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So... Arnold

Started by GDS_Starfury, March 08, 2023, 07:22:42 PM

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Sir Slash

That's because the Spartans didn't post here. Big mistake by them.
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Ubercat

Quote from: Pete Dero on March 21, 2023, 03:38:53 AM
Quote from: Ubercat on March 20, 2023, 04:44:17 PMI agree but would go further. I think the problem is ideology. Blindly followed beliefs enable all sorts of atrocities. Religions, which historically have caused the most problems, are merely ideology with a supernatural layer in my view. The 20th century with the rise of Communism and Fascism has demonstrated that you don't need to believe in any gods to be an asshole.

German fascists used religion during WW2.
The Wehrmacht soldiers wore the slogan 'Gott mit uns' on their belt buckle.
People around Europe were called upon (often by priests) to go and fight with the Germans against the godless communists.

In today's Russia religion is used once again to fight the demonic nations in Europe.

Do you think that Communist ideology is any less poisonous than religion based ideologies? Fascists can only dream of matching their death count.
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JasonPratt

"Ideology" per se isn't the problem -- everyone has an ideology to some degree, as an overarching worldview, which is a belief system that has subordinate belief systems (not always coherent with the worldview of course, or with each other.)

It's like saying "belief" in itself is "the problem", with "religion" merely being "belief" (therefore problematic) with a supernatural layer (although not all religions involve a supernatural reality); and so Communist "belief", because it's a belief, is no less poisonous than religion-based "beliefs". (Though, perhaps incidentally, the original communists in the 19th century had some seriously and overtly Satanic religious beliefs. Marx represented a shift away from that but still had one foot firmly planted, up to the groin, in a type of Satanism.)


Now, if the problem is qualified as "blindly following" a "belief" set (or an "ideology"), compared and contrasted to not blindly following a belief (or not following a belief?), then "blindly following" could be unpacked for clarity. But if all beliefs are to be regarded (and rejected?) as equally "poisonous", then I don't know how it can matter whether they are followed blindly or not-blindly. Whereas, if some beliefs are more "poisonous" than others (whatever that means), then clearly not-blindly following a poisonous belief would be just as poisonous in effect, and maybe moreso, than blindly (at least incompetently?) following the poisonous belief. (Thus, even at a more secular level, one might quip that the facisti, like Hitler and Mussolini, failed at matching the death count of the ComIntern, by proportion of being relatively incompetent socialists! -- much as Stalin's team insisted they were!)

If, however, there are better and worse beliefs (and thus better and worse ideologies, world-views, philosophies, religions, etc.), then blindly following a better belief could easily be better than blindly (or even competently instead) following a worse belief. But blindly following even a better belief could mean incompetently following a better belief and so producing worse results, perhaps by being contradictory to the belief-set's principles (among other potential problems). Or, someone could have a good, healthy, or at least non-poisonous ideology, and be not-blind in following it -- and yet choose not to follow it sometimes in favor of a worse ideology when that seems to achieve or work toward a want the person has chosen to fulfill! After all, if there can be better and worse ideologies, then refusing to follow a good ideology and even to act against a good ideology, is at least likely to have bad results!


So in the case of Arnold's video-appeal, is he or is he not endorsing a belief (and thus an ideology) to be followed? Yes, he is, even if the contents are perhaps miniscule. If "the problem" is "ideology" then Arnold's promoted ideology must be equally problematic and his attempt at promoting that ideology should be rejected along with every other ideology in order to avoid "the problem". But this is also an ideological position and so at the very first step it self-contradicts itself as poisonous before it ever gets to even identifying (much moreso rejecting) any other ideology (like Arnold's for example) as poisonous!

To avoid self-contradiction, then: if "the problem" is bad ideology instead of good ideology (and if we agree that this is itself a good ideology to be accepted instead of a bad ideology!), then is Arnold's ideology in the video bad or good? -- and why, and to what extent? (Depending on its complexity it might be partly bad, partly good, in different ways and degrees.) Also, does Arnold show evidence of blindly following the ideology he is promoting, or not?

