Scholar

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Everything posted by Scholar

  1. Racism is not a european thing. What an absurd thing to say. There is no such thing as "europeans" as a collective anyways, that is a generalizing term that has little to do with the reality of what the different ethnic and cultural groups in europe are. The reason why Christian colonizers focused on race so much has deeper historical reasons, and has nothing at all to do with the "whiteness" of europeans. Colonialism was spured on by scientific advancement and competition between nation states. To make it about europe or whiteness obscures any true understanding of how these things came to be, and might come to be in the future.
  2. What is racist about this is that you attribute all the buzzwards above to the color of someones skin. You are literally using an immutable characteristic of several groups of people, many of which have been victims of all of the above, to justify a generalization about human beings. If most rapists were black, it wouldn't make it any less racist to talk about rape being a "black" phenomena. Being white doesn't make one ANYTHING. It is only in your racist, indocrinated head that the color of someone skin is in any shape or form relevant to anything other than describing the mind of a racist, which you are. You are just describing how you come to your racism. It's like you simply fundamentally lack the ability to comprehend what racism is and why it is irrational, immature and evil. Why are you focusing and making this about skin color? Where do you think the term "slave" comes from in the first place? Who do you think, for hundreds of years, ran the greatest slave trades in the world? Again, you can't justify your racism with racism, that's assinine.
  3. There is no such thing as "White people", that's a racist notion. There are several ethnic groups in europe that have white skin color, many of them had zero to do with colonialization and in fact were victims of imperialism. There is no such thing as a "white european identity", that's an american concept.
  4. This is racist. There is no such thing as "White Europeans", By virtue of generalizing them this way you are engaging in an act of generalizing individuals by literally the color of their skin. This isn't even what race is. The slavs for example were considered subhuman by both the anglosaxons and various other "white" groups. Even the celts considered the slavic people as subhuman for a significant peroid of time. And there is various ethnic groups in europe that have white skin color that obviously cannot be generalized into "Whiteness" in any meaningful sense of the term other than being victims of Roman or Judeo-Christian imperialism. The reality is that imperialism expands itself through identity. The South Americans were imperialistic, Asians were imperialistc, the mediterraneans were very imperialistic. Imperialism can be found viritually everywhere historically speaking. Whiteness is a very modern, american notion that is completely divorced from the history of colonization. Colonizers didn't consider themselves "white", but whatever their ethnic group was. They considered themselves superior. Just like the Han Chinese today view themselves as a superior racial group. They don't think all asians are like them. They don't even think all chinese people are like them. Superiority thinking is not reducable to this very specific and simplistic american view of blackness and whiteness.
  5. The problem here is that I was making a point about the limitations around vigilantism and why it is unproductive and harmful, and you came in to state a truism that "Perceived injustice leads to uproar". This contends with absolutely nothing. It just describes what is happening with the implicit validation of that thing. Yes, I understand that if a vegan goes on a terrorist killing spree of meat-eaters, that this will be because of injustice. It doesn't make it any less irrational and harmful. I never claimed that #MeToo wasn't because of injustice or that it wasn't important, I was specifically speaking to a person on this forum who was justifying to himself vigilantism, which you implicitly condoned by responding to me with the truism you stated. "Well it happens for a reason." Yes everything happens for a reason. Nazi germany happened for a reason, it happened for this exact reason in fact, perceived and partially real injustice.
  6. Again, I would recommend informing yourself on who this person was. If you think that this person is anything but an opportunistic sociopath you are naive. It's naive on the level of saying that maybe Trump is actually good hearted and all of what he is doing is just his attempt of making the world a better place, albeit he is just ignorant.
  7. Ah yes, moving the substance of a conversation into a meaningless repetition of a truism. You literally are saying nothing of meaning here, do you even realize that? Nothing of value was provided to the discussion.
  8. There are people who took plenty of psychedelics who will take hormones. If God and his creation is perfection, then the desire of the transsexual is also perfection. His actions to change his body and take hormones are perfection, because all of that cannot be a mistake, given that God made it so. See how you apply your logic selectively? It is a perversion of God's will, you should be ashamed that you even put him in his mouth given you are insulting him by conflating his intelligence with your ignorance. Thankfully God made it all so in the end he is insulting himself.
