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  • What is meant by consciousness being aware of itself?
    Do it, now. — Krishnamurti

    And then there is silence for a moment, until the answer is given: "It stops."
    And when the answer is given, it is clear that it has not stopped.

    And those 2 are the brightest and the best, so I rather doubt you will get much better responses in the forum. If only they could have managed the 4 minutes, the world would have been transformed, but thought had to come up with an answer - it stops, not seeing the performative contradiction.

    It is like a Zen Koan, set up to block the road of thought; it is a question that cannot be answered with words or thoughts, but only with one's whole life.
  • The philosophy of anarchy
    I am an anarchist, and as such, I do not accept that there is any rule preventing the making or imposing of rules. If you don't want to obey anyone else's rules, that's absolutely fine, but you will probably get locked up or killed. And wipe your feet before you come into my house.
  • What's with "question or poll"?
    I have more than 50 discussions, and I cannot remember ever having a poll or a question.

    If you don't want a question or a poll, I think the trick is not to tick either of the boxes.
  • Experimental Philosophy and the Knobe Effect
    I tend to disagree. But my point is that there is a natural understanding of intent relating to deliberate acts and unintended but perhaps foreseeable consequences that only applies when the primary goal is presumed. So the folk intuition could be to give the benefit of the doubt - presumed intent when the secondary consequence is positive and vice versa. The facts so far support my hypothesis as well as Knobe's, but the environmental org experiment might distinguish them.

    Because intentionally harming the environment would be daft unless it was unavoidable given the main intent, and likewise making a loss.

    There is an ambiguity in the meaning of intent: I intentionally break eggs in order to make an omelette, but my intention is to make an omelette, not to break eggs. Oil companies do not intend to cause global warming, merely to sell product, but now we know that they know that they are causing it, and I at least, am starting to think them culpable because reckless.
  • Experimental Philosophy and the Knobe Effect
    In short, it seems groups can be seen as more intentional based on morals too, rather than just CEOs and generals, well morals or maybe just the words ‘harm’ and ‘help’ for other reasons.invizzy

    We inflict collateral damage, which is an unfortunate and unintended consequence of our military humanitarian efforts. They murder innocent civilians.

    Try the experiment with Green-piece org instead of ACME Inc. We all know that companies conduct business for profit and there is usually an environmental cost. But if a group has the improvement of the environment as its aim, one has to presume that the environmental effect is deliberate, and it is the profit or loss that is likely unintentional.
  • Experimental Philosophy and the Knobe Effect
    I don't think it's completely a matter of class, but also, and perhaps more so, of occupation. If a life-guard fails to save a drowning man, we tend to condemn, whereas if he built a wall in his spare time and it collapses and kills someone, we might forgive. But with a bricklayer, it would be the other way round.

    "A cobbler should stick to his last."

    That is to say, the experiment may be being misinterpreted: not 'intuitions about whether outcomes are intentional are based on how moral we see them', but intuitions about whether outcomes are intentional are based on whether or not they are part of the job-description.

    That is Machiavelli's position, that the ruler should not be squeamish about breaking a few eggs in the course of making the omelette of the state; that to be a weak ruler is the worst sin for a ruler. Thus to fail to make a profit is the worst sin for a CEO; everything else is 'justified' if it facilitates the goal of the occupation.
  • Experimental Philosophy and the Knobe Effect
    Ever since Machiavelli, the morality of the rich and powerful has been completely different to that of the folk. We do not judge them by our own standards. We excuse the harm because it is not part of his duty, and we praise the help for the same reason. We might judge the minister for the environment differently, and even possibly excuse him if he harmed the economy.
  • Greatest contribution of philosophy in last 100 years?
    Arne Naess.
    Contribution studiously ignored.

    Audre Lorde.
    Contribution studiously ignored.


    But what did the Romans ever do for us?

  • Greatest contribution of philosophy in last 100 years?
    Contribution to what? Curiously, the list of the great and the good so far on the thread seems to leave out the philosophers of environmentalism, of feminism, of anti colonialism. It is surely not the business of the philosopher to contribute to society but to challenge it. It is not our business to answer to a miserable accountancy that cannot value anything except in terms of convention and complacent compliance.
  • Philoso-psychiatry
    The analogy is to psychosis symptoms such as conspiracy theories. The specific reason I think this should be considered is an understanding that mental content is something emergent from physical brains but not the same thing.Mark Nyquist

    Yes. I think the analogy works up to a point, and bearing in 'mind' that talk of computer virus is itself an analogy from biology. But up to more or less the same point, a much earlier model of possession by evil spirits will also work. A false theory is created by a malicious agent, as is a computer virus, and is designed to infect, and take possession of the hardware and use it to spread itself.
    And that moral story survives as the notion of white hat and black hat hackers/magicians.

