I think it describes the primary actors of the SJW “movement” and my criticisms are directed there — DingoJones

That doesn't identify anybody. Name some names and explain why you refer to them as SJW. Until you do that all your posts are just nebulae.

You may know what it means but still be misusing it. Until you give an example of your using it, with the details I requested above, it's all guesswork.

You said there are only two types of people who use “SJW” as a pejorative — DingoJones

If we trace this exchange back to near its root, say here, we see that:

1. I said the main pejorative use of SJW is by hard right figures
2. You said 'what about when progressives use it' and I responded that when they use it, they are referring to extremists.

More generally, anybody might use the term pejoratively when referring to extremists.

People misuse words all the time, so it would not surprise me if you are misusing a word. I don't know whether you are hard right or not, it would be unwise for me to decide based solely on your protestations, since people on the hard right generally reject the label.

if you use SJW pejoratively against moderate progressives then I expect you are either hard right - despite your denials, or applying it to people who you think are extreme but are not, or you are misusing the term. Since you have given us no example of this alleged use, we cannot pick between those possibilities.

You would do better to pick an example of a non-hard-right public figure, whose political stance is well-known, using 'SJW' pejoratively about non-extremists. That would at least provide the basis for some sort of discussion.

You are asking me to explain to you why you use a term a certain way.

Doesn't that seem a bit odd to you?

can anyone here think of any non-trivial intrinsic similarity between these two things? — Troodon Roar

The trouble is that we don't know what a 'non-trivial intrinsic similarity' is. You have given examples of similarities that you regard as not being that, but examples do not a definition make. There are countless similarities between any two nouns and it is entirely a matter of personal opinion as to whether they are intrinsic or trivial.

BTW I think one can get things that are even more different by moving beyond the physical. For instance, what is the similarity between the Maastricht treaty and my memory of falling in a rockpool by the sea when I was five? Or between either of those and a rock?

Well, Im not hard right or a progressive talking about extremism and Im saying it. — DingoJones

There's no discussion possible from a cryptic statement like that.

You need to identify an individual about whom you are saying it, the activities of that individual that cause you to say it, whether you mean it as pejorative, praise or something else, and your reason for saying it with that intent.

how do you explain [the]... use [of SJW] as a pajoritive by people who are not hard right or progressives who are talking about extremists? — DingoJones

In my experience it is not used pejoratively outside those two contexts. If you think otherwise, supply some examples and we can discuss them.

What about people who are lefties and use the term and they do not mean extremists? — DingoJones

What about them?

When progressives use the term pejoratively, they are thinking of extremists that favour violence or seek to de-platform even relatively moderate buffoons like Jordan Peterson. When hard right figures use the term, they are generally referring to anybody that campaigns for social justice.

That is why the term is best abandoned. It means different things to different people.

The attempt to get Nicholas Christakis canned as a professor at Yale is a good example, too. — Terrapin Station

That demonstrates the difficulty with the term SJW. I think most people would agree that the treatment of the Christakises was terrible, and if the term SJW were only applied to people that conducted the sort of personal vendetta that we saw against the Christakises then it might be a useful term.

The trouble is that the term is used in a pejorative way by people on the hard right to describe anybody that campaigns for social justice. They are deliberately equivocating the term in order to bundle constructive, compassionate, reasonable progressives together with extremists that shout down or even physically attack anybody that disagrees with their view.

Given that confusion, it's best not to use the term about others. If one wants to criticise de-platformers or violent antifas then criticise them by name, rather than calling them SJWs.

I don't agree that encouraging employers to fire somebody is necessarily bad though. The cases where I have seen this done is where the person in question has publicly made violent threats against women or racial minorities, or encouraged such violence, on a platform where they identified themselves as working for that employer. I think it entirely appropriate that an employer would sack somebody in that case. They are bringing the employer into disrepute. If the threats had been made privately, or in a context when there was no reasonably prominent connection to the employer, that would be different. It would still be revolting behaviour, but not sackable.

Now you're dodging:

My complaints are many — unenlightened

... but you won't identify one of them,

I think I can point you to the several provocations — unenlightened

... and yet you don't.

It's off topic really — unenlightened

If you are now saying your attack on an individual and a profession was off topic then it's hard to see why you pursued it so vehemently. But if your grudge is spent then let's drop it.

