iolo

On the one hand, who owns land: it's just there. On the other hand, it has always been regarded as a sort of property, and those who got there first h...

Swan Thanks - got it now. I find that the difficulty with leaving politics alone is that the politicos rush off and pull some insane trick like Brexit...

Shamshir - I'll have to ask my Wife: it's she who has the Mathematics degree. She's an existentialist, however, and doesn't believe in much! :)

My own notion is that early hunter-gatherer peoples got the idea that a pre-enactment of a hunt would help the real one, giving rise to the concept of...

Swann - Agreed. What is amazing to me is that so much of American political discourse nowadays seems to be about people's hating one another. I think ...

S - I think a number of forces, especially political ones, encourage us to indulge hatred for their own purposes, I was brought up a Christian Sociali...

I'm more on Swan's side than not - hatred is a mere silly self-indulgence, even if it's only for adverts and such. For grown-up apes, the question is ...

Punshhh - Very well put. It has been a huge mistake (Wilson's at first) to abandon representative democracy, where we chose people who know something ...

If some tory clown got a majority to execute me, my children, and all educated people in the UK, would I accept a majority of four percent, few of who...

ssu - those the German foreigners called 'Welsh' (or 'foreign') were normally called Britons or British all through actually. The word was pinched to ...

I'd guess that the key ingredient in hatred is a feeling of inadequacy: the last person I can recall hating seriously was our PE master, who used to m...

Britannia was the name of the Country when it was part of the Roman Empire. There must surely have been some reason, like being British?

The British came here from the Basque Country as the ice melted. A few foreigners have appeared from time to time since, but other than changing the l...

S - It isn't that I have no opinions 'against' anything, capitalism for instance, but that I think that except where people have been very heavily bra...

I had some answers I can't re-reach - apologies. I live in a society that is not desperately religious, I don't feel very strongly about all this 'God...

It seems to me - outside the US at least - a bit odd to define yourself in terms of a belief you don't hold. As I have rather tediously reiterated, I ...

It seems to me that all religious arguments start off with a spoken or unspoken series of "given that"s. I have nothing against re-living the eighteen...

Except I left out 'vote' in 'their vote'. it is an extra-ordinary instance of how people can get hugely worked up about something they'd never bothere...

It's amazing that before Cameron introduced this insanity, it was a nonsense confined to Tory fanatics. Once he'd produced a referendum, it got heavil...

Well, once upon a time I learned to read classical Greek, whereas German has been way beyond me. The thing is mixed up heavily with matters like emoti...

'Personalities' are made up in back rooms, Serious politics are about what we are to do. Because the rich intend to destroy the world rather than lose...

If we insist on non-British set-ups like referendums to settle tory squabbles, we'll into non-British politics like assassinations and Civil War (whic...

The whole idiocy is as wonderful lesson in not allowing internal tory ambition-battles to destroy our Country. Next time, if we must have one, let's s...

It seems to me that the various 'religions' are large-scale intellectual constructions by which to justify acceptable behaviour (which behaviour, oddl...

It is a great pity that political parties now feel compelled to have fuhrers to prevent serious issues being discussed. The rich manifestly do not wan...

Jesus was a human being in a culture that made 'God' totally other. Paul/Saul was a Roman citizen and therefore used to the idea of human beings becom...

Cris - Capitalism is and economic system based on greed, where those who are most greedy have learned to brainwash, bully or kill everyone else, makin...

Freedom for me would be the end of capitalism, the only power-system that still exists. If we got shot of that nonsense we could be could begin to thi...

Doug - I don't find much to disagree with in that.

The difficulty with all these discussions is one of definition. Most people now use 'communism' to mean despotic state capitalism and 'socialism', exc...

Hi Frank. Got shut off from the other place, had to change my name. What about you? All well?

Just and unjust are human mental constructs. How can they apply to anything beyond?

Why's it a cage? It's just a fact, surely? Why this aimless scepticism?

We belong to a species that developed consciousness as a survival technique, living in an economic order that controls our lives and thinking for prof...

Apes are better at being apes, humans are better at being humans; other comparisons can only be irrelevant. surely?

Dusty of Sky wrote: What are smart phones for? A number of different things. But clearly, there are some features we want our smart phones to have, an...

Doesn't 'equal' or 'unequal' depend on what things are for, so that knives, being for cutting, are not equal because some are better at that. What are...

In the UK at the moment 'anti-Semitic' is more and more being used to mean 'opposing the crimes of "Israel"', which complicates matters considerably. ...

Immigrants were born outside the Country, mostly in England, We have a lot of excellent native Somalis, Chinese, Italians and Spsaniards..

I'm always a bit baffled by 'Ze Vill of Ze Peepul'. Which people - the ones of 2016 or now? If this idiocy breaks up the UK, that's great, but I fear ...

It seems to me that a religion is a very archaic belief in an outmoded view of the universe, centring on a Fifth-Century tyrant in the sky who is so u...

We're am odd mix, I think, of sort-of-chimpanzees and abstract thinkers. The chimpanzee bit would hit back when hurt, then forget it, but the abstract...

Belonging to a State means you need to accept its (not necessarily very sensible) laws and institutions and not rock the boat too evidently or the bul...

I fear that, the way things are going, this idiocy is going to create such contempt for Parliament that it will seriously weaken democracy. An issue t...

Hi Frank - wondered where you were. Yes, it's a good place, but rather hard work for intermittent and un-philosophical one liners of my low type. One ...

It seems to me that, despite desperate attempts to brainwash everyone, the obvious fact about any society is that some people exploit and dominate all...

ftd - it seems to me that, since capitalism and class relations are constantly in change and development, we are, alas, not given any 'before' in whic...

I'm impressed by the scholarship, but my upbringing in Marxism always stressed the unity of theory and practice. I am left, in my later years, to be j...

After the insane treatment given to President Obama, it is difficult to believe that the vast majority of Republicans are not racist, I'm afraid.

Socrates evidently supported the upper class in Athens and dislikde democracy. I can't see anything about decadence in his story, just political divis...