Ding an sich?

That's a picture, what it represents doesn't exist. — MindForged

If it represented nothing, how could it exist?



One could object that a hot dog is actually a sausage, but that wouldn't help you when ordering your food.

There the old horse is! He exists.

@banno

Banno started a very long discussion on the old Philosophy Forum about whether Pegasus was real. It seems to me that many were agreed that Pegasus, wingéd horse, was real. How can that be?

Characters in fiction are not real in the same way my cup of coffee is real, (or maybe they are) but the fictional story is as real as the cup of coffee once it is told. That is so whether the story is told around a campfire or printed, bound, and sent to you from Amazon by under-paid and abused proles, slaving away for the greater glory of Jeff Bezos.

Someone reading this thread can not be 100% sure that Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank exist in the flesh, but he can be sure that we at least exist as characters in a thread. (Terrapin, MindForged, and Bitter Crank are in bigger trouble if they are not sure they are real either as flesh or as characters in this thread.)

I still have my 1988 Mac Plus in the basement. Lovely thing it was, with the coat hanger tool to open the case, should one want to expand RAM, for instance, as one would since it the original's RAM was something like 1 megabyte. It didn't even have a hard drive--sold separately. But it was, never the less, amazing.

Back to @Purple Pond's Aboutness of language...

The question is too obvious. As you said, it's like supposing there is a mystery to a screw driver.

If a fellow tries to fix his phone he finds that it is not so simple: Philips, blade, 5 point, tri-wing... etc. -- several special varieties to foil the drive to screw Apple or Huawei out of a fucking fixit fee.

I remember from my first teaching gig in 1968 using 'programmed learning' for adult literacy that "The cat is on the mat.". It used simple line drawings showing the cat on the mat, the rat has a hat, and ants without pants. From what memory in your head did you choose "The cat is on the mat"?

In any case, the statement "The rat has a hat." might be true, or it might be false. How would I know from the context of that one sentence? The cat/mat nexus is valid only if the cat actually is on the mat.

As to cats and mats, words refer by triggering memories in a brain. My adult learners who did not know how to read did not register the sentence as meaningful--hence the line drawings... cats sitting on mats, rats with hats, ants without pants. You see or hear the words, the auditory/visual/speech system processes them, and voila! a cat is on the mat. If you see the words "кот на ковре" the words will refer to nothing. Unless you speak Russian.

I can't find much wrong with your ideas, but I am not quite sold either. — ZhouBoTong

Fair enough.

I once over heard some black workers discussing terms: "We used to be called niggers, then it was negroes, then it was blacks, then it was African Americans. I don't know what we'll be called next." True story.

Some people use the term "aboriginal" for Australia's 'first people' and for Canada's 'first people'. Indians, redskins, native Americans, American Indian, etc. I try to use whatever term people seem to prefer. Niggers and redskins is pretty clearly not a good choice.

Hair, the musical. You familiar with it?

Bear in mind this very popular musical is from the 1960s, a much different time than now.



Here are the lyrics:

I'm a
Colored spade
A nigger
A black nigger
A jungle bunny
Jigaboo coon
Pickaninny mau mau
Uncle Tom
Aunt Jemima
Little Black Sambo
Cotton pickin'
Swamp guinea
Junk man
Shoeshine boy
Elevator operator
Table cleaner at Horn & Hardart
Slave voodoo
Zombie
Ubangi lipped
Flat nose
Tap dancin'
Resident of Harlem
And president of
The United States of Love
President of
The United States of Love
(and if you ask him to dinner you're going to feed him:)
Watermelon
Hominy grits
An' shortnin' bread
Alligator ribs
Some pig tails
Some black eyed peas
Some chitlins
Some collard greens
And if you don't watch out
This boogie man will get you
Booooooooo!
Booooooooo!
So you say . . .

I've heard some of those words used to reference blacks - but not recently.

Have you considered becoming a monk on Mt. Athos? Or becoming a holy hermit living in a cave? Something like that? After a few years of that the wretched world might start to look good.

I don't see giving charity as an exercise in me displaying grace, surely you don't either. — schopenhauer1

No, I don't see it that way either. Grace isn't something one displays or does.

So, what exactly do we do with this whole structure, work, charity and all? — schopenhauer1

Are you familiar with the religious idea of being "in the world" but not "of the world"?

Not being "of the world" represents one separating and distinguishing one's self from "the world" (structure, work, charity, social media, all that stuff) to the extent that one is able. It means identifying what in the world "is not for me" and what in the world "is for me". Philosophers have observed that people are driven like slaves by the demands of the world--not just that you work, but that you have a weed free lawn, drive a nice car, keep the monetary value of your property up, and so on. Strivers are all about achieving maximum rewards and displaying them to best effect.

