Two things about Bernie here: first, to use an idiom that has been floating around for a while, Bernie has always been a compromise choice for the left. He's who you go for because he's an apple that's not entirely spoilt, despite the basket being mush. Second point, related to the first, is that Bernie's vote for this bill is consistent, to a degree, with his voting record. He was on board with Obama's equally shitty bailout in '08 (in fact, this bill is worse), and of course, he voted for ACA despite it being a compromised bill by his own standards.

In this light his acquiescence with respect to the current bill is disappointing but not unexpected. Lesson: politicians won't save you, they're a means to an end, and a limited one at that, even as one should absolutely choose strategic moments to support them.

This is the creeping authoritarianism people need to look out for.

Heidegger contradicts de Beistegui in a number of ways. — Xtrix

Trying to figure out why you think this. In any case if I knew you only wanted to read things that agreed with your preconceptions then I ought not to have posted anything. As you were.

think you got that quote slightly wrong. The usual sentiment that I see has a conjunction, not a dysjunction — Pfhorrest

Ah, my mistake!

Give me liberty or give [the old, the sick, and the poor] death!

Everything I've been whinging about, in a single video:

NOS, you must understand, is selective about whose boots he licks. He's a man of refined taste in State leather - Trump's being of the highest quality, like his steaks.

Considering that 9/11 was used an opportunity to conduct a series of genocidal wars that left millions in the Middle-East in appreciably more wretched conditions and killed even more Americans than died on that day, the current lack of anyone to bomb, invade, and pillage as a response might explain the utter impotence of American leaders who simply lack any other vocaublary of action. Americans will die - have died - as a result. Bitter, tragic irony.

Quick note that the tragedy of the commons is an economic myth and fabrication, or perhaps better, a scenario only possible under extremely abnormal and artificial circumstances.



Or for a quick read on the work on Elinor Ostrom.

Is that alow figure in the "fucking universe"? Because that was the death toll from your normal, standard, every year flue in 2018. — Nobeernolife

No, it isn't. It's a disgrace. Like alot of other things about the US.

100,000 is an extremely low figure for a country like the US whose medical system is extremely disjointed and given the freedom of movement people have. — I like sushi

It is not a low figure. In no fucking universe is 100,000 people drowning in their own lungs a low figure, and anyone who says otherwise can get fucked. This is especially the case for the richest, supposedly 'most advanced' nation on Earth, which at every step along the way has botched its response and exhibited failures of leadership that ought to be, by any rational standard, considered criminal. That the 'medical system is extremely disjointed' is not a given but a social and political failing that itself ought to be subject to extreme critique and remedy.

Heidegger in fact contradicts much of what's referenced here. — Xtrix

?

"In the Physics Aristotle conceives of φῠ́σῐς as the beingness (οὐσία) of a particular (and in itself limited) region of beings, things that grow as distinct from things made. With regard to their way of Being, these beings stem precisely from φῠ́σῐς, of which Aristotle therefore says: ... Φῠ́σῐς is one branch of Being [among others] for (the many-branched tree of) beings." Aristotle says this in a treatise which later, in the definitive ordering of his writings by the Peripatetic school, was put with those treatises which have since borne the name μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ [ 'metaphysics' -SX], writings which in fact belong to the φυσικὰ although they are not counted with them. The sentence we just read comes from chapter three of the treatise that is now called Book Γ (IV) of the Metaphysics, and the information it gives about φῠ́σῐς is identical with the guiding principle put forth in Physics, Book B, chapter one, which we have just interpreted: φῠ́σῐς is one kind of οὐσία.

But that same treatise of the Metaphysics says exactly the opposite in its first chapter: οὐσία (the Being of beings as such in totality) is φῠ́σῐς τῐς, something like φῠ́σῐς. But Aristotle is far from meaning to say that Being as such is, properly speaking, that kind of φῠ́σῐς which a bit later he explicitly characterizes as only one branch of Being among others. Rather, this barely expressed assertion that οὐσία is φῠ́σῐς is an echo of the great origin of Greek philosophy, the first origin of Western philosophy. In this origin Being was thought as φῠ́σῐς such that the φῠ́σῐς which Aristotle conceptualized can only be a late derivative of the original φῠ́σῐς". (H, On the Being and Conception of Φῠ́σῐς in Aristotle's Physics)

And in the Introduction, Heidegger explicitly attributes the 'narrowing' of φῠ́σῐς as 'already within Greek philosophy', so much so that Aristotle conserves (as above) but an 'echo' of the original meaning of φῠ́σῐς, and that the 'greatness' of Greek philosophy "came to an end in greatness with Aristotle": "What is, as such and as a whole, the Greeks call phusis. Let it be mentioned just in passing that already within Greek philosophy, a narrowing of the word set in right away, although its original meaning did not disappear from the experience, the knowledge, and the attitude of Greek philosophy. An echo of knowledge about the original meaning still survives in Aristotle, when he speaks of the grounds of beings as such".

