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@PREZ-HILTON
Words have power and even as a social convention using the word she to refer to a male pretending to be a female as a result of a perverse self hate, can slowly start altering your worldview.
It is a distortion to say that we are talking about someone who is "really male" and "pretending" to be female. It is a male who transitions into a trans female, and presumably wears the clothes or otherwise assumes the role traditionally taken by a female. However, there is no "illusion" that the male is "really" a female - in other words, that they are not trans. This is the point of my original post: inserting some idea that they are "deluded" about an underlying reality is a piece of propaganda or bias. You might think that a male deciding to become a trans female is wrong, and that social conventions should not be changed, and you can make the argument for that. But it is another thing to lie, distort the facts, or to frame issues in a grossly misleading way.
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@Kritikal
It comes down to the fact that what the left side in this issue is arguing for involves some degree of social change. Regardless of what is stated in Merriam Webster or anywhere else, definitions and meanings of words are dependent only on the shared understandings of those using the words - in fact this is why entirely constructed languages such as Esperanto or Klingon are able to function at all. Therefore, it is entirely possible for a new social understanding to become commonplace, for example in which a second use for the term "female" can understood as shorthand for "trans female" and the pronoun "she" or "her" can be used to refer also to trans females. Likewise with "they / them" pronouns. Dictionaries change, and the use of language changes over time - new words appear, old words are used in new ways, and this does not lead to any kind of Orwellian "semantic overload" so long as there is a shared understanding of the underlying material facts. Nobody, on any side of this debate is at all confused about the biological differences between a trans person and non-trans, and the point of disagreement entirely revolves around the perceived inconvenience or incursion upon the freedoms of those who would need to adapt to the social change involved in transgenderism being viewed as ethically neutral rather than as a deviant, unhealthy or perverse behavior.
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@Athias
To answer your question directly, yes. But there's more going on in the scenario you've described. Namely, an employer who's working on school property. If this teacher's behavior is in violation of quantifiable rules which he agreed to either explicitly or implicitly upon employment, then while he maintains discretion in which speech he indulges, the school's management maintains the proprietor's proxy, as well as discretion in their response. So, in other words the ball is in his court. Let's entertain the notion that the school stands by the statements of their employee, then the ball is in the female student's court--i.e. she can either ignore the teacher, or find another school.
I would point out that most often what gets called "free speech" issues, are most often institutional issues of the sort you have just described, as opposed to straightforwardly legal issues. For example, Jordan Peterson who was working within the parameters of a teaching position - the considerations are almost exactly parallel here. So I would just point out that your proposed solution - which I agree with - would reduce the scope of "free speech" to the legal domain, which would be seen as a loss to most of those who currently claim to be advocates for the "free speech" side.
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@RationalMadman
This is where the transphobic 'toaster' and 'helicopter' identification come to mind. It's one-way respect. Society mocks furries and wouldn't call a person who thrives and enjoys roleplaying as a dog or chimpanzee as being identified that way, nor would they ever allow a person to engage in a lot of plastic surgery and use face paint to transition race and ethnicity. They would never allow a 78 year old who wants to feel like a young woman or man to identify as that age in any official capacity... In constrast, we are the devil to hold people to the same standard with their gender (which was always meant to be 'sex' it was male vs female, you didn't list 'man' or 'woman' and still don't list that next to this slot called 'gender' on official forms).
Gender is simply related to people's identity in a fundamentally different way from any of those other facets. We cannot simply compare across them and apply the same rules. For example, ethnicity is inherently tied to both heritage (family lineage) and biology, as well as one's entire cultural surrounding, while species and age have important ethical connections to one's level of agency. Gender, on the other hand is linked to one's self-expression, to their sexual life, and the interplay between the genders is a dynamic which is internal to the particular culture - it is a category which you can't simply compare to any others which apply cross-culturally to an extent. The difference is in being different - they aren't the same thing.
It isn't. I've experienced it first-hand in my own household on other matters. It's very real, my household growing up leans/leaned left-wing but I am fully aware that the right-wing has their own variation of cancel culture such as not daring to talk pro-choice etc in certain households. I'd be alienated by my (expecially extended) family and friends (or rather, aquaintances) if I would dare be open about my outlook on certain matters. I won't specify my IRL career status and fear with regards to my account here being linked to the real me or certain opinions and kinks I have. I am certain there'd be some negative impact but nothing life-threatening. Anybody blackmailing has a lot stacked against them, I have levels to how hard cancel culture can truly affect me, I am not very famous or anything too fragile. I make sure the people I rely on for income (bosses and/or people who could get me fired and/or barred from places I generate income) like me beyond what Internet beef is likely to cause or can't hurt me if they dislike me and for years have stayed completely off social media in any outspoken sense.
Notwithstanding those who break off personal or professional relationships for political reasons, it still does not merit the use of a political keyword, a fixed idea of the right which is in itself a piece of propaganda and nothing more. I empathize with your personal issues, but the existence of oversensitive people is not at all the outgrowth of the left, or any circumscribed "culture" or ethnicity which is what this phrase is attempting to portray. Likewise, with terms like "grooming" - the right is intentionally rolling out these terms in an attempt to gain linguistic territory. Even to entertain these phrases as part of one's vocabulary, is to have given part of one's brain over to something vast and inhuman, to become an advertising robot on behalf of the forces of fascism.
