SoylentNews

Short notice here. I call upon all Soylentils to submit Fine Articles to SoylentNews, but in this particular instance, any articles on the extremely embarrassing incident in the trailer park in Indiana involving White supremacist Matthew Heimback, founder of the Traditionalist Workers Party. Yours truly has submitted an entire shit-load of submissions, but for some reason they get rejected. I can only surmise that this is embarrassment by some editors who have alt-right leanings, or live in trailer parks, or have feelings for the old "Mother-in-Law".

But that is neither here, nor there. Soylentils are against censorship. Hell, we let Eth and jmorris, and Runaway post their crap, so why no report on the latest follies of the alt-right? No interest? Oh, seriously, who is not interested about a guy who lists his profession as "white nationalist", carries on an affair with the wife of his webmaster, who is also his father-in-law, and then assaults said father-in-law, and the daughter of the father-in-law, who would the the "wife" in question. Oedipus had it much easier than Matthew.

So submit away! Ten times a day, or an hour! Keep that queue full of submissions! Make the editors work!

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UPDATE! Wow, subs barely last half an hour now! Here are some more that have been, um, "declined".

Prominent US neo-Nazi arrested on domestic violence charge

And a totally unrelated, but very informative and interesting article on the source of alt-right anti-semitism.

Finally, another on the Israeli alt-right movement.

Just not of interest to Soylentils, huh? That's what they want you to think! (Not saying that there is an alt-right cabal controlling SoylentNews, but there just might be an alt-right cabal controlling SoylentNews.)

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What? No White Wakanda?
Or Antifa has succeeded?

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March 22, more declined submissions, which are actually quite interesting for the average Soylentil.
Jason Jorjani to leave the alt-right
Readership plummets for alt-right Breitbart without Bannon

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March 23!

We're sorry, your submission "Looking Under the Alt-Right Rock" was declined for the following reason:
We are not interested in the sexual habits of this individual.--JR

The editors felt it inappropriate for them to correct the issue themselves. Please feel free to correct the issue yourself and resubmit.

Such an interesting submission, Looking Under the Alt-Right, alright. Somehow I have the Idea that even if I fix it, and resubmit, it will still get rejected. But you know, despite Rhinos and K-pop, it is not about the sex.

Oh! The main thing is that janorinok is back! So nice to be denied by my favorite ed, who has safely returned from the jaws of death! Thank you, JR!

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March 25, 2018, Rejected again!
This one is good, can't remember what it is about. There are so many, so many.
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March 30!!! Oh, Noes! Crying Neo-Nazi story rejected!!!

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April 5, 2018
I have submitted several reviews, or stories about reviews, of a film that was premiered at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, "Alt-right: Age of Rage", all of which have been rejected! It as if somebody does not want Soylentils to know about this movie?
  https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=25584 Enjoy.
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April 8, 2018
Can we just link my submissions page, so anyone can see the whole sorry episode?
https://soylentnews.org/~aristarchus/submissions

In Momenti ad Mortuum Ethanol_fueledum.

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April 18, 2018

Oh, the Soylent Carnage! A week's worth of worth submissions, rejected without comment, apology, or notification! Some were quite good, like the Anglo-Saxon archeology piece, and the bit on alt-right attacking professors. Or, we could read the eds lame submissions! Ha!

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April 30, 2018
"We're sorry, your submission "De Alt-Right: te vrezen of te bestrijden? " was declined for the following reason:" And nothing follows. Our eds can't read Dutch? What are they, Austro-Spanish-Hungarian?

So here we are, once again being the alternative to the "other site", which seems to have crapped itself, but we still have our own problems. Yes, I have gone on about them for maybe way too much, but I wanted to bring up one nicety of SoylentNews that is honored in the breach. Notification of submissions rejected.

For Example:

We're sorry, your submission "Here’s How an Alt-Right Troll Auditions for Survivor" was declined for the following reason:
Journal for this - not worthy of the front page--JR

Now I love JR, or janrinok, he is my favorite editor, he tries to stay true to the ideal that was SoylentNews, but I have to ask, not worthy, why? Us submitters could use some more constructive criticism! Is it just that once again, I was critical of the alt-right? Knowing that would help. Or was it that the submission was about broadcast TV? Was that the reason? Not enough to go on, even for a 2400 year old philosopher!

