1. Was Jesus' resurrection only a work of literature with no physical grounds that such a thing occurred? — saw038

Whether Jesus was raised from the dead is a secondary question. The primary question is, "Does God exist?" If God exists, Jesus could have been raised from the dead, because God could put life back into a dead body if he chose to do so. Of course, it is possible that God exists and Jesus wasn't raised from the dead. Maybe the Jews were right: God exists, but the Messiah has not come yet. Jesus was a great guy, but not The One, maybe.

If the Christians were right that God exists, but wrong about Jesus being the Son of God, then they were in deep trouble when the guy they thought was incarnated God (if they actually thought that -- they might not have at the time) was crucified, died, and on the third day was still totally dead. The disaster was Jesus' death, not the lack of a resurrection. He doesn't seem to have had time, as far as we can tell, to build up a deep following to take over for him upon his demise. The 12 apostles and followers had only had Jesus for 3 years--not very long. Even if he was God incarnate, the material Jesus was working with was not the finest grain of wood. Even as the endgame crisis approached, they kept drifting off into la la land.

The Gospels, and Paul's letters, were not written to be literature. Sure, one can read/teach the Gospels and the Old Testament as literature, and some of it is just fine as literature goes, but the Bible is best understood and appreciated as the faithfuls' account of God's actions in the world.

2. Was Jesus' resurrection a true story that transcended the realm of physical laws as we currently perceive them? — saw038

If Jesus was resurrected... yes, it was a very scandalous violation of the universe's rules and regulations. How DARE God pull a stunt like that on us -- who does he think he is?
Oh, well, I see ...

I don't think God exists, and therefore I can't think God raised Jesus from the grave. If I were changed back into thinking that God does exist, then it would be quite possible to believe that For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

I liked this piece from The Guardian "A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell".

It touches on a number of the good observations made here.

It would be helpful if everyone listed their obsessions in their profile. That way one could more efficiently dismiss posters whose obsessions are not a good match with one's own obsessions.

You didn't give that impression. There are children present who might have fastened on to panaceas like automation or the infinite don't-be-evilness of Google. I was just heading them off at the pass.

That is to say that women would only have equality if men allowed it. — m-theory

Ah, but if women are responsible for their own equality, a lot of that spilt ink about oppression goes down the drain.

My gut feeling is that we would all (men and women alike) rather be other-oppressed than be failed self-liberators. If we fail in our own liberation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we fail at overthrowing our oppressor, well, they were just too oppressive to beat. Not our fault!

Does this not also apply to other oppressed groups? Many blacks, gays, latinos, asians, poor whites, etc. claim that they FEEL oppressed, that they are forced to be second or third rate persons by THEM. Blacks and gays both made a lot of progress when they got together in groups and asserted their black and gay pride to one another, then began acting on the premises of that pride. "I'm just as good as you are."

That police kill a disproportionate number of blacks is not a problem of insufficient black pride. The number of blacks killed by each other is.

That organisms communicate isn't in doubt. Birds, for one, noticeably communicate a lot. Plants communicate -- chemically. They issue simple relevant messages to like kinds, "being chewed on". Communication requires only mutually recognizable signals, not language. While clicking aphids may communicate, they don't have a language of clicks.

Going up the evolutionary ladder to dogs (who are more amenable to neurological study than dolphins), we find they are closer to us than mere signaling. When you talk to your dog, it's left and right hemispheres are processing what the dog can make sense of in the same way that we do -- emotive loading in the right hemisphere, word meaning (sit, speak, lay down, good dog, drop it, shut up, etc.) in the left hemisphere.

The chapter goes into detail on these four demands — Moliere

Great. But it isn't just old fashioned, out-of-date old-leftist-fogies who say the first demand that needs to be met is "Hand over the keys and the cash." Taking possession of society's wealth (mostly in the hands of a tiny minority) is the only way to assure that the basic income is high enough, that working conditions are good for all workers, especially those doing the dirty work that is necessary but not worth automating, and that automation is in the interests of the workers and consumers.

Let's not think that Apple, Google, and Uber have our best interests in mind, or if McDonalds brings in the all-robot-fast-food operation, that we should all say "hallelujah".

