Let me explain this again.

To complain about Hebrews from the Bronze Age, and then immediately bring up what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians is antisemitism. This is because all Jews are being lumped together and accused to being violent invaders.

That's what @BitconnectCarlos was doing, except he was doing it to Muslims.

Is there any part of that which seems confusing to you?

Yes. Muslims tended to kick ass. But since the 2nd generation Muslims were Iranians, @BitconnectCarlos was spouting bullshit about how Arab Muslims were great colonizers. They weren't. And complaining about Arab Muslims from 1200 freaking years ago adjacent to some bullshit about Hamas, gives the appearance of bigotry.

Let's complain about the Hebrew invasion of the "promised land" and then immediately talk about what we all know about what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. That bullshit would be anti-Semitism.

Dammit why can't anybody on this forum read the posts they're responding to? :groan:

I'm mainly familiar with AI art generation. It opens up new doors for creativity.

I haven't used the AI answer generator except I once asked it a question about Kierkegaard and its answer blew my mind. It was so insightful. How could it have come from an unconscious machine? It's crazy. Turing would be amazed.

The Persians still had to be conquered and made it worth their while to "convert" for this to even be a thing, that's all I'm saying. — schopenhauer1

I agree.

You cannot just skip over stuff because it's convenient for your argument. — schopenhauer1

I was just answering Bitconnect's claim that Arabs were great colonizers. That's not true. The great Muslim colonizers were Persian.

The whole reason the Middle East is Islamic is because Arabs formed a deadly army that was able to defeat the floundering empires — schopenhauer1

If you keep reading you'll find that within about a generation after the Arabs came out of Arabia, the Iranians took back their own territory, as Muslims. At that point, the Islamic leaders were all former Christians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists. For the most part, Islam was spread in the Persian language.

It's just a historical fact that conversion to Islam was usually voluntary because of the social stability it provided.

Arab Muslims are far better colonizers than Jews will ever be. They are such good colonizers that the Western world takes it for granted that they must be the original inhabitants of the huge swaths of land they've conquered. The Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas is difficult for the West to wrap its mind around because the mentality is so foreign to us but it's encapsulated in the original 1988 Hamas charter: "Jihad is its path and *death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."*

Maybe we're the ones in the wrong. What's this brief life on Earth compared with the eternal bliss of the one true Creator, Allah? Live for death, not for life. — BitconnectCarlos

This is mostly bullshit, though. For the most part, the geographical development of Islam was done by Persians, and it wasn't done violently. Islam was attractive because it served as merchant law throughout Central Asia.

And there's nothing foreign about Muslim extremism. Your bigotry stinks.

What is your opinion of AI (artificial intelligence)? — Agree-to-Disagree

I like it. What are your thoughts?

The IPCC talks about it quite a bit. Since it ended in the 1850s, it means North America has been warming up since then. It's yet another reason we use computer models instead of looking out the window to understand the climate.

Did you happen to look at the graph on the Wikipedia page? Look at what happened to the temperature at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The Little Ice Age

The proximal vector in the multiplexed zone retraces the inferior Fibonacci levels to localize on the scale of dimensional applications.

It should by now be clear that moral truths do not tell us about how the world is, but about how the world ought be. — Banno

Schopenhauer said the world is never going to be the way it ought to be because that's boring. Thus we have threads on every disaster of the day but none on that thing that turned out really well because everyone was moral as hell.

I'm just making the point that ultimately I'm having to trust other people's word for it, and I'm increasingly seeing problems within academia that make me unwilling to extend that trust. — Tzeentch

I'm guessing a lot of people are in this situation.

unless Frank is arguing that since @Hanover's actions are sometimes dubious, we should not pay attention to his opinions concerning ethics — Banno

No, that came out of my attempt to explain my view that ethics is mostly about looking backward and judging actions that have already happened.

There are all sorts of problems associated with trying to face the future correctly that I think are mostly covered by acting out of love for life, love for the human world, and seeing yourself in other people in a Sartre like way.

This thread touches on one of the problems with the forward facing approach.

It's frustrating dealing with the global scepticism at times. — unenlightened

Is this because you think we need a democratic initiative to find a solution, so skepticism diminishes our efforts?

Or is it just that skepticism itself is irritating? Or both?

Ok. So maybe it's not happening around the clock the way I thought it was.

What I wanted you to understand is that though you describe it as an adversarial setting, that alone victimizes some people. Some black people won't even go to legal aid to get help understanding the system because they've been taught that it won't help and it could make them a target. If a car insurance company does engage in bad faith, the playing field really isn't level. I'm sorry I accused you of being involved in that. I was wrong.

"Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without reviewing the patient’s medical chart. A job title at one company was “denial nurse.”" — PBS

Is the above giving incorrect information?

If you have this thought that people get in wrecks, go to their trusted family doctor, get a prescription, maybe get few rounds of physical therapy and then the insurance company tells them to fuck off, you are mistaken. Those don't decribe the claims that have driven this system. — Hanover

I understand what you're saying, and you've opened my eyes to what you have to contend with. But are you telling me it's not true that insurance companies try to avoid the obligations they've entered into with people by allowing things to play out in a courtroom? Are you saying there's nobody at the insurance company who is trained to deny claims and then see what happens? My experience is that you have to call them back and threaten to get a lawyer. Sometimes you have to get a lawyer to make them pay what they've contracted to pay (this is with health insurance). Tell me that this doesn't happen, and that this isn't part of what you do. But if you tell me that, could you also explain how you've avoided being involved in that?

Yes, the Dutch have had to deal with water for centuries. I live by the coast myself, so when the deluge comes I'll be the first to know about it. :lol: — Tzeentch

Ok. Send us telegram if you need buckets. :cool:

With such numbers we may as well assume the foetal position and wait for the water to take us. — Tzeentch

Aren't the Netherlands already under water?

Why haven't any of the beaches gotten smaller in the past 25 years from rising sea levels. I figured they would have closed many flooded beaches by this point. — Merkwurdichliebe

It is. I have a cousin who bought a condo in the 90s when the beach was about a 100 feet away. Now high tide comes right up to their back door, and that's even with sand dredging. Without the dredging, I think the condo would be gone. Rich people get most of the benefit from dredging. Because of the way the coast works, when they dredge for rich people, poor towns lose more coast. It's something about how the currents work.

What makes it complicated is that this has actually been happening for about 150 years. There are civil war forts where most of the fort is now under water. You can't identify single incidents like this, or look at a single graph, or look at this year's weather and decide what the climate is doing. The climate is much bigger than this year, or even the last 150 years. This is why they use super computers to sort out all the billions of variables.

This is all fascinating to me. But the Granny I told you about didn't get any pain and suffering money. She just got the money to pay some of her medical bills, and she had to split that (50/50 I think) with her lawyer, so she just ended up getting a little bit to help out.

It's like saying a football team was immoral because it threw a trick play and won the game. If it's all a game, it's all a game. You may want it to be something else, but there are billions of dollars driving this industry and if you think it about something other than the billions of dollars, it's just because you don't know. — Hanover

You're misunderstanding me. I realize that Granny should expect the insurance company to screw her. This is all normal. This is how it works. What I'm saying is that the people who sign up to do the screwing are doing something monstrous.

At this point, I think you're not capable of focusing on a specific individual that you've hurt. You just refuse to accept that you have done this. All the explanation of the "trick plays" tells me you have. You need an epiphany.

What each side does is try to represent the interests of the other, regardless of whether you think their interests are worth protecting. If that lawyer didn't try to reduce the liability of his clients, then his clients would end up paying amounts that were beyond what they owed. — Hanover

The fact that there are people who want to scam the system does not make it ok for insurance companies to do the same thing. And they do. They try to get our of paying what they owe. They use the court system to intimidate people.

This is how morality works: If there was one single time when you attempted to or succeeded in screwing someone over, you have done something monstrous. That person was struggling, and you either tried to make it worse, or you succeeded in doing so. It doesn't matter that it was legal for you to do this. It was a terrible thing to do to someone else, and it wasn't the "system" hurting them. It was you. You could have done something else with your talents, but instead you worked it out in your mind that using the court system to intimidate and harass someone was ok.

You know in your heart whether you've done this or not. If you haven't, then that's great. I'm not sure if you're intentionally twisting my words to strawman me, or what. This is not about the system. It's about that person you either tried to hurt, or succeeded in hurting. If there is no such person, then great. Only you know the truth of that.

:up:

Three, plus post-grad certification for the USAF (and USWB) 1958-59 as a meteorologist. — jgill

That's cool. Did you do weather reports for the Vietnam war?

How many degrees do you have, if I may ask?

The cloud problem is about modeling them for long term predictions. Clouds have a huge impact on the climate, but they aren't sure if future clouds will be more flat or more columnar.

I'm wondering if quantum computers would make it possible to model it?

