NO really, I didnt know, lol.

Within a LARGER scope, it could be meaningless or not, depending on your metaphysical position, which ultimately can be no more than belief. Within the scope of science, the concept of an atom does have meaning, or we wouldnt be able to make sense of scientific theories.

as is the US (until later this year — Xtrix

ooh. I didnt know that. I'll do some reading on it, thank you )

Nevertheless, other countries whose economies depend of the exporting of fossil fuels are also persuadable. Brazil, Russia, Australia, Britain, etc. — Xtrix

Thats not empirically true. The USA and Nicaragua are the only two nations which did not sign up to the Paris Accord. Everyone else generally agrees the planet is warming up. And no other country believes more guns mean less crime.

What "stuff" would that be? Atoms? — Xtrix

It's impossible to say whether things like 'atoms' really exist, nor does it actually matter. An 'atom' is a very simple concept, even meaningless for many elements in natural conditions, such as metals for example, because of 'electron sharing in substance 'pools' larger than 'molecules.'

But it doesn't matter, because such words refer to a scientific model to explain the observed material world, and not the material world itself.

In the model, events change an object's state (subject) to something else (object) by an action (verb). Whether the object exists or not is irrelevant to the language used to describe it, because it is only describing an abstracted model of observed phenomena.

I have another explanation

The current generation is not marrying, first because divorce is now so common, and second because its income is lower than the prior generation. So there is a surfeit of testosterone going around and alot of people who are useless to the economy because, without having children, they arent buying enough stuff.

So the ruler's solution when there is a surfeit of useless people is to send them overseas to get killed off, while saying it values human life, it actually does everything it can to attribute war deaths to other factors, resulting in absurd statements I have heard like 'only 7 people were killed by the war' in the first persian gulf thing (stated deaths are only for combatants during declared military engagements, not including deaths from so called 'friendly fire,' which are frequently much higher than all deaths caused by the enemy).

The USA is looking for someone else to play the killing off game to the extent it is now being deliberately aggravating, assassinating Iranian generals when there had been many prior opportunities untaken.

I'm in continual awe of the power of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda. — Xtrix

I would agree that modern propaganda techniques have evolved to the point where it is no longer possible for human reason to defeat it in the USA. I had the same problem when I was working in gun control, where the NRA has been so successful, half of the USA refuses to believe that anything it says could possibly be wrong. I wrote something about the NRA's propaganda techniques here: https://www.yofiel.com/writing/guns2/243-nra

There is no longer any point at all in trying to convince gun owners that their beliefs could be wrong. Any fact you show them has so many false counter arguments stacked up against it, it is snowed under until they simply change the subject to some other false propaganda from the NRA.

It seems mostly unique to the USA. The rest of the world has not shown itself to be so gullible. I atrtribute it to the USA's founding on 'self evident truth' in the Declaration of Independence, which is also wrongly understood in all of the USA. Franklin changed Jefferson's original words 'sacred and undeniable' to 'self evident' to accommodate Paine's philosophy of naive realism, which was popular at the time. In fact even the natural rights themselves are not so self evident. People have different intuitions on what natural rights might be, or how to resolve conflicts between them. And Jefferson actually based his choice on Locke's empirical reasoning, but as it has a theistic premise, it is not taught in public shools.

People in the USA are particularly susceptible to 'self evident' fallacies. Its a cold winter, so global warming must be wrong. Basically that's as far as most people in this country are capable of thinking.

There is no doubt that man is affecting the environment. The greenhouse effect is easily demonstrable in the laboratory, and to deny man is heating the planet up is akin to denying Newton's laws of physics. And there is no remaining doubt that the planet is warming up.

For a while, climate change deniers had an edge due to dropping temperatures in some areas, and the sea not being as much warmer as predicted. As the sea covers 2/3 of the earth, it is a dominant factor in the analysis. However, even in the last 10 years, we now understand much more due to better satellite data on weather, and something called the ARGO buoy system ( http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/About_Argo.html ). Its data is available from NOAA ( https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/) . It originally measured only temperatures in the first 50 feet of the sea, and it was assumed deeper waters were simply colder. But in trying to find the missing heat, new 'bouncing buoys' were deployed can now measure temperatures down to 3000 feet. And the missing heat in the ocean was found, in large, static 'bubbles' under currents higher up, where the heat is trapped and does not reach the surface.



These currents also convey cold water from the poles, causing lower temperatures elsewhere from melting ice caps.

Incidentally, the increased heat reduces the amount of oxygen that can be retained, and the best study of the data so far, published in SCIENCE in 2018, finds that the lowest zone of the ocean, the 'dead zone,' has quadrupled in size since 1950 ( https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-suffocating-dead-zones-oxygen-starved ). Other human factors besides the greenhouse effect, such as agricultural runoff, are adding to this ( https://earthsky.org/earth/dead-zone-gulf-of-mexico-2019 ), causing the dead zone to extend closer and closer to the surface. In combination with overfishing by modern 'super trawlers,' this has depleted large areas of the ocean of fish entirely.

