The Iran deal is a 110 page document with a detailed process for verification in place. Are you seriously comparing that to the two page piece of pixie dust Trump got from the DPRK? That's insane.

As an aside, I get the impression some of Trump's defenders here may not realize that even having this summit was a concession to the DPRK regime. It wasn't an achievement to have the meeting. North Korea have been wanting this level of respect in the form of bilateral face-to-face negotiations from other US presidents for decades, but didn't get it because they never gave anything substantial away to deserve it. Just continued with the vague promises that turned out to be lies. So, all I see is that on top of giving them the meeting, Trump gave the most repressive country in the world an excessive amount of respect and the cherry of calling off military exercises. Again, for nothing, zilch, nada. Yet. Maybe things will change but nobody in their right mind would say that concrete progress has been made. And the optics are terrible. Trump, after sending his minions out to castigate Trudeau, who there is apparently a special place in hell for, then kissing the ring of one of the most vicious and cruel dictators in the world. Again, if it all works out, great, but the emperor is even more naked than usual today.

I don't know (and don't much care) what effect it will have on the Democrats though I doubt that alone would cost them an election. Anyway, you agree with my analysis or not?

We all hope it will work out, and we all agree we need to keep trying, and we all agree the DPRK is dangerous, and war would be a disaster. The point of disagreement is over whether the summit achieved anything substantial and whether it was therefore a success. It didn't and wasn't because Trump went unprepared, got all squishy when the supreme sociopath smiled at him, and gave away a huge concession on military exercises as well as legitimizing and strengthening Kim's position in a way no orther foreign leader could have managed. For nothing. I repeat, for absolutely nothing except some warm fuzzy words that the North Koreans have said before. Make no mistake, they are laughing in Pyongyang now at the US administration and their wacky president who wants to put his condos on their beaches.



Oh, and this:



Anyway, it may work out. Who knows. But this is not a good start. The US is in a strategically far weaker position (with China, for example, now calling for a lifting of sanctions) than it was before the summit. That's undeniable.

"But for now, this is only a historic breakthrough for the Kim dynasty, whose rule over an enslaved nation has been given a huge boost. They will be celebrating. For the rest of us, it is further cause to grieve that the world’s most powerful nation is in such incapable hands."

Yes. But I'm sure Sean Hannity will put a positive spin on this and that's all that matters really.

Here's a conservative view which comes to about the same conclusion. Massive disappointment:



"If Obama had done this, I would be crushing him today."

Example:



Send a boy to do a man's work... :fire:

Put it another way, you've got a bunch of amateurs led by your fool president playing with someone (Kim) who actually knows what he's doing. So, predictably, Kim wins round one.

You've got nothing but same ol', same ol' yet. North Korea has broken every commitment to denuclearisation it ever made. And its delaying tactics are legendary. So surprise, surprise, there's not even a timetable in this agreement. Actually there is nothing new at all on their side. It's just fluff. About the only thing that's new is Trump committing America to ending military maneuvres and Kim, a vicious dictator, being given the type of respectability on the world stage normally only accorded to democratic heads of major powers. Of course, it's not just Trump's fault. It goes back at least as far as Clinton if not beyond. I don't actually blame him as much as his predecessors and China who it suited to have a bulwark against western influence on their border. So, he's trying in his own naive and stupid way to do something (even if it is most likely mostly for his own glory that he's doing it, or maybe the possibility of a condo on a previously militarized beach). Anyway, nothing here yet except pomp and ceremony.

Damned be the haters and the naysayers. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Blessed be the critical of thought for they shall inherit reality rather than have it brutally imposed on them.

[This and related comments below moved from the Shoutbox]



Use 'hide" in square brackets. Anyway, yes, left Hanover in Singapore where he was advising the Don on some new real estate opportunities.



Good job, H!

Trudeau hasn't tortured and killed enough of his own citizens for Donald to consider him a Goodfella.

Looks like the meeting between the two dictators went well. But they haven't released the text yet, so one wonders...

The system is an arsehole created by arseholes educated to be arseholes.

One more. This channel is fantastic:

It could be useful for more serious stuff that usually ends up mixed into the Shoutbox and that has the potential for a good OP. So, yes, let's see how it goes. :up:

There's no mod issue with the discussion. It's fine for the lounge. There is a line of course and when someone seems to be very disturbed we might shut down a discussion on the principle of "First do no harm". That doesn't appear to be the case here.

Also, I think your personal situation raises important issues: How does modern society (competitive and capitalist as it is) delimit our capacity for happiness? Is there a point at which happiness is considered a mark of insanity because we live outside the accepted limits of the conditions widely regarded necessary for it? Is this "insanity" maybe a desirable thing if it allows an otherwise socially impermissible happiness? Is there a sense in which society itself is "insane"? And so on.

I would stick by my earlier point that we need to problematize the social conditions for happiness because "success" as circumscribed in modern society is too narrowly defined and certainly isn't contiguous with contentment (as your case illustrates). I'd just add the caveat that we are always moving whether we like it or not and the correct orientation is neither fully navel- or horizon-gazing but somewhere in between, so we need to constantly recreate the conditions which we have found lead us to happiness and if they change adjust ourselves promptly. (Back to storms and icebergs again).

i guess what i want to say is: i accept your tragic view - but I'd add: Oedipus cut out his eyes. If he talked about how tragic it was to be oedipus instead - the tragic element would be lost. — csalisbury

Yes, exactly. There's a perversion of the tragic whereby the pseudo-tragic eats itself and is revealed in the results of its own incontinemce. There's just no philosophical sustenance to be found. So, my major objection to philosophical pessimism of the type presented here is this negative excess. It's kitsch—the self-indulgent explication of the tragic that destroys its value by transforming it into just another mental commodity to be toyed with and ideologically weaponized, and that paradoxically reduces the subject as messenger of the "unpalatable truth" to precisely the kind of meaningless and impotent force that was supposed to be the origin of its angst.