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@Athias
So, let's say I meet a person who I assume was born male based on musculature, facial hair, jaw line, shoulder width, narrow hips, and other physical symbols conventionally associated with males. But this person happens to have a dress and long curly hair--down to the butt.
However, based on your position, it should apply not only in this case. For example, imagine that a teacher has a female student that he doesn't like. This student was born female, and is not trans, but is slightly overweight and has some masculine features that she is embarrassed about. The teacher decides to disrespect her by referring to her as male throughout the class, even after she politely asks him not to. Would you maintain your position that this decision is totally up to the teacher's discretion, and that the teacher has no obligation to "indulge" the girl's request to be referred to as female?
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@RationalMadman
The trans people who go from he to she or she to he often are phobic and fundamentally against the philosophy of the they/them genderqueers. They mistake each other for allies because they have been low on numbers so far and had to oppose heteronormativity together but trans he to she and she to he is heteronormative, they just switched alignment.
The idea of using male or female pronouns is not incompatible with the philosophy of someone who would not use that pronoun. I am male and was born male, but it doesn't mean I'm "fundamentally against" they/them.
I do not believe a person needs to go by pronouns of another gender in order to be happy in life, their discomfort with their body and birth-assigned sex run far deeper than the momentary joy being called he or she in their new gender gives them.
It is their freedom to do so, in my opinion it doesn't even matter if they "need to" do it - they have the choice to identify however they want to.
I use desired pronouns to avoid beef with them and cancel culture.
Then you can rest assured because in fact "cancel culture" is an entirely fabricated talking point invented by right wing think tanks. I would advise that you say what is really on your mind rather than censoring yourself to avoid criticism.
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If someone asked me to call them by the pronoun "she / her" - although they were born as a male - I can agree to this purely as a matter of social convention. I do not need to believe that this person is "really" female or "really" male. In other words, just because I use female pronouns to refer to this person, it doesn't necessarily imply anything in terms of my beliefs about their chromosomes. Conservatives may not happen to like this social convention, and prefer that pronouns used in conversation always mapped onto biology or the gender assigned at birth. However, the fact that progressives disagree, in no way implies that they are confused about the science of biology. And, to argue that this convention should be generally accepted, is not to deny the biology of sex differences. I bring this up because it is a fact that is almost universally misunderstood or misconstrued by conservatives when talking about the issue.
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@sui_generis
I have found the videos on this channel very useful.
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@Bones
You must admit that this complicates the entire issues. Assume that I create a term "aje", which is the societal constructuction of age. What if a group of aje-activists wanted the term aje to be the one in legal documentations and for everyone to achknodelgers them based on their aje, as opposed to age. Such is my problem with the gender-spectrum activists - creating a definition to make your argument is circular.
The process is a kind of large-scale negotiation around which terms are used, and balancing practicality versus tolerance, etc. However, to claim to have an objective viewpoint that there "are" two genders, is mistaken in the sense that you are imagining that you can appeal to biology or some other concrete science to make a final decision and end the process of negotiation. For example, if the "aje activists" wanted to divide age by 2, so that we referred to 1 year olds as 0.5, 10 year olds as 5 in "aje," and so on, it would make no sense to say that people are "really, scientifically" a certain age/aje. The argument would simply be that it is impractical and there is no reason to make the effort necessary to accommodate this linguistic change. The way we make the division is arbitrary and socially constructed. It would be like arguing against daylight savings time by saying that it puts the clock one hour ahead of what the time "really" is.
I don't disagree that investment in capital plays a valid role in the economy, but I do disagree that this justifies the flat tax.I fail to see the connection.
You argued for the flat tax on this basis. There is no reason why the tax on the rich is "slavery" if the proportion of their wealth taken is different, since their relation to the economy is entirely different, and the value of their wealth to them is different also.
But it's not the lawmakers fault that a certain race commits crimes, or are more prone to illegally immigrating. Sure, you can assert that the Trump Mexican wall discriminates against Mexicans but it just so happens that it is Mexicans who attempt to illegally enter - if they didn't enter then there would be no discrimination.
It's the law itself that is discriminatory. They didn't arbitrarily define immigration laws with the nation happening to have whatever ethnic composition of the people who happened to be there at that time, or define laws and enforce policing in certain areas based on abstract notions of justice. The nation, and the entire legal paradigm that guides the formulation of its morality, norms, and laws, has an implicitly ethnic character. Sure, if a white person tries to enter the country illegally, they will be punished the same way as anyone else, just as if rap music were outlawed, a white person making rap music would be punished just the same way as a black person making it. But, the inside-outside distinction behind the law itself, is formulated in reference to a certain community, which has an implicit understanding of its own ethnic composition.
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@Bones
The whole gender construct thing isn't congruent with reality. A distinction between "labels which describe features of a person" and "adjectives" ought to be recognised. Terms such as "man" and "women" should refer to "men" and "women" and it just so happens that science, as oppose to thought, is a more capable indicator of these traits.
Even if someone asks to be referred to using totally arbitrary pronouns, and I agree to this convention, we do not necessarily imply anything about the scientific facts about chromosomes etc. It is just a matter of social convention that we refer to them this way, and the same with the number of genders - we can totally agree about the biological facts about chromosomes, DNA, and genitals, yet hold two different ideas about how many gender titles are used.
