This is not an argument. It is an emotional appeal for inclusivity. — Leontiskos

It's not an argument indeed. It is a piece of history; the plain fact of the matter is that the term "Christian" has always been disputed from its inception and such identity labels nearly always are disputed.
No true philosopher would be unaware of this, or claim to possess the truth of the matter. :wink:

Mormons think they will ontologically become an independent "God." Christians think it is blasphemy to say such a thing. But no biggie, right? No significant difference there. :groan: — Leontiskos

"Christians" have been accusing each other of blasphemy, setting each other beyond the pale as apostates, heretics, heathens, or whatever, from before the time when the Bible as we know it was compiled; the texts to be included and those to be exiled to the Apocrypha were part of that conflict. Whatever consensus of belief has come to be accepted by you or anyone else about what constitutes a Christian has been arrived at through debate and conflict that has rejected more inclusive positions.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." — Matthew 16:24

Thus speaks the man who ought to know, and according to His standard, there are very very few Christians or have ever been; nor is belief the criterion.

I find it odd that one can be pro-life on moral grounds, but against free school meals, child support and so on. As though a woman does not have the right to control the resources of her body, but no one has any comparable duties with their financial resources. Makes no sense to me.

But my original point was that the attack on Walz's treatment of his son, and the accusation of violence, like the attack on his son earlier, was a lie being perpetuated on these pages without refutal; and the contempt shown for the disabled seems too often to go along with the supposed "pro-life" stance, which more usually turns out to be a parallel contempt for women, than a real valuing of all life.

Imagine JD Vance doing this. — NOS4A2

Imagine JD sharing a platform with his non-verbal son, and having the presence of mind and care to pull that son aside when he was about to walk into a teleprompter screen?

I can't imagine JD being open and honest and caring at all. I can't imagine him wanting to show his mixed race family off to the maga racists anyway. But they better get used to a lot more disabled kids of all sorts as abortion becomes more rare.

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

Close to half of the population will live through a harrowing court case, called "divorce". — Tarskian

I have lived through a divorce in the UK. It consisted of signing some papers and if I remember perhaps swearing an affidavit or something. There was no court appearance, and in general, the legal aspect was the least harrowing part of the separation.

Start with bullshit, and conclude with self-justification. This thread should have been put out our collective misery already.

The Great Replacement (French: grand remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory,[1][2][3] is a white nationalist[4] far-right conspiracy theory[3][5][6][7] espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites,[a][5][8] the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.[5][9][10] Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States.[11] Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.[12][13][14] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."[3]

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

Two clicks worth for you.

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

But no true Scotsman would reveal what lies beneath his kilt,

Here’s a thought experiment for Christians. — Art48

I'm not a Christian, except by cultural heritage. But moving on...

...that Christianity is false. Suppose you came to believe that Jesus was just a man. — Art48

These are two very different questions. but let me ask you, are you "just a man"?

I assume that Jesus was just a man, but most men are not still thought about two millennia later so that "just" is having to work rather hard and looks a bit suspect. Hitler too was 'just a man'.

Nazism is false; Christianity is not. Do you want to even think about or discuss what it means to love your enemies or die for another's sins? And can such things be "false"?

I have costal real estate to sell — Mikie

Sell it now! Next year it might be territorial waters, or at least uninsurable.

Hey guys, I'm struck by how many fairly prominent seeming republicans are speaking at the DNC. Is that a normal thing in your politics? In the UK, we occasionally get someone swapping sides, but they tend to be regarded with suspicion and sidelined. I don't think I have ever seen a UK Tory saying "I'm still a conservative, but please vote Labour this time, because our leader is a corrupt and destructive person." Nor vice versa. There were Labour politicians undermining Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader, but none that spoke at the Conservative Conference. It just seems an extraordinary event to me; is it normal in the US?

A justification needs to be more than a simple claim or assertion — Leontiskos

Can you justify this claim? Where do justifications bottom out? I'm probing the probing here.

Edit: Also, what more can be provided?

Maybe there is a difference between justifying to society and justifying to oneself that is relevant here? — wonderer1

Possibly. But probably not, given that society just is a number of selves interacting and justifying stuff to each other. I guess I want a justification for looking for a justification of a justification. I'm not sure if that is an allowable move in the language game, but if it isn't, then maybe the opening move is illegitimate too.

