Well, that has always been a factor for Trump since he was marching across NYC real estate deals. Cool with people he hates as long as he gets the better bank rating.

And then matters went another way.

I am shaped by my construction work life put in here in the city. It is astonishing to us that such a dishonorable person was given so much credit by other people.

Dammit, that makes sense.

Here is a purely political question:

Who will Trump select for his VP? Even if one were a completely committed MAGA personality, the burning cars on either side of the road must give pause.

It seems to me that if the becoming has no end then there can be no ultimate convergence. — Leontiskos

This prompts me to think of Heraclitus. Everything is Becoming because the past is as Eternal as the Future. So, there is a nature that brings about what we encounter but we are limited in our means to understand it.

It is interesting that Aristotle said that the Platonic views were a reaction to this idea. Aristotle's opinion does put Platonic dialogues like Craylus into a particular perspective, where the struggle between convention and nature is underway.

You are doing a good job representing the problems with statements made with such certainty, But your interlocutor will only pick out another detail to put forward in an equally absolute fashion rather than defend previous arguments.

The only way to detect black holes is noticing when they steal material from adjacent stars and planets.

I am not sure how to weigh all the different global strategic shakedowns but the recent escalation since the end of the grain deal has turned the Black Sea into goo. China is a major customer of that grain. It looks like a major divergence of interests has developed between partners sworn to never part.

What I find odd about the different groups packed into the Trump tent is where they are incompatible in terms of theri stated interests. The MAGA zens I have encountered in my family and in society appear in three different displays:

The culture warriors who want to reverse changes in institutions.
The groups who wish to restore privileges their parents enjoyed.
Business-people who profit from corporate welfare in its many forms.

These interests can overlap but they are not the same and there is friction between them. The outbreaks of violence, for instance, caused some of my family to separate themselves from the movement.

What does not fit with any of these is the absolute form of 'libertarianism' expressed by Nos4a2. The three groups floating the boat all want state power to secure their ends.

I could mix more metaphors but it is time for walkies.

The end of 'metaphysics' is argued in certain theses. Well, there they are, to be discussed.

What is a dialectic that could talk about it? An odd conversation bent upon stopping conversations?

Even if you just listen to your thoughts, you are still having a one way conversation. — believenothing

The way you have expressed it confuses me. Are you saying (or asking if) there is a difference between the back and forth of internal dialogue?

If what you say is simple as that, then the best defense would be to argue that in a court of law.

It is interesting that Lauro, (Trump's lawyer), calls for televised court sessions along with many on the other side of the aisle. I am surprised that Trump thinks it will help him.

You're putting the cart before the horse. — Michael

My Kingdom, for a horse.

Or is it the other way around?

I was observing that you were intentionally using criteria that cannot be used. Doing so is an evasion of the matter of what can be proved (or not).

It works this way for Hegel because he sees thought as coming first, methodologically and, to the extent he mirrors Boehme, ontologically as well. Of course, he also sees man coming from nature, the way we tend to do today, so this is hard to square. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A dynamic in Hegel that helps confound the matter further is how the development of the individual is a matter of the concrete in distinction to a mere idea that only appears in thought. To some degree, that is an inversion of the individual subject for Kant and Reason's relation to the World. And to keep the snowball of the "Idealism" rolling further, Marx performs his 'inversion' of Hegel.

I don't expect to leave school with my lunch money....

None of your allegations are going to be applicable in court. There are only the unsupported claims, lies, and interference with official operations of the conspirators that will be heard.

Your argument amounts to saying a matrix of crimes you cannot prove justifies a set of crimes that might be.

Hegel was an "idealist." He was a devoted Lutheran who saw the truth of religion as integral to the truth of philosophy. But he also said philosophy had to travel a long way before that could be realized.

The movement involved terrible suffering. Hegel did not make light of that or apologize for it in the way some did. The role of reason followed a different path from simple devotion to a belief.

Should I conclude from these remarks, that the development of universals, that took up so much of Hegel's efforts, was merely a footnote against the theology you read in his texts?

I think we are all peculiarly situated to have problems. And the tools we have to deal with them are also odd. So, I tend to be amazed we can function at all.

I am not irritated. I was considering my own personal reasons.
I will keep my wondering to myself, as requested.

You presented the matter as varying levels of concern. The differences others dwell upon are not your problem. That leads me to wonder what is your problem.

There is a tension between Fate and Freedom in all of philosophy. I am asking how that plays out particularly in Hegel's writings.

Is unpacking this and reassembling our belief systems even possible or useful? — Tom Storm

Do you think of that as some kind of exemption others do not?

What I don't see in your descriptions is the long centuries of suffering required to approach the universal as something we could talk about. That is the central theme of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the lectures upon the Philosophy of History.

And those ideas prompt me to wonder about the following: Hegel considered the religious as a necessary element of our existence but went to some effort to distinguish that from philosophy.

