I was just curious. It seems to me there's a great confusion, at least a great divergence of opinion, about what the difference is.

Because people see mental illness as a character defect rather than a biological disease. — Wheatley

Do you think there are character defects at all?

:cool:

I'm only saying what I'm saying. My first post was kind of making fun of the fact that you're still bitter since I deleted or moved one of your discussions a couple of weeks ago. In my second post I said that anxiety was hard, asked you to explain something I didn't understand, and wished you well. No need to be confused.

By the way, when I talk about stupidity I don't really mean a lack of intelligence so much as an attitude, e.g., thoughtlessness, lack of good sense (being pedantic), laziness, refusal to change one's mind no matter what, and so on.

Neither do I want to exclude people without any philosophical education. It's about the attitude.

I'm not sure you would understand but it's all in my head. Its anxiety. — Wheatley

That stuff is hard sometimes.

If you really want me to stop, I'll stop. — Wheatley

Stop what?

Signing out for a while... — Wheatley

Take it easy.

It's been at least two weeks Wheatley. I thought you'd be over it by now.

I do feel as if a push for heavier moderation has come in the past year or so, but maybe that's my own perception. — Noble Dust

There hasn't really been a concerted push for heavier moderation of low-quality posts. Every so often one of the staff might say to the others, "let's get rid of all this X crap", or "can we stop X from posting all this Y", but very often we don't see it through strictly, and we've been doing that from the start anyway.

What has changed is that we've become less tolerant of racism and sexism, but that doesn't apply to most of your examples.

I pretty much agree with @StreetlightX and @Banno. I think we're too lenient. There's too much low quality stuff on the forum, because the mods are busy dealing with flaming and trolling.

@Noble Dust In my view, Baden's post on how to write an OP lays out an ideal, and casual discussion topics are sometimes all right so long as they're not stupid. Banno divides opinion, but I think his topics are examples of OPs that haven't taken a lot of effort but which are not stupid.

Sorry ssu, but your post is shallow, stupid, and ignorant. Ciao xxx.

And things would have been better if they have stayed in the countryside without an industrial revolution? — ssu

No. It's really annoying when you do this. Many things got worse for many people, but it doesn't follow that I think things would have been better had the industrial revolution never happened. It's really odd that you feel the need at every turn to stamp your foot and insist that capitalism is better than what came before. It is not black and white, obviously.

You minimize the trauma and destructiveness of capitalist ascendancy, but you don't even have to do that to defend the status quo.

Sorry, did the vagabonds or, ahem, Luddites own the land? Who was it stolen from? Or is the argument, as Proudhon put it, that property is a theft? — ssu

Vagabonds existed because the common land was stolen in the enclosures, with many peasants being evicted. Luddites protested the unfair situation that led to the devaluation of their skills, owing to the growing power of the capitalists as traditional economic relations were broken down. But yeah, I guess the treatment of the Luddites is not the best example of direct repression in defence of land-theft, as that battle had been mostly won already.

Well, let's remember again that they weren't as slaves forced into the factory. — ssu

Obviously they were forced by circumstances, if not by direct coercion.

Likely as factory workers, however bad the conditions were then, did get better salaries than working the fields and literally facing hunger. — ssu

What you describe here is poor farmers being forced to work for capitalists.

In any case, I don't know if anyone is saying things were better for peasants than they were for the working class, although in some cases they probably were: peasants sometimes had a level of economic independence that factory workers could only dream of.

But yes, people all over the world go for urban living and factory work instead of staying in their villages. The degree to which they are forced varies geographically and historically. That doesn't go against my points.

So, is the answer Communism or is it capitalism, where we try to fix the problems, jamalrob? — ssu

Although it's irresistible, communism seems like a dangerous utopian dream if it's meant to be an immediate aim. Even as a distant goal it can serve to justify present-day suffering. I am not sure what the answer is ssu.

Your response to KK is emotive and irrational.

It's hardly debatable that the concentration of the ownership of land, and capital in general, can be traced back to theft in the form of such legal measures as enclosures and clearances, with accompanying punishment and repression of the victims (vagabonds, Luddites, etc).

