors such a s Nietzsche. Nietzsche made the case for moral relativity in a very sound and convincing manner, and I've been pondering what he wrote for over a decade and a half. During that same decade and a half your attention on the subject of morality may have been held by smug Anglican morons like GK Chesterton and CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and Francis Spufford, whose minds are as soft and sluggish as their bodies. Because of your misfortune in reading material, it may really be as unreasonable for me to be annpyed with you and think you're a moron because you haven't got a clue about moral relativism as it is for you to smirk at me because I don't understand your inside jokes about Episcopalian clergy and church services and coffee klatsches and golf courses.

Except of course that it's not unreasonable of me inasmuch as I'm speaking of principles applicable to the entire human race and to much more than that, while your frame of reference is a lilly-white WASP-y version of a nerd-filled comic-book store. The socially-crippled comic book guys won't admit that they're afraid to cross the street and talk to those women who have worked over there in those stores for years now, much the same way that you deny that you're afraid even to think about the implications of the speculations of centuries' worth of the intellectual world getting on with it without you. I'm afraid to talk to women, too, but I cross the street and do it anyway. I act in spite of feeling exactly the same anxiety as the comic-book guys, just the same way that contemplating a random universe with no supernatural Beings caring for me terrifies me, but I contemplate it anyway, because a world based on Leviticus and Matthew and so forth makes just as little sense as a universe in which Superman and Spiderman and so forth are real.

Against Utilitarianism

It seems obvious to me that morality is always completely subjective. In fact, I think that "morality," as most people still use the term, is not as accurate a term as "moralities."

I think that utilitarianism -- the attempt to provide a rationally-devisible basis for good behavior -- functions primarily, as does religion, as a comforting illusion. A solid guide to correct behavior is posited, referred to as God's will in the one case, and -- what? a utilitarian optimum, in the other? In either case, it is just a matter of discovering what is right.

I, on the other hand, believe that we are all just muddling through, ethically as in so many other ways, and that ethics can never be solved like a mathematical equation. The terms of which the equation is composed are always subjective. Even worse, for utiliatarianism at least, things are always changing. The moral ground under our feet never ceases to shift.

Lest you become too alarmed by my moral relativism, let me say that I believe that I, and the average ultilitarian, and the average believer in God as well, would tend to be very much in agreement most of the time, when judging what we thought was good or bad behavior in given situations, and I think we would also all three tend to agree much of the time that a given situation presents a very difficult choice about what we think should be done. In short, I think that our three distinct individual moralities are probably very similar, although we have arrived at them in three very different ways. Some people hear the phrase "moral relativism" and immediately think of things like the characters in Dostoyevsky who murder people because they are no longer decent Christians, but have become appalling moral relativists with no sense of right and wrong -- and, well, I think Dostoyevsky is overrated.

I think my viewpoint is the most optimistic, the one which allows for the most improvement in behavior. (Although I still insist that said improvement can only be measured subjectively. You may well ask: then how can it really be measured at all? Same way as in the previous paragraph: we would tend to agree or disagree about such things, and we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that there was a more exact way -- or that someone else couldn't define good and bad behavior completely differently and provide his definitions in a utilitarianism with logical frameworks as sound as those in another person's utilitarianism.) I wonder, have you seen the recent film version of Moby Dick with William Hurt as Ahab, Charlie Cox as Ishmael and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck? It's very good. The scenes of whales being attacked, injured and killed are very disturbing to the contemporary viewer. We are made to sense the animals' suffering quite intensely. And the scenes are even more disturbing in that the whalers' joy at a job well done is communicated just as intimately. So does this make the viewer think that the whalers are bad men? In the case of this viewer, not at all. They remained the very serious men grappling with ethical issues which they had been before the hunts and were again afterwards. The hunting scenes merely reminded me of a great change in moralities which has occurred since the mid-19th century as a result of our knowing much more about whales. Those whalers are muddling through as best they can, just as we today are muddling through, and doing things, probably, without a second thought which would very likely appall our great-great-great-grandchildren, who in turn are doing things which (etc etc etc). Excelsior.