It was an excellent way of diverting attention from the Epstein files and the riots in Minneapolis. Also I expect there are lots of MAGA people riding those stock market waves too.
I watched the speech in Davos and expect that no one was listening by about half way through. He was just babbling. I could feel the tension just ebbing away as it became more and more obvious that he’s senile.
He may have come away with a “deal” after his meeting with Mark Rutte and think that everything is settled, everyone’s a winner and he’s done great again. But maybe he wasn’t listening to the speeches before he arrived. European leaders made it clear that the world has changed and the change is permanent. Europe will be decoupling it’s dependencies on the US and securing it’s future independently.

Lot’s of nice quotes from the speech like this one;

So we want a piece of ice for world protection

He could have followed that with, that’s a nice piece of ice you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.

Just like his niece, Mary Trump, said, he’s nothing but a grifter.

Yes, it’s all over the news here in the U.K. We’re all well aware of it and it’s scary.

Yes, I’m expecting the audience to gradually leave the room until he’s standing there on his own.

He’s just lived up to his nickname of TACO. They just need the men in white coats to come in and lead him away now.

I’m listen to the speech now, he’s lost his mind.

The crucifixion (and the resurrection) were seen primarily as a symbolic condemnation of violence, not a sacralization of it.

I would say symbolic of the possibility of redemption. The narrative indicates this, that Jesus’s life and life story was to demonstrate an acceptance/recognition of human frailty by God. That people by their very nature do crucify each other, do deceive, enslave, etc each other. But that they can be redeemed, can be freed from the guilt and shame, it leaves them. That they can be restored to the purity they enjoyed prior to the fall,(something which is impossible without redemption).

In other religions this issue of destructive human nature is dealt with in other ways. But the goal is the same. To reduce this behaviour in the population, by offering a benevolent alternative and to provide an off ramp for the guilty.

That's the thing: US foreign policy hasn't meaningfully changed for decades, completely irrespective of whichever clown occupied the White House. Even if they say they want to do things different, they will say A, but do B.

Yes, but this amounts to the blob, the swamp in Washington and Trump is just as much a creature of the swamp as the rest of them. So no change there then particularly. But viewing geopolitics in this way seems to lack a sensitivity to current events and how these events may change the chess pieces on the board. I know that geopolitics has to be viewed in this way, because long term strategic interests, geography and culture do play a part. But what about when a creature emerges from the swamp and tries to up end the apple cart. To do away with democracy and the rule of law. To become an authoritarian dictator a stride across the global stage hand in hand with the worst authoritarian leaders on the planet, disregarding the real concerns of true allies and his own people. Does that figure in your analysis, can that change the geopolitical drift?

I have never understood the resurrection story, or, as some put it: God sacrificed Himself to Himself to save us from Himself because of a rule He made Himself.

It fits into a larger narrative. The idea that God created the heaven and earth so that beings could live a life independent of his direct control. Or in other words like a puppet that has come to life and doesn’t need strings to move any more and a puppet master to operate them. This inevitably results in some personal autonomy in these beings. Then we have the garden of Eden story, where the beings partake of the tree of knowledge, signifying the fall.
If one takes this narrative on board then it makes sense for a representative of God to be introduced to attempt to guide the beings when they go astray.
Now the crucifixion story signifies that these autonomous beings, due to their independent autonomy have the agency to crucify themselves, or pervert their autonomous behaviour. In the crucifixion this is demonstrated writ large. The resurrection signifies that those beings can be released from the guilt and shame of this behaviour and be reinstated as pristine beings in the garden of Eden, so to speak, as they were prior to the fall.

I am not a Christian, or a Christian scholar, but do find the Christian mysticism of these narratives compelling.

Ironically I feel like now would be a great time for Russia to make a move on Greenland either to take advantage of the tensions within NATO or to exacerbate them.

Fortunately for us Russia is already preoccupied with trying to secure the Donbas. It would cause overreach for Russia to invade other territories, especially a sea based invasion. Trump’s talk of Russia, or China looking to acquire Greenland is pure fantasy, along with most of his rationale right now. People are starting to say has he lost his mind. It’s beginning to look like a classic case of megalomania.

Trump sees what's happening with Russia and China making moves on Ukraine and Taiwan and doesn't want to miss out on all the fun.

I think you’ve summed it up quite well there.

Unpredictability can be a great boon in geopolitics. There was a brief period during which I thought Trump might go against the establishment, but almost from the start of his second term it has been continuity of agenda with zero deviation. The only remarkable thing is his particular brand of domestic kool-aid is more polarizing than anything we've seen in a while.

