I agree - having a small group of monetarily motivated survey takers dominating the results is undesirable in terms of obtaining "reliable" and "valid...
I've been on both sides--taker of surveys and producer of surveys; people are inherently untrustworthy and unreliable when it comes to taking surveys....
Your plan involves a lot of loading, unloading, shipping, and dumping debris into the Marianas Trench. Too much trouble. It would be easier to just nu...
I'm going to go with his probably accurate impression of collective malaise. There are billions of citizens in various countries subject to a collecti...
It could be the "very sad" comment was directed at the penny-ante squabbling among the Christians over this or that holy sight. Or maybe it was the si...
I'm sure the CIA uses Mossad, just like they use ANY source of information they can get their hands on. Normal behavior for an intelligence agency, I ...
You are probably well aware that determining blame, responsibility, guilt, causation, and so on is not always straight-forward. It can be a very compl...
Israel is historically an occupying power. If you want to go back far enough, Joshua led Israel into the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, which had ...
Brexit was the big mistake, IMHO. The EU isn't a perfect union, of course, but it seemed like the UK was much better off IN than OUT. I certainly can ...
How much North Sea oil can Scotland lay claim to? Aside from fish and fleece, what other products does Scotland produce? (I know jack shit about their...
We do have, and likely will have, national identities for quite some time. People are born into specific communities, specific small regions, specific...
Very interesting! I had not heard of (or had totally forgotten) the British historical link to the SLP - USA. Also hadn't heard about the Fabian - Lab...
Rugged Individualism is a ruling class friend. By all means! Encourage the masses to be individualists, rugged or not. Individuals should definitely p...
Divide and conquer is a piece of it, but probably a small one. The ruling class has other, very robust tools: Misinformation; relative and absolute po...
I don't know much about BLM founders, actually. Or the organization itself, either. I could know more, but I haven't read too much about them. I was j...
It does. Just rearrange the words a bit: "I should be moral." Maybe you will be, maybe you will not be, but surely you should be. Never mind "why". Ju...
It is usually unwise to take people's claims at face value. Did you know that I am a "trained Marxist" as well? Sort of. $1 and my training certificat...
Hey, you provided a link about ANTIFA accounts. I recently discovered the source of the word "antifa". A WWII German Soldier's recollection of his war...
There are numerous problems with CRT, and civil-rights advocacy and agitation too: a) Race-consciousness is presumably at the core of the problem, so ...
"Is Big Pharma Ethical in Effectively Controlling Medication Affordability by a Nation's Populace?" Is the Pope a Buddhist? On the one hand, pharmaceu...
Another good topic, Jack. It is less "experience changing us" and much more "experience becoming us". All of our lives are "experience" of various mag...
There is a downside to desalinization -- even on a fairly small scale: The product of desalinization is very strong brine, which dumped back into the ...
I was discussing this with a friend over lunch. He asked, "What does anyone mean by "sustainable"? Does it mean 8 billion (and more) people living lik...
You are so strict! But "sustainable" is not an all or nothing term. As for wind, back in the '90s the small town of Worthington (pop. 10,000 with two ...
You didn't ask me, but... Here's the policy. Float the economy on a deep pool of cheap oil. Available, plentiful, cheap energy to fuel industry and dr...
When pre-woke, woke, and post-woke? groups speak, they are not speaking truth to power. They (or we) are mostly talking to ourselves. Deep down the el...
That's the way it comes off in the mouths of some evangelicals. "You've accepted Jesus as your personal savior; Sweet Jesus, we are done here. Sorry a...
Yes, it does apply equally well to Socialism or Communists. Stalin and Mao were not what Marx had in mind, in my humble opinion. Both of them have a l...
As well it should. I would still advise incipient missionary to package their persuasion in the form of concern for others' material and emotional nee...
It easier for 20th / 21st century believers (or philosophers) to think about the meaning of loving their neighbors than it is of loving God. God, afte...
No! "spiritual salvation" delivered in the absence of love (agape) or absent concern for the person's wellbeing, results in the missionary position of...
Just my not-overly-erudite opinion, but I think quite a bit of "us" is factory pre-installed--don't take offense, Ma, at the factory metaphor. Every o...
Polio is caused by a virus, not a bacilli. Not much good about it, and it has almost been stamped out. Tapeworms, on the other hand, have one benefit:...
Worth noting: while the brain doesn't replace many of its lost neurons, if any, the trillions of connections among the 80 billion neurons are constant...
Basic features like gravity led to the 'self-organized' formation of star systems galaxies, and galaxy groups just as earlier, basic physics led to th...
I don't know. DNA, and proximity to same and other cell types seems to be part of how cells organize themselves into tissues and organs. But then, one...
At least the retina, optic nerve, and brain are the same system. Is the relationship between the ears (the essential sensory part, not the floppy exte...
All sorts of common matter which have old names ("water" is an Old English / Dutch / German word; air, on the other hand, is derived from Greek 'aer' ...
Thomas Malthus has been dead since 1834. Dead as a doornail. His famous book was written in 1798. Why is his old book your favorite touchstone for fai...
Following Christian theology (interpreting--or misinterpreting--Old Testament) we were created innocent but we listened to the snake in the Garden, di...
I came across an essay in AEON you might (or might not) find interesting -- "The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a ...
My guess is that public sex and nudity would be a lot less entertaining were it to become so common as to be unremarkable. When sex in the park is ill...
Why, indeed? Because we are not that charitable. Billions are not overly enthusiastic about changing their lifestyles to save the planet, never mind t...
A more complex scenario would be more interesting and challenging. In Situation Ethics , Joseph Fletcher poses this situation: an unattractive man ask...
Hey, I have not been a go-along get-along kind of guy. All sorts of things bother me; there are many opinions I find objectionable; I regularly encoun...
Of course I can live peaceably next door to someone who thinks I should not exist (there are such people, actually) and they can live peaceably next d...
Agree. So? In highly privileged, sheltered workshops like super-liberal private colleges it is apparently possible to physically injure others by putt...
Never mind thought experiments. People hold all sorts of highly disreputable ideas. What should be done about it? Nothing. No doxxing, no cancelling, ...
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