Those are relevant. There's also the dismissal of the white working class — Isaac

I don’t know what you mean.

Equality always comes at the expense of liberty, so the pursuit of it is by definition anti-liberal. — Tzeentch

Liberty requires responsibility and modern liberalism pursues that responsibility.

:up:

Again I’m reminded of a scene from a film.

conflating the mad fringes of wokeness with progressives in general as Tzeentch has tried to do is just the right wing attempting poisoning the well tactics — Baden

I can’t help thinking something like this is behind Adams stunt. He fancies himself as a trickster, after all.

The discussion was (at that point) about the effect of 'woke' culture. Pretty much everything said since then has been directed exclusively at avoiding any discussion of even the possibility that it might have negative consequences exacerbating negative responses. — Isaac

I think there are instances of people being unfairly ‘canceled’.

I’m not sure how much wokeness may be too restrictive or if the claims that it’s too restrictive are merely politically motivated.

Those are two aspects that come to mind. Are there others?

“It’s okay to be white” isn’t racist (at face value) by design.

In new campaign promises Trump wants to take government owned land and build 10 new “freedom cities” on it. If I remember right they do things like that in communist China and they sometimes end up “ghost cities”.

Maybe it won’t seem as communistic if he also promises that Mexico will pay for the cities.

I think the movie 'The Matrix' does a perfect job of illustrating most humans. There are only a few people who really want to know the truth and take the steps to seek it out. In real life, I believe most people don't really, really want to know the absolute truth of everything. It's not a bad thing. It just is. Most people are in 'self-preservation' mode, just like most other animals are. It's not bad, it's just instinct. I believe there are some, a small number even, who passionately want to know 'the truth'. Not to shove it down someone else's throat or bash it over someone else's head, but they just have a passion to discover, and a love for, truth. I firmly believe those people will find it. They will find the truth if they genuinely seek it with an open mind, but an open mind is a must. An open mind to reading all sorts of things. Yes, even the Bible, but other material as well. If you seek, you WILL find, but seeking is still a requirement. — Michael Phelps

Welcome, Mr. Phelps!

If it’s not impolite to ask, what is the truth?

I ask as though you know because you seem so convinced that there is “the truth”.

I suspect that you may be inclined to say something like “seek and ye shall find”. If so, please resist the temptation.

If only that were true. — RogueAI

I think he means that it’s gone out of style. It used to be all the rage back in the 50s. You know, back when America was great. :wink:

I think this is one of the most interesting questions with respect to the philosophy of religion -- and I think it may get at why religion is as powerful as it is. (I think secular persons tend to underestimate the power of religion too...) — Moliere

What do you think the power of religion is? or rather the primary power or purpose?

Woke promotes racial segregation. Need me to repeat it? — Tzeentch

I hear it enough from people like Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and now fresh off the assembly line, Scott Adams, so you don’t need to parrot it further on my account, but thanks for asking.

Racial categorization predisposes one to racial bias. It’s a collectivist impulse; we end up responding to people more as members of a social group than as individual people. In so doing you’ve immediately placed them into an out-group instead of integrating them into your in-group, predisposing yourself to bias against the former and preference towards the latter. — NOS4A2

This is getting very tedious. What you call a “collectivist impulse” is simply how our associative minds work. There is no way to get around this, even if it were a good idea to do so. My mind automatically identifies and categorizes people, at a mere glance and beneath conscious awareness. Whether my ‘groupings’ are positive or negative depends, as I just previously mentioned, on personal and/or cultural experience. Is that really news or are you just playing dumb for some reason?

Moreover, it implicitly promotes racial segregation, which Adams's comments are a clear indication of. — Tzeentch

Jesus, someone please pull the hook out of your mouth.

"It's okay to be white" is an slogan that's been around for years and used by alt-right trolls to spark media backlash. You don't think that Adams knew that?

They utilize and further the same superstitions, nomenclature, and taxonomies born of pseudoscience to guide their thoughts and behaviors. It invariably leads to hasty generalizations, racial affinity, and guilt by association where none ought to exist. It creates hierarchies or pits one false category against another. In the case of praxis here it creates implicit racial biases. — NOS4A2

You don't seem to understand how a bias develops. Not sure how many times I've pointed it out in this topic but mere categorization does not create a bias.

If you were on board with current right-wing media you might say that my bias was created by 'legacy media' or whatever.

Generally speaking, I think a bias develops through culture or personal experience. I've actually had little personal experience with black people in my life because of where I've lived but all the experiences I have had were positive. I can only attribute whatever bias I have to media and perhaps some influences in early life from my parents who were a bit racist, though not in a mean-spirited way, if that makes sense. Culture, in other words, rather than personal experience. That's why I'm always pleased to see minorities portrayed positively in the media and culture in general. I think it serves to counteract all the negative.

