This video is even more stupid than I assumed before watching it, and goes far beyond Ukraine’s situation. It’s a hot-pot of crazy conspiratorial contrarian crap, including straight-up anti-vax commentary and the usual strawmen (as if people have problems with Russians civilians, rather than Russia and their military). The fact that OP posted it without supporting text, as if it were a self-contained slam dunk of their argument, speaks loudly of their character.
OP is just a persecution fetishist, they define themselves by seeing what others think and purposefully going the other way, and they LOVE being disagreed with and being the minority; how else are they going to get that sweet sweet superiority complex fix? You could bet your komi that if the popular sentiment were in favor of Russia’s actions, they’d be wearing their blues and yellows like a proper “free thinker”.
The origin of the term is irrelevant; it is a convenient and well-understood word, therefore useful. If you prefer, call it mass indiscriminate slaughter. What is important is the concept. The fact that politics has recognized and conventionalized the idea does not make the idea any less independent or worthy in itself.
Transcendent values do not depend on religion, culture, or political stance. They cut across those things, which is why a vast range of people of many religions, cultures, and politics can agree about the horror and outrage of the Holocaust. The source of those values may lie in natural law (note: I am using the term strictly in its secular sense, not in its religious sense). However, arguing about the source eventually bumps up against various fundamental philosophical polarities, as I mentioned. I leave those discussions to the college sophomores. An excellent short summary of transcendent values is in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
I am very much not in favour of the watering down of everything.
It is a political term, made in politics, by politics, for political reasons and it is used AND decidedby politics and politicians.
That is why the term is applied when countries and its politicians OFFICIALLY recognise a war as such and refer it to is as such (usually in RETROSPECT, and AFTER all the facts are out in the open).
If your wife finds lipstick on your shirt, try to use the “origin of the term is irrelevant” argument on her and see where it gets you
Changing the term does not change that the goals and the way a war is fought is a political decision.
War, even in cases of extreme want-on destruction like the Vandals, is always a matter of “getting something” … be it money, land, resources or influence.
The end-goal of any war is some sort of socio-economic political gain.
There is no such thing as “Transcendent values” that are agreed upon every single person and culture in the world and do not “depend on religion, culture, or political stance”.
Because if there were, those would have transcended time, as well as space.
Tribes of looters and pillagers across human history seemed to have missed the memo.
The existence of this book seems to be a point in favour of what I am saying though.
If they were “Transcendent values” then we would all automatically have them and he wouldn’t have had to write a book arguing about them and trying to convince people about their worth or their existence
A “transcendent” characteristic of all human beings are purely physical and natural. Written in our genes and DNA. Morality and values are a social construct and therefore depend upon each person’s circumstances and upbringing.
Lewis actually agrees on that:
Lewis cites ancient thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, who believed that the purpose of education was to train children in “ordinate affections”, to train them to like and dislike what they ought and to love the good and hate the bad. Lewis claims that although such values are universal, they do not develop automatically or inevitably in children. Thus, they are not “natural” in that sense of the word, but they must be taught through education. Those who lack them lack the specifically human element, the trunk that unites intellectual man with visceral (animal) man, and they may be called “men without chests”.
I do not have to say how much that last sentence could be considered extreme discrimination today, do I?
No, that clip is always relevant. One could say that it is talking about things that “transcend” time and can be applied in politics throughout the whole of human history.
I’m disappointed you think OGS doesn’t have a right to show their stance on this topic. This argument of keeping things apolitical sometimes gets ridiculous, as in when there was the fundraise by Ukrainian game studio of Stalker and all the Russians of course got annoyed and said that games should be outside of politics; as in if you’re from Ukraine and you’re country is invaded, and you use your creation, Stalker series, to gather 800,000$ to support your country, you’re doing something wrong. Or when Namecheap, who had a vast majority of Ukrainian stuff, had taken the decision not to work with Russians, it was greatly frowned upon, which is just ridiculous: are you gonna work for people who invaded your country? Russians haven’t made any good games, I don’t know, War Thunder maybe? Which they have censored chat on.
