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Joshua Rasmussen is pretty cool.

Sure we can use that semantics for the purpose of this discussion about moral talk. I think even under your semantics it would be subjective and I will lay out why (and you can obviously correct me if i am strawmanning) . If you can say that your morality is not completely subjective , under the same semantics I don't see how your stance on beauty would be different (how beauty would be purely subjective), because your sense of beauty can probably be explained or at the very least it is informed by biological mechanism and evolution and by even cultural factors as well, so the same things are applicable there (as far as I see it). Lets talk about moral statements, that includes moral language like should. For example: "I think we should maximize human flourishing". Just because that moral statement has an element in it that is basically connected to or informed by outside factors namely by 'human flourishing' which is grounded in biology, culture ,spiritual practices etc, that does not make that moral statement not subjective. The way you check for subjectivity and objectivity in the context of morals is by checking what a given moral statement's truth value is depended on. So given the same statement of "I think we should maximize human flourishing" , this statement's truth value isn't depended on outside factors, it is depended on your own preferences and values and those values and preferences exist in your mind (using your semantics,of subjectivity - it is depeneded on your preferences). Even if there would be no other human that would have the same kind of morals as you, that statement could still be true given your preferences. Just as a sidenote for language kind of problems: I don't have strong views on it, this is why im perfectly okay with using your semantics. I am not a language realist or whatever it would be called (I am not even sure what objective definition would even mean).I only have two main goals in mind with language. 1) I want to make myself to be clear enough for my conversational partner so that he/she can understand what im saying 2) I want to understand what my conversational partner is trying to communicate.

Okay gotcha. Now I understand your semantics a little better on this, but I personally wouldn't use morality in this case, because to me morality cannot not be prescriptive, this is why science alone cant "solve" moral questions . If we are talking about a purely descriptive statement, then thats just gonna be a scientific question. So for example, if we create a descriptive statement about what we mean by human flourishing, then thats not gonna be a moral statement yet, unless we add moral language to it like (should). We can answer the question of what can bring higher and lower human flourishing without any need for morality there. But, if we make a statement like "we should care about human flourishing", now we are in moral territory and now we can use human flourishing as a moral axiom to work towards. Under my semantics - all of this is compatible with moral subjectivism. Subjective just means mind dependent. The fact that we can give a description about how our moral preferences or intuitions developed or from where they came from or the fact that it can be influenced by outside factors doesn't negate the fact that these preferences are still mind dependent . A good way to recognize this, is if we switch moral preferences with taste preferences. So going with taste preferences - We would probably never say that just because there is a cultural or evolutionary explanation for why I have this preference, that my preference for vanilla over chocolate isn't subjective. To be clear, under your semantics (the way you use subjective, it might make sense to use terms like "not fully subjective", but under those semantics im not even sure if you would categorize anything as purely subjective) When you bring comparative statements in the picture, then its should be trivial for everyone that not all moral systems will be equally fit/good for that given thing. So for instance, if by healthy you mean something like "being good for survival" then yeah, it should be trivially easy to recognize for everyone that certain moral systems that don't care or that care less about survival, those will be less healthy compared to others under this definition of healthy , but under my semantics this still wouldn't make one moral system better compared to another. This is just picking a metric you care about and then checking which moral system can maximize it.

Yeah I pretty much agree with this approach as well. To me, these are words that we use to categorize things, and they are useful for that and thats it (not necessarily claims about metaphysics). What do you mean by moral constructivism? how is that meaningfully different from saying that you have your own personal goals and preferences and that is what grounds what you ought to do?

I can agree with this, just from the fact, that I find context independent (or in other words absolute) truth to be pretty much gibberish, the same goes for moral realism. Decision theory is grounded in morality and I think that you are a moral antirealist as well, so these things are either grounded in our subjective preferences/values or we can decide these things in an intersubjective manner (once proper context is provided, what the actual goal is).

