People with high IQs in pattern recognition can make a lot of money trading Forex using technical analysis (reading candlestick chart patterns). It may or may not be objective, but it is useful.

You haven't understood the point I was making. My point is that the source of (at least this particular kind of) inequality is the State itself. 'Downtroddenness' is not owing to free exchange and enterprise, but the coercion which the State implements. — Virgo Avalytikh

Property would have to be redistributed equitably before ancap would succeed. Perhaps I grant you that the State is the cause of inequality. But how do we start over?

How, exactly? — Virgo Avalytikh

To get you to think about what I said above.

Should I be taking this as a threat? — Virgo Avalytikh

No. I’m trying to help you.

Furthermore, perhaps I grant you that the resources of the rich are merely of higher quality. Why do you think you are entitled to more property and higher quality?

I don’t know what “ancap” means. I know what’s keeping the “downtrodden” from eating the rich. It’s the police state. People are not rational. They will lash out at the target they blame for their lots in life. That’s people like you.

Obviously, you’ve never lived in the ghetto. I lived in one in Chicago and Madison. You clearly don’t understand the downtrodden like I do. There is a simmering rage ready to be unleashed at the slightest hint of societal (State) breakdown. Hobbes was right.

Up to you. By the way, saying that you will ignore someone, is not the same as ignoring someone. Saying that you will ignore someone is pretty much the opposite of ignoring someone. It is contradictory. Ignoring someone is something you do. It is not something you talk about with that person.

I am not interested or uninterested in ignoring you. I do not even really look at who posts a comment. I just read the comment, and then I may make my own comment based on that. Why would it even matter who has made the comment? A forum like this, is not a place for personal vendettas, I would think ... ;-) — alcontali

:clap:

If the State were dissolved, there would be massive unrest.

There are more guns in the US than people.

If there is massive unrest, there will be massive bloodshed.

If you value your property, you should not dissolve the State.

You value your property seemingly above everything else.

Thus, the State should not be dissolved.

QED (That’s smack talk for philosophers.)

It’s a fact of life that blows up your entire philosophy. I’m just illustrating the FACT that your philosophy is ridiculously naive.

I seriously doubt it is possible for a self to be truly selfless. Unless, of course, you believe in Jesus Christ... but even his opponents find fault with him.

Even Mother Theresa was an attention seeker.

If not disagreed with, then this relevant question ensues: What rationale can the earnest human inclination to approach a state of selfless being hold other than the state of selfless being itself?

To say that the state of selfless being is instrumentally beneficial—hence, that it is not its own (inherent) rationale—is to make its benefit egocentric in some manner; this then thereby nullifies the reality of it being a selfless state of being whose proximity one as ego intends to approach or to maintain. — javra

I believe I understand your point. However, every ego is ego. In other words, everyone has one. It is inescapable in so far as we only have access to our own experience/consciousness and have to infer what others experience through analogy to our own. This will ultimately fail at least some of the time. To me, love is understanding and acceptance of another for their faults and virtues and striving not to control them. This is difficult when it comes to raising children, but children always grow into adults, and the adults they become happens regardless of parenting style or technique (largely).

Parents, teach your children well. Children, teach your parents well.

Racism is a result of a faulty inference from an individual to a group. “A Muslim blew himself up in a church. Muslims are bad.” Demagogues are mostly to blame for racism imho.

That, or soon enough the desperate will include those whose recent and latent sense of entitlement and justice will find ample grounds for themselves to do something about it! . — tim wood

Everyone feels entitled. Some just get more out of their sense of entitlement than others.

As an aside, during this state of agitation I coined the term “Ronald Reagan’s Paradise” as a descriptor of the state of affairs in our country.

Dumb is wasting everyones time to share your purposeles opinion. Go away, shooo! — Zelebg

Maybe if you understood my and others’ responses, then you would see what the the waste of time is.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. Some of them could maybe work, some can’t. I think mini-home communities would be preferable to a lot of them, and I think it is also humane. Homeless people are generally in need of extensive healthcare, and we should be working to fix our healthcare system before talking about putting them to work.

A personal note: after not taking my medications for a couple of days, I became extremely agitated and my wife took me to UW hospital where I stayed on the psych ward for two nights. I knew I couldn’t stay long because of the cost, even though I probably should’ve stayed for a week or two. I have Medicare which pays 80%, and my bill was still over $1000. So not only did I not get the help I needed, but I also had a large bill I couldn’t afford to pay. See the problem?

I have a problem with the first question. My wife works at a transitional housing program for the homeless in Madison, and it’s rarely the case that just one factor is involved. For example, the vast majority of them have a dual diagnosis of mental illness and substance addiction. Most have dealt with real trauma in life that a lot of privileged people either have not or can afford to get help for. All of them are down on their luck, mostly since birth.

What a very refreshing attitude. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

It’s a minute by minute struggle to be at peace. The “other” constantly wants to point out what’s wrong with you. At some point, you’ve just gotta realize there’s no pleasing anyone but yourself.