    Such an understanding seems to point to a policy of isolating infected persons, and brainwashing them by way of removing the infection. That is a dangerous understanding.

    I would like us to put ourselves into the pictures and analogies we make. Is it perhaps a certain paranoia in us that we need to arm ourselves in advance with a theory by which to understand the mystery of the other? Is our theory of mental illness itself a virus that we are spreading, that is infecting the world.

    Even on the internet it is proving very difficult to sort the memes of God, from those of the devil - truth and sanity from lies and folly.
  • Philoso-psychiatry
    To get a mental image of this, imagine a virus on a computer network. Agent Based Models are a way to computer model this and simple models can show progression of a virus moving from node to node on networks with some nodes affected and other nodes unaffected. In biological brains the biology can be functioning normally but the corrupted networks of mental content are the cause of the abnormal condition.Mark Nyquist

    Do you think your informational computerised view is much different? Are we machines? Are we infected by viruses? The very idea seems like a virus that has infected us.
  • Deciding what to do
    I see this as a very moderate expression of an argument for a genetic component to moral behavior.T Clark

    No disagreement from me. Social relations are a survival issue. Communication, and therefore truth, is a survival issue. But alas in humans, genetic programs for behaviour can be overridden to a large extent by learned behaviours and identifications. The programmed socialisation becomes socialised antisocial behaviour, by the propaganda of the day. There can only be one winner. There can only be one winner. There can only be one winner.
  • Deciding what to do
    The topic would better be called 'Deciding what to be'. What to do follows from what one is. If one is Buridan's ass, one dithers and cannot decide. If one is a football fan, one cheers on the team, and boos the other team. It is connection, identification with the other that motivates something bigger that mere self-interest. Hurrah for philosophers, I say, and boo to soldiers. Hurrah for truth and boo to lies. Hurrah for peace and boo to war.

    If one is a modern individual with no loyalty and no connection to others, one does what one likes, which is probably nothing much, and one is always anxious about the other who is nothing but a rival and competitor, liable to steal one's dinner.

    babies as young as three months old, long before they have language, are already judging other people's behavior and making value judgements.T Clark

    Babies are dependent on (M)others, and therefore make connections and loyalties very quickly, because their lives depend on it. It is only a very recent possibility to live without direct connection to humans or the living environment. We have created the mechanical life (and hence the amoral governance) of which we now complain.

    Therefore choose solidarity with humans, with bees, with tigers and with the forest. Choose 'Team Life'.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    ought we not?Isaac

    I think we ought, but I think we ought to do so carefully, with respect for differing opinions.

    I certainly do not trust my (UK) government to do what is best for most people in the UK let alone the world. And that is a question I also don't know the answer to, - in the case of a conflict between the interests of the world and the interests of the people it represents and governs, does a government have a right or a duty to do what is best for the world?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Simple question - do those millions at risk of starvation because of the continued war get a say in whether it's worth it or not?Isaac

    I'm at risk of dying of cold because I cannot afford the heating bill. So I get a say. And I say that defeating fascism is expensive and costs many lives, but also saves many lives. One can never make the pragmatic calculations of such global events, because no one knows the future, and no one knows the alternative future brought about by making a different decision. War is disgusting and starvation is disgusting, and if we all thought you knew how to end them, we'd all vote for you.
  • Climate change denial
    There is no good solution because fossil fuels, and especially oil, are the backbone of our economy. It's the thing that made the industrial revolution possible and makes the economy tick, because it's a cheap, easy to use and an energy-dense source of energy. Add to that there are whole industries build on derivatives of oil and natural gas.ChatteringMonkey

    The story is that the economy progresses to improve life for us all, and science provides the best solutions to all human problems. It now appears that science and the economy have produced an existential threat to humans. And you want a "good" solution? Time to change what we think is good, I'd say.

