I try to take care of my health as much as possible because I cannot afford to have a medical emergency.

Education in America differs wildly by state (and even school district). Americans often get different instruction on slavery, the Confederacy, Vietnam war, etc.

Micheal Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” covers way too many examples to list here. A must-read for those attempting to reject Cold War-era propaganda. Here’s an excerpt:

The Costs of Counterrevolution

From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught anything about these events, except to be told that U.S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U.S. interests, thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U.S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democracy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to "uplift lesser peoples " …

In the name of democracy, U.S. leaders waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World War II by all combatants combined. Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate estimate. U.S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a “mistake” because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads. By prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese supposedly demonstrated that they were “unprepared for our democratic institutions.”

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 million in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;¹ over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust. Official sources either deny these U.S.-sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe.

Ftn 1:The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U.S.-led United Nations economic sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.

Gotta make sure we protect the Vietnamese from the evils of communism by killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Another hundred thousand civilian casualties due to dropping Napalm, for their own good

I like the cut of your jib

If society is at the point where we’re making dictators then you likely have to be an immoral POS to stay in power. At every stage below you there are opportunistic people who want to take your spot.

Would be ironic if you deleted this post OP

Philosophy or at least philosophy memes.

Also, more signposting and less doom. All of my algorithms are so depressing already.

My partner suffered a lot of abuse in previous relationships and my own flaws (some perceived, some very real) triggered her. She “psuedo” broke up with me about three times. We got couples therapy and did a lot of work. It was hard but a few years later we’re now happily engaged.

Find remote work. Even better if freelance. Save up money for travel expenses and emergencies. Travel the world while sending in your work digitally. If you’re an American citizen, you’ll still have to pay taxes even though you’re not living in the states (“land of the free” btw).

If you’re asking what type of work you should do, it depends on your skills and interests. Computer programming, graphic design, technical writing, etc. If you’re not already established in a lucrative area that supports remote work then you have some years of work before you can make the move. Plan accordingly in the meantime.

Where? Where does accountability kick in? We’re all walking hypocrites indoctrinated by a capitalist and patriarchal system.

You’re not wrong BUT this is only one side of the issue. Patriarchal norms undercut men’s ability to form meaningful relationships and capitalism is making us wage slaves. The behaviors you’re pointing to are symptoms of a larger problem.

It’s not just women having the choice to marry. Women are flooded with choice through dating apps. It puts men in competition, costs money, and is overall a humbling experience. The amount of effort (and money) an average looking average height man has to expend pushes men to stop trying and focus on bettering oneself. This is where the Rogans and the Tates come in. The left isn’t speaking to these boys so the right wins by default.

I’m having a hard time understanding your view. Do you think that morality is relative to each person’s view point or do you think that moral facts do not exist at all?

To recapitulate: If you condemn an action or practice, slavery for example, then this is typically understood as a moral judgment. You have judged that the practice of slavery is bad rather than good. But you said you do not believe in objective facts about morality. So, in order to understand your view, I took you to be substituting moral reasons for practical reasons. So instead of saying slavery is bad for moral reasons, you’re saying that it has consequences that are undesirable. Hence, I argued above that this is to act as though morality is objective even though you do not think it is. The analogy with numbers was meant to illustrate the salience of such a view, but it seems this is not your position.

Now on to my view. For someone who thinks that facts about the moral goodness/badness of actions are as objective as facts about the physical world the question “who decides the facts?” is erroneous. “The Earth is a sphere .” = true. “One person murdering another.” = morally bad. Even if everyone gets together to decide that the Earth is flat, this would not change the descriptive fact about the world. Even if everyone gets together to decide that murder is okay, this would not change the normative fact about the world.

Since you claim that morality is objective I would assume that you would be capable of tracing where this objectivity comes from, how it emerged, and how it stays that way.

I have my own philosophical views about why morality is objective and how we can make moral judgments. I wrote this in other comments, so I will paste them here:

“Personally I go for Kantian deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).”

“Immanuel Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis, for murder, stealing, etc.”

“Why should we think that morality comes from our own reason? In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.”

Also, if it were objective for all people, I imagine we would all know its content.

Not necessarily. I personally think that we can know right and wrong, but our epistemological access to moral facts is not required in order to think that the moral facts are objective. Again, consider the analogy with objective facts about the physical world. The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle that we did not know about for most of human history. It is only recently, in conjunction with discovering the scientific method, that we have gained access to facts about the Higgs Boson. The point is, objective facts about the world are not dependent on our ability to know them. The same is true about normative facts. Morality can exist objectively without our yet having a method to determine what the moral facts are.

Ah I see. In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.

He gives different philosophical arguments for these positions in The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason. Unlike science, where we can appreciate the result without combing through the evidence, the philosophical arguments have to be understood in their entirety to see the salience of the conclusion. I’m willing to give a sense of the view (see the foregoing), but I’d rather not recapitulate the entire work. If you’re interested, I would read the following entry page on the issue. You might find Kant’s arguments convincing: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

So your suggestion is that we can keep our moral judgments out of practical considerations without espousing the objective truth of moral facts? This would lead one to act as though they believed in objective moral truths. Which is fine! It would be like thinking numbers don’t exist (perhaps because you don’t believe non-physical/abstract entities exist) but acting as though numbers exist because it is useful to do so. I don’t hold that view, but I can see your perspective.

The question of who defines morality is potentially a category error. We don’t ask who defines descriptive facts about the world. The Earth is round, that is a fact, and its truth does not depend on anyone’s opinion. It is our job to develop ways to figure out whether it is true. Similarly, there are normative facts about morality and aesthetics. Some things are morally or aesthetically good, and it is our job to determine whether it is good.

Admittedly, we have had more success with descriptive facts than with normative facts.

I’m not sure I understand your question

I wouldn’t say we have no way of knowing, just that we disagree (often on edge cases). But people way smarter than me spend their lives thinking about these things and form convincing arguments is support of definitive answers.

To draw a parallel, most of human history we observed the world and reached conclusions. Mostly we were wrong but sometimes we came pretty close. Then we discovered the scientific method, which allows us to move closer to the truth over time. (Note, though, that the epistemological worry reappears, albeit in lesser form, as the scientific method must always be amendable to new empirical evidence that contradicts highly confirmed theories.) My hope is that philosophy will discover a science of normative facts, giving us an agreed upon method for determining moral and aesthetic value.

Yes, there are problems with the categorical imperative. Another problem: what if two moral duties are in conflict? A third: can’t we phrase the same action under different descriptions in a way that yields different results?

There are objections to every moral theory because this is philosophy and we rarely reach a consensus on topics this large. These problems are indicators of epistemological grey areas. They do not, in my opinion, entail moral nihilism.