The problem is not only your low quality posts, but your endless stream of new discussions. I'd like you to participate in discussions started by others instead of posting new ones every day. I've been deleting your discussions and will delete more of them as they appear.

I'm a 28 year old virgin who spends their time on PornHub and the likes — Wallows

I'm not quite that desperate — Wallows

Ok

Yes, by "meeting people" I probably mostly mean getting laid. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it's not easy to get laid without meeting people. I met my wife (wife now, not then) on Tinder, and she later said she only agreed to meet me because I said I was "looking for friendship ...", which was rather dishonest of me.

I'm not a fan of Tinder. I can't stand cheesy/sexual chat up lines and "normal" conversations via text are so boring. Nothing beats meeting people in real life — Michael

Tinder is a way of arranging such meetings, not an alternative to them.

Maybe that's how it's mostly used, but it's not really my experience of it.

Anyway, there are many other apps and sites that make it easy to meet people. And that's what it's about: meeting people.

So, what have I got wrong in my perception of women? — Wallows

I think yes, your perception is conditioned, or "warped" as you say, by your circumstances. But whatever we tell you will probably not alter those circumstances or change how you feel. You need to meet some women. You know that most women do not appear on PornHub, so you already know that your perception is wrong, and in what way it is wrong.

When I was young I was unsuccessful with women, and I had a kind of bitterness developing towards women who enjoyed sex or behaved overtly sexually. All of that stuff--which in retrospect is like a poison--disappears when your life changes, i.e., when you get laid and make friends with women. But I guess these days it's easier to get trapped in porn and misogyny because of the internet.

On the other hand, also because of the internet it's easier to meet other people now. Have you tried Tinder?

:up:

But isn't it good that you have non-Muslims like George Eaton, and a few people here, to protect you from offence? :wink:

Maybe they'll say you have internalized Islamophobia.

I start to wonder about dementia — unenlightened

Reading your recent posts, so do I.

I did not enjoy being assaulted by the thought of "masturbatory diarrhea" first thing in the morning.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. It's good to know that some people who strongly disagree with Scruton's opinions are willing to be reasonable.

Yeah I mean saying that there is a "Soros Empire" formed by and around an "extensive network" of "Jewish intelligentsia" who are pulling the strings, is an age old antiSemitic stereotype through and through. — Maw

Knowing that you've seen the full quotation, I have to say that this is beneath contempt.

The idea that the term 'Islamophobia", or, more saliently, the meaning behind it is agitprop is detestably ludicrous. In fact, I think the term "Islamophobia" doesn't fully express the connotations it ought to have, as compared to antisemitism. But that's fairly demonstrative of what can and can't be discussed, as shown by the rancor expressed towards Ilhan Omar. — Maw

You attempt to push his position outside the realm of reasonable opinion, but really you just disagree with him. I happen to agree with him.

But why should I or anyone really care that Roger Scruton is losing a Government position because of this? — Maw

A predictable and thoughtless question. It's not for any personal sympathy for him or his agenda as a government housing adviser, but--obviously--because of what it shows about the state of public debate, of government, of cultural mores, and of journalism.

Anyone who thinks "The West" or "Islam" can be conceptualized as a monolith, unquestionably has a child's understanding of history and modernity. — Maw

I more or less agree with this.

That's all there is to it. — Maw

But this is wrong. Can one criticize the West as such? Can one criticize Islam as such? Even though I may have indulged in both in the past, in the end I think both kinds of criticism are pretty stupid. Notice that both of these stupid criticisms have appeared in this discussion.

They were mostly deporting poor people, whom they classified as white trash, deplorables (term from Hilary Clinton's campaign), riff raff, useless, and so forth. The ruling-class Brits hated the poor. Poverty was criminalized. Criminals were deported. — Bitter Crank

Yep. Incidentally, this was a time when the concept of race was quite different from how it is now. It wasn't about colour, or wasn't only about colour: the poor were seen by many in the higher classes as being an inferior race, social classes being regarded as reflecting innate differences.

Not especially relevant to this discussion, but relevant to modern discussions about race.