And the medical profession doesn't campaign against smoking, over eating, poor sanitation, or poor air quality? — unenlightened

And psychiatrists campaign against conditions that contribute to psychiatric disorders. For instance they have been foremost in the campaign in Australia against the inhumane treatment of refugees in detention, many of whom are now suffering psychological disorders. So what's your complaint?

C'mon man play the ball not the man! — unenlightened

Such a plea would have a greater ring of sincerity if you hadn't said:

in order to encourage you and others to have a little less hubris, a little more humility, and a more careful use of language. — unenlightened

I don't know why you launched this bitter, unprovoked attack, but it would be a good idea to reflect on why you have done it, rather than doubling down.

There is a need for medical doctors with special additional training regarding mental and behavioral problems, psychoactive drugs, medical diseases presenting with psychological and behavioral symptoms — Chisholm

It sounds like you are not aware that that is exactly what psychiatrists are.

it is quite odd to blame and treat a person who's depressed with medication because people treat him/her badly — TheMadFool

This just shows that you don't understand what depression is. Many people with depression are not that way as a result of being treated badly at all. Many people in unfortunate circumstances are not depressed.

And nobody with an ounce of understanding of psychology blames people who are depressed.

I bring up psychology's pseudoscience and racist past in order to encourage you and others to have a little less hubris, a little more humility, and a more careful use of language. — unenlightened

That is beneath your usual level, and rather disappointing. Such a statement is an insulting grab for the moral high ground and bears no relevance to anything that had been written earlier.

If you've had a bad experience with psychiatry, or someone close to you has, then bring it out so it can be discussed openly, fairly and constructively. Making unsupported slurs, disguised as wisdom and impartiality by the use of poetic language (poetry being something for which, as all regulars here know, you have a gift) is unfair and unhelpful.

One of the things psychology has been quite good at is identifying social risk factors for mental illness. Unfortunately, it has never been seen as its business to mitigate them. — unenlightened

Just like ambulance officers don't see it as their business to stop people driving so fast. Should ambulance officers all quit attending road accidents and take up jobs as highway patrol police until we reach that utopian ideal when nobody drives dangerously any more?

Knowing several people whose lives have been immeasurably improved by psychiatric treatment, I am very glad for the existence of psychiatry. That prescription is sometimes abused is undeniable, but that is no different from any other field of medicine. On balance, having concrete, successful treatments for illnesses is a tremendous boon to humanity, despite the fact that they can have side effects and are sometimes applied based on mistaken diagnoses.

Give me a template — Judaka

An Australian alt-right figure, Pauline Hanson, said that 'Islam is a disease' and that Australia has to 'vaccinate itself against it'. It was reported both nationally and internationally.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pauline-hanson-says-islam-is-a-disease-australia-needs-to-vaccinate-20170324-gv5w7z.html

Find me an example of a person of non-European ancestry making a statement like that, that was reported as widely and did not receive criticism.

I am confident to give examples — Judaka

Then give one. The above are not examples. They are vague, generalised asserted slurs.
Let's have some names, places, dates and quotes, rather than nebulous insinuations.

I've given plenty of examples of the latter to you. — Judaka

Name one.

I'm actually in favour of demonizing other groups/individuals which replicate alt-right thinking rather than limiting criticism to groups of white people. — Judaka

and you have been repeatedly asked for an example of this alleged double standard, and have failed to supply a single example.

In the few examples you have supplied, either the behaviour was based on race or skin colour, and has been roundly criticised, or it was a celebration of culture and hence had no similarity to what the alt-right does.

This has been pointed out to you many times, yet you just ignore it.

I'm talking about ethnocentric perspectives, favouring the main race and trying to maintain ethnic hegemony. That's what the alt-right is preaching and that's the similarity I see.

..... I think that goes uncriticised [In cases other than the alt-right] — Judaka

and you have been given examples of where it has been criticised.

If you think there are important examples where it has not been criticised then mention them by name and we can discuss them.

If you want to claim inconsistency, you need to give actual real examples of the inconsistency, not just speculate that there might be some.

I think the only reason those kinds of prayers aren't answered is because they're more of a test than an actual, sincere prayer. — OpnionsMatter

I urge you to reflect for a moment on what you were saying. You are implying that every one of those many millions of times that a devout Christian has prayed fervently for their critically sick or injured child to recover, and the child died, they were being insincere and only wanted to test God.

