Comments

  • Memetic Inbreeding
    If some were annihilated, like QAnon pockets, isn't that just part of the breeding ground's environment at work?frank

    I hadn't considered echo chambers within echo chambers. I was thinking more how Q has made the step of allowing itself to be falsified, been falsified, then gone back into hiding to regroup and reset rather demonstrate an ounce of shame.

    When a kid touches a hot stove, it hurts, and they learn. When Q does it, they learn nothing.
  • The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
    And I'm thinking, the period after post-modern is post-apocalypse. :yikes: Hope not.Wayfarer

    I'd say belief in/awareness of a technology-driven apocalypse is definitely part of the postmodern condition. Right now that's kind of the bookend of the postmodern era: it started with the apocalyptic vision of two world wars, it held its breath through mutually assured destruction, and now it's getting ready for irreversible destructive manmade climate change.

    I was always taught (sociology, sorry) that postmodernism begins mid 20th Century, esp 1960's. I think the theory's slippery lack of specificity is telling and appropriately ironic. I guess you are trying to align it to a bigger picture.Tom Storm

    A lot of people get retrospectively relabeled as pomo or proto-pomo. It's quite common in criticism of pomo within philosophy to start at Kant. For some reason, Descartes making God an absolute necessity for objective reality was seen as secular Enlightenment, while Kant saying we can't know everything was seen as Bible-thumping. Conservative philosophers are weird.

    But I think Wayfarer is right. Even if late modern physics isn't strictly pomo, it would be weird if it wasn't a major contributor.

    I'd say anyone who is even passably science-literate and not given to perverse conspiracy theories would agree, but I don't know how many of each of those categories there are. I'd say the conspiracy theory crowd are a fairly small minority, but I don't know about the science-literate.Janus

    Manmade climate change's reality has an overwhelming consensus in science, so I expect that scientifically literate people would agree that our use of technology is apocalyptic. Those who disagree don't care much for scientific authority, evidence, facts, etc. One grand narrative or another falls either way.
  • The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
    My belief is that post-modernism describes a real social condition and period in history, that the 'modern' period began with Newton's publication of his Natural Principles and ended with Einstein's publication of Special Relativity. Between those two bookmarks, the belief that the laws of nature reflected God's handiwork still clung on but the discovery of relativity theory and then quantum mechanics swept all that away. Postmodernism proper begins around the first two decades of the 20th C. 'All that is solid melts into air'. 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold'.Wayfarer

    That's interesting. I agree that latter 'modern physics' could just as well be called 'postmodern physics'. Relativity de-centred the observer, embedding them in a mathematical language game (a reference frame) and insisted there was no special, objective, neutral position to judge those games (no special frames). Quantum mechanics replaced ontic objects with epistemic ones: replaced a ball rolling down an incline with 'everything we know about balls rolling down inclines', resulting in a plurality of future realities.

    I'll stop here to savour us agreeing about something. It feels nice. :)

    There MUST be published papers written with this thing.hypericin

    https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01436-7

    And these are science journals and proceedings, not humanities ones. Somehow this was less damning for science, which depends on s rigorous referee procedure, than for humanities papers trying to manage interdisciplinary approaches into fields it was never going to understand.
  • The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
    Well, I think most people place their hopes in improvements of human life due to medical science and science;based technology.Janus

    Cheers Janus. While the anti-vax lunatic fringe might disagree, I think most people would agree. By contrast, would you say that most people agree or disagree with the sentence: Our use of technology is causing a catastrophic global warming event?

    While I anticipated that most experienced pomophobes wouldn't resist jumping the gun a tad, this is precisely why I've limited this first thread to the fundamental claim of pomo: that people lost their faith in grand narratives, unity, and authorities. What replaces these gets somewhat more contentious. Few of the noteworthy pomos were relativists, in fact many were Christians.

    This is my first exposure to the subject and I was favorably impressed with your description of the issue; so much so that I fell right in with the description of postmodernism so completely as to see itJames Riley

    Hell, what a responsibility! I hope I was accurate enough. On which...

    Self-disgust had nothing to do with it. Empires shed their empires because they could not hold on to them any longer. Then too, the natives were getting restless, never a good thing for the regime.Bitter Crank

    "Self-disgust" is probably the wrong term, I agree. There were several reasons, finances not least. But here I was referring to the fact that, after Hitler, it was untenable to control those restless natives with force. We had told everyone that what the Nazis had done was evil, even though we'd just been doing it ourselves. Two years later, Britain ceded India. Not a coincidence.

