Had man in a worshipful manner - made it his vocation and duty to know what's true, and do what's right in terms of what's true - — karl stone

Here is your problem:

You are assuming that "the truth" is crisply, concisely, and clearly stated in clean Helvetica text and that the upshot of seeing the truth is equally obvious. That's not the way truth usually appears. More likely than not it will be laboriously spelled out in obscure language and printed in some barely readable obscure font (figuratively speaking, you understand).

Then one has to figure out how to implement the truth that one has understood (correctly or not).

I assume you realize that "printing" money is not the issue, it is the money supply - which mostly consists of figures in computers. — Relativist

For god's sake, don't be such a literalist. Of course I understand that only a certain kind of money (paper currency) is actually printed.

If adding to the money supply is so harmless, then why don't we just pay the interest on the debt with freshly created money? Or is it the case that there are some limits to what fiat currency can accomplish in the world?

Constitutions are not "sacred" documents like the Ten Commandments--carved in stone and handed down from heaven and valid forever. They are working documents designed to address the perceived problems of establishing government at a given time. — Bitter Crank

at you have done is just what you argued against, which is to make the Constitution sacred in the sense that what it is said to say is the highest law of the land, untouchable by democratic effort. — Hanover

You don't have to respond, but I honestly don't see how you derived your conclusion from what you quoted. I would think that calling the constitution "working documents designed to address the perceived problems of establishing government at a given time" was not making the constitution sacred.

I think we were taught in school to hold the constitution as a sacred document. Many years since, I think the constitution is not sacred, not perfect, and too difficult to amend.

The liberal Warren Court was in place for a long time -- especially if one was a conservative. Now we will have a conservative court in place for a long time (so it will seem to liberals). If we are going to change justices more often, (like give them one ten year term) then the scope of their jurisdiction needs to be much more limited.

2. The US is a model of a democratic state with a massive chronic trade deficit which has reached the point of being unable to adequately fund its government and military, but it isn't able to raise taxes (or tribute). Instead, it just has a debt which would take out the global economy were it to default. — frank

The United States IS able to raise taxes. The fact is the politicos in Washington don't want to raise taxes. It wasn't that long ago that the wealthy high earners (the top 5%) paid much more in taxes. In 1965 the tax rate on the wealthiest individuals was 91%. The current level of taxation on high incomes was recently lowered from 39% to 37%. 91% is what it takes to actually balance the budget and pay off old debts.

During the Vietnam war there was much discussion of "guns vs. butter" -- the cost of war vs. the costs of domestic programs. Johnson didn't want to choose either one, he wanted both. As a result a significant amount of debt was piled on just as old debt was being retired. During Reagan's administration (1980-88) tax cuts were combined by the ruinously expensive and pointless arms race called 'star wars'. More debt. Clinton was able to balance the federal government some years; I may be mistaken, but his budgets may have been the last ones.

red rectangle: WWII; green rectangle: star wars and tax cut

It ignores how governments actually go about attaining and using its mone — MindForged

National debt, in a country with a fiat currency, that has lender confidence, has absolutely nothing at all I in common with personal, or local government debt. — Rank Amateur

I understand that personal or corporate debt isn't the same as national debt. However, the fact is that national debt is a recurrent item of discussion among economists and politicians, both.

I have difficulty believing that there are no consequences to an steadily growing nation debt. fiat currency or not. After all, we have paid off the debts from past wars: $4 trillion from WWII, for instance was paid off sometime by the late 1960s. (The cost of WWII was $350 billion in 1945 dollars. That was something like twice government spending since 1776. A lot, in other words.) Other countries seem worried about their own and others' debts.

Printing money generally has the effect of devaluing a currency. If last year there was $1.5 trillion in circulating currency, and another 1.5 trillion dollars worth of money is printed, then a dollar can't continue to have the same purchasing power.

Granted, fiat currency doesn't have any inherent value, but obviously a country can not become fabulously rich by magically creating huge amounts of money. If that were so, then every country would be printing their way to financial heaven.

So, explain how debt is not a problem.