It is a simplistic analogy but it's underlying message is valid. Investments are big risks - if this weren't the case, there would be no homeless - which is why there are big rewards. If you want to look at tangible impact towards a company, it's fair to say that investors liquify companies money.
I don't disagree that investment in capital plays a valid role in the economy, but I do disagree that this justifies the flat tax.
But this can be applied to literally every rule that is established. By nature of truism, any law which is enforced on a population of diverse culture will result in it effecting one culture more than another, even if it isn't statistically relevant. Out there, some race is most hindered by traffic laws, whether it be white, asian or black yet no one really makes a fuss about it.
The point is that this dynamic is often entirely ignored by the liberal paradigm of law, and that in relevant cases - such as immigration, prison reform, policing, etc. - these do result in statistically relevant outcomes.
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@Bones
There are two genders - I do not accept Two-Spirit or Boi.
Isn't this largely a social construct, or matter of definition though? To say that there "are" two genders, or more than two, isn't it just a matter of opinion? I don't see how this can be decided objectively. It's a matter of how socially we decide to refer to people.
Taxing X person a higher percentage Y person means you are taking a larger portion of money from X person. X person's money was acquired through work. Work requires time, therefore, if you do not have X's permission yet you take more of X's money, you are taking their work which is taking their time which is slavery.
The problem with this equation is the assumption that people who have money acquired it by work, and that there is a direct association between time worked and profit. In fact, it works almost the opposite way, since those who own capital no longer need to earn money directly though labour. Capitalists gain money through their investments and by their knowledge, not by working for a wage.
Systemic racism, defined as "a form of racism that is embedded in the laws and regulations of a society or an organisation" does not exist because there is no explicit law which targets minorities. However, this definition is quiet counter productive - (most) BLM adherents are not arguing that laws are racist they are arguing that there is large scale racism.
I think it is more complicated than this, and that the laws can be implicitly biased without referring explicitly to race. I would agree that "racism" is a confusing term here, but we could say that the laws have implicit ethnic connotations. For example, imagine a law that banned jazz music and rap music, and only allowed classical and rock. This law does not target any minority, since anyone of any race can make whatever style of music they wish to. However, it is clear that this law would have implicit ethnic content, and that its effect would be to deepen racial divides. Nations, cultures, cities, ideologies, and cultural artefacts are all saturated with ethnic meaning - and critical race theory is simply to point out that we do not live in a liberal, colourblind world.
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@RationalMadman
I will tell you the real fucking truth about crypto.It is for criminals to purchase the most taboo things ever and was not ever meant for the general populace to consider valid.
As 3RU7AL pointed out, there may be a use case for such alternative technologies if the restrictions being placed on people are actually unjust - e.g. banks cutting off donations to Wikileaks. I pointed out many problems in the OP, but if the price were able to stabilize and the use cases for cryptos improved, they could also become a powerful vehicle for investing, and help many people to reach financial freedom who otherwise wouldn't. We are talking about handing financial tools otherwise only available to the rich, to large segments of the population who wouldn't otherwise have access to them. Of course, in such a shift every stage is not going to be smooth. But I would also point out that decentralized digital currencies have many inherent benefits over traditional currencies, foremost being the ease and speed of making payments.
If we imagine the difference between the world in which anyone could make an instant payment to anyone else using a digital store of value, versus the world in which such payments are heavily regulated with the amount of friction involved in the current system - we could consider that opting for the latter simply because of the edge cases in which the technologies involved are used for "taboo activities" is in effect placing a ceiling over the wealth and standards of living for a large percentage of the population. And we could make the same argument regarding the internet itself, computers, etc. While I pointed out the problems with reaching its goals, the potential I hope to see for crypto is essentially a massive redistribution of wealth - from communities that have intergenerational, consolidated wealth, to communities that have an internet connection and are motivated and intelligent.
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@3RU7AL
That's what I hope happens. But the price would need to stabilise long term for this to viable right?
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@RationalMadman
@Mikal
It seems like a lot of what you guys engage with on the site is interpersonal drama about moderation issues. Is that just your favorite topic to discuss?
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@3RU7AL
Interesting, I will take a look at it.
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@3RU7AL
I haven't read it, what is your interest in him?
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@sui_generis
recommendations on reading to flesh out my understanding of this shift? anything between Descartes' Meditations & Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy — I'm basically completely unread in the canon
Leibniz was probably the ultimate apogee of the Platonic tradition in its rationalist form, although his work is very difficult to study as he was so prolific and didn't really summarize his philosophy anywhere. However, he proposed a "universal language" and was a forerunner to modern ideas of cybernetics. Spinoza (and also Descartes) represented a kind of absurd example of rationalism taken to its mechanical extreme. Viewing the entire world as a sort of vast, inhuman machine, of which philosophers could unlock the secrets through abstract deduction, he demonstrated the ultimate consequences of the idea that God was simply the rational principle of everything that exists. Jacobi pointed out the nihilistic implications of this "Spinozism" and how it demonstrated the absurdity of rationalism. Another important note is the Sturm Und Drang counter-Enlightenment movement of Hamann and Herder, who emphasized the embodied nature of thought and the role of language in determining thought, although they are often neglected as their works are largely unreadable.
