BlackRock made billions off the GameStop Ordeal, Wall Street as a whole isn't threatened. Rich people win and lose all the time in the market, a particular spiked event isn't an indication of a threat to class interests, the key issue with neoliberalism is wealth inequality, the upward distribution of wealth and power over labor. Although yes, we could catch and convince people who are angry about Robinhood and such, that's probably the greatest value of it.

That guy was a full on Fascist.

Sorry I erased my comment cause I didn't want to get into this discussion but you already saw it.

I largely agree with you that the prevalence of bad liberal progressive politics (especially in popular media) dissuades people, I just wanted to express the other side of it which is that the Right calls anything and everything political correctness and most of them to my experience are not open to an alternative superior left-wing opinion when shown. They're offended by anything to the Left of them because they want to be, it feeds their sensibilities. The priority target for political organizing (in terms of effective use of our energy & time) are really people who agree with you but are politically timid, or apolitical folks who can be convinced to new political opinions. Of course you should try to convince some Right-Wingers, like even 1% (I know some leftists who were former Right-Wingers after all, it changed their lives) but that's not where we're likely to be successful.

As for who doesn't want more social justice? A lot of people. Not everyone is on the fascism spectrum, but plenty of people are moral cowards and don't want to change their preconceptions. I have a hard time understanding why you don't see if this if you actually tried talking to Right-Wingers.

yawn

I answered Maximal to all of them, because that's what I am considered to the rest of the spectrum. Among those on the furthest left, there's another spectrum where you will find people who think I'm incrementalist or sympathetic to authoritarianism. Depending on what your stance is on things, people are going to define these parameters differently.

Scrolling down the first page of threads, they are mostly philosophy threads with a couple of big political threads. A number of active members are progressives and/or leftists. That doesn't make it a leftist forum, and even if it did, discuss politics elsewhere if you don't like it. Get a life.

This is such a laughably uncharitable take of what I was trying to get at. I’m not going to engage with those having a conversation only to themselves.

What you're missing is that what you call well-established laws are approximations to deeper laws. It's both true that we can still use Newtonian physics adequately for a broad range of problems and that QM allowed us to squeeze out far more practical applications (such as being the basis of all modern electronics) We know GR & QM are approximations because we need a theory of Quantum Gravity to explain a number of phenomenon.

I'm inclined to agree on stressing the structural issues more. But if we're interested in getting the full picture, there's a causal feedback loop to recognize that helps explain why the system is so resilient to change, the rich go such long ways in their effort to defend their wealth.

There is much to suggest that the psychology of rich people are different:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/does_wealth_reduce_compassion

https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/the-rich-drive-differently-a-study-suggests/

It's also a psychological issue. Despite diminishing marginal utility, why do billionaires spend so much of their time on work? Yes, they may not work hard as a slave on a fishing boat off the coast of SouthEast Asia, but they do spend many hours a day on work. Why bother running your company and attending Wall Street meetings? Why not just permanently retire after you accumulate your first 50 million in the bank and enjoy the rest of your decades on Earth on your hobbies or something? For most citizens who work because they want to satisfy a certain level of consumption and leisure, it's difficult to fathom the pointless but enormous amount of time and energy spent on making more money.

The reason is that once you're that rich, accumulation of money becomes about status competition. Conspicuous consumption is a kind of addiction. Being very rich is not just bad for everyone else, it's also bad for rich people themselves. Being very rich is inherently a bad thing for human beings. It’s something that society needs to eliminate, just like a disease.

I think the economic externalities to the rest of society is the main reason why we shouldn't allow concentrated wealth to exist, but I think it's a worthwhile additional critique.

That's the U.S, where yes its economy is designed to do that it that way, but it isn’t necessary. Japan did it through its Ministry of International Trade and Industry, where government industrial policy was instituted without military spending.

Check these out:

The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide - Richard Conniff

Giants: The Global Power Elite - Peter Phillips

The 1st book is a comedic portrayal of the lives of rich people, digging out facts that make them look like interesting animals in a zoo.

The 2nd book is actually less a narrative book and more a long documented list of corporations and wealthy people, who they are, and how much money they make. And there's a summary in every chapter describing what the list is about. Data used is recent.