#2 and #3 could be implemented tomorrow - theoretically. The current national representative government (House/Senate) isn't able to wipe it's ass, let alone pass progressive legislation. Neither item is particularly radical -- both were floated in the 1960s -- Milton Friedman thought a guaranteed income was a good idea.

Automation has been introduced into all manner of work, from surgery to soy beans. The technology has been developed far enough to eliminate a large share of the jobs the work force performs IF owners of work places decided to restructure their operations to eliminate 70% of their workers.

We could practically achieve the first three points of the plan by... oh, maybe 2036. That's only 20 years down the line and with a very large investment to get the technology in place, everywhere. (Successful automation doesn't require state-of-the-art equipment in everybody's back pocket.)

Automation will eliminate jobs. Indeed, that's the whole point of automation.

Beware. Automation hasn't been wielded by workers for their own good. It has been wielded by management for command and control and cost reduction. Even if work sucks, that doesn't mean that having no work will be better. Even the suckyest work place is likely the source of many people's vital social relationships. It's often the very suckyness of work that has bound people together.

Replacing the workplace as a critical social institution is going to take a lot more than weakening the work ethic. (One doesn't have to be a reprobate republican to wonder about how strong the Protestant Work Ethic even is. I see some evidence of it, but not lots of evidence, not everywhere.)

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-opening — Pneumenon

Maybe I heard this before, don't remember. But I fetched it up on YouTube. It's "hard music" -- one has to attend to it; hear it several times. Think about it.

For this piece, I think it helps to see what they are doing. Video #1 is the Alban Berg Quartet



Video 2 is a recording with an animated score -- it's an impression of the score, not a rolling copy of the printed work. I thought the animation added something -- something to look at, for sure. I tried following the actual score, but this was a bit over my head for that. Might not be for you. The recording is maybe not so hot--think of this version as a 'study' experience.

. . . I can't say I understand this as a response to my post, but okay. — Terrapin Station

I didn't mean to offend. Or confuse, either.

I was in a flippant mood and felt like saying something disparaging about "fine art". Actually, if I were very chilly (not in danger of freezing), there are still works by masters (I guess they are masters) that I would burn rather than shiver. I'm thinking of paintings with lots of fat little wingéd cupids, maidens in ecstasy (or severe pain -- hard to tell, sometimes), nauseating pastel colors, insipid angels, etc. I'd save a second rate Jackson Pollock over those.

And then there are works by masters for which it might be better to die in the cold than burn. Actually, there are quite a few of those works.

"Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work"... Didn't read it.

Saying "Post" something-or-other makes it sound like the writer has perceived a major turning. Maybe. Some time, maybe 25 years ago, a socialist group I was in was batting around the idea that workers were becoming unnecessary. automation and robotics have been around quite a while. An unnecessary working class flies in the face of the orthodoxy that labor creates all wealth. It also screws up the model of the economy where workers produce and buy, pumping money through the economic plumbing.

I have no problem with mechanized, electronic systems replacing many workers. The crappier jobs (a majority) could, should, and damned well ought to be replaced by machines and electronics.

There are two big problems with the guaranteed basic income idea: One big one is that maybe a majority of the population are not prepared--mentally, physically, or emotionally--to have decades of life without work. For a substantial percentage, life-without-work is more of a nightmare than a joyous future. It's sort of like disability: having the status of "unable to work" becomes an additional disability.

The other big one is whether there will be enough wealth available -- and granted to the unoccupied, unproductive population to maintain a life worth living. The capitalist class is rather stingy.

Were the revolution to have occurred, and the capitalist class was disposed of (nicely -- turned into ordinary people) the problem of the stingy ruling class would be eliminated, but then we would enter the unexplored, uncharted territory of an economy based on altogether different principles than what we (anybody) has dealt with so far.

That said, I've always enjoyed time without work -- on unemployment, living on savings, and early retirement. There is a reason why people are paid to work: nobody would do it for free. I had a couple of jobs which were so interesting I would have done them for nothing (for a few months, not years) but most jobs are devoid of intrinsic reward. A majority of jobs are flat, unsatisfying, dull, vaguely humiliating [it's not the work, it's the staff], unstimulating--and it goes downhill from there.

Work might be more satisfying under a different model of work. Working on the railroad that workers own might be better than working for Warren Buffet on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. Working in a retail coop should be better than working for Walmart.