The whole third chapter of the Introduction - tellingly titled 'The Restriction of Being' - is more or less an account of how Plato and Aristotle fucked up (or began the fucking-up-of, completed by Latin translators) the perfectly good notion of φῠ́σῐς that the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus and Parmenides in particular, had - at least according to Heidi's as-usual idiosyncratic reading of philosophical history.

Not here to entertain hypotheticals, go play toy murder somewhere else.

It's hard to imagine the cognitive dissonance at work when people actually think that a projection of 100,000 deaths is 'good job'. What an incredible, utterly heinous fuck up. A CV related death nearly every ten minutes in NY, being generous. For once I actually feel somewhat sorry for Americans. What a fucking tragedy. I hope you decapitate all your leaders, including and especially your head of state.

StreetlightX who seemed to equate the notion of regulating exotic wild animal trade to being racist — schopenhauer1

I said it once in this thread earlier and will say it again with embellishment: I neither said nor implied this so kindly fuck off.

'Tis probably one of my desert island books. Like, if I could read no other books but that and a few others for the rest of my life, I'd be OK with that.

Cop out.

It's nonetheless an important question to ask why indeed there are tens of thousands of deaths from the common flu regardless. I haven't looked into it with any depth, but it does seem that the distribution of death skews heavily towards those in the lowest socio-economic brackets. So while the WhAt AbOuT tHe CoMmOn FlU? Question is stupid and disingenuous, there's lots to be said about the continuity of failure with respect to the treatment of both.

Don't see why we can't throw all of them into a firepit.

The fact of the matter is that capitalism has always included state intervention. Capitalists try to capture the state using their economic power. It's in their interest to do so. The mythical "pure capitalism" that has never existed is nothing but a fairy tale used to conceal the downsides of the real and existing economic system. — Echarmion

:clap:

From Miguel de Beistegui's Truth and Genesis:

"From Parmenides, Aristotle retains the conception of philosophy as addressing beings in their being, where being refers not to some privileged being or element, in the way of the physicists, but to their common origin or ground, or to the principle from which they unfold. This is a principle that lies beyond and is distinct from the realm of physical things; it is, quite literally, meta-physical. Yet, from Heraclitus, and from the Ionian physics echoed in his work, Aristotle retains a conception of the world in which we live as a world essentially in motion, as a world of becoming, yet a world that does not fall so much under the authority of the senses and of a type of approximate knowledge known as opinion, as it is incorporated within philosophical discourse, thus raising the highly complex philosophical question of the relation between being and becoming, between the metaphysical (which continues to speak in the name of a certain conception of Φῠ́σῐς) and the physical. With the birth of philosophy as the science of beings as such and as a whole, or as a questioning of beings as to their being, philosophy asserts itself from the start as the twofold science of physics and meta-physics.

As far as Aristotle’s physics is concerned, I shall limit myself to a few remarks. The first and perhaps most decisive feature that needs to be stressed is that this is a physics, and thus a conception of natural phenomena, that is not mathematical but ontological and metaphysical through and through. This is what distinguishes it from modern physics. Aristotle’s physics remains entirely within the confines and under the jurisdiction of metaphysics. The Aristotelian cosmos, for example, is not compatible with Euclidean geometry, and his considerations regarding the structure of the universe, which he sees as metaphysically curved and circular, do not even attempt to reconcile it with Euclidean geometry. Strangely enough, it is perhaps closer to Riemann’s geometry (at least potentially), which Einstein used in his demonstration of the physical curvature of space-time.

For Aristotle, as for the physics up to Galileo and Descartes, geometry is not the fundamental science of the real world; it is not the science that expresses the essence and fundamental structure of that world. It is only an abstract science which, in the eyes of physics, itself the science of what is, can only ever serve as an adjunct. It is perception, and not mathematical speculation, experience, or a priori geometrical reasoning, that constitutes the bedrock for the true science of the real world. This is precisely the approach that will be overturned by Galileo. In short, Aristotle’s conception of nature cannot be abstracted from the ontological considerations within which it occurs.

...The second point concerns the most relevant aspects of the Aristotelian conception of nature. As an immediate effect of the first aspect of Aristotle’s conception of the universe, one disqualified by modern science, it should be noted that the Aristotelian cosmos is finite, differentiated, and hierarchical: it is composed of various spheres, vertically ordered, each sphere corresponding to a degree of ontological perfection higher than that of the sphere immediately below, all spheres being moved by their inner telos more fully expressed in the higher spheres. At the top of this pyramidal structure lies the divine principle, the motionless origin of all motion, or the Prime Mover.

