You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Echarmion

Comments

What matters to Trump and the GOP is whether they can plausibly spin this into a victory, and have the means to fight it to the bitter end. Trump hasn...
November 04, 2020 at 07:40
Trump is about to make a statement. We are at exactly at the point where, according to predictions, Trump would look the strongest. At the end of elec...
November 04, 2020 at 07:09
Trump is currently fairly comfortably ahead in Florida, which is good for his chances. He's behind in Arizona though, which is bad for him. So far Tru...
November 04, 2020 at 06:01
That seems to me a perversion (no pun intended) of the notion of morality. Morals / ethics are about interpersonal relationships / conduct. Fantasies ...
November 03, 2020 at 10:42
Haven't really followed those races. From 538s forecast it seems likely, but by no means obvious that the senate will flip.
November 03, 2020 at 10:20
I find this connection weird. It has the acrid smell of puritanism to me. An abortion is a medical procedure that aborts a pregnancy. It's not some ki...
November 03, 2020 at 10:03
So, any bets on when Trump will declare victory and demand that no further ballots are counted?
November 03, 2020 at 09:50
It is important to point out that extreme polarization in the US does not originate with social media. There is some evidence it has accelerated since...
November 02, 2020 at 09:38
I personally tend towards the idea that a dividing line between biology and chemistry, between animate and inanimate, simply does not exist. "Life" is...
November 02, 2020 at 08:24
The interesting question here is why you are surprised. Is it because you expect at any moment to die? No. It is because you know how guns work, you k...
November 02, 2020 at 07:42
If Trump looses 2020, he'll just run again in 2024, if he isn't dead or in jail. In fact I fully expect him to pretend he is still the "real" presiden...
October 31, 2020 at 18:53
Ah, the good old hypocrisy fallacy. You don't get to decide what people are allowed to complain about. What matters is whether the complaint is warran...
October 31, 2020 at 16:09
The idea is that you figure out what the law is, in a given situation. Laws are after all made for real people in real life. They're not some kind of ...
October 27, 2020 at 21:46
If consequences were always determined by intention, there would be no difference between intentionalism and consequentialism. The two would necessari...
October 27, 2020 at 09:52
Eliezer Yudkowski has said something similar, defining knowledge as "the ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality". If you can equally e...
October 26, 2020 at 07:14
What's wrong with preferring Goebbels over Hitler, in theory? The argument implied here is that, as long as the situation doesn't seem really dire, pe...
October 21, 2020 at 07:08
The first part of the story makes sense. Burisma hired the son of the US VP to get better connections with US politicians and thereby soften or avoid ...
October 20, 2020 at 13:25
Of all the reasons for not voting Biden (his actual voting history, his policies etc.) you choose some questionable story about how Biden was maybe so...
October 19, 2020 at 18:54
Diversity is necessary for survival. Weakness is not a biological fact, it's merely a human judgement.
October 19, 2020 at 13:40
In a more general sense, the idea that continued immigration into Europe threatens "western" culture and secular culture more generally seems to be ba...
October 19, 2020 at 11:19
My takeaway from the exchange in this thread is that the left really cannot help but fracture itself with ideological arguments.
October 19, 2020 at 11:08
What reason would this Constantine have? The conversion of the Roman Empire did not happen in vacuum.
October 19, 2020 at 05:55
Unless Biden is clearly ahead after election night or its clear the Republicans loose the Senate, expect the result to be disputed. The electors of th...
October 17, 2020 at 13:03
No, we don't. This description of human behaviour is so overly simplistic as to be useless.
October 17, 2020 at 08:44
It has always been pejorative if you're on the left. But there does seem to be a crisis of progressivism, which ironically has lead to conservatism ha...
October 16, 2020 at 21:06
Scalia's method was to ask what the text would have meant to an ordinary person at the time it was passed. He believed that only the text of the law b...
October 16, 2020 at 19:44
Consideration needs to be given to the democratic mandate, but the interpretation and application of legal texts is practiced with that in mind in man...
October 16, 2020 at 15:19
I have been asking myself if the right thing to do - from the perspective of Barret, who claims to value the SC as an institution, and everyone else w...
October 16, 2020 at 08:13
It's very odd to me to characterise Jesus' teachings as a ruling system. But is your argument that teaching harmony and kindness was not only unpreced...
October 16, 2020 at 07:54
I don't even see how this follows in the first place. 1 talks about states of affairs, 2 talks about rights. Essentially, according to the quote of Ra...
October 16, 2020 at 06:05
The argument presented in the article is hardly convincing, and doesn't address polling at all. Whether or not Biden "has it in the bag" is a fairly i...
October 14, 2020 at 06:08
Slightly off topic, but isn't libertarianism just a form of utilitarianism that places some concept of "freedom" as the goal of the utility function?
October 13, 2020 at 14:25
Releasing private emails sounds kinda illegal to me. Trump apparently wishing it's 2016 again.
October 12, 2020 at 04:54
I highly doubt that. Today, it's much easier to leverage a mob via Facebook then it is to bend standing institutions to your will. Of course agents of...
October 10, 2020 at 16:26
I think the plan is fairly obvious in it's broad strokes by now. There are obvious avenues to pursue via violence in that plan. I think it's unlikely ...
October 10, 2020 at 11:32
Well, there are certainly ominous signs. A republican governor saying that democracy might be suspended in favor of "stability and prosperity". A part...
October 10, 2020 at 07:48
I think Kant more or less nailed this when he concluded that a) since we are not omnipotent, all that can really be expected from someone is to will g...
October 09, 2020 at 15:27
So it's at least not absurd to assume some amount of ontological "randomness". As I alluded to a few pages ago, it seems to me that the question of wh...
October 09, 2020 at 14:27
Yes and no. I am assuming that instead of speculating about ontology, your approach would be to simply focus on the epistemological universe, that is ...
October 09, 2020 at 14:12
That's true only if you ignore all of Asia.
October 08, 2020 at 17:57
Is it a coincidence that Michigan is one state where the republican legislature might appoint it's own electors? Why are you talking to the propaganda...
October 08, 2020 at 17:08
Shots will be fired (figuratively and possibly literally) before that will be known with any certainty. According to fivethirtyeight, polling errors h...
October 08, 2020 at 10:39
Perhaps it's a matter of different definitions of the terms. The strictest form of determinism would be a mechanical determinism, where the state of t...
October 08, 2020 at 07:58
No evidence of a significant group of "shy Trump supporters" was ever produced. The operative question now isn't whether Trump will win the popular vo...
October 08, 2020 at 07:44
And that's a fundamental problem. I.e. we cannot just improve our measuring apparatus in some way. Either we come up with new physics, or this stays, ...
October 07, 2020 at 20:50
That's certainly one explanation. It doesn't seem to be a move to boost his chances at re-election, quite the opposite. So it's either unrelated to th...
October 07, 2020 at 08:07
And the result of all this is that we cannot predict the exact time an individual atom will decay. We can only give probabilities for timeframes, corr...
October 06, 2020 at 20:25
Probably. We seem to be misunderstanding each other pretty much across the board. I am really just talking about the probabilistic quality of QM, the ...
October 06, 2020 at 19:33
That's not where the uncertainty comes from, the way I understand it. The uncertainty is fundamental. Not all values of the system can be known at a t...
October 06, 2020 at 14:30
Right, I tend to mix this up. What I was getting at is that classical mechanics arise from events that are not mechanical, and not determined in the w...
October 06, 2020 at 06:19