You don't have to associate yourself with all that. Do you have to work for your daily bread? So you do because you don't want to starve. But you don't have to be a striver; you don't have to be the fastest worker, the top salesman, the largest grossing real estate agent, etc. You can arrange your life to get by with as little as possible -- thus requiring the least amount of effort possible, and least possible commitment to "the system".

How well does that work? At best, I'd say "so-so". At worst it is just another existential shit pile.

I would think it fair to terminate me based on the implication that I might not work well with other races. — ZhouBoTong

I don't much like southerners as a group, never had any sympathies for the Confederacy, believe reconstruction was too mild and ended too soon, etc. But the fact of the matter is, the Confederacy is part of American History, and so is Robert E. Lee. The car from the Dukes of Hazard, though, can hardly embody anything significant about American History, Lee, or the Confederacy.

If you were fired or not hired because you once dressed up as a car which, in the TV series had the confederate flag on its roof and was called the General Lee, then I think the personnel department at the firm to which you applied should probably be examined for psychiatric disorders.

Really, there is something quite neurotic in the obsession some people have with statuary, names, and symbols here and in other countries. That would go for people who feel they owe allegiance to the long-gone Confederacy as well as people who are enraged by seeing the symbol.

I believe in achieving social justice, but social justice isn't about symbols, statuary, and names. It's about the fair distribution of material resources and the opportunity to make desired economic choices and pursue opportunities.

Magic mushrooms. Seriously. They’re doing research on it for depression (at Harvard I think) and it seems to work wonders. — Noah Te Stroete

So I've heard. I have no experience with the drug.

What am I saving and why? — schopenhauer1

The life you save may be your own?

I think what Un is talking about, and he can speak for himself, is something called "grace". Grace is freely given and unearned. You probably are suspicious of grace, or unfamiliar with the idea. It's not charity and it's not materialistic. Suppose you don't like, don't believe in God? Is there then no grace for you? Grace isn't a deal: We don't -- we can't -- do anything for it. It's a gift. "I believe in God the father, almighty" isn't an incantation that forces god to shell out grace. I haven't audited god's accounts, but as far as I know, god can give grace to whoever--believers and nonbelievers, Hindus and atheistic communists.

Is there a secular, non-christian, non-religious version of grace? Yes, and it is elusive. It's a paradox that you can not struggle to get grace. You can't force even godless grace to just appear. You can prepare yourself but you have to let grace happen to you. (At least, that's the way I understand it.) It's like love -- you can't make yourself love somebody, and you can't force somebody to love you. But what you can do is let it happen.

You have to "let go".

Meditation would probably help you, if you were directed toward the right goal.

But that’s the attitude change. If it’s a choice, what does it mean to choose society’s need for production? At the end of the day that’s what I’m choosing. — schopenhauer1

You don't have to choose "society's need for production". There is over production as it is.

There is no rebellion outside of the abstract notions which are just talk around the behemoth material social reality that is to be accepted with joy. — schopenhauer1

I know people who didn't, who haven't accepted the behemoth material society reality with joy. I didn't accept it with job. To paraphrase the liturgy of baptism, "...behemoth material society reality, I reject you" (instead of "Satan, I reject you").

I, and others, like you may have to put up with social crap, but we don't have to rejoice in it. You can be as nonconforming as you can manage, and have as little as you can to do with the toilet full of social crap. Granted, it isn't easy. If you have to work (for daily bread) then you are likely to be dealing with at least some social crap. But you don't have to soak in it up to your eyeballs like some people do.

Keep complaining -- it's good for people to hear dissenting voices. But for your own happiness, carve out a little niche where you can feel OK at least sometimes.

What does one do when one is born but doesn't want to do what is required of being alive? — schopenhauer1

Drop dead? No, just a snarky comment -- not a serious suggestion.

Since you do exist, as unfortunate as that might be, it would seem that you could do whatever you wanted to do to make life as pleasant for yourself as possible. Of course there are downsides to existence. Gravity, for instance. It's a drag. Life sucks.

At times, we all can feel the futility of soldiering on through the swamp of existence. You are not the first person to lament it. You do seem unusually immobile, however. I don't know what idea or drug or strategic shove would get you moving again. Here in the northland winter people are forever getting stuck, spinning their wheels on ice. Sometimes pushing doesn't help. It's tough to get out of an ice rut. But... eventually they do, else they are found in the spring, frozen, clutching a nihilist anti-natalist tract in their dead hands. Figuratively, of course.

You have an idée fixe. You could dislodge it with a little effort and that might help.

It's cool and trendy to hate Ayn Rand. And I don't know why. Because what she says is amazing. — AppLeo

No, people have been loathing Ayn Rand for decades. It's old hat.

That you are 20 years old correlates well with liking Ayn Rand. Young adults, moving toward independence, in college or starting to build a career, equity... tend to like her. I read her several decades ago and thought she was, you know, OK. At my age of 72 she is not on my list of books to re-read; if I was sure I had another 30 years of mental acuity (and existence, of course), I'd find time to revisit her, but... the clock is ticking.

