Yeah, but then a global goverment comes with its own set of problems, a heavy bureaucracy would be one of them. And a lot of power attracts all types of nasty figures invariably, so i'm not sure that would do it. But maybe some type of seperate organisation that gets funding and power specifically to tackle this problem could help... I don't know exactly. — ChatteringMonkey

But corruption will be there no matter what we do. Some people are going to look for ways to exploit what exists to the detriment of others. That's just human. The thing about corruption, though, is that it depends on its host. It doesn't want to destroy the social order. It will act to protect it if need be, because it needs it.

That said, we'd probably need a new global religion as well, to glue the global order together. I think we're probably about due for one.

It's not only about the raw energy, but also in what form it comes, how easy is it to use etc. Nuclear fission for instance probably can compete with fossil fuels on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI), but the problem is you can't turn it on or off at will like fossil fuel plants... it's mostly a base load, and what we need is peak power.

And maybe more importantly, we need fossil fuels not only for energy, but for all the derivatives, like plastics, chemicals, fertilizer etc etc etc... For instance we do not know how to make fertilizer in an economically viable way without natural gas. This means we need to rethink and remake our entire agriculture if we want to produce enough food without cheap fertilizer.

The same is true for most of the economic sectors. We literally need to rethink most of them from scratch, because they organically grew out of cheap and easy to use energy and the readily available waste and byproducts of refining oil and gas. It's hard to overstate the enormity of this exercise, because years of iterative innovation on these existing processes and enormous amounts of capital investements need to be throw away to basically start over. — ChatteringMonkey

And I don't think this is the kind of change that we can engineer for ourselves. As you say, it's too deeply rooted in what and who we are. We can't preserve ourselves and our way of life. All we can do is bless future generations in their quest for life.

So it really comes down to this: how much faith do you have in your own species? People who hate humanity will just be bitter no matter what. People who love it and believe in human genius, will see that there's a way.

If his point is that some countries won't coöperate he obviously does have a point. — ChatteringMonkey

Yea, we'd need a global government probably. Or if a new power source was just so much better and cheaper than fossil fuels, that would do it as well.

I'd suggest that the bodily attachment is just one way to relate to our masculinity, and that we're not just our penis. In fact we can be a man without it entirely. — Moliere

I agree. My point was that the constitution of masculinity is in what it's not as much as in what it is. It's one of those obscure MerleauPonty type things, although it goes back to Plato.

:grin:

Last year the US government spent $15 billion subsidizing renewable energy, you get a $7500 IRS credit for buying an electric car, and in my state you get a 30% tax credit for using solar power. That kind of thing isn't unusual.

I don't disagree, though in my experience while masculinity is "opposed" by femininity, it is more useful to view them as opposite poles on a broad spectrum, rather than two sides of a dualist paradigm. — LuckyR

The advantage of that is that you have the middle point of the spectrum: the Hermaphrodite, which is a potent symbol.

All the facts concerning his crimes are in the past. Unlike you I've got a good grasp of criminal law. — Benkei

But like you, he's not in the USA.

Exactly. Treating a relative label, like masculinity, as an absolute descriptor, is a fundamental error. — LuckyR

Or you could say trying to pin down an essence will hide the fact that the term is half of a whole that can't stand independent if its opposite.

Wouldn't the energy produced by fusion power be much much much greater than the energy produced from natural gas? — Agree to Disagree

No.

Who controls the energy produced by fusion power? Will every country have their own fusion power?

Turning the supply of energy off can certainly cause damage and/or disaster.

You need energy to fight a war, to manufacture weapons, to protect yourself, etc. — Agree to Disagree

Who controls the energy produced by natural gas? Fusion wouldn't be any different from natural gas other than it doesn't cause climate change.

You said recently that we should all be scared senseless about climate change. All sorts of bad things flow from deep seated fear, one of them being that it becomes ok to dehumanize other people with labels. It's something I struggle with as well. We could all do with some practice putting fear aside to see what clouds fall away from our vision when we do, so we might see that we're all in the same boat, we all have basically the same desires and needs.

I think one of the main things driving climate change denial is this very thing: fear. Except it's fear of intellectuals and academics. It's fear that these scientists might be right, and so we should be worried.

Fear divided us so we don't even see one another. All we see is monsters. That's not good.

Would everybody use fusion power peacefully?

With great power comes great responsibility.

Are all people and countries responsible? — Agree to Disagree

Fusion power doesn't produce materials that can be weaponized, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Many/most people are selfish and most concerned with looking after their own.

This is one of the reasons why climate-change/global-warming is unlikely to be "solved". — Agree to Disagree

Eh, fusion power would solve it along with other problems. Various parties are working on it.

