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@zedvictor4
Aside from the gun pointing at my face, this all sounds very benevolent. The gun makes it a little difficult to feel under no obligation whatsoever though. Makes me feel like I am being robbed, rather than asked nicely.
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I am not sure what the point of the Bible is if a believer can just interpret inconvenient sentences however they want. The Bible contains many commands to take or, at least, keep and maintain slaves - and not a single passage plainly condemning it (to the best of my knowledge). If, given all that, a Christian somehow concludes that slavery is evil, then the claim that the Bible is a word of god is bunk.
It is as if someone read Marx' Das Kapital and concluded that, in communism, private property is good and public ownership is evil. Why read anything at all if words can mean whatever you want them to mean? Just generate a bunch of random symbols and pretend that it is a Shakespeare's novel.
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"Theft" implies a certain degree of covertness of the action, but the government takes money away openly and under a threat of violence. So taxation is not an act of theft, but it is an act of robbery, or "plunder", as Frederick Bastiat aptly called it.
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@yachilviveyachali
I am open to good answers to my questions. I am not open to metaphorical answers to concrete questions. If I ask whether 1+1=3 and you say yes, then you are speaking a different language than me. If everyone else speaks English and Jordan speaks Dragon, then he is a fool.
What I wrote is a basic logical conjecture. Its validity does not depend on what anyone believes. If you believe that A does not follow from A, then your belief is simply wrong.
Nobody said anything about proving something on the spot. You said that there are things that cannot be proven, and I said that they can be rejected on the spot.
"Before giving an answer"? In most cases he never gives the answer, and people have to press him hard to finally give one.
Does he believe in god? I have not seen him answer this one single time, even though "god" is what he nowadays talks about more than anything else.
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@yachilviveyachali
When asking whether dragons exist, people do not ask whether they exist metaphorically. You know it and Peterson knows it. So please stop dodging the real issue.
Meaning beyond one's existence is a contradiction in terms. Something can only mean something to a conscious being, and outside of said consciousness the concept is inapplicable.
That which cannot be proven can be rejected on the spot. Otherwise, feel free to accept all kinds of invisible massless unicorns and descend into madness.
"Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?" is a simple yes or no question. There are two options: "Yes I do", and "No I do not". If neither, then "I do not know". "What do you mean by 'believe'?" is a stupid response.
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@yachilviveyachali
Dragons clearly are not real: I do not need to elaborate on that, and I have already talked about differences between fantasy and reality. As for atheism -> nihilism, this is just a Christian projection: Christians tend to think that a finite life is meaningless, while more... rational people focus on enjoying the finite life that they demonstrably have.
On the Great Flood, we can hypothesize that it happened, suggest what evidence would confirm or reject it, and look for that evidence. The results of such searches have been very conclusive: there was no "Great Flood" or "Noah's Ark". This is all religious fiction.
Peterson is not doing a therapy session when talking to Harris or O'Connor. And even if he did, what kind of a psychologist cannot answer a simple yes or no question?
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Maybe because democracy is self-contradictory. It is supposed to have someone represent the individual, but the masses vote for the representative. It is as if I went to a grocery store to buy apples, and people voted for me buying bread instead. This contradiction is bound to result in the system descending into a corrupt oligarchy eventually.
An individual can only be represented by those individuals who he himself appoints. There can be no voting for that. In democracy, no one is represented - instead, everyone is ruled over. The pretense of top-down accountability is still much better than an open tyranny, but it is not sustainable in the long run.
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@LucyStarfire
I have heard that before too. But I think that I know myself better than a stranger from the Internet. 😉
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@LucyStarfire
There are no good people, true yes.
And this is the kind of nihilistic conclusions that slave ideologies like Christianity led to: some variation of "the world sucks". Buddhism leads one to accept the balance and not see the world as intrinsically bad or good, which is an improvement. And whatever I practice has led me to conclude that the world is freaking awesome - and Mother Theresa's of this world will never even get a glimpse at the kind of life that is possible with a proper moral foundation.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I think going from "this needs to be paid for" to "This needs to be paid for by extortion" is the actual "big lie" of our civilization.Consensual funding would cause a hundred secondary effects would would improve government efficiency for the exact same reason that competing companies are better than artificial monopolies for employees and customers.
I agree - but, at that point, we are just talking about a private organization and not a government any more. I simply meant that if the government is to exist at all, then it should be funded with taxes or some other imposition of its will on the individuals. Whether it should exist is a different question. I lean towards "no", and, I suspect, you do too.
I am now ambivalent on that point.While the government is operated in an evil impractical manner shrinking it is better, but it would never be small enough to be acceptable under those terms.On the other hand if it operated morally and cunning structure (in the same ambitious spirit of the checks and balances of the US constitution) then it being larger would not necessarily be a bad thing.I don't know what it could accomplish under such circumstances. There is the fundamental problem of definitions. Right now the idea of "public action" and "government" are synonymous, but a better definition of "government" might be "the people who you call when you need to threaten violence against an aggressor".There is no reason for public action to be mixed with violence. Every social safety net and non-violent public service could be a chartered corporation, the charter following basic requirements agreed to in a constitution (the social contract).As long as it works, collective public action can grow to 99% of the economy for all I care.
This is likely to go terribly wrong. Milton Friedman once said: "Nobody spends other's money as carefully as he spends his own". A good illustration is Lime Scooters: have you seen how people treat those, versus how they treat their own? A person will never drop his scooter into a muck and walk away - he will have to use this scooter many times over and cares about its condition - but the rental scooter he will probably never use again, and if the next person to use it finds it dirty and unrecoverable, then who cares?
