I technically care that Trump has been retweeting it, it matters that he's untruthful, and it's his method of building fanaticism.

But I don't think it's productive to spend my mental energy on being outraged by it after the initial understanding. That's falling into Trump's trap, he's kind of a propaganda genius. It's a way for all the news cameras to follow his every word, moving from one public show of insanity to the next, while his base support remains untouched and attention focuses away from the policies he's helping implementing, which is what really impacts and hurts millions of lives. Attention and energy in politics is finite, and you should allocate it to what matters more.

Voting for Biden is such an obvious decision, it's something the Left (or what I call the Left, the activists who are in tune with the reality of the ground) should talk about for 10 minutes and then shut the hell up and spend the rest of the year on other politics (unless you live in a swing state and want to increase turn out or something). For people who rhetorically stress about the limits of the electoral politics for real change, they spend huge amounts of energy bitching about it more than anyone else. It's so simple and quick, it can barely even be called a strategic decision. It's one of those small steps along the way to the actual strategic questions, like a small turf battle you need to win in a long war (but that you still need to win if you want to proceed). If you're so emotionally stuck on this obvious and simple fork in the road, you're probably not thinking about the other 1000 steps. Or more like you're probably not prepared for it because there are all kinds of far more complicated and harder decisions to be made on that path, the rest of the army will just have to leave you behind.

I really do think you can agree with Dawkins on disliking the connotation of the metaphor and get over it in 2 minutes, and then go and discuss the science. Why are you wasting your time arguing with people online about it?

"Did Mary Midgley understand The Selfish Gene? I always thought she was attacking a straw man. Was I wrong about that?" - Nigel Warburton

"I think she was. Which is too bad, because there are very good reasons to criticize that book, on biological grounds." - Massimo Pigliucci

https://twitter.com/mpigliucci/status/1317860473111498752

Why are you guys so caught up in this? If you dislike the metaphor so much, fine. As I mentioned earlier, Dawkins did too and preferred the term Immortal Gene. You can google it. My problems with the book is that it's outdated science, don't waste your time going around in circles because the terminological usage offends you so much.

Dawkins said he regretted the metaphor and would have re-titled the book the Immortal Gene. I personally dislike him, both scientifically and his public persona, but your critique is kind of easy to dismiss.

And I've some sympathy for the aesthetics of Unweaving the Rainbow. — Banno

Oh I liked that Rainbow analogy he gives, quite a Nietzschean flavor to my tastes. But it's a small thing, and not particularly original.

There seems to be a somewhat pervasive misunderstanding, Dawkins hasn't really contributed much to the primary literature (except the part about memes, which has collapsed), his Selfish Gene book was basically a popularized compiled synthesis of the work of influential evolutionary biologists: Williams, Hamilton, Trivers, etc. No one thinks those figures contributed junk science, but it's just an extremely narrow perspective if you end at them.

Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry - Edited by Jeffrey Kovac, Michael Weisberg

I've put Chemistry completely on the back burner with respect to philosophy of science so I'm trying to mitigate my ignorance of this.

I have to say, these comments of yours are just summaries of your beliefs like a preacher on a podium instead of trying to understand why the people here disagree with you. This is a philosophy forum, why are you here?

There is something to what you’re saying, if happiness is achieved by having a list of ambitious goals and pursuits in which you expect yourself to be happy if you check off everything and reach the end of the list, then yeah, there are many people who are left unsatisfied. Happiness is thus obviously not that but a day to day “attitude” which you exercise (of course which is not completely flexible and affected to some extent by our circumstances)

There are Christians for instance, who by believing they have a loving father like figure by their side 24/7, are comforted and are happy. But there are also those that are miserable despite their religious beliefs. The difference between the two is thus because some train their minds through their religious practices to be happier and those who don’t.

But this is not unique to religious belief. There are also non-religious people who are unhappy and those who are happy. I’ve mean, I’ve met happy non-religious people, you’ve never? Speaking as an atheist, I regard this category as those who pursue both happiness and rationality.

The most plausible explanation for everyone involved in checking in on Trump and reporting it is that it’s real. One facet of implausible conspiracy theories is believing that every person involved in the process has their lips shut while the public is fooled.

Debate was 2 days ago right? Chances of both Biden and Trump being infected?

The Democrat elite are extremely incompetent and out of touch with American citizens, they’d functionally would lose the election than put real effort reaching out to new voters. And if they actually were competent, they wouldn’t be so silly to give up their interests for a small number of people who aren’t doing anything real to pressure them. The fact is everyone else looks at third parties as spoiler parties and will hate you for associating with them, surely a nice way to gain political influence.

This isn’t speculation, the Greens have repeated this strategy going back decades. It will only gather a tiny number of votes, and it will certainly be a waste of time.

