If the statistics are represented as axioms they can be used to theoretically develop abstract rules via rational discourse. — Aleph Numbers

If the statistics are represented as statistics, even more so. I mean, you have mathematics at your disposal to do just that.

Acting counter to what is believed to be good behavior would be wrong, but to argue that the consensus is wrong could be considered not immoral. — Aleph Numbers

Okay, so I guess what you're saying is that you can challenge majority opinion as long as you don't breach particular rules. So I could verbally challenge, say, UK deportation policy (which is popular with the racist majority in the UK) so long as I don't actually hide a Windrusher in my cubby hole.

Fair enough, although it's limiting, it seems to me. Say that the majority get fed up with protests after BLM and Antifa and decide that protesting is wrong, unpatriotic, etc. Doesn't seem unthinkable to me. We still have the right to verbalise our contrary opinion, but we would be immoral to take our placards to the streets. Debate should always be the first, second, third, fourth and fifth port of call, but the problem with majority opinion is that it is propagated the majority of the time, which is always a barrier to moral progress. Think Rosa Parks.

For example: if the majority of humanity believes that stealing is usually a wrong behavior for most people some of the time, a descriptive claim, is run through the process I outline in the OP, it becomes the moral axiom that stealing is sometimes justified relative to humanity. This is because the morality I propose is defined as "what is considered by the majority of humans to be good or bad behavior for most people some of the time" One can make another descriptive claim, such as that stealing is a good behavior if you are trying to feed your starving children, that isn't by definition immoral as it is merely descriptive until it is run through the consensus finding process. — Aleph Numbers

I think this works better for "Would you like it if X were done to you or a loved one?" type questions. I think it gets harder when dealing with questions about the most vulnerable in society, who are generally minorities embedded in majorities who at best don't care about them and at worst don't like them. You can't get a meaningful majority opinion on questions like 'Should you be deported to your grandmother's country of birth if you commit a minor fellony' when most people live in the country their grandmother was born in.

Personally my faith in the majority is low. I am a democrat, but one thing that democracy constantly highlights is that majority opinion is pretty ugly, stupid, and backward. I do not find the average person to be a good role model.

I'm not saying you're wrong- in any way. It's just this is probably the EXACT same quote geocentrists said to real scientists not that long ago, usually before imprisoning them or worse. You can blame religion, or you can blame the true common element, which is dogma. — Outlander

Rigid belief systems of any kind can and will thwart progress for the believer. That includes outdated scientific theory, if one makes a belief system out of it. However, to thwart the progress for generations to come, you need a religion. Me not accepting the big bang is unlikely to affect my great granddaughter. Me converting to Christianity and believing in Genesis and that non-believers will burn in eternity for hell is likely to affect my great granddaughter a lot.

Everyone should be free to believe whatever makes sense to them, no matter how out of date or stupid. But no one should have the power to stop someone else, including their children, from being capable of taking on new information.

It's also worth remembering that the geocentrists who imprisoned heliocentrists were the Inquisition. That's not a coincidence.

Coincidentally I've just been in two stores looking for liquitex cadmium red medium and neither store had it. I'm taking this as a sign of the end of the world. — frank

And anyway it would have been their cadmium red.

My red is not the same as my red, by the way.

Like most forum atheists you want to compare religion to science as if they were the same thing with the same goals. — Hippyhead

Nope, not me. I'm happy to agree that that religion should make no claims to fact.

Wigner was roundly refuted by everyone including himself, including for the above reasons: necessitating consciousness for wavefunction collapse cannot reproduce statistical experimental outcomes.

Other reasons why Wigner was wrong... His argument was not valid. He was fine with measurement devices reporting contrary outcomes in superposition, he was fine with cats being alive and aware they are in boxes and simultaneously dead and aware of nothing, and yet his argument was that a human being couldn't possibly report that an outcome was one value and another. His theory was based on taste and ignorance. He couldn't seem to get his head around the idea that

<friend saw dead cat | friend told me cat was alive> = 0

Penrose pointed this out, and the paradox of a universe needing consciousness to collapse the universal wavefunction into a state that contained consciousness. A teeny weeny term in the wavefunction (representing the improbability of life on Earth) would be the only consciousness available to yield consciousness capable of collapsing wavefunctions.

