commie

Who cares about what is usual? If I had more money, others would have more money too. THAT is collective thinking. Alternatively, money can be used to prevent destruction (even hoarding it can have that effect). As long as we're going to have money, I would therefore like to have more. The more we have, the less it matters. It's quite simple. Even if nobody shared, it wouldn't be a zero-sum game by the way. THAT is more complicated. Being able to purchase things isn't the issue. Being able to purchase people (even if only for a few hours a day) is. There's a woman where I live who sells produce. But it's more expensive than the cheap produce you can buy in a chain store. Would I lose real relationship if I could afford to routinely buy from her instead of a cheaper supplier? No, I only lose the opportunity for relationships I never had by not participating in the production myself... and more purchasing power would only increase my ability to participate. Of course there are ways to participate which require no purchasing power but in the societies we live in, they are limited and aren't available to everyone. Do you consciously choose not to desire certain materialistic pleasures? I only make conscious choices about the ones I do desire, and I do not somehow choose to stop desiring either. What I choose to do is to notice the fact that satisfying these desires is at best pointless. Since I naturally do pointless things all the time, I often satisfy such desires but I certainly don't care about which ones I have satisfied since having satisfied them in the past gives me at best zero satisfaction.

What is a "lenghty and strict lockdown"? What on Earth could the point possibly be? A couple of posts ago you said you wanted to discuss actual measures and now you're back to silly strawmen.

You want to discuss how to reduce pollution and cruelty, for instance by taxing gas up to 20USD a gallon? A bit off-topic perhaps. You are describing being jailed. Obviously I have a problem with jails. Or since it's a corona thread, you might be describing being hospitalized instead. Yeah, it would suck being disabled after a stroke because the doctors were overwhelmed... which is precisely what these "lockdowns" would prevent.

This would require talking about actual measures instead of the word "lockdown" which has evidently become an empty political pinata. As to saving lives, people were already hating me for advocating for strict regulation of motorized transportation, food and such before I even knew what an equation was. Basically every sane country which isn't an island has been doing this for at least 4 months now. The Swedes did it too soon, is all. I have no idea what this "lockdown" boogeyman you're talking about is. There was a long holiday this spring if you weren't an essential worker. I wasn't able to try shoes on in a shop before buying and that was basically the extent of the inconvenience. I'd take worn shoes over having to go to the office of course but the great thing about it was the reduced traffic and pollution.

The numbers aren't comparable and health care systems don't get overwhelmed from those so people don't die from many other diseases and accidents as a domino effect. Also, as someone pointed out, we simply understand the long-term risks better. There's no legit comparison, except perhaps in locales which have been hit very hard.

The effect sucks but is it ONE trait? Have you read about Altemeyer's experiments with screening players in a strategy game? Remove the people with one of the traits from the pool of player and the outcome changes dramatically... or so he claims.

Influenza immunity is so widespread almost everyone has some. It's not a binary thing. Current vaccines don't do the same thing as a natural infection and you get innate immunity too. Look it up. TB isn't even a virus. So far as I know, treatment remains straightforward.

Argentina can ill afford to pay millions to do nothing or hand out billions in easy credit to businesses like rich states such as Germany. Of course the crisis has to be managed differently. The difference is that there is little immunity to this virus which is unique considering how serious and contagious the disease is. Once immunity has built up through exposure or vaccine, that will become a legit question. I'd be OK with masking forever in public transport and such or with dropping masks most of the time but some habits (including hand hygiene) have probably changed forever. I would be surprised if people stopped wearing masks in medical settings during flu outbreaks for instance.

Trump can blame and hate but he has no actual struggle. Historical fascists structured their movement around their struggle and they were empowered to do the extraordinary things they did by much less flamboyant actors who wanted their enemies destroyed. Trump is at best a reality show fascist.

The Holocaust also sounds like zero empathy but most people who've carried it out or defended it weren't sociopaths. Unless of course you're a politician, running your mouth about sacrificing the elderly and so forth in public spaces isn't self-serving (quite the opposite) nor is it merely misguided. It's basically missionary zeal... that or looking for a fight.

