That's just your poor interpretation. The golden rule considers all stakeholders on an equal and balanced basis.

That’s the problem to begin with. Tastes, manners, proclivities, beliefs, desires, etc. are pluralistic.

Not much of a rule, then.

It could be as simple as a handshake. No need to pretend we’re speaking about cannibalism.

Not much of a rule, then.

Still, assumptions are made, behavior is premised on them. Worse still, it’s self-cantered. You consider yourself before considering anyone else.

Well, other people might not want to be treated the exact same way you want to be treated. That’s why the golden rule fails, in my opinion. Better to find out how they want to be treated first of all instead of assuming that everyone wants the same treatment as yourself.

The problem with religion, as far as I can tell, as that it has placed value on unworldly objects, whether the supernatural, the soul, the afterlife, God, and so on. Essentially, and in practice, it places value on ideas instead of objects. These ideas can be myths, stories, narratives, characters, but all are products of the mind, never visible or reachable by any method other than turning into oneself.

We’ll have to dig our way out of that. One way I’ve come to value a person is to recognize her originality. Nothing like her has ever existed, nor ever will, because she’s original, one-of-a-kind, and in that sense effectively priceless.

I’m not an economist, so perhaps it’s for the best.

I don’t know why you would tell a person his lot in life is well deserved because his skin color is a certain shade. But you’re thinking with race here. That’s the problem to begin with. If you look at a crowd and divide it into races you will get disparities that you cannot explain without resorting to racism.

I haven’t contradicted anything. A state might be more or less wealthy for a variety of reasons, like the nationalization of industry, higher taxes, less wasteful spending, debt, and so on.

The labor theory of value has largely been abandoned and widely criticized. I’m not sure it applies.

It’s theft on a grand scale.

So should we let the chips fall where they may, how do we explain to racial groups that go dramatically under-represented in some fields that the cause is pure fairness?

Tell them the race of those involved has no bearing on anything in the entire process.

Now, why do states back such things? What's going on between states? Which state is richer? And how did it become richer?

In short, it accrues to its power and benefit. The state has no real mechanism to earn wealth of its own so it must take it from those who are productive.

Representationalism is odd in that it always assumes an image or “representation” (“a pixelated appearance”) of what is seen, but can never show us this image, upon what medium it appears, and can never point to the being whom is observing it. It is odd that it is present in both materialism and idealism, as if one conceded something to the other.

Your instincts are correct here. It’s morally wrong. As the case proves, any race-based inclusion leads to race-based exclusion. When you make an effort to advance some groups you impede others. This is why we ought not to favor some races, and for the same reasons we ought not to disfavor other races.

It is also demeaning both to the favored and unfavored groups insofar as it paints the candidates as requiring special considerations based on superficial phenotypes, none of which factor in to education.

It’s unjust. It doesn’t rectify any past injustice because it doesn’t even consider them. It doesn’t distinguish between the deserving and undeserving. That it is premised on fuzzy taxonomies makes it all the more threadbare.

A case for affirmative action could be made to flesh-and-blood human beings who have actually been excluded from such institutions because of their race. That sort of injustice could be rectified by giving them the full benefit of proper consideration as they give everyone else. Beyond that it should not go.

Is the method of pretending others say things they didn’t say a bad habit or a tried and true method of deceiving fellow travellers?

Isn’t the mind, too, an abstract object? An idea? How do we experience abstract objects with other abstract objects, ideas with other ideas?

As usual, misrepresentations, made up logic, and other absurdities. The statist knows he can start a corporation and compete with the very corporations he despises, but won’t, because risk is best left to other people and other people’s money.

If you experience the world through the five senses, what being and with what kind of senses do you experience abstract objects?

One wonders why, since corporations control the United States, one doesn’t just start one. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to do. Once done he could let it loose on the battlefield and immediately possess the power and influence he claims they have.

But all that would involve effort. Much better to fall back on the hope that he may one day control social activity, capital, and most importantly the lives of other people with the monopoly on violence, so long as he can elect a body of benevolent angles with the swing of his vote.

Tickets are worth things because people work—I’m not so sure what that means. As far as I know currency is usually valued according to what, if any, commodity backs it, or on the faith in the issuer of it, in many cases governments and their central banks.

Watch the faithful statist reserve a special code of ethics for his government that he refuses to hold to any other group of men and women. Wealth should taken away from those who earn it but we shall let it forever coalesce, without work or effort, in the politician’s coffers. Hundreds of millions of people cannot work together, but the faction we put in power can do it all. The private man should never earn and save too much wealth, god forbid, but our officials should take it and hoard it for their own uses. They, and only they, know how to spend it. This we know because we voted for them.

The paternal politics of the servile.

I like the idea of no force threatened against peaceful people, but it doesn't feel right in this context.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths v making the rich pay a little bit more.

Obviously those in poverty aren't being helped by other means. Do you have any suggestions?

Taxes are quite an old concept and they haven’t helped much yet. I’m not sure a little more will do. And they might even have a worse effect, which is indifference. If the state takes a man’s quarter and promises it will help the poor with it, the man no longer has the quarter to give and less responsibility towards the poor. He has already done his part.