I think it might have been him that also pointed out that conscious observers are high-temperature bodies and cannot mediate coherent superpositions. There's simply no way to get the information from a superposed live/dead sheet of paper through a human eyeball to a brain to collapse it to alive or dead. So even if consciousness could collapse wavefunctions and nothing else could, we'd never be able to test it because there are no coherent superpositions possible in conditions that human consciousnesses exist in. For that reason, Wigner's conjecture cannot be considered a scientific one.

Ultimately, any interpretation has to obey both the mathematics of QM and yield experimentally verifiable statistical outcomes. Wigner's does the first, but fails the second.

I've had quite enough nonsense for today, maybe tomorrow.

Okay then. Show me this person that routinely makes people miserable on purpose and is happy at the same time. — Tzeentch

Will all caps help? WHETHER IT IS TRUE OR NOT (and it's not) YOU CAN'T DEFINE MORALITY IN TERMS OF PERSONAL HAPPINESS ON THE ONE HAND AND CONSTRAIN PERSONAL HAPPINESS TO BE CONSISTENT WITH MORALITY ON THE OTHER TO SUPPORT THAT DEFINITION. THAT IS NOT AN ARGUMENT.

And, while we're at it, this is YOUR theory you're presenting. You need to do better than present a circular argument followed by shifting the burden of proof onto others. Otherwise all philosophical debate would reduce to things like:

God doesn't exist. Prove me wrong.
Aha, but God does exist. Prove me wrong.
Except that he doesn't, so... Prove me wrong.
etc.

Is it possible that even you can see how this sort of thing is an idiotic waste of time? If you want to demonstrate that all immoral activity actually reduces personal happiness, that's your burden. You have to do the legwork. You can't assume it and then claim to derive it.

It is true though. People that want others to be miserable are miserable themselves. If that has to be the basic assumption on which my theory is built, then so be it. It seems like a reasonable assumption to me, which I have seen confirmed plenty of times through experience. — Tzeentch

No, it isn't a reasonable assumption because it yields a circular argument. It's also insufficient to just make stuff up to make an argument hold. Either do it properly or don't do it.

Hold up. Both my replies to you have been about the nature of true happiness and not yet about morality.

The assertion that my theory amounts to "it causes harm to others, thus it is immoral" is way too hasty. — Tzeentch

Unless your definition admits the possibility that personal happiness can be consistent with the suffering of others and still be considered good, you are merely defining morality in terms of a variable that is itself defined in terms of morality. If you claim that one cannot be truly happy if one causes suffering, then your are claiming that personal happiness is a function of moral considerations. If you simultaneously claim that moral goods are those that increase personal happiness, you have a circular argument.

If you want to avoid this, stop working from the top down and build your theory from the bottom up. The answer to a moral question in your theory cannot be equivalent to 'he must be unhappy deep down because otherwise the answer comes out wrong'.

Like I said earlier in the thread, the people would need to be polled often enough that we would have time to implement the axioms that result from the process I outlined in the OP. — Aleph Numbers

I understand. My point is that this isn't useful. The axioms are just statistics. One can do away with them and just tell people the statistics and have a single moral imperative: conform!

through rational discourse one could persuade people to act in new ways via application of axioms that are established by consensus — Aleph Numbers

But wouldn't those persuaders and persuadees be acting against morality by arguing against moral truths? If majority opinion is moral fact, then contrary opinion is also contrary to morality.

The man carries out this act without regret, thus must be ignorant of matters such as love, compassion and the harm he inflicts upon others. One so ignorant, cannot be truly happy. — Tzeentch

There is again a circularity. His awareness of the harm he causes others now apparently overrides even the feeling of happiness. But this is precisely a utilitarian view of morality. Irrespective of how we get there, we have a single, fixed path from 'causes harm to others' to 'is immoral' that is impervious to the variable 'happiness', whether because it is unimportant or because you keep redefining happiness to get the answer you want.

m = m(h)
h = h(o)
-> m = m[h(o)] = m(o)

Morality is a function of happiness. Happiness depends on outcomes. Therefore morality is a function of outcomes. No considerations of happiness required.

Btw 'I feel happier' is an outcome, so one can even derive moral answers along the lines of 'yes, because it increases my personal happiness' on utilitarian grounds without redefining happiness to mean 'knowledge of the suffering of others', so long as no one suffers. E.g. I want a banana. Should I eat a banana? Yes. I want to stab babies. Should I stab babies? No.

