“It was the first time in human history that enslaved people had destroyed a slave system, declared themselves rulers, and maintained that status in the face of open international hostility. The Haitians did this at a time when the entire hemisphere remained engulfed in slavery. They were the first in the modern period to declare the complete, simultaneous, abolition of African trading and slavery, and the universal right of man to be free of enslavement.” –Professor Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd

http://kentakepage.com/a-date-to-remember-22-august-1791-the-haitian-revolution/?fbclid=IwAR0LhAV5L9iJNeH-_RvWqVYg_oazEodMfGuETpHNsYliH0pL1MjRwcGHeEw

We can argue about how close to slavery was the serfdom of pre-revolutionary Russia, or whether the American War of Independence was or was not a revolution.

in the future that there will be a better social arrangement — thewonder

One might hope so, but a sufficient motive for revolution is that this social arrangement is a fate worse than death.

His earlier remarks are so absurd that he can't help but slip back into contradiction. — S

Unfortunately this is now normal political discourse. One cannot fruitfully engage with people who do not care about self-contradiction. One has to recognise that the time for talking and listening has ended.

The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. — Jung

Archetype.

Thus the physical hero is the same archetype that might be called Heracles or Superman, or some other. The difficulty is to see from time to time what archetype one is enacting and giving new life to oneself - hero, villain, trickster, seeker, prophet, ...

Alas, one can kill oneself, but one cannot give birth to oneself. One cannot even conceive oneself. Perhaps the nearest to an opposite would be masturbation.

This very deep. I don't know why but it means something very important. — TheMadFool

What I meant to allude to in a light way, is how things that have no monetary value, like the atmosphere, or climate stability, or the Amazon jungle, or rats, lack value because we lack imagination and cannot see how they connect to us. I can imagine the value of a beef farm well enough ( and value is always an act of imagination) all that yummy meat, jungle though seems useless. Unfortunately, we have become hypnotised by money even when rationally we know it cannot measure value properly. Money says dump your rubbish in the sea, because no one lives there so no one cares.

The reason individuals enter into such a contract is that many people collectively are capable of much more than they would be as individuals, — Pantagruel

Reason: I like milk, and while I can milk a cow or a goat well enough, I am not very good at making buckets. Most people could not survive a week alone as adults; no one could survive alone from birth. Individualism is a fantasy that justifies exploitation.

So, I am perfectly happy with my choice. — alcontali

Your happiness means a lot to me. But we are discussing the social contract. And the social contract is just the way social relations are conducted, and nation states with various forms of government are one form it can take, and Bitcoin is another. So the social contract is the social contract and exists with or without anyone's formal agreement, just as national borders exist and do not have to wait for everyone to sign up to them. And if someone wishes to deny or renege on the social contract, or exploit it or find ways around it, they in no way invalidate the existence of these mutual obligations and dependencies. It just makes them one of a number of such people society has to cope with as best it can.

Property does not cease to exist because there are thieves, money does not have no value because there are forgers, language does not cease to have meaning because there are liars; but if there are enough of them, then eventually society does collapse and usually nigh on everyone loses.

My savings are in bitcoin — alcontali

Bitcoin still only works by social agreement. If no one accepts your money, you have no money, because money is the social acceptance.

Well, I generally live off my savings. — alcontali

You only have savings by the grace of the social contract. Governments regulate promissory notes such that society can rely on them, and you can hold them and exchange them for goods and services. The concept of property is brought into being by the social contract, and without it you own nothing.

One can analogise the social contract to the agreement you make every time you go to a new web page; you don't read it, and you wouldn't understand it if you did, but nevertheless, by clicking on the button or by walking on the public highway, or by sucking on that tit, you are deemed to have agreed.

As far as I am concerned,.. — alcontali

As far as i am concerned, there is no social contract, because I am entirely self-concerned.

However, the facts are that humans are socially dependent, they are born helpless, and have to learn from society how to survive, and depend on the work of others to house and feed them to make the tools by which they live and so on. Even members of the most primitive tribes are well aware of their interdependence. It takes the arrogance of a Western modern to imagine he could last a week without the help of society. As far as he is concerned, he did it all himself. Nobody taught him to read or write, he made his own computer and suckled himself. Loving your neighbour is communism, and ought to be banned, except that would be a social contract - banning stuff.