    Endless growth is cancerous.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    and it is this idealization of the objects in your environment that you are conscious of, not a faithful recreation of the color patches that make up your putative visual field.Srap Tasmaner

    Because, of course, one is not normally interested in colour patches in one's visual field, but the latest dresses and trainers in the material world that material girls live in.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    It's a nice thought, but demonstrably false.Srap Tasmaner

    Well I'd need to see that demonstration. But anyways, back to Hume, your fun video actually uses the term 'imaginary' to describe the colour constancy and lighting compensation that happens. Which scores a stupendous predictive hit for Hume, even if I got it wrong.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    The optical illusion argument makes no sense to me. The illusion in the checkerboard illusion is that there is a checkerboard, not an imaginary checkerboard. If one were to make an actual board with those same shades, it would look like it was badly faded in some areas. On the other hand if one took a regular checkerboard, and reconstructed the whole scene, there would be no illusion because the eye would correctly identify the squares that were the same colour, despite the variation in lighting due to shadows.

    Note that everything in the above paragraph in the third and fourth sentence is imaginary. But Hume will have been familiar with rainbows, and I think familiar enough with optics to have some understanding of the phenomenon ... "no one takes a rainbow for a persistent extended object," I seem to hear him say, "and that's why it's a safe place for the wee folk to hide their gold, and for the gods to cross into Asgard."
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    Except it's not a world of objects but of perceptions; objects are mere prejudice. Empiricism slides into idealism.Srap Tasmaner

    No. it's not the objects that he denies, it's the reasoning. Of course there are objects; of course they aren't in the mind, and of course they are not the product of reason. When you follow strict reasoning you end up with 'Yikes!'. Natural impulses are a better guide.

    To begin with the question concerning external existence,
    it may perhaps be said, that setting aside the metaphysical question of the identity of a thinking substance, our own body evidently belongs to us; and as several impressions appear exterior to the body, we suppose them also exterior to ourselves.
    [Snip]
    But to prevent this inference, we need only weigh the three following considerations. First, That, properly speaking, ’tis not our body we perceive, when we regard our limbs and members, regard to but certain impressions, which enter by the senses ; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind as difficult to explain, as that which we examine at present. Secondly...
    — P190.

    So that upon the whole our reason neither does, nor is it possible it ever
    shou'd, upon, any supposition, give us an assurance of the continu’d and distinct existence of body. That opinion must be entirely owing to the IMAGINATION : which must now be the subject of our enquiry.

    These days, we talk about climate models rather than images or imaginings. We know they are made up because we tweak them see how robust the predictions are. The model is not the climate, but the climate is real.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    Then he explicitly concludes that the senses themselves cannot produce this separation. The senses don't distinguish what is part of yourself, and what is not.Metaphysician Undercover

    Hume was not an idiot. He was certainly aware of sensory boundaries such that when one hits the nail into the wall with the hammer, it does not hurt whereas when one hits the fingernail, it does. Or that one can see and move ones hand, whereas one can see, but not move another's hand. What he was arguing against was the Cartesian theorised absolute self, devoid of, ie prior to, sensation and perception. Descartes constructs his doubt of the senses so as to produce an immaterial mind. Hume by contrast says that this doubt is in fact impossible, and is a fabrication of philosophers. The mind goes beyond the senses to 'make sense' of them in ways that reason cannot justify, but simply has to accept. There is no proof of existence of anything, self or world, but what is evident needs no proof.

    For as to the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shewn its absurdity. — Hume
    P188.

    This makes Hume a direct realist, in contrast to Kant, who puts back a separate external existence as the unfathomable, (and to Hume, absurd) Noumenon.

    The subject, then, of our present enquiry is concerning the causes which induce us to believe in the existence of body : And my reasonings on this head I shall begin with a distinction, which at first sight may seem superfluous, but which will contribute very much to the perfect understanding of what follows. We ought to examine apart those two questions, which are commonly confounded together, vizi. Why we attribute a CONTINU’D existence to objects, even when they are not present to the senses ; and why we - suppose them to have an existence DISTINCT from the mind and perception.

    The search is for a ground, a bedrock for knowledge. For Descartes, reason, for Hume, perception. Thus he (Hume) looks for causes of belief not reasons for belief. And as we know from elsewhere, he also argues that causes are unfounded ideas, that arise from but are not present in perception, along with continued existence and distinct existence.
    We have something vaguely of the form P → Q → ~P. Yikes.

    And it happens all over the place, his description of his chamber being another example, and his simple reliance on his own identity.
    Srap Tasmaner

    Just so. Because he is arguing against rationalism. Rationalism is the belief that one can reason from first principles to the world. Descartes shut himself in a darkened room and tried to argue his way out of it. Hume says you cannot argue your way out of a paper bag, but fortunately you don't have to, because the world is already present and available to be made sense of.
  • Merging Pessimism Threads
    I think merging threads is almost always a bad idea. It results in a disjointed and confusing read.