Yeah, you probably wouldn't know who Flannery O'Connor is. She was a Georgia writer whose short stories wonderfully expressed her rather dry, unsentimental Roman Catholic faith. She died at age 40 in 1964 from Lupus (an immune system disease). Some of her stories were regulars in freshman literature anthologies. She's hopelessly politically incorrect these days; a Flannery O'Connor story would be a multiple triggering event for fragile college students.

And now I know who John Rogers is.

William F. Buckley, conservative author, public intellectual, publisher of National Review, etc. interviewed Rand, but I can't find the clip I was looking for. Below is an Ayn Rand interview from 1979 with Phil Donahue, who is nothing like Buckley. I mention these just to note that Rand used to be a quite visible personality, and lots of people saw her on TV, as well as read her best selling books.

Here's the first Paragraph of Buckley's Ayn Rand obituary.

Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was, in fact, stillborn. The great public crisis in Ayn Rand’s career came, in my judgment, when Whittaker Chambers took her on—in December of 1957, when her book Atlas Shrugged was dominating the best-seller list, lecturers were beginning to teach something called Randism, and students started using such terms as “mysticism of the mind” (religion), and “mysticism of the muscle” (statism). Whittaker Chambers, whose authority with American conservatives was as high as that of any man then living, wrote in National Review, after a lengthy analysis of the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy, “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

Welcome. I'm glad you took a step past reading and wrote something.

Is there anything that Tom, Dick, or Harry could have done 10 years ago that would matter? — ZhouBoTong

Indeed there are things that could, would, and should matter 10 years later.

Let's say that Tom was being considered for a job in a bank, and had been convicted of embezzlement 10 years earlier. That would be a fatal problem for his application.

Let's say that Dick was being considered for a job in a bank as a security guard, and had an arrest for assault and battery. He paid a fine, no jail time. Security guard? Minor assault? Might be an advantage. Hire him.

Let's say that Harry was being considered for a job as loan officer. 10 years ago in college a woman accused him of attempting to force her to have sex with him. There was no police investigation, the college took no action after a cursory investigation, They were both 18 years old at the time. The bank has no idea what happened, except the record on social media revived by @me2. Apparently it wasn't very serious; the college or the police would probably have acted if a claim of rape had been made, especially if an exam showed that he had raped her. However, none of that happened.

I say it should be ignored because they were both juveniles at the time, both capable of misinterpreting the other's signals. No rape occurred. The woman didn't accuse him of attempted rape, but attempted sex (somewhat different). He has no criminal record; he has an excellent employment record since graduation (3.9 gpa). This ghost from his past is too tenuous to worry about. Hire him.

In the context of #me2, women (or men) can make an accusation of merely inappropriate behavior that is usually unsubstantiated or unwitnessed, and expect that everyone should believe the veracity of their accusation. No, sorry. Unsupported accusations are not good enough. Coming forward and accusing someone of unpleasant or criminal behavior that happened 10 or 20 years ago when the claim can not now be investigated by more than hearsay evidence is not fair. Now, some events that happened in the past can be investigated. If a rape investigation was made, the evidence (tissue sample) probably still exists. If someone murdered someone 10 or 20 years ago and was not previously accused but now has been, police can usually make some kind of investigation and either find evidence or no evidence.

The standards that are being applied in all sorts of situations in response to statements or actions which may be in fact innocuous often border on hysteria. Institutions are SO concerned about negative publicity that they sometimes go to quite unjust extremes to distance themselves from someone who said the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way... etc.

It would be possible to train a crow, or a parrot to do this, and note, these were banded birds, so... I'm rooting for the crows, but how naive the crows were... don't know. Clearly they weren't all that naive by the time they made their televised debut. Now, IF one observed a crow doing this in a natural setting, that would be more impressive. Like, if you set up this experiment out by a corn field and waited for a crow to land on the platform of the experiment, and it sized things up and proceeded to perform as filmed... Even better would be if the crows found their own pieces of gravel and dropped it into the tube.

Still, birds have been observed using sticks (which they had to "prepare") to spear insects in tree crevices.

The Minnesota DNR has a batch of cameras set up in various places to catch wildlife doing their thing without people being around. One of the cameras observed a wolf fishing. The wolf was beside a typical creek where one would find non-game fish like suckers swimming around. Interestingly, the wolf watched the water, grabbed a sucker, then deposited it on the bank above the water (biting it to kill it). Then it went and repeated the fish capture. It had 5 or 6 not-very-big fish collected before it ate them.

No one has observed wolves fishing, that I know of. Was this a pioneer wolf or is this just previously unobserved behavior? Don't know.

There's been enough videos made of various animals (like squirrels and raccoons) figuring out how to open doors, for instance, and not just by pushing, for us to suppose that they are capable of fairly complex problem solving. Cats and dogs are observed doing some of these sorts of things too.

