Reality's not here right now, please call again later.
You again? Reality is in a meeting, can I take a message?
Ah I see, thank you for the email, we share your concerns, but reality does not wish to comment on that at this time.
You read that where? You know you can't trust anyone who says anything like that, it's a partisan mouthpiece.

It's already dead, our lords and masters are just afraid of necromancy.

I should've said: "I'm sure Dessalines cut them off"

If I had the photoshop skills to make a Dessalines Picard facepalm I would.

The first law does not hold on a cosmological scale. — Pfhorrest

Only holds for closed systems. If you consider the Earth apart from the sun, it gains energy constantly. If you put the sun back in, the sum of energy asset and liability goes to zero.

Maybe force isn't always necessary, since the British slave trade was eventually abolished by those who opposed it in Parliament. — Marchesk

And the slave revolts making it a ludicrously costly investment.

@frank has a medical qualification and is working in a hospital treating covid patients. If he says chronic, it's probably chronic.

Sounds like doublespeak without specifying what sort of exercise and coordination, and why it's necessary. Any group in power is going to be exercising force and coordinating their power. It's how they rule. But what sort of exercise and coordination results in a free society? — Marchesk

I don't think it's too obscure to think of power and freedom as interlinked.

You can only do a thing if you have the ability to do so. It can be more or less hard to do a thing, given the societal circumstances you find yourself in, and which you do not choose. Someone raised in a palace is going to find themselves having more opportunities than some kid thrown out on the street. Someone born in a country where criticising the state will land you in the gulag is going to have less ability to express their political opinions. Someone born without the ability to walk will have less mobility in a society where wheelchairs are not available. Someone born into poverty will have to choose crime to get by more often than someone raised in a palace. Someone born into a rich household with massive social opportunities, like David Cameron, will find themselves in positions of power with much less work; their choices are linked to levers of opportunity just not available for the hoi polloi.

A political idea of freedom that doesn't link to one's ability to exercise choice; regarding what actions they may choose, what effects their actions are likely to have; is one that sees freedom as irrelevant to the likely effects of a person's actions and opportunities. If you are more powerful, your abilities make more waves.

A homeless guy excluded from most opportunities because they can't get a job, so money stops them from doing anything; that guy's powerless. A society that makes that situation likely for some and not for others is one with big power asymmetries; big asymmetries in what people can choose.

Apply the same logic to capital. They can only live on us for so long.

It's impossible to be vigilant all the time, or even all but a tiny fraction of the time. We're hardwired to take shortcuts. It takes a lot of effort; both cognitive and emotional labour; to actually think in a way that sticks to what can plausibly be inferred from what we know.

LNC doesn't give you a logic by itself. It says very little about valid inferences; or plausibility of claims; or evidentiary status; it just tells you not to believe something and its negation at the same time. This is nowhere near enough.

What laws does the logic you're talking about follow?

Do you think there's more than one logic?

Even by doubting the laws of logic, you’ve affirmed them, as thinking that something “might be false” presupposes that there’s such a thing as “true” and “false” in the first place. — Harry Hindu

There's always the question of which logic is appropriate for the task, and which describes people's conduct the best. Say we go back in time and people are still wrestling with electron orbitals and coulomb's law; people were committed to theory that entailed that electrons would be slowly drawn to the nucleus of an atom through electrostatic attraction, but people also knew that didn't happen. The theory predicted one thing, and was believed to some degree, the experiments found another. People still believed in the predictions of Coulomb's law by and large, but stopped applying it. They didn't act in accordance with the principle of explosion and suddenly believe arbitrary positions because they believed a contradiction, they stopped the explosion by restricting the applicability of Coulomb's law in calculating the distribution of positions of electrons in atoms.

Most arguments people make do not obey classical propositional logic, or paraconsistent logic, or any other formal logic. Most arguments scientists make do not rely on any formalisation of inductive logic; there aren't logical constraints on what makes a sensible explanatory hypothesis in general, they are domain specific.