That's a mathematical equivalency to other physical attributes rather than a metaphysical description (the difference is we have a way to explain mass as a property of objects, something in addition to m=e/c^2, we’re more hard pressed when asked about energy) Now it may be that metaphysical description is impossible, Don Koks in his recent book suggested the question of "what energy is" may be meaningless if energy is a quantity that can't be expressed in terms of anything else. Maybe, but I personally think it's giving up early, same for particles even if we conclude they're "fundamental". I see worth looking into descriptions in relational terms if not by breaking them into further components, meshes well with process metaphysics.

Agreed that it's not separate from spacetime, we know energy isn't conserved in general relativity over very long distances.

There’s a point to doing science with its corresponding philosophical rumination (running into either of the 3 results I mentioned) Empty label switching is a complete waste of time.

So it’s just word play that brings comfort by the appearance of internal coherency, it doesn’t explain anything or help us grapple with the real world, in line with my first comment. Personally I don’t want to waste my time with that.

So now you’re going in circles and that we need panpsychism, and your previous comment was a total deflection. That was the target of my last comment.

Scientific investigation reveals features and fills in details, it doesn’t satisfy your “why” intuitive inquiries right off the bat. Either it will if we fill in enough details (it’ll take decades or centuries, not surprising it doesn’t right now), or there are limits to scientific investigation and it won’t (and thus we shall remain quiet) or we’ll learn enough to realize the initial mystery turns out not to be a good question (often happens)

When I say panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, I meant exactly that. I didn’t mean its explanations are unsatisfying because it fails to get to the root of the mystery, but that it’s just label switching and has no positively contributing content or description. And I’m utterly confused why you think it does.

If you don’t need it, if it doesn’t explain anything, then I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with it. Just put a question mark to it. Frankly I think you’re backtracking, because all this time you’ve been speaking as if it’s replacing the role of the failure of known forms of scientific explanation, not an additional side job.

If you think there’s no details that you can empirically confirm I’m conscious and tease out the manner in which I am so, and it’s just an unfounded inference, you don’t even need panpsychism frankly.

Again, I think you just have lofty expectations for what counts as incremental scientific explanation (it takes a ton of filling in details to get an intuitive grasp of some phenomenon) and settling for a non-explanation. We couldn’t really directly see chemical bonds or atoms until very recent technology, but that didn’t mean before we could, the past few centuries of chemistry wasn’t really improvement of knowledge.

“Because for the longest time we thought that by coming up with the right physics or chemistry or biology we could find the "equation for consciousness".

Man do you guys have any idea how scientific explanations work? It’s very hard work and potentially incomplete. We haven’t even figured out how to explain chemical bonds form purely out of quantum mechanical principles, and it may be a type of emergent phenomenon where doing so is not possible. There’s still decades and centuries in the future to figure out how far we can do it successfully, computational chemists are working on it. I don’t know what you’re expecting out of scientific explanations, but it’s probably a ghost that isn’t there.

Doing a kind of metaphysics where you switch the words (especially to a radical position such as what we thought was inanimate matter in the rest of universe has elements of consciousness that we see in animals) just adds more confusing assumptions, it gives zero descriptive content that gets us closer to an explanation. Like if it satisfies you to call atoms and molecules as consisting of mental substance instead of physical, that leaves us with “so what now?” It’s an empty pyrrhic victory, you can’t use it for any additional predictions. If we want to know what consciousness is and how it works, everyone else is going to continue their investigations.

I'm just frankly utterly confused with the appeal of panpsychism. There are views that I completely disagree with, but I can understand the pull towards those views. But I'm just lost here. It seems like people are just switching words "mental & physical" "1st person & 3rd person" without adding any explanatory depth. Like word play to make the understanding of the metaphysics of emergence of mind seem conceptually coherent in their head, but without any given power to the terms used and the underlying purpose for their usage. I think I understand what consciousness is referring to when people use the term. We think, feel sensations, and so on. And you can get into debates of the nature of what’s being referred to, and questions about whether snails or grasshoppers should be considered to have consciousness, or mini-consciousness. I have no idea what motivates people to extend that notion to everything else in the world. Why do you think that helps explain anything.

