By the time we are old enough to make half-ways decent subjects in the psych lab, we have already absorbed a lot of learning. A two-year old child is thoroughly contaminated by all sorts of experiences and learned information. Adults who try to parse out where anything in their brains came from are, of necessity, dealing with spoiled goods.

A problem with "intuition" is that our brains (apparently) perform many functions which our conscious attention cannot observe. So, when we "sleep on a problem" we sometimes wake up with the solution in hand. Intuition? Or should we call it background mental processing?

Sometimes our reasoning is conscious and quite deliberate. Much of the time, it seems, whatever we call thinking and reasoning goes on through extensive unconscious operations working with decades of stored information.

This isn't any sort of new insight, of course. But we like to claim that we have control over our thinking, when--I think--we do not.

Do babies "know" anything?

The neonatal brain is set up to acquire information, which it does immediately to a very limited degree. So, babies do not "know" who mama is until they have some good experience with mama, which one hopes happens post haste. In the days, weeks, and months that follow more information is acquired.

An interesting (observed, documented) phenomenon is that babies are born with very limited knowledge. I vaguely remember an experiment with new born animals. An optical illusion of depth was created and covered with glass. The little subjects were very reluctant to crawl beyond the point where the illusion began. Somebody did the same thing with human babies,

Human babies have been observed displaying surprise at confounding phenomena. The babies did not find balloons falling to the floor very interesting. When a helium-filled balloon was let go of and rose to the ceiling, the expression on the babies' faces indicated that they were shocked and appalled, as well they should have been.

The babies in these experiments were very young, and had not experienced much of anything yet, in the areas of optics and physics.

My guess is that newborn animals come loaded with the equivalent of "read-only memory" that enables them to start acquiring necessary information from the start. Some knowledge, but not very much, is built in.

What does "Too Much Magic" mean? In William Howard Kunstler's view, ""Magic" is all the high-end technology (that may or may not exist) that somehow manages to replace oil, gas, and coal and produces abundant food, fiber, and building materials WITHOUT also producing a lot of carbon and various other contaminants.

"Magic" assumes that we can have it all without the CO2, methane, and so on. Somehow we will be able to feed 8 billion people without heavy farm machinery, distribute food across the world without heavy shipping, and house and clothe everyone without using vast raw material and growing megatons of cotton. Somehow there will be dry land and clean water for everyone. Somehow it won't be too hot and humid (the wet bulb temperature) for people to work outside.

Fossil fuel is vital, critical, and central to the industrialization that produces the world we live in. There are no practical substitutes for fossil fuel. Wind, solar, wave energy, tidal energy, heat pumps, geo-energy, and so on ALL require the existing industrial base. Then there is the feedstock that coal, oil and gas provide. Heat pumps require mines, smelting, factories and electricity, for instance. Ditto for all the rest.

Are we totally screwed?

We may be. We will try to carry on, none the less, whatever happens, until...

Our only hope is fusion, or solar energy and hydrogen to make the energy portable. Or even better, a drastic reduction of economical activity. Try that telling capitalists though... — EugeneW

You are probably right that "a drastic reduction if economic activity" (which pretty much covers everything) is probably the only possible plan that could make a difference. All other plans involve "too much magic".

It isn't only the capitalists who will resist. A sharp, abrupt reduction in economic activity (including reduced food production) means immediate (rather than delayed) disaster. Reduced economic activity means a severe and prolonged depression--no work, no income, dwindling resources across the board, food shortages and hunger, then starvation. Grim.

Perhaps we could maintain some food production and distribution by marshaling the populations of nations to raise food. To the Fields! Human hand labor has a lower carbon foot print than your typical John Deere. If that were to work (and we didn't have a revolution sparked by angry office workers required to hoe long rows of beans) we might avoid starvation. But much less grain would be produced. Rice, wheat, corn, millet, and so on can be grown and harvested in smaller fields, but not in the huge quantities now produced.

Some small-scale manufacturing will be needed too, in all sorts of industries, but nothing like the present.

This dramatically scaled down economic activity would still leave room for the "reproduction of society", but a simpler poorer society, one more locally centered.

What are the chances of a peaceful reduction in the economic activity of the world?

Poor.

