During my adolescence I found the anarchist cookbook. I used to read through it, fascinated with its ideology, and sometimes building various explosives and weapons. In high school I experimented with drugs and got very close to flunking out. I got in trouble with the law more times than I'd like to admit. I was very angry and paranoid, and the idiotic policies put in place during the Bush years had a lot to do with that.

Nowadays I'm a completely different person. I'm deeply religious, I try and go out of my way to say kind words and help others, and I'm a much happier person. I'm about to graduate with a degree in biochemistry from a great college. I believe the world would be a much better place if people would try harder to understand and love each other and show mercy. Reading this piece by one of my childhood mentors very much evoked a feeling of vindication.

Yup

> During my adolescence I found the anarchist cookbook. I used to read through it, fascinated with its ideology, and sometimes building various explosives and weapons.

Yup

> I got in trouble with the law more times than I'd like to admit.

Yup

> I was very angry and paranoid

Still fighting the anger I have from no where. I am not paranoid though the Snowden stuff is making me somewhat.

> I try and go out of my way to say kind words and help others, and I'm a much happier person.

These are things I try to do otherwise I find myself acting ill towards people.

I am not sure which hit me more the article or your comment. Glad to see there are others who acted the way I did in my younger days and are striving to become a better person everyday. This past May I finally graduated from a decent regional college with a degree in Information Systems and now have an awesome job doing what I love.

For what it's worth, if you're not familiar with Christianity, most Christian religions aren't biblical literalists. I was taught in grade school, by nuns, that the Old Testament wasn't to be taken literally.

> Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

Let me guess, was the universe written in javascript?

Do you have a peer reviewed source for this?

When science tries to take what it knows in the here-and-now and extrapolate those present-knowns billions of years into the past, that's where confidence should drop. At that point it's trying to take a hard-won confidence in present observations and borrow it for explaining the past. But it's not justified there.

It's like trying to say you could observe a stock for 40 years and extrapolate that tiny slice of price history billions of years into the future -- and then proceed to claim to confidently know not only what the price was at the end of those billions of years, but also the price action along the entire way.

Virgin birth. Resurrection. Parting the seas. Water into wine. And so on. Things that straight up, didn't fucking happen, ever, by any reasonable probabilistic estimation based on what we know about the world today, and those are far more recent than billions of years ago - words in a book are so far outweighed by what we know about the world that we're talking sub .01% chances here. And if you want to start calling them metaphors or helpful fictions, that's fine, but you're departing from any regular version of Christianity.

If the rules of our universe were so flexible that stuff like that could happen with such regularity less than a few thousand years ago, it's overwhelmingly likely that we'd have seen some evidence of gross violations of physical laws today.

When it comes to creation and all that, sure, science is blind, most scientists would agree with you there. But that doesn't mean Christianity has the answers. I'll take ignorance over blind belief in a random story any day, and that's what science has going for it.

For example, you seem to have some concept of "testing" that involves the observer having to cause the observed phenomenon in order for it to be empirical. On that basis you might have to classify the existence of the sun as a mere hypothesis without empirical backing, though.

Also, you should be aware that a lot of cosmological knowledge very much comes from the here-and-now, in that the light we capture with our telescopes is actually here right now - otherwise, we could not capture it with our telescopes. If you think we should discard those observations because the light we captured has been traveling for a while, you probably also would have to consider it a mere hypothesis that your computer screen showed this text one nanosecond ago.

Cosmology does not somehow mysteriously extrapolate the temperature of the microwave background - it's something you can measure, and which has been measured, a lot.

Of course, there are some assumptions - in the case of cosmology, the probably most important one would be the cosmological principle ("the laws of physics are the same everywhere"). But note that any cosmologist will tell you that that is an assumption, not something that is necessarily true.

Also, you may want to consider that looking back billions of years is what allows us to derive laws of nature which would be a lot harder to figure out by only observing recent events, which then can be used to understand things that are of more immediate concern to us here and now.

For example, the principle of evolution by natural selection was derived from observations of the past and its effects (that is, the biological landscape on the planet), and now is useful in order to explain an predict the development of antibiotics resistance.

No, don't project words into my mouth, because that's not what I'm saying. I have a spectrum of confidence when it comes to science, and the more its conclusions are reached under solid empiricism, the higher that level of confidence.

If the cause was not observable, then it is completely and totally rational to take one's level of confidence down a few notches. After all, we're not able to observe HALF of the cause--(produces)-->outcomes process.

The existence of the sun is not hypothetical, because its existence is on the right side of that process - it's an "already happened" outcome that is routinely confirmed by the senses daily.

The discussion about what caused the sun's existence is irrelevant to the vast amounts of present knowledge that can be gained from empirically observing it in the here-and-now. Not only that, but any claims (Christian, science, or otherwise) about what really caused its existence can ultimately only be glued together by faith (a confidence in things unseen).

It's not very accurate to use the word "faith" to describe any element of the scientific process. Consider the explanations to that effect from this article, which are good reading, but too lengthy to include here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

A useful excerpt from that article: "In such cases the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.”"