I’m supportive of the idea that Russia’s role (and thus threat) in global affairs is greatly exaggerated. If people read the press in Asian countries as I do, they see Russia very differently from the US & European press. Russia is just treated like another normal country, not Hitler.

I do think Russian bombing in Syria has been de-emphasized here though, which is Putin’s worst crime in the past decade. You can squeeze in a realist interpretation in this too to an extent, but not as much as for Ukraine. So I think the bounds are a bit more than Eastern Europe.

I'm with you, I am somewhere between Epicurus/Aristotle & Aristippus on the pleasure question, but even the latter taught that the pursuit of physical pleasure should be restrained by moral concerns. Do you think the observation of the impoverished life being widespread and the lack of opportunities to pursue such pleasure for many people may have been a contributing factor? In Ancient China for instance, the reason Mozi argued against Music for instance was that its pursuit was not cost-effective for the benefit for most peasants at a time when famine was common, not that he was intrinsically against music.

Here’s a list of Kant’s other unsavory comments. Not a fan of his meta-moral views either so there’s no controversy for me.

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2010/03/kant-on-killing-bastards-on.html?m=1

If your friend broke your promise or lied about something, and thus gives you suspicion to become “skeptical” of their character. This is very different from your apparent type of skepticism that he’ll turn into a Nazi and kill you someday, because you can imagine it out of logical possibility. How this helps anyone’s judgment, I don’t know.

I divided the two into different categories of skepticism out of nominal convenience. I can easily reword this into saying I think there's one type of skepticism, one that makes sense because it serves a purpose, yours isn't really functionally working skepticism.

This went around in circles repetitively so this is my last comment.

You’re either really confused with how these concepts are put together (imagination/logical possibility isn’t remotely the basis for skepticism) or you’re constantly plagued by dysfunctional paranoia in your personal life.

Yeah I just think you jump from A to Z without recognizing you’re jumping to Z instead of to B (your response to the friend and scientist example) I can’t help you if you think these errors are at such scope that they’re plausible signs for hidden gigantic errors.

In regards to the friend lying it's not unreasonable to be open to the fact they might turn into Hitler next week.

Yeah I have no idea how you're operating in your everyday life then. Your philosophical disposition is either completely contrary to how you actually use skepticism (or that of anyone) or your life is completely messed up. I say pay attention to how skepticism is practically used (it’s the one we know of and works to improve judgment) and examine the rational basis for it. Imagination is not the same as basis for skepticism.

We're talking past each other because you're ignoring my core argument, which I clarified twice by now.

I'm talking about actual doable skepticism, and I gave several examples of how rational grounding relates to smaller cases, reread my posts above. The point was to show that what you're doing is not actual justifiable skepticism, but just getting from A to speculation Z without any plausible connection. Making up any possible alternate scenario that one can formulate in words is not a case for skepticism, neither in the radical skepticism that you're promoting or the common familiar types of skepticism that all of us observe and agree upon.

Besides the optical illusions, the fact that our senses don't perceive all reality, dreams, the effects of psychotropic substances on our perceptions, the rubber hand illusion when it comes to selfhood, do I need to continue?

Your train of thought shouldn't continue because it is extreme. Try applying your reasoning arguing for radical skepticism to milder cases of skepticism and see if it works, and it clearly doesn't. That scientists make mistakes doesn't mean the whole scientific field is bunk and astrology might be equally true. That a friend that you know has told a lie to you before, being put under suspect to lower moral character, doesn't mean you should be open to the fact he might turn into Hitler the next week. Those aren't grounds for skepticism, the comparison between the pair examples are only superficially similar.

Skepticism requires a grounded basis just as much as Justified Belief. In a court case where one side has presented a fair amount of evidence, you need additional reasons to express skepticism, your skeptical case can not be arbitrary. Or in a more extreme case, you can try to pretend that you doubt mathematical statements like 1+1=2, but it would be posturing, it wouldn't be real skepticism. Properly functioning skepticism is a lived experience based on workable reasoning.

Think about why we make the case for skepticism in the first place. Skepticism in one own's moral judgment is grounded in the observation of cases of fallible human beings all around us, no one is perfect and we have emotional biases. Skepticism in science is grounded in an abundance of history of once established scientific truths that have been overridden by new evidence or better theories. (or its corollary, the trust we have in scientific theories to the extent we have them is because of its successes, in its predictions in experiment and its applications in technology)

What could skepticism that everything we observe and know about the world is fake possibly be grounded in? Doubt has to be based on something, we can't just doubt things just for doubt's sake.