Aristotle emphasizes that metaphysics (which he also calls “first philosophy”) is required only to the extent that there is indeed a motionless reality, without the existence of which physics would be the primordial and universal science. It is the very existence of a motionless reality that turns physics — the object of which is the kind of reality that has the principle of its own motion and rest within itself, in contrast to the technical object — into a merely secondary philosophy. For Aristotle, Φῠ́σῐς does not designate the whole of reality, but only “a specific kind of beings.” There is, therefore, a reality of being, which the world of becoming does not exhaust."

StreetlightX who seemed to equate the notion of regulating exotic wild animal trade to being racist. — schopenhauer1

That's not what I said nor implied.

:up:

And it brings Kant to mind. What would he have said? He could perhaps acknowledge (at least the possibility) that the mind is a fold in the fabric of reality. — Pneumenon

Kant is interesting because because although we can only know the world through our representations of it, Kant, in all his rigour, says that the same applies to the self: self-knowledge is not exempt from representation and the self has no special status in this regard: "I, as intelligence and a thinking subject, know myself as an object that is thought, insofar as I am given to myself … like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself … I therefore have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself." Elsewhere: "Of this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X … This I or He or It … is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever".

This is the basis of what alot of commentators have referred to as the Kantian 'split subject': a subject at once both an object like any other and that which is a condition of any knowledge whatsoever. In the words of Markus Gabriel: "We have no grasp of that which constitutes our world even though it is we who perform said constitution. The uncanny stranger begins to pervade the sphere of the subject, threatening its identity from within. Kant is thus one of the first to become aware of the intimidating possibility of total semantic schizophrenia inherent in the anonymous transcendental subjectivity as such". The possibility of madness is one of the marks of the real in the subject - in thought - and not merely 'beyond it'. Kant himself vacillates on this point and it causes all sorts of issues, but there's definitely a way to read Kant as opening the issue of 'subject as object' in a way that's worth pursuing.

They rummage around their mental locker looking for something they can know that is not in their own minds, and find nothing. — Pneumenon

The case against idealism has never turned upon finding something that is not of the mind; it turns instead on showing how the mind is itself 'non-ideal', how the mind itself already belongs to an outside: the mind as an involution of the outside, a fold in a fabric. It is the nature of mind itself on which the fate of idealism hangs: as origin as or product? Thought itself is a secrection, already impersonal, socialized, involuntary, alien. Thought as a monument or index of what is not thought.

Nah, 'tis incredulous - lacking in credibility, but without the positive association that 'incredible' now has.

The opposite has always seemed to me to be the case: enough time philosophizing, and idealism seems more and more incredulous - a sign that one has not spent enough time thinking about the nature of things.

https://nationalfile.com/india-naked-man-in-coronavirus-quarantine-escapes-bites-woman-to-death/

:brow: :death: :fear:

Yeah.

Welcome to the forum and great first post! In some sense you're entirely right - you can cut up the world any which way you please, and no will be able to tell you that you are 'wrong' or 'right' about any particular selection (apple or applorange). However! The fact that any such cutting can take place does not imply that all such cutting is arbitrary. Indeed there are good reasons why one individuates apples and oranges, beginning with the fact that each exhibits a certain invariance with respect to the form of each. I can pick up the apple, and all of the apple, as it were, will move along with my arm, even as the orange on the table next to it remains where it is.

Note that in this simple case, what has in some manner individuated the apple is not a mere 'perception' - or at least, is not only a perception - but a certain action, a doing. No matter of conceptualization is at work here: a mechanical arm, programmed to pick up the nearest object which might in this case be an apple, will still pick up only the apple.

However even if we remained at the level of visual perception, invariance still plays an important role. It is important, when looking at the apple, that the apple does not arbitrarily change its form as we look at it. If you were to change your angle of view by say, 40 degrees by taking a few steps to the left, it is what doesn't change as much as what does change that allows you to see this apple as one: the apple retains a certain axis; it's 'back' changes as you move (you can't see the whole of the apple); the quality of light that reflects off it's surface also alters in certain ways and not others. None of this is merely conceptual or arbitrary, but reflects certain relations of movement and specular quality that would be the same if any other person with similar perceptual capacity moved in the same way (there is indeed an objectivity to what you see).

The trick here is in recognising that our relationship to the world is not, first and foremost, conceptual, but bodily. Not only are we bodies, but we relate to other things as bodies as well, and bodies offer each other certain affordances that are not, first and foremost, conceptual or arbitrary. What is misleading about your picture is the fact that it is a picture at all: a flat, 2D image that, if you were to turn your screen 40 degrees to the left, would not make the fruits also look like they were displaced at an angle of 40 degrees.