It is essential for an individual to own as many things in his life as he can own. Communal management of anything, even if fully consented upon by everyone involved, is bound to lead to a tragedy of the commons. This is why large private corporations such as Google grow to become slow and unmanageable beasts, and corruption thrives there almost as easily as it does in the government - in fact, such corporations end up colluding with the government and lobbying the laws that dry out competition.
I think that Harry Browne's model is optimal: people form temporary associations to achieve very particular goals, then part ways. Instead of having a large corporation in which almost everything is managed by a collective of managers or shareholders, to the extent to which it is possible, it is best to contract everything. Working on a large software project and need to build 100 different modules? Hire 100 different programmers to write one module with unit tests each, then hire a few to put all this together - pay them their dues, then say goodbye to them - and you have the final product without the burden of being accountable to countless individuals working for you or holding your assets.
Automation creates fascinating prospects for that. I am already outsourcing 95% of my code writing to ChatGPT and get more done in a day than 5 years ago most software engineers got done in a month. If I were to create a new video game, for instance, I would not need to rent an office, build a studio, search for investors and publishers... I would just find a few contractors to do different parts of the project (each of whom is much more productive than almost anyone was 5 years ago), then put all this together and self-publish, using LLMs for advertising purposes.
In the future, everything could work this way. People will own their lives and not have to contend with countless contracts they have to bind themselves by. And instead of collectively used enterprises such as Lime, there instead would be networks like Uber everywhere connecting service providers with service consumers, and project directors with private contractors. You can have your own scooter without having to build it from raw materials, and without anyone having to accept any long-term job contracts. Someone who is good at building chassis will build chassis, and, without his awareness, he will have contributed to thousands of vehicles roaming the streets of his city.
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@LucyStarfire
That is a different consideration. I am a huge proponent of being generous and kind: every time I help someone out, I cultivate the abundance mindset and spread positivity around. But Christian morals suggest that that is an imperative of any virtuous person, implying that, by default, no one is virtuous. Buddhism simply says that, if one has any imperative at all, then that imperative is to ultimately understand that there are no imperatives. That is a much healthier mindset than the "sinner" mentality Christianity promotes.
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You said that Christianity is superior to Buddhism because it prioritizes helping others even at the cost of personal suffering, which Buddhism does not - but you have not explained why this is a superior priority. Ayn Rand, for instance, saw it exactly as the property making Christian morals evil: self-sacrifice is negation of life, rather than its promotion.
I tend to agree with her. A good moral system should empower the individual, not enslave him, and making serving others the cornerstone of morals is that horrible "original sin" idea in a different shape: you are worthless by default, and you must earn the right to exist by slaving away to pay off the loan you have never taken.
Buddhism seems much more practical to me. The exemplary Christian is Mother Teresa, a miserable woman (by her own admission) living in poverty and dirt. The exemplary Buddhist is a content monk looking at a river and contemplating life - sounds boring to me, but certainly an upgrade over Teresa, Jesus and other sacrificial lambs.
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@yachilviveyachali
Please. He is not just here to ask questions: he makes very strong assertions on topics that he considers himself an expert at. "Dragons are as real as lions", "Atheism leads to nihilism", "Everyone has a Nazi prison guard in him", "Men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people" - are just a few examples (and the latter two assertions I agree with).
Where he becomes obtuse is when probed further - he is very vague and dodgy when it comes to backing up his assertions on certain topics with an argument, or when it comes to religious truth claims that he very carefully avoids endorsing or rejecting. It is not hard for him to say how many genders there are, but to say whether the Great Flood actually happened or not - he cannot even say "I do not know"; instead, he will start the usual nonsense: "What do you mean by 'happened'? See, Carl Jung said that... [the tangent continues for as long as it takes for his conversation partner to give up on this line of questioning]"
From. your exerpt of his appearance on Rogan's podcast, his brilliant insight apparently was that sex is fun and is biologically encouraged. Wow, who would have known... Nobel Prize-worthy innovative finding.
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@yachilviveyachali
I have had a few interactions like that with peole who claimed that there was a lot of depth to Peterson. Then I would ask them to give an example of an especially deep insight of his, and they never could. It seems that Peterson is a master of using sophisticated language that sounds profound, but amounts to nothing. I am not saying that he does it intentionally either - more likely he is just uncomfortable with concrete statements on some subjects for he is afraid to commit to something he is not fully sure of. His listeners marvel at his brilliant performances, then cannot name a single position of his.
During one of their debates, Sam said, "What worries me, Jordan, is that after all this time I still have no idea what you believe. And if I have no idea, then neither do the listeners". Being so unclear that nobody knows what you are trying to say is not a sign of sophistication, but of sophistry.
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@yachilviveyachali
How about answering the question and then elaborating on it, rather than going on endless tangents? A metaphor's purpose is to illustrate a point, not to substitute for it, and it appears that all Peterson does is the latter. To say that Dawkins or O'Connor have little regard for metaphorical language is quite something, when Dawkins regularly cites great works of fiction, and O'Conner has received the Oxford degree in theology. Perhaps they just know what the proper place for such language is, while Peterson thinks that its domain of applicability is unconstrained?
Peterson certainly is a deep thinker, and he has come up with some profound insights on evolutionary biology, sociology and politology. However, deep thinkers are highly susceptible to losing touch with reality and descending into madness, and that appears to have been his trajectory for the past 3-4 years. He has become increasingly irritatable, sophistic and vague. I just listened to his recent conversation with Sam Harris, and it was a world of difference from their debates in Vancouver, London an Dublin years back: the guy sounded like RFK, a full-on crank.
