Witty made some cool contributions to philosophy worthy of study like hundreds of other philosophers out there too :)

7.8/10 philosophy stars, would recommend. Goes well with a pinch of salt to taper off the harder edges.

So my comment that communism has "same for everyone" is not at odds with modern considerations about communism. — Frank Apisa

No it literally is.

That actually happened, in no small degree thanks to those who sat out or voted third party — Xtrix

Electoral gaslighting - "look what you made me do". DNC lackey.

No wonder America's so fucked up - a place where voters get blamed for the inadequacies of parties, and where people can convince themselves that elections aren't a question of accountability. Wild.

Electing Trump isn't holding them accountable. — Xtrix

Actually that's exactly what it is and no amount of double-speak will change that fact. Elections are quite literally mechanisms of accountability, and if you have pretend that that isn't the case just to try and make a point, you've lost the rhetorical plot. Confidently asserting the literal opposite of the case doesn't make it true. Maybe you've learnt one too many lessons from Trump. Or the DNC for that matter. Next you'll be telling me war is peace and that triangles are actually circles.

He's already made concessions. I mentioned some already. Is it more or less "delusional" than believing Trump will be swayed by pressure? — Xtrix

Food scraps for electoral hostages, which you're begging to remain. It's a kind of Stockholm syndrome - falling in love with your hostage taker because they've let you pee in the toilet that one time.

So what is the point of this thread again? — VagabondSpectre

To present warmed over Heidegger and ask if anyone has an oven to warm it up a little more.

And communism has as its core "same for everyone." — Frank Apisa

Yeah I mean it's not like "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is one of the most famous communist slogans out there. No possible way.

Yes, as I've said before, nobody pays for a free hamburger. — Baden

But if you OrGaNiZe and be an AcTiVisT they will name a National Burger Day (after a woman chef) and Trump wouldn't do that! ha! Checkmate commie scum.

Ah there you go again with the big hitting arguments. Real intellectual-powerhouse stuff Frank, no idea how I'm going to match. Maybe next time you can do an angry interpretive dance or something given your inability to conjure words.

Republicans and Democrats are gay marriage, abortion and a somewhat tougher stance on immigration. — Benkei

*With the caveat that deportation rates under Trump still fail to match that of Obama, and that Biden has flip-flopped on abortion like the flavour of the month. Oh, and best not talk about Biden's vote for DOMA.

we want to have an administration we can influence — Xtrix

But you have to be delusional to think that this is what Biden will enable. Why in the world would the DNC offer anything when the apoplexia of "imagine the other guy" causes people to fall in line no matter how terrible the line is? (case in point: this thread). Give them this and they will browbeat you with it by offering a quantum up from the political minima, forever. If you're not willing to hold them accountable now, exactly when? Tomorrow, when the Republican party has a come-to-Jesus moment? When the cows come home, and the DNC know this; you, apparently, do not.

Yeah no one is saying much of anything because there's nothing to say. Just give the DNC carte blanche and acquiesce in the obsolescence of what minimal democracy you have.

And then believe - against all rationality - that they might actually give progressive causes anything at all when the bone they threw was a segregationist rapist warmonger as a consolation prize.

Yeah just a few "hot spots of American life" like incarcerating blacks at record rates and supporting illegal, region-runing wars. Usual American stuff.

Yeah I also want to know what to make of him enabling the indebting of an entire generation and sniffing young girls at every opportunity!

Thanks, Xtrix!

he quickly censored them, — tim wood

Oh I didn't censor them [####].

Oh and speaking of Twitter!

Why Twitter? I can play with halfwits right here!

But of real political organizing and activism — Xtrix

Last time I checked, 'being held electorally hostage' was not in the activist playbook, but I suppose Americans do things weird.

No I believe I'll stick with "go [####] yourself [####]".

"Brownshirts" lmao

It really comes down to this: those who say that not voting for Biden are voting for Trump miss the fact that it was very policies and politics championed by Biden and his ilk which got you Trump in the first place. A vote for Biden is a vote for the next Trump, and the one after that.

American electoral politics has been a ratchet mechanism for the last two generations, with each click of the wheel forestalled only by a momentary holding pattern before plunging straight back into reactionary hell again. Voting for a Trumpian catalyst is a prolongation of pain, not an anaesthetic to it.

No claim of racism today? You must be feeling tired.

Acknowledging your inability to say anything of relevance does not make it any better. It's just putting a lampshade over it.

Not much point. You view it from a distance through your telescope and decide that your understanding of what you see is all there is to it. But on the ground where the reality is - or was, is where you were never anywhere near. Yours, then, is shallow revisionism based on the wrong focus on the wrong things. And did you not read where I advised against the mistake of thinking I'm defending Biden?