Now, to gosu_gosu, who in a fairly rude manner speaks about “the current thing”: it’s a fairly weak point. You can call actions of “the current thing” such as Popular JS Package node-ipc Adds Malicious "Protest-ware" On Purpose - YouTube , or making a silly stance like not reading Russian classic books. However OGS’ actions in taking a stance have made for a meaning purpose, such as the thread with links to donating to Ukraine I posted was decided to stay here, thus people could donate, spread the word; another thread with Play for Ukraine or such, where you get teaching games and what you pay goes to support Ukrainians.
"social credit points " that actually help Ukraine
“Absolutely nothing!” is achieved by your argument
“who still can formulate their own thoughts.” so those who take a different stance than you do can’t formulate their opinions. Fancy opinion. Good luck lobbying for Russian gas and enjoying civilization while it lasts.
Russians who will suffer consequences are also people. I understand they don’t protest to the full extent of your liking, but is all empathy out of the question?
Reported for bigotry. The whole post is like a perfect example of propagandistic manipulation. Or should I say “the whole thread?” First they say “we are against the government, not the people”, and later they use generalizations, ad hominem attacks, “oh you are just a simpleton ha ha”, support of shady business practices “let’s just ban all customers from a specific country”, ad hominem like “good luck lobbying Russian blah blah” and so on. And OGS team members supporting this. Great!
All you had to do is to figure out a simple response and face the consequences without trying to appease everybody and motivating other not-so-polite community members to grab the torches. Koba’s response was ideal. “This team thinks it’s important and uses the platform to communicate this”. Done. Position is clear, message is clear, rules are clear. And if you want to discuss “why”, just ask people to open another thread with a different message. The politics is always a heated topic, but you can make it cooler (hehe) by looking at it from the philosophical angle.
I have to say, i find it really weird that there is even a discussion about it.
I personally feel that every single human being should be against any kind of war. Killing, murdering, shooting, harming another human being should be a strcit no-no for anyone with any common sense (and i do assume that 100% of go players have some common sense - i have always thought go players as intelligent people).
I find it weird that this thread has gotten 50 responses this far - albeit many just claiming that they agree with someone else - i honestly thought that murdering innocent civilians is something that every single go player would consider being “bad”
@Icedrinker1 i really do hope they will stop bombing you soon and you (and all the other ogs users) can be safe. Take care.
Or, how about, the OP came and within 4 sentences insulted everybody with a differing opinion multiple times (1=you only care for social point, 2=the way you decide to support Ukraine is an abomination, 3=you can’t formulate your own thought), and those people don’t particularly like being insulted?
OP is not a simpleton just for having a differing opinion; he’s a simpleton because of how he approaches debate with other people and for how dismissive he is of opposing views for the simple reason of them being popular, which has nothing to do with their intrinsic value. If he supported Ukraine and approached any debate like this, starting off with insults and dismissiveness of a common view, he’d be a simpleton all the same. He’s also much worse than a simpleton for that brain-dead conspiratorial video that he posted to justify his view and post. Why are you holding everybody except OP to higher standards?
Can we perhaps all agree on this topic to stop insulting each other? I don’t want to close this topic, but I feel things are escalating.
There’s no need to use words like “simpleton”, “bigotry”, “brain-dead”, “abomination” etc, we don’t have to generalise entire nations to get our points across, and we don’t have to proclaim the incapability of thinking about people you disagree with.
I am not commenting on this thread. After dealing with war for the last 10 years, I will say that I understand the position of “why is society suddenly showing support for this one war, instead of all of the others that are continuously happening”. I also understand that “war should be opposed no matter what”. I agree with both, and I have made it clear that I do not support the invasion or Putin. I also do not support either Biden or Trudeau. I have yet to find a government that I fully support.
And so the only thing I have to really comment on is…
Unfortunately, reality is not kind. There are people who will kill you, Koba, because of what you look like, what kind of people you are attracted to, your beliefs, etc. What if there was a large group of people who truly hated you and wanted you and people like you dead, and go around in their own country killing people like you.