In Australia, where I presently live, the biggest problem is how men treat women. There are many good things about Australia, but this is a national disgrace. The Australian men have an international reputation for abusive treatment of women; and that makes Australian men look like creeps.

Why is this so? Most likely because the first white people in Australia were violent criminals [...] — Ilya B Shambat

Even if it were true that the early European settlers were (mostly?) violent criminals, I can't see how that would account for the behaviour of today's Australian men. But in fact, most of the convicts were sent to Australia not for violent crimes but for petty crimes, born out of poverty.

It comes pretty naturally out of what follows, I think. You treat meaning rather like a thing or a property, whereupon it seems mysterious that it could survive without a context, and how does it survive, in what form etc. I'm saying that if we just look at what we mean by meaning and especially mean, these concerns seem to miss the point.

Reification of meaning.

I take you to mean an ancient text in an unknown language that is as yet undeciphered.

In one sense it is meaningful: we know it means something, but we don't know what. We recognize it as language, that it had a role in a culture, and so on.

In another sense it is not meaningful: it's meaningless to us, it carries no meaning in practice to any language-using meaning-making creatures.

So asking if the meaning was lost when its culture disappeared or is somehow still contained in the stone tablet, waiting to be released again, is ambiguous. It's either, depending on how you're using the word "meaning".

What is the philosophical issue beyond this? Well, even with this ambiguity we can still say that meaning is always at least originally bound up in a context of social practices, or, if you prefer, is always at least originally located in individual minds. Which means that the question isn't an enlightening one, in that it doesn't do much to resolve that debate.

Or am I missing the issue?

No, not that doctor. — S

Maybe more like Dr Nick Riviera?

I supported the closure. The philosophical content had shrunk to almost nothing and letting it continue would have resulted in more childish bickering. And as I see it the decision was about quality more than it was about being illiberal and controlling.

Yeah, it's good to know about those fallacies, but I don't think it's a case for pinning.

I agree with @TheWillowOfDarkness and @Hanover and @StreetlightX.

Among the bad posts and obnoxious posters, I suspect that fallacies and biases are far from being the biggest problems. In fact, the identification of fallacies can be part of a bad argumentative style, and a preoccupation with fallacies seems sometimes to indicate an interest in critical thinking at the expense of philosophy.

And there's just something so middlebrow about it, like a preoccupation with "correct" grammar.

So I say no way.

Unfortunately there is no such feature in the software we're using, but SophistiCat created browser plugins that do the job: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/28211

So it Isn't that people don't see it. What other reasons could there be for lack of an article submission ?

Perhaps:

1.Those that have the ability to write such simply weigh up the pros and cons and don't think It's worth it. Wouldn't they be looking at publishing in a physical, established magazine like Philosophy Now.
I am not sure about the monetary reward. I think someone once told me that they receive a free annual subscription. Are there copyright issues ?
2. Some might be put off by the wording and don't feel ready to Submit. Encouragement and feedback throughout the writing process might produce more results.
3. An initial stimulus or prod suggesting a theme that members could compete in writing about. — Amity

Yeah, I had an article published in Philosophy Now a long long time ago, and I received a year's subscription.

Otherwise I'm not sure. It could simply be that while that discussion was pinned, we didn't have many members. The forum's grown a lot since then.

I did find it difficult to find information about articles. It comes under 'article submissions' stuck between 'Feedback' and 'About TPF'. The headline 'ARTICLES' at top of page only takes you to the one and only article ever published ( as far as I can remember ). — Amity

If my memory serves me right, I had the Submit an article for publication discussion pinned at the top of the forum for a year or more, and we got almost nothing.

Sorry Jake, I don't know. I only found out because there's very little documentation for PlushForums, so when I was Googling for information about some admin functionality, it came up on Vanilla. I haven't looked into it any further.

Yep, that's how I understand it.

In this form and hosted as it is, yes it's just a service from PlushForums. But I believe it's based on a fork of VanillaForums, which is open source and available to run yourself.

Another question. Could you move this forum to another host if that was for some reason desired? I'm not suggesting this is necessary or desired, I'm just wondering if moving would be possible. — Jake

We could move if necessary, say if it became too expensive, but it would mean starting from scratch unless we had control over the source code and database of the new forum. So if I hosted the new forum and could change the code, access the database directly, and so on, then I could conceivably run a script to import the data from the PlushForums JSON export.

