What constitutes truth anyway? — Jesting Pilate

It's what they crucify you for speaking.

Statistics say that 25 percent of all internet searches are related to porn. — TaySan

All this unwanted sexual imagery was one of the (many) reasons I quit social media. — TaySan

Perhaps you and I are a small minority. But I notice a related phenomenon that might be called "food porn". Here in the UK at least, fast food and ready meals have come to dominate. Cookery used to be taught in school as 'domestic science', but no longer. people do not cook very much, or make jams and pickles or pies or cakes. At the same time the number of cookery programs on the media multiply endlessly. Every house has to have an enormous new kitchen full of gadgets and cupboards and surfaces. And it never gets used, because people live on delivered pizzas.

Thing about food-porn is it is completely tasteless and has no nutritional value. It does not satisfy, and so people stuff themselves with junk food and become obese.

Pornography is similarly unsatisfying and sensually impoverished, and it similarly arises in conjunction with a decline in physical relationships, of which it is a mere image. Because there is no touch, no smell, no actual stimulation of another body, it has to be more extravagant and extreme than reality. Every contact must be orgasmic because it is only the image and there is no actual contact. Extreme images of various kinds and crude mechanical stimulation substitute poorly for the complexities of a real relationship, and become an unsatisfying addiction exactly like junk food.

That, my friend, is a very limiting belief because it prevents you learning anymore from what I have to offer. Everybody (both stupid and smart) has something to teach you that you do not know. — Thinking

Told you you wouldn't understand. If you are to teach me something, you will have to be less predictable.

I wonder where the Freemasons lie in that picture because I understand that they began in the building trade. It makes me wonder about the whole nature of the symbolic within building design and the imagery underlying traditions, including the esoteric. — Jack Cummins

The freemasons developed from the master stonemason/architects that made an international business of building castles and fortifications, but more especially cathedrals. "the great Architect" features in their rituals and measurement instruments in their logo. I don't know much more than that...

The type of the fantasist is the architect. A type so dangerous to authority that he has to apply for "planning permission" to even begin her fantastic imaginings. Her castles in the air begin in the void between her ears and waft out onto blue paper prints, and from there the steel fabricators and brickies, live out the fantasy as true believers and realise it on the ground. Buildings are social constructs; ask any termite.

How do you build the best belief for the most empowered individual? Answer below. — Thinking

I am clever and you are stupid; you wouldn't understand.

I doubt he would have agreed with this statement by Hume, though: — Ciceronianus the White

It doesn't suit my purpose to agree with that either. Or with you, a lot of the time. So it goes, as Mr Vonnegut used to say.

But in particular, the argument from character is a very weak one. The guy was fat, ignore everything he says.

Not reason itself, but the supression of emotions/passions in search of pure objectivity. — WaterLungs

:100:

(To quote like above, simply select some text from a post, and click the quote button that pops up.)

Which would make it an off-hand conclusion on his part, absent any thoughtful consideration and evidence. He was an unabashed apologist. — Ciceronianus the White

Yet he agrees with Hume, a philosopher so unapologetic he is still seemingly ahead of the times.

It is a commonplace notion, but if you go looking for the monstrous in humanity, you find it in such reasoned solutions to life's problems as the gas chamber and the torture chamber - places run by bureaucrats and scientists rather than poets and artists. Artists have nightmares, but it takes a scientist to realise them.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. — David Hume

Hume is neither glib, nor an apologist. And Chesterton is right in his observation that it is the logician more so than the artist that is vulnerable to madness. It is one who tries to make reason the master and eliminate passion, that ends up in trouble. And this is no off-hand remark of Chesterton's, but the direction of much of his writing. He is not anti-rational at all, but anti rationalism, the folly that makes rationality its passion, and thereby undermines itself.

Reification is definitely a thing.

Make a distinction. Call it the first distinction."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

To answer my own question, as one always must in a dream:- no it is quite impossible, because to lucidly dream is to be aware of the unreality of the experience, and since I am awake, or at least dreaming I am awake, if I am in fact dreaming it cannot be a lucid dream by definition.

The trick the op plays is to insert himself into my dream and try to make it lucid. but he can only do that for real in his dream.

Except I suppose in the case of lucid dreaming , where one supposedly is aware that one is dreaming. — Joshs

Is it possible that I am lucidly dreaming you said that?

It is possible that you are dreaming the very same experiences that you are now having. — Aoife Jones

In your dreams!

Dreaming only makes sense in the context of wakefulness. I might dream that someone posted, " It is possible that you are dreaming the very same experiences that you are now having." and I replied, "In your dreams!" But that would only become meaningful to me if I awoke from the dream. In my dreams my dreams are reality and I am awake.