  9. You are moving the goalpost. The claim you initially made was that people will take things into their own hands if the laws fail. The laws are not what is failing here, it is society. This is why the whole vigilante thing is absurd and unproductive. Yes, we live in a deeply sick culture. We objectify individuals by consuming their excretions, raping them so that they provide us with milk, killing their children and we repeat this cycle until the individuals reproductive system has been so exploited that it no longer provides us with any value. I am well aware of rape culture and the extend to which it permeates all of society. The reason why the vigilantism is not a good idea is because, if you were to ever apply ethics in an even remotely consistent way, you would justify terrorism and atrocities you probably would not be as fond of after realizing they would be committed against you, because you are one of the objectifiers, one of the supremacists. When I say these attitudes are dysfunctional and dangerous, I do not do so because I think society is not as bad as you think. I do so because society is far worse than most people can imagine. And those who lack that imagination are the very individuals who would have to face judgement if their standards were applied in any measure of justice.
  10. It doesn't make her any less morally depraved and dispicable. She knew exactly what type of person Elon Musk was. There is a history to this person that is relevant to this, in that she was basically a staunchly conservative woman who criticized the very behavior she is engaging in. Yes Elon has an obligation to pay for the child, there is no quesiton that he is a despicable human being. But creating a life with a person you know did this over and over again, so that you can enrich yourself, is orders of magnitudes worse than what Elon is doing here.
  11. I am not sure who is more dispicable in this situation. A woman who literally has a child to blackmail a billionaire into giving her money, or a billionaire whose life goal is to immitate Genghis Khan's procreative strategies.
  12. The law is not failing in this sense, it is simply that there is an epistemic hurdle that is unsolvable in relation to the law. There probably is no law that you could construct that would alleviate this issue entirely. That law can regulate all human interaction and solve all abuse is fundamentally naive and false assumption. Incest laws for example exist almost universally, but they have virtually no impact on abuse rates and might in fact exacerbate them given criminal persecution leads to pathology in individuals who otherwise might not have been, as for example a result of social isolation. Some of the systemic problems around rape stem from sexual repression and lack of education. Individuals are not made aware of the risks and are not taught how to protect themselves and most importantly how to navigate such abusive dynamics. The problem in other words is that women do not feel comfortable coming out, especially against high status individuals, and therefore prosecution becomes difficult. To draw another analogy to incest laws, it is the fact that incest is so taboo that many victims of such things do not ever speak out about their abuse, as well as the disproportionate power abusers can hold in such dynamics. We also do not teach individuals to identify and call out such things because we as a society are too immature to maintain an awareness of these issues without them threatening our false sense of security. The #MeToo movement is useful in so far as it raises awareness such that we can approach these problems with a solution oriented mindset. One of the major problems was that women would not come out with their abuse because we would dismiss them on a social level. Just saying that the law is not persecuting rapists is utterly unhelpful. What about the law has to change, what in the system has to change? Why is it so difficult to prosecute these things? Mindless outrage just leads to "Defund the Police" type policy thinking which contributes to the problem rather than resolve it. It is a red herring. I am sure the laws can be improved, but the resolution to this problem will not be this simplistic.
  13. This is an insane stance, because the whole point of the law is to determine if someone is or is not innocent. That is what the whole process is about. Vigilantes cannot and will not do that. What you are proposing is going back to a time where black men are lynched because a woman accused them of having raped them, for whatever reason. You cannot have societies make these determinations on how you "feel" about a certain situation. It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer. There is a deep reason why this has to be the case in relation to justice. Sometimes criminals will get away with their crimes, this is a given in any society. In essence, you will not prevent the abuse because the root cause of the abuse here is that individuals with power are deified, both by women and men. We still live in a society that is far too status driven, and individuals with status will always be able to exploit their power if society is freely giving them that power. The abuse occurs because of a fundamental trust that is given to individuals who have high status. Even if you will catch all the rapist, the rapes in such a society will not stop. Radical criminalization does not work for any social problem of such dimension, and indiscriminate persecution of individuals who are accused of being guilty of something is not a healthy pathway towards social growth and resolution.
  14. The fact that transgenderism is still a topic that people struggle with makes me very pessimistic about more pressing social justice matters like the persecution of consanguinamorous individuals. People struggle with concepts that have a mediocum of complexity to them. The more complex the idea, the harder it is to navigate and the more space there is for bias.