I don’t think it’s on a linear axis, but I do think there is a spectrum of viable skepticisms. I’m more skeptical about political forecasts than scientific consensus, which I’m more skeptical of than logical conclusions. I think skepticism relies to some extent on confidence in practical terms, you can be open to being challenged on issues, but the problem is we don’t have all the time in the world. It’s not a reasonable way of living life to be open minded to the possibility of every conspiracy theory for instance, you have to make judgment on what’s worth your time. You have to juggle confidence and open mindedness.

Where the line is (or if there even is a line, perhaps it's more of a stretched out spectrum with gray areas) could be an interesting philosophical puzzle to tease out, and there are people working on this in Epistemology among Philosophers. But there are a lot of issues where we haven't teased out the fine details, but it doesn't result in total ignorance. Again, I really don't see why you think there is a risk of falling into something like solipsism just from the idea that we could use more skepticism. This is very black and white thinking, and you're blocking yourself from exploring the question by insisting upon it.

Better is not objective though even with assumptions. I mean why assume X is better than Y? I wouldn't argue that society would be better if people were not homophobia because that wouldn't be a true statement. It would be true to say it would be different but not better. Even better chess or be a better scientists are subjective claims that aren't grounded in solid "hard" rules."

Chess players who win choose certain moves that are "better" and we objectively evaluate that to be the case from the fact that such players can win the game.

You're looking for a requirement to deem certain claims to be evaluated as true that doesn't need to be there. Performances in Chess games are a real thing, and they can be evaluated using logical reasoning.

Yeah, human beings have interests because we are a certain type of creature, living within a social context. That's what discussion about ethical issues are, normative questions about how we should live and treat each other given we're certain type of human beings. Do you deny that it would be a more pleasant society if people weren't homophobic and that's a "better" way of running society? Not so different from other normative questions like "how to play better chess" or "how to be a better scientist" They're objective claims given certain assumptions we adhere to. How to be a better human being among others is another one of them. Just because they're not exactly the same as scientific claims doesn't mean they're just empty words.

The number of people who adhere to solipsism are pretty close to non-existent, there is no such risk. People apply skepticism all the time in healthy ways, I don't know what your problem is about this frankly.

Just to add to Pfhorrest, the fact that you were able to distinguish between solipsism and dubious beliefs about homosexuality means you already hold some kind of intuition that distinguishes necessary practical skepticism and going into the deep end to (groundless) skepticism. The bit about morality seems to contradict your recognition that incorrect beliefs about homosexuality need to be challenged. Your outlined response here seems to me more about being provocative about a subject you have yet figure out how to articulate in a clear way rather than any real rejection of the necessity to challenge one's own thinking.

Setting aside philosophy for a second, if you don’t make challenging your own beliefs a practice and you succeed in life in doing nothing harmful to others, you’re both extremely lucky and some kind of saint.

Which none of us are, human beings have many moments of misfortune and imperfections in our interactions with others. There is simply no way to cruise life morally in this world without inflicting doubt on yourself and challenging yourself to be a better person using rational reflection. And it’s going to take effort, not comfort.

And yeah, that includes comfortable religious beliefs. If you want to train that rational muscle, you have to be consistent and honest.

I'm more worried about Biden's foreign policy, because that's the President's day-to-day job and where they have the most power. And there are too many countries out there that the U.S. influences for grassroots movements to touch upon.

You can click on the links and open them up as I'm doing right now. None are Fox News, or Fox News-like sources. I suggest trying to click on them and reading some of them.

You say fair enough and that you're not shooting at me but nevertheless your comment was a reaction to something I said...

The first article is a summary of Biden's record, the second article is by the same author on why voting for Biden is nevertheless necessary to take out Trump.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/democrats-you-really-do-not-want-to-nominate-joe-biden

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/an-ineffectual-biden-presidency-is-better-for-the-left-than-an-actively-authoritarian-trump-presidency

Nah, the real work starts in November, when Trump is assured out and the grassroots pressure begins. No reliance on corrupt centrists figuring things out.