Okay, so eating a human infant is fine then? — NKBJ

See A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift.

see above. Is it employing any reasoning at all, or just randomly plucking at straws, so to speak?

Well, I don't know how they do it either. I'm not sure how my brain solves problems (or frequently doesn't even recognize that there is a problem).

But take the crows that figure things out that are of interest to crows--like fishing a grub floating on water in a tube, but below the level the crow can reach with it's beak... The crow, in this situation, picked up pebbles and dropped them into the tube--raising the water level until the grub was close enough to grab.

Trial and error? (I've certainly used that method successfully on a couple of occasions. Read the instructions when all else fails...) Now, the experimenters had placed a solution at hand (or at beak). Supposed several different kinds of objects -- twigs, bits of polystyrene foam, little ball bearings... small stones. How long would the crow have taken to figure out that only bits of stone worked well? Would the crow have checked out the options first, and then selected small stones?

Crows have large bird brains and they are very social. They make many sounds besides their familiar 'caw'. They maintain relationships with their parents over a year at least. They can recognize specific human faces (identifying the faces attached to people they consider trouble as opposed to faces of people who tossed food around). And it is the face, not the body -- masks were used in the experiment and birds used the mask to identify the wearer. In the experiment there was some indication -- not a lot but some -- that crows could pass this information about nuisance or useful people from one generation to another -- not biologically, but by 'communication' of some sort. Unfortunately, too many of the crows had disappeared during the au natural experiment to produce much data on this last item. One adolescent child of the surviving parent crow did correctly recognize a mask as trouble. But... too little data to be trusted.

If squirrels and crows could cross breed, they's probably be running things.

I mean yeah, but that observation is trivial and doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Humans need to reason and cannot rely on instinct to live. — AppLeo

The real "grand scheme" puts humans and animals in the boat together. One of the ways religion poisons, is by splitting humans off from the rest of the animal kingdom, claiming divine favor, godliness, exclusive reason, etc. for humankind and a rather flat existence for everything else.

Much human behavior is genetically (or instinctually) directed--probably less than in other animals because our brains are organized for reasoned, instinctual over-rides. We tend to focus on behaviors we have reasoned control over, and pay much less attention to behaviors which are directed genetically.

Genetic control governs HOW we respond to WHAT. It doesn't govern whether we like Progresso more than Campbell soup, but it could very well govern how insistent we are about making our own soup. Instincts are what decide whether we will try -- and enjoy -- a ride on a roller coaster or not. Risk aversion or risk tolerance isn't something you choose.

As for animals reasoning, we have observed birds and mammals both doing problem solving. Crows are not reading Aristotle, but they have problems and they solve them--sometimes. We don't always solve our problems either, and we are reading Aristotle.

Animals can only know reality through observation. They navigate through life with their instinct.

Humans navigate with reason. — AppLeo

It would be more 'reasonable' to think of reason and instinct as a continuum rather than either/or. Non-human animals can exercise some reason and some human behaviors are instinctual.

The ancient idea of "an eye for an eye" was an advance in justice. The victim of an assault or a theft isn't entitled to inflict just any amount of damage he or she might wish--like death for the lost of an eye. Damage and punishment should be balanced.

Balancing damage and punishment is still a sound principle. The theft of property isn't worth capital punishment -- though as recently as 250 years ago in England it was. Even the criminal's death is not considered a balanced punishment for killing someone in many jurisdictions around the world. (Though there are places were being gay merits the death sentence.)

More enlightened policy calls for rehabilitation or restorative justice, if restoration is possible (as it would be in the case of petty theft).

Back in the 1960s was it? Dr. Karl Meininger, a psychiatrist, wrote about The Crime of Punishment--where the form of punishment the state uses is a crime in itself. Being imprisoned in a hell hole for 30 years for drug crimes probably counts as a crime in itself. Juveniles are certainly subjected to criminalized punishment.

Have you seen The Sopranos--Tony Soprano, et al, the TV several year long serial story about the mafia? The Mafia was very strict about the rules. Break a rule and you'll find yourself being strangled to death. Or shot, beaten to a pulp, and so on. The Sopranos illustrates the question of why we like this creep and his crooked cronies. I don't know. I really enjoyed watching the series, even though the Soprano and Co. behavior was repulsive.

How do we become moral people? We become moral because, as children, we fear punishment. We are told to behave properly, or we will be punished (required to be quiet for 10 minutes or being spanked). The child fears the loss of the parents' love, so it anxiously complies with demands to behave properly.

The small child internalizes this system, and as the child matures, the system remains in place but becomes more sophisticated. So it is, that adults do not need to be threatened with punishment every 5 minutes. They understand that behaving properly is better, and when they don't behave properly -- even if they are not detected -- they feel very guilty. Guilt is a gift that keeps on giving society well behaved people.

