I'm talking culturally, not individually. Individuals that deviate from certain things just die off and if they didn't pass on ideas of genes before doing so they're gone almost as quickly as they showed up.

You can't point to any culture where starving to death at an undefined time is valued positively. There are a few "you're old so now go off into the woods and die so that we may prosper" types but none that welcome starvation whenever you happen to run into a shortage of food.

RE:


Programs for Mind control are a Fact. MKultra is a fact. It has gotten more advanced today. We only are just hearing about the mind control programs of the past. No telling what they are doing now.

The obvious crap is television, surveys, hypnotism via television, etc. But those are mild compared to Low frequency EM waves.

Well the two schools of thought of what they're up to know amount to
A: More unsuccessful mind control research that relies on countless people keeping their mouths shut and they do because world governments are very competent and sinister.
B: None of that because they know they're so incompetent that they can barely keep from plunging their countries into ruin and spend most moments of the day resisting the urge to do anything because they think they'll definitely end up making things worse.

From time to time I hear some convincing arguments for option A but more often it's hard to see how it could be anything but B, but maybe that's just successful mind control in action.

Well I kind of agree that they are probably pretty unsuccessful on a large scale, but it gripes me that they do in fact experiment on unsuspecting HUMAN subjects. That is just not right.

I have an X-Husband who was given LSD or some other mind altering drug while he was in Viet Nam and left the service diagnosed as "Paranoid Skisto..." I have also known others besides just him. So I know they did it to our service men. That's just wrong.

as long as there are at least two people on the planet with the means to communicate with each other and inevitably disagree on something, the potential for war, violence will always be present. In the entire history of mankind we have been at war with one another more so than not. limited resources and an increasing population; religious, political, ideological, mechanisms for control are what keeps the irons in the fire.

I think its the aliens who pretend to be "Gods." They are the ones who start the wars.

So you’re not really saying that “cultural viewpoint” = “absolute viewpoint”. You’re simply saying “cultral viewpoint” is what determines value, regardless of what any individual member may think.

But again, I say that “the culture” and “the individual” do not always assign the same value to everything (or anything for that matter.)

So I will state my position in the same terms you stated yours…

You can’t point to any individual in any any culture who always agrees that every value assigned to an item by the culture, is always exactly the same as every value the indivdual himself would assign to that same item.

If you want to base your entire argument on an amourphous thing like "a culture", then you can't expect the argument itself to be anything but amorphous. Which is exactly what it's been as far as I'm concerned.

The purpose of hypnosis is "mind control"? The purpose of taking of psychiatric drugs is "mind control"? The purpose of propaganda is "mind control". Even the purpose of education is "mind control". In fact, any attempt to change or infuence anyone's mind or thoughts in any way is, by definition, an attempt at mind control.

kill more people.

Okay I will.

awesome! i'll help u dismember and bury the bodies in multiple locations. sm:)e

Looking at this on the level of the individual is not useful because with a few billion people you've always got one who thinks Iraq is a made up country and that the moon owes him five dollars.

Sky all you are saying is that everyone has an opinion or point of view. That is pretty much common sense. I don't see it as anything to waste time debating about.

Well to artificially expand the implication he's saying that because everyone has their own opinion it doesn't make sense to say that people can make an evaluation of the total value of things around them so it's not possible for there to be more total after an exchange than there was before it.

As he's arguing against some part of my -"people have to suffer for me to have happiness" is backwards thinking- explanation but I can't quite tell what he is objecting to since he keeps tying this up in "this stuff is subjective and there's no way to take an objective view because we aren't capable of that."

I happen to think the opposite. Any group is made up of individuals. All the problems, goals, viewpoints, etc. of the group are nothing more than problems with the summary agreements between the individual members. So any problem the group has can only be solved by addressing the individual problems of the individual group members. Now if you're only concerned with solving the problems of the majority and are not concerned about the minority then fine, we’re concerned about two different things and I’ll bow out.

