does the concept of a being from before time creating everything make sense? — Starthrower

Saying a being existed "before time" is saying that there is a time external to time, which is incoherent. It is like asking what's North of the North Pole.

The biggest skepticism and contention I have with UBI is that it's frequently used by libertarian-types to substitute and replace services the government provides with a cheaper alternative that, because it's not directed towards particular public or individual needs, are less useful.

Yes, Agustino, I mentioned Peterson (he was brought up before I mentioned him, however), and now I am ending the conversation lest we further digress off subject.

I never said that graduating Harvard is equivalent with being a Professor there. I see you haven't lost your knack for putting words in my mouth. What I don't understand is you bringing up the fact that Peterson used to teach at Harvard. Does that make him smarter than Shapiro? Does it make him better than him, because he had an occupation at an elite institution whereas Shapiro "merely" graduated there? Feel free to make a thread whenever the hell you want. Or, perhaps, better yet. Don't. I always seem to forget how unbearable it can be to converse with you.

This thread is about the gender pay gap, not Peterson, so, I don't care to digress into that conversation here (or Osho, for whatever reason you decided to ramble on about him). If you want to discuss the merits of Peterson and his "breadth", create a new thread and I will perhaps comment on it. I've been watching some of Peterson's videos and he's a sophist who wrestles with his ghosts formed from his own delusions.

Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of the Universe cannot support life. And where life manages to survive and reproduce, it remains exceedingly fragile and precarious. 99% of all species that have ever lived have become extinct. It is ludicrous to think humanity can transcend an indifferent Universe. Even assuming (without justification) that the Universe was designed, there is nothing intelligent about it.

I guarantee there are many professors at Harvard who vehemently disagree with Peterson. And Ben Shapiro received his JD at Harvard Law, so I'm not sure what your point is exactly. Then again, you've never been one to either state or defend your point well.

Certainly, Augustino, you are not equating a seemingly arbitrary journalist with a "left-wing intellectual". Just as most left-wing philosophers, or philosophers in general, rarely reference or confront Ayn Rand's Objectivism, so too, I imagine, they can safely ignore Peterson's unoriginal, uninteresting, self-help "philosophy". He resembles many modern intellectual conservatives (e.g. Ben Shapiro), who pimp out sound-bite friendly, cherry-picked statistics, or makes vapid claims sound meaningful by stating it with assertiveness and conviction, making it easily digestible to young, frustrated men, who are more interested in feeling right then being right.

My working hypothesis is that you've come to this from Jordan Peterson or a related video making an argument that the gender pay gap doesn't exist when including other variables.

To say that it doesn't exist is more than a bit of an exaggeration. It absolutely does, robustly, but to varying degrees in different countries. Even a very equal one like Norway - men make 27 pence extra per pound of woman earnings. The pay gap also exists when you break it down by occupation - though the difference between male and female wages decreases when women and men are employed in equal proportion in a given job (or occupational category). This is to say that controlling for occupation still evinces a pay gap.

If, however, you take the approach where median male earnings and female earnings on a yearly basis are linearly regressed upon a bunch of societal indicators - like occupation, work hours, age, time in current job - you'll probably see that occupation explains the most variance out of any predictor. At least this is how it breaks down in the UK. Nowhere near 100% of the variance (think, the trend of differences between women and men) is explained through the sum total of all predictors. UK analysis puts this somewhere between 30 and 50% of the variance. Which is to say, and Peterson is very fond of this formulation (when applied in other contexts) - at least 50% of the difference between men and women isn't explained by any socioeconomic factor other than gender!

Edit: The first paragraph is absolutely the right analysis for discerning whether there are pay gaps within occupation. It also applies to age and job experience with the same conclusion, go figure.

So, here is a factsheet, and I'll slip in an outright howler that Peterson's army of beta-male epigones seem to forget.
(1) Men tend to make more than women.
(2) Men tend to be in higher paying jobs than women.
(3) Men still make more than women when controlling for occupation (or other socio-economic factors).
(4) There is no personality test approaching common place enough to provide a society wide census of personality traits and earnings. Thus variation due to them cannot currently be modelled precisely in the population at large.