In simplest terms, Clarence Thomas complained he was the victim of a high-tech lynching. In a narrow sense I think he was correct - in no way to be construed as a defense of Thomas. Your skewed view and invective is its own kind of yellow "lynching" of Biden. If it serves some therapeutic function for you, I hope you get better quickly. But whatever the merit of your remarks, or bits of truth buried in them, they're all thrown over by your use of them.

Busing alone was no simple matter, and not to be reduced by the likes of you to your personal notions of it. That is, respect the thing itself as it is in itself. My own view of school desegregation is that Eisenhower's solution in Little Rock in 1954 was the right approach. And that not being possible in many jurisdictions, a federally enforced financial equality of school systems would have been nice - although that so difficult a subject it's almost unaddressable in those terms. In Texas, for example, rich cities objected mightily to having their property taxes shunted to poor city's school systems. Again, these not simple issues for the like of you.

And that's the substance of my presence at the moment in this discussion: not to defend, but to object to your brand of ignorance masquerading as knowledge. You read something and think you know enough about the subject to comment on it. In the manner of your comments, you make clear you don't. You could, if you allowed for nuance and complexity and the possibility that your own notions were contingent and speculative, but that's work and where's the fun in that? But it makes you a brown shirt, . — tim wood

Wow four paragraphs and not a thing to say about Biden but about everything but. It's almost like it's all irrelevant :chin:

How exactly did Anita Hill get "shit all over" in the Clarence Thomas hearings? — tim wood

Oh you don't know? Maybe you should ask Joe Biden, who was so worried about his conduct that he issued a half-hearted apology to Hill which to this day she has not accepted:

"As committee chairman, Biden was responsible for calling and questioning witnesses, for controlling the pace of testimony and cross-examination and for defining the tenor of the hearing. His critics say he failed in each regard, calling witnesses inimical to Hill while failing to call corroborating witnesses, forcing Hill to describe in graphic detail scenes of harassment she had suffered, and in general failing to defend Hill’s vulnerability and to direct the hearing. “Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged?” Biden asked Hill at one point.

“He absolutely failed at almost every point to take control of the event and to make it dignified and safe for Anita Hill,” said Michie [, Helena director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University in Texas - SX]. “The other thing he did is that he made her repeat in detail every sexual allegation in front of this panel. And she said repeatedly, ‘It’s all in writing, you have it all in writing.’ And he would say, ‘I know it’s uncomfortable, but we have to do it.'"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/27/jor-biden-anita-hill-clarence-thomas-1991-hearings

Shall we go through the rest of the list? Do you want to go on? Tell me more about the supposed inaccuracies I'm peddling. If Biden was black you'd no doubt be accusing me of being racist too. Too bad you don't get to use that one hey? Must be very sad for you. No worse than being an ignorant ass about history though.

What is "bus segregation in schools"? It doesn't make sense — tim wood

Also, I have no doubt that you cannot make sense of a great deal, but perhaps if you take your morning vitamins you may just be able to get through a couple of paragraphs without overloading your minimal brain capacity:

"In 1975, Biden was representing a state where one of the first major urban school desegregation plans had been ordered by a court. Many white parents in the Wilmington area were angry. In response, Biden sponsored not just the bill limiting courts’ power but also an amendment to an appropriations bill that barred the federal government from withholding funding from schools that remained effectively segregated.

...Biden’s anti-integration efforts didn’t end in 1975. Two years later, he co-authored a bill that barred federal courts from ordering busing plans unless courts found evidence of discriminatory intent. That legislation failed. A 1977 report on school desegregation by the Civil Rights Commission, a federal agency, described Biden’s activities as stymieing school integration.

Federal data analyzed by Johnson and other researchers shows that busing succeeded in narrowing racial achievement gaps before frontal assaults and legislative maneuvers by Biden and others rendered it easier for districts under court order to be released from integration demands".

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/joe-biden-didn-t-just-compromise-segregationists-he-fought-their-n1021626

. What is "bus segregation in schools"? It doesn't make sense. The video of Biden's remarks on Thurmond are here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/biden-praised-segregationist-strom-thurmond-as-closest-friend-who-believed-in-heterogenous-diverse-society
View it and learn the truth of it. How exactly did Anita Hill get "shit all over" in the Clarence Thomas hearings? Biden "likely a sexual predator"? "Likely"? The crime bill, read about it here for the truth of it: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/20/18677998/joe-biden-1994-crime-bill-law-mass-incarceration — tim wood

Thanks for providing sources on some of what I listed, all of which simply repeat what I said :) I do indeed hope people read about it for themselves, given that people like Frank are so incapable of even remotely addressing any of the points raised that the best they can settle for are pearl-clutching and ad homs.

