OK, well at least some good has come from Sapientia's charm offensive. We now know 1) This is definitely not America and 2) Whatever we do, jamalrob will get the blame.

Sorry Nils, I didn't notice this discussion before (a PM to a mod is probably a more reliable way to get a quick reply). Anyway, we have a change log that records all edits and deletions and allows us to restore any accidentally deleted posts. I've looked through it for the week prior to your post here and I can't find any record of an edit or deletion done by you or by a mod to one of your posts. Can you be more specific about the date and I might be able to locate it?

By the way, I contacted you in response to a complaint by another member who felt you were evangelizing. So, you weren't actually singled out by the mod team.

You could have a hundred times as many attacks and they still wouldn't be representative of the beliefs of the 1.7 billion Muslims in the world. It's not the religion that's carrying out the attacks, it's a tiny minority of the religious.

Points taken but none of that justifies the claim that we live in a "post-truth" era, which to me is just a fancy meme, and ironically self-undermining. And if this is representative of the strategy of progressives, to be martyrs of truth in a post-truth world, we just end up playing the same partisan game we accuse the opposition of. Better we work on the presumption that there is some rationale behind the push for change and try to understand it and engage with it.

Do you feel like you are stuck in such a filter bubble that you can't manage to find out facts about stuff? Is it such an effort to circumvent? It just seems highly exaggerated to me. Or again, is it just others who are too dumb to figure it out?

It is important, but I bet if you did a poll here to ask people if they felt they were less able to dig up facts now than before, you'd get a majority negative response. It seems to me people are always worried about others being "post-truth" while they have it covered.

One side of the coin. The other side is that there are more facts available to those who want to find them than at any other time in history. I mean, it may be that we were better off without filter bubbles, and targeted advertising etc. but the difference now isn't of such qualitative magnitude to justify calling this is a "post-truth" era. That's just a way to sell newspapers (mostly to pissed-off progressives, I presume).

Not that I'm optimistic about the future or anything. It may be we've just about reached the peak of progress and are beginning the slide backwards. But that's another debate.

There's more truth at our fingertips than ever and there's more bullshit around than ever. We're not post-truth (any more than we ever were), we're info saturated.

To embrace depression as a learning experience rather than to try to avoid it may be necessary to lay the groundwork for a future desirable state, and when this is the case labeling it simply as an illness is misguided, I agree, but depression in itself is still an undesirable state. Society is short-sighted on the issue but not completely blind.

This issue has been dealt with here.

Hm, throw a colostomy bag into the equation and we might have something.

For some reason I read that first as "Stare at the ceiling and urinate..." and I was pretty sure that wouldn't work. Reading it again hasn't changed my opinion much.

Why does anyone still continue to study this nonsense? — lambda

There's no 'value' that can come out of such a state. — lambda

Really? So, you would contend that the world would be no worse off intellectually or morally had no-one ever engaged in philosophy?

Ah, no Ireland there. Chose the UK instead. Did OK. (Y)

How you think is more important than what you know. — Thorongil

Not when how you think is based on what you think you know.

I didn't use the word "damming". That would be me making a judgement. I provided a link to.views of his that people were troubled by. I haven't made any claims beyond that as yet.

You asked for a source of views expressed by Bannon that people are troubled by. You got one. Those are some of his views. They trouble some people. Don't expect a running commentary on it. Read it and figure it out yourself.

Five seconds on Google turned this up:

https://www.romper.com/p/5-steve-bannon-quotes-that-explain-why-trumps-chief-strategist-pick-is-concerning-22563

The big elephant has been hanging out in the Shoutbox. Anyway, as far as I know, there's no maybe left. He's won. As for what happens next, there's only one thing you can be sure of, he won't make America great again.

On a scale of careability, I rate this a zero.

Good to see you again, Flux. 8-)

I did take a brief look at the document and it seemed to comprise of nothing more than a list of your philosophical positions on various issues. Of all the things I or anyone else could be reading right now, why would that be of particular interest to us? Unless you answer that question in the OP, I doubt you will get many responses here.

