I have often thought that if you want to know what Trump is up to, look at what he accuses others of.

Geoffrey S. Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York until he was fired by Trump has a new book, "Holding the Line". Some highlights from an advance copy review by the NYT:

The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.

The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.

And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.

“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.

“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.

The background here is Jesus vs Pharisees. — Alkis Piskas

Again, it is not so simple. Paul himself discusses both his dispute with the disciples and the question of obedience to the Law. The Gospel of Matthew was written about 50 years after the death of Jesus. The stories it and other gospels contain are influenced by Paul and the schism that led to the separation between Jews and Christians.

Where Matthew portrays the Pharisees as the adversaries of Jesus, Mark warns against the Scribes (Mark 12:38) While some scribes were Pharisees not all were. The issue with both Scribes and Pharisees was the question of who had authority regarding questions of the Law. The question is further complicated by Paul's claims about the Law and Gentiles.

Yet, I couldn't find where does the statement "Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die" exactly refer to in the Old Testament. — Alkis Piskas

That is because it is not there. As I said:

The prohibition against killing is one of the ten commandments ... It is the second clause, which does not appear in the Hebrew Bible ... — Fooloso4

This embellishment too is related to the question of who had authority regarding the Law.

But we should not lose sight of what is at issue in this thread. If Jesus taught obedience to the commandments, and it is evident that he does as he is portrayed in Matthew, then it is what he believed and taught. Or, more precisely, it is what Matthew's Jesus believed and taught.

I would like to know what people think of C.S. Lewis's argument for the divinity of Christ. — Dermot Griffin

The idea that Jesus is divine is paganism. Jesus would have been appalled and outraged.

It is not so simple. What is at issue is the distinction between tradition and commandments. (Matthew 15:3) The background here is likely to be the dispute between Paul and Jesus' disciples regarding the Law. Jesus not only quotes the commandment, he says elsewhere that all the commandments, even the least, must be upheld (Matthew 5:17-20).

How can Jesus ever say or think such a thing at the moment he was agains killing? — Alkis Piskas

The prohibition against killing is one of the ten commandments. The obvious problem is, how can one
uphold all the commandment when one commandment says do not kill and another says that one who reviles his mother and father must die? One possible answer lies in the distinction between death and wrongful death. The full statement passage from Matthew is:

You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. (5:20)

It is the second clause, which does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, that seems to support the distinction between death and wrongful death. Whether the action is wrong and punishable will be judged. If it is in accord with the commandment then it cannot be wrong.

It is the only bit of moral teaching that is not explicit in classical philosophy. — Banno

This is not something I have thought about before. Why this difference in attitude? Some quick musings:

Perhaps it has something to do with the Greek notion of virtue (arete), which includes the attributes of strength and power, and so, an indifference or disdain for weakness and poverty.

Jesus elevates the weak and poor:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20)

and regards wealth as a liability:

Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 19:23)

There may be two related things at play here, the low status of the early followers and the messianic promise of a new world.

This was not an innovation, it is a part of traditional Judaism:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/charity-throughout-jewish-history

I am more than a little uncertain, however, if such a dive into primary texts will interest the Forum. — Paine

That is an uncertainty that I confront every time I start and continue to put time and effort into a thread based on a primary text. There are always more readers than there are members who participate.

I encourage you to do it.

You are a traditionalist. — Tom Storm

I do not consider myself a traditionalist. In part because I don't know what is included or excluded from the tradition. I am a Marxist ... Groucho, that is: "Whatever it is I'm against it".

I have considered simple minded notions of human flourishing as a goal for human behaviour. — Tom Storm

So, you're a traditionalist! The notion of human flourishing (eudemonia) is from Aristotle's Ethics.

Do you value truth and beauty along with the good? — Tom Storm

Yes, but do not give them equal status. I prefer Plato's "trinity", the just, the beautiful, and the good. But I do not regard them as eternal Forms. I think that is a misreading of Plato. I have made the case for that elsewhere on the forum.