So, you get a self-stroking, self-fulfilling, and self-serving form of angst that revels in its own odour while its observers can only continue to comment on the bad smell. The unpalatable truth then turns out ironically to be the degraded subject of the ideology himself who misses the entirely obvious point that should be accessible to any person capable of basic linguistic abstraction from lived experience that the structural negatives of life are precisely the elements that make possible an orientation within which life as recognizably human, as having value, can subsist.

If you're happy, you're winning. The end. Better to find that out now than when you become "successful" and realize you're actually miserable because you sold yourself out to the social dream.

(People that set conditions on their happiness inevitably find out not only that they cannot be happy unless they've met those conditions but also that they can't be happy if they do because the basis for their happiness is socially conditioned guilt/fear and everything they do to achieve their goals on the basis of those feelings magnifies them further.)

:) Sometimes racism is so pathetic, you have to laugh. Still racism though. And gurugeorge will have to take his "theories" elsewhere.

Note: Pseudoscientific racist ideas about sub-species etc. are not acceptable here. I hope posters will get back on topic now. Further posts along those lines will be deleted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "around here" but when I searched for "Chomsky" I came up with 253 mentions... — Ciceronianus the White

The fact that my lefty god is only mentioned on average once in about every 1,000 posts is worrying.

Here's a more representative sentence of difficult philosophical writing that I happened to have just read:

"Here we encounter the key formula: Kierkegaard's God is strictly correlative to the ontological openness of reality, to our reality as unfinished, "in becoming"."

(The Parallax view - Slavoj Zizek)

Stuff like that slows you down, but not interminably if you know the vocabulary, and in slowing down it forces you to think. Which is the whole point. I'm sure it could have been made simpler but not at the expense of many more words (in an already very long book) and the philosopher in question doing most of the thinking for you (at a level below his).

“Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” — tinman917

If this really stumped you, your case is probably hopeless and philosophy not for you, frankly.

(Edit: Sorry if that sounds unhelpful. The point I wanted to make was that I doubt it really stumped you and you are just being pernickety about understanding.)

It's amusing that the paranoid republican right wing who are among the most likely (along with libertarians) to argue fear of government as a reason to oppose gun control also seem to be among the most likely to support massive spending increases for the military. Go figure. Anyway, the paranoia is a kind of a cultural game I think along the lines of religious belief. At base level, you express it to be in with the crowd you want to be in with. So, you only put it into practice then to the extent it appears credible to your peers, and believe it to the extent necessary that your actions become credible to yourself.

So, many people hate the idea of IQ testing and research. OK, so other than that observation, do you have a point to make? Usually an OP should have a thesis of some sort for debate in order to focus the discussion. Nobody seems to know exactly what to talk about here.

I don't see anything new here that you haven't covered before. What's new?

(

And let's not forget :

"I, JOHANN FAUSTUS, Dr.,

Do publicly declare with mine own hand in covenant & by power of these presents:

Whereas, mine own spiritual faculties having been exhaustively explored (including the gifts dispensed from above and graciously imparted to me), I still cannot comprehend;

And whereas, it being my wish to probe further into the matter, I do propose to speculate upon the Elementa;

And whereas mankind doth not teach such things;

Now therefore have I summoned the spirit who calleth himself Mephostophiles, a servant of the Hellish Prince in Orient, charged with informing and instructing me, and agreeing against a promissory instrument hereby transferred unto him to be subservient and obedient to me in all things.

I do promise him in return that, when I be fully sated of that which I desire of him, twenty-four years also being past, ended and expired, he may at such a time and in whatever manner or wise pleaseth him order, ordain, reign, rule and possess all that may be mine: body, property, flesh, blood, etc., herewith duly bound over in eternity and surrendered by covenant in mine own hand by authority and power of these presents, as well as of my mind, brain, intent, blood and will.

I do now defy all living beings, all the Heavenly Host and all mankind, and this must be.

In confirmation and contract whereof I have drawn out mine own blood for certification in lieu of a seal.

Doctor Faustus, Adept in the Elementa and in Church Doctrine."

(+The Thai word for "ox" also means "moron" so under a syllabillic translinguistic analysis, it's a literal/semantic self-reflexive contradiction.)

And once all the oxes had left the oxymorons, the oxymorons were moronically no longer self-contradictions.

Using metaphorical language is not necessarily more intelligent than using literal language. A common metaphor like "ghost town" should be understood by every native speaker of standard American or British English. If they're not, there's your answer and they're not dumb for misunderstanding.

Q.E.D. :up:

If not, logically this whole effort is a performative contradiction and should be shut down. And no-one who thinks it isn't can speculate on my motives for saying that because that would be paranoia. After all, what does it matter? Just address the logic of my argument.

I don't really know. Is there even an answer? — Posty McPostface

The point is that if you don't have a non-self-contradictory argument for finger-pointing at the fingerpointers and wondering about their motives, paranoia etc, you don't have anything worth responding to here. So, do you have such an argument?

Why does it seem wrong to you? Maybe you can expand a bit to help get the conversation going.

:cool: Just discovered him recently thanks to @Noble Dust.

Starting to really like this guy. Reminds me a bit of Jeff Buckley. RIP.

:up:

If that is unconvincing, and an ad hom is even possible here, it is probably the equivalent of a ticky-tack foul in sports, barely meeting the definition of even a character reference, let alone a character attack. Merely a response in kind. And definitely not an example of name-calling. — 0 thru 9

Yes, it wasn't a biggie. Agree there.

Might be an interesting discussion. :)

Also we've veered pretty far off-topic here. Should leave this discussion for the more general issue of failed communication.