    There's even something called postmodern architecture, based on deconstruction.Manuel

    I hope to get on to this in a follow-up thread, but pomo culture is typically either post-marxist (which is why Jordan Peterson is a tool) or post-Freud. Check out the book Less Is A Bore for a sense of pomo architecture... It's basically anti-Marxist rather than deconstructive, but yeah there's some theory there too.

    It's just quite baffling that they never really gave a good response to Sokal and Bricmont's books or arguments.Manuel

    After Sokal there was a period of bridge-building, inter-disciplinary conferences and workshops, probably the foundation of interdisciplinary university activity today if I can risk a grand narrative. Including Sokal iirc. He managed to stop being a douchebag in the end.

    I think you would first still need to agree that po-mo had provided a particular lens through which to view things. I am not sure this can be readily established.Tom Storm

    Hopefully I've made the case that early pomo sapiens in language (Lyotard, Baudrillard) did have such a view, insofar as they observed a change in how people were using language, particularly in politics, advertising, universities, etc.
  • The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
    And yes I do think people in general are as committed to the modernist project as ever.Janus

    I'm interested in what makes you think so, and what aspects of it if it's not the whole.
  • The Postmodern era: Did it happen?
    Having said that, I do think that it's fair to say that postmodernism was a movement in literature and philosophy I suppose, depending on how you view Derrida and company. But I don't think it was a historical epoch. So I can't answer the question you pose.Manuel

    That sounds like an answer in the negative.

    Is that post modernism, or just the result of ordinary cynicism and conventional scapegoating, the product of political failures and concentrated media ownership? I think the internet has simply helped to concentrate and organize some eternal problems.Tom Storm

    Ordinary now. But ordinary at the time? Was it usual for Americans to distrust each other for no obvious reason before McCarthy? Was it usual to assume your President was engaged in criminality before Nixon?

    Digression - I re-read part one of Don Quixote recently and it showcases many of the alleged po-mo literary devices; parody, self-reflexivity, irony, pastiche, double coding and that was in 1605. This ancient novel showcases an astonishingly contemporary sensibility.Tom Storm

    Yes, this is well known. But then Hamlet was an existential play centuries before existentialism. It happens, especially with geniuses like Cervantes and Shakespeare.

    Communism untethered to a metanarritive?hypericin

    Rather that nominal communism was untethered from theoretical communism.

    As I see it the meta-narratives only "fell" among a select group of academics. Outside of that "circle jerk" the meta-narrative of modernism is alive and kicking hard.Janus

    Well that's an interesting question. Within philosophy you'll find people who haven't really moved past Plato. Whether or not modernism ended for the masses, it would be naive to expect philosophers would cease to cling to it. But the question and your answer don't pertain to philosophers: what you're suggesting here is that people in general are as committed to the modernism project as ever, right?
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    God intended nothing other than survival, maintenance, and contingent harms along the way.schopenhauer1

    Then I suspect God, as Woody Allen once said, is an underachiever.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Well that's unnecessarily offensive.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    My point was that archeological and genetic evidence says we have to consider that violence and proto-war may have been part of the prehistoric human world.frank

    I was never arguing that violence didn't occur, I even cited an article about violence along with the other two as an example. What I was arguing against was the characterisation of HG tribes as typically violent toward outsiders when in fact they were typically cooperative.

    The archeological evidence to suggest otherwise simply doesn't exist afaik: it shows that sometimes violence occurred but, as per my quote above, these rare cases are elevated to the norm. The consensus within archeology is the same as within anthropology as far as I can tell.

    And there's no genetic evidence at all that I know of. Linking the higher diversity of genes to violence between males is assuming the conclusion which we shouldn't do, especially since your conclusion is in prison for touching boys.
  • Science: coherence → provisional foundation ?
    It seems to me that the scientific methodologies roughly consist of a move (process) from coherentism to provisional/tentative/falsifiable foundationalism.jorndoe

    Hopefully coherentism takes care of itself, both in terms of foundationalism ought to yield a single coherent theory (trivial) in because of the condition of empirical falsification (assuming the universe itself is coherent).

