It provides very strong security. — Olivier5

It certainly seems basic common sense reinforced by current events that to be an unaligned neutral buffer state between two larger powers, is to label oneself a potential battleground. No one with any sense wants to live in No-Man's-Land between two armies - hence the name. Or you could choose to join POTATO, or whatever the Sino-Russian defensive alliance is called.

Your question calls for good judgement. The author's judgement as you report it here seems mechanistic, not good enough for you or me.

Back in the 70s, there was a campaign for natural childbirth in the UK. Women often felt that child birth was over-medicalised, that the wishes of expectant mothers were being overridden, and that obstetric interventions such as forceps delivery, caesarian sections, induced contractions, etc, were overused because they were expressions of male power in a place where the previous tradition had been for female midwives to be in charge.

The campaign had some success, and all sorts of innovations came in to re humanise childbirth and de-medicalise it; birthing pools more natural positions than lying on a bed, de- stressing the event to reduce pain and promote relaxation, and so on.

50 years on, there is a scandal in several hospitals about excess neonatal and maternal deaths, caused by an ideological commitment to natural childbirth, overriding the mother's wishes and failing to implement those same interventions of caesarians, inductions and forceps that were being overprescribed before. So it goes.

There is no recipe for avoiding both type one and type two errors, except this:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.

Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency. — Lao Tau - 29

1. Essential properties - These are properties which are absolutely necessary to the word. A tree is a plant.
2. Accidental properties - Properties that the definition can contain, but are not essential to its identity. "A tree can have branches". — Philosophim

These trees have roots and branches, but are not plants. https://medium.com/@gp_pulipaka/an-essential-guide-to-classification-and-regression-trees-in-r-language-4ced657d176b

Are there trees without branches? — Benj96

Palm trees tend not to have branches.

Then there are tree ferns, tree heathers, tree peonies, etc.

In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height. In wider definitions, the taller palms, tree ferns, bananas, and bamboos are also trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree

It is a fact, that even within botany, 'tree' is not strictly defined. Some philosophers will attempt to impose a definition, and complain when folk use the word differently or point out difficulties. But the rest of us know that where the boundary of the word is is unimportant except when it becomes important and that's when a specification is appropriate. I have some birch trees in my garden that are less than an inch tall. I am growing them from seed.They are dwarfed by the heather - a shrub with the structure and woody stem and branches of a tree. But they will catch up.

In engineering, a plant is machinery. In politics, a plant is something else again.

#55. https://shwep.net/podcast/naomi-janowitz-on-ancient-jewish-magic/

We live in a social world of constructed meaning, and and meaning is made of ritual. This is a really good episode, that speaks to various debates we have here about knowledge as social construct, language as social construct, performativity and the intersection of race and gender with ritual and magic.
Certificates displayed on walls, passports, are objects imbued with real magical power; written incantations. There is a huge amount to think about in this episode - highly commended.

Knowledge is habit; repetition of the past.

On the contrary, it is you who misinterpreted my position. You need (1) to show that you correctly understand others before blaming them for misunderstanding your incomprehensible statements and (2) make sure that your statements are comprehensible.
— Apollodorus

As for (1) you didn’t show me that I misunderstood you before I showed you that you did misunderstand me, and repeatedly so. Therefore it’s you who needs to show me that you correctly understand me before complaining about my misunderstandings (and you didn’t show me any of my misunderstandings yet!). As for (2), I can’t make sure my statements are comprehensible to you if you conveniently chop them to build a straw man argument. — neomac

May I commend to you both the power of silence. This is too tedious to even try to understand. There are some really interesting links and points of view being drowned in this febrile proving and demonstrating and strawman burning, of what can only be conjectures of what may develop, and guiding moral principles that may or may not not be shared. Just present your best case and let the enemy do the same instead of trying to win an argument that no one can possibly make on either side. For god's sake we do not need competitive misunderstanding!