Would you want to stop them? How would you do it if they were committed and willing to die for their cause of “ridding the world of people like X”? Do you say “well I personally feel you should be not doing that kind of thing”? What if they just laugh and keep doing what they’re doing? Do you take harsher measures? How far will you go? What if they won’t stop unless you kill them?
Do you go to war to save innocent civilians?
@Vsotvep I think this is why bugcat (and I) do not want OGS to start becoming political. It will always devolve into name-calling, talking down about others, calling them “simpleton”, saying “i thought you were all intelligent”, etc. Political discussions in an open forum do not lend themselves to kindness.
Go to war to save your own civilians, by all means (not you specifically, everyone for their own civilians).
But please, pretty please, no more transatlantic/ transpacific/ cross-Mediterranean “savior missions”, enough damage already. I understand troops need to believe they’re saving someone (it’s one of those professions that needs a compass to function and in that sense different than say, a desk job counting invoices) and here and there they do realistically save someone or another, but honestly, can everyone stay put, stop being so bottomlessly greedy and stirring s*** so we can realistically hope to start violently dying in smaller numbers?
I don’t expect our species to see the light any time soon, but can we at least cut back on the meddling?
First, I haven’t quibbled about the definition of politics. However, if you mean that you want to take that off the table, that’s okay with me.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the term “moral code,” which is so commonly and incorrectly associated only with religion (I did indicate a possible source in secular natural law). I elucidated the term in the next two sentences where I equated it with transcendent values. Do not confuse “transcendent” with “transcendental.” I am not using the term in a mystical or religious sense. I only mean that the values transcend religion, culture, nationality, and politics.
Generally, except for the anti-Semites, people condemn the Holocaust, for example, regardless of their religion, culture, nationality, or politics. In other words, their outrage is founded on something that transcends, or goes beyond, those four domains. That “something” is rooted, whether in a secular or religious sense, in our common humanity, which encompasses the transcendent values.
To take one example of such a value, consider murder (extra-legal killing). The prohibition against murder is very nearly universal and transcends those four domains, despite the details of how it may be expressed in one culture or another. This may be because of religious actuality (God made us that way), religious belief (I’m afraid of a nonexistent Hell), or secular natural law (I don’t want to be murdered, and so I rationally recognize that it is in my self-interest to live in a society that prohibits murder).
I’m not opening anything. The values I speak of are more transparent, tacitly agreed upon, and understandable than the shadowy, corrupt, twisted byways of supposedly “objective” politics.
Actually, “thousands and thousands” is not exact, and I’m unsure of why you are shouting in boldface.
Who is talking about “every war”? My part in the discussion concerns genocide, as I prefer to call it.
Your three paragraphs about the origin of the term are beside the point as I explained in a previous post. Your imaginary, personalized example is quite obnoxious and ironically does a poor job of making your point. Also, the heavy use of all caps and boldface makes a bad impression; adults are quite capable of understanding something without such disfigurements to the text.
I never said or implied that it wasn’t. Indeed, I said that a war can be a political calculation. Everything else I said was about the reaction to genocide, which is usually not political. If you want to argue about something else, we should stop.
I never made that claim. Please don’t exaggerate to create a straw-man,
I choose, for now, to ignore sarcasm, as it is beneath serious discussion.
Not true. Some people are mentally deranged or deficient and many lack self-awareness, among other explanations. The purpose of Lewis’s book is to point out things that people may not have noticed, or noticed but could not understand.
Not really. Lewis would scoff at the notion that it is a “social construct.” The secondary source you quote simply states the obvious, as I described above, that some people need education to learn about or understand transcendent values, just like they need to learn about lots of other things that exist whether or not we know about them.
Not you specifically, but all of us in this topic seem to have a slightly different understanding of the term
Do not confuse “transcendent” with “transcendental.” I am not using the term in a mystical or religious sense. I only mean that the values transcend religion, culture, nationality, and politics.
I am not confusing those terms at all:
If something “transcends religion, culture, nationality, and politics” then this, automatically means that it is on a higher level than them and that since those values are unaffected by all those things that more or less define a society, then they should have been pan-anthropic.