It looks then that you agree with me that there is a general drift in US geopolitics in the national interest. But this is a meaningless platitude which can be applied similarly to any country. In order to have meaning in this discussion it should be possible to discern the effect a significant change in leadership would make to that drift.

Here we have a leader who has trashed the trust foundational to NATO and is threatening an action which will inevitably result in the end of the alliance. Meanwhile has is reported to have invited Putin to be on the board of his newly formed Palestinian rebuilding council. I heard from a reliable commentator earlier that this council is to be much more than an authority on Palestine, it is to become a global alliance of authoritarian leaders to usurp the role of the UN. Do these sort of development alter your US strategy?

I don’t disagree with your take on the deep state within the US, but I read this as a deviation from that. It’s certainly a deviation when it comes to the political strife within the US. Also, the deep state thing is more of a drift than people actively planning anything. In which case Trump’s actions will rock the boat, because there is an unpredictability thrown into the mix, along with events being shaped or not by the people, to a degree.

It comes across to me as a child realising that he is not going to get what he want’s, that saying pretty please isn’t going to work this time and is pleading why he needs to have it.
I get a feeling that he is really becoming an embarrassment now and responsible Americans will not let him do it.

E.g. reflecting on which things are you or yours. We do this casually every day.

Interestingly there are also things we take for granted every day, like that we are reliably in our home, our garden, with our social group, that the sun shines. That when we pay money into our bank, it will be there when we want it. Things, which if they they suddenly stopped our world would grind to a halt, or fall apart.

Trump seems to care. Aha, I know he could do a deal, I won’t annex Greenland if you give me a Nobel Prize.

Capital ‘S’ Self. Which is the entire aim of the path. There’s nothing really corresponding with that in Western culture save as a kind of import from Indian sources. Which is not to imply disrespect but mindfulness of context.

Yes, very much the undifferentiated self, but seen, or known from a personal perspective.
As for a Western equivalent, it seems like it was lost in the mists of time. Maybe never was here, I don’t know.

He won’t be eligible for the next one now.

Looks to me like Trump reinstated an already existing programme because it was the opposite of what Obama did. Now in his second term he has become expansionist and will probably want to add the moon to his new list of colonies.

The point which Reitan goes on to make is that both Hegel and Schleirmacher say that though we can't know the self as such, because we are the self, so this fact of our identity as the self could 'serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway'. But then, considering the great complexity (not to say prolixity) of Hegel's philosophy, this is not simple or straightforward.

Within the Indian traditions the self can be known. I don’t want to diminish the gravity of the idea that, 'the eye can see another, but not itself', rather to point out that there is another route by which the seer sees him/herself. Which might be what is being referenced by Reitan. We are the self, so access the self through being ourselves.
Not only that, but by awakening the crown chakra, one steps (metaphorically) into a transcendent world, in which one becomes both transpersonal and identifies with one’s self, simultaneously. So in a sense, the eye begins to see both ways. Which is represented in religious iconography by the deity standing within a lotus flower, which represents the thousand petalled lotus of the crown chakra.

I'm a Trump supporter and even I disagree with the Trump administration on this. I am not seeing the value of manned spaceflight at this time.

What’s it got to do with Trump?

We can draw a parallel with deepfakes, which have been going around for a few years now. The legal ramifications have been worked out and tested in the courts. What is different now is app’s like Grok make it possible to produce this kind of material in seconds as an alteration to a photo, which can be accessed by anyone on the platform.

There as no public v private, or any real privacy concerns. So one could claim to be embarrased by an Ai image getting into the public, but I highly doubt this would be the same "embarrassment" meant by that claimed when the image is a real, private image.

This is an interesting angle, maybe it doesn’t matter if the image is of the actual body of the person in the photo. As long as it is believable, or the public can be persuaded that it is. Also there is that visceral reaction people have to indecent, or explicit material. This can increase the impact and where it is used maliciously to blackmail, or abuse a vulnerable person, it is a serious issue.

There have been reports in the U.K. of a rapid increase in the amount of pedophilia related material. Where the line between real images and AI generated images is becoming blurred. I heard reports that the photo’s of Renee Good were micro bikinied and spread in social media within hours of her murder last week.
Then there are people in the public eye being depicted with bruising, smeared in blood, or with tattoos. Where defamation may be involved.

