Yes the CCP steals labor and money from its people, like all Communist parties. I don’t. You don’t know where my money goes, where your money goes, simply because you haven’t followed it. You couldn’t know if your tax dollars go to ratheon contracts or into Joe Biden’s hair plugs. Until then you can only imagine things.

Anyways, what’s more interesting is your idea of someone dragging us proles into the future, and Joe Biden is the one to do it. I’d love to hear it.

I’ve never bought anything from the CCP, nor have I sent them any money or lip service. Besides, you wouldn’t know where my money goes in any case, so I think all you can do is imply that if I own something made in China, I must have some specious connection with the CCP bilking wealth from their serfs, all to “bring them into the future”, no doubt. But that sounds like something right up your alley, not mine.

I don’t lecture others how they should live. I don’t seek control over others’ lives. I don’t seek to impose rules on others I myself refuse to follow. I don’t stand in front of the world and preach the end of days while I contribute to it.

I shop local.

I didn’t say Biden drives. I said he flew an 85-car entourage across the ocean and road around Europe in it.

How do I support the Chinese government?

I am a communist and a hypocrite because…why exactly?

Your fantasies do not apply to me, unfortunately. I despise the uniparty and am a registered independent; I find your lot indistinguishable from the other; and the group think and silo mentality do not apply.

How many months has Trump been out of office now?

The problem is you guys are the stupid people. You believe you can see the future and know how to fix it. Your answers to these problems, and the solutions, lie somewhere in the brains of careerists and bureaucrats, and nowhere in your own ideas and actions.

“Politicians will save us!”

The person you choose to bring stupid people into the future is an idiot, a hypocrite, and an inborn liar. You, and others like you, obediently await your dear leaders for change. How has that worked out for you?

Biden flies an 85-car entourage to Europe and you bellyaching scolds hang on his every word looking for climate actions

“…b-b-but Trump”

I don’t see anyone else driving around in an 85-car entourage. To do so is both ineffective and hypocritical. No one else could do it, let alone stop doing it. It’s a stupid argument, James. Find a better angle.

Are you flying an 85-car entourage across the Atlantic, driving around Europe in it before going to a climate change conference, only to lecture whomever is listening before dozing off in a septuagenerian stupor? Couldn’t you lecture others by other means, without the hypocrisy?

Your argument is a stupid one, James, a lesson in sophistry and obsequiousness.

You haven’t taught me anything. My eyes get heavy about two clauses into you self-concerned drivel, so I may have long stopped paying attention by the time you made your argument.

So here is your chance: what is wrong with what I believe?

Uh oh someone all of a sudden doesn’t care about the environment when Biden’s involved.

You haven’t taught me anything. Your first mistake was believing you had wisdom to depart with. If you want to defend Biden’s actions just do it.

Defending a politician’s hypocrisy should be beneath you, but you can’t help it. One of these days the dissonance will overwhelm you.

“Will we act? Will we do what is necessary? Will we seize the enormous opportunity before us? Or will we condemn future generations to suffer?”

Biden cruised around Europe with his 85-car convoy and then lectured the proles about climate change.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-11-01/napping-at-cop26-and-85-car-convoy-the-optic-challenge-of-bidens-climate-image

The phrase “imperialism” is largely pejorative in delivery, and always confusing. As such it has the character of an imposter-word, used solely on account of the implications of the term. Examining its root, neither thing nor action, renders it mostly meaningless anyways.

Though America’s interventionist ways are obvious and odious, it’s not so easy to call America an empire when it’s aspirations and efforts are shared with others. It’s presence in a country not its own is often due to the obligations of treaty as opposed to annexation and dominion.

A List ofTreaties and Other Agreements

Do you not understand the word “speech”? Is a lie not speech? Your silly analogies about guns, wildfires, and electric jolts cannot alter the fact that speech is speech: it produces none of the effects or damages you claim it does.

Proposing a fine for anyone who speaks contrary to Tim’s truth is in direct opposition to the principle of free speech. If you do not oppose free speech, why do you oppose free speech?

I need only to know your past comments on the subject of “yelling fire in a crowded theater”, which anyone can find. Here is journalist Christopher Hitchens falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. He acted in contrary to the dicta, as anyone can do, and it was permitted and had procured no trouble or punishment. It appears free speech does permit it after all.



