You know, no matter how small a piece of shit may be in your soup, it's still a piece of shit in your soup.

Jebus, Trump really smeared one into Mays face today, didn't he?

The suburban life is really different here in Thousand Oaks where every other car is a Maserati or high end BMW or sone such.

It's further up there if you like next to North Ranch. But, I always liked living in Reseda rather than Westlake more, due to the fact that everyone seems more friendly instead of pretentious about their status. Cities just do that for some reason.

Perhaps, but I digress.

There is always trickledown. — raza

Laughs ensue.

I don't know how to answer that. Why would I suffer when I can make another suffer instead? Empathy? Love? — unenlightened

Why not? Aren't you making an over-generalization here?

Would you say that people prefer moral relativism and with it nihilism than be responsible for anyone or anything? Why is that?

'Quo vadis?' is a moral question — unenlightened

Interesting take on this question. But, essentially I think you are right. So, was Jesus in the right again to ask Paul to go back to Rome and face crucifixion?

However, at least Trump appears to be more honest and stick to his values and points with regards to the other issues (immigration, tax cuts, Obama care, etc.). — Agustino

Stick to his values. Good one.

It is the fashion to proclaim that there is nowhere to go, and think this is deep philosophy, but this is because there is a fashion for running away — unenlightened

What do you mean by this? Running away from what exactly?

Human rationality matures out of and is equally dependent upon the randomness of irrational thought. — Marcus de Brun

Well, then there's really no way to deny or affirm this. It seems like a metaphysical statement.

Irrationality therefore is the fountainhead of creativity and rationality its temporal limitation. — Marcus de Brun

Yes, possible.

I honestly got teary reading about Mary...

:pray:

What your really asking is how to relate to people who haven't genuinely suffered? Because to talk about suffering one has to experience it to conceptually relate to it, as far as I'm aware.

If they due interfere with due process, things won't end well. Anyway, Mueller isn't the only investigational committee and if he does get shut down on any idiotic premise the power hungry nutjobs in office can muster, then the investigation will continue with the Senate committee or Congressional committee with everything Mueller has discovered being true and genuine evidence to adhere to in those committees also.

That's how I see events flowing if Mueller gets shot down. I don't think the evidence accumulated by Mueller's team can be discredited on any grounds. I hope I'm not wrong about this.

Trump has done such a fabulous job of bullshitting the electorate that nobody knows what to believe - well, enough people to always provide him the benefit of all the doubt he’s sown. It’s like one of those firefighting airplanes that goes overhead and dumps this enormous cloud over everything. — Wayfarer

Well, Mueller won't let him bullshit out of this situation. There's no way he could pull off a fake news or "I don't remember" card here.

Well, the links between the Russian intelligence and other structures of power in the post Soviet, now Russian Federation, are more credible given this investigation in my mind. Anyway, I always knew that Trump got help from the Russian intelligence community, just that the above gives more substance on how that happened.

Well, this is just batshit:

Several experts on financial crime and espionage told the FT that the most troubling part of the interplay between Trump’s past in business and his present in public office was his potential susceptibility to blackmail. Keatinge, the Rusi expert on illicit finance, calls such a scenario “the number-one fear of any intelligence agency”. Knowledge of an illicit transaction might not be as sensational as the most notorious claim in the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele’s dossier on Trump’s Russian connections — that Russian intelligence had footage of the future president instructing prostitutes to urinate on the Moscow hotel bed in which the Obamas had once slept. But it could be at least as powerful if used as kompromat with which to pressure the president. — FT

From the article above.

@Wayfarer, and others interested.

Use this website to bypass paywalls:

https://outline.com/

Insert the URL of paywalled article.

Paywalled. — Wayfarer

There's a workaround if you use Chrome or Firefox, if interested PM me.

Christ someone take a look at this:

https://www.ft.com/trumptoronto

And we still haven't touched the realm of nonsense. Ehh...

although upon reflection I fail to see why a particular possible world should be more real than others, or what it would even mean... — litewave

I think it's about which view is closest to reality. The second link I provided talks about homomorphic and isomorphic states of affairs or realities. I think it all comes down to a pragmatic coherentist view in regards to possible worlds and their relationship with the world.

Edit: Under Fregian logic, I don't think there's room for isomorphic propositions. So my bad.

I think that can't be true because reality obtains from atomic facts and the various possibilities they can configure in to give rise to states of affairs in logical space. Wittgenstien doesn't talk about modalities in the Tractatus per the previous posts I made from the Scott Soames book.