Hume is the really important figure, and incredibly insightful, who put the poison dart into the entire Platonic enterprise. That is, he shattered the harmonious otherworldly unity of concepts - Kant cited him as awakening him from his "dogmatic slumber" - so he is definitely important to study in this connection. Instead of a metaphysical study of the conceptual structure of the universe, Hume proposed that the foundation of the system of sciences would become the study of human nature. Kant attempted a response to Hume in a kind of philosophical systematization of faculty psychology. This is the key point because here metaphysics shifts away from the Platonic idea that external reality holds a conceptual or semantic structure, and Kant lays out in detail how a rigorous study of metaphysics can be based in human faculties without ascribing the forms of reason to the external world. However, where previous philosophy had become frail after its multiple dogmatic and contradictory attempts at formulating absolute knowledge, the Kantian style of philosophy was eventually reduced to a sort of hand-wringing about the conditions of its own possibility. The bridge from Kant to more contemporary philosophy is Hegel, who attempted to show that philosophy can attain scientific certainty - that it can discuss the absolute - without returning to the dogmatic metaphysics critiqued by Kant.
- Hume - Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Kant - Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
- Kant - 3 Critiques (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgment)
- Fichte - The Science of Knowledge (important transition between Kant and Hegel)
- Hegel - The Phenomenology of Spirit
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The Bitcoin white paper describes it as a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash."
However, many argue now that it is an asset rather than a currency, largely due to the volatility of its price. Cryptocurrency in general, has struggled to find a genuine use case outside of speculative investment. NFTs can be seen as signifiers of status or luxury items, but this is far from settling the question of their inherent value. Many also pin their hopes to crypto gaming, yet the games themselves have yet to be developed, and it is not clear how the presence of NFTs will enhance the actual gameplay - it remains for crypto gaming to develop games that anyone actually wants to play for their quality as games. Another development is decentralized finance, which seems to simply be a rotating of funds between assets and functions essentially as a ponzi scheme. It raises the question, what is the genuine use case for cryptocurrencies, and will their main appeal always be as a vehicle for risky, yet profitable speculative investments?
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@zedvictor4
The import of critical philosophy today can be seen in the failure of so many ideological projects.
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@sui_generis
if y'all who are so educated in the western philosophical canon might help me understand why it is neo-platonism fell out of favor (essentially explaining the rise of modernity as a whole kthxbai) I'd love to hear it.
I think it's because of the Reformation and also Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics. We see overall a turn to worldly action as the medium through which knowledge is validated, rather than otherworldly, abstract rumination.
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@RationalMadman
He also has promised to get the site popular and for a lot of us, the site being unpopular is a major issue, it's painfully dead in the 'debates' section for instance and other than myself barely anyone who was active has stayed active long-term (Intelligence_06 is another exception alongside me) because the debates section just gets so dry and since a lot of voters are lazy it ends in a tie and that is annoying.
I would consider somehow integrating the 'debate' and 'forum' sections together, so that debates could be cross-posted as forum posts in the various sections where people could comment on them. Personally I find it much easier to look through the forums than to browse the debate section.
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We can see the "wall of text" tactic commonly used, and seems to be effective in terms of persuasion on this site. It is often used in the politics forum also. A large amount of information gives an imposing effect, and it is too overwhelming to pull apart and criticize any particular claim. The reader is only left with the sense of being impressed by the post, rather than assessing the merits of what is stated. Many of the votes for Airmax seem to come down to his use of this strategy. So, I chose to vote for 3RU7AL because his proposals seemed bolder and more opinionated, as well as more concise.
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@3RU7AL
Personally I think this is a good idea, and I remember proposing a similar idea on DDO. It could be difficult to implement, but I think it could be useful to filter out content we don't want to see. Also, where it might get confusing is with replies, if others are replying to a post that we have hidden.
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@badger
And then you got dudes chopping off their dicks. People identifying as dolphins.
But these are not imaginary problems, and the problem will not go away simply by solving people's psychological issues. Conservatives are almost entirely in denial about this, and as you said it is a "Pandora's Box" - but conservatives are under the illusion that we can put the lid back on simply by wishing it away. The problems of modernity are reframed as the hysterical agenda of some small group of students. In fact, even if those "woke" students disappeared, the norms of gender or race would not automatically reassert themselves.
The various ethnic centers of the world have been maintained by the stability of the nation-state. And as the nation-state model is breaking up, the concurrent religious / social structures which are the psychic dimension of these ethnic groups, are also being dissolved. It is the actual, not only psychological, "balance" of the world system which is being disrupted, precisely by the extent to which communication occurs across - rather than within - ethnic groups. And so the real cause of these dynamics is not ideological, but in the development of the global means of communication, network technologies and so on. The real "conservatives" or revolutionaries today are the big tech companies, who are trying to regulate and contain, to privatize these developing networked paths of communication.
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@thett3
I believe in God because I feel God in my heart. My religion works for me. I can make plausible sounding arguments, but that isn't why I believe. If you want God in your life He will come, but it's probably not going to be through a syllogism.
