Yes they are intelligent to a certain level, but they would have to purposefully interact with their environment which ours don't. — Sir2u

Why must they?

Fair enough. What constitutes as proof? If seems that some believe only actual racist remarks count as proof for racism. When is somebody an anti-Semite?

Do you have dyslexia?

Plants already communicate, reacting to their environment. That is a certain level of intelligence already.

Secondly, Western culture is superior to many other cultures — Thorongil
Pssst. No so loud, Thorongil. The thought police are going to be on your case for uttering such heresies as "Israeli culture is superior to Palestinian culture". You'll be in the stocks by morning with a sign around your neck "racist, sexist, xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic, elitist, imperialist, cultural hegemonist, genocidal oppressor", and worse, possibly.

And to actually write "Western culture is superior to many other cultures" -- that's just going to send the PC Brain Washers into a frenzy. — Bitter Crank

It's only natural that a Westerner will claim Western culture is superior because the values by which this is measured are Western. Since we're not sharing the same paradigm with other cultures (to the extent these are monolithic structures, which they aren't), the statement is therefore inane. On the basis of US culture, US is superior to Europe. On the basis of Dutch culture, US culture ranks somewhere slightly above a dictatorship. New Yorkers probably feel superior to hillbillies. That really doesn't get us anywhere and that's the reason to just facepalm whenever somebody claims superiority based on culture. :-*

For the rest, pretty much agree with Meister Eckhart.

As if I didn't read what you wrote. You could try to be more patronizing in your next reply to me, though. Maybe you'd succeed.

What part of what I wrote don't you agree with? You weren't saying that he's racist?

Here's a definition of guilt by association: "guilt ascribed to someone not because of any evidence but because of their association with an offender."

Do you think that definition is confused? Because that's what I was referring to. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I will be patronising because for some reason old people like you think they don't need to pay attention. I've never said he was a racist (I said it's likely he has a problem with Jews) but even if I had it wasn't going to be because of guilt by association but because he actively manages a media outlet that he set out to create to give voices to racists, mysogynists and anti-Semites. Those are his own actions after all. Surely we can all agree that if Hitler had never been vocal about his hatred of Jews (but Goebbels was), the existence of concentration camps might have been a clue! THEREFORE (in capitals in hopes you'll be paying attention), Bannon running Breitbart is a pretty good indication even if not conclusive on its own.

But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

The "golden rule" doesn't mean more than don't retaliate if the paragraph it ends is taken as context. In the wider context of Luke 6 it might also mean do "good" to others even if they're being dicks. It has nothing to do with "compassionate intentions" and those aren't required to understand the rule, nor is the subjectivity of the OP. At most it can be said that being compassionate is the type of thing to do unto others.

So you're going to declare that he's racist whether he's actually said anything racist? Guilt by association in your view (and per your assessment of what "alt-right" refers to, etc.)? — Terrapin Station

Try again and first read what I wrote. Also, you're confused as to what guilt by association entails or at least applying it incorrectly if I had said what you think I said, which I didn't.

It communicates with odors. — Wosret

You're describing a plant.

How is that at all racist? (I'm just doing one at a time. If you don't feel that one is racist, we can move on.) — Terrapin Station

That's assuming his summary was a fair assessment. Alt-right is a movement not a set of principles. It's made up of racists, xenophobes, mysogynists etc. (just look at the publications on Breitbart) and therefore alt-right becomes racist etc. For Bannon to pretend this causality is reversed and that people are attracted to some set of ephemeral principles is a simple sleight of hand. It's a smart move, you never get caught saying anything outright unacceptable, you just facilitate others to do it for you.

So in that light, highly likely he has issues with for instance Jews.

My point was you were talking bullshit but I'm sure you are aware of that and are just being facetious. Since this is the second thread in a month where people are just vomiting their opinions on this particular sentence, I suggested, in the first post of this thread, that people look at it in context. Which you subsequently ignored (like everybody else) and therefore your bullshit was called. Apparently that hurt your delicate sensibilities to qualify that as rage. Instead of taking issue with how I phrased it, you'd do well to just read the passage and learn something (to the extent there's anything worthwhile to learn from religious texts, but different discussion).

Compassionate intentions undergird Jesus's Golden Rule, so if one doesn't acknowledge such a fact, then the Rule becomes a bit flimsy. With it, I can't see how anyone could disagree. — Heister Eggcart

Bullshit. Jesus mentions the "golden rule" ending his point that we shouldn't retaliate against others. If someone steals, don't steal back. If someone hits you turn the other cheek. Then he goes on, after the golden rule, how we should do good and that a person who does good only to those who do good to him are less praiseworthy than those that do good because it's the right thing to do. I'm not even fucking religious but read the damn book of you're going to opine on the matter.

Same goes for everyone else.

Why don't you give the context of what he said? Because then it obviously means something else than you think it means.

Sounds like you're sad because you don't believe in democracy!

I doubt you'd be crying over the electoral system right now if Hillary was POTUS! — dukkha

I considered her a marginally better option than Trump but effectively it's the same difference.