We fall to a lower level and then start very slowly to pick up from there. — ssu

Aye. I'm hoping that in the wake of it wage repression stops. I'm also hoping that the demand shock prompts that. But I don't think it will happen much.

It's likely to be another huge covert wealth transfer and another run through of the austerity/defecit bollocks; now that the bailouts are on the public balance sheet as debt by fiat of accounting.

Yes. It remains true that the US stimulus package is not addressing the huge demand shock, seeing as it is mostly adding liquidity to stock markets at the price of leverage rather doing much to address the expected failures of small businesses, the huge unemployment, and the massive downward spike in spending power of huge swathes of workers.

They're evidently not doing a very good job at being a solution.

Common sense is over rated. The only reason anyone would say that anything non-trivial is common sense is because they cannot or will not justify it for other reasons. People appealing to common sense usually do so regarding matters where evidence and careful argument is mandatory. "Geopolitics, only common sense!", "Economics, only common sense!", "The mind, it's common sense!". It's usually just another way to avoid providing evidence or argument and to mock whoever or whatever you disagree with. A "salt of the earth" version of self evidence.

Hey but the stock prices are returning to above their enforced minimum! The markets are more liquid, people are spending money, things will return to normal soon.

Now I need a shower.

Edit: I should've added; it's not the government's fault if you don't want to go out and spend!

When we refer to natural rights that are not recognized by the law, I think the only thing we're saying, for any practical purposes, is that they should be legal rights. — Ciceronianus the White

:up:

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Something I want to draw a distinction between: framing and priming. Priming is when someone shows you a picture like this:



Next to the statement: "Brexit negotiations stall again due to harsh terms from Bojo's Britain" - the intended effect being that you recognise the face as being stupid and angry, and it resonates with the statement phrasing (like calling Boris Johnson Bojo and making "harsh" match up with the scowl). Priming in general is explicitly applying some prompt or accompanying device to some other statement/claim/argument that is intended to make someone more likely to interpret the statement/claim/argument in the intended mood. Successful priming strongly promotes the intended interpretive mood and its behavioural corollaries.

No one can ignore priming effects, just like you can't look at this sentence without reading it.

It's a well documented thing (though there are plenty of papers that exaggerate its effects). Newspapers especially use priming to convey the mood they intend you to read their article in.

Now framing; a frame is a context of interpretation for a claim. No one is in full control of their context of interpretation for any claim. When US Republicans make "states rights" arguments, say against gay marriage being a federal law, the purpose of that (and it was designed by Goldwater IIRC for this regarding civil rights) is to impede the adoption of the law by changing the narrative that supports the imposition from a religious/prejudicial one to an autonomy/jurisprudential one. People who believe in "small government" will be able to say "it's a state's decision" and argue in terms of the benefits of political devolution even though before it was a federal law binding all of 'em that gay marriage was not allowed .

Questions can prime for framing: "Should individuals always be allowed to decide who can use their business?" as a counter argument against "Gay marriage should be legal US wide" primes people to talk in terms of the supporting narrative for the "small government" argument.

Also wanted to add 2 to the list that you see on the forum:

(10) A priori reasoning is over-rated; people's speculations are done within a frame, a priori reasoning often uncovers the founding principles of the frame rather than the truth of the matter. Logic alone doesn't let you decide the truth or falsity of any contingent proposition, one whose truth maker is not arbitrary; and for this reason almost all propositions we encounter , reject or adopt are contingently true or false. "Self evident" usually just means "it seems this way to me for reasons I cannot state". Another way of saying this: satori is not a justification or evidence, it is a frame announcing its presuppositions.

(11) Do not hang back and simply ask questions; if you position yourself always as the critic and the cynic, you can bolster your own beliefs simply by rejecting all others - and it is much easier to show a flaw or falsify than to get a good picture of something or confirm. Do not let the asymmetry in difficulty between justification and falsification be a reason your beliefs never change; all doubt is done within a motivating context - a frame - which can, itself, be more or less occlusive or productive to generating well justified beliefs regarding the matter at hand.

The choice of rules doesn't ultimately matter much, what matters is what theorems you can derive from them. All the classical propositional logics have the same theorems, they just start from different assumptions/rules of inference.

