23 May 2019

On Morality...cont.

 In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.

 One shouldn't forget Marcus Tullius Cicero's 'On Natural Law'. It is an argument that nature itself has an evident preferred moral behavior- such as parents don't eat progeny. I took a course on-line from Yale/Coursera recently on everyday morality. It was interesting to learn what they think in academia. They tend to write-off deontological ethical systems, including that of Immanuel Kant and his idea of the categorical imperative. There is a kind of list of moral values that people select from, and the left tend to value individualism and freedom from harm as about it, while conservatives also include a few others like honor that is lacking in the left. Morality can be defined in several ways, objectively. The easiest way is to regard it as social behavior and norms that people actually have in fact, and then describe that as their moral system, rather than describing some ideal way they might say they have or aspire to. The left also want to find a primitive morality hard-wired in babies. Calvin believed that God communicates basic moral values through conscience, and Christians go farther through the Holy Spirit toward realizing what right behavior is. Here is more on that topic--Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.

Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.
Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.

Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.

While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.

One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.

Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.

Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.

On the Right of the Left to Murder the Unborn on Fake Christian Grounds

In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.

Police Facial Recog Systems May Identify Wanted Criminals- Democrats Hate That

Police use of facial recognition systems are coming under some media and civic attack- such as San Francisco where they were banned, because they potentially can recognize wanted criminals, illegal aliens and fugitives from the law that might otherwise pass unrecognized by a patrolman. The expert systems are an upgrade to fingerprint and I.D. scans that policemen can employ to verify that a possible suspect is or is not already wanted.

With so many tens of millions of undocumented people in the United States the possibility that a policeman will remember the face of some hundreds of thousands of fugitives from the law when encountering one is non-existent. Facial recognition systems are about the only way law enforcement people can sort through the bins of billions of individuals that live in or may travel through the United States each year.


Lawless cities that would prefer to allow terrorists and law breakers of various kinds to drift through the masses incognito are not helping to secure public safety at all in banning face recognition systems.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/san-francisco-bans-police-use-of-face-recognition-technology.html


https://gizmodo.com/we-dont-need-to-pause-police-use-of-face-recognition-we-1834958605

Certainly democrats could abuse the system and track people as ruthlessly as corporations track smart phone locations and with rtf scanners and sales record follow the location of many citizens already. It is the private sector corporate world with the use of face recognition system that has the greatest capacity to abuse the data. While law enforcement agencies use the technology to sustain public safety the corporate world already has the ability to use it for whatever critical collusions or scientific purposes they like without public review. Public review of law enforcement uses of face recognition technology should exist in camera each year to confirm that it isn't being used with nefarious application as might a zodiac killer use the technology to sort out and track his victims, or a very old and rich University study society to learn who it prefers to delete economically.



22 May 2019

Every Citizen Should Care About Public Debt

Classical virtue is relevant even in an era of mass media social conditioning and commercialism. If one learns anything from history it is that societies function best with virtuous citizens. One should work for the ideal state regardless of one’s personal longevity or lack of. Socrates didn’t fear death, he was concerned about acting without virtue and truth. Public debt is not good though many would rationalize it away.
John Calvin, the reformer, acquiesced with the idea of loaning money, yet felt that interest should only be charged on the rich that can afford it. The public cannot well afford vast public debt one-third of which is held by foreign entities. It is the poor that lose out to pay for the debt. The British American Revolutionary war loans and interest thereof were not paid off until nearly the start of the 2oth century. Social spending in England was minimized to pay the debt down, and Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in those poor English circumstances.
Though one cannot accomplish construction or maintenance of the ideal state alone, citizens should work as best they can toward those social ends that best serve the people, the democracy, and the well being of others. Concern for others as well as oneself are not only Christian values they are classical values that pre-exist even Hellenic Greece.
To live a life without pursuit of virtue or truth if one can, is in a sense to fail at life Being a good citizen and human being concerned with working for virtue in even a small way may not get one to heaven, for one needs the Lord to enact that, yet it does make humanity itself a little better, and human works brighter and more honorable.

Send Your Name to Mars on the Mars 2020 Mission

N.A.S.A. is placing anyone's name that cares to on a chip aboard the Mars 2020 mission. The little Rover will see the sights and report.

This is the website... https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/mars2020

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Isn't It Time to Rethink Shoes

Isn't it time to rethink shoe manufacture in the United States? American shoes for ordinary people have been made in China, Thailand or elsewhere far too much since the end of the Sally Fields-Paul Newman era. Bring shoe manufacture back to the United States with three-part designer print on demand shoes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48360373

Every shoe-store and Wal-mart could have print on demand three part shoes made for the customer live. It would end the need to send so many jobs overseas.

Store shoe production could have pre-fabbed mesh with spray on materials. There could be air-filled inner soles. Modular pieces could snap or lock together, perhaps be removable-even transformative. Innumerable ways and menus for custom and standard models could be selected by a customer.


For Democrats It's 'How Do I Hate Thee Trump, Let Me Count the Ways'

The title holder for that dubious honor must be Abraham Lincoln. He might have been qualitatively hated as much as quantitatively. After that maybe people thought rudely of Herbert Hover. President Trump is hated by Democrats, yet that is very partisan. They hated Richard Nixon equally well. George W. Bush was badly thought of by many Democrats and even some Republicans.
People even hated Ronald Reagan. Riding a Greyhound bus from Reno circa 1981 I remember a guy with a Bohemian accent saying aloud the first ten miles- “Ronald Reagan, Donald Duck, Ronald Reagan, Donald Duck…”

Scientists Trained an AI to Design 17,000 Viruses

Because biologists are among the most common scientists and AIs like large language models can be trained to design viruses the potential fo...