And then there is the boilerplate:

The editors felt it inappropriate for them to correct the issue themselves. Please feel free to correct the issue yourself and resubmit.

For some reason, in my particular case, I feel that this is less than sincere. I have resubmitted, with the limited guidance given by the eds, and had the re-submission also rejected. Oh, poor aristarchus! Doomed to a level of Dante's hell where the editors are the authorities, and they can make decisions based on things we know not of. So I guess I will put something about how there are boobies, a la TMB, on Survivor, with the alt-right rejected because there are never any boobies in alt-right things at all because it is just like the scene in the Blues Brothers, where the Illinois Nazis were plummeting to their death, and the second in command, cmn32480, says, "I have always loved you." So, there is that.

Now is the time for all good Soylentils to come to the aid of their news aggregating website! We need more balance, more inclusiveness, less right-wing fanbois bubbling! We could use an aristarchus submissions, not because he will just submit more and make us look like a bunch of right-wing dweebs, but because there is a viable, majority, sane and everyday position out there that thinks the alt right needs to be hung out to dry. Let the racist bastards speak, I say. And my submissions are the one way to do so. If the eds reject them, they have made the bed in which they will lie. Not a good bed. Roll over, and there is Milo? Do you really want that?

President Trump promised steel and aluminum executives Thursday that he will levy tariffs on imports of their products in coming weeks. He said the imported steel will face tariffs of 25 percent, while aluminum will face tariffs of 10 percent.

"We're going to build our steel industry back and we're going to build our aluminum industry back," Trump told reporters.

The president announced the action after meeting with leaders of the two industries at the White House. On Thursday afternoon, major stock market indexes fell sharply after Trump's announcement, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing down 420 points, or about 1.7 percent.

The obvious two problems with such a proposal is first, it makes everything more expensive for US companies since steel and aluminum get used in a lot of products. Second, there will be return fire. For example, most steel imports come in from countries friendly to the US (Canada, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, etc). Retributive tariffs from our best trade partners is not to going to help the US's situation.

Even if this is a typical hard bargaining tactic (start off with an extreme demand and then negotiate down to what you really wanted), it's pretty provocative. There are already people making decisions based on what Trump might do (such as sell offs in the markets). Countries might follow shortly.

Trump is already looking at a massive route in the 2018 elections. This sounds like it'll dig the hole deeper since even the risk of a tariff war will depress economic activity. Right now, the US economy is doing relatively well. But Trump can fix that. Voters will look even less favorably on the Republicans, if the economy tanks on top of everything else.

Okay, the Eds, using the term losely, in their infinite wisdom, again, terms used loosely, rejected a submission from your loyal and faithful Soylentil, aristarchus. This is not unusual, or unexpected, and normally I do not resort to journal entries for rejected submission, but in this case, I actually spent a fair amount of time putting it together, and despite what the eds fear most, that reality has a well known liberal bias, reality has a well-known liberal bias, and the subject matter of this particular rejected submission needs some discussion. I turn it over to you, my fellow trusted and loyal Soylentils, persons of rapier wit, and steel-trap minds, charity to a fault in debate, real Lentils of Soy!

Original Submission (this is going to hurt, and lose stuff.)

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

A post on the American Philosophical Association blog [apaonline.org]offers some insight into the popularity of a certain Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, who seems much beloved by the alt-right.

Peterson’s work invites a much more extensive critique than I have the space (or inclination) to offer here, and there have been numerous excellent critical pieces (including this recent article in The Guardian) [theguardian.com], but what’s more interesting to me is the question of why so many young men are drawn to his work, specifically what need his pseudo-intellectual misogyny fills for these men, some of whom I’ve found to be otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable in one-on-one interactions.

Evidently, Peterson just published a book, and controversy has ensued. But our author here thinks it is nothing to worry about.

