• Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The interviews with people who were recused from the current Trump trial are interesting. Finding the limits to one's own objectivity is such a New York City thing.
  • Trying to clarify objects in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

    Thank you for the considered response. I agree that there is a departure from Russell and Frege in the work but see it from a different angle.

    I, too, am working, so will elaborate when free.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Regarding perception, the NYC entrepreneurial set of Trumpsters do expect a direct benefit from tax changes in one fashion or another. Moves to change how LLCs operate and the Democratic effort to develop new corporate taxation make these folk nervous. Efforts to make the IRS more effective is also muttered about.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Well, I was reporting perception, not actual policy on taxes. I take your point on the cost of trade wars.

    The culture wars issue sounds more like offering rhetorical support.Relativist

    Not sure what you mean by that, but many people are invested in that view of conflict. I have a lot of family in Texas who are mostly concerned about those issues.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    From my encounter with Trump voters, in my family and work life, there is a difference between those who are mostly concerned with having the least amount of taxes charged against them as possible and those who want more control of cultural institutions. I have met people who want both of those agendas but plenty more who do not care about the other side of the politics.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    The case is about attempts to squash negative accounts before the election. The law involved concerns efforts to change perceptions of the electorate through illegal means. What actually happened sexually no longer matters.
  • Trying to clarify objects in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

    Leibniz did present a 'universal character' suitable for a principle of sufficient reason to be up to the task of sorting out what things are. Or at least provide a ground for talking about the fundamental elements in a coherent way.

    The challenge of the Tractatus begins with separating 'facts' from 'things'. That seems like a clear withdrawal from a "correspondence theory". In that regard, Wittgenstein is taking a step backwards. Regrouping after failed attempts.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    What is wrong with assuming the previous statements have been read and understood? Did I leave something out?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Lame response, considering what you have claimed.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    But you claimed that the apparent attempt by T to overturn the election results was a plot perpetrated by Biden. Those are your words. Are your words only something that are claimed afterwards?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    I accept your withdrawal from your thesis.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    Not even the part where Biden engineered the whole event?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    The confluence of efforts to change the electoral votes combined with the support given on the day by T and afterwards, in the form of referring to the participants as hostages, and what not.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    It is your narrative. Are you asking me to explain your theory to you?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    That narrative would have some teeth if the evidence to the contrary was not so obvious to all who observed the incidents as they happened in real time.

    Your story will have to explain how that was engineered.
  • I’ve never knowingly committed a sin

    Are you saying that you have never hurt another person for the benefit of yourself?

    Never lied to avoid suffering the consequences of honesty?

    Never pretended to be who you were/are not?

    Never taken what was not yours?

    Never broken a promise, made either implicitly or explicitly?

    Not supported a loved one when they needed that?

    I will presume you get the general idea.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    It was pretty darn clever of Joe to get T to call for a protest on that day and send them to the Capitol with people he knew were armed.

    The genius of the plot unfurls further when one considers how Joe infiltrated the circle of associations between willing participants in overturning the vote count that day. Fusing the efforts of The Proud Boys with the Electoral Vote Plot while operating as a Democrat is a dazzling display of Bad Boy politics that Roy Cohn would have saluted if he understood it.

    No word from the spinning grave as yet.
  • Trying to clarify objects in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

    Interesting. That matter of abstraction puts the focus on what "psychology" is understood to be in the text. Close or far, as it is described.
  • Rings & Books
    One element in Descartes' session of doubt that is worth observing is the emphasis on not relying upon what we all experience as the basis of building theories. His own mistaken guesses are exemplars of that sort of thing.
    The issues discussed in The Meditations are different from the Discourse on Method. Our world to explore if we are up to it.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

    I can follow your description of what is happening but the attempt to bring another to be more skillful is its own thing. The truth or falsity of that is not a general idea. It might even be stupid, in many ways.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

    I was not thinking of the speaking as taboo. Zhuangzi confronts the categorical quality of Confucian expression but does not reject what it is trying to do. Confucius appears as a teacher in the work.

    On a practical level, the training leads to a change or not. Perhaps a way to read Zhuangzi is to look at the problem of reporting success and failure. Those words are highly leveraged properties.
  • Currently Reading
    Solaris by Stanisław LemJamal

    Pretty much the center of imaginary intellects. I love the book and the Tarkovsky movie.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith
    The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something.

    So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much.
  • Rings & Books

    Thank you.

    A discouraging word in the hand is better than two birds in the bush.
  • Mindset and approach to reading The Republic?

    I was excited and surprised that the text challenged my thoughts so directly five decades ago.

    I took notes and annotated the text densely back then, noting connections as they appeared to me. I have a different point of view from those days but still receive the benefit of that work.

    So, I suggest taking notes of your problems and impressions.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

    I see how Kierkegaard's argument is using the biblical accounts to build a sort of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" model of an individual. But the emphasis upon the limits of psychology in the text place it very far from the theory of drives in Freud.

    There is, in Kierkegaard, a move against the role of sex as a measure of sinfulness as depicted in the language of Paul.
  • Rings & Books

    I don't know what that emoticon means as a proposition. Or the absence of one.
  • Rings & Books

    The article speaks of husbands and bachelors but no bachelorettes. Nor of thoughtful philosophical wives.
  • Rings & Books

    Is that to say that women who partake in that 'over-abstractness' are 'men' by that measure?
  • Rings & Books

    There is an odd anti-feminist feel to this view of personal isolation. The space does not include much room for academicians like Nussbaum or Arendt, to mention two at the top of my head.
  • Currently Reading

    I agree completely about the English rendering. I have been wishing I could read Russian from the first chapter. It is difficult to access the purely objective descriptions but the dialogues, both inner and outer, are very stilted, like translating one generation's slang into another.

    I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality?Jamal

    I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

    I share your high regard for the Concept of Anxiety. The work is a part of K's conversation (and argument) with Hegel. As model of personal development, it focuses upon the crisis of adolescence and the perils of becoming a 'single individual'.

    This is done in the context of establishing the religious as giving the possibility for the psychological. But it also gives an account of good parenting that speaks to the immediate circumstances of such development. That quality of observation makes me think of Ortega y Gasset saying:

    Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo. — Meditations on Quixote
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Trump goes after a Judge's family because he figures he can.
    Not a good look if you care about appearances.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Trump attacks Biden over Easter coinciding with Transgender Day of Visibility

    I gather from this that the Easter Bunny is not gay. But if I cannot even see the Bunny, the matter becomes more obscure.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Trump shares an image of Biden tied up like a hog in the back of a pickup truck.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith

    Point well taken about argument under his terms. But it is presented as a limit to explanation rather than a resolution.
  • I am deeply spiritual, but I struggle with religious faith
    Isn't Wittgenstein's answer that it can only be shown, not argued about?Wayfarer

    W does not put it in those terms. What is shown is separated from what is explained. Is that the last word of what can be explained? Seems like a weird place to stop.