My personal opinion is that possible realities branching out and diverging from the actual world kind of fade off and become meaningless. Take it for what's that worth, just an opinion. It kind of sounds like a consensus based objective idealism of sorts, which gets deeply elaborated on in his Investigations...

Well, it just says that the actual world is represented by a designated point in logical space. But why is this point designated? — litewave

Just think of it as an observer that obtains a specific reality from what they observe, the world. Yeah, it's getting mystical and solipsistic here. As the author notes in that referenced text, this isn't subjective idealism, but closer to objective idealism of Plato and Leibniz.

It is already apparent that Wittgenstein's idea aims at the construction of a geometrical representation for the logic of propositions, and that his "logical space" is an abstract space like the "phase‑space" of physics or the "sample‑space" of the theory of probability. And this leads immediately to the next and most essential question: what are to be the points of this abstract logical space?

The right answer: to this question has been already given by Stenius (Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus', 1960): every point in logical space is the representation of a possible world! (Stenius' answer is not the only one that has been suggested, but none of the others will do as an interpretation of Wittgenstein's position.) Let's call these worlds "logical points". We have thus:

Logical space = the totality of logical points,

The logical the set of logical points which
place of “p" = would make the proposition "p" true.

One point in logical space is designated: it represents the actual world. (Since each possible world is incompatible with every other the designated point is unique.) Of course, we do not know its exact position; but if we know a proposition "p" to be true, we know the designated point to lie in that area of logical space which is the logical place of "p". Thus we have:

"p" is true = the designated point is contained in the logical place of "p".

According to Frege the denotation of a proposition is its truth‑value; according to Wittgenstein the denotation of a proposition is its logical place (= a set of possible worlds). And 'this makes clear, why formula (F) has to be rejected.

I believe the answer is presented in the above quote from the website you referenced. I see now that I'm going to have to delve into Stenius' interpretation of the Tractatus. Dang...

It sounds like a trite truism; but, it's undeniably true.

I highly recommend the following to read. Let me know what you think about it @Srap Tasmaner.

Thanks.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/wolniewicz1.html
https://www.ontology.co/pdf/wolniewiczb.pdf

Any input from you, Srap, welcome. If you think it's not worth doing, let me know and we can brush this aside.

@Srap Tasmaner, before we move on, I feel as though it's important that we still need to cover one important topic to understand the importance of the picture theory and everything else that follows. Namely, I want to delve a little more deeply into 'logical space' and the possible configurations that can be obtained from the arrangement of objects in it. In fact I would want to go as far back and cover some more of Frege, just to give some more backdrop on everything that follows from it, which is a lot. But, that might be too much to ask for, so I'm just going to stick with logical space until I feel that we've adequately covered it to entertained where and how pictures derive their meaning from, in logical space.

Just to start out in case anyone is interested, here are some useful links:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/wolniewicz1.html
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Wittgenstein-s-Logical-Space


I'll read up on it, and delve more into this aspect as time allows me to. I should have everything ready by the end of this week, as I'm still composing everything.

Sorry for this snag, although an important one we ought to cover.

No, I agree with pretty much everything in the OP. I just am unsure about the root Schopenhauers will in all this? Is this a natural state of affairs, seemingly so?

If so, then the next logical question in my.mind is whether or can overcome these psychological needs and ideals. If not then the situation is hopeless or incorrigable

As a aspiring stoic who really is just a cynic, I think by default I digress from continental or postmodern philosophy. Yeah, I'm missing out on a lot of fun but that doesn't really make me tick.

As I said in my previous post the title of the thead should read: Appearance vs Reality vs The World. Just seems like something you'd assume as a grounding aspect to the discussion.

Awesome, some Wittgenstien in there... I like the self referential feature of doubt being exposed there.

I'm going to meditate over those deep insights. I appreciate you sharing them. By chance do you still run that blog of yours? I would gladly follow your musings about politics and the current state of affairs.

Lol, something to watch in my free time I think.

Thanks.

Indeed, Quo vadis.

Maybe a turn to religion and mysticism?

Then let's wait and see what @Marcus de Brun has to further state.

Don't you see a glimmer of genius in stating that it is the very nature of fulfilling fantasies and irrealities that creates discontent from our very own nature?

I stand by what I have stated.

Where is all of this headed, Ciceronianus? I almost feel despairingly sad at the current status of The Republic.

"I'm not talking about sex."
Then what? — InternetStranger

Sex used to be a private activity between two partners, and it should stay that way for the sake of intimacy and not trivializing the activity into Oblivion...