That's why I rejected Janus' description of knowing the difference between future and past as a matter of orientation. Either we're oriented toward the past, or toward the future, but we cannot be oriented in two opposing ways at the same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

In a way, I think the whole question is misguided. How can I tell the difference between the posts that come before this one, and the posts that come after it? Well I can read the ones that come before. and the ones that come after are blank. In terms of orientation, one faces the past and walks backwards into the future, anxious that the next post will be unkind or make one look foolish, or worst of all, that there will be none. Spatially, one can look where one is going, but temporally one sees only where one has been, so I think one is oriented one way and travels the opposite way.

I think that anticipation has a greater effect on my overall psyche than memory does, hence I tend to be an anxious person. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can relate to that. But what could you anticipate without memory? Excuse the Pavlovian, but one salivates in anticipation of dinner because one remembers dinner following the dinner bell. I don't think we'd be anxious without at least some memory of bad stuff having happened before.

If I started having trouble remembering things this would make me afraid. But maybe this would just be a matter of being afraid of my future in demential state. — Metaphysician Undercover

Let me say it boldly; memory is time. There is a rare condition, associated with binge drinking mainly, in which the ability to lay down new long term memories is lost. Time for the patient stops at the onset, and ever after, they think it is the 3rd of October 1974, or whatever the date is. I think your notion of the present having some 'thickness' derives from short term memory, which again can fail to an extent, so that one 'wonders what one came upstairs for'.
There is a related condition in which patients confabulate. Not only is memory time, it is also identity - the narrative, episodic and incomplete, that gives the orientation that locates the present as an event at the end of the known - tune in for next week's exciting episode of The Philosopher's Journey. Confabulation is the automatic attempt to make sense of sensation by giving it narrative identity. Without memory, time is disconnected from itself into meaningless sensation, and the death of the narrative self is what dementia threatens.

what type of knowledge allows us to say that there is a difference between future and past — Metaphysician Undercover

There seems to be past - present - future, as memory, sensation, and imagination. I suppose you privilege the present as all-encompassing, in that memory and imagined futures are also 'sensed' as 'present'

But one does not count prediction as knowledge; all factual knowledge is of the past; all prediction, even, is an extrapolation from the past. It is the blankness of the post below this one that marks it out as 'future'. Whose post it will be, and what it will say, is unknown until it becomes known at which point the post has been made and it is the past.

What makes the memory of an event different from the anticipation of an event. — Metaphysician Undercover

I am never afraid of the past.

Here's a talk. It's low key, conversational, and a quietly devastating criticism of much current practice in education, mental health, and science.

http://radiocafe.media/newmexican-perry/?fbclid=IwAR0n3v0-fZkjJqbsF83ln09r4TTKijvVwpBGPQjtxivEz3u4r91wLfwkVVI

Anyway now that I realize it no alternative would work because anything that measures value would be susceptible to corruption. Thanks. — TheMadFool

It's more so that any metric of value would be money. Rather the way that anything used to measure length becomes a ruler, whether it is a thumb, a foot, a chain, or the distance light travels in a year.

But the odd thing about money as a metric is how very elastic it is. In times of plenty things are thrown away that at another time would be of huge value. I am as we speak building up a store of nice plump rats in anticipation of the Brexit food shortages - the price can only go up.

1.3k
. But dead people don't post, and have no philosophy.
— unenlightened

But they do study the causes of death. — Andrew4Handel

No, dead people do not study, either at college or independently.

I am not even sure that the voices of the mentally ill and generally distressed get heard or responded to — Andrew4Handel

I'm quite sure they are widely ignored and even suppressed. The voices of the dead, however, are silent by nature.

This prejudice against death, however, is a kind of xenophobia. Discrimination against death is simply assumed good and right. — Heisman

Most people are so prejudiced on this issue that they simply refuse to even consider the possibilities of death.

Viviocentric provincialism is exposed through an enlarged view from our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, and the limits of our knowledge of the larger cosmos we live in.
Overcoming the prejudice against death, then, is only an extension and continuation of the Western project of eliminating bias, especially biologically based biases (i.e. race or sex based biases).

This guy presents himself as Speaker for the Dead, but the dead have no point of view and nothing to say. So it is complete tosh - there is no such enlarged view, but rather only life has a view, and having a view is almost definitive of life in discussions of 'artificial life' for example. Perhaps I am afraid of death, and perhaps I am not, perhaps i welcome it perhaps I will seek to evade it at all costs. Perhaps I will kill myself when I have posted this. That way, from my POV I will have the last word, though not from anyone else's. But dead people don't post, and have no philosophy.