But keeping it simple, supposing one has a general duty of care to one's fellow beings, one who is bent on harming his fellows thereby forfeits his own right to be cared for. Is this a justification or merely a restatement in other words? I might talk about a 'necessary mutuality' of moral behaviour, such that the thief forfeits his right to possess his own property, or the kidnapper his right to his own freedom. I'm struggling in the end to make sense of the question in terms of what sort of thing would count as an answer; if the principle of self defence cannot stand alone, how could it be defended by another principle?

I thought the claim to have acted in self defence was the way one justified an act of harm. You want a justification of the justification?

We are so polite and restrained on this site, as if we were all democrats or something. But have a proper gander at how the republicans take on The great golf cheat.



But for a really lame speech, the NDC can't compete with the Orange Baby recently declaring himself the defender of law and order, (you have to smile, surely?) and giving a purported 'economic speech', both in a monotone of sleepy dreariness that even Fox gave up on following. I won't give links to spare the blushes of the apologists, but you can find them I guess if you want to.

No solidarity amongst whites, that's the problem. :wink:

Where do the whites go? — NOS4A2

Everywhere else.

Yet, the reality of the situation is that the good Samaritan suffers because of the atomization of society, and hence hell is other people, the game becomes more refined and there is no room for compassion or sympathy. — Shawn

The good Samaritan in the parable did not suffer. He did not put himself above the others who did nothing, he helped a stranger and made nothing of it. It was the teller of that story who was crucified as a dangerous revolutionary.

Hell is other people, and so is heaven. Because the individual cannot survive alone - it takes two at the very least. If one is striving for independence all the time, other people are hell because one seeks to reject what one cannot do without. But the good Samaritan depends on the thieves and robbers to give him the opportunity to practice his virtue. No one would be reading about Jesus today or retelling the Samaritan story if he had not been crucified by the local religious cheeses.

Our exchange today, is dependent on a story told 2000 years ago, and relayed by nameless scribes through the years. We are temporary nodes in a web of life, and the judgement we each make is mainly about what is and is not worth relating to another.

To overvalue oneself is to live in fear; to undervalue oneself is to overvalue oneself. Therefore, relax, judge not that ye be not judged. Retire when the work is done.

Being and nonbeing produce each other.
The difficult is born in the easy.
Long is defined by short, the high by the low.
Before and after go along with each other.

So the sage lives openly with apparent duality
and paradoxical unity.
The sage can act without effort
and teach without words.
Nurturing things without possessing them,
he works, but not for rewards;
he competes, but not for results.

When the work is done, it is forgotten.
That is why it lasts forever. — Tao Te Ching:2

If it has been collectively decided to aim for happiness on an collective level, then what meaning could individual happiness mean to anyone?
— Shawn

This is such an odd formulation. — unenlightened

The rather tired old ideological dispute rehearsed above for a page and a half is precisely the one you set up in this sentence, between the happiness of the collective and of the individual. It is this shoddy distinction that seems to oppose the individualist to the collectivist that is the source of the trouble.

Psychologically, it equates to the conflict generated by the fact that humans, like any social animals, have both individual and social needs. But it reaches crisis point in humans because they are the top predator, and are therefore their own only enemy.

The pursuit of happiness, conceived as an individual right, immediately invites the individual to calculate and measure himself and his own happiness in relation to the rest of society. Thus the pursuit becomes a 'beggar your neighbour' affair, and life a competition. Every day one is reminded "there can only be one winner", One does not seem to register that every winner is dependent on a slew of losers.

Yet the celebration of the winner is necessarily a social event. Being the best, the fastest, the cleverest, the richest, the happiest, has no meaning without the envious adulation of the collective. And this demonstrates that the very act of comparing that enables one to consider one's own happiness so as to pursue it necessitates a miserable society.

But it also demonstrates that individual happiness depends mainly on the regard of others and the place one has in the collective, whether that is the workplace the classroom the playing field or the government.

The happy man is the one who has the stable positive regard of his neighbours. If one really understands this, one understands that there is no conflict, because the happiness of the individual is only to be found in the happiness of the collective. Life becomes much simpler and happier.

—

If it has been collectively decided to aim for happiness on an collective level, then what meaning could individual happiness mean to anyone? — Shawn

This is such an odd formulation.

Let us try the experiment. Let us collectively agree to aim for happiness. I think the first thing we need is a constitution that expresses our agreement and constitutes the formal foundation of the collective. Are we all happy to do that? All those in favour say "aye "and call yourselves "founding Fathers (and Mothers)".


It's a bit of a fairytale, but do notice that it is a Good Old American Fairytale, not Mr Nasty's Fairytale.

