• Infinite growth on a finite planet
    What do economists learn about ecology and natural sciences in university? Is anybody in the thread an economist? What do you really know about these things. In Spain courses tend to include subjects that are relevant for the degree, for example to become a language teacher in Primary you also need to have a good knowledge of sociology, psychology or even certain areas of mathematics. This is so because you have to work personally with experts in those fields, and also to inform your teaching practice. Do economists study ecology?
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    I do not disagree with what you wrote about color perception, it was merely a way to define my point. Maybe crude in its formulation, but it was not specifically about colors and perception, but about deduction. The idea that there is a certain scientific baseline for color and if the perception is way off, there might be something way off with the sensory observation of that color compared to the baseline of human biology. Maybe it was a bad example, but if you read behind the lines, I think the point was about something else entirely. — Christoffer

    It was not a bad example; we need to use concrete images and situations to make abstract ideas more conveyable. My point was that, while true reality exists, it´s not for us humans to know, as all acts of knowing are active representations that say as much about us than about the phenomenon, if not more. Thus, to establish a permanent, unique, universal meaning to an action of communication (not just literal speech, but ALL OUR ACTIONS and inactions are acts of communication and expression) can only be done by imposing by force the meaning generated from a given subjective (individual o collective) observer. Rationality does not prevent that; Logic and Mathematics is only a lingua franca that humans can use to communicate among ourselves and with Nature. What is derived from rational experimentation and debate is not "the truth" but objective knowledge. Objective means shared: some information is given shape, turn into "an object" so that it can be pass on. But shared representations about reality are never reality; they are only the standpoint of a collective observer, no matter how numerous.
    A majority of people interpreting similarly an action can impose, by force, their meaning on the rest of society. But that is not truth, it´s only a mirror that give us light, but reflected and modelled after the observer.
    The democratic alternative is to use reason, individual experience and social communication to make a "mirror" large enough to reflect phenomena with a maximum influence of nature and a minimum influence of personal or collective minds in the output. But this is only possible if all communications are allowed, even "wrong" ones, so far as they are not in fact part of a procedure to commit real crimes, such as personal death threats or pointing out who should be killed.

    Your concept of speech acts as efficient causes of future crimes are probably based on your current lack of knowledge of how chaotic systems work, how the individual psyche works, and the complexity of the network of mutual interactions that human behaviour is inmersed in. No offence!
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    ↪Christoffer
    I have read all your previous posts, but I could only bother to clarify one of the errors they contain.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    colours are not objective measures of anything, but subjective experiences. What is green or not depends on the observer, and this has been proven: https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-seeing-green/
    Also:

    https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-evidence-science

    It has also been proven that some individuals have tetrachromatism, that is, they have somehow recover the much wider range of colours we enjoyed when we were reptiles.

    Not just colours; everything we experience is partly affected by sensorial stimuli, partly by the contents of our mind, and partly by the context, including our own actions. Both squares are exactly the same shade of grey, if we look closer at the pixels; but if we look closer, there is no cylinder on a checkered mat. Both experiences are equally real; and mutually exclusive. The intention of the observer will determine one or the another, in a given moment.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Gray_square_illusion.png
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The true purpose of this thread about Donald Trump is to use him, as a person, as scapegoat. The scapegoat mechanism, developed by primates, allows you to find comfort in throwing stones in the same direction of a majority, the direction of a politically correct aim. It also lets your brains let off steam, and relieves them from the strain of not being able to speak your repressed thoughts plainly in the whole day, in a society where the range of things that can be said and discussed is reduced gradually year by year.

    If Trump were impeached, another permitted scapegoat would be taken, to receive all the vile that you don´t allow to utter even to yourselves; about other public figures and phenomena whose honest and rational analysis is prohibited by political correctness.

    The joy is increased when somebody sides with the scapegoat Trump, and then you can also elaborate in your mind a stereotypical image of the member, that makes you feel better and smarter by comparison.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Xenophobia is not a real term, but a "shut up!" word.