There is much that is useful in Freud's theories, not least 'pervasive polymorphous perversity'--we being sexual beings from the getgo. Infantile sexuality is, of course, not the same as adult sexuality. Are the oral / anal / genital stages useful? Not to me, except that terms like "anal retentive" are altogether too descriptive of certain people to throw them out as part of bad theory. Just like one may not believe in the devil, but "the devil is in the details" is too good a phrase to lose.

One of Freud's favorites, Wilhelm Reich, spoke out in favor of adolescent sexuality -- the importance of adolescents being able to explore sexuality. It was a scandal back then, and a lot of adults still dread adolescents doing exactly that. Not that anything ever goes wrong with hot teenagers exploring their sexuality!

Do you see any truth in the claim that Freud's theory of mind (Id, Ego, and Superego) was a ripoff of Socrates' Chariot Analogy? — Agent Smith

I don't know. He probably was familiar with it, being a well-educated urbane sophisticated crackpot. Were you planning on suing Freud's estate for copyright infringement of Socrates' ideas?

Freud's psychodynamic system is too rococo to be tied to any single source. I don't think he cooked up the oedipal conflict and penis envy after reading Sophocles' plays. Besides, he was wrong about penis envy. Men have penis envy, not women. (see the scholarly work of M. Python, Biggus Dickus)

A nuclear winter would make no difference, or make it worse. — Punshhh

IF we have a nuclear war, hundreds of cities nuked, enormous firestorms all round the planet, you can rest, quite assured that global warming will drop to the bottom of the list of things to worry about. As Tom Lehrer put it back in the 1960,

Oh, we will all fry together when we fry
We'll be french fried potatoes by and by
There will be no more misery, when the world is our rotisserie
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry

But we’re past the tipping point now, so there’s no stopping it. — Punshhh

My guess is that we are beyond the tipping point -- but I have no data to back up the guess. (Please don't send me data; I'm old and have no time to process extra data sets.) Whether we are or not, we will likely lurch into successively more difficult climate events that will be difficult to predict.

Tra la la

I find the Trinity to be a stumbling block and and an altogether unhelpful piece of theology. I guess that makes me a unitarian--one God, Jesus not God, no Holy Spirit.

I have never heard an understandable or persuasive explanation from a priest or pastor as to what the Trinity is. I don't find the trinity to be useful in terns of lived faith (which I pretty much don't have any more). The unitary God--omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omni etc.--seems to be fully sufficient. The Godhead and Jesus, maybe God became Jesus, the resurrection all present problems too, Never mind the virgin birth (and Mary still being virgin after giving birth to Jesus' brothers).

So, no. The Trinity doesn't do much for me. I don't think it (the concept) actually does much for anybody else, either,

Your Weltanschauung is perhaps not the same as mine.

What is going to happen in the future? Nobody knows for sure, because very unexpected things can happen. I'm old; I won't be here much longer. You are much younger; you will probably live to see how all this develops well past mid-century. I wish you, your son, the younger generation, and the next generations all the best luck you all can have.

My advice: Make your own observations. Splice them together and interpret them as best you can. Pay attention to news from around the world. Whatever is going to happen has long since been set in motion, and it will, in all likelihood, happen.

Enjoy your life today because the troubles of tomorrow will be difficult enough to manage.

Good luck.

Same with this climate lunacy, how can a 1 or 2 or even 5 degrees have a negative impact? — stoicHoneyBadger

To be charitable, maybe you are confused by the difference between "weather" and "climate". Weather is what happens, and what changes every day. Climate is what has happened over the last 10 years, last century, last 1000 years, last 10,000 years.

In weather, a 10 degree difference doesn't matter. Warming up a planet's climate (the heat gain over the whole planet averaged out) 1 degree C (or 2 degrees F) is a huge event. It's a huge event because the 1 degree difference won't be averaged out; it will be experienced as extremes.

I don't need to look it up--I remember it. The business about an ice age in the 1970s was nothing like a scientific consensus. 99% of the population was not worried about it. A coming ice age was a blip. Nuclear winter was a bigger deal because that was something that stupid humans could actually bring about, and the feared nuclear winter wouldn't start until after the even more feared massive destruction of nuclear war.

You seem to be impervious to reasonable scientific arguments. Maybe you are lonely and have found that imperviousness gets you more attention than perceiving reason. I don't know what your problem is, but you seem to be affected by what the Jesuits call "invincible stupidity".

This makes me wonder how things will be affected as the US becomes a more Latino nation. — frank

That is a good question, and one which was asked by the established population in the past. Those Irish! Those Italians! Those Jews! These unwashed rabble yearning to get here...