All this would logically require establishing first what counts as good and bad (healthy and poisonous?), thus relatively better and worse, and why. Which would itself be establishing and developing a moral or at least a pragmatic ideology!
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JasonPratt

#78
Put more shortly: even to judge whether Arnold's promoted ideology in that video, such as it is (and whatever it can be discovered to be), is good or bad, more or less (or poisonous or healthy, which can be somewhat different from moral categories), one must already have an ideology to work with and to work from!

Do all of us share the same ideologies? Obviously not, as total sets of beliefs. Are all ideologies, and thus all our own ideologies, only poisonous? That position would itself be only poisonous and so self-contradictive. So among us all, which ideologies are better or worse, and why?

In any case -- in every case! -- each of us will be considering the ideology promoted in the video by Arnold, in light of each ideology of ours, whatever that is.

And if any of us doesn't know what his ideology is, why he has it, what it means, what it logically implies, etc. -- then such a person can only, at best, be blindly following his ideology (such as it is, whatever it is).

Which might also include Arnold: is he blindly following an ideological position? If so, or if not, how can we tell by analysis?
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

Gusington

Yeah but we all bleed that grog color.


слава Україна!

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W8taminute

Quote from: Gusington on March 23, 2023, 12:56:42 PMYeah but we all bleed that grog color.



All jokes aside though, yes I agree with you. 
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al_infierno

#81
Quote from: Ubercat on March 22, 2023, 08:45:49 AMDo you think that Communist ideology is any less poisonous than religion based ideologies? Fascists can only dream of matching their death count.

I always have to laugh when people make this argument.  Yes, it's a real shocker that Nazi Germany, a nation that existed for roughly 10-12 years, didn't rack up the same body count as the Soviet Union, a nation that existed for 70 years.  The mind boggles!

If we really want to go down this route, Communists can only dream of matching the death count of Catholicism over the centuries.
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Ubercat

Nazis aren't the only fascists around. Anyway, it's a dumb thing to argue over. They're both equally evil. Any ideology held strongly enough to dehumanize people and commit genocides is to be fought against.
"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labelled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today."

- Thomas Sowell

Gusington

Comparing the death counts of different ideologies/nations/religions/empires is at best, crass and tasteless, and never ends well.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

FarAway Sooner

To be clear, all moral belief systems rest in certain, faith-based assumptions.  I might even go so far to suggest that atheism largely amounts to putting one's Faith first and foremost in empiricism.  I used to consider myself an atheist, until a friend asked me what I thought of Faith.  In the process of explaining to her that I didn't have Faith, I realized I did have, but that my deity was of a different flavor.  20 years after that, I finally was comfortable to put a name to that Faith, although I still have trouble living up to the lofty standards of that Faith.

But I digress.  It's fair to argue that ideologies tend to be one- or (at best) two-dimensional, whereas less ideological belief systems can live across all sorts of different dimensions, with different weightings and different intersections.

I'm hardly original in claiming that our values are much less our sense of taste--developed differently in each person, but with some common ground for most of us, and largely applied by instinct rather than by rational, empirical thinking.  There's a whole school of modern psychologists who have largely confirmed that in the last 20 years or so.

JasonPratt

#85
I don't think there can be such a thing as a less (or more) ideological belief system. But as previously noted, I regard belief systems and ideologies as the same thing. There can be less or more detailed or developed belief systems; and less or more flexible belief systems. But those two descriptive categories are distinct: a less-developed belief system (ideology, a set of ideas) can be highly inflexible; whereas a more developed belief system (which can potentially be a logical system of ideas not only a set) can be very flexible.

By analogy, a human body is unimaginably more complex, and also more flexible, than a rock of simple composition; and very much less flexible than a pool of pure water (which is much less flexible than the same pure H2O with extra energy phased into a gas than a liquid. And far more flexible than H2O with much less energy phased into a solid!) But natural capability does seem to require both some amount of flexibility (literally and/or metaphorically), and increasing amounts of complexity.