My point has already been made. Truth doesn’t need you to censor falsity, and at any rate, your sense of what is true or false is as useful as an asshole on the elbow. Yes free speech permits the distortion of truth, but only because free speech is the only way to straighten it. Censorship permits the distortion of truth and its suppression.

The “falsely yell fire in a crowded theater” dictum is not established law, but a -puerile analogy found in the unanimous opinion of Justice Holmes, who used the phrase to censor and jail a socialist who was passing out flyers urging resistance to the draft. Smarter jurists have long since overturned Holmes’ precedent (the clear and present danger test), and speech can only be prosecuted if it is directed to inciting or producing “imminent lawless action”, but it’s no surprise to find that the analogy still lives in the mouths of those who fear and wish to suppress speech—that is exactly what it was designed to do.

But I would never expect penalty for your misinformation because only speech itself can rectify it. I would be doing a disservice to both truth and myself by censoring falsity, which treats truth as no worthy opponent to lies, and myself a coward, fearful of words. In any case, calling for the censorship of lies out of one side of the mouth and spreading misinformation out of the other is not a good look. And one day your opponents will wield the exact same tools of suppression you created. What then?

Marxism ground Marxism into dirt, not to the mention the millions of people buried beneath it’s rubble. If the bourgeois, unclean, and philandering Marx was able to foresee the disasters performed in his name, I wager he would have written otherwise.

There hardly was any liberalism. The only thing liberal about what we have now is perhaps the rhetoric used to goad people into accepting increasing paternalistic statism and compulsory cooperation. The self-styled Liberal is taken at the face value of his pretensions, and policies which are put forth as Liberal are accepted in the same unreflecting way. See any Liberal party in the commonwealth.

At any rate, Biden is none of those. He, like other state careerists, is but a figurehead for a cabal of effete busybodies who want nothing more than to advance the state’s, and thus their own, interests.

I don’t think it can be said that philosophy is a one-to-one ratio to writing philosophy, so it need not be read in order to practice it. But the fundamentals of logos still apply whether reified in written form or not.

If you want to engage with someone philosophically, though, it is a net benefit to anyone’s education to do it with the best philosophers the world has remembered, at least insofar as their works have been passed down to us.

So one needn’t read philosophy to be a philosopher, but that isn’t to say one shouldn’t.

Chalmers’ zombie twin is not “logically coherent”, to me. He can only assume, and not prove, that “conscious experience” is missing from the zombie. This is because he assumes, and never proves, that “conscious experience” is a fundamentally natural phenomenon. Of course he can imagine it missing from a zombie because he has long assumed it occurs elsewhere.

I think you’re right. He’s reasoning in a circle.

Despite having one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, Singapore is seeing its highest surge of the pandemic, giving us a taste of what could happen with so-called “zero-COVID” countries, which is a euphemism for the authoritarian hellscapes found in China, Australia, and New Zealand. It will be interesting to see if it was all worth it.

In my corner of the Earth, though, the mostly-vaccinated populace still shuffles around with their masks and vaccination papers. Government subsidies are winding down, and all of those who required the handouts to remain afloat during forced lockdowns are doomed to find out what happens when their tax-payer dollars are redistributed elsewhere, and at the whims of careerist politicians. The money used to fund rent, wage, and income subsidies will now focus on programs that “incentivize work”, as if government incentives weren’t the problem to begin with.

In any case, the state regimentation of our lives and livelihoods has been extended.

Before taxes the US used bonds to accrue funding for military activity. Basically the government had to beg for a loan from its people. Nowadays they just steal our money or skim from our purchases and we have no say how it is spent. Maybe bringing back government bonds, and government begging, would help to fund its projects without all the theft and forced labor.

Human action shows that one can generally trust that his community members will not kill him, but it doesn’t show and it doesn’t follow that one should trust their rhetoric. Humans are too fallible and each one exhibits myriad biases, loyalties, conflicting interests. This is especially true when it comes to power and politics. De omnibus dubitandum. It would be epistemically irresponsible to do otherwise.

If people suffer from their beliefs, so much the better. It’s how we learn. But if we make them suffer for their beliefs, whether through censorship or campaigns of hatred, no credential or expertise will make our rhetoric palpable.