It looks like Musk backed down yesterday and is taking down the facility. As there were indications of government action against it in most European countries.

Yes, agreed, it seems a clear cut to me.
But this shines a light on what Musk and Farage are doing. They are claiming it is censorship, a free speech issue. So they are claiming that free speech includes the right to publish embarrassing, or defaming images of anyone on public forums, without their consent.
This looks like an overreach of the free speech narrative, exposing it as a false populist narrative, or culture war.

By his account, the transcendental subject cannot be a 'creator' (I believe that Kant would say that it has not an 'intellectual intuition').

I would say he is saying that the transcendental subject (ts) can’t be a creator of the noumenon. He’s not saying that it can’t create within the interaction between the ts and the noumenon, that the interaction is altered in some way by the ts.

So, indeed, it seems that reason, according to Kant, can say something about the noumenon: there is 'something beyond' the subject and this 'beyond' is also related to the 'empirical world' (i.e. the world of appearances ordered by the cognitive faculties). That's why I think that there is an unresolved tension in Kant's model.

I don’t see an unresolved tension, only perhaps an incomplete model. Yes the intellect can say something about the noumenon, namely that it is necessary and that we can say nought about it.
Likewise he is saying something about the ts, that it is necessary and that we can say nought about it.

This makes perfect sense to me that we* are at the meeting point between the two things the ts and the noumenon. That they are orthogonal, so in a sense cross each other’s path and where they cross the product of this interaction can be found, namely man. Man is to be found on the cross and has a cross to bare. I would introduce the trinity at this point;

Father = transcendental subject
Mother = noumenon
Son = humanity.

*I apply this rationale to the whole biosphere not just humanity.

I’ll have to give that more thought, you’ve made it quite complicated there.

This just says we can think noumenon simply because we exist.

My cat knows the noumenon just like I do. Although he wouldn’t think about it like me.

With respect to the real world in general, why would anyone care that he is acquainted if he cannot know from possible experience what he is acquainted with?

He can know it through experiences, just not through thinking. He doesn’t know what he knows, or that he knows it necessarily.
He might be told that he is acquainted with the noumenon, through his being, rather than through the intellect. So he may then meditate and contemplate on it and sense it’s presence through communion.

Please don’t apologise, I welcome the interest.

I thought the issue about Grok should be included here because it has been treated as a free speech issue in the press. It was the lead story in the U.K. yesterday, after Iran.

I’m not sure what to think about that, but I do think it’s a publication issue. Because People are using Grok to alter images with skinny bikinis on X, which are immediately posted on a public forum. Meaning embarrassing pictures of people which are non consensual are being published. This seems to fall foul of the U.K. online safety act.

Interestingly the two main political party’s are in agreement that it should be stopped. While only Elon Musk and Nigel Farage are claiming censureship, or a free speech issue.

Notice that I do agree with Kant that the 'empirical world' arises also from the cognitive faculties of the subject. However, I believe Kant overreaches in saying that we can't know absolutely nothing about the noumenon.

Kant is saying we can’t know anything about the noumenon with rational thought. Basically it is veiled from us. This does not negate our knowing it by other means. Kant is only talking about reason, rational thought. We are acquainted with the noumenon through our presence in the world.

So does abuse of women and girls via Grok, a freedom of speech issue in the U.K.?
Or an issue around pedophilia and abuse of women being facilitated by AI?

Nice story, I have looked very carefully for signs of physical magic throughout my life and don’t think I’ve witnessed it, or seen good evidence for it. Well apart from the time two rizzler papers that seemed to move of their own accord into position to make a joint, at a News Years Eve rave in Goa. Although I’m a bit suspicious of how that happened.

Joking aside, there is plenty of opportunity for magic to happen without violating the laws of nature. All it needs is movement and the opportunity for chance coincidences in the physical world. Or internally within the mind, or being of a person, or group of people.

I would say though, that I do think that if there is a heaven, or Nirvana, that magic is common place, or even intrinsic to what happens there and that the fact that physical magic doesn’t happen in the physical world is due to it’s structure, rather than the absence of magic at all.

Neither China or Russia would even think of invading Greenland because they would immediately be pushed back by NATO forces. Trump has nothing when it comes to a reason to annex Greenland. Maybe what he’s thinking of in 20 or 30yrs in the future when the arctic becomes less frozen and mining can be done where it is inaccessible at the moment. Although if NATO breaks up, the geopolitics will have changed by then and the US would likely be weaker.

