The 2018-2020-2022-2023 trend is very blue (anti-MAGA) heading into 2024. :up:

7Nov23 Election Day

Dems crushed MAGA^^ in
• Ohio (reproductive rights & recreational ganja)
• Kentucky (governor)
• Pennsylvania (supreme court justice)
•• Philadelphia (mayor)
• Virginia (senate & house!)

:cool: :up:

^^ making autocracy great again

:fire:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/847478

Yes or no – the United States has been, and is currently, a constitutional republic, not a democracy?

Do you think we humans could create a guidance book that became as popular or more popular than the bible or the quran, ... — universeness

The internet. :pray:

... but provided well-chosen 'what if,' scenarios and gave sound, robust, advice on what to do next.

The tech singularity (AGI —> ASI). :point:

:up:

Why otherwise would humans be so eager to fight wars if everybody would lose? — ssu

Our atavistic delusions of grandeur (à la the gambler's fallacy).

FWIW – To paraphrase J.S. Mill's quip about "conservatives" – The religious aren't necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are religious. :smirk:

:mask: True.

Bemusings ...

And at long last I've finally realized that it's stupid to tell stupid people that they are stupid.

Most people are very stupid but very few actively struggle against this congenital defect.

Un/fortunately sober now, I don't suffer fools who suffer fools or who don't already know they are fools.

Today's 'online' sophistry: pseudo-science rationalized by pseudo-philosophy (i.e. Dunning-Kruger woo woo).

'Less is more' and 'more is less'. Poverty means 'never enough' no matter how much (money) one has.

For the love of God, inspite of His indifference ... for the love of humanity, inspite of our inhumanity ...

To paraphrase JS Mill's quip about conservatives, I'd sum up Old Atheism as 'Theists aren't necessarily  stupid but most stupid people are theists.' Now we have New Atheism  which, more or less, crosses some polite line with 'Theism makes people stupid and makes stupid people dangerous.'

An 'atheist' is someone who says she doesn't believe in God which is just a polite way of saying 'I don't need an invisible crutch'.

It's the slow dying, not the hard living, that kills you.

This life, here and now, is a Purgatory (of lessons maybe learned from losses) where Hell desires meanings which do not exist and Heaven revels without a cause.

People are always trouble. The problem is how to tell who is worth the trouble from those who aren't before it's too late. And it's always later than you think.

Through these veins runs the blood of ancestors who were kidnapped and sold into slavery by other ancestors.

I still don't trust people who've never been drunks or junkies and, except for my mother, who believe in magic.

Inevitably you reach an age when you cannot appreciate the aesthetics or do not understand the morals of people half your age ... From this perspective, youths seem neither to feel nor think for themselves. What are they – hedonic drones? flame-blinded moths? defecating skinner boxes?

The latest All You Need is Cash-grab is just old Macca trying to make chicken salad out of chickensh*t. Ain't that a shame...

So much pretty doesn't make up for so little beauty.

Chapter II - The Biological foundations of personal identity — DeSoto

Being No One by Thomas Metzinger (or his much briefer, less technical summary The Ego Tunnel).

Also, a more general (even entertaining) treatment of the topic that comes to mind is A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality by John Perry.

@RogueAI @schopenhauer1 @BitconnectCarlos

So was this Israeli cabinet minister sacked just for what he said or rather for his extremist, Freudian slip – saying the quiet part out loud – nuking Gaza? :brow:

https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-minister-amichai-eliyahu-suspend-benjamin-netanyahu-nuclear-bomb-gaza-hamas-war/

The Likud-led regime is nothing but Hamas with US firepower & NATO support.

:sweat:

Yeah, given our current knowledge and best guesses on that basis, asking about the beginning of the universe makes about as much sense as asking about the edge of the Earth.

Last time I checked, "the Roman Empire" was the root of what we today call "Western Civilization" and, given the choice of "sword or the Cross" in the name of Jesus, much of the world was "Christianized" during the millennium after the fall of Rome. Conquest, not self-critique.