Does everybody want climate-change/global-warming to be "solved" ? — Agree to Disagree

Most people want a hospitable world for future generations. One thing we could do to contribute to that would be to stop emitting CO2. Short of that, slowing down would help.

Masculinity, like anything else, stands out against a backdrop of its negation. You'll pick up on your own masculinity when faced with an opposition to it: your wife, mother, daughter, female divinity, female archetype, etc.

Is it a piece of genitalia or genetics that makes the masculine? Yes and no. Imagine that every human has a penis. We reproduce with machines that produce new creatures with penises. Will a penis mean "male?". No, it will just be part of "human "

But in a world with humans who don't have penises, having one means something. It means something. See what I mean?

Well done.

How would you know if someone has a belief if there is no evidence of that belief? That's the question that interests me. How are belief states exhibited in the world, not do they exist when there is no evidence for them. It's about those things that demonstrate that one has a belief. — Sam26

I don't think you could be certain. You start with the conviction that humans have the faculty of thought which gives rise to beliefs. You don't believe that about bacteria or clouds. It's just humans.

So you assume others have beliefs, right?

Why not run along before embarrassing yourself further about a subject of which you’re completely ignorant? :up: — Mikie

Good grief.

In order to understand others you have to put yourself in their shoes. See what they see out of their skull holes. Then you hook into their frame of reference and the meaning of their utterances will be obvious.

If a person has a very rigid sense of identity, they can't take up residence in other people's positions. Or maybe they've judged the other to be evil or what not. Then they don't want to be tainted.

This doesn't undermine the idea that meaning is first shared and after that potentially private. It just means sometimes we aren't communicating. We're just talking at each other.

-- the wisdom of Asperger's.

I know this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, but I was addressing the general question about how countries in the US sphere of influence develop. — Srap Tasmaner

Oh, sorry.

Well no, but something like what's in the first sentence wouldn't surprise me honestly. The US has a lot of problems but a biggie is the legacy of chattel slavery. If we provide aid and support to country not burdened by such a history, they might very well do better than we do. — Srap Tasmaner

That's probably not what's going on here, though. Remember, Russia attacked Ukraine and Obama let it go. This is Biden's call. He chose to publicly threaten every entity in the world which does business with the US to sanction Russia or suffer the consequences. Big decisions frequently come down to the personalities on the scene at the time, not principles.

What the heck, man? You've already notified us that even if he really was guilty of a crime, you don't care because you don't believe in laws. So you're just trolling.

They're just being buttheads.

Against the shelf -- wasn't it our own continued repetition of using "water" (for obvious needs) that allowed the translation to take place? — Moliere

In this case, yes. Our own usage was like the Rosetta stone for Egyptian, or Babylonian texts were for Sumerian. The latter two cases show that translation doesn't rely on a continuum of usage. We're able to engage with abstract patterns that people thousands of years ago used. We're outside those ancient communities, though, so it's possible that translation is lossy. Since our worldview is profoundly different from theirs in some ways, I would say that's likely, though there are those who would disagree.

And we understood this bit, in the translation, but did we get the whole meaning? I don't think so. — Moliere

There are probably nuances that we don't know about.

The utterance "The cat is on the mat," means "There's spinache between your teeth," but the sentence still retains the meaning "the cat is on the mat", too. That is, given that code divides audience between in-group and out-group, the in-group would still know what the sentence means to the out-group, and if a member of the out-group would use the sentence, that's what the utterance would mean. — Dawnstorm

I agree.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Hittite language. When they were first trying to translate it, they thought maybe it was Semitic, because there was a lot of that in the region They kept coming across a word that looked like it would be pronounced "wassah", and it was frequently near a word that was probably "bread." Then somebody had the crazy idea that "wassah" may have been the same as the English word "water." Turns out that was true. Hittite is an Indo-european language from a 3500 year old extinct culture, but they pronounced "water" pretty much the same way we do. That's an old shelf to take meanings down from.

You should just worry about the fluffernutters or whoever it is that rules the Netherlands. And what kind of a name is that for a country, anyway? — T Clark

That's King Flutternutter to you.

The way to change demand and behaviour is with incentives and disincentives. A tax on meat, a subsidy on public transport. The way to change production is by regulation with a Ban of CFC s for example, or a ban on the sale of gas boilers, or change the building regulations. The world can be reconfigured quite easily, we have been doing it for centuries. — unenlightened

It's doable. People would be healthier if we did. Reduced healthcare costs...