If you want me to provide some references for the UK I can. — fdrake

Great post fdrake! It would be great to see some references for these.

To expand slightly on your 4th 'factsheet' point, this idea that personality differences between women and men partially explain the differences in wage gap has been touted by 'Youtube intellectuals' such as Jordan Peterson (who seems like a rebranded Ayn Rand) and James Demore, the Google engineer that was fired due to the pseudo-scientific farrago of garbage he wrote.

This explanation depends upon a study written by David Schmitt, who has written in response that while there are psychological differences between men and women, the variance is minimal, and likely decreases for people in the same occupation.

This thread needs more hatred towards the Jews.

I would prefer an upvoting button, as was case in the old Philosophy Forum. Some topics can stretch 5 to 10, over 20 pages, and who has time to read every single post? It's easier to get a gist of (at least based on user score) the stronger arguments, or more salient points by focusing on higher rated posts. There are, undoubtedly, cons to the system, but ultimately I think it would provide a net benefit for the community.

I've been reading Cioran's oeuvre in chronologically published order. Finished Tears and Saints a week ago and I'm nearly done with A Short History of Decay, which I've long considered his best and most well-written work.

Also rereading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Haven't read it since 2011

I've reformatted the original post into a standard syllogism.

1.God is the greatest thing we can think of.
2. Things can exist only in our imaginations or they can also exist in reality.
3. Things that exist in reality are always better than the things that only exist in our imaginations.
4. If god existed only in our imaginations, he wouldn't be the greatest thing that we can think of, because
5. God in reality would be better.
Conclusion: Therefore, God must exist in reality! — Harjas

1. Vague terminology. What is "greatest"?
2. False equivocation. Things that "exist" in the imagination do not exist as things in reality do.
3. Vague terminology. What is "better"?

The Heights of Despair by Cioran (rereading)
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

Oh I also read Moby-Dick by Melville last year, and I thought that worth mentioning. Absolutely breathtaking.

Surely I'm not following you correctly...Nihilism demands that life must have a ready-made meaning?

I'm not reading multiple paragraphs from the IEP. Sum up whatever it is you are attempting to say.

Yes, affirming life as good is a deliberate act of engagement, just as asserting the meaninglessness of life is a deliberate act of engagement. — Bitter Crank

I'm not following the point of this as is stands within the larger context of your argument. My point is that despite the title of the thread being (in part), Against All Nihilism, stating that life may have no meaning, no pattern, or no purpose is in-itself a Nihilistic statement.

There may not be a purpose for us to fulfill, there may be no unifying pattern which makes all life meaningful — Bitter Crank

Regardless of your view on life's inherent goodness (which I don't agree with), this forms the very basis of Nihilistic thinking.

Thank you kindly ;)

Quite excellent! Despite being a devout Christian, he was nevertheless highly skeptical of many forms of superstition, best demonstrated in his most famous essay, An Apology For Raymond Sebond (although given his many digressions however, it's discussed elsewhere as well).

Sure, if it's regulated and stabilized, but that seems anathema to what cryptocurrencies supposedly represent. It would be better to adjust my statement as, the idea that non-government-backed crypto-currencies will replace government-backed currencies is laughable.

Some books I've read in the last few months:

Melancholy by Laszlo F. Foldenyi (reread)
Paradise Lost by Milton
SPQR by Mary Beard
Ancient Greece by Thomas Martin
The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar
Selected Works by Cicero
The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce
The Once and Future Liberalism by Mark Ilia

I also finally finished the full essays of Montaigne, having started in 2013.

The value of bitcoin increased...what?...over 33% within a month or two? This is where its use-value as a currency is severely lacking. If the value of the cryptocurrency can increase dramatically within so short a time-frame (or decrease, as has been observed in the past), why spend it? It is far more useful as a speculative, income-generating asset, as opposed to something I can, say, purchase groceries with.

