brain dead take.

Always a racist slave state? sure. A military cult since like 1910? sure. A broken oligarchy? sure.

Fascist? defs heading that way. Not always.

We are actually kinda involved, as a US protectorate (Prove me wrong pollies, prove me wrong! defy your masters. Ask the Kurds how always allying with the US works out) we tend to support their interests in the middle east, also we ship Israel weapons except we claim we don't because apparently if I give you a trigger, a barrel, and a receiver and you have the rest I haven't technically given you a weapon under international law 🙄. I think Australia has helped them repair some of the planes they're using to murder children.

But I do broadly agree with your analysis. I think the issue isn't as simple as "loyalty pledge evil! mean evil labor" but also like what it's being used for here is absolutely horrible and could most charitably be interpreted as a system backfiring and least charitably ghoulish power brokers squashing the soul out of a decent person to back warhawks.

I don't always agree with the party's ordering. Some people I just fundamentally do not trust. I think there's some concern with weird vote exhaustion (e.g. my 2nd is party 1st, my 1st is party 2nd, my 3rd is party I don't want. My 1st goes to my 2nd, which doesn't win, so my 3rd is counted and party 2nd loses by one vote) but I don't know how likely that really is in practice and I mostly just drop horrible people and political schemers /shrug

TBH I've basically lost faith in the Westminster system. I participate because absolutely fuck disempowering yourself to any degree but I put my energy in smaller scale stuff and trying to build community.

Idk, I can't vote for her and I don't vote labor except once all my actual preferences are exhausted so I'm not really paying much attention to this. I don't vote labor because they pull nonsense like this, acting like there's some way "not being divided" over mass murder is worth a damn.

If they're talking about an IR bill or whatever then idk maybe not getting wedged makes sense but children are dying. I don't really know how much more obvious the right side of history can get than "the side which stops children dying".

I vote below the line also and think labor is accepting and aiding a genocide here. Hence my tongue in cheek wording about people who vote below and my less tongue in cheek wording about right and wrong being real.

We can debate the merits of loyalty pledges till the cows come home but if you use them to silence people trying to stop or slow a genocide you're actually um a nightmare clothed in human form and I hate you and want you to die 👍. The labor party can fuck themselves with a rusty chainsaw on this one, they're wrong and history will remember them as murderers.

I postulate that there comes a point where language is required to achieve a higher state of emotion.

Right, just so we're clear you're making shit up and clothing it in the language of science.

I am not banning you yet because I'm not sure you quite understand what you just implied but it's hard not to read this as a claim that humans with different capacities for language don't reach your enlightened heights of emotional complexity.

That is a very dangerous attitude which has been used to justify absolutely horrendous stuff.

Do you uh, wanna backpedal from that claim?

This is a pretty strange stance to argue. As far as I can see you're saying:

1. we can't know another animal's emotional state
2. some humans rarely have abnormalities in how they feel emotions
3. from 1 and 2 it is possible that emotional capacity is not universal in animals
4. from 3 it is unlikely non human animals are comparable to human animals in emotional capacity

I just don't see how you get from 3 to 4. It would seem to me given how similar humans are to at least other mammals, specifically in the neural structures we believe to be where emotions arise and in the behaviours we believe to be emotionally driven, we should strongly suspect they have emotions highly comparable to us and not the reverse.

Why would the default assumption be they don't?

To add some nuance to this most people vote by party in the senate.

Look I don't really agree with our system on so many levels and would probably come down on "we don't actually have a democracy" overall so please don't take this as some mewling defence of the status quo. replyguyinhale however she's a senator and for better or for worse most people vote by party in the senate. The number of superior, awesome, and somewhat democratically responsible people who vote below the line is a statistical blip, apparently most of yous are happy having your vote mysteriously distributed according to back-room fellatio.

So, if I was the sort of person who might become a labor mp or support the party, I could mount a defense of their loyalty pledge thing on the basis that particularly in the senate you are being voted in as a sort of embodied vote of the labor party's will and the party internal selection mechanism has deemed you specifically worthy of having a voice in the party room.

If that is their stance, and that is the implicit social contract of getting put on the ticket and receiving support from the party and its donors then you can sort of see where they are coming from. I have no idea if this is how most of the labor voters in her state feel or not but it's certainly how the party does.