However, I think it is more likely, given that we have largely integrated the pain of those collective traumas, that this regressive moment will be relatively brief, and we will soon see a progressive wave of compassion, justice, sustainability, and even kindness in reaction to the Trump-Peterson era. I suspect this regressive movement will be viewed by history as the final death rattle of the older mode of relation, making way for the emergence of a qualitatively novel historical era. As Whitehead writes, “new epochs emerge with comparative suddenness,” and the tragic regression we’re currently enduring may ultimately be understood as the factor that finally propelled us into a novel mode of relation.

And of course there is much more commentary available, as in The Guardian article referenced, and many other places.

Digg [digg.com] reviews the book:

David Brooks writes in The New York Times that Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is having a moment, and that he may be the "most influential public intellectual" alive. The man that Brooks, a writer known for missing the mark on cultural criticism, calls "the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which" young men are raised today has revealed himself over the last year to harbor a bevy of regressive ideas on sex and gender that turn out to be grounded in his own psychological theories.

Some Canadians [macleans.ca] are rather disapproving:

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson was in the news this week—and one imagines this makes the university sad. Peterson first made the news and became a belle of the alt-right when, in September 2016, he announced that he would not use a student’s preferred pronoun if he were asked to, except that he might if he felt the request was “genuine,” and no one had asked him that anyway.

        What that poor man has been through.

And she adds more:

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

        “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

        To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

What the poor man has been through!

Finally, from the pages of The New Statesman [newstatesman.com]:

In recent weeks, I have become mesmerised by a clinical psychologist who is the darling of the alt-right. That is not a sentence I ever thought I’d have cause to write, but Jordan Peterson is something else.

        I had seen some of his lectures before that notorious interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News in January, the one that gave him particular notoriety in the UK for his comments on the gender pay gap. As Stephen Bush wrote last week, Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is at base a self-help guide, and like every other contribution to that bloated canon contains a mixture of the persuasive and self-evident.

Dark Enlightenment or dank memes, it does seem that the intellectual pretensions of the alt-right are somewhat less than solid. But in a world of changing and confusing roles and self-identities for males, I usually refer to The Art of Manliness [artofmanliness.com] for more actually useful information, without all the rightwing agitprop, and very handy mustache grooming tips.

Original Submission

Pushing 30 is exercise enough.

        Home About FAQ Journals Topics Authors Search Polls Submit Story Subscribe Preferences Log Out Atom feed RSS feed

Alright, clunky, but most links restored. Have at it, and knock the TMB off his high horse!
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Update, of sorts. I have received a message from the TMB his own self, one of those things, again, that lowly normal Soylentils do not have, bragging about how he now has two journals with over a hundred comments. Well, lah-de-dah! Do we really need to turn journals into a popularity contest? This is one reason why, normally, I just let rejected submissions lie. If Soylentils are not interested enough to have it on the front page, in the estimation of the eds, then it probably does not belong there, or in a journal. And I would direct everyone to NotSanguine's journal on rational debate, it is much more interesting than this one. Unless you are a incel with a Red Pillar who voted for Trump.

We put off part Two of Ethics for Soylentils, even though they are sorely needed, for another unfortunate series of events: aristarchus censored yet again.

As some are aware, since the unpleasantness at Charlottesville last August, I have been submitting articles on the self-named "alt-right". Nearly all of these have been rejected. That in itself does not disturb me, I tend to call a spade a stupid idiot white supremacist homosexual gayhater who cannot get dates. But that is just me. No, here we have a case, for the second time, when one of my submissions has been accepted, but then disappeared. This worries me. It is one thing to be rejected, with which I have no problem, and I will not grouse about. But to be accepted, and then the Man in the High Castle steps in to block the Fine Article? Sounds like censorship to me, and must also seem that way to at least some of the editorial staff.

So here is my submission that was accepted, but never made it to the front page:

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Not sure about this one. Seems too early to panic. But evidently, Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning attended a party of the alt-right, white, and light. Article is on Slate [slate.com]:

        Chelsea Manning went to a rather awkward party on Saturday night. It’s something she’s been able to do since May, four months after an outgoing President Obama commuted the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst’s prison sentence after she had served seven years behind bars for leaking 750,000 sensitive military and diplomatic documents on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well that alone should get Soylentils all a buzz, especially the ones who are "Stolen Valor" participants.
But there is more to the story, and the party.

