Every time I see this thread I want to make a joke about FOIL and PEMDAS being the correct way to solve inequalities.

I could no longer resist.

Congrats, I guess. But as the Kwisatz Haderach this doesn't seem that special to me.

Isn't this sort of like saying "man's over evolved eyes are a curse upon him. If man didn't constantly constrict his pupils to block out the incoming light, he would be overwhelmed."

...well yeah, the pupil (sublimation/distraction/etc.) is part of the eye (consciousness). They are part of one whole that evolved together. Light is good, it lets us see. Too much light is bad, it hurts and fries your photoreceptors. A pupil is a good thing. It isn't "running away from the truth of how much light is in the room," to have your pupil constrict, just like the release of endorphins isn't some sort of "illusion-making to hide the real levels of pain in the body." The "real level of pain," is determined, in part, by the endorphins.

They are all part of the same whole. There is no "true level" of human misery and suffering that we can discover by "cutting through illusion."

I can imagine a senate made up of retired government officials, civil servants and jurists who have experience in dealing with the practical fallout from legislation, who could maybe prevent future mistakes.

Yes, this would be a great idea. If you had strong (perhaps legislatively mandated) guilds/associations for each large sector of the economy (e.g. health, agriculture, entertainment, etc.) you could put members into that chamber as well so that it isn't all former government employees.

Any sectoral guilds would need to be subdivided into independent organizations for labor/management (maybe also one for middle management). Then, each sector would send their representatives, which would always be evenly split between labor and management reps (middle management is nice as a tie breaker). Such reps wouldn't be popularly elected, but the labor and MM reps would be elected by millions of workers across a huge swath of the population, so close enough.

But 18 for 332 million is asking rather a lot of each representative. If you have small numbers in legislature, you have hopelessly huge numbers in each constituency.

Maybe, but that's already the case. Right now it's 1:770,000, on average, more like 1:1,000,000 in some places. This precludes anything like the "knowledge of how people feel" that local politicians might get.

A very solid majority of Americans don't even know who their representatives are, and this is true even among those who voted in the prior election. If there weren't so many, people would have a much easier time keeping track of who actually represented them.

Plus larger districts would make Gerrymandering virtually impossible, while also making it far less likely that people who are extremely far away from the national median voter get into office.

To be honest, I don't think there is much value in representatives "representing" their constituents. In practice, they have never actually done this, and it's unclear if it would even be a good thing to have a state run "according to popular opinion." Direct democracy isn't just a bad idea because it would require too many elections.

The big benefit of elections are that they keep leaders accountable. Mess up enough and someone else gets a turn.

I'm less and less convinced that democracy is a good in and of itself. If my hypothetical fantasy nation could look like Denmark, but have its leaders picked by some technocratic processes, or it could look like Ecuador, but have free and fair popular elections, I know which one I'd pick. And which one I'd rather live in too.

Edit: City councilors with ward representation often really do try to "represent" their wards. The results aren't good though. You get bad decision making because people are worried about what is good for the part and not the whole, and it ends up hurting everyone. 9 times out of 10 an at-large-council appointing a professional manager is going to function better than a popularly elected mayor dealing with ward councilors.

Sort of on topic, when I heard of Zapffe my initial thoughts were:

A. What makes certain things in conciousness "artificial?" What could this even mean? It seems like conciousness must include an ability to focus on some things and not others for it to be consciousness.

B. If human conciousness is such that most people who have it enjoy it, then doesn't that just show that it isn't actually that bad? The charge of "artificial" exclusion of some elements of conciousness doesn't really make sense. I don't get how focusing on what one finds relevant can ever be defined as somehow artificial or alien to consciousness.

This would seem to imply that pessimism of Zapffe's variety is defective conciousness, not that all human conciousness is defective.

So far, nobody wanted to make government smaller - at least in the US.

I definitely wouldn't mind just completely getting rid of the US Senate. Having a chamber based on arbitrary borders where a 2/3rds majority is required to do anything is ridiculous and helping to drive the deterioration of the state.

Then the House is way too big. People don't actually discuss anything in large numbers, they just acts as cliques. People can be smart, mobs are dumb. A lot of damage is done by Representatives who come to Washington to play act as "outsiders," doing nothing but protest antics. When you're one of 435 you don't feel responsible for success. I'd say 18 is about as big as you'd want to go on a deliberative body.

Since you need specialized committees, you need more than 18 legislators, but some sort of tiered system could deal with that.

I might also just clear house and get rid of local law enforcement and make it a state/national affair. It'd be worth it if only to abolish police unions.

Just wanted to note that the Thomas Riker situation only implies body-soul dualism, not the often associated ideas of the immortality and immutability of the soul (or some aspects of it).

Because as we know from another beaming mishap on the USS Voyager, it is possible for two souls to be combined into a novel, composite soul (sharing a composite body). This was, of course, Tuvix.

Unfortunately, they were somehow able to undo this fusion, both killing Tuvix and forcing Voyager to continue on for several more seasons in the Delta Quadrant with Nelix, the most annoying member of the cast.

Like I said, I might not be very helpful :rofl: . The whole scale thing is just something I've seen thrown out in favor of pessimism quite often. I used to think it had a great deal of merit and use it myself. And then one day it struck me that it is actually one of the sillier philosophical arguments out there.

I don't know if I have much to add. I read Grimscribe as part of a book club a while back and I really liked it. I've had people explain "Conspiracy Against the Human Race," to me before, but I've never read it.

From the overview I got, it the ideas sounded somewhat similar to those of R. Scott Bakker, who is another fantasy/horror author I really love.

That said, I love the fiction, not all of the broader philosophy. It seems to me like it all hinges on the claim that the world is indeed meaningless, and even more the claim that freedom is illusory. I don't think there are good reasons to believe these claims.

For example, there seems to be serious problems with epiphenomenalism. If epiphenomenalism were true, there would be absolutely no reason for our perceptions to correspond to reality. This being the case, there would also be absolutely no reason to believe what our perceptions tell us about the inevitability of death, how we are controlled by hormones, etc. — i.e., no reason to believe that epiphenomenalism describes reality in the first place.

Without these claims re "meaning and freedom," the rest of the pessimismtic claims seem unsupportable.

The idea that all thought contravening the conclusions is an elaborate "coping mechanism," rubs me the wrong way. It's possible to rebut literally any position on the basis of such "arguments from psychoanalysis." Marxists have a similar way for explaining any disagreement with their theses.

