That's precisely the sort of irrationality and intransigence that justifies dismissal. — Leontiskos

What do you think counts as acceptable justification for belief?

Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification. There are others.
— frank

I think you're nitpicking. — Leontiskos

Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification for belief.

Trump is going to do a great deal apparently. It was only posturing prior to a negotiation — Punshhh

I missed that. Do you know when Trump mentioned it?

Everyone they spoke to said they have already stopped all trade with the U.S. — Punshhh

That makes sense.

So if you can only rationally accede to an expert if you presume that they possess sound arguments, then you cannot accede to an expert regarding the proposition, "Do not kill the innocent," while simultaneously claiming that such propositions are not rational (i.e. cannot be the conclusion of a sound argument). — Leontiskos

Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification. There are others.

If you believe P without justification, your belief is irrational.

Rationality is not a property of statements or propositions. It's a property of behavior and belief.

If you believe P without justification, your belief is irrational.

More simply, if you continue maintain that the only possible support for a proposition like, "Do not kill the innocent," is rationalization, — Leontiskos

I've never maintained that.

In your case the question would be: Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is the conclusion of a sound argument? — Leontiskos

I believe that time slows down (relatively) near a black hole. I don't have a sound argument for it, though. I just know that's what experts say. Most would consider my belief rational. I have a good reason to believe it. Other rational bases for belief would be things like direct observation, some use of logic, or that everybody believes P. Believing P for emotional reasons isn't usually considered rational.

If you believe X because experts attest to it, but you simultaneously deny that the experts could have any sound arguments to hand, then you are being irrational. — Leontiskos

I guess. Experts are expected to have evidence, though.

Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is a rational statement? — Leontiskos

I don't think rational is a property of statements. It's about the way a person believes or behaves. You believe P rationally if you have a decent reason to believe it. But the bar doesn't have to be particularly high. If you believe P because experts agree that P, then you're behaving rationally, and your belief is rational.

Until that happens, enjoy the decadence. — ssu

:razz:

Actually I'm pretty happy — Mr Bee

:up:

Maybe once climate change sets in that area will become a center of civilization. The peripheral islands will be the Americana zone.

Why does Hague think Trump expected China to back down? Based on everything Trump has said, I would assume he expected them to do exactly what they did.

If you had to put your sentiments about the present situation in a nutshell, what would you point to as your main concern? Is it:

1. US withdrawal from NATO and the UN
2. Economic instability from tariffs
3. A concern about the spread of far right policies, including increased authoritarianism

Or what? I don't think I've ever seen you angry before, and you seem to be. Why exactly?

I think when you get older you get more complicated. The young revolutionary is still in there, but he has to contend with the older person who realized that calling for a revolution is calling for a huge amount of suffering, which is diabolical. So now you have an internal conversation about justice and acceptance.

Yes, but you can support liberal values and be opposed to murder. Liberalism isn't about letting people do whatever they want.

The U.S. is a laughing stock. — Punshhh

That's not a problem for Americans. Most Americans have no idea how the US appears to other countries, and don't care. They're just sort of oblivious.

And Trump now says he's going to send American citizens who have been convicted of crimes there, removing from them any possibility of appeal to the US justice systems. — Wayfarer

No, he said he wanted to. He did not say he was going to.

Nice correction. Well done.

He's testing whether he can defy the Supreme Court and not be held to account. — Wayfarer

No he isn't. The SCOTUS said "facilitate" the return. They left out "effectuate."

You guys keep crying wolf. When the wolf shows up, you'll have nothing to say to mark the occasion.

I said morality isn't based on rationality because it supports both good and evil.

You said that if it supports evil it's being misused.

I asked how you know when rationality is being misused. You don't have an answer.

The age-old answer to this claim is that rationality can be used or misused, much like a gun. " — Leontiskos

What tells you if it's being used or misused? A rational argument?

A pessimistic view is that capitalists need freedom to operate, so they champion liberalism because it diminishes religious and governmental interference.

This is art by Kelly Boesch.

A sound bridge between rationality and emotive morality may be useful. That is because without the rational, we may end up with 'herd instinct'. Morality based on rationality or emotion alone may too narrow in scope. — Jack Cummins

I agree. Maybe a person works better as a whole: letting the mind temper the heart.

I do not deny Nietzsche's argument or the issues of relativism. Nevertheless, what may be happening is a 'fashion' or slippery rope argument whereby the right to express hatred is being justified. — Jack Cummins

That may be true, but such justifications tend to be supremely rational. Rationality is not a guide to moral behavior. If anything, rationality is something to be wary of.

