commie

My idea of an idle chat about such matters is 2-5 hours so that is a big ask, and I will of course have to decline. But I can try to give you some hints: I'm obviously a communist. And I've been one for long enough not to be impressed by people's fanciful notions regarding the demise of whatever it is they call capitalism. I went to a public highschool that was very good indeed by US standards, same as the children of regular workers or the children of their bosses (the ones that got good enough grades in middle school, that is). My income is about half your rent even though the cost of living is higher over here. As you might have guessed, the flipside is that I work nowhere near 60 hours. Instead I've done stuff like poring over medieval documents to track some rich peoples' purchases of dog food in order to argue against prejudices about the way money was and wasn't used.

A little strategic advice to you: when you encounter deluded zealots who are obviously being used like these activists, instead of reacting against them and their pathetic act, ask yourself how they've been indoctrinated and who benefits from all this?

Value judgements and meaningless words aside, this is factually all wrong. I like learning about lots of useless facts. So when people who obviously don't know they're talking about abuse my beloved facts to construct magical narratives, it makes me sad. Whatever narrative these people want to tell, they should do it as is proper: with constellations, gods, heroes and such.

It's not obvious to me what is there to disagree about. Like I said, I don't suppose you're actually into medieval economic institutions. Likewise I don't suppose you're into Adam Smith. So my best guess is that the issue at hand is magic. To put it an awkwardly explicit way, I suppose I disagree that magical thinking is a productive approach to the workings of societies.

What is the function of a birdsong? Sure, one function is survival. But does that answer the question? Likewise, the most obvious function of Islam is of course survival. You could spend a lifetime learning about the details of its survival function or indeed about its history. But I guess that's not what you're asking about. My best guess is that you're not asking for details the least technical of which are all over the web but simply wondering what monotheism is for. And I don't think that's a question that can be answered for you. Just listen!

I had never heard of the dude so I gave him a try out of curiosity. I watched the first video until I couldn't countenance the bullshit anymore, which didn't take long. It doesn't matter whether what someone says is logical when it's based on lies and/or delusions. Likewise it doesn't matter how sharp you are or what anyone's IQ is. Unless you're doing something abstract like math, start with the facts of the matter and not with big words. Looking up facts isn't some great intellectual feat... far from it! The most important skill that requires nowadays is being able to tell facts from abstractions (looking up "the market" would yield nothing useful for instance). Why are you interested about this? Tell us and someone might be able to suggest stuff to look up. I don't suppose you actually are into medieval economic institutions! More broadly, I would be very skeptical of whatever this fast-talker says about psychology. And I recommend you be careful about labelling yourself (narcissism and so forth).

Some people's posts have not aged well...

You missed the most important question: what is Islam? There never has been a coherent Islamic answer to this question, because on the one hand people who do not even follow the Quran get to be Muslims while others who do are condemned as heretics. Everything follows from that issue, including sectarian terrorism (as opposed to patriotic terrorism for instance, which racist commentators often conflate with the former). As an anti-essentialist, I on the other hand figure fiqh is fitna and therefore that there is only one Islam.

That link is basically a Gish gallop. I realize I'm posting on an obscurantist forum but if there's anything in particular you want debunked, please be specific. Regarding the main point though... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/runaway-tipping-points-of-no-return/ I don't deal in "relief" and other forms of denial but thinking rationally about this for a minute might have a similar effect. Here are the basic facts of the matter: you don't have a crystal ball and neither do any of the ideologues who waste everyone's time with their everlasting emergencies. There's nothing to accept or concede because we don't know what's going to happen. But we do know pollution is a cumulative problem. Anything you don't do to help makes the problem worse and conversely that anything you actually do to help mitigates it. It's that simple. This never was about fixing everything. One complication is that there is much work to do regarding adaptation as well as the mitigation. If you're interested you might take a look at how people are preparing for sea level rise in the Netherlands for instance. If you're more interested in politics and less technically-minded, there's also quite a bit of work do regarding future refugees, starting with defeating reactionaries in prosperous countries. Lamentations and existential bullshit achieve nothing.