...art ...Provides conversational fodder, leisure activities . . . all sorts of things. — Terrapin Station

A room full of large, fine oil paintings with heavy wooden frames could be broken up and fed into the fire, keeping away the chill. Adding the original hand-written scores of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and the Beatles to the fire might allow one to heat up a large kettle of bath water, provided one had had the good sense to first rip up some silk tapestries to plug the holes in the wall first. Pieces of the Bayeux Tapestry would make a nice wash cloth, bath towel, and bathroom mat set.

Just Joking he said.

Another thought would be that without a Wrong we could never settle a moral discussion as there is nothing but conflicting opinions butting up against each other. — shmik

Without a Wrong, or a Right, I don't see how one could settle on one's own decision, never mind settling a dispute with someone else. There has to be some agreement on what it is that is most important.

If we pile up all the moral abstractions-with-or-without-concrete-consequences that we cart around with us, one or two of those values is going to end up at the top of the heap -- the thing that we reference most often to settle decisions within our own minds, or attempt to settle with others. What is most Right? For some it is Security. For others Wealth. Comfort. Motherland or Fatherland. Art. Peace. Knowledge. Victory. Sex. Independence. Food. Love. High Status. God. Liberty. Visible Success. Survival. And so on--one or two being most compelling for individuals.

People employ reasoning, but they are driven by emotions. The thing we really value the most is the thing that has the strongest emotional power. That thing is going to determine what we feel is most Right most of the time, and (I think) will drive our reasoning.

Love, Art, Peace, or Knowledge might be the thing we profess to value most, but it is more likely to be something like High Status (relative to one's peers) or Survival and Security that drives us. There is likely to be a difference between what we say is the most important value (like Love and Truth) and what really drives our behavior (like Sex or Comfort). A jarring difference would be the normal human situation.

So, we may reasonably object to everything the Nazis (or Communists, or Republicans) represent, and pronounce them Wrong, but what really makes us hate them as WRONG is that they are a threat to our own secure orderly life, our survival, and liberty to do what we feel like doing. Justice may not figure that highly in our motivation.

The concept of Right and Wrong were flattened out for ardent Nazi Party members, ardent SS operatives, and like kinds: The Fuhrer's wishes are the only fact that matters. The further a German was distanced from this black hole, the more one could exercise one's own sense of right and wrong. It was the task of the Gestapo and National Socialist Party to make sure that no one felt that they were too far from the wishes of the Fuhrer, or your local Gestapo operative.

Per your link... Only the most philistine slobs would serve a cocktail in a plastic cup. Even if your vodka comes in a plastic bottle and costs pocket change a pint, you wouldn't drink it out of a plastic cup. (Cheap vodka is properly consumed directly from the bottle. It may be passed if it's a communion.

From the Sydney (AU) Post: Train running over man delayed 90 minutes. Passengers irritated by delay.

BTW, it wasn't an accident. IF the train had arrived on time, the bomb on the bridge would have exploded and the train would have crashed into the flood-swolen river. A woman had been asked to choose between throwing Banno under the train, or killing the one authentic, oppressed, colonialized, colored, transgendered, intersectional feminist on the train. Since it was a woke middle-class female adjunct philosophy instructor who did the choosing, she, of course, opted to kill the white man. (See the thread "wtf is feminism these days".)

SINCE everyone may not be familiar with motte-and-bailey arguments, here is a brief discussion (This is at "Practical Ethics" an Oxford University site.)

From this page there is a link to an amusing discussion of motte-and-bailey arguments by a poster at Landover Baptist Church.



Green Alert: The site is satirical.

There is something similar about the threatening, edgy, hostility of right wing religious zealots and status-seeking, intersectional, oppressed, colored, female gendered, colonized zealots. There's a If you are not FOR us... (and we'll decide how "for us" you are, and whether you even can even count as "for us") then you are AGAINST us which you almost certainly are if you happen to have a penis, especially a white one.

And when Henry VIII wasn't divorcing or beheading a non-heir-bearing wife, he was busy burning monasteries -- partly to fulfill the Long Range Landscape Plan which called for romantic monastic ruins, but mostly because he was busy seizing their Roman Catholic wealth -- for his own use, and power.