  15. White colonialism is a racist term, given that whiteness is an entirely constructed notion.
  16. A major reason why Bernardo defines the external world as a mental state is because there is no reason, under the principles of philosophy, to assume that there is a second ontological category that is somehow different than the "mental". This notion to me is in a way correct, but it truly confuses a deeper point about the nature of ontology in the first place. The reason why the idealist calls reality fundamentally mental is because that which he has access to, which he defines as his experience, is something he labels as mental. The "mental" or "mind" is in that way a construct that stands in opposition to what is consider externality. Once you collapse the inner and external in an ontological sense, the term "mental" loses all it's meaning. Whatever it's qualities would be, would actually just be qualities of reality. But there is a more important point here, in that somehow Kastrup believes that even what he considers the "mental", meaning his own mind, is a singular ontological category. In essence this can be said to be true, given that ontology just equivalent to existence, but it overlooks reality about "mind" that leads to the recognition of Infinity. The ontology of colors, of blueness, is as different in it's nature from the ontology of sound, or the chirping of a bird, could possibly be. They are entirely different ontological categories. They are literally impossibly dissimilar. No two things in all of existence could be more dissimilar to each other than sound and color is. To call them mental is meaningless, because all that mental means is "of existence" or "existing". Ontology is existence, and the existence of redness is utterly foreign and unequal to the existence of the chirping of a bird. Both are existence, but they are not a "type" of existence. Redness is not mental. Redness is precisely one thing: Redness. It is irreducable. It is no other category than that, it is itself. Every concept that you project upon it is not Redness. So when an Idealist says the external world is mental, all that could possibly mean is that the external world is "of existence". What kind of existence it is, that is unknowable, as unknowable as colors are to a blind person. Why is this so essential? It is essential because if you truly realize the utter dissimilarity of the ontology between redness and the chirping of a bird, you will immediately realize the radical nature of Infinity, and the radical nature of Existence. Any propositional explanation of reality will immediately be recognized to be absurd, Redness cannot be explained by anything. It cannot be explained by any account of the mind, any account of physicality, any account of anything that one could possibly understand or think about. The nature and existence of redness can only be accounted for in one way: In itself. Redness is completely and utterly self-justifying, self-asserting. It is Absolute. The only thing that could allow for Redness to exist is Absolute Infinity, because it will contain Redness, it will contain all things. Every ontological category which you call a sense, namely colors, sounds, concepts, feelings, temperature-perception. They are not mental, they are themselves. There are Infinite such ontological "categories", each infinitely and absolutely foreign to one another. Each of them indescribable, irreducable. When we speak of the mind, we simply speak of existence, of reality. To call it mind is a remnant of dualism, which labels externality and internality as opposed to one another, as mental against physical. But this is a confusion, because reality simply is infinity. It is ontologically infinitely diverse. There are not two ontological category, but endless categories of them. But each of them, in a sense, are ontologically equivalent, given they are all simply existence, which means they are themselves (self-affirming existence or substance). When it is said that something "feels" like something, all that really means is that something exists. That's literally it. The issue is that the human mind confuses predictive notions about reality with the ontological notions. So it employs the notions of "feeling" as they relate in terms ot metacognition to a function of survival. Nothing is felt, it simply exists. The projection of the "it is felt" notion has it's purpose in that it focuses the notion of "reality" onto externility focused reality modeling. So the model of the physical world is given primacy, in the way it's illusion is consistent. The physical world doesn't change, the body and it's needs do change all the time. So, changing things are defined as "feeling", and unchanging things are defined as reality (external world). When individuals take psychedelics, the usually stable "existence" of the physical world model suddenly, for the first time, dissolves, and is shown to be as fleeting as what is considered other "feelings". But what is actually happening is that reality is fleeting and fluid in that way. Reality can give existence to redness, and then give existence to something else. It is infinite, it can do anything, of course. However, that does not change that the ontology of all those things simply are themselves, they could not be anything other than themselves.
  17. This is a silly assumption. Robots are expensive, they will need to be maintained and so forth. And the more work is replaced, the less human labour will be worth. So you will have people work these types of jobs for absurdly low rates that are more profitable than buying and maintaining a robot.
  18. Right but this means that hell exists and infinite torture of infinite beings for all of eternity with no return to the Godhead must exist.
  19. God as defined as existence. It will just be denied that God has the properties that you attribute to him, namely Love, Intelligence and so forth. Can God choose not to create eternal separation and suffering? Would that not deny his Infinitude?
  20. I am assuming you're an american. You guys are naive and gullible in a way that is just awe-inspiring in it's horror. He isn't saying this out of compassion, but because he knows this will appeal to people like yourself. Because you are easily manipulated, easily fooled. This post undermines every single thing you have ever said on this forum in how profoundly it recontextualizes your intelligence.
