Idk. Evil certainly seems to exist, since there's a tendency for good intentions to degrade into destructive things. The process may be incentives, but the pervasive pushing of it feels intentional and malevolent.
Also I like that arabesque behind him. We need more arabesques in interior design.
yeah those screen things are amazing
in the game Dying Light they are everywhere around teh place and the city they are in, is notably named after a place from the book of Genesis, Haran, which also is the name of a person in that part of the bible, someone important, i forget exactly.
definitely a hot/dry climate architectural feature though, doesn't make sense to use them in cold or wet climates so much
Evil is pretty difficult to define. It isn’t always objective and clear. Both sides of the pro life and pro choice argument claim the other side is evil.
Some people say suicide is evil while others argue that it is evil to control what someone does with their life.
A lot of people that do horrible evil things, typically have traumatic experiences as children that fuck them up. So does that mean they were born evil or does someone become evil? A lot of sex offenders were victims as children. Does that mean they don’t deserve help if they become adults and have evil compulsions? It’s easy to sit back and call this good and that evil when there isn’t any context. But most people I meet who do “evil” things like lie, cheat, and steal have pretty fucked up backgrounds that shape their incentives differently.
Context matters for the purpose of judgement, but doing something to another person against their will has to always be defined as evil.
I don't think suicide is evil, but it surely is a product of evil. A person has a right to do it if its their wish - but here's the rub : would they wish it if society didn't tell them to do it? Society is definitely telling people to commit suicide, and confused people push for doctors to assist in it. That's definitely evil. The suicide itself is not, but has to be understood within the context of evil's pushing.
The pro choice people are mostly evil. Yes, I'm reducing a complex human being into a little word - evil. They can choose to advocate for self discipline, but they instead choose to advocate for undisciplined behavior and dealing with the consequences by making women unhealthy. Maybe it's also murder, but it doesn't have to be, for it to be evil - even giving them every possible benefit of the doubt, they still are telling women to destroy their health.
Suicide and abortion have something in common - a lot in common, but one thing at the root of it. Both are causing harm after trying to reduce harm. There's a tendency for good intentions to have the opposite result. This is called enantiodromia, which my profile is currently named after. Evil is not simply destruction - its one polar end of the enantiodromic moment, meaning the momentum of effects opposite to intention.
Of course there's reasons for it, incentives. Recognizing both the incentive structure and the pattern of enantiodromia is necessary to have justice. A system of injustice creates bad incentives - a death penalty incentivizes corrupt people to remove competition by framing them, for example. Same for "legalized" suicide - it was never illegal, but forcing doctors to kill creates an incentive to kill people against their will, and build businesses around the service of killing people, and those businesses will push the narrative that suicide is okay because that gives them business. The good intention becomes devastatingly bad - so bad, that I have to seriously consider that the people originally pushing for it had evil intentions from the start.
This BTW is why democracy inevitably devolves into a death cult.
mobs do mobbing after all
I don’t see where society tells people to commit suicide. Some people are legitimately so miserable that they would rather die. Other people don’t see any purpose in living because they are going to die anyway so why does it matter if you die now or later? These are all valid perspectives and they are minority perspectives. Society can’t tell you to do something that it bans and frowns upon.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. I agree about the incentives shaping people’s actions. But I don’t agree that they were initially formed with evil intent. What is the incentive to create senseless evil? What is the motivation? I think that if keeping people alive were more profitable than letting them die, the actions would change. Would these same people now be considered righteous saints? I don’t think so. I dont see it as an issue of good vs evil. But we can agree to disagree 🤝
Its not necessarily intent. I only take it seriously as a possibility - I'm not asserting that evil was the motivation, only wondering how people could fail to see the terrible consequences of their narratives. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt, that they merely didn't see how their good intentions would have bad effects.
I can't blame someone for skipping all this thinking and going straight to "they're evil" - the effects are obvious enough. Or maybe they've done all the thinking or even gone further, then concluded that the simple word, "evil," actually applies. Maybe such boldness deserves appreciation. Idk.
I think about situations I never experienced and try to imagine what I would do. For example, if a woman got pregnant at 16 and did not want to have that baby then what should she do? Aborting it is “evil” but forcing her to have it is also evil. Forcing someone to have a baby and dedicate their life to raise a child for 18 years requires a police force to ensure she fulfills this unwanted obligation. And the existence of a police force requires taxation, which is theft. So pro life is stopping one “evil” with another. Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil. This is why rothbard was pro choice.
I think that was the age one of my cousins got pregnant. Her daughter is now one of the most wonderful people in the family... If my cousin hadn't been religious, she would have only heard the message from society, which is "its okay to abort, here, take the easy way out," and the wonderful person who is her daughter wouldn't exist. Which messages we promote have real consequences.
'Free will' assumes that people have all information and perspectives. That's a silly assumption! How much are we influenced by the people around us and the example set by TV and movies? Most people are close to 100% programmed by these things. They aren't their own programmers, so their will isn't actually theirs, so 'free will' is mostly a myth. The only way it can be a real thing is if we choose not to go with the flow, or choose to push a flow different from the mainstream flow.
I'm totally against the police being involved in peoples' choices. If you say we can't use police to enforce a ban on abortions, I agree ; however, look at the other side, where you use police to enforce a ban on a kind of speech. In the UK, you can be thrown in jail for offending someone with your speech. If you tell a woman that abortion is murder, and she feels offended, should you be thrown in jail? Clearly the police are the criminals, as are the people pushing for policy. The policy is the real crime.
IMO, the only real resolution is to do away with policy, which means doing away with government. The existence of a machinery of enforcement is too much of a temptation to people and their agendas. I wonder how many contentious social issues would simply disappear if there was no mechanism of violence to fight over using. That's what it really boils down to - who gets to control the dummies in uniform. I used to be one of those dummies... No matter what uniform you wear, you're basically police, if required. What elections really boil down to is : what are the conditions of the application of violence? For a time, one side is in power, and we inch closer to that side's reasons to murder their opponents. Then for a while the other side is in power, and we inch closer to murdering the other side. The capacity for murder is maintained and built up, and elections matter because the other side might finally use it and you're dead. We approach that in gradations - we'll just surveil people for now, no big deal ; then we'll put people in jail for reasons, no big deal, its not killing ; then we'll increase penalties, have many penalties for one crime, and its no big deal, its just justice and those are bad guys - but there is an endpoint, the final climax of the will of the people, where democracy finally transforms into its transcendent state, and there's no more room to add punishments and loss of liberty, and the state commits genocide. That's what elections and policy are really about. Maneuvering for the final showdown, extermination. Issues like abortion and assisted suicide are foreshadowing and foreplay and rehearsals. All issues are.
Interesting perspectives. Idk if I’d agree that the end goal is to exterminate everyone. But ultimately, those in power are trying to make the most of their time in power. I agree that the problem is policy. So in a world without police, how do you stop someone from having an abortion? You can’t. Even with police, people can find ways to still have an abortion. So the best thing to do is try to talk peacefully people out of it. But you will never be able to convince everynr and some babies will always be aborted. It is what it is.
I don't mean it's a conscious goal. Its just the direction we move in, like a collective unconscious will. The best intentions, if enacted in policy, only amount to murder.
Just a extra thought. Policy makers who push to raise the age for abortion legality are incentivised through big pharma lobbies. Stem cell harvesting and using aborted fetal material in medications and vaccines is very profitable. The biggest debate around abortion legality is age of the fetus and when the developing being should be declared a human with civil rights.
