I would never vote for the con man. — Noah Te Stroete

You mean the Racist-in-Chief?

“Sanders' plan requires eliminating the tax-free status of employer-provided health insurance (and since his plan would essentially eliminate employer-provided insurance, it makes no sense to preserve its tax-free status).” — Noah Te Stroete

Yes, his is one of the possibilities for public healthcare. That's not how it has to be run.

I see where you might be confused. A public option is not private insurance. It’s a government-run alternative to private insurance. It’s what some candidates are advocating as a first step in order to eventually phase out for-profit insurance so we can eventually get to a single payer system. That’s the strategy anyway. — Noah Te Stroete

Okay. So that's what you'd be in favor of?

Medicare-for-all is a replacement for employer-based insurance. Are you thinking about a public option? — Noah Te Stroete

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sanders-medicare-for-all-bill-how-would-it-work/

The specifics about how socialized healthcare can and do get implemented differ widely from country to country. So, Medicare-for-all is often combined with some sort of public option, whether that be reduced to only coverage for cosmetic surgeries, or to your total insurance.

Furthermore, I think Sanders was right during the last debate when he pointed out that people aren't dedicated to their insurance companies per se, they just want to keep their doctors--and a socialized system would of course require all health providers to be "in-network" to use that industry's lingo.

It's pretty obvious that you're just throwing a tantrum because you have no argument, evidence, or logic to back up your claims.

In NKBJ’s defense, she might be arguing that people ought to take a stake (and often do) in the community regardless of how the system treats them personally. — Noah Te Stroete

Thank you for your attempt to reason with the brute, but it seems he's lost that ability for now.

Also, as to your claim about support dropping to 30%, could you supply a source for that please?

I would argue (in the abstract, without having seen the poll in question) that a surveyor telling people they would have to give up private healthcare when the government offers medicare for all is misinformed at best, and at worst lying.

The assumption is that production is good and needs to occur, and people need to fulfill that by being born to do that. — schopenhauer1

That's not my assumption. My assumption is that since people are going to be born whether you like it or not, we have an obligation to make those lives as good and meaningful as possible.

That perspective is off.. If you never existed, there is no mattering in the first place. There is no you to be deprived of anything in the first place. You are not in a room saying, "Let me in!". — schopenhauer1

Right! So what's the point in that?

Just keep producing stuff or die, including more lemonade. — schopenhauer1

I produce knowledge :wink: :victory:

Sprinkle this with some sort of hedonic justification of the 6 or so pleasures of the world (physical/aesthetic pleasure, relationships, yadayada...):vomit: :vomit: . — schopenhauer1

:lol:

The realities were because we were born we have to survive which means we need to utilize/consume some sort of resources for survival. — schopenhauer1

Well, the truth is that those pleasures you so eloquently disdain arise out of a biology that pushes us to utilize/consume just in order to procreate. Why? No meaningful reason. There's no point to our existence from the perspective of the universe.

But there's a point to my existence because I, as a conscious creature, am the meaning-maker and I say there is one. Instead of feeling robbed of.... of what? Non-existence? The chance not to...think? Be? Feel?

Once you've stared down the empty and treacherous throat of existential crisis, you need to pull yourself back and decide: "you took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade."

Apparently people need to be born so they can work, and have choices about where to work :roll: (even if that was a perfect reality of really being able to choose where to work). — schopenhauer1

In my opinion, work or "labor" can be a good thing, once removed from the typical humdrum of the ever-hungry capitalist machine.

Par exemple, most people have "creative" hobbies in which they labor to produce something for their personal or shared/social enjoyment.

Another fallacy...if the system is flawed, it must be something wrong with YOU. — schopenhauer1

I'm actually only partly implying that. Yes, the system is flawed and broken and a gloomy pit of despair, yaddayaddayadda. BUT you also have choices about how to deal with life's lemons. Be a gloomy grouchy McSadPants, or try and make the best of it.

Doing social work keeps me sane and happy, personally.
But to each his own--enjoy wallowing in your self-made hell :)

The assumption is we should throw more people into the world so they can be happy producing things. Kill me now please. — schopenhauer1

You could always retreat into the woods/mountains as a hermit and forget about us silly humans.

Instead of exercising your brain, you called me spineless (not literally), stupid (not literally), and an incompetent arguer (not literally) — god must be atheist

Funny how you seem to take offense at my (apparently fictional?) ad hominems, but have no qualms about issuing them.

this thing which a simple, uneducated 25-year-old is capable of figuring out? — god must be atheist

Are you describing yourself here? That would explain a lot, actually--including your spelling.