By theoretical virtue I mean things that can help us differentiate and rank theories. It basically gives meaning to the word "better" in the context of choosing between theories. So for instance, if there is a set of facts (call it X), and there are 3 different theories put forth to explain X, theoretical virtues can helps us to non-randomly choose between those theories. So things like simplicity (all else being equal, a theory that assumes less is better) , explainability ( all else being equal, a theory that can explain more facts is better) , predictability ( all else being equal , a theory that can predict future events or behaviour and isn't just an explanation for an existing dataset is better) and there are more virtues , but generally speaking those are the ones that are brought up.

@DocWatts Regarding specifically the "what would make an argument better compared to another" do you have a take on theoretical virtues? Also do you have a stance on theories of truth? (I am referring to correspondence, pragmatist , coherence and others)

Naaah, Jordan is way too invested in maintaining his christian and non-new agey image. Your stuff will be categorized as new age and he will definitely debate you on solipsism and won't just let you to lay it out without any pushback. You will be debated and your ideas will be hardcore scrutinized on the go and I don't think you have a good skillset to deal with that.

@questionreality Whats your take on jan6?

Go ahead, lay those things out.

Why wouldn't they need to worry about voting next time? As long as there will be elections in the future, that statement doesn't make any sense. Think that statement through. Lets go with Trump actually fixing giant problems and after 4 years the next election comes. Why would Trump give room to democrats and to the deepstate to win the next election and potentially destroy everything that he fixed? it wasn't an accident and it wasn't a slip. Trump is probably aware that his followers will get charged by this rhetoric and he knows that they would be okay with him being a king with all the power in the world . You can literally see posts with like 60k+ likes on twitter where people say I would rather choose a dictator(Trump) than Joe Biden. What you need understand is that the MAGA crowd has certain beliefs that necessarily leads to this direction. In their eyes, everything is corrupt and rigged againts them and everything is controlled by the deepstate (including democrats) and only Trump can help. Given those beliefs and given Trump's rhetoric - of course you end up supporting dictatorship , where the dictator is the good guy, who needs to have power to actually have the ability to fight against the worst and most dangerous group of people in human history. There are almost no real centrists , all of them are right wing, they just don't have the spine to admit, because this way they can collect social credit for appearing less biased.

I completely agree. I am becoming more and more obsessed with clarity (regardless what kind of domain we are talking about). Identifying all the relevant things and being able to know what things you should ignore in a given domain and in a given moment or time period is absolutely essential. Regarding LP, the more clarity you have and the better you can spell out exactly the thing that you want to do or achieve , the better you will be able to attack it and the better you will be able to find and focus on the relevant things. I think in a lot of cases, the reason why we don't know what to do is because our goal is not specified enough so its unclear how we could approach it. A good example for how important clarity is the XY problem. The other important thing after you have clarity is laser focus on the relevant things (obviously without clarity you don't even know whats relevant). Casually doing certain beneficial habits (like going to the gym, meditation etc) can be good, but purposefully doing those things and knowing exactly why you do those things and what you want to achieve exactly with those things will help to actually get results. Imagine being able to spell out the exact purpose behind 90% of your daily actions (including micro actions). An Insane amount of time and energy is wasted because of the lack of goal orientedness behind our micro actions. The other really underrated thing that everyone knows about ,but almost no one takes it seriously enough is tracking your progress and consciously creating an environment where you can periodically get feedback.

None of this make any sense in the context of democracy. What kind of possible issues being fixed could make it so , that republicans won't need the votes of christians in the future ? There is no reason for republicans to discourage potiential voters from voting for them in the future. Thats like saying "You won't need to vote for me in the future, so that democrats will have more chance to win future elections and completely destroy what I built up and what I achieved as a president" From the MAGA's pov, thats like saying "give more power to the deepstate in future elections"

More like almost half of the population thinks that a noble king is better than the corrupt and evil deepstate . Imagine having all the beliefs MAGA has about the deepstate about vaccines, about rigged election about sacrificing kids for ritual about raping people and kids, about poisioning the food , the air, the water, about hiding technology that could cure cancer etc and having Trump the savior who can single handedly go against and fix all of that.