Let's look at a few simple cause--(produces)-->outcome examples:

- When a chair moves in a room (outcome) and you didn't observe the chair moving, can you with 100% confidence identify why/what moved the chair (cause)?

- When your wallet goes missing from your desk (outcome) and you didn't observe its disappearance, can you 100% identify who/what moved it (cause)?

- When you walk up to your house with a broken window (outcome) having never seen the window being broken, can you 100% with confidence identify the what broke the window (cause)?

I'm not saying that science is using faith to establish confidence in observable OUTCOMES. Science is using faith when it cannot observe CAUSES and proceeds to make claims about those CAUSES. Faith has to do with attributing confidence to that which cannot be observed or subject to empiricism. For example, the original cause of the sun's existence.

To be clear, when I use the word "observe", I mean in the sense of using empiricism and the senses to gather data about reality.

Causality, as such, is not directly observable. Correlation is, and causation is inferred from patterns of correlation.

When done scientifically, the specific method to go from observed correlation to conclusions about causation is to form a hypothesis, predict future observations based on that hypothesis that could be falsified to disprove it, and then go and test those predictions.

Eventually, doing this enough, and you'll end up with falsifiable models that have been rigorously tested from which you can make inferences about what must have caused events where you cannot observe the correlated event that you would infer to be the cause that are as strong as the inferences of causation you can make with events where you observe both the putative cause and the effect for which you infer it is the cause.

> If you haven't observed the cause, you have no rational reason to establish 100% confidence about what it was.

If you have observed the supposed cause -- and its supposed effect -- you have no rational reason to assert a causal link with actual 100% certainty. OTOH, with sufficient related observations, prediction, and testing those predictions, you can construct a model of causality that lets you get arbitrarily close to 100% certainty in stating what the cause of an observed effect is, whether or not you can observe the event that is the inferred cause.

> This is really simple rational thinking

It is simply incorrect, and seems grounded in both a mistake about what science does and the mistaken belief that causality is directly observable.

> I don't get how science arrives at any level of confidence about causes that it can't (nor has ever) observed.

The same way it arrives at any level of confidence about causes that it can observe (observe the event, that is, not the fact that it is a "cause", which is never observable, only inferable.)

> I have no problem with confidence in what it can observe, I take issue when it can't observe and attempts to take what it can observe and confidently extrapolate that into the past.

The whole thing science does is produce and refine methods of inferring things that are not observed from things that are.

The whole thing science does is produce and refine methods of inferring things that are not observed from things that are.

This is awful, awful science. Science works best when the entire process (from cause to outcome) can be subject to empiricism.

I think we've reached an impasse here, because clearly we differ on whether or not unobservable events can be reasoned about with any level of confidence. You seem to state that inference and models that produce predictions will lead to a "arbitrarily close to 100%" level of confidence, and that's where I completely, utterly disagree... especially when we're trying to talk "billions of years ago".

Even in the recent case of a broken window, only your neighbor who saw the event could have a decent level of confidence in what caused it. Millions of tests, models, and inferences would only produce an educated guess as to what happened, all of which would be obliterated by a neighbor simply explaining what they saw.

As I said before, I am strictly empirical when it comes to science and am willing to call my personal claims about unseen events as "faith" when I am trying to establish truth about them.

Events can be observed. Causation is not an event, its a relationship between events which cannot be observed, only inferred. Science is entirely about developing, testing, and refining rules for inferring things that are not observed from things that are observed.

> Even in the recent case of a broken window, only your neighbor who saw the event could have a decent level of confidence in what caused it.

I disagree. Its quite possible, in many cases, to observe how it broke, what other objects are in proximity to the broken glass, and other things that were going on in the area and have a "decent confidence" in how it was broken without observing the actual event of breaking.

> Millions of tests, models, and inferences would only produce an educated guess as to what happened

To the extent that this is true, causality is always an educated guess even when you observe the event directly, and the educated guess, with or without observation of the event, can have any arbitrary degree of certainty.

You seem to just be repeating the belief in the myth that causation is directly observable and that science is about reporting observed causation, and not developing predictive rules. That's just plain wrong.

Empirical observation -- which never includes causation -- is the input of science, but it is no the whole of the process. If it was, science would never get beyond describing events that occur (without their causes) and observed correlations. That's not what science is.

Hmm, I may be improperly using the word "cause" here because of the connotation of the word causality. I see what you are saying, I probably am using "cause" & "produces" interchangeably.

Can I set up an an example for you to translate into how we arrive at knowledge?

Let's say we both stumble upon a giant multi-level sandcastle on the beach. For the sake of this thought experiment, assume we never saw the creation of this sandcastle, nor can we observe any other sandcastles like it being caused into existence (i.e. it was there long before we existed, and we'll never observe one being created again)

Me, in my irrational Christian ways would use faith to say "well, I've never come across one of these before, but I would posit an intelligent designer caused the existence of that sandcastle". You, with your rational and logical models of scientific inference, would take all sorts of measurements and gather the available present evidence and extrapolate that data deep into the past. Given the benefit of time, you would argue the complex movements of the ocean against the rocks and beach likely formed the sandcastle in a slow process over millions of years.

