I am lucky enough to live in the house I remade for myself. So, both made and found. The 'made' is also a matter of finding in regard to what I could afford. I regret some of those choices but I cannot cohabit the place of the one who made them.

As a worker in the trades, I have diligently attempted to carry out designs and fell short to varying degrees. People still live in those places, living with my work. When I visit extremely designed spaces, I see the shadows of my life in peculiar details another investigator might miss.

I have encountered those who have a different relationship to their work than I have developed. I will not opine upon that. I am pretty sure it is different.

I don't think the Greeks shared the conception of self-organization that is associated with modern biological theory. — Wayfarer

Aristotle considered the matter through developing different ideas about seeds. That some bits of material were ready to become something else is in direct opposition to the Pythagorean idea of forms impressing themselves into matter like a seal pressed into wax.

I like the way Kierkegaard talks about it. Love builds up. Beyond forms of affection (or the seeming absence of such), love assumes the presence of love. Looking for proof of it is to step away from it a certain distance.

Fidelity in marriage is more than not committing infidelity. Love builds up. If one or the other completely stops doing that, a light does go out. In my mind, that is different than the struggles that cause much of the friction of relationships. Honesty suffers a lot of slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I am not site admin but I think that should be okay since a place for websites is provided in the profile.

I hope my post does not violate the forum's rules. — Linkey

It does. From the Site Guidelines:

Advertisers, spammers, self-promoters: No links to personal websites. Instant deletion of post followed by a potential ban.

Quote the sources.

Are you withdrawing the claim that first person claims to be God (other than God) can be found in the Scriptures?

[parenthesis added]

The rate of homelessness in most places is significantly proportional to the cost of housing. Real estate markets are strongest in "blue" states because of the influx of capital that permits very high paying jobs. The curve is flatter where the wealth gap is not as exponential. That is one of the reasons why "red" states receive more from federal funding than they pay out in taxes. Nice work if you can get it.

The problem with mental health care is a part of the deconstruction of the hospitals and other state institutions that has been done under the idea that such work could be redirected to community level support. This process has been under way for decades. The fallout is perhaps now forcing itself into a wider public awareness. To be clear, this does not resolve into any particular political agenda. It is an intellectual failure of our society as a whole.

The use of the "Son of God" and the "Son of Man" have different roles in the writings before the Christian era. Something to be pursued in a different conversation, perhaps.

Putting aside the various folk who presume to speak for God, that is different from a human being saying: "I am God." If that rebuttal is of no interest to you, the difference is very important to other people.

Consider someone declares they are God and that this statement is the absolute/fundamental truth or "the word". They then offer you a trinary choice — Benj96

Where in the Scriptures does someone declare this?

There are those who claim that such a person exists. Big difference.

So you agree it's a reasonable infringement on free speech, because it can cause damage. — Relativist

What I am arguing is that laws against harmful speech are not an infringement upon free speech as defined by the First Amendment. The First Amendment did not overturn the laws against fraud, libel, based upon harm that was inherited from English Common Law and developed in U.S law. We are expected to speak without harming people. The point of tort law is that such harm becomes something legally actionable when it can be reasonably proven by rules of evidence and procedure.

Free speech in the First Amendment deals specifically with whether the 'Government', the acting power of the state, can protect itself from speech for the sake of preserving that power. Each of the ten Bill of Rights directly addresses ways 'Government' becomes too powerful. Casting these restrictions as "infringements" of otherwise infinitely unencumbered potentialities weakens their utility as protections against tyranny.

In my first response to you in this thread, I began by agreeing with you that:

Censorship is not the only way to deal with disinformation. — Relativist

The laws we have regarding fraud and libel are not censorship. A secular life of individual autonomy without them is the war of all against all. The life of the secular also requires a willingness to speak honestly for the sake of the life it makes possible. That willingness is the element that cannot be legislated or put in a company manual. That is an element absent from Nos4atu's peculiar brand of solipsism.

On that basis, I think the problem of deep fake images is a profound one which should be and will be addressed in all sorts of exchanges beyond the political. As a matter of participatory politics, maybe nothing more can be done in the near future than inculcate a skepticism shared by enough people of what the images are reporting. This includes imagined scenes of eating cats. There is an inflationary aspect to it all. It becomes less meaningful with each use. At some point, it is up to the citizen whether to keep purchasing it.

The damage of fraudulent speech, as demonstrated through Common Law, is measured by its demonstrated result. The level of criminality that may be involved concerns the question of malicious intent. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an excellent book about it. Those issues are different from the freedom from 'Government' as spoken of in the First Amendment. The Government cannot legislate against speech directed against itself. That is the meaning of the other ways listed such as the freedom of the press, the peaceful assembly of protest, or the petition of grievances.

