Author	Message
PowerKord	Posted: 16 Oct 2006 09:12 pm    Post subject: ONE HUMAN FAMILY - Discussion Thread Posts in this topic dated October 2006 through December 2007 have been moved to an archive file (261,000 bytes) http://www.deleonism.org/archive/225-1.shtml
davesearles	Posted: 21 May 2008 04:30 am    Post subject: File under "One human familiy" Indian village proud after double "honor killing" Fri May 16, 2008 5:46pm EDT BALLA, India (Reuters) - Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a towel. They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend "Jassa", 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled. Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita's father's house for all to see, a sign that the family's "honor" had been restored by her cold-blooded murder. A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from India's capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a man. Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister. "From society's point of view, this is a very good thing," said 62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or panchayat. "We have removed the blot." Growing economic opportunities for young people and lower castes in Haryana have made "love marriages" more common, experts say, and the violent repression of them has risen in tandem as upper caste Jat men fight to hold on to power, status and property. Sunita's father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, police told Reuters. An uncle and two cousins were among four others arrested. http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSDEL29449420080516
mikelepore	Posted: 21 May 2008 08:17 am    Post subject: Vince didn't claim that humanity now acts like a loving family. He says they ought to.
davesearles	Posted: 21 May 2008 12:27 pm    Post subject: Oh, weren't the girl's father and other relatives acting in a loving manner? Who are you or I to say?
mikelepore	Posted: 21 May 2008 06:44 pm    Post subject: I don't know the meaning of "Who are you or I to say?" Does a person need authorization to say something? I wag my tongue and words come out. Opinion is all there is unless something is an exact science
davesearles	Posted: 21 May 2008 07:06 pm    Post subject: of course it comes down to opinion. Say in this sense means set. A loving family is undefinable. And all we can really look at is behaviours. Are certain behaviours or the lack of others more or less guarateed to exist or not exist because people are in a "family"relationship. No way. Often, too often that realtionship brings out the worst in people not the best. It is nt uncommon at all for people to treat total strangers with far more respect than they do people they are in a family relationship with. It's a model with a very very bad track record.
mikelepore	Posted: 21 May 2008 07:16 pm    Post subject: So instead of telling people how to feel, Vince should urge people to follow what he considers the best kind of behaviors?
davesearles	Posted: 21 May 2008 11:33 pm    Post subject: ML: So instead of telling people how to feel, Vince should urge people to follow what he considers the best kind of behaviors? DAS: BEHAVIOR but certanly not behaviour that is found acceptable or not on account of the actor's or anyone's supposed belief. After all the villagers where this Romeo and Juliet were murdered could always claim that their behaviors were of the best kind, that they were protecting socially accepted family interests. or we would have a dynamic like this: A good adult married male would not have sex with someone outside of the marriage. Bill Clinton defined himslef as a good person. Therefore Clinton making a young woman a federal employee and having her give him blowjobs as part of her job was not him having sex with someone outside of the marriage. "I did not have sex with that woman. "
mikelepore	Posted: 22 May 2008 01:20 am    Post subject: davesearles wrote: but certanly not behaviour that is found acceptable or not on account of the actor's or anyone's supposed belief. How's that? All law is someone's belief. I'm glad that modern civilizations usually have a law against murdering your daughter because she dishonored the family. That means my interpretation of the event, that such a murder happened, would be that civilization's laws didn't get it right. My reaction would have to be that, either the law is bad, or the law is good but the good law wasn't aadequately enfrced. Who says so? It's my belief. If there are enough of us who feel this way then we will seize the power to make a law, and then we will impose this law on everyone. But maybe the people who want murder to be legal will be the majority instead, and they will make the law diffferently, and impose that on everyone. No matter what the outcome, someone's "personal beliefs" is made coercive. It's just a question of whose. But it's the same with a technical decision. You can't both have a bridge across the river and simultaneously not have a bridge across the river. It's one or the other. But some people wanted the bridge and some people didn't. Every outcome is force. The only time an outcome isn't force is when you're behind closed doors and your actions affect only yourself. I'm eating a bag of cheese-doodles for supper. Very bad nutrition habits. I'm only hurting myself. This is so different from that news article, I'd say the opposite.
davesearles	Posted: 22 May 2008 03:49 am    Post subject: This is what I mean - a behavior ought not to be classified as good becuase of someone's belief statement that it supports something good. Such as: Killing these two children was good because it preserved the honor of their families. This merely looks at the beliefs as good and bad and not the behaviours as acceptable and not.