    China for example. It doesn´t mean that individual Chinese people can´t be civilized; but their society is totally beyond that and it actually shows when you have friends that were actually brought up there. The pillar of civilization is citizenship, the institution based on people contributing individually to their society, from their own point of view, with their duties and rights. This essential separation has been destroyed in China; The citizen doesn´t exist, only small human incarnations of the super-structure. The individual is only valuable as a cell of the system, the use for the regime; you are Chinese, but you are not Pei or Lan. Not really. It´s not just the traditional collective spirit of Chinese people; is way beyond that. It´s a game of Sims, with cameras, digital controls, and constant reminders that you don´t matter as a person. If you research the origin of civilization (that is the culture adapted to living in urban environments) the really new, paramount institution is the citizen as a subject of rights and duties, as opposed to a mere part of a tribe or social group.
    Chinese people who come to the civilized world, should undergo a de-programming stage, to help those people instead of importing the post-civilized system that is also appearing in other nations. When we notice that Chinese people work even when they should be having free time, we should not praise them, we should realize they have a psychological problem that needs to be mended. They are not happy. Their families aren´t either.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Benkei
    To keep people from a specific country is not racism, or anti-mexicanism or whatever it is called. It has to do with the relationship between the two nations. For example, some countries make deals with other countries to facilitate the exchange of workers and students. In the case of Mexico, I understand that what´s probably happening is that their government and the American government can not reach a good agreement on how to manage the common borders, and president Trump must be threatening to halt all applications from Mexico as a measure to put more pressure on the negotiation. All countries do this. Mexico too.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪Benkei
    My problem is that I don´t believe our species has different races; apparently Anthropology does not support the existence of subspecies in Homo Sapiens. That is why I get confused with accusations of racism. For example, how is to be born in Mexico a race? I think it is just a nationality. I honestly don´t understand this racist approach. When Americans talk about racial stuff, I feel like they are talking about the races in the Lord of the Rings; like Mexicans were hobbits.
  • Society and testicles
    which from what I can make out, is his choice word for the people of different races that he perceives to be doing the cucking... — Mr Phil O'Sophy

    I don´t believe in races. I don´t think we live in the Middle Earth. Racial theories were abandoned even before DNA discovery, and only poor ignorant people and supremacists believe in them anymore. Darwin did too much harm to Biology.
  • Society and testicles
    ↪Mr Phil O'Sophy
    none of those words.
  • Society and testicles
    This requires an explanation. — Baden

    No, it doesn´t, I picked a picture from the internet that seems to ilustrate my point. I don´t know the story behind and it really does not matter; it is just a visual aid. Not everything needs to be plain and accurate, imagination and symbolism are also relevant to reasoning. According to James Hillman, Jungian author who developed Archetypal Psychology, it is important to let images speak by themselves to our unconscious mind:

    "For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that's walking into your life…and the moment you've defined the snake, you've interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.…"

    Nowadays we know for certain that the Unconscious is crucial to rational thinking, since most of our cognitive activity is really sub-conscious. Notice how cover of books actually help to make sense of the content; they are chosen for a reason, and play a role in the way you interpret the texts. However, this influence is not direct or obvious, but through the imaginal world of symbols that J.A. Cirlot studied so well (I totally recommend his dictionary of symbols, since it is in English too).

    For example, look at this cover; the simplicity, the choice of letter type (that is suitable for Scripture), and the marble background tells our subconscious that the content is transcendent, prophetical and abstract or sublime. The title is impressed on our mind very strongly, because it is all we get. This influences how we will read the book:

    https://miculteolog.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/309621273_2.jpg
  • Society and testicles
    ↪darthbarracuda
    Curiousity: We "testify" in courts, because Romans literally grabbed their pack when they took an oath.