There are some people with varying degrees of psychopathy for whom this system of internalization was not possible. They don't have strong connections between their pre-frontal cortex and their limbic system -- the emotional center where guilt, love, fear, etc. live. It may be that the lack of neural connections between PRC and LS are literal.

Does the justice system work? Like locks exist for honest people, laws exist for moral, self controlled people. Once a crime is committed, the person needs to either be dissuaded from committing crime again, or they need to be secluded from society. Some people never commit a crime again after being punished (or they don't commit that particular crime again, anyway) and others get even better at crime, and do crime again and again.

The best way to reduce crime (there is no such thing as eliminating crime) is for adults to do a good job raising moral children. Unfortunately, there are people raising children who do not know shit from shinola. Their homes are too chaotic and disorganized for proper love, tender care, and beneficial discipline to operate. The children in these homes are screwed from the get go.

And, of course, adults who had excellent rearing occasionally decide to act against some social interest or rule. I have always been a very well behaved person, law abiding, and so forth; but even I have, on occasion, decided to commit some minor criminal offense. We need not go into details, but I think this is really quite common.

Some people, some societies, are just more crime prone than others. For instance, somebody told me a joke once... it was the recipe for an omelet from the Balkans. Step one: steal six eggs.

It appears we are out of luck. This thread does not seem to be the definitive discussion of abortion.

among libertarians — AppLeo

Which you sound a lot like.

What gives you the right to distribute money. — AppLeo

Well, to the best of my knowledge, no body has given me the right to distribute money. I do have some ideas about what to do with a few hundred billion dollars. I do not expect to get the opportunity.

Do you know what capitalism is? — AppLeo

Ummm, I think I have some vague notion of what it is, yes.

Which means capitalism is the only system that values the individual — AppLeo

Surely you must be joking, Mr. AppLeo.

You know what's greedy? People who want to take money from the rich even though the rich created their wealth through sheer productive ability and built major businesses that increased the quality of life for everybody. — AppLeo

Very lame. If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich? Or, if you are so rich, why are you not smarter? It's a puzzlement.

Labor creates all wealth. Some people have ideas, some people are able to marshal investment capital and arrange for a factory to be built. But the building the factory and making whatever is made in the factory (useful goods or wasteful crap) is made by workers transforming raw materials into commodities of one sort or another. People get rich by expropriating the surplus value that workers (the vast majority of the population) create.

It's a pity philosophers don't take her more seriously. — Wallows

John Rogers (whoever the hell he is) says “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Flannery O'Connor says "I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

Karl Marx had nothing to do with the American Experiment, yet we committed genocide upon the aboriginal peoples in our territory and we brutally enslaved millions of Africans. 1 in 25 men were killed during the civil war (population of 16m males, 640k killed). We seized the northern half of Mexico for ourselves. Former slaves experienced decades of terrorism. Labor obtained an 8 hour day and a 40 hour week only through bitter struggle. Roughly 50,000 people a year were killed on the highway for decades because of bad but very profitable engineering. so on and on

We are quite willing to attribute the horrors of the Soviet Union and the Cultural Revolution to Karl Marx, but we are reluctant to attribute anything to the spirit of free enterprise in which the US was conceived. Maybe we are not looking closely enough?

Our species is not very nice a good share of the time, regardless of the economic system we operate within. Everyone (especially in groups) are capable of doing really bad things. Human history 9or the last couple of centuries) is chock full of horror stories, all true and many understated.

My point? Capitalism, Industrialism, National Socialism, Communism, Maoism--pick your poison--entail massive processes which end up crushing the individual. Yeah, Communism was not nice, but it managed to achieve enough industrial production in less than a quarter century between 1918 and 1941 to defend itself from and defeat the German army. Nazi Germany was capable of prodigious production to support its war, and the UK and US pulled off equally amazing feats of production.

You don't like distributivism; I don't think economic freedom (unfettered free enterprise) is a good thing.

It just seems to me that democratic socialism, with its curbs and limits on corporate excess and individual greed offers more advantages for the future than another hundred years of predatory capitalism.

The literature seems consistent that mothers nearly always grieve termination of their pregnancy. — tim wood

Even though I am in favor of abortion being legal and readily accessible, I wouldn't for a moment suggest that aborting a fetus is a matter of indifference to the parents, particularly to the woman who experiences it first hand. A very early miscarriage can send parents into grieving, depending on the emotional investment in the pregnancy. For most people, conceiving, delivering, and parenting children is the central experience.

On the other hand, ending a pregnancy one didn't wish for, and preventing the child that was not planned on and perhaps definitely not wanted is also a great relief. Bearing the unwanted child is no small burden, and lasts a long time.

Which problem -- the problem of class or the problem of getting a good education?

For those in the upper classes, there is no class problem. They are at the top, they like it, and they plan on staying on the top.