Yet complexity by itself does not necessarily translate into increased capability; that depends upon organization, among other things. For example, information theorists would argue that capability depends not only upon organization, but also upon information. Which leads into some very interesting analyses of genetic structure and consequential capabilities in all scientifically studied life forms!


Anyway, along the line of my prior discussion, that "ideology" per se is not the problem, Ubercat comes close to the reply I was nudging toward! (his original emphasis):

Quote from: Ubercat on March 23, 2023, 02:14:50 PMAny ideology held strongly enough to dehumanize people and commit genocides is to be fought against.

I will tweak that a little: people should fight against (or at least have an obviously vested interest against) any ideology that dehumanizes people, including an ideology where ideology is more important than people. It doesn't strictly matter whether someone holds such an ideology strongly or loosely, it should still be opposed. It doesn't strictly matter whether putting such an ideology into practice leads to genocide, it should still be opposed.

Now of course, someone can also take that idea and misuse it, by mistake or even intentionally, for example, by falsely claiming some people are being Nazis, especially in order to bring social pressure against them -- which would be dehumanizing those people, not incidentally. Perhaps topically relevant to Arnold's video! But the misuse does not abolish the use (as one of the few quotes I know from Aristotle  :Nerd: ).

Whereas, I am not sure there even can be any proper use of an ideology that dehumanizes people! -- although I'll grant that in theory portions of such an ideology might have proper use in a different ideology. Identify and remove the false portions of an idea set; and keep any true portions, to be integrated logically into a more true idea set / belief system.

To give another example, one can have an ideology where ideas are described in terms of being viruses -- which necessarily includes that ideology! And this can have some true and even useful details and applications; it's a basis (maybe the basis) of memetic theory (and thence cultural 'memes'), as developed or at least popularized by Professor Richard Dawkins. But that ideology, as a set -- certainly as developed and applied by Mr. D -- involves radical dehumanization of persons. Thus, Mr. D conveniently (and/or incompetently) ignores its implications for sake of his own personhood and ideas, including moral appeals, which he wants us to accept. Relatedly, on one hand Mr D would have us consider moral appeals to be based on what amounts to genetic itches or the passing of genetic gas (in various ways), and yet on the other hand to not regard, or rather disregard, his own moral appeals as being only the same thing! (Which, among several of his other ideas, leads to what I like to quip as Mr D Science Theater 3000 moments.  :evil: ) His ideological set is somewhat flexible in some regards, inflexible in others, as could be expected of any ideology based on truth claims; but its fundamental basis is radically depersonal, which leads by extrapolation and application to radical dehumanization of persons. He only keeps a concern for persons (sort of) by an unstated importation of and appeal to a fundamentally different class of ideology, which he inconsistently but conveniently jumps back and forth to and from at a moment's notice. Logically he has an ideological set that should be substantially rejected; but some portions of his overall set can still be demonstrably true and even useful, to at least some degree -- such as in providing a metaphorical description of how a funny picture of a "NAFO Beaver" wrecking a Russian T-90 in Ukraine might be shared and spread through human interaction! -- and so could be (maybe should be) imported into another belief system.

Source, Crossroads!

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GDS_Starfury

source Crossroads my ass, I posted that picture!   :nono2:
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JasonPratt

Oh that's right, Crossroads made the joke about your wife scolding you! My fault: I was pretty tired by then after reading all that. And writing it! :grin:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

FarAway Sooner

Wait.  Starfury posted a picture of Crossroads' wife as a heavily armed Ukrainian Beaver, and now Jason's getting debated on whose wife it really is?  Huh? 

Now I'm getting really confused by this whole thread.

My sense is that, if we use the terms "ideology" and "belief system" interchangeably, we've lost some subtle connotations from both words.  But I also get how easy it is to blur the line between the two.  It's very similar to a comparison of the words "religion" and "mythology".

Crossroads

I was too confused as what I was a source of, or not, in this case  :doh: 

I guess that's what happens when you look at beaver pics for too long  :Party:
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