Suicide says 'Talk to the corpse, 'cos the person ain't listening.' There may be good reason for that, like no one having listened to distress...

Someone who isn't dead might like this: http://radiocafe.media/newmexican-perry/?fbclid=IwAR0n3v0-fZkjJqbsF83ln09r4TTKijvVwpBGPQjtxivEz3u4r91wLfwkVVI

And if you're not willing, you're incorrect? — Terrapin Station

Not even that. If you are not willing, you are not saying anything.

Is this the room for an argument?

a profound statement. — Andrew4Handel

What do you think that statement is? the nearest I can get is a universal and definitive "Fuck off!", but I'm not sure that 'profound' is how I would describe it.

The Catholic doctrine used to be, and AFIK still is, that suicide is the only unforgivable (presumably because unrepent-able) sin. Such a doctrine is likely to have a suppressive effect on suicide. Is that a good thing anyway? (Assuming a lack of truth).

Lib-dems two-faced? Who'd a thunk it, suckers?

the pleasure of bathing is only felt when the participant is bathing. — Purple Pond

"Feeling" seems to be a amalgam of sensation and emotion. So I would say that the sensations of bathing induce emotions of pleasure. But here is a problem for your claim: if there is no pleasure until I actually bathe, what can possibly induce someone to be bothered to run the bath in the first place? I must surely have some feeling about the idea of the bath which induces me to realise it.

Emotions that constitute a motive necessarily precede the sensations that result from them, and can only be the product of memory and imagination, not sensation.

Empathy is the experience of understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and condition from his or her point of view, rather than from one's own. I am asking in terms of how accurate that is. — BitterClassroomixo

And I am saying that is a silly question. There is no conceivable measure. You can only measure my empathy with you and understanding of your post using your understanding of my post and empathy with me. Nevertheless, there is empathy, and people feel it in themselves and in other people, empathetically. And sometimes folks will fake it. There has to be the real for there to be a fake.

Not much can be done really and exactly; I feel your pain, but not really or exactly, but just slightly, vaguely, imaginatively. And that is called - really and exactly - "empathy". Stop making it something it isn't and then claiming it doesn't exist - that's silly.

Much as I despise the guy, it is nothing shameful. One can be in favour of tax rises and not pay the government the rise one proposes until it is implemented - one works with the systems as is and seeks reform. And the EU agricultural policy has been a notorious dog's breakfast for a long time, mainly to accommodate the result of the revolutionary law in France that property must be inherited equally by siblings, with the result that holdings became fragmented and inefficiently small over the generations.

Meanwhile, back in Blighty:

Every thread needs a theme tune. It's in the guidelines, or the constitution, or something...

Yup.

People like me are the best, and unfortunately that means people like you are a bit crap. My pride insults you - get used to it.

Quite an absurd response, black people need to be aware that cops will be more likely to shoot them and if they're not aware they are in mortal danger? I do hope you're not serious. — Judaka

Yeah, I wish I wasn't too. But hey, life's to short to argue with wilful ignorance. I'll leave you guys to your moral high ground.

My favourite topic.

I am often persuaded by a good argument (that is, until I hear a more persuasive argument that is more nuanced from another side.) — Noah Te Stroete

I often walk northwards, until I get hungry, and then I turn round.

Identity is not self-sameness, nor is it that uniqueness that the police and immigration are interested in. Rather it is a state of mind brought about by a process of identification. For example, I am a certain height, which is more or less constant through adulthood. But 5ft 1ins is not an identity. 'Short-arse' is an identity which is developed in relationship with others who are taller.

So what’s my identity? — Noah Te Stroete

You're a philosopher, dude. Someone who wonders and questions and changes their mind through their relationships with others (a lot, relative to others). So it has aspects of the personal and aspects of the social. one has identity always in relation to someone or something.

