Tate

A lot of small time police departments are substantially funded by drug related property seizures. I wonder how that pans out when marijuana becomes l...

I agree. It will probably be like marijuana. Little by little states will legalize it except for a few hold outs, not to mention any names Mississippi...

My point was that it's not just somebody else's fault. If you're adapted to an American lifestyle, the problem is you.

What's the complaint?

I don't hear anybody talking about it. They're more focused on gas prices.

Bipartisan gun control legislation passed by the Senate

We could have 52 states. Puerto Rico wants to be one. We could add Ukraine.

All the great epics start with those assumptions. Well, actually that's not true. You could start a great epic with that assumption, though. Except it...

Third person data is is things like "The moon orbits the earth." Would you agree that this statement is true from any perspective?

You're saying that in this, our Age of Mechanism, we give precedence to the physiological, and treat first person data like some sort of foam on top? ...

How about: Sensation, physiologically, involves nervous system function. Sensation, as the content of awareness, has properties that are absent from t...

I was talking to an ancient old woman, and I was asking how they dealt with heat in the summer when she was young. She first said it's hotter now than...

:chin: :rofl:

It's called a dictator.

I don't even know what your thesis is.

:yawn:

Not really. He came to power by organizing military action. Since then, it's worked well to shore up his power and control. This is the first time thi...

I didn't say he's mad.

There isn't much to Russian politics other than Putin. Look at the way he started the war: by dragging officials before the cameras to say what he req...

He is what underlies the conflict.

The reason being that a great power conflict is very different from the average geopolitical conflict. Definitely.

Russia is not a great power, so there is no "great power conflict" here. If it was, then Obama wouldn't have had the option to ignore Russia in 2014.

A "great power", as the term is used in political science, has global influence. Russia is not a great power.

I don't know. The death of Putin might be the only path to peace

The US and the EU are simply willing to admit Ukraine as a member and ally. They have not proposed to force Ukraine to do anything, so I don't see how...

I'm not sure why you call it a compromise, but the answer is no.

No doubt support for Ukraine is prolonging the war, but the primary cause of its duration is Putin. The reason there have been no negotiations is agai...

I think that more so than most wars in recent history, this war is about personalities more than about states. It's Zelensky backed by Biden against P...

US support for Ukraine could easily drop to nothing in 2024. I'm guessing Europe would follow, for the most part. Europe definitely needs to have its ...

Not everyone can do that. The inability is called aphantasia.

Everybody in the matrix is a program except for the real people.

The idea of main distribution board has been around for a while. I've been reading about the evolutionary period when that would have first started: t...

I was just asking what sort of parties you'd like to see.

I think it's that the brain uses models that enhance the competence of the organism by creating expectations, which is just a theory. There is such a ...

There were profound differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats during the civil war. The conflict was over whether the South should be p...

:yum:

Deduction is part of determining what's really there.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PcpuDXKo7as/maxresdefault.jpg

@"Banno" @"Marchesk" @"Janus" @"Wayfarer" @"Jackson" @"Tom Storm" When you analyze a visual illusion, you use a little deduction to figure out what th...

You were programmed you to think that, Smith.

I agree. Those categories assume a Cartesian framework which is so embedded in our culture that we forget that it's problematic. We probably keep retu...

No. I don't know what ontology that is. It's not indirect realism. If you insist that the real world consists of what you're most directly aware of, t...

This is a kind of idealism: one inhabits a realm of mental objects.

Your argument is that we encounter statements directly because it's nonsense to say it's indirect. I don't know what it means to say it's direct, so i...

They are multiple causes. As we've discussed, at this point, expectation of inflation is one of the causes. Will the economy slump into stagflation? T...

We contact statements directly? How do you know that?

Watch Napoleon Dynamite

Sure. Did we already do a thread on what a state is? Don't want to derail.

Needs some peaches on top.

Interesting that you think of the state as having whims and fancies. I was just reading an article that speculated that the reason the human brain shr...