I sent you some recommendations through PM, check your inbox.

Massimo Pigliucci has a blog dedicated for Stoicism that you can shift through, and also has a list of recommendation of books for Stoicism:

https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/books/

I often disagree with the economist Herbert Gintis, but he gave a pretty solid answer I think:

"The government is an institutional apparatus that interacts with family units, residential communities, markets and economic institutions, as part of the process of social and economic development and change. It has no "purpose." Rather, it has a structural position in a constellation of institutions that further (or retard) social development.

Governments that promote the passage from poverty and ignorance to prosperity, wisdom, and the possession of skills have proliferated around the world, and will continue to do so, at least in the near future (until some technical development permits an efficient form of totalitarian rule---hopefully something that will never happen). Reducing poverty is in the same category as disease control."

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1NX9L84XFXFY2

There was no line in which we crossed to enter a post-truth stage. We have always been hugely consumed by lies, motives to dismiss evidence, inclined towards self-deception, manipulated by propaganda, attracted to superstition, and so on. I think you can sketch out factors in which sectors of the population has gotten better in this respect and worse in others.

Saying that X is very bad, does many if not most of the same things as Y, and is therefore inadequate (thus why I opposed Hillary Clinton and supported Bernie Sanders), doesn't mean that Y can't be significantly worse than X. Listing a bunch of bad things done by X is not an argument against "Y is worse than X", it's bad reasoning.

Yeah I never denied Hillary's fracking commitments, that's quite a twisting of words, nor did I deny anything about Obama's imperialism. Your claim is that making the nuanced assessment that the Democratic Party is destructive but happens to be less destructive than the Republican Party is partisanship. Personally, I think it's called looking at the facts while at the same time being ideologically opposed to both parties.

Oh god not this nonsense again. There are obvious differences in the frequency & degree to which Centrist parties support Right-Wing Policies and a Committed Far Right-Wing Party supports Right-Wing Policies.

One party is highly inadequate in curbing climate change, only committed to mild investment in renewable energy, while flirting with fracking & oil drilling on the side. But they have a platform for which grassroots movements can push forward more ambitious programs and set their political leaders' feet to the fire.

The other party is completely dedicated to shutting down the EPA, dismantling international climate agreements (even to the opposition of corporate leaders), is explicit in public statements to be denying that climate change is happening, and advocates burning as much fossil fuels as possible. The only thing grassroots movements can do is prevent the party from destroying everything.

See the difference? And I can run down the list for the comparisons for issues such imperialism, welfare state, and so on that the Democratic Party sucks on and are closer to the Republican Party than most people think, but are transparently still better on all of them.

There's such a thing as making the nuanced case there are overlapping similarities but yet there are still dramatically different political consequences that arise from each party being in power.

I'm with you there, but neoliberal liberal/centrism still has a sizable gap from the Extreme Right politics of the Republican Party, it's just that the gap is a lot narrower than what most people think. But I would still say MSNBC still very different from Fox.

Oh yes for sure. I've had frustrations with both while it seems to me even much more severe for Trump supporters. Clinton supporters do a lot of mental gymnastics to cherry pick facts at their convenience, but many Trump supporters make claims that flat out directly contradict the results of polls and deny what experts say about Climate Change, and a host of other issues. I mean I think most of what shows up on Cable News is complete trash, but there is a notable difference between MSNBC & Fox News.

I think your portrayal of the people who use term "fake news" is quite accurate. They have this total disregard for any claims that don't fit their ideological standpoint of what feels true to them, which most across the political spectrum do to a certain extent but it's this total dismissal and refusal to engage with what's well accepted by the majority of the society that's striking. Although I think Donald Trump is quite different from most of his followers, who acts in concern for his own ego than any ideological standpoint that he really cares about. It's not so much that he dismisses the truth of anything that doesn't fit his ideology as much as he could care less if it does if it's convenient to the game he's playing.

"Because of this proclivity for that oxymoronic guff he calls “truthful hyperbole,” Trump is frequently accused of being a serial liar. But this is not quite right. For one thing, it misunderstands what lies and bullshit are, and who Trump is. In On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt tells us that the difference between the liar and the bullshitter is that the liar is deliberately trying to tell us something he knows to be false. The bullshitter, on the other hand, simply does not care whether what he says is true or false. He will say whatever is necessary to persuade his audience. That means it will include a mixture of truth and falsehood. The bullshitter may even end up saying a lot of true things. But he doesn’t say them because they’re true, he says them because they work.