You could just as well say that people embrace pessimism because they are glum depressives who need an excuse for being sad— it's a "coping mechanism."

The "meaninglessness" of existence question is an interesting one though. I like Nagel's article on this "absurdity," https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%2520Absurd%2520-%2520Thomas%2520Nagel.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjp9ZDVx4WEAxUDkmoFHTYOBywQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1CdbUWlHJRrzwgiaCWZH1N

At least Nagel asks the right question, which is: "what would make life meaningful?"

If we lived for 10,000 years? If we were the ruler of a galactic empire for five million years? If the entire universe only contained our solar system? If the entire universe consisted of one small town and we were one of its 80 residents? If our body grew to the size of a billion galaxies?

People often bring up the scale of the universe when they say life "obviously lacks meaning," but why exactly should fudging around the length of our lives or our size relative to everything else that exists have anything to do with meaning? It's a weird idea when you think about it.

Post-modernists can't misread a philosopher. They just read different [insert philosopher's name here]s. Protagoras and Gorgias become the heros of the Platonic Dialogues. :cool:

Does anybody know of a philosopher or philosophical project/ question that is more interesting or important?

The key "grand system" builders are Plato, Aristotle, Saint Aquinas, and Hegel. You might throw Kant in there as well. Those authors all spawned "traditions" which continue to attract a very large number of devotees. There are worlds to explore in each.

Aristotle and Aquinas are fairly dry. Being foundational thinkers for what would become the "scientific method" and modern thought, a lot of their greatest insights will seem like common sense. We're just used to thinking that way now. Aquinas is also filled with theology, which is generally a turn off to modern audiences. So I might not start with either of those two.

Kant is similarly quite dry, although also a good deal more difficult to read IMO. And based on your post, I don't think you'd like him (granted, that's scant evidence to go on).

That leaves Hegel and Plato. Hegel is famously a slog to read and difficult; Plato's dialogues are often cited as among the best works of literary art from the ancient world. The choice is easy, give Plato a shot.

If you liked Nietzsche, you'll probably like a good deal of Plato because, despite all the railing against Plato that Nietzsche does, he often ends up advancing the same positions. Yet Plato's approach is very different, and his ethics in particular are quite different.

Platonism certainly did become a dogma over the centuries, and this is to some extent what Nietzsche is actually attacking when he rails against Plato, but Plato himself is the opposite of dogmatic in many places.

I would recommend the Apology as a starting point because it's short and sweet. That or you could just jump into the Republic. Or, if you really admire the Dionysian element in Nietzsche, there is the Phaedrus. Just bear in mind that the first speech in the Phaedrus is supposed to be terrible, and the second flawed. It's not until Socrates throws his cloak back in divine inspiration that the real gem emerges.

The Teaching Company's course on the Dialogues is quite good too, and is helpful for getting all the symbolism going on. Just get it through Amazon or Wonderium or something, because they are ridiculously overpriced on TTC's website.

I also really like Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato and Hegel as a secondary source (it's sort of a misleading title as it has as much to do with freedom as the "divine").

Very few philosophers are as fun to read as Nietzsche, but Plato is one of them (Saint Augustine is another). For Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics is worth checking out though. It's more dry, but still quite readable.

(That all said, Hegel is my favorite "big system" guy. It's just tough to say where to start with him).

It's particularly silly because it's been pointed out several times that:

A. Hamas won 44% of the vote in that election, not even a majority. They beat Fatah by a whole 2%.
B. They rule Gaza unilaterally not because of that election but the 2007 Gaza War they fought with Fatah where they essentially threw a coup and murdered the Fatah members still in the Strip.
C. They haven't allowed for anything like democracy ever since, repress protests, disappear/torture dissidents, etc.
D. Up through 2022, they polled fairly terribly, with north of 73% saying Hamas should be forced to hold election and that their military wing should be disarmed and disbanded.

Also ironic is that a key campaign promise was to stop hiding military assets/forces in civilian areas and using "human shields." Hamas pronouncements that all of Gaza is "eager to become martyrs," for them should be taken with a grain of salt. It hardly seems fair to hold the general population accountable, especially since the 10/7 attack was planned in secret, hidden even from the Hamas political leadership and their allies. Israelis have far more say in their government.



---
Anyhow, Israel's unity government seems to be begining to crack up. There seems to be growing recognition that totally removing Hamas and returning the hostages alive are mutually exclusive goals.

Totally removing Hamas requires taking Rafah, which requires some sort of understanding with the Egyptians. This is lacking precisely because Israel has no clear vision for what comes next. As much as Egypt might love to be rid of Hamas, obviously they don't want to write a blank check (or take in refugees, or be forced into a position where it looks very bad for them not to take refugees.

It's really unclear what the plan is supposed to be.

Right, I'm not sure acting is necessarily any more traumatic than going to a big family gathering, a big digital art exhibit, a crowded city, flying on a plane, or daycare. If anything, if might be less of an issue than daycare because a child isn't going to a rotating cast of generally overstretched strangers for most of their waking hours. It really just depends on how it is done.

The Seventh Seal for example has two children who are probably 18-24 months old. But they're in a few short shots doing child things, playing with the actors outside. I don't see how that necessarily has to involve anything traumatic.

Problems with child actor seem to be more prominent when they become celebrities and act as a "career." In general though, I think drama programs are excellent for young children. It teaches public speaking and the ability to take on roles based on context.

A weird decision-making process from Iran. They are losing face over not engaging Israel as Hamas is destroyed and getting into it with the US and UK (and potentially the rest of the world given they keep hitting even their ostensible allies' shipping) via Yemen, but then they bomb Iraq and Pakistan, provoking a counter attack by Pakistan.

Iraq makes some sense, because they've already been fighting with their Kurdish population, up to using artillery on their own cities in a few incidents, but they have also had a growing rift with Iraqi Shia, and this won't help that. The Pakistan choice is even more strange, especially since they were trading fire with the Taliban earlier in 2023 and have an insurgency with their Azeri population. It seems like flailing.

Unfortunately, even if Trump loses, America politics are going to remain incredibly broken. The US cannot even follow through on its commitments to Ukraine/Europe despite the fact that the overwhelming number of lawmakers from both parties support more aid for Ukraine.

We've reached a new low, where even the few areas of agreement between the parties end up getting wed to hit button domestic issues. Now aid to Ukraine has been made contingent on an immigration deal during an election year (one packed with administrative poison pills as well), making it 50/50 at best if anything gets passed before November. Unfortunately, this is going to have very real consequences on the battlefield, especially as air defense munitions run low.