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If someone would rather clean toilets for $2 an hour in Los Angeles than live in a ghetto in Santa Fe de Bogota, then offering them this opportunity constitutes a valid private enterprise benefitting both parties. I think Americans should travel to other countries (especially developing ones) more, as many of them do not have any idea what conditions the majority of human population lives in. I certainly have lived in places in which cleaning toilets in Los Angeles sounded like heaven relative to the local experience.
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This post is for libertarians, ancaps, or objectivists, but anyone is welcome to opine.So imagine the ideal deregulated, privatized society. The haves aren't forced to subsidize the have-nots. In theory, if one person violates the property rights of another then they should be made to pay restitution (who does said enforcing is another question for another day).Imagine a society evenly split between haves and have-nots. It's fashionable for the haves to own $500,000 supercars, both expensive and relatively fragile, to the point where a fender bender could cost $30,000 to repair. You are a have-not with a regular car. One day, while driving, you're distracted. You will spent countless hours of your life behind the wheel, so it was bound to happen at some point; you're not drunk or on your phone. Perhaps you're younger and have less experience driving. In any case, you were following this guy a little too close, and you didn't notice in time when he slowed down to turn. And so, you rear-end him. Fate flips a coin, and it turns out the car you hit was a supercar.In today's world, there are rules protecting you from being taken through the cleaners for an honest accident. But how should it work in this libertarian world? If you're 100% on the hook for a $30K repair bill, then in practice doesn't that amount to someone else's property rights aggressing against yours? If not, then explain.Is the problem solved by insurance? If so, then would it be expected that the driver of the supercar fully insure his own vehicle against damages? Is this the ethically right policy? What liability should the driver of the other car have? Would the right outcome ensue in a free market?
I think this is a caricature understanding of free market ideas. A free market does not imply lack of proper institutions resolving edge cases like this - it just puts creation and maintenance of those institutions in the hands of private individuals, who can then shop for their services and choose the package that works best for them, without any governmental ministers telling them what they should choose.
Another confusion is on the concept of restitution. It does not imply that the compensation should always have the equal value to the damages done. It takes into account considerations of reason. Did the have who bought a $500,000 supercar know how fragile it is and how likely he is to be rear-ended by someone who cannot afford to pay him $30,000 for repairs? Then that will be viewed by the (private civil) court as a risk he had to take into account, and correcting for that risk, he now may be decided to be eligible to only 1% of that amount.
The role of courts in a fully private society is to resolve conflicts between individuals in a way that allows them to part ways in peace. Bear in mind that we do not live in such a society, and if we did, then the societal values would likely be very different, gravitating more towards quick resolution of conflicts allowing everyone to move on and live their private lives in peace. What may sound like unrealistic - that the have in question would accept such a seemingly one-sided ruling - may very well be a normality there.
A private society is not a set of hard prescriptions for each possible scenario. It is just the model of social organization in which everything is privatized and there is no central organization with the monopoly on use of force. What specific models and institutions people choose to build there is an open question. It is very likely that a private society in Iran would look very-very different from a private society in the UK - but both would generally frown upon aggressive violence and coercion, and endorse quick resolutions of disputes.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
That might be backward. Those favored by the system become rich.The question is not how to get rid of rich people, its how to make a system that favors (makes wealthy) the honest and productive people.Best practical answer and only moral answer is: A system that favors people who convince others that they're worth it without deception.
I would question this approach to the matter. I do not think it is meaningful to talk about someone being "worth" something in the economical context. Suppose someone does not think that Bill Gates is "worth" having billions of dollars - what implications does it have and what does it really mean?
What is important is the nature of economical transactions in the society. When me and another person find a way to be useful to each other, to trade on mutually beneficial terms - are we allowed to do so, or does someone intervene on the basis of our trade not aligning with his vision? In the first case, we have a free market system in which, by its very nature, one can only get rich by providing more value to others than others provide value to them. In the second case, the best way to get rich is to make friends in high circles and use their power to enrich oneself.
In most societies a lot of emphasis is done on generating some kind of society-wide guarantees that will not allow anyone to fall through the cracks: "If you are poor, the society will take care of you". This is corrupting in many ways, but the most obvious way is that the organization (government) which is bound to take care of the poor will require a lot of resources - far more resources than the wealthiest individual in the country can ever hope to acquire - and the infighting between those seeking to control those resources is inevitable. It also incentivizes destructive financial behaviors: if you know that, should you fail, the society will bail you out, then you will be much more reckless in your spending - much like banks that are guaranteed bail-outs by the government will be investing much more aggressively than they would in the presence of a real risk to go bankrupt and have to deal with it on their own.
I think that it is better to place emphasis on liberating the economy. If the economy is truly free, then, except for rare cases of extreme disabilities and the like (which private charity takes care of far more efficiently than the government does), poor people who remain poor for decades have only themselves to blame: the opportunities are everywhere. Any poor person can learn a craft, become useful to others and get out of poverty.
While in an unfree economy the poor are more likely to remain the poor, because they get free cash from the government without needing to do anything to change their circumstances, and the government erects a lot of barriers preventing them from partaking in more ambitious economical activities. In the US, for example, most visas do not allow foreigners to work in the country - and if you are, say, an F1 student here and you run out of money, then there is nothing you can do legally to fix your finances, short of returning to your home country.
Where does the sales tax fit in all this? It very directly inhibits all trade transactions. If there was no sales tax, then I could make chairs in my garage and sell them at the price my customers are willing to pay for them. With the sales tax, both of us have to pay the government for the right to partake in such transactions, and, splitting the tax between ourselves, I become poorer (I get less cash for my chairs), and they become poorer (they pay more for my chairs). The government takes the tax money and decides what to do with it - and me and my customers certainly know better than the government how we would rather spend that money. The government might even decide that chairs are better produced and sold by Ikea than by random garage producers like me and enact a special tax on me, or issue a licensing rule.