Reminds me of The Culture. Excellent books if you like Sci-fi. The end of scarcity entails the end of capitalism. Want something? Download the specs and your atomic scale 3D printer will build it for you, including building an extra large atomic scale digital printer if you want something big like a spaceship.

He says, cutting across a deal of off topic axe-grinding.

Like other British "aristocrats" at the time, his father was conveniently married to the daughter of Wall Street financier Leonard Jerome. — Apollodorus

So how many husbands did the girl have exactly, and did they all get some nookie or was it mainly a polyandrousness of convenience.

You want the State to be the sole arbiter of safety. I do not. How can we reach a moral resolution to this impasse? — NOS4A2

Health and safety needs funding and it needs coercive power. If there is some way this can be provided other than by the state I'd love to hear about it. ???

I agree that the state is in many ways just like a mafia, that is why I bring it up. However, I like to think that a democratic government is somewhat less corrupt, somewhat less arbitrarily violent than a Mafia would be in the absence of governmental opposition. I could be wrong...

But what I see happening, that I think you will probably disagree with, is that governments of nation states are losing their power to multi-national corporations, which are largely immune from government regulation. Far from fearing the strength of the state, I fear its weakness and its vulnerability to complete subversion and take over by corporations with agendas entirely at odds with those of ordinary people.

:100: But good luck convincing anyone who matters of that. Meanwhile, I fight despair with gallows humour.

In my view, people are going to have sex no matter what. — Paulm12

This is the real problem, that someone somewhere may be having fun, and not paying for it by producing another wage slave.

There was a film about it, called "If".

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1190773529/?playlistId=tt0063850&ref_=tt_pr_ov_vi

In my mind the proper role for government is to defend liberty, or to go extinct. The moral and just way to fund any institution is voluntarily, whether through subscription, donation, etc. — NOS4A2

Recipe for a Mafia. 'Voluntary' contributions to 'protection'.

But I suggest to you that market regulation is also important. For example, border control and health and safety. Thanks to https://www.caa.co.uk for example, I do not have to worry much about either getting on a plane, or a plane falling on me, because unsafe operators are banned from the country. Recently, under the influence of small government advocates, building safety regulation has been relaxed. The result is freedom for builders, and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

And that is why I for one fear laissez-faire. It results in abysmally low standards in everything, and pollution, exploitation and death. I want doctors to be regulated, electrical equipment to be safe, food to be fit for consumption and so on. I want government to deal with the mafia and the snake oil salesmen as well as protecting me from the Mongol hordes.

Shut up, Brazil, nobody care what you think. Keep the cheap coffee and cattle feed coming. And let's not talk about deforestation too much.

An electric motor and a spring, basically. The difficulty is in getting the forces balanced so that the motor operates the finger with the strength to flick the switch while also tensioning the spring enough to pull it back afterwards. If i remember I had a very small toy motor geared down with a worm thread, and a coil spring from god knows where. But you could use a spiral spring too. The finger is just mounted on an axle that makes a 1/4 turn each time, and the lid works by gravity. Wooden box -easy to fit the bits to; an old cigar box in my case with the top cut in half and hinged.

Marvin Minsky's useless machines. — Agent Smith

Back in the sixties, we had to make one of those for a physics project. The joy of liberal education!

Sure. But if some Americans firmly believe abortion is murder, that matters. Their opinion shouldn't be brushed aside in the name of someone's privacy. No one has a right to privately commit murder. — frank

If the law wishes to mandate children being brought into the world, then it seems to me that the law should also provide for the upbringing of that child, and every mother should therefore receive a reasonable living wage as employee of the state, while their child is a minor. The law forbids murder, but it has then to provide a justice system that deals with annoying people in some other way, because murder works.

I'll leave this here in case anyone is interested. It's a big pile of extemporised words and might not immediately seem on topic, but if you follow it you might get somewhere and see something.

http://legacy.jkrishnamurti.org/es/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=960&chid=664

"FBI diddit" — jorndoe

The trouble is, with the loss of political probity, no one is believable, which means that anything is believable. In the UK we have the scandal of police officers under cover getting married and having children to infiltrate animal rights groups and acting as agents provocateur - there's reason for suspicion whenever there is a term which does not exist in English, because we would never stoop so low, would we?. So you cannot trust even your spouse and parent of your children.

