Lenin was right about the state as an apparatus of coercion, and noted it’s evil and exploitation; he was right that a state is unnecessary in a moral man; — NOS4A2

I think the founders of the US would have agreed for the most part. Their goal was to leave government some distance from the average person's life.

Their vision didn't work in the end though, due to the massive immorality of slavery. As I said, as a species, we're not ready to live without states.

But this is a topic for a different thread... — ssu

I don't think either of us cares to discuss it further, though

"KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia’s military leadership has withdrawn its officers in the Russian-annexed city of Kherson across the Dnieper River in anticipation of an advance of Ukrainian troops, the Institute for the Study of War think tank said Sunday.

"To delay the Ukrainian counteroffensive as the Russians complete their retreat, Moscow has left newly mobilized, inexperienced forces on the other side of the wide river, it added."

wtf?

It was not a matter of doing nothing or projecting maximum force. The Bush National Security Doctrine specifically discounted international instruments that would have treated AQ as a criminal gang. Whatever one thinks about that choice, it was an expensive one. — Paine

The US participates in undermining terrorist plans around the world. I think the use of the military wrt Afghanistan was to get to terrorists who were being protected. Iraq was about locking down sources of radioactive material and democratizing the Middle East. That's the conclusions I came to, anyway.

That's the myth that those promoted War-on-Terror told us. — ssu

It's purported to have been from an analysis of the middle eastern society, and it's also a little wisdom garnered from the American Revolution. Societies vary in the lessons they learn. :grin:

Deterring terrorist attack hasn't happened by fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan. — ssu

How do you know? Do you have a crystal ball to see what would have happened if the US military would have just stayed home?

Terrorist groups have been destroyed by police through the legal system in various countries. But who cares about how terrorist group are really dealt. — ssu

You're sounding a little bitter about the whole thing. What would you say Al Qaeda wanted most of all?

So better to have the longest war in US history, tens of thousands of killed and a humiliating defeat? Of course! Having the FBI to do a police investigation would have been so "weak dick" response. — ssu

Supposedly the best way to invite more of the same was to look weak.

I see. I'm not holding my breath.

So did many great thinkers. But he proposed achieving such ends through statist means. That’s why it has never worked, and we see that communist states are some of the most totalitarian in history. — NOS4A2

Exactly. Were there non-statist means to achieve the non-state that you had in mind?

"The long-term goal of world communism is an unlimited worldwide communist society that is classless, (lacking any exploitation of man by man), moneyless, (lacking a need for currency to regulate human behavior), and stateless, (lacking any violent compulsion of man by man)"

-- Wikipedia

I would prefer a government that doesn’t operate as a criminal organization, a monopoly, and an anti-social institution. — NOS4A2

I think Marx felt the same way.

Did you believed Bush Junior when he said Iraq had WMD? — Olivier5

I think he did believe that. It's a little easier to tell what GW Bush thought versus Putin, though.

She resigned because, facing electoral annihilation, her party would have given her the boot otherwise. It's not all that difficult to get rid of a PM compared to a U.S. President. If you're in search of common decency, you are probably looking in the wrong place. — Baden

Oh, it's more complicated than I thought.

I was thinking the same thing. Common decency? Very un-American.

Plan A from Princeton (notice who actually wins this conflict)

Are you dreaming of the kind of world Marx thought we were headed toward? No governments? We're just not ready for that yet. All attempts so far to build communist nations failed disastrously.

Here's one way stipulation could enter our play: I don't play golf, but I know roughly how it works. If you know no more than I do, we'll have to make up some rules as we go and agree to them. We'll hope we're getting it roughly right. Our sense of the basic idea isn't enough to get us through an entire round of golf with the sorts of complications that inevitably arise.

Here's another: we could take elements of basketball (teams, a playing area with goals at either end) and elements of golf (small object struck with a special kind of stick) and combine them to make something like hockey or field hockey. Hockey wasn't on your list before so it's not something we can straight up play based only on intuition; we have to make up the rules based on some things we understand from other games. — Srap Tasmaner

It sounds like you're saying mathematicians might stipulate things for the sake of advancing the field?

I feel like I'm just not getting the opposition you see here. — Srap Tasmaner

I was just looking for the necessity behind stipulation in math. I think you're saying it's partly cognitive imperatives where we're exploring the contours of the mind, and then some other stuff. :up:

(They may not even all be consistent.) — Srap Tasmaner

I would agree that we do have directly opposing intuitions. Does this show up in math so that a decision has to be made about which side we'll use as our basis?

Agreement in the selection is effectively agreement about the content precisely because what we're agreeing to select among are the semantic contents of our intuitions. — Srap Tasmaner

If math is self consistent, this is like deciding whether we want to play golf or basketball. No stipulation is taking place.

If math is self contradictory, then we could have stipulation. I'd have to invite you to agree with me.

Which do you think is happening?

I don't know. What's "real stipulation"? Does that mean "arbitrary"? — Srap Tasmaner

If I stipulate that zero can be positive or negative, I'm inviting you to agree that we will talk about it that way. The agreement is the basis of the way we speak, not some intuition that we share.

Where we share intuitions, I shouldn't have to stipulate anything. Those intuitions ground our language use.

There's choice in axioms at least in the sense that we can select which of our intuitions to build on. — Srap Tasmaner

Then there's no real stipulation going on. The mathematician is guided by which of his intuitions he wants to explore. That's the only choice involved. Is that what you're saying?

