Those are cool, John. Have you ever done mural painting?

Here's my biology one. I had some pain issues at the time.

I think the headline on this thread is Russian propaganda, — Wayfarer

Interesting view.. I'll look into it.

I think it's not about long term commitment. — ssu

We're talking about the impact on Syria. Maybe the invasion itself had some psychological impact (encouraging revolt, for instance), but the material contribution was that the US mangled Iraq and then left, allowing ISIS to form.

The questions I'm left with are:

1. Was a lesson learned? Will future US presidents and Sec's of State more clearly communicate to potential revolutionaries in the world that the US won't involve itself?

2. Will westerners cease interpreting rebellion in other parts of the world as the appearance of democracy?

None of the upheavals and coups and wars that have followed has ever been free of the issue of how to respond to Israel's continued existence whatever the headline excuse may be. — Barry Etheridge

Sure. Israel's existence is a source of stress to the region. That insight doesn't seem to warrant a sarcastic "Have you heard of Israel?"

Pfft.

The regime's reaction has always been one of utmost brutality and total indifference to human suffering, which remains the case until today. — Wayfarer

True. But do you believe the rebels could have created a democratic government (prior to the chaos)?

Heard of a country called Israel at all? — Barry Etheridge

Yes. How is Israel a factor in the disintegration of Syria?

Well, in my view the US Middle East policy has been a slow moving train wreck that went off the rails totally years ago when the younger Bush had this brainfart of invading the country his father had wisely stayed clear of ( — ssu

The invasion of Iraq contributed for the same reasons we've already pointed out: lack of long-term commitment on the part of the US.

Cool. Biology class?

Intervention in other countries' sordid affairs would be a great idea if their various sordid situations weren't so damned messy. — Bitter Crank

Apparently, the Obama administration was assured by various parties (including Turkish) that the Assad regime would crumble easily in the face of revolutionaries taking to the streets.

A few doses of sarin gas later....

Thanks for the Frontline clip, have to watch it! — ssu

I couldn't find the whole episode on youtube. If you can access the PBS website, it's on there (this episode is about a year old, btw):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/obama-at-war/

But you're right. It explains that both Obama and Kerry made public statements (in off-the-cuff answers to questions from reporters) that seemed to draw lines and assure US support. It's the sort of thing that arises from ambivalence... no clear policy in the first place.

In the present US presidential election, that ambivalence is present. Obama and Clinton believe the US should be some sort of global leader. The opposing view is isolationist (as if that's even an option at this point.)

Well I don't know what his reasoning was for pulling back from the conflict, but in hindsight it looks to have been a good call. — Punshhh

Why do you say that?

A legacy of foreign policy decisions in regard of the Middle East going back decades, perhaps even to the late 1940's. — Punshhh

What decision made in the 40's influenced the present situation? It's interesting that you bring up the post-WW2 world-scene. To me, this question is really about what we owe one another on a global scale... and what we don't.

I stared at this for a while. It dredged up a weird beach trip from years ago... stuff I never sorted out.

"I sense [or believe] things in this moment". — numberjohnny5

I'd say there's a sense of that statement that is indubitable.

o be honest, I haven't read much about the Internalism-Externalism debate, but the reason I probably side with the Internalism side is that since beliefs are mental and knowledge is a subset of belief, then knowledge is mental (along with its constituent parts, of course). — numberjohnny5

And that outlook sets the stage for mind-body conundrums. Externalism is explicitly an attempt to fly free of those issues. There's a good SEP article about it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-intext/. I found it to be a can of worms... the questions just keep rolling.

Also.. what do you think of Wilfrid Sellars?

First, I want to clarify what I mean by "know" or "knowledge", just so that we're on the same page. I'm using the common philosophical definition (at least in analytic circles) of knowledge as justified, true belief. — numberjohnny5

That would be knowledge-internalism. The opposing view is knowledge-externalism. Both views have strengths and weaknesses.

; truth refers to the correspondence theory of truth; — numberjohnny5

That theory benefits from being pretty intuitive. It's foundations may be shaky, though.

My view is that we can but only within a phenomenological-in-the-moment-sense-experience-of-something, and not with anything in which time separates the "presentness" of experience. — numberjohnny5

What belief would be justified by sensory experience? Give me an example.

As with many things, I come across a view/claim that I cannot resolve or that I don't completely buy.