Here is the 2015 US budget chart (from the Science web site)



According to this chart, 6% of the budget is being spent on debt. 6% on debt may not seem all that large, but it isn't discretionary spending. It's part of the very large non-discretionary spending on social security, medicare, medicaid, and non discretionary defense spending. Without more taxation (and there are rich people to tax) spending on good discretionary projects like science, education, the environment, R&D, transportation, Centers for Disease Control, and so on will have to be cut.

The solution is to increase taxation (long since reduced) on the richest portion of Americans who have more wealth than the rest of the population. I have looked deep into my heart and I find that I can stand their unwilling sacrifice of ... let's say, hmmm, $50 trillion. You can rest, assured that after being so fleeced, they will still be able to enjoy fine wines, excellent meals, haute couture, and so on. They might have to put up with a slightly smaller yacht, a less pretentious collection of houses, and so on. They would not be reduced to eating beans and wieners (unless, of course, they preferred beans and wieners).

But then again, if we can get $50 trillion dollars out of the super rich, we might as well take the rest of it too, and let them be grateful to make soup out of wiener water.

There seem to be dramatic different ways of interpreting the significance of national debt, varying from crisis to indifference. Some kinds of debt make sense: a mortgage at reasonable interest rates makes sense. At unreasonable interest, no. Steadily accumulating credit card debt doesn't make sense: one should restrict one's spending to one's income, with only small amounts of short-term debt being tolerated.

National debt seems more like credit card debt to me. Some of it may be as necessary as a mortgage, but a lot of it is living beyond one's income. Now, the US Government could, if politicians were willing, increase its income through taxation, and could put a ceiling on its debt or lower its indebtedness. It would be a good thing, because the interest on the national debt is huge, and costs us the opportunity to accomplish worthwhile goals.

Here is a chart from the Australian Government on world debt: I don't find much solace in it.

General government net debt 2010

He's famous for pointing out the discrepency between the geometric rate of population growth 2,4,8,16 etc, against the arithmetic rate 1, 2, 3, 4, etc, at which agricultural land could be increased — karl stone

Yes, I know who Malthus was, and that his predictions did not pan out. However, I didn't reference Malthus, and neither did Kunstler. Our situation today isn't a Malthusian problem. Old Thomas has become a stumbling block which we trip over. People in general fall somewhere on the spectrum of optimism and pessimism. Whether their location makes sense or not doesn't seem to have any influence on their thinking.

As I indicated above, I'm favorably disposed towards techno-fixes when, and if, they are appropriate, and when and if they have a good chance of achieving the desired ends. The problem we face with global warming isn't malthusian. Had Malthus had the insight to see that the industrial revolution going on around him would eventually lead to serious problems, he would rank up there with Newton. Someone (I forget, don't know where the reference is) may have detected signs of climate change roughly a century ago, but their observation was isolated, and could not be fit into a pattern at that time.

The problem is CO2, methane, and some other heat trapping gases. They are in the atmosphere now, and won't disappear tomorrow. The solution lies in changing human behavior. Unfortunately, achieving major shifts in human behavior and thinking is much more difficult than turning an air craft carrier or the largest oil tankers around on a dime.

Were we able to change our thinking, our cultures, our behaviors on a dime; make industrial policy based on subtle shifts in the climate 50 years ago; shift to public transit away from private autos and air travel; live much more simply; become vegetarians; and so on and so forth, we could have prevented or solved the problem decades before it became critical, we'd be in good shape now. Alas...

The best we can do at this point is mediate the coming disaster as much as we are able (however much or little that turns out to be). Que será, será.

OR you could just get a big honking diesel pump and be done with it.

More to argue against abolishing private ownership — Marchesk

@Tinman1917 There are two kinds of property: personal property (your books, soup bowl, spoon, cell phone, four-poster bed with a large mirror mounted on the ceiling, and the peasant hovel in which all of this is located. The other kind of property is "capital" property: factories, apartment buildings, railroads, warehouses, farm land, ships, and the like. Capital property produces income for the owner by receiving rent from the apartment buildings, profits from the railroad operations, and so on.

