I imagine both. All his defenders keep conveniently overlooking the wife. I never met the man, so I can't know how crazy he was. It is widely known th...
I don't believe anything is objectively moral. Morality is a human concepts and humans tend not to form a consensus on the particulars of even the mos...
Watch any frightened or injured creature for two minutes, and you know exactly what's going on, how it feels, what it needs. You know, because as an a...
He didn't need to depart from anything. Nobody asked him to prove that he believed what the church preached; it was already taken for granted. The dem...
All Philosophim said was that power is not what causes the change. Sorry about the grating; it was unintentional. I was not referring to myself. At so...
That is the definition of hypocrisy. And why did he "believe" that this "belief" of his required demonstrating over and over? How would that have serv...
But you don't see the parallel with: Same thing. If they remained good, they would use power well; once their character is corrupted and they've gone ...
Sulawesi, in Indonesia https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/ The oldest cave paintings date from 35,40...
Hew was simply a sadistic bastard. And dishonest. That whole "Nobody in here but me and God" palaver was published to mollify the church. This, in spi...
It's simply one more step in our alienation from nature, one another and our authentic selves that started 6-7000 years ago with walled cities and str...
I have a secular and practical reason for sharing an aspect of that reservation. My problem is not with freedom, sexuality, or the frank expression of...
Misuse of power is only one example of what may happen when the wielder of power is corrupt. Corruption means debasement, spoilage, loss of integrity,...
Just so! And a weak moral person is more easily corruptible than a strong one. It takes an exceptionally strong moral person to remain uncorrupted in ...
and are both excellent. So is The Natural and All the President's Men and Our Souls at Night and I guess The Horse Whisperer , though, as with Indecen...
All of those, yes, but not in the top favourites. Those were all fairly low-key, cerebral comedy. I have very low tolerance for rowdy humour, none at ...
This is what I was getting at also. The perception that power itself corrupts probably stems from the fact that people who were already immoral are fa...
Compare it to the production and advertising of junk food. What results? To be entirely honest about one's own convictions, it's more useful to imagin...
Favours, no. Consciousness has a character, a heritage, a configuration. Before it becomes autonomous, it is also educated. Before it wakes up, we wil...
I wasn't suggesting that. I was suggesting that a lot of pornography is not the kind of straightforward coupling between two consenting adults that on...
So, in one society, you have children told to dress properly and that they have souls and that they're free, proud, righteous citizens of a great civi...
Of course it is. In several different ways. The most obvious one giving children a badly skewed version of sex, love and relationships. It's not the s...
Oh yes. But I liked Knives Out andA Perfect Murder For me, it's mostly about the story. Though I do appreciate a nice backdrop and pretty people - lik...
Yes, they went nuts over visual invention in the 80's. Lighting effects, camera magic, fantastic stage sets, big industrial machinery, walls of comput...
Absolutely. Forgot about Leon and If Hated it. Just too, too, too much. Same with Imaginarium. Not everything needs to be illustrated with cartooney e...
The real can be sublime, but most of the time it's tedious, annoying, frustrating, sad, painful or downright horrible. For most people, most of the ti...
Oh, now I'm really curious. Wondering whether it's a generational gap in communication. The coincidences might have seemed silly, but I thought they w...
I tried a couple. You Tube wants to charge me rent for Doctor Strangelove and Being There. So does Amazon Prime. ?? I didn't cringe once. Now I'm curi...
There are many factors why people are corruptible, but I believe the chiefest among them is social conditioning. I don't just mean a child being told ...
One of my all-time favourites. Love Pauline Collins. Did you see the series Upstairs Downstairs? The girl was incandescent. Plus, it was cool to see J...
Is that because the super-rich - except for people like the Koch brothers and George Soros - don't understand the power of wealth, or because they're ...
Whatever pressures we put on ourselves. For the past 6000+ years, we have pretty much set our own agenda for individual breeding and the survival of s...
Oh, no. It's far more hopeful and fruitful. Every member of the mob knows exactly how well she's doing in comparison to her sisters and which one is m...
We've been watching some of our old VCR's. Close Encounters and Fantastic Voyage are idiotic. What did we ever like about these lame SF offerings? Obv...
I can't vouch for these being all-time favourites; just movies I like that come to an increasingly porous mind: The Milagro Beanfield War Wag the Dog ...
Not really. If the queen is defective, or she mated with a defective male, her new colony will never get started; she and her one mate are bred out of...
It wasn't a question of better or worse morals; it was a question of unequal comparison. When people compare the Law of the Jungle unfavourably to the...
Well, they certainly figure into bad decision-making. On the whole, I think we make better decisions with reason than with emotion. The way generals d...
General question: When people talk about "the jungle" and how horrible animals are to one another, they usually cite predators and prey - an then comp...
The two main bones of contention through history, and long before, were land and water. Who controls most arable land and water, their clan survives l...
Interesting concept, from a legal pov. What scale would the court have to be? Yes, numbers and density have a major effect: even where resources are n...
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