    Our society is all about crushing symbolically men´s testicles, and that´s bad for women, as they have no protection against their own biological dark desires for brutes and dangerous men. These characters glare like fireflies in the night, becouse women are now living surrounded by emasculated "best friends" that are afraid of being denounced or forsaken for being too forward with them. So women, especially young girls, become easy victims for orcs who are used to impose themselves aggressively and treat women like inferiors. The emasculated boyfriend or husband will go to his corner to cry, instead of manning up.

    Enough of this; Western men need to be men again, if not for our own sake, for the sake of our women and families. We need to claim our testicles back.

    [Mod edit: Deleted racist image]
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    My cat. She isn't very intelligent, she can't speak any English, she sleeps through much of the day, and she shits in a litter tray, but she would still make a better president than Donald Trump. — S

    Your line of reasoning led you to that conclusion, so I don´t blame you
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Wait. People from certain countries don't want/believe/share democratic values, respect law, human rights and in top of that don't have abstract thinking skills? Which countries are those? — Benkei

    You are being naughty...I did not say "countries", but individual people who can move around. It´s your ideological defense filters talking, because deep in your brain you know what I mean and you agree. The filters will prevent this realization (for now).
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    1k
    Is there any text that you would find inapropriate for school?
    — DiegoT

    Kama sutra probably isn't appropriate.     — Mr Phil O'Sophy

    I haven´t read it. Is there any call to kill infidels in that book? what makes it inadequate for children? I believe it was written by a monk and talks about sex and religion.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    We teach kids the basics of science in school. It does not infer from this that they are going to grow up and make atom bombs independently. Such conclusions are not reasonable. — Mr Phil O'Sophy

    There´s a huge difference: we teach science with experiments and examples that allow children understand that what they are being taught is real, we don´t ask them to have faith or tell them that a place of eternal punishment exists for those who fail to understand how seeds grow or the heart keeps our blood moving.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪tim wood
    who would you rather have as the U.S. president right now? You can not say any Democrat politician, that´s too easy. Somebody not involved in politics.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    There's a glaring fault there. Would you trust this demon worshipper with the care of children with Down's syndrome? "No" should be your answer. So, should we trust Trump with the presidency?[/q

    Before I answer, I neet to know what he wants to do with Down children     — S
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    ↪Mr Phil O'Sophy
    Is there any text that you would find totally inappropriate for school and for the education of children?
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    The system is a complex one that scholars spend their lives trying to understand. Its not something you're going to get clear answers from by just brushing over someones Top 10 cherry picked quotes from islam. — Mr Phil O'Sophy
    So basically you are saying that I need to be a Muslim dedicated student of Islamic teachings to really understand what the texts might mean.