The question we have to address is: radicalism or reform? That land ownership originates in theft might not justify the wholesale dispossession of the owners in one fell swoop. Conservatives and moderates can point to the Bolsheviks' terror-frenzy of dekulakization, starting with Lenin and culminating under Stalin, which I agree was a crime that no original theft can justify (even if the victims had primarily been rich landowners, as claimed). Also, such radical projects usually turn out to be disastrous. And yet, we do live in societies whose unequal distribution of ownership is a legacy of that original theft. So, what to do eh?

What is lacking typically is the understanding just how feudalism was abolished by modern commerce, which is only replaced by very eager figures of speach of "modern day feudalism". As if our current time in the prosperous West with it's democratic structures and welfare state resembles the feudal past. We may have problems today, but they don't anything like under feudalism. Just as our present day farmers, those usually old people who work still with agriculture, are far away from the subsistence farming peasant of the past. — ssu

Feudalism was "abolished by modern commerce" in a specific way that I think justifies drawing a parallel between feudalism and capitalism in terms of the inequality of ownership, property relations, and the relations of production, despite the huge differences between the two systems in other ways.

The bourgeoisie didn't simply cry "feudalism is unfair and we hereby abolish it!", even if it seemed to take that form in certain places and historical moments (where the Enlightenment took its most radical and progressive form (jeez I do sound like a boring old Marxist eh)). What happened is that nobles, even e.g. Scottish clan chiefs, gradually began to find the benefits of capitalism more attractive than their traditional obligations as patriarchs, nobles, or vassals, and became capitalists, alongside and competing with the new capitalists who arose out of commerce. The peasants were out of luck: thus the working class was born.

I don't think anyone is denying that there are huge differences, or that we formally have freedoms that are often beneficial. They key point is, despite that, each of us is thrown into a world in which a small part of the population holds the land and capital, thanks to inheritance and class dominance. Whether one is an owner or, on the contrary, depends on the owners for one's livelihood, with virtually no say over the situation, is an accident of birth--also rather like feudalism.

Well, I hope we still can discuss difficult topics. Because if this forum will have problems for an open dialogue, just think how bad it will be out there in the real World. — ssu

I agree. I want to keep it open to a wide spectrum of views.

Well, he was talking about his rough neighborhood and things what he saw. I don't think he made it up. — ssu

I thought so too at first, but now I suspect he did. In any case, it was his racism that led to the ban. Even if it were true that he'd become racist owing to his bad experiences, it's not an excuse. He was not only "talking about his rough neighborhood and things he saw".

Yes, I considered addressing what you meant by meaningless sex, but decided to assume you were equating it with casual sex.

Well we're in agreement then. But I suspect you have a higher bar for what you consider to be a "genuine connection".

Deceiving and hurting unsuspecting people is bad, sure. I was making the point that lies and manipulation are most often just part and parcel of flirtation and casual sex, entered into willingly by both parties, and thus not bad.

If sex doesn't mean anything, then it's masturbation. — darthbarracuda

For you it might be. For others, casual sex is most often a much more complex and interesting connection between two people than mere masturbation, no matter how brief the encounter.

Fair enough.

But I don't even think it's clear how to distinguish genuine from fake interest. In performing a connection, a connection is made, I think. Often.

I find it uncomfortable as well. Sex without genuine connection seems to me like masturbating with someone else's body. You pretend to care so that you can use someone else.

And to know that another person doesn't care about you beyond your appearance, and to be okay with that, makes it sound like you don't really care about yourself — darthbarracuda

A sad and unimaginative view. The worst thing is that you move from personal discomfort so easily into moral condemnation.

People like to have sex and they play games around that. If both parties are playing the game, it's a form of relating to someone as a person, not merely using someone as a means or treating them as an object.

It's more like a dance. A dance is not made up of truthful statements and there's no reason flirting should be either, just because it happens partly in language.

Wanting to be an "object of desire" is tantamount to wanting to be "treated as an object." — TheMadFool

I disagree with Michael on this: I think you're right. To find someone physically attractive just is to objectify them.

The problem is in treating or viewing someone only as an object, which is probably the sense in which "objectification" is used when described as a problem. One can dress with the knowledge that one will be objectified, but one ought to be able to expect to be treated as a person as well.

