Seriously, you need to ask yourself what motivates this 'at-all-cost" defensiveness you have against feminism. — Akanthinos

I've asked myself and the answer is that I don't have an 'at-all-cost" defensiveness against feminism.

you made a bare assertion relating to a controversial position in philosophy as though it was an established fact. — S

I see, so you'd like for me to have prefaced it with a qualifying expression?

No problem:

I believe that belief is what you choose to hold to be true without requiring objective evidence. This can be for the sake of convenience; I am willing to accept that Canberra is the capital of Australia without having to go there and check. However, the most significant of our beliefs are those things that we want to be true. Life after death. Good and bad. My remarkable intellect etc.

Why don't you try to state what's wrong with my definition (the full one, not your cherry-picked version) without an appeal to definition (especially one that doesn't even contradict my position)?

Could you point out in that Wiki article what you find so sinister? — Akanthinos

Nothing. I included it in order to show that this is not just another 'Day of Whatever', but a day on which there are significant strikes and demonstrations around the globe.

As for the opposition being strongest, you just showed your colours. Feminism is not in opposition to the male population. — Akanthinos

&

Feminism is in opposition to the ideology (if you can even call it that) of patriarchal control and to the structural conditions of women's biopolitical serfdom. — Akanthinos

You'll need to explain how these are different.

Once again, I will state that I don't oppose feminism and I agree that much work still needs to be done, but less so in the developed world, and if we're going have coordinated strikes in developed countries, perhaps it might be an idea to protest against gross inequality instead of female inequality.

That's a philosophical position called doxastic voluntarism. You are talking as though it is established fact, when it isn't. — S

Are you saying that it's an established fact that it's not?

Let’s try not to over-generalise and further sabotage or draw attention away from addressing more important issues such as the global shift towards gender equality and ending discrimination and violence against women, then, shall we? — Possibility

I'm flattered, but you overestimate my influence.

Where is the source of your quote? — Possibility

El 8 de marzo vamos a parar el sistema patriarcal, capitalista y depredador ‼️ Todas A LA HUELGA

SO let's talk about it some more on this thread... — Banno

I'm reluctant to engage with you directly, but do feel free to read my comments.

do you really view this activity as ‘pitting women against men’? — Possibility

If you dedicate a day to telling half the population that they're being exploited and abused by the other half and thus should strike in order to "stop the patriarchal, capitalist and predatory system" then it is likely that this message might persist into at least some of the other days of the year, no?

To reiterate my point. The situation in Europe (where I live) regarding women's rights, whilst not being perfect, is not at crisis point either. Call it divide and rule or call it a smokescreen, International Women's Day, as it is celebrated here, is a convenient distraction from more pressing issues.

Like incel, the more you wail, the more pathetic you appear. — Banno

Wow! That escalated quickly.

I may not have seen every promotion of International Women’s Day, but I haven’t really noticed a lot of ‘pitting men and women against each other’ — Possibility

I'm referring to this type of activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women%27s_Strike_2018

this criticism of potential opposition between progressive forces and identity-based politics is at its very weakest when it is leveled against feminism, because feminism is the identity-based politic that reaches the largest population group. — Akanthinos

When half the population claims that it is oppressed by the other half, I would say that the opposition is at its strongest.

The privileged are blind to their own privilege. — Banno

This is a Hans Christian Anderson quote, right?

Functionally, P.C. is an iteration of the ad hominem fallacy. It is totally meaningless in terms of establishing truth, value, logical consistency etc. and therefore belongs to the realm of rhetoric rather than philosophy

Belief is what you choose to hold to be true without requiring objective evidence. This can be for the sake of convenience; I am willing to accept that Canberra is the capital of Australia without having to go there and check. However, the most significant of our beliefs are those things that we want to be true. Life after death. Good and bad. My remarkable intellect etc.

↪Txastopher Male tragic — Banno

If you're suggesting that I don't consider that women have a collective grievance, then you're wrong.

Nevertheless, I question the relative of importance of male discrimination against women in the developed world when compared to other issues. For this reason, I suggest that since pitting men and women against each other may have a political benefit for particular groups, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that these groups would promote such a state of affairs. International Women's Day being but one way of furthering this objective.

