In this thread, I am wanting to understand why I see life so differently today! Has this happened to anyone else? I read that as we age we gain a sense of meaning to all those facts we learned. The young absorb the facts but don't have a sense of meaning until they experience what the facts mean. Like a young person volunteering for military service and knowing nothing of the meaning of being in war. The old warrior may answer the call to duty but will do so with a very different sense of what he is getting himself into. — Athena

My father was a staunch conservative and I've always thought that I would be more conservative with increased age, just as folk wisdom suggests. That has not happened though. If anything, the more I learn the more progressive I become, even venturing into the woke end of the pool.

I think people may be born with a kind of nature that predisposes them to one way or the other and no amount of learning has much impact on changing it. They say it has to do with openness to change or willingness to try new things.

There's also the dismissal of the white working class, the demonisation of dissent... — Isaac

I was just reading DeSanctimonious's new book and this seemed to click into place. In it he claims with emphatic repetition how the woke progressive elite ruling class that now dominates the nation (with the exception of Florida of course) looks down their nose at anyone who fails to uphold their pseudo-religious ideology.

Part of me hopes that he runs against Trump because the shitshow could be spectacular.

The huge money giveaway we have just been through resulting in inflation and talk of doing more of the same — Athena

How do you figure?

Rocks are beings. Are rocks sentient beings, like human beings? No.

Flowers are beings. Bach’s fugues are beings. Numbers are beings. Parachutes are beings.

At least according to what I — and traditional ontology — mean. You seem to understand this. But if you do, then what’s the problem here? — Mikie

If I’m following right, basically that it devalues sentience, which is kind of ironic because Buddhists are intent on extinguishing sentience.

It was Lincoln's call. The rest of the government wasn't involved. — frank

All I'm saying is that the country was divided. Can we agree on that?

There was Lincoln up in Washington all by his lonely self and down south there was 'govament' also involved.

Am I really speaking in riddles? Nevermind.

The EP was issued per the constitutional war power of the president. It was Lincoln's call. The rest of the government wasn't involved. — frank

Granted it's unlikely the South would have ever won but if they did I don't think that Lincoln would have remained in power. But I see your point about the people.

I said that the EP and the civil war is an instance of responsibility being imposed by force. The majority of the people and government won, fortunately.

The nation professes to value liberty and is therefore duty-bound to uphold it. Slavery isn't in accord with that duty so force must be used to stop it. The United States has never forced another nation to free its people because it's not duty-bound to do so. It's not responsible for the people of other nations. It's responsible for people who live within the nation.

What are you thinking?

How so? — frank

I don’t think you can claim to value liberty if you deny it to others.

responsibility can only be taken up voluntarily — Tzeentch

And I’m not disagreeing. We (as a people) can chose to be responsible.

That would be irresponsible. — Tzeentch

So you feel that is their right? What about the rights of the nearby residents who are getting poisoned? They can leave? Or they can legally sue the industry? You have to admit it wouldn’t be a fair fight if the residents were poor.

It seems like it comes down to you favoring those with wealth and power. It does make sense to align yourself with wealth and power in a self interested sort of way.

That suggest that you believe the Southern slave owners were being responsible in the way they conducted their businesses.

What if a business dumped toxic chemicals into a nearby river in order to avoid the cost of proper disposal and the pollution had a negative effect on the environment and the health of nearby residents, would that be responsible or irresponsible?

I have been 15 years in the US and I don't remember a single day when liberal media did not provide some info about black people. You can search CNN at the time you read my comment, if you don't trust me. There definitely will be something about black people somewhere (it has been like that the last 15 years, and the odds are too small that it will not be the same at the time you read my comment). It's like they are trying to educate people all the time about accepting blacks, and definitely they keep making it one major political issue. — Eros1982

:lol: Ironic.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the civil war is an instance of responsibility being imposed by force isn’t it?

Then you are opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation?

Enslaving people has nothing to do with responsibility?