Why did you egg me on? — god must be atheist

I did nothing of the sort to you. But it does sound like you have some issues (paranoia, for example) you may want to take up with a therapist.

But back to the actual content. You said:

the workers who go on working would tend to prefer a less intensive socialist economic system. — god must be atheist

and

Think public resistence to general medicare introduced in the USA. — god must be atheist

To which I replied that 70% of Americans (and therefore a considerable percentage of those workers "who go on working") support medicare for all.

I appeal to human nature when I say that the more disenfranchised, the poorer, the more marginalized somebody is, the more likely it is that he or she will want to have a system in place where social safety-nets are more abundant and more easily accessed. Converesely, those who find much reward in the system, do not promote social safety nets, as their safety and well-being is well-established, and providing for the safety and well-being of those who are in need will only reduce, even if however litte in amount and in impact, the status of the well-off. — god must be atheist

This isn't really an argument for or against socialism. For instance, a person who's leg is broken will have an interest in getting a cast. Someone who's leg is not broken will not share that interest. Therefore, what? Per your logic, therefore the person with a broken leg shall not receive a cast?

Instead of moaning that the nitty-gritty details of your position are so elemental that it literally causes you pain to explain them, perhaps you should spend more time making sure they're actually any good.

I have a transparent face. Many people have told me that. — god must be atheist

You also have nothing to back up your ideology.

Think public resistence to general medicare introduced in the USA. Same difference. — god must be atheist

The public generally (70%) likes the idea of general medicare: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/most-americans-now-support-medicare-for-all-and-free-college-tuition.html

the concept is too simple to interest me to explain. — god must be atheist

That's a cute attempt to save face, but sadly also very transparent.

Did I say that?

the workers who go on working would tend to prefer a less intensive socialist economic system. — god must be atheist

That's a broad claim I hope you have some evidence or at least argument to back up.

your pathological tendentiousness — JosephS

How charming! I hit a nerve!

Some advice: take yourself less seriously and/or toughen up a bit. The (very mild) feedback I gave you on your logic shouldn't have sent you into such a tizzy, and if that's how you routinely react to (again, very mild) feedback, then you won't last long here.

You have an issue with the expectations of logical form, not with me.

While you're at it, look up the term precision and then compare it with accuracy. — JosephS

I have neither an issue with logic nor with an anonymous stranger on the interwebs (you). I'm merely trying to argue logic, and if that seems to you like something more personal, than I have to assume you're not quite as good a logician as you're attempting to paint yourself here.

And, just FYI, logicians have a long history of battling amphibolous language. They famously named a fallacy after just that.

Actually, I did read that part. But your summary of your position was unclear, so I cleared it up for you.

A and D are neither provable nor disprovable by the premises. B is disprovable. But you're labeling all three the same way. That is how misunderstandings intrude.

I agree with everything else you're saying, but I think it's all a better critique of your own amphibolous use of language than my insistence on precision.

While "undetermined" is fine colloquially, we need to be careful to use rigorous patterns in language to assure that we are precise in what we are communicating. — JosephS

Yes, but if you look carefully at the logic, A and D are indeterminable given the premises, and B is outright false. That is to say, we can't say anything about A and D given the premises, but we can say something about B. In other words, it follows that ~B.

If you want to be "precise" about your language, you should endeavor to reflect that nuance.

I'd phrase it differently:

A) Some dinosaurs are people (undetermined)
B) All people are dinosaurs (does not follow)
C) Some people are not dinosaurs (follows)
D) No dinosaurs are not people (undetermined)

Well, yeah, and that kind of ties into why economists have this narrow view of how capitalism is the holy grail and so on. Capitalism promotes, endorses, and rewards only one type of living, and that's worshiping the bottom line. Socialism allows for differences in people's life trajectories, goals, passions, etc. and aims to allow everyone their individual pursuit of happiness.

Relevant additional study: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/73.pdf

When asked to hypothetically fire a significant amount of the workers in a factory in order to maintain the previous year’s profit (even though one could choose to fire fewer workers and still make a profit), economic students would on average fire as many people as possible, while philosophy students would fire the least.

Hasn’t Mueller been appointed to investigate the alleged collusion of Trump’s campaign with Russia? And, hasn’t it been the alleged crime? — Number2018

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/12/what-is-collusion-215366

your basic premise is that objective truth exists — Number2018

Yes. And anything else is nonsensical.