We have replaced the biggest dick competition with the biggest pile of horseshit competition - Trump wins there, and Boris the parody Churchill wins here. Alas, there can be no democracy without truth.

Why not go for the full transformation with hormone therapy, sperm bank and castration? Reduce all that testosterone fuelled crime, and completely end unwanted pregnancy. A small price to pay for huge social benefit. Imposing it on immigrants would do a lot to solve that problem too.Foreign tourism would be reduced, mind, unless it became a destination of choice for women...

And the reduction in population would be good for the environment.

their meddling in Russia's backyard with Europe as its forward pawn
— Tzeentch

Russia is Europe's backyard. — Olivier5

...

Nobody likes to admit they live in the shed.

I am currently convinced that organic, pasture-fed animals are environmentally neutral. — Louis

That is a bit simplistic. The issue I would put to you is one of sheer environmental acreage.

If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

Now that too is a simplification, because there is some land that is unsuitable for crops, but even there, most will support forest and wilderness. Unquestionably, a mainly vegan diet as the norm, would be greatly beneficial to the environment, at least while we wait for @180 Proof to halve the population, and even beyond. Most animals are fed crops for a portion of their diet because pasture does not grow all the year round in most places, and at the moment we are still losing forest to cattle and their feed, to satisfy the increasing demand for meat

the problem is this whole black&white attitude. — Kevin Tan

I agree. There has always been a bit of a religious attitude about polluting the body with animal products. Leave the slugs in your salad for added protein, I say. :wink:

The numbers do not lie; the votes add up to 99% therefore 1% is free and undecided even amongst those who have voted. As I have often said if the world appears to be in contradiction, change your diction, because the world does what it wants.

The blind following an old blind man with a stick, mistaking it for a vision. [tries to remember that old trick of turning a stick into a snake... that was a real deepity.]

He made the poll scores add up to 101%. — Metaphysician Undercover

If even one you had been without error, the scores would have added up correctly - it was none of my doing - I didn't even participate. But wait- perhaps the world can yet be redeemed if I do:-

There! order is restored with one percent of freedom.

Philosophers have valiantly fought the tyranny of religion and tradition; but they have come under the sway of the tyranny of knowledge and become hypnotised by the tricks of science. We are ruled by arrogant certainty and it is taking us to our grave. Don't be so sure.

Jung wrote too much. Have you read Alice Miller? Her thesis is that Freud was confronted with patients suffering from traumatisation from child sexual abuse, but because he was being paid by the parents, had to dismiss their experiences as 'fantasy', and invented a whole theory of how this could be, setting the course of psychology back a century and causing untold misery. Jung didn't really get to this either, but got embroiled in the exploration of the same imaginary realm. So it goes.

Simply that the state ought to mind it’s own business — NOS4A2

What, then, is the state's business, and how can it finance itself?

Here's a clue. You're all wrong.

he wants people to follow him — Sir2u

I never looked that facility before, so I don't follow anyone, but I just looked and discovered I have 22 followers. That's almost a whole cults-worth! I must message them all and tell them where to send their money.

the separation of the state and economy? — NOS4A2

Can you explain what you mean by this, since you cannot give an example? It seems to me that if there is a state at all, it needs an income, and therefore to be part of the economy. If it does not exist,
the problem with an anarchy is that it cannot resist a mafia/government taking control.

If it does exist, it needs to either participate directly in the economy as a player, or else to raise taxes through legislation. The former is very much where the wold seems to be headed governments are losing power to international corporations. The latter is where we have come from and what I assume you object to.

What is it that you advocate?