My understanding is that personal property (within reason) would remain personal property. If your residence was a 100 room mansion, that probably would count as a pile of plunder and you would not be staying there (except as a resident of one of the locked attic rooms).

Capital property, on the other hand, would not remain in the hands of the owners. The workers would take it away from the owners, and it would become the property of The People.

The occupants of the former factory/railroad/Bloomingdales store, warehouse, hog farm... would take on the role of stewards of the former business property, to maintain the assets (machinery, buildings, raw materials, etc.) and to carry on production if the democratically elected People's Congress on Production decided that they wanted whatever it was that the factory made.

The people might decide that the light rail vehicle factory would continue in business while the stretch limo plant would be converted to making bicycles.

Is this socialism or communism? I don't much care what it is called. Socialism is fine by me. Screw the dictatorship of anybody.

Very tall trees, sequoia or redwood, manage to lift a lot of water from their roots into their canopy. You might investigate how they do that. (It's capillary action, of course. Could one duplicate the area of a sequoia's surface, under its bark, devoted to upward bound capillary action?

A piece of information from Wikipedia

"The water pressure decreases as it rises up the tree. This is because the capillary action is fighting the weight of the water. ... Scientists have found that the pressure inside the xylem decreases with the height of the tree, and similarly, the size of the redwood leaves decreases with the decrease in pressure. May 6, 2004"

@karl stone Did I recommend this author, this book to you?

Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation by James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler details the nature of the environmental crises. While doing that he also punctures many a delusion about what is possible. For instance: "We'll build huge numbers of windmills and square miles of solar panels." Great idea. But... given that we are past peak oil, what will happen when our million windmills and millions of solar panels wear out? We still have relatively cheap petrochemicals with which to carry out this production. Forty years from now? Sixty? Much less oil available and much more expensive. I am thoroughly enthusiastic about windmills and solar, but a lot of energy is needed to build the steel masts from which the windmills are hung. I assume a fair amount of energy is required to build solar panels too and that they probably don't continue to work forever.

Kunstler's point is that there are no magical solutions to our several interlocked environmental crises.

The system I describe has all the thermodynamic efficiency of a steam train — karl stone

Indeed, but if we could build large solar plants in the ocean at the equator, why wouldn't we just run a wire from the complex and plug it into the electrical distribution systems of India, China, SE Asia, Africa, or South America?

Not necessarily. — karl stone

Take a larger view. in the years of WWII 1939-1945, horses were indispensable. Why? For one, they don't use oil. For two, they are strong. For three, they can be used flexibly. Four, Germany and the USSR still used horses for various purposes in 1938, and horses were part of military planning.

Spot the horse!
Spot the tanks!



How many horses did the Wehrmacht lose in Operation Barabarosa? 179,000. How many horses did the USSR and Reich III use during WWII? About 6,000,000.

Here's a mule helping a US soldier in northern Burma, Nov. 17. 1944



Trains, for instance, didn't replace horses. Trains made horses critically important for short distance hauling to and from the railroad--up until trucks replaced them by 1920 (later in agricultural regions).

The first computer was built in WWII. It took about 40 years for personal computers to make their appearance. By 1995. they were pretty much integrated into business, and people were buying computers for home use. So, about 50 years.

There was a thing on the BBC World Service last night about rhetoric. They were talking about rhetoric. They were using examples of up-to-the-minute rhetorical devices that have been in use for a very long time. One of their examples (conduplicatio--the technical name for it) involves repetition of the first 2 or 3 words in a sentence.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. — Winston Churchill

Churchill did two things here: first, he described the anticipated invasion of Great Britain, but what was emphasized was "we shall fight". Second, the emphasized the fight. One could think that the fighting would be on somebody else's beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills, and think of victory.

Another rhetorical device they discussed was the rule of three, like "veni, vidi, vici". The rule of three is still essential in all sorts of speech.

Point is, some things never go out of style.

...might all join hands and dance around the maypole to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair. I'm not that naive.) — karl stone

Apparently you're not that young, either -- Mr. Scarborough fair. And you're being very anachronistic: the heyday of maypoles didn't come close to Simon and Garfunkel. They (S & G) were certainly favorites of mine, back in those dear dead days of long ago. (Well, still are, mostly.)

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me,
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain,
And an island never cries.

Where I live, we just narrowly missed getting hit by a Category 4 hurricane which just ripped through the Gulf of Mexico. — Jake

So, how bad was it where you live? What was it like?

I've never seen a hurricane. Gales, once; tornadoes, one or twice; blizzards, numerous. Long hot droughts, once or twice. Bad floods, a few times. No hurricanes. No earthquakes either.

I don't know if you were aware, but long established research shows that improving living conditions tends to reduce family size. — karl stone

Yes, I am aware of that.

The problem of population, 7-11 billion, is that it is up against an agricultural environment that will be deteriorating, even if we make some progress toward limited CO2/methane/other. Those are:

All the arable land we have is now being used for agriculture. There are no significant idle reserves. (What about northern lands becoming agricultural? The soils that are now very cold or frozen are not, and will not be suitable for agriculture. What about irrigation? All of the fresh water that is suitable for irrigation has been tapped. Drinking water has also passed its peak. The Asian glaciers are shrinking rapidly. In 50 years, the temperature in many agricultural areas will be too hot to work in for much or all of the day. (When the temperature and humidity combined make it impossible to cool off, people start dying from heat.) Fisheries productivity is in decline.

Agriculture, under the best of circumstances, is risky: too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too many insects, not enough bees, plant diseases, soil exhaustion, etc. There is usually enough world production to keep people fed, but an increasingly warm, erratic climate doesn't favor agriculture. Projecting enough production to feed 11 billion ignores erratic and fast climate change.

Not despairing yet? Declining hydrocarbon output: Much of high agricultural productivity depends on cheap, abundant oil and gas for chemicals, fertilizers, and fuel. We are past peak oil. We can not feed 7 billion people, maybe not 5 billion using animal traction, organic farming, and the like. We could do that at maybe 2-3 billion under good conditions. Those days are over.

Getting the population down to 2-3 billion or less will come about if the species crashes. That could happen if global warming becomes too severe in the 22nd century (only 82 years away).

I am pessimistic about all techno-fixes. I like techno-fixes. However, it does not appear that the we have the will or the political means to slam the brakes on CO2/methane/other. If we (the whole world) did have the will, the ways, and the means to abruptly cease CO2/methane/other output, we could, perhaps, solve the problem. But we don't. NO country is meeting even the modest targets set recent agreements.

Why not? Why are they not?

One reason is that major technological changes (like from horse power to machine power, like telephone, radio, television, railroads, highways, airplanes, medicine, engineering, etc. etc. etc.) require around 40 to 50 years to propagate throughout society. It isn't just behavior change; it's all sorts of changes. We have not committed to abandoning fossil fuels, so the 40-50 year change over hasn't begun.

Yes, there are solar panels and windmills here and there. But transportation in the developed world is still predicated on cars and trucks. Heating and cooling still are largely dependent on electricity from fossil fuels. A rising standard of living around the world requires more production of everything, and a lot of waste.

It isn't that I think we can not do anything; theoretically we can. But we run up against time (we waited too long) and material limitations on what is possible in a short period of time, because people generally don't worry about threats unless they are unmistakably visible -- like seeing the tornado about 3 blocks away. That's just the way we are wired.

So, the novel isn't eternal. The Elizabethans didn't write novels. Other forms had popular preeminence--verse and drama.

What cultural forms will be most celebrated in 20 years is uncertain, let alone what will be most celebrated 200 years from now. Who in 1940 would have anticipated the beat movements of the 1950s? Or the 'psychedelic art' of the 1960s? What will the state of (big C) Cinema be in 20 years?

Cultural Cassandras are always wringing their hands and bemoaning the decline of [music], [art], [manners], [writing], [you name it]. With some justification, of course. Culture, like a glacier, is always declining. It always heading down and ending up in the sea. But at the other end it's always being renewed.

If global warming turns out to be as bad as expected, I would expect the state of the arts in 200 years to be really lousy. One thing for sure: people won't be writing apocalyptic novels. They'll be living the apocalypse.

One major problem that is not amenable to a technical solution is population. Not if we want to remain civilized, anyway.

7 billion plus people have the capacity to swamp improvements in food production and fresh water supply by merely continuing to reproduce at moderate levels. What we need to do, in the midterm and long term is reduce the number of people on the planet. That means population attrition, not just in Europe or Japan, but everywhere.

One word: submersible! — karl stone

Maybe that would work. If the framework on which the solar panels were mounted were sufficiently strong and rigid, it could probably be submerged without being damaged by wave action on the bottom. Or, one would float the panels on small lakes or lagoons where wind wouldn't generate huge waves. Floating panels should be look at as a specialty application.

Wind turbines, however, can be located off shore. But they have to be off a shore that gets enough wind. In Minnesota, at least, wind is providing a substantial share of electrical energy. States from MN to TX down the center of the continent generally have good wind. Texas is a leader in wind energy -- surprising, even though there is an exceptionally large amount of hot air in TX.

but in my view, a war for survival is not the way to go. — karl stone

Hmmm, Odd. If survival is the goal, and there is a real threat to survival, then why wouldn't an all-out effect be the way to go?

If we lose our freedom we will never get it back — karl stone

Throughout American history, "freedom" has always been somewhat illusory. That's probably true everywhere, and it is certainly true here. Deviation from the norm, or clearly expressed dissatisfaction with the norm, usually meant sustained hostility. Luckily for many dissenters of various kinds, there was always frontier territory where one could go, at least until the frontier came to an end in the latter 19th century. Strong challenges to the status quo, like unionism, socialism, Mormonism, abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights for blacks, and so on have been intensely resisted by the central authorities.

Yes, we have had more freedom than openly despotic states. But Americans have been free like most people elsewhere have been free: if you like the way things are, it seems pretty free. Most Germans felt that the nazi years were good times, because they didn't strongly object to the goals of the Nazi state. Our national narrative is that everyone is free and our history is good. As long as you don't challenge that too forcefully, you'll be OK. But organize a strong union and go on strike against your company employer, and the state is likely to interfere. (And they have interfered. Current law has created numerous barriers to successful organizing.) The central state has frequently interfered with leftist organizations.

Why are suburbs uniformly white? Why do black people mostly live in second or third rate housing? It was very specifically and centrally planned that way. (See the histories of the Federal Home Loan Administration, like The Color of Law by Rothstein.

What you seem to be describing here is a centrally planned economy, and that has failed again and again to deliver for people and the planet. — karl stone

Not so fast. The American economy, bless it's little coal shoveling petroleum pumping heart, isn't accidental. America was founded on basic principles of exploitation -- begun with the Plymouth Colony and pursued with a vengeance ever since. It didn't just happen by chance. Governmental, financial, regulatory, treaties, religious, military... institutions have propagated the kind of economy we have now and have resisted any deviation from the "free enterprise model". The law, courts, legislatures, religious bodies, education, westward expansion (aka genocide of the native people), suppression of labor rights (or forced labor in slavery), manifest destiny, and so on have all been focused on created the kind of economy we have.

Take railroads, for instance. In most of the 19th century railroads were the prime industrial drivers of the economy. How did it happen that long lines were built across the country, mostly before there was any particular need for the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, etc.? They were built because the central government and financial speculators in New York wanted them built. It didn't just happen by accident.

If the US is going to make it's critical reduction in CO2 and other green house gas emissions, it will be because the central government and centralized corporate powers decided to do it.

Caught by spam filter - restored by mods. Thanks mods! — karl stone

If Karl's posts can't make it through the spam filter, then there is something wrong with the filter.

We don't take into account how much we have which is valuable to the society because we're too busy trying to get ours — BrianW

That is, of course, the precise problem. And we don't sufficiently understand or maybe appreciate the contribution of the common good to our own good. Indeed, I think the common good is invisible in some very individualistic mind-sets.

1. against the inertia of ignorance?
2. towards self-motivated philanthropy?
3. towards greater self-discipline (more conscious control of emotions, attitudes, thoughts)?
4. towards greater understanding and appreciation of life?, etc, etc. — BrianW

Good list. I've engaged in life-long learning since college (50 years ago). I like to think that I've made some progress against ignorance and its inertia.

According to the latest climate report from the UN, we have even less time to do something "to save the world" than we thought: 12 years...

Of course we can cut CO2 emissions to practically zero in 12 years (or say 24). When Japan, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States mobilized for WWII, heaven and earth were moved. Tremendous productive forces were employed to build the capacity to wage massive war. We can do it again for CO2 reduction.

How?

Convert private auto manufacture to mass transit production.
Start a crash wind turbine and solar cell production program; install widely.
Build large energy storage batteries.
Immediately reduce consumption of goods which are not merely unnecessary, but are useless.
Reorganize life for need rather than profit.
Obviously: end coal and petroleum production.

It can be done, but it will almost certainly NOT be done because the short-term costs of saving the planet will cost the rich more money than they can stand losing. It will be necessary to liquidate the wealth of the richest 1%. (Mind, that is liquidate the wealth -- not liquidate the wealthy. Liquidating the wealthy gets too much bad PR.)

"Time is money" speaks of the urgency of crass money-making. Better that we eschew that sort of urgency and "take our time".

For one thing, the existential value of our time varies. When all is well and there is no crises to spur us, time is plentiful and we needn't hoard it. When the house catches on fire, though, every second is terribly important. The value of time varies with age, health, and knowledge of one's ultimate doom (inevitable death).

something like that...

Everyone has a mask that they put on. — Posty McPostface

Many people wear masks; they have a cabinet of masks. But not everyone does. To a large extent, I do not. I tend to be a "what you see is what you get" kind of guy. I'm not the only one. It's not a great virtue in itself to go out in public without a mask. Some of us are just too stupid to know how to fake it properly.

Schopenhauer has relieved me in my loneliness, to understand that there were other people like me in life, and somehow made it through it. — Posty McPostface

In fiction I have also found that sort of comfort, that there are other people like me in the world. And in life, too, I have found that comforting insight. My biased view of the world is that there are billions of people who breeze through life with rare difficulties. They are well adjusted achievers. I stumble around, never accomplishing that which I would accomplish, and am something of the bumpkin

OK, so I'm exaggerating, but the ego can take a beating, as well as dominate. One must always be on guard against one's own self-defeating prophecies, as well as the self-fulfilling ones.

"wallowing is what I do."

Yeah, I am disabled for having undifferentiated schizophrenia or a psychotic disorder. So, there's that aspect of my being. No fun in Posty's world. — Posty McPostface

So, you were dealt a bad hand. Sorry about that. Your diagnosis is explanatory, in part. I can understand better how your immobilization might happen. On the other hand, you are tending to the condition with which you must live. That is no small thing. Tending or not tending will have dramatically different outcomes. So keep up the good work of taking care of yourself.

My psychologist once told me that the ego is a dominating force that compels us to act on our behalf. Yet, I am not dominant by nature. — Posty McPostface

At least the ego dominates the individual. What else could dominate? Simple physical need could dominate; our basest drives could dominate. "Ego" in Freud's conception is a moderator, as well as being dominant. The ego moderates the crude drives of the id and the fussy requirements of the socially dictated superego.

"dominant ego" doesn't mean that you feel the need to dominate others.

I don't like people. — Posty McPostface

The king: "The people are revolting."

The Queen: "Yes, I find them very revolting."

philosophical pessimism — Posty McPostface

Oh, no; that won't work out well.

I am not still grieving. One never forgets the loved one, but one does adjust and become accustomed to their absence. It just takes time. At first, it seems like one would never adjust--but one does. It takes time -- many people grieve for a year or two. My father grieved the death of his wife (married for... 60+ years) for well over a year, but eventually his grief lifted.

The work of the survivor is to cherish the memory of the one who died and to embrace life still. No one will take the place of your mother, of course, who as you say you have been very close to. But life does go on; the seasons change, and one's life reawakens... in time.

Judge for yourself. Here's a PDF copy of the book. FREE!!!

https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf

It's been a very long time since I read Freud. However, if you think psychoanalysis is still kicking (I agree, it is) then this would seem like a good book for you to read. It's not a "how to interpret dreams" hand book. Some people find it helpful, but it's kind of a luxury service, considering the length of therapy, number of visits, and cost. Plus, there are not a whole lot of Freud-style psychoanalytic practitioners any more.

Another reason why psychoanalysis isn't as viable as it used to be has to to do with Freud's murky psychodynamics involving sexual issues like penis envy, the oedipal conflict, and stuff like that. I think Sigmund got it wrong: It's men that have penis envy, not women. (Men are always making comparisons -- how big is his? Is mine big enough?) A truism among gay guys is that one is either a size queen or a liar.

Still another reason why psychoanalysis isn't as viable as it used to be has to do with success rates. Now, one could probably find that all psycho-therapeutic approaches would benefit some people, and all psychotherapeutic approaches would fail to help some people.

Back in 1967, a doctor divided up a bunch of certified crazy people among three different psychotherapeutic approaches. One group were behaviorists, a second group were classical freudians, and the third group were people with zero training to do psychotherapy. At the end of 6 months, they found that some people in each group had made improvement.

Well, how could it be that untrained people would get as good results as a psychoanalysis? Well, people like receiving caring attention, and in this study the patients got caring attention of one sort or another--even from the untrained people.

OK, back to dreams.

If one assumes that the peculiar content of one's dreams is just peculiar errata and isn't in fact coded messages from the unconscious, then there isn't any reason to pay attention to one's dreams. Only if you believe that dreams are important are they important. The upshot of thinking about dreams as meaningless or meaningful seems to be indistinguishable.

People who have lost a loved one will probably dream about that person for a time. They will, quite often, even see or hear that person while they are wide awake, sitting in their usual chair, or doing something they did in life. My partner died about 9 years ago, and I find him still appearing in my thoughts -- particularly when I am half awake. Then I realize with a bit of a start that Bob isn't here anymore.

In general, mental health practice doesn't give a lot of attention to a rich understanding of the mind. Why? Because therapists need to collect insurance payments, and insurance companies are not interested in leisurely investigations into people's dreams, neuroses, and so forth. They way the patient cured in 8 sessions. If it can't be done in 8 sessions, then tough. Give them drugs. People who are very very mentally ill are expected to need extensive care, but run-of-the-mill neurotics are sort of screwed these days.

Why am I me? — JohnLocke

Because everybody else was already taken.

a dramatic shift in treating individual problems as societal problems. The drug addict is no longer viewed as a hedonist or escapist; but, as a set of problems arising due to unaddressed societal issues. In my view, this shift in perception would enable talk about devoting more resources to societal issues such as crime, drug addictions, even murder. — Posty McPostface

Never mind about free will and determinism. The relevant question is: Who controls the money and what do they want to spend it on?

You know that wealth is maldistributed in the United States. A few people have a lot of wealth. A lot of people have no wealth. Those who have great wealth are by and large uninterested in, and/or are hostile to the problems of poor people, drug addicts, and various other sub groups that have little to contribute to the increasing wealth of the few. "Fuck 'em!" is a nutshell summary.

Bad housing, low quality schools, minimal social infrastructure, etc. are not accidental. They exist because resources were directed elsewhere. Why don't blacks live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods? Because blacks, as a group, were deprived of opportunities to accumulate equity in housing over the course of two or three generations. When the post-war suburbs were built, they were explicitly built for white people. It isn't the fault of white people who bought houses in the suburbs. It's the fault of white people who designed the federal home loan system.

Why are there so many drug addicts? Because selling drugs to people is lucrative. Next question, please.

Why do blacks do so poorly in school? Because their schools are not very good, and because they come from culturally impoverished families and communities.

Why are so many white men unemployed in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and so forth? Because various economic policies (which benefit rich people) led to de-industrialization, and the rich people didn't give a rat's ass what happened to the displaced people.

Certainly, individual decisions contribute to individual and social problems, and social problems influence individual decisions.

Now, obviously, nothing will persuade the religious segment of society. So, is this utopian pop-fiction or will it only appeal to those on the left of the pendulum? — Posty McPostface

Most of the religious people in the country are in the minimal wealth populations. They are the same boat as everybody else.

I'm gonna guess (probably accurately) that this is more about getting a dig in at left wingers from a right winger. — MindForged

If digs are being gotten, in my case it's "left" on "left". I don't think the problem highlighted by this hoax is a left/right issue. Good, solid publications exist in the fields being lampooned. The problem of junk journals is probably one of supply and demand: there just isn't enough quality to go around.

I do doubt some of these fields should even exist as academic departments. I have absolutely nothing against advocating for disadvantaged people. But advocacy isn't the appropriate reason d'être for an academic department.

Academics in some fields have been excoriated for horrendous language for decades. The Miseducation of American Teachers came out in the 1960s. It had a wonderful appendix of stupid language used in Education journals. The purpose of such language is generally to make a sow's ear look like a silk purse. The educational journals suffered from a serious deficiency of significant content.

Deficient content is a wide spread problem because faculty are pressured to publish as proof of productivity. This isn't limited to academia: a good share of the non-fiction books I've read in the last few decades would have benefitted greatly from an editor's knife cutting out material that was redundant several times over. But then the book is kind of skinny, and seems less substantial.

Of course, scholars across all fields [outside of the sciences] need to apprehend the scientific method--if for no other reason that they are educated people and science and the citizen is very important.

When one thinks critically about classical literature, English literature, music, sculpture, history... "science" per se may be helpful; it is more likely that logical and consistent rules of evidence are going to be more helpful.

The point that critics make about identity studies is that the content of the fields too often is free of logical and consistent rules of evidence, let alone actual science.

How is it that psychology is all big about dreams? — Posty McPostface

Freud was big on dreams, of course; he thought they were the royal road into the subconscious mind. But psychoanalysis isn't the dominant strain in psychology, these days.

Dreams are interesting to brain science because the brain is busy doing something during REM sleep. What is it doing? We don't know for sure. It might be consolidating content. It might be rummaging around in the attic. Perhaps the brain just doesn't have an 'off' switch. I don't know.

There is nothing wrong with interrogating ones dreams, of course. It strikes me as a parlor game of sorts--not a total waste of time, but it is the conscious thinking about dreams, not so much the dreams themselves, that would make it useful.

Dream on, and interpret if you wish. Have you read "the Interpretation of dreams" by S. Freud?

Perhaps my brain produces too much DMT. — Posty McPostface

Apparently.

I understood you the first time, and the 2 dreams I mentioned were precisely what you described, "that can be reflective of another possible world you could have lived in or experienced" provided that the possible world is within this world and not an alternate universe

Why not?

Aren't they glimpses into one's soul? — Posty McPostface

Hell no, they are not glimpses into one's soul. Why aren't they?

Well for one, not sure we have a soul to glimpse into, and two, if "soul" means "mind" then the best way to glimpse someone's mind, soul, is to talk to them, listen, observe. Three -- you don't get to glimpse into my soul through my dreams, you only get to hear as much about my dreams as I care to tell you. If that tells you much about my soul, then... you're imagining things. If I did have a soul, and I wanted to glimpse what was going on in there, I would think. Thinking is how we assess and access our mind... soul...

Look, dogs dream. Other animals dream. Clearly dreams have something to do with some basic function of the brain. So, if you have pleasant dreams, enjoy them. If they are boring forget them. If they are terrible, consult a psychiatrist (who probably won't be able to help you either, but you can give it a whirl).

a bird has no need for self-deception — schopenhauer1

Au contraire. Given the endless and thankless effort which birds must expend on their instinctive egg-hatching natalism and olympic level migrations twice a year just to lay more eggs and exhaust themselves feeding another batch of ungrateful chicks -- I'd say they have maximum reasons for self-deception. Those songs they sing? All lies. Bright colors? Deceptions. Mating for life? A hoax.

Are worms really worth getting up early for? Another lie.