Sounds terrifying. Like a limitless supply of drugs. Voted no.

But overall, far-right extremist plots have been far more deadly than far-left plots (and Islamist plots eclipsed both) in the past 25 years, according to a breakdown of two terrorism databases by Alex Nowrasteh, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.

White nationalists; militia movements; anti-Muslim attackers; I.R.S. building and abortion clinic bombers; and other right-wing groups were responsible for 12 times as many fatalities and 36 times as many injuries as communists; socialists; animal rights and environmental activists; anti-white- and Black Lives Matter-inspired attackers; and other left-wing groups.

Of the nearly 1,500 individuals in a University of Maryland study of radicalization from 1948 to 2013, 43 percent espoused far-right ideologies, compared to 21 percent for the far left. Far-right individuals were more likely to commit violence against people, while those on the far left were more likely to commit property damage.

President Trump spoke Tuesday at Trump Tower in Manhattan.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
“We find that the right groups and the jihadi groups are more violent than the left,” said Gary LaFree, one the researchers and the director of the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The data set is in the process of being updated, so it does not reflect current state of extremism, Professor LaFree cautioned, but “in general, we’ve been seeing this fairly robust trend in right-wing cases.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-alt-left-fact-check.html

And yet the right-wing message, from posters here up to the President, is that the problem is a violent left wing.

I said it above but it's worth reiterating: this violence is pre-existing fascist violence. If you remove anti-fascism, fascism remains, and kills, and destroys. If you remove violent fascism, there is no Antifa.

antifa is more of an ideology than an organized group — BitconnectCarlos

I agree, it's not an organised group like a police force. It's more like an identity, or a hash tag. I don't think it quite constitutes an ideology. Most anti-fascists believe in liberal non-violent protest. Some believe that if they are attacked by fascists, those fascists are fair game for retaliation. You obviously do not. And inevitably, as with rioters and looters who piggyback any protest, there are people drawn to it for aggressive purposes.

But then that illustrates why this:

i characterise them as violent based on their beliefs and also actions — BitconnectCarlos

is hypocritical. Because "their beliefs" are not fundamentally or ubiquitously violent, nor are their actions. It is sufficient for you to label a movement of anti-fascists fundamentally violent if a few people who identify as Antifa are so, even though they are not organisationally linked to the vast majority or even any of the movement whatsoever, which is far from logical by itself. But to simultaneously claim that the police forces that endlessly churn out and protect racist murderers bear zero responsibility for the death they cause speaks to an intense bias.

The irony of course is that the aggression between fascists and anti-fascists pre-exists the latter. It's not like right-wing, racist thugs were harmless placard-wavers until Antifa showed up. Racism and fascism have always been violent, be they in the form of the KKK, skinheads, or the police. That violence has been condemned by the left, thumbs-upped by the right, and been ignored or even propagated by the police for decades. Now a left-wing movement has said, 'We'll go where the right-wing goes and hang the consequences' and suddenly the right wing, like yourself, *sometimes* has a problem with it, i.e. has a problem with the left meeting the right on its own terms. A white supremacist drives a car into a group of left-wing protesters. Fine, so long as no one retaliates, right?

When you're fine with racist organisations, including police, repeatedly murdering people but you feel you have to take a stand when anti-fascists say and act like they're not going to be intimidated as they peel swastikas off walls, you declare the prejudices that are necessary to support such blatant bias. When you say that only individuals can be murderous racists but even in a non-organised anti-racist movement every member shares the blame for its worst elements, you are taking a firm position on the side of violent fascism.

I don't think whether Harris' views on morality or free will bear on the question of the OP. One would expect the "smartest philosopher in the world right now" to maybe have a view that is immediately and apparently intelligent, but there's no basis to say he isn't that smart because of the way he views these issues and whether or not we agree with them.

The question as I see it is how he argues for it, and this is where Harris seems weak to me. I mostly know him from his speeches against religion, and he doesn't come across as particularly honest. For instance, he substitutes religion in general for specific religions and vice versa at will, casting the war between science and religion as a general religious problem because that's what suits that argument on the one hand but then demoting religion to an almost meaningless umbrella term when it becomes necessary to show how the violence and intolerance of a religion is driven by specific dogma (e.g. there are no Amish suicide bombers). I think honesty is a pre-requisite of intelligence.

I've never felt he argued eruditely (articulately, yes; wittily, yes), and this seems to be the main criticism those who would otherwise be sympathetic have. He describes the state of the art of fields and the consistent feedback, even from the likes of fellow horseman Dennett , is that he just doesn't understand those fields.