        In a BuzzFeed report, partygoers touted Manning’s attendance as proof of their own inclusivity. “I truly don’t want to speak for her but I guess she respects what this is all about,” said Jack Posobiec, an infamous alt-right provocateur and vocal Trump supporter. Cernovich later tweeted that he was “glad she stopped by.”

                Yes I literally shook hands with Chelsea Manning tonigut, the left is freaking out, it was not a big deal. It was a huge and amazing party. Glad she stopped by. All are welcome to party with me.
                                                                                — Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) January 21, 2018

If it is alright with the dudes that promoted Pizzagate, that someone who released the child-murdering conspiracy theory that is the US Military is at their party, well, it it alright with me.
But:

        In other words, Manning claims she attended the party to learn more about a group of people she believes push a dangerous ideology that doesn’t deserve a platform. Gathering “intelligence” on “fascists” is probably not the most pressing activity when you’re facing a difficult Senate race, nor is the inconspicuousness presumably required of such a secret mission realistic if you’re as famous as Chelsea Manning. If that is what she was up to, it’s also a move that could be construed as evidence of an affiliation with antifa, the anti-fascist activists on the left that are often associated with violence and direct-action tactics that sometimes break the law. Antifa’s tactics also include conducting deep research on far-right organizers, sometimes by embedding activists at events.

OK, you know the drill, Soylentils! Look to your Right! Now look to your Left! One of these people is a Microsoft shill. Careful what you say.

Other coverage: http://www.newsweek.com/chelsea-manning-says-she-attended-pro-trump-new-york-ball-gather-intelligence-787929 [newsweek.com] [newsweek.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/an-evening-with-deplorables-inside-the-far-right-party-in-manhattan [theguardian.com] [theguardian.com]
http://www.newsweek.com/white-supremacist-accused-amtrak-terror-attack-also-attended-alt-right-event-771495 [newsweek.com] [newsweek.com]
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/lukethompson/2018/01/04/the-x-files-alt-right-gillian-anderson-david-duchovny/&refURL=https://www.google.com/&referrer=https://www.google.com/ [forbes.com] [forbes.com]
Only including the Forbes link because their site is opaque if you block javascript, and I am hoping someone can tell us what it says!

And, the evening was not a total loss [nydailynews.com]. One Nazi got punched in the face. So, who was making money off the alt-right in this instance? And how is this submission user hostile?

As usual, all the actual links are stripped, and this is actually the version I posted after this submission was put into stasis. But the points remain the same. (Except, what happened to the User:Hostile tag? It was there until I pointed it out. Is there a Hostile User list on SoylentNews? Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the antifa party? The Mighty McCarthy Buzzard! ) It was pertinent enough for some editor to approve of it, but beyond the pale for some other editor, for some other reason, which I presume we will never know.

In other news, janrinok sent me a very nice Direct Message, (note: normal Soylentils do not have these, so they are like messages from the Gods!), where he said he read much of the past history of the censorship of the arirstarchus on this site, but he did not see it as such. And he expressed some concern that my submissions might open SoylentNews up to a lawsuit (Peter Thiel is an ass!). I do not find that convincing, and I still believe that it is the political bias of several (I could name names, and name names of people who were to become eds, and were mysteriously dropped?) members of the editorial staff, and The Mighty Busstard.

Strange, janrinok seemed to think that I took TMB to be my nemesis. Nothing could be further from the truth. I consider TMB to be my student. A recalcitrant, stubborn, and significantly developmentally delayed student, but I have hope for him. In the long run.

So I encourage everyone to add the #freearistarchus!!! tag to your sig, even though we are not Twitter (thank the gods), in order to shake up the eds. The promise that was Buckfeta is in danger of being lost, as I have long pointed out. So we need to decide what SoylentNews is to be, a libertarian backwater blog, or an actual replacement for the site that must not be named, for the same reason that site was what it was.

Oh, and if any of you disagree with me, I will more likely than not send you over to Larry the Cable Guy. Let's git 'er done!