This gets called "interderivability"; for two given lists of inference rules (or more generally, propositions), if you can derive all of the consequences of one from the other and vice versa the lists are interderivable.

Intellectual hygiene.

The reasons for accepting a specific claim will depend on the claim and the evidence for it. I doubt there is a general recipe that applies to all claims and all evidence that will tell you just when to believe and when not to believe. I believe it is much more productive to think of adjustments that can be made to one's own propensities to believe and personal evaluation of whether a claim is justified. There is a huge asymmetry between how easy it is to show something is flawed or impoverished and how hard it is to show something is a well justified complete picture. It's easier to demonstrate falsehood than truth, and easier to find a flaw than construct a position.

Untrustworthy people or institutions will use that asymmetry, letting you construct their position for them while never spelling out the complete picture, and being unable to say what would make them change their mind about the statements/the defeaters for their justifications of it, or their interpretations of evidence.

So here are some rules of thumb I find helpful:

(1) Sources, is the person's claim backed up by data?

(2) Is it from a person or institution you trust?

(2a) An institution that relies on sourced arguments that terminate in interpretations of data is a more reliable truth teller than otherwise.
(2b) A person who has a habit of backing up their claims with sources or data, or at least tells you where they're getting their information from, is a more reliable truth teller than otherwise.
(2c) When a person or institution uses a sourced argument, can you find other people or institutions which do the same thing? Can you find ones that you cannot establish are politically partisan who do the same thing?

(3) Be on the lookout for question substitution and cognitive shortcuts; are a person or institution's claims regarding a question actually demonstrating a much weaker or different claim? EG: "There are racial differences in intelligence" vs "There are statistically significant differences between the mean scores of race categories in IQ tests that are entirely attributable to biological factors"; the first is a lazy claim that relies on a lot of priming and framing to be interpreted as true, it does not spell out its truth conditions or justifying conditions or potential defeaters, whereas the second spells out its truth conditions, justifying conditions and gives a recipe for constructing defeaters. Find the latter kind of statement more worthy of investigation and plausible entertainment than the former.

(4) The form a question is posed in or a claim is made are not innocuous and innocent; we can be primed to alter our dispositions. If the truth conditions of a claim are only explicable (as in, can be stated), given that you already are predisposed to evaluate it as true, make some extra effort to doubt that claim.

(5) If you're looking to cut through noise, don't use raw Google to check something, use Google scholar. That will give you access to peer reviewed papers, their abstracts will tell you who wrote them and sometimes who funded them, which you can check for conflict of interest if you don't trust them. You also get a sense of how much that work is used by their citation count, though it is not a particularly good measure of inherent truth or usefulness for various reasons like peer review being its own kind of filter bubble.

(6) Consume media that reacts more slowly than Twitter and other social media. It takes longer to read a thinkpiece and follow its sources than to knee jerk True/False assign a soundbite, but over a long time of practicing intellectual hygiene you get a more fruitful knee jerk reaction; True/False/Frame or Priming dependent/Plausible/Well justified.

(7) No one is immune to the effects of ideology or thinking from the wrong perspective about something. Do not let yourself be filterbubbled and confirm all your suspicions through constant saturation in their content. As much as it pains you, if you're on the right read what the left is saying, if you're on the left read what the right is saying. And try your hardest not to dismiss something just because it's from a source you're discinclined to like.

(8) Dismissing a source due to being unreliable should be done on a domain by domain basis: if you trust the UK newspaper the Guardian on one topic (say, to report the effects of healthcare spending cuts), that doesn't mean you should trust it on another (say, to report about security overreach from British institutions - their team of journalists that dealt with Snowden got dissolved and their head was replaced with someone very sympathetic to GCHQ).

(9) The more domains a source relies on bullshit to justify its claims in, the less trustworthy it is (like the UK's Sun).

We are always in error, the goal is to learn to be less wrong.