Largely what happened is that they assimilated and became the average American. They also changed what American had been earlier. Without the Irish, no corned beef. Without the Italians, no pizza. Without the Jews, no hot bagels and lox. With the Latinos everything is becoming a burrito.

The more contacts with the old country, the slower the acculturation. Latin America is not an ocean away.

The location in their native society from which immigrants come is a factor. A lot of Germans (pre-civil war) were from the German middle class. Later they were poorer laborers and farmers. Most of the Irish were displaced starving poor.

Latin America isn't a homogeneous continent. It is undergoing major changes along with the rest of the world. Previous groups have brought distinct flavors of politics, culture, crime, clothing, and so on. Irish gangs, Italian gangs, white gangs, Puerto Rican gangs, black gangs, latino gangs. Octoberfest, beer, bratwurst, but mercifully, no lederhosen.

Really, the cultural contributions of immigrants is too large to nail down. It's pervasive.

Staid Minnesota has a (relatively) large population of Somalis, SE Asians, and Latinos. I don't buy the argument that "diversity" is inherently good, but as time goes on, the immigrants have not changed staid Minnesota all that much. Annual consumption of pho and burritos has gone up, but Minnesotans have not taken to goat meat. People are not flocking to become Moslems or Buddhists; the latest immigrants are not becoming Lutherans. Yet, anyway.

The United States has regional cultures which over-ride the single 'national' culture. The Deep South and the west coast are distinctly different. The Great Plains and mountain states are different than the east coast. New York and Omaha are not just different in size. Charting how immigrants might change the culture has to account for how the various American cultures are changing -- apart from immigration.

I would prefer that immigration be sharply limited, but in reality I don't think that will be possible. In the decades ahead, the disruptions of climate change, population growth, poverty, war, and injustice are going to let loose a lot of population movement--willing and unwilling, desired and not desired.

Well, capitalist right wingers might be worried about profits, but most conservative or right wing people object to in-migration on cultural grounds. For instance Marine la Pen and others (not just right wingers) want to maintain French secularist traditions, and limit non-Christian religious manifestations in public. The US doesn't have the same version of secularism that France has. We have always been blessed or afflicted with sectarianism up the ying yang. Lots of Americans would probably just as soon Islam would disappear, but we are more familiar with religious pluralism. France, a traditionally Catholic nation (not too many Protestants--ask the Plantagenets) has a more monolithic religious background and a very strong secular culture. It's not contradictory.

So, there are both financial reasons and cultural reasons for wishing to limit immigration. Workers also have financial reasons to object to immigration. Workers willing to work below prevailing wage levels help impoverish native workers who do low skilled work. Take Roofing: It used often to be done by white workers; then it became a reasonably good job for black workers. Now it's work done by immigrant Mexicans and Central Americans, who may or may not be legal. (The music on the crews' boom boxes changed along with the workers--country, then bebop, then latin polkas.)

Meat packing (like at Hormel, Iowa Beef Processing, etc.) used to be good union jobs. In the 1980s the unions were destroyed and soon it became a setting for undocumented workers.

Shouldn't governments work to end this particular kind of exploitation? — frank

Yes they should, certainly.

I consider sex trafficking a different (and much worse) crime than crossing a border illegally.

Human trafficking (ranging from a gross crime to merely the first round of financial exploitation) is again different than sex trafficking. Yes, governments should stamp out human trafficking too.

Traffickers run a conveyor belt to rich countries; it begins in poor countries. Intervention has to be conducted outside of the destination countries, which makes things difficult. How does France or the UK conduct interventions in Nigeria, or the US in El Salvador? (Well, we figured out how to do interventions in El Salvador, Chile, and elsewhere whenever we felt like it.)

Yes. I don't remember what mechanism was proposed to bring about an ice age. Nuclear winter, however, was deemed more likely in the 1980s. It was a not-altogether-irrational fear. Were several thousand nuclear bombs to destroy many cities in Europe and North America, the resulting blasts and fire storms would throw up enough ash, dust, and smoke to deflect enough sunlight to bring about -- not an ice age - but a long nuclear winter, lasting years. Food production in much o the world would become impossible. Maybe we would not survive, owing to starvation, if we survived the nuclear blasts.

Big volcanic eruptions have chilled the earth in the past, some fairly recently. In 1816 Mount Tambora blew up, lifting a massive dust cloud into the upper atmosphere, chilling the world's climate for a fairly short period of time (see The Year without Summer).

