Misunderstanding sufficiently clarified.

So how can we be sure that some of our nice modern Leftists aren't nascent savage psychopaths? — gurugeorge

We don't have to be for the generalized comparison to be absurd just like we don't have to be sure that some nice modern conservative writers aren't nascent savage psychopaths for the generalized comparison of them to Hitler to be absurd. Anyhow, you don't have to look further than the population at large to find a significant proportion of budding psychopaths—or at least the kind of potential for savagery that we would identify with the extremes of fascism and communism etc.—as Milgram and others have demonstrated. So, it would hardly be less valid or useful to compare us all to Pol Pot.

IOW, the comparison is not at all absurd, because the expressed ideology is virtually identical. — gurugeorge

Except it's not at all.

Let's play nicely, folks, or posts will start disappearing. And not supernaturally either.

To speakers of Slavic languages it should sound just right: the first syllable stands of "shadow" or "darkness." — SophistiCat

Latin roots though, right? I would guess. Anyway, it reminds me phonically too much of its opposite, "luminous".

Physical theories and calculations rely on mathematics, sure. As for physics relying on mathematics taken to mean the ultimate reality of nature is mathematical rather than physical, you might find some that agree with you on that too, but you'll have to flesh out exactly what you mean by that. And until you do I'll presume it's nothing "miraculous".

OK, this is a nice word-wall critique of science that I have some sympathy with. My point was more specific though and related to the relatively impoverished imaginative basis of miracles, the supernatural and so on—i.e. the subject of the discussion, as compared to contemporary physical theories. Science isn't the be-all and end-all of life etc, I know. I'd personally rather create art than anything scientific, but it's still a hell of a lot more interesting than magic virgins, ghosts and oddly behaving wafers etc.

I think it's useful to distinguish between the largely religiously-inspired concepts of "miracles" and "the supernatural" as boring and unsophisticated tropes that offer little of interest in terms of our knowledge of the universe, and physics, as a set of rich and imaginative theories, especially at the cutting edge, of how reality works. I haven't made a broader metaphysical point than that.

Doesn’t physics itself rely on other things? — Mr Phil O'Sophy

Like what?

Tenebrous.

Came up regularly in a book I once edited and I had to look it up. It still sounds to me to be the opposite of what it is. But maybe that's just me.

Contemporary physics, particularly at the extreme micro- and macro- levels is a much richer source of novelty and strangeness than the impoverished narratives of "miracles" and "the supernatural", which are fuelled largely by superstition and parochialism rather than the more hard-earned aspects of the imaginative life associated with the former, which are borne of a combination of real intellectual work and theoretical courage. So, anything of "miracles" or the "supernatural" that can't be at least potentially distilled into theoretical physics can be confidently flushed from consciousness as superfluous to understanding and most probably detrimental to it.

...Reflecting the fact that the concepts of "miracles" and the "supernatural" are somewhat incoherent. And the only way they can be rendered coherent, and get us beyond the truism, is to posit something above and beyond nature and nature's laws. That's where the "no" comes in.

I don't have any reason to believe the laws of physics admit of exceptions.

OK, well, no, and I expect this to end up about 80% no. What's your prediction?

For example, this definition includes things like me telling you I will flip this coin and get tails 20 times in a row, and I get it, and you and others are not capable to reproduce the event within a reasonable timeframe using the same coin. — Agustino

That definition would seem to include good magic tricks.

It's what's known in the business as hyperbole. Good for selling books. Not so good for making intelligent arguments.

Because Mao was a savage psychopath who killed millions of his own people. It's a transparently silly and unhelpful comparison. Like comparing conservative activists to Hitler would be.

Not bad. Uses some unfair tactics though like ridiculing and drawing unfair inferences from the transcription of a single lecture excerpt, and could have been more balanced in emphasizing JPs positives. I think it's important to recognize that he probably has helped many people motivate themselves to lead better and more productive lives. And also to draw more attention to where he has been vilified and misrepresented. I do agree, now that I've seen parts of his books, he's not much of a writer, and he apparently hasn't demonstrated a great degree of intellectual weight or originality during his career. And it makes me cringe when he compares today's left-wing activists to Mao and so on. So, overall, he's a relatively mediocre thinker philosophically (at least on the global stage onto which he's been suddenly catapulted) with some decent, if not ground-breaking, psychological advice to reel off that has struck a chord with many young people, particularly young men. And that's about it beyond the media circus. At this point, I doubt his fire justifies much more oxygen from the left.

It's kind of ugly to talk about art in a philosophical way, but seeing as I was invited, here are some fairly random thoughts...No quote either, just jumping in on the anthropomorphism bit.