The adults in the room are going to need to recognize that they have to be willing to pass legislation without their party's most radical members or America's already battered credibility as a partner (or even an adversary) on the world stage is completely ruined.

At this rate, it's only a matter of time until the country defaults on its debt, sparking a huge crisis. If anything, the GOP losing big over the next 10 years or so will probably only make this more likely, as they lose any share in wanting to see success.

The only consolation is that, given how polarized things are, it seems fair to assume that very few voters are going to switch parties for the Presidential ticket. Demographics being what they are, this probably means Trump loses by 9-11 million votes this time instead of just 7.5 million, although this hardly precludes him taking office again. That's probably the worst case scenario, especially if there are some Florida in 2000 style shenanigans surrounding his victory.

The Platonic concept of Body/Soul integrity, as a harmonious interaction, is new to me.

Just to clarify though, the body/soul - instrument/harmony analogy is Pythagorean, not Platonic. Plato has Socrates argue against the analogy in the Phaedo. It's in the context of Plato's arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. Plato doesn't like the analogy because it would imply that the soul (harmony) must disappear when the body (instrument) is destroyed.

Right, "human shields," generally refers to placing civilians around active military operations or forcing them to stay near such operations. Resettlement in occupied territory is a crime, just not equivalent with the concept of "human shields."

The Crimea example given earlier is not a good one. What Russia is doing in moving Russian civilians into eastern/southern Ukraine while deporting Ukrainians into Russia is illegal, but it isn't using human shields. When the UAF has advanced, Russians who were moved into Ukrainian territory have been allowed to flee, and they certainly haven't been forcibly transporting civilians to military objectives. There are all sorts of bad things you could say about Russia: the mass graves with signs of torture, the fact that their own soldiers were found castrated in the same mass graves, the absolute disregard for civilian casualties, such that if Gaza had a similar fatality rate to Mariupol it would mean 250,000-300,000 dead. However, using human shields has not been one of their infamies.

It's an odd fixation given that essentially the entire international community has recognized that Israel is engaging in illegal activities in the West Bank. They just aren't engaging in exactly the same crimes Hamas engages in.

And this isn't even an assessment that comes with any sort of moral overtones. Israel doesn't need to do what Hamas does because of their large military advantage (and because human shields would be useless against Hamas). Rather than being some form of restraint or virtue, you could chalk this up to Israel simply not standing to benefit from such actions.

That said, there are few militant groups I can think of who have been so completely and callously indifferent to "their people's" deaths than Hamas. I don't think it's wrong to say that, in Hamas' calculus, Palestinian civilian death and suffering has often been taken as a good thing, a goal to achieve for the good of the wider project (hell, their own public statements say as much). But even if you thought the ends might justify these means, the fact that no "mass Arab attack on Israel," was going to happen was very easy to predict, such that Hamas' actions aren't just callous, but callous with no discernable chance of success, sheer nihilism.

I figured as much, but I think the analogy actually is quite good in some ways. For in the case of the Soviets, we see a state that was in every way justified in defending itself and taking all means necessary to defeat their adversary. At the same time, the Soviets also did a ton of cruel, unnecessary shit that actively hurt their effort to defeat the Nazis. To my mind, Hamas has often acted similarly. It would be one thing to carry out horrific attacks that actually could reasonably expected to help the long term position of the people of Gaza, but their means aren't even good for achieving their ends.

Most of the Strip is now occupied (and destroyed). If the IDF's figures are even remotely accurate, they've lost a very large share of their total strength wounded/killed/captured, and a significant proportion appears to have also deserted. Their leadership is encircled, and their last leverage point is the hostages, which Israel only appears to be willing to accept their exile for. Their plan seems to have managed to get a lot of their people killed, their land destroyed and occupied, and their organization decimated — which was not particularly hard to predict given their strategy.

Some sort of militant group will exist in Israel after this. It might even be an Islamist group. But it seems probable that it won't be Hamas, and even if it is, it will probably be (justifiably) new leadership, because this not a good outcome.

You could also say it's analogous to the last days of the Third Reich in that the war is already decisively lost, and there doesn't seem to be anything to be gained from making your people's city your funeral pyre, but the leadership obviously isn't concerned with that. Although, it's not quite as bad, since the Nazis had a window to surrender to the Western Allies in 1944 on, when the war was decisively lost, and spare their people the epidemic of rape and half century of Russian domination fighting on entailed, but they chose the "let's use Berlin as our funeral pyre," option even with that off-ramp (notably, millions of soldiers and civilians did not, and fled west).

Hamas are like the Allies who occasionally commit a war crime but that's all good and excusable because they're fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people and therefore are the good guys.

You don't even need to stretch it to "occasionally." The Soviets were part of the Allies and they committed war crimes on an industrial scale, and also responded to dissent within their own population with disappearances and torture, like Hamas.

The parallels work pretty well. The Soviets had a habit of refusing to let civilians evacuate urban areas because they thought keeping the people crowded into them would frustrate the German advance. Also similar is how the party elites sat on stacks of horded supplies while the population starved and leveraged this to extort them.

The analogy also works because, following their victory the Soviets carried a large scale genocide expelling about 12-14 million Germans from Eastern Europe, killing another 2-2.5 million (this is after the war), and I can't see a world where Hamas achieves total victory and Jews are allowed to remain in Israel.

The analogy falls apart though when you consider how Hamas got control of Gaza, fighting a war with the PA. Stalin had unified control, whereas I would have to assume that if the Jews left Israel tonight a Palestinian civil war would erupt by next week (same thing happened with the Iraqi Kurds).

It really goes to show how dismal the whole situation is (and was then for Eastern Europe).

I don't quite see how you think that "strong emergence" gets around Plato\s trap. Can you explain what you mean here?

Strong emergence would show the analogy is simply wrong, as Plato is arguing, although it would be wrong in a different way. With strong emergence, we would have a new, fundemental and irreducible force in play. Such a force would seem to be causally efficacious, and so it shouldn't be a problem to say the mind causes the body to do things in the way that it appears to be a problem for a harmony to "cause" changes in the instrument that generates it.