If we control all the elements that cause wars then we have no wars .
The same thing for violence . Men and women were not created from day one as warriors or criminals were they ?.

Close, but not quite.

I never said or implied that “it doesn't make sense to say that people can make an evaluation of the total value of things around them”. It makes total sense to say that.

What doesn’t make sense is to say that everyone’s evaluation of that "total" will always be identical.

And as to “it's not possible for there to be more total after an exchange than there was before it ” again that’s not what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that the “total” has at least two different ways of being evaluated, one way for each of the two parties involved. And if there is/are any external observer(s), then there is an additional one for each external observer. So who’s evaluation are we taking about?

Since you appear to be talking about “the exchange as a whole”, then you must be talking as an external observer.

Which basically means that the personal viewpoints of the two parties involved in the exchange have no bearing on the equality of the exchange. And personally, I think that is a completely backward way of looking at exchange.

You're the one saying that preventing war won't help everyone.
(Strictly speaking if Iraq had gone as planned preventing it wouldn't have helped certain members of the government but I'm talking about how we make it undesirable to even them.)

What does that have to do with making people suffer to gain happiness?

You're certainly arguing against me saying the opposite fervently.

Both, or all if there are more than two people/groups involved at a time.

If that works for you. From an external viewpoint it should be easy to see how they both have more than they had before.


The way I said it that you've omitted in this quote is direct enough that there shouldn't be more failures of communication.

"For me to be happier someone else has to suffer." To get more of something someone else must have less of it.
If you disagree with this you've totally derailed this to talk about some kind of undefined value that doesn't have anything to do with this topic.

If you agree with it then you're a nasty person (from an external viewpoint,) but hopefully this stuff I've been talking about will have a bigger impact on your life in the coming years and you'll understand that good things for other people can mean good things for you as well without having to mean an equal amount of bad on some other group, subjective, objective, or however the hell you want to think about it.

Ok, now you seem to be suffering from simple delusion. Nowhere did I ever say anything even remotely like that.

I'm done.

But people won't value that equally so there must be some that would be hindered by preventing wars.
OR
You've had no reason to keep complaining about how much people value things. I'm saying that when we exchange a lot (and as mentioned earlier we only make exchanges when we think they do something for us so we can't say how much but we can say it's positive value change rather than negative,) the benefits from lots of exchanges add up, eventually, to more than you could possibly gain by taking things from your trade partners by force.

It's non-zero sum because they are also gaining OBJECTIVE value from the exchanges and right now all the societies doing much exchange have, in general, the subjective views that they gain a lot by it, which matches up with just about every objective measure you could ever think of.


SO- to have less war we do need to look at those people who do not place as much subjective value on trade. As it turns out the objective value they're gaining from it right now it petty, slim, or nonexistent so it makes sense that they would place little subjective value in world economy style trade. If we help them develop things so that they do start gaining objectively their subjective views will follow, unless we change the view first in order to get them involved in the first place (but trying to spread our ideals to others hasn't worked so well in recent decades so we should probably take a more direct approach in helping them get on their fee tso to speak.)

You obviously need to take a loot at the things people want now before you go giving them things but in my experience studying and otherwise seeing what's going on in other cultures the parts of the world most prone to war want the things global economy trade would give them. There are small groups that don't and in many places you'll have the equivalent of televangelical Christians preaching about how the changes are making things worse than in they were traditionally (and to be honest new evils they weren't used to do pop up but with a little preparation for it they won't be nearly so bad as the stuff they get rid of,) but let's help as many people as we can right now.

War requires some group of rich folk and a good sized group of average ones so just by taking this first step we would make it much less common to have both of those in a country that were willing to go to war. After having made decent progress in helping the easier groups of people in the world to help we could then turn to smaller groups and evaluate how we could best help them. There will be more overall wealth around them with which to work with and working off of what I said earlier about reducing local crime/violence by having inclusive support systems for the downtrodden setting up help for small groups benefits the people who are already doing well by making their neighborhoods safer.

Is this making sense?