And so your opinion would have been the same had Clinton won, considering the polarization would have been the same and we'd still be on the same 200+ year collision course set in motion when the Constitution set out the foolish election system it did? — Hanover

Yes, as I said in another thread, it doesn't matter which monkey pushes the button and when Baden was trying to call it I again I stated I don't care who'd win. Maybe if you'd have a bit more knowledge about democratic systems (historic and contemporary) you wouldn't be so hung up on the shitty system you have.

Oh please, you're not sad that things will be destroyed that people worked hard to achieve. You're sad that achievements you agreed with are being destroyed. If the preservation of legacy is important to you, take comfort in the fact that Scalia's legacy will be preserved with a solid conservative replacement. — Hanover

Of course you know better how I feel. How stupid can your comments get? >:O

And it's not the preservation of legacy I'm concerned with but tearing down something in its entirety that a slight majority of the people seem to support (or a slight minority, depending on how the popular vote will play out). But never mind them, because they lost, right? Here's the picture though, if voters would be evenly distributed according to their statistical occurence then your left door and right door neighbours would be Democrats.

Finally, not every vote for Trump was a vote for ending Obamacare as not every vote for Clinton was a vote for continuing Obamacare. The opinions of the candidates (or party line for that matter) do not reflect the myriad of interests of citizens that exist in the US and this is why representative democracies fail and will ultimately disintegrate. The USA is a very good example of that with its latest election. I'm looking forward to another 4 years of schadenfreude.

From what I've read there are plenty of Republicans who disagree with Trump. The fact that he's a Republican president doesn't entail that a Republican-controlled Congress will inevitably support him. — Michael

Fat chance. Trump won, not backing the winner will be political suicide.

The House, Senate, and presidency is Republican, which means if it is polarized on some level, it's not for the moment when it comes to our government. There will be no gridlock and legislation will be passed (bye bye Obamacare and Iran deal). The Republicans also have a majority of Governors and state houses. Can someone open their eyes and just accept that the US is a very conservative country, opposed to European style social care, and stop being surprised when it doesn't do as left minded folks think it should? — Hanover

What a bullshit reply to my observation that it's sad somebody can be this happy about the schism existing in the USA. Yes, it's a winner-takes-all system and no, I'm not even surprised. We already had Bush jr. for 8 years which was a farce as well. In the meantime popular votes for both candidates are almost equal. But never mind what a lot of other people think because the Republicans won. Just because Republicans won the election doesn't make your fellow Democratic countrymen irrelevant, nor their wishes and hopes for what the US government should be.

So yeah, I'm saddened by people celebrating that they're going to destroy things a lot of other people worked hard to achieve.

I can't believe you're this happy when your country is basically a divided, polarized mess. :-|

It's a complex world where people wish to believe in simple solutions. Trump gives them that and with only two parties, there are only two narratives about the state of the USA and where to go from there. Even a multiparty system leads to a hopeless simplification of complex social problems, a two-party system simply exacerbates it. This year it was worse since candidates didn't discuss policy at all. 18 months of shit shoveling and commercials. Greatest democracy on earth indeed. Ha ha.

EDIT: It's also the ridiculous smugness of the Democratic party leadership that led them to even have Clinton as the candidate. It wasn't as if it wasn't clear from the beginning that Clinton was a controversial figure for many Democrats and non-Democrats alike. In hindsight, Michelle Obama should've run for president.

see for example: http://www.sanderveldscholten.nl/

Something like that is what I'm looking for. It's in Dutch but it gets the idea across.

What do you mean? — jamalrob

I meant that I have a domain that I can use.

Thanks mcdoodle. My experience is that WordPress updates would destroy my site, which cost me time to get fixed again. Maybe I did use wordpress.com though, I can't remember and I also recall that the site owner of this site said that WordPress tries to do everything and as a consequence isn't really outstanding at any one of them. But that was a few years ago.

WordPress is pretty terrible and I want to build something special so just displaying a CV isn't what I'm looking for. I'd go for squarespace if I didn't already have a website.

Meaningful relationships seem to be the norm for social creatures like us. Whether it's with family or friends or a partner we tend to build them up without any conscious effort. Some people are of course unlucky.

Relationships aren't a source of optimism but they can reinforce that outlook. Better to have loved and lost, is an optimistic look at love relationships. My old relationships were positive experiences in the end, where a pessimist going through the same wouldn't agree.

My relationships to others (and things and ideas and events) make up meaning. That's not The Meaning as I understand the OP to ask but I'm comfortable with life having no meaning.

spiritual values fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition — Wayfarer

Weird how I more or less agreed with the thrust of your post and then start foaming around the mouth because you could have simply stopped at "spiritual values".

There's more to this world than owning stuff but it isn't a religion. In fact, We'd be better off without materialism and religion.

Now, why aren't you investing in the American economy? 8-) — ArguingWAristotleTiff

It's also interesting that goodwill and IP are activated on the balance sheet of large corporations. What happens with Apple's already dismally small amount of taxes when their goodwill evaporates? It's not going to be hip forever.