Responsibility is taken (up voluntarily by the individual), not imposed (through governmental threat of violence). — Tzeentch

You know that’s silly. If you actually believed that, I could go to where you live and take all your liberty by force, make you my slave, and because you’re philosophically opposed to forcing others to be responsible or whatever your hands would be self-tied and you would be a compliant slave.

So what’s your address?

First time that I heard the expression “white trash” was when I was around 11 years old. Some cranky old Hawaiian woman had stepped into the bus at school for some reason, I don’t recall everything about the incident, and called me and the only other haole (white person) on the bus white trash. Later I had to ask my mom what it meant. Anyway, can you imagine the level of hostility you must have to feel in order to randomly insult children? Another oddity is that my family was middle class and the other haole’s family was quite affluent.

The backstory is that the Hawaiians got fucked over good by people who had the choice to not fuck them over. The old lady also had a choice but wasn’t doing what they did and what they continue to do.

That apparently not everyone thinks they go hand in hand.

A tricksters job is only to show us what’s important. So what’s more important, freedom or responsibility? A libertarian will scream like a blue faced antisemitic berserker…

However, I don't think pursuing responsibility is what "modern liberalism" does. It simply tries to force people into acting in ways it considers "responsible" - that is not liberal. That is authoritarian. — Tzeentch

Affordable healthcare isn’t responsible? Regulations aren’t responsible? Etc.

Those are relevant. There's also the dismissal of the white working class — Isaac

I don’t know what you mean.

Equality always comes at the expense of liberty, so the pursuit of it is by definition anti-liberal. — Tzeentch

Liberty requires responsibility and modern liberalism pursues that responsibility.

:up:

Again I’m reminded of a scene from a film.

conflating the mad fringes of wokeness with progressives in general as Tzeentch has tried to do is just the right wing attempting poisoning the well tactics — Baden

I can’t help thinking something like this is behind Adams stunt. He fancies himself as a trickster, after all.

The discussion was (at that point) about the effect of 'woke' culture. Pretty much everything said since then has been directed exclusively at avoiding any discussion of even the possibility that it might have negative consequences exacerbating negative responses. — Isaac

I think there are instances of people being unfairly ‘canceled’.

I’m not sure how much wokeness may be too restrictive or if the claims that it’s too restrictive are merely politically motivated.

Those are two aspects that come to mind. Are there others?

“It’s okay to be white” isn’t racist (at face value) by design.

In new campaign promises Trump wants to take government owned land and build 10 new “freedom cities” on it. If I remember right they do things like that in communist China and they sometimes end up “ghost cities”.

Maybe it won’t seem as communistic if he also promises that Mexico will pay for the cities.

I think the movie 'The Matrix' does a perfect job of illustrating most humans. There are only a few people who really want to know the truth and take the steps to seek it out. In real life, I believe most people don't really, really want to know the absolute truth of everything. It's not a bad thing. It just is. Most people are in 'self-preservation' mode, just like most other animals are. It's not bad, it's just instinct. I believe there are some, a small number even, who passionately want to know 'the truth'. Not to shove it down someone else's throat or bash it over someone else's head, but they just have a passion to discover, and a love for, truth. I firmly believe those people will find it. They will find the truth if they genuinely seek it with an open mind, but an open mind is a must. An open mind to reading all sorts of things. Yes, even the Bible, but other material as well. If you seek, you WILL find, but seeking is still a requirement. — Michael Phelps

Welcome, Mr. Phelps!

If it’s not impolite to ask, what is the truth?

I ask as though you know because you seem so convinced that there is “the truth”.

I suspect that you may be inclined to say something like “seek and ye shall find”. If so, please resist the temptation.

If only that were true. — RogueAI

I think he means that it’s gone out of style. It used to be all the rage back in the 50s. You know, back when America was great. :wink:

I think this is one of the most interesting questions with respect to the philosophy of religion -- and I think it may get at why religion is as powerful as it is. (I think secular persons tend to underestimate the power of religion too...) — Moliere

What do you think the power of religion is? or rather the primary power or purpose?