The claim is this:

Absolute certainty is possible only via phenomenological sense-perception in any present moment (that is, sense-perception not separated by time). For example, "I am aware that some experience is occurring as I type this," or "I sense things in this moment".*

Do you disagree? — numberjohnny5

Yes and no. I agree with (the spirit of) Kierkegaard that the only thing we really know is what it feels like to be alive. But that is a poetic attack on grand intellectual philosophical projects.. not on the possibility of knowing that there's a table in the next room.

Could you give context for the view you're talking about?

A run on the dollar would cause a great depression. Not the end of the world, but quite a bit more than a haircut.

We just experienced one of the worst banking crises and financial collapses in history totally comparable to the 1929 crash. — ssu

Actually, we just put it off. The bail-out was designed to counter loss of confidence. With a $19 trillion debt, the capacity for warding off that sort of loss is diminished.

Do you know that he decried the slide of the modern world into debauchery, especially as was happening in his time in France, during the French Revolution? — Agustino

I think the proper punishment for adultery is to tie the offender to a chair and dunk it repeatedly in the bay. And maybe after that do a witch test.

The ultimate reason is that there isn't something to replace the dollar for now and countries like China don't want a global monetary crisis — ssu

Can't stop feeding the monster because we'll all die with it. I agree. If it comes to that it won't be something brought on purposefully.

I have done a lot of oil and watercolor... but it's been a really long time since any of that was abstract. BTW.. do you know anything about Chinese gardens?

In the events you described there's more going on than just death. When a younger person dies it's unnatural death. When someone you love dies, love itself can feel like a wound.

Were either Heidegger or Spinoza talking about afflicted death? Or just death in general (which can manifest as something happy and natural.)

Or is this the stronger claim that we must perceive real things in some sense to know that we are mistaken at some point — The Great Whatever

I think any argument for indirect realism is going to assume internalism: one can only be said to know P if one has access to some justification for P.

Where P is "The pencil looks bent, but it's not.", the justification is probably an empirical/rational combo. Could there be a purely rational justification for knowing one's fallibility?

I think Hume would say no. No ontological argument can be purely apriori. I think Leibniz would say yes. Old-school rationalism always orbited divinity. I think the contemporary version would be some sort of panpsychism.... so if you believe in purely rational justifications for ontological statements... you probably already think the universe has the character of a dream.

The number of balls could be changing from moment to moment (the balls are really alien spaceships and they go into hyper-space as needed.) So both people could be right. If you're going to embrace global skepticism, contiguity past to future is out the window.

I don't think the argument from illusion even has anything to do with the OP. It's just a mistake I made about what TGW was saying.

Cool! Do that.

I've been experimenting with cutting the doodle people out and placing them in various collage-like situations. It started with photoshop stuff I used to do.

Because it's a positive assertion. We are sometimes mistaken. The only way that could be known is if we have access to the truth.

If the initial premise was that we might be mistaken, then no access to truth would be necessary.

how do we know that all of our perceptions are not just of these misleading ocular phenomena and not of what we think they are? — The Great Whatever

I mistakenly thought you were supporting the Argument from Illusion, but you aren't. That argument begins by pointing out that we are sometimes mistaken (which obviously implies that some of our assertions are true.) You're just arguing that global skepticism can't be defeated. That's true.

But that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that the way they experience coffee might be nothing like the way you experience coffee. — Michael

This assumes that people experience the same coffee, just in different ways. It's common knowledge that that happens.

The Fed is the lender of the last resort... not the overseeing regulator — ssu

The Fed does regulate (though not in the legislative sense, obviously). It's along the lines of a fuel regulator in a car.

Jefferson thought public money should be controlled by Congress. That attitude changed dramatically when he became the president and he used legal mechanisms set up by Hamilton to access treasury funds. So Jefferson proved that he was flexible enough to turn 180 degrees if the topic was survival.

I think his opinion of the US having a $19 trillion debt would be the same as that of the rest of us... we're probably at the end of the ability of the US to prop up the global economy. The next time the shit hits the fan, there will either be a global economic collapse or there will be a run on the dollar.

More interesting is: how did the debt get so big? It's partly to do with the bail out, but it started ballooning out before that when GW Bush lowered taxes during the invasion of Iraq.

Mostly doodle, I think.

it is why a movie like the Matrix makes sense to a popular audience. — The Great Whatever

In The Matrix, a multitude of people are jacked in to the same virtual reality. Who is the dreamer?

