President Donald Trump

Frankly, I confess to not being able to make a clear distinction between genocide and natural disaster since genocide seems to naturally arise from human tribal warfare.

Human history is filled with examples of genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology

For those in the audience like myself who are unacquainted with the term ....

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action

Frankly, I don't represent myself as a moral authority.

I'm an animal with DNA that dictates my preferences. It is innate to wish that my children survive and continue the chain of life into the future. I struggle for and advocate for that possibility.

It doesn't have anything to do with morality. It doesn't make me either a good person or a bad one. I'm just a zombie acting out the code embedded in me like everyone else.

Am I strange ? Sure. Most zombies are focused on issues which are relevant to their personal survival advantages vis a vis their fellow zombies. They are coded for common hierarchical orientation which confers survival advantage to those further up the hierarchy. Colloquially, we might refer to this kind of competition as "keeping up with the Joneses" or "the rat race".

I'm coded to promote equality. To try and infect my fellow zombies with some principles embedded in secular buddhism in which we let go our clinging to our place in the hierarchy and accept a modest standard of living which allows us to let go of the survival competition between ourselves.

Not because it is good. Not because it is moral or ethical or just or intelligent.

Simply because it is a manifestation of my innate animal desire for my children to have the best chance to survive and continue the cycle of life.

I admire Albert Einstein and his take on determinism in which he effectively embraces the idea that he and everyone else are effectively zombies.

It makes sense to me and my personal zombie orientation.

I'm grateful for his example and the elegance of his self-acceptance as a great role model. Without his example, I might have struggled to figure things out. He did the thinking for me and I just found his ideas worked for me.

All the business with notions of morality and virtue and good vs evil ..... it seems like a whole lot of work and completely unnatural. It just seems like a rationale for whatever social rules contribute to our natural zombie inclination to survive.

How do you feel about Kepler and his take on planetary motion.

For what it's worth, I completely grasp that my programming is in conflict with the programming of others.

I certainly recall the common tribal orientation I was exposed to as a Jewish child in which we were exposed to the idea of being God's chosen people. I dated a Mormon woman whose tribe provided the exact same indoctrination. So I grasp the ubiquitous of the messaging in which we are all exposed to the idea of belonging to a hierarchically superior group in some way.

It basically translates to "we are right and they are wrong".

Since we are biologically wired to be in mom and dad's good graces, we go along and accept the indoctrination. It's so deeply embedded in us that we don't even pause to consider that it's just environmental programming designed to assist in our tribal belonging which aids our survival.

When someone comes along and starts poking at that deeply embedded and unconscious part of ourselves, it's often not welcome. It's a deep part of ourselves which has been accustomed to functioning on autopilot.

We have become comfortable with the story of ourselves as virtuous protagonists in a dramatic world of good v evil. People are generally addicted to their ego version of themselves. Implying that we are all just amoral zombies acting out on survival preferences are fighting words. That they are not superior to those koran toting muslims in the middle east freaks them out because they are foaming at the mouth to rid the world of those who they've been programmed to view as "hierarchically inferior heathen".

I'm adventurous. I'm not ruling out the possibility that we evolve beyond the hierarchical programming. I'm not clinging to the idea that it will happen. I'm just trying to remain open minded and see where it leads.

NN, I think you should consider taking your foot off the gas a little for the next few days because you might end up banned and I don't want that. Think of it as me asking you to help lower the electrical emissions for the good of the planet or something.

Maybe read some R.R. Martin if you haven't. Have you read Fevre Dream? You're also boring as **** right now.

I don't have any feelings about that.

The whole conversation about Earth's orbit and Milankovitch Cycles arose as a means of explaining why we have oscillated between ice ages and warm periods every 100k years for the last million years.

Go to NASA's website and their explanation of Milankovitch Cycles is that the primary reason for the change in the Earth's orbital relationship with the Sun is the gravitational force of Jupiter and Saturn.

I mistakenly took that as the complete explanation for the Earth's departure from a perfectly circular orbit when it only explains the majority of the departure from a circular orbit.

To e'criture's credit, there is a part of the Earth's orbital departure from circularity which has nothing to do with the gravitational force of other planets. So I learned something from him.

The thing I learned from him had nothing whatsoever to do with the explanation of why we have ice ages and warm periods. It was tangential to the discussion, but nonetheless was a more complete explanation of orbital principles. He deserves credit for his academic contribution even though it wasn't relevant to the understanding of the relationship between Earth's orbit and changes in Earth's climate which are relevant to humans.

If he wants to flex his superior understanding of orbital principles, he is certainly entitled to do that.

If he wants to engage in substantive discussion of matters which impact human society, he is welcome to do that as well.

Interesting. How do you feel about restricting your posts to the topic of the thread.

If I get banned, so be it. If I'm boring, so be it.

I'm just being me.

I recognize that this is not a venue where one is entitled to free speech and the lords of the forum can censor / ban me at any time.

I'm amenable to moving in that direction.

But that would involve people like you not trying to embellish a nitty argument about orbital dynamics, wouldn't it ?

I've been binge reading Stephen King and even reading some of his son's work and his contributions to the Sandman Universe. I literally have a Dreaming comic in my lap and I am trying to figure out who the **** Merv Pumpkinhead is and what his role in the Dreaming really is.

But it's cool, when you read it feels like the whole world starts to unweave and dissolve into the nothing.

Our zombie like nature which causes some of us to worship Trump, others to support establishment Democrats and others of us to advocate for alternative policies is indeed related to the topic of this thread.

Yes. I’m amenable to moving in that direction.

I don’t think taking this into metaethics makes much sense. I’m not claiming you need to care about deontological considerations, I’m saying if you do care about those then it seems like there’s something worse in terms of rights/principles/duties between genocide and natural disaster. We wouldn’t say a natural disaster is committing genocide, we would say that maybe the previous generation is responsible for the increased chance of natural disaster. It’s harder to assign direct causal links there than the genocide case.

I find the belief that we are zombies to be dubious. I think ordinary human disagreement is a better explanation for why people have different beliefs.

I also think “everyone is a zombie” is not going to help your president of the world campaign.

Imagine you keep portraying yourself as an extremely knowledgeable and smart person but then you burn it all down by whining and crying about a non existent free speech issue lol. Seems like a general problem with people like you: You cry about free speech but what you actually mean is: 'I don't want other people to have free speech, my opinions should always be unopposed!!!!"

+1

You didn't learn anything from ec if you still think something needed to happen to make Earth's orbit elliptical rather than circular.

You don’t even need to understand calculus to grasp that planetary orbits are highly likely to be elliptical. In newtons famous example of attempting to fire a cannonball into orbit, too much velocity causes the ellipse, and only a specific set of conditions result in a perfectly circular orbit.

Earths orbit has an eccentricity of only about 0.0167, meaning that it’s pretty close to circular.

Am I getting Nutty's message right? If we do nothing then civilization as we know it will end. Therefore, we should end civilization as we know it.

honestly if we're not going to talk about trump in the trump thread can we just talk about orbital mechanics? way more interesting

did you know that in orbit, speeding up can make you later?

it increases the far side of your ellipse. so if you’re in orbit trying to catch up to something, you might need to slow down

The sheer amount of hubris to equate “I don’t understand it” with “nobody can understand it” is pretty mind boggling.

The people orbiting Trump are particularly slow.