I realize that the government has to be funded somehow, but I think that the role of the government should be significantly shrunk. The government might have a role in a situation where one individual wants to murder another individual - but it should have no role in a situation where one individual wants to sell something to another individual. And it certainly should have no role in deciding whether the rich are "worth" their money. Bill Gates' customers have voted for him being a billionaire with their wallets - and there is no more honest vote than the one that is supported by gold.
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@fauxlaw
What I think you are owed is a public ridicule, but I have better things to do than partake in that.
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@fauxlaw
I must be illiterate then, for to me the two sentences you used to define "faith" contradict each other. "Substance of things hoped for" and "evidence of things not seen" are completely different entities, and I am not sure I understand what either one means. What substance are we talking about? If I am hoping for no rain tomorrow, what is the substance of it not raining tomorrow that constitutes my "faith"?
You mentioned "other senses", but never specified what those senses are. It all is extremely fuzzy: "There is something we do not know about and we cannot articulate, but it is there" - is the kind of language I hear a lot in discussions like this, and it never amounts to anything. I need something concrete, and I am not getting it.
You mentioned something interesting: "leaving doubt behind". That is every scoundrel's dream, to encounter something who leave doubt behind and tries his hardest to believe in the scoundrel's claims. There would be a lot of very wealthy Nigerian princes on this planet if people left doubt behind more often when it came to tangible things - such as their wallet - than ancient fantasies. To me, it does not really matter if the Nigerian prince is Christian or not.
What I think more likely is happening is that this "sixth sense" is a product of self-deception. One can hypnotize themselves into believing anything, and that is a sure path to madness. I use the reality around me as reality check (pun intended): I know that a hot stove will burn away any fantasies I may have about its temperature. If there is no hot stove to tell me that I am wrong when I am, then it is just a waste of my time. "Supernatural hot stoves" belong on pages of fantasy books, not in one's personal search for happiness.
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@AdaptableRatman
I am not familiar with the data on the IQ distribution of Trump supporters, but Mussolini's closest followers certainly were not shallow people: they were hardcore ideologues that were willing to die for their beliefs (and many did, including Mussolini himself). Trump's closest followers just seem to be crafty politicians taking advantage of his penchant for loyalty.
You can find parallels between anything. "Fascist" though is a very specific term, and the fact that you can find some parallels between Mussolini's and Trump's followers does not imply that their ideological makeup is similar. I can find a lot of similarities between Stalin's and Sanders' followers, yet I would not claim that Sanders's supporters are Stalinist.
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@fauxlaw
After all this, I still do not understand what it is you mean by "faith". It seems like a placeholder for something that you cannot quite articulate. A good concept can be explained concisely; if I have to do hours of reading just to understand what it means, then either this is a bad concept, or a good concept specific to a very-very narrow field (such as some obscure branch of algebraic topology).
Here is how I think about it. When choosing what action to take, one can rely either on something they know, or on something they do not know. When I run an ultramarathon and start feeling a horrible pain in my right knee, I do not know for sure what is happening - but I do know that in most cases it indicates a serious injury, so I better take this seriously, and not brush it away as just my knee getting occasional cramps, which is normal.
I could instead assume that something bigger is watching over me and will not let me get seriously injured - and keep pushing. Many people ended up in hospitals this way. In some cases it did lead to a good race result without a serious injury, but as a consistent approach to such situations it is foolish.
I prefer to never operate on things I do not know. Everything I do is based on my knowledge about the world, my knowledge of my abilities, of my preferences and values, and my ability to forecast consequences of my actions. I absolutely will not put a lot of effort into something that I believe has a low chance of succeeding and that does not offer any rewards along the way. I will not bet all my money on a lottery which I have a 0.00001% of winning - but if I had faith in the forces of cosmos being on my side, then, perhaps, I would want to do so?
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This is pretty silly. No one in their right mind would think that Musk seriously endorses National Socialism. This is a gesture that many other politicians have made, and nobody batted an eye. Here is the ol' pal Bernie: 007aa5984b.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/623c798bbebff6c7d14939bb7ef0eb95/200000253-7932679327/BernieSanders.jpeg?ph=007aa5984b And this guy, Barack, just cleeeearly wanted to endorse the National-Socialistic healthcare policies: d.newsweek.com/en/full/2571225/barack-obama.jpg?w=1200&f=208a398c3d66364348289c22cf9380d7
Let us be adults and not overreact to every media "sensation" based on someone raising their hands once across a long speech.
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I have seen a lot of these fuzzy claims before, and they do not amount to much. "Reality is multileveled" - what does it mean? How is it differentiated from a one-leveled reality? It seems to be one of those statements that sound profound, but there is no substance to them.
The most substantial claim in your opening statement is this one:
Science does not contend that reality can be reduced to a single ontological level, on the contrary, science asserts that reality is in fact, multileveled, it asserts that the four dimensions of existence that we call reality, are contingent and relative to a greater reality of more dimensions, of which we cannot have certain knowledge, and which can only be expressed metaphorically.
Where does it assert that? I am not aware of any scientific field in which the presumption is that there are aspects of reality of which we cannot have certain knowledge. In physics, for instance, one of the primary endeavors is the "theory of everything", that would potentially describe the properties of the most fundamental blocks of reality from which, in principle, all real phenomena will follow. The existence of, for the lack of the better term, "supernatural reality" is not supported by any existing evidence.