It's almost like they enjoy the exaggerated sensation of being in control. — Pantagruel

For a lot of people it's normal to sit watching television, eating carbs because the television is tedious and boring, probably taking some addictive benzos, so just crank up the air conditioner. I don't think they're trying to overconsume, it's just that their world is configured to keep them in that state.
Overhauling the system would be difficult to engineer.

Who are you and why are you trolling this thread?
— Mikie

People have to reduce their demand to have any hope of "solving" climate change. And even that might not be enough.
— Agree to Disagree

Seems like a perfectly reasonable position to me. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a troll. Sounds more like an ad hominem to me. — Pantagruel

Plus he's right. People would have to reduce their demand.

My wife and I did a little excursion for lunch on Sunday (my Mini got 60 mpg on the trip so I don't feel so bad about that). On the way home we stopped at a rural antique store. I parked next to a giant black Ford truck that was idling, nobody in it. The people were walking around browsing the store. They just left it idling for 20 minutes or more to keep the AC going. It wasn't even that hot out.

People and their inherent stupidity, their willingness to project problems on others while completely ignoring their own culpability, are definitely at the heart of this problem. However if a majority of people won't wake up to the fact that they are causing the problem, they might still get behind initiatives to curtail production through increasingly stringent regulations, thereby indirectly regulating their own behaviours. — Pantagruel

Every year I'm amazed at the demand for air conditioning. People make their dwellings colder in the summer than they would be in the winter.

How long do you think that this will take?

I live about 1 m (metre/meter) above sea level. Currently sea level is rising by about 3 mm per year. I don't need to worry for about 333 years. Even if sea level is rising at 5mm per year I don't need to worry for about 200 years. As Bobby McFerrin sang, "Don't worry, be happy". — Agree to Disagree

It's hard to say, but you can look at what's happening now. The east coast of North America is shrinking as we speak. It's been doing that for years, so it would be a little crazy to buy property right on the beach. Rent maybe, but don't buy. I think the abrupt movements will be a result of hurricanes.

So just look around and decide based on that.

nd fossil fuels had not been used when the Greenland ice sheet melted 416,000 years ago. Something else caused it. This also suggests that we are still within normal limits for an interglacial. — Agree to Disagree

Yea. When Greenland melts again, the oceans will rise by around 20 feet.

I would aspire to something greater than simply not having people starving in the street. IMHO, the main purpose of the state is to promote the freedom of its citizens. No state is secure when its people are unhappy, and a free people will not willingly choose what makes them unhappy. America in particular suffers from an artificial division between the public and private spheres, which is itself born of a conception of freedom that focuses too much on negative freedom, and not enough on reflexive freedom and social freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Lincoln's vision of freedom was about social mobility. Masters may be happy, but they aren't free because they're cemented into a particular role by law. In a free society, people can choose the role they wish to invest their spirits in. But roles are like robots: they're pre-programmed to some extent. You have to surrender to a role in order to engage the world and secure your own well-being.

A prime example of people who lost sight of their spirits is the German soldiers at the Nuremburg trials, who defended their actions by saying they were soldiers. Soldiers do what they're told. Soldier is a role, and it's correct that they do what they're told, but a human being can withdraw from the role of soldier and invest in some other. So identifying entirely with a role can result in a failure to take responsibility for one's actions.

For Lincoln, slavery wasn't evil because it made people suffer. He believed suffering is just part of any life. What made slavery evil was that it blinded people to their potential and to their responsibility.

I'm not sure if this definition of freedom fits with your analysis. It's true that free people, in Lincoln's sense of the word, choose the paths that they believe are right. If that's what you mean by "free people will not willingly choose what makes them unhappy", then we're in agreement.

ocial Freedom then is the collective resolution of these contradictions through the creation of social institutions. Institutions, the state chief among them, objectify morality in such a way that individuals’ goals align, allowing people to freely choose actions that promote each other’s freedom and wellbeing. Institutions achieve this by shaping the identities of their members, such that they derive their “feeling of selfhood” from, and recognize “[their] own essence” in, membership.”


In the language of contemporary economics, we would say that institutions change members’ tastes, shifting their social welfare function such that they increasingly weigh the welfare of others when ranking “social states.” In doing so, institutions help resolve collective action problems.

We are free when we do what it is that we want to do, and we can only be collectively free when we are guided into supporting one another's freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe if you gave some real-life examples, I might understand this better. As it stands, I really have no idea what it means.

So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself?

Yes. For two reasons.

1. There is ample evidence that high levels of economic inequality lead to a greater risk of state capture by those with wealth. In our system, wealth can buy you political power and political influence, which in turn allows the wealthy to countermand the interests and expressed policy preferences of the vast bulk of the population.