I didn't mean to imply that everything we believe needs to be established through a syllogism. However, the feeling in your heart is unstructured and lacks semantic content. Therefore, you cannot deduce the cause of that feeling from the feeling itself. If you have a general feeling of love or being watched over by a larger being, and you refer to this feeling as "God" - then the relation between the meaning you personally ascribe to God and the religious concept of God still remains completely indeterminate. And, since the religious concept of God is by definition beyond human comprehension as you describe, then the emotion you feel - being a bounded and finite feeling, cannot be ascribed to God, any more than its opposite. Maybe God is most present when you feel bad, when you have a sense of utter meaningless, or maybe God is not present through any feeling at all - you have no way to establish any of these possibilities over another. The feeling could also be caused by some other invisible pagan spirit or demon which watches over you and causes emotions but does not have the other attributes of the Christian God.
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@thett3
I’m not supposed to talk about it because some think tanks are presumably talking about it as well? It’s a conspiracy to talk about it?
That's what I mean. It's not that you are talking about inflation because it's at a multi decade high, and think tanks also happen to be talking about it. It's that you're talking about inflation because think tanks conspired to make it a talking point, and it also happens to be at a multi decade high.
They exist to push an agenda. These agendas are often in contradiction with each other, and there are think tanks broadly affiliated with every part of the political spectrum.
In my opinion you are really painting a misleading picture of the role of think tanks in the modern political discourse. I disagree fundamentally that they play a passive role simply reflecting what are already the main issues, advocating on all sides.
But these two organizations are involved in a successful conspiracy to lead right wing voters a certain way, even though they themselves advocate for different things.
Exactly, they are defining the parameters of what is discussed, and which issues are prioritized.
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@thett3
The fact that you can make a post like this reveals only your own bias, not mine.
You think everyone starts talking about these things at the same time purely because the evidence shows they are real issues? You don't think there are more issues to select from - how do you think the priorities are decided? That is my point, it doesn't work that way and there are literally conspiratorial networks that are planning out the discourse in advance. Anything you said about liberals is beside the point.
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@EtrnlVw
Lol, sounds like you're done having a conversation here.
Sorry I didn't mean to end the conversation but I don't have too much to add to it at the moment, I have read what you said and I will think it over more.
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@EtrnlVw
Is this what you think about God? or is this someone's assumption about God? Some of these terms are simply unnecessary.
Believers have "faith" because their concrete ideas about God are mere arbitrary imaginings with no basis in experience nor in reason, but only as images passed down in stories from one generation to the next. We do not know anything about what created humanity, nor do we know anything about that being - if there is one - that looks down upon human affairs and guides them from above. The intuitions or direct experiences of these can only have as much weight as any other intuition. If your ideas about something are entirely untethered from your mind and from your senses, what can it mean to say you believe in it? Why believe it rather than something else? To believe in that sense simply means to affirm. The word "God" being ultimately reduced to a mere sound uttered, the idea of belief becomes nothing more than an affirmation.
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@EtrnlVw
Philosophically sure, theoretically sure. But whether or not God exists is not dependent upon on an accurate model of God. When we are talking about theology, we are simply engaging the intellect, not reality.
This seems to be the key point. There is a difference between what makes sense theologically, versus what believers actually have in mind when they think about God. I am sure that believers have experiences that assure them, from their point of view, that a being exists - called "God" because of the connotations of that word. But if we really follow out the implications of a being, absolutely omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent - by definition this is such an abstract concept that we have no way to know that whatever our intuitive idea about God really has any relation to what God "really is."
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@Polytheist-Witch
That is interesting and I am curious to learn more about that. I didn't mean to say there's anything wrong with it. In my post I was mostly referring to monotheistic ideas about God.
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@Polytheist-Witch
Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder so proof of gods. There's no actual factual, archaeological proof that any gods exist other than signs of worship. If you require proof to believe you do not have faith and are not a true believer, sorry but you're not. Any and all proof that any gods exist are based on personal experience of the believer and while those personal experiences can be shared with other people who have had those similar experiences, and agree with someone and form a religious group around those beliefs that is not proof anyone outside of those personal experiences. Your proof is not even proof to someone who believes the same as you and practices the same religion you do because their experience, while similar, is not exactly the same.
However, in that case the question is how you evaluate what you believe, considering how often people's personal experiences of meaning, or intuitions about what is true, are incorrect. Many people have personal revelations with directly opposite and contradictory conclusions. My question is how people judge between these beliefs - what kind of Gods do you choose to believe in, and how did you decide that they have these characteristics rather than others?
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@zedvictor4
And GOD principle might be a further extension of this process of material evolution, to a point of conclusion.
I think you are "personifying" the process of evolution itself by attributing a purpose, or linear narrative, to a stochastic material process - giving it a "conclusion" or ultimate end. In fact it is a random process of variation and "selection" according to the conditions of the environment (survival).
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@zedvictor4
I think it is important to make a division between the monotheistic, absolute God, versus other ideas of "Gods" which could be multiple, simply supernatural invisible beings. Even those who claim to believe in the former, cannot help but personify that God in their mind, and really their idea of God is something implicitly much more pagan. Something like an invisible giant that is interested in their lives, who they can communicate with, and that intervenes in predictable ways. I believe that such an idea is laying behind even seemingly very abstract ideas about God.
And one likes to think that there is a purpose to everything...And one refers to such purpose as a GOD principle.