I am not a physicist, but I'll throw this one out there because:
1. It seems fairly reasonable, maybe if anything it's too obvious (I'm bad at telling).
2. I think physicists would agree (I would be biased :D).
3. It might be interesting to think about. If not it's short.
4. I've got nowhere else to put it/it didn't really fit with a comment I wrote :D

I'll apologize in advance for missing replies to replies and any discussions. I get bogged down on a daily basis and then time evaporates and later I often discover that I need to think more about what people say and I get bogged down again and suddenly it's months or maybe even years... (anyone who is "young" this is how cruel it is to become "old" although I'm not ancient: live, do, and think, as much as you can while time seems infinite!).

Anyway here it is:
Science is not dogma, science is imperfection striving to be less imperfect. That something is good enough for practical application including awesomely impressive feats like detecting gravitational waves —a feat which was considered impossible/unachievable by Einstein— does not truly give any qualitative or relative measure of how correct the current science is compared to better future science. What we can surmise is that there are at least some large questions left unsolved (grand unified theory stuff) and those indicate that there will be a future paradigmatic shift in physics that is at least on the scale of the one from Newtonian to "Einsteinian".

Ethics for Soylentils

The Short Version, 0.0.2

        As the resident philosopher, et cetera, et cetera, here is a short primer on ethics. No promises of completeness, comprehensiveness, or persuasiveness, but just some things.

        ONE: Some things are good, some things are bad.
        TWO: Some things are right, some things are wrong.

        We will start here. No first we might consider the contrary position, moral nihilism. As cited in the movie The Big Lebowski, “these men are nihilists, they believe in nothing.” Now there are several things that are attractive about moral nihilism:
  1. you are not the boss of me.
And
  2. you are not the boss of me.
These two explain the attraction the position has for libertarians of all stripes. But we have to keep this anti-position in mind, as kind of a null hypothesis to the moral endeavor. (Oh noes, did I just write that? Homminy crap, this will attract those anti-null hypothesis ACs, and then the Electric Universe types, and the Flat-earthers, and jmorris. But, can’t be helped, we plow on.)

        Moral nihilism may be a bit to strong from some, so they opt instead for something like constructivism. Now this is a sociological school of thought of quite some age, so it is good to pay attention. One of the consequences of Marxism is the standing of Hegel on his head. This requires some explanation. Hegel was a German philosopher that put forth a systematic idealism. Without going into it too deeply, idealism is the idea that ideas are more real than things. Yes, to practical minded people, this is insane. But there is a long tradition of this in philosophy, going back to Plato, who held that the concepts of things, the part of them that could be comprehended by the mind, was what was true and real, whereas the phenomenal part was partial and fleeting. So, Marx, going with the popularity of materialism as against Platonic and Hegelian Idealism, tended to explain reality based on the realities rather than the ideas. This led him to suppose that it was the material conditions of humanity that lead to ideas, rather than that ideas revealed or defined the reality that humans lived in. Practically, this meant that for Marx, philosophy, religion, law, and perhaps even the arts, are all forms of thought conditioned and created by the economic relations of the society in which they occurred. Ideas, for Marxists, are ideology.

              Now this leads into a long European tradition of “ideology critique”, especially in French philosophy, coming from the structuralist ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and leading to the Post-modernist tradition, and, yes, to social constructivism. But we only mention all this here to point out that the idea that morality, ethics, ideas of right and wrong, have been in contention for quite some time, and a long-standing approach has been to analyse the position you oppose, to reduce their position to self-interest. We see this all the time, right here on SoylentNews, where climate change deniers accuse the opposition of being in the pay of “green energy”. But seriously, ideology goes deeper than that.

      And, this raises our question here. If the idea of good and evil depends upon a particular “mode of production” in Marx’s terminology, then of course the standards of good and evil could be changed, by effecting a change in the mode of production. Now some may react in horror at the idea that political violence may change what is right or wrong, but the larger question is whether there is any objective morality at all. Marxist ideology may critique Capitalist morality as the mere superimpostion of ideas in defense of a historically determined reality, but it suggests that all morality is in fact not based on anything else. So the question is, what would post-Capitalist morality be based on? Or if there no longer was any structural basis for ideology, would morality exist at all?