Donald Trump is a bullshitter. He is best classified as a bullshitter rather than a liar because he himself does not believe he is issuing falsehoods. He doesn’t necessarily think that he’s telling the truth either. What he does is find the words that will produce the effect required at any given time; he finds the most effective promotional tool. Some- times these things are lies. Sometimes they are not. But Trump’s intention is produce consequences rather than either to deceive or enlighten. Trump will feed you whatever bullshit it takes to get your money or your vote." — Trump Anatomy of a Monstrosity by Nathan Robinson

(the book has a bunch of biographical examples to illustrate the point about Trump)

Also since you listed Gandhi, you should know he's a controversial figure on the Left. I recommend Norman Finkelstein's book on him from an appreciatory point of view & Arundhati Roy (a female political activist) for a critical perspective on him.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Gandhi-Says-Nonviolence-Resistance/dp/1935928791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501138662&sr=8-1&keywords=norman+finkelstein+gandhi





https://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Saint-Annihilation-Between-Ambedkar/dp/160846797X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501138613&sr=8-1&keywords=arundhati+roy+gandhi

Who is the Noam Chomsky of female intellectuals?

Emma Goldman & Simone Weil, but they're not modern.

Oh that what you consider unlikely is exactly what Smith intended to do. What often confuses people is to put ourselves in the shoes of Smith who lived in the age of society in which the consequence of liberalization of markets weren't well understood. Hi pre-conception was that if you set up a system of perfect freedom of market competition, it would lead up to a system of perfect equality. It was an argument he carefully construed that we now know to be a really bad argument.

"[Smith] believes that ideally, competition should be among parties of similar advantage. A system of perfect liberty, he argues, should create a situation in which "the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock . . . be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality." Smith sees perfect liberty as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for competition, but perfect competition occurs only when both parties in the exchange are on more or less equal grounds, whether it be competition for labor, jobs, consumers, or capital." - Patricia Werhane, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism,

This was the passages from Adam Smith she was referring to:

"The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality. If in the same neighbourhood, there was any employment evidently either more or less advantageous than the rest, so many people would crowd into it in the one case, and so many would desert it in the other, that its advantages would soon return to the level of other employments. This at least would be the case in a society where things were left to follow their natural course, where there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to chose what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper." - Wealth of Nations

Yeah anarchism isn't well known at all in mainstream political discourse, partly given that socialism and its history is barely if at all understood by most people and partly that it's not as popular as Marxism as a research subject in university departments.

I recommend Understanding Power instead as a first read. You can probably find copies somewhere online the net and it comes with extensive footnotes that are longer than the book itself:

http://www.understandingpower.com/

No I'm afraid you're not familiar with his work then....he's from the anarchist tradition from the Left. Then there's the self-described anarchist tradition from the Right, where you see people like Murray Rothbard & Ayn Rand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Political_views

If you're interested, take a look at Understanding Power as an introduction to his thought.

Chomsky is an anarcho-capitalist? That's like calling Ayn Rand a socialist; unless you misspoke, I'm not sure you are familiar with Chomsky's work.

I'm not sure Chomsky is a fan of Smith exactly, but he does cite him as an early sharp thinker who sought ideals that he strongly sympathized with: liberty, equality, solidarity, and so on.

It's important to note that Smith talked about the role of markets, government, labor, and so on in the context of a different age, it was before the age of Corporate Capitalism. If you try to understand the ideals that Smith sought under the conditions of the society he observed, what you would expect him to think of political economy in the modern age is quite different:

On Adam Smith probably would of thought of corporations, quoted from Patricia Werhane:

"Smith [had a] genuine fear of institutions, as shown in his critique of the system of mercantilism, of monopolies, and of political or economic institutions that favor some individuals over others. Smith questions the existence of "joint-stock companies" (corporations), except in exceptional circumstances, because the institutionalization of management power separated from ownership creates institutional management power cut loose from responsibility. Smith's fear is that such institutions might become personified, so that one would regard them as real entities and hence treat them as incapable of being dismantled."

The best book on Smith that I know of is "Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism" by Patricia Werhane but you'll probably have to find a copy through the library or something because it's difficult to find. Smith is rarely understood or read properly and the book demolishes a number of myths about him.

Chomsky regularly cites from Smith more so than he does from Marx when talking about Capitalism, which is a rarity from the Left if that interests you.

https://theintercept.com/2015/08/03/239-years-ago-adam-smith-predicted-anger-seattle-business-ceo-pays-workers-well/

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

"The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history(….) Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own. It is not reached by assuming that our own age is the absolute to which Luther and Calvin and their generation are only relative; it is only reached by fully accepting the fact that their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us."