Really?

What I am saying is that there are a lot of similarities between the east Asian countries trying to maintain ethnic hegemony and what the alt-right want, similarities between the alt-right wanting whites to be prioritised in "white" countries over non-whites in the same way that governments across the world prioritise their majority races. — Judaka

In the OP you were saying more than that. You were implying that people criticise behaviour in the alt-right that they do not criticise when it is displayed by non-whites. Yet the examples of racism by non-whites that you have supplied are heavily criticised. If the double standard that you imply were real, the Burmese genocide of the Rohingya would go uncriticised. Yet the criticism from Western countries has been vociferous, even to the extent of condemning a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you have reduced your claim to an observation that racism occurs in all countries, and from people of all skin tones, then that is uncontroversial. I doubt many, if any, would care to argue. It is the claim in the OP that racism is only criticised when it is done by white people that is unsupportable.

Some of the purported examples are just speculation. You speculate that the lack of ethnic diversity in China and Korea may be because of racism, but you have no evidence to support that.

You use the example of Israel preferring Jews, but that is not a valid example because Judaism is a cultural affiliation (including religion as an aspect of culture), and has nothing to do with ancestry or skin colour - as I pointed out above.

The other examples you gave - tribal feuds in Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, mistreatment of Africans and Indians in the Middle East, are not examples of 'accepted racism'. The words you use to describe them - 'infamous', 'difficulties', 'hegemony' - reflect how those attitudes and behaviours are criticised around the world. So they are not examples of behaviour like the alt-right's being regarded as acceptable when it manifests amongst non-Europeans. Those behaviours are decried just as is that of the alt-right, just as both should be.

I would add that, abhorrent as I find tribalism, whether in Africa, Eastern Europe or Northern Ireland, at least it has some theoretical coherence about it. It's basically about recent ancestry. The alt-right doesn't even have that. They just hate people with darker skin tones, plus anybody that is Jewish or Muslim, even if they have fair skin.

I would argue that the vast, vast majority of nations outside the West have cultures that can be characterised by alt-right thinking. — Judaka

There are plenty of places where people work hard to preserve their culture. France springs to mind, where, so I am told, they have a government department that works to prevent the intrusion of English words into the language. This is fairly successful, as can be seen by comparing the large number of English words in Canadian French to the very small number used in French French.

The Jews are another group that work hard to preserve their culture, again with considerable success.

I expect there are many other examples of preservation of culture.

But as we have established, the alt-right don't care about culture. They only care about ancestry and skin colour.

You say that fixation is prevalent throughout the world and is regarded as perfectly acceptable except when it is whites. I suggest you provide an example of it, because I can't think of any. When such attitudes do arise they are condemned - for example the discrimination against Dalits in India, which is against the law, although it still happens.

Because they would not get many white people coming through a village in the Congo, and would be curious about the novelty. When I travelled in remote parts of Asia three decades ago I attracted great interest from locals who were interested in why a white person was there.

I hear the people condemning the ‘alt right’, usually on a particulate tv channel, or newspaper or magazine. Who exactly are they? They claim to feel ashamed of their white culture — Brett

I have never heard anybody say they are ashamed of white culture, and can't see why anybody would.
What's to be ashamed of in classical music, the canon of Western literature, yuletide festivities and Yorkshire pudding?

so you think if a 'white' person from the west stood in a crowded market in DRC, or any such country in Africa and stated that there is no such thing as race, and had a placard that said similar, that you'd get general agreement from the people there? — wax

I doubt they would be interested in the placard. Why should it matter to them what you think about an abstract, not to mention scientifically unsound, concept such as race that plays no role in their everyday life, since everyone around them is of the same 'race'?

I expect they'd be more interested in satisfying their curiosity as to why you are there, where you are from and would you like to buy something.

I think there's lots of evidence to support the idea that the alt-right is not particularly concerned with culture but the literal whiteness of the West. — Judaka

Then they are not interested in ethnicity, and so a parallel cannot be drawn between them and people who celebrate their ethnicity or culture. Ethnicity is not skin colour, else the ethnic conflicts that plagued Europe since the year dot would not have happened.