According to you those values transcend societies, and culture, and nationatily and religion, SO, by YOUR definition they should be present in EVERY culture, nationality and religion, not only now, but through time as well (else they wouldn’t have been important/significant enough to transcend those things).
In the end, unless you atleast mention , let alone define, of which EXACT values you are thinking that are transcending, this whole discussion is missing its most important component. Context.
What are you talking about? Being “anti-semite” is EXACTLY something that is about “religion, culture, nationality, or politics.”
It is in the word. What is a Semite if not (I quote) “a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group”
Ethnic (nationality)
cultural (culture)
religion (religion)
It ticks three of your four boxes, right there.
In other words, their outrage is founded on something that transcends, or goes beyond, those four domains.
You have yet to tell us what THAT is … I am honestly curious to what that reason could be in this case.
The prohibition against murder is very nearly universal and transcends those four domains, despite the details of how it may be expressed in one culture or another.
We are going now to the basic ideas of the “social contract” … there is no way to have a society, even in tribes living in caves, where there is a free for all for killing and looting among the tribe.
That is basic lawmaking and politics, but still lawmaking and politics.
Be that as it may, the same concept of “murder is bad” usually applies to the tribe, within the tribe and it is a PRIVILEDGE among the tribe … history has shown that “murder in war or raids or pillaging towards OTHER tribes to get their stuff” is not only allowed, but, in some societies it was their prime political standpoint.
History also tells us that if you do any “mistakes” and betray the tribe or get out of the tribe, they will probably murder you … oh sorry … “legally execute” you … Socrates might have smiled at that
So much for a prohibition that “very nearly universal and transcends those four domains” … don’t even get me started on how many people were killed on grounds of “religion, culture, nationality, or politics”
Well, you and me are not, we are just talking in a forum, but this is also a general political standpoint at the moment in order to stir outrage and improve morale for this current war, to apply those “values” where previously there were none and that is a dangerous BYPRODUCT, because there have been too many wars and grievances to revisit.
Even the slightest revisionism in a place like the Balkans could have people remember things that we all just wrote off in a “it was war, things happen” forget and forgive kind of thing.
Did you know that Greece and Bulgaria fought for Thessaloniki, just 110 years ago? Both nationalities had significant presence in the city. Greece came on top on this one, now there is a million Greeks there and the Bulgarians have not a similarly significant presence, if any. The Turks might also have a say since they lost the town in 1912 and their national hero Kemal Ataturk was actually born there.
Did you know that there are hundreds of villages in Greece that bear the names of towns and villages that are in today’s Turkey and they were violently expelled from there in 1922? Just a hundred years ago. I actually met with old people that could remember that day. The history of violence in Europe is just off the charts.
I am fairly certain that you never woke up to find a “Great Canada” expansionist pamphlet in your front door, but I assure you that there are “Great Greece”, “Great Albania”, “Great Bulgaria”, “Great Turkey” and “Great Macedonia” pamphlets here … and that’s just one corner of Europe.
Actually, “thousands and thousands” is not exact, and I’m unsure of why you are shouting in boldface.
Yes, it IS exact, and I am putting it in bold to make certain that this is understood.
Here you go:
Dorian invasion, circa 1200 B.C.
All those tribes that we read in history books on migrating and “being displaced” by others, how do you think they “got displaced”? Did the other tribes write them an eviction notice?
No, it was WAR.
War before 1000 B.C.
Wars after 1000 B.C. (Persian wars? Wars with tribes in Illyria and Thrace and Asia Minor and Southern Italy, and the Greeks settling all around the Mediterranean? What do you think, it was all “empty land” or maybe we fought some locals here and there? Alexander the Great? The Roman Empire? )
Wars after 1 A.D. (the Romans, the Vandals, the Ostro/VisiGoths, the Byzantines, the Avars, the Huns, the Persians again, the Turks eventually, the “Holy Roman Empire” etc)
Wars after 1000 A.D. (the Crusades, more “Holy Romans”, the Franks, the British, the Ottomans, the two world wars etc )
And that’s just the “big stuff” … especially in ancient times, what do you think, people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs? If we go just by what we recorded in scuffles among the Greeks and the fluctuations of the Egyptian Empire (which is far older than the Greeks), in other places they have had their fair share of wars all the time, but it is just not recorded in history.