On the other hand, you cannot get moral answers to even simple moral questions in your 'personal happiness'--based formalism without redefining personal happiness ad hoc to get the right outcome, which is what you've done in both of your replies to me. You may as well bite the bullet and embrace utilitarianism.

Not to try to get the thread back on track, but what do you think of the consensus morality I describe? MSC keeps telling me it is fallacious, but I don't think it is. — Aleph Numbers

I don't think it is fallacious. But it doesn't seem useful. Just as in morality-maximises-happiness all moral questions become questions about whether people are happy, populist morality just becomes questions about statistics. It becomes descriptive, with the only possible moral imperative: conform! The other obvious thing to point out is that morality is inevitably time-dependent if views can change over time. In addition, new moral questions, such as environmental action questions, become undefined until a majority view is formed.

Is it possible to change the moral views of one person? If yes, then presumably it is possible to change the moral views of many people (simply by changing the views of one person many times). If yes then we can build a random moral generator to define a set of putative moral truths, then convince the majority of people that those views are true. Morality is then random. Replace the generator with, say, journalism and morality becomes a dictatorship, or a competition between would-be dictators.

Where I align with your view is that, left to our own devices in simple environments (e.g. uncluttered by bad ideology, questionable social structures, and individualistic or otherwise antisocial incentives), I think how people behave is a better guide to morality than anything a philosopher has ever thought up. I'm not an anarchist by virtue of the fact that our environment is not conducive to anarchism, but I do believe that the only fundamental morality is that which our biology has equipped us with, that any additions and corrections are either arbitrary or a consequence of the environment we have made for ourselves even if those additions are necessary for decision-making within that environment, and that any moral claim that cannot be evaluated purely in terms of our biological drives can only be evaluated relativistically. I have had a thread on this and plan a follow-up soon.

You have been corrected on what the Copenhagen interpretation says and been shown three thought experiments that demonstrate that your claim that only consciousness causes wavefunction collapse, and therefore that mind creates reality, is demonstrably false. Without actually disagreeing, you still seem to end up concluding that therefore your claim is true.

Having established that, in your view, even NOT X leads to the conclusion X, I'll relieve myself of the burden of explaining my field to you, but as a scientific communicator myself, I do have a responsibility to pipe up when unscientific people attempt to appropriate and misrepresent scientific theory for, what amounts to in this case, religious ends. (Your belief that QM proves that mind creates reality is religious insofar as it is impervious to evidence or indeed what QM really tells us, and driven by belief.) Not for your benefit; for others who might take you seriously.

Just as, when we discover a historical artefact of importance, we change our knowledge of history but don't actually change the past, when we obtain information about what a quantum system was doing in the past, we change our knowledge about it but not the system itself.

This is exemplified in the double-slit experiment. Without the possibility of measurement of which electron goes through which slit, the electrons pass through both slits. On the other side of the slits, the wavefunction interferes with itself. We can see this by placing a film on the other side of the slits to capture the overall distribution of electrons after a number have gone through. When we measure this film without measuring what happens at each slit, we see stripes on the film.

If we instead place a different coloured light source at each slit, and have a photon detector detect which coloured light was scatted by which electron, we can measure which slit each electron went through. This results in a different pattern on the film: instead of stripes, we see a double bell curve (kinda like a pair of boobies). This is because each electron wavefunction is collapsed before it can interfere with itself: no interference effects = no stripes.

We can turn these photon detectors off and on with one switch and we can turn the light sources off with another, which means we can turn our consciousness of which slit each electron went to off and on without effecting how each electron scattered light.

1. Lights off, detector off -> stripes, whether consciousness collapses states or not
2. Lights off, detector on -> stripes, whether consciousness collapses states or not
3. Lights on, detector on -> boobies, whether consciousness collapses states or not
4. Lights on, detector off -> ???

According to khaled's religious-like faith in the power of consciousness over reality, the pattern must be stripes because there was no conscious observation of which slit each electron went through. Without consciousness, each electron must have remained in the state of going through both slits.

In fact, the pattern is boobies. Even without an observer, the experimental setup resolves the question of which electron went through which slit, reason being that the experimental setup itself cannot possibly know whether we look at experimental outcomes or not. Consciousness is irrelevant: what matters is experimental set-up. Or, to put it another way, quantum mechanics is a science.

Perhaps observation of the film collapsed the state, I hear you ask! But no. If the film was in a superposition of a*|stripes> + b*|boobies>, then we would expect to see stripes a/(a+b)*100% of the time as we repeat the experiment. We see boobies 100% of the time. We can never get stripes with this experimental setup. Ergo each wavefunction is collapsed at the slit without consciousness of it.

Ultimately it is only the person themselves that can judge whether they are truly happy, and only they themselves that can validate the trueness of such a statement. I, on my part, can choose to believe them or not. If I see a truly miserable person state they are happy, I am going to doubt that statement, obviously. — Tzeentch

For sure, but in a moral theory that depends entirely on personal happiness, if you assume everyone to be lying about their happiness if the wrong moral fact is derived, you don't have a workable theory: it is circular. It is not a question of completeness: you have precisely demonstrated that you have not answered anything, merely deferred the question.

Human beings have both selfish and social drives, and satisfying either can be a source of happiness. A less extreme example might be a guy running off with a woman he's infatuated with, leaving his wife and five young children unsupported and none the wiser. This is unconstrained hedonism: the man is doing exactly what he wants undeterred by considerations of responsibility and consequences for others. The harm he causes far outstrips the benefit he enjoys; nonetheless I'm sure he's having a wonderful time.

Opinions of others (parents, society, school system, politicians, etc.) that have become internalized, and have formed the bedrock of our worldview, even though they may directly counteract our attempts at finding happiness. — Tzeentch

I completely agree that bad institutions, such as bad laws (or lack thereof), bad leaders, and religion can make people unhappy and/or immoral. But I've seen people ecstatic at the idea of an atheist being tortured for eternity and I've seen them do charity work because of their beliefs. It's not a straightforward mapping from one to the other.

Then they are not truly happy, no matter what they may tell themselves. — Tzeentch

Then you don't have a moral theory. You're merely deferring a moral judgement to one about happiness, while insisting that a person is not the judge of their happiness but rather you are. You can bypass the middle man of happiness entirely and just insist on what is moral and what is not on a case-by-case basis, which is what you're doing with happiness.

Evolution and cosmology are certainly interesting, but they don't really serve the need that fuels religions because they are intellectual, not emotional, experiences.

Science concerns itself with facts about reality. Intellectual.

Religion concerns itself with our relationship with reality. Emotional. — Hippyhead

Then I put it to you that a significant step forward would be for religions to give up pretending they have facts about creation and history, admit that it's all just emotive storytelling, and cease filling children's heads with false facts and interfering with teachers' job at teaching them scientific facts.

Depends how you define secularism. I would argue that using the scientific method doesn't mean that you are a firm proponent of metaphysical naturalism. — ssu

Irrespective of the views of the individuals, science is a secular discipline. It does not depend on the teachings of any church, is not constrained to study and report on that consistent with any church dogma, and does not consider historical texts absolute truth.

So without an observation the electron (matter) doesn't exist as a particle (definite). — khaled

But this has nothing to do with mind, nor does knowing have anything to do with being. As described above, the measurement collapses the wavefunction, not knowing what the measurement is. It would be problematic if it came down to knowing, for reasons this conversation makes clear.

Knowing allows us to update what we know about the wavefunction. It is not a physical collapse mechanism. In the same way that knowing more about history doesn't change what happened in the past, merely changes our narrative about it.

Knowing the outcome of a measurement allows us to remove any inconsistent information in the wavefunction as of the time of measurement. For instance, a cat might make a measurement, but since we can't ask cats about experimental outcomes, we can't do anything about it. However if the radioactivity detector used to smash a vial of poison to kill a cat is also rigged up to a printer and we later discover that radioactive decay had been established before the cat was dead, we know that, when we open the box and the cat is dead, we didn't just collapse the wavefunction of the cat. If there's no such output, we do not know this so cannot assume the system to be in a pure alive or dead state before we open the box and check.

I hate to say it but probably because they commit a disproportionate amount of the crimes and in turn have a disproportionate amount of contact with the police. — BitconnectCarlos

Okay, so in that case it actually doesn't matter what the numbers and proportions are. If cops went on daily racial murder rampages, it would just mean that more blacks are criminals.

There was footage recently of a perfectly compliant press team being arrested by silent police. I say team, but about half the team were left alone. Specifically the white half. I guess the non-white half were criminals, right? And the white half not.

The bigger picture here is that there were 14 unarmed black people killed by June of 2019. The article mentioned this was 63% lower than the number in 2015, so presumably in 2015 we're talking like 25 deaths of unarmed blacks.... in the entire year....of a country of over 300 million, of which over 30 million are black. — BitconnectCarlos

How does this explain that unarmed black people are killed at over twice the rate of unarmed white people?