Would you be attributing some personified sapience to God? A "purpose" seems to imply that he can plan, and have thoughts or preferences about the outcomes of humans.
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@thett3
It is so obvious when a certain topic starts getting pumped by the conservative think tanks for strategic reasons. All of a sudden all of the conservatives are talking about "inflation" - before that it was "wokeness" - before that "CRT" - and so on. Talking points arise all at once, in a very clearly coordinated way, and at strategically chosen points in time. Does it bother you that the buzzwords you will be repeating in 6 months from now are currently being carefully planned and agreed upon in a discussion somewhere of some conservative advocacy group you know nothing about?
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Probably the most common atheist argument is that there is no evidence that God exists. However, it is unclear what would constitute positive empirical evidence for God's existence. Most theological arguments for God's existence are rational rather than empirical - except perhaps for the argument for design, based on the inherent rationality evidenced by the material world. How can human beings assess the evidence for an infinite being that is, by definition beyond their comprehension? What would a world without God look like, compared to a world with God - and how can we be sure enough about this to make the comparison? In many ways, the concept of God is beyond the material world, and as such empirical evidence cannot legitimately have any bearing on whether or not we accept it.
This also brings the question of what it would mean to believe in God at all. If God is truly infinite and beyond human comprehension, then is whatever believers have in mind when they think about God, really God? If an image, or feeling, or idea comes to mind when thinking about God, then this limited idea can never really be God, who is a totally infinite being. Then, our use of the word "God" itself becomes an empty signifier, a vague attribution of sapience to the universe without any concrete application.
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The problem with users like Mesmer and Wylted is that they produce such a high volume of new posts, and spout a litany of new claims, compared to their engagement with any sustained debate of particular claims. If another user takes the time to dig into one of their claims and show that it is unfounded, that post will quickly be responded to with some non-sequitur, or ignored, and then buried by a bunch of new topics.
Also, regarding race realism, it is based in a series of fields, such as sociology or psychology, which are relatively soft sciences. The capacity to draw strong causal conclusions like the ones race realists want to make based on experimental studies in these fields, or demographic statistics, is inherently weak due to the amount of variables involved and the difficulty of identifying and controlling them. A huge amount of studies can be done, and correlations can be drawn using statistics, but very few causal connections can be conclusively drawn from these by strict scientific standards. In effect, this means that race realists can provide a seemingly endless stream of academic citations and evidence, and all their opponents can do is point out that their evidence is inconclusive, and point toward the null hypothesis - so that they can be painted as some sort of relativists who don't want to accept hard scientific evidence. Fundamentally, any understanding of what a rigorous empirical application of biology to the understanding of political and cultural outcomes would look like is still in its infancy, so any conclusive statements of doctrine on this basis are by their nature unscientific.
However, personally I would still choose to keep even extreme perspectives on the site. Although I don't think they were contributing to a substantive debate, I think that keeping a very liberal policy creates a more open environment for actually interesting debates to occur. As long as these opinions are general political positions and not specific attacks against individuals, I think they should be allowed on the site.
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@ebuc
Black race of USA tends to be more conservtive
Since they are a minority group with a higher population living in poverty, there will be a high reliance on social integration of that group - a tight knit sense of community with at least a certain set of values which are held in common. This predicts that these groups will be more religious and conservative.
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@Mesmer
I don't agree with this framing of "most liberal". It's more liberal than having one definition, but, again, you haven't provided any objectivity as to your definition being must-use jargon. I literally told you what was required to make your case ("**If** you could demonstrate to me that 'behavioral trait' is jargon, then I will concede this"). Instead, you've decided to dance around with framing that doesn't have objectivity.
A typical use of the word behavior is in relation to "the way in which someone conducts oneself," i.e. directed human action. To say that defining racism in terms of beliefs about differences in behavior is "nonsense" because of differences in sweating-rates, is in my view a fringe application of the concept of behavior. Likewise, if we said that two people were "behaving differently" although their intentional actions were identical, because their hair grew differently, or because their hearts beat at different speeds, this could be seen as a fringe use of the term also. Therefore, if someone called a psychological theory about behavior nonsense because it did not capture differences in hair growth or heart rates, this would not be a valid objection.
You're close but not quite right. Hatred is something within the realm of intense disliking, whilst animus veers towards a personal grudge. That's why Merriam-Webster lists animosity (synonym for animus) as being only related to hatred
If I were to list various instances of "racism" / "racial hatred" and asked whether these constituted a "personal grudge against a race" it would surely come down to your own opinion which instances you would deem appropriate and which not. Many leftists would claim that Charles Murray's motivation for writing his books was a personal racial animus, while those on the right will say that Critical Race Theory advocates have a personal grudge against the white race. How do we determine who is right?
Still, I'll respond in good faith to what you meant. I think race-based attacks are all spawned by this animus. That's why some write 1000 page manifestos of why they're about to attack a certain race. Serial killers tend to be indifferent to who they kill, and do so sometimes for the thrill of killing, or sometimes to get back at society. I've never heard of a serial killer killing a certain race of people without having hatred of said race -- that doesn't add up.
It seems that by your standard, the only racial disparity we should have tools to condemn, are examples involving people being murdered, purely and explicitly for the reason of an emotional reaction to their race, and anything short of this is deemed trivial nonsense.