After all, the only present observable evidence we have is the ocean, the waves, the rocks, the sand (and all those intertwined processes), so it's clearly the only way we can arrive at a cause, right?

Why a sandcastle? By using a known designed object as a stand-in for objects whose design is under dispute, you're inadvertently begging the question[0].

Scientists didn't just decide to hate creation one day, making up evolution in response. They looked at everything they saw[1], then over centuries of discovery, found that simple creation didn't agree with the evidence. On a shorter time scale, the same process leads born creationists (like myself) to accept evolution on its merits.

Also, when evolutionary biologists refer to processes that occur over vast lengths of time, they aren't using time for its "wishy-washy benefit[s]", they're using time because time is what they observe in the form of sedimentary layers, isotopic decay, and genetic drift. Science is not like Doctor Who, in that "timey wimey" hand waving is discouraged.

After all, the only present observable evidence we have is the ocean, the waves, the rocks, the sand (and all those intertwined processes), so it's clearly the only way we can arrive at a cause, right?

Can you provide a specific instance where an interventionist/creationist model provides better agreement with the evidence?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

[1] By which I mean conducted experiments, made observations, and gathered evidence.

In this context you should also note that simply positing an intelligent designer does not actually gain you anything. Explanations can be recognized by their ability to predict future observations. Positing an intelligent designer does not allow you to make any predictions whatsoever. There is nothing necessarily fundamentally wrong with positing an intelligent designer - it's just not an explanation - so, if you want to have an explanation, you are still on square one. You essentially just have given the thing you lack knowledge about a name, namely "intelligent designer", but you haven't gained any knowledge about it.

As for your sand castle example: Well, I don't really have a clue how a geologist or an archeologist would go about that, but presumably one could try and determine the structure of the castle, such as the form of the grains, and how they stick together, and find other instances of similar structure to try and figure out what kinds of processes might be able to form such a structure? But as always: When in doubt, we simply don't know.

Also, I smell the Boeing from the junkyard argument for creationism. In case I am right there, you urgently should educate yourself about what natural selection is and in particular how natural selection is not random, and how evolution without natural selection would not work.

So when you can't subject something to empirical observation... such as the original creation of the you yourself, where exactly does one gain a sure confidence in the explanation for your original cause?

Well, leaving aside the "sure confidence" (science never gets you 100 % certainty on anything ever): You correlate that for all of the other similarly shaped moistened collections of organic molecules for which you know anything of where they originated from, it was their parents. That's why you probably are pretty sure that you were born by your mother. If you want to know the same thing about our sun, you look at any number of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy which are in all kinds of different stages of their lives to correlate how stars commonly tend to come about - and your best guess is, again, that the sun probably happened similarly to other stars with similar observable properties.

BTW, I think this is a good demonstration of your misunderstanding of how science determines probable causation: Have you ever been to a magic show? Your model of causality would mean that you would not be fooled by any of the tricks (if you could observe actual causation, you would notice the lack of causation between the misdirection and the effect). The fact that you (probably) are fooled is evidence that you do actually use the principles described by dragonwriter, you just aren't quite aware of it.

Or in short: If you are interested in this, you really should read a bit about the philosophy of science. People have spent a great deal of effort on figuring out this stuff and all the fallacies that you haven't quite thought through yet.

Sounds like you're quite well-educated on this topic. Can you list a few recent philosophy of science books that you've read? I'm also interested in hearing your personal thoughts on each book you recommend, because I will not accept a simple copy/pasted list of coursework from Wikipedia. I want to hear about material you've personally read and your thoughts on each one, seeing as how you're thrusting these expectations on me.

It's not like what I am saying is totally new here. I'm plenty well read on the topic, and most of what I've said is similar in vein to Hume [1] (and others') work on the problem of induction [2]. For such a well-educated "philosophy of science" man as yourself, I'm surprised you've missed that obvious connection.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Induction [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

no, I can not, and no, I am not thrusting any expectations on you, I am just telling you that there is literature out there that you might be interested in - though it seems like you are already aware of that.

Given that you seem to be familiar with the philosophical problem of induction, I guess I will revise my interpretation of what you are saying, and suggest books on actual science instead. It was not at all obvious to me that you were trying to point out the problem of induction, and if you were, then I would suggest that you haven't actually understood it, or rather, its consequences.

I think there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the argument for the problem of induction - but you have to realize that philosophically, there is no distinction there between the inductive conclusion that there is a big bang or evolution or bacteria or electromagnetism ... and the inductive conclusion that there is a sun. "The sun" and its associated properties and predictions are also pure induction and thus equally vulnerable to the problem of induction. And even more mundane things like the assumption that there are people out there and that there is a supermarket out there and that the bread that they sell you is not poisonous and ... - they are all inductive results. The problem of induction thus postulates that they are all equally problematic. See also solipsism.

The problem with your arguments is that you make an arbitrary distinction between things you supposedly "observe directly" and things that are "only derived inductively", which you do not justify (and which is not justified by the problem of induction), and which I would suggest is actually not justifiable, and what I am criticizing are the inconsistencies resulting from that. My best guess is that you need some more scientific background to see clearer why that distinction is arbitrary.

For example, you are constantly referring to the here-and-now as some kind of special category of evidence. You do realize that there isn't really any "here and now"? There is no "sun here now" - there is only a brain here and now that processes signals that we hypothesize come from photo receptors in the eyes, which we further hypothesize were stimulated by waves of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn we hypothesize has previously been traveling for around eight minutes from what we hypothesize to be a star, about which we further hypothesize how it works internally, which is part of why we hypothesize that it is still creating those electromagnetic waves, even though we wouldn't know for another eight minutes if it had disappeared (or so we hypothesize). That's a whole lot of hypotheses and indirect evidence and quite a bit of looking into the past involved to call that "present knowledge from the here and now", don't you think?

And no, we can not observe the cause - you only can observe the effects, ever. In the case of the sun, that is the electromagnetic radiation that we hypothesize to be created by a star in our neighbourhood.

And essentially the same thing is true for the big bang: We see its effects, among those the microwave background, which is electromagnetic radiation which we hypothesize to be coming from the horizon of when the universe became transparent, which we hypothesize to be 13.7 billion light-years away, ... - and if you have a radio telescope, it can easily be confirmed by the senses daily.

So, if you were to apply your standards consistently, you probably would have to consider belief in the existence of the sun right now or belief in the existence of bacteria and viruses (you can not observe those with your senses, in case you mean that a little bit too literally) as a matter of faith.

I would think that that's silly, and it's much saner to say that the empirical evidence for the sun and the big bang and bacteria is all pretty strong, possibly varying a bit in strength, but without any of the qualitative differences that you seem to be implying.

-- Isaac Newton

Says who? Not all Christians think of god that way. You write as if you haven't thought about this much or spoken with many believers. Atheists aren't automatically entitled to the moral and intellectual high ground you know. I'd judge their "valuation of science and logic" the same way I'd judge yours (critically and carefully), and you don't get a pass because you believe in science. /An atheist.

Yet again, very literal interpretation.

I don't see why he asserts this as if it is indisputable fact. This is one of the most debated topics in all of human history. The leaders of almost every major revolution eventually reached precisely the opposite conclusion.

The book may in fact do harm in the hands of those who are rash and quick to anger. But I don't think that has anything to do with something that is inherently illogical.

You make an excellent point, one which Noam Chomsky addressed by saying[1]

> "If we're interested in let's say diminishing the amount of violence in the world, it's at least arguable and perhaps even sometimes true that a terroristic act does diminish the amount of violence in the world. Hence a person who is opposed to violence will not be opposed to that terroristic act."

Edit: The context was the use of violence to stop a hypothetical "train" from transporting munitions to help the criminal US war in Vietnam.

[1] http://www.eduqna.com/Quotations/495-quotations-5.html

It's violence, and it's moral certainty is debatable depending on the specific context.

Being against violence means wanting to minimize the amount of violence in the world, no? It's a strange strawman to say that being against violence means never taking any forceful action whatsoever - that just leads to violent outcomes through inaction.

It's easy to make your decision when the potential downside (a child cries for 5 minutes) is so minor and the potential upside (a child gets saved from dying) is so much bigger in comparison - it only becomes an interesting debate when you up the stakes considerably. For example, the debate about whether what Mandela did, back in his "terrorrist" days, was justified.

Their use of violence against the hijackers was not pacifist, and because they were not pacifists many lives, arguably countless lives, were spared.

Violence for self-defense isn't pacifism though. Pacifism is not "only use violence when it is justified".

That you recognize that violence can be justified (for instance, in self-defense) means that you're not a pacifist. That is okay, most people are not.

The author asserts that violence used to prevent additional violence is illogical. You and I both recognize that as false, as both you and I recognize the value that violence can have when it is used for self-defense.

But back to the main point, there is a world of difference between "self-defense" and "violence used to prevent additional violence". Self-defense is immediate: someone is punching you, so you punch back. The other thing... it doesn't have to be. In my mind, self-defense is justified. But self-defense is defined as "have no other reasonable option", and thus is fairly narrow. If you can negotiate, if you can protect your interests by deterring the enemy, if you can eliminate the enemy without violence, by say sanctions, etc. then you have options and it's not self-defense. Also, self-defense is not the condition where violence is the best option. It's only self-defense when violence is the only option.

Perhaps violence is justified when it's not self-defense, but I don't think you can call any first-strike "self-defense" in order to gain the high moral ground.

Can anyone think of a terroristic act that resulted in one or more deaths actually leading to less net violence? Most seem to cause more violence: Dorner shooting police, causing police to open fire on civilians they thought were him. 9/11 leading to many innocent deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. People are much more likely to respond to violence with violence, than they are to respond with it to peace.

I think its a fine definition of violence, IF you accept that violence is sometimes necessary (I think most people hold this view), or even that violence may not be inherently wrong (really a logical extension of the first... but I feel that less people would say they agree with this view).

One salient point I found mentioned about this was in HPMoR, where Harry mentions that Gandhi endorsed the use of nonviolent resistance if the Nazis invaded India. Of course, we know exactly what would have happened if they had done that, and we also have a pretty good idea of what would have happened if the Allies hadn't used violence during WWII.