Yet your point this entire time is that there is an epidemic, that white cops just walk up and shoot black people without consequence because they just hate black people. The numbers we're dealing with are so small here... imagine if there were 4 unarmed white men killed and 3 unarmed black men killed yearly. Sure the number is disproportionate, guess you win....? — BitconnectCarlos

So your current logic is that you can choose when this all started and discount every killing before it? Because it's not just one year. It is every year.

No you just need to do a more thorough job and dig into it a little more. — BitconnectCarlos

How is your selective approach to stats my problem?

Twice more likely to be shot dead? Are they armed? — BitconnectCarlos

Unarmed. You cited the source, didn't you read it?

Are you committing a crime? Are they a suspect for a crime? Why are they being shot? Did they surrender? — BitconnectCarlos

Amazing how your demand for statistics ceases the moment you get them. I guess statistics weren't that important after all.

You realize there's a ton of dead white people you haven't heard of? There's also a ton of dead indigenous people you haven't heard of. Nobody cares unless it's a black man killed by a white police officer. There's actually a bunch of white George Floyds the media just doesn't care about them. — BitconnectCarlos

Show me the stats.

As of the June 22 update, the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. The database does not include those killed by other means, like George Floyd — BitconnectCarlos

Right. Now how many black people are there in America compared to white people? And how many white people have been filmed unjustifiably killed?

The same source shows that black people are more than twice as likely to be killed than white people. Funny you didn't mention that...

It's nearly impossible if not outright impossible to find stats on this. You've got some work to do if you're going to make this case — BitconnectCarlos

Statistics are easy to find. You are twice as likely to be shot dead by police if you are black. Beyond statistics, there's a large number of reported cases, often filmed, showing police brutality against black people. There are remarkably few white George Floyd's.

Jesus christ you are hyper-sensitive regarding a normal use of language. — BitconnectCarlos

Way to miss the point.

Again, you need to find the statistics which prove that cops are just randomly murdering black people -- and only black people -- for no apparent reason/no apparent cause -- simply because they are black. And not only does this happen, but that this happens at an extremely high rate. — BitconnectCarlos

Seriously? This is your cutoff for considering the possibility of racist violence in the police force? Like, none of them can also hate Mexicans? They have to choose victims randomly not opportunistically? It honestly amazes me what presumably otherwise intelligent people will say to avoid admitting there's a problem that the entire world is well aware of.

No, I found it strange how you only mentioned black people being killed by police on numerous occasions despite more white people being killed by cops and there being no mention of any other race. — BitconnectCarlos

Again, recognising no difference between lawful and inevitable killing and utterly unnecessarily murder. My issue is not that police kill. It is that police particularly murder black people.

I couldn't tell if you're just a black person concerned with issues within the black community (understandable) or some random white guy/non-black who's basically just virtue-signaling by only taking notice of one politically salient race. — BitconnectCarlos

And that's very telling. You can understand why a black person would be enraged by police brutality against black people -- an agreement that the problem exists. You can't understand why a white person would find this abominable, and can only assume they are virtue signalling. That is a fundamentally racist interpretative schema that assumes that other white people like yourself would similarly not care about racism. I can assure you -- and I can't imagine you have not been privy to much evidence -- that decent, non-racist, non-fascist white people are very much outraged by unjustifiable and particular police violence against black communities.

What does this even mean? — Aleph Numbers

We are all genetically similar.

It also says when an observation is made. So what it seems to stipulate is that consciousness is type of measurement. Measurements are only setup and used by conscious beings. How is a measurement taken without the idea of measurement? — Harry Hindu

I'll rephrase the explanation. A system begins in state A. An automatic spin measurement is made and printed a minute later that says it is in state B. A conscious measurement is a minute after that showing it to be in state A. A minute after that, someone reads the sheet of paper.

If consciousness is the trigger, the order of state measurement is: A, A, A, B. The second A is a continuation of the first. This is not what Copenhagen describes.

Instead, the state evolves as: A, B, A, A. I.e. the purely mechanical measurement gives A -> B, however we only know anything about that afterwards.

The Copenhagen wavefunction is a mathematical encoding of what we know. If what we know about the past changes, that change is encoded in the past, not at the moment of discovering the change.

The uncollapsed "result" is measured by a measuring system which then prints it to the paper at whichpoint we see it. The collapse happens somewhere in this process. — khaled

Yes. That is not the same as saying the collapse happens precisely when we look at a piece of paper printed three days ago.

What makes you think it happens at the paper? — khaled

That was precisely what I said doesn't happen.

The copenhagen interpretation sets the collapse of the wave function to be at the point we can actually see it collapse, aka when we observe it. — khaled

It states that it occurs when a measurement is taken. It does not stipulate a requirement on consciousness. The process of measurement is considered mechanical, not mental.

To me, the most rational response to religion is not to accept or reject it, but to try to understand the human need that religion is attempting to address, and then find ways to meet that need that work for that person. — Hippyhead

That, in a nutshell, is the project of modernism. I disagree that the debate has been awaiting this sort of supply and demand. For instance, the religious appear to require creation narratives. That is common to most religions and describes an understandable desire for context.

Secularism has given us evolution and cosmology and this has gone down extremely badly with many religious, especially Christians, especially in America. The issue is not that secular science failed to address needs: it was deemed to fail because it was inconsistent with particular beliefs.

I really want some things to be objectively moral - or to at least avoid cultural relativism. I think a good start for moral axioms is to recognize what most people most of the time would consider moral or immoral behavior — Aleph Numbers

The problem with popularism is that we often find bygone popular behaviour morally reprehensible.

How much does it matter to you whether there is one rule that all must obey or everyone has their own near-identical rule hewn from a rough template? And why does it matter, if it does?

Most elementary ethics reduces to describing social rather than individualistic behaviour. (Some, written by psychopaths, flip it, while complex ethics arise from complex environments.) We are, genetically, driven toward both. Given that genetically we are much of a muchness and given that genetics is assumed to describe objectively real things, is this objective enough? And given that we are not all exactly the same, is this relativist enough?

Yeah, I've never felt this sorry for religious people.

NIETZSCHE: [offering hammer] You should argue with-
180 PROOF: [taking hammer] Thanks! [Starts hammering nails into a baseball bat while the cordless chainsaw battery charges]

This prompted some "All mind" theories like the copenhagen interpretation and panpsychism which argue that mind is either the fundamental building block instead of matter or is required for the existence of matter (more accurately for collapsing the wave function). — khaled

Comparing Copenhagen theory with panpsychism is like comparing astronomy with astrology. Copenhagen is a minimalist interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not care about consciousness but measurement, since measurement is the latest time we can establish that a system ceased behaving in a quantum way and was, by then, behaving in a classical way.

As an obvious illustration, consider a measurement apparatus that prints results to paper and does not need human oversight. Imagine it is measuring a process that at most takes an hour, but no one comes in to view the results for three days. The Copenhagen interpretation does not suggest that the wavefunction collapses when the paper is eventually looked at.

In addition, Copenhagen is not wavefunction realism. The wavefunction is interpreted as everything known about a system. In no way does Copenhagen suggest that reality is comprised of mind. It is, unlike panpsychism, a scientific, physicalist field.

Nice identity politics too.

See - you're the lesson. You just speak, and all this hilarious shit comes tumbling out. — StreetlightX

I did baulk at that one. One doesn't expect racism on a philosophy forum to be quite so overt as 'If you think white people have been bad to black people, you must be black'.

So it's certain I exist? So why do people say Descartes was wrong? — Tom343

Because he then went on to "prove" the existence of external reality by claiming he could imagine an infinite and perfect God who Descartes was too finite and imperfect to think up by himself and who was too good to play nasty tricks on crazy Frenchmen.

I think the first. For most people, even those in prison surrounded by murderers and rapists, solitude is something to be feared. I think that, on a psychological level, much of our sense of self derives from our interactions with others. People have been driven bonkers through solitude, and loneliness is a major cause of suicide.

There are doubtless those who find social interaction so difficult that solitude is preferable, but that's one disorder trumping another.

Mostly agree but not with the legally procured part. There are a handful of chronic pain issues I could claim I have that a Dr can't reliably test for, opiates can be legally prescribed and in some cases are directly pushed onto patients who would do better with other pain management therapies. — MSC

Is fraudulent reporting of symptoms to obtain heroin for recreational purposes legal?

I don't know Kenosha, can you look at someone and determine if they're a racist? — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, to an extent. It's called psychological vetting.