    Do you apply the same critical approach to all books? Because I wonder what must be written in a volume to make you think that is not really ok for children to read and memorize and think that is God´s sacred word.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    ↪Baden
    If the intimidation involves threats, revealing personal information, slandering, or making impossible for you to communicate (like hacking attacks to your website) this is punishable by law. It´s not freedom of speech. Freedom of speech concerns mainly the Informational, Expressive and
    Aesthetic, functions of language; but not the phatic function when it is related to the comitting of crimes.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    ↪Hanover
    this behaviour has never been part of freedom of speech. When you use the language for real crimes, like publishing black lists with addresses to facilitate attacks; or directing death threats; or, as in the example, to slander, that´s not freedom of expression, but common well-known crimes that have a textual element.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    No because I don't think Qurans are generally harmful. You say the Quran incites violence, but the vast majority of Muslims are not violent. I think banning religious books will do more harm than good. — Purple Pond
    Have you read the quran and hadiths? because if you haven´t, your belief is just a belief. The vast majority of Nazis never participated in any crime. Many of them did not even live in Germany, such as Henry Ford. Even today, most neonazis are law-abiding citizens. Do we conclude the Nazi ideology is not so harmful after all?
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    Like Dasein, and other vocabulary introduced by everyone's favorite Nazi. Another of those good things Nazis did. — Ciceronianus the White
    It is very important to recognize good things in your enemies. You must not reduce your adversaries to stereotypes, or reject things because they came to you from the wrong hands. Republicans reject climate change measures because Dems talk about it all the time; Democrats reject the defense of the national borders because Trump wants to improve them. This is irrational thinking. The most evil person or movement can do good things and say the truth sometimes, as much as saints and heroes have their share of mistakes.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Sure, because they give the Ellis Island Medal to racists. — Inis
    So let´s say Trump is a racist, and think Mexicans are a race. So what? People can think and feel what they want in Democracy. They are only required to comply with the law and respect the rights of others. For example, a person might conclude that the only really effective way to reverse climate change is to sacrifice Down children to Azazel, demon of the desert and all that´s hot. So long as he doesn´t even try to kidnap a child or indoctrinate his own offspring with these ideas, we should be okay with it.
  • Is it true that ''Religion Poisons Everything''?
    As I understand, early Christians were communist in that they owned no private property and shared everything, but the politicisation of Communism is different, and the claim that the USSR, say, embodied a kind of practical Christianity is odd. — AJJ
    Perhaps it is odd in North America? In Europe there are lots of connections. The Catholic Church has right-wing and left-wing factions, and this division has been going on for some centuries. However, both main branches share many tenets of the Left. When you put the Poor and the Marginalized first and say that the Rich go to hell, as Gospels proclaim; you are creating a communist mindset.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    And Jews aren't part of the society? Further, how is the Nazi destruction of civil liberties and personal property not harmful? Like come on, everything you're saying is making hyper-idealized scenarios the reason why one ought to maintain free speech — MindForged

    I advocate freedom of speech, but I don´t think we can save the Nazi regime at all. True, they gave us the technology and scientists to reach the Moon; the first laws to protect the environment (Ecology is a word coined by a Nazi), Goebbels taught us how to win elections, and they also invented sex dolls. However, I think we can accept the good things without taking the whole pack, that was hell on Earth. Fourteen million people died in the death camps, with the help of IBM by the way; six of them Jews, but in reality you had there all kind of people: prisoners of war, dissidents, homosexuals, disabled people, Gipsies, Catholics, all kind of people: most of them citizens of Germany. Only Muslims were spared, because the Arab world was allied with Hitler and many Muslims volunteered to serve in the German SS.
    Precisely because the Nazi regime was nightmarish, I don´t want censorship. If people can´t handle "dangerous messages", let´s give them the skills and means to criticize them, and let´s let them do it publicly.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    Nazism came to power because of limited free speech not because of free speech. When your party controls the airwaves, controls the conversation, and what is allowed to be talked about, you become the very thing you claim you want to prevent. — Harry Hindu
    Indeed! And the first victims are those related to humour and parody, because no totalitarian regime can prosper if people can see it through the lense of humour. Cartoons, comic strips, stand-ups and casual jokes are the first communications to be censored when a totalitarian movement wants to impose itself on society. The effect of censorship, what is really about, is too things: to impede the process of rational processing of propaganda at the individual and social level; and to impose a single meaning to words, symbols and actions among the infinite possible meanings that people can assign to them. For example, to ban the swastika in Germany served to the purpose of keeping this universal symbol of life and renewal, attached to his former Nazi use. When feminists ban beauty contests, they impose the meaning of celebrating female beauty and youth as something inherently degrading, banning all other possible meanings.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    In the public domain, can we trust the government to censor "harmful" speech?

