Comments

  • Obeying the law and some thoughts for now
    We should obey because we do not want to get harassed, kidnapped, or killed by others. So we do our best: shuffle along in the hopes that every move, thought, and word stays on the correct side of some largely-unknown code.

    The law, as a whole, is unjust. We had no hand in its creation, no agreement to abide by its dictates, and no opportunity to exist outside its scope. Everything about it is an imposition. Everything about it operates on the idea of coercion, theft, and the violation of human rights.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Yeah, I don’t get it. Now abortionists get to vote for the policies they want.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    I just wonder whenever I write a post, your name appears shortly after. It’s odd.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    My eyes glaze over whenever I see your name, Xtrix. No good questions, responses, and even the insults are boring. Gotta try harder, man.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Is anyone (with the exception of the MAGA cult) foolish enough to take what a politician says at face-value? Anyway, you have a remarkably low tolerance for human sweetness.

    It’s not about policy at all, is it?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    Not a single interesting thing has come out of you.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The Trump campaign was hacked and the data given to the press, but they won’t report it because publishing emails is now verboten for them. Are you all upset?
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    They’ve been doing it their whole lives. No doubt they’re good at it, if branding is your principle upon which to judge. With an army of campaigners and millions of dark money in your pocket, we wouldn’t expect anything less. But there is no better to hide your lack of interviews and lack of transparency behind such a fake exchange.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    No, don’t be fooled, communism is not cooperatives and more democracy. These little tales are what they tell you to trick you into giving up your freedoms. Next thing you know you’re in a labor camp.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)

    Perhaps too scared to face hard-hitting question, whether about Harris’ flip-flopping or questions about Waltz’s stolen valor, Harris and Waltz interview each other!

    It’s all an opaque act, a virtual candidacy, like Biden: the election of a figure head to represent the US in world political pageantry.
  • Perception


    Do you understand what pain is? What smells and tastes are? Vision isn't special.

    I know we smell, taste, and see our environment, yes.

    I'm not concerned with the adjective "red". I'm concerned with the noun "red". I've been over this with Banno and others.

    You can talk about pens as being coloured, just as you can talk about stubbing one's toe as being painful. But colours and pain are not mind-independent properties of pens or stubbing one's toe; they are the mental percepts (which may be reducible to brain states) that pens and stubbing one's toe cause to occur.

    Besides, I can dream about red dragons. The adjective "red" is not being applied to some mind-independent dragon that reflects 700nm light.

    But if I were to give a general account of the meaning of "the X is red" or "red X" it would be something like "the X looks red" or "red-looking X". The noun "red" in the phrases "looks red" and "red-looking" does not refer to a mind-independent property.

    The noun “red” doesn’t refer to anything, save for maybe a concept or some other string of words like a definition. Nouns are persons, places, or things, and “red” is neither of the above.

    But your general account uses adjectives, not nouns. There is no noun “red” in the phrase “looks red” because the noun is X and “looks red” is the predicate modifying it. You can try using “red” in the place of X and see what you come up with. “The red looks…”.
  • Perception


    Colour qua colour is the experience; colour isn't light, isn't atoms reflecting light, and isn't some third mind-independent thing that is neither light nor atoms reflecting light.

    It’s not clear what we’re experiencing when we use that sort of language, though, leaving unexplained the question of what color is. It’s impossible for me to understand what experiencing an experience is and what that entails. On the other hand, I do know that I am experiencing mind-independent objects, such as the paint, the light, and its surrounding environment.

    The adjective “red” can only describe a red thing, and it is that thing that absorbs certain wavelengths, and reflect others. There is no reason for me to apply that adjective to any other objects, especially mind-dependent ones.
  • Perception


    So colour experiences change when the neural activity in V4 and VO1 changes.

    I was speaking of color qua color, not color experiences, whatever those are. I don’t doubt that you experience the changes in pigment, but it seems to me the changes in pigment are the result of the changes in the object, not some other mind-dependent property. We can test this by mixing paints. It results in a change in color of the paint. At no point am I altering a mind-dependent property to achieve the results.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    The common ownership of the means of production sits as a dream in the heads of communists, just like the dictatorship of the proletariat, the labor theory of value, class struggle, and a litany of failed communist predictions.
  • Perception


    I’m wondering how this view accounts for the change of color, or the differentiation between colors. Mind independent things change color because their properties change. We can do this by adding pigments, dyes, etc. This accounts for the change in the color, which I think means the color is in the mind independent thing.

    What mind-dependent things or properties change according to your view?
  • Perception


    There is no red "in" the pen. The pen just has a surface layer of atoms that reflects light with a wavelength of ~700nm. When light stimulates the eyes it causes the neurological activity responsible for colour percepts, and we name the colour percept ordinarily caused by 700nm light "red".

    Say that a coloring agent is added to a clear pen in order to make it red. Different agents can be added to different pens in order to add different color to the plastic of the pen. Pigments and coloring agents exist out there, in the pen, independent of the mind. I can’t see the color anywhere else, whether beside it, in front of it, or somewhere behind my eyes.

    This leads me to believe the color, which is the coloring agent itself, mixed as it is in the plastic in order to produce a singular result, a red pen, is why the color is in the pen.