Something I've always wanted to ask you, do you think a law can be immoral?

maybe the union requirement not quite so much. — tim wood

Having a contractually obliged political organisation of heterogeneous but align-able interests that spans every aspect of the private sector is extremely attractive. An already organised series of levers for grassroots activists.

We too, we too. Just for the heck of it,and if it doesn't bend this thread too far out of shape, can you maybe make two brief and substantive suggestions for improvements? — tim wood

For America? Not that my opinion matters.

Redistributive measures (suggest huge progressive income tax and treating all assets gained and held as taxable and highly taxed, bring back FDR).
Mandatory union membership as part of a worker's contract.
Huge investment in tax officers.
Updated laws on data and fiscal transparency.
Updated laws on tax avoidance and company formation (fuck shell companies).
Weaken corporate restricted liability.
Tiny donation caps for political parties from private interests.
Make all party funding a matter of public record, I want the bank statements and a public registry of names and accounts and transactions.
As thorough conflict of interest background checks on politicians as you have for social workers.
Well funded and staffed public institutions to enforce all that crap.

And if anyone says "capital flight", take some cues from China.

I can dream. If any of that stuff actually became a political option it would be shot down from the get go.

I'm partial to making lying a federal civil offense, subject to triple financial damages and/or fines depending on circumstance, the lie itself being sufficient to convict.

A politician who can be demonstrated to be acting against the public interest should be charged with treason.

I'll sleep well tonight.

I mean, I'm British. We're the trope codifiers for modern imperialism/neocolonialism. It isn't a coincidence that we can both go to a foreign country and expect them to speak our language, right? Isn't it strange that the world treats English as the dominant language.

Some reading (neutral source, philosophy encyclopedia article on neocolonialism)

It's people who want to understand the world as a real-life anime with superheroes and ultra-villains who think something world-stopping just happened. — frank

America's politics is set from the ground up to be a gigantic spectacle. Everyone who reads the news can't help but become intimately familiar with American politics. Everyone who consumes media can't help but become familiar with American culture. Our news cycles are dominated by your politician-come-reality-TV-stars, and it should go without saying that the USA's stance on the matter, whatever the matter is, sets the tone for things internationally.

Your culture is generalised and exported as entirely universal, your politics dominates headlines and policy the world over, and you're somehow bamboozled that the rest of the world has a tendency to react to it. We get pissed off with how full of shit your politics is when it spreads around filling the airwaves with endless crap, gets into the minds of our politicians by being born from the same, uliginous, anus or ends up making some Palestinian kid afraid of the sky.

Republicans do not have to give a flying fuck about Trump's sexual assault allegations, they only have to pretend to legitimately care and appeal to legal signifiers to be persuasive to their voter base on the matter. There are already narratives popular in their voter base that allow them to metabolise it. Take "being resilient to shocks caused by finding out your top brass is likely to be a sex offender" as you will.

Democrat supporters are saying the same shit they were lambasting just months ago in the Kavanaugh trial (edit: promotion interview), revealing it absolutely is just a partisan issue to them as the Republicans accused them of. A major credibility issue for sincere American liberals who get hit in the feels by credible sexual assault allegations regarding the president they're supposed to like.

We are in the best of all possible worlds, the democratic party absolutely will minimise this showing their outright hypocrisy and opportunism, and the republican party can laugh at the sidelines whereas before, to them, it was about "due process" and the role of court (don't politicise a tragedy, as you lot like to say).

They deserve each other.

I don't want to talk about your sexual life.

Interesting points you raise indeed. — ttjordy

For if you want another datapoint:

If we're talking about talking about sex, I don't find it distasteful when people do, unless it's exaggerated/bragging and their past partners are the butt of every bragging joke. Hearing decontextualised gory details is boring to me if I'm not involved in them, or if they're not presented with a good joke that shows some insight. I wouldn't talk about the intimate details of my current sex life in a public setting, unless it was a problem with my current sex life I was confiding in a very close friend. I'd probably keep my voice down in that case.

I'd hesitate to say "this is how things must be done", or to essentialise my attitudes towards sex, or to derive ironclad norms of conduct (how it ought to be done or talked about...) from my preferences.