I have seen some big cope from republicans saying that what Trump truly meant was: "If he wins a second term, he can’t run again." (because that would be his last term). If they truly think thats what Trump meant, they shouldn't vote for Trump ever again, because he is too mentally declined and he can't communicate his thoughts at all.

Insane statements to make. Conservatives pissing their pants when Biden says some soft ass things and they read into his statements 20 layer deep, but they will make excuses for Trump when Trump's statements are pretty clear and straightforward. They won't ever call out or say a word when their daddy Trump using insane rhetoric like this and they cry when people call Trump a fascist. Just imagine if Biden would have made those statements, how conservatives would have reacted to it.

Musk and his freedom of speech It seems, there are protected users (all rightwingers) who have special priviledge in using racial slurs Some of the users are: Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Endwokeness, Clownworld, bunch of users with "Trump" in their name , Libs of tiktok etc. https://x.com/brndxix/status/1816231803973521728 Just as a sidenote: I haven't seen any articles written on this and it is from twitter so it is possible that it is fake or a misunderstanding , but on its face right now, this looks really bad.

Watch the videos in slowmo that I linked I don't know what else to tell you guys or watch this with 0.25 speed from 10:39. You can see the opening of the pot is facing officers, you can also see how she is lifting up the pot and threw it right before she gets shot. You can literally see that steam coming off from the top of the chair. Again you can condemn both of these cops and acknowledge that they hugely fucked up and the one who shot her in the head should go to jail while also acknowledging that she threw the pot. Now regarding the details of the story: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sonia-massey-police-shooting-mental-illness-b2585416.html she was mentally ill (had schizophrenia), and an additional context to the saying of "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" :

She did throw it, watch back the videos in slow motion. At this point, this is almost inarguable. You do know that you can still accept this point and still condemn the cops, right?

@Princess Arabia watch this from 18:30 You can even see when the water lands on the floor.

She did throw it and you can see the pot flying towards the cop and inferring from the steam you can see that from the pot the boiling water managed to immediately land at the cop's feet. How did it get there if it wasn't thrown?

Given all the context "rebuke you in the name of Jesus" does mean throwing the boiling water on you, but regarldess watch the video from the timestamp of 28:25 with 0.25 speed. You can see that she is throwing it.

Here is how it looked like from the shooter cops's pov (I time stamped it, its starts from 28:25 If you put the speed at 0.25 you can see that she did try to throw the boiling water on the cops. The other thing is that she did say a few second before the throw "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus" while holding the boiling water in her hand. That all being said, he shouldn't have shot her in the head.

Leo keep increasing the standard until you only have people left who are worth interacting with. I gave you some points in the other thread about how I personally think you could do that , but obviously you can enforce more rules or different rules. You have a bunch of mods who would probably be happy enforcing new rules if they could see how those rules could elevate the quality of the forum. Its your forum dude, you can do whatever you want with it, you don't need to conform to anyone. There is not much to gain from letting people destroy your mental health and letting people create absolute garbage threads that are 4chan quality. When you have people who cant respond with an argument and evidence when pushed on a set of claims they made and they refuse to let go or concede said claims, there is no reason to keep those people around. We ideally should strive for an environment where people are repulsed from responding with speculation and are highly motivated to source their claims (in a way where they can defend the claims made in that source, not in a way where we overwhelm people with sources that we haven't read ourselves) ; to validate the claims that are said in their source, and to reflect on their thoughts 2-3-4 times, before they click on the 'submit reply' button or before they create a thread. People are addicted to this forum and I think some of these people would be willing to change, because some of them absolutely have the capacity to do it, they are just not motivated enough right now. Maybe banning people for a short period of time (and then progressively increase that time, if they refuse to change) from visiting this forum would be enough negative movitation for people to start to change. I think it would be worth it for you to try to enforce a new standard. You can always reverse things, you can always apologize (if you think you fuck up) you can always ask for feedback and then change accordingly, but I think at the end of the day, it would be a good move.

yep, you got it.