What does exist is the domain of thought in which very complex ideas can be distilled in metaphors. There can be pieces of intergenerational wisdom that are very hard to capture with a rigorous scientific methodology, yet that demonstrably have a lot of value. The "Chesterton's fence" mental experiment that is commonly used as an argument in favor of conservatism likely cannot be expressed as some kind of an equation, and it is not clear how to test its validity in a real experiment. Yet it makes sense to anyone who comes across it, and it is clear that in this concise mental experiment something very fundamental and robust is embedded.
There is absolutely no need to invoke "other dimensions", the "supernatural" or anything else of this kind to explain this though. Humans have brains that are powerful processing machines, and billions of brains learning from each other over the course of hundreds of thousands of years are bound to find some heuristics that apply to all generations, regardless of the level of their technological advancement, or their cultural progress. The "Chesterton's fence" is a product of countless historical events across which the pattern of breaking things and realizing that seemingly obsolete things were there for a good reason was observed.
The religious kind like to claim that there is something more here, something as real as our physical reality, but less understandable. Why would there be? There is a lot in the Lord of the Rings, but everyone knows that it is a human mind that produced it. Tolkien did not commune with some otherworldly spirits to write his books. He did not tap into domains of reality not accessible to us mere mortals. Curiously, Tolkien was a devoted Catholic, but I do not think that many Catholics would suggest that Sauron reflects some divine phenomenon. That Sauron is a purely fictional character - notwithstanding embodying elements of ancient stories that, in turn, had a lot of intergenerational wisdom encoded in them - is as clear to everyone as that there is no Galaxy Far-Far Away with Darth Vader in it in this Universe.
The problem with religion is that it goes further than that: the religious Saurons are taken more seriously than Tolkien's Sauron. They are taken as somehow more real, existing in some "larger world", the way Tolkien's characters are not. Is there a bigger world in which Frodo Baggins is alive? Come on now. But with, say, Buddha it is different: many Buddhists think that he exists in some "Pure Realm" that is out there somewhere.
I do not know about other people, but that is all I personally say about religion: not that it is evil, or stupid, or useless, or does not contain deep wisdom and powerful traditions - but simply that it is fiction. Good fiction has everything that religious people credit their "holy books" with, and as long as it is taken as fiction having that, I have no problem with it whatsoever. I have no problem with someone saying, "The Bible is a book that helps me navigate my life, that I read frequently and from which I gain new pieces of wisdom". I guess I would find the particular choice of the book a little strange - with things like endorsement of slavery and genocides - but, hey, in a proper context those, too, can contain a lot of wisdom.
But when you say that the characters in the Bible or the Quran are somehow more real than Sauron or Darth Vader - then I have to say that, indeed, this is quite stupid. I think I knew for sure that Santa Claus was made up when I was 4 and a half. It seems to me that 4-5 is a good age range to start understanding the fundamental difference between fantasy and reality - and to understand that fantasy plays a very important role in human life, and it should never spill out from its proper domain into other domains, especially those dealing with questions of reality.
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@yachilviveyachali
Dawkins surely understands that a dragon can be a metaphor for a struggle. But you are making the same conflation as Peterson trying to defend him: putting facts of reality and, using Peterson's language, "metanarratives" in the same epistemological category. When saying "dragons are as real as lions", one makes a very concrete statement of fact. If Peterson wants to use a metaphor, he should do so; the statement that a creature from a metaphor is as real as a creature from the real world makes no sense. It is like saying that cheese that I imagine in my head is as real as cheese that is in my fridge, because cheese in my head represents eternal human struggle to acquire food.
Alex O'Connor once took a few minutes of prompting to just get Peterson to answer one straightforward question: does he believe that Jesus rose from the dead in this reality? Peterson did his best to wiggle out of the answer by bringing it a lot of pseudo-philosophical garbage. In the end, to a very carefully crafted question, he finally said: "I suspect the answer is yes". Why could he not say so immediately? Because making substantial statements is not something he is comfortable for.
Peterson poses as this deep thinker who sees all sides of every issue and does not commit to much in light of complexity of the questions - but in the end he ends up saying almost nothing. "The Bible has some intergenerational wisdom encoded in them" - yes, no guano, Sherlock. Anyone who accepts this has little to gain from listening to his musings on religion - which seems to be what occupies his mind 95% of the time nowadays.
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@AdaptableRatman
-->@<<<MayCaesar>>>You are gaslighting.You say a Fascist pooivy depends on the leader bekieving in it.Any Trump was a racist prick his whole past, this was shown multiple comments and ways he ha dled himself. He also donated a LOT to Hillary to try to beat Obama as candidate before he later Ran. He also pushee mainstream the lie that Obama cant be born in US as hes not white.
I do not know what "gaslighting" means, but I do know a lot about Fascism: read Mussolini's title book and thought about it a lot. Trump or any of his supporters I have talked to have never shown any interest in the ideology, and their words and actions have only a small superficial intersection with it.
I have not seen any evidence of Trump having been a "racist prick". Donating a lot to Hillary to beat Obama is an indication that he is racist? I also think that Hillary would have made for a much better president than Obama - so what? I also think that Condoleezza Rice would have made for a better president than Bush - so which way am I racist?
You seem to be looking for racism everywhere where more than two races are involved. That is very common nowadays, and very lousy.
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@yachilviveyachali
And here we enter the realm of postmodernism, something that Peterson vocally opposes, yet practices: "Words mean whatever one decides they mean". If "dragons exist" means something else to Jordan than to most other people who use English words the way they are intended to be used, then he just engages in definitional sophistry and is not worth listening to.
But he does not even follow that consistently. If you ask him, "Is there more than two genders?", he will instantly say, "No": the discussion is closed for him. But if you ask him, "Is Jesus alive?", then he will say something like, "What do you mean by 'is'?", or "It would take me 5 hours to answer this question".
