Trump's low-inflation economy. Amusing. We had thirty years of low inflation economies until the Fed (beginning in the Trump administration and under a Trump nominated chair) got too busy with the money printer. But of course the HF article is not aimed at anyone who knows anything.



He's actually alright. He never needed to be as polarising as he was really.

It's hard to imagine how it can get worse. Though I trust it will find a way.

Demonstration by parody.

OK, I made an edit pretty much along those lines. So, I'll close this now. Thanks for the feedback!

So obviously circular that CS Lewis couldn't have written it because he was a smart guy. But it seems obvious to me that CS Lewis did write it, so however strange or unlikely it is that it's not circular nonsense, I have to accept that it's actually a great argument. QED, Jesus was and is God.

So, social and political discussions are treated equally; set apart from 'philosophical'.
Easy, no? — Amity

Sounds reasonable to me.

clarity should begin by including 'Political discussion' along with 'Shoutbox' and 'Lounge'. — Amity

The "for example" part indicates the list isn't exhaustive, so I'm not sure it's necessary. However, if other mods and members think that would help, I don't object to doing it.

Update on MAGAverse logic:

Compare that to me and hundreds of my buddies riding up Trump tower with a noose and threatening to hang him. — Baden

This is fine as long as we don't actually get to kill him. Like I said, liberating. Get the noose, Jess, we goin' for a ride!

MAGAverse logic leads to rather liberating conclusions though. It would be legitimate protest for a crowd threatening to kill Trump to smash its way into a building with him in it, but not legitimate to declare such behavior "extremist". That would make you a dictator like Biden, making war on your political enemies!

Or if it makes you easier for you, I'll go outside and burn an effigy of Trump right now. So, I do some crazy shit that doesn't matter... Compare that to me and hundreds of my buddies riding up Trump tower with a noose and threatening to hang him.

I don’t get it. — NOS4A2

You don't get the difference between an actual threat and not an actual threat? Well, for example, if I say now that I want to beat Trump over the head with a hammer, I'm not an actual threat, because I'm nowhere near Trump. But if I break into Mar-a-Lago with my hammer when Orange Man is home and threaten to beat him over the head with it, I am. Does that help?

Protesters chant crazy shit all the time. Trump was burned, beheaded, and hanged in effigy on countless occasions, for example. — NOS4A2

Oh, I see, so if a crowd of left-wing protesters had smashed their way into a building Trump was in looking for him and threatening to kill him, the police would have just laughed it off because they were probably just joshing.

NOS's heroes just wanted to hang Mike Pence. One tiny hanging. Would that have been such a big deal, really? (Warning: We are now entering the MAGAverse).

Current Irish PM:



Previous PM:




Minister of Agriculture:



*Sigh*

No indication from @64bithuman that he's willing or able to do what was asked, so closing this.

Can he repost his old OP? — ToothyMaw

No.

I at least thought it was good. — ToothyMaw

That's unfortunate.

That's unfortunate. Read the post I linked to, please. Then take your chance to do something decent with your idea if you can.

Can I please be allowed to discuss feminism? Would that be okay? — 64bithuman

Read this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

Then post something that shows you have done so below this post. If it's coherent and demonstrates you understand how to put together a decent case for whatever it is you want to argue, I'll leave that stand as the OP.

:ok:

I never "brought up any compliant" to you or to any of the moderators even though you have asked me both here, and in private messages — skyblack

I haven't sent you any PMs. Unless it's a very long time ago and I've forgotten. I wasn't trying to ban you either seeing as I expected it wasn't really a threat. You raised an issue and I looked into it. That's all.

Try what? Mention you in a comment that's relevant to a complaint that you brought up? I'm afraid that's part and parcel of being a member here.



If so, it would be nice to know what I did that was threatworthy before I ban said member.

:up:

Wait a sec, is that the one where @skyblack is calling y'all sissies and yellow bellies and you posted a picture of a turd?

Oh, I don't remember that but it's true I rarely look in the lounge at all. I should probably keep a better eye on that.

:up:

Nice thread @Jack Cummins

There's a problem in terms of how we think of the self when we think of it as something that can be found, like a Mars Bar that fell down the back of the couch. And it doesn't work any better when we make the Mars Bar into a gold bar or a diamond or whatever happens to be current and valued. When we project the "problem" onto the self, we distract from the context the self finds it in. The context is that which forms the space in which the self finds itself, and so forms the self, whether or not we consider it found. We are always already found and if something is wrong it is where we find ourselves. But it's a neat trick of contexts to render themselves invisible so that we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to change them while we focus on this nebulous Mars Bar that always disappears when we have the munchies. Erm, anyway :point:

To find one's true self is to confront that monster, and set it free from the prison of the unconscious. It is to face the fear and shame of oneself. — unenlightened

And to lose oneself is to look for it in abstraction, in ideology, in navel gazing, in allowing the unconscious to work freely under our comfortable habits so that the context which it has created for us can go on making us what we don't wish to be,

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2210/moderation-standards-poll/p1

:wink:

Oh, right, I see now. I thought it was just a gin and orange. :chin:

Ok.