Do you read these texts with distinctions like that in view?

I would consider putting Foucault upon your list because of his writings, Concern of the Self, emphasizing the notion of health as requiring a personal regime verified by a person. It is implicit in many philosophical frameworks. But Foucault shows the importance of it as means of separating bad evidence from the possible good. Something many other thinkers take for granted.

You will have to cite where you get this interpretation from for me to follow along. I am not sure we are reading the same texts.

In the passage quoted, Hegel questions outlining conditions in which the 'understanding' may or may not be able to function. To that degree, he is challenging speculating upon the conditions you describe.

Russell's opinion misses a quality of Berkeley when Berkeley says nobody can actually question the phenomenal. Object permanence happens. God, in this situation, is not me.

From what I understood of him, there was no way to tell. He was arguing against those who said they had a point of leverage to move the activity one way or another.

I am pretty sure that Hegel was not on board with that "postulation" as a description of what he was trying to do. Consider one of his objections to Kant:

This thought, which is proposed as the instrument of philosophic knowledge, itself calls for further explanation. We must understand in what way it possesses necessity or cogency: and when it claims to be equal to the task of apprehending the absolute objects (God, Spirit, Freedom), that claim must be substantiated. Such an explanation, however, is itself a lesson in philosophy, and properly falls within the scope of the science itself. A preliminary attempt to make matters plain would only be unphilosophical, and consist of a tissue of assumptions, assertions, and inferential pros and cons, i.e. of dogmatism without cogency, as against which there would be an equal right of counter-dogmatism.

A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy bids us pause before proceeding to inquire into God or into the true being of things and tells us first of all to examine the faculty of cognition and see whether it is equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has won for it general assent and admiration; the result of which has been to withdraw cognition from an interest in its objects and absorption in the study of them, and to direct it back upon itself; and so turn it to a question of form. Unless we wish to be deceived by words, it is easy to see what this amounts to. In the case of other instruments, we can try and criticize them in other ways than by setting about the special work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim. — Hegel, Logic, paragraph 10

It is fair enough to question whether Hegel achieved the escape velocity to get beyond the presumptions Kant made. But he did give it a shot.

In a bizarre way, that economic miracle has been done by a leadership that thinks of itself as being Marxists. — ssu

That prompts me to think that both Fukuyama and Huntington are not dependable prognosticators on the basis of their theses but perhaps Fukuyama has an edge in their old debate by noting that a special identity is diluted through transactions.

I guess one of the problems with the Huntington view is that once one has agreed to a certain means of exchange, then one has joined that world purportedly put at a distance.

The distinction you make between persons and the situations they find themselves in is interesting. What I would approach as degrees of freedom are imagined by you as a given condition. Your assumptions are not capable of comparison with any set of conditions.

Are you using a rubric where all are the same?
I agree as a matter of identity but situations in the world are very different. You have not expressed much interest in those differences.

Race thinking. So, what is that?

An acknowledgement of a sequence of events or something else?

I get the impression you do not live in one of those places shaped by racial differences.

I recognize the distinction between inner and outer reality that you have drawn out. It seems to me that if one has a practice that keeps one alive and builds strength, it is not a program or a regime but being able to take advantage of an insight.

A capacity to act with a particular understanding rather than knowledge as reserved through devotion.
The most mystical versions are ostensive gestures.

As a matter of theological theses, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric are not easily separated. While the Valentinus group shared a room with the Pauline believers, they could agree that something was wrong with the world, and it needed fixing. The Augustinian acquisition of neo-platonism overlooks Plotinus rejecting that point of view.

So, there has long been the problem of how to reconcile the world as a perfect creation with the view of it as a place of struggle where the good guys could lose. This is still a critical question of existence, no matter what one might believe.

I find Kierkegaard's approach interesting in that his view of Love is not a necessary form of life but a weird addendum.

To think about how property helps create identity, think about browsing a bookshelf in someone's home and what it says about them, or what a teenager's bedroom posters are doing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One of the elements I find interesting when comparing Veblen with Marx is how the 'predatory' quality gets associated with a desire to dominate in contrast to a desire to fit in. Veblen recognizes the desire to dominate but notes that 'conspicuous consumption' is often a token of belonging to a class. And the membership always requires new fees paid toward that condition. The 'fetishism of commodities' is parallel to an actual advantage rather than being a simple result of an illusion of the self.

The scanning of bookshelves reminds me of Le Rochefoucauld saying that education is a second self-love.

Someone figures out how to build something that would change the market for those capable of investing in that particular possibility.

The investors are dependent upon a body of knowledge they cannot confirm for themselves.

The question of how values were maintained and developed was a focus of Hegel and his critics afterwards. But it is often overlooked how Hegel focused upon slavery as the worst human condition. He framed the whole of human history as the struggle to obliterate it.

A desire that makes it necessary becomes something else through stages of new experiences.