It's like Kant's ethics. It's not that you can never treat someone as a means, but that you ought never treat someone as nothing but that.

It was low quality and unphilosophical.

:up:

More than that, though: the "resistance to race", as Street puts it, even if it's a luxury, is no less progressive for that. One can hardly advocate for a world in which a black writer is a "writer" and not a "black writer" by self-identifying as a "white writer"--and feeling faux-guilty about it. I think the focus on whiteness here is entirely regressive.

I'll take it! — StreetlightX

I knew you'd say that.

I'd think you'd make a really good fascist, given a chance. — Marchesk

In style more than in substance. Street would make a better Leninist, I think. Hang the bloodsucking kulaks, that kind of thing.

@StreetlightX Calm down

I don't really care much to equate programming with philosophical thinking. At most it can only map to a logical modality of thought. In programming you create the world entirely and the only thrown errors are the ones which you explicitly check for. Programming doesn't help you to think, it helps you to put limitations on thought. To set bounderies. Programming is all rules and no pathos. Yet philosophy is brimming over with affect (yes even the analytical tradition and the so called logical positivism). — emancipate

:up:

You tell me, Socrates. If you're interested, have a think about it and let me know what you come up with. I reckon it could be an interesting avenue.

Well I didn't say that every orientation is a belief.

Doesn't a tree have an orientation toward its environment? But we wouldn't say a tree believes it should grow toward the sun. — frank

You got me.

Maybe something got lost along the way. I agree with jamalrob's statement that a belief is the linguistic rendering of an attitude or a mental state. — Luke

I'd just like to clarify for anyone reading this that when I say "attitude", I don't mean it in the sense of a way of thinking (although it can be that), but more in the sense of an orientation: a bearing on or comportment towards one's environment, other people, and so on.

Just what I was thinking.

So Parmenides, but a soup instead of a sphere. It's weird how philosophy eventually circles back around to its roots, in modern drab. Or maybe Thales? Soup is watery. — Marchesk

You never eat the same soup twice.

Sounds reasonable.

Off the top of my head, yes, so long as we're not talking about the environment as it is beyond a possible perception. I could try to work out a better answer but I don't want to go down that rabbit-hole right now.

Well, for my taste you put too much weight on the synthesizing of the manifold, and not enough on the environment. Too much about the perceiver and not enough about the perceived (or about the relation). I mean, it's not "arbitrary", as you said it was (uncharitable perhaps).

There's no such thing as what an object looks like without someone seeing it. — Isaac

The way I see it, this is just a truism. Maybe you're interpreting it more strongly. I'm not saying the cup in the cupboard doesn't look like anything because nobody can see it.

Knew I'd get through to you one day :grin:

I think jamalrob is arguing that how an object looks, tastes, feels only applies to perception. There's no such thing as what an object looks like without someone seeing it. The indirect realist goes wrong by assuming there is, and then proposing the additional mental intermediary. But there's no need for the intermediary if the act of seeing is what something looks like.

If that sort of argument works, then the debate is rendered moot. There's still a realist question of what objects are independent of perception, but they aren't like perceptions. — Marchesk

Aye I think that's roughly where I stand.

I mistook your critique of indirect realism as a defense of direct realism, even though you briefly mentioned some correlationist stuff at the end. So if I understand you correctly, within a correlationist understanding of the empirical world, we do have direct awareness. But it's a relational one, because that's how perception works.

There isn't a veil of perception hiding us from the world, there is just the empirical world we all live in. The transcendental stuff outside of humans is another matter, and we can't use perceptual talk to reference it. — Marchesk

That's pretty much it, yes, but I want to say that this as a pretty strong realism. The talk of transcendental stuff could be misleading.

However, currently I don't know what my position is regarding realism vs correlationsim, given that there is some obvious conflict there.

Because you're not a direct realist. I don't know why you defend it. — Marchesk

I think the article is quite clear that I'm attacking indirect realism more than advocating direct realism. Indirect realism is a way of thinking about things that does a horrible injustice to the way we perceive the world. Direct realism is better, almost by default.

We await @fdrake's monster post with eager anticipation.