For me? Well I actually believe in shit like right and wrong so...

I'm bored of this. I thought you had interesting opinions, sorry for my mistake.

Depression, anxiety, dementia and chronic liver disease are emerging as some of the fastest-growing chronic conditions.

Woooh yeah deaths of despair baby!

Society is going strooooong

All we've done is massively increase inequality, poisoned the world, taken an axe to social services, and let everyone get infected with a virus that causes cumulative brain and heart damage. Who could have predicted this?

I'm shocked, shocked and appalled I tell you.

I miss thinking the future was gonna get better but neoliberalism had entrenched itself so firmly in politics/APS/economics most people don't even realise it's an ideology and not fact, most of the contamination (plastics, pfas, agrichems) are long lived and we're also dependant on them, and climate change is about to get mega spicy if the models are correct and Indonesian, Indian, and islander people are gonna be (rightly) demanding some of this continent's habitable land.

interesting times ahead for us!

it's not an analogy it's a thought experiment. I am trying to understand the shape of your ideas.

So the ability to feel pain is harmed by cybernetics? division from a whole (still no idea what you mean specifically there in the absence of localised organs)? and if you're going to die in about an hour?

We appear to be imagining different scenarios. Imagine it is freshly amputated and is still alive, or that we amputate it and hook it up to an artificial circulatory system, or indeed my circulatory system but at a distance so nothing else is connected (curious if you think the pain chance changes in that situation).

I'm sorry, I could have been more explicit. It seemed obvious to me discussing a dead hand was silly but being the internet it's worth clarifying these things.

wait what? that's an extremely unusual stance!

What do you mean separated from the whole? all the non hand parts of me are also no longer whole but I am willing to believe amputees, even multiple amputees, even people who have lost the majority of their body can feel pain if their brain is alive and mostly intact.

This is consistent with my belief that pain experiencing happens in a centralised mass of nervous tissue we call a brain.

If you don't think centralised masses of nervous tissue are needed to experience pain (required for plants to, given that no brain is something we can prove) what do you think is? Why would a patch of grass have that thing but not a blade of grass (grass lacks localised organs afterall) or my hand?

Ok, and I opened by acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness but you never actually said that you disagreed with my assertion that my amputated hand doesn't feel pain.

Do you think my amputated hand feels pain? It would seem that you would have just as much (more maybe! given electric shocks or heat to the fingertips will make it recoil) evidence for it feeling pain as grass. And that all your arguments about grass signalling also apply to my amputated hand.

If you don't think my amputated hand feels pain (or could be considered at least as likely as grass to) why don't you?

Also we need to distinguish responding to the environment and even making decisions from experiencing pain.

I can make a robot from Lego that follows a line pretty well but I think we're all pretty comfortable with the idea it is vanishingly unlikely to feel pain (although there are people who feel punishment machine learning schemes are unethical lol).

No I'm not, I'm asking why you specifically believe those things to be comparable.

What specific knowledge do you have which prompts these apparently very deeply held and unusual beliefs?

Damaged plants can send out signals to other plants, and chemicals to repel what is damaging them (to the specific area where the damage is being done) and repair their damage.

Could you please explain how this can be distinguished from wound healing in a human. Like what chemicals are sent out? what is the mechanism? are they transported anywhere in particular? are different signals collated in determining a response or does the same hormone guarantee the same response in a dose dependent manner?

Some plants will avoid growing towards areas that they have been unable to thrive in before.

This is surprising to me, is it distinct from following chemical gradients? I have never seen this, or heard about it. The closest I would say I have ever seen is not growing towards salt or dry soil. What is the evidence here please as I don't know what you're talking about. Is there a memory effect? if a grass doesn't grow south and you put it in a new area will it also not grow south?

You still seem to be talking about things from a purely human perspective. Dogs will damage their feet and not even let you know sometimes.

I'm really not, I had a whole thing about memory and will to live and avoiding areas where I specifically spoke about rats.

Whether or not you notice it (and it's true that many animals will try to hide injuries, humans included) doesn't mean there is no modifications to behaviour. E.g. licking, protecting the area (less weight on paw, lifiting it up etc), reacting to the same stimulus more negatively such as not eating or growling etc when being touched.