2. Inequality itself is bad because human being naturally judge themselves based on those around them; we are naturally hierarchical. Hierarchy isn't necessarily bad; divisions that are too deep are.. To put it in psychological terms, I agree with Hegel that private property plays an important role in objectifying our will to ourselves and others. Think about how you learn things about someone from the books they display in their book case, or why teens blanket their rooms in posters. But when a great deal of people's total wealth adds up to essentially nothing compared with a small cadre of elites, their property becomes irrelevant to objectifying their will. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see what you're saying, this is what I'm seeing, though.

1) The wealthy don't need to control the US government to control the US population. They control us because they can take their jobs somewhere else if we want to play hardball. This is globalization. You can't make Americans happier by attacking the wealthy because that will increase poverty. In other words, I think the solution you're reaching for would have to be global. It would require a global government. There isn't one.

Thanks so much for your post. It was a really interesting read.

:cool:

"By convention" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, with that in mind. Isn't that like pointing to the public shelf of meaning? — Moliere

Yes. It is. Is that bad?

True, but he is able to borrow against the value and spend what he has borrowed. So, it's like he has sold the stock, functionally anyhow, but he doesn't have to pay taxes on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My point was that if we want to tax Bezo's wealth, we'll have to have a progressive federal property tax. Income tax wouldn't do it.

The problem here goes beyond just tax avoidance though. Human ability tends to follow a roughly normal distribution. Wealth follows a power law distribution. This gets down to the issue of returns on capital generating a system where inequality expands if positive action isn't taken. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So far, the main force resulting in redistribution is the occasional economic collapse, like the Great Depression. Those events reset everything. I've lately started thinking that leftism has always been a kind of cultural phantom. It appears to be there, but it's not real. All of the victories assigned to the left were actually the result of various catastrophic events. Or maybe I just have the apolitical blues.

Obviously, this is not the way to do things, but there is something interesting about the idea of firms that are "large enough," being partly owned by the public (or by the workers at said firms, having unions on the boards, something done in Germany, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

We have the postal service. :razz: And we have a heavily regulated financial industry.

In any event, the labor share of all income in developed countries has been trending down for half a century now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That may be true, but most of us aren't doing that badly. We aren't starving, for the most part. We don't live in shanty towns unless we particularly want to. I guess my question would be: what really is the problem we're hoping to fix?

We will probably see over 50% of all income go to capital in the medium term. This is bad news for places with high wealth inequality. E.g., American income inequality is not nearly as bad as wealth inequality, where the top 1% owns 15+ times the share of the bottom 50%, and 90+% of all stocks and bonds are owned by the top 10%. AI will probably also have the effect of making returns on capital outpace wage growth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself? Or is it that we need those funds to help people who are actually starving? How are you looking at it?

Excellent summary there. — unenlightened

Thanks!

Yup, that fits the form. The original question was with respect to gender-identity, but the form is there.

The one thing about the form that might elude the original disagreement is that "Jack is a dog" can be read not just as an identity-statement, but also as a description. It'd depend upon the context -- if the question is "Did you buy a cat or a dog?" then that's a description, but if Jack is running around the yard barking like dogs do, and so you express "Jack is a dog" then that's an identity-statement. — Moliere

I'm sorry, I'm out of the loop on what the original disagreement was. If the question is asked: "Is that a dog?", the meaning of the uttered sentence is partly a matter of context and partly about what we pick out as dogs by convention.

I thought that at one point, though sometimes I flirt with the notion too. But it is absurd, I understand. (though the world is too by my reckoning, so there are worse conclusions) — Moliere

:grin:

When the truth is that Wittgenstein was such a philosopher's philosopher that it's best to reserve judgments from thinking he supports this or that thing we care about. (early on cutting my teeth on W. I did the same thing -- seeing connections to leftist politics and all that. Eventually I figured out that that part was all me just trying to grasp the thoughts of a genius mind. It's an easy mistake to make with the greats) — Moliere

Some commentary I read said that a high percentage of interpretations are based on reading in ideas not expressed by W. Maybe that stuff ends up being more interesting than W. himself.

but I do think the PLA has a bearing on some common thoughts about the meaning of identity-statements — Moliere

Like "Jack is a dog"? That kind of statement?

Keep in mind that in one article you posted, the data only went back to 1980. In the other it was 1991. Any legit scientist would tell you that's not enough data to say something about the climate, so the use of "anomalous" doesn't mean what it appears to. Watch out for articles like that.

Did you see they discovered that the Greenland ice sheet melted 416,000 years ago? That was in a previous interglacial, which is kind of astounding. It means the period we're in is on the mild side. The Greenland ice sheet could melt and we'd still be within normal limits for an interglacial.