I'm amazed at the lack of skepticism from the average person towards both media and government. It's not like they do not have clear record of nefarious and outright deceptive behavior. Why do people so easily keep trusting them with so much shit? Where is a speck of suspended judgment to be found? It is insane. — Merkwurdichliebe

So true. :clap:

Granny was in a car accident. She hasn't been able to turn her head side to side since then. She hires a lawyer to sue because the other driver's insurance company doesn't want to pay for any of her medical bills. She won, by the way. This is a true story.

There's a lot of litigation in the US. Companies need to be able to defend themselves. Of course. And at the end of the day, the insurance company's lawyer was trying to screw over the little old lady. He was trying to keep his client from having to pay out what they owed. This lawyer does this everyday. It's what he does for a living. He tries to screw people over.

If that's not you, then great. I misunderstood.

Is that what you're saying I said? — Hanover

My impression is that sometimes you hurt people who don't deserve to be hurt, and these people you've hurt don't have the resources your clients do. Do I have it all wrong? Are the people you defend against all rascals?

Sure, there are people who want to play the system. You're there to stop them. That's great. And everyone you direct your skills against is a rascal. Is that what you're saying?

Banno and I are moral realists who recognize that moral truths have an effect via belief. — Leontiskos

That's not a thing.

You and Michael are attempting to speak about the effects of truths independent of belief, which is an especially odd approach when it comes to morality. Morality is about how humans should act, and humans act in light of their beliefs. Therefore a moral truth is brought to bear on reality via belief. — Leontiskos

What you're saying is in line with moral antirealism. Michael was asking about moral realism, specifically whether it makes any difference if it obtains. I think we all pretty much agree that it doesn't.

I do think Banno correctly noted your allusion to the original sin myth. Not that the religious story can't be correct metaphor, but you do have to pause if you find yourself reciting the mythology of your culture to ask it's valid of or if its just bias. — Hanover

I was talking about babies. They're innocent. They learn about morality through experiences of all sorts. It's a life long progression.

It's not the case that we stumble about making countless serious ethical violations until we right ourselves. Most make missteps now and again, but we're mostly morally abiding folks. — Hanover

When you first described to me what you do for a living, I was a little shocked because you seemed kind of nonchalant about it. To me, it sounded horrible, though. You stand with a large company against people who are struggling. I didn't wonder: how does Hanover not see that what he's doing is against some objective moral code? I wondered how you sleep at night. To me, morality is visceral. What is it to you?

But the other 99% looked forward and didn't ever commit the crime because they knew it immoral. — Hanover

Well, you're a monster. What's your excuse?

Sounds like you really bought in to the Garden of Eden stuff. — Banno

I get the feeling you don't know what innocence and guilt are. All you know is that you ought to because you ought to? Hmm.

No, not even that, not yet.

Here's the poverty of empiricism, naturalism and so on, when it comes to ethics: in looking at how the world is, nothing is said about what to do about it. — Banno

I think you have it backwards. Morality is mostly about looking backward, not forward. You only feel guilt and grief about what's already been done. We only try the criminal for what she did, not what she will do.

Every person starts out innocent and covers themselves with wrongdoing as they grow and learn. This is what redemption is: to stand back up after having fallen and putting foot to path to try again, having learned what every generation learns anew. You can't hear the moral code handed down to you until you've made the mistakes that bring it home to you. Then it becomes a touchstone that you'll pass to the next generation, but they'll make the same mistakes again on their way to learning it. That's how it has to be.

I agree, grift is a major part of it. Like all good scams there is a small element of truth involved. — Agree-to-Disagree

I agree.

Back then it was mostly statistical studies. Then after that period atmospheric physicists joined in and made it a real science. — jgill

I read that in the 1970s, climatology was described as a science of wild guesses. A huge amount of progress has been made, but there are still problems, like the cloud problem:

"In addition, climate models have difficulty incorporating certain information about clouds. Most climate models map features over areas of 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, though some cloud models may have grids of five kilometers by five kilometers; but even within five kilometers there is a lot of variation in cloud cover. Allegra LeGrande, adjunct associate research scientist at Columbia Climate School’s Center for Climate Systems Research, said, “Sometimes there are processes that are just too small, too complicated, too hard to measure. And you just can’t explicitly include them in the climate models. These tend to be processes like the ephemeral, little wispiness of the clouds. How are you going to translate these tiny ephemeral cloud bits into a climate model of the whole world?”"

I just take note of typical grifty tactics, like narrative shifting, and as the list grows my trust shrinks. — Tzeentch

I'm coming around to the whole grift theory. I think you're exactly right.

Ha! That's weird.