    In scientific terms: the properties of the material in the pen determine the wavelength and efficiency of light absorption, and therefor the color. My question is: what properties in the “color percept”, whether added, removed, or changed, can explain why the pen is red?
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    It is a fallacy. And you’re telling me you hope Kamala Harris is a real communist while arguing that the entire Chinese communist party aren’t real communists. How can you dig a deeper hole?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    Your confirmation bias may be coloring your perception. Are you predicting he'll space out and wander off in the debate? If he doesn't, will you assume he's on some secret miracle drug that's being kept from real dementia patients?
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Oh, a “real” communist. None of the other ones were real.

    Do you know why someone would abuse the No True Scotsman Fallacy? To avoid valid criticisms of his argument. But to understand what I mean you’d have to have a shred of self-respect and decency.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    What proof? Empty assertions and evasions is all you’ve ever given.

    First you hope for a communist politician and now you are trying to distance yourself from them.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    No one really cares what kind of companies and associations you like. In fact I’d hope you’d join one. But none of your evasions change the fact that the countries mentioned have communist governments, run by communist politicians from the dictates of a communist party, all of whom wrote the party and government constitutions that explicitly state their aim to bring about communism. None of it changes the fact that you said you hope Kamala is just like them, a communist.

    All of the horrible things these people did and still do in order to realize their goal proves only the lengths they are willing to go through to get it, and also the types of behavior you are willing to put up with all because you believe an old and out-of-fashion theory.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Yes, we haven't seen communism yet. Except for before industrialisation.

    There are plenty of examples of people trying to bring it about, though. They turned out to be all shit-holes.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    I asked why you hoped Kamala would be communist, and you told me to go read Das Kapital to come back with some arguments. Now you’re chastising me for equating Marx with communism.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    You’re telling me to go read Marx while accusing me for being unable to think for myself. I’ve read Marx I’ve read his critics, and his critics won. But I also know history and everyone except you has watched your communism fail spectacularly in every instance. So can you give me any reason besides reading Marx that one might want a communist to rule?
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    History is the greatest argument against communism. Get back to me when you have learned some.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    We can only hope she's a communist.

    Why?
  • WHY did Anutos, Melitos and Lukoon charge Sokrates?
    Quite simply, they are censors. They’ll abuse power to silence views they do not like.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    The realization that Harris is running a virtual campaign is setting in. No policy, no interviews, flip-flopping on past views like the banning of fracking…no one knows what she thinks or believes except Kamala. The only principles one can glean from her stump speeches is the same hopey-changey piffle we’ve all heard before. It’s a shame some people love that stuff as much as they fall for it.

    But forget grass-roots. The Harris campaign and the media have worked together to form a movement of pure astroturf. Her free concerts dressed up to look like rallies proves she has a lot of money to toss around, and she can garner what appear to be supporters so long as the payoff is worth it, but the sponsor of the infamous Green New Deal is not much different than the once-failed presidential candidate of 2020 except that this time she’s the anti-Trump movement’s last hope. Like how quickly Harris believed Jussie Smollete, that movement will swallow anyone and anything to keep their folk devil out of office.

    So far no leaks, no policy, no hard-hitting interviews—for all we know she’s the great communo-fascist Trojan horse we’ve all been waiting for. But they can only keep a lid on it for so long.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    There was the intel provided by Dutch to the CIA earlier in the summer. The fact that the allegation was utterly false just makes it all the more egregious.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    That's because Democrats are always heavily armed.

    They were. four shootings and several alleged sexual assaults in the span of weeks.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    So the "propoganda I was referring to was the falsehood that the Clinton campaign wanted to make stuff up about Trump and that they used this in the campaign. That is categorically false.

    But they did.

    https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/05/20/politics/hillary-clinton-robby-mook-fbi
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Find illegal votes because he was concerned about illegal activity, like a president ought to be. Democrats objected to Trump’s election first by trying to impose “faithless electors”, and also by claiming Trump was working for the Kremlin. Their constituents took over entire cities, and burned many to the ground, including laying siege to the whitehouse. All of this of course passes your norm test, I’m sure, but if course I never saw you raise any objection.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)


    Right, contesting an election is wrong in your strange world… or at least only when Donald Trump does it. Yeah, the Supreme Court had to shut down a politicized Justice Department and prove the unconstitutionality of their politicized indictments, but it’s all Trump’s fault.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    @schopenhauer1 laments the loss of decorum in politics, and Trump, through his magic words, is making it all happen. No greater example of magical thinking has been published.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    Typical Trumpist propoganda, which I've previously disabused you of.

    That’s the only thing you can say and it’s taken place of your arguments. Keep telling yourself that, if it helps. But you have nothing to dispute it.

    That's laughable. Are all investigations unjust when hindsight shows the person was innocent? In this case, there's not even a rational basis to claim Trump was proven innocent - because Trump's obstruction was successful

    What obstruction of justice? You’re just mad because an innocent man protested a sham investigation, and now you wish he had been charged for it. Sorry, pal, no charges, no obstruction, so go find some more deep state propaganda to keep the conspiracy theory going.

    I had neither heard nor read Biden's statement. I stated something I believe to be factual based on m own analysis: the process was followed, no rules were broken. You didn't dispute that.

    That’s because you’re uninformed. The core principles were violated, just as Biden said. Remember that when they try to scare you about “threats to democracy”.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    I’m sure that’s true, especially if one prefers expediency and power-grubbing over principle. So long as others recognize the hypocritical violations of their core principles, as Biden himself did, I’m fine with it. It’s enough for me that they reveal themselves for the frauds they are.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)


    That’s odd because you still haven’t answered the question I asked. Bad faith can only get you so far.