The crisis of global warming is far better supported by science and ordinary observation than the somewhat far-fetched ice age of the 1970s.

BTW, don't rest too easily. There are enough nuclear bombs and still enough delivery systems around to bring about a nuclear winter. The Union of Concerned Atomic Scientists thinks that we are as close to doomsday now as we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the USSR started setting up nuclear weapons in Cuba.

axioms are questioned — stoicHoneyBadger

I think billions of people (especially us older ones who grew up before global warming became a global concern) are questioning all sorts of axioms. We grew up in an robust expanding economy which was lifting all boats (1950s, 1960s) but which then plateaued (for most people). The last 40-odd years have been a time of very little wage growth and almost continual inflation. Prosperity has come to mean something different than it did in the 1960s. More axioms being questioned.

We grew up during a period when the weather was pretty much 'normal'. We have seen winters becoming milder, spring coming sooner, and summers beaming hotter. This is first hand experience. We have all seen a lot more severity in weather events. 4 months ago, there were a dozen tornadoes sighted; previously (over 130 years) zero tornadoes occurred in December.

Many people have gotten swamped by a tsunami of conflicting information and wild claims about everything from globe warming to who won the 2020 election. Once upon a time there were 3 TV networks and the newspaper (which were effective money-making operations). Now, there are hundreds of news and opinion channels, very little of it vetted by competent editors. It's no wonder that people are so misinformed that they are "not even wrong".

No, the 5 stages of grieving are not relevant. It's more a process of recalibrating as new and multiply validated information comes in,

Starting at the bottom, the worse victims of exploitation are hidden victims, like undocumented migrant workers. — frank

Sovereign nations have a duty to control their borders. Unchecked population flows across borders have consequences for both the illegal immigrants and citizens, which is why nations do not allow unregulated immigration.

Yes, illegal immigrants are subject to exploitation. Their exploitation is beneficial to businesses who are happy to have low paid workers who are good employees (they won't organize, file a lot of complaints, etc.). Because low wages here are still higher than where they came from (if there is even employment) the immigrants still come out ahead. There are significant cash transfers back to origin families and communities.

A sub-basement wage group lowers wages for poorly paid citizens who are also exploited. (Of course, exploiting labor is the name of the capitalist system. Exploitation is that without which there is nothing.

I do not doubt that illegal immigrants are seeking escape from what are likely third word shit holes, and I am very much in favor of us assisting those countries, whether the source of illegal immigration is SE Asia, Africa, or Central and South America, and the destinations are the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

So "no" to illegal immigration and "no" to illegal immigrants. "Yes" to international assistance in situ.

In your particular case, "head up ass" is eminently scientific.

So wage gap or for the same job? — stoicHoneyBadger

Yes, wage differences are found for specific equally qualified men and women, putting in equal numbers of hours, effort, achievement, etc. Granted, the wage gap figures used in citations are averages, and sometimes averages of very large data sets. One should assume that some specific equally qualified women are being paid more than some men for equivalent jobs.

Individual factors result in variable wage results. I am a male with a graduate degree. I never achieved the expected wage levels that I normally would have because of job choices that I made, lack of ambition, dropping out of the workforce for short periods of time, and pursuing diverse personal goals. I'm not complaining; people who achieve high wages generally are very focused on job performance.

I don't see a scientific bases for such outlook. — stoicHoneyBadger

I don't know any thing about you. Maybe you lack enough education to understand the science. Maybe you are looking at the world through paleo-conservative colored glasses. Maybe you have your head up your ass -- I don't know. It takes a fair amount of bone-headed stupidity to say ask "Why do you assume 280ppm is optimal? why not 1280, for example?"

What is the optimal co2 level and how did you measure it? — stoicHoneyBadger

The optimal CO2 level was what it was for about 4 million years before 1875 (to pick a quarter century year--280 ppm. By 1875, fossil fuel consumption was beginning to raise the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. By the first quarter of the 20th century, we can see (in retrospect) that climate change was beginning,

Measuring the quantity of various gasses in the atmosphere is a straight-forward quantitative chemistry procedure.

An optimal temperature for human civilization is one where climate and weather are reasonably stable--about 280 ppm CO2. Added heat in the atmosphere (along with added water vapor) destabilizes both climate and weather, such that weather (and climate) become increasingly chaotic and unreliable. This is particularly important for food production. We are currently at 412 ppm and rising.