“Hmph, I’m not going to vote for you, so turn more Left-wing if you want my vote” says a tiny handful of people voting Green, and somehow the Democratic party elite care enough to listen and change their strategy.

Is this an actual political dynamic with an empirical basis that activists can use to their advantage, or is this a cult-like wishful thinking.

I frankly don’t care enough to spend much time making a fuss about it, the main reason I don’t vote 3rd party is because I think it’ll be better for the Green Party to die permanently to not distract new incoming activists.

Third Parties like the Green Party are notorious among activists going back decades for wasting all their mental energy and funds every 4 years on the Presidential campaign when it's statistically guaranteed to failure by the nature of the winner-take-all electoral system. To the extent some of the members try to take power in local politics, they have been incompetent failures with a few exceptions, perhaps because all the competent people stay away from third parties because they don't want to waste their time.

You should still sign up to vote Democrat down the ballot for non-swing states even if you don't care for the Presidency. That's what I'm doing in New Jersey.

Honestly, the fact that many people are stuck on wasting the rest of the year discussing what could be decided upon in 10 minutes is proof they're overly committed to insignificant performative grievances instead of winning the war towards policy goals, the kind of thing mainstream liberals tend to be rightly criticized for. It's being consumed by electoral extravaganza, just because you're doing such in an upside down fashion doesn't mean you're not.

I think analyzing the mind from the angle of a complex biological phenomenon is the right way to go. This is taken by some critics as back peddling to some metaphysical essentialism inherent in biological systems, like the old vitalists, but I don’t see a reason if we haven’t yet concluded on a unifying principle with other physical substrates.

I mostly agree, I mean I pursue philosophy for self-improvement and pleasure that can’t be reduced to those concerns.

Only I'm less hesitant to explicitly value the economic or welfare outcome (wider categories than transactional) of a pursuit. If certain pursuits have no such outcomes in a particular society, I see a potential critique how that society is badly designed to exploit full utilization of those skills rather than seeing discouragement of the value of that pursuit. And if it truly has no practical applications whatsoever, it makes me question how in tune those ideas are with reality. Maybe I’m being optimistic about the interconnectedness of the world and thinking everything of value can lead to contributions to society is wishful thinking, but I think the abstract ideas leading to contributions speculation worked out quite well in history so far.

Can you explain what you mean by indexical and how it works that way?

I mean I looked up the word and saw your chart above, but I feel clueless about how you overcame the massive burden of proof for such a description of reality, it looks arbitrary to me.

Exactly. This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted.

I'm not sure we should avoid the question of whether it has value to society, after all tuition and tax money goes into educational programs and the issue will inevitably pop up, spending money on something when it could be used for something else needs to be justified.

That doesn't mean that I think we should crush the value of learning into easily quantified units, but I do think we should explain to people about the history of ideas. My take is there are plenty of incidences of how abstract ideas with seemingly no practical applications but it turned out they did (Hardy's Apology for Number Theory for instance turned out to have applications in combinatorics) But we should explain to people that the only way this kind of progress happens is if we allow people to learn for learning‘s sake.

What should be valued is "comprehensiveness" how it brings progress into domains of thought, and the practical applications should be trusted to follow, even if it takes decades or even centuries. I don't know your take on this, but this also goes into the question of whether String Theory should continue on or whether it takes up academic resources.

If you’re a person curious about ideas, you’d probably find something you like in such broad categories if you dig enough. That is, if you’re actually curious about ideas, instead of treating it as sports. I mean intellectual history of schools of thought has some importance, but ultimately, why should anyone care.

Your response, I like the way it sounds. All the stuff about working hard in living in the present rather than pinning your desires onto dreams. But it sounds to me you're meshing different issues into one pessimistic world vies. Working on politics is about long term strategized dedication to future outcomes. I'm open to a different interpretation if it makes sense.

I just don't know what you're referring to, you're using these words in a way that's kind of alien to me. When people are organizing to pass policies that benefit lives, they spend months or even years on it, and they have structured planned strategies to do it. (even local organizing still takes dedication over long periods of time) There's a chance of success or there isn't. If there's no chance of success, work on organizing for something else or stay home and try to enjoy your life as best as you can. But people work on projects because they see reasons for a better outcome than whatever exists now.

I think it's worth fighting for a better future because there is at least a chance, and fighting for that chance is what it means to be an ethical person. Is pessimism for you an attitude that psychologically prepares you for the (likely) worst outcome? I can understand that position. But pessimist philosophers appear to reiterate that there is no point in any kind of hope. Now we can be pedantic about the definition of hope, but if I was sure it was definitely zero, I wouldn't bother fighting for a better society. But I'm not certain, and I think it's worth fighting for just like previous people who probably had their confidence beaten down constantly but actually succeeded in creating a better society. But you have to believe in the possibility of a chance of success (hope) for that reasoning to work.