    In the private domain, do you agree that what can be said is the owner's pejorative?     — Purple Pond
    with pejorative you mean prerogative? Let´s make this question less abstract and more real. Are you in favour of banning Quran and hadiths, or at least their use in public libraries and schools, and also public apologies of these texts? Quran has hundreds of verses calling to violence and hate towards non believers; it says explicitly that God is okay with slavery, and with disciplining women that refuse to obey. It contains twice as many verses against Jews as the Mein Kampff. Hadiths, as they are more specific, are also much more explicit in their promotion of all kind of violence.
    What would you do with these texts?
    My personal answer is that no book must be banned, not even the Mein Kampff or Mao Red Book or Madonna´s five books for children. But all books, sacred or not for some people, must be open to any kind of criticism and mockery; and they are not to be taught in schools or in kid libraries if they incite to violence or defend theories about the social and physical world that are discredited by Science.
  • Free speech vs harmful speech
    I heard somewhere, teach/learn how to think, rather than what to think. — TheMadFool

    that´s Athena, who´s having this as her January personal cause... It should not be a cause, but something we take for granted, but here we are, back in the dark Modern Age!
  • Is it true that ''Religion Poisons Everything''?
    In 1830 Tocqueville wrote that Christian democracies becoming a despot, a totalitarian government that would so control our lives our lives they would be meaningless and unfulfilling. I have always seen the conflict between communist and Christians totally baffling. Communism is applied Christianity, isn't it? — Athena

    Communism is as you say, a practical answer to "Matthew 5:5: "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." It´s no wonder that first socialists and the first feminists were deeply religious people; all totalitarian movements born as a response or reaction to the Masonic cultural revolution (Enlightenment) and the tragedies of the Industrial Revolution, that is: socialism, marxism, anarchism, feminism, fascism, nazism and more; all share the same basic ideas. These ideas are:1 the suprapersonal structure (the people, class, race, political movement) are the real human subjects and individuals are only cells of these organisms, with no inherent value separated of the suprapersonal movement. We see this in feminism, where the movement ask for more posts for women for being women, not for their individual merits. 2. The Salvation metanarrative: the Jewish foundational myth, that is not so original (Aztecs had a similar one, exodus included), is about a people that needs to be liberated from oppression and march to a new promised land that ultimately needs to be conquered by force; this ethnic aspiration is legit because it´s part of a grand divine plan to lead human History to its literary climax or resolution of all conflicts. All revolutionary movements we know are adaptations of this recurring theme in the Torah. 3. Manicheism, or belief that moral categories are not mere subjective appraisals of how actions relate to our personal values; but real cosmic forces of which men, with free will, are also part: History as a fight of good versus evil.
  • Is it true that ''Religion Poisons Everything''?
    That is why the church didn't want uneducated people to have Bibles that they could read for themselves. Things like the witch hunts, or beating the devil out of our children, can come out of uneducated people reading the Bible. — Athena

    The first two books that Gutenberg printed out: The Bible and Maleus Maleficarum. There you had the religious wars and the witch hunts.
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    ↪TheWillowOfDarkness
    I once organized a debate with fifteen kids with 10-11 years, about the existence of God; I myself did not take part. They reached to this conclusion: God existed in the past, when the Bible happened; but not anymore.
  • Is it true that ''Religion Poisons Everything''?
    ↪S
    so these movements say. But we can not study social phenomena from the point of view of the phenomena themselves; the scientific study of the Bible started to progress when an author questioned that the Torah was written by Moses. You can not ask, say, FARC narco terrorists what they are; they will tell you they are the people´s army of liberation. You need to observe and compare with similar phenomena before making a classification. I argue that communism and christianism are part of the same phenomenon because they share many common features, not to mention a common origin.
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    Because social cooperation was necessary to build in this manner, and given the nature of naturally occurring tribal hierarchy, it seems impossible to me that cities came first and religion afterward, and impossible that multi-tribal society could have occurred without knowledge of God. Then you can relate all this back to Nietzsche and the transvaluation of values, God is dead, the ubermensch, and the Nazis sawing off the tree branch on which they unwittingly perched. — karl stone

    Bear in mind please that the modern ideas of God are recent, and we can not assume at all that they were equivalent to what people believed tens of thousands years ago. The concepts of divinity have changed over time as human social phenomena changed; it is true as you say that Heaven is in correspondence with social hierarchies, and helps to legitimate these structures. But the God that Nietzsche declared dead was his society´s traditional God; when people become atheist, they are atheist of the god of their parents, and assume that all of the other gods are false or are different images of the god of their parents.

    Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, who was a Spanish general born in Colombia, answered in this way when asked if had considered becoming a Protestant: “No creo en la religión católica, que es la verdadera, menos voy a creer en las musarañas de los protestantes” (If I don´t believe in the Catholic religion, that is the true one, how could I believe in the Protestant nonsense?).

    Nietzsche was a sort of prophet, and followed the tradition of Zoroaster, Buddha, Majavira or Paul, that is, to become atheist to the God or gods you are brough into; a sort of Freudian "Primordial Murder" necessary to contribute your own personal aprehension of celestial matters. However, this enlightenment is not so original, but a mere product of what some sensitive members of our species do with the zeitgeist of their time. Nietzsche lived in a time where his ideas were in the air, he was just more receptive to them than the common folk.
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    Contrasting and comparing with Nietzsche - with whom I have some familiarity, has caused me to go beyond my core arguments, and now you tempt me further beyond my knowledge base. I cannot follow. — karl stone
    I think your intuition about tribes needing new religious myths and deities might be right, but it is generally believed that this came as a result of these tribal people having to live and organize themselves within the walls of the first cities. Civilization is the process of developing the kind of culture needed to make cities work, and that implied an evolution of our divine pantheon in the direction of ever more abstract and less tribal deities. This said, the Göbekli Tepe ruins, that predate any other religious building by several millennia and were built way before the first small cities were erected, might change this theory and give your hypothesis a good chance. Who knows!
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    Spoken like a true Judeo Christian farmer, but Gods of hunting and war were not demonic. Their "morality" fed and defended primitive societies. What's immoral about that? — karl stone

    No, I did not say demonic but daemonic, as in the Greek meaning as used by Greek philosophers. I did not use immoral either, but amoral. These deities were symbolic aprehensions of the laws of Nature, as they are manifested in socio-natural phenomena. The idea of moral and immoral or Good and Evil as "natural laws" with their corresponding deities on the contrary, is known from the late Iron Age onwards, the last centuries of the Age of Aries.
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    Clearly, the fundamental law of nature is truth — karl stone
    Thjs resounds with me, because it is in accordance with Greek philosophy and Egyptian philosophy (Maat)
  • Nietzche and his influence on Hitler
    If hunter gatherers had not discovered God, and appointed him as an objective authority for social morality - — karl stone
    I´m not sure that hunter gatherers appointed any supernatural being as authority for morality. It is difficult to guess and impossible to settle what people in prehistory really thought and believed. However, from the Ancient literary sources that were based on long oral traditions, we can deduce that their gods were not moral. They were daemonic creatures: that is, the "spirit" or functional structure that Ancient people recognized in natural and social phenomena, with both positive and negative traits (from human point of view). For example, the daemonic traits of electricity are that it is awesome and more powerful than many other things, but very dangerous and deadly, just like Thor or Jupiter were. When Zeus, the daemonic symbol of lightning manifested himself at the request of misguided Semele, she was carbonized. From her body was rescued Dionisos, who carried the yang energy of his father Zeus but manifested it in more mortal-friendly ways (up to a point).

    Zeus or Ra were sacred, but not moral. If you go to West African gods or Mesoamerican gods, you will notice that this amoral condition was even more obvious. There is no point in appeasing and sacrificing to moral and good gods; you make sacrifices to daemonic entities that are hungry and need to be tamed or kept satisfied.

    We don´t have evidence of deities with moral atributions prior to the Axial age.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    ↪S
    would you be okay with restricting immigration from regions where cannibalism and human sacrifice is still practiced frequently? My point is if you agree that a nation should set and enforce standards to foreigners willing to apply for citizenship.

    https://www.deviantart.com/saint-tepes/art/Cannibalism-World-Map-284854822
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