The term shouldn't apply to slavery because that's not what slavery was about. Slaves were (sadly) functionally productions tools that produced value. In other words, instead of having a cotton-picking machine, you could get a human to do it. You weren't financially incentivized to racially abuse your slaves (although some slave owners would). Slavery was a business decision, not an attack on any race due to their race.
Yet slavery in the US was racialized. What should we call that? Of course, many slave owners did harbour deep racial resentment, but what if they had been cold and calculating? Your argument seems to be that we should not use critical language to describe the racial dimension of this at all.
I think you need to re-think "ethnic cleansing" in terms of racial animus. It's very clearly designed to remove a particular race. If you had a liking or indifference towards a race, why would you want to mass remove it?
But this is the problem as I laid out above: your attribution of "racial animus" depends totally on your own personal opinion. If we asked advocates of ethnic cleansing throughout history, they would say that they were not acting out of emotion, but that their policies were totally necessary and unavoidable. Who should we believe? Will we need to administer psychological tests to determine people's emotional state before we can condemn any of these policies?
Besides that, I was not claiming that Hitler or anyone involved in these examples did not in fact feel hatred. It was an hypothetical or counterfactual - "what if" this were the case - to demonstrate the limits of your definition.
You can't reject it lol. It's either: (1) racial I.Qs can differ, or (2) racial I.Qs cannot differ -- there is no third option.
I agree that average racial IQ scores likely are not identical down to the last decimal.
Nope. That's faulty logic on your end. I've only argued that racial I.Qs differ. That is it. You're the one supplying anything further than that. Stop doubling down and just admit that you strawmanned me.
I will decline that because I do think your arguments have conservative implications. You basically seem to be stripping away any language we could use to criticize racial imbalances or injustices beyond the most extreme examples of explicitly racially motivated hate crimes. You prefer personal criticism of the motivations of individuals over broad social critiques - this is deeply conservative.
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@Mesmer
Secondly, it's super clear that I'm using a definition for behavior that differs from yours -- this is the crux of our disagreement on this point. I'm saying that I can use behavior to describe sweating because it's behavior, in a loose sense (sweating is an action). You argue that technically, behavior has a stricter definition. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't define 'behavioral trait' and so I inferred that I could use this looser definition. About from you Reference.com citation, I couldn't find anything that states 'behavioral trait' is jargon with a strict meaning. **If** you could demonstrate to me that 'behavioral trait' is jargon, then I will concede this.
The form of your argument implies that, in order for a term to be meaningful, it must apply strictly under the most liberal use possible according to documented definitions of the term. My argument is that the definition of almost any term can be applied in such a loose way that would contradict common usage - especially in e.g. social sciences.
In other words, in my view it is impossible to constrain usage of these kind of terms by a strict jargon which would make their usage uniform. To rebut me on this, you could provide such a definition of "racial hatred".
Hatred based on racial animus.
Animus is a synomym for hatred, so you have restated the term in its own definition.
Also, hatred is an emotion. What if we imagine a cold and calculating serial killer, who only kills victims of a certain race, but without any emotion? What if Hitler was such a psychopath, who did not feel any personal feelings of animus toward Jews? Then by your terms we would have no language to condemn such actions.
Further, this term does not apply to an insitution such as slavery, ethnic cleansing, or any other societal racial injustice. We would constantly need to be tying such institutions back to some theoretical emotion felt by the people responsible for them. Do you believe that such societal-level injustices are unimaginable, or that we should not need language to condemn them?
You didn't provide at least a third option to render this dichotomy false, hence it remains a valid dichotomy.
I can reject the entire construct, or even accepting it I can suspend judgment on what any group's IQ is.
So for context, this is what I said to you: "Quote where I said or implied this or admit you're strawmanning."The fact that you failed to provide any quotes proves that you have strawmanned me, intentionally or otherwise.
It follows by implication, that if you think the behaviors of groups innately tend to be different, then their roles in society will naturally be different.
I don't know why you'd expect me to agree with another Wikipedia definition when I'm arguing one is nonsense.
You argued that the term itself is nonsense on the basis of the first sentence of its Wikipedia article.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on X isn't a valid definition -> X is nonsense
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@Mesmer
Anyway, the whole point of a definition is to define what is and what is not part of the word. Saying that "nobody is required to provide an absolute criteria" contradicts what a definition should be.
Just pointing out that you stopped responding just when I challenged you to provide an absolute criteria for "racial hatred". If you could not provide such a definition then your case really doesn't make much sense.
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The first sentence of the wikipedia article on hatred uses the relative word "very" in the definition:
"Hatred is a very angry emotional response to certain people or ideas."
It would be up to interpretation whether someone is "very angry" at someone because of their race.
If slave owners did not have a "very angry emotional response" to slaves, would this mean we could not condemn slavery as a racist institution?
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@Mesmer
Once again, for the third time, you've failed to address every point I've made
In some of these examples I have ignored where you have misunderstood my words or simply said the opposite of what I said without much argument.
You didn't *literally* say that, but it's a necessary implication of your argument because, according to your words, intelligence isn't a "behavioral trait", it exists as an "automatic biological process". Again, in your words, the differences in racial ability to sweat cannot be judged as "racist" because it's an "automatic biological process", and your same logic applies to intelligence because that is also an "automatic biological process". Yet when I mention that races have differing levels of intelligence, you have labelled that as "racist", despite it contradicting your definitional framework.