Nobody of non-northern European ancestry celebrates their 'brownness', so the claim by the alt-right that pale-skinned people are the only ones that don't celebrate their skin colour is pure nonsense. In fact the alt-right are almost the only ones that do identify it as a source of pride, and rather than celebrate it, they just spew hate on people with different skin tones.

Now liberals can surely use the term now for everything they see bad in the right — ssu

That's not what I've been seeing. I've only seen the term 'alt-right' applied to sites like Breitbart, Fox News and people like Trump, Milo Y and other white supremacists.

I have never seen it applied to Theresa May, Angela Merkel, George W Bush or John McCain, all of whom are (were, for McCain, PBUH) on the right wing of the political spectrums in their countries. For the Aussies and Kiwis, neither have I seen it applied to Malcolm Turnbull, Christopher Pyne or Simon Bridges. It has not often been applied to Morrison and Dutton, but I think there is justification for doing so.

the only ethnicity by and large that tries to ignore their ethnicity are Anglo-Saxon whites. The alt-right is basically complaining about that and many liberals hate them for it but why?

Are they equally outraged when other ethnicities draw meaning and identity from their ethnicities? — Judaka

If the alt-right really were focussed on celebrating their own ethnicity and culture they would be:

- learning Morris dancing
- organising Shakespeare festivals
- creating book groups to read and discuss Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Austen
- attending poetry readings of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley
- studying Old Saxon in order to read Beowulf in the original
- joining choirs to sing evensong and works from Tallis, Parry and Purcell
- seeking out and learning old English folk songs, and encouraging their performance

and participating in many of the other amazing outpourings of creativity that there are in Anglo-Saxon culture, just as in other cultures.

Yet, oddly, they don't do any of those things. Most of them display a contempt for all culture, English along with the rest.

And who is it that does all those things then? Well, as far as I can see, mostly the lefty liberals that the alt-right likes to despise. Academics and the like.

The average soft lefty knows ten times as much about Anglo-Saxon culture, and appreciates it ten times as much, as the alt-right bovva boys. They are not interested in celebrating their own culture. They don't even understand it. All they want is something to hate.

We can't uplift our own culture by denigrating other peoples'.

May I suggest we stop looking for answers, and begin living again. — Nort Fragrant

What about those people for whom the essence and zest of life is looking for answers? What will they do?

Whether this collapse has a physical interpretation, and what that physical interpretation is, are where all the knots are AFAIK. — fdrake

With decoherence, which is key to my preferred interpretation, collapse does not happen, unless we want to call a rapid but continuous evolution from one state to another a collapse.

Every one of those four points is simply an unsupported assertion. It looks like the place where you got them is a low quality source, and best ignored.

It also misrepresents the notion of Darwin's Doubt, which is a particular philosophical idea that arguably originated from Darwin and was mentioned by JBS Haldane, picked up by CS Lewis, and used as the basis for a long argument against 'naturalism' by Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga. He calls it the 'Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism' (EAAN). While I don't think Plantinga's argument works, it is more coherent and scholarly than the above. It's interesting enough to be worth the time of reading through it and thinking about it.

The gist of the argument is that one cannot believe in both Naturalism (lack of gods) and evolution, because (it claims) the probability of our developing a capacity for reason under such assumptions is too low, and is incompatible with our observation that we can reason. That argument has no similarity to what is presented in the OP. Google 'Plantinga EAAN' and you'll soon find an outline of his version of 'Darwin's Doubt'.

I don't think it's about probability. The Slippery Slope argument says that if we make small change A, then we will subsequently make larger change B, followed by a series of ever large changes C, D, E etc until we make extreme and horrible change Z.

This is usually a fallacy when used in an argument, because it ignores the fact that in most situations each step is a choice, and we can halt the progression wherever we want.

The exception where it is not a fallacy would be where, once the first step is made, there is no possibility of stopping or turning back. Examples of that in the real world are hard to imagine. An example from physics is where one crosses the event horizon of a black hole. If you do that, there is no turning back, and you are doomed to be spagghetified by the extreme gravitational forces nearer the centre of the black hole. You will feel perfectly fine after crossing the event horizon, and for some time after - everything seeming perfectly normal. But after a while you will be pulled towards the centre and exterminated. You cannot escape.