If we all would still be living the tribal life... — Benkei

If wishes were horses...

the explosion of human population growth happened as a by-product of the industrial revolution. If we were still fishing with sailing boats and hemp ropes and nets, the population would not have been growing at the rate it has, and we would not be as numerous as we are, nor as totally fucked as we are, and there would still be lots of fish in the sea. But Steel hawsers and plastic nets are a thing, and I have to carefully sort the seaweed I put on my garden to decontaminate it.

I'm not advocating a massive cull of humanity, I'm predicting one.

yeah, also important — Mikie

Sure, Global warming is simply one aspect of the degradation of the environment caused by human overshoot that results by from myopia of self-centred, shortsighted thinking. But a drop in human fertility is rather an ameliorating factor to the problem.

It’s at least as real and important as toxicity. — Mikie

Middle class white males might be being emasculated by synthetic oestrogen pollution.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028202043893

This is far more important than a few million Bangladeshis and Chinese drowning and a few million African's starving, etc.

I can't grasp what you're saying. — AmadeusD

I blame your utter insanity.

It's utterly insane that cyclists are legally allowed in bus lanes. Utterly bewilderingly dangerous - and it encourages cyclists to blame everyone else. — AmadeusD

It is utterly insane that humans have voluntarily, by consensus, given up their own freedom of movement in favour of that of machines they have created.

When the stone falls on the egg, alas for the egg; when the egg falls on the stone, alas for the egg — Arabic proverb.

It is the vulnerability of organic life to damage in accidental contact with machinery that results in the domination of the machine unless regulation protects the rights of life. When cars were first introduced to the road in the UK, a law was instituted that such devices could only operate on the public road if a man with a red flag preceded them on foot to warn other road users. Unfortunately, as it was only the rich and powerful who could afford these monstrosities, this law was repealed, and thus the myth of the freedom of the road was transferred from the human being to the machine.

This reached its apotheosis with the building of the motorway system from which everything as natural as a horse, a pedestrian or a blade of grass was rigorously forbidden and excluded — rocks only, eggs forbidden.

By the sixties it became apparent that the freedom for all to travel anywhere resulted in everywhere being a carpark and nowhere worth visiting except those few corners inaccessible to the machine. "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot." (not us of course - them).

Yet still machine rights still trump the rights of human and animal, because folk cannot think straight, and "the economy" demands that we all have more and faster and shinier, and spend more of our lives roasting alone in our mechanical tin boxes between 'the machine for living' we call home, and mechanical serving life we call 'work'.

Thus the luddite view of progress as something to be resisted.

Dude, I didn’t read your post yet when I wrote the below. — Fire Ologist

Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ. A cliché in time makes Jack a dull boy.

no one believes that hokey stuff anymore. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, we know it's all the CIA making trouble and controlling our minds.

Have I fallen into the abyss? If so, can someone throw in a lifeline and pull me out? — Thales

Saw your first ship sink and drown from rocking of the boat
And all that could not sink or swim, were just left there to float. — Ship of Fools, Robert Hunter

And if you are able to pull me out, how will you know it’s still me? — Thales

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together — The Beatles

If you study the weather, you quickly come across features consisting of regions of low pressure with winds circulating around them. these form spontaneously under conditions where there is a local temperature gradient such that there is a mass of hot air below cold air. Hot air is lighter and rises while cold air is heavier and falls. the 'cyclone' forms spontaneously like the whirlpool that forms in a draining sink because water is falling and air is trying to rise. When they are big, we give them names and categorise them as storm or hurricane, or twister, etc. Eventually such features run out of potential energy and lose their identity.

In order to arrive at complete contentment, restrain your ambitions.
For everything which comes into being eventually returns again to the source from which it came.
Each thing which grows and develops to the fullness of its own nature completes its course
by declining again in a manner inherently determined by its own nature.
Completing its life is as inevitable as that each thing shall have its own goal.
Each thing having its own goal is necessary to the nature of things.
He who knows that this is the ultimate nature of things is intelligent; he who does not is not.
Being intelligent, he knows that each has a nature which is able to take care of itself.
Knowing this, he is willing that each thing follow its own course.
Being willing to let each thing follow its own course, he is gracious.
Being gracious, he is like the source which graciously gives life to all.
Being like the gracious source of all, he embodies Nature's way within his own being.
And in thus embodying Nature's way within himself, he embodies its perpetually recurrent principles within himself.
And so, regardless of what happens to his body, there is something about him which goes on forever.

- Translated by Archie J. Bahm, 1958, Chapter 16 — Tao Te Ching

https://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz16.htm

What Ukraine did up until 2014 was true independence, — Tzeentch

"True independence" is doing what Russia wants, and if you are so foolish as not be "truly independent". Russia will come and liberate you, and give you free access to their language and government as well. Now I understand.