  21. In this conversaiton, around the chapter "Defining Happiness", the individual from the Research Institute for Qualia makes the point that a world in which all of us existed in a simulation which stimulated our "Well-being" neurons would be a good world, that such a world is desirable. This view is justified through a certain view of what Meaning is. It is stated that we seek Meaning because it provides us with a positive mental state, so in the end, if you changed the agent such that you stimulate that state directly, they would be perfectly satisfied, and on the contrary, perfectly unsatisfied and feel deeply meaningless due to the stimulation of that area of the brain. All of this is true, however, the conclusion that then follows from this, that a world in which we did nothing but stimulate our meaningcenters to be blissfully meaningful, is a good world, is where the researcher plays a little utilitarian trick on us. It's an assumption that just because this is how the human mind works, it is therefore desirable to maximize that which the human mind seeks. And this assumption is false because it neglects the very reason for why things are sought, and that is ones own nature. It is ones nature that determines what one finds meaningful and what one finds not meaningful. It is trivial to say that, by adjusting ones nature, one is therefore also adjusting what will give one the experience of meaning and pleasure. If I changed your brain to enjoy and find deeply meaningful the torture children, then that is of course what you would find deeply meaningful. But there is no "ought" in the universe that tells us that positive sensation must be maximized, and that such a world would be desirable or good. The universe moves completely outside of the need for pleasure. Atoms move, evolution moves, and the human mind moves, without the necessary presence of pleasure at the end of that motion. And that is because of the nature of reality, which is what determines the motion of all things in the first place. The human mind does move towards pleasure, but it also moves towards other things as they relate towards it's own nature. And there is a deep metaphysical blindspot here, in that the utilitarian assumes that because the nature of the human mind is such that it inevitably is pulled towards positive states and pushed away from negative states, that therefore the world ought to be structured under the maxim of hedonism, because that is what the human mind does anyways. The conclusion of this view is that a world ought to be created devoid of nature, that the positive state in of it self ought to be maximized, even if it contradicts our nature. But that is not the purpose of the universe. The universe's purpose is found in it's complete nature, in the motion of every atom. In that way the human nature is an extention of Divine nature. The "meaning" of life is life itself, exactly as it is, and exactly as it will transform itself. It is self-justifying. What this means is that hedonism is not the inevitable conclusion of evolution, as is assumed by the researcher. He believes if human beings were maximally rational, that they would inevitably conclude that pure hedonism is the logical way of expression, the path of least resistance and therefore the way reality will express itself. But reality will not express itself bound by some false, logical maxim he established, but instead by the nature of what it is. The way humanity will express itself will relate to it's nature, and in that way, if we find the idea of simply sitting in a soup of pleasure until the heat-death of universe occurs as meaningless, then that is not how we will express ourselves. There is something far deeper transpiring here that goes beyond mere human nature, beyond mere, simplistic psychological accounts. The mistake committed here is that one has assume that the nature of the human mind is to seek pleasure, rather than part of the nature of the human mind being that it is pulled towards pleasure, and that positives states are a foundational way in which our nature fulfills itself. But the nature is what is fundamental, as a complete phenomenon. Especially on a collective level it will not be reducible to a simple hedonistic account of the brain. This does not mean that the hedonistic server farm is not the end-point of this civilization. It could be, who knows. The point is that the nature of the universe is far deeper than that. Evolution dictates that, even if 999 out of 1000 civilizations become hedonistic server farms, one of them will continue in a way that explores the infinity of reality in a different way, just by the nature of random expression (which is the only way infinity can fully discover itself). There are more superficial points to be made, in relation to the impossibility of transcending ones own nature completely (by adjusting ones nature one will eventually lose the very drive that sought the adjustment, meaning the maintaining of the adjustment requires stability, which requires a rigidity in ones own nature, which translates into ignorance), but that would be for another conversation.
  22. Jesus didn't exist in the way you think he did. If you do believe such nonsensical fairy tales, how can you expect to be truthful? He is a story, a story that was turned into a system of control by the roman empire. That's all Christianity fundamentally is. The perverse nature of religions like Christianity is that they take the gift of the Kingdom of Heaven and sell it to you for gold to enrich themselves. You don't need the pope, the catholic church, or these religious systems to take what is within you.
  23. This is exactly what is going on in China as we speak. It's just stage blue nationalism. There are chinese scientists who make the case that mankind originated from China rather than africa. It's similar to how the Russian nationalists will claim that ancient greece was a product of russian culture. It gives legitimacy to imperialistic and superiority thinking.