They clearly are a matter of choice or there wouldn't be non-Euclidean geometry. — Srap Tasmaner

I guess we aren't on the same page here. :victory:

But Euclid had axioms. — Srap Tasmaner

Those aren't a matter of our choices though. They reflect cognitive imperatives.

That was our question: Do mathematicians stipulate like the architects of artificial games? Or do they follow imperatives that we all share?

We have some basic intuitions about collecting and counting, about geometry, and so on, and we build mathematics out of those by making choices, our axioms, and then those axioms have logical consequences. — Srap Tasmaner

If you're talking about the axioms that protect set theory from paradoxes, you're right. There's nothing intuitive about those axioms. It's debatable whether math really needs set theory as a foundation, though. That's the danger of fiat. Once you're free of any rudder, anything goes.

You're the one who seems to be insisting that the rules you've mentioned have no use even within the realm of math itself.

Interesting.

Then I take it you don't recognize pure math as having meaning — Real Gone Cat

If what you're saying is meaningful, there should be some use somewhere.

I take it you know of no practical use, but maybe there are non-practical "pure math" uses. If not, then what you're saying is mumbo jumbo.

What are you aiming at? — Real Gone Cat

Meaning is use.

I was addressing the idea that 0 cannot be across from itself. Now you want applications? I don't get you at all. — Real Gone Cat

I'll take that as a "no"

The current situation looks dire. — Manuel

Lots of death, yes.

frank

No, I was thinking more fundamental mathematical principles, or how mathematics as a system works. Things like harmony, symmetry, orthogonality, duality, that kind of stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

Aren't those things features of how the human mind works?

So, let the domain be the number line and replace A with 0. Clearly each negative number is the image of its corresponding positive value under a reflection in 0 (and vice versa). Now here's the kicker : 0 is a reflection of itself. I.e., 0 is opposite (across from) itself. — Real Gone Cat

Do you know of any practical use for this information?

Let's set aside what caused Putin to invade, it matters less now, because the war is going on. The important question now, is what are the next steps that could be taken to end this war as quickly as possible. — Manuel

I think this is a good idea. Our assessments of how we got here won't agree. You can criticize the West for supporting Ukraine, but that's not going to stop as long as Biden is in office. The situation is pretty entrenched at this point. More caskets will be filled.

If you need to say every integer has a sign (for whatever reason) then you'll need 0 to have a sign. Which one? That strikes me as a deep question, in the sense that your reason for giving it a sign is probably not powerful enough to dictate which sign; you'll need some other reason for saying which, and that reason is likely to be "deeper" if you see what I mean. — Srap Tasmaner

Deeper into what? Cognitive imperatives?

I'd forgotten Dennis Ritchie talks about that, but computer scientists (not coders) spend a fair amount of time thinking about semantics. When Jim Backus and his team at IBM invented the first high-level programming language, they had to simultaneously figure out what such a thing would be, and also invented a formal way of specifying its grammar, the Backus-Naur Form still used today. — Srap Tasmaner

I once made a program in machine language and burned it into proms. I'm guessing the higher level syntax would follow necessity to some extent? The purpose was to speed things up so that bigger, more elaborate programs could be written. There's stipulation in that, I guess, with necessity as a rudder.

What is math's rudder? What necessity would inspire us to talk in terms of +0?

The trouble comes of what fills the role of stipulation in everyday usage of a natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know. There are jargons everywhere, in sports, in the law, in engineering, in medicine, etc. But I don't think there's much stipulation going on.

The original creator of C-language spent most of the introduction of his book complaining that C is not a language because "language" refers to the use of the tongue, and your tongue is useless in computer programming. He was already subject to a jargon that developed somewhat organically.

"Zero has an inverse" is true IFF zero has an inverse.

Problem solved.

In other words, zero is across from (opposite to) itself. — Real Gone Cat

If that perspective is valuable to you, then great. It wouldn't be valuable in say, electronic engineering, where zero volts or ground is neutral. You really can't have it that zero volts is also positively or negatively charged.

I think that same situation will hold in most of the ways we use "zero.".

If the domain of mathematics has some other use for the word, I wonder what it could be.

and that's the point made by Austin's strategy. Until you have a term with which to contrast it, "real" has no meaning, does nothing except perhaps misguide. — Banno

I see.

Indeed and so we might arrive back at idealism - what criteria do we use to demonstrate that the physical world is real other than intersubjective agreement? Not sure kicking a rock Dr Johnson style will cut it. Do you have an approach to this? — Tom Storm

At one time, my greatest fear was of not being able to tell reality from fiction. When I began to realize there is no criteria for that, I headed into a crisis.

I decided that my explanations for what I experience will always be in flux. My anchor is the content of my experience. It's kind of like a deal I made with myself. It works. Plus I'm no longer afraid of being insane. That helps.

Sure. So here an unreal idea would be an hallucination? A dissociation? Again other words set the issue out with greater clarity. — Banno

I don't know what an unreal idea is. They guy thought he was a character in a video game. That was an idea which he took for reality.

Since you have no criteria for determining if you're presently on Ketamine, you don't know if the world you think of as real is just an idea.

I first noticed that when I was about 16. It's not bad philosophy. It's just part of being human.

Sometimes people confuse their ideas with reality, as with the Ketamine use I was describing. A person thought he was a character in a video game.

Were you thinking that we can't see the effects of quantum weirdness with our own eyes?