Intelligence itself is not a behavior, but it determines behavior. Sweating is literally surface-level and has no implications for behavior.
Saying that "nobody is required to provide an absolute criteria" contradicts what a definition should be
Then I would challenge you to provide the absolute criteria of the terms "hatred" and "racial hatred" .
Yeah nice try, but you've already answered the question through the implication of your own words: "I would say that making sweeping judgments about the comparative intelligence of different races qualifies as racist." You **already** believe that people of all races, despite evolving in different environments, despite having different brain sizes and skull shapes, have EXACTLY the same level of intelligence.
This is a false dichotomy: either I make broad sweeping judgments about the comparative intelligence of different races, or I believe that all races have an exactly identical average IQ score.
Quote where I said or implied this or admit you're strawmanning.
Then I don't understand why this argument would be important, unless it is being used to argue against things like affirmative action.
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The fact is that you're fine agreeing that different races sweat different amounts, but as soon as I suggest that races have different intelligence levels, it's "racist".
And the fact that you seem to think this self-evidently indicates some kind of hypocrisy is surprising. Anti-racists do not need to argue that all people of all races are identical in every respect. But they do argue that the claims of racists - that races differ in ways that are significant enough make broad claims about their comparative merit, and that this means their roles in society should naturally be different - are unfounded.
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@Mesmer
your definition of behavioral trait contradicts claiming intelligence as a behavioral trait
I didn't say that, I said that it determines behavior. Therefore if you believe one group is more intelligent, then that implies that you believe "that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance".
For the rest of it you are contradicting my statements about definitions. My point is that for any definition you give, especially for broad subjects like politics or psychology, I could give an example which seems to fit the term but doesn't fit your given definition, or vice versa. It is impossible to provide a completely airtight definition for terms like racism. Ethics and moral philosophy have the same problem, but we do not say that all ethical distinctions are meaningless for this reason.
The fact is that you're fine agreeing that different races sweat different amounts, but as soon as I suggest that races have different intelligence levels, it's "racist". You're the one saying that all races are identical when it comes to intelligence, and then saying that "nobody" believes that the races are "exactly identical in all respects".
I would not make any broad statement about intelligence like that. And yes, I would say that making sweeping judgments about the comparative intelligence of different races qualifies as racist.
Did evolution only apply to people from the neck down, and somehow, people of all races, despite evolving in different environments, despite having different brain sizes and skull shapes, have EXACTLY the same level of intelligence?
The null hypothesis in psychology states that different groups should be assumed not to vary unless sufficient concrete evidence exists to prove otherwise. Therefore it is not my question to answer, instead if some racist wants to argue that case, they would have the burden of proof in doing so.
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There is nothing in the wikipedia article that actually prohibits the idea that different races sweat at different rates, or necessitates it being racist. If the definition is ambiguous, then the case of sweating is on the far side of that ambiguity, and we can safely leave distinctions around sweating-rates out of the concept of racism without the entire idea becoming meaningless.
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@Mesmer
"Behavioral trait" isn't a generically accepted term. Your definitions are a way to interpret the term "behavioral", but there isn't a universally accepted definition.
Your argument seems to be that since the first sentence of the wikipedia article on racism cannot support a strict, all-encompassing division between what is or is not racist, therefore the entire concept is illegible. Even granting that we found some case of a behavior differing between races which was not considered racist, this still would not mean the entire concept of racism was senseless. That is simply not how definitions work - no word has such a strict definition, especially in softer sciences like psychology or sociology.
The same wikipedia article verifies this, since it does not offer the first sentence as an all-encompassing definition, but continues:
"It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity.[2][3] Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities."
So I think these debates about the scope of the definition are somewhat beside the point anyway. In order to use the word racism, nobody is required to provide an absolute criteria by which in every situation we can say what is or is not racist. Instead, we require only to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate uses of the term commonly enough to make practical use of it.
I think this debate would be more productive if conservatives could get away from this attempt at refuting the idea that "all people are exactly identical in all respects" - which nobody has ever said, and is a ridiculous strawman even to bring up, but the falsehood of which conservatives seem addicted to reminding us all. Instead, it is more useful to see racism as involving those differences being relatively significant, especially when relating to that person's virtue or value to society. Racism also has the connotation of a personal prejudice toward a group on the basis of race.
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@Mesmer
As it shouldn't be.
You have entirely missed my point. You are attempting a reductio of wikipedia's definition of racism by using a fringe application of the term "behavioral trait".
Black people have darker skin - is this a behavior? Would that be a reasonable reductio?
Furthermore, if I were to hypothetically grant you this distinction (i.e. accept your definition of "behavioral traits", if I am to argue that African Americans have lower intelligence than Whites, then people shouldn't be able to label that as "racist" (according to Wikipedia's definition), with your distinction in mind. The reason being is that the existence of intelligence is "an automatic biological process", not an "instinctive action".
Yes, intelligence is not a behavior, but it is a capacity which determines behavior. If you claim that one race is more intelligent than another, then it is reasonable to infer that you believe that those races "possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance" and that they "can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another".
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