    Deleting threads works though.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    The sceptic must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body ... Nature has not left this to his choice. — "

    That idea, [existence] when conjoin'd with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it.

    He doesn't really need the tyranny of Nature here, does he? The sceptic is not admitting anything of any consequence.

    There's a bracketing problem here.

    The idea of existence conjoined with the idea of any object makes no addition to it, but existence conjoined with the idea of any object adds everything to it. A unicorn is a horse with a horn, but the main difference between a horses and unicorns is not the horn, it's that horses exist. Nature bites.

    On such subtitles, philosophies are built and crumble. 'Maps and territories' anyone?
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    There it is claimed, first, that since to conceive of any thing is to conceive of it as existing, existence is not a distinct idea at all, not a separable perception:

    That idea, when conjoin'd with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it.
    Srap Tasmaner

    Just for fun and profit, here is Kant, who some where said that Hume's work 'awakened me from my slumbers', ripping off Hume big-style,

    Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgement. The proposition, God is omnipotent, contains two conceptions, which have a certain object or content; the word is, is no additional predicate—it merely indicates the relation of the predicate to the subject. Now, if I take the subject (God) with all its predicates (om- nipotence being one), and say: God is, or, There is a God, I add no new predicate to the conception of God, I merely posit or affirm the existence of the subject with all its predicates—I posit the object in relation to my conception. The content of both is the same; and there is no addition made to the conception, which expresses merely the possibility of the object, by my cogitating the object—in the expression, it is—as absolutely given or existing. Thus the real contains no more than the possible.
    The Critique of Pure Reason, Section IV.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    It might be useful to contextualise Hume a bit. His contemporaries were Voltaire and Rousseau; Thomas Reid was his antagonist -and friend. His inheritance was Newton, Spinoza, and further back the great Descartes. This is the beginning of Science as a rival authority to religion, and a time of questioning and revolution. In particular, it is the first stirrings of the industrial revolution.

    It seems to me that Hume's scepticism was mainly directed towards Rationalism. He is against 'innate ideas' that Descartes inherited from Plato. Rather, everything comes from the senses, and yet there is nothing in the sensory field that makes sense of the senses. Nevertheless, we do make sense of them through ideas like cause and effect, and object persistence, but this is not by a process of (deductive) reasoning, but by an act of imagination. One imagines a world beyond the senses in order to understand and make sense of sense-experience.

    Reason is no longer king, and man has taken the first step towards a reconnection with Nature. Darwin will take the next step, and environmentalism the one after that. The Treatise on Human Nature is thus a work of philosophical psychology, and epistemology -what is man's place in the new world, and what are his fundamental properties? Not the Cartesian 'thinking thing', but the empirical, 'sensing thing'.
  • Reading Group: Hume's Of skepticism with regard to the senses
    Always happy to read a bit of Hume. One the best. And by way of illustration, Modern developmental psychology follows and agrees with his analysis even down to the fact that in infants, notions of cause and effect develop before the more indirect understanding of object persistence. See here, for example.
  • Philoso-psychiatry
    You actually think we shouldn't try to get people who hear voices and think they are God to understand that their beliefs, and the voices they hear, aren't rooted in reality? We should just encourage people to listen to whatever instructions their voices give them, if they give instructions?ToothyMaw

    Your question is rhetorical and rather slanted, but here is a real alternative approach, not antagonistic to drugs where they can be helpful, that does not seek to impose a particular understanding of reality. Open dialogue is an established approach to mental health that has good results dealing with difficult cases.

    Well, the main idea is to listen carefully to each participant in the conversation, accepting their comments without exceptions or conditions. Within this unconditional respect for their voices, people start to listen to themselves. They learn more about their own story. This is why, in the dialogical approach, we do not look to find some right story, or some right commentary on the story of the person in crisis. Really, what is most important is the response in the here-and-now while speaking about the important issues of one’s life. The most difficult and most important experiences most often do not have any words, such that it would be possible to have an explicit narrative about it. They emerge in being moved, e.g. in an emotional reaction, by the things being told. This is the most important moment for a dialogical practitioner.
    {snip}
    In my mind, a much more effective way is to think about ‘psychotic’ behaviour as an embodied psychological response to extreme stress. ‘Psychotic’ experiences are one form of defence that the embodied mind uses to protect itself against a total disaster. They are not pathological, nor signs of an illness, but necessary survival strategies that everyone of us may need in an extreme situation. The extreme situation may be something that is occurring in the present, or it may be drawing on earlier experiences in a person’s life. In hallucinations, the person is most probably speaking about real incidents that have happened, but which they do not yet have any other words, other than ‘psychotic’ ones, to express it with.
    — Jaakko Seikkula
    https://www.madintheuk.com/2022/10/interview-with-jaakko-seikkula-creator-of-the-open-dialogue-approach/