And what people say (or think) they value is often not what they value in practice. — Tom Storm

Agreed. Good point.

I wouldn’t expect that if we were to discover a planet with its own intelligent life, its conceptualizing capabilities would be radically different than ours. — Joshs

I am not so sure. I imagine it very well might be.

I suspect that what is generally meant by a value system is simply those things they value rather than values that are systematically derived, determined, ordered, integrated and applied. Further, it may be that we cannot always say in advance what it is we value until we are confronted with a situation where we must act or decide.

What we may regard as good is what in one sense or another we value, but I think this falls short of what ethical deliberation requires. My own view follows that of Plato and Aristotle - it does not focus on values but on the question of the good. We all desire what is good, but the good does not guide our deliberations. It is rather what those deliberations aim at. The question of the good is aporetic. Short of knowledge of the good the best we can do is what upon deliberation seems best, and the flexibility of thought to modify what seems to be as needed.

To paraphrase and correct Wolpert, we regularly become those beings for whom things are knowable, but not to us currently, because we are not capable of conceiving of that kind of knowledge in the first place (within our current schemes of conceptualization). — Joshs

It may not be a matter of the limits of current schemes of conceptualization, but of all schemes of conceptualization that are available to us qua human beings.

This is not a question that we can give a definitive answer to, but my guess is that we will never know more than a sliver of reality.

Here is a quick and clear summary:

Mueller revealed why he didn't charge Trump with a crime — and it wasn't because of a lack of evidence

The former special counsel Robert Mueller went into detail Wednesday about why he didn't make a decision on whether to charge President Donald Trump with obstruction of justice.

Mueller pointed to three factors that he said impeded prosecutors from making a decision on the obstruction case.

The first is a 1973 decision by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted. For that reason, Mueller said, charging Trump with a federal crime "is unconstitutional."

He also said it would be "unfair" to even suggest Trump had committed a crime, because it would deprive him of the opportunity to defend himself in a court of law.

And he said filing a sealed indictment was not an option because of the 1973 DOJ policy, and because there was a risk that it could leak.

"Charging the President with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider," Mueller said.

But the former special counsel emphasized that if prosecutors had confidence that Trump did not commit a crime, they would have said so. He also implied that it is up to Congress to potentially pursue impeachment proceedings against Trump. (https://www.businessinsider.com/why-mueller-didnt-charge-trump-obstruction-2019-5)

What'll be the reaction of those on this forum if no evidence of significant wrongdoing is produced? — Tzeentch

The evidence of significant wrongdoing has already been produced. He is wrongfully and illegally in possession of classified documents.

There was plenty in the Mueller report. Trump was not, as he claimed, exonerated. The fact that he was not prosecuted does not mean there was no evidence of significant wrongdoing.

Not to mention Trump’s medical and tax records and passports. God knows what they found in Melania closet and Barron’s room. — NOS4A2

The reason why is simple: he has no regard for national security. He carelessly threw all these things together as if they are his personal effects.

It’s a nothingburger. Zilch. Nada. — NOS4A2

I assume you must have read the documents, perhaps even the missing ones, if you know this. You did not tell us that you are authorized to view classified documents.

Nietzsche's views on science are something I have not given enough attention to. A few scattered thoughts as to where attention should be given:

The relation between knowledge , truth and life.

Not simply science but the different sciences.

Determinism and eternal return.

But all versions are 'good' subject to a particular value system. — Tom Storm

I have problems with the idea of value systems. No doubt we have things we value, but I do not think that they form systems.

It is commonly held, and some might regard it as a truism, that what we value is what is good. But the question arises whether we ought to value something because it is good rather than regard it as good because we value it?