But conceptually, I would argue this doesn't appear to make sense. The analogy breaks down because a lyre/harmony relation seems like a reducible one. That it is conceptually hard to see how this could ever work is sort of the point. Strong emergence isn't at all intuitive and this would seem to suggest that either something is fundementally wrong with the concept, or the concepts it is built on top of (substance/superveniance), or that there is something wrong with our intuition.

Either way, something seems wrong with our intuition. Both strong emergence and the idea that the mind is causally inefficacious both seem unreasonable, but we seem forced to choose one or the other (or reject the analogy).

For me, this is tough because I think the analogy is probably in some ways a good one, although "melody" would work better. But I would tend to want to locate the problem back at basic ontological distinction between things and processes being basic (putting Heraclitus over Parmenides).

But Fool implies a "harmony" could exist without the instrument which plays the notes, by referring to "harmony" as if it meant a general principle of "tuning". This allows Fool to say that the "harmony" as the general principle by which the lyre is tuned, precedes the playing of the lyre. But this is a different meaning for "harmony" from the one that Plato is using, which is the common definition of "harmony", the simultaneously sounded musical notes having a pleasing effect.

Is that so? I had noticed that the Center for Hellenic Studies text keeps a lot of the Greek original terms to avoid the connotations they have gained in English. It translates "harmonica," as "tuning." And Socrates certainly seems to use the term like it refers to a (specific) "tuning," rather than just a any harmony.

I don't know enough about the Greek to know if this is how the term was used. I have to think it isn't, simply because you can put any stringed instruments in tune in different ways, but maybe not. So, I think Fool's response is in line with how Socrates uses the term. The problem I see is that it seems possible that Plato is having Socrates use the term in a very limited and argumentatively weak way on purpose.

Given the advice that comes before, I think we are supposed to pick up, examine, and discard each of the first two (arguably three) reasons he gives for discarding the analogy, until we get to the last argument that parallels the problems of strong emergence. Likewise, Plato seems to save his best overall argument for the immortality of the soul for even later in the dialogue. I don't think this argument works, but figuring out why it fails required innovations in logic that weren't around for a very long time.

Socrates argues that the soul cannot be an attunement if the tuning existed prior to what is tuned. But there is an argument that Socrates neglects to pursue. The tuning of a lyre exists apart from and prior to any particular lyre. The tuning, the harmony, is an arrangement of frequencies that exists even when a particular lyre is not in tune. Although the tuning of a particular lyre does not endure once that lyre is destroyed, it does not follow that the attunement, the Harmony, is destroyed.

That's a good point.

The harmony is not the vibration. The strings will vibrate whether they are in harmony or not.
The harmony or ratio of frequencies is what causes the vibration of the strings to function in a certain way.

Also a good point. But I was speaking mainly in reference to his third argument, that the mind appears to control the body (at least to some extent), while a harmony can't control a lyre. I don't see in what way a harmony played on a lyre could be said to cause the lyre to change. The type of change going on in the lyre defines the harmony in its entirety. That's the part that ties back to physicalism best IMO. The comparison of an "in tune harmony," to an "in tune (virtuous) soul," is a red herring a think.

I do also think Plato weakens Socrates' argument by having him work with an analogy where the harmony/tuning is only analogous to "the proper way to tune a lyre." You can tune stringed instruments to many different keys, and this wouldn't have been news to the Greeks. But Socrates' earlier arguments re souls varying in degrees of virtue has to assume that there is only one "true" tuning. I assume this is an intentional weakness though. I am pretty sure the Pythagoreans also likened the soul/body relation to a melody, and that analogy doesn't run into the first road blocks Socrates throws up against it, since obviously melodies can vary in the qualities from one another.

I was just reading the Phaedo for a class and it hit me that Plato's argument that the soul cannot be analogous to a harmony is literally the same argument against strong emergence that is still giving physicalists a headache 2,000+ years later.

His initial arguments for the soul not being caused by the body in the way that a lyre causes a harmony all have key weaknesses. But given Plato has just had Socrates give a warning to the effect of "don't despise wisdom just because it turns out that some arguments you thought were good actually turn out to have huge flaws," I am pretty sure Plato leads with bad arguments on purpose (you always find new stuff in these).

Socrates' last argument is that the soul/mind cannot be like a harmony because the soul sometimes rules over the body. That is, mind sometimes causes the body to act. But how can a harmony cause an instrument to act a certain way? Simple answer: it can't. A harmony cannot cause the strings to vibrate different ways because the harmony is the vibration of the strings. In the terms of modern physics, we would say that any effect on the lyre caused by the sound waves it generates (the harmony) can ultimately be traced back to the strings itself. If the analogy were true, the harmony/mind must be causally inefficacious.

This is a killer argument. It is really just variants on this argument that leads to physicalists having to posit epiphenomenalism or eliminativism. But for Plato (and most people) it is prima facie unreasonable to say the mind has no causal powers vis-a-vis the body.

This argument still seems very relevant today because I would think that most people who embrace computational theory of mind or integrated information theory very much would like to compare the mind to a harmony or melody. It is an "emergent informational process." But for that emergence to be causally efficacious, you need some sort of "strong emergence" that gets around Plato's trap, and that is hard to come by.

But we have no access to that telos, so it's just a pie in the sky "what God wants". Then there is no way of knowing what constitutes "synching up", and individual human beings (following their own telos) will try to make their own determinations as to what constitutes the prior telos, making affirmations about whether or not a particular telos is in synch with the prior, based on nothing real.

Because the supposed "ideal" is left impotent in this way, it cannot be the true ideal. It's a fiction which cannot be obtained, and furthermore, we have no way of even knowing if we are coming close, or even headed in the right direction. Therefore this proposition cannot be accepted as a true representation of "the ideal".

This whole post goes to MacIntyre's thesis. The assumption that, if man has a telos, it must be defined in terms of some sort of divine command theory and exist as separate from culture, and the assumption that it is impossible to observe any such telos are fundementally at odds with ancient conceptions of the concept. A core point in the Euthypro is indeed that such a foundation for "the Good," is wholly inadequate, but this is just shooting down one simplistic avenue of thought.

Conceptions of divine command theory obviously go back to the ancient world, but they weren't popular until the Reformation, and they became popular precisely because of modern redefinitions or morality (and were more popular in Protestantism in any event). The more common formulation is that God has authority precisely because God is good, and what goodness is entails this sort of authority.

The mistake is to assume that, if mankind has any sort of telos, it must be defined by divine command, or that it can float free of the communities in which men live. In the ancient world, the community is prior to the individual.