There are sections of technical analytic philosophy that I have to review over, but the parts I was able to grasp are very interesting.

"Meanings as Species" by Mark Richard, some provoking bits:

"...Of course languages, lexicons, and individual words—like species—evolve. As one population ‘reproduces’ its language in the next, new words arise, old words have their meanings changed, phonology shifts, grammatical rules may be modified, and so on. As is the case with species, some of this evolution will be quite gradual: successive generations are able to fluently communicate with one another, just as successive generations in a population lineage are (counterfactually and in principle) able to interbreed, have fertile progeny, share a system for recognizing mates, etc. As is the case with species, even when abutting generations enjoy the sort of cohesion that would drive the observer to classify them as speakers of a single language, the soritical ways of linguistic change, given enough time, will lead to a diachronic lack of cohesion so great that no one will say that ancestor and descendent populations speak the same language, even though the languages they use are related by descent."

"...Whether we stick with this sort of terminology or not, we should agree that Quine is correct to think that the notion of analyticity is of little to no use in the study of language. But it certainly doesn’t follow from this that the notion of meaning can’t bear any explanatory load, any more than it follows from the fact—biological species do not have essences; none of the small changes that might lead, when summed over time, to speciation are themselves intrinsically changes that separate one species from another— that the notion of species cannot bear any explanatory weight. The notions of word meaning, concept, and (public) language are no worse off because of Quine’s and allied arguments and observations than is the notion of species because of Darwinian arguments and observations that speciation is a historical process and that it is folly to think that species have anything like essences."

"...Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tracks something that is event- like, more process than product. Our talk about meaning, like our talk about species, tends to be cast in terms that are more appropriate to something that is not event-like: thus the attraction of the views that species have some sort of essence, and that a word’s meaning can be identified once and for all with a definition or a Fregean sense or something of the sort. Because of the apparent lack of fit between what our talk about meanings and species tracks and the conceptual box that talk creates, we might at the end of the day decide that rather radical conceptual engineering is called for: we might even recommend dropping talk about species or meanings in favor of talk about populations related by descent or lineages of lexicons linked by various relations of communication. To do so in the biological case is not to suggest that species talk does not track a real phenomenon, or that the claims and generalizations biologists make in speaking about species are empty or unverifiable or false. Ditto, for the linguistic case."

There are some things in your control, including "parts" of your external environment, whether in your immediacy or within reach. For the parts that are not under your influence, Stoicism teaches not to stress yourself out due to them. This is quite a difference from what you're implying.

I'd go further than what Camus says as quoted above. I'm rather confused about what force an intrinsic/metaphysical "meaning" (whatever that is) would have even if we knew it did exist, so it's not even worth talking about. Like if an angel (or some advanced alien) approached me and told me I was created for a certain purpose, their existence will force me to change my scientific views, but not my values. Like I have certain interests and concerns (I value my friendships, I enjoy Japanese literature, and I have certain political views about society) What difference would be done to that if someone or something has an opinion on what I should do with my life, unless I was blackmailed into it. It's like as if someone's parents told their kids what to be when they grow up, why should you care about what they say?

Life is really just a string of moments of experience. If you define meaning/purpose as "it's worth spending those moments one way rather than another way" than I'm fine with these terms, but I don't see what's more complicated about it.

This is quite good and in tune with my experience. You just can’t browbeat people into voting for and campaigning for an awful candidate. Sorry, I don’t agree with that attitude, and argued for strategic lesser evil voting in 2016, but that’s the truth about our society. You have to go about this much more sincerely, but that hasn’t happened and never will. If you are committed to get Biden elected, put in half the work Sanders supporters do for their candidate and get out the vote.

“....The answer is that you can do nothing. The opportunity to win back Bernie's voters came and went four years ago. Bernie could spend the rest of the year campaigning for Joe. Joe could promise to abolish private property by executive order on day one. It would not be enough.

...I campaigned for Bernie in the 2016 primary and voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Actually, in spite of my reservations about the party, I have, as a form of harm mitigation, chosen a straight Democratic ticket in every election I have ever voted in. I will probably volunteer for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts after the Sanders campaign concludes. Because I’ve texted literally tens of thousands of Bernie voters, I wanted to offer some suggestions about what the party (and you as individuals) can do to ensure that enough of them show up in November to beat Donald Trump...

...According to the New York Times, Bernie Sanders was the most donated-to candidate in almost every district of every state in the union. He has a volunteer corps of over a million people. He lit a fire under a bunch of us who spend most of our time joking around on Twitter. I have never seen more people give freely to something bigger than themselves. It was not enough to win, but it was something unique in recent history.

If Sanders drops out of the race and endorses Joe Biden, that network of volunteers and grassroots donors will vanish like frost. The problem is not that Sanders lost but that he was defeated by main force. You don't see it that way, but my friends do.