So, YES, that was VERY exact.
For those bored of reading and links, here it is in a visual way:
Your three paragraphs about the origin of the term are beside the point as I explained in a previous post.
Ah, ok, now you are ignoring the UNITED NATIONS that MADE THE TERM.
Great
Sorry, but English is not my first language so I tend to stick to the language and definitions that are agreed upon.
Please don’t exaggerate to create a straw-man,
I do not think that there is a bigger exaggeration than the claim that there are “values that transcend religion, culture, nationality, and politics” …
I choose, for now, to ignore sarcasm, as it is beneath serious discussion.
No, I am actually serious.
You think Genseric (king of the Vandals - a tribe so violent in destroying stuff that the world Vandalism, indeed, transcended time, thousands of years after they were gone) and Attila the Hun, would pause even for a second before those “values that transcend religion, culture, nationality, and politics”?
Well, if they did, it was not recorded. However, the rubble and destruction they caused, was.
I think that these cases go without saying. We are not talking about edge cases, else I would have maded the point of those kids lost in jungle raised by wolves and things like that. We are talking about societies in a more general/braod sense.
The purpose of Lewis’s book is to point out things that people may not have noticed, or noticed but could not understand.
So, you are practically saying that their nationality, religion or lack of culture or lack of education made them be unaware of the values that “transcend religion, culture, nationality, and politics” ?
Is there another reason why those people wouldn’t have noticed or not understood the existence of those values, I wonder. I’d be very interested to hear what made them unaware.
Same point as above. If you are being educated about something then this automatically means that you are GAINING something in culture, you might be illuminated about the shortcomings of your religion, or be weaned out of your national customs (e.g. the Maori had no problems with cannibalism) or learn that the local politics are unethical.
So, there are no values that “transcend” those things when the education involved IS about said things.
Excuse me, but all these sound to me like Lewis was feeling very guilty about the British colonialism and I’ll leave it at that.
Bottom line:
There are no real values that transcend anything. Values are a social construct that was needed in order for people to converge and initially create families, then tribes, then villages, then cities, then nations, then empires. A person living alone in a cave, that will never meed another human needs (and probably has) no values.
Values are added and substracted depending not only on YOUR religion, nationality, culture and politics, but also depending on what your NEIGHBOUR’s religion, nationality, culture and politics are.
You might be very keen on peace, non-violence and even non-ownership and then the Vandals come along and kill your kids, still your flocks, raid your crops and set fire to your house.
So, if you know that your neighbours suck, eventually you change your values to reflect the danger those people pose.
Alternatively, if your neighbours have higher knowledge and values, it might rub off on you in a “what have the Romans ever done for us” sort of way.
Politics and culture is what defines a society. And society defines its politics and culture. They are interconnected.
The values of the inhabitants and participants of that society are shaped by the politics and culture of that society and of the people around them. This in turn shapes the society and the circle continues.
Now, here in Europe, the land of perpetual war, in order to continue to function as a continent, we decided to “forget and forgive” and create the EU and bury the past under the “it was war, bad things happen” policy. Lame as it may sound, that is what the nations did.
Re-introducing and re-evaluating wars under the “transcendent values” you are talking about could mean one very dangerous thing long-term: The digging out and re-evaluation of old disputes, old feuds, old ambitions, old grievances and, sadly, old borders.
And you saw the borders on that video, right? Less stable through time, than the sea during a storm.
More strife, division and bickering is not something we would like to have here so that other people might be happy about the supposed existence of values of such height and importance, so as to transcend societies, nationality, religion and culture and politics.
If some values are good and better than others, the people will eventually gravitate towards them. Let them do so naturally. We do not need a “better values crusade” so that we can be “educated” about the “transcendent” values.