Consider Timothy Chappelle's formulation of Platonic virtue ethics: "Good agency in the truest and fullest sense presupposes the contemplation of the Form of the Good."

A key term that differentiates this from modern morality is "good agency," versus "right action." Good stands in place of ought/right, and a more holistic agency in the place of individual acts. Contemplation of the good is presupposed, but not any unified standard. In more modern views (e.g. Kant), we might think in terms "rules" that "any rational agent," can agree too (and indeed, recent ethics threads on the board assume this indeed must be what morality is).

This just doesn't make sense in the earlier context. If there were horses with intelligence on par with men we should still think that being a good horse is different from being a good man. Likewise, living as a "good knight," differs from living as a "good nun," or "good scholar," even if they are all untied in what is true more generally of the good life and "the Good."

The perfection of virtue doesn't sit outside the sphere of intersubjectivity and history. It does involve the contemplation of a good that transcends these, but can't be reduced to it.

So Plato's designation of "love" as important is based on something other than an appeal to the prior telos, "mankind's telos", just like his designation of "just", "good", et.. Plato makes an extensive analysis of human emotions, feelings, terms described as virtues and vices, good and bad, and their relations with pleasure and pain, and makes suggestions based on this analysis of human beings within the context of human society. So he provides guidance for the telos of the individual from an analysis of the human being, within the condition of human society, and he does not pretend to access that prior telos which you call "mankind's telos".

On the other hand, if a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this: constantly caring for his divine part as he does, keeping well-ordered the guiding spirit that lives within him, he must indeed be supremely happy. (Timaeus 90a-c)

Plato definetly ties the good life back to things that are higher and prior to many. I tend to agree with Chappelle that Platonic virtue ethics is generally compatible with Aristotlean virtue ethics, which is why a synthesis of the two was so successful for so long.

I'd also say that any claims to the "Church" having had a unified purpose driving its moral philosophy is going to end up being overly reductive. Claims that the Church's ethical teaching reduces to Machiavellian social control have the same flavor as claims like: "they only let us vote so that we don't realize we're slaves to capitalism," etc.

Pop science keeps pushing the notion, but I suppose a physicist might also. This is strange territory where philosophy can't seem to abstain trespassing.

It's a two way street. "Virtuality" is a philosophical concept that existed prior to the idea of "virtual particles," (how they get their name). But now philosophers will point back to the successful idea of virtual particles when describing other "virtual" phenomena (e.g. Floridi and D'Agistino with "virtual information," working in philosophy of mathematics/information).

As well as I understand the history of the debate, which is not all that well, I believe it has generally been the philosophers who have been more against the "reality" of virtual particles (e.g. Oliver Passon). But I don't know if philosopher/physicist is that useful of a distinction in philosophy of physics proper. People often have degrees in both, work in both, collaborate, etc. The silo is probably more relevant in terms of how people who work primarily in metaphysics interact with physics proper (and of course people in less relevant fields also sometimes have to appeal to physics, e.g. physics becomes relevant to biology through reductionism, to ethics via "free will" debates, etc.)

From an external perspective, yes, but I don't see how this solves the problem that if it is possible for an uncaused event to "create" time, then such events should be multiply realizable

From an internal perspective, the time dimension is nonetheless bounded in at least one direction.

I don't think claims that it is "meaningless" to talk about the external frame cash out. No one is confused about what Black Hole Cosmology is saying; the theory isn't contentless. There are some neat empirical findings that make it plausible to some degree as well, although it is still highly speculative. But such a theory would entail that there is something causally prior to the singularity bounding time that we observe, and this proposition is not contentless or incoherent. I don't see how this is prima facie unreasonable either, as we can clearly observe events that are causally prior to other singularities that form in our universe.

One of the motivations I've heard for eternal inflation is precisely that it avoids this problem by having inflation occur without begining or end. This is also partly the motivation for Platonist views like Tegmark's.

If the reasons are external, and preprogrammed, it would be incorrect to call them "one's own" reasons. I think that the "reasons" in the form in which they are attributed to the individual, would be distinctly different from the "reasons" which were prior to the individual, so we could not say that these are "the same reasons" in a different form. They would be distinctly different reasons. And if they are by any means "the same reasons", then we cannot attribute them to the individual.

It seems to me that in many ancient and medieval ethical systems it would be both. There is on the one hand man's telos, which is internal to man (plural), but determined prior to any individual man. On the other hand, there is free man's own reasons for doing what he does, being who he is etc. The whole reason ethics is difficult is that these two can vary from one another in practice. Man can fail to fulfill his telos and fail to flourish, through his own choices.

The ideal situation is where man's free choice synchs up to mankind's telos. But there is a wrinkle here in that these thinkers were generally not free will libertarians. However, neither were they modern fatalists. Rather, they embrace a certain sort of "classical fatalism." "Character is destiny," Heraclitus says. They embrace the concepts of "fate" and "divine providence," and elucidate the ways in which man is a slave to circumstance, desire, and instinct, and yet allow that man, both individually and as a society, can manage to become more or less free / self-determining. Part of fulfilling man's telos is precisely becoming more self-determining and more "one's self," rather than being a mere effect of external causes. (Modern existentialism recapitulates part of this, while missing crucial elements)

This is why an overflowing love is important in Plato and the Patristics. To hate something to be controlled by it. To be indifferent to something is still to be defined by what one is not. Only love, the identification of the self in the other, allows one to avoid being determined by what is external to personal identity. This translates into a "love of fate," that must accompany the entity that will not be mere effect.

Plato's early-mid works are instructive here. The Phaedo and Republic goes into how man becomes more self-determining by overcoming desire, instinct, and circumstance, a view we also see particularly well elucidated by Saint Paul in Romans 7. For both Paul and Plato, Logos plays an essential role in the resurrection of the "slave to sin," to true personhood. However, in Plato there is also more of a recognition of the ways in which we enable each other's freedom, and in how society can enhance or fail to enhance to fulfillment of man's telos (the Apology and Crito get at this social dimension).

I think the social view moves towards a climax in Eusebius, who has a proto-Hegelian view of how history can act as an engine spurring man on towards the greater fulfillment of human purpose at the world-historical scale. With the medievals, you also start to see the acknowledgement that, while human telos has certain unchanging elements, it is also shaped by the social-historical conditions man finds himself in.

So individual man's reasons are not identical with the the global telos of man. This is precisely because man is not free, and being enslaved to desire, ignorance, and circumstance , man lacks the knowledge and means of fulfilling his purpose. Even modern existentialists seem to recognize the need for some level of self-determination to make life meaningful, although they deny the global telos.