His argument seems to me that humans are equipped with formal structures of cognition that are perhaps evolutionarily based and that are therefore basically set in place and relatively fixed. — Joshs

He calls human language and mathematics "cognitive prostheses" and identifies "mathematics as a special case of human language.". We no longer expect ordinary language to give an adequate description of the physical world. Should we expect mathematics to?

but my contention that these schemes are continually adapting and changing. their nature in response to feedback from the world, so there is not the disconnect between formal cogntive structures and world that Wolpert suggests needs to be overcome in order to see more of reality. — Joshs

If I understand him, he moves in a different direction:

I am emphasising the possibility of things that are knowable, but not to us, because we are not capable of conceiving of that kind of knowledge in the first place.
This returns us to an issue that was briefly discussed above, of how the set of what-we-can-imagine might evolve in the future. Suppose that what-can-be-known-but-not-even-conceived-of is non-empty. Suppose we can know something about that which we truly can’t imagine.

He makes a distinction between the possibility of gaining knowledge based on what we can imagine and our inability to imagine what that knowledge might be.

Maybe it’s about both. — Joshs

What I should have said is that AI is only a part of the larger question of limits. And, of course, death is the ultimate limit, or so it seems.

And how we talk about that seems to be the most contested thing. — Paine

Do you mean what is natural is contested or the contest of different philosophies or different interpretations of Nietzsche?

If you are calling the advances in knowledge over time the world breaking through then I see no problem, but if you mean "reciprocally responsive interaction" I don't see where he makes such a claim.

I don't recall him saying anything about the limits of reality.

They are not capable of anything beyond our models which produce them — Joshs

A computer capable of self-learning is able to do more than the programs that produce them.In addition, they are capable of doing what we are not. In any case, the article is about the limits of human knowledge, not IA.

For myself, the celebration of war and struggle in Nietzsche's writings is hard to listen to on this side of the Shoah. I have no interest in washing his hands of the responsibility he bears for his rhetoric. — Paine

I think his rhetoric is unfortunate, but a large part of the danger lies in taking what he says out of its philosophical context.

Heraclitus "the obscure", one of Nietzsche's spiritual progenitors, said:

War is “father of all, king of all” (Fragment B53)

This is echoed in Nietzsche's will to power. It is not simply a matter of man against man, it is the way of all of nature, all of life.

We should also look at what he says about one's best and worst enemies, struggle, contest, and conflict. It is not simply.

Provincialism dressed up in sophisticated clothing is still provincialism.

Wolpeet gives the impression the world can ‘break through’ from outside this reciprocally responsive interaction to affect us directly, but if it did it would be invisible and irrelevant to us. — Joshs

What does he say to give you that impression? It is not a matter of the world breaking through but of our expanding what we know. That has limits, but they are our limits not the limits of reality.

Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. — Joshs

Poor analogy. Spider webs and bird nests are not capable of self-learning or self-improvement.

A physical reality can never ‘far exceed our own’ , given that physical reality is the set of goal-oriented interactive performances of humans on our environment — Joshs

This is not a given, it is a concept of reality that you endorse. It misses the point. It is as if a dog or paramecium (his examples) claiming that physical reality is the set of goal-oriented interactive performances of dogs or paramecium on their environment. The fact that we can entertain and express such ideas does not mean that reality is limited to what we think and do. It may be only "a sliver of reality".

Our devices, like our world , can never be ‘beyond us’. — Joshs

Our devices may someday be beyond us. In some ways they already are. Our world is not of our making and not in our control. It is not ours in that it controls the shots and we have limited power to change that. The world does not answer to us.

Those who view mythology as untruths probably miss the point of this large corpus of ancient wisdom. — Agent Smith

It is not so simple:

The myth of the metals in the Republic is called a "noble lie".

The muses tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth (Theogony 27) — Fooloso4

Aristotle said that poetry is more philosophical and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general or universal truths while history gives particular facts. The poet is a "maker of stories" (Poetics, 145b)

In so far as such stories are not factual, they are fabrications. But they represent more general or universal truths than a description of some particular thing that happened at some particular time.