davesearles	Posted: 22 May 2008 04:05 am    Post subject: I see that the One Human Family link at the deleonism.org website is inopperative. I hope that it is permanently so.
mikelepore	Posted: 22 May 2008 06:55 am    Post subject: It works okay - http://www.onehumanfamily.cc/ - do I have a link anywhere that has it spelled differently? Of course, an act that "supports something good" isn't necessarily good. First the act must be "not bad" before it has any chance to be good. The act must not infringe on the rights of others. If the act infringes on the rights of others then it's automatically bad, regardless of whether it supports something good. Example, I can't say "I do this as a symbolic action in the name of world peace!" and commit a terrorist act -- the act would be automatically bad regardless of any other considerations. If an act does NOT infringe on the rights of others, then, it may not "support" a good but at least it's justified. (The legal system disagrees with me entirely, since some acts which don't infringe on the rights of others are prohibited.)
davesearles	Posted: 22 May 2008 06:28 pm    Post subject: Oh it now looks like it works. They must have had a block on it at work where I tried it from. Maybe the cc ending did it.
davesearles	Posted: 22 May 2008 06:32 pm    Post subject: Too bad it's not in fact an "of course" or the idea would not be violated so often.
PowerKord	Posted: 26 May 2008 03:23 am    Post subject: Bass-Ackwards Greetings: davesearles wrote: Are certain behaviours [sic] or the lack of others more or less guarateed [sic] to exist or not exist because people are in a "family"relationship. Ultimately the behaviors define the formal relationship, not vice-versa. Regards, vince de benedeto ONE HUMAN FAMILY www.OneHumanFamily.cc
davesearles	Posted: 26 May 2008 03:05 pm    Post subject: Have no idea what "ultimate" refers to in this case. The father killed her (to preserve the honor of the family) part because she was his daughter who committed the sin of marrying a young man from her own village. So her behavior defined the relationship? And how does "behavior" as the ultimate cause square with your observation of the genetic link of all humanity? What was the relevance of that at all if the relationship is ultimately defined by behavior? The genetic link argument seems to try to support the opposite. Moreover I go to your website and look at the lst sentences of the opening pargrapgh: "We wish to transform this view, this understanding of, and presumption about, ourselves to that of its opposite: a global population that sees itself as connected, related, and concerned about each other, with the attendant and requisite changes in the three aforementioned spheres of our existence. We wish, in other words, to transform ourselves into a global population that is, and is aware of itself as, one human family." DAS continues: None of this is behaviorially directed or defined. Under this, the father murdering his daughter could have been perfectly justifed becuase he was "concerned" with "understanding", "presumption" to bring about "attendant" and "requisite changes." I always think about Abraham receiving a "command" from God to kill his son. Which apparently according to three of the world's great religions which share that same biblical text, would have been perfectly alright because of Abrahams' belief that God told him to do it.
mikelepore	Posted: 26 May 2008 11:14 pm    Post subject: Vince mentioned genetic relationship in reply to my remark that his use of the word "family" seems to be a figure of speech like the common "brothers and sisters." He reminded me of the genetic link of the whole species to show that the word "family" can be used literally. To be more precise, there is a considerable amount of genetic similarity between, say, a human and a tree, more similarity between any two animals, still more similarity between any two vertebrates, still more between any two mammals, still more between any two primates, such as a human and a chimpanzee, and still more genetic similarity between any two humans. Carl Sagan once used the phrase, "Our cousins, the trees." Dr. Sagan was comfortable with phrases that are less than literal, as long as they have some basis in truth.