If someone is actively racist then of course we should get rid of them and if we don't then that's an institutional failure — BitconnectCarlos

There is an extensive history of protectionism in the police, as well as a stubborn refusal to allow reform. That is not a failure, that is an oppositely-directed success.

Black cops shoot black people at around the same rate. — BitconnectCarlos

Are you seriously going to rest your argument on an inability to differentiate between a lawful killing and murder? How many black people have been shot in the back by black police officers who then hide a gun on their victim? How many black people have been choked to death by black police officers? If you're excusing every George Floyd on the basis of black officers inevitably sharing a quota of lawful killings, that would be a new low.

What you can't do is if one cop commits a horrible offense that he deserves to go to jail for tothen target every cop and start shooting cops indiscriminately. — BitconnectCarlos

And who the hell advocates this? Are you claiming this is Antifa's MO now?

Just curious, are you black? — BitconnectCarlos

Is it difficult to imagine white people not being more okay with racist violence than with anti-fascism?

This seems like a larger criticism towards white people. I don't get it. Do you want white people to apologize for slavery? Jim Crowe? — BitconnectCarlos

Now that *is* a straw man, though not an unfamiliar one. I've heard racists use this a lot, like they're excused for pretending bad shit never happened. No, I don't expect white people to feel guilty for their ancestors' crimes; I just expect them to not perpetuate them. My point was that this violence has been going on for a very, very long time, and yet people like you act like the left have just picked a fight for no reason.

The interesting thing is I'm fine condemning right wing violence, but with you guys I've noticed you're not willing to condemn any left wing violence — BitconnectCarlos

I don't think you are. Your stated view is that the police who vet, recruit, train and arm the police who enjoy positions of authority over people have no responsibility for the lethal racists they unleash.

I am anti-violence as a rule, but let's say there's a film in which every day a bunch of white thugs beat a black kid coming home from school. Sometimes to death. The parents tell the police every day and the police sometimes shoot the father for invented reasons. Then one day these thugs follow their next target around a corner only to find a posse from all walks of life ready to beat the shit out of them. You're the guy in the theatre standing up shouting 'They shouldn't be allowed!' having sat silently through two hours of violence against blacks. I'm the guy saying, 'This should never have been thought necessary'. So, yes, after centuries of violence by whites against blacks, I'm less disturbed or surprised that decent people have accepted that occasionally there will be fisticuffs than I am by the dude who stood up and ranted at the end of the movie.

So I'm afraid you've got it back to front. What pisses us off is not that left-wingers aren't immune to criticism for violence. What pisses us off is that, after everything that's happened, after every crime that the right wing has perpetrated, defended, or remained silent on from slavery to George Floyd, you cry 'no fair' when a fascist gets so much as a punch in the teeth for a fight he almost certainly started. It's a bully's mentality.

the reason traditional religions are dying is because mankind has ... technology. — JerseyFlight

Science and the internet have definitely helped.

Maybe when fascist extremists show up at polling sites with guns you will understand. — MSC

Or maybe not. Trump has vocalised an intent to close polling stations in Democratic demographics to stop people voting, has incited his own voters to commit voting fraud by voting twice (once at a polling station, once by post), and has repeatedly stated an intent to stay in power beyond two terms. I don't think he needs guns, nor do I think his voters would care if he used them, since the above doesn't phase them at all.

the moment dozens of them begin assaulting gay minority journalists (see the andy ngo assault) and random business owners as they did in Portland you're just shit. — BitconnectCarlos

Change 'gay' to 'black' and 'Portland' to 'Tulsa', see if you still feel the same way.

Although the stated goals and history of the antifa movement are noble, in recent times there has been some disturbing footage involving seemingly unprovoked assaults on the innocent including business owners and journalists. While fighting fascism is a noble goal, we encourage the antifa movement to show a little more constraint but also to continue to maintain vigilance in regard to fascism. — BitconnectCarlos

This is almost what the Antifa manual says. It warns against accepting people who are drawn to it for violence, against allowing violence to be a member's MO, but permits confrontation and self-defence. They seem as aware of opportunistic thugs as anyone. If the police would take this stand with actual racist killers, it would be a good and welcome start.

if I can resist the temptation to become a junkie I’m pretty confident I could resist the temptation to turn the dial up more than a trickle — Pfhorrest

It helps, when avoiding a deadly spiral into drug addiction, that drugs are not easily or legally procured.