Indeed, the problem is methodological in the sense that you wish to generalise from a particular. Not good when discussing race.

But to be meaningful some care is needed in how things are approached and handled. — tim wood

I don't understand your use of 'meaningful' here.

Try this. My ancestors were smart enough to move to the region I now live in - and I am smart enough to choose to be here. For by far most folks, not so. That means I and mine are way smarter than everyone else except my immediate neighbors. Agreed? — tim wood

No.

Ultimately a tool for murderers who wish to engage in wholesale murder (do you think this is an exaggeration?). — tim wood

Has been used as tool for, yes, undoubtedly. Ultimately a tool for, no.

If there are differences between historically isolated groups of humans, I'm interested to know what they are.

Racism is the discrimination against groups and individuals on the basis of racial prejudice This seems unfair and as such is unethical. Racialism (for some this term is a merely a synonym for racism), on the other hand, is the idea that genetically similar groups have shared physical and intellectual characteristics.

It seems uncontroversial to say that sub-Saharan Africans have dark skin or that north Europeans have fairer hair than their southern counterparts. The problems arise when we ascribe relative value to difference. This seems a shame. If the descendants of the Celts have a better sense of smell or the Arabs have higher IQs, I, for one would like to know. Sadly there are some discussions that current multicultural dogma prevents us from having.

Could there be a "direct/'pure' democracy"? Yes, but it's unlikely we'd ever have that, and most people probably wouldn't want it. — Terrapin Station

I'm not sure if a modern direct democracy is 'unlikely'. There are many instances of participatory democracies which bridge the gap between direct and representative forms. New communications technologies can only make citizen participation easier so we can reasonably predict an increase in participation.

The assumption that most people wouldn't want this is merely a convenient fiction perpetuated by main beneficiaries of representative democracies; namely politician and the business communities.

Democracies aren't any more likely to have laws that I agree with. — Terrapin Station

I can't speak for your taste in laws, but even so, I suspect that democracies are far more likely to have the laws you agree with. Of course, it is conceivable that an enlightened and benign dictator could make better laws than a democratically elected government, but should the enlightened and benign dictator be superseded by an evil dictator there are not the legislative mechanisms in place to protect the people that are found in democracies.

The ideal state is an aristocracy in which rule is exercised by one or more distinguished people.

It's worth pointing out that by 'aristocracy', Plato meant a type of meritocratic rule by the 'best' rather than in the privileged, hereditary landowning sense in which we use the term today. By 'best' he meant the those who had successfully undertaken the rigorous philosophical training that he outlines in the Republic.

Regarding the illusory (or not) nature of democracy, that rather depends on what you expect from a democracy. Nowadays, all democracies are representative, which means there is only democracy when the electorate gets to vote (every 4-5 years in most cases) and even then the real power lies with whoever sets the agenda; like the illusion of choice in deciding how you're going to be tortured, the US two party dichotomy demonstrates this nicely.

The term 'representative democracy' in itself is contradictory and misleading since if a democracy is not direct than it is not a democracy. A better term for the system most of us have today is 'elected oligarchy'.

Understood as elected oligarchies, most of the criticisms of modern (representative) democracies dissolve and can be seen as inevitabilities of a system skewed in favour of the wealthy.

You are oversimplifying the argument if you reduce it to a pyramid of suffering with humans at the top. — Echarmion

I'm not doing this, vegans are.

you are in fact like me. If I feel that this isn't the case, I should not worry about the consequences my actions have for you. — Echarmion

The problem is not the supposition that similar beings have similar experiences, but rather the supposition that the more dissimilar to me the lesser the ability to suffer. Why should the human be at the acme of a hierarchy of suffering?

And here we see your inability to think clearly about the issue. — NKBJ

Look, what is convincing on Instagram is not necessarily convincing on a philosophy forum populated with (mostly) thoughtful adults.

Good luck with your post hoc rationalisation of your chosen dogma. You've clearly convinced
yourself. Unfortunately, you haven't convinced anyone else, which suggests two things:

• Firstly, you're easily convinced.
• Secondly, you're arguments are feeble.

Maybe you should stick to venting on social media.