You are going to have to count on losing more Bernie Bros than Hillary lost. Maybe you don’t need them, but you do need to take stock of your own forces. Your army is consultants, suburban parents, journalists who are addicted to Twitter, and senior citizens who are addicted to MSNBC. Also, possibly, the handful of very confused senior citizens who have wandered onto Twitter.

I have been giving about twenty to thirty hours a week to the Sanders campaign, which amounts to a few more than six hundred assignments requested. The top texter has requested, last I checked, over eleven thousand assignments. The total number of volunteers on the text team is over thirty thousand. On a slow day, I sign up maybe a dozen people to join us as volunteers. Other texters have told me much the same. You can do the multiplication.”

https://medium.com/@srwm1138/im-a-bernie-volunteer-here-s-how-joe-biden-can-win-bernie-voters-6da47bbf4d52?fbclid=IwAR1I2RfBsDJ8xu2pJm84I3Bx8-Du1eWKnh4KDaoCGchd5O2-Wdo7BogYN-w

Super Tuesday post-analysis leaves me frazzled.

Jonathan Chait said back in the last Presidential Election that he hoped Trump got the Republican nomination because he would obviously lose to Clinton. lol

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/why-liberals-should-support-a-trump-nomination.html

Also note we’re voting for Commander in Chief, not Speaker of the House. Foreign Policy is the President’s main job, it’s the area they have the most concentrated power and what they do when they wake up in the morning and respond to intelligence briefs. Americans don’t care about the rest of the world so that’s not the subject talk during elections, but who sits in the office influencing American Empire is really the most consequential.

Well their single-minded goal isn't to win against Trump....No one even knows who Klobuchar is outside her state, but she's a standard neoliberal Democrat which is their preference. Warren is a Democratic Party Insider and adheres to a form of market liberalism, she's relatively too left-wing for them but still enough in the ballpark for the corporate media to accept.

This NYT opinion piece here reports a testimony that the Democratic Elites actually think Klobuchar has the best chance of defeating Trump (of course it's because their brains are telling them it's their preference) I'm guessing the NYT faculty really wanted to endorse Klobuchar, but that would seem too absurd when she's not even a front runner, so they wrapped her up with Warren.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/opinion/amy-klobuchar-2020.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR09Cmo48CZlnbNLDTtAj-TVQC_RDWDJJjZooVhHFTfz1kikIMVUigezh7g

Sanders is the only Democratic candidate with a majority of people of color who support him while Warren’s support leans heavily towards a narrower white and affluent base. Some sharper Warren supporters I’ve talked to speculated it’s because she’s not as well known while Sanders gained more favorability over the past few years while he was in the spotlight, but we don’t know yet and the election is this year.

But by this point, she pretty much sabotaged her own campaign in the past few months, the former CAP Clinton campaign consultants working for her right now probably influenced her decision making more so than the grassroots support she had.

I guess I'm one of the few here who knows something about the subject.

There are "strong" women in anime. This goes way back to even Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki intentionally made brave girls as the main protagonists of his films. Strong & Intelligent women are fashionable even in the highly sexualized series, a lot of the strongest characters are attractive women. It's noticeably different from a lot of Western fiction, where there are also strong female characters, but they're usually not the dominant ones. That doesn't mean there's nothing sexist about anime, I mean a big chunk of the industry is wrapped around exciting the fantasies of guys. I don't think it's entirely a bad thing, like violent video games. Women also have their own shoujo series in anime. It should be recognized and thought over though, and you should be able to separate reality from fiction.

It doesn't describe anything because it presents no information. You could have zero knowledge of what "x" is and still agree that x = x. That can't be called describing anything.

This was what I was saying last year, and now a few more people are barely catching on. These days I'm more bothered that the people shouting this stuff about the Earth's apocalypse and the need to act, are so unwilling to bear the cost of stuffing a football field's worth of contained nuclear waste into the ground.

The Left should hijack the impeachment process and press their own causes. Impeachment can be about anything unlike RussiaGate, and since a lot of people are going to be paying more attention to the primaries in the coming months, we could preemptively grab the microphone and use it to jumpstart the slowed Sanders campaign. Don't let it be about Trump's mini-scandals, and use it present a visionary opposition to the current establishment. The impeachment against Nixon for Watergate was exploited by activists to strengthen the FOIA and the War Powers Act in their push against the Vietnam War.

Modern capitalist countries will dip into a depression and harm people’s lives & stifle social development without continuous economic growth, that’s how the market economy works. If you don’t like how it works, we can debate about an ideal future society to aspire towards. But we’re not playing some Sims City video game where you pick and choose your designs of society, you have to deal with institutions in the current existing world in order to reorient and change the established order step by step.