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Donald Trump has spent 81 days on the golf course in his first year as President, racing past his predecessors.

Mr Trump, after a weekend at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, has spent more time on the green than George W Bush did during eight years in office.

The President has also been on the golf course almost three times as much as Barack Obama did during his first year.

The American public spent at least $43 million in order to support President Donald Trump‘s considerable golf habit in 2017.

The American Public Reportedly Spent $43 Million Last Year So Trump Could Play Golf

Donald Trump plays golf almost three times as much as Barack Obama after one year in office

Gretchen Carlson named chair of Miss America organization

Former Fox News Channel anchor and 1989 Miss America Gretchen Carlson was named chairwoman of the Miss America Organization's board of directors Monday, and three other past pageant winners will join her on the board.

The new leadership comes less than two weeks after leaked emails surfaced showing CEO Sam Haskell and others disparaging the appearance, intellect and sex lives of former Miss Americas. Haskell resigned Dec. 23, along with two other top leaders.

The selection of Carlson marks the first time a former pageant winner has served as the leader of the nearly 100-year-old organization. The organization also announced the appointments of three other past Miss Americas: 2012 winner Laura Kaeppeler Fleiss, 2000 winner Heather French Henry and Kate Shindle, who won in 1998 and now serves as president of the Actors' Equity Association. Their appointments take effect immediately, as does Carlson's.

Previously: Miss America on Life Support

EU should ban Austria presidency, French appeal says

Earlier: Coalition government with far-right party takes power in Austria

Vienna Says Will Grant Citizenship to Descendants of Austrian Holocaust Victims

Same-Sex Marriage Legalized in Austr(al)ia

Link to previous journal.

Italy to send soldiers to Niger to stop migrants

Italy to send almost 500 troops to Niger to stem migrant flow: PM

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.

Mood music for post.

⛄🎅🎄🎁👼

ＩＮＩＴＩＡＴＩＮＧ．．．

Out of boredom, I did a Google News search for "arcology". This was the lone result:

Paolo Soleri accused of sexual abuse by daughter

No serious arcologies have been built despite decades of research/advocacy. Various projects have been proposed but not realized:

Crystal Island
Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid
Dubai City Tower
Sky City 1000
X-Seed 4000

But the dead stiff Paolo Soleri is now just another #MeToo rapist. Is disinterment on the table?

In the future, there will be no arcologies. Soleri's ideas have been celebrated and studied, and others have proposed arcologies, but there will always be pesky obstacles like a global financial crisis, lack of lengthy carbon nanotubes, or the threat of terrorism. If you put one million people in a single building, the incentive to find the one or handful of weak spots becomes that much greater. Because more kills = higher score. Instead of arcologies, expect more apps and socially-conscious VR.

If we don't see nukes flying in every direction, we'll get to experience new and exciting wars soon. Perhaps right here on American soil. They'll be fought with bioweapons, maybe some directed energy weapons, and Hackaday-chique explosives powered by 3D printing and Raspberry Pis. American ingenuity is not dead: it has to kill America first.

A select few elites may be able to escape the carnage. The Musky One will soon have four spaceports from which to launch his escape vehicle to Mars. Why else would he plan for 2024 when everyone else is talking about 2035? He saw the writing on the wall and wants to print his "Get Out of Judgment Day Free" card ASAP. Assuming Muskman survives the journey, he will live in a cave on the side of a cliff as the free market's chosen God-Emperor of the Red Planet. The ratio of women to men will be around 10 to 1, if not 50 to 1. You can guess what comes next. Homo sapiens sapiens erectus muskii.

So as you celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa, or New Year's this season, take a look at the people around you. Look for the pressure points, the joints, and any visible signs of weakness that could be exploited. Do so reflexively. Make a higher level of paranoia your new normal. Become more ascerbically cynical and distrustful than you already were as a SoylentNews reader. Get ready for mankind's final adventure, a global battle royale with no winners.

The Miss America Emails: How The Pageant’s CEO Really Talks About The Winners

Miss America CEO suspended over leaked emails revealed in story he calls 'unkind and untrue'

The End of Miss America

rDT summoned.

Easy Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies Recipe

Snickerdoodle

Classic Spritz Cookies

[Put here because it isn't substantially different than when the story ran last year.]

A robot designed to resemble the anatomy of a human boy can perform actions such as push-ups and sit-ups, and uses "sweat" to cool its motors:

The design of a new life-size bot named Kengoro closely resembles the anatomy of a teenage boy in body proportion, skeletal and muscular structure, and joint flexibility, researchers report online December 20 in Science Robotics. Compared with previous humanoid robots with more rigid, bulky bodies, Kengoro's anatomically inspired design [open, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aaq0899] [DX] gives the bot a wide range of motion to perform humanlike, full-body exercises.

Video (37s).

Also at Motherboard.

Previously: "Sweating" Robot can do More Push-Ups

Every Vote Counts!

RICHMOND, Va. -- Among the holiday hustle and bustle of Carytown, Virginia voters react to what some might call a "Christmas Miracle" for Democrats in the Commonwealth.

"That's sort of amazing," voter Scott Williams said.

"That's pretty amazing," voter Ariel Furler said.

In a stunning turn of events, Democrat Shelly Simonds gained eleven votes in a recount to beat the Republican incumbent in the 94th District by just one vote.

The final tally: 11608 votes to 11607 votes.

UPDATE: Apparently it's a tie now. By state law, the winner of the tie will be determined "by lot."