Thanks for the clarification, I couldn’t remember the figures, but knew it was a lot.

I don’t know enough about how much ICE was active before Trump, but I saw a report the other day that ice spending has risen rapidly to over a billion dollars and they are recruiting by offering a $50,000 up front incentive for new recruits.

I bet if Europe stands united together and doesn't blink first on Greenland, nothing happens.

Yes, this is the time. Let’s hope they do and let’s face it, if they don’t, they will be a laughing stock.

The only thing that makes Trump forget Greenland is that something else captures his imagination or demands his focus.

Well at least no one is talking about the Epstein files now.

The supposed "ideological crisis" is a result of dropping any pretensions of acting ethically, in favour of just openly being inconsiderate, narcissistic twats. Trying to rake back any intellectual dignity from the mess that is the GOP is a lost cause. Intellectual dignity is not on the menu. One cannot have such an "ideological crisis" unless one is committed to at least appearing to have a standing commitment to coherence, justification, or ethical self-understanding. Those pretensions have simply been abandoned.

Yes, it’s a case of populists exploiting the phenomena of social media gaslighting along with religious fervour and dogmatism. If they can confuse the populist message with religious righteousness it can be smuggled through into mainstream opinion and work as a powerful force to divide and rule. And guess who’s the poster boy for all this. It will descend into chaos, corruption and economic failure.

Yes, it’s looking pretty bad, it looks like the republicans will have to go all the way now, because if they stop they will be finished for a generation and as you say there might strike back at the fundamentalists. But if they do go all the way, there is a risk of civil war, which will be pretty disastrous.

It does and it will likely be extended to anyone who dissents from Trump’s murmurings and opposes any action by ICE, or any other government initiative.
Now all he has to do is stimulate sufficient dissent on the run up to the mid-terms and democracy will be finished.

I don't think this assessment is accurate if the Ancient Greeks philosophers are taken into account.

Yes, there would have been a few deeper thinkers who had thought about this, but the world they were living in was steeped in the belief, to such an extent that it was as accepted as real as water and air.*

Perhaps, but 'revelation' is a loaded term―I prefer 'altered states' or 'non-ordinary states'. Kant's noumenon is specifically defined as that of which no experience at all is possible

Yes, altered states could suffice, but it leaves out the important thing about revelation. That the person is contacted by a being, who is in a transcendent relationship to himself. This requires something called hosting, in which the person is temporarily transfigured, or “sees through” the eyes of the transcendent being. Is taken up into heaven, so to speak and witnesses heaven. That when the person comes back down to earth, what they witnessed is no longer explainable, or conceivable, but is couched in a conceptual language of this world and their terrestrial conditioning. Hence allegory, now if that person discusses their experience with someone else who has witnessed similar, they are holding a discursive conversation about a transcendent state.

By comparison, and I’m not drawing a direct comparison, only hinting at a possible parallel. In the human body were we to assume a transcendent relationship between the person and the individual cells in his body, a hosted cell might be a receptor cell in the eye, or a memory cell in the brain of the person. Such that an individual cell in his body bares witness to the transcended state of being a person. Of course that cell would not “comprehend” what it witnessed, but the image perceived by the person, has possibly passed through that cell, so in an esoteric sense, the cell did witness something the person saw.

The question is whether adequate discursive articulation is possible.

Two people who have experienced revelation can hold a discursive discussion about it.

Regarding the neumenon, I still see a parallel, it’s true that we may never experience the neumenon, or have an understanding of it. But we are composed of it, hosted by it, so in a sense we have access to it. But we are totally blind of that access.

In fact I think the same about ordinary states―they are made to seem ordinary by the assumption that our talk in terms of identities adequately characterizes them, captures their nature.

I agree entirely, which may be a doorway through which it can be discussed.

*I could go on at length about how a culture, particularly a historic culture, where everyone believes something without question. Is very different to what we experience in our disparate culture. Magic does happen, religious narratives do come to life. I witnessed such myself in India.

I’m concerned about all the lives lost and suffering as a result of Trump’s behaviour.

The bromance has been souring lately.

Yes, Putin is too sensible to trust such a madman.

So like I said in my first post here, whether or not they turn over Greenland will probably also depend on how much economic pain Europe is willing to accept for it, if the US wants to play it that hard that is.

The amount of investment going into arms production in Europe will fuel an economic boost. Also if more energy is required in the short term, it will also act as a stimulus. These effects are probably already showing in Poland which is ahead of the curve in this process.