    Interestingly though, physics has two foundational theories -- quantum field theory, and general relativity -- which are, put together (holism), incoherent and non-empirical.
  • Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy
    If you know anything about Verlinde's entropic model of gravity though, I would be curious to hear how something like that might relate to this entropic model of expansion, if you'd care to pontificate on that.Pfhorrest

    I don't, I'm afraid. The actual gravity is a function of temperature, I recall that, but I never got my head around why it's attractive. I'll try and squeeze in some pen and paper work on Sunday.
  • Planned and Free Market Economics
    Nowadays it seems to me that the mindset of many has become that Free markets are the only way to go and Planned market strategies are set to become a thing of the pastdclements

    It's the post-truth era. It can be demonstrably true that free markets not only destroy the world but themselves and still the post-truthers will say nothing else works. At the end of the day, free markets overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest few, and the wealthiest few have managed to convince us it benefits us.
  • Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy
    Then let's imagine a system just like that, except that n itself -- the width of the image -- is also variable. There's still only the two white pixels in it, whose positions are also variable.Pfhorrest

    Okay, I get that. Thanks.

    Stirring the system up sounds like it amounts to the same thing as spreading the particles aroundPfhorrest

    There's a bit more to it about making certain states accessible that otherwise wouldn't be, which is what I had in mind. I'm not sure it's relevant here though.

    if the universe ever got to a point where there's almost no way to increase entropy by moving existing energy around, we might start to see violations of conservation of energy too.Pfhorrest

    Like an expansion of space to allow entropy to increase, sure.

    I'm just talking about the toy system of points on a line. Let's look at our variation on that, the 1-by-n bitmap with two white pixels on a black background. For the sake of illustration let's set n=8 for now. There are exactly two (I mistakenly said one before) states where the white pixels are separated by 6 black pixels: if we call the pixels A and B and represent black space with underscores, those are the states:Pfhorrest

    Yeah I got it, my point was that thermodynamics is a statistical concept. There are fewer microstates in the two-particle model for the maximal distance, so moving to it doesn't increase entropy, it would decrease it. However this only works in this this low-dimensional, low-particle-number model.

    If we make this real and have two molecules in a tube, it would be very surprising to see each molecule at either end of the tube: that would be an ordered system. There's not really a concept of them filling the container.

    As the number of particles increases, the number of microstates that fill the box increases exponentially and faster than the number of microstates that fill only part of the box and one approaches the limit where statistical behaviour is expected.

    So I guess the question here is what is it you suspect thermodynamics fundamentally is when you're dealing with two particles in a tube? Because it can't be statistical and be demonstrated by your toy model*.

    But all that aside, I like the idea that expansion is a kind of quantum tunnelling of the entire universe to a larger version of the universe to increase entropy. That does make some sense.

    It may increase its energy, making the overlap between individual microstates and the current state vanishingly small, but if it increases the number of such microstates in compensation, it could still work.

    *Actually it can be: even two-body systems are statistical in quantum mechanics (e.g. Pauli exclusion), just not in the sense of thermodynamics.
  • Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy
    I imagined to myself a little thought experiment or visualization: a toy system consisting of two points on a line segment, so it would have a very simple 2D configuration space, with obvious (err... note on that later*) peaks and valleys of entropy in it giving an obvious entropic arrow of time. And then, to that model, I added a third variable, and so a third dimension to its configuration space: the size of the line segment. Because higher-entropy states would be available on larger line segments, the entropic arrow of time would naturally point down the dimension of the configuration space that represents the size of the line segment...Pfhorrest

    Can you draw this? I'm struggling to see why a line on a 2D configuration space would be well-served by a third dimension representing the size of the line segment. My best interpretation is that you're introducing some non-locality but I'm not sure.

    In other words, in a completely empty space, the entropic arrow of time will be toward a larger completely empty space. But if there's an even steeper entropy gradient in the other dimensions of the configuration space, thereabouts the entropic arrow of time will be angled further away from straight down the dimension of the configuration space representing a larger line segment: in other words, if there's any process that results in higher entropy faster than making more space, that will happen first.Pfhorrest

    So entropy is essentially a count of the number of near-degenerate states (or microstates) that are equivalent (making a macro state). One way of increasing entropy therefore is to fix the number of particles and spread them out. But yeah there are other ways: increase the temperature, reduce the number of particles, stir the system up. These usually require work.

    There is exactly one state of the system where the two points are maximally far apart. There are increasingly more states of the system where the two points are increasingly closer together. The most common distance-apart for the two points to be, out of all the possible configurations of the system, is zero.Pfhorrest

    I'm not sure how you feel about that in light of the above. There may well be fewer macrostates where volume is maximised, but that doesn't mean fewer microstates. For two-particle systems this isn't necessarily important, since, on a line, there are really only a few microstates making up the macrostate of maximal separation (though I'm unclear why you think there is such a state). However for a macroscopic system, there are a huge number of such states, an exponential function of particle number. ({1, 2, 3, 4, ...}, {2, 1, 3, 4, ...}, {1, 3, 2, 4, ...} and so on.)
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Ah okay, thanks. That's interesting. Violence undoubtedly occurred, which was why I posted the second link. But this sort of thing was covered above to an extent: raising the rare and recent to the level of norm and ancient. (I know 10,000 years isn't recent, but it's still a fraction of a percent of our existence.)
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Given that hunter gatherers are the very people we tended to violently slaughter to steal their land for our empires, is it really too far of a leap to posit guilt as a reason for preferring the latter?Isaac

    Guilt and that sort of contempt that unacknowledged guilt fosters. But even beyond that, it's difficult to imagine humans as peaceable. It's the WYSIATI again: history is a list of wars punctuated by discoveries; the news is conflict punctuated by sexual assault stories. From a limited viewpoint, we do seem inherently cruel.

    Reading anthropology and, before that, evolutionary biology really surprised me. I was a Pinker-esque optimist, still am quite an optimist, who pooh-poohed golden age laments. But everything does point to humans in their natural environments actually being admirably and enviably much groovier than we are.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Nymphomaniaca don't derive pleasure from sex? That's weird.frank

    I know, right? It's actually really sad. Every time I think about your ability to read it gets me down tbh.

    Like that slaughter house they found in North Africa a few years ago. A whole village wiped out.James Riley

    In Libya? That was really recent though. I'm talking about tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Encroachment on "my" hunting grounds, tit for tat, blood feuds, etc. Some was just dick-measuring raids/warfare.James Riley

    Encroachment was only an issue in hard times. I mentioned on another thread, when the Quebec government stepped in to protect the resources of the Cree people from white trappers who were trapping animals to extinction, the govt thought they had to establish boundaries for each Cree group because that's what Europeans do. Cree leaders were tasked with reporting any white trappers or Cree hunters from neighbouring areas and keep a tally of what was hunted. It didn't work for the Cree as they were used to hunting wherever they pleased, so they just made the numbers up and didn't report the "encroachments".

    As far as I can tell, this is basically standard among immediate return groups: unless the shit hits the fan, go where you will in peace.

    It's only difficult to wrap our heads around now because we've become absolute bastards since.

    My ability to read is a nymphomaniac.frank

    Yeah it cannot derive pleasure from sex.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    If you could be bothered to read your own links, you see that you pointed to an article on chimpanzees. We aren't descended from chimpanzees. Nobody in the science of human origin looks to that species to understand our own.frank

    It's mainly about humans, as are the other two. Literally every man in the village has shagged your ability to read.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Disingenuous.frank

    Demonstrated (read the links).

    Your justification is morbidly obese.frank

    Your archeology will never get a girlfriend.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    I think that native American tribes formed part of the understanding of how warfare spreads from tribe to tribe like a cancer, but, yeah, there's nothing racist about it, it's just a response to being attacked.

    In terms of models, it's difficult to say because we colonised pretty much everywhere that didn't itself colonise. The US melting pot probably is the nearest we have, God help us.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    The point is: I'm looking at archeology and genetics, you're looking at prejudice that I think goes back to Hobbes. My justifications kick your justification's asses.frank

    You're looking at outdated interpretation of incomplete archeological evidence as far as I can tell. Can't even reach my justification's ass to kiss it. :rofl:
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Ah okay. This is just what I was talking about here:

    My impression had been that the violent savage theory had been recognised as too hasty and probably not unrelated to the fact that it was devised by backwards honkies who, let's face it, have never been great with representation.Kenosha Kid

    That there is a higher lower limit of the number of females who can have contributed to the human genome to date isn't a mystery in search of a solution, and certainly

    That points to prehistoric war as the norm.frank

    is not justified.
  • Why is the misgendering of people so commonplace within society.
    Yes, exactly this. And it's not just a case of remembering to use different words in the right places, but of replacing generic language rules with person-specific ones which is an unreasonable demand for the sake of a tiny minority.

    That said, fully in favour of a switch to generic genderless pronouns, which has been pushed for for decades and affects a much higher percentage of people. I tend to oscillate between "they", "he or she", or just "she" as a counter. "They" is clearly superior; I should stick with that. No doubt it'll annoy a tiny minority of people again who either want a personal pronoun or are militantly cis, but I object to the assertion that I should care.
  • Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy
    Anyway, if I understand right through my sleep-addled brain, you're suggesting that it's not so much (as I was speculating) that maybe some law of preservation of free energy (/ some kind of equivalent symmetry) requires that more space and so energy be created to counteract the increase in entropy, but rather that the increase in space and so energy requires (or makes room for the possibility of) thermodynamic action to counteract the decrease in entropy. It's not things winding down that inflates space, but inflating space that keeps things wound up.Pfhorrest

    Yeah more or less. Thermodynamics is entirely reducible to statistical mechanics (which is in turn entirely reducible to quantum mechanics) which comes down to probability theory and combinatorics: if you imagine a partitioned box with gas in one partition and a vacuum in the other, when you remove the partition the gas expands to fill the whole box: you never get the gas collecting on one side or the other after a time. This is simply because the number of configurations of gas molecules that occupy the whole box greatly outweighs the total number of configurations occupying one side or the other (or the top, or bottom, or middle, etc.).

    In the case of the inflaton field, expansion should be fastest where matter _isn't_, so as time goes on, we have more and more space to occupy, like a series of partitions being removed one after another, each giving access to a box that's exponentially larger than the last.

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

    The thermodynamic arrow of time and the second law of thermodynamics are thought to be a consequence of the initial conditions in the early universe. Therefore, they ultimately result from the cosmological set-up.
  • Criteria for a stance-independent definition and the definition of involuntary suffering
    Seems fine. When people like things, it's always positive. When they dislike things, it's always negative. I'm sure we can muster counterexamples (Stockholm syndrome?) but that's besides the point.

    The problem I see is that the OP concerns the actions of one individual and the idiosyncratic preferences of another. Let's take a mundane example. Anna and her sister Barbara have asked you to hang a picture on the wall. Anna likes the picture above the fireplace but hates it above the sofa. Barbara loves it above the sofa but hates it about the fireplace. They only agree on hating it everywhere else. So here the forces of liking and disliking are balanced unless you choose not to act, in which case you maximise disliking*.

    Morality concerns how we should behave (practical reason). Moral realism states that some claims about how we should behave are true. If in the above example, one or both sisters must suffer and one or neither of them must be pleased as an outcome of your behaviour, how do we go about finding the pertinent moral proposition that is true and, if we can't, if there's literally no difference between two contradictory behaviours, how do we justify our belief in a true proposition?

    *The solution obviously is to shoot Barbara in the head so she can't dislike anything and hang the picture above the fireplace.
  • Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy
    Morning Pfhorrest. One of the Andrews is also a physicist iirc. @Andrew M?

    By our current best understanding of physics, the universe as a whole is not a closed system, because there's new energy being created everywhere all the time by the expansion of space.Pfhorrest

    Yeah there's a few things you could be talking about here. There's dark energy which is thought to be driving the expansion of the universe, but also the ground state energy of all quantum fields in the universe. There's also the inflaton field, a dark energy contender, which expands space without reducing its energy density. Not telling you stuff you don't know, just thought I'd annotate your OP for the general readership

    The second law of thermodynamics is itself a time asymmetry.

    So, could perhaps the second law of thermodynamics itself therefore be responsible for the creation of new energy via the expansion of space, which in turn undermines the effects of the second law on the universe as a whole?
    Pfhorrest

    Noether's theorem isn't causal, it's more like two sides of the same coin. Here you're describing the expansion of spacetime necessitating a violation of conservation of energy. It wasn't just space that was created at the big bang but time too, and there's your time asymmetry necessitated by Noether's theorem.

    This is very related to the second law though. If spacetime were fixed, the universe should tend toward equilibrium. But an expanding universe is constantly non-equilibrium: it's essentially creating more and more possible configurations of matter that are each more likely than the one we're in. There you do have a causal relationship: the expansion of space causes a thermodynamic arrow.

    I hope that's useful. I'm not a cosmologist so maybe someone else out there will blow my mind.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    What the kinds of things covered in those articles tells me is that people will rationalise things in whatever way suits them. In the end, it is study and evidence that differentiates between the close-enough and the not-even-close.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    This is perhaps a more on-point article:

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/new-study-of-prehistoric-skeletons-undermines-claim-that-war-has-deep-evolutionary-roots/

    Basically it comes across to me that there's a certain political aspect to the way early human groups are portrayed, like there's a need for a certain kind of person to find some natural justification for their own personality traits. The view of early man as violent was forged largely by quite privileged white men between two world wars: paleontology and archeology were gentlemanly pursuits practiced by the kinds of people who today you would expect to vote Republican ;)

    The actual fossil evidence and studies of the groups most similar to our prehistoric ancestors suggests the polar opposite to this handy "I can't help being a shit" theory. But it'll stick around no doubt.

    Our genetics indicates we have around twice as many female ancestors as male. That points to prehistoric war as the norm.frank

    You'll have to explain that. Are you talking human ancestors?
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Betraying my impatience (read: laziness :rofl: ), this first hit on my search seems fair-minded enough and describes the paleontological rethink I thought had occurred, e.g. mistaking animal bites for spear holes, hunting tools for weapons, etc.

    https://www.livescience.com/640-peace-war-early-humans-behaved.html

    My impression had been that the violent savage theory had been recognised as too hasty and probably not unrelated to the fact that it was devised by backwards honkies who, let's face it, have never been great with representation.

    And it rightly points out that violence was still a factor, even if we mostly got along well. There's always going to be some antisocial element to contend with.

    EDIT: Ah! Second hit was: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-humans-tamed-themselves/580447/
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    Then what was all this about?Marchesk

    Literally as written. For most of our existence we haven't had racial conflict. Race hate is largely a white man thing. Which races do white men hate? The ones our crusading ancestors shat all over.

    So you know, I'm certainly willing to reconsider this, but I'm not sure why or how you've come to that conclusion.ChatteringMonkey

    From anthropology, pretty much exclusively, wherein the consensus is that small, immediate return HG social groups -- which is how we spent most of our existence -- are pretty uniformly peaceful and cooperative until they have to defend themselves against warlike groups. I didn't think the paleontologist view you mention (axe wounds in skulls sort of thing?) was even still held today. I'll look into that.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    The written record doesn't go back much further does it? How would we know whether they were prone to racisme or not?ChatteringMonkey

    Because similar groups of people survive to this day, and are a matter of record. Generally traditional societies aren't just tolerant of but cooperate with other groups, and only become warlike once they encounter other warlike groups. The whole intolerant, tribal natural human notion is just rubbish.

    So where do you want to draw the line on Christianity, Constantine?Marchesk

    Context clues, dude. When did big armies of Christians go abroad and kill a ton of people? Was it Jesus?

    I just don't agree with your post summarizing historical conflict as largely Western EuropeanMarchesk

    Now that really is straw-man--building. My patience for patently BS arguments runs about as far as the benefit of doubt dictates. You're out of yard.
  • Is Racism a Natural Response?
    I guess things were peaceful enough under Egyptian, Roman, Aztek, Chinese, Assyrian, Persian and Mongul rule. It's true, slavery was based on being conquered rather than skin color, but as long as you paid your taxes to the Emperor/Pharaoh/King, and your religious practices were accepted in the empire, it was all good.Marchesk

    You're still talking about recent humans, a few thousand years at most. You know we've been around a lot longer than that, right? I mean, a _lot_!

    Yeah, because prior to Christianity, everyone in the Middle East got along swell. Jews, Samaritans, Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians never had any cause to fight each other. Those damn white Christians, like Jesus and Paul, messed everything up /s.Marchesk

    And here I was talking about _now_ wherein most racism one encounters is by white people, targeted against black people, middle eastern people, Jews, etc. Not a lot of Samaritan-on-Assyrian hate these days, you notice. Also, I know you're straw-man--building, and really badly, so this is largely pointless but I'm pretty sure Jesus and Paul didn't try to colonise Africa. Reading all the words helps.
  • Poll: The Reputation System (Likes)
    We all started from zero a few days ago, I think.
  • Climate Change (General Discussion)
    Let's make people put their property where their mouth is.James Riley

    I'm disappointed to discover that Google Images found NOT ONE photo of Terry Jones tucking into an Anglican cathedral. :rage:
  • Is Society Collapsing?
    People have been saying 50 years for a bit too long.Lil

    May I present you with your first like, and my first genuine one...

    Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, queer rights, trans rights, animal rights, conservation, climate change action... Is society getting better?
  • Bannings
    Oh good, that guy was too much. I wondered if it was really Mike Lindell.