I'm interested in hearing jamalrob's opinion on proceedings. — Evil

Hi Evil. I don't think I have the heart for this debate any more. Who knows, maybe I'll muster the energy to gather up my tatty old opinions for another try, but maybe not.

Right now The Lounge doubles as a place for relaxed and off-topic discussion, as well as a dump for threads that don't fit moderators' standards in other forums, which makes for a weird mix. I would rather see a dedicated "dump" subsection (you could give it a more polite name, like "Not quite philosophy" or something). — SophistiCat

This could be a good idea.

Thanks for the comments. As I'm in a minority, I don't feel justified in making any substantial changes. I agree with the several comments about the specific problem of "intra-religious" discussions, and I'm inclined to be stricter with that stuff, but otherwise I'm going to leave things as they are, and leave it to the mods to use their own judgement.

I just told you: the site is categorized. It always has been.

Still don't know what you mean. There are many categories and every discussion is in one of them. All discussions are categorised.

It's unfortunate, that the categories cannot be implemented in practice due to the workings of the forum. Otherwise, we could have sticky and guidelines for each sub-forum, where the inhabitants of this forum might flourish. — Wallows

What do you mean? Specifically, what is "implementing the categories in practice"? And what is "sticky and guidelines"?

Fascinating.

Unless you go with the Bitter Crank-Terrapin view that "it" refers to the conditions (which is the view of at least one linguist, so Google tells me), it's just a dummy subject, stuck in there to satisfy the syntactical rules of English. In Spanish you'd say "llueve". There's no subject, because of the way Spanish works.

So along with some others here I suspect it's not a philosophical issue.

EDIT: Just noticed that Dawnstorm made the same point.

A question with a view to showing that ethics is about the things we value and not merely about moral comprehension: if I destroy the Mona Lisa for no reason other than wanton destructiveness, is it a simple category mistake to call the action immoral?

I'm sure you can imagine examples. The point is to show that our actions in respect of people or babies or animals or dead bodies or psychopaths do in fact take place in a moral sphere independently of any assessment of individual criteria such as future moral comprehension. The concepts of right and wrong do in fact, in real-world communities, apply to those actions. I take you to be arguing either (1) that they should not apply, that perhaps people all over the world have made a mistake, or (2) for a meta-ethical position whereby you think that the only reason we apply the concepts of good and bad to our treatment of others is that we recognize that they are, or will be, moral agents--that they have individually satisfied some criteria (and hence that principled veganism is based on a mistaken assessment). If your position is the latter, then it seems to me that our moral concern for people with severe cognitive impairment, for the dead bodies of our loved ones, and for pet animals stand as counterexamples.

You do not treat a person well because you've established that they have the mental capacities that you deem to be requirements for morality. And if you treat a person well on that presumption, you do not suddenly treat them as morally insignificant if you later find out that they lack those capacities.

But my wider point was that ethics just is about human actions concerning the things we value. We value pet dogs and most non-psychopaths would not wish to see them tortured. This is an ethical matter despite a dog's possible lack of moral comprehension. Do you disagree?

EDIT: The even wider point is that I think you are appealing to an intuition that is close to my own view, which is about species membership and the moral sphere of human society (which includes animals, though not as moral agents). I.e., I think that individual capacities are a red herring.

The case with infants is different, the infant will grow up and gain moral comprehension — DingoJones

But take the generalized AMC. Some infants may not ever gain moral comprehension--it could be some kind of severe mental disability--and yet they would, obviously I think, remain morally significant.

This probably doesn't go any way towards answering you, but note that I should have said something like: "That is, you could argue that species membership justifies the exploitation (the use) of animals". I didn't mean to suggest an argument in which species membership justifies any treatment that is currently practised, like cruelty.

By the way, @Sir2u amd @DingoJones: the omnivore argument is pretty lame. Surely people here should agree for the sake of argument with the very reasonable proposition that all people could conceivably live healthy lives without animal products? Principle of charity and all that.