The shift to emotivism is important here. For the existenialist, moral freedom can't be the crowing achievement of man because moral freedom is simply reducible to desire. Due to their focus on the individual, they often lack the same focus on social freedom as well, but not always. Without these, the idea of a telos for mankind does indeed become incoherent and reduce to a single "internal" purpose defined only by the the individual.

Interesting that he converted to Catholicism from having been a convinced Marxist.

Interesting, but not totally surprising. There is this whole huge area of Catholic philosophy that sits sort of free floating from the rest of academic philosophy. It tends to be far more focused on ancient/ medieval philosophy, but unlike secular academic philosophy re ancient/medieval philosophy, it is also intent on updating these for modern times.

This camp does produce a lot of good philosophy. E.g., Nathan Lyons "Signs in the Dust," is the best theory of pansemiosis I've found, and is far more grounded in the natural sciences and much less "heavily continental," than anything else I've seen attempt this sort of thing. Sokolowski's "Phenomenology of the Human Person," a blend of Aristotle and Husserl, that also takes the natural sciences and modern linguistics seriously is another example. It's one of the better articulations of a "(more) direct realism."


Unfortunately, the conversation between these camps seems to mostly go one way ("After Virtue" being an exception), without much back and forth.

By "start to exist," I simply mean:
1. Is uncaused / has no prior causal history.
2. Is not eternal, without beginning or end.

The English language is not particularly good at this sort of thing, which is why I use the 3D visualization language for a 4D manifold earlier.

I'd really appreciate some compelling evidence supporting the proposition that h. sapiens are an "exception" or any more improbable on "the evolutionary path of life" than any other multicellular species. We're not, and that's a brute fact.

Caleb Scharf writes a lot of information theoretic interpretations of evolution (and just about everything else really.) One neat idea he has is that of "core algorithms," or "corgs," which he likens to chords in music in that you can make the same chords many different ways. "Heavier than air flight," would be an example. The idea is that there are certain features that can evolve that are very handy, features like flippers, wings, sight, echolocation, etc.

This is a framework for understanding convergent evolution. You can think of evolution as a terraced deep scan of a shifting solution space, and there are peaks around these corgs such that it becomes likely that they will be actualized by some species over enough iterations.

You see many corgs being realized through extremely diverse lineages. Different types of flight get reproduced in different lineages, e.g. the humming bird, unlike other aves, has mastered insects' ability to fly without traveling forwards. Human beings have hit on heavier than air flight with both fixed and rotary wing aircraft, echolocation, sonar, etc., all in a short time. That alone in unique.

Obviously, being vastly more intelligent than other animals has (at least temporarily) been a tremendous reproductive advantage. Humans are clearly special in the sense that culture and technology have allowed us to plow through corgs at a very fast rate. Language, while not totally sui generis, is also fairly unique and enabled this.

And I think it does bring up some decent questions. First, why wasn't this solution hit on earlier? It is very effective.


Second, it doesn't seem completely improbable that man, or some sort of self-modified post-human or synthetic lifeform born of man might make it off this rock. But if that's possible, someone else should have done it first, so where are the ETs? Surely someone else can at least figure out how to use radio broadcasting. That is, the Fermi Paradox would suggest we are sort of special.

We

I think these kinds of questions have really only been meaningful since maybe the mid-19th century. It would not have occured to anyone, or hardly anyone, that this was a question before that time. Subjects understood themselves in a social role, demarcated by their social class and their religion. Those background factors were assumed by everyone to be true - not only in the Christian West, but in other cultures also. The meaning of life was understood in those terms, and it was simply given, there was hardly the conceptual space to contemplate it. Of course, that may not be true of some exceptional individuals - Giordano Bruno comes to mind, but then his questioning of the accepted 'meta-narrative' so upset the establishment that he was burned at the stake. But to nearly anyone, if you were to ask them 'what is the meaning of life?', I think they would find it very hard to understand and respond, as their meaning was simply a given. They would not know what you were on about.

This reminds me of MacIntyre's premise in "After Virtue." He makes a parallel to the sci-fi novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz," where, after the apocalypse, mankind has recovered the language of science, but not the content. Students learn the periodic table, but have no real conception of atomic theory. People make appeals to neutrinos, but have only the faintest ideas about how they fit into a larger theory of physics, and absolutely no idea how the idea was originally empirically grounded.

MacIntyre's point is that this is essentially how we use moral language today. Moral language was developed in a framework where it was essentially universally agreed that man had a purpose: the cultivation of virtue, the contemplation of the Good (God), both fulfilled in the concepts of theosis/diefication.

The old Greek proverb: "count no man happy until he has died," is incoherent in the modern context. Happiness and the good life are disconnected from the original idea of "the Good Life." That is, the term "Good Life," as employed by Saint Augustine wasn't about "being happy and finding meaning," but rather about living the (morally) good life. Meaning and purpose are assumed in "the Good." I mean, it's even hard to make the distinction with our current lexicon.

I don't know if MacIntyre's thesis holds up all the way, because I haven't finished the book, but it seems highly plausible in at least some respects (namely the thesis that emotivism/relativism only make sense in our historical context and aren't universal). I don't think Augustine or Aristotle would understand emotivism. "Well of course people disagree about what is good, that's a direct consequence of their lacking virtue," I would imagine would be the response.

And overall, I think the ancients and medievals had decent reasons for thinking that cultivating virtue and conquering vice went along with meaning, in part because being free to do what ones thinks is truly good seems to be a prerequisite for a meaningful life, even if it can't define it by itself.

"Things either happen or they don't," seems to miss how some things are contingent on others. For example, flipping a fair coin and having it come up heads 100 times in a row is something that either happens, or it does not, but its happening at the 100th coin flip is contingent on the prior 99 flips having come up heads.

I like the idea though. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd hear in pre-Socratic philosophy; those Greeks loved their "simple but counterintuitive," lines. Of course, you'd have to frame it in good verse for it to carry much weight with them.

Absolutely. That's one of the main things you need the higher level "global" state for, securing rights.

I don't know what you mean about China. In its current form, it's hard to imagine the Chinese establishment agreeing with a bill of rights that would enshrine free speech protections.

Unfortunately, your most powerful players, those best able to foster the emergence of some sort of global governance, are also those with the largest incentive to avoid the formation of such a thing.