Here, I am wondering about philosophy as being about the pursuit of wisdom for living. — Jack Cummins

This is the crux of the matter. There isn't just one kind of life. In some environments, you'll have to be racist to thrive. In other environments, racism will get you ostracized. As Nietzsche pointed out, your tribe's morality is relative to the kind of society they have created.

one possible measure which holds up to rationality is the idea of respect for others in general. — Jack Cummins

It's also possible to rationalize disrespect for others in general. I think that's why morality isn't based on rationality. People naturally rationalize whatever they're doing. Rationality is kind of like fashion.

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne. — unenlightened

I read this during a rainy November vacation on the east coast not too far from the setting of the book. Grey days looking out on a grey ocean, thinking about Hawthorne's message: that when rationality is pitted against nature, it will lose.

In Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, the main character says she has set herself beyond the pale. This is related to her taking hikes in the woods in spite of being a single woman. Apparently in Victorian England that's all it took, and being beyond the pale came with potentially harsh consequences.

American society doesn't have anything to compare with that. You can't set yourself beyond the pale because no matter how bizarre you are, someone has you beat.

So the answer to the OP is: use the quaint terminology however you like.

They're going to have a labor crisis in a few months and all the immigrant stuff should subside. For a while.

Fascists seek to return greatness via the invigorating effects of warfare.

I’m not interested in a revolution. — Joshs

I have been for a while now. I was born at the wrong time. And you sir are no leftist.

What would you do if you were a university president threatened with loss of grant money, or a news service or law firm threatened with loss of access? Would you fight back or acquiesce? — Joshs

Fight back how? Through the courts? Or standing in the middle of the street with a freaking sign in my hands?

I remember when I first discovered that one of the things the 1% does with their money is control the public conversation to reinforce their position. I was so shocked I was ready for the revolution then. I remember wanting to be part of a firing squad.

Give me a revolution and I'll salute it.

wonder how many died of the 1 million who demonstrated in Puerto Rico? I’ll bet some would have thought it was worth it. — Joshs

My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country. Go Joshs. Do that protest! Quote some Hegel to them. That'll leave them befuddled.

And yet I wasn’t convinced that he is a full-blown dictator until a few months ago — Joshs

Eh, he's 78. He's going to be too tired to be a dictator in 4 years. Fortunately he's all we have to pay attention to. Nobody else. :roll:

Protests, on the other hand, can sometimes be surprisingly effective. — Joshs

In this case I think the effectiveness would be in the legacy of the protests. Trump has already shown a penchant for using force against protestors. Some people would likely die in the clash.

The Constitution allows the president to become a temporary dictator during a war. For instance, Lincoln freed the slaves with war power. He suspended habeas corpus and put people in jail for criticizing the government.

If Trump does that (and doesn't end up with a bullet in his head), the problem is that Congress would likely go along with it. That's what's unusual about this situation. People watched Trump try to derail an election and elected him again. This is what a lot of Americans want. There would likely be riots that people like @Joshs would attend, but riots don't do anything.

In other words, the fact that Vance is waiting to become president and we know he favors authoritarianism, means that the Democrats would have to morph into a political dynamo to counter the drift toward dictatorship. Could that happen? I guess. I doubt it.

You’d have to talk to the individuals in the unions, but in general I’d say that blue-collar unions will be dominated by social conservatives. Probably a bit different for teachers’ unions. — Joshs

We have a very different conception of leftism. I think for you, it's more of an academic thing. I say this because you said the strength you see in it is philosophical. I gather you see it as something that only people with specialized knowledge understand.

To me, it's about a response to the way that people end up being nothing more than machines in a liberal world. There's something deathly about liberalism. The Left is about finding a way back from that, while hopefully keeping some of the awesomeness that liberalism created.

As for conservatism, did you see the people carrying signs saying "Hands Off"? That is the very essence of conservatism: to maintain the status quo, to hold on to what we know works. Our species is alive and well in this moment because of our conservative side, that preserves traditions and hands them on to the next generation.

Would you say leftism is closer to Hegel than to labor unions?

Well, you may be right. We'll see.

Deleuze — Joshs

Deleuze would agree with Nick Land regarding accelerationism. Land was a Marxist, and Land became anti-Enlightenment. Land influenced Vance, who will probably be our next president. There is a little trail from Marx to where we are now. Leftism became a hollowed out corpse. I told you man, read Dark Enlightenment.

I think right now you're kind of frozen by the realization that we might be watching the end of democracy in the US. I understand that. I have the Gettysburg Address memorized and through my life I have repeated it to myself. It's been a touchstone for me no matter what the US was going through. I love the ideals behind the US. So I also became frozen when I read about Vance and started to understand what was happening.