That the Russians desire a neutral Ukraine is something that they've told us consistently over the course of some 15 years, and it's something they reiterated even after the invasion started. — Tzeentch

I dare say Ukraine would like a neutral Russia too. It seems to me that you nor Russia can understand what 'independent' means. It means you don't have to get what you want all the time from everyone.

The "imperialist expansion" narrative lost all its credibility literally one month into the war. — Tzeentch

It was you that suggested that Ukraine was supposed to be neutral. If that is not the justification for the invasion, then it can only be that Ukraine is supposed to be part of Russia.

I would say that Ukraine was supposed to be independent. That is what we seem to disagree about.

Talks with the Russians / Ukrainian neutrality is a fate worse than death? — Tzeentch

Yeah, of course; didn't you know? Any compromise at all is worse than death.

There's nothing heroic about that. It's folly. Though the deaths of so many men is tragic to be sure. — Tzeentch

War is always folly, and always a tragedy. Come to that, human life is mainly folly and tragedy. But allowing tyrants to triumph is no less foolish and tragic than warring against them.

I must say that i find the fact that The Great Dictator's ambitions have been thwarted for 3 years by a professional comedian rather wonderful. A picture painted in blood, but that is unfortunately the kind of picture we dictators enjoy. If only Putin could have been laughed out of Ukraine!

The idea of invading a country to ensure its neutrality is something worthy of the British Empire. Akin to enslaving a people to liberate them from their savagery.

↪unenlightened When the situation is sufficiently bleak, 'balanced' analysis just betrays an unwillingness to face reality.

Ukraine is strategically lost, and from such a position there are no tactical master strokes, unconventional military strategies or 'wunderwaffen' that can conceivably turn the tide. The worse one's situation becomes, the less options one has. — Tzeentch

In the long run, we are all dead. In the meantime, if one starts from the fundamental irrationality that the wasting asset of one's life is worth spending in a good cause, then one does not give up the hopeless cause, because that alternative is worse than failure and death. And from that position one analyses the best desperate measure to take in the meantime.

A slightly more balanced analysis: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-kursk-2024

And some obviously biased "latest news"...

Clearly this incursion is going to be crushed in time. — Tzeentch

Yes of course. Wagner are being recalled from Africa to do it! It might take them an hour or two...
You wonder why the Ukrainians ever bothered to resist at all. They must be crazy berserkers.

Seems to make some sense, what say ye?
— unenlightened

Ukraine's actions in Kursk make no military sense. — Tzeentch

Well I could make sense of what the professional military analyst I linked to was saying. Perhaps the Ukrainian military is stupid, and so is my analyst and so am I. But when your response AND Your quote of Mearsheimer begin with declarations of incomprehension, I rather tend to think that a strategic justification that seems to make sense to me would be worth actually considering and responding to.

Ukraine seems to have already mined a road to the South, and begun to fortify a couple of defensive lines one on the Eastern side of Sudzha, and one closer to the Ukraine border. and clearly this is not just a propaganda raid. They might be going for the nuclear plant, and I have seen several reports of them being already 20 k up the road in that direction, but there is another 30 k to go, and the logistics of holding the plant and the supply line territory would be formidable.

Russia said Wednesday that it strengthened security at the Kursk nuclear power plant amid Ukraine's assault in the region.

The Russian Guard Corps said it took additional measures to ensure the safety of the plant, including the deployment of additional units in the area. — yourlink

Well it is pretty clear that there are no significant combat troops in the area, only conscript units So I imagine if the plan is is to disable that plant and shut it down for a good while, they could probably do so. To hold it longer term might also be possible, but would be costly.

What makes a deal more sense is that the aim is to force the Russian to fight an offensive war on their own territory, and continue to attrit the Russians with a slow defensive retreat, as explained in the video above.

Herewith, a little talk about the possible aims of the Ukrainian Offensive. Seems to make some sense, what say ye?

Do you understand the true natural of reality and all that is naturally real? Let's hear abotu it... — Tom Storm

Use your eyes and your ears when crossing the road, and don't step in front of a bus! And proof read before posting.

Given the metaphysics of idealism, the true nature of our reality isn't readily described. — Tom Storm

So much the worse for idealism! Don't come crying to me about it! The true nature of reality is that it is naturally real, and what one can say about it can sometimes be really true, and the result of saying really true things about the nature of reality is that it is truth-telling.

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Have it which way you want, dude. Look at the evidence, form a theory.