Maybe his books are better, but this does seem similar to the Lost fanboy argument: whenever I decided not to watch any more of it was coincidentally when friends who were fans insisted it "got good".

I’m not suggesting that we replace all of those verbs with context-dependent versions of “to human” — Pfhorrest

I understand that; that's not the problem I see.

my broader proposal that there would be a verb “to human” implied by the form of the noun we would use in place of our noun “human”, e.g. “humaner”, where “to human” just means “to be humany” or “to do as humaner does” — Pfhorrest

A verb is fairly specific, either denotatively (Hoover) or by some convention (adult). The properties of human, particular those capacities to do X, are myriad. In terms of what a human is, those myriad properties specify more. In terms of what the human did, they specify less.

If X has only the property of bipedalism, X would be more vague than 'human' as a noun but more specific as a verb: to walk on two legs.

As we add more properties to X it becomes more specific as a noun (X has properties {bipedal, upright, mostly hairless, opposable thumbs, wide vocalisation range} pretty much nails it down to humans) but as a verb it becomes increasingly ambiguous. AND --> OR. The utility of this is the question.

FTFY. I never said every anti-fascist is a criminal either so you're straw manning me now. — BitconnectCarlos

You characterised the entire organisation as violent on the grounds of overbroad definition of fascism and cited as evidence a single person killed by police who claimed that person killed a fascist. At the same time you insist that the police, who have been murdering thousands of black people with impunity for decades, should not be judged as a whole for its systemic racist violence but should be considered distinct from each individual, however many, who commit those acts. You're not being misrepresented. Your problem is you apply one criteria for systematic violence against black people and another for occasional unorganized violence against fascists, as evidenced here:

I just think each instance where cops kill someone needs to be taken as an individual case and it's not fair to lump them all in as one so I get annoyed when people take every death-by-cop case under one umbrella. — BitconnectCarlos

and here:

Lets start here: Do you believe the group is violent/promotes violence? Also if they're not violent, why in a crowd of hundreds did basically no one step in to stop the assault on Andy Ngo as he was assaulted by dozens of men dressed in head to toe in black? — BitconnectCarlos

White cops killing black people forever = bad individuals
A few people roughed up by anti-fascists = bad anti-fascism

I wonder how predictable this can get. For instance, I would guess you agree with the following dual standard as well:

The extraordinary numbers of hand-picked Trump staff involved in crimes and collusion with Russia = a few bad apples
A few opportunistic looters piggybacking on a peaceful protest against murder of black Americans = bad BLM

Amirite?

I just think each instance where cops kill someone needs to be taken as an individual case and it's not fair to lump them all in as one so I get annoyed when people take every death-by-cop case under one umbrella. — BitconnectCarlos

And yet one guy dies during a BLM protest and every anti-fascist is a criminal. The hypocrisy is incredible.

His murder of Danielson was captured on video. — BitconnectCarlos

This is untrue.

His murder of Danielson was captured on video. — BitconnectCarlos

That's not true.

As far as I can tell the so-called “fascism” they are protesting against doesn’t exist beyond their own skulls — NOS4A2

All right-wing nutters agree with this.

In other words, this is an unjust and violent movement worthy of contempt. — NOS4A2

American police, you mean?

Because he killed Aaron Danielson and then drew a gun on police when they tried to arrest him? — BitconnectCarlos

Was this based on due process? I'm joking. Fascism doesn't do due process. Allow me to rephrase. Was this based on the testimony of people who murder black people?

So just to be clear, thousands of black people murdered by police for decades is a few bad eggs who have to answer for themselves, but one anti-fascist accused of a crime by the same police who murdered him makes the entire organisation murderous? This is still the same question, although I guess you are answering it implicitly.

Does the name Michael Reinoehl ring a bell? — BitconnectCarlos

An anti-fascist shot dead by police again?

I condemn the policemen/women who commit egregious murder, but it's important we get the facts first before rushing to judgment every time someone is shot. Each case has its own facts. If the officer has committed an offense then of course we should punish them. Policemen have killed white men as well, you just don't hear about it because nobody cares especially if these white men are poor or mentally disabled. — BitconnectCarlos

And yet there are a hundred thousand instances of anti-fascists protesting fascism, but we should judge them on the few instances of them assaulting -- not killing, just pissing off -- bad people. That's your hypocrisy, and what it says is loud, clear, and in no way good.