Your interesting OP is keeping me from getting to church this morning. I hope you are aware of the negative effect on my morals your writing has.

The pre-modern ages, on the other hand, were concerned with good and evil. ...if men did not, by a power structure, have to be devoted to their women, most of them would have treated women like nothing more than cattle that they would use and throw away after. — Agustino

What is the time of your dividing line between pre-modern and modern? 300 years ago or 3,000? 10,000--back to the time of the first buildings in Jericho?

This view of history is characteristic of modern consciousness — Agustino

Maybe intellectual discourse hasn't always been concerned with power structures, but those who had power or who were challenging a power have always been concerned about it. The Pharaohs, the kings of Babylon, the Roman emperors, the first feudal lord in his first small castle, the cruise director abroad a pillaging Viking longboat have all been pretty clearly concerned about power. And so have the recipients of exercised power.

Because order still requires to be maintained. If it will not be maintained by the traditional power structures, then it will be maintained by the authoritarianism of the state - which is much worse. — Agustino

Well, I don't know... is order maintained by the state actually any worse than order maintained by other power structures--church, corporation, family...? If there is no state sufficiently strong to maintain order, then some other institution will become like a state, maybe the church, or the corporation, the local strongman. Is a secular authoritarian worse than a religious authoritarian?

The state will move in to deal with this - it will take over children, how they are raised up, and so forth (out of wedlock birth is at 40% in US - up from 5% 50 years ago) - as a way to solve the problem that has been created. Soon we will slide once again into a totalitarianism - which is the necessary result of all forms of progressivism. — Agustino

The number of children born "out of wedlock" -- what a quant phrase that has become -- is yet another item in Hilary's basket of deplorables. [The out-of-wedlock rate in 2013 among Hispanic women was 53.2 percent. For African American women the rate was 71.4 percent. White women gave birth out of marriage at a rate of 29.3 percent in 2013, the CDC said. Aug 14, 2014]

But... while agreeing that 40% bastardy is deplorable, I'm not willing to agree that "totalitarianism is the necessary result of all forms of progressivism." You might, perhaps, have committed a sweeping generalization there.

The virtues will teach people how to be kind to one another, how to respect one another, how to care for the feelings of one another. — Agustino

Sounds good. We all like virtues, don't we? What, exactly, is the program for returning to the saving virtues of Aristotelianism? I'm thinking it would take a fairly robust exercise of power to throw the switch that gets the social trolley off the track leading to perdition and onto the track leading to salvation.

It's a bit tricky, because "virtues" are in themselves not active agents. The virtues of mutual kindness, caring, and respect are propagated by doing the virtues, not in teaching or being taught--though teaching virtue is a necessary thing. (Just "Be ye doers of the word...")

Climate change, for example, is a racial issue because it's going to impact on different racial and enthic groups in different ways. Many parts of the world do not have the technology or capacity respond to the effects of climate change. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Headline in the New York Times: WORLD WILL END TOMORROW. WOMEN AND MINORITIES TO BE DISPROPORTIONATELY AFFECTED.

I don't think anybody has the resources to respond adequately or smoothly to the unpleasant challenges of global warming.

Just consider the cost of the intensified storms, flooding, droughts, and forest fires the US has experienced so far: In the last 6 years climate change has cost just the US around $150 billion. Two hail storms in Texas in March and April, 2016, lasting just a couple of hours each, cost $5.6 billion. How could that be? A lot of very large hail (up to 4.5 inches in diameter) and high winds struck the heavily populated area of Dallas - Fort Worth - Plano, TX. (Information from NOAA).

Granted, these are manageable in a multi-trillion dollar economy. But Hurricane Sandy cost $60 billion alone, and that damage is still being repaired. There are a lot of heavily populated flood-prone cities. A good share of Boston, for instance, was built on filled-in ocean-side marshes. New York took an unexpected beating from Sandy's flooding. So would Washington DC and other cities. Then there are the gulf-coast cities... New Orleans, for instance.

The US does not have the resources to smoothly relocate 20 million people from east and southern coastal regions, cope with a year round forest fire threat, periodic severe flooding anywhere a heavy, slow-moving rain front stalls, drought, tornados, hurricanes, forest fires heat waves, and other threats (insects, disease...) as the effects of global warming intensify. Let's hope the San Andreas Fault doesn't finally let loose the Big One.