The only remaining issue is whether our impact is significant compared to other factors affecting the global environment. Of these the most significant is heat from the sun, which slowly varies to some extent not predictable. On this there are obviously three alternatives.

• First, it is significant, in which something should be done.
• Second, it is not significant because other factors are making the temperature go up. In that case there is even more reason to do something about our own heat generation to extend our race's life.
• Third, other factors will bring about another mini ice age, in which case we will mostly go extinct. Our own heat would not be significant.

So given the choices, we should definitely do something, yes.

[r

What do you actually know about the people making these statements? — Bitter Crank

Gun rights aren't a core issue for me. I don't actually know any gun rights sites or spend any time thinking about the issue. I do read some right wing, nativist and libertarian sites where people strenuously argue for gun rights. They all tend to be the responsible gun owner types generally making abstract points about freedom and law, not people hoping for mayhem. Note, I read the left wing wackos too. I've always had the ability to read things without necessarily agreeing with them. I regard myself as a centrist wacko. — fishfry

Well, here is my experience on the issue. There are three types of response from public forums on gun issues:

• First, a fringe element is definitely NOT only 'discussing abstract points about freedom. if you are working in gun control and such gun addicts find out where you live, they PHYSICALLY ASSAULT YOU. One was earning money by repairing guns for a black gang in Sacramento. I had to abandon my house there after gang attacks on me, property damage, and someone shooting my cat.
• Second, there are '2nd-Amendment evangelists' who refuse to accept anything the NRA says could be wrong, no matter what you say or do. Most of these actually profit from guns, and there are alot of them now. It's said there are more people selling guns than work in supermarkets and Starbucks combined. I suspect this includes all Walmart employees, but whatever the actual number, there are one hell of a lot of them.
• Third, the less fanatic are not actually aware that the NRA only emits propaganda. They only watch news like FOX, and they only talk with each other, such as on gun fan forums that ban me as a troll within 10 minutes of me sharing anything.

There are anti-gun sites, but they are totally dominated by people with emotional problems who don't read anything I post. Incidentally, no matter what I write anti-gun lobbyists, websites, and politicians, the only thing I have got back at all is mass-mail donation requests. And publishers wanted something less academic for a more biased audience, so I have been rather forced to abandon my work on the topic.

i can find no sites besides this one where people can express views without bias.

By the way, regarding the assaults, the police basically just found it amusing and have no apparent interest of trying to control the situation whatsoever. After the assaults on me started, someone was gun murdered around the corner, and I was already planning to leave Sacramento. I tried to provide the police with some information on a checkbook that was stolen, where someone cashed the checks faking my name at a bank the day before the murder. As you may not know, security checks are designed to retain a finger and thumbprint when someone rips it out the checkbook. So they even had that. I offered to give more information to a detective and testify if they wanted. It was totally ignored. The only thing they did was put yellow tape around the house of the victim.

I now live in a senior mobile home park that does not allow young people to live in it, with its own private security, and nowhere near Sacramento, with unpublished address. That may seem excessive paranoia, but someone WAS murdered just around the corner.

Hmm. thank you for your wisdom.

I never thought I would say this, but Iran, N Korea, whatever, the sooner they send a whole bunch of young people into the worst possible environmental conditions to get seriously killed off, the better. Nothing else seems to work. I tried everything I knew. This mad squad that is incapable of even the remotest inkling of kindness is taking over everywhere. I tried wisdom. I tried respect. I tried humility. I tried humor. I tried information. I even tried pet pictures. I tried a dozen different ways to get any kind words out of them at all. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

The laws enforced by western governments in the realm of marriage and divorce make generational reproduction impossible. So, men are being advised to stay clear of marriage and having children. — alcontali

That''s a very interesting observation. Monasteries and such being very much out of style, you point to a real reason for the apparently increasing amount of antagonism going around these days. What do you think the effect on women is of this social change?

what sites do people discuss 2nd amendment without behaving like they could kill someone any day? I have done some work on the topic and I cant find any serious, or more notably, kind, people to look at it.

the more it goes up, the harder and longer it goes down.

s there any disagreement about this argument? Annoying if I won't get a good argument about an argument because my argument is good enough :P — Qmeri

Im not up on the latest fashion on this topic, but in the 1970s it was a more reductionist view, that is, if we lived in a simulation, it would appear to have the same rules we observe in the physical world. So it doesn't make any significant difference, and can be removed by Osccam's razor as a consideration.

Yes in fact, simulation was around then, for example the SPICE circuit simulator, and people had made the same extrapolation that the apparent universe could be a simulation even then.

Also there were a couple of SF books about brains in bottles connected by a computer with people experiencing a virtual life that they didnt know wasn't 'real' even back then. Maybe one was by Pohl and Kornbluth. It was a long time ago, I can't remember

it was 'old thought' like Plato too which was generally held to be 'replaced' in the enlightenment by more complete reasoning not reliant on doctrinal assertion alone, which was why it was called the enlightenment

That doesnt have anything to do with the USA's social contract, so I dont have anything further to say on it.

