A given conservative may not like aspects of Donald Trump, but in what he says--and how he says it--they see something very likable. They may not have...
I have been reading 1877: OUR YEAR OF LIVING VIOLENTLY. Rutherford B. Hayes had just been elected in a very dubious electoral process, and the country...
So you must live in "a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone". How are you not one of the ...
The US doesn't have so much influence on the world because of our solid gold virtues; it's because of our extensive inventory of armaments and very la...
The music begins. Molecules of dopamine and serotonin are emitted, circulated, received, and up took. Perhaps you are with your partner, both hearing ...
I am both a soft-core Marxist and a soft-core Christian. My doubly soft-core social conscience compels me to at least try to understand the causes of ...
Well, I've never met the founders of BLM, or even local coordinators. Alicia Garza said (in a quote Google found) "“We are trained Marxists. We are su...
Certainly, insurgencies can arise from the left as well as the right. At least in the United States at this time (last 20 to 30 years) it has been the...
Why on earth would a convict be proto- or hyper-typical of their sex? I was just reading a book, 1877: Our Year of Living Violently (2010) by Michael ...
The general principle that "anything worth doing at all is worth doing well" certainly applies to masturbation. The experience of billions is that mas...
"the word fascist is intended to mean oppressive, intolerant, chauvinist, genocidal, dictatorial, racist, or aggressive." I think it was Paxton in Ana...
You can't drown in "the deep seas of the unconscious mind" because YOU are the deep sea. This isn't Freud. My theory is that "I" exist in the unconsci...
Having to prove one's sanity by finding a lost reference to an obscure story sounds too Kafkaesque. "Your Honor, the defendant can't produce the refer...
I know one person who has undertaken proper psychoanalysis. This fellow has a very vigorous / rigorous intellect, is very well read, and engages with ...
What Freud developed that was seminal and useful was a psychodynamic theory of personality development. The id, ego, and superego weren't merely level...
Observing that "what we really want has so rarely if ever been an option" is a useful insight, assuming that what we think "we really want" really IS ...
The Republicans have been electing a downward spiraling list of candidates since... Eisenhower in 1952. 1960 -- Nixon (slimy) 1968 -- Nixon -- not the...
When does history begin? With the Big Bang? Life arising on earth? the appearance of Homo sapiens? Settled life 12,000 years ago? The rise of the city...
Others have had liberation movements as well. Gay liberation was a high water mark for me, but it would be absurd to claim it as the driving force beh...
The Iraq war was misbegotten from the beginning. The justification (that they were working on nuclear weapons) was a lie told to the American people, ...
According to William Faulkner, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past." So there is that. (The quote is from "Requiem For a Nun". It's not a rel...
That is merely diplomatic hypocrisy. All very routine and customary. But it is unavoidable. Personally, I'm kind of naive. I'm always shocked when I s...
I do not think "comfort" is a significant philosophical problem. The phrase "I am not comfortable with..." is a euphemism, a dodge, or perhaps even an...
The Color of Law by Rothstein and A Peculiar Indifference by Elliott Currie provide a solid understanding of how housing segregation was engineered in...
Said to be the best available book on fascism. Someone (can't remember, might have been Paxton) noted that fascism is as much method as content. In ot...
Once the bullet leaves the gun, its trajectory is determined. But the moment the fool waving the gun around pulls the trigger is determined by chance....
I think I understand your clear explanation. Chance events seem like they are part of the knowable universe. We don't know when they will occur, just ...
That you have sent a message to other people would seem to cancel out the idea that you are the only one in existence, or that you believe you are the...
You "seem" (appearances may be deceiving) to be using it as a definite, fixed quality. Hey, if your not -- splendid. It just seemed that way to me. Bu...
Are you arguing that the motion of small solid bodies in the solar system -- interacting with each other, the planets, and the sun -- are not subject ...
Good or not, chance is a factor in life. It just IS. What is bad is ignoring the part that chance events play (positive. indifferent, and negative). U...
What animal is that? It is just you. If you lived where there are a lot of bears, and one of them was running your way with you on the menu, you'd be ...
You already know about what I am going to say here, but... I'll press ahead. Strengths, weaknesses, talents, skills, abilities, capacities, traits and...
One example of this would be bears which discover garbage. A smorgasbord of stuff is suddenly available, most of which isn't healthy for bears as a st...
A discontinuity between one animal, Homo sapiens or birds... take your pick, and all other animals is completely insupportable. There are some genes t...
There are areas of evolutionary thinking which get kind of "squishy" -- that is, not on such solid ground. Evolutionary psychology is an example. It s...
I've been a member of this and its predecessor forum for at least 10 years. There are a lot of people here who accept evolution, because the membershi...
Oh, I didn't know I was a 'die hard Darwinist'. But sure, evolution applies to human beings, as does natural selection and more. There is more because...
I don't see why it would, but there is zero likelihood of our species always making the right choice -- or even always choosing the lesser of two evil...
In terms of physical strength... sure, one can compare a weak horse to a strong horse in the same way one can compare a weak man to a strong man. Stre...
If so, then the misdirection is yours. Starting out with "In natural predator-prey relationships if a predator is so strong a hunter it proliferates a...
"Weakness" and "strength" are too heavily loaded with moral connotations to be very helpful in describing ecological relationships. What is necessary ...
It is clearly not necessary to believe in God in order to be good, because there are people who are good who do not believe in God. Conversely, there ...
Right. There are and have been people who are/were anti-natalist without using that term, perhaps quite a few, who have never attracted official notic...
It may have, but reading anti-natalist posts on sites like this are not representative of even most subsections of the public, like people generally i...
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