    For a better general overview of the method: https://imhcn.org/bibliography/recent-innovations-and-good-practices/open-dialogue/

    From the above:
    In the 1980s psychiatric services in Western Lapland had one of the worst incidences of ‘schizophrenia’. Now they have the best documented outcomes in the Western World. For example, around 75% of those experiencing psychosis have returned to work or study within 2 years and only around 20% are still taking antipsychotic medication at 2 year follow-up.

    Open Dialogue is not an alternative to standard psychiatric services, it is the psychiatric service in Western Lapland. It is a comprehensive approach with well-integrated inpatient and outpatient services.
  • A simple but difficult dilemma of evil in the world
    What a lot of nonsense you all talk. I made you and the world and you think I am mean because I didn't make it easy and comfortable for you. As if your everlasting comfort ought to be my priority. Perhaps don't worry so much about me, and learn to make each other's comfort a bit more your own priority, instead of the gleeful bickering. — God
  • Asymmetry in What is at Stake and Why the Left Should Stop Eating its Own (as much)
    I don't think I equated the kinds of experiences you just recounted with being called a white privilege denier or racist. Being called a racist does absolutely nothing to me in particular, although it is mildly annoying.ToothyMaw

    Well it can be more detrimental than that, in some contexts.


    No one really believes that disabled people are evil, but every Bond film has a disabled, deformed or scarred villain. Now the effect of this sort of thing, as has been pointed out, is to undermine solidarity -

    We inherit the world, and become responsible for it, such that we need to deal with the stuff we are not to blame for, or become blameworthy for it. It's not enough to say - I don't make the Bond movies - children watch them. And children grow up and make Bond movies - unless they are disabled.

    The thing is that racism is not particularly verbal nor particularly a belief and certainly not reasoned. It is more like an unconscious habit that children pick up from parents neighbours and the media. It is constantly reinforced and yet invisible. One cannot blame kindergarten children for their racism. But nevertheless, one cannot reasonably deny its existence.

    And the Negro's name
    Is used, it is plain
    For the politician's gain
    As he rises to fame
    And the poor white remains
    On the caboose of the train
    But it ain't him to blame
    He's only a pawn in their game.
    — Bob Dylan

    The nature of pawns is that they live in a very small world of their immediate interests through which they are manipulated by players with larger interests. And most are persuaded that the only escape from being a pawn is to reach the end of the board and be transformed into a major piece. It is unheard of for a pawn to become a player - that is not part of the game at all.

    At which point I go back to the simple question of how talk of the difficulties that face white people trying to engage in serious discussion actually functions in the discussion? The poor white remains only a pawn, and incapable of solidarity, and Medgar Evers remains dead, and that is the asymmetry. It would be much easier if black people ...
  • Asymmetry in What is at Stake and Why the Left Should Stop Eating its Own (as much)
    No, but try to adopt a nuanced view on race, attempt to discuss it with candor, and see how quickly you get declared a bigot or a white privilege denier.ToothyMaw

    Ok, let's try. I'll start with a personal anecdote. My daughter aged 4 was a highly articulate, outgoing confident child able to engage children and adults in conversation and eager to relate to friends and strangers alike. She was thus very keen to go to school. But within a couple of weeks of starting school, she started to demand that her (white) father take and collect her, rather than her mixed race mother,
    and then, one evening, she cutoff all her long frizzy hair and hid it under the bed.

    Now where I personally would like to draw a hard line is at the point where anyone whomsoever tries to make a comparison between this kind of experience, and being called a white privilege denier. And that is why this conversation becomes difficult. We are supposed to be having candid discussion about race, but even before it has begun, you have brought forth the terrible injustices that white folks have to put up with. So where do we go from there?
  • Illegitimate Monarchical Government

    inductive arguments are invalid. Obviously, my comments apply to valid arguments only.
    Average
    You seem to be assuming that you will survive the ensuing chaos.Average

    No, I assume some of us will. If none of us do, your question of legitimacy has no application either.

    But I see you are interested in a form of dialogue that I cannot be bothered with, so you'll have to carry on without me.
  • Illegitimate Monarchical Government
    What makes a government legitimate or illegitimate? Is it possible for a government to be legit or are all states sus? The entire discussion revolving around legitimacy seems to involve a lot of moral dogmaAverage

    The problem is in your question. "legitimate" is related to "legislation" and so your question addresses the legitimacy of the legitimising process. Transferring the meaning to reason and philosophy does not help; because then you are questioning the logic of logic...