Those who complain about anti-fascists are fascists and fuck them. — Baden

Quite! :victory:

They'll call mainstream right-wing thinkers fascists - and now consider that they openly advocate for violence against the fascists. — BitconnectCarlos

Again, the police openly commit acts of violence against black people and yet, as we've seen, you'd refrain from condemning them. But someone in the internet age calls someone a fascist and that's an enemy worth having. Am I being unfair?

Antifa as a movement is militant and they have assaulted journalists, Trump supporters, and burned down and looted businesses — BitconnectCarlos

So would you agree that, as a whole, the US police are a militant, murderous white supremacist organisation? Like Antifa, the police are not a centrally organised body. Like Antifa, the principles they nominally stand for are not manifest in the crimes of a small number of individuals.

Do Antifa principally assault Trump supporters? Or do they principally protest fascism?

I think the harm Trump supporters do makes a good case for interpreting the assault of them as self-defence. Joke. But still...

This comment has solidified my impression that you have nothing other than lame insults and weak strawman-generalizations and are therefore demonstrably completely argumentatively helpless.
Good luck next time, you’ll need it. — Zn0n

Triggered.

In a looser sense, someone doing something contextually associated with humans, like "to err" or whatever, could also be another sense of "to human". E.g. from the perspective of some inerrant angels or something, "way to human it up" could be a cromulent way to say "you erred". — Pfhorrest

Yeah, I get that from the 'to adult' example. So is the idea here that we replace specific categories with context-dependent verbs, e.g. 'Oops, I humaned!' referring to the property of proneness to error and 'I humaned that I think therefore I am' refering to the human capacity for rational thought? It seems to defeat the purpose to me. A human is, as you say, a bundle of properties, of prone-nesses, each of which already have corresponding verbs.

'I hoovered the carpet' makes sense because a Hoover does precisely one thing.
'I adulted today' makes sense because, by convention, it means one thing (if you know or infer the meaning) and relies on the concept of an adult and that adult having the property of self-responsibility. We don't use the same verb to mean 'went to a strip club', so there is no ambiguity.

This thread has at least solidified my impression that anti-natalism is depression + generalisation from samples of one.

Like a lot of proofs for God's existence, this has a lot of padding that quickly becomes irrelevant then reduces to familiar arguments, a consequence of choosing postulates consistent with one's conclusion rather than deriving one's conclusion from sensible postulates.

The TL;DR version is the prime mover argument contaminated with the God-of-the-gaps.

1. Multiple possibilities are reduced to single eventualities all if the time. There is nothing special about the first event in that case. This is simply describing physics and saying it is sentient.
2. The God of the gaps is a stupid, trapped God. One can set up a metastable system at will, freely. God is then obliged to decide which state that system will decay to. He is obliged; we are free. Is this really the God you sought to prove?
3. We've known for the best part of a century that there's no infinite regress in the Universe. Time has beginning, and there's no time before it in which someone could decide to kick things off.
4. Free will having no prior cause is eminently unreal. The problem with the incompatiblist idea of free will is that it must be random to demonstrate itself. I can go left or right at a fork in the road. A compatiblist will figure out which way is best. An incompatiblist will choose at random, which is to say: whatever experiences, knowledge, emotions she has cannot bear on the matter. Uncaused will is no kind of will at all, as it is indistinguishable from randomness. Again, is this the kind of mindless God you seek to prove?

So really what your argument boils down to is that the universe was randomly created, and constrained to obey laws. In that universe, no guiding intelligence is needed or can demonstrate itself.

That’s like saying if you oppose the Democratic People's Republic of Korea you’re anti-Democracy and anti-Republicanism. What they oppose is their activity, not the name. — NOS4A2

Protesting against fascism? Same question, really.

If ideas exist after their discovery, but they can’t be created — Tristan L

The creative idea is created. It is information: coordinates in configuration space. When I vary those coordinates, I am trying a new idea (a new vector).

This instance is what the artist calls “idea”. However, I think that the idea, unlike the widea, actually is the output of a creative act, which at the same time is an act of discovery of a widea – unless that discovery is deterministic, in which case the idea exists from the start, but only becomes directly seeable later on. — Tristan L

That is not how it seems to me. The output of the creative act is a piece of art, or a piece of a piece, or a draft. I can read it and know how it reads or hear it and know how it sounds, etc. The idea might be: how would it sound if, instead of everyone singing the same thing, half the people sing the fifth note up in the scale? Et voila: rudimentary harmony us invented. But you still need to evaluate a cost function -- you near to hear the thing and measure it against expectations -- to know if the idea was good and, if so, if you've nailed it. This is the extra thing that ideas have above the bland coordinates that a brute force, unguided trawl through the space of possible ideas must have to be creative.