I can't think of a similar exception in politics or ethics. All the Slippery Slope arguments I have seen in those domains are nonsensical. But theoretically one can imagine that there might be a case where there is one.

Anyway, point is, Alice learning of the measurement results splits Alice, but does not split the universe, as is commonly assumed. Bob, being able to speak to both versions of Alice, is still in a common world. So yes to the three worlds if you count them that way: One for each Alice, and one for Bob. — noAxioms

At the risk of being annoyingly meta, I think there are multiple interpretations possible of the many-worlds interpretation of QM.

One can take a 'splitting' interpretation, in which worlds branch off when a measurement is made, or one can take the interpretation that all the different worlds exist in superposition from the outset, each one having a definite state of everything, and what happens when we make a measurement is that we narrow our knowledge of which possible worlds we could be in.

Under the non-splitting interpretation, if Alice measures spin as V, then Alice knows she is in a V-world, whereas Bob doesn't know whether he is in a V-world or an H-world, but knows that Alice does know. There are two Alices and two corresponding Bobs, but the knowledge of the two Alices is different whereas that of the two Bobs is the same.

how can you "measure" a superposition or how can a measurement be in a superposition? I thought any observation causes the wave function to collapse in a single eigenstate and a measurement, I would think, involves an observation. — Benkei

That is my understanding. And the abstract of the paper doesn't say a superposition is detected. I suspect there is some over-interpretation of the experiment's implications going on here.

Why should I have access to infinite knowledge of God if I am a finite being? — Joseph Walsh

I don't think any finite being can have infinite knowledge of anything. Where could they store the knowledge? Some philosophers (eg Kant, who was at least a Deist if not a Theist) go further and suggest we can have no knowledge at all about God. I am inclined to agree.

Do you think the word of God is the truth: why or why not?

I don't think we could ever know if any given writing is the word of God. It's safest to assume that no human writing is the word of God. But that doesn't mean we can't respect others' beliefs about it, and maybe even in some cases find wisdom in parts of it. Just as long as the writing doesn't tell people to mean to one another. That's when trouble starts.

What are the ramifications of a disbelief in God?

Many, and it depends on the person and which version of God they don't believe in. Some people get good things from belief in a version of God, so a nonbeliever would miss out on that, except that they may get the same benefit from some alternative belief or practice. Some people perform terribly evil acts motivated by belief in their version of God. Again, a nonbeliever would not do that unless motivated by some other belief, such as White Nationalism.

How do we know that God exists?

Some people believe they have met God. That seems a fair enough reason to believe. I have not met Her, so I remain open-minded. Some versions of God are so self-contradictory that they could not exist unless we decide to discard logic - eg the version of God that is said to love us perfectly yet will torture us forever in hell if we are not convinced enough to believe.

But Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.

So, according to the article, the notion of objective reality has not been unequivocally undermined, as your headline asserts. It might be the notion of freedom of choice or the idea of locality which have been undermined; the article only claims that it must be that one of the three is wrong. — Janus

Given that, it appears to me that the article says nothing new.

Experiments have already 'confirmed' Bell's Theorem, which says that one of QM, locality and counterfactual definiteness (similar to freedom of choice) must be wrong. Since we haven 't given up on QM, that means CFD or locality must be wrong. And if we accept that, then the Proietti result gives us no reason to accept that objective reality doesn't exist.

Caveat - it's a couple of years since I read Bell's paper, so I may be misremembering.

If that's right, then belief in 'objective reality' goes back to being a metaphysical question - which is where I feel it belongs.

I haven't read the paper yet, but I did a search for references to it on physicsforums and found nothing, including in more than one recent discussion on the Wigner's Friend thought experiment. So I suspect the experiment doesn't say what the MIT article claims it says. To have a situation where two observers can obtain contradictory measurements, rather than just measurements with differing levels of detail, would be too epoch-making to ignore.

The reports of the experiment are very new, so that could explain the lack of commentary. But it also means the article has not been peer-reviewed. I suggest people wait for that before they start trying to draw metaphysical conclusions from it. Further, the article is so new that nobody has really had time to analyse it fully yet.

Luboš Motl writes that the experiment is not described in enough detail to enable full peer analysis. He also challenges some of the assumptions, and hypothesises that if they were replaced with more standard assumptions, the claimed anomaly would disappear.