Woke promotes racial segregation. Need me to repeat it? — Tzeentch

I hear it enough from people like Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and now fresh off the assembly line, Scott Adams, so you don’t need to parrot it further on my account, but thanks for asking.

Racial categorization predisposes one to racial bias. It’s a collectivist impulse; we end up responding to people more as members of a social group than as individual people. In so doing you’ve immediately placed them into an out-group instead of integrating them into your in-group, predisposing yourself to bias against the former and preference towards the latter. — NOS4A2

This is getting very tedious. What you call a “collectivist impulse” is simply how our associative minds work. There is no way to get around this, even if it were a good idea to do so. My mind automatically identifies and categorizes people, at a mere glance and beneath conscious awareness. Whether my ‘groupings’ are positive or negative depends, as I just previously mentioned, on personal and/or cultural experience. Is that really news or are you just playing dumb for some reason?

Moreover, it implicitly promotes racial segregation, which Adams's comments are a clear indication of. — Tzeentch

Jesus, someone please pull the hook out of your mouth.

"It's okay to be white" is an slogan that's been around for years and used by alt-right trolls to spark media backlash. You don't think that Adams knew that?

They utilize and further the same superstitions, nomenclature, and taxonomies born of pseudoscience to guide their thoughts and behaviors. It invariably leads to hasty generalizations, racial affinity, and guilt by association where none ought to exist. It creates hierarchies or pits one false category against another. In the case of praxis here it creates implicit racial biases. — NOS4A2

You don't seem to understand how a bias develops. Not sure how many times I've pointed it out in this topic but mere categorization does not create a bias.

If you were on board with current right-wing media you might say that my bias was created by 'legacy media' or whatever.

Generally speaking, I think a bias develops through culture or personal experience. I've actually had little personal experience with black people in my life because of where I've lived but all the experiences I have had were positive. I can only attribute whatever bias I have to media and perhaps some influences in early life from my parents who were a bit racist, though not in a mean-spirited way, if that makes sense. Culture, in other words, rather than personal experience. That's why I'm always pleased to see minorities portrayed positively in the media and culture in general. I think it serves to counteract all the negative.

Something like a social environment? Or a set of beliefs? Or what? — Moliere

I'm thinking roughly along Buddhist lines, that everything is an illusion born of our conditioning and playing out in endless repeat until we realize our true nature (emptiness) and somehow extinguish our conditioning. I'm not too hot on the extinguishing part personally. Free and extinguished is hard to imagine and unappealing to my sense of selfhood.

Yeah, I saw that one too. — unenlightened

:sweat:

I believe Rowdy Roddy Piper won the Oscar for best performance by a professional wrestler that year. — T Clark

I trust no one made a joke about his wife. That could have landed very badly.

I'm thinking inescapable in the sense that we require some kind of framework. You can remove the water in a fish bowl but it will have to be replaced with different water for the fish to live in. I think we require ideology, in other words.

So, it makes you more sensitive to others, more empathic? Those are frontal lobe functions, abstract thought, symbol-making functions, far from the primal drives. Seems to me that's more connected to the thinking world, rather than the physical one. — Vera Mont

The basic neurology of it is suppression of the default mode network. Modern folk tends to have a hyperactive DMN. I certainly do.

That's interesting. What 'things' do you feel when meditating that are different from the things you feel when connected to the outside world? And how does feeling deeply affect behaviour differently from the presumably shallow feeling we normally experience.
I can't always follow what other people mean by feelings (which i think of as response to sensation and other stimuli) and emotions (which i think of as either primal or sentimental.) We have more precise language available, of which most of us rarely make use. — Vera Mont

When in regular meditation practice I notice being generally more sentimental. Hearing a touching story, for instance, makes eyes water when ordinarily they would not. That sort of thing.

And I would characterize the feeling of being in meditation as more connected to the world.