Plato's myth of the metals is called a lie because it is a fabrication. It did not happen. Socrates is a maker of stories. The truth of the story is that we are not all equal by nature.

If you feel defeated it is only because you have defeated yourself.

See what Nietzsche says about one's best and worst enemies. You are your own worst enemy. It need not be that way. Zarathustra asks if you are up to the task.

In support of what you say, from the link you provided:

In any case we can escape from this external way of thinking only as we realize in thought and act that democracy is a personal way of individual life; that it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life. Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.

I just heard a segment on the radio talking about Nure-onna (wet woman). Given your interest in the Japanese and mythology I thought this was an interesting coincidence.

So, you threaten to leave, come back, then claim to leave officially, then come back. You tell me you will not discuss anything with me, then respond to me.

I win? Does that mean you will take your ball and go home?

Why have you made this contentious and personal? Are you not able to engage in disagreement over a text without becoming petulant?

It really is farcical isn’t it? — Xtrix

I reliabel source of amusement. Unfortunately, there are a significant number of people who agree with him and people in positions of power, shameless toadies, who attempt to aggrandize their power by kissing his ass.

I just received a PM from Tate:

I'm not interested in discussing anything with you.

Unfortunately for him, this is a public forum. I will continue to post as I see fit.

The myth of the metals in the Republic is called a "noble lie".

The muses tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth (Theogony 27)

More so an undying hatred for the establishment uniparty and the State — NOS4A2

Right. The Trump Party, where loyalty to the leader must be pledged and demonstrated, where even minimal descent will be punished, where there is no State only the whims and desires of Trump is a much better option.

You already shared a link where that topic was discussed. — javi2541997

The links I provided are to things I posted [that is, wrote] on the forum.

I do not agree with the claim in the link you provided that:

The purpose is to put myth to the epistemological test to ensure that it arises from validated true belief, the hieros logos (sacred tales).

The short answer, I think, is that myths provide answers that reasoned discussion fail to provide. Their effectiveness lies, at least in part, in providing beliefs that are taken by the listener to be true. Rather than validated true belief, Timaeus, in his own works, gives us "likely stories (ton eikota mython)". It should be noted that Socrates remains silent.

The question of why Plato used mythopoesis is interesting.

Do you know other examples about mythopoeic? — javi2541997

Plato's Phaedo. A detailed discussion:here

Plato's Timaeus. Discussed in far less detail here

One way to give meaning to life is to condemn some aspects of the present and claim that something better is coming.

This is Christian eschatology. It's Marxism. It's any kind of progressivism. The painful parts of the present gain meaning in that they're part of a bridge to a better world. — Tate

See above:

... what both Lampert and Rosen are getting at is that the expectation of the Übermensch sounds messianic. (emphasis added)

In line with this I would argue that a) this can be regarded as another of Nietzsche's inversions of Christianity ... — Fooloso4

Except the Übermensch might not arrive. Instead there may be the last man. But ...

b) it is consistent with the eternal return in so far as a messianic figure is a recurring theme.

... to will the eternal recurrence of the same ...
— Tate

What does it mean to will something that will happen whether one wills it or not? Is it more than passive acceptance? — Fooloso4

What is the dangerous crossing? — Tate

I addressed this in a previous post.

Z says:

Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman – a rope over an abyss. (7)

This reminds us of Aquinas' claim that man is higher than the animals and lower than the angels.

Nietzsche accepts the idea of higher and lower beings but rejects the idea of a fixed order of beings ascending to the transcendent.

Later he says:

There are manifold ways and means of overcoming: you see to it! But only a jester thinks: “human being can also be leaped over.” (159)

This, I think, refers back to Paul's promise of death and rebirth:

... it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body; there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body ... (1 Corinthians 15:44)

More generally, Paul's hatred of the body. As if we can by a leap of faith become spiritual bodies -sōma pneumatikos. — Fooloso4

That's indoctrination! — unenlightened

Yeah, that occured to me, and in a school that was influenced by Dewey's educational philosophy!