- Herbert Butterfield [The Whig Interpretation of History]

Maybe the discussion should start off with the fact that there is no such thing as the "free market"? And I'm not even talking about the Left critique of economics & capitalist society (of which I'm a part of) but mainstream economic theory. Even many of the followers of the Chicago School of Economics are not genuine free marketeers, because they learn Macroeconomic theory in Graduate School that, there are many elements of the economy that are, and have to be, inevitably and deeply regulated.

It's more complicated for North Korea, for instance they "solely" developed Nuclear Weapons for deterrence. They actually agreed with the Clinton Administration to stop their nuclear development if the U.S. would hold back on its military provocation and some other negotiations regarding aid, and it succeeded, but the Bush Administration ripped up that agreement leading to the current situation.

I would generally agree when it comes to the U.S. and the major powers. The stockpiling of nuclear weapons is for greater military aggression, not for safety concerns.

(Also accidentally flagged your comment, sorry about that)

I understand, but as an ethical question it is the action itself that matters, the intention is not essential and really only becomes applicable once an act has been made. Something that one simply wants to do but never does has no relevance. In line with the OP and ethics, I feel like consequentialism takes precedence over intention as the latter is perhaps applicable in the case of virtue or values, but it is probably best suited to moral philosophy.

I agree, and this is close to what I meant, although I don't think you necessarily have to subscribe to consequentialism to believe this. At least from my virtue/care ethics framework, consideration for consequences is naturally welded in it.

"But professing good intentions and acting with good intentions are two very different things"

Why is it different? Intentions have to do with the resolve for a higher moral good, the thoughts and feelings of the actor rather than the nature of the actions themselves. (of course, one can profess good intentions and not believe in it at all, but that's something different from what I meant.)

The problem with good intentions is that even the worst monsters profess good intentions, so it doesn't really tell anything about the person and the nature of their actions. Most people reinterpret things to justify what they're doing as for the greater good and they may sincerely believe what they're doing is alright, if not at least partially, otherwise they wouldn't be inclined to do it.

"With respect to these questions in particular, among the lessons I've learned are precisely that both politics and democracy and incredibly misunderstood notions, not simply among 'lay people', but even - and perhaps especially - by those who count themselves as mainstream political theorists."

Or rather I think it's a feature of society for the political theorists to be particularly targeted to not know what democracy is.

http://highexistence.com/wonder-terror-propaganda-modern-governments-misuse-media-manipulate-bewildered-herd/

The opposite of love and care is not hatred or disregard, but disinterest. — Wosret

You know, I heard that many years ago and found it interesting but now I don't know if that statement makes any sense. Sure, one may argue that in society and human interactions, disinterest in many ways may be a more prevailing problem than hatred in the absence of love & care, but that's saying something else. The opposite of "disinterest" logically is "interest", which can just be positive or negative. And the opposite extreme of hatred is love. I find the suggestion to the contrary bizarre.

I was talking in generalized terms but the way the social sciences sometimes works is you can do anything with the data to make it appear to fit your thesis if you leave out different factors. Anyways as I said, I think internal domestic violence went down since the Enlightenment. I disagree with him about how current times compare to pre-Historic times.

Pinker is probably correct that since the Enlightenment, at the very least internal domestic violence has gone down, though I don't really think for all the reasons he says it does. (he also cherry picks which types of violence he considers significant.) From what I can see, he most is definitely wrong on pre-Historic violence, which he takes a minority stance on the subject matter within anthropology, something people who haven't gone into the subject aren't aware of. Leading Anthropologists such as Douglas Fry, Brian Ferguson, and Stephen Corry have done a lot of analysis to show his assumptions are wrong.

https://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker's%20List%20-%20Exaggerating%20Prehistoric%20War%20Mortality%20(2013).pdf

Some of the comments on Dennett’s use of “illusion” are covered in a review in The New Statesman. For example,
these excerpts:

“In this new book, confusion persists, owing to his reluctance to define his terms. When he says “consciousness” he appears to mean reflective self-consciousness (I am aware that I am aware), whereas many other philosophers use “consciousness” to mean ordinary awareness, or experience. There ensues much sparring with straw men, as when he ridicules thinkers who assume that gorillas, say, have consciousness. They almost certainly don’t in his sense, and they almost certainly do in his opponents’ sense. (A gorilla, we may be pretty confident, has experience in the way that a volcano or a cloud does not.)