        Interesting questions, all.

  So here we go. If there is such a thing as right and wrong, or alternatively good and bad, it must needs have a basis somewhere. This is one of the really smart things that Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, had to say. All morality must be founded on some principle. If not, it is nothing but the subjective expression of a personal preference.

1. Let him settle with himself, whether he would wish to discard this principle altogether; if so, let him consider what it is that all his reasonings (in matters of politics especially) can amount to?
2. If he would, let him settle with himself, whether he would judge and act without any principle, or whether there is any other he would judge an act by?
3. If there be, let him examine and satisfy himself whether the principle he thinks he has found is really any separate intelligible principle; or whether it be not a mere principle in words, a kind of phrase, which at bottom expresses neither more nor less than the mere averment of his own unfounded sentiments; that is, what in another person he might be apt to call caprice?
4. If he is inclined to think that his own approbation or disapprobation, annexed to the idea of an act, without any regard to its consequences, is a sufficient foundation for him to judge and act upon, let him ask himself whether his sentiment is to be a standard of right and wrong, with respect to every other man, or whether every man's sentiment has the same privilege of being a standard to itself?
5. In the first case, let him ask himself whether his principle is not despotical, and hostile to all the rest of human race?

Introduction to the Principles of Morality and Legislation, chapter one.

Now there have been attempts to describe morality along these lines, again for some reason by Englishmen. The name of the theory is “Emotivism”, sometimes mocked as the “Boo-Hooray” ethical theory. Under this, the only meaning to an ethical judgment is personal preference. Which by its very nature is unprincipled. Bentham wins. (And holey crapolla, BBC has an “ethics guide”?)

        Next, we might take the subjective idea and try to run with it. Problems, though. We might say that it is right for any individual to do what is in their own self interest. See the problem? What people want, and what they need (interest) are quite often not the same thing. So we end up modifying a theory into what is called “Egoism”. Yes, named after a Planet in the “Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 2” movie! No, “ego” is just Latin for “I”, or me. Of course, to define what someone should find in their own self-interest, as opposed to what they actually say they want, takes of bit of doing. So we end up with “Enlightened Egoism”. This is what any suitably educated and scientifically aware individual would want, so you must want it, too. No matter what you say.

          We may even be able to extend such a theory to the range of principle that Bentham demands. “Everyone should do what is in their own (enlightened) self-interest. And Devil take the hindmost. Sound familiar? On this view, whenever anyone starts spouting any other ethical theory other than one based on selfishness, they either are jockeying for advantage, or seriously deluded. The may quite possibly be a SJW. But this does leave us with a real problem. Often times it is in our interest to cooperate with others, but of course it is also just as in their interest to betray us when we cooperate. What are we to do?

        Another Brit, earlier than Bentham, gives us a shot at this. Thomas Hobbes lived during the time of the Glorious Revolution in Britain. He sided with the Monarchy. Others, like John Locke, sided with the Parliment. But it is interesting to understand that they started from rather similar amoral assumptions. Imagine primitive humanity, before there was society, laws, authority, or anything. This is a rather novel idea, foreign to political thought previous. For earlier political thinkers, the state was based on a natural order, kings were put in power by Divine Right, and so obedience was required by natural and divine law. Hobbes, and Locke, and interestingly, Jean Jacques Rousseau, came up with a new basis for legitimate authority, an idea called the “Social Contract". Prior to the establishment of such a contract, human lived in a “state of nature”.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Leviathan

But this does share something with our Emotivists and Marxists, in that it holds that morality is a human invention, not a fact of nature.

  To this war of every man against every man this also is consequent, that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind.

op. cit.

Now Hobbes's way out of the state of nature is to agree to a truce in the war of each against all. But more importantly, he maintains that it is in each individual’s own self interest to do so. Part of the reason for this is Hobbes’ rather pessimistic ground for human equality.

NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For, as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

You may think you can prevail by superior strength, but if we really put our minds to it, each of us is equally lethal to any other of us. Ya gotta sleep sometime! So this means that for everyone, the social contract is mandated by an enlightened self-interest. And of course, breaking the social contract is equally in everyone’s enlightened self-interest, if they can get away with it! Thus Hobbes insists on the creation of an absolute power, a Leviathan, the Monarch, to enforce the agreement. Problem being, the Leviathan is not actually a party to the agreement? Oh, now we move on to Locke, the American Declaration of Indendence, and a whole bunch of liberal bourgeious revolutionary stuff. Skipping ahead.

      Back to Bentham. Self-interest as a principle only gets us so far. Bentham proposed something more universal, a true principle, the principle of “Utility”. Now he here is delving into one of the major points I want to make in this short “Ethics for Soylentils”, the distinction between theories of good, and theories of right. Bentham is competely on the “good” side, and in this he agrees with the ancient Greek school of Epicurus. Utilitarianism is a variant of “hedonism”, from the Greek word ἥδυς, “pleasure”. If it feels good, it is good. Hedonism has been controversial from the beginning, with many saying that pleasure is bad, or suited more for animals or children than for humans. But Epicurus and Bentham both respond along the lines of “what else you got?” The significant thing about moral theory based on a “good”, however, is how much of it there is, and who gets what. If some is good is good, more good is better. Ethics of Good are all about maximization.

            This may be what gets Bentham out of the egoist trap. If more good is, in principle, better, it is immaterial whose good it is, as long as there is more of it. Thus the principle of utility, in order to be a principle, is larger than what I want, or what gives me pleasure. It is this:

"By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness."

Of course, what is important is the total happiness, not the particular happiness of an particular individual.

if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

Principles, chap. 1

  But on the upside, the happiness of each individual counts for as much as any other, so when the tally is calculated, at least you had a fair chance.

Bentham’s theory leads us to a couple of conundrums, at least. One is the notion of right actually has no place. In fact, this may be one of the most progressive aspects of Utilitarianism, the pleasure of one counts equally to the pleasure of any other, a radical egalitarianism. This can lead us to some conclusions we do not particularly like. For example, if a large number of people, particularly teenage girls, get pleasure from the performances of Justin Beiber, who are we, or The Mightly Buzzard, to say they are in error? The other, and the one most often posed, is that given the equality, there is no bar to sacrificing the pleasure/happiness of some, if it results in the greater happiness for even more persons. This has been played out in fiction multiple times, but the two I would mention are Stephen King’s Storm of the Century, [Born in sin? Come on in!] and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.

          We may have gotten away from moral nihilism, and from an equally nihilistic egoism, but there are still more issues in an ethical system. One is the Hobbesian question that if you could take over the entire apparatus of society, why not be an egoistic tyrant? This is the lingering appeal of Realpolitik, as expressed by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. This is really the question of normative force: why should anyone be moral, particularly if they really do not need to be so?
        Secondly, we have the question of right, which brings with it the idea of absolute value. In King’s TV series, the islanders are offered a choice, the life of an innocent child, or the death of all of them. For an accountant, there is no issue. But some might say that the sacrifice of an innocent, no matter what the consequences, is always wrong. Are there any things that are always wrong?

Stay tuned for the next installment of Ethics for Soylentils, where we will consider just that.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro looked to the world of digital currency to circumvent U.S.-led financial sanctions, announcing on Sunday the launch of the “petro” backed by oil reserves to shore up a collapsed economy.

The leftist leader offered few specifics about the currency launch or how the struggling OPEC member would pull off such a feat, but he declared to cheers that “the 21st century has arrived!”

“Venezuela will create a cryptocurrency,” backed by oil, gas, gold and diamond reserves, Maduro said in his regular Sunday televised broadcast, a five-hour showcase of Christmas songs and dancing.

Didn't Venezuela used to have a fiat currency backed by oil? Why would anyone believe that this new fiat currency, despite having cryptocurrency cooties, will fare any better? I bet that the public nature of the block chain is a significant part of the reason they went with this scheme. You know to prevent the people of Venezuela from buying the things they need on the black market. Like anyone would use the "petro" for that anyway.

And we may also have a sign that the bubble of cryptocurrencies is reaching an unsustainable high, if we have deadbeat dictators grasping at this particular bit of straw.