Either the guy tries to pander to his Christian audience without committing to Christian beliefs (which he, correctly, finds to be contradicting the very scientific field that he has worked in professionally), or he tries to sound profound when saying nothing of substance - or he just lost it and does not know what he is talking about any more. Perhaps it is a bit of each.
At this point, I would rather listen to William Lane Craig than him. Craig, at least, owns everything he speaks in favor of. He will defend everything in the Bible and claim that all the genocides that god asked Israelites to partake in were justified. Craig is a dishonest debater who twists his opponents' words and misrepresents scientific claims in cosmology and biology, but he has enough spine to plant his feet on the ground and defend everything he believes. Jordan is a warrior too, but he seems more interested in defending his ego than any particular views.
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Trump is just another big government hawk, a vocal central planner supported by tens of millions of Americans. If he is a Fascist, then every American president after 1999 was a Fascist - and at that point the term does not mean anything. Trump and Mussolini have little in common aside from the personality cults around them.
I think that Trump is much more similar to Obama or Biden policy-wise than he is to Mussolini. He is not implementing any racial-favoritist policies, he is not making himself into a supreme dictator, he is not building a police state - instead, he continuously finds ways to funnel more money from private hands into the hands of bureaucrats and to prevent people from engaging in economical and social transactions that offend him and his loyalists. Other than that, I do not think he has any principles, and his supporters' main principle seems to be that whatever offends "the left" is what needs to be done.
Mussolini was an actual convinced ideologue, and his supporters believed in Fascism. Name one prominent Trump supporter who openly expresses his belief in Fascism - you cannot.
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@yachilviveyachali
There is a difference between expanding one's mind and erasing all barriers guarding one from nonsense. The idea that ancient belief in dragons was grounded in observations of reality is very plausible, but to claim on that basis that "dragons are as real as lions" is insane.
Peterson fails to distinguish between fantasy and reality: to him stories reflect certain truths of reality that are not capturable by physical facts alone, therefore they are as real as those facts. This conflates basic concepts. There are facts about physical objects, and there are facts about stories - and the latter are completely unrelated to the former. "This books tells a story about a dragon" is a statement of fact; "therefore the dragon is as real as my dog" is a statement of nonsense.
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@Greyparrot
I will celebrate it with a glass of fine whiskey; cheers!
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@Greyparrot
I am impressed by your trust in your mind-reading ability, but the evidence does not justify it. If I was not interested in discussing it, I would not be talking to you right now.
Your debating skills so far have not made a very strong impression on me, my friend. Seems like, in line with your desire for the government to shield you from foreign competitors, you just do not handle challenges well in general. I only needed to push a little bit against your arguments for you to fall completely apart.
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@Greyparrot
My central point here was that trade benefits all sides involved, while tariffs hurt all sides involved - just like free conversations like this one benefit us all, while restrictions on them harm us all. I certainly am not interested in "winning" anything. I am interested in hearing out good arguments challenging my views though, and when the arguments I hear are weak, I will push against them and ask my conversation partner to improve them.
If that is not what you are looking for, then no hard feelings.
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@Greyparrot
That is a strange expectation to have. Have you done anything of the kind with my arguments? If you associate debating in good faith with people strengthening your argument, but yourself not strengthening theirs, then you will have a hard time finding good-faith debate partners.
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@Lemming
Pretty much all of them, but especially the laws prohibiting businesses from being open, or taking in above a certain number of customers. North Korean-style limitations on freedom of movement cannot be justified in my system of values.
The reason many people are suspicious of experts is that they assume that the experts' expertise assumes expectation of validity of their recommendations - but these are only loosely connected things. I can be an expert on mathematics - and make a recommendation to force all high school kids to study graduate-level math. Expertise in a subject does not imply expertise on the role of the subject in a human life. I would trust a chef to whip up a great meal or to talk about a nice recipe - I would not trust his advice that I should buy a $2,000 chef knife for my home kitchen.
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@WyIted
So your answer to a bully punching you in the face everyday is to continue to let them because punching back might make things worse for both of you?Are you even a man at that point?
No, I do not see how a bully punching me in the face benefits me - and punching him back will certainly make things better for me. I do not know what world you live in in which standing up to a bully is not advantageous to you. :D
This is more akin to this. Me and a friend meet up every Saturday for a run in the morning. My friend's wife one day beats him up, and he tells me that our run will have to be slower, because he is feeling a little sick. "Damn it! I will show his wife!", I think and ask my wife to also beat me up.
There is about as many logic in "retaliatory tariffs" as here.
You do not trade with European governments - you trade with European traders who do not impose any tariffs on you; your and their governments do. If their government makes trading harder for both of you, then your response is to... ask your government to make it even harder? Sounds like you are asking another bully to punch you both in the face, because one bully's punching was not painful enough.
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@Greyparrot
I see you ignored the point of not repeating the 2020 global supply disaster on critical goods. This leads me to believe you are not interested in debating in good faith.You also ignored the point about American youth having no future prospects because we sacrificed stability for convenience. That cost goes far beyond your petty concerns over taxes.Your analogy about hospitals isn't comparable. Hospitals aren't being offshored or imported from geopolitical rivals or frenemies with a record of hostile trade practices. We’re not slapping tariffs on harmless competition, we're correcting decades of offshoring that gutted decades of American industry. Tariffs aren’t about what's the most efficient solution. They’re about taking a dramatic step toward regaining economic independence. You can worship at the altar of cheap goods if you want, but don’t pretend that altar is free. 2020 proved the price of economic dependence is steep, and next time, it won’t just be toilet paper, microchips, or necessary pharmaceuticals that’s missing.