So it is never possible that I am dreaming, only that I have been dreaming. Only the awake can declare the dream to have been a dream.

So wake up!

Loving your country, culture and people doesn't mean you would have to hate other countries and their people and cultures. — ssu

It doesn't of course. No more does loving a white woman prevent one from loving a black woman. But if you will consider what is being said about identification as distinct from being and doing, and if you will take a look at the history of nations and their conflicts, that will save me from repeating myself, and allow us a sensible discussion.

Applied philosophy.

One can be a thief by virtue of stealing. — SophistiCat

Well strictly, one can only steal something if 'we' agree it belongs to someone else. 'We' have very detailed rules about this.

One can be a kind person by virtue of having a kind character. — SophistiCat

These are examples where being who you are is up to your decisions or your character. — SophistiCat

Sure. But Identity is not simply being the person you are, though, it is making the identification of who you are. "I am one of the kind ones, not one of the unkind ones" is the speech act of claiming the identity of kind person. "Sophisticat is one of the kind ones." is the speech act of assigning the kind person identity. This is what I mean by saying it is always social. Identity is always reflexive and relational; always a status claimed and/or assigned, and contested and/or uncontested. That I am 5ft. 10ins. is a fact about me and an identity I have previously claimed, and it has been assigned me by the passport authority. I would be the same height even if no measurement had ever been made, but I would have no height identity.

By the way, the "nationalist" community in N.I. is composed of those who historically opposed British colonialism and oppression. Are they the moral equivalent of racists? No. Your analysis, at best, lacks nuance. — Baden

A drunk driver who kills is not a murderer, but that doesn't make drunk driving acceptable. Some instances of nationalism are much less damaging than others, and an impotent yearning for a non-existent nation is likely to be a less damaging one. Likewise the racism of a tramp is of little consequence, but the racism of a high court judge is very harmful. Let's nuancify all round and measure whose identity is more and less divisive than another's. But I haven't done it much thus far, because I haven't established the first principle, that identities are always divisive and to that extent violent both psychologically and socially.

Perhaps we cannot avoid identification completely, perhaps we cannot even avoid the more toxic forms; thus conflict sociology, in which N.I. is the paradigm case where the alignment of identities leads to social conflict - whereas unaligned identities leads to internalised psychological conflict and social peace. To explain a little: the alignment in N.I. is such that political loyalty is strongly correlated with religion, and with class, and with place of residence, and place of work. If the fault-lines of these various identities were not aligned, most people would find themselves united on some issues and opposed on others, and then external conflict would nearly always be damaging to their own cause on another issue. Social peace and compromise would result.

What unites these identification categories is that belonging is, by and large, not up to you. — SophistiCat

Belonging is never up to 'you', it's always a social matter. 'We, the empowered' make the decision to include or exclude you.

We have seen of late that one can be stripped of one's nationality at the whim of the government. As I have mentioned elsewhere, if Hitler says you are a Jew, there will be no argument, no contradiction available by recourse to mere fact. And of course the same goes for race; the one drop rule makes it nothing to do with skin colour or any kind of appearance, and everything to do with social construction.

Here's an iconoclasm: there's nothing personal about identity.

I invite everyone to join the unenlightened ones by allowing that realisation
to bite their bums into non-existence.

But given all that, racism is still the deeper moral insult imo in part for the reasons I've outlined above. — Baden

I think your apologetics are weak, and do not answer the counter-examples in the op.

For the historian, they are pretty much the same thing. From the National Socialists of Hitler, to the famous signs in the UK of my youth "No Blacks, No Irish, no Dogs", to the incident in New Orleans my attention was drawn to recently. — unenlightened

In practice the Irish in Britain, and the Italians in America have suffered exactly the same moral insult - if you want to call lynching a moral insult.

Patriotism is openly lauded on this thread as a 'good thing'. But as I have already noted, it unifies by dividing, and actually consists of deliberate planned unfair practices. Buying local is an environmental good, but buying national is operating an informal cartel. One cannot promote one group without demoting another. One cannot have One ought not have, and it is immoral to have, a global economy run by cartels.

Speaking of which, have y'all noticed how the Western economies have been supported undermined by the Chinese purchase of government debt. This keeps consumption high because the currency is strong, and also makes Chinese goods cheaper, undermining Western manufacturing. Perhaps when y'all start to notice that you are on the losing end of patriotism, you might be more inclined to see it as problematic.