Someone said, I forget who, that the name of every tribe, in their own language is "The People". One is black or white, German or Italian, smart or dumb, homo- or heterosexual, only in relation (I could say "in comparison") to others. One even has or lacks an identity as an identity relative to others. 'They all have one, but I do not'.

she might have chosen a better way to say it because an alternate and more more literal reading is that being white is something to be ashamed of. — Hanover

Well I have heard folks say they are proud to be American, or Irish or whatever, and perhaps they might have chosen a better way to say it, or perhaps that is the way identification works, that one can be proud to support the Aussies at cricket, and likewise ashamed when they are caught cheating. It seems to me that folks can feel proud or ashamed of their ancestry as a matter of fact, whether you think it justified or not. One is not praiseworthy or blameworthy in such matters, according to some (our) moralities, but one feels as one feels. Let's not shame her for her shame.

it's only important if you focus on racial differences. — Judaka

This is not true. It's pretty unimportant if I focus on racial differences or if I don't, because I'm white; it becomes important if racial differences have a cultural significance for people whether they are focussing or not. That is to say, if your skin is black and you don't know that that fact is significant in affecting how readily a cop will shoot you, you are in mortal danger. Not focussing on racial differences is a privilege of whiteness.

it has more cultural weight here. — Moliere

Sure, that likeness is in its literal meaninglessness rather than its cultural meaningfulness. This slots right into Orwell's world: "Attack is defence." Compare with "Loreal - because you're worth it." How reassuring to know one is worth a blob of face cream. How reassuring to know that teachers and students carry guns.

who do you think, in the case of these acts, are the demagogues? — Moliere

I meant it quite literally - Trump, Bolsenaro, our own Boris and Farage, etc. But I see them as the natural outcome of Blairite focus group politics where winning power is the only policy: 'Give the people what they want', ignoring that what the people want is invariably a contradiction.

So, would she have preferred to have been born non white and underprivileged? — Teller

I imagine she would prefer that there was not an over-privileged and an underprivileged group, but that all were born equal in privilege and benefit.

One of the saddest things about privilege is that the privileged usually come to believe they deserve it, and so take pride in their privilege, instead of acknowledging it as a debt they owe to the underprivileged.

I have a tendency to go off-topic — Baden

Do you not like Mondays either?

I may have linked this paper once before. — Moliere

I haven't seen it before. Lots of detail I'm not familiar with, but a rather narrow time frame. It almost seems to say that politics causes culture rather than my emphasis the other way, though of course they are not separate.

... social practices are indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of subjectivity, which is here defined as self-defensive. — abstract

I think 'subjectivity' is what I would call 'identity' here, and I would rather say 'self-aggrandising' because the notion of self defence seems more like an advertising slogan than anything real. Demagogues arise when there develops a large gap between the social body and the individual identity - when humiliation is widespread. What one is not supposed to notice is that in reality, people with power do not carry guns, they have expendable others do it for them. Just as industrialists do not work in industry. The cops and the killers are pawns in the same game. The education system produces the school shooters.

America as the place where people jostle for their 15 minutes of fame. Germane or not? — csalisbury

Well yes, of course, but they do it in a context that, from the lonesome cowboy of Clint Eastwood through Chandler's Marlow, super-spider-bat-iron man and a million other heroes, financial, sporting, whatever, pitting themselves alone against the cruel world. One jostles for fame because fame is virtue, and so one is dependent on society for the acknowledgement of one's independence. The best of the culture explores this irony.

Hence Thatcher's response to the IRA, 'denying them the oxygen of publicity' well rehearsed in the thread already. It would make sense if one could arrange for society to negate its fundamental character when convenient. But a man with gun becomes a person of importance to those around him even with a media blackout. And the culture is that a person of no importance is no person at all. What America lacks is the notion of solidarity.

So the argument that the number of deaths is 'insignificant', is to be expected - you want to be a proper American mass killer, you gotta get a tank at least, and maybe some missiles.

The rush of attention to a mass shooting should be mentioned if the goal is to try to understand why close to the same scenario keeps repeating. — frank

Keeps repeating? You mean like 'over and over again'? Is that why you brought up the media attention, or was it directed at me? You might have made that argument, but it would not have been an argument against anything that was being said, but, as I said before, an attempt to shut down the discussion.

But you have exposed yourself sufficiently and I will not bother to respond further.

I didn't call you silly or hysterical. I called the Viking argument silly and the public and media reaction hysterical. — T Clark

Indeed, and here you are repeating it. And again you have no justification whatsoever, because there is no Viking argument, and there is no mention of the public or the media either. So what do you think you are addressing with these comments?