lot of bad police behavior in the US — fishfry

Two wrongs make a right? Nah. Still need to address systemic discrimination.

Marxist organization — fishfry

Either way, we still need to address the social/cultural problem, systemic discrimination.

If saying that "All lives matter" is racist — fishfry

I wouldn't say it is. Except perhaps in reaction to "black lives matter"?

, the comment was kind of memerific, often seen out there, as a reaction, which seemed to be what you were doing. No need to diverge off to semantics.

1. Observer/activist: "black lives matter"
2. Responder: "all lives matter" ← doesn't really say much (except perhaps to ignore 1)

If the commies are taking advantage of the situation, then that still doesn't mean there isn't a problem.

Wasn't it Obama that once said something about cultural DNA, heritage, legacy, something like that, a lingering problem that needs addressing...?

All lives matter. — Apollodorus

Sure, I guess.
And "black lives matter" is a part of "all lives matter".
There's some focus on that sub-set because some systemic discrimination has been seen in particular.
By refusing to say "black lives matter" and instead just keep saying "all lives matter" you haven't really said much, except to deny or ignore something that needs addressing.
Red herring? Ignoratio elenchi?

Right, .

So, with the cancer example, if we suppose it's for an unknown greater good, then the right thing would be not doing anything about it.

There seem to be weird absurdities along this line of inquiry, which makes me think it started out wrong.

The thread took a turn. :)

Since 4 is false or so we believe, there is suffering/evil, — TheMadFool

If we cannot say that relief from cancer is good, then we have nothing. ^{(Martinez, StJude)}

In case there's some unknown greater good at play, somehow justifying the suffering, instigated/warranted by God/gods, then such relief isn't actually good.
This would then stop efforts^(StJude) dead in their tracks, or at least their warrant/justification.
"Everyone stop what you're doing!" :cheer:

I can stop my crack habit — unenlightened

(y) Maybe there's a "can" ambiguity?

Modal can: it's possible to quit the nasty habit
"Free will" can: you don't will it so

one can want things that conflict — unenlightened

Yeah, neurotic apes, unreliable we are, unlike...

God — unenlightened

Might be moving more towards homo sapiens psychology.

Hey, it's not really about me, just what the syllogistically styled argument looks like to you folk.
I guess it could be written as: if 1 ∧ 2 ∧ 3 then 4.
Might be outlandish, might be right, might be something in between (which is where I'm leaning, but my personal leanings aren't relevant, just the argument).
Suppose x doesn't happen, then maybe Q didn't want it after all, or maybe couldn't make it happen, or forgot, which may or may not fall under 1/2/3, or whatever, ... Or, there could be something ambiguous about "want" that could be elucidated, ...
Doesn't take more than a counter-example, yes?

Depends on the context, doesn't it? Whether or not it's indefinite.

Via John Watkins, where the domain of inquiry is indefinite:

(∀) empirical universal statements are falsifiable but not verifiable
(∃) existential statements are verifiable but not falsifiable

If you make a ∀ statement, then falsification is applicable. If you make an ∃ statement, then verification is applicable.

Claim (example): all swans are while
Burden (general): sufficient/relevant evidence is tentative/provisional/proportional falsifiable justification (unless the contrary is impossible)

Claim (example): there are evil-doers that cast magic spells on others
Claim (example): the Biblical Yahweh is real and intervenes
Burden (general): verify (unless the contrary is impossible)

I guess that also reiterates where the onus probandi is placed. Theists have to provide verification (when they wish to convince others), and when they fail (and have kept failing for centuries on end), others, including nonresistant nonbelievers, are equally justified in disregarding their extraordinary existential claims.

If the domain is local, like 180 Proof's elephant example, then it's a different matter.

Surely it's not such an exclusive either/or thing?

Individuals go about their business in societies all the time.

So, there are some thresholds in whatever direction, where things go extreme or unacceptable.

We surrender some freedoms (don't murder), worry less about others taking your freedoms (don't get assaulted), do yours (contribute), utilize commons (infrastructures, hospitals), act responsibly, employ some to carry responsibilities (military, schools, politicians), ... (long list I guess)

We then discuss where reasonable thresholds are, find examples of overstepping or insufficient responses or whatever, so as to continuously improve, yes?

There are all kinds of inter-dependencies in societies; it's not like we'd get as far without some cooperation.

immigration — NOS4A2

No need for that nonsense. Just make your own way there.
No one will care. Unless you travel by (Iowa-class) battleship?

Moving to Greenland and occupying land there is a problem because I’d have to contend with the Danish state’s monopolization of it all. I wager that had the Danes left the Inuit alone there wouldn’t be this problem. But they meddled and claimed the land as their own. — NOS4A2

No one would know. (Hence the location.)
Greenland has been autonomous for half a century or so (from unreliable memory).

Not bad. But I fear it will be prime real estate once you’ve had your way with the rest of the world. — NOS4A2

In your lifetime? Doubtful. You'll be meddle-free.

, I hear Baffin Bay, Greenland, is good.
The Sirius Patrol doesn't cover the area.
You could run into the occasional polar bear and Inuit hunter/fisher (the former might be more likely to "meddle"), but otherwise good.
No one's gonna' bother you, it'll be you and freedom. (y)

What's up over in Trump-land?

It appears that he thinks that Cyber Ninjas will find many thousands of votes for him in Arizona. Then they will move on to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin where they will also find many thousands of votes for him. Enough votes to overturn the election in his favor. — Trump Thinks That He Will Be Reinstated In The White House (Caren White, May 2021)

What’s really scary about this is not just that Trump is obsessed with this recount but that he thinks that it will lead to Biden being thrown out of the White House and Trump becoming president instead. — Trump Thinks That He Will Be Reinstated In The White House (Caren White, May 2021)

This is why I am convinced that Trump will run for president in 2024. In his reality, it makes sense to run for a second term and believe that he can win. — Trump Thinks That He Will Be Reinstated In The White House (Caren White, May 2021)

Is White exaggerating?

Water comes out of my faucet and H₂O is our model of a wee bit of that.
I guess the word "water" and H₂O shares reference.
Does that work?

With the "innocent until proven guilty" rule we favor the risk of not punishing an offender over punishing an innocent. (y)
With the death penalty, we add a finality into the mix.
Doesn't seem quite right, for a legal system having to deal equally with everyone.
At least, I wouldn't vote the death penalty in, unless I was prepared to face the music myself — killing of an innocent by a death penalty that's on me, thus rendering me guilty with finality.
Maybe I'm just culturally biased.

What good is a definition of good, when, in some given situation, you still have to figure out if following it is the right thing to do?

Sure, we can come up with things like the golden rule, yet, from there to have them be universal and unconditional doesn't seem right.

It's easier to come up with examples than definitions.

in that case which parts of scepticism do you think are right? — Amalac

I guess that's where the harder work lies.
I don't see any particular reason to doubt we're chatting in English here, for example.
Some trivialities demand less doubt than other (perhaps more sweeping or less clear or evident) claims.

The problem is, we need justification in order to avoid having to randomly guess which beliefs are true and which beliefs are false (and which are neither true nor false). — Amalac

Right, so justification is typically where the work is.
Why doubt and why uphold? Both could take justification.

Anyway, the usual philosophical drive/search for unqualified principles has just failed in this case it seems.
There's more to the story of skepticism, some sort of demarcation?

If all skepticism is wrong, then anything goes.
Since that's not the case, some skepticism is right.

You might doubt anything, but not everything.

If all skepticism is right, then doubt about skepticism is also right.
Hence, unjustified belief can be right.

Seems the problem is the universal (or unqualified) statements.

(y)

(T), you make an existential claim to others ...

• if you're referring to something extra-self, then show us something
  ^{(existentially mind-independent, objective, applicable to both of us)}
• if you're referring to something you have on your mind, then tell us about it
  ^{(typically existentially mind-dependent, subjective)}

What do you have, (T)?

A mind is a thing. An object. — Bartricks

Don't think that can be right.
Objects tend to be breakable (under conservation), whereas things associated with mind are interruptible (experiences, thinking, etc).
So, processes, occurrences, though maybe memory is an exception.
The quote looks like a category mistake, and that's going by evidence mind you.

I can't find any information about air particles :chin: at least online. — The Opposite

How about Nitrogen, Oxygen, water, and pollution?

Atmosphere of Earth

Wind is moving air. :D So, I guess it's "made from" air and motion?

innate ...but so is science! — Todd Martin

I'd say a development of our natural way of learning.

We learn from accumulating experiences, interacting with it all, ...
We might then extrapolate (induction) and formalize (for deduction), systematically do away with errors (or demarcate domain of applicability), ...

A cat doesn't type weight, wind angles, force, gravity, etc into parabolic formulae and calculate, to jump onto a prey just the right way.
We might by formalizing the scenario, taken all the way to self-guided missiles.

In principle at least, it doesn't really matter exactly and exhaustively what it all is, as far as the methodologies go.

Is belief in God innate?

Most certainly and obviously. Religious fervor is just as strong today, after thousands of years of science, as it was in the most ancient of times. — Todd Martin

I'm not so sure it's "belief in God" that's "innate".
Rather, we're prone to a variety of known cognitive biases or "features", like apophenia, patternicity, personification (abductive), autosuggestion (and the reiteration effect), knowledge-gap-filling, confabulation, wishful/magical thinking.
Taken together with childhood impressionability (indoctrination), this stuff easily leads to superstitions, "seeing faces in the clouds" as it were, etc.

Ah, Frank - I love you more than words can say. — Banno

But...you just did. :)

Would he be that pesky?

Mr. Esper and General Milley worried that if they even raised their names — Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Laura J. Richardson of the Army — the Trump White House would replace them with its own candidates before leaving office. — Promotions for Female Generals Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction (The New York Times)

My 2 cents for now.

Guy yells in pain when his hammer misses and hits his finger instead.
Other guy notices, recognizes, points, and grunts "Hammer", "Pain".
When the grunts, the words, grow common, they're used for hammers and pains.
I'd think most have experienced the unpleasantry of pain, some by hammers.
That doesn't mean anyone has another's pain, and apparently that isn't required either.
At least hammers can be shared.
I guess, once word use stabilizes across, nuances may be discovered, and shared meanings eventually become auto-assumed.
Something similar could be said of the audio itself, saying and hearing words and phrases, plus writing and reading.
Language is social; it seems natural language can give lots of insight into others' personal experiences.

The pain is subjective (existentially mind-dependent and process-like).
The hammer is objective (existentially mind-independent and object-like).

But if it is reasonable to believe in God, why would it not be reasonable to believe in revelation? — Janus

Belief in revelation is evidently unreasonable either way. Put differently, personal revelations are unreliable.


• Did Jesus Really Visit the Americas? (Carlos René Romero; Jul 2008)
• Argument from inconsistent revelations (Religions Wiki)
• Argument from inconsistent revelations (Wikipedia)

With 100 total:

Guilty: 57 (67 required)
Not guilty: 43 (34 required)

I imagine Trump saying "he's a good guy, I like him" to various non-guilty'ers, and swearing and name-calling on various guilty'ers. :D

Ultimately, theism [...] — Wayfarer

If so, then Protestantism, Sunnism, and many other religions, are no longer theisms.
Redefining theism like so, doesn't really do much here (except rhetorically perhaps).
Not sure you can speak on other people's behalf so cavalierly.

By odd verbiage, Eagleton abstracts away semblance of common religions, and takes off into the clouds.
I suppose that may be fine in lofty theology, and your faith perhaps.
(I might take it one step further, and say that Eagleton conjures up strawmen to replace Dawkins by misrepresenting what he's on about; don't know that much about Dawkins, though he seems to care less about, say, panpsychism and Spinozism than common religions.)

"Ultimately [...]" and Eagleton doesn't represent typical faiths of people on the ground.
Not sure what Anthony Kenny would have to say; maybe this is an indication (emphasis mine):

If we reflect on the actual ways in which we attribute words such as “know” “believe” “think” “design” “control” to human beings, we realize the immense difficulty there is in applying them to a putative being which is immaterial, ubiquitous, and eternal. With a degree of anthropomorphism we can apply mentalistic predicates to animals, computers, institutions; to organisms that resemble us or artefacts that are our creations; but there are limits to anthropomorphism, and an extra-cosmic intelligence appears to me to be outside those limits. It is not just that we do not, and cannot, know what goes in God’s mind; it is that we cannot really ascribe a mind to a God at all. — Knowledge, Belief, and Faith* by Anthony Kenny, 385-386

"Acting" isn't really in atemporal's vocabulary.
We'd be talking strangely inert and lifeless, more like abstract objects.

In any possible world, a triangle will have three sides.

Hence, it is necessarily true that a triangle has three sides. — Banno

Strictly speaking, shouldn't that be:

In any possible world with triangles, a triangle will have three sides.

?

Otherwise you might inadvertently have populated all possible worlds with triangles.

Ed: was implicit

Madness on display:

Revising God's Prophecy! (16m:47s youtube)



Greg Locke has substance-free demagoguery nailed to a T. Sid Roth laughs in tongues, too. :D

Do not pay attention to the news, to the headlines, to the reports — Hank Kunneman Prophecy (Omaha, NE)

And there are people following just that — "lying left media", "news in the pocket of evil socialists", "'they' suppress or censor opposing views", ... And so a problem emerges. Problems. Popularization of "free" "alternate" (and extremist) "information" sources, isolation, echo chambers, mis-dis-trust, ... QAnon is more of the same madness.

The Bill of Rights grants freedom to such stuff, and maybe that's fine, after all, it equally allows those "Holy Koolaid" people freedom to expose the madness. A minimum of generally available, mandatory/expected education (and skills in critical inquiry) might be better. That takes resources, though.

sold out in less than 30 minutes — Olivier5

That's awesome.

In the scheme of things, it's nice to know that some politicians are actually doing something right down to hungry children on the street.
Child poverty is an awful problem (as far as I'm concerned), but often dismissed by tax-phobic politicians.

, there have been other..movements/trends as well. :sad:

Holy Hate: The Far Right’s Radicalization of Religion (2018)

Accompanied by a hyperbolic "red scare"...

, sure. I just meant that conspiracy theories haven't replaced Christianity. Rather, going by evidence, it seems more like Christians have been more prone to running with conspiracy theories.

They call themselves Christians but really it's a degenerate form of Christianity. — Wayfarer

Maybe? Watch for generalization across conspiracy theorists. And the "no true Christian" thing. Well, the QAnon'ers are goners anyway.

, the US conspiracy theorists are largely Christians, though (but vice versa surely not all Christians are conspiracy theorists).
Maybe a variation of 's Voltaire quote could be something like ...
"If you've come to believe enough absurdities, then what's one more?"
Might be evident to some extent:

A particular strength of our findings is that we assessed the interactions of a converging set of cognitive biases in a single theoretical model that explained several types of supernatural beliefs — Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose (2013)

Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories. — Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds (2014)

The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena. — Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs? (2016)

more radical participants displayed less insight into the correctness of their choices and reduced updating of their confidence when presented with post-decision evidence
[...]
our findings highlight a generic resistance to recognizing and revising incorrect beliefs as a potential driver of radicalization — Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs (2018)

A first-hand account, which the author then relates to the US:

Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight (by Aleksandar Hemon on Literary Hub; Nov 1, 2018)

I'm guessing Hemon has read Umberto Eco.

Those who don't learn mistakes from the past are doomed to repeat them — paraphrasing Santayana

Anyone know how much truth there is to this stuff?

• Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General (The New York Times; Jan 22, 2021)
• New York Times: Trump and DOJ attorney had plan to replace his acting AG and undo Georgia election result (Washington's Top News; Jan 22, 2021)

The Georgia runoffs later seemed to confirm the election results.

, I can heartily recommend the Bernie meme inauguration threads out there for a good laugh.

Haven't read the two articles yet, just glossed over a few paragraphs.

Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult. [...] Apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others, liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make. — The Liberalism of Fear by Judith N Shklar

Just FYI, there is some history to this take on liberalism/liberty/freedom. Elements can be found in the Cortes of León (1188), the Codex Holmiensis (1241), ..., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), this one in particular (which Thomas Jefferson aided in putting together):

Article IV – Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law. — Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789

The French Revolution was nasty business, but they did seem to flesh some things out well for the future — only equal freedom in principle limits individual freedom.

Embedding morals in political codes doesn't seem easy, but restricting freedom to non-cruelty is certainly intuitive. Looking forward to actually reading the articles. (y) :)