:roll:

:up:

Even though the Allies committed war crimes, they were morally superior to the Axis. Is that correct? — RogueAI

That question is too vague.

Yeah, the world was better off that the Allied powers had defeated the Axis powers. No doubt the world will be better off when the US client-state of Israel destroys the Iranian client-terrorist proxies of Hamas & Hezbollah. The question is: will Israel destroy itself, or be destroyed, in the process by becoming the monsters it is fighting? Apparently, Israel has – especially, since 1967 – such that the "Greater Israel" state policy is, in practice, indistinguishable from, IMO, the US' "Manifest Destiny" and even Third Reich's "Lebensraum" ideologies.

So, Rogue, is the concentration camp regime that's indiscriminately mass-murdering prisoners "morally superior" to the very few prisoners who had escaped only to murder the guards' & torturers' "innocent" families and friends?

(update 5 mins after I wrote this post) To wit:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/04/us-jews-rift-gaza-israel-crisis

Isn’t it true you can’t have it both ways, you either have universal rights and liberal principles are a thing or they are not. — schopenhauer1

Attempts by Europeans to impose "universal rights and liberal principles" by colonizing and coopting non-Europeans for the last half-millennium was and is, in fact, trying to "have it both ways" – subverting that "universalist" end with illiberal (i.e. imperialist/hegemonic) means.

The very idea of being self-critical of one’s OWN ideals seems a Western thing.

In theory, maybe; but not in practice. Empires (via conquistadors, gunships, missionaries & systematic colonization), for example, are not "self-critical" emancipatory projects (pace Hegel, vide Aristotle).

Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?

Mahatma Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

:fire:

I'm claiming that Allied war crimes were morally equivalent to Axis war crimes insofar as they were both war crimes. Your special pleading is what's "absurd", sir. Inform yourself. :mask:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II

Does the committing of Allied war crimes entail a moral equivalence between the Allies and Axis? — RogueAI

Yes. What makes actions "war crimes" is that, to begin with they are not self-defensive, they are gratuitous, etc.

Israel has a history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and other human rights violations that skirt the lines of genocide. We see the intent put into practice on a large scale. — Tzeentch

:100:

Did the Allies commit genocide [war crimes] against populations of Axis powers? — RogueAI

The Allies certainly committed their share of war crimes (e.g. Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki ...)

I guess it's also lost on you that you're not making sense.

In other words, more blaming the victim. :roll:

And so, with respect to my previous post, what's your point about Philo Judaeus?

:up:

What Coates tells us on the other hand is his personal experience, how he did feel when being in the occupied territories etc. — ssu

And the appended links to videos (which you've ignored) do not corroborate Coates' "personal experience" of "the occupied territories"? :chin:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/850515

IIRC, the Roman Empire, beginning(?) in the 1st century BCE and culminating in the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church and its 4th century CE canonical bible, had manufactured world-historical 'Jew-hatred'. This quintessentially European fetish comes down the millennia to us belated, hyper-Europeanized folk socio-culturally internalized as antisemitism – perhaps the most prevalent, viciously paranoiac conspiracy theory on the planet – for which Jews themselves are blamed even by so-called "philosophers" (here on display in many posts). Heil Effin' Heidegger! :shade:

If I were to die, I'd rather people find a good finished master of my songs than a crummy old demo on a cassette. — George Harrison, 1979

https://youtu.be/AW55J2zE3N4?si=21Us0av-Evnfqz_P (A-side single)

Fucking rubbish. — George Harrison, 1995

"Love Me Do" (2:23)*
B-side single, 2023 remix
The Beatles, 1962

*original UK single, Ringo version

Let's suppose for a moment that God exists and is the fundamental truth of nature. — Benj96

Which "God"?

How is "fundamental truth" distonguishable from truth itself (or not-fundamental truth)?