As the OP says, this expectation must be derived from experience, even if the parameters of the idea are derived from genius. In the case of fifths, perhaps someone heard the effect of someone trying and failing to sing along, with that failure sometimes producing a nice effect. This provides both a narrowed search and a measure of success.

. I don’t understand why Pfhorrest and you unneededly seem to back down from full-fledged platonism, though. — Tristan L

I think that both of us are distinguishing between an act of creativity and systematic permutations of coordinates. I'm not sure the question of the ontological status of those coordinates is particularly relevant. They correspond to arrangements that could be made, be it if sounds, words, colours, etc. They don't strike me as any more or less compelling a case for idealism than anything else, making it a separable discussion.

It's analogous to the distinction between going on holiday to Florence and the coordinates of, say, the peak of the Duomo. I am saying that a molecule of oxygen that eventually drifts from Tokyo to Florence has not gone on holiday, because it is not a guided trip with intent and expectation. And you are asking whether the position that the peak of the Duomo occupies is real and eternal.

I got Trump-exhaustion a long time ago. When you have a figure in office who is so stupid, so shameless, and so morally unscrupulous, it ceases to be interesting when they say or do anything. It's like trying to guess the next number that a PRNG will output.

As such, I'm a little behind. Can anyone tell me how anti-fascists became the bad guys on Cloud Trump? Being an anti-anti-fascist doesn't seem like an obvious recipe for political success.

I think it's an admirable aim and an (over?) ambitious approach. I'm not sure why you focus on libido -- a drive in most animal species -- as a cornerstone of the development of logic -- a particularly human endeavour to our knowledge. It's not an obvious choice.

'Fall' is metaphorical and juxtapositional. The Roman empire expanded its sphere of influence, territorial ownership, and power. Then that sphere contracted.

No factual proposition can be validly deduced from a normative proposition. — MMusings

On the contrary, you cannot have a normative proposition with a positive truth value without a fact being implied.

One ought to help old folk cross roads implies that old folk exist, roads exist, old folk sometimes wish to cross roads, and, with or without assistance, old folk can cross roads, all of which are factual propositions.

:up: I think I misinterpreted your use of "determined". I gather you mean just causally determined, e.g. the charge is + because it has always been +.

That space, time and causality, esp. conservation laws, exist suggests that there is no true "nothing" possible in this universe, and never has been. It is likely that you cannot have time without energy and vice versa, and you cannot have space without momentum and vice versa. To put it another way, nothing can be transferred in space or time without having somewhere to go, and there can be nowhere or no-when to go unless something can transfer there. Things existing and there being some place and time to exist in are co-dependents.

Given that time began with something, and something began at the start of time, the second option -- something came from something -- seems the most accurate to me, but given that this something has properties, the origins of those properties are still mysterious.

I am using a sub-particle in this kind of an example, but as I mentioned, something else could be used as a better substitute. — telex

But what? If there has never been a thing created out of nothing, what possible substitute could there be?

Yes in science, that seems to be the case that there is a need for teleology. But here we are putting teleology aside, for philosophical inquiries. — telex

Do you have any non-religious problem with the idea that there was always been something, and that that something was no intended?

EDIT (premature ejaculation)

For example, a sub-particle with a certain positive charge will be a cause for concern as to how it has always existed with that numerical positive charge. Why hasn’t it always existed with another numerical positive charge. What laws determined that positive charge? — telex

This is the greatest mystery, and as far as I know, no one has an answer to it better than Multiverse theory.

In this universe, a charge can be positive or negative (or neutral, i.e. not a charge). What is the property of this universe such that that is the case? Could it have been different in the past? Might it be different in the future? Does it depend on what's in the universe? If no charges had ever been formed, would the universe still have the property of only allowing +e and -e as charges? Is this property a property of all universes, or just this one? Are there universes which allow any value of charge? Are there universes in which charge is impossible?

All these relate the question in the OP. Maybe the only solution is a multiverse in which everything is possible. But even that will probably have fundamental laws, such as: it cannot yield a universe with properties but no conservation laws.

How can a state of nothingness pass down any kind of a complex property like a negative charge of a sub-particle, if nothingness itself is void of any kind of properties. A state of nothingness has no properties. For example, there appears to be no rational reason to say nothingness can randomly produce that negative charge of a sub-particle, because then we will ask, what laws determined that negative charge and why wasn’t it another quantity? — telex

It doesn't get to the heart of your question, but just to clarify that no thing is created like this. Whatever the properties of the perhaps wrongly-monikered 'nothing' is, it does obey conservation laws. You cannot go from nothing to a single electron; rather, electrons and positrons are created in pairs. And in order to create anything with energy, you need to put energy in. The Big Bang, for instance, was an extremely energetic event. Where that energy came from is the biggest mystery in science. Anything that changes obeys such laws.