@Amity Was it that @NOS4A2 said that we should grow thicker skins? Maybe I wouldn't put it that way because some of us can't so simply change our reaction to unpleasantness and shouldn't be expected to. The rest of what he said was pretty insightful though I thought.

Yeah, I think there's a bit of this. But that can also just be perception. Not everyone who feels excluded is actively being excluded, even if they're not being actively welcomed either. — Srap Tasmaner

I can imagine that coming here is like walking into a bar in a strange town where everyone seems to know what's going down except you.

When i initially joined the site, oh about a year and few months ago, i went through numerous incidents wherein "veteran" members of this site went on a trolling spree, trolling me on all my threads. The attempts were "Nasty", would be putting it mildly. It was deliberate and almost clockwork. Of course, all this was supported by the silence of the mods and perhaps some behind the screen chuckles. Then of course there seemed to be the secret handshakes of other veteran members, and long story short, it was a group effort. — skyblack

Can't do much with unsubstantiated claims against unnamed posters but we obviously don't support trolling sprees by anyone and the debate here as far as I understand it is whether to extend the type of modding we apply to philosophical threads to political threads. No one on the mod team advocates for insult and diatribe. In fact, one argument for leaving political threads a bit freer is that posters may more likely confine their insults and diatribes there. Another is that the nature of political dialogue tends to be more confrontational and it's unrealistic to expect it to be carried on at the same level of charity as philosophical dialogue. Again, that doesn't mean any of us wants to see bad behaviour in political discussions and if there was a clear majority wanting more modding on the political threads, I'd go along with it (though this type of modding strictness question comes up periodically and it's never been possible to discern a clear majority either way, which suggests to me the community is roughly evenly split on the issue).

Really? — Amity

Yes, why not?

Agreed.

My point was more that a leader's chances of success relate to how they accommodate our projections of that which we are not, but aspire to, either positively or negatively. We recognize implicitly our own lack of power and its source at least partly in our human distance from a consistent ideal—call it our narrative emptiness. Insofar as a politician can fill that vacuum for us, we're satisfied. They do "us" for us. But when they really turn out to be like us, we relate to them less not more because the form of the relation is aspirational. When they fall apart as narrative, so does their usefulness for us. It doesn't matter what the narrative is, that's socially defined; its consistency or otherwise is the psychological issue I'm pointing to.

It does look like she got complacent and careless with image control. She's paying the price.



How many times you watched that vid, sir. :brow:

Trump presented himself as a piece of garbage from the beginning. It's a different dynamic. His whole shtick was "I'm an ignorant fool just like you, Joe Public. Vote for me and validate your own stupidity." So, the fact that Trump is what he pretends to be allows the public to pretend that he is what he's not (worthy of being President). Whereas the fact that Marin is not what she pretended to be doesn't allow the public to pretend that she is what she is (worthy of being PM). It's the conflict between the public and private persona that short-circuits our ability to project our image successfully, not the absolute nature of the image, the acceptability of which is culturally sensitive.

As if being the PM of Finland is such a pinnacle of success that losing that position will mean ruin. — Hanover

It ain't. I meant as PM.

We ask what would happen if she were a middle aged man or whatever. Maybe we could muster up the same sanctimonious outrage, but there'd still be a collective yawn. No one wants to see a middle age man grind into another middle aged man. They want to see her doing all that she's been doing. That interest isn't going to end just because she might choose another track. — Hanover

My interest began and ended pretty quickly. You seem a bit more entranced. But her future life as your favourite celebrity is not what I was talking about.

I think it's vastly improved in terms of philosophical content. I'll leave the rest to @Michael. But well done!

Depends on the situation. "Reverse racism" is used as a political tool to obscure systemic racism, for sure, and accusations of sexism against women are often a cover for frustrated misogynists. But we don't want to give a licence to any form of racism or sexism. None of it is acceptable.

About time you showed up :wink: . Her image has been severely undermined and so, I think she's effectively finished. And she probably knows that. Hence the tears. It's not a moral issue, and nothing she did is inconsistent with being a top class PM. It's just the image. The "Prime Minister" is that thing in our head we consider Prime-Ministerish and for most people that has certain boundaries. We don't want the human getting in the way. We'd rather brush that under the carpet. Her sin was letting her human out there in full HD vid, so we can't. Ergo, she's toast imo, though she'll probably limp on for a while.

The lounge definitely shouldn't be looked at as a "bin". Poor OPs just get deleted. The lounge is aimed at more lighthearted social discussions, which may have something philosophical in them but at least have a very casual or fun tone. I think your discussion fits well in that category. It is admittedly a disadvantage of the way the front page is set up that less serious or non-philosophical topics either tend to get too much space on what is supposed to be a predominantly philosophical discussion site or they get backgrounded altogether. I've had to mess around a lot with moving and rearranging things for the Short Story competition so that the stories neither dominated nor were forgotten about. And we've pinned the Shoutbox so we keep alive the social element. That's the compromise we've settled on, which isn't perfect, but about the best we can do for now.