:up:

On the post before my previous one I have linked two other posts containing three videos of other informed commentors further corroborating Ta-Nehisi Coates' observations (as well as my own throughout this long thread going back to 2021). Posting a video of three center-right / conservative Black Americans to 'counter' Mr Coates' interview, schop1, lacks substance and seems to me racially problematic. :brow:

Well, you're entitled to your opinion ...

One American writer's experience and reflections on Israel's 'Jim Crow democracy' ...


https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/847621

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/847687

The making of the last(?) Beatles' recording...

1Nov23

If I were to die, I'd rather people find a good finished master of my songs than a crummy old demo on a cassette. — George Harrison, 1979 Rolling Stone Interview

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/850584

2Nov23

:smirk:
i.e. mismanagement rationalized by misinformation ...

What's the common denominator of all struggling democracies? — Vera Mont

IMHO, the common denominator is a structural lack of economic democracy (i.e. they are "democracies"-in-name-only).

Yes... but I guess it still leaves us with open questions about which metaphysical models we may be willing to engage with, or accept as worth our time. — Tom Storm

:up: :up:

One must somehow choose a set of 'categorical axioms', so to speak, as non-Euclidean geometers have done in order to explore both possible and impossible versions of the world.

So if poor old @Bob Ross had answered that there were only one cup, I'd have skewer'd him on the other horn of the dilemma, that since there was only one cup there is no difference between observed cups and cups-in-themselves. — Banno

*Boom!* :smirk:

:up:

:up:

:100: :fire:

Once again, for all to see, you refuse to succinctly answer my direct questions of your "idiosyncratic" – problematic & confused – statements (re: their presuppositions and/or implications), so I'm compelled to no longer give you the benefit of the doubt that you're an intellectually honest participant on TPF and finally conclude, sir, that Socratically engaging with you is futile.

"Allow" or "delay" what?

What I meant was whether the financial elites would allow control to be handed over to benign "strong AGI". — Janus

Oh, that. I don't expect "financial elites" will "allow" it any more than junkies & drunks "allow" themselves to become addicts or chimps & tigers "allow" themselves to become well-fed captives in municipal zoos. We – cradle-to-grave dependents on 24/7 goods, services & infrastructures – already live inside the internet and there's always a mad-scramble race on to monetize 'ANI' (i.e. deep learning/neural-net systems and agents e.g. ChatGPT, OpenAI, face-recognition surveillance CCTV, Siri, etc) in any and every c/overt way possible. Mass culture has been 'amusing us to brain death' (i.e. cognitive obsolescence) for a century, which ubiquitious – no "off-switch!" – computerization has accelerated the last few decades ... and maybe the computational curve is going vertical – 'strong AGI' running the asylum – just in time to prevent us from bringing down global civilization on our own heads. Will such caretakers (zookeepers) be "benign"? I expect AGI to be no worse to us than our Haves have been to we Have-nots (or nature) for the last half-millennium.

Could you rephrase what you're asking?

Any more positive views of the world's future? — Tim3003

Given (3) accelerating global climate change, (2) persistent proliferation of WMDs and (1) the ascendancy of anti-democratic, reactionary populisms in high-income nations, the near-imminent prospect of 'strong AGI' (capable of automating the strategic infrastructures of global civilization in order to transform the current, unsustainable scarcity economy into a sustainable, post-scarcity circular economy) cannot be realized soon enough.

I take your questions seriously, and provide long detailed answers. — Gnomon

If that were so, then you would have given "detailed answers" instead of just more of your usual run-on gibberish. The fact is, Gnomon, you're intellectually allergic to direct questions put to your idiosyncratic confusions and never give "detailed answers" to them, such as

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/709894

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718369

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/742056 — 180 Proof

C'mon, Gnomon, rectify this failing on your part by giving succinct, direct answers to my questions either in my previous post and/or in these old posts linked above (or show that the questions are invalid in someway/s).

:up: