User talk:JFG

Provocation of aggression is not a fact of nature; a lion or bear does not respect this so-called structure of morality. Instead, provocation of aggression is a legal frame work by some human societies to regulate human interactions. In war between two great powers there exists thousands of individual violations of aggression on both sides. There were thousands of raids upon Christian and Muslim villages prior to the Crusades of Europeans. Therefore, making provocation of war imagined legitimate by rulers on both sides. When rulers abstract the individual legal frame work to a collective level the many individuals under his power often feel justified in joining a war against the members of the rival power. The right to defend yourself and/or your nation/religion/ideology under aggression is a useful legal innovation that probably advantaged societies that adopted it; it is not a fact of nature. An example of the provocation of aggression argument is made today by rulers of liberal democracies for covid 19. They state if you’re not vaccinated you exist in a state of aggression toward the vaccinated population. This claim is highly dubious but for arguments sake let’s say this is true. If you dogmatically follow the principle of non-aggression, you should be vaccinated. All the claims of the vaccine causing infertility, myocarditis, and countless other severe condition could be false; but there is also a high probability these conditions are all too real. So, if you take the vaccine, you are internally consistent with non-aggression but at the cost of your health and future genetic success. The point I’m making is your moral code could make you an evolutionary dead end. Given that we understand provocation of aggression is a legal framework not one set in nature, should one disregard provocation of aggression as a reason to retaliate and simply aggress whenever he thinks it would advantage himself? Let us again look to nature: a lion attacks when he feels it would advantage him, but lions have very limited understanding the rules of the humans around him. A lion that attacks a human in the plains of remote Africa would face limited chances of retaliation for his attack; but a lion in a zoo in Chicago would certainly be killed for doing such an action. Therefore, lions have a low level a genetic fitness for their demonstrable actions in most of the environments of the world today. Lions are quite cognitively rigid in their actions, humans through morality and law are becoming cognitively ridged. Successfully defending against the existential threat Islam posed to Europeans was not achieved based on arguments of self defense on a collective level to the individual. It was achieved by modifying Christianity into a Christo-pagan religious syncretism. It is best exemplified in the work of the 9th century Heliand epic: the Heliand tells the gospel story in the style of pagan epic; Jesus is a war chief and his disciples are his generals. The Chivalric code combined the Germanic warrior ethos with some Christian values for example; to fear God and maintain His Church, to serve the liege lord in valor and faith, to protect the weak and defenseless, to give assistance to widows and orphans, to live by honor and for glory, to fight for the welfare of all, to obey those placed in authority, to guard the honor of fellow knights, to eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit, to keep faith, at all times to speak the truth, to persevere to the end in any enterprise begun, to respect the honor of women, never to refuse a challenge from an equal, never to turn the back upon a foe. We see elements of Christian and Germanic paganism running throughout the code of the knights. Therefore, the justification of war was a non-factor; instead, the mere existence of the knights under the Christo-paganism religious belief was enough for the survival of the Europeans.

I fully agree. I would like the encyclopedia to reflect this logic which is great in my view. It remains the case that there are people using these arguments so they must be represented. So are they not factual but moral arguments? Or is there a third type of claim that is legal or political arguments? JFG (talk) 08:22, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

You could classify it as a deconstruction of legal arguments, legal arguments are often portrayed as true for all people at all times. I'm undermining this argumentation form because it presupposes law as a priori true. I'm ok with you or others modifying my words to better fit your website's format as long as the core of my argumentation is not modified. Also, the arguments in the history section on this site is the direction of my attack. It may be a bit aggressive but that was my point. I wanted to show the flaw in their thinking.

The article you are referring to absolutely presupposes arbitrary moral axioms from which a legal system is derived from, in which the claim is evaluated in, and from which the claim originates from. One can certainly establish true and false within the realm of certain axioms, which the article tries to achieve. I do not make a case for the underlying presuppositions or for the simplification of the involved concepts. Furthermore I believe that truth itself can be differentiated by three different types that affect the content and meaning of the referencing words in question. These types of truths are: Truths in the realm of certain axioms, truth in subjective systems and objective truths of the universe. Granted, a general description of the particular system of evaluation should have been outlined in the according "dependent upon/depedency of" fields of the claim template. We should definitely start to define essential terms on their according pages. Vuk (talk) 13:29, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to look like I'm ignoring your important critique Vuk because you raise interesting arguments; I'm still working through it so I will probably post my response in a few days. JF and I talked about this in his call in show yesterday at the 1:02:50 timestamp if you want to hear our thoughts on this matter.