The class problem belongs to working class people who spend their lives producing wealth which ends up concentrated in the hands of the richest .001% to 5% of the population. The solution is for working class people (who are at least 90% of any country's population) to understand how much they are getting screwed by the rich. Labor produces all wealth, ultimately, and when labor withholds its labor, the mighty will fall.

Yeah, you've heard something about this idea -- it's from Karl Marx. The solution is revolution: The revolution of redistribution of wealth and power. OK, so you don't like what happened in China, the USSR, or Cuba. Fine. You don't have to like it. Marx didn't spell out how the working class should put together a new, just society. Surely Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn't have all the good ideas.

The new society will be built by the working class as they see fit.

As for getting a good education, no matter what high school you went to, no matter what college you graduated from - Podunk State or Harvard - commit yourself to life-long learning. Education is always achieved by the individual through individual effort. This has been proven many times: Students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Berkeley who screwed around all the time learned nothing. Some people who never went to college became quite learnéd.

many bloody revolutions have been ignited by the melancholic. — TheMadFool

Or by the very pissed off.

The current psychiatric method of treating depression seems to be just an ad-interim measure - staving off the serious consequences of depression - — TheMadFool

True, because that is what is possible for a psychiatrist and a patient given the present conditions.

without any attempt to correct the larger causative social ills. — TheMadFool

The larger, causative social ills are going to require a revolution (literally, if not figuratively) to resolve. Who is going to do this? Everybody is going to do it because the problems are that big, or it isn't going to happen at all.

The deeper roots of opposition to abortion are that the fetus belongs to either a god or the father. An abortion deprives a god or a man of a baby. Men beget babies, women bear them. Women are suppose to get pregnant and bear children. That's their function. Aborting a fetus is a perversion of women's function.

In many societies controlling what women do has been an overriding concern. Women are supposed to be subservient (obedient servants). It isn't their place to make important decisions about life and death. Women are not entitled to decide whether to bear a child or not. Fewer and fewer people accept these notions.

We can not suppose that abortion of a 5 month or less fetus is a horrible experience for the fetus. It is not, because at 20 weeks, fetuses have neither consciousness to experience horrible experiences nor a sufficiently developed CNS to feel pain.

Later on, At 8 months for example, a fetus can feel pain, and can usually survive if delivered at that time.

I believe an acceptable position is that "Abortions may be performed up to the end of the 20th week without justification. After 20 weeks, abortion may be performed only if the fetus is found to have developed very abnormally, or its continued presence in the women endangers the life of the mother.

20 weeks is more than sufficient for a woman to consider whether bearing a child is an appropriate decision for her to make.

Aside from the individual men, women, and fetuses involved, the welfare of the world is at stake. Every effective means of birth control must be in play: sterilization, contraception through drugs or barriers, and abortion are all important methods of limiting fertility.

Social class is determined by the value you can produce in the market, not your background. — AppLeo

Many people think they live in a class free society, or that the class system is very fluid. They are not, and it is not. A good job and money will improve your standing among your peers -- but that's just the minimum definition of class. If you are a member of the crème de la crème, extra money is merely nice -- not essential.

"Class" (as in polished antique silver, old Persian rugs, and ancestors who got off the boat in 1620 or 1066) is derived from a family's reputation as long-term distinguished leaders of society. This usually includes being, and having been, reasonably wealthy, and WASP -- White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The bluest of blue bloods in the US are the descendants of the Mayflower Compact signers--1620. You can't buy your way into that group. the highest upper class in Britain is richer and larger than the highest American upper crust. They go back a long ways; 1066, at least. Some longer.

Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York City and multi billionaire founder of the Bloomberg Business News Service, doesn't have the family history to count as a member of the social/economic crème de la crème upper class. What he is is a charter member of the fewer-than-1% club of very very rich people. It too is very distinguished; it's upper class, and it's democratic--something the crème de la crème is not. Any very very rich person can join. Only women whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution can join the DAR.

His family didn't come over on the Mayflower. His family were not royalty. His family did not own plantations (and slaves, of course) in Georgia. His family didn't fight in the American Revolutionary War or the Civil War, especially on the Confederate side. Further more, he is a Jew. Even Jews that walk on water don't get into the highest level of the upper crust. Neither do blacks. Italians either. No Mexicans. Really! The very idea.

The crème de la crème highest crust of the upper class, marries carefully, sends its children to the right schools and colleges so they will meet other crusty crème de la crème scions and marry one of them.

If your great great great great grandparents were not crème de la crème upper crust, you won't be either.

Just because you can't be a Mayflower Compact Signer descendent, doesn't mean that you are trash. There are quite a few class grades below the crème de la crème level, yet way above riff raff. In my part of the world, would-be upwardly mobile people live in the right suburbs, send their children to St. Thomas or St. Olaf College. Their children take their place as the up and coming generations of social and corporate managers. It's a good group to belong to. They run a lot of stuff. But they're not crème de la crème. They are solidly upper middle class; kind of bourgeois. Can one buy one's way into this class group? Just about. You have to have been born into it, and attended the right high schools. But your children can belong to it, even if your parents didn't.