Belief is often so tangled with identity that if you challenge a person in the former you essentially ask them to concede the latter.

Biden’s new choice for Comptroller of the Currency, who supervises national banks, is Saule Omarova, a veritable commie. First Biden wants to monitor American’s accounts if they have total annual deposits or withdrawals worth more than $600, now he has chosen a bank regulator who thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government, a true nutter, someone who earned her stripes at Moscow State University on a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.

Bidenomics in full effect.

I read the Doha agreement. It was the one good thing to come out of the Afghan war in decades. What you don’t mention is how it was backed by NATO and the UN Security Council, our allies. You don’t mention the intra-Afghan talks, anything about the process, and Biden’s failure to live up to and enforce the agreements. You don’t mention any of it because you’re crippled by anti-Trumpism.

Biden didn’t care about the agreement. He violated it.

The state is necessarily and increasingly paternalistic. So it is no wonder that its most obsequious subjects are invariably callow. In the UK, the welfare state architect used the phrase “cradle-to-grave” to describe his social security scheme. Now that’s a telling phrase.

It seems likely to me that anyone living in that sort of system—raised in it, educated by it, paying for it—is nearly doomed to become dependant on it. And to be honest, I can hardly blame the man, his money stolen and used to build the system, when he seeks some sort recompense in the form of what it can offer. It’s beyond the point of repair now. The best we can do is raise and educate our children otherwise and hope for the best.

It’s too late. EU leaders ran to contribute to world-wide fascism far quicker than Trump did. They’ll need to beg the man for forgiveness.

It’s not surprising, ssu, that you would attempt to shift blame back to Trump. I would expect nothing else. But it wasn’t Trump who abandoned Americans and Afghan allies while sneaking away in the night. It wasn’t Trump who left billions of dollars of equipment in the hands of the Taliban.

The drone strike was significant because, for the Americans, it was the last act of war in that 20 year campaign. The fake news immediately spread the government line that the drone strike was in retaliation for an “ISIS-k” attack. General Mark Milley said it was a “righteous strike”. These lies only served, however briefly, to distract from Biden’s withdrawal disaster. It was a fitting end to the whole charade.

And now they’ve all moved on. No accountability. Nothing. No protests. We live in a world where a president can be impeached twice for utter nonsense, while at the same time the predecessor and his officials can get away with lies and murder and gross incompetence.

There is some question begging occurring in the scenario. The conclusion is assumed in the premise. Why would consciousness occur in one but not the other? In the world without consciousness the people are not sentient. Why are they not sentient? There is no consciousness.

I don’t think so because idealism is inherently solipsistic. The idealist cannot view past himself, or at least believes he extends beyond his own boundary.

I just wonder why we would insert consciousness into our view of things. For whatever reason we often shoehorn these essences over nature, but is never actually deduced from it. After all, the term “conscious” describes things, and is not itself a thing. We add the suffix, make it a thing, and the world is supposed to conform to it.

I’m just pointing out there is no recipient to your behavior. It affects no one but yourself. The suffering you prevent, and the beings you’re saving, are imaginary. So why pretend?

The ideology undergirding all factions is that of statism, as it invariably will be. No other principle can reign over this one because the intention of any political party is to seize the state machinery, thereby attaining control of it, and thus power over everyone else. The people, facing the progressive loss of their own power, are left to use their measly right of suffrage, to vote for some power-seeking careerist, perhaps with the view that he possesses some remnant of a principle similar to their own, but never a 1-to-1 ratio.

So to answer why the statist would vote for a party that contradicts his own principles, it’s because he couldn’t do otherwise.

What if a baby was guaranteed to be born into a lava pit and you can convince the parent not to do that? You would, correct? The thing is you are not seeing life as properly that volcano.

You would only prevent the baby from being born in a volcano if you convinced her to have birth elsewhere. You cannot prevent a baby from being born in a volcano if there is no baby.

None of this is to say that life is good, or that one should have children, only that an antinatalist could never prevent harm and injustice by not having children. It could be said that his efforts go as far as preventing fertilization, or maybe pregnancy or birth, but that’s about it. His efforts cannot be stretched beyond that.