Well, you are just reiterating the received wisdom that unenlightened is questioning. And the question is normative, not anthropological. Racism is just as easy to explain in anthropological terms as nationalism (at least at the just-so story level). But how is it that racism is less acceptable than nationalism or ethnocentrism, when they are so similar? — SophistiCat

:100: It's always nice when someone understands the topic. So far, i seem to have attracted mainly the right-wing in defensive mode, rather than comprehensive mode. But it is more a challenge to the Neo-Marxist, Postmodern destroyers of freedom that run this site. (Yes, @Baden this means you.) Turns out they are all bourgeois lickspittles of capitalism after all. Vive l'Internationale!

George Orwell's wrote a nice essay on this subject: Notes on Nationalism.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.... Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power." — Tom Storm

I think this ranks as about the most idiotic thing George ever said (he didn't say that many). If he had ever seen the British Expeditionary Force trolling halfway round the world to defend our people in the Falklands, he might have had second thoughts.

You could generalize 'nationalism' further to any group identifier, including sports team, religious group, hipster groups etc etc... I think we have a need to identify with groups, and will do it regardless. For all the negative that is associated with it, it also motivates and mobilizes to transcend the purely individual/selfish. Doing away with all of it also would imply doing away with some of the positive aspects of it.

So why do we still tolerate Nationalism is a bit like asking why do we still tolerate the rain? Because it will rain regardless of us tolerating it — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, all identifications have this dual aspect of unifying and separating. We are united in excluding Them.

nationalism can unite people across a number of different boundaries like race or class. — BitconnectCarlos

Indeed. But circumstances can change and fragment that unity, as happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl harbour. Suddenly, they were not American enough.

To say of one identification that it can in some circumstances overcome the fragmentation of other identifications, is not a great recommendation. If racism happened to unify different nationalities, that would not be a cause for rejoicing.

It makes sense... It makes no sense — NOS4A2

You are merely describing your identifications, not making any analysis of them. We make sense, they make no sense.

Why on earth would they do this, — TheMadFool

It doesn't look much like a barrel of laughs for anyone. I suspect that people did what they did on all sides for reasons other than to arrive where things stand. Of course no one wanted to expel her and get all this grief; but it is the nature of the institution - its whole identity and raison D'etre - to separate itself from the riff-raff. The individuals do what the institution is set up to do, not what they want to do. That's why I call it a gilded cage. Harry married who he wanted, whereas his father, Charles, did his duty, and had what he wanted on the side. A pair of disasters.

In this case, accusing the entire royal family is rather unusual don't you think? — TheMadFool

It's odd that even though the accusation is particularised as a single conversation with one individual, and other relationships with the family are specifically mentioned as being close, still the accusation is taken to be of "the entire royal family".

Thing about institutional racism is that it is not personal. The policy is that the reputation of the Royal family is more important than the needs or comfort of the individual. This means in this case, that family is more important than race. That makes it institutionally racist, whatever the beliefs and other practices of any or all members are. Megan becomes "selfish" for finding that her race impinges on her life even in a life of privilege.

As Harry explained, the members of the Royal family are ALL trapped by the trappings of privilege. The cage is well gilded, and it takes another conflicting loyalty to even expose this, and thus open the possibility of escape.

To what end, if not to (set into motion or contribute to some movement to) get said power to behave differently, in such a way said power hurts less (inflicts less suffering) or helps more (enables more enjoyment)? — Pfhorrest

If I play the lottery, the end is to become rich. If I tell the truth, the end is that the truth be told. I suggest that this is a strong sign of the moral act, that the act itself is its end. You may hear it, or not hear it, but the truth has been spoken.

Sometimes, it is moral to speak truth to power, for example . One usually gets crucified; it is usually not of any great utility. Sometimes what is moral is a losing strategy. "Greater love hath no man than this..."

One might say that pain and unhappiness are symptoms, and immorality is a disease. One might say it is infectious.

↪unenlightened You're well named. — Bartricks

Thank you. You are also well named. But at the risk of a little negativity, let us focus on our disagreements and dispense with the compliments.

I do not believe the state is entitled to do anything to us that we would not be justified in doing to each other in the state's absence. So, if there is no state I am still entitled to defend myself against attack, and I am still entitled to keep the food I grew and stop you from taking it from me, and I am still entitled to others keeping up their ends of bargains we've voluntarily entered into, and so on. — Bartricks

First, I have made a case — Bartricks

I make an argument that, say, Xing is immoral. — Bartricks

You have made a creed. My creed is different, and comes from the Diggers. "No man has any right to buy or sell this Earth for private gain". Which develops from the sayings of Jesus; "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God, that which is God's."

I might get to taxation justice later, but if you start with inalienable property rights, then It seems reasonable for me to question your premise rather than your conclusion.

Even if so, "society" and "state" are not synonyms. — Pfhorrest

No they are not. But 'state' relates to 'estate'. In order to institute property relations as a construct, a society has to lay claim to the land whose rights it wishes to confer. A state is a society that claims sovereignty(?) over a territory.