It is a country mile from being permitted to pull anything one pleases out of their hind parts.

So your answer is just give the elitists more power to control the people? — Harry Hindu

Not at all. The importance of education as it engages what each person and family consider most important is what shapes what gets to be public. The simple dichotomy of 'elites' and 'people' overlooks the desire to raise children as one deems best.

For example, I don't want to dismantle the Department of Education because it helps develop universal literacy and objective knowledge and keeps alive the difficulty of sharing history from many different stories of history. On the other hand, I don't want them to replace my role as a parent. And to do that, I accept that my autonomy means other parents will exercise the same right, even when their choices are wrong from my point of view. The matter of when other peoples' choices infringe upon mine is where the matter gets sticky and difficult to solve with a list of restrictions. Who shall guard the guardians?

I understand the differentiation you wish to apply from your previous comments. My comment hoped to express my doubts that such should (or could) be applied directly as a measure of law.

Censorship is not the only way to deal with disinformation. — Relativist

Yes, to have the collision between 'truth and falsity' as described by Milton requires a shared secular space where the autonomous person is allowed to persist within. The freedom from authority is not a self-evident condition because authority has different dimensions. Consider the language of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. — U.S. Constitution

This list of what cannot be legislated starts off with a powerful source of authority in its own right. This permits different groups of people to teach their children as they please. If this process is not to dissolve into the despotism the amendment struggles to avoid, there must be a countervailing agency of education that will preserve secular freedom. How to do that without establishing another tyrannical authority is the fundamental challenge of democracy in our Republic. The secular is not an order that replaces all others but is a form of participation that stops when enough people stop participating. As Eliot said: "We are the music, while the music lasts."

In our short history, the 'Government' has given plenty cause for the petitions of grievances. The possibility for a democracy is the possibility that the secular spirit is still alive amongst those who serve it. Keeping open the space for personal autonomy is a continual struggle.

Over the years, the author of this OP has maintained that the existence of "states" is not the result of a process of human development within the dynamic of many conflicting agencies. It is, instead, an idea that infected the world when enough people started sharing it. By the criteria of the First Amendment, this makes the entity essentially theocratic. This is a withdrawal from any shared secular space where the causes of speech do not have to be adjudicated by abstruse logic. The imagined theocracy also abnegates the voice of the press. All appearances of culpability are washed away by gesturing to the dark cabal huddling just outside of the sensorium. The withdrawal from the space makes it impervious to any contradiction observed coming from it. Elvis has left the building.

Agreed. I think Rousseau agrees.

For sure, I don't want to celebrate the quality in that way. And hard-core assholes do not regret anything.

But I do not feel triumphant.

Property is the result of the luck of inheritance or the gains of conquest. Rousseau described the initial move as the result of calling a certain area "mine." That would seem to fill the bill of "legitimate control." Can such an idea be free of competing interests?

I view the matter as starting with the tyrannical and learning better.

I regret many episodes of what I did while parenting. As much as I don't like the quality, it is a part of me as it is with the people who I oppose.

Instead a thief is considered to illegitimately deprive the owner of control.

So ownership cannot be about control. — Banno

if you have got it right in the first sentence, how does the 'acquisitive' spirit featured in the second type differ from the original desire?

Having spent the last ten years in the midst of the 'cultural war' up close and personal, the freedom to lie is a component of the desire to disrupt a certain kind of conversation while establishing particular narrative as facts. The method combines the power of received ideas with fictional narratives. Maybe the best example is when Trump discounted the severity of covid. He asked his followers to discount evidence as he does. Whatever goals are entertained by the believers, it is the freedom to not be concerned with evidence that is most appealing. And yet the group keeps producing "evidence." They are immune from contradiction.

Those questions are interesting to me as a reader of Aristotle because of the emphasis Aristotle put upon only being able to speak of potential by means of analogy. He expressed more confidence about other things.

So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen. — Banno

That was Marx's argument

And folk hereabouts think this a good argument? — Banno

What?

Good points.

I count the use of language that includes the use of the word 'vermin' to describe other people as an immediate disqualification. I would be fired in a heartbeat if I did that at work. What does it mean that it now gets treated as a rhetorical flourish?

He never mentioned where they were from, who they were, that they were a “specific community”. So that’s a lie. — NOS4A2

“Twenty-thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life. This was a beautiful community, now it’s ah —” Trump said. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They're taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.” — azcentral press

Trump changes the denigration of the first message to match the defense Vance is giving for lying about it. They are a team now. Try to keep up.

I feel I am not in Kansas any longer. I thought we were talking about believers in the Deep State.

I don't recall when any of those people slandered a specific community in this way. It is the degradation that you keep ignoring.

No, I think people can speak for themselves.