All this taken together leads to the pretty darn obvious conclusion that animals suffer. — NKBJ

Look, if you want to base your diet on an intuitive anthropomorphic ranking of suffering, go ahead. However, you are presenting 'ethical' veganism as a rigorous philosophy, which, as has been shown, it definitely is not. the adjective 'ethical' in 'ethical' veganism affirms moral superiority based on logic and evidence and implies a normativism that proceeds directly from the canon of western thought. A more correct term would be 'faith' vegan since such a large part of vegan morality is based on speciesist intuitions about the subjective experience of living things.

In short:

• Vegans = no problem
• Proselytising 'ethical' vegans on philosophy forums = Mormon missionaries

I agree that the 'ethical' vegan suffering argument is valid, but the fact that it could lead to the absurd conclusion that it is wrong to eat any living thing shows that despite its validity, it is unsound. My suggestion is that the premise, "causing suffering is wrong" is where the problem lies.

Of course, it's easy to get people to agree that causing suffering is wrong, and most ethical vegan arguments slip this in at the top as an unchallengeable premise, but upon examination it's not true in this absolute formulation. What we should be saying is that causing suffering may be wrong.

If we accept that causing suffering may be wrong then arguments turn on the degree of suffering, its qualitative and comparative nature in different living organisms and its effect on the agent of the suffering. Thus, we can still minimise suffering and condemn sadism, but accept that some is the inevitable corollary of existence.

Unfortunately, no non-anthropocentric ranking of suffering exists. The claim that one kingdom suffers more that another is merely vegan doctrine. All anyone can confidently claim is that eating entails suffering. Also, their dogmatic devotion to an anthropocentric hierarchy of suffering and their childish assumption that all suffering must be wrong calls into question the right of vegans to use the term 'ethical' to describe themselves since it would more truthful for adherents to describe themselves as 'faith' vegans.

Regardless of my alimentary preferences, it seems quite likely that the suffering entailed in keeping me fed is far greater than the suffering that would be caused by me starving to death. However, since I don't believe that causing suffering is wrong per se. I can forgive myself for not being able to photosynthesise and find no need to reject entire taxa as potential sustenance.

If, in addition to animals, plants felt pain and one was to conclude that it was immoral to eat them for this reason, then it would follow that all eating was immoral. If one also concluded that we should not do immoral things, then it would either follow that we should not eat and therefore die or that it was less immoral to eat to survive than to cause the suffering entailed in getting the food we need to eat to survive.

This suggests that whilst it may be immoral to cause suffering unnecessarily, causing suffering necessarily is not immoral when the result of that suffering obtains our own continued existence.

If the suffering entailed by providing human food is not morally bad and plants suffer, then it shouldn't really matter what I eat, plants or animals since suffering entails in all cases. Put this way, ethical veganism sounds like the logical terminus of a reductio ad absurdum instead of a reasoned position.

If X is wrong, and you make a choice not to do X, then you gain some positive morality. However, in order to establish that veganism confers moral superiority, you would need to establish that non-veganism is wrong; something you have yet to do.

Even if it were the case that non-veganism is wrong, in terms of consumption, vegans could indeed be morally superior, but there is no reason to suppose that this morality carries over into any other areas of their ethical lives.

I'd say I am also morally superior to a husband who cheats and/or beats his wife. — chatterbears

Not, presumably, because you are a vegan, but because you don't cheat/beat?

I would argue, in your case Chatterbears, that any moral gains you make by your affirmed veganism are more than cancelled out by your ignoring and/or wilfully misunderstanding anyone who disagrees with you and that your conclusion that the resulting attrition of your interlocutors in the face of your mantra-like repetition amounts to some kind of philosophical victory.

Is it conceivable that no controls on migration would create some kind of migratory entropy in which no one nation was significantly more desirable to live in than any other?

If the answer is no, then putting aside all the cosmopolitan arguments and accepting that a nation state is an administrative region, we can ask OP's question in a slightly different way:

How much immigration can a nation state take before experiencing unacceptable negative administrative effects?

Clearly, some nations are more attractive to migrants than others. To what extent can that attraction be compromised before an immigration policy becomes self-defeating?

One can be pro-immigration and accept that there have to be limits to immigration. The difficult questions arise in defining these quantitive and qualitative limitations.

