DocWatts

The 'Deep State', in the way Trump and his cohorts use the term, is a right-wing conspiracy theory - a dishonest justification for giving an autocratic strongman dictatorial powers. Period. What's being disingenuously referred to with this conspiracy theory is the administrative apparatus of federal, non-political employees that literally every modern country in world uses and depends upon. It's the 21st century equivalent of the 'stabbed in the back' conspiracy theory, which blamed Jews and socialists for Germany's loss in World War 1, which the Nazis skillfully used to seize power Stop spreading this BS, it's antithetical to a Conscious Politics forum.

Mark my words, the Trump immunity ruling, which officially places the US president above the law and the US Constitution, will go down as the worst ruling since the Dread Scott decision, where the SCOTUS ruled that black people were not citizens and thus not protected by the Bill of Rights - leading directly to the US civil war. People who are downplaying the importance of this ruling need only imagine Biden sending a team of Navy Seals to assassinate Trump, since the ruling places the US president outside of the rule of law. Biden could claim that because assassinating political opponents was carried out in the execution of his presidential duties it's by definition legal - and thanks to this decision, he'd be correct. It's an insane ruling that effectively ends up US democracy, even if it's actual effects are gradual. The salt in the wound is that five of the size justices that voted to end democracy were themselves appointed by presidents who got into office despite losing the popular vote.

There are elements of truth in this, but remember that there are developmental aspects to left-right politics. The right is far worse about forcing simple solutions on a complex world, because conservative psychology has its roots in fear, projection, and a denial of Reality. The Left is of course also capable of reductionist thinking (an idealogy like Marxism can be a good example of this). But the ways that the Left denies Reality tends to be more subtle, and less aggressively ignorant, than thinking that all your problems are because of feminism or immigrants, for example. It's been reliably shown that as people become more educated they become more Liberal. Moving Left entails being able to think more in terms of systems and systems thinking, which is why topics like Systemic Racism or Structural Inequality are incomprehensible to people who lack this capacity.

You might be interested in this write-up for my philosophy book, which goes into the embodied, biological roots of meaning. In essence, meaning isn't some transcendental aspect of a supposedly 'neutral' or objective Reality - it always exists for a particular someone, and within a particular context. _____________________________________________________________________________________ MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS Orienting Metaphor : World disclosure is the mind’s way of constructing a home for us within Reality. What Is A World? And What Do Worlds Have To Do With Minds? If this book can be likened to a ‘guided tour’ of a seven story building, with the executive suite on the top floor representing our relationship to our beliefs about Reality, then the premise we’ll be exploring on this ground floor is that minds disclose worlds. Our orienting metaphor for this section is a home, and the central idea we’ll be exploring is that minds create homes for us within Reality. And just like a house is constructed to be compatible with the lifestyle of human beings (houses aren’t built underwater, nor are their doorways accessed from the ceiling), minds construct a version of Reality for us to live within that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. The process by which minds turn Reality into a home for us to reside in is called world disclosure. What a world refers to is a cumulative whole of meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships for a living Being. We can think of a world as what Reality is on an experiential level for an individual. To disclose is to reveal or uncover something. So world disclosure is the process of revealing a meaningful world within the whole of Reality. SIDE NOTE: The way we are using the term world denotes a more specific meaning than what’s normally meant by ‘the world’. ‘A world’ refers to an individual’s experiential world. While ‘the world’ is a cumulation of the broader social, cultural, and ecological environments that exist on our planet. What’s being referred to here is the former rather than the latter. What’s important here is the capacity for meaning that’s created by world disclosure. As living beings whose survival hinges on our ability to appropriately interpret and respond to what we encounter in the world, we do not and could not reside within a bare Reality. What we reside within is a meaningful world. In our metaphor of home construction, houses of course don't build themselves. Rather, they are constructed from building materials that are put together through the labor of people. Likewise, minds disclose worlds from the opportunities and demands of a particular environment, through the organizational structure of a living body. And just as houses are built to different specifications for specific environments, living beings experience different forms of world disclosure based on their distinct evolutionary adaptations. Hence, it is only through the living body that a mind has access to a world of people, places, and things. Another way that this could be stated is that minds are inherently embodied. Therefore, when we speak of a mind we’re also necessarily speaking of a living body as well. The term somatic is used to describe ideas and practices that deal with our direct experience of the living body. Thus, what we are articulating is a somatic theory of mind. Consequently, minds do not ‘invent’ worlds independently from the living body, nor does world disclosure take place in isolation from our broader shared Reality. This is because world disclosure is fundamentally relational. Which puts world disclosure at odds with philosophical theories such as solipsism, which deny the existence of a shared Reality beyond one’s own mind. In case the distinction between an environment and a world is still a bit unclear, an ‘environment’ refers to the physical and social spaces which exert evolutionary selection pressures on a living being. In contrast, a ‘world’ denotes the meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships that a mind experiences throughout its life. Alternatively, we can think of worlds as what environments become through minds which are hardwired to experience meaning. The difference between an environment and a world can also be likened to the difference between a house and a home. For a home isn’t just a physical space, but a significant place which has been suffused with a rich tapestry of familiarity and meaning. The larger implication of all this is that minds aren’t passive spectators that are ‘parachuted’ into a preexisting world with fixed features. Instead, minds actively shape the characteristics of the worlds they inhabit. However, this doesn’t mean that minds are free to reside within just any type of world; nor are the characteristics of a world a ‘choice’ that individuals make. Rather, the type of world that a mind resides within is a consequence of its bodily structure, along with the opportunities and demands of its environment. Therefore, a world is not solely a product of a mind, nor is it an inherent feature of physical Reality. In fact, it is not a ‘thing’ at all! Rather, a world is a process that’s created and sustained by the interaction of a mind and its environment. How this process unfolds for a living being is a direct consequence of how that individual uses its evolutionary adaptations to meet its survival needs. Consequently, what Reality is for a living being can’t be asked in isolation from what that organism does. Using ourselves as an example, there are aspects of our physiology that are especially important for the types of world disclosure that human beings experience. These include highly expressive and communicative faces, a bipedal posture that’s oriented along a front-back axis, highly dexterous hands that are used to manipulate our surroundings, and forward facing eyesight that serves as our primary navigational sense.