Look: I get that you are a conservative and you

— Bitter Crank

do not like a lot of the social changes you see happening around you. A lot of people, conservative and liberal alike, do not like what they see going on. Conservatives and liberals alike are worried about various pieces of social, political, and climate change. You do not have to LIKE the changes you see going on, but denying their existence doesn't serve you well. Fore warned is fore armed, and that can't happen if you disbelieve what is going on plainly in front of you.

Necessity. Most people are paid less than the value they produce for their employer. They work for less than they are worth under sometimes very poor conditions because there is no alternative. This applies to both men and women,

There were periods when many women did not work for wages, particularly before the Industrial revolution. Since many women (as well as men) have worked under similar conditions for relatively low pay. After WWII, many women did not work for wages (at least in the US). Returning soldiers resumed their jobs in industry and women were thus displaced. Women were expected to raise children at home. That was a workable arrangement during a period of wage growth and a booming economy. Towards the beginning of the 1970s, the economy changed. Wages started stagnating and was accompanied by inflation ("stag-flation"). In order for families to maintain their previous level of consumption (along with children's college expenses, etc.) women had to return to work, whether they received equal pay or not.

In the US, wages have not grown significantly for most workers since 1973. This is part of the deliberate redistribution of wealth from the working classes to the plutocracy.

You can believe in lots of things that defy logic and reason, even in man made climate emergency, but the fact is if women would do the same work for less, why would anybody hire men? — stoicHoneyBadger

The wage gap between men and women has been very well documented across all sorts of job categories. I have little sympathy for women at the top of the wage pyramid; if over-paid female execs are making 10% less than their over-paid male counterparts, tough shit. Men and women at the bottom of the pyramid, on the other hand, have all the reasons under the sun to be unhappy with wage structures.

Does crop insurance not take "too good competition" into consideration? — god must be atheist

My understanding of crop insurance is that it protects against the financial risk of natural disaster (flood, hai, drought, insects...). There are other devices to protect against over-production. An important one is the central government's purchase of surplus commodity crops (corn, cotton, rice...) and keeping them in storage until the demand and supply are favorable for sale. Another device is to pay farmers to leave land fallow. This can serve environmental purposes as well.

These price protection devices are especially helpful to protect small farms. At least in the US, there are not very many small farmers left.

Perhaps the biggest device to protect against over-production is the shift to corporate farming. Large corporations can diversify and vertically integrate their operations. Food processing is more profitable than food growing (in commodities especially). So, if you own 20,000 acres of land producing wheat and corn, you can still make money by turning the low-profit commodity into higher profit corn flakes, cake mixes, and so forth.

One might think that in a world of 8 billion people, there would not be such a thing as over-production of food, but from a financial POV, there is. Everybody from a Texas rice farm, a curry factory in India, to a street vender of rice balls in Sri Lanka wants to make a profit.

This was personal experience?

The reminds me of a joke I heard in college 57 years ago, Why does one remember these things? It was a "dumb pollock joke" told by Rick L. The joke opens with the pollock's buddy taking an urgent shit in a shoe box, and putting it under the bed. Later, the dumb pollock is having sex for the first time (with a woman). His buddy had instructed him to retrieve a condom from a box under the bed. The buddy was outside the door waiting to see how things would go. He heard the pollock yell, "Hey, there's shit in this box." The buddy called back, "turn her over, stupid; you've got the wrong box."

I don't have milk, unfortunately. — stoicHoneyBadger

Not necessary, You've heard of baby bottles? Besides, your wife can pump it at work and save it for the baby, next day. Breast feeding is a very good thing especially for the first few months.

True, IF there was a crop failure (hail, grasshoppers, drought, flood, etc.) insurance would help a great deal. But prices will normally fall if farmers have great harvests. Supply and demand. True, good years and bad years balance out, IF one isn't downed by debt.

I was just drawing an analogy to how smaller economies (Greece, Sri Lanka, Argentina etc.) can end up being at the mercy of the IMF, World Bank, and international capital in general.

Development, which always seems like a good thing, can result in bankruptcy. So can reckless spending, diverting money from productive public projects into unproductive private pockets, and bad bets on the future.

The Great Depression era lyric I was thinking of...