So, Bangladesh is in far worse shape. There many millions of people live just a little ways above the average high-water mark, which keeps rising. They do not have the resources -- or the territory -- to move everyone into higher and dryer land. Where are these 30 million people going to go? India? Burma? Australia? China? California? Scotland? Uzbekistan?

I don't think it's a manageable problem. Global warming does and will disturb all plant, animal, and human ecologies and we probably will not be able to cope--which means the crises will not be met with adequate and graciously humane responses.

"We" didn't do "global warming" to "them". No one even suspected that there would be a long-term consequence to burning all the fossil fuel we could get our hands on until fairly recently--and already it was too late. The countries that burned a lot of coal and oil did so because it was there, and it was readily accessible, reasonably cheap, and it unleashed tremendous energy which we put to good use (more or less).

Global warming is a global disaster, a human catastrophe.

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If rage is the rational response to these things, should I then project this rage at myself? — VagabondSpectre

No. You should not. It's not healthy for privileged males to feel as bad as relatively privileged feminists would have us feel. That advice, of course, is coming from an unrepentant W.A.S.P. male,

Not feeling guilty is a privilege, and since I'm privileged... I choose to not feel guilty. I don't feel guilty about the sun never setting on the British Empire. I don't feel guilty about manifest destiny, either, or the genocide of Native Americans. I don't feel guilty about the Holocaust. Guilt is the appropriate response for wrongful acts that one has committed. There are certainly many strong responses appropriate for all the wrongs of history, but guilt isn't one of them. Rage against the crimes of the past seems a bit beside the point, too.

I would not claim that everyone is a potential murderer (though there is some evidence that just about anybody might commit murder under the right circumstances) but I do insist that there is no group of like-minded people on earth who are incapable of launching atrocities against their enemies, their neighbors, and anyone who gets in the way. Were feminists to actually form a matriarchal state, they would be as prone to commit all the crimes of a patriarchal state, given the same amount of time in which to perform them--their high-minded rhetoric notwithstanding.

This isn't a reason to celebrate or gloat. It's just that there is no Promised Land of milk and honey. No matter where we go, there we are -- and we are a problem we have not come close to solving.

I didn't listen to the whole talk, but long enough to hear that she has a coherent, reasoned view of history. From her perspective, big dick white males did indeed rape, colonize, co-opt, and corrupt the colored world, in oppressions of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. Rage is the appropriate response to this construction, though she wasn't raging here (as far as I watched).

From my perspective, what is universally true is that whoever happens to have superior power tends to expand at the expense of those with inferior power. Europe colonized so much of the world because it had superior power derived from superior technology (per J. Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel). It is also universally true that the recipients of colonization do not like it--no reason why they should. When they can, they revolt.

Homo sapiens behave this way. It's what we do. It's who we are. There isn't an acre of land worth having anywhere that somebody else hasn't tried to take it away from the previous occupants. This is true everywhere: in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. People accumulate, and those who are the most successful accumulators, as a rule, do not give very much away to less successful accumulators. Zama Joshi can look to her ancestral homeland (India) for vivid examples of this.

Identity politics focuses intensely on the specific over the general, which can (but doesn't have to) set the stage for an experience of continuous multi-point oppression. At any moment, in any location some specific aspect of an identity group is being oppressed, discriminated against, abused, disrespected, discounted, and so on. The narrow focus does not allow for a wider perspective (like, maybe at a particular moment nothing untoward was happening).

The longer, wider view doesn't miss the fact of maintained structural disadvantages and exploitation, but it allows one to also view the progress that has been made in reducing disadvantages and exploitation. The wider view makes it a bit easier to maintain emotional equanimity, which is damned useful in "the struggle".

This is really a helpful summary. Thanks.

these kinds of people are a minority, but unfortunately they are the loudest and they are very very angry at times. — VagabondSpectre

The example provided in the video seems fairly far from ideology and much closer to someone who is in need of a sedative. Winding oneself up that way is either playing a "game of uproar" or it is uncontrolled anger. In either case, it was clinically interesting.

There is moderation and then there is immoderation.

When it comes to the nature/nurture debate I think it is clear that it's not really a matter of the one or the other. — Wilco Lensink

Right. Nature and nurture interact in enormously complex ways all the time.