How can a state of somethingness have always existed? Somethingness implies some kind of a determined complexity. — telex

Whereas one of the biggest answers we've had in science is that complexity needs no teleology.

philosophy is, among other things, an attitude, an attitude of unbiased neutrality.
...
If the religious are inclined to be philosophical, it's a sign that they, whoever they are, finally see the light — TheMadFool

There's the contradiction. You cannot approach philosophy with theological biases. If the point of philosophy to a theist is to prove that God exists, is good, is all powerful, and is responsible for everything we are, it is not philosophy at all.

That doesn't forbid philosophical discussion of whether God exists, what he might be like, the ethics of Jesus, etc. As you say, we can philosophise about anything.

I know the GF agreement's background. But in what way does the new bill threaten the agreement? It could be said that in the case of no deal it is the EU who will put up trade barriers between NI which is part of the UK still and Eire.. — Tim3003

That's rather like saying if I go outside my family erects a wall between me and them.

But it's essentially a puerile observation. Many volumes have been written across the ages about the meaning of the Eucharist. Harris offers no scholarly insight into the practice. And say what you will, there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. You can't dismiss their earnest and heartfelt beliefs with pancake jokes. — fishfry

Yes you can. Especially given the means of Catholic ubiquity (violence, war, incarceration, totalitarianism, etc.), that ubiquity is not a defence of any Catholic idea. And the worse the idea, the more theology is required to rationalise it, so the vast literature on the Eucharist is an indictment, not a defence. The Eucharist is an absurd practice, the absurdity held at bay only by normalisation through endless repetition and by unquestioned indoctrination. Like almost every aspect of religion, this does not demand a sophisticated rebuttal on the believers' own terms.

That said, Sam Harris has never impressed me either. I don't really get what the OP sees in him. He strikes me as a lefty Jordan Peterson type: a sufficiently eloquent orator to inspire and elevate an unpopular and underground movement, largely on the internet, but by no means an honest or insightful thinker. Maybe I've missed his finest hour on YouTube. If anyone has a link, I'm willing to learn.

Nah, it's not going anywhere soon — 3017amen

Silly me, presenting facts. What are facts to the faithful?

I am just not going to get on this forum for awhile. — Gregory

Religion is most usually fanatical. Have you seen this forum lately? — Gregory

I've seen you, you seem fanatical. But that is not an answer to the question asked.

Your being ridiculous. All religions do this — Gregory

All religions plan for people from different, as yet non-existent religions centuries later to take over the world? News to me. To what end and how?

The fact that it is relational does not make it subjectively dependent. — Dfpolis

True, but in this case it is. The fact that it frame-dependent does mean that it is not objective.

There is absolutely no basis in reality for Dawkin's view — Dfpolis

What, evolution?

Evil is not about complaining, it is about objective inadequacy — Dfpolis

This is a straw man and I think you know that.

As we grow old, our bodies become increasingly inadequate to support a healthy life. That is an objective fact, whether or not one is reconciled to it. — Dfpolis

No disagreement. We grow old, we die. No 'evil' involved.

But you did. Don't pull a Trump and deny what is on the record. — Dfpolis

Yeah, I confused myself. Nothing is deprived. Point being, there is no perfect human state of health that we can be deprived of by cancer. Perfection is good for poetry and theology, it has no place in reason. We're rotting from the second we slop out.

rom the noun “a human“ we could back-form a verb “to human”, which means to do those things definitive of a human — Pfhorrest

That's my question. 'To human' can have no unique meaning. Would it mean to hunt and gather, to farm, to make or imbibe wine, to rock out, to err, to walk on hind legs, to reason, to make patchwork quilts?... And so on.

It as written by a group of scribes in the 1st century, if you trust history. — Gregory

The individual books were written over a much greater period of time, along with a great many more texts that are not in the Bible. The Bible was collated in the 3rd century and became standardised in the 6th. Your Jewish conspirators played a very long game, didn't they. Precisely how did they plot to make Christians hundreds of years later collate the book to bring an end to an empire that was already ending/ended? Jewish sorcery, perhaps?

The Bible is a religious text and so inherently conspiratory. They used it against Rome and won. — Gregory

You understand that the Bible didn't exist then. The Roman Catholic church collated the Bible after the fall of Rome.

How do we handle nouns like 'human' that do many qualitatively different things?