In political science, the term for a mixed authoritarian-democratic form of government is known as a 'hybrid regime'. In a modern context, they're a function of failed democracy . They're not a state of affairs that we should aspire to - and they're certainly not some higher, more conscious 'synthesis' between autocracy and democracy. They are what happens when democratic institutions, and the civil society that supports those institutions, weaken to the point where an unaccountable elite (whether that's an individual or a small group) is able to place themselves above the law, and game the system to stay in power.

On the whole, Biden has been a good president whose legislative accomplishments have done more good for ordinary Americans than any administration in the past 50 years. The problem is that he's failed to build a sustainable democratic coalition that can bulwark against the far-right's efforts to turn America into an autocracy. If Biden loses against Trump that is the only thing he'll be remembered for.

The structure of our Electoral College and Senate is such that it gives rural folks with stage Blue values an undemocratic, outsized influence in US federal elections. Both institutions are effectively a form of Affirmative Action for conservatives. If US presidential elections were decided by national popular vote, it would be almost impossible for the Republican Party to win. The structure of the US Senate is quite undemocratic, since it gives small rural states like Wyoming the same amount of Senators as states like California that have 40x's its population. In other words, our institutions are quite outdated and flawed, which is why someone like Donald Trump who has the support of maybe a third of the country has better than even odds of becoming president. Voter suppression efforts in red states make this problem even worse, ever since the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

The problem is that a sizeable portion of country has been groomed, through decades of propaganda, for an American version of fascism. They think that Trump is going to be 'thier' dictator, who's going to protect them from a litany of imagined threats. Of course, many of these working class MAGA types are going to be left holding the bag when the US government under a Trump autocracy degrades to the point where its unable to fulfill many of its basic functions. These are the same people who will be crying foul and looking for a scapegoat when they're kicked off from their government subsidized healthcare, when someone close to them is forced to carry a non-viable fetus in thier womb for nine months, when they lose their job due to a recession that's triggered by plutocratic economic policy.

The Supreme Court is effectively giving Trump all of the tools he needs to be America's version of Putin.

Welp, looks like the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, decided to celebrate the 4th of July by decreeing that Presidents are officially above the law, and have broad immunity from being prosecuted for crimes they commit while in office. The six MAGA judges aren't even trying to hide the fact that they're going out of their way to set Trump up as an autocrat. By this Supreme Court's logic, Biden should just go ahead and have Trump black bagged, and claim legal immunity because it was in the execution of his presidential duties. (Not seriously suggesting that Biden do this, but holy fuck does this decision set a dangerous precedent). https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-due-rule-trumps-immunity-bid-blockbuster-case-2024-07-01/

Oooph, that was rough to watch. Of course, if Biden were a corpse he'd still be the better choice over Mango Mussolini, but for the typical low-information Voter who's on the fence, it was a bad look. Considering that the election is likely to be decided by less than a 100k votes in a handful of swing states, something like this could be enough to lose the election. On the other hand, Trump's criminal conviction has been hurting him, his sentencing in just a few weeks. Republicans have been doing terribly in Senate and House elections, and it's anybody's guess what might happen between now and November. So it's reasonable to assume that the election is still a toss up.

Find an area of philosophy you're interested in (such as metaphysics, ethics, etc) and get a 'lay of the land', so to speak. No need to get fully enmeshed into the world and values of academic philosophy, but you should be able to know enough about the history of a subject to have a context for the ideas your interested in - especially if you plan on developing and articulating your own vision. For instance, if you're interested in ethics, you should at the very least know the broad strokes of historically significant paradigms such as consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. As far as getting 'the lay of the land', I wouldn't bother trying to learn about someone like Hegel or Marx or Kant by wading your way through primary sources. There are more efficient and economical ways to get that information than by banging your head against 'The Phenomonology of Spirit', for example. Much better use of your time to find a book or lecture from a contemporary academic who's already put in the work to translate the ideas in a way that's comprehensible for a normal person. I'd highly recommend the 'A Very Short Introduction' book series as a way to get started, they're relatively quick and easy reads, and cover a huge variety of topics within philosophy. Additionally, I'd encourage you to go of your way to get both a Western and an Eastern perspective on these topics - doing so can be a good way of inoculating yourself from getting 'paradigm locked' into just a single restrictive viewpoint. If you're into the philosophy of science, also explore spirituality . If you're primarily interested in spirituality, go out of your way to become scientifically literate. Having a broad palette to pull from will only benefit you.

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that the Republican Party has been consistently underperforming in elections since 2018. While the Democratic Party has been consistently outperforming the polls during that same period. The supposed 'red wave' of 2022 never materialized, and Republicans got their asses handed to them in the special elections across the country over the past 2 years. Trump has failed to grow his base since losing in 2020, and in that time he's become a convicted felon. Meanwhile the Republican Party has only doubled down on the unpopular abortion bans that have cost them big electorally. While this doesn't mean that Biden is on a fast track to an easy reelection, I'd argue that Trump rather than Biden has more an uphill battle to get reelected.

Best guess - Biden will handily win the popular vote by 3 - 5 million, while just barely squeaking out a narrow victory in the electoral college. If you live in the US, and especially if you reside within a swing state, and you've ever thought about political canvasing, it's basically now or never, since the election is highly likely to be decided by a few tens of thousands of votes in a handful of strategic states - Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

Local, state, and national laws banning single use plastics from things like takeout would be a start. A timetable and eventual deadline for packaging for stuff like food and consumer items to switch over the biodegradable plastics seems like a no-brainer. Public funding towards R &D for more economical forms of biodegradable plastics, and plastic alternatives, would also be worthwhile.

Most human beings cant spend every waking moment pursuing their life purpose , recreation is a normal and healthy aspect of living a balanced life. Of course, there are better and worse ways to use recreation. The question is how well your gaming is integrated into the rest of your life, along with your intentions when you dive into a game. Are you using games because you enjoy engaging with an interactive piece of art? Are you using them to socialize and bond with your friends? Or are you habitually using games to disengage from Reality, and avoid dealing with real world problems? Cultivating mindful habits around how one engages with virtual worlds (whether that's a game or social media) is key.

Can speak from experience here (probably would have fallen into this camp in my teens and twenties), but there's a few different ways you could parse this question. So what is a 'hardcore gamer'? In my my mind, I can think of three buckets that one might be referring to. Note that these aren't mutually exclusive, as someone could fall into just one or all of these. 1) Folks who treating gaming as a hobby, like how someone might treat golf or woodworking or Dungeons and Dragons as a hobby. 2) Folks who treat their opinions on gaming as an identity. Think of folks who get emotionally invested in the console wars between Xbox and PlayStation, or who are very ideological and defensive about their hobby. 3) Problematic gamers - basically folks who haven't developed healthy technology habits, where their gaming is interfering with other aspects of their life such as school and relationships. In my experience, I don't see really any correlation between #1 and immaturity, at least any more than someone who's heavily invested in home improvement or science fiction is likely to be immature. Categories 2 and 3 seem to be more closely linked to immaturity, but keep in mind that folks in these two categories also tend to be younger as well (hopefully growing out of these as they mature).