It's ugly, but the fact is that real life isn't a movie, and the good guys don't always win just because that's what's just.

I didn't take it as indisputable. Instead it is taken in the context of where he is. Specifically being a minor part of a major machine, acting out to damage the machine won't do anything other than cause more violence.

Pacifism is a tool, not a silver bullet. For revolutionaries and reformationists, there is no silver bullet.

During the war (to his credit, before the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis were publicly known), Gandhi called on Britons to fight the Nazis without arms, suggesting that the only way to defeat the Nazis with violence was to become more horrible than the Nazis.

Today we have the benefit of hindsight so we can see that was a silly thing to assert, but that hindsight realization should drive us to realize that caution must be exercised when advocating non-violent resistance. It cannot be successfully applied to every situation.

(To Every Briton: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945851/posts)

[T]here is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity... he believed in ’arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?

---

“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.”

“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”

“Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

[snip]

Mahatma Gandhi has never lived under a thoroughly totalitarian regime; his generosity and humanity make it difficult for him to realize how very cruel a dictatorship can be. In India, and in Palestine, and other plces, violence or organized nonviolence is a form of “public relations.” …

Thus gandhian nonviolence as well as its ugly opposite — Zionist terror — implies the existence of a free democratic society in England (and in America). It is to this court of public opinion that the resisters in India and kidnappers in Palestine have appealed. But suppose there were no democracy in Western nations?

A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did.

---

That last section in particular strikes me as quite similar to George Orwell's objection.

(quotation from "Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs At The World's Crossroads", by way of: http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-vi...)

I think this was in "End of Faith."

False.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-...

(primarily focuses on the lampshade myth, but also touches the issue of soap from human corpses)

I don't think that the foreign policy of the Five Eyes is really a relevant tangent at this point in the discussion, but suffice it to say that I am 'Not A Fan'(tm). If you're looking for someone to disagree with there, you'll have to find somebody else.

That kind of comment trivializes what was done in the name of Fascism. Just stop.

You might argue that even if Germany had been unswayed, the Americans and British would have been. That may be true, but then you are just pushing the task of using violence to stop Hitler onto another party. You haven't eliminated violence, you've just postponed it and had millions of people senselessly kill themselves instead of making the Nazis struggle with the task.

The only way that loosing the support of the uninformed German masses would have stopped the Nazis is if those previously uninformed German masses took up arms against their government. The Nazis were only going to stop killing once there was nobody left to kill, or once they were killed. They played by a different set of rules.

And they needed active support from the "uninformed German masses" - why do you think Goebbels was their 3rd or 4th most important man? The support was gained through propaganda, and the core parts of that were the all-around (including moral) superiority of the Aryan race and in contrast the portrayal of Jews as its absolute enemy, both despicable and threatening.

If that propaganda had been revealed as a lie via large-scale non-violent protests, it would have caused serious and quite possibly unsurmountable problems for the Nazi government - they did not have nearly enough hardened ideologues to run the entire country.

No, I don't think that.

What I think is that are a fine example of people who could not be stopped with anything but violence. Killing or letting them have their way were the only options.

They likely could not have run the country without the support of the German people (I'd like to point out that it is not clear that they could have run the country _even with_ the support of the German people; they were still on a self-destructive trajectory even if they had not been at war with the Allied forces...) but they could have kept the slaughter going. While having an industrialized society does make genocide more efficient, it is by no means a prerequisite for genocide.

The Nazis required propaganda not because they were afraid of what would happen if the German public became peacefully non-cooperative. They needed propaganda to 1) prevent a violent rebellion in Germany and 2) remain strong in the face of violent opposition from the Allied forces.

---

Succinctly put:

I do not believe that the Germans were pure monolithic ultimate evil.

I do not believe that this would have been a winning strategy:

"You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

Against the Nazis, I believe that is the strategy of a fool.

What is clear is that the German people knew something was afoot. Perhaps they did not know that there were camps build for the express purpose of extermination, but the sure as hell knew there were mass deportations, families being disappeared, and concentration camps (a concept that is distinct from death/extermination camps).

However, when I talked to those granddads, it became very clear that they knew what was going on. They not only had a sharp memory of what happened, but also tried to make their ideology and actions appear harmless. It's always the same story. "I had no idea what was going on. And what could I have done, even if I knew it?"

The stinky story falls apart, when they start explaining how it was back then. After an hour of talk you get the sense that they try to defend something that is simply illogical. Most Germans today, don't agree with any part of the NS-Period, but cannot get rid of their own hate against Jews, colored people or different people. You've recently read this story about the guy who got him self arrested, right? Try to suit up like a Jew, a Black, a Gay or any other enemy of the old regime and you will really understand how it is. On Halloween you can go out as one without looking weird, but even though the setup is artificial, I'm sure you will get reactions that you wouldn't expect and from people from whom you wouldn't expect it.