The issue with this "lockdown" discourse is that the word doesn't seem to mean anything. The Swedes were the first to introduce a long-haul strategy for the very reason you bring up and I understand it wasn't called "lockdown" (I don't speak Swedish). So far as I know other European countries either used this word for temporary measures or didn't use the word officially, even for their temporary measures. I'm partial to the latter choice since I've not heard of measures deserving of the name being used outside of China. And since the virus can be stopped within weeks with quite mild temporary measures (basically a long holiday), why would one need years of "lockdown"? If people aren't happy with an ongoing situation, all they need to do is stop people from moving around so much for a few weeks as well as prevent travel from places which aren't doing the same. This isn't a permanent solution since people are going keep entering the country and rebooting the epidemic one way or another but if people like bouts of temporary measures better than permanent measures... well, this isn't rocket science. The sticking point is that someone has to pay for such holidays but that's never been a problem when it comes to military expenditures, has it?

Nah. Sociopaths do not usually get worked up about the morality of clothing and so forth.

It's a death cult. Notice the lack of arguments against masks and the arguments about the consequences of serious epidemics (economy and so forth) masks could slow or even prevent in some cases. If they actually cared, they would argue actual measures instead of symbols. More deaths because of prohibition, you mean. We don't want a "lockdown" because we don't want to interrupt the supply of illegal drugs... why make them illegal then? Interrupting the supply was supposed to be the whole point!

Hi folks! I'm back for this bit of spectacle so I can't blame you for being into it. But be halfway reasonable: this ain't 1860. Trump or Biden winning or stealing this isn't going to change much. They're not magicians who can whisper to "the economy" or outlaw politics somehow. I can think of a shallow as well as a more strategic argument. The Dems have already lost in 2016 after having antagonized progressives... how is the second time supposed to bring about different results than the first? Dems will simply keep repeating propaganda like a crazy person instead of facing what they've done: Russia, white "working class", shy voters, whatever. But the real issue with this pseudo-progressive scorched earth strategy is that it relies on a misunderstanding of electoral politics. Voters do not and can not possibly negotiate their support for this or that politician. That's an individualist fantasy no proper leftist would indulge in. You don't get to take or reject a deal during a direct election. You vote once and the reason why you voted (or didn't) isn't recorded. Whoever wins this election will therefore not be beholden to any group of voters or to any political party for that matter but to billionaires and Congress. So what progressives can do electorally at the Federal level is to elect people willing to bargain hard with the POTUS on their behalf to Congress. The only progressive fights to be had are down the ballot... or rather, down some ballots. If the Electoral College was more than a formality, you'd have an indirect election where negotiation might have a role but progressives would be also be marginalized in such a setup. In a winner-takes-all election, a minority of voters can only win by suppressing the majority or by taking advantage of a divided opposition. And progressives are so weak they wouldn't even have a chance in a three-way race! You can't fix that by refusing to vote for a candidate you don't like because stronger factions are in a better position to do the same.

Increasing the geographical scale? Now that's a cold way to talk about genocide.

Nationalism is the death of traditions, languages and cultures. Most of our traditions are much older than nationalism. Certainly our languages are. Yet nationalism isn't all bad... when it comes to resisting imperialism. So the issue is the kind of integration you're talking about.

Yeah, the way she waves the shapes of sentences is so cool. Do these people also figure non-human animals, infants or severely mentally disabled folks are p-zombies?

Which book? Farewell Tour doesn't seem to be about nationalism in education. I looked at the list of his books and it's not clear by the titles which other one you might be talking about. Hedges is a good preacher, I'll give him that (strange that someone so verbally hostile to Christians would recommend him!). I remember him from the War is a Force days. But he didn't sound like someone who had distanced himself enough from gringo nationalism to write something very insightful on the topic.

How precisely could it get worse, nationalism-wise? What difference would it make?

Public-sector schools are crazy nationalist in the US. It's a basic function of schools in most countries to be fair but in some places they take it farther than others.

I wouldn't say you're biased. Evidently you have no idea, which is easier to remedy. Take care to start from scratch though.

Please get a clue.

Because we have different words for different types of mental phenomena. I have already illustrated the distinction. If you called all mental phenomena thoughts, you would be likely to be misunderstood. You would also lose some of the nuance that the English language affords us. But there is no law against it of course...

Sure, there's a difference. Otherwise we'd call them the same thing, right? A chair is an object for instance. You can think about a chair, about chairs in general or about what makes a chair a chair but a chair is not a thought as such. I already told you what the mind was, didn't I? Perhaps you meant to ask about minds. In the physicalist framework, a mind is a dissipative structure in the thermodynamical sense which has the peculiar property that it constructs an internal model of the world it keeps updating as it interacts with it.

If objects are mental it follows that the mind is the creator of objects, doesn't it? It follows furthermore that the mind creates itself as an object. It does not follow however than the mind is only a object. If you can understand the Trinity, you can understand this.