As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:
• Perfectionism
• Sense of Urgency
• Defensiveness
• Quantity Over Quality
• Worship of the Written Word • Paternalism
• Either/Or Thinking
• Power Hoarding
• Fear of Open Conflict
• Individualism
• Only One Right Way
• Progress is Bigger, More
• Objectivity
• Right to Comfort

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

So, obviously, if one applies a minimum of charitable interpretation, it is the style and institution of education that is in question, rather than the topic itself. And it is part of a much wider analysis of the legacy culture of capitalism that grew out of slavery.

Now obviously again, if one changes the implicit values of an education system that serves a particular society that education will fail to serve that same society, by the measure of its own values. This is an excellent argument against all progress, beloved by conservatives.

The article is another right-wing hatchet job on critical race theory that refuses to even imagine that societies' values might change - The American Way is the only way and nothing better can be conceived.

Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. — Hume

What people are calling 'subjective' is an area of lived experience that is evaluative. It encompasses desire and desirability, preference, morality, and whatever is 'what one makes' of 'what is'. So in order to evaluate life, one needs life, and as your intuition seems to be telling you, in order to evaluate non-existence, one needs to experience non-existence. The latter is not possible, and to me, this makes the former also impossible. One can not unreasonably prefer pizza to cheese on toast if one has experienced both, but to prefer non-existence to existence... ??? Ask anyone who has died which they prefer, the living cannot know. Or just wait 'til you attain this status yourself, and then decide.

You might be interested to google 'Marshall Rosenberg'. I started this thread on him a while back.

Non violent Communication

The founder of the club, Nicholas Maxwell , manages to misread much of the philosophy of the past 100 years. — Joshs

You may well be right. But he is a legitimate, well published academic, based at UCL a fairly good university. A crank, maybe, but not one to be dismissed quite that quickly.

Surely we'd still be 93 million miles from earth — frank

You are the sun god, and I claim my eternal life!

God had to make shit smell, to prevent folks disappearing up their own arses like the Ouroboros.

You are by no means alone. Here is club you can join.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/friends-of-wisdom/what-went-wrong#blu

A paradox shows the limit of language, not the limit of being. If as a matter of fact particles turn out to be wavy and waves turn out to be particular, then so much the worse for the convenience of philosophers; there's no arguing that it is impossible because {words and arguments}. Likewise, if God is omnipotent, just put up with it and sort your logic out as best you can. Obviously he can make a rock that takes up the whole of space so that there is nowhere to move it to, and then squash it into a long stick and use it to get the fluff out of His belly button. In fact looking around, it would explain a lot if that's what He already did, because the devil was teasing Him about how He couldn't be omnipotent because {words and arguments}.

There are mixed race people and mixed culture people and life is complicated.
— unenlightened
Not really. — Harry Hindu

No, really!

Then tearing down statues of a particular culture isn't trying to erase a particular culture?
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/502492-list-statues-toppled-vandalized-removed-protests/ — Harry Hindu

No it isn't. One does not wish to erase the memory of slavers or colonial exploiters, or of Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or whoever. But one wishes to change a culture that lauds them as heroes and role-models. It is fairly clear that a culture that is defined by its oppression of others such as nazism or slavery, cannot coexist with one that defines itself as fair and open. so we object to graffiti swastikas and statues that celebrate slavers.

Some complained that a white, female artist has no right to depict a Black male, Emmett Till. This is not good logic. — Jackson

I agree. But that there are silly claims, does not entail that there are no sensible ones.

absolute boundary of a culture. — Jackson

Of course there are no absolutes, but on the contrary, cultures interpenetrate. There are mixed race people and mixed culture people and life is complicated. But sometimes there is justice in claims of cultural exploitation and expropriation too.

That’s the necessary result in that kind of thinking, and yours. — NOS4A2

Alas it is the result of your thinking, not mine. I do not think cultural differences should be erased - you do.

and The Chinese communist Party agrees with you. :rofl:

Well, we’re all of a certain species, is basically what I’m saying. — NOS4A2

It's your bullet dude; bite it or spit out. This is what the Chinese say, that Tibetans, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others need re-educating. Your turn will no doubt come. We're all of a certain species, but we sure ain't all of a certain culture.

Ha ha. Yes indeed, we are all Chinese now.