Importantly, this is not to deny that there are no 'absolutely individuated things'. But the choice is not between things individuated in absolute terms, or in arbitrary terms. Rather, the world itself must be understood to be relational: absolutely relational, even, such that everything is individuated only ever in relation to other things, without, for all that, those individuations being written off as merely arbitrary. Relational 'properties' have no less necessity than 'absolute' ones. It is necessary, by dint of the structure of the apple and the constitution of my body and its movement, that I see the apple in this way, and not other. So the initial dilemma posed - between absolute necessity or arbitrary nothingness - must be denied. What needs to be acknowledged instead is a certain necessity that belongs to the relative itself.

But I am still not sure what he means by "folk tradition", why doesn't he just say "tradition", what are these little folkers doing there? — Pussycat

It's a diminutive of course. Non-virtue signalling, if you will.

At least 15,000 people who may have caught the new coronavirus from a Sikh religious leader are under strict quarantine in northern India after the man died of COVID-19.

The 70-year-old preacher, Baldev Singh, had returned from a trip to Europe's virus epicentre Italy and Germany before he went preaching in more than a dozen villages in Punjab state.

Bad luck if true, I guess. But politically correct for the current administration, as the case is about a sikh, not a hindu. — ssu

:sad:

RE: the above, it's been interesting to track the reaction to the virus in India, which acted with extreme rapidity and decisiveness long before CV became a standing threat in the country itself. They've had <1K infections so far and enacted travel restrictions and mass gathering bans as infections were growing in other countries. They've had the 'advantage' - if you can call it that - of knowing full well that their health institutions will not be able to handle the pandemic if it grows out of control there, so have been crazy pro-active in trying to prevent it's intrusion into the community. Seems to be holding fast so far, one only hopes it keeps up.

--

Otherwise, one of the interesting effects this virus might have is to forge far stronger international cooperation with respect to health. Everything's so interconnected now that an outbreak in India or any other developing nation will inevitably have pretty terrible effects on the so-called developed world. The global north will be forced - out of sheer self-interest - to help fund, train and shore up the healthcare systems of the rest of the world in order to contain its spread. Virus' don't give a flying fig about borders, and, if played right, nationalism will be seen as a strategy of massive failure with respect to a properly global threat. This comes with dangers of its own but I'm hopeful here that this is one of the few cases where a rising tide lifting all boats may actually be meaningful.

Haha, fair enough, I forget that thread exists sometimes.

You might enjoy this piece by Catherine Malabou:

https://transversal.at/blog/to-quarantine-from-quarantine

"Such is perhaps the most difficult challenge in a lockdown situation: to clear a space where to be on one’s own while already separated from the community. Being cooped up on a boat with a few others of course generates a feeling of estrangement, but estrangement is not solitude, and solitude is, in reality, what makes confinement bearable. And this is true even if one is already on one’s own. I noticed that what made my isolation extremely distressing was in fact my incapacity to withdraw into myself. To find this insular point where I could be my self (in two words). I am not talking here of authenticity, simply of this radical nakedness of the soul that allows to build a dwelling in one’s house, to make the house habitable by locating the psychic space where it is possible to do something, that is, in my case, write.

I noticed that writing only became possible when I reached such a confinement within confinement, a place in the place where nobody could enter and that at the same time was the condition for my exchanges with others. When I was able to get immersed in writing, conversations through Skype, for example, became something else. They were dialogues, not veiled monologues. Writing became possible when solitude started to protect me from isolation. One has to undress from all the coverings, clothes, curtains, masks, and meaningless chattering that still stick to one’s being when one is severed from others."

Yeah, the CCP obviously fucked its initial response too, to the extent that it was one of the few issues that had - for a time - people seriously upset with the government even though all the filtering, especially after the death of Li Wenliang, the 'whistleblower' doctor. It's hard to imagine why anyone would think China has been 'let off the hook' by anyone. All through February, China was a punching bag for everyone for whom this virus was the lot of exotic foreigners with their bizarre cultural practices. In many cases Chinese people - people I know - where verbally abused on the street, and in some cases physically assaulted.

It was absolutely a skipped rock. Current apocalypse listening:

There's no such thing. Lol — ZzzoneiroCosm

The currently existing state of China begs to differ.

That said, technically all capitalism is state capitalism, as Polyani pointed out long ago.

Yeah not like it's state capitalism or anything lol.

Uh-oh the troll is getting indignant keep it up everyone.

The right-wing media will blame the CDC and FDA, treating them as individual institutions uncoupled from the Trump administration. — Echarmion

You were almost right. Our resident shit-for-brains has been sicced onto the WHO instead. We should take bets next time.

That's not true sometimes people are stupid and think otherwise - that's not necessarily capitalism's fault.