The lower classes have traditions too. One way to get into certain well paid tightly controlled trades is to have a father who was a member of that trade. He can get you in, but you have to perform on the job. It's not honorary.

One can see shades of class even among riff raff. There are those beggars who maintain themselves much better than others; they are willing to beg, collect aluminum cans, etc. -- whatever it takes to supply themselves with certain minimum necessities. Then there are the bottom of the barrel riff raff who get drunk, fall over on the sidewalk, and stay there until the police cart them off to jail or detox.

How much human suffering is okay?

We can't quantify or qualify it. Maybe we could say, "More than the individual can bear is too much." How much is that? Potentially, enormous. Some people can bear an enormous amount of suffering. Some people do not do bear suffering easily -- they are crushed by it. It isn't their fault -- it's just how they are constituted.

I have not suffered as much as some people have. I think I bore up reasonably well, especially to physical pain (injury, infection--definite cause). I haven't faced a potentially fatal injury or illness, yet. I expect to, eventually; might be sooner, might be later.

Suffering, of course, comes in 57 varieties. People with COPD feel like they are suffocating. Well, they are suffocating -- it's not just their imagination. It's not painful, it's terrifying, apparently. Alzheimers patients certain suffer, but their mental resources are so scrambled it is hard to communicate with them. People who have severe mental illness suffer intensely.

There is suffering, and then there is SUFFERING. I have osteoarthritis. Sometimes I have a large quantity of pain, but the quality is tolerable. It's dull aching. I've had very bad toothaches that were not tolerable. A bad toothache is 'loud' and very dense"--so much pain from one very small nerve. (It was a piece of nerve that a root canal had missed. It was really pissed off!).

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger — Purple Pond

What doesn't kill you will try again later.

So far, everybody has been on target. Everything said above is true. But...

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the student has no choice about being the pig's appendage.

The high stakes game of social mobility is over before the student arrives on campus. IF he or she comes from a high-achieving, at least affluent, well connected family, he or she will probably attend an at-least-very-good-to-very-fine college and, barring some major personality flaw (tilts toward psychopathic murdering, has a taste for cannibalism, sexually prefers little girls and boys, etc) things will work out just fine.

Even very bright, ambitious students from low-achieving, poor working class, socially marginal families will be lucky to complete college at all, and if they do will not ascend into the refined upper classes. Most children are attending schools that do not/can not prepare students for excellent collegiate performance.

Social rank is hard to buck, and effort isn't sufficient. The upper classes (where the choicest goodies abound) will not admit the learnéd rube from Fargo into the firm, period. He may have done very well at Concordia College, and he may have gotten a PhD in Chemistry at Wisconsin-Madison (unlikely but possible), but he will never belong to the Right Class of people.

Compared to where he came from (anywhere in Fargo; working class family; mother descended from Russian peasant farmers in North Dakota; father from lutefisk eating Finnish iron miners in Minnesota; Lutherans, father worked at a hardware store -- note, worked at a hardware store, didn't even own the podunk operation); mother works in a hair 'salon' in Fargo... he's doing really, really great. Very high achieving. He'll get a job at 3M in St. Paul, live in an older home in White Bear Lake, maybe play golf, do the usual, marry; have children; drive a nice SUV... but he won't be part of the St. Paul upper class no matter what.

, @et al

So, testosterone fluctuates daily and seasonally and declines after the prime years. I get that and it seems to be well researched (we've known that testosterone fluctuates and declines over time for many years). Now we would need to establish a causal (or at least correlative) relationship between seasonal variation in testosterone levels and appearance of depressive symptoms.

Depression (conservatively defined) isn't a new phenomenon, but it seems to becoming more common around the world now than it was 50 or 75 years ago. The rate of mental illness (requiring intervention) used to be posted at 10% -- this about 50 years ago. Over time it has increased to about 20% of the population. IF 1 out of 5 people are experiencing diagnosable mental illness in various countries, then something pervasive (and unnatural) is going on. What could that be?

Just an off the cuff guess would be the on-going turmoil that industrialization and aggressively managed economic policy causes in both developed and developing countries. Capitalism, more or less, would be another term for it. Capitalist (or for that matter non-capitalist) industrialization subverts individual, family, and community life to the needs of hungry enterprises. People can cope with these changes for a while (a period of years) but eventually the cost of adaptation begins to erode resilience.