Thought I might post another snippet from my philosophy book, 7 Provisional Truths, for those who might be interested. This section is a follow up to my earlier post about how Objects are mentally constructed (but not imaginary), where I describe how objects are akin to a lens that our minds use to navigate Reality (which can be found here: https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/101752-a-framework-for-ontology-objects-are-mentally-constructed/ ) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Disclosive View As A Window Into Visual Perception An illustrative case study for how the Disclosive View can help us explain and interpret our embodied interactions with the world can be found in a survey of how our visual field is organized. What we’ll be articulating here is a phenomenological account of how objects are disclosed to us through visual perception (recall that phenomenology concerns itself with how things show up for us in the directness of our lived experience). Let’s first acknowledge that not having access to eyesight doesn’t preclude an individual from experiencing objects. Minds are inherently adaptable, so a perceptual system without access to eyesight has other avenues for object disclosure, such as touch and sound. For our present purposes however, we’ll focus on the primary means by which objects are disclosed to human beings, which is through vision. For those with functioning eyesight, our perceptual system organizes visual input along a subject-horizon schema. (A schema just refers to a template by which something is organized). In practice, this subject-horizon schema highlights whatever visual phenomena we happen to be focusing on as a ‘foreground’ (i.e., a subject) which is contrasted against a ‘background’ (a horizon). The boundary that marks where a subject ends and the horizon begins we experience as the edges of an object; be that a blade of grass, or a printed word on a page. For things that extend beyond our field of vision, like the interior of a room, the unified whole that we experience is akin to a mental composite, composed as we move our eyes around, taking in details. Crucially, these subject-horizon schemas are not predetermined. Instead, their boundaries have an inherent flexibility that’s dependent upon the context in which we’re viewing something. A well-studied side effect of this flexibility are optical illusions. Optical illusions aren’t a case of our visual system ‘malfunctioning’, as common sense might attest. Instead, they are a consequence of the fact that our sense perception is tailored for coherence and intelligibility; not to recover fixed features from a ‘neutral’ Reality. While contemporary common sense might tempt us to analogize our visual perception to a video camera, in actuality the embodiment of our minds and our perceptual system tells a very different story. The roots of this misleading metaphor stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what sense perception is all about. As living beings, our survival depends on being able to flexibly cope with the complexities of a fluid environment. A perceptual system that functioned like a mechanical recording device wouldn’t be up to the task of providing focused information that’s relevant for our needs and purposes. The reason that this matters is because the overwhelming majority of what we might potentially encounter within Reality is irrelevant for us. Consequently, our perception is just as much a process of filtering out a near infinite stream of irrelevant stimuli as it is a process of presenting with us sights and sounds and tactile sensations. The fact that your nose isn’t visible to you right now, despite it lying within your visual field, is good evidence of this. As it turns out, we’re capable of attending to only a tiny part of our visual field at any given moment. While our entire field of view spans about 180 degrees horizontally and 135 degrees vertically, only 2 degrees of that field consists of the highly detailed images that we associate with ‘what it’s like’ to have vision. This high detail portion of your visual field is associated with the fovea centralis, which is the region of your eyes where the light sensitive photoreceptor cells known as cones are most densely packed. From here, the rest of your visual field gradually widens out into a low acuity no man’s land of rough and tumble nebulosity. Where we can’t make out much more than some basic impressions of shapes, colors, and movement. If you doubt this, try affixing your eyesight on a focal point that’s a few inches away from this page, and see if you’re still able to make out any of the words in this paragraph. It may be a bit surprising to discover just how small a portion of our visual field this high detail focal area actually is. Yet when everything is functioning properly, this system works so well that the blurry no-man’s land which takes up the majority of our visual field isn’t a hindrance to us in practice. In practice, we’re scarcely aware of it most of the time, which is indicative of its efficacy.

Thanks for the share, I'll admit that I've yet to hear Verveake talk at length about his views on ethics. My broad perspective is that ethics is a skill and capacity that can be cultivated, having to do with how wide our 'circle of concern' for other beings extends, and how adept we are at understanding the perspective of others. Which I suppose would place me into the camp of virtue ethics. This is in contrast to the idea that ethics is primarily a detached from of intellectual reasoning, which I tend to disagree with. While there are certainly specific situations where adopting a more detached position can be useful and appropriate (for instance, for people in positions of authority whose role necessitates impartially), this is the exception rather than the rule.