Once a disabled man knocked our door and asked for a signature. He tried to use sales tactics to get his signature, but when I found out what it was for, which he strongly tried to hide, I was shocked. He blatantly tried to get our votes for their nazi party. That's not a year ago. Of course, I told him to go the f* out of here and that he should read a book, which explains how his own party burned people like him alive, and then think about his political views.

How well did he? He was rotting away in prison when the most important aspects of India and Pakistans independence was negotiated by more pragmatic leaders.

The British decision to grant independence happened at a time when Congress had lost massive amounts of influence due to their stance on the war, and the other parts of the independence movement had used the opportunity to strengthen their positions.

Because he was out of the picture when the most important decisions was made, he lost his chance at preventing the partition, for example.

It's clear he was an important leader, but there were many others.

There's something to that, but consider the case of Tibet. Ok, China isn't Nazi Germany, but they're pretty totalitarian, particularly in Tibet. They certainly don't allow "a free press and right of assembly." The Dalai Lama, as spiritual and political leader of Tibet, has insisted on Ghandi-style non-violent resistance for over 60 years now. Instead of jumping into the ocean, Tibetans protest the occupation by setting themselves on fire. It happens so often that gasoline is a controlled substance in Tibet.

We might note that non-violence hasn't been very effective against the Chinese, (at least so far) and if that's all Orwell was getting at, fine. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that the Dalai Lama and his followers do understand the nature of totalitarianism, and it's not just naiveté that makes them continue with non-violence.

To apply an example: If this resistance was trained into the British public, and the Germans marched into London and declared themselves conquerers, the population would ignore them. When they are ordered to build factories here, to report to detention centres there, they would simply refuse to. Threats and demonstrations of force aimed at extracting compliance by brutalising certain segments of the population would be disregarded by the rest of the population[1].

Supplies for the conquerors would go missing or never be produced. They would have to rely on their own manpower to oversee all operations at gunpoint. As soon as the men with guns are called away somewhere else, work stops, workers disappear.

Any population which could respond in this manner would be unconquerable not in terms of territory, but in terms of spirit, which I believe is the sort of thing Ghandi was after.

The degree to which you could ever implement this system is dubious. I'm not sure you could get large groups of people to act that way. But if you could, it would be very effective.

[1] This is the bit I find hardest to see in practise.

That is a very strong component of what Orwell was getting at. What Orwell was further getting at is that the Germans had extermination on their mind, the English in India and even the Chinese in Tibet did not.

Additionally Orwell is pointing out that non-violent resistance is made effective by the existence of free societies anywhere in the world that they might have influence. The Tibetans benefit from this, as you can infer from how much time the Dalai Lama spends courting the international community. Gandhi's suggestion to the British would have led to the eradication of free societies.

Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, on the other hand, have a much broader goal, which, yes, involves lifting oppression, but also includes more subtle aspects of the well-being of their followers once that goal has been achieved. I think that contra Orwell, practitioners of non-violence appeal not only to free societies elsewhere, but also to the humanity of their oppressors. And so they try to eliminate the conflict, rather than winning it. Except... decades later, Tibet is still oppressed by China.

My point is not that Orwell is wrong, but that he misunderstands Ghandi.

A justified violent action is future oriented, hoping that the future will vindicate what will be a past action but knowing that at the moment, the action is "wrong" until it becomes redeemed through historical context.

By contrast, a legitimate violent action is past oriented, and understood as simply "right", because the power carrying it out has been granted legitimate state power. Here, we can see how people in the US who favor military action often see military action as the "right" of the US to protect its interests, coupled with the legitimacy of US power as a force for the promotion of human rights (not a view I agree with, by the way).

This might sound like a strange and useless distinction, but consider the difference between a police officer shooting someone because there is no other action, and doing even though it may be wrong, and on the other hand, a police officer tasing a "non-compliant" suspect because he believes he legitimately has that power and won't be harmed even if, in the future, people decide it was a wrong action.

At that point, it seems useful, at least to me, to understand that we live in an imperfect world and may have to do violent things, but can be strong pacifists by asserting that there is never a "legitimate" violence.

I liked the approach in Iain Banks' Culture series. The Culture believes that war is sometimes necessary but resolutely refuses to glorify it, so all their combat ships are named things like "Thug" and "Gangster" and "Torturer".

And if you really want to go to the definition, wiktionary [1] has it as:

    1.One who loves, supports, or favours peace;
      one who is pro-peace.
    2.One who avoids violence.
    3.One who opposes violence and is anti-war.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pacifist

In my personal opinion, abolishing standing militaries while leaving ourselves open to raising an army if the (perhaps unlikely) need arises is, while probably not a common attitude, still just a standard non-pacifist position. I am more than open to abolishing standing armies, but I do not consider myself to be a pacifist.

That's not so much "pacifism" as it is "being a bog-standard sensible person". Of course standard sensible people like to give themselves all sort of nice sounding labels that they can wear like badges (egalitarian, pacifist, etc); there isn't anything wrong with that.

I guess the take-away here is that people can certainly claim these sorts of things about themselves, evidence to the contrary, but we shouldn't necessarily take them seriously.

Here is a decent summary, although I recommend reading the entire (brief) essay: http://booksbycslewis.blogspot.com/2012/10/why-im-not-pacifi...