Take as one small example the opioid epidemic: A very strong opioid drug was heavily marketed to physicians and was presented as not being an unusual addiction hazard. Stupid. no opiate is non-addicting. Addiction is just a feature of the way opioids work. Doctors should know that, but representatives of the Purdue Pharmaceutical Company, LP presented it as a safe drug, and doctors tend to rely on dug companies for information. Plus many doctors, being at least as venal as everybody else, enjoy the perquisites they get for generously prescribing whatever is on offer. The Sackler family which owns Purdue Pharma LP are the beneficiaries of the boom in oxycontin sales and addiction. They also make hydromorphone, oxycodone, fentanyl, codeine, and hydrocodone, MS Contin, Oxycontin, and Ryzolt (time release Tramadol, an opiate). They also make iodine-based surgical disinfectant washes, laxatives, and -- humanitarian of the year award -- gluten-free stool softeners.

I don't have anything against opiates: When used with caution they are effective for relief of moderate to severe pain. What opiates are not good for is long-term use, where addiction is practically guaranteed. Opiate addiction is really not good for the body, especially when the drug of choice is not readily available. If one could buy opiates over the counter, addiction would still be a bad thing but it might result in less socially destructive dysfunctional behavior practically required to maintain a supply.

Anyway, the Sackler family drove the sales of its narcotic products to maximize profits for themselves with enormously negative consequences for millions of people, directly and indirectly. They are an egregious example, but not fundamentally different than what most wealthy corporate owners are willing to do. The Koch brothers are another egregious example, but so are the owners of Shell, Exxon, Rio Tinto, Amazon, Facebook, et al.

Poverty, addiction, social disruption, over-work, naked exploitation, zero free amenities (like parks, clean swimming beaches, etc.), no time and place for good sex, good food, nice music (however defined--Mozart for me, rap for you)--add very abrasive carborundum grit to the grind of already unsatisfactory life and wear people down to the point they can no longer cope effectively.

a hot cocoa — NKBJ

At last! The missing piece of effective public health depression intervention. Hot cocoa stations (HCS) located at strategic intersections throughout the city. HCS will be an effective and inexpensive means to curb gun violence, suicide, domestic uproar, et al. Uber will deliver flagons of hot cocoa (with or without marshmallows) 24/7 free of charge in selected deplorable zip codes. Senior citizens can run the HCS for a small wage that won't affect their minimum social security, public housing, or food stamp payments.

suffering is inherently meaningful because we know what it is like to suffer and when we don't we can be glad that we are no longer suffering. — Wallows

God, it FEELS SO GOOD to stop hitting one's self on the head with a hammer.

Too many people are calling themselves depressed or are being diagnosed with depression and being given anti-depressants. "Too many" because there are other causes of people's dysfunction, misery, and unhappiness that have concrete causes and can at least be frankly addressed. (Whether they can be fixed is another kettle of fish.)

Bad relationships, chronic debt, poverty, brutal people, too much drinking/drugs, bad parenting, and so on leave people stressed out, angry, bitter, resentful, frazzled, maladaptive, and so forth. They don't need anti-depressants, they need relief from the causes of stress, anger, resentment, befrazzlement, bad lifestyles, ad nauseum.

They need to get their lives straightened out. They need honest reality-based guidance (if they'll take it). They need debt relief. They need to get paid more for their work. They need better transit. They need better child care facilities while they are at work. They need ready access to consistent medical care. They need more affordable decent food. They need to stop drinking so much and using so many recreational drugs. NONE OF THAT is depression.

-Clinical depression: where depression inhibits an individual's ability to function
-Melancholy: a general feeling of sadness that doesn't interfere much with your life
-Grief: a sadness that comes from the loss of something or someone
-Weltschmerz: a sadness regarding the general state of the world
-Stress, illness, or otherwise physically induced depression
-Life changes: major life changes, even good ones, have been associated with depression — NKBJ

So, I would rule out all your definitions of depression except the first and the fifth. The others are not depression -- they are what you named them: melancholy, grief, Weltschmerz, and life changes -- even good ones. Come on: Who, having gotten a better job, a raise, and an exciting new sex partner becomes depressed because of the good life changes?

-Hormone-induced moodiness: all humans go through regular chemical fluctuations that can cause brief spouts of depression — NKBJ

Hormones are measurable: What hormones are chemically fluctuating (especially in males) that would account for depression? It seems like that would be the most easily detected cause of depression, but it doesn't seem to be (unless you are counting neurotransmitters as hormones).

So: Depression, caused by stress, illness, or otherwise physically induced, inhibits an individual's ability to function.

Joshs's point is on target:

depression as a failure to adaptively cope within one's own subjective world of aims and goals. — Joshs

Failure to cope with the friction between one's private world view and public reality is a source of great stress. (Its the story of my life, soon to be made into a bad movie.)

Frankly, I don't see any value whatsoever in conditions which depress normal functioning. The hallmarks of depression -- poor memory, perseveration, lack of concentration, sleep disturbance, irritability, dysphoria, etc. etc. -- don't seem like advantages for anything.

Melancholy and weltschmerz may have philosophical or literary utility (they are useful flavoring agents) but they aren't depression, per se. Grief is usually transient, has a cause, is not abnormal, and is normally over in a year or so. 99 times out of 100, people progress through grief predictably.