I thought I might share a write up for a philosophy book that I'm writing, which touches upon ontology, epistemology, and our embodied experience within the world. In it, I attempt to present some of the phenomenological insights of Heideggar and Merleau-Ponty in a more accessible manner, as part of a broader effort to develop a metaphysically agnostic, pragmatic ontology that has its basis in our embodied interactions with the world. Objects Are Mentally Constructed (But Not Imaginary) In this section, we’ll be introducing an alternative to the common sense, or Objective View, of objects. Because this alternative is grounded in the world disclosure process we’ve been exploring, we’ll refer to it as the Disclosive View. In contrast to the Objective View’s insistence that objects are absolute features of Reality, Disclosive View contends that objects are more akin to a lens for navigating Reality. This makes them fundamentally experiential, as they’re how our mind turns our surroundings into something that’s comprehendible for us. In essence, objects are a type of interaction which happens between our embodied minds and our surroundings; neither existing ‘out there’ in some external Reality, nor as a pure fabrication of the mind (distinguishing them from hallucinations, which present us with non-existent phenomena). In sum, the gist of the Disclosive View is that objects are mentally constructed (but not imaginary). Before proceeding, let’s first clarify what a mental construct is. What a mental construct (or just a construct, for short) refers to is a distinction that our minds create and sustain, which is coupled to some observation about ourselves or our world. If we think more deeply about what an object actually is, it’s our mind’s way of drawing a boundary around some portion of our local Reality. The advantage of carving up Reality in this way is that it allows us to relate to what’s contained within a given boundary in a more concrete way (as a house or as a chair, for example). As such, the boundaries which mark where one object ends and another begins are not arbitrary; rather, they are functional in nature. They are our mind’s way of packaging our surroundings into more manageable ‘chunks’ that are easier to interact with and understand. Because this point can be easily misconstrued, the contention here isn’t that objects are ‘imaginary’ (like how Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are imaginary). Instead, what’s being pointed out is that objects are the products of a cognitive process that puts us in direct contact with the world. As living beings that are adapted for survival, objects would be useless to us if they didn’t convey generally reliable information about Reality. This also explains why there’s a valid distinction between objects and hallucinations, despite both being mentally constructed. Since the former puts us in touch with our surroundings and our environment, while the latter does not. Hence, objects are mentally constructed, but not imaginary.

Thanks! One of my aims with this book was to do an in-depth exploration of philosophical concepts that's more accessible than what you'd find within an academic book or lecture (both Verveake and Leo do a very good job at this). The concept of 'disclosure' is drawn directly from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, which Verveake and myself are both drawing up on. The shared domain that's being explored here is called 'embodied / enactive' cognition, so it makes sense that we'd be exploring similar ideas and concepts (I'll admit that Verveake is of course an influence on my work as well). For the most part I agree with Verveake, we just have slightly different areas of emphasis. Verveake's main 'thing' (if he can be said to have just one primary area of emphasis) is the unfolding 'meaning crisis' within Western society. My own perspective is about cultivating a more construct aware perspective, so that we can learn to hold our attitudes and beliefs in a more provisional and self aware way. Both Verveake and myself emphasize meta-rationality, so one would expect there to be commonalities in our subject matter and approach.

That sounds like it falls squarely in the preview of metaphysical ontology, whereas the perspective I propose is more about using ontology to better understand our subjective, embodied experience within the world. To that end, what I propose is a type of pragmatically oriented metaphysical agnosticism. Having a living body with survival needs is a central to how we understand our surroundings and our world, it doesn't matter whether that body is composed of 'matter stuff ' or 'mind stuff'. In general, I've found metaphysical speculation about the overall meaning and purpose of capital R 'Reality' to be less helpful than perspectives which are grounded in our subjective, lived experience. Mind you I'm not saying that there aren't uses for metaphysical theories and speculation, I just find that in my personal experience, they introduce a lot of unnecessary baggage if our goal is self-understanding.

A good analogy for my frustrations with how intellectually lazy this false equivalency between Trump and Biden is: Let's say I have two candidates for a job opening in my small company Don and Joe both want the job, and unfortunately for me they're the only candidates available. Joe has enough experience to be qualified for the job. He's far from exceptional, but I can at least rely on him to show up every day and do what I'm paying him to do. But he's quite old, and there's questions about if his health will hold up over the upcoming years. Don is convicted felon with a history of fucking over every person he's ever worked with. He's primarily applying to the job is to enrich himself at the expense of the company, and leave someone else holding the bag when the shit hits the fan. He also has numerous sexual harassment allegations against him, and has a trial pending for inciting an armed mob against his previous employer when they fired him. "False Equivalency" Fred : " I dunno, not seeing much of a difference between these two candidates."

You're commiting a 'false equivalency ' fallacy. In no reality are Trump and Biden equally incompetent, unethical, deluded, or corrupt. Defaulting to this stance is an example of an intellectually lazy 'thought terminate cliche'.