EU isn't at all contacted,

The EU was contacted and was going to use resources already dedicated to Operation Atlanta, but Spain vetoed it. But it seems like all the ships in the original package are going anyhow.

Reflagging ships isn't a solution. Look at the targets, Indian-operated/Liberian flagged, a Gabon flagged ship. The ballistic missiles attacks haven't come close to any ships, but I believe there were 26 ships in the area in the first incident, 50 in the second. They just targeted a Russian ship (obviously this would probably be an accident). The fact is they lack capabilities for target discrimination and so the general strategy seems to be to try to hit anything as a means of disrupting global trade.

India

One of the ships attacked had an Indian crew. India already has ships in the area, they just stopped an attack by unrelated pirates recently and they are sending several more ships.

The problem is more one of willingness to put ships under a consolidated command, not willingness to send ships to the region to intercept attacks.

I think an oft missed distinction here is between the idea that "every thing around us is physical" and the broader claim that "all facts can be explained in terms of facts about physical entities." Abstract objects are more of a problem for the second claim.

The idea that "all the things around us are physical," doesn't seem particularly at odds with some forms of "idealism," particularly Platonism or Absolute Idealism.

The argument that knowledge of mathematical facts is "caused by a physical brain," fails to be a conclusive argument in favor of the stronger claim that "all facts reduce to facts about the physical." The facts underlying X's knowledge that 7 is prime seem like they should be different than those underlying "7 is prime." It seems quite possible that it could be true that we need our brain to recognize mathematical facts and for it to be true that mathematical truths cannot be reduced to some set of facts about physical entities.

If it is claimed that mathematical facts are actually facts about "relations between physical entities," then it still seems like abstract relations exist, and these relations just happen to be equivalent to our original mathematical facts, in which case, it still seems like mathematical facts cannot be reduced properly.

We live in a world beset by truly global collective action problems: climate change, ocean acidification, the power of transnational megacorps, global inequality driving human migration on scales never seen before, etc.

I don't see how things can be improved through further decentralization. I could certainly see improvements from splitting up the United States, but only in the context of there being regional (e.g. EU, AU) governments with power analogous to that of the federal government in the United States. And ideally, these regional organizations would be organs of a global government.

But, provided we have such a global government, then it seems much more feasible to dissolve the United States and actually improve things. The US and China (and soon, India) with their huge economies and huge share of global votes would probably be a serious barrier to global governance actually, so the two moves would work together.

I had the thread on "Exponential Elector Selection," earlier. I don't know if that's the right mechanism for selecting leaders, but I think you want to keep leaders accountable through some sort of popular selection mechanism, while also doing more to professionalize the leadership than popular vote democracy does.

Particularism will be part of any successful regional/global governance scheme. You need the more global level to deal with collective action problems, corruption, and security, while local entities deal with day to day management.

There is even some indication that the Houthis are avoiding targeting anything that isn't related to the US or Israel, which means the EU may have more to lose by getting involved

lol, what? They hit two Panamanian ships and would have hit a Nigerian flagged, Japanese owned ship has the munitions not been intercepted. "Extremely dangerous," might not be the right word. They've successfully hit commercial ships (e.g. the two Panamanian ones, a Norwegian flagged/owned oil/chemical tanker) and those carried on with minor damage.

How exactly is a Norwegian owned/operated tanker delivering to Italy related to Israel? How exactly is firing on ships transiting from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan related to Israel?

In other words, the Houthi have friends in high places, and anyone who gets involved on the US or Israel's behalf can expect retaliation that targets their weak points.

Russia didn't even veto the UN resolution.

Iran / wider Muslim world

Ah yes, because of close alignment between Iran and the Arabs, two sides essentially in their own regional cold war.

FYI, proportionally is generally assessed at a fairly granular level. E.g., if a force is firing inaccurate and ineffective artillery from the playground of a school being used as a shelter, you can't hit the artillery with a 2,000lb bomb because the risk the artillery poses to your forces is not proportional to the risk to civilians in the school. If said artillery was instead lobbing shells into a crowded city, it might be proportional to use such means to destroy it , despite the shelter, as the artillery would represent a major threat. Likewise, even if the artillery isn't much of a threat, it might be proportional to capture it with infantry or destroy it with small loitering munitions, because then the threat to the civilians would be drastically reduced.

Proportionality is not assessed based on a comparison of total fatalities in a conflict, for obvious reasons. Whoever ends up with enemy forces on their land is generally going to have higher losses (not always true though, e.g. the current Ukraine War). The losing side is also, generally (though not always) going to have significantly higher losses. But proportionality would be an absolutely unenforceable concept if it tended to require that the winning side in a conflict cease operations as soon as it began winning.

So, Israel's responses are disproportionate on other grounds, and this would be what comparisons to WWII miss. I think the intuition in bringing that conflict up is that you can't very well ask that winning parties to a conflict cease operations as they start winning — fair enough, but that's actually not what is at issue in Israel's use of force in Gaza. The issue would be destroying all the infrastructure and relying on powerful munitions in an urban area against an enemy that seems to have been largely militarily defeated already. Where is the proportionality? IDF losses have been shockingly light so far, and by the IDFs own figures a solid proportion of all Hamas fighters have already been captured or killed.

You can't just look at numbers. For example, the Iraqi push to retake Mosul from ISIS had, to date, higher civilian deaths in absolute and relative terms. However, those forces were also operating without many of the advantages Israel has, so what counts as "proportional" is going to vary. The proportionality depends on the risk to your soldiers/civilians versus the risk to enemy non-combatants, which means Israel's decisive advantage of the ground factors into proportionality.

My favorite source on time is Arthur's "The Reality of Time Flow: Local Becoming in Modern Physics." It's fair to its sources and even funny at times, but does more poking holes in "definitive" answers to the question that have been advanced than providing one itself.

I wasn't aware of the concept of causal diamonds before it either.

We're committed finitists here. Heresies are not allowed.

In all seriousness, IDK. I see a thread in the queue by a new user named an-salad? I assume it might be there due to lack of content; I think this post might already be longer than it.

Once they had control, yes. However, on their rise to power the Nazis were very active in the sort of street fighting that characterized political life in the Wiemar Republic. Their anthem comes from the party's origins as street brawlers defending their turf (they were no way unique in having a paramilitary/brawling organization, many parties had this). You see a similar thing with the reactionary Black Hundreds in Russia prior to WWI.