The farmer is the man
Lives on credit 'till the fall
Then they take him by the hand
And they lead him from the land
And the [banker / middle man / lawyer] is the one that gets it all

Farmers, of course, don't always go broke. Farms have been the basic of a lot of capital accumulation by small entrepreneurs--at least in the past. And it isn't all indebtedness. Technological change led to agriculture that was more efficient and more profitable on a much larger scale. (More efficient and more profitable methods are wrecking the land and water resources, but that's for another thread.)

We really shouldn't be surprised that the people who run money run it on behalf of people who have money, not on behalf of those who do not. — unenlightened

Even your friendly small-town banker depends on the community's indebtedness to them. A prime source of problems down on the farm has been banks encouraging farmers to expand operations, through bank loans, of course. All's well and good as long as the market for parsnips or parsley--whatever they are growing--keeps expanding too.

It doesn't. The market for corn, soy, wheat, meat, milk, parsnips, and parsley expands and contracts; prices rise and fall. Payments on the banker's generous loan become difficult to make when the prices fall, and default becomes likely. More loans the next year may bail the farmer out, or nail his coffin shut.

Small countries are like small farmers. Unless they are lucky, the costs of debt and default are high and the risks are every present.

As I said, it is an ideal to strive for. Like Christians want to be like Jesus, but it doesn't mean any of them would really get there. — stoicHoneyBadger

If it is so extraordinarily difficult to achieve an ideal, such that no one does, then these types do not actually exist. If they do not exist, we do not know what "ideal" types would actually be like.

We know what 'real people' are like. We prefer some people, and some types of people, to others. Better than aiming for the unattainable, aim for the highly desirable types that you can and do know,

My father was a rural boy who grew up to be a very responsible and intelligent person, father of 7 children, a good husband, a devout Christian, a consistent and persistent worker and provider for his family. He was not an athlete; he was not an intellectual. He was a good, kind, decent man--a real type you, I, your son, or anybody else could become like.

We all know people we don't like, don't admire, and who we do not want to imitate. These people are not the antitheses of ideal types. They are just real people we do not find admirable.

Could you be more specific here? — stoicHoneyBadger

Trump was a crook before he was elected. Tax fraud was his specialty. He violated numerous laws before and during his presidency.

He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. The Paris Accords are inadequate and have been ignored around the world, but his reasons were his loyalty to Republican energy interests and climate crisis denial.

He engaged in potentially damaging relationships with Vladimir Putin (potentially treasonous).

He encouraged insurrection on January 6, 2021. This was an extremely serious illegal act for a sitting president. It was an attempt to prevent Congress from ratifying the election of his opponent.

Since leaving office, he has yet to acknowledge that he lost the election, and has been working with Republican Party operatives to make it easier to falsify election results and at the same time limit the number of voters who might vote for the opposing party.

and so on and so forth. I am trying to forget his term in office.

Presidents in general are not reliable truth tellers (not because they are morally deficient, but because of political necessity and expedience) but he set a new low for deceit and misrepresentation that we had not seen since Richard Nixon (forced to resign in 1974).

EDIT: He further betrayed the American people by being the incompetent narcissistic buffoon that a majority of the population thought he would be.

By blocking the construction of the keystone pipeline and revoking numerous off and on shore and drilling permits. Lower supply = higher price. — stoicHoneyBadger

There were very strong environmental reasons to block the Keystone pipeline. The biggest reason is that Keystone would carry the "dirtiest possible" oil from the Canadian tar sands fields. The tar sands are a mix of sand, clay water, and a type of thick oil. The mix has to be either dug up like coal, and then heated to extract the oil. Or steam has to be pumped underground. Extraction thus uses more energy than pumping oil or fracking.

It's not a great source of oil, but it is the only oil Canada has got, so... they dig it up.

Rather than working hard to scrape the bottom of the oil barrel, we should be working harder to replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, and nuclear. (Seems to me that most hydropower potential is already tapped) AND reducing use of energy across the board.

Global warming is real; we have just about run out of time to avoid ever worsening consequences.

That Trump did not start any wars and did not betray any allies. — stoicHoneyBadger

Trump was too busy betraying the American people.

I'm from eastern Europe and what I see going on in US, Canada, UK, etc. is perceived not as progress, but as madness. So we clearly have no desire to join this lunacy, we'd better stay with Poland, the Czech republic, Ukraine, etc. — stoicHoneyBadger

I'm an old man now, and the years of striving as a boy and young man are ancient history. Your ideals are yours to pursue, and as far as I can tell, they are good.