> The leaders of almost every major revolution eventually reached precisely the opposite conclusion.

> I don't think that has anything to do with something that is inherently illogical.

(I think my editing has preserved the spirit of the letter.) I would say it is deeply illogical. You would have a hard time convincing me that any of those leaders have managed to prevent any amount of violence through the use of violence. I don't see any progress in the erradication of illegal violence, and legal violence is more violent than ever.

The notion is definitelly illogical. What your reasoning shows is that the leaders of almost every major revolution had pride. Pride is inherently illogical.

If you are not interested in being convinced, I am certain this example will not convince you, but I believe that the subsequent abolition of capital punishment in Romania makes it an excellent example of moderated violence ending a cycle of violence.

Much like careful amputation can save lives, the appropriate application of violence can end conflicts.

This editorial review on the Amazon page for the book might offer some more insight: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0974458902

Oh, and might I add, The Anarchist Cookbook isn't flawed so much in that it presents violence as a means to an end, but rather that actually following the recipes will likely get you killed or maimed. Hopefully people reading the book already knew this.

The Vice's Guide episode where they try out recipes makes this crystal clear. The napalm experiment was probably the most eye opening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcIMuoUcc1s

The Anarchist Cookbook is also the title of an unaffiliated text file containing explosives recipes.

See here: http://www.anarchistcookbookz.com/the-anarchist-cookbook-faq...

If you wanted to make such a book properly, you would be best off describing things that you did not invent (or worse, dream up but never tried) but instead things that have actually been used. For example, describe how the Finns used storm matches to make Molotov cocktails (which they used to great effect against Soviet tanks, though modern tanks will not be vulnerable to those sort of attacks. That should also be mentioned prominently in this hypothetical "Cookbook-done-right.")

So with rampant stupidity and reports of massive swat team abuse cropping up in the US what tools are available to the citizens to counter this? Seems the anarchist cookbook is probably on that list.

A tool is a tool, people really need to be encouraged to use them responsibly and punished if used irresponsibly.

This won't last long. When municipalities find out how much it costs to maintain these "freebies" they'll put them out for bid. You can buy one and park it on your deer-hunting lease.

edit: I'd submit that it was the violence of their respective systems upon their non-violent protests that is responsible for anything Gandhi and MLK achieved.

> Gandhi remained committed to nonviolence; I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Umkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) in 1962, in which I stated, "Force is the only language the imperialists can hear, and no country became free without some sort of violence."

You say that like it's an argument in favor of violence and against pacifism. In those two cases, the violent side lost specifically because they were violent.

I'm not convinced that violence is never called for, but pacifism clearly can work in at least some circumstances.

I don't mean it to be. I mean to say that the strength of pacifism comes from the violent reaction to it.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec11/nixont...

Now his personal feeling of threat comes more from the revolution than the state, so his opinion of revolution has changed.

Hopefully the consolation that no one will be able to download, take out from a library or buy his book without being put on a list by secret intelligence services will make him feel a little better about writing it.

I didn't think the cookbook had a premise. I enjoyed it because it was full of fun sounding, curious articles that one would never find elsewhere. It gave a sense of adventure and quiet rebellion to the reader and it could be enjoyed in peaceful solitude. It could also be used as a guide for fun projects with friends ("let's try to make thermite!") or just some exciting group discussion.

>The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil. Gandhi's non-violent resistance against the British occupiers had some effect because Britain was wrong, but not Evil. The same is true of the success of non-violent civil rights resistance against de jure racism. Most people, including those in power, knew that what was being done was wrong. But Evil is an entirely different beast. Gandhi would have gone to the ovens had he attempted non-violent resistance against the Nazis. When one encounters Evil, the only solution is violence, actual or threatened. That's all Evil understands.

-Robert Bruce Thompson

https://web.archive.org/web/20110727223802/http://lesswrong....

http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror

>"In a [previous study of mine] assessing terrorism's coercive effectiveness, I found that in a sample of 28 well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist organizations accomplished their stated policy goals 0 percent of the time by attacking civilians."

>"The seven puzzles...are: 1) terrorist organizations do not achieve their stated political goals by attacking civilians; 2) terrorist organizations never use terrorism as a last resort and seldeom seize opportunities to become productive nonviolent political parties; 3) terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government; 4) terrorist organizations have protean political platforms; 5) terrorist organizations generally carry out anonymous attacks, precluding target countries from making policy concessions; 6) terrorist organizations with identical political platforms routinely attack each other more than their mutally professed enemy; and 7) terrorist organizations resist disbanding when they consistently fail to achieve their political platforms or when their stated political grievances have been resolved..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TM_31-210_Improvised_Munition_H...

Very great statement. I've done volunteer work before and have come to the same realization.

Any teacher who learns more than his collective students is a failed teacher. Period. Such a teacher's life has been worthless--this is a mathematical fact.

Being proud of gaining more from your volunteer service than did the people you are supposed to be helping is not something to brag about. It is morally reprehensible and brings to mind all of the criticisms of poverty tourism that have so often been levied against your type of exploiter.