I did not see that point relevant to the discussion, because you have not explained how the disaster could have been avoided with a different set of policies. Unless the US market fully closed itself from the rest of the world, a global epidemic of that scale was bound to lead to serious shortages everywhere.
The "petty concerns" are for freedom of the individual from tyranny of others who raid his land once a year to collect a tribute. I could not care less about amorphous groups such as "American youth". Point at a particular young American, and you will see someone who has to spend insane amounts of money to just to go a university, because the government has taken over the education industry. Maybe you can find consolation in the belief that if the US government did not run education, then the Chinese government would - but I do not hold the belief that only such possibilities exist.
Your main concern seems to be "stability", but how is it measured? There is perfect stability in North Korea: things are perpetually miserable - is that what you would prefer? Stability is stagnation. Proactive, enterpreneurial people will take potential shortages into account and correct for them. But people who rely on scoundrels like Trump to fix their business, who believe that he will bail them out if things get hot, or prevent things from getting hot in the first place - well, these people will one day find themselves without inventory.
I know a lady owning a large souvenir store in Virginia, and most of her inventory is from China - but she also constantly negotiates with suppliers from India, Korea, Mexico and so on. That is what a good enterpreneur does: he diversifies and expands, planning for contingencies. Many Americans seem to not want to bother with that: they want the government to tell them who to buy or not buy from. Well, I do not see why I should be prevented from running my business the way I want to run it because of their laziness. I think that the primary role of any government is to hurt excellent people so that mediocre and lousy people feel better about themselves.
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I loved playing Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic as a Dark Side character: the Dark Side choices there are comically evil, where it was hard to take them seriously because of their absurdity. But playing as a cold-hearted evil pragmatist - now that I cannot do at all. Playing Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader was quite hard for me as, while the game offers you a lot of somewhat good choices, you ultimately play as a high-ranked individual in an evil totalitarian society, and you know that in your empire there are torture and executions routinely done in your name, millions of slaves are suffering every day and the proceeds from their work go to your coffers. And there is little you can do about it before the ending (no spoilers).
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@fauxlaw
First, this is very vague: from your description, it is still not clear to me what exactly your definition of "faith" is - aside from seeing that it is different from what people conventionally mean by it, and I do not see much point in playing the redefinition game. If faith is some kind of a "sixth sense" that has never been found in anyone's research, then it is exactly what I said it is: unjustified stubbornness, clinging to something ethereal.
Faith is best exemplified by Job's behavior in the Book of Job. God decides to inflict unimaginable suffering on him, yet he keeps having faith that god loves him - that is foolishness. The kind of foolishness that has people stay in bad marriages because they believe that "fate" brought them together, keep doubling down on terrible investments or disfunctional business models, building totalitarian utopias because they see the light at the end of the tunnel despite all evidence of it being an illusion. A functional adult should not be operating on faith under any circumstances.
What if I cannot go around an obstacle, you say? If I cannot, then I will not - neither will anyone else, no matter how much "faith" they have, by definition of the word "cannot". There cannot be solution to an obstacle that cannot be bypassed.
But what if an obstacle is just very difficult to go around? Do you think that only people with "faith" will persist in overcoming it? What, do you think everyone else is a frail weak-minded coward? People of faith tend to think of those without one as some kind of simplistic hedonists who do not have any high principles and will give up as soon as things get a little unpleasant - which to me is just a projection of their own weakness, of the fact that they never found themselves in this life, hence do not have anything that drives them to keep going, other than "faith". They have not found a rational reason to keep going, so they have to go by an irrational one - with all the downsides of such, such as ending up in bad marriages and trying to make it work for decades with no success.
I run ultramarathons, friend. I intentionally seek discomfort. Where is the place for "faith" here? There is none. I love challenging myself, and I know that I have put in enough effort into training and racing, so I can finish my next race and not fall apart. There is no reward at the end of the race other than the satisfaction from completing it, and there is no guarantee that I will complete it. I am not there for the destination - I am there for the journey. And obstacles are an essential part of the journey. I do not need any motivation other than knowing that what I do accords with my values and passions.
But "faith" gets you to double down on stupid things. In ultramarathons, I have to be strong, but smart: if 20 miles into the race I get a nasty injury, I will seriously consider quitting - not because I am weak, but because I do not want it to be my last race. But a person with "faith" will keep going, wake up in a hospital next day, undertake a leg surgery and be out of the sport for the rest of their life. "God will watch over my leg" - surprise, buddy, biology happens to be more real than old folklore stories.
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@fauxlaw
The problem I see with this story is that it rewards faith, yet faith is essentially stubbornness in defiance of reality. You have faith in something when you put the idea or the goal above logic and reason and set off on a crusade ignoring any signals from the real world.
I do not need to have faith to complete pretty cool projects: what I need to have is passion and persistence. Me not having faith in some bright future after death does not make me think that "I have done enough": I want to squeeze all juice from life, and I will only have done enough the moment my body is done being eaten by earthworms. Reality is too cool to put it behind in favor of old folklore tales.
Faith can make one persevere in pursuing both good and bad goals. Soviet communists had a very strong faith in their theoretical utopia, and that made them blind to the obvious signals by reality that they are on the wrong path. What are 5 million starving Ukrainians if we are changing humanity itself?
The old man from the story had a problem: he did not have much passion for life, never found anything that would keep the fire in his heart burning. "I have done enough" is one of the saddest thoughts one can possibly have - and I wonder if such thoughts often arise precisely because the man had served "god" his whole life and never stopped to think what it is he wanted to do.
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@AdaptableRatman
Hell works in isolation.This idea of it being all demons and sinners together in a community is a hoax from pagan or certain protestant ideas.It is isolation, you writhe in agony as you feel completely alone.