mikelepore	Posted: 26 May 2008 11:45 pm    Post subject: davesearles wrote: And how does "behavior" as the ultimate cause square with your observation of the genetic link of all humanity? What was the relevance of that at all if the relationship is ultimately defined by behavior? The genetic link argument seems to try to support the opposite. I don't think Vince claimed that it's observable that people are more compassionate to one another if they are more closely related biologically. I think Vince is saying that it's productive to _remind_ people of our link as a species, that pondering this fact tends to promote compassionate behavior more than pondering the opposite, categories that divide people, "the fatherland", "our race", "our corporation", etc. As a person with hundreds of college credits in science, I'm cautious about announcing that a correlation has been measured, but I think there _seems_ to be a correlation between compassionate behavior and the habit of pondering human oneness. Among the most peaceful religious tradtions are the Buddhists, the Jains, the B'ahai -- people who have no use for nationalism or other divisive loyalties. But violence has always followed whenever loyalty was to "our group" and not to the neighboring "them", according to tons of historical data from the Spartans to the Apaches.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 12:24 am    Post subject: ML: I think Vince is saying that it's productive to _remind_ people of our link as a species, that pondering this fact tends to promote compassionate behavior more than pondering the opposite, categories that divide people, "the fatherland", "our race", "our corporation", etc. DAS: Perhaps he is sayong that suggesting it, implying it, whatever. It may be productive for the manufacture of schmaltz but beyond that I don't see it. And we surely slip into the murk trying to define "compassionate". That's what I beefed about before - you're not talking about behaviour but compassion. The behavior is acceptable or not based upon the "compassion" behind it. No thanks. Compassion me out.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 12:32 am    Post subject: ML: Carl Sagan once used the phrase,"Our cousins, the trees." DAS: DAS: Do you suppose that Sagan would have thought it alright to cut down old apple trees to make way for more productive young ones?
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 03:39 am    Post subject: Vince quoted Dave: Are certain behaviours [sic] or the lack of others ... Dave writes: Vince, I know that you must have gotten a thrill out of adding that "sic" behind my word "behaviour". You might try looking it up with that spelling and see what you come up with. Dave Searles
mikelepore	Posted: 27 May 2008 06:19 am    Post subject: You seem to be skeptical of the idea of compassion because some people commit murder in the name of compassion. And yet you have always understood that some people commit murder he name of democracy and socialism, and that didn't make you skeptical about democracy and socialism.
mikelepore	Posted: 27 May 2008 06:21 am    Post subject: davesearles wrote: Do you suppose that Sagen would have thought it alright to cut down old apple trees to make way for more productive young ones? I don't know. I wonder what your point is.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 05:38 pm    Post subject: ML: But violence has always followed whenever loyalty was to "our group" and not to the neighboring "them", according to tons of historical data from the Spartans to the Apaches. DAS: But domestic violence contrasts with that pattern it seems.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 05:46 pm    Post subject: ML: Carl Sagan once used the phrase, "Our cousins, the trees." DAS: Do you suppose that Sagen would have thought it alright to cut down old apple trees to make way for more productive young ones? ML: I don't know. I wonder what your point is. DAS: Now why should I have to have a point? But I think the point was that I suspect that Sagen didn’t advocate killing off some people to make room for more predictive replacements.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 06:00 pm    Post subject: DAS: That's what I beefed about before - you're not talking about behaviour but compassion. The behavior is acceptable or not based upon the "compassion" behind it. No thanks. Compassion me out. ML: You seem to be skeptical of the idea of compassion because some people commit murder in the name of compassion. And yet you have always understood that some people commit murder he name of democracy and socialism, and that didn't make you skeptical about democracy and socialism. DAS: No I am skeptical about “compassion” because it does not define a behavior. And as I have started to indicate of late I am also skeptical about “socialism” and have started to be exclusively openly directed to a more specific goal of workers democratically controlling production. If its not that, all the “socialism” in the world isn’t going to sway me toward it.
mikelepore	Posted: 27 May 2008 06:33 pm    Post subject: "Democratically" doesn't define a behavior either. It's was a favorite word of Stalin and Mao while they were massacring and enslaving the workers. "Control" doesn't define a behavior either. In the ideology of the USSR, any worker could join the CP, and once in the CP either persuade the central central committee or get promoted to the central committee, and the central committee appointed the industrial managers, therefore, the workers "controlled" the industries. The only thing that defines a behavior is if you say who does what, like Steinhilber's SIU charts.
davesearles	Posted: 27 May 2008 10:49 pm    Post subject: There are definitely weaknesses there. But in comparrison that description gives a lot more indication as to what action is being proposed than actions that are "compassionate." Have something better at conveying the idea than democratic and control? I'm all ears.
mikelepore	Posted: 03 Jun 2008 08:45 pm    Post subject: Along the same lines as "compassion" -- I'm starting to get skeptical now about the way Wally Petrovich uses a lot of democratic buzzwords like "real democracy" and "a real government by the people and for the people". Maybe it's just me, but I could never talk that way. I don't think it explains anything to people who haven't already been converted.
davesearles	Posted: 04 Jun 2008 04:05 am    Post subject: industries democratically operated by the workers - I don't know that you would want to get more specific than that. It's not just saying democratic. But I suppose you could even loose the word democratic and it wouldn't be that much different industries operated by the workers. Still I would rather have it.