Far be it from me to defend the dastardly imperialist Onecirrus but they're talking about the residents of the island, not about people of Puerto Rican ancestry living on the mainland. The alternative to statehood is independence.

:-)

Some people here should post actual information or get a grip. The night has been good to McConnell but, specifically, where do you get the idea that Biden lost MI or PA? Good for Biden who is a centrist, bad for most Democrats.

That's how the big lie works: spread crazy allegations against your target over, and over, and over again. If you have enough of a megaphone and can afford to wait long enough for people to get used to your lies, centrists will start parroting some of your nonsense as fact. Your opponents will keep contradicting the lie, and so centrists will come to resent them because they don't like to feel they've been duped. Mission accomplished.

The math works of course but that doesn't address the more conceptual ("spooky") issues with non-local causality I was alluding to (or at least not directly). I'm far from well-read about this but I noticed a couple accessible-looking papers were published a month ago but I failed to make time for them so far... I expect one day people will laugh at our interpretations of QM, specifically w.r.t. apparently non-local phenomena. This is too often taken out of context to mean something grandiose but you're left with stuff like the CMB which is only compatible with its mainstream explanation in the context of a small set of frames. In any case c is used in contexts not directly related to speed, time or space (most obviously to figure the energy released by nukes and such). You always have the option to go deny facts with solipsistic arguments but really, the speed of light is about as absolute as anything gets.

Recognizing this is the point. Try filtering everything you can. See what remains.

How about aiming this anger according to its purpose? Being angry at life serves no purpose. It's not life as such that's unfair. Be specific and use that anger. Once it has accomplished its purpose, you may find you don't need it anymore.

Unless you are a solipsist, wouldn't the mysterious efficacy of mathematics qualify? A bedrock influenced by things which arose above it in other moments, you mean? It would be prettier if mental events all had always been synchronical. Do you have an even prettier proposal? In other words, what does this duality bring to the table? For what that's worth, with regard to what I might call a "bedrock" quality, I feel more of a difference within these types of mental events than between them. Granted, reason feels special in that regard since I feel like there's a difference among the other types. The necessary hierarchy might be more fundamental than any of the distinctions proposed here, therefore I can not agree.

It doesn't have to but that would address issues with a finite speed of light, in QM for instance. So far as I know, that's the only argument for dropping the "convention". It's an argument against it being "only a convention"... unless you redefine the word "convention", that is. That's the usual perspective (the one of a hypothetical photon) I mentioned. We were talking about something more interesting (and problematic).

Let's be even more general then: why assume a causal hierarchy? Why couldn't all types of mental events influence all such types? Do you get that question? Surely reason is effective outside of an emotional context so I don't see how "emotion-therefore-reason" could possibly be "the function" of reason.

That's a misleading statement. It's a convention in a particular context but not in most others. Therefore it's far from being only a convention. As always with the speed of light, this is tied up with causality. This is most obvious when considering the CMB I think. If the speed of light was infinite in one direction in some kind of objective sense rather than merely from the perspective of a hypothetical photon, it would imply that the creation of the universe is happening now... but in a very different sense than is usually meant: that is, it would have happened during billions of years in the past in an expanding and then contracting circle of which your location happens to have been the center all along while it happens now in one particular direction where at an unknowable distance lies a place which is also lies in all directions around you, except in the past... a "convention", you say?

No. Yes. That's two marks out of three.

I guess I need to sit down and listen to my reason more because I seem to be in denial about that. More generally... Like its kin never, ever is a dangerous word. If you distinguish thought from both emotion and sensorial sensation, why couldn't reason work backward from thought? It seems like it but of course the deduction could be a mere rationalization that serves to justify the emotion as part of an outwardly rational narrative.

Being considerate is usually the right thing to do but the real point of idpol is of course to divide and rule.

Because you don't want this turns into a confrontation between gunslingers working for partisan Democrats and gunslingers working for partisan Republicans. When lawyers fight, no one gets shot.

This isn't the CIA's remit and these others can only make it worse. This isn't the kind of problem that's solved with a stick.