No doubt that some of what you see going on in Europe and North America not only has the appearance of craziness, some of it actually is crazy. We might not agree on the list of things that only "look like crazy" and "really are crazy". May I suggest that some of what has gone on in Eastern Europe (and the rest of the world) also looks like crazy, and some of it actually is crazy. Madness of this sort is never too far away, anywhere.

It seems to me that not very long ago in Eastern Europe, and a little less recently in Western Europe and North America, 'peasant' men and women both worked in the fields digging, plowing, planting, hoeing, and harvesting. Men and women alike have worked in heavy construction and factory work. Both sexes had to have thick legs, strong backs, and broad shoulders to do this work. Thanks to mechanization of work, one now has to spend time doing artificial work (exercise) to maintain a fit body. Women can afford to have some sort of Parisian or Hollywood ideal shape, since they won't be digging any ditches in the near future. Some men still do enough physical labor to maintain a strong body. But most men are not doing physical labor.

You know all this, of course. And you know that all this came about through impersonal large-scale social and technological processes, not just in North America and the UK, but also in Eastern Europe. When the old, stable systems of the past fall apart, people sort of 'go crazy' trying to find a new stable center. The more difficult that is, the more madness there is. Some of these vast changes result in beneficial liberation from the past.

On balance, most people prefer being liberated from the drudgery of labor, the heavy hand of Church and State, and (often) suffocating tradition. Those are replaced by the equally heavy hand of the capitalist establishment, Yes, it is true that liberated people sometimes go to extremes in politics; the norms for public decorum may fall so low so that it seems like "anything goes". Education deteriorates because employers need fewer well-rounded educated and knowledgeable people. Indeed, too many well-rounded, educated, and knowledgable workers are a nuisance to employers. Nothing but trouble!

You have the singular misfortune of "living during interesting times", as the proverbial Chinese curse goes. Best wishes to you and your family; I hope everything works out well for you.

I am reluctant to endorse your goals for your son.

It's all well and good to have the mind of a philosopher, the spirit of a warrior, the body of an athlete, and the soul of a creator, IF and only IF those are the traits your son has the native ability to manifest, and IF, and only IF those are the traits your son wants to have. (The jury is likely to remain out for a long time on whether some, all, or none of these traits are learned or are native.)

He may be a perfectly fine son, person, citizen, etc. and not manifest these traits.

Suppose he doesn't pan out the way you want him to?

Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class — Paine

There's more to it than my favorite part about the stupidity pf lawns.

C. Peter Domhoff Who Rules America and The Bohemian Grove and other retreats;: A study in ruling-class cohesiveness and others. Domhoff has (surprisingly) also written about dreams. Some of Bomhoff's material is on line at https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu.

C. Wright Mills The Power Elite 1956, but still true. "C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University."

Dorothy Day The Long Loneliness: (the autobiography of the legendary Catholic social activist)

Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find and other stories.

John Rechy City of Night 1963 Lets hear it for a great account of sexual adventures (cruising the streets and parks of Los Angeles) If you prefer your erotica served up as sociology, try Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places his scandalous PhD dissertation about gay sex in St. Louis, Missouri city park toilets in the 1960s. The scandal was much less about men having sex in public toilets and much more about his methods of studying it.

Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited & the BBC's dramatization

Robert Brooks I Claudius & the BBC's dramatization

There is no such thing as absolute morality.

Take the Ten Commandments: they seem to demonstrate absolute morality, and some are more absolute than others (in practice). The prohibition of killing people is honored in the breach by the most and least devout together. Or, the Seven Deadly Sins -- Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony, Avarice And Lust. The 7 deadly sins have 7 heavenly virtues: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence. These lists are distillations, not de novo rules handed down from Mt. Sinai, the story in Exodus not withstanding.

Absolute rules or lists of sins and virtues are touchstones. We 'touch base with them', we may attempt to observe the 'spirit' if not the 'letter' of The Law.

People living together develop a default morality, based on millions of interactions. When in doubt, we might look to whatever 'touchstone' we like to measure how off-base something was, is, or would be. And we consider the consequences. We might wish that some obstacle to our happiness was dead, but the price of getting rid of them is usually too high--but obviously not always.

We tend to be neither as bad as we could be, nor as good. We tend to seek workable compromises.