Something like a social environment? Or a set of beliefs? Or what? — Moliere

I'm thinking roughly along Buddhist lines, that everything is an illusion born of our conditioning and playing out in endless repeat until we realize our true nature (emptiness) and somehow extinguish our conditioning. I'm not too hot on the extinguishing part personally. Free and extinguished is hard to imagine and unappealing to my sense of selfhood.

Yeah, I saw that one too. — unenlightened

:sweat:

I believe Rowdy Roddy Piper won the Oscar for best performance by a professional wrestler that year. — T Clark

I trust no one made a joke about his wife. That could have landed very badly.

I'm thinking inescapable in the sense that we require some kind of framework. You can remove the water in a fish bowl but it will have to be replaced with different water for the fish to live in. I think we require ideology, in other words.

So, it makes you more sensitive to others, more empathic? Those are frontal lobe functions, abstract thought, symbol-making functions, far from the primal drives. Seems to me that's more connected to the thinking world, rather than the physical one. — Vera Mont

The basic neurology of it is suppression of the default mode network. Modern folk tends to have a hyperactive DMN. I certainly do.

That's interesting. What 'things' do you feel when meditating that are different from the things you feel when connected to the outside world? And how does feeling deeply affect behaviour differently from the presumably shallow feeling we normally experience.
I can't always follow what other people mean by feelings (which i think of as response to sensation and other stimuli) and emotions (which i think of as either primal or sentimental.) We have more precise language available, of which most of us rarely make use. — Vera Mont

When in regular meditation practice I notice being generally more sentimental. Hearing a touching story, for instance, makes eyes water when ordinarily they would not. That sort of thing.

And I would characterize the feeling of being in meditation as more connected to the world.

Propaganda is much more crude than that. It's flashy -- often times it can be reduced to a command: "AVOID" "FEAR" "BUY" "VOTE". And it's crude because it doesn't need to be sophisticated: it works on emotions that are already there. It's not brainwashing as much as calling attention. — Moliere

I'm reminded of a scene from They Live.


It may suggest that ideologies are deeply embedded and inescapable.

It's what Vulcans do to control their otherwise volatile emotions. Social conditioning is aimed at the same thing: to keep a rein on feelings that could prompt destructive actions. Language gives us a way to communicate emotion without the threatening or provocative behaviours that could disrupt the social order. — Vera Mont

Actually you tend to feel things more deeply because you’re more attuned to bodily sensations than wrapped up in what Buddhists call ‘monkey mind’. I think that may be what @Darkneos alludes to in the OP.

Maybe Friday-night brawlers should be sentenced to a course of meditation instead of a weekend in jail. — Vera Mont

:up:

I think Trumpy got his idioms mixed up. He wants the anchors to be under the table (with their secrets).

If emotions are socially constructed then all that means is that they're like language. They help us communicate and regulate our energies appropriately. Of course we can be manipulated by others emotionally and with all forms of communication.

Meditation may offer a "spaciousness" where there's more room to not react mindlessly.

I could be wrong, but I think this is what NOS is on about. If this link doesn't work for you, just google "Race Social Construct". — EricH

Their concern is with its adoption in genetic research and medicine. NOS's concern seems to be with its social adoption, claiming that it is somehow inherently naughty and requiring absolution if ever socially applied.

Nice. Never thought of it like that before.

So intellectually honest are you that you like to lie about what I said. — NOS4A2

Where exactly did I lie?

I would suggest that you do more than suggest and actually explain but that is clearly too much to ask of you. One thing is certain, your unwillingness to explain yourself, as well as your trolling behavior, further demonstrates your intellectual dishonesty. I suggest that you somehow become more intellectually honest. It will benefit everyone, including yourself.

I don’t really care how you think things look because you haven’t been able to portray with any accuracy what I’ve been saying and I’ve had to correct and clarify too many times to mention. — NOS4A2

No, I’m afraid that I got it right in the last post. :grimace:

It seems that according to Gert morality has all but nothing to do with irrationality because half the fun of morality is rationalizing our actions. Only the truly batshit crazy harm themselves for no reason. Take something like smoking for instance. A person can smoke for pleasure and fully realize that it is harmful to them. There are countless way to rationalize the behavior however, all so that the addiction can be satisfied and avoid the discomfort of withdrawal.

I quite like the idea that far more harm is done by people acting altruistically than out of self interest — Banno

That part I don’t get at all. Since when is going to war altruistic? People go to war because they’re sociopaths or because their leaders are assholes.

Again your trollish phrasing with “harbor”, suggesting that I welcome biases.

