If Democrats really want a better government, or one that is closer to their ideology, they should stop enjoying scapegoating the current president and his voters, and instead:

1. Support him in measures that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on; come on, there must be a few items there. Also, to provide loyal advice on alternatives to his policies and offer him support (that is, allowing to save his face before his voters and party, by renouncing to something and by "protesting" the measure instead of claiming victory).

2. To provide an alternative that is not entirely reliant on tribalism (identity politics), low IQ discourses and populism. Show some little loyalty to your country and responsibility for the future; and demand exactly that to new Dem leaders. Trump is there becouse Hillary was worse, so bad in fact that even Dems didn´t like her.

they are accomplishments if they serve his electoral program. A program includes all the goals and more that a new president need to use as a guide of his office. If Trump is trying to check on that list he´s doing fine. If he´s not, then he´s going astray. Both Republicans and Dems should make a point of that all the time. Americans are very lucky that presidents want to honour their promises. In Spain an electoral program is just a type of toilet paper, and the last president´s record was to betray the whole of the agenda. ALL of it. Well (cheap) jobs were indeed created...Now we don´t even have a real president, but an impostor playing the part, as a leader from his own party has denounced.

We just can´t have that intelligent conversation. I share your frustration entirely.

yes, biologists do use economic terms, I agree with that, I disagree in considering it a positive thing.
Astrology is not so bad; consider how people such as Newton, Copernicus or Tyco Brahe were accomplished astrologers, and they were great contributors to knowledge. Brahe is famous for his study on the first supernova, based on papers sent by his friend the English wizard John Dee. Astrology was a science in the Modern Age, only it was based on a paradigm that was later abandoned: that is, that planets emitted a radiation that affected life on Earth. It turned out that only the Sun and the Moon can exert that influence on living organisms in our planet, as they are close to us.
Astrology, like Economics, did a very good job for millennia of calculating the passing of comets, predicting eclipses, adjusting the calendar to the celestial motions, and perfecting navigation. It was rejected by the new Science becouse the Enlightenment needed a new paradigm, a new way of arranging the puzzle of the Universe above and below. Copernicus wanted this change, but he was not to see it, becouse he could never produce hard evidence that the models Astrology was based on were false. This evidence came a century ago, with the development of optical telescopes.

Likewise, we have Economics today, that is based on real calculations and facts, just like Astrology was based on real formulas and the empirical observation of the sky. However, something is missing, or we wouldn´t have caused the Sixth Extinction or the Population bomb. Economics is based on the wrong paradigm, and we can not tell becouse Science is based on the same paradigm. Just like Astrology fitted pretty nicely with the theory of the four humours, Platonism, and creationism, and all these explanations seemed to reinforce each other and do a good job of describing real phenomena.

so it´s all part of his character then, the persona he has created to communicate with his followers and haters. Whatever he says in his famous tweets, I don´t think he can really promote the systematic use of torture by American forces.

I don´t see why you use "subjective" as synonym with "mental". Mental contents have a degree of objectivity, the part of them that is shared or shareable with other people. For example, my image of what a car is, is subjective; however, my subjective picture shares characteristics with the image of many other people, and these coincidences are derived from shared, social experiences. Maybe you do this identification, to stress that subjective contents are representations, or secundary realities, produced by a mind as opposed to primary realities that exist aside of our mental activity.

are you sure? What is objective then in philosophy? This is my understanding of the word: Objective seems to refer to objects of our mind, images we focus on to manage our behaviour in the world by bearing in mind certain patterns and becoming oblivious to the rest. Therefore, objects of knowledge, action, desire. When two or more people talk about these objects, they need to develop a common language based on experiences that are available to all parties, just to make sure their respective mental objects are similar enough to disregard the differences in each individual mind. Hence, objective knowledge, knowledge shared.

I´m not an American and if I were I´d still would not vote; so I do not have to make my mind on Trump. However, I find him a very interesting character from an archetypal point of view. He´s so clearly the Fool in the tarot, and people into tarot cards will know what I really mean. The fact that his name is actually, trump, is also very curious! In tarot, the Fool means the return to a point where different choices are possible, a way out of stagnation and lack of response to current challenges. It´s an ambiguous figure, whose role is not to establish the new order or route, but to create the chaos and a new landscape that makes potential and new beginnings possible again.

I don´t think reading about what a group has to say about themselves is the best way to know what they really are about. That´s only their discourse, their programming and propaganda. I´d rather know what BLM is from people who are familiarised with their actions, contribution to society, allies, and goals their actions help to achieve.

maybe you are all in the right, and numbers are the way we construct our experiences dealing with a real underlying reality.