What fascinates me about the idea that reality is a dream is that the stuff beyond temporal and spacial boundaries is extrapolated from the content of Now. If we're talking about a multi-dreamer dream, then how would we account for commonality in those extrapolations? In The Matrix, it's the software. I'm not saying this couldn't be sorted out. It's that the further we go in addressing its conceivability, the more thoroughly we're describing the world beyond the dream.

The escape hatch is obviously solipsism. I think accepting that means accepting that I'm secretly alienated from myself. How would that be different from denying solipsism? Too tired to work it through tonight....

These are mysteriously intriguing, Mongrel; are they self-portraits? What media are you using? — John

I was trying out a some new magic markers. The coloring was digital.. from an app called Prisma.

Cool landscapes from . I've never been able to do much with landscapes. I'm more of a portrait person.

Then you simply fail to see a key element of capitalism and why it's preferable over other systems. Financial incentivization is very effective. Robots are being created to do more work not to give humans an easier life, but to make the builders of them more wealthy. — Hanover

What capitalism offers to innovation is a dynamic society (during the boom times anyway). Bell Labs is proof that a government regulated monopoly can be a global leader in innovation. They had a captive market and labored under profit-caps.. so they weren't going to get any richer for innovating.

Bust times give rise to innovation in the creation of shanty towns.

You could start by being honest. Your title suggested that there's nothing wrong with racism, so obviously you know it is held to be wrong.

The National Guard has been called out to maintain order in Charlotte, NC because of rioting related to racism. Are you aware of that?

Sure. I think you also know things about the world by way of reason, and use empirical justifications for decisions.

Perhaps being good means acting in accordance with one's self, and being bad is acting out of accord with what we believe in, 'sinning' against one's self. — Cavacava

I agree with this. Borrowing from J K Galbraith, we're each in motion. A visual image would be a vector. Good is what I'm reaching out for. Evil is what I'm turning away from.

I agree it's most fundamentally about identity, and that's where I see the social aspect of it. Society is the sea out of which my identity rises, and society is itself an individual among others of its kind. I partake of the identity of my society.

maybe that is what authenticity is, the acceptance of one's own fundamental weakness and the willingness to act toward others, not naturally, but as dictated by norms. — Cavacava

Could be. But it's also possible that one is caring and empathetic by nature and the norms at hand say to choke those feelings down and put those Jews on that train. That's an extreme case, but I do believe that (in my society anyway) growing up means learning to be the master of ones feelings. That's morally precarious. The child who acts spontaneously will learn from experience the best ways to satisfy desires. The notion that morality is all about teaching the child to be numb and alienated from himself is wrong.

Isn't that exactly how the first hermits and monks justified their existence? — Barry Etheridge

I don't know. Doesn't seem like much of a hermit who feels it necessary to justify being alone.

Some would say that if you were born in the wild and raised by ducks or whatever, you would have no morality for lack of society. Therefore morality relates only to social interaction.. I imagine people who offer that argument would find something pertinent in the so-called Private Language argument.

I'm not sure if there is any reasoning at all at the base of this perspective. I speculate that it comes from people who don't think of guilt and forgiveness as aspects of morality. Perhaps because both of those words are meaningless to them?

An odd reference since the incapacity has nothing to do with the isolation and everything to do with the absence of physical objects. — Barry Etheridge

Likewise, you could be moral with regard to imaginary friends while off roaming the tundra. Offering that fact would be a poor response to the argument I was alluding to.

But healthcare is precisely where there is close social attention paid to the ethical dilemmas. — apokrisis

I said I realized that people are different. For some, morality is mainly physical... the nervous system is quite capable of saying "NO!" For some people it may be that the concept of society is paramount. I wonder if people like that would also say that playing the piano and driving a car are fundamentally socially mediated activities (because you couldn't do them if you were alone in the wilderness).

And then there are the highly intellectually inclined: there is no morality unless it can be manufactured by logic.

in this sense a signpost indeed doesn't mean anything — The Great Whatever

This thread had me thinking about the ancient art of reading goat entrails. If the entrails have the appearance of a monster called Humbaba, it means something bad. I could see it as silly superstition, but I think that entrails actually could mean something bad. It could work the same way I-Ching, horoscopes, tea-leaves, cards, palms, etc. work: I think when people attend to those indications, what they're really listening to is their own intuitions. The reader hears his own voice coming through the entrails and so his own fears or joyful expectations are there. His own mind is trying to talk to him.