As Levendis, the daemon in THE MAN WHO ROWED Christopher Columbus ASHORE by Harlan Ellison said, "It is not surprising that there is bad art; what IS surprising is that there is so much good art everywhere."

This applies to books too. There are so many great books of all kinds. That's the reason I reject "must read" or "best books o all time" lists. It might be more helpful to present lists of bad books.

I have read books by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn; Fyodor Dostoyevsky Leo Tolstoy; Soren Kierkegaard; Franz Kafka; George Orwell; plays by William Shakespeare. Little Milton; no Nietzsche; no Schapenhauer; no St. Thomas Acquinas; a little by Augustine and St John of the Cross; very little Hannah Arendt.

I count some of the items on your list as great literature. I can't think of any reason why everyone should read everything on your list. I majored in English (a long time ago) and have since read quite a bit in classics, religious studies, science fiction, history, and science. Many of the books I read were good FOR ME to read. Should everyone read my long list of books? Of course not!

The best advice I can offer "everyone" is this: If you have the inclination to read a lot, then read widely. If you don't feel inclined to read a lot then you probably won't. If you can, at least find a few books that you enjoy.

There are authors who I love--Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg. I also like Allen Ginsberg and some other beat poets. William Blake is on my A-list, and so is John Donne. There are a mixed batch of poets I have read with pleasure (and not a few I tossed aside with disgust).

Load the cannons with insufferable canons of literature (and every other art) and fire away.

It's not canonical books; it's canonical lists.

Straight people and their tedious sex problems! All this bitching and carping about consent, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory sex. I'm surprised the birthrate of first world countries hasn't totally collapsed.

If straight people are unsuccessful in having reasonably good sex in private, then they will have to start having it in front of an audience which can provide real time guidance.

Spit in my mouth — Hanover

When did spitting in somebody's mouth become a thing? It's started appearing in gay porn fairly recently? Saliva -- whether traded in kissing or spitting -- is the same, but how do people interpret the act? intimacy? Love? Contempt? What?

Plus, at this point, the real issue of concern is what the sanctions are about to do to the Russian society. — frank

I wish there was a clearer picture of what the sanctions are actually doing. Of course, gradually tightened sanctions are not going to have an over-night effect, but I hear mixed messages on their effectiveness.

Of course I know nothing about your brother. But... Perseverating negative thoughts (all the people in my life that I have hurt) is a feature o depression in some (many?) people. Self-blame and guilt are also features for some (many?). Maybe the situation is that the antidepressant your brother was taking just wasn't effective for him.

People stop taking psychoactive medication because the drugs work, and they don't need them any more. Then they relapse. People also stop taking these meds if they don't feel any better. That is not an unreasonable response, but a different medication (along with talk therapy) might have been successful.

Maybe your brother did hurt a lot of people, or perhaps he exaggerated his guilt (to himself). He wouldn't be the first or only depressed person to consider himself a miserable failure, In some ways, the feeling of failure is the flip side of unworkable perfectionism. Some people manage to achieve some sort of perfection, but most of us don't. We just keep beating ourselves over the head because we are not smarter, happier, sexier, richer, more fit, better hung, or anything else under the sun. Short changing ourselves is a feature of depressive thinking.

So how is your brother doing?

He did consider it science, and it isn't his fault that experimental psychology had not developed far enough to provide methods for testing whether psychoanalysis worked, and if it did work, what aspect of it was key to success. I would call it more "ruminative" than meditative', but that's not the significant thing.

Psychoanalysis isn't dead, but good luck finding insurance that will pay for it. Talk therapy with a competent therapist (there are fewer of them than one might think) is unquestionably beneficial for many people. Besides finding a good therapist, one needs more than 6 sessions, usually. A year of weekly sessions would be more like it.

Whatever therapy one seeks, it seems like there are a couple of truths, at least:

Self knowledge is good and useful. (know thyself, and the unexamined life isn't worth living)
Therapy means change. (Easier said than done)
Sanity is difficult to maintain in a crazy society. (Erich Fromm)

William James was the first 'professor of psychology' at Harvard, 1875. The first PhD in psychology went to G. Stanley Hall in 1878. So... from Socrates to Psychology wasn't exactly a short cut. Philosophy wasn't interested in experimental methods. Science in general is said to be an offshoot of philosophy but again, it took a long time.

Freud developed his system of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. He deserves credit, but psychoanalysis would have benefitted from more science and less philosophy.