Does that join the dots sufficiently for you?

another projection from our Dunning-Kruger highlight reel: — 180 Proof

It's odd though, how popular the "argument" form is. A sort of very loud and insistent variety of "he who smelt it dealt it", whereby antiracists become racists, and fascists become defenders of free speech. But a philosophy forum and the mainstream media dominated by kindergarten nonsense is a rather desperate state of affairs, and there doesn't seem to be anything much to be done.

We don't, and they do. And everyone has to know which is which.

Odd thing is that in Victorian times pink was for boys and blue for girls... — Banno

Why is that odd? Personal identity is a social construct. Far and few far and few are the deconstructers of personal identity. Their hens are pink and their fans are blue and their memories just like a sieve.

if there is no state I am still entitled — Bartricks

No you ain't. You are entitled to the produce of land to which you hold the title, which if you do, you get from the state. No state, no entitlements, merely whatever you can hang on to you hang on to until you don't.

If you insist on debating the premise anyway, try giving an argument against it instead of just saying the equivalent of "nuh uh" or acting like this is some novel complete nonsense that nobody in their right mind would legitimately defend. — Pfhorrest

I don't see how one can mount an argument against such counterfactual nonsense. Entitlement is a social construct; you make like a tiger, expect to be shot and skinned.

Yeah - joke. But also serious in the sense of having experienced a social change that is a threat to identity. It doesn't matter that these things are mere conventions that change with society, they are experienced as immutable moral imperatives. Homophobia, transphobia, are very real to the people that suffer them, and the violence that often ensues is a defence against what is being experienced as a personal attack on Mr or Mrs Normal. If you don't know whether you are X or Y, I don't know whether to fight or fuck.

Personal anecdote: I'm walking down the road with my long hair and pushchair, and from the van coming up behind, I get the wolf-whistles and a shouted proposition. Then they overtake, and can see my bearded face. And in an instant, they have gone from macho-men to gay-boys. What a humiliation for them!

Hence the now immutable fact that girls like pink and boys like blue, and they wouldn't dare, for the most part, perform anything other. The idea that children might like green or yellow is ridiculous, apparently, and we shouldn't let that small minority dictate...

I blame the hippies. the men started to grow their hair long and the women start wearing trousers. It's been downhill ever since. A chap doesn't know who to grope and patronise these days.

Onions grow from onion seed.
Don't put your fingers in the electric socket.
It's worth learning to read.
Don't excrete in the drinking water supply.

There is such a lot to learn in a complicated world, no one ever knows it all, and it's easy to get things wrong. And one of the things folks are getting wrong recently, that is almost as daft and dangerous as putting your fingers in the electric socket, is that truth is unobtainable, or un-communicable, or non-existent, or radically relative and personal. There are Darwin Awards for such philosophies, (which are always granted posthumously).

I guess I've just always come to the usual conclusions - why should I care what is written in any holy book?
— Tom Storm

In terms of divinely authority, I agree 100%. But the stories are great. — norm

Why should I care if I am beheaded, or you are? But I do. I don't pretend it is rational though.

A book is holy to the extent that people do care about it in a reverential way. If one happens to care about other people, one will usually somewhat care about the things they care about. First one cares about something, and from there one can reason what one should do. One cannot reason one's way to what one should care about, not even to caring about oneself.

America has lost its crown in the Dumbass Derby.

https://eand.co/how-britain-became-the-dumbest-society-in-the-world-e90431463924

Why is April the first all fools day, when fools prattle on every day?

As BitterCrank and 180Proof said, history got us here. The global economic system is blocking any way out, not American neo-nazis. — frank

Apart from the undeniable claims that the past led to the present and and the economy is responsible for inequality, this doesn't say very much to me. If you like history, there is a direct line of proud inheritance from the state sanctioned piracy and invention of white superiority of the Elizabethan age to the British royal family of today, accused of institutional racism. This is not nothing, even though it is global gossip. Let me put it this way, the American War of Independence was a revolution against that exact same institution founded on the notion of the God-given superiority of certain bloodlines. The US is still struggling to rid itself of the psychological legacy of the British Empire. Race was a British invention, and a natural extension of Royal prerogative.

So I guess you're saying BLM should just shut up and go home because they already lost. — frank

Er, no. Any more than I'm saying Jews should shut up and go home, or into exile or any other place. I'm saying when we stop arguing about silly things, we are left with a reality of systematic prejudice and marginalisation. And we all know who are the victims and who are the perpetrators as racial groups. I'm saying that white whiners are being plain dishonest in their complaints and fatuous arguments that using terms like 'race war' are unfair to them.