It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity. — StreetlightX

I follow your point and not to be pedantic, but let's not forget the standard use of the word "recursion" in linguistics. This sense of recursion isn't automatically introduced into language with negation allowing the latter without the former (Pirahã (arguably) lacks recursion but retains negation). And you can apply recursion to negation just as you can to other modifications. Also, you can stratify levels without recursion simply by starting new sentences that add layers of qualification to the previous ones (as Pirahã (allegedly) does).

What I mean is: are we just talking about a battle of definitions here?

EDIT: (I haven't read your other thread on innate ideas btw. Just noticed it now. I'll take a look before I go any further).

Which makes the idea of an innate idea particularly hard to define and the argument hard to set in place. I mean you could define it as some kind of potentiality, like a physical grammar module in the brain which programs recursion and other universal aspects of language into us, or you could define it as something necessarily linguistic or at least proto-linguistic (in which case the concept becomes somewhat incoherent)..

I like the metaphor; I think too that drives blend into emotions, which blend into nascent ideas, which blend into linguistically clear concepts of various levels of complexity and layering, and the process doesn't always happen in an ordered way. Where an "idea" actually begins and ends is hard to pin down.

And the weak suffer what they must? - Yanis Varoufakis

So far, so interesting.

The very first human "language" (if you accept language developed gradually, and not everyone, notably Chomsky, does) probably had no tense at all (tense is one of those things that doesn't really make sense unless you have more than one anyway). Utterances (apart from their necessarily vocal nature) would then essentially be coterminous with what we would call ideas - but these ideas constrained in scope by the bounds of a rudimentary language may be as unrecognizable as ideas as any "basic language" would be as a language - I mean the more basic you make a language, the less it is a language, and if ideas are inextricably linked with language, they may, the further you trace them back, lack the qualification of being ideas and end up as just emotions or motivations or drives.

Oh, no problem, I think it's an interesting issue.

Not trying to avoid your question, but that's leading into a discussion of aesthetics, which seems a bit off-focus here. Anyway, the beauty is in how the painting, the poem, the story, the sculpture functions in the contexts in which it does so.

Well, beauty is also difficult to define uncontroversially, but following my definition above, that form of beauty which cannot be denigrated or degraded without a concomitant degradation of something beautiful in the self can be considered sacred.

I'll try a broad definition then: That which is sacred is that which the nature of which is that it cannot be denigrated without denigrating the nature of the one who denigrates it.

The Sickness unto Death - Kierkegaard

Donald Trump thinks the elections are rigged, and he is (accidentally) right — Bitter Crank

Ironic. Trump claims the elections are rigged (against him) but it is the fact that they are rigged (to sustain a two party system) that has allowed someone so despised as he to have any chance at all of winning the presidency. As many of his voters will be voting against the other (also widely despised) candidate as for his candidacy. It's doubly ironic that most of the rigging is on the conservative side in working to deny likely Democrat voters their suffrage. But this is like Trump's complaints against the media - what he rails against is very often what has got him where he is.

Well, I appreciate your confidence in my abilities but my power does not quite extend so far.

I have reasons why I wouldn't, but I don't want to side-track this discussion into a debate about the Clintons. That's the strategy of Trump supporters who want to detract from their man's failings. If someone wants to start a discussion on the Clintons, I'll probably join in and give my reasons there.

Just quote the relevant parts of the relevant emails then.

No amongst having a good laugh I'm actually also doing philosophy. Just that you get stuck up on "Crooked" and not on anything else.

Again giving excuses for them. The media should be unbiased. The real truth is that they do have a bias to progressivism. And Trump unmasks this. Exactly as I've been saying all along. People think the media is free when it's really not - it's in the binds of progressives. But because of Trump we can all see that - the mask goes off — Agustino

But again your post proves me right. I made a collection of arguments about how Trump used his anti-media persona to his advantage and was actually advantaged initially by it (getting much more coverage than other candidates); and I then went on to state that current biases against him (if there any) would be unsurprising in the context of his attitude. But you respond not with any kind of rebuttal or analysis or even acknowledgement of my arguments, but rather the unsupported assertion that I am giving excuses for the media followed by more unsupported assertions about how the media is in the binds of progressives. Where is the philosophy that you keep contending you are doing in your response above? Show it to me.