I would say there is a similar element in the American right, but in general the focus on self-defense is more private, less communal. The Nazis were more focused on collective self defense, and you see this in thing like the Hitler Youth. American sensibilities are far more individualistic.

That said, support for the right to bear arms is conditional. A number GOP strongholds have stripped 1/4th or more of all African American males of the right to bear arms for life, sometimes over trivial offenses like "felony vandalism." There has been no push to undo this (unlike disenfranchisement), quite the contrary.

This alone makes the movement different from the Nazis. It is less about a national people being unified, but about a select people controlling the state.

The left similarly focuses on particular groups quite a bit; no wonder there is such disunity. But in the left it manifests in different ways.

Absolutely. The leader is divinely appointed and the electorate either acedes to the will of God and is rewarded or is punished for rejecting God's will. There has been a lot written about how Donald Trump is analogous to the Persian King Cyrus, who allowed the Jews in exile in Babylon to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. It's not just one person writing on this, but a major theme.

All the problems since 2020, the Ukraine War, the Gaza War, high inflation? Divine punishment for rejecting Trump (or failing to fight for him after he won).

Cyrus is in many ways a good choice because he is a pagan king and not entirely righteous (even the stand out kings of Israel, David and Solomon, have their many very unrighteous moments). This helps wave away claims about Trump's lack of religious observance, the various scandals, etc.

But there is also a movement to see Trump as a sort of prophet, or I've even heard "John the Baptist of the Second Coming." I don't think it's likely, but given the fervency of some Q circles, I could certainly see a small subsection of Trumpism becoming a religion akin to Rastafarianism. When Trump dies, there will be a vacuum in that enviornment, and people willing to step in with prophecy. Given how things already are, it wouldn't be that shocking to see pronouncements that Trump isn't really dead, but in heaven like Elijah, and likely to return in the last days. Modern Judaism has some groups like this too around certain leaders.

You can buy Saint Donald Trump prayer candles and icons, and I'm not sure they are 100% ironic. But the full on Trump worship crowd is a small subset of a subset of his supporters, not a particularly large group.

I agree that the label has many problems. There are certainly some troubling similarities between the "Trumpist movement," and fascist movements, but there are many differences as well. For one, the Trump camp has been openly feuding with the security services and military for a long time, and hasn't done much to court the officer corps. It's also a movement with its core support in the elderly; Trump lost voters under 55 by landslide margins both times.

Most important though, it is far less a movement of unity than the fascist movements. The fascists certainly looked inward for enemies, but they were also looking outward, a far cry from the isolationist trends in Trumpism. There was this potent idea of a "people" that needed to be unified.

While there certainly is some of that in Trumpism, the celebration of the "real Americans" as a sort of exceptional people, the movement takes as its core opponent a whole half of the country. You see this bleed into policy, e.g. when Trump refused to allow a natural disaster declaration for California fires against all past precedent, openly voicing the opinion that federal funds shouldn't go to such liberal states (ironic since the fires largely hit areas he won). There is a war to be waged in Trumpism, but it's primarily a culture war. Fascism was about a sort of top down unity, Trumpism is very much a movement of minority rule.

You can even see this in how Hitler went through pains to organize big rigged plebiscites. By contrast, while Trump will certainly claim he really won the popular vote despite losing by millions of votes, it isn't an area of focus. The GOP has largely embraced the idea that they should be able to rule while gaining fewer votes, and that the system was always intended to work this way, to boost the power of the votes of the more virtuous. There is none of the hand wringing that accompanied Bush II's loss of the popular vote. Instead, state parties are actively working to enshrine Electoral College-like institutions at the state and local level. The GOP proposal for Colorado elections would have let them win the last governors race despite losing by more than 10% for example.

And then there is the full throated endorsement of police and police unions, despite them being both organized labor and public sector workers, a loathed combo in most situations. Contrast this with all the attacks on the military. If I were to look for a parallel, I might look more to apartheid South Africa. The movement is inward looking, focused on minority rule and control of the levers of power.

Countries all throughout the West are going through a transitional period, where the ruling political class is being replaced ("populists are taking over"). The desire for meaningful change is high, and elections are close, so all the major sides (and even wild cards like Trump) believe they have a shot at winning.

I wouldn't frame it simply as "populism." Trump lost by 3.5 million and then 7.5 million votes (his loss margin was equal to 10% of his vote total). He could certainly win this year, but if he does he will likely lose by 9-11 million votes just based on demographics.

The GOP has won more votes in a national election once is the past 36 years, and the trend will almost certainly hold true for 40 years, almost a half century. The only time they won a national election in that period they happened to have the incumbency following 9/11 despite the fact that they lost the popular vote in 2000. And, based on the most complete recount information released back in 2008, they also lost the Electoral College. The Bush victory in 2000 relied on the fact that the deciding state was Florida, where his campaign manager was the AG, in control of the elections, and his brother the governor. Even then, it came down to a party line vote in the court. Without that, the party would be on a near half century losing steak.

So it's populism, but of a very particular sort. It's a populism where restricting access to the ballot box has become a top priority. In a number of states, 1 in every 5, and as much as 1 in every 4 African American males has been stripped of their voting rights. The states where disenfranchisement is highest are all GOP strongholds. When the voters of Florida overwhelmingly supported giving these people their voting rights back, the GOP was able to effectively keep disenfranchisement on the table.

I'm not sure if you can even call it "populism." It is decidedly not about the broad will of any people, but the broad will of "the good people." It also isn't anti-elite. Conservative billionaires are heros. Clarence Thomas isn't in any hot water with the base for cozying up to a billionaire and receiving massive gifts from him. It's anti-intellectual for sure, and against many institutions, but it celebrated elites provided they are the right sort of elite. Again, I think South Africa is the better model here.

Undoubtedly if Trump wins the next election we'll see the same type of thing from the Democrats, etc.

Certainly, but there is a valid point to be made if a "democracy" has handed power to the side getting fewer votes in 3 of the last 6 elections. The problem looks even more acute when you consider the widespread use of disenfranchisement mentioned above and all the structural issues that support highly divergent levels of voter turn out across different populations. You don't get the day off to vote and if you live in some places you could spend the entire work day waiting to cast your ballot. In terms of actual approval, the GOP does even worse than losing by 7-11 million votes would suggest.

And then there are to consider all the ways in which the Senate and the limit on House seats favors small rural states, or even more so the aggressive efforts to make minority rule even easier to achieve.