You literally said she stopped using it. Aka she felt pain. Ever eaten after a dentist when your mouth is still numb? you will straight up bite off chunks of your lips and keep eating. If there was no pain she would keep trying to use it and probably just be confused when it didn't work. Which btw is how she'll behave if you anaesthetise her!

Also if you've ever noticed her behaviour after removing say a piece of gravel from between the pads in her feet you'll probably notice despite no damage the first step or two will be tentative. She's anticipating pain, again behaviour modification.

Plants just don't do anything like this.

It does though, you will stop walking. Clutch your foot, say ow, look at where you hit the thing, be more careful when walking near there, move the object, pad the object, maybe wear protective covers on your feet, maybe dress a wound if the nailbed was damaged etc. If your toe keeps hurting you will travel to a doctor for assessment, or splint the toe and so on.

Unless you don't notice, in which case you feel no pain despite the toe signalling furiously.

Along side this a bunch of cellular processes will happen to repair the damage, but they happen even if you don't notice (distraction/nerve damage, anaesthetic etc) and so we can notice "huh, there are 2 clusters of things happening, one is conditional and one isn't" and that's a clue that there's something more going on than just a body repairing itself.

You've got to operate on evidence, there's an infinite number of things you can't falsify and you have no criteria for choosing which to believe or not.

In other animals we observe things consistent with pain such as long term behaviour modification in the absence of a persistent hormone. Things like avoiding places they were injured, becoming more cautious or less curious, even changes that destroy them like starving themselves to death.

Anyone that says "only humans feel pain" is a chauvinist ignoring stuff like rats giving up the will to live.

But trees or mosses or whatever do none of this. A tree will keep trying to grow towards a fence that damages branches in a storm, a tree never starves itself to death making thicker bark after teens carve lovehearts into it, a tree doesn't stop reproducing after 3 droughts kill all its children and so on. Leaves might change colour in response to periods of high or low sunlight but these changes are like tanning, they don't modify anything about how the tree trees.

We can't know is true, but we also can't know I don't have an invisible dragon in my garage. you should definitely not live your life thinking I have an invisible dragon in my garage. Why? you don't have any evidence to suspect it's real that is distinguishable from a random lie. We have no evidence of behaviour in trees indistinguishable from chemical signals we know are below the level of consciousness in ourselves.

You're conflating very different processes here. While there is the hard problem of consciousness and we can't falsify ideas like panpsychism consider a few things.

If you amputate my hand and press on it it will emit nervous signals. Does anyone feel pain? If you destroy most of my brain but keep me alive, then stab me almost all the nervous activity and hormones etc associated with injury will happen. Is there any reason to believe there is any pain felt?

I would say no in both cases, pain is not emitting nervous impulses, or something that precedes releasing endorphins and inflammatory factors etc. Pain cannot even necessarily be reliably correlated with stress markers like heart rate, and in the case of phantom limb syndrome pain can even be associated with a complete lack of signals.

There are good evolutionary reasons to exhange information and resources, even unwittingly. Apparently some bacteria in my tummy are in conversation with my body constantly but I'm not at all aware or actively participating in that. Maintaing pain only really seems to offer advantage if you can do something about it, while it's possible for things to exist accidentally it's not like grass can move to places without mowers or trees shade themselves. In all animals with nervous systems the nervous systems are the vastly most expensive thing to keep alive. In fact there are a few creatures who when entering an immobile stage of life rapidly digest their own (a good explaination for both tenure and retirees!).

Plants don't have rapid long distance communication in their bodies, they don't have centralised organs, they don't even have anything approaching the levels of activity we associate with the simplest nervous systems.

It's probably best to think of grass "screaming" as skin cells "screaming" for resources to make more melanin when exposed to UV. Or lymph nodes "screaming" when releasing hormones to heal a wound and stuff. This is all vastly below the level of consciousness.

Or whatever, embrace panpsychism, like the invisible dragon in my garage nobody can prove it false /shrug. Animals eat plants though and thermo law 2 is a thing so even panpsychics minimise suffering by being plant based.