Are these phenomena "simply" chemicals having a mental effect? Does every psychological phenomenon have a biological counterpart or neural correlate or something like that? — Wilco Lensink

Animal cells communicate with each other electrically and chemically. Sometimes chemicals "cause" emotions, and sometimes chemicals "communicate" emotions. For instance:

If you are walking in the woods and you see a big snake on the path in front of you, you will probably have very strong feelings. Sighting the snake is the cause. The emotion "fear" is the response. As soon as the snake is recognized, a signal is sent to the adrenal glands (located on your kidneys) to squirt some adrenalin (the fight or flight chemical) into the blood stream. In just a second you feel a tremendous reaction and you jump back away from the snake, and a couple of seconds later you are ready for action. If the big snake turns out to be a tree root, you will still feel totally charged up for a little while, until the adrenalin is used up by the body's cells.

A new mother and father feel a rush of warm fuzzy emotion when they hold their baby. You also feel warm and fuzzy when you have wonderful sexual experience with somebody you love. Where does this warm and fuzzy feeling come from? The two parents went to a great deal of trouble to have a baby and they are very happy about it. This is the objective situation. So also is the good feeling of wonderful sex with a lover. But... Brain cells use electricity and chemicals to communicate. When the parents hold their baby, when you hold your lover close, the hypothalamus emits oxytocin. Oxytocin is the messenger that brings good feelings as a result of real experiences. The baby, your lover, is the cause. The chemical messenger is the result.

Now, if a researcher squirted some oxytocin up your nose, you would then feel warm and fuzzy and your reactions to the people around you would reflect the presence of the chemical. You would, it has been shown, trust them more under the oxytocin influence than you would have without it. (The effect wears off, but the added trust might linger for a while.)

The hypothalamus doesn't just pop off some oxytocin at random. It does so on the basis of real experience. Similarly, the adrenal glands don't just pop off some adrenalin because they're bored. Something has to trigger it. (And if someone has an anxiety disorder, lots of things will trigger it, and they'll be very jumpy anxious persons.)

I have to wonder: what are feelings and emotions? Are they the same or somehow different? — Wilco Lensink

It depends how fussy one is. In common parlance, a feeling and an emotion are pretty much the same thing. There are some differences: "To feel" is a verb. "I felt like killing them" is the verbal expression of the emotion 'rage' or 'intense anger'. The emotion 'rage' is a noun. Some people "have emotions" other people "feel emotions". Maybe there are more "feelings" than there are "emotions". Maybe feelings are more specific than emotions. "I feel like you are putting me down because I am Chinese." he said. "He had feelings of inferiority." "He was feeling like he wasn't part of the group." "He was lonely."

One can go around and around on this.

There is a fairly specific and limited set of emotions. We experience this as feeling.



"To feel" also includes what we register from our senses. "I feel like it is too hot." "The stone feels very smooth." We feel the environment, and we feel our emotions.

I may be nitpicking here, but I wonder how we (as humankind) have come to these conclusions. — Wilco Lensink

Not nitpicking at all -- it's a fundamental question.

We have been observing each other for a long time, and beginning with guys like Aristotle, we have been theorizing about how 'mind' works. We have had the means to tie our observations of behavior to the brain (and specific parts and processes) only just recently.

Functional MRI scans (fMRI) are one means. fMRI scans show which areas of the brain are active during certain activities. Subjects can be instructed to perform some mental task while they are are lying very still in the machine, and we can see what areas of the brain 'light up'. A Hungarian team trained dogs to lie still in the machines and measured their responses to different words and intonations. (human brains and dog brains work very similarly.)

Here's a picture of the dogs being instructed on how the fMRI machine works. As you can see, the dogs totally approve of the physics of magnetic resonance imaging.



CT scans, fMRIs, EEGs, many years of dissection, study of stroke and brain injury patients, study of other animal brains, and so on have yielded a much clearer picture of how we operate. Sociologists, psychologists, biologists, entomologists, et al have been piecing together how and why animals behave the way they do.

My thought is that genes do not "give us addictions" in the same way genes give us a disorder like Huntington's disease. Rather, genes shape the way the body metabolizes chemicals. Genes also shape the way we respond to stress. Genes shape the way our emotions respond. This shaping (which is a tendency, rather than rigidly determinative) may lead to addiction, or may not.