I might not be well informed about Black Lives Matter then. I thought they had a racial, victimist, whites are to blame, approach to social issues. Exactly what is different between BLM and gang terror. From outside it looks like related phenomena, as riots promoted in the name of BLM are usually linked to pillage, burning and violence. Please explain to the outside world what BLM stands for and what makes it a separate thing from the violence provoked by gangs.

why do people hate Trump in the U.S.? Is it becouse you are weary of him, after so many years in the spotlight and all those appearances in tv shows? What exactly is hateful in Trump. Trump is a curious surname; in English sounds like "wild card" or "winning card", in Spanish is similar to "trampa" that means trap.

I have a personal rule of thumb to understand subjective vs objective. I replace "objective" by "shared" and everything makes more sense. For example, Science is about building shared knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be reached by experiences people can have in common and make sense of through a common language (logic and mathematics).

you are a lucky man, becouse such evidence exist. Please do your own research about what neuroscience and psychology have learnt on this very issue. In fact, the current debate is about whether conscious processes play any active role in thinking, or act merely as witnesses to what the subconscious imagines and thinks.

there is no way, there´s always a leap of faith. Robots work becouse they don´t doubt and take things for granted; if they could really think things through, they´d have to learn to bet and accept a number of assumptions for practical reasons and deal with uncertainty.

it was a wrong move, with the best intention. Hell would be a pitiful place without all those good intentions...

Trump, if he is as smart as he claims, surely can learn from the army that real torture is no longer useful, and belongs to the past or barbaric regions of the world. Drugs and motivation can do the job nicely, and we are probably not that far from reading prisoners´minds with artificial intelligence. Torture is part of scapegoating dynamics, more a business for islamists or gangs than for professional intelligence. I might be entirely wrong on all this.

I might be wrong, since I I´ve never been in the U.S., but I think many people see "white supremacism" as less an issue than "non-white supremacism", since whitle supremacistd are not that many and more often than not they kill themselves with their guns and do not seize urban areas violently.
While black supremacism on the other hand is a lot more present in society and affects cities in a very dramatic way, with violence and crime in the name of race, attacking any ethnicity. Society realizes that KKK is way less of a security concern nowadays than BLM, becouse events such as the horrible killing in the sinagogue are a fraction of the massive killing being produced by gangs all over the country.

Moreover, KKK thinking is criticized and marginalized and dealt with, while BLM thinking and Muslim supremacism are not subjected to real criticism in most media or censored or their funding controlled. If ALL supremacist, tribal, non civilized ideas were equally treated by both right and left media and administrators, there would be no more reason for concern among voters depending on what colour the supremacist creed claims.

If are not an economist, surely I can explain myself better. To bear in mind what findings in other sciences mean for your field is not reductionist; it is reductionist NOT to take those theories into account, and even particular studies. The texts produced by a branch of Science are meaningless, until the relationship among those ideas and ideas in other disciplines are explained.
For example, economists have real issues with the idea that Nature is not really best described in economical terms: species, resources, competence, predation and partnership, leading to "evolution" or cumulative capital. Nature is just a market yet to be exploited by man, so nothing can be learnt from Ecology or Biology that should be applied to Economics. It´s economics that explain nature, in this pseudo-scientific view, very much like gender theory enthusiasts think that human nature is best explained by Judith Butler and not by anthropologists.

you need to try to define numbers a little more so that people can take a stand. The current notions of what numbers are, derive from accounting, book-keeping, measuring and calculating, so their meaning is reduced to their use in economics, engineering and science. However, bear in mind that ancient philosophers both in the West and the East consider numbers in a more qualitative, comprehensive way. I think Numbers in philosophy are closer to the meaning we give to "Laws of Nature", if we consider, not the manifest laws we know such as gravity or thermodynamics, but the underlying restrictions that give shape all of Reality.

Do you use substance in this "prima materia" sense? or is there another way of using the word

I think philosophers use substance as a reference to the foundational level of reality in a given context. Like, the substance of oral speech are vibrations of air molecules. Sub-stance, what under-lies (the whole of Reality or a system within it)

I think any human work has different purposes. All we do is Art, as all we do is done with skill and some measure of subjectivity (self-expression).

I´m afraid is the former. I wish all politicians and leaders were corrupt and clever, then we could solve problems much faster. But in reality, they usually believe in what they believe, as they live in their small reality bubbles, like the rest of us. What we find obvious and undeniable is really what is inside our bubble.

I don´t know if value can be established rationally. Some questions just do not have an ultimate answer, becouse Reality itself has no answer, it happens for no good reason. However, we can clarify how phenomena relate to values that all human people share. We share a core of values becouse species who are not favourable to life, freedom and learning about the universe do not survive for long. So there are values that are inherent to entities that remain and pass on their seed to new entities. All Philosophy can do is to help people understand how their behaviour and phenomena contribute to the existence of those values or to their extinction. To show the links, with the help of Science. I guess

sorry, I meant Democrats should NOT make climate an identity issue. In Spain all parties agreed to stop talking about separatist terrorism in campaign and only make joined statements and policies on the issue, and terrorism was defeated and democracy became stronger. The socialist party, with Zapatero, broke this consensus and used terror in campaign to reach power; terrorist attacks are on the rise since then and the political armies of the separatist group are trying to consolidate a coup d´etat.