What do you mean by the expression “familiar with the report”? Do you actually expect Trump audience to read a redacted version of 448 pages report? Of course, they are familiar with the report, but through a partisan interpretation and hermeneutics, taking place in a space absolutely different from an academic field. — Number2018

My point exactly. And Trump knows that.

There is a shift from a focus on understanding something to a concern with manipulating it, from meaning to usage”. — Number2018

True.

In any case, I've proven the relevancy of literary criticism for understanding Fake News. There are other things that can be helpful in understanding it, sure. But it's a large part of the dissection of this phenomena.

Secondary causally. If suffering alone caused suicide, then victims in the Holocaust and slavery would have all killed themselves long before their circumstances did.

i wouldn't wish it on Hitler. — christian2017

Well, he did kill himself in the end. Unluckily, too late for his millions of victims.

I think the amount of pain, stress, suffering an individual is going through is secondary in suicidal ideation. What seems more important is the individual believing they have something to live for. Note, I say believe, because some people seem to have nothing going for them, and they think their lives are worthwhile somehow, and others seem to have the whole world at their disposal, and yet kill themselves, because they lack some inspiration to take advantage of it.

Personally, I think that a lot of suicidal people should be encouraged to participate more in charitable activities or things that help others--helping others is often what gives people a sense of purpose in life. It also helps to shift their focus away from the ego. Too much naval-gazing is unhealthy.

My apologies for trying to be subtle previously. — Noblosh

I'm not sure what word you're looking for, but subtle is not it. Vague perhaps? Flippant? Boorish?

As for the rest of your commentary, literary criticism frequently deals with the epistemological question of authorial intent and how do we know it. Sure, I don't live in Trump's mind (thank goodness), and I have serious doubts about his intellect. However, (much) literary analysis allows for the judgment that something is intended, when you can make a convincing case for it:

1. Trump is an avid Twitter-er, and so knows how that system works and how to send out a message to his base.
2. Trump is always trying to come across like a successful business tycoon (though history belies that).
3. Trump has publicly explained choices that seem just as mundane with the same intent: consider his insistence on using a Sharpie for presidential signatures.

Ergo, it is not at all far-fetched to think that he uses ampersands on purpose. Even if he started doing so accidentally, he persists with it for a reason.

I'm not sure why you assumed hostility, though — Noblosh

If your intent had merely been to point out a flaw in my reasoning, you would have left it at that. Instead you made a snippy remark to go along with your (unreasoned) claim that I got something wrong.

Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

You're reaching too far with this one. Careful or you'll look beyond pretentious. — Noblosh

Nope, I'm not.

And, for the record, I really don't care much if some anonymous person (you) on the internet thinks I'm pretentious for the pretty benign act of interpreting an ampersand. I think that conveys more a sense of your own personal insecurities than it reflects on me.

But good day to you as well.

The analyses of the overall situation on social media could be useful. While in literature, as well as in our lives, there is not a black and white message, but a far more nuanced one, the public Internet sphere is primarily occupied by trivial and oversimplified "meme" that "resonates" with a person's prejudices, so gets sent around the globe in an instant. The people who are posting complete rubbish on social media, day in and day out, as a sort of obsession in life, are not able to make timely efforts to get focused and sit down for hours to analyze and reflect on the problems we face. — Number2018

Well, that's a literary analysis right there.

I do not argue that literary criticism is not a relevant tool for analyzing Fake News. However, I would appreciate it if you could provide an example of its application. — Number2018

Um, but you literally said:

Both books are great, but I do not think literature or literary criticism could be relevant to understand fake news. — Number2018

In any case, we can take Trump's latest tweet:
"Robert Mueller is being asked to testify yet again. He said he could only stick to the Report, & that is what he would and must do. After so much testimony & total transparency, this Witch Hunt must now end. No more Do Overs. No Collusion, No Obstruction. The Great Hoax is dead!"