It is also an unjust mechanism for helping the poor. It is unable to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving, those who want and do no want help, and it operates through the theft and extortion of other people’s money.

My suggestion is we need more concerned people such as yourself to cooperate and help.

Yes, I accept the former, but not the latter. I don’t think taking people’s money or property is the right thing to do. I don’t think advocating to take other people’s money and property is the right thing to do either. The right thing to do would be to help those in need.

You can do no more than to try to belittle me, whether to pad your weak theories or to make yourself feel better, but the fact remains that your oligarchs have not nor cannot shaft me. They do not have the power over me that you claim they do. I respect that you want to advocate for their employees and feel you know better how they should run their businesses, but the power I speak of is real and affects millions residing in particular jurisdictions.

So yes, maybe stick to fiction.

You said these oligarchs will shaft me yet you cannot say how. Odd, that.

I don’t own a Tesla, use Facebook, and am largely unaware of Koch industries. If they ever strip me or anyone of our human rights I will stand in opposition. Until then, I guess the gubberment is the problem after all.

Uh oh, those those scary oligarchs. Can you name one and how he’ll hurt me?

I said “public health”, not “universal healthcare”. I also never said public health is fascism. Maybe pick up some glasses.

A quasi-fascism already revealed itself among most western nations under the guise of public health. Entire populations were stripped of their human rights, subject to state dictate and lost a significant degree of their power, freedoms, and the right to control their own lives during those times. So all this jibber-jabber about “our democracy” and the threat of a future fascism rings hollow in the wake of this period. We’ve already lived it and are still experiencing it.

In contrast to other federal, state, and provincial governments, the US government didn’t quite go down the path of other western nations.

If everyone would agree, that would be the end and things would move on. But they don't. There's a lot of people like NOS4A2 that think this all is a huge democratic conspiracy ...and Trump won.

Dems and republicans of the establishment variety, to be clear. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy because that would entail some cunning and foresight. I think they’re deranged.

He’s Jason Bourne.

Dopes falling for a show trial…again.

I’m one thing, the cup is another.

Yes, in every case it’s me that exists. No cartwheel, no backflip, and no model of a tea cup. We need not insert other, invisible things into the formula in order to understand what I am doing when I perceive another thing.

I wasn't trying to separate dream from dreamer. I was pointing out that if you can talk about it must exist. The manner in which it exists is irrelevant. You, as the doer, are dependent upon other things for your existence just as your dreams' existence are dependent upon your existence. The Earth is the doer and you are the deed.

Your body and mind are just as much a deed as a doer. One might even say that the deed of living and the doer (your body/mind) are one and the same.

The manner in which it exists is wholly relevant. It doesn’t exist at all. You cannot take a string attached to the word “dream” and attach the other end to its referent. Philosophy ought to avoid these figments if we are to ever understand what it really is we are talking about.

Does a walk exist? Does a cartwheel exist? Does a backflip exist?

Our language no doubt attempts to abstract actions from the extant being that performs them. But at no point should we take this to mean there is an actual, existing distinction between doer and deed. They are like the morning and evening star, one and the same.

I exist. I experience. But it doesn’t follow that something called “experience” exists.

Yes. But your experienced tea cup (the one you act on, talk about, point to, describe, remember, locate, plan about, name, reach for... The one you just referred to with the words "tea cup") does not cause the responses in your epidermis. Something else does. If this weren't the case it would be impossible to be wrong. It's not impossible to be wrong, therefore your construction (no matter how generally accurate) cannot actually be one and the same as the causes of the data from which it is constructed.

Therefore there are, by necessity, at least two nodes to consider. The tea cup of your experience (and mine, and the rest of the world - we construct these things together), and the hidden states which such a construction is an attempt to model, predict and modify.

I don’t think it would be impossible to be wrong. There are other things in the environment, including ourselves, that can prohibit or impede our understanding, like narcotics or physical disabilities. We can experience those in tandem with the tea cup. It raises a good point, though, that we do not just experience isolated objects like teacups, but the environment in general.

I don’t yet see the necessity in evoking construction or representation until a construction or representation can be found. Construction implies something is constructed, that this something is visible, and that there is something or someone to view it. Maybe they have some sort of explanatory power, but don’t you think it would be better to eliminate these figments in favor of trying to understand the extant features of the world?

The shame of technocracy and one of the downfalls of the current system is that the Supreme Court ought to stay out of such decisions. This is why Roe was a mistake to begin with. A handful of judges chose to make abortion something like a federal right, so a handful of judges can take it away. Congress, the so-called representatives of the people, now get to walk around as if all of this isn’t their fault, and use the politics of it all to further their careers. They all know that such decisions ought to be made democratically, constitutionally amended, with long public debate and the involvement of many voters and legislators.

So your experience doesn't exist? Or are you saying it does have a position?

I’m saying if it exists it has a position. You told me it exists but where it is doesn’t matter.

Markov blankets are not necessarily spatially extensive membranes; they are just a set of states that separates internal and external states.

The epidermis, then. The epidermis is in direct contact with the tea cup.