It is obvious from outside that Republicans are (usually, not always) climate change negationists, to a great extend, becouse they perceive it as a Democrat thing, just one more lie from the Party they don´t trust. If Dem politicians REALLY wanted Republicans to care about the climate, they would make it an identity issue. They´d leave public climate reports to scientists (like Morgan Freeman, who´s not a scientist at all but many people probably think he is at this point) and make agreements with Republicans on this grave matter without using it as an electoral weapon or political banner.

burning heretics wasn´t something Modernity eventually did with. Burning heretics was a consequence of Modernity. Modern printing allowed the bible and all kind of texts to become cheap and escape any control. This brought about an era of darkness of the mind, not just enlightenment. In the South of Europe, where the corrupt Church was still very strong, burning at the stake was very rare in comparison with the Protestant Europe, keen on developing new book cults. Consider for example, how the Spanish Inquisition burnt 28 witches, which is really nothing compared with the hundreds of thousands killed in Northern Europe during the same period.

Economics is not Science. A scientific approach requires research to make predictions, and to be able to connect the phenomena studied to the greater picture of the scientific paradigm; Economics can not do this becouse economists refuse to base their work in the theories contributed by relevant disciplines, such as Physics, Biology or Anthropology. Economics is a pseudo-science, like Astrology; Astrologers, like economists, also make nice calculations, have a lot to say about how to interpret the past, and make predictions about the future hoping that they will become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The opposite of Depresion is Sex.

To me it´s crystal clear that everything must have some meaning,
or else I fear nothing would retain any value at all.
For the Uni-verse is one, since its very beginning,
and objects are just mental images we use to recall
certain experiences separated from the whole.
What is good in one "object" must be in all beings,
and hence it´s not items we need to behold,
but relationships among those items, and patterns, and the good concord
that gives our things their purporse and worth.

I´m from Spain, and I find difficult to grasp why people can be so sure they are in the rational waggon. To me, both Republicans and Democrats are very much affected by irrational ideas and discourses. They magnify like a lense the decandence of the country. I´m not saying Spain is doing any better, or the rest of Europe; I just can´t understand how people can see their own leanings as the most sane. You vote Dem then, don´t you think they are tribalistic, obsessed with race, and unable to deal with reality?

why not? Can´t a person deduce that, if a universe can form for no good reason, anything else can happen too? Including entities capable of producing new universes.

I did not explained myself well then Khaled. I don´t suppose you can derive values or Ethics from Mathematics and Logic and Science; what I meant is that you can not defend values or rights that are in contradiction, or do not take very much into account, these sources of established knowledge. For example, you can not just say that gay couples should have an equal right to adopt children than heterosexual couples, before you test scientifically what is best for children, or even against what has been published in that field of research. I´m neither gay nor a person who wants to adopt, that is why this example feels neutral and easy; but I know that people involved in adopting children do care and are left with just lobbying and campaigning to set up the rules. That is not ethical, of course, or is it not Ethics just reason applied to living your life well?

I also do not claim that Mathematics and Logic are fundamental. I even tried to make clear that they are cultural products. However, Mathematics or Logic, any branch of them, any approach to them, are always reactions to some mysterious patterns that are external to these cultural systems, phenomena that exist for non human systems too and are measurable to some degree. For example: 1 + 1 does NOT equal 2 in reality; it´s an abstraction, that picks some relationships in the universe and ignore the rest. When you count two oranges, you are not taking into account the effect of their mutual interaction, their location in spacetime, the objects they are interacting with, or the fact that in the atomic level of complexity, there are no oranges at all. These are all measurable quantities; for example you can calculate the gravitational interactions between the two oranges and the oranges with the Earth; or predict that the fact that the oranges are together will increase the production of fruit flies when they go to waste, in comparison with the production of fruit flies if the oranges are separated three kilometres (becouse fruit flies go for two oranges in greater numbers than for only one). So 1 + 1, whatever the objects considered, is really NEVER 2, at least in this universe. Nevertheless, one plus one equals two is not just an absurd proposition; it does relates to the physical and imaginal world, it just does so in an abstract way. Abs is a Latin prefix meaning separation or privation; so to abstract is to pick some elements and leave the rest, becouse mental resources are limited, and we can not take into account all that exists. We usually just want some oranges and care not for their gravitational leanings or quantum interactions. Thus, our Maths and Logic are not fanciful; they just don´t account for ALL real relationships in both the physical and the imaginal o secundary worlds. Becouse some people care for oranges and others for cherries, different mathematical tools are devised and some are not that well designed. But an underlying reality or pattern exists that humans, comets, ants and water molecules are reacting to, or better said, are part of. Hammers come in different shapes and materials, but at the end of the day, a banana is not a hammer and won´t do the job. The same should apply to values and rights and duties as mental tools of our behaviour, if you really want to nail it with them. Before we all go bananas.
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