“More unnecessary confusion, in which one begins to suspect Dennett takes a polemical delight, arises from his continued use of the term “illusion”. Consciousness, he has long said, is an illusion: we think we have it, but we don’t. But what is it that we are fooled into believing in? It can’t be experience itself: as the philosopher Galen Strawson has pointed out, the claim that I only seem to have experience presupposes that I really am having experience – the experience of there seeming to be something. And throughout this book, Dennett’s language implies that he thinks consciousness is real: he refers to “conscious thinking in H[omo] sapiens”, to people’s “private thoughts and experiences”, to our “proper minds, enculturated minds full of thinking tools”, and to “a ‘rich mental life’ in the sense of a conscious life like ours”.

“The way in which this conscious life is allegedly illusory is finally explained in terms of a “user illusion”, such as the desktop on a computer operating system. We move files around on our screen desktop, but the way the computer works under the hood bears no relation to these pictorial metaphors. Similarly, Dennett writes, we think we are consistent “selves”, able to perceive the world as it is directly, and acting for rational reasons. But by far the bulk of what is going on in the brain is unconscious, ­low-level processing by neurons, to which we have no access. Therefore we are stuck at an ­“illusory” level, incapable of experiencing how our brains work.

“This picture of our conscious mind is rather like Freud’s ego, precariously balan­ced atop a seething unconscious with an entirely different agenda. Dennett explains wonderfully what we now know, or at least compellingly theorise, about how much unconscious guessing, prediction and logical inference is done by our brains to produce even a very simple experience such as seeing a table. Still, to call our normal experience of things an “illusion” is, arguably, to privilege one level of explanation arbitrarily over another.”

The entire review is here:

http://tinyurl.com/jp9xhc5

Yeah that's similar to what I guessed but...I wish there was more. It's kind of a really~ loose symbolism.

I second StreetLight's recommendation of Works of Love, but I would recommend the introductory essay to Gordon Marino's "The Quotable Kierkegaard" before you read it. It's the best explanation of Kierkegaard I've ever read (an interesting thinker who's not very understood well imo. And I'm a thorough Atheist.)

How about these?

Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction - Susan Wolf
Love: A History - Simon May
Love's Virtues - Mike Martin

I joined the North Jersey DSA organization and attended meetings in others, and doing work in organizing.

Sure, but I'm not sure if we can really separate "how the examination of hearing serves a basis for a new metaphysics" without it being based first on an effective metaphysics of hearing.

I would say that I do agree with you that much of how we characterize the nature of what we hear is on the differences of the vibrations, and thus there is a justification for examining the properties of sound waves to look for insight. This seems to be less so for how we examine the relation of light with respect to vision because we are only able to take advantage of a very narrow spectrum and it's the nature of light for some of its properties to remain consistent (such as speed) though it is not true when we examine the qualities of color & brightness, to which it is impossible for there to be an "inseparability of medium and content" (for instance, if we are to examine the nature of perception of flashing colors in empty space instead of perception of objects)

I think the difference in discourse between the examination of hearing and that of vision is different because much of the latter focuses on qualities that describe the contours of objects of perception while we have much less of that for sound (we do have some of that, such as the focus of how something sounds differently if an object is hard or soft upon collision with another object)

So perhaps an effective metaphysics of perception differs based on what aspect you are focusing on, such as a focus on how the medium affects the experience of perception (brightness and shades of flashing colors/loudness) in contrast to how it reveals the attributes of objects (appearance of objects/hardness of objects) So I'm suspicious of using what you described as a justification for using properties of sound waves as the basis for metaphysics of hearing, unless we are to do the same for vision in respect to its medium. I'm not really sure how much the ontology of waves actually reveals about the nature of its coinciding experiences.

This is interesting, but I find something off about analyzing the metaphysics of hearing as an act of perception based on the properties of sound waves (the medium that provides information for perception) rather than the objects of perception (if there are such objects to be said, I'll have to think about this) when you do not for vision with respect to electro-magnetic waves. How do you justify this difference?

Usually when I do have slightly vivid dreams I can remember, they sap out of my memory real fast after a short number of minutes I'm awake.

I always found the middle Wittgenstein insightful. His TypeScript really goes deep into what he was thinking in between the Tractatus and PI and what connects the two. Frankly, I don't see how you can even understand the other two works without it.

I think what confuses a lot of people is that they think that Wittgenstein's idea that problems of language use underly all philosophical problems undercuts any need for systematic thinking & metaphysics. I mean sure, it places strong limits on metaphysical thought and expression, but there are all sorts of conceptual assumptions that lie even in our use of "ordinary language" so to speak, and systematic metaphysics helps us navigate the terrain in how such language is used.

Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All? - Ian Hacking
Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters - Jonathan Ladd