The quote I cited was clearly a joke. As is the idea that "hell" actually exists. It is just another story to scare children with that no one above the age of 5 should take seriously.
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@LucyStarfire
I do not think of it as self-sacrifice: when someone has an important place in my life, then their well-being becomes my well-being. It is possible that some people never form such strong connections with anyone for a variety of reasons, but if you do form one, you will not be able to deny its power.
I would absolutely place myself between a vicious bear and any of my 5 closest friends. I am quite a romantic.
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@AdaptableRatman
As one fictional character said, "Hell sounds like where the party's at: all the fun people go there!"
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Naturally, people are only friends when they are useful to each other. If spending time with my best friend did not give me a massive emotional benefit, then she would not be my best friend - and I am sure she feels the same way. A strong friendship is characterized by strong compatibility and enjoyment of each other's company.
As for people betraying and abandoning each other - either you have surrounded yourself by the wrong people, or you do something often that makes others pull away from you. There are people in my life for whom I would put my life on the line witjput a second thought, and who I fully trust to do the same for me if the need arises (and it did several times, and they put their feet where their mouths were).
And "god" being a friend... Which one? The Christian one, the guy who once allegedly exterminated nearly all life on Earth with a flood because his creations did not worship him hard enough? Such friends I would run away from at the speed of light. :D
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It seems to me that the creator of something autonomous like the Universe is responsible for all consequences of such. If god designed the Universe in such a way as to allow for all this happiness and all this suffering to exist in it, then he should be credited for the former and held responsible for the latter.
I have never encountered a monotheist who would think this way though. Their assumption is always that god is inherently good, pretty much by definition, and either they claim that suffering is somehow justified, or that suffering is not god's responsibility. I have never found either to make much sense.
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He has descended into some kind of postmodernism, randomly redefining commonly used words and asking his opponents ridiculous questions such as "What do you mean by 'believe'?" Most of the time what he says has no substance and is just dancing around the real issue. His conversation with Dawkins where he tried to argue that dragons are as real as lions was painful to listen to.
I used to listen to him a lot, and while he always was quite vague in his arguments, I thought he had a lot of valuable insights. But after his sickness, or maybe due to the amount of fame he quickly earned and corruption by it, for the past 2-3 years it has been impossible for me to listen to anything he says without cringing.
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I think that "god" is like Santa Claus, with the only difference being that no cult was ever formed around Santa and he has not grown into an object of mass worship by historical accident.
Does it matter if Santa really exists? Sure, that would affect what happens to kids around Christmas. But it does not matter much epistemologically since there is zero evidence of his existence. Something without evidence is a fantasy: a fantasy can happen to be true by chance, but the probability is very low, so the best approach is to assume its falsehood by default.
I figured that "god" was just another fictional character to fool kids (and, as I learned later, adults too) with when I was 6, and in the near 30 years since then I never had a reason to reconsider that conclusion.
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Marxism is one of those ivory tower philosophies that make no sense whatsoever, but if you hypnotize yourself into them by thinking hard about them and trying to make it work in some imaginary world, then you may succeed. It is much like religion in that it is completely detached from reality, but you can be drawn into it through peer pressure.
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@Greyparrot
@WyIted
What I see in your comments is an emotional reaction: "They mistreated us - time to mistreat them back! That will show 'em!" In Russia they have a saying for this: "I will gouge out my own eye so that my stepmother has a one-eyed stepson". I would expect the top economy in the world to be above that. What I am interested is what improves the economy here, and tariffs demonstrably do not. Free trade does, and if the trade partner puts some obstacles in the way, it is still better to have unobstructed gates here than to create another bottleneck. "Allies" or not - who cares? Neither the US nor the Chinese government is my ally. I am interested in trading with Joe here and Wang there, and I see no reason why someone from the White House should step in between us and collect a toll.
To the idea that someone can look at Warren Buffet and want to emulate his business... Sorry, but this is not a serious one. How many American companies emulate his business and succeed? If it was that simple, then everyone would be a billionaire. Chinese "slavers" (whoever you meant by that - I am quote confused now) can look at Warren Buffet's business now; how will American tariffs make it more visible?
As for Sowell's quote, he meant by that that whatever policy one implements it will always have negative side effects. That does not change the fact that some policies are better than other policies, and some policies outright suck. I would argue that all forms of taxation - including tariffs - suck. But tariffs suck quite a bit more than many, for the same reason as mandated oligopolies in general suck. If only three local hospitals are allowes to operate unhinged and all other hospitals have to pay a toll, then the healthcare prices will skyrocket and quality will plummet. Guess what imposing tariffs on imported cars will do to the auto market? Basic math: supply lowers - the rest follows.
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Corruption/dishonesty of some experts does not undermine the importance of expertise. If you get cancer, will you go to a certified specialist for treatment - or to a conspiracy theorist like RFK who believes that cancer treatments cause anthrax?Â
In addition, some questions are questions of morality, not expertise. It is obvious that lockdowns save lives when a massive deadly epidemic is abound - but that the lockdowns therefore are justified is a moral judgement. In my moral system, there is no excuse for what virtually all governments did during COVID, no matter how many lives it saved. And in a free country people should be free to make such choices for themselves.
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If I knew that a nuclear bomb was about to be detonated on Manhattan, it would be nice if the system incentivized me to warn the police, rather than to short a bunch of Wall Street stocks and become a billionaire while watching millions of people die on a livestream.
I am with you on not making insider trading illegal, but I think that it is healthy for information to be as widely available as possible, so people profit not on trading secrets, but on trading positive goods. I want my life to be better off due to my ability to buy cheap apples, not due to overhearing that apple prices are about to skyrocket because some Washington shmuck wants to appease farmers at the expense of everyone else.
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