It makes no sense to me. The money in the fund has already been confiscated as taxes, for example, via payroll taxes, and added to the fund. That is money that has already been taken from you. How does confiscating that money a second time help you any?

In politics and government the hierarchy is artificial and conventional, not natural. So this type of hierarchy is not inevitable or born of necessity, but the practical and logical consequence of synthetic political organization.

I like the idea, personally. I’m against all taxes. I also think it is fundamentally absurd to tax money that has already been collected as taxes. So I’d treat the statement as a good one.

What do you think about it?

Executive orders are interesting. I don’t think they’re so transient when it comes to the institution of government itself. They can direct the executive agencies and the military, for example.

There is one side insisting that red is the experience that we have of red and the other side that red is the thing that causes the experience, for several pages now.

Is arguing about semantics that interesting?

The implications are interesting. One concludes that reality is a construct of the mind, the other, not a construct at all.

Their record. If given power, what will they do? Harris has been vice president for the past three years and I can not name one thing she has done, for instance. If she wants to enact price controls, give 25000 to first time home-buyers, why hasn’t she done so?

I do think it’s appropriate because it’s newsworthy. The duty of a journalist is to publish it.

Ah, nos4. What is any reasonable person to make of what you write? Near as I can tell only that you're a complete fool, and often an annoying one. When you make sense, I'll attend, but for the rest, even these minutes in replying to you are minutes wasted.

If I had wanted a reply I would have quoted you. But the topic was a good one, however naive and obsequious the opinion of it was. For future reference, don’t waste your opinions on someone who doesn’t respect them.

Policy ought to be a big part of it, but it doesn't capture everything. Better: we predict a future that is entailed by each candidate, and choose the candidate that we believe will deliver the better future.

Luckily the past can give us a hint. Both were heavily involved in past and current administrations. No predictions required.

Ideas come into being at the moment of expression, and persist as long as the expression does. It’s why we often write them down or record them if we do not wish to forget them. There, and only there, they can be considered, referred to, and analyzed. Until then it is all the body and its activity, none of which are ideas.

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.

Yeah, I don’t get it. Now abortionists get to vote for the policies they want.

I just wonder whenever I write a post, your name appears shortly after. It’s odd.

My eyes glaze over whenever I see your name, Xtrix. No good questions, responses, and even the insults are boring. Gotta try harder, man.

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?

Not a single interesting thing has come out of you.

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?

Nice little op-ed.

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.

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.

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.

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…”.

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.

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.

Trump is back on X.com

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.

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?

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?

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?

Clown world.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

History is the greatest argument against communism. Get back to me when you have learned some.

We can only hope she's a communist.

Why?

Quite simply, they are censors. They’ll abuse power to silence views they do not like.