I agree with what Tiff said above. It's never to a business' advantage to gather losses, as if the tax write off associated with a $1 loss is more than $1. That is, if a business could choose a $1 profit and have to pay 40% of it in taxes, it would choose that instead of having a $1 loss and not having to pay taxes on it. Sure, under scenario 1, they'd pay $ 0.40 in taxes, and under scenario 2, they'd pay $0, but the net profit under #1 is $0.60, preferable to the $0 profit under #2.

It stands to reason that if your net income is negative, you'd owe no taxes. It also stands to reason that businesses don't start and stop every year on the tax due date, which means that if my losses in Year 1 are $1m, then I should be able to carry over the loss to Year 2. That means in Year 2, if I earn $500k, I'm still at a $500k loss over Years 1 and 2. I can keep carrying over the loss until it's gone. That's how it works. So, if Trump (for example) took massive losses in Year 1 and he's now very profitable in Year 10, it would make sense that he would have had a very low to no tax burden in Years 1-9. — Hanover

And then we get to the tricky part: how to value intellectual property. Quite possibly the reason it's on sale for 50 kUSD instead of the 20 kUSD it was bought for, is to write off a loss of 50 kUSD (and probably a lot more in labour costs and other things) instead of the actual money spent. So with 20 kUSD, he probably "bought" a 100 kUSD write off. Depending on the taxation rate that could create an effecitve profit.

So the claim appears to be that Trump has tried to exploit the issue of Obama's true heritage, first raised by the Clinton campaign in 2007. — tom

That wasn't the claim though: After all, he gained the political spotlight years ago when he tried to undermine the authority and legitimacy of Barack Obama on dubious grounds, then persisted in doing so for years, and remains defensive, and even proud about it, to this very day.

He did exploit it, not during this election, but previously. — Agustino

And arguably for a good while during this election cycle, which cycle tends to start about 3 years before elections in the USA.

Was going to reply to your other post, but since you deleted it... — tom

Que? I didn't delete any posts. Still waiting on your link to open btw. The proxy-server ain't responding...

EDIT: It finally opened. I fail to see the relevance.

Amazingly yes. Even as a non-US citizen I've been able to read the news, which I mostly do just for laughs.

Then I can conclude speciesism (or any type of discrimination for that matter) is perfectly fine. If done for the right reasons.

So much for the OP.

What are the right reasons though?

From virtue ethicism that's not very hard to argue; compassion and empathy where it concerns eating animals.

A utilitarian though? What reason does he have to include the happiness of animals in his calculus?

They also rape and kill their own species without repercussions, and often rewards -- are they then cool too? Everyone's got a Trump. — Wosret

So we are different from animals then?

I think of "equality" like that? I wasn't talking about equality though, I was talking about the "rights of equality", e.g. the right to be treated the same as others who are the same. If Speciesism is false than I'm just another animal and I can be held to the same standard as a domestic cat, alligator or lion - in other words, nothing wrong with eating meat.

It's not about equality, that's ridiculous. — Wosret

Really? Equal rights are ridiculous? Simply stating it isn't about that doesn't quite convince me either.

BTW, I eat meat once a week and consider myself a flexitarian.

What makes it that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than say a domestic cat?

If we're just animals like them, we shouldn't.

But if we do so "because we can" then the raison d'etre for ethics seems shaky.

I'm going with rights of equality by the way and argue that I'm allowed to eat meat because other animals are allowed too.

What is the discredited conspiracy theory that Trump initiated? — tom

I'm sure Sapienta can point this out as well but go back to what he wrote and try to find the verb "initiate" or any synonym of it in there.

I don't think so. I think he understands it's quite possible that he'll lose the election and seeks to convince people that if he loses it can only be due to fraud. That's not showing "greatness of spirit" in my book. It's shows meanness of spirit, a spiteful spirit, intent on undermining not only the authority and legitimacy of the victor but the election process itself if he's unsuccessful. — Ciceronianus the White

I'll paraphrase into street lingo: Trump is a whiny bitch.

The natural reaction...

That you keep yelling "strawman" doesn't make it so.

And there's so much wrong with just that one paragraph it's rather sad you don't even have an inkling of what's wrong with it. The world would be a much better place for women if men like you would all die off rather sooner than later.

Women aren't trained to seduce men, their self-esteem isn't tied to their capacity to do so and even if it were so, then obviously their responsibility in this respect is zero because they're "made" that way by (progressive) society. The problem here is your assumptions and ridiculous generalisation and the equivocation of the women abused by Trump with your silly generalisations.

Some women are expected by their surroundings to act in the way that you describe and it's prevalent among conservative surroundings that objectify women. It's thanks to progressivism women moved away from living under the joke of their husbands and with it came sexual liberation - the right for women to choose how to dress when and where and with whom to have sex. Yes, that includes women's ability to instigate a relationship or make advances - horror of horrors. But there's nothing shameful about it, because it's nothing else than men (try to) do

In the end, a woman doesn't seduce me, I let her seduce me. I'm not some unwilling subject in those exchanges and I'm certainly not a victim of it or abused if it happens. It's called taking responsibility for your own actions as a man.