Lets categorize, the 1st: "Truths in the realm of certain axioms." Axiom is defined as a self evident truth, an example is two parallel lines never intersect. The First Crusade was an unprovoked war of aggression is not an axiom. 2nd: "Objective truths of the universe" are the 1st claim just restated. These first two arguments I consider the same and are the 5 postulates of Euclid. 3rd: "Truth in subjective systems" The subjective system in the claim would be all the members of Christendom and the existential threat of Islamic expansion. But so was Christianity to Islam, from the 1st to 11th century Christianity went from a small local religion in Palestine to the religious structure for 80% of Europe and parts of the northern middle east around Armenia. Both religions were superpowers poised for conflict given their meeting of borders in Turkey and France/Spain. Both religions had a policy of subjecting opposing religious adherents as they conquered them. If Islam never expanded into Christian lands do you think Christendom would of left them alone? No way, Christianity was an existential threat to Islam. As demonstrated by the reconquista of Spain and the Iraq war to name a few. There are no valid justifications of war based on a legal claim of provocation of aggression because thousands to millions of innocents will be killed. Furthermore many Christians and Muslims were converted through extortion or threat, therefore enacting group justified violence on those people based on the group's behavior is not justified in the subjective system of provocation of aggression. Provocation of aggression is imperfect common law legal system for regulating behavior among individuals. Applying this to the group has had effective propaganda purposes by government and religions but it is just this propaganda. Therefore it is not a truth in a subjective system either. Both Germany is responsible for world war 1 and the first crusade was an unprovoked war of aggression fit into none of the categories for truth. How should they be classified then? They should be categorized as propaganda for genetic survival and expansion of the genes of said members of that country or religion. I take pride in the actions of the crusaders against Islam but I don't delude myself into believing it can be justified within a truth framework.

Also, Provocation of Aggression on an individual level is a legal tradition, but the question is, is it a truth within a subjective system? An example of a subjective truth is Cancer causes death in some people. I could foresee a possible future world where cancer never kills anyone again because we modify something within our genes to change this subjective truth. But as of today, we have complete information to say it is subjectively true. In provocation of aggression, you often don't have all information. People have different thresholds that they believe warrant it. The legal system attempts to unify all these individual beliefs of the proper provocation of aggression into one code to regulate human interaction. First of all, I didn't consent to this, I prefer to use my own level of proper provocation of aggression. Second, the law is interpreted by subjective judges and juries, therefore not making the legal code consistent and not in the realm of truth.

I appreciate your response, James. Your thinking is not correct around the concept of subjective systems: The arbitrary moral framework of the people of the 11th Century could be a valid system of evaluation but it is not the system from which the claim originates from. The claim originates from the modern progressivists mind that has arbitrary moral preferences that has shaped and is intertwined with modern international law, morals and "humanities". Within this subjective system of moral preferences, from which this particular claim emerges, I want to run the process of evaluation and establish true or false. I do agree that minds and preferences vary and different people might have different thresholds that would change the outcome of the process, so of course this fact only further complicates the matter, especially when trying to establish lines for future treatment of similar cases. Although it should be also stated again, like JF pointed out in the AMA, physical actions of a person are truths of this world; The assailant stabbing his victim with a knife is a truth of this nature.

Furthermore I want to point out that you are misrepresenting my article about the First Crusade. The article specifically argued that the First Crusade was a military response to the Seljuk conquest which posed an existential threat to the Western European peoples that were unified not only in faith but also by structure of law through the Catholic Church, which was an overarching political and moral authority alike. Islam cannot be used as a collectivizing term in this particular context as it implies supranational structure, leadership and sufficient uniformity in faith, which Islam of the 11th Century did not possess. Preceding events between Islam and Christianity are not relevant to the evaluation of true or false in this particular system, neither are any other extensive regresses of perceived connected events. The Turks were an unknown people before the turn of the millennium, at least for Western European nations. The conquest of Anatolia represents the first contact with the Seljuk Turks and the Christian Realms. The general historical context of this time was established as it is necessary in elevating the existential nature of the threat posed by the Turks. I believe that this property of the threat plays an important role in evaluating the claim in any modern structure of thought in regards to international law. Whether I take pride in the Crusades or not is irrelevant to the problem. As stated before, I do recognize that I should have stated some of the criteria by which the claim is evaluated. As of now I have no better solution for the issue and I would want to hear JFs opinion on the matter once he reaches a conclusion. Vuk (talk) 17:34, 04 February 2022 (UTC)

It might take me some amount of time to think of an overall system that can properly represent the truths and moral assumptions at play in all this, but I thank both of you for laying out the arguments. I don't think either of you is wrong here and I would like to capture this properly so that going forward we'll have a good classification system that makes sense with the rest of the corpus of knowledge and arguments. Might take a few weeks though before I can find the time. We can keep contributing to the encyclopedia in the meantime! JFG (talk) 18:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)