I guess I don't understand the significance of the question to you. So I'll offer a deflationary response.

If it is required to hear the entire thing in one go to count as listening, you didn't listen.
If it isn't required, you did.

I can see a few intuitions regarding continuity of the piece in the background, but I dunno how they relate.

Why the hell are you complaining about the LSE's biasedness when you're citing "conservativehome.com" as a source

Presbyterian in the streets, Joycean in the sheets.

You leftists love "facts"...you generate them in the same way that horses generate manure. — Chester

Linking to an openly leftist organisation (LSE) as proof of how terrible the Tories are isn't in the slightest bit scientific or reasonable. — Chester

Poor people in the UK don't appear to be starving , in fact many of them look like they're eating like pigs. — Chester

I'm done now. You are impossible.

My hobby: giving sermons in graveyards.

I don't "put tiles on a roof". — Chester

Then what do people pay you for. Jesus. Can't even do your job and people pay you.

Population decrease now will cause a population resurgence later when people begin to like living here again. — Chester

Literally "close your eyes and think of England" as a population growth strategy.

The cost of living is not on the rise with all goods and services...for instance most people can afford electrical appliances that older generations could only dream of, food's got cheaper in real terms cars are cheaper in real terms . One of the biggest cost growths has been in housing, and guess what causes the cost of housing to go up? Increased population and smaller family groups. — Chester

(from London School of Economics). Real wages adjusted by a consumer price index that does not include rent or mortgage repayments. This is a measure of how easy it is to buy groceries if that's all you bought. The long term story looks like: stuff gets easier because of imports, then the Great Recession happens, and your wage doesn't buy groceries as well.

That's not a complete picture though, as it doesn't include rents and mortgages (or transport costs). The majority of people are switching to private sector rented housing. Here's how the median monthly price of rented housing goes: from Shelter for England.



A secular decline in the grocery purchasing power of wages (since 2011) occurs at the same time as an aggregate 20% hike in median rents. These are median rents, the above are mean wages; the mean is effected more by the highly skewed to the top income distribution. You have a similar story for trying to get a sensible house on a lower salary (insofar as using house price ratio-ed to earnings is a good indicator for this):



Used to be a cheap house price is about 4 times a yearly salary. Now it flatlined at 7 despite all the other crap going on. (For lower wages and lower housed prices). So basically; better have had a mortgage before all this recession shenanigans started otherwise you're fucked. I'm guessing you were in that position, maybe you even owned your house, and that's why you're not particularly sensitive to how the ground's shifting under your feet. For you, it literally isn't.

Except all those bloody immigrants 'eh, it's all them. Too many of 'em. :roll:

It doesn't. It just means you're slowly being colonised by CCP rhetoric by being here.

I had no idea we could agree on things.

Let's see if I got this right.

(1) Treasury gives money to FED to make leveraged bets with.
(2) Fed buys currently untradeable crap from banks for cash. Expects buybacks with interest. Part of their deal is they get to keep what they bought if the bank fails to buy back, getting a pile of crap in a shitty conditional situation as their reassurance.
(2a everyone shorted the shit out of everything because they knew it was garbage and the underlying conditions that made them garbage investments haven't changed.)
(3) Banks do whatever they can to profit from the money.
(4) Companies who receive bank cash in exchange for whatever do whatever they can to profit from the money.

Seems to me; everyone leverages up while the real economy is still tanking. Pundits look at graphs upticking after the injection and broadcast the measures' amazing success at restoring the economy's functioning. The profits concentrate in the hands of the very wealthiest.

Looks a lot like the banker bailouts to me, only worse.

and a large portion of the blame lies with the moral relativism/nihilism of much modern philosophy. — unenlightened

I don't think so. If people are drawn to relativism and nihilism, it's because they're drawn to explanations that resonate with their life. I'd place the majority of the blame on what social/cultural features make that philosophy resonate in people when they read it. People do not give an iota of a damn about the prevailing mood of academic philosophy, because it's (seen as) all just worthless irrelevant intellectual masturbation; another pile of lies pretending to be a font of truth.