>Piss poor governments?
You want to tell me that the government of Afghanistan was worse before the United States and CIA installed the Mujahideen? That India and Egypt were made better by British rule? That Algiers needed French guidance, because the middle east establishes "piss poor governments" without Western supervision? Your "morally problematic" idea is that the Middle East cannot survive without Western rule or intervention, yet all of your examples of "piss poor governments" directly result from the West's mission civilisatrice.

For example, you name Assad, a member of the Ba'ath party, a movement that would have been unable to take power in the middle east were it not for continual CIA intervention and funding, just like Assad wouldn't survive today without continual Russia support and the anti-Assad movement wouldn't exist unless it were orchestrated by the United States.


>Don't think the western government style has singular virtues?
No, I don't think that the United Kingdom's way of governing India, Pakistan, or Egypt had "singular virtues." Nor do I think that the style of government established in South Africa before Mandella was anything of the sort. Nor have American interventions and regime changes done anything but make the middle eastern regimes perpetually worse. So no, I would say that the western style of governing the middle east does not have singular virtues.

You might like the West's comfortable style of domestic government, but you would feel differently if you lived in a third world country under Western influence.

>No internal rifts and dissension?

You mean the tension between Nato-allies and Warsaw/Russian allies?

>they need to get their acts together and start taking care of their rather large demographic, water, food, and economic problems.

Yeah, I am sure that it's all on them and has nothing to do with centuries of colonial rule, followed by the continual proxy-wars waged by the United States and Russia. It's not Russia and America that's keeping the middle east in perpetual chaos; it's all their own fault ...

I'm not interested in educating you on history, so I will just respectfully say that I think the picture of the world you paint is not only inaccurate, but morally problematic.

I don't understand why you draw the connection to "Islam," as if the reason for these bombings have something to do with the tenants of a religion and that these people wouldn't respond with violence unless they were religious.

Don't you think this has more to do with the fact that a predominantly Muslim region was under Western colonial rule for more than two centuries? You really think it's Islam, and not the continual attempt of Western powers to control the middle east?

If, say, Texas, were under Iraqi occupation for two centuries and Texans committed horrible atrocities against innocent groups of Iraqis, would you say that Christianity was the cause of the violence?

If an African American during slavery committed horrible crimes against innocent groups of white people who had nothing to do with slavery, would you say that he committed the crime because he was black?

These attacks were horrible. I am in no way saying that they were justified. But it's ridiculous to think that religion has anything to do with them.

If we understand consciousness as "intentionality," that is: "being conscious 'of'" an object, then clearly we are conscious of a lot more than we're aware.

For example, I have been "conscious of" a loud ticking sound outside for a long time now, but didn't realize it until just now. Likewise, if a large buzzing sound continued for some time and then suddenly stopped, I didn't "just now become conscious of it," even though I didn't realize it was there until it stopped.

We don't find only one intentional object amongst a field of vague sense data, but an entire horizon of intentional objects, some of which we aren't attentively focused on.

I think that Dennett's own philosophical works might be entering into an area of post-intelligent design.

I agree completely. In fact, I argue this in a paper I am presenting at an upcoming conference.

Hume seems to dismiss this in a footnote because he lacks an account of intentionality, i.e. he can't distinguish between "our feeling" and "what we feel."

One thing that I think has been overlooked in the paradigmatic billiard ball example (which almost every early modern uses) is the context of Hume's denial of causality. Hume says that we cannot get the idea of force, energy, or power from the "(1) impenetrability, (2) extension, or (3) motion" of the billiard balls. These three qualities name Descartes' res extensa, a model that defines substance by geometrical properties alone.

The critique of this position, made by Leibniz and Newton, is that the Cartesian qualities cannot account for the "equal and opposite reaction" of things. Leibniz explains this using active and passive forces; Newton by energy.

I think that the passage of history have made us overlook these two aspects of Hume's refutation: (1) we cannot know causality a priori and (2) that nothing visible can give us an idea of force, power, or energy. Hume spends the bulk of the text arguing for (2), but basically assumes (1).