From your last couple of posts it now looks like you think that adopting the “false taxonomy” of race is racist because it could only be adopted by someone who believes that different races are actually different species. That’s plain stupid, quite frankly.

The philosophical problem is that as we are intelligent animals, we can harness our environment and other species to lengths that hasn't happened earlier on this planet, however when we are animals, we are part of the environment too. So, why the difference between us and the biosphere, when we don't make such with other animals? — ssu

If that’s not rhetorical could you rephrase the question?

No, a racist, because you think the taxonomy of races is as valid as the taxonomy of apples and dog breeds, and you admit you hold racial biases. — NOS4A2

Where have I stated that the taxonomy of homo sapiens, canines, or apples is valid? I’ve explicitly stated that each are varieties of their respective species.

Also, it appears to be intentionally misleading to say “hold” racial biases because it implies that I embrace racial biases.

Your troll game is weak this morning.

Right, apparently according to your thinking I’m both an appleist and a canineist.

we don't treat humans as we do animals — ssu

If only that were true. :broken:

Anyway, NOS is still trying to explain why adopting a “false taxonomy” requires absolution when applied to humans but not to anything else… I think. He stated that humans are special because they’re influenced by “social, cultural, and political” factors. I pointed out that both apple and canine varieties (also “false taxonomies”) are also influenced by human social, cultural, and perhaps even political factors. In fact, they wouldn’t exist at all without the influence of humanity and its culture.

Would you compare human races to dog breeds? — NOS4A2

Dog breeds are also cultivated by humans. They're influenced by social and cultural factors, in other words, though not necessarily political as far as I can tell.

So because of this you believe you hold a racist attitude towards certain out-groups. — NOS4A2

You apparently consider "holding a racist attitude" and "having implicit racial biases" to be synonymous. :roll:

The taxonomy of plants lack the influence of social, cultural, and political factors. — NOS4A2

You just pointed out that varieties of apples are cultivated by humans. :lol:

How do you know you have implicit racial biases if implicit bias is unconscious, and you are unaware of them? — NOS4A2

One way subconscious biases are revealed is in snap judgments where there's no time for consideration.

Did someone say it was a sin? I said it was false, unjust, and pernicious. — NOS4A2

You wrote:
"Adopting it [false taxonomies] for good intentions or for whatever other reason doesn’t absolve one of it."

This suggests that there is something inherently wrong with what you call 'false taxonomies'. That all false taxonomies, or maybe just this particular one, have an intrinsic property of evil or whatever. I don't know the metaphysics of how inherent negative properties bind with false taxonomies.

Going back to the example of red and green apples, if you recall I pointed out earlier that they are of the same species and appear nearly identical other than color. If I'm not mistaken the categorization of red/green apples would qualify as a 'false taxonomy', according to your thinking. Now if I were to adopt this false taxonomy, say I was at a farmers market and innocently requested a green apple from a farmer, you seem to think that I would require absolution for this transgression. That can't be right, can it?

Are you implicitly racist? — NOS4A2

I'm pretty sure that I have implicit racial biases, yes. Actually, I'm rather explicitly racist against Portagee's due to some young adult experiences.

Adopting it for good intentions or for whatever other reason doesn’t absolve one of it. — NOS4A2

It’s not a sin to distinguish people by race. Is this a religious thing for you?

Saying it is implicit is simply an admission of guilt. — NOS4A2

Realizing our implicit biases is self-awareness.

I remember watching an interview with Scott Adams around when he first publicly came out as a Trump fanboy. He was one of the ones who praised Trump as a genius, an expert communicator (I think he meant an expert manipulator). When acknowledging Trump's lies he basically said that the ends justify the means. Did they? Trump didn't accomplish anything that any other Republican candidate couldn't have, like lower taxes and reduce regulations for our corporate overlords, slashing entitlements, etc. He failed miserably at some of his most notable promises. If he was such a genius manipulator why wasn't he more successful? and why does he continue to lose so badly?

The truth is that people like Trump are simply unbound by things like principles and honor and are therefore capable of doing things that, thank God, relatively few people are willing to do. It seems that Scott Adams must be like Trump in this way, otherwise he couldn't admire him as he does.

Employing and furthering the problem doesn’t only resist change, though, it compounds it. The only way to banish it is to quit using it. — NOS4A2

Merely acknowledging race or "false taxonomies" is not the problem so if it were possible to be "color-blind" it would not solve the problem. Intentionally employing and furthering biases is done in order to manipulate the ignorant (racists who may lose more than they gain) and take or maintain the advantage over the disadvantaged.

The way to banish it is to realize what's going on and stop being manipulated, or stop being an asshole if you're one of the manipulators or one of the manipulator's bootlickers.