An open door policy may be a good thing up to the point that it isn't anymore. Migration is dynamic and what is acceptable one day may not be acceptable the next, which is to say that there is not a simple and unqualified philosophical position that one can take on immigration that doesn't take into account the contingent effects of immigration on a nation state.

There seems to be assumption that suffering is a necessary condition of suicide.

The degree of outrage and victimhood appears to be inversely proportional to to the degree of personal responsibility for one's individual situation.

An example would be obesity. When obesity is understood as a symptom of insufficient will-power, the obese person is responsible for his or her situation. However, when obesity is seen as an addiction the responsibility is shifted towards the manufacturers of the products that supposedly cause obesity, the solution is passed onto health professionals and the obese individual becomes a victim rather than agent of his or her own destiny. Outrage follows when said victim is asked to take responsibility for the consequences of his or her actions.

There are many examples of this type. It is often referred to as medicalisation or pathologization, but it strikes me this is only part of the cause. Whilst it is certainly true that medicalisation has increased enormously in the past decades, it could not have increased without an underlying spread of deterministic beliefs on which to base this mode of thinking since it is so much easier to relinquish personal responsibility in a determined universe.

Given that determinism serves capitalistic growth so well, then it is not unreasonable to claim that deterministic beliefs have been spread by advertising. If this is true, then we may hold the advertising industry responsible for OP's original observation, and, more generally, frame the whole situation as a symptom of the quest for capital growth.

↪Txastopher ...is not a proposition. — Banno

Is too.

↪Txastopher Why can't there be a proposition that cannot be shown to be true, nor shown to be untrue?

Actually, such propositions underpin Gödel's incompleteness theorems. — Banno

I didn't ask the quoted question, but since you mention it; "This proposition is false".

If I tell you that my ear itches, then it is refutable since I may be lying.
— Txastopher

And how would you refute this? How would you show that I was lying? — Banno

Bearing in mind that all I claim is that it is refutable, then I would ask you, "Are you lying about your ear itching?", if you replied truthfully in the affirmative then I would have refuted your claim, but, more importantly, this shows that the claim is refutable.

↪Txastopher There is a world of difference between you believing tht my ear is itchy, and my believing that my ear is itchy.

They are two completely different things. — Banno

I thought we'd established that we are not talking about beliefs.

If my ear itches, then it is irrefutable that my ear itches on an internal level. If I tell you that my ear itches, then it is refutable since I may be lying. So you're right, there is a difference,... and?

"Cannot be shown to be untrue" is not the same as "can be shown to be true". — Banno

Clearly, but when dealing with the concept of refutability it does since irrefutability is a quality predicated on refutability. If we don't accept that a condition of irrefutability is that it can be shown to be true, then all things that can't be shown to be true automatically become irrefutable and we end up with the tortuous nonsense of having to prove negatives; e.g. absence of God.

I don't care if you believe me or not; I believe my ear is itchy because... well, my ear is itchy. For me, doubt has no place here. — Banno

I'm sure you don't, but at the very moment you make your observation public then you invite reasonable scepticism.

My interest was in the other types of statement: Rich people are more stressed in their lives. Reading more than 6 hours straight is damaging one's vision and so on (these statements do not belong to the "more than reasonable" area and their negation is not inconceivable). — Isaac Shmukler

So we have deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning. The fact, that not everything is as clear cut as your a priori examples does not mean that reason cannot be applied to other areas. Information is reasonable to the extent that reason has been applied in its derivation, but this doesn't mean that it's true.

Here's an irrefutable belief: My ear is itchy. — Banno

My understating of 'irrefutable' is that it describes a fact that can be shown to be true and as a consequence cannot be disproved. Your example of an itchy ear could, conceivably, be a lie. Therefore, it is not irrefutable; or is refutable. That there is supreme being cannot be shown to be true therefore is not irrefutable; or is refutable.

If refutable means can be shown to be untrue, then irrefutable means cannot be shown to be untrue; or can be shown to be true.

What is the origin of reasonableness?
In other words, what makes a statement sound reasonable? — Isaac Shmukler

Presumably, that the statement has been arrived at by valid logical mechanisms and derives from true premises. In other words, is the product of a sound argument.

This means that a statement is not in itself reasonable, but rather reasonableness is conferred upon it by the means by which it is derived.