The only thing that could stop it is if some black swan appears out of the Democratic domain and takes the presidency away from Vance. Otherwise, I think through Trump's administration they're going to be filling vacancies with loyalists.

So I wasn't analyzing Trump's ideology when I said what's happening should be welcome to a leftist. I was suggesting we just look at the possibilities that come into existence with those tariffs. As @ChatteringMonkey mentioned, it's going to be hard to see that while fully armored up to fight Trump.

Are you saying you believe that Trump is producing an economic revolution? And that you believe this revolution he is hatching is a beneficial thing for America? — Joshs

Read Mark Blyth's comments. He agrees with me and the president of the UAW. @ChatteringMonkey mentioned some of this earlier in the thread.

PROVIDENCE – With the Trump administration imposing “insane” tariffs on the rest of the world, many commentators are worried about the problem of “sane-washing”: imputing cogent rationales to policies that have none. Such naive punditry, they argue, distracts from the grift that is unfolding before our eyes. The Trump family’s moves into the crypto sphere – where its meme coins serve as an open invitation for bribes – certainly support this interpretation. But is this the only conclusion to draw, or could something else be going on?

Consider an alternative explanation.

The US project of promoting global free trade had already been abandoned by the time of the 2016 election, when both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump then imposed tariffs on goods from China and other countries, and many of these were maintained or extended under President Joe Biden. One of Biden’s signature policies, the Inflation Reduction Act, was an attempt to promote US reindustrialization in green sectors, which, in addition to being protected by Trump’s tariffs, would be subsidized. Trump’s latest wave of tariffs is also supposed to drive reindustrialization, albeit of a more carbon-intensive variety. Thus, free trade seems to be off the menu for both Republicans and Democrats.

The reason for this bipartisan embrace of protectionist policies concerns the global role of the dollar in promoting structural trade imbalances. As John Maynard Keynes recognized back in 1944, all countries, left to their own devices, would rather be net exporters than net importers. Today’s net exporters in the European Union, Asia, and the Gulf earn dollars that their own economies cannot absorb, because that would raise domestic wages and prices, undercutting their competitiveness. The earned dollars are liabilities for local banks, and the easiest way to turn them into assets is to buy US government debt, effectively handing the cash back to the United States so that it can continue to buy exports.

Why would the US want to end this seemingly magical state of affairs? Because, as Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis argue, defying current-account constraints does in fact carry long-term costs. Countries that are net exporters build up huge surpluses at the price of undercutting domestic investment and local wages, which depresses their economies, while the US “benefits” from unlimited cheap foreign goods, but at the price of hollowing out its own industrial capacity. In 1975, the three largest employers in the US were the Exxon corporation, General Motors, and Ford; in 2025, the biggest employers are Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot. The first group made tradable goods, while the latter companies by and large sell imports domestically.4

Given these long-term effects, leading figures in both US parties have come to regard the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as an exorbitant burden. Both parties want to “rebalance” the US economy by promoting domestic production, which entails a forced adjustment on foreign exporters to curtail their demand for dollars.

Why don’t they just come out and say this? Probably because talk of “being ripped off” by other countries is more compelling to the base than arguments about the finer points of trade policy. Moreover, the fact that the Trump administration lacks a comprehensive plan to rebalance the global order doesn’t mean that such a reordering is not already happening.

After all, Germany’s export engine was sputtering even before the pandemic. Its recent loosening of the “debt brake” (a constitutional cap on structural deficits) and embrace of investment suggests that a rebalancing toward domestic consumption is already underway. The Trump-driven surge in EU defense spending will add more momentum to this trend, and the prospect of a more consumption-driven euro area will give global investors a viable alternative to the dollar.

As for China, it seems to have realized that flooding the rest of the world with green exports (electric vehicles, solar panels, and so forth) has its limits. It has already diversified away from the US market, and this has increased the need for greater domestic consumption. Meanwhile, the rest of export-driven Asia seems keen to set up shop in the US to retain market access.

Such a rebalanced world would need fewer dollars. Ending the current system will be massively disruptive, no doubt, and the prospect of US reindustrialization may prove illusory. But it is important to remember that both parties see it as necessary. The rebalancing began before Trump arrived on the scene, and is being driven by forces that may outlast him. — Mark Blyth

Tariffs have not historically led to recessions all by themselves, even Smoot-Hauley. — Joshs

The real cause of the Great Depression was probably concentration of wealth. The trade war and the panic precipitated the collapse. Wealth is pretty concentrated right now, though.

I think the present moment is a test for how leftist you really are. If you're white-knuckling the volatility we've had so far, shaking your fist at stupid Trump, then you have a very conservative mindset. He's handing us an economic revolution. If you're a leftist, you're like: go Trump! Get those tariffs!