Well not entirely, because semantic interpretation is also part of formal logic when applied to a natural language, and semantic interpretation is rather not thought of as kown a priori, because there are alot of different opinions on it.

well Im not sure if everyone agrees that meaning is defined a priori in formal logic, but thank you for the thought )

↪ernestm ‘Insults to truth’. Trump awarded honorary doctorate. — Wayfarer

it took me a little while to realize how funny that is.

ok ) I dont think it would be interesting here, but I do plan to sit some philosophy courses again in the next academic year, and they wanr me to write things to get course waivers, so I guess I will back at it later.

I ceetainly would appreciate hearing what you think would be the next thing to address on this. Some people already want me to continue the dialectic. I was thinking of taking a break from the depths to address the climate change controversy, now that the ARGO results are coming in on heat trapped in the deep sea things are looking really bad there. Most of the other stuff I drafted on my site could do eith more work. And I broke my wrist so I have to type with one finger.

Perhaps we need a formal logic 'on insults'

And you're appearing to rationalise Trump's egregious bullshitting, which is a red rag to a bull for me and a lot of others — Wayfarer

Can we take a step back a bit and think how people believe Trump's bullshit in the first place. He couldnt get to be President of the United States if he is obviously wrong to them, and he's not obviously wrong, so there must be some way he is finding to make the bullshit meaningful. That's all Im trying to accomplish here is to understand how that's possible. Im not trying to justify it.

well thank you there is a section at the end which briefly discusses other work now. If you think of anything else Id be glad to hear it.

we've definitely agreed on the education problem before, and we are both frustrated the same way.

What I try to do here is explain why false beliefs can still be meaningful, because during what I call 'the epistemological gap,' there are times when we do reasonably believe something is true without direct evidence, such as the sun rising tomorrow.

Philosophers have tackled the relationship of society to truth before. Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies is an old example, and more recent is Frankfurt's On Bullshit, which is particularly relevant to Trump and the general "post-truth" thing. — Pfhorrest

Due to similar criticisms of your type, please see answer below.

The news media has become very selective in what it states and prints and is politically biased - on both ends of the political spectrum. How are philosophers to solve this problem? — John Gill

What I did was write a Hegelian dialectic towards a resolution of the issue from the perspective of formal logic, and you can find it, with edits to the intro as per criticisms, here:

Can Formal Logic Win the War on Truth?

Of course to make a more thorough answer, as it is not trivial, it is 5000 words. Thank you for your comments.

Due to ongoing criticisms of your type, what I did was write a Hegelian dialectic towards a resolution of the issue from the perspective of formal logic, and you can find it, with edits to the intro as per criticisms, here:

Can Formal Logic Win the War on Truth?

Of course to make a more thorough answer, as it is not trivial, it is 5000 words. Thank you for your comments.

because you clearly do not realize you are not talking to me. Had you read what I wrote, then you could talk to me, but now you are involved in further ridicule, I won't have anything further to say. Go ahead and insult me as much as you want then, if thats how you need to make yourself feel better about yourself. Good bye.

my article is about formal logic
— ernestm

No, it isn't. If it were, it would contain lots of formulae and stuff. I know that, 'cause I've whole books on formal logic, all of them with weird symbols. Yours doesn't, so it's not. — Banno

Who are you talking to? Because its not me.

As I said, my article is about formal logic. Frankfurt does not address formal logic. This gets boring after a while. Will you please pester someone else.

we agree on that.

Obviously the title is too misleading so I changed it for people who don't bother reading anything else but the final paragraph.

Please note the final section has 'merit' in quotes

Again as I said I defined my terms. Again, I amended the introduction to cover prior work rendering direct reply to TIME unnecessary.

https://www.yofiel.com/writing/truth/war-on-truth

If others are interested in discussing inconsistencies or lack of clarity without ridicule I would be glad for the input.

Again, I amended the introduction to cover prior work rendering direct reply to TIME unnecessary.

https://www.yofiel.com/writing/truth/war-on-truth

If others are interested in discussing inconsistencies or lack of clarity without ridicule I would be glad for the input.

thank you for going away.

I amended the introduction to cover prior work rendering direct replt to TIME unnecessary.

https://www.yofiel.com/writing/truth/war-on-truth

If others are interested in discussing inconsistecies or lack of clarity without ridicule I would be glad for the input.

as pointed out by others above, those who form an opinion based on incomplete knowledge should not be taken seriously. You formed your opinion and admitted you didn't read what I wrote already. Its now my turn to ridicule you. -fart-

you'd have to suspend judgment and actually read it.

i already addressed your ridicule, and I object to people quoting out of context like they are impeachment lawyers. All my terms are properly defined.

ive explained the meaning of merit in the oxfordian sense. Im not interested in debating it.

i have created an area on my Yofiel site called 'Plato's Cave,' with 10 general topics about the war on truth, also adding sections on natural rights, guns, and theories of mind. The menu and blog navigation all works, but there's still some cross-links between the articles to clean up.

Plato's Cave

The most recent article also describes my 'epistemolocal gap' in detail. See TOC.

Can Philosophy Win the War on Truth?