    Self evident principles and conclusions seem like they are probably just lazy philosophy.Average

    ...like this. Reason can help to keep our thinking straight in the sense that it is truth preserving. This means that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion of a reasoned argument. but without 'self-evident' principles as premises, reason has nothing to operate on.

    Thus you have an unassailable rational position of nihilism and ignorance. The rest of us have no other recourse but to point out the vicious circle and move on to organise the world as best we can on fallible but congenial claims we take as 'self-evident.' When we get in a total mess, we might go back and see if another principle will help us better. "Some men are God's appointed rulers." used to be held self-evident, but there were problems...
  • Philoso-psychiatry


    You chaps don't have to entirely invent a new frame for psychology alone. There has always been resistance to the reductive, chemical/mechanical medical model, and there are alternatives out there.

    The social model:
    Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety (1984) showed how an increasingly competitive, unequal society spawns chronic insecurity. The book challenged the notion that anxiety and depression amount to a mental illness denoting that something is wrong with the individual sufferer. For the most part distress and anxiety represent an entirely rational response to the sufferer’s situation. The role of the therapist is therefore not in ‘curing’ the individual, but rather to negotiate demystification and to provide insight into the effects of the problems in the sufferer’s world, based on the sufferer and the therapist’s shared subjective understanding.
    https://www.mentalhealthforum.net/forum/threads/david-smail-1938-2014-pioneer-of-the-social-materialist-analysis-of-psychological-distress.130996/

    It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. — J. Krishnamurti

    [url=http://]Thomas Szasz[/url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz has the best critique of the socio-political position of psychiatry, and takes @introbert's position about coercion.

    There is also a development that is something of a synthesis of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry in Trauma Theory. My old thread has some interesting links you might like to pursue.


    I forgot to mention also, the Open Dialogue approach.
  • Liz Truss (All General Truss Discussions Here)
    The lesson I would like everyone to draw from all this is that a dishonest, amoral government must always fail in the long run because a society is first and foremost a moral order. The Party falls apart, because everyone is out for himself and there is no loyalty to person or principle.

    To put this in terms a capitalist might understand, a market that deals in pigs in pokes, snake oil and Ponzi schemes is not worth trading in at all. It's not worth being an expert in, or a market leader of, and it's nothing to write home about. It has no value. None at all.

    There is no government in the UK because no one can believe anything the government says. This means that no one will seriously try to do what the government says, and this means that they cannot govern anything or anyone.

    In such a situation, people are reduced to their own sense of decency and must care for each other as best they can. The government has the status of bad weather, and must be endured and adapted to.
  • Liz Truss (All General Truss Discussions Here)
    Her only supporter is the Philosophical Zombi himself,Grease-Knob. Even in the Gory party, you need a bit more than that. But there is now cross-party support for the idea that it is a mistake to consult the plebs about the leader. And of course The US can confirm that.
  • Liz Truss (All General Truss Discussions Here)
    In office, but not in control. There is a lively expectation that this thread will end in about 2-3 days. It may take a bit longer, but why would she resist at this stage? I don't know who will volunteer to run the shit-show for 2 years and then go down to an annihilating defeat. Jeremy Hunt might do it because he is, I think, a genuine patriot, or Rishi might because he just wants the feather in his cap, and he's going nowhere otherwise. There'll be no more consulting the rank and file about things after this, surely, so it can all be tidied up quickly.

    Or, if the zombie economists have made their killing, they might just call an election and let Labour take the blame for the long grind of poverty and the breakup of the union.

    But the chances of the Prime Muppet making it to Christmas are
  • Why Must You Be Governed?
    What do you say to the Amazonian, then, given that they have stolen their village “the commons”? They have no right to keep their village?NOS4A2

    I will say what they generally say, that they do not own the forest, they belong to it.
  • Why Must You Be Governed?
    We have not agreed to anything.NOS4A2

    Rights come from men.NOS4A2

    Therefore you have no right to your garden.

    That there is logic. Allow me to sell you some.
  • Why Must You Be Governed?
    Rights come from men.NOS4A2

    Oh, a social contract.


    Will you destroy my garden, should there be no “social contract”? Is this why you need to be governed?NOS4A2

    I don't need to be governed. I said at the outset that I am an anarchist. But you need me to be governed.