Certainly there will be room for cryptocurrencies within the landscape of modern economies, but their volatility limits certain practical applications. The idea that cryptocurrencies will replace government-backed currencies is laughable. In fact, unless I am mistaken, that was the raison d'être of bitcoins creation.

Nothing is word. A word that can mean a great many things, but within the context of this thread, attempting to hypostatize it's most literal meaning into some sort of physical reality is mere Munchausenian.

"Nothing" is not a thing. A privation is not a substantive.

Did we ever learn why the new owners of the old forum purchased it only to abandon it?

What pure drivel. Shit like this doesn't deserve 7 pages of discussion.

I read the Pinker/Wieseltier spat with great interest in 2012, and found Wieseltier to be insufferably smug without justification, given the poverty of his arguments. In fact, I recall having discussed this in the old Philosophy Forum.

There are three white men who possess more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population - but America is not an oligarchy, right? — Zoneofnonbeing

I mentioned wealth inequality in my previous post. This type of inequality is certainly deleterious to democracy, but that by itself does not transform America into an oligarchic state. Again, that is a mere toss of terms.

Only 5-6 corporations control 90% of the information we get to hear - but America is not an oligarchy, right?

Assuming this stat is correct (which I find extremely doubtful given the rise of internet news sources, regardless of their reliability), yes, monopolized dissemination of information is certainly detrimental to democracy. I'm not contesting that. However, these large multinational corporations do not entail an intellectually homogenized workforce all aiming for the same message. And this fact alone hardly makes America an oligarchy comparative to say Russia, or China, which you conveniently fail to mention.

When we look at the last 50 years in American politics, the most powerful offices in the land (president, vice president, attorney general, governor, senator, secretary of state) have been disproportionately held by members of just three families: Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton - but America is not aristocratic and oligarchic, right?

So? Most of those individuals were qualified to run and hold elected positions, and to my point, some of them were elected, and some were not. How is that oligarchic?

Reminder: the definition of oligarchy is a system whereby a few people are in power. Claiming that America is not an oligarchy is a demonstration of willful ignorance. American democracy is not "precarious" - its non-existent.

No. At most the above suggest that America is a flawed democracy. Which is certainly is. But to claim that America is oligarchic is nonsense. We are using an abstract political concept with a single definition: that there are few people are in power. This is vague and unhelpful and can arguably be applied to a range of countries. You must provide other examples of oligarchic countries with which we can compare the USA and see where, if any, parallels exist. Is England an oligarchy? Is Canada an oligarchy? Is Australia? Are we closer to Russia. China? Saudi Arabia?

Yes, and that is part of the problem. If people actually read about and understood the democracy of Ancient Greece, they would not be claiming that America was a democracy at all. — Zoneofnonbeing

And if they "read about and understood the democracy of Ancient Greece", knowing that it excluded women and kept slaves (among other invariably anti-democratic things), they would hardly call Ancient Greece democratic either. Democracy in America was hardly "democratic" in 1869. It was hardly "democratic" in 1919. Democracy has undeniably expanded since the early 20th century, and while it's status remains precarious at times, equating it with "the antonym of democracy", in your words, an "oligarchy" ostensibly places it, at minimum, within the same political sphere as Putin's Russian, or Xi Jinping's China, which is absurd. Yes wealth and income inequality is rising, yes gerrymandering threatens equal voting power, etc. etc., but to claim that America is an oligarchy, an "anti-democracy" is an exercise of mere ignorant hyperbole. You do not get to "toss around terms" either.

I'm sorry, but this is silly. No one stating that "Donald Trump is threatening Democracy" is equating American Democracy with the Democracy of Ancient Greece. It is simply a shorthand way of stating that Donald Trump's presidency is tarnishing political institutions, and other institutions that are important within modern day democracies, e.g. media, which is true. It does not inherently imply that America is a literal Democracy any more than saying it is sunrise implies that the sun is literally rising and circling the Earth.

A formal fallacy, viz., affirming the consequent.