To be fair, one of the worst things about Trump is precisely his ability to capture - like a black hole - what little political energy people have. He's an energy-sink of political discourse. Everything else that matters - that matters even more in many cases - becomes sidelined because people become so apoplectic over Trump that systemic issues, the policy monstrousness of his opponents (i.e Biden), failures of leadership at other levels of government - all fade away or get sucked into this narrowed, monopolized vision of politics where it all ends and begins with Trump.

Yeah I mean how could Biden's mutiple-decade litany of policy shitness ever comapre to a series of irrelavent quotes!

Ah yes, the most powerful argument of all - simply not having one.

I'm Australian where we have equally shit representation - a bunch of rabid Christian loons intent of aping American-style governance of punishing the poor and rewarding the rich.

All his life, Joe Biden has been fighting for the things I think would make the world a much better place. — Frank Apisa

And this is just a fucking joke. Biden, who fought for bus segregation in schools? Who, as late as 2003, eulogised segregationist Strom Thurmond as those 'among his closest friends'? Biden, who let Anita Hill get shit all over in her sexual assault allegations in the Clarence hearings? Biden, who is likely a sexual predator himself and who enjoys touching and sniffing young women - in fact young girls - in public? Biden, who supported the Iraq War unconditionally? Biden, whose support of and engineering of Clinton's Crime Bill led the US to have among the highest rates of incarceration in the world? Biden, who supported DOMA? Biden, who enthusiastically stripped bankruptcy protections from private student loans and helped entrench and expand the sprawling the American debt state? Biden, who has, throughout his career, argued for - and attained - cuts to social security? Biden, who was at Obama's right hand as he laid waste to the Middle East, bailed out Wall Street, deported hundreds and thousands of migrants, and continued a drone war which murdered hundreds of civilians?

Biden has done more harm to the US and the world in his decades long career in politics than Trump could ever aspire to. Trump is a self-interested illiterate wanker doing the bidding of his Republican overloads. Biden's a true fucking believer - he only happened to do it with a bit of charisma, which even now he's lost to the creeping onset of dementia. Biden has fought all his life to make the world a worse place to live in for everyone, and he's been incredibly successful in doing so. For the student-debt problem alone - which, incidentally, he acted in place of credit companies who had given him hundreds and thousands in corporate donations - Biden deserves to be disembowled in public by a pack of hungry rats.

Ha, this was great.

Are you familiar with Damasio? I believe he differentiated between ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ in pretty much the same way you’ve briefly outlined. — I like sushi

Yeah, I briefly referenced Damasio's own distinction earlier in the thread somewhere, and though I've read Descartes' Error, it was a loong time ago. There's definite overlaps with his approach and that of Barrett, though I believe Barrett makes more explicit and makes alot more hay of the fact that emotions have a predictive, inferential role, and are productively thought of in terms of concepts and cateogorizations.

Religion is mind bleach, always has been. The real question is how all Churches are not registered as industrial producers of bleach.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgewm7/gop-states-reopening-early-will-push-people-scared-to-work-off-unemployment

"Republican governors in states like Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina have announced plans to begin reopening their states’ economies despite warnings by health officials that it’s too early to do so. The decisions mean that businesses may soon start calling people back into work before they feel safe, creating a coronavirus-specific dilemma: If people in those states are offered their jobs back, but refuse to take them out of fear for their safety, they will likely no longer qualify for unemployment benefits—even though they’re taking the same precautions as people one state over."

Work or Die. Or just Die. It's all the same to these pigs.

Why would you publish a paper stating that you agree with everything Professor X said?! — jacksonsprat22

Exactly. Literally no one cares about people agreeing or disagreeing with each other.

What I’m interested in is not lengthy quotations which have nothing to do with the OP, but insights into the Greek meaning of being as phusis. — Xtrix

No you're not. You're interested in elaborations on the Heideggarian party line.

Go excuse ignorance somewhere else.

I mean in which universe has "at least he's not the other guy" seemed like an actual campaign strategy? That's meant to turn people out to vote? Oh yes, and couple that with some kind of attempt to vote shame and my gosh that's visionary campaign planning right there. Maybe it's because I'm not American and can see this stuff from a distance, but my God, these kinds of moves are active attempts at losing. I mean maybe that's the point. No one except for the decrepit actually likes Biden anyway - a candidate about as exciting as wet toast - so those the the options that are left. It makes sense but Jeez, at least be self-conscious about it.