I see it as a device to reduce agency to a play of puppets. The puppet masters cannot be seen directly but they are responsible for all you do encounter. When someone seems to be speaking for themselves, they never are. Unless, of course, the speaker is one of the vanguards pointing this situation out.

Within this framework, there is no possibility of being corrected.

I cried "fire" in the theater because I need to clean up the mess in the first three aisles.

Hosea illustrates how different the views of the Kingdom of Heaven are between different Christian groups.

Paul quotes Hosea 9:21 in Letter to the Romans 9:24 in order to support the inclusion of Gentiles to the expected change. It is helpful to read that passage in the context of the whole chapter:

Israel's Infidelity, Punishment, and Redemption
Plead with your mother, plead—
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
and her adultery from between her breasts,
or I will strip her naked
and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
and turn her into a parched land,
and kill her with thirst.
Upon her children also I will have no pity,
because they are children of whoredom.
For their mother has played the whore;
she who conceived them has acted shamefully.
For she said, “I will go after my lovers;
they give me my bread and my water,
my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”
Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns;
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers,
but not overtake them;
and she shall seek them,
but shall not find them.
Then she shall say, “I will go
and return to my first husband,
for it was better with me then than now.”
She did not know
that it was I who gave her
the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and who lavished upon her silver
and gold that they used for Baal.
Therefore I will take back
my grain in its time,
and my wine in its season;
and I will take away my wool and my flax,
which were to cover her nakedness.
Now I will uncover her shame
in the sight of her lovers,
and no one shall rescue her out of my hand.
I will put an end to all her mirth,
her festivals, her new moons, her sabbaths,
and all her appointed festivals.
I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees,
of which she said,
“These are my pay,
which my lovers have given me.”
I will make them a forest,
and the wild animals shall devour them.
I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals,
when she offered incense to them
and decked herself with her ring and jewelry,
and went after her lovers,
and forgot me, says the Lord.
Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
From there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
From there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of
Egypt.
On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, “My husband,” and no longer will you call me, “My Baal.”(master)
For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no more.
I will make for you a covenant on that day with
the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety.
And I will take you for my wife forever;
I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.

On that day I will answer, says the Lord,
I will answer the heavens
and they shall answer the earth;
and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall answer Jezreel (God sows);
and I will sow him for myself in the land.
And I will have pity on Lo-ruhamah (on the not pitied),
and I will say to Not my people, “You are my people”;
and he shall say, “You are my God.” — Hosea 2, NRSV

The emphasis upon changing the cosmos itself is also central to Paul's vision. But Paul is expecting the faithful to transform into new creatures altogether. Quite a leap higher than changing the covenant with Israel and creation as Hosea describes.

And both are very different roles from that of Jesus in the Gospel according to John where the Logos was co-present with God at creation.

This chapter also puts the kibosh on Paul's attempt to place 'faith above works' into the scriptural tradition. Israel has to stop being a whore for the change to happen.

And to follow up on the Marcion separation of the punitive and loving spirits, Hosea gives the lie to that proposition.

Edit to add: I forgot to mention that it was a talk given by Jason Staples that brought the two passages to my attention.

A supreme being would be responsible for our production. Our ideas are just our ideas. As the Proverb says:

The plans of the mind belong to man,
but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.

All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes,
but the Lord weighs the spirit. — Proverb 16

You follow the lack of concern for people exemplified by your Leader. Amplifying lies is not moral behavior, especially while holding a large megaphone.

The damage done to the community falsely vilified by a Presidential ticket is reprehensible regardless of whether it leads to violence or not. The fear is real enough.

You are reversing the power relationship involved. In Genesis, we were thrown out of the Garden after we tried to become equal to God. Similar smackdown happened with the tower of Babel.
Icarus did not pack enough sunscreen. Prometheus got nailed to a cliffside.

As the Reverend Dirty Harry said: "A man has to learn his limitations."

That presentation is also a vital part of the call and response that unfolds at his rallies. He polls the crowd to ask how he should respond to his 'managers'. He gets to stand inside and outside of the operation at the same time. Using one register for x and the other for y. Ventriloquism of the highest order.

A lot of stories about Supreme Beings include reports of what happens when you get too uppity. I am inclined to err on the side of caution.

With the addition of Lara Loomer to the Trump Brain Trust, a wide disparity is revealed in the skillsets of the Deep State Provocateurs on hand to do the dirty deeds.

My ninety-year-old mother is still a better shot than the kid was in Pennsylvania. The Florida dude looks like he was angling for Bill Murray's role in Caddyshack. These efforts are a far cry from the work of 9/11 and 1/6.

I recommend starting with Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.

We use natural resources for our ends. But the idea of property is a claim restricting competing claims. The exchange of commerce proceeds from ways of establishing a right to something versus simply people taking stuff from each other as they can.

And that last bit gets one ready to read Hobbes.