Usually, the money that wealthy poverty tourists spend on travel would be thousands of times more efficient had they just donated that money.

You are gleeful that you profited more from your volunteer work than the supposed recipients did. Your self-reported tale of exploitation is disgusting.

What a worthless comment.

Terrorism -- or (more to the point) political expression by violence -- is not at all a means to end violence, and it would be foolish to pretend that it can ever be. As a matter of fact that is the point of the submitted article. The original title claimed that the Cookbook's author felt terrorism is "a worthless strategy" but such a title contrasts so strongly with the actual article that it boggles my mind how the original submitter even came to that conclusion.

Terrorism is just another form of political expression, and calling it worthless is like calling a hammer worthless where a screwdriver would be more appropriate.

It is better to speak of things more specifically. Topics like assassinations, industrial sabotage, propaganda, and bombing campaigns all deserve individual treatment; talking about "terrorism" has the tendency to lump them together.

Some of the things that frequently fall under the umbrella of "terrorism" do have the potential to end violence. Even things that are violent.

Because of the fuzzy and subjective nature of the word "terrorism" it is always possible to assert that examples of "terrorism" working are not examples of "true" terrorism, but if we are wary of that loophole by being purposely inclusive, there are examples in history of terrorism ending violence. The show trial and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu is an example that springs to mind immediately. Allied resistance movements during the Second World War are another (such as Operation Heads, an assassination program run by the Polish resistance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Heads).

We don't need violent protests now that we have the Internet and can leak documents exposing government corruption and write about truths to inform people and allow them to vote in different politicians.

Today, however, the violence of the current regime goes beyond just violence against other humans. Today the current regime is committing violence against the human species, and threatening that species with extinction.

Violent acts that may stop the extinction of life on Earth are not only justified... they are morally obligatory.

We are in the last hours of humanity. The species won't be saved by squeamish old boomers.

Who is threatening the human species with extinction. I can think of several ways that humanity could go extinct, but none of them would benefit any government. Be specific.

The only remaining debate is whether we will experience apocalyptic horrors of Biblical degree, whether just humans will go extinct, or whether all life on Earth will go extinct. These are our three possible futures. The Permian mass extinction has oft been cited.

You are morally condemned for your ignorance. You are part of the problem. Shame on you.

Why would you even make that argument? What possible help could that be?

It doesn't matter WHY governments are causing the extinction of the human species. All that matters is that THEY ARE. If some institution, system, person, class, group is accidentally causing the extinction of the species, it matters not what their motive is. Any violence toward them that could be successful is morally obligatory. Even killing 90% of the human species is preferable to extinction--destroying all technology for instance is preferable to extinction.

Why are you making dumb arguments that we should do nothing in the face of scientifically proven extinction threat? Do you WANT the species to end?!

You are actually so threatened by what I'm saying that you feel the need to follow me around on HN and add your worthless 2 cents. It's actually rare to see your kind of empty, mindless blabber here on HN. But it does make me laugh.

I will happily live with a range of people with a range of moralities, but I would not be comfortable living with people who easily justify violence on utilitarian grounds, even if they are claims about the extinction of a species. These claims have to be vetted. Appropriate responses have to be weighed and considered. Unfortunately, a lot of immoral action has been justified "for the good of the many".

wibkemarianne, I'm not saying that I understand your views on morality, nor am I saying that you are necessarily a utilitarian. But what you've said implies some possible overlap.

Here is how I would frame the problem. Climate change is a collective action problem involving individuals, governments, businesses, and many kinds of incentives and moralities. What are some practical, moral, feasible ways to address the problem?

wibkemarianne, you wrote above "Any violence towards [some institution, system, person, class, group is accidentally causing the extinction of the species] that could be successful is morally obligatory." What is your basis for this? What is your definition of morality?

The who and why matter because they give important information on how to make change. They also weigh in on morality. Many (most?) people try to make choices that advance their goals.

Let's say that a set of groups is part of some arbitrary problem. Let's say that no one of them is fully responsible, but they all contribute to the problem. At what point, if any, is the problem serious enough to justify harming the groups somehow? How confident are you that you understand the problem well enough to justify the harm? Who decides? You have said that in some cases violence is morally obligatory? Whose morality?

The above paragraph is only one way to view the problem. Another important perspective is to focus on "how we fix the problem" while working with the groups involved as partners. I'm not saying that men are angels. Neither are their organizations. But often fixing a problem is more important than assigning blame.

Blame, by the way, is a computationally difficult, if not impossible, thing to estimate. Sometimes, the blame calculation (e.g. the process of determining who is at fault) is uncertain, computationally expensive, and biased. It is no surprise that many moralities have some notion of "forgive and move on". It often channels your energy in more productive ways.

Lastly, even if there are cases where violence is warranted, one has to ask if it will have the desired effect. Practicality matters very much. I made my point because collective action problems, in my experience, are unlikely to be solved by violence. Collective action problems are often best solved by leadership or changing the rules of the game.

http://www.salon.com/2000/09/18/anarchy/

* Year 1969. Writes the Anarchist Cookbook.

* Years 1973-75. Becomes a teacher.

Interpret at will.

> The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence.