Dunno.. He sounds incredibly stupid and careless to me.

Excellent post!

Leaving space here to meditate about this and reply this weekend.

Extraterrestrial philosophy! Something rather interesting! Finally! Thank you. I'm going to make a mental note to explore this fascinating topic in the future.

Sorry I'm not interested in Ummite stuff though, but thank you anyways for the link.

One of the devil's scheme is to make you doubt yourself. But little does it know that that is a good thing.

It's not good to lie, generally speaking. But not all lies are the same. Some lies are more important than others. Same with other moral questions.

We need free will to better fight the darker sides of the human condition.

What did I just read?

A dangerous, deprecating, childish and low quality style of speech, especially for someone who ought to be respectable, educated and civil in manner, as the current president of the most powerful nation in history.

I wonder what real infinity is really like. Infinite space, infinite speed, Infinite time, infinite heat, Infinite energy, Infinite number of something, and so on.
Because to me it seems infinity is not impossible. It just doesn't manifest in this world apparently, if one is to fully trust modern science.

I exist. I was born. I didn't make the world.

You blaming the Democrats exclusively shows your ignorance and narrow mindedness.

Yes, we need objective truth. That is why we have science, engineering, philosophy and common sense.
So in short, we need both objective and normative truths.

Hello all. I'm new, but I detest all nonsensical wordplay. They're destructive, childish and polluting. Thank you.

They each have their merits and drawbacks. It's not simple and black and white.

You don't have to be a realist or an idealist to be creative. Being one or the other might affect your imagination, but it is not a prerequisite.

The political propoganda and campaigning is one thing, but at this day and age when some media swears by alien sighting, flat earth, various ridiculous and unfounded conspiracy theories, vaccination infertility, denial of fascist terrorism, blatant contradiction of well established scientific theories, denial of history, and so on, the it becomes slightly concerning.

I disagree. I doubt science, with its limits, primitiveness and cultural factors. But that is a lot different than believing in a delusion like the existence of God/gods as the religions fantasize.

I'm looking to buy a book on Ethics. Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm looking for something more practical, not the murder 5 people to save 100 or other such improbably scenarios. Something definitive and perhaps influenced by the European Enlightenment movement. Anyone have some recommendations?

The clue is, as is often the case, in the name. Fake, news. News that is fake and untrue.

I wouldn't say intelligent person. Someone who actually believes in a lie of such improbably fantastical nature would be termed much more aptly as delusional than intelligent perse. Creative, perhaps, but delusional all the same.

The republican party is a bigger threat than fake news. The increasing cost of your health insurance than some Facebook post. If you aren't careful of your news sources, then everything is a threat to you, and you need to live your life in constant worry and paranoia.

When you say a lie again and again, you make it real. We like to argue constantly as atheists and liberals when we already knew there was no God and vaccination is important. Beating a dead horse, we are actively ignoring the alive ones.
That is why I don't like reading Dawkins or Hitchens. They're beating a horse long dead while alive ones gallop past us.
I think talking too much about fake news is only going to make things worse. Most fake news believers are so not because of ignorance but because they like it.

I wonder what Kant himself would've made of this thread.

Creativity is a social thing. The sharing of ideas and imitation causes creativity to blossom and flourish. I write therefore I am.

"I assume that we are all familiar. "

You assume wrongly.

Combating unwanted thoughts, suicidal or whatever else, requires one to understand the fact that you are not your thoughts. Many apparently unnoticed factors affect the mind, both conscious and unconscious or sub conscious, so you shouldn't go about taking responsibility for your thoughts.

There is no such thing as the ideal chair. And not because ideal here means the most comfortable (that is not possible either). The ideal chair or the ideal apple is just the form, like a blueprint upon which reality is based. There are however ideal proper nouns. Monalisa is the ideal Da Vinci work, others are imitations. It isn't the ideal painting, because ideal painting here means the idea of painting.

I might have made an error in the data, but the fact remains that inequality has gotten out of hand in the US, and the government is wasting valuable public sector money on "defense". These are very destructive behaviours.

Sorry friends for not posting the replies I ought to, I'm a little busy now, but I will get back at the topic this weekend.

You already know it, just ask your gall bladder!

I'm not so optimistic as that.

You have your figures and estimates all wrong. And that's just two billionaires.

"Knowledge is brought into being when patterns are spotted in information, and generalizations are made on that basis. "

So could you also say, knowledge is a distinctively human thing, while information is everywhere? But then, does a cheetah knowing how to hunt constitute as knowledge or information? Does a seed of a plant have knowledge or information about how to grow to become a certain type of tree? And is it knowledge or information when hydrogen molecules know that they're lighter than oxygen molecules?

In case of humans. Are these knowledge or information? a) I know how to knit. b) I know the height of Mount Everest. c) I can or I know how to digest complex foods.

That is why most government spending is military defense and policing.

Yes, it did seem plausible to estimate that more and more jobs will be replaced by machines, and unemployment will increase as a consequence as the years go by. But the reality is otherwise. Unemployment is at an all time low. So the question now isn't about the rates of employment, but rather the QUALITY of employment. More benefits, shorter working hours, paid leaves, increased wages, job security and better pensions are just as important as just flat employment rates. The United States has just a 3.5% umployment rate now, but that doesn't at all mean that economy-wise things are just handy dandy and tip top over there.

But I also think it's dangerous to be hasty and drastic in the (hypothetical) event of wealth redistrubution, as that can cause many unforeseen problems on the economy. There is much to learn from the failures at similar experiments of the past.

5%??

"If you take a billion dollars from every billionaire in the country you can run the government for six weeks. "

The financial position of the United States includes assets of at least $269.6 trillion (1576% of GDP) and debts of $145.8 trillion (852% of GDP) to produce a net worth of at least $123.8 trillion (723% of GDP) as of Q1 2014.

Divide the 123 trillion dollars among all Americans.

So, if you divided the money correctly, every household in America would be millionaire. But even if you didn't divide it exactly equally, if there was a ceiling to wealth accumulation, say at one million dollars, then everybody would still be well off.

And let me tell you something, the government too would run much better than before. Because you see, the super rich have a rather hateful relationship with taxes, and they also seem to need to spend many hundreds of billions of dollars every year on protecting their money from other forms of what they think is thievery.

But the rest of us? Well, we're much more accomodating. We don't fetter too much about having to pay taxes, and don't find the need to devise elaborate plans on not paying them. Society doesn't run without taxes, and everybody benefits from them. We understand that. We're also not very enthusiastic about all the wars and the lethal gadgets, especially not when at 598.5 billion dollars it costs more than half of ALL of the budget passed by congress. (54% to be precise, so more than all other discretory government expenditure combined). So, without the super rich, both tax collection and government spending would increase, making everything better off. The reality of now however is, unfortunately, very much the opposite.

Can't agree more with this post.