frank

I wrote several paragraphs. Your response was one weird question.

Not at all. It's going on all around you all the time. It's nature.

Historically, American socialism has been tied to either Marx or Christianity. Your strategy is confusion about what constitutes your sphere?

More please.

I’m not suggesting that you should allow people you love to drown. You should protect yourself and that means protecting your loved ones. As for those...

OK. I think we took the concept of mechanism as far as we could. I think the pendulum is poised to turn back. But the age of mechanism will be like a ...

And you read it with relish, while Tolkien's other book, where everything started off lovely, wonderful things happened, and it all wound up beautiful...

So you can't accept Sauron even though you know the position he holds in the world that you love. Therefore, your argument comes down to a giant wad o...

What are you drinking?

Middle Earth is an expression of a primal conflict between good and evil. It only exists because of Sauron's superior, Morgoth.

The one where the organizing principle was: do something about Sauron. People love life. Life is a great drama. When the monster dies, the drama is ov...

They love him too. He's badass.

If you love the LOTR then you love Sauron. Is this point really too obscure for you? Really?

Tim. What did you mean by this:

If I pointed to the antibiotics of the world as examples of creativity and ambition, and you then reminded me why the great struggle of the antibiotic...

Then his point isn't striking you as intuitive. He was banking on the likelihood that it would strike you so. Or it might just be that example. How ab...

Cool.

I don't think "the first chancellor of the German Empire" is a rigid designator.

Place it in the context of the history of analytic philosophy.

Kripke's point depends on the understanding that H20=water is an identity statement. They're both rigid designators picking out the same object in all...

I'm fascinated by human culture and was really intrigued by the idea that we live in an age of mechanism (can't remember where I first contacted that ...

My thinking has evolved away from Nietzsche toward just libertarianism. Nietzche is just there to invalidate any moral argument by way of the godless ...

The Frodos of the world are truly amazing, but they apparently need a Lord of the Rings to provide them with something to overcome. So does this argue...

Possibly. In a nutshell, why would you say it's wrong?

We can look back and see that worldviews change over time. For instance, people once thought the sky was a hard dome. The transformation of the concep...

I think any workable argument against it will end up being a moral argument.

What do you mean by mixed economy? State ownership? Or state intervention in the economy in the form of regulations?

But think about what happened in 2009. State intervention created short term stability, but would a larger scale reset have done more to produce long ...

My Darwin/Freud/Nietzsche combo is all mechanism-philosophy, the intellectual aspect if the Mechanistic Age (in contrast to the Platonic Age of Essenc...

It's also important to recall that all human motives are rooted in the pleasure principle. If a society spends much of its resources making life comfo...

I would go with Chicago circa the Haymarket riot. It was a cultural wasteland. The Great Depression was partly an agriculturally induced environmental...

Don't give up so easily.

It's a brand of social darwinism that appeared in the UK and the US in the 1870s. Among other things, it led W.E.B. Dubois to claim that the moral wea...

Is our present economic system mixed enough to eliminate the threat of great depressions?

What's an example of this instability?

Lions rarely elevate zebras, yet the plains are greatly benefited by these blonde beasts. Ambitious humans likewise foster health by 1) creating indus...

It's not strange. :up:

So a law against lying would institutionalize mistrust? Does an oath of office also do that?

Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud. Discuss.

If everyone constantly lied, social integrity might be in danger. I can't offer anything empirical about that because I don't know of a case of it. Bu...

How would you prove that lying politicians undermine the fabric of society? If society is a manifestation of our biology, its fabric would have to be ...

An argument against it would be Social Darwinism; easy to defeat, yet it still has a robust following. In the US, it could be accomplished by the judi...

It's probably rooted in what we are biologically. It's interesting to think of a large scale society as a manifestation of our make-up the way a bee-h...

Humanity is neither male nor female, though it's parts have those properties. Something is lost in wholeness. The act of identifying a whole is the ac...

You seem to be saying that P is true IFF there is social agreement about P. Not sure about that, but are you contradicting yourself accidently? Or doe...

The concept of truth is too basic to define, so there aren't multiple definitions. The word "truth" could mean hotdog in some contexts, but that's not...

You might be trying to tell me that I may be bound to the conventions of my time. Not sure, though. I'll take your obscurity as a sign that you don't ...

My argument was simple. Why do you need a plethora of literature to answer it? Per you, your thesis is relatively true. It's just one way of expressin...

All of this suggests a transcendent vantage point, yet your point seemed to be that it's only relatively true. If it's convenient for me to disagree w...

Is something added by "human" here? Or is a certain metaphysics smuggled by that reference? Have you read Heidegger's. What is Metaphysics?