It might be useful in tackling the question of what we have in common with animals in our appreciation of aesthetic qualities to draw some distinctions between the terms 'aesthetics', 'beauty' and 'art'. For me the trio represent in order an increasing level of social mediation, and in the case of 'art' an inevitable institutional pollution. So, aesthetics can refer to basic sensory perceptions of form as well as more advanced conscious judgments. It's hard to deny that we share some of this with animals, but we can't readily disentangle the basic sensory perceptions that attract us to or repel us from some particular object or organism from the higher level interference of conscious judgment that we're "burdened" with. We see some harmonious arrangement of pattern and/or colour etc. and it resonates with us on initially a visceral and then on a more conscious level, filters up through us in a way, and we think, "that's beautiful' (or whatever). And so we're on beauty then, a more emotionally loaded term, broader, more personally and socially mediated, more prone to historical trends, cultural differences etc., and suggestive but not illustrative of that base-level harmony of form that goes beyond all judgment. From there then we progress to "art" which is never really "art" until its designated so and has no necessary relationship at all to aesthetics or beauty, a kind of free-floating value with the main criteria being that it be "useless", communicative of some emotionally accessible state, and institutionally positioned either physically or in the abstract. Here we've left the non-human aspect of aesthetics far behind, and I tend to agree there's not a lot of interest we can sensibly say about that (notwithstanding possible future scientific discoveries) without falling into clumsy anthropomorphism. Our vessels are likely too full of the bigger picture of beauty to appreciate the most distilled nature of aesthetics.

It was kind of bad taste, Agu. And I can say that in full confidence that my arse is not presently impaled with a vegetable of any description.

I doubt there was any conspiracy here. It's common knowledge the American justice system is at best very inconsistent in its application, so it's important to stack the odds as much in your favor as you can. That means at the very least appearing humble and contrite from the beginning, particularly when you know you've broken a law (even one which is usually not prosecuted in the breach).

I really don't know why he couldn't have seen this coming. I don't even think he was as bad as he was made out to be originally, but he deliberately set out to play up his negatives. For a supposedly smart guy...

I think you two are talking past each other because you have different ideas on what constitutes an aesthetic or artistic experience.

Plus much of Christian Africa, Buddhist Myanmar, Jewish Israel and so on... Countries infected with - if not always dominated by - religiously inspired hatred and violence.

(I'll leave it at that as we're some way off-topic.)

What do you mean by brutish in this context? — Agustino

Willingness to resort to physical force rather than reason to address problems.

Abandonment of the importance of our religious heritage — Agustino

Yes, he said that makes us brutes. It's right there in the captions. And it's silly because, apart from the laughable hypocrisy, the evidence points in the opposite direction: the most religious societies today are the most brutish. Look it up. You'd do well to encourage atheism if it's the opposite you're after.

What part of the video were you referring us to then?

This is off the point. Just tell me how more brutish I, and other atheists, are because we're not good Christians like Putin, and help educate me the Vladimir way on how I can become a better person.

All those atheist Norwegian and Swedish brutes really need the gentle Christian Putin to show them the way. Er...

It's stunning but unsurprising hypocrisy for him to talk of anyone becoming brutish. There aren't many people around, atheist or not, who would be able to stomach the kind of crimes he's proved himself capable of including the murdering of journalists, the carpet bombing of civilians and the defense of brutal tyrants like Assad. Surprised you'd fall for such a transparent piece of propaganda that's really aimed at the least thoughtful and intelligent sectors of the population.

The distrust of government (which you equate with "community") — Hanover

No, I didn't, but if it's your government you're afraid of, then next time you go to the polls, I suggest you vote one in you don't think is going to kill you.

Wonderful sense of community in America where everyone is so afraid of each other that many would rather have a civil war than give up their guns. And why are they so afraid? Well, because everyone has a gun, of course.

It's excruciatingly dumb and self-serving. They need to find a better actor too.

Oh, we shouldn't do that. :grimace:

Cross-posted. — Baden

The new conspiracy will be that Agustino and Baden are the same person :rofl:

Cross-posted. Back to reading (a blog about good and bad uses of English, coincidentally).

The modifier "above certain levels" is right there in front of you. It's a prepositional phrase acting as an adverbial modifying the verb "taxed" in conjunction with the other prepositional phrase "at 90%" pointing to the fact that there are two important qualifiers on the action of taxing; firstly, that it be at a rate of 90%; and secondly, that it apply above a certain level. That level is then conveniently specified as being $150k. There is a way to confuse yourself about all this if you really try as I said, but it's too taxing to go into now.

It's one of those sentences where if you really want to be confused about it, you can find a way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

Something about macabre pussyfooting swastikas. Sounds fine to me.

:eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

Lessons in cultural understanding 101 with Agu. Lol. :)