Take coffee. Genes control how fast we metabolize caffeine. Some people are fast metabolizers, some are slow. People who are slow metabolizers are going to be more affected by caffeine than fast metabolizers, who clear caffeine relatively quickly. If you are a fast metabolizer, you can afford to drink coffee in the evening -- and still sleep well. Slow metabolizers might not sleep well if they have coffee for their mid-afternoon break.

So, it seems likely that some people are prone (but not guaranteed) to become addicted to a given chemical IF they try it, and IF they decide to use it several times to obtain desired results. So, X tries a narcotic (probably not the first drug ever tried) to obtain an tranquility. Genes determine how fast the narcotic will be metabolized. Genes shape how quickly the person becomes habituated. Some people "know" they have found the drug they were looking for when they first take a narcotic.

Most people who receive narcotics for pain, experience relief, and when, through healing, the pain is diminished feel no further desire for the drug. They get no kick from the narcotic. They are very unlikely to be come addicted. I've had narcotic drugs several times for surgical pain and it didn't do anything remarkable other than reduce pain.

Alcohol, narcotics, and stimulants present a strong likelihood of addiction -- given the right set of circumstances. For instance, people who are depressed might resort to alcohol for self-treatment. Alcohol does dull discomfort for a short period of time. To maintain the effect, one needs to maintain a certain level of alcohol. Pretty quick the person becomes dependent on alcohol to function. They are addicted. Had they not experienced depression, they might not have resorted to alcohol as a solution.

Most people get through all the difficulties of life successfully (or not) WITHOUT becoming addicted to any chemical. A minority seem doomed to addiction.

The Democrats are no different. If you have ever done anything political in America, you'd see that the Democrats are the cancer of the American left. They are the fairweather ruling class, and constantly throw most oppressed peoples under the bus. — discoii

I have often tossed Republicans and Democrats onto one manure pile, but there are differences. Democrats are almost always the party responsible for legislation that protects vulnerable and marginal groups, as opposed to Republicans. This difference manifests itself in various pieces of social legislation.

Where Democrats and Republics join in kicking the oppressed under the bus is in the area of trade and industrial/economic policy. Neither party is especially interested in the very large demographic block of working class people who have been rendered economically uncompetitive in a deliberately tilted world economy. Republican Trump and Democrat Clinton might both frequently and emotively reference this group, but for the most part both parties have have pursued policies that gang-bang this group. For Republicans, the Reagans and Bushes, screwing the working class was the least they could do.

(And a destabilized working class block of many millions of people ramifies negatively into other groups.)

Where Democrats and Republicans are not different (or are just slightly different) is in the area of defense spending, defense policy, financial regulation, and the like. Both parties are sensitive to military spending because this huge spending program showers funds on most congressional districts. Nobody wants to lose the local contracts. Both parties support a more or less aggressive policy overseas.

Historically, there were more nuanced variations. There used to be such a thing as liberal Republicans; there was also such a thing as Dixiecrats, southern Democrats who were pro-segregation, kind of KKKish, and such. All that started to fall apart in the 1960s in the fight between conservative Goldwater and Liberal Rockefeller Republicans. Ronald Reagan's two term presidency, followed by George the First, and after Clinton George the Second, were the result. The Republicans have continued their multi-decade trajectory toward the far, far right horizon.

The war in Vietnam and the Great Society Programs of Lyndon Johnson were the worst and best of times for the Democrats in the 1960s, and marked an end to the multi decade trajectory of the Democrats from Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson toward the left horizon.

The democrats and republicans are nice good cop/crude bad cop. Neither of them are on the side of the guy in the interrogation room. "Nice" is appearance rather than substance. As some homosexual pundit put it, "The democrats and republics are both going to screw you, it's just that the democrats will use vaseline."

Nazi-hunters — Barry Etheridge

There were Nazi hunters because the post-war West German government had demonstrated less than an enthusiastic commitment to carrying out the necessary detective work to find, arrest, and prosecute named Germans who were responsible for atrocities under the Nazi regime. These were not antisemitic Germans who kicked a Jew or two down the stairs. They were people who were directly responsible for the Holocaust--like Dr. Josef Mengele or Adolf Eichmann.

If the Allies were anxious to be done with the war crimes trials and denazification programs, it wasn't because of some inchoate sympathy with the Nazis. Rather, the Allies wanted Germany to take care of itself as soon as possible. Germany had been significantly damaged by the war, both in terms of physical infrastructure, but also in its human resources. The Allies felt that the trials and denazification programs weren't conducive to Germany becoming productive again.

In so doing the Allies didn't issue an amnesty to leading Nazis. They expected the Germans to pick up the task of prosecution. For the most part, that didn't happen.

now thankfully ruled unconstitutional — Barry Etheridge

This just in... "A court on the French island of Corsica upholds a local ban on the burkina..." BBC

"Racism" has become an obsession. Where once there were three or four races, and if Asians didn't like Caucasians, they were "racist". Now if Norwegians don't like Swedes, they are "racist". If Christians don't like Moslems, they are "racist". Preserving cultural stability is a "racist" enterprise. "Racism" is out of hand.

A lot of people are probably "ethnicists" rather than "racist" but that requires more mouth-part movement than is convenient if you are going to utter the word 10,000 times a day.

Some people (some Danes, for instance) are willing to accept multi-ethnicity; they are not willing to accept multiculturalism. Danes have a long and valued cultural history which, like all peoples' history. involves the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent. If they accept desperate immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, it doesn't seem like an enormous imposition to insist that the immigrants adapt to Danish / European folkways. This is doable for the immigrants. So, a Danish grand mosque was designed in the Scandinavian modern style. Religious food rules can be relaxed. One's children can be Moslem and eat the pork roast that their fellow Danish children are eating in school. Granted: some Moslems are much more observant than others. But isn't the decision to be very observant (like being ultra-orthodox or strictly Methodist) your problem rather than everybody else's?

Individual and group differences are spread out on several axes: religion, geography, ethnicity, diet, language, race, occupation, education, politics, recreational drug preference, sex, and so on. It doesn't make sense to boil all conflict down to "racism".

I think awareness can exist without self-awareness.

The frog's eye receives photons; the cornea transmits signals to the frog's brain; the signals are processed and a moving object is detected and minimally characterized; instructions are sent. The mouth opens, the tongue is advanced according to the brain's instruction. The frog catches a fly. The tongue retracts; the fly is swallowed; repeat.

It's really very complicated, but what doesn't happen (as far as we know) is that the frog is aware of its achievements in fly catching. The frog's senses also track threats, and the frog moves, or doesn't move, accordingly -- as directed by instinct. Presumably the frog feels almost nothing--no fear; no pride; no boredom; no etcetera. It doesn't have a lot of brain, and if there is the ability to respond chemically to threat (a spurt of cortisol) the frog doesn't have to process the experience.

For a frog, minimal awareness definitely seems to require no development of frog-self-awareness. Frogs are a successful organism without 'consciousness'. (I'm assuming that self-awareness and consciousness are pretty closely related.)

It is less believable (to me, anyway) that an intelligent dog operates the same way a frog does. Dogs have much more brain with which to perceive, process, and evaluate. They interact on some level with other dogs and humans in such a way as to suggest that they have limited self-awareness, limited consciousness. Maybe not much, but some.

New borns? Infants? A normal baby will develop extensive self-awareness; I'm thinking this starts from scratch. The new borne suckling from its mother's breast doesn't need self-awareness, initially. But soon it starts to distinguish between me/not me. Two year olds are terrible because by that age (before, often) they have divined that they not only exist, but as beings have a fair amount of power. They can say "no" to everything, for instance. The little bastard tyrant has come into his own.

The original idea (before I posted on this forum) was that a fully anonymous forum would be a bad idea because there would be no social pressure to post consistently (and possibly therefore think consistently). But I'm not sure how true that connection between public thought and private thought is. — Ovaloid

While I try to think consistently, it doesn't always happen. (A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind? I don't know.)

It depends how an issue is presented. For instance, one could say that capital punishment is ineffective and inhumane. Perhaps it is. But locking up somebody for 50 years in a small cell isn't exactly a demonstration of humane sensitivity. Maybe capital punishment is more humane than life imprisonment. It depends on which aspect one focuses on.

Situation ethics, then?