Not just equality, liberty, and freedom, but things like science and philosophy are overwhelmingly Western — darthbarracuda

Statements like these which both homogeneous and idealize a concept stretching back roughly 3,000 years are ludicrous to me. Concepts such as equality, liberty, freedom, etc. have been presented and argued in a variety of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern philosophies, and in the substantive form of working political systems and empires. And plenty of inventions that form the basis of modernity traveled from East to West. Modernity is not predicated on an exclusively "Western culture".

And we cannot ignore the existence of genocide, authoritarianism, and other forms of persecution that have plagued "Western Civilization" for millennia. If the American Revolution is "Western" than so is the Holocaust. If the Radical Enlightenment is "Western" than so is the Inquisition. We don't get to have our cake and eat it too. We cannot pick out positive concepts that have emerged from a more or less arbitrary "shared history", claim them as our own, exclusively, and then gloss over historical disasters as mere hiccups. The homogenization of "Western culture" is useless in any practical sense. It's an absurd notion that has no basis in historical accuracy, and attempts to build arguments off the basis of such a concept is inherently fallacious.

The only delusion here, I'm afraid, is the idea that there is a genuine historical parallelism between the actors within the Revolutionary War, and modern day US citizenry and US military.

On the other hand, I'm not particularly interested in repealing the constitutional right to bear arms, as lately - largely in light of the autocratic tendencies of President Trump - I have had largely negative attitude towards strengthening the federal government. — Brian

Two thoughts come to mind with these types of arguments. As much as I loathe Donald Trump, and as big of a megalomaniac as he is, the fact of the matter is that if this current kakistocracy did transform into some sort of dictatorship, there is very little the citizenry can do. There are a handful of examples where armed US citizens clashed with the government (in the form of one armed agency or another) and always goes poorly with the former. It is a delusional fantasy to think that armed US citizens can stand against the US government.

Secondly, the idea that the US government will transform into a dictatorship remains just that, an idea. It is a hypothetical. Gun avoidance, however, exists in the very real quotidian. This is a substantive issue that has plagued our nation for decades, whereas other similarly developed countries have fixed their gun avoidance problem with gun control.

Newton was absolutely not a deist, and while Kant did not believe that there were sound arguments that evidenced or proved God, he was a Christian on pure faith. I recommend actually reading Kant and Newton, and additionally Jonathon Israeli's magisterial trilogy on the Enlightenment to cure yourself of your ignorance on the subject.

.That is, in answer to your initial question, I would argue that what Enlightenment/ Modernity has very clearly resolved is the fact that human reason - however daring and courageous it may be, cannot by itself - alone and unaided - succeed in guiding humanity closer toward (the) truth. Rather, it would seem, as the great "Angelic Doctor", St Thomas Aquinas, taught us so long ago, that the boldness of human reason must always be matched and complemented by a firm foundation in the parhesia of supernatural faith (in the divine knowledge Christian revelation). — John Gould

Ha. The radical arm of the Enlightenment (i.e. Spinzoa, Diderot, Bayle, d'Holbach, et al.) decisively showed the inconsistency and intellectual poverty of the 'Moderate Enlightenment' (i.e. Kant, Voltaire, Newton, Leibniz) the latter of which aimed and failed to marry faith to reason.

The problem is that all of us have learned to treat the government like a Big Daddy that is supposed to take care of us, while we misbehave. That's wrong. People are supposed to take care of each other, not governments. As far as I'm concerned, the government is an evil. — Agustino

Agustino, this is the type of mindbogglingly moronic political philosophy that I'd expect from a freshman high school student who is just started read Atlas Shrugged. You've participated in philosophy forums for what? Four years now give or take? You have absolutely nothing to show for it.

just a shame that he was ultimately prevented from fully implementing/ extending the policy on a permanent basis by the spineless liberal legal establishment — John Gould

Yeah, Rule of Law is pretty overrated.

Agustino, surely you can't be serious with this rubbish statement.

I'm a big fan of air-conditioning

One big argument from incredulity