And as I was getting at, it’s a dumb question.

Lol. You’d better hope the State never dissolves because it’s what is standing between you and your property and the unwashed masses armed with their rage and AR-15s.

Eat the rich.

Everything we experience is equally a self-generation. Our body doesn't produce just the appearance of colours, but anything we encounter with our senses, including the shape, mass, etc. of.objects . If this self generation was a problem for the reality of colours, it is equally a problem for the reality of anything we experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Well said.

Colors exist as objects of cognition. Cognition is a function of conscious agents. To say that colors don’t exist “in the real world” or whatever nonsense you are saying is to abstract away the principal part of existence, viz. consciousness.

That is how I understand the question, and my answer is no. Colors do not really exist in the brain where light waves are encoded from sensory input into a signal or whatever electrochemical type of abstract information. So color signals to become real or to exist per se as colors, an agent or “self” is necessary to decode, understand or perceive those signals as colors, while in reality colors might as well look like a monochrome waterfall of Matrix symbols. — Zelebg

This is physicalist nonsense. Why not just ask if consciousness really exists?

Ooohh touche Noah! Well played. :clap: — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Why would I rather be other than I am? I’ve tried being other people, but it never works out. :wink:

Climate change is a hoax designed to destroy our capitalist free market system. I know this because ExxonMobil told me so.

I will be sitting out the Wisconsin primary due to the fact that the candidates I choose never come close. I may even sit out the General due to another fact, viz. if voting really made a difference, they would make it illegal. Even if Yang became President Yang, he would be made ineffective by the Big Oil and Wall Street owned Republicans in the Senate, not to mention the largely right wing judiciary.

The Constitution was designed to disallow a “tyranny of the majority.” By “minority” they meant the property owners. Now it’s the corporations. It will be the same old shit. Mark my words.

But if you are like me and you are tired of and embarrassed by our mentally ill and cognitively disabled president, then vote.

My opinion, much like the party bosses who said that an office boy like Harry Truman could be President, is that a Labrador retriever could easily do the bidding of the transnational corporations.

Some here do actually use their extensive knowledge of mathematics to argue about things that are not in its purview. They wrongly think that axiomatic thinking (deductive reasoning) is the only path to knowledge, seemingly not realizing that the axioms they rely on could never have been arrived at through deduction. See the problem here?

What does it matter? The predators get in your head, treating you like filth your entire life to the point that you don’t know whether the voices in your head are theirs or the demons that control them.

Yeah. Unfortunately many of the world leaders don’t see it that way.

Not all ends justify any means. Some ends justify certain means. No end is so noble as to justify any means possible.

Rich privilege, power, and comfort seems to justify any means possible according to the rich, however.

some people unjustifiably believe the world (or the rich) are out to get them. When examined more closely, that rarely seems to be the case. — Relativist

It’s not so much that the rich are out to get the poor. It’s that the rich have privilege that they don’t want to give up. It’s a matter of habituation and what people get accustomed to. The rich couldn’t handle maximum security prison with the life-hardened poor. Judges know this. The judges delude themselves that the rich convict is really a good person that just made a mistake. The judge’s bias is never more transparent than when he sentences the black crack dealer to life in prison for his third offense. The judge believes the convict is a hardened criminal who can’t be reformed even though dealing crack was probably the best opportunity the poor black man ever had in this society where everything was stacked against him from birth.

People really aren’t all that different in their morality, however. It’s just that some have had easy lives and get all the chances in the world. Some have one or two opportunities in life that they better not fuck up. Most people have no choice but to live in oppression and poverty, or to take a chance and deal crack.

Senators are just as much criminals as anyone else. They just don’t have to worry about police harassment and biased judges because the judges are biased in their favor.

Sorry if you suffer hallucinations and paranoia. — Nils Loc

I’m not sick. Society is sick.

I try and often succeed in treating people fairly and tolerantly in public. I don’t know what they are going through. I abuse the demonic people on TV and the demonic people on the other end of the tech company surveillance devices. These demonic people want to control everyone.

I agree with you. I was just saying something like that to my teenage son a few weeks back. He told me that he didn’t think Uncle Mark likes him. Kadin is often very sullen and angry at the world, but mostly he has low self-esteem. I asked him if he acted like he was happy to see Uncle Mark or if he looked like he was unhappy to see him. (I knew the answer.)

People judge by appearances.

I was giving an example of a stereotype to shed light on his. It was a rhetorical device.

You’re completely missing the point. I’m not at all surprised.

Actually it is a truth that many white men are pseudo-Christian Tump supporters who own AR-15s. Most people living in the US know this.

Likewise, there certainly were noble tribes. The tribe that greeted Christopher Columbus welcomed him and his crew only to be later slaughtered or enslaved by Columbus.

That’s like saying all white men are pseudo-Christian Trump supporters who own AR-15s is a truth.

Yawn