Passive voice in the first sentence hides the details of who's asking Mueller to testify.
He points out that Mueller "must" stick to the report. The way he says it, implies that it Mueller does so, then Trump will look good. But anyone familiar with the report knows that it implies that Trump has been linked to a large number of crimes. But Trump bets on his followers not looking, and so he presents it in this positive light for himself.
He uses the metaphor of a witch hunt to imply that the accusers are baseless and fanatical.
He uses the word "collusion" again, which is not a crime anyone was actually looking to charge him with, so duh there's none of that.
He lies about the obstruction. Just a blatant lie: he has, publicly, repeatedly obstructed justice. But he just repeats these lines over and over again, because at some point, when it's heard again and again, people start believing it.
Personification of the "Great Hoax" as some (presumably) evil creature which is now dead.
He uses (ungrammatical) capitalization to emphasize words.
He uses incomplete sentences for emphasis and simplicity.
He's ungrammatical on purpose, because it makes him look less intellectually elitist and his followers like a leader who's not too much smarter than they are. They want to think that they could be him, that he's one of them.
And finally, he uses ampersands, in part because they help with the character count for tweets, but also because they look official and business-y.

I mean, that's just a cursory glance at one tweet. It's clear to me that any analysis of how Trump and Fake News works necessarily include a huge element of literary analysis.

That would relate the phenomenon of Fake news to the art of affecting the audience. — Number2018

Since that is it's aim....well, duh.

Moreover, Trump's rhetoric and his oratorical style are not prominent at all, they are quite modest and monotonic. — Number2018

And yet effective. Hence the usage of rhetoric to examine them.

Narratives that are going viral in social media usually have simple and poor structure, so that literary
criticism would not be an appropriate research tool here. — Number2018

And yet effective. Hence the usage of literary criticism to examine them.

From ancient mythology to Hemingway to subway graffiti, literary criticism has not let the simplicity of a text deter it from fulfilling its job.

Literary criticism covers the analysis of rhetoric. That's most of what fake news is. Ergo, literary analysis would be helpful to the analysis of fake news.

I'd go so far as to say any close analysis of the wording of fake news is literary criticism, whether intentional or not.

Both Huxley and Orwell grounded their narrations on simple ideas of utopia and dystopia, and both are in perfect fit with regimes of the truth of grand narratives of modernity. Within our postmodern conditions, grand narratives have been wholly compromised and transformed. — Number2018

That does not answer my question. In fact, it kind of suggests literary criticism would be pretty helpful, if you know anything at all about literary criticism.

I do not think literature or literary criticism could be relevant to understand fake news. — Number2018

Because....?

I think this could easily be tweaked to be a Gettier problem, which is, imho, much more interesting.

So, usually, yes, knowing what someone looks like, seeing a picture of that person, and recognizing them as that person constitute a justified, true belief, thus a valid knowledge claim.

But let's say I have a friend X, someone (possibly X himself?) hands me a picture and says X is in it and indeed I see a person in it who looks just like X, thus I believe that my friend X is in this picture. Later I find out that the person I thought was X in the picture was actually his identical twin Y (whom I didn't know about, perhaps), but that X is still in the picture, just a ways off in the distance, possibly with his back turned to the camera.

I was justified in believing X was in the picture, since that was what I was told, and I recognized a person who looked just like him.
Also, it was true that he was in the picture.

Justified and true, and yet I did not know he was in the picture.

Why should I take into consideration of another individuals moral stratification? How would I know their understanding of if it is 'funny' or hurtful. How do we determine an appropriate joke? — Future Roman Empire II

Woman tells you she lost her baby yesterday due to SIDS. Are you saying you wouldn't realize that a joke about dead babies is totally inappropriate right now?

I think you should take cues from the person you're talking to. If that person in some way indicates that s/he is using gallows humor to deal with some horrible experience, you can try to contribute. If not, then just be compassionate and nice.

Personally, I think people who make occasional jokes are just trying to make others feel good/laugh, but incessant jokesters are just annoying and want attention. Or, as unenlightened said, they are actually trying to bully others and get away with it under the guise of "humor."

Basically: know your audience, pick your timing, and remember that the world does not revolve around you.

I think @Baden gave a very good, succinct account of the different ontological statuses of God and Canada. You seem to be insisting on one particular notion of "existence." Yes, in a sense, Canada is not "real" in that it does not exist apart from our collectively believing in it and acting as though it does. But it is a real idea that encompasses other ideas and other real things (i.e., it does encompass a certain landmass).

God is purported to be an independently existing being, and so his existence would not depend on our belief in him or our acting as though he existed.

In other words, Canada is a concept, and God (if he were real, which I don't believe he is) would be a thing.

There's no consensus because you're simply wrong. — Benkei

Ah, well then. If you make your case like that, I guess it must be true. S/

Clearly you've run out of productive things to say. Oh well. Next time mayhaps.

No really, don't bother. We like the air down here just fine without you.

Lol, Frank comparing himself to Socrates. :rofl:

You are a card.