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Voting is the exercise of politics, and granting or denying rights and privileges is equally a political exercise. So, yes, we should respect others' ...
October 14, 2020 at 23:43
Absolutely, he could still lose -- either by getting too few votes in the states with sufficient Electoral College weight, or his victory could be sto...
October 14, 2020 at 06:45
Sure they are. A lot of words were added to English in the 16th and 17th centuries as intellectual types found Middle and Early Modern English inadequ...
October 11, 2020 at 21:29
Well -- it won't get rigorous in the way some sciences have become BECAUSE the kind of experiments that yield rigor are unacceptable from a human righ...
October 11, 2020 at 21:20
I find it annoying when people dismiss psychology out of hand (as it has existed since the late 19th century). Granted, there is a substantial pile of...
October 11, 2020 at 21:09
So much for theory. I assume you have experienced a) friendship, b) love, and c) lust. So, restricting yourself to as full an explication of your expe...
October 11, 2020 at 04:32
The worse fate that Marx predicted was that the Bourgeoisie and Working Class would destroy each other IF they were not able to resolve the question o...
October 08, 2020 at 21:42
It's possible that religiously based apocalypse scenarios have migrated to the environment. "The Final Judgement" is a powerful concept, and whether i...
October 08, 2020 at 16:38
Scattered reports (stuff I pick up in the mainstream press) suggest that the rate of extinctions is picking up; some insect species or another disappe...
October 08, 2020 at 04:19
Wasn't Plato very concerned that subversive music and poetry would disrupt his ideal republic? So, go right ahead and post about music. Here's a song ...
October 07, 2020 at 21:18
The Roman Empire recorded a number of severe pandemics and famines which killed off a significant percentage of the population, without it causing a c...
October 07, 2020 at 16:12
There are probably gradual declines, such as what the Romans experienced in the last century of the Roman Empire. They did notice it -- they were not ...
October 07, 2020 at 16:02
We might not recognize the fall until later -- true enough, Rome gradually subsided as an imperial HQ over time, and there was no headline, "The Roman...
October 06, 2020 at 03:14
Come now. 2 million have died in this pandemic, so far. It isn't over, but it doesn't look like we will even approach a quarter of the 50 million who ...
October 06, 2020 at 01:33
Maintaining the status quo is a choice. Radical change is imposed. Revolutions and radical changes come about because existing conditions have created...
October 05, 2020 at 02:29
State governments used to fund radio stations in the US --thinking here of the Wisconsin State Radio Network or university radio (like U of Minnesota,...
October 01, 2020 at 18:54
I liked that Biden told trump to "shut up". I'd have preferred "drop dead" but that would probably be considered 'inappropriate'. I couldn't stand wat...
September 30, 2020 at 04:21
In: Bannings  — view comment
It's a great thing that the old guys on the Forum don't 'sound' old at all! I'm 74, your junior. Alas, it will always be that way.
September 30, 2020 at 04:16
Audience size, revenues, and content are related. The purpose of television, for instance, is to sell audiences to advertisers using the content as ba...
September 29, 2020 at 19:24
Antony, stay engaged, but give yourself a break. Or a brake, maybe. One has to step back from excessive exposure to repetitious daily news (doesn't ma...
September 29, 2020 at 06:16
Good topic; good questions. Because we are social animals and this is the way social animals behave. Why would it be otherwise? You know, women have b...
September 27, 2020 at 04:05
I think/hope/believe that otherwise normal citizens make up the majority of the population, and that we are not helpless dupes of various cynical prop...
September 26, 2020 at 02:07
Your raise some very valid points here. Over the last 50 years, life for the working class (which is the vast majority) has become much more precariou...
September 24, 2020 at 06:21
There is something not altruistic about aging justices hanging on for dear life, rather than resigning. Ginsburg isn't the first one. And IF they are ...
September 24, 2020 at 06:13
When this circuit was attached to rats' brains, the rats sat there and kept pushing the lever again and again until they died of dehydration/starvatio...
September 20, 2020 at 04:26
You know what a good God would allow and would not allow? How did you come by this rare knowledge? Apparently -- if one goes by doctrine and experienc...
September 18, 2020 at 05:40
I have conflicting thoughts about the innocence of animals. On the one hand, the various qualities attached to innocence -- free from moral wrong; wit...
September 18, 2020 at 01:45
God made the World in six days flat On the seventh he said, I'll rest So he let the thing into orbit swing To give it a dry run test A billion years w...
September 17, 2020 at 22:33
You are assuming that God is not a fan of Darwinian selection. Actually God set up the world with vicious competition at its core to see what would ha...
September 17, 2020 at 22:30
However, the lion will sleep a lot better than the kid will.
September 17, 2020 at 22:24
True, but I no longer enter into discussions of racism with serious intent. Of course racism is a problem, but what most people have to say are shallo...
September 15, 2020 at 23:32
We should certainly stop being racist for the wrong reasons.
September 15, 2020 at 23:20
Here you want to pose cosmic questions and you haven't got the clock right. A clock powered by a spring goes "tick tock" as the escapement meters out ...
September 15, 2020 at 22:44
Clothing is"necessary" in the psychological, cultural sense. Long before the current cultural milieu, people started wearing clothes -- not just cloth...
September 14, 2020 at 19:33
I didn't mention Adam and Eve as a serious comment. For the purpose here, I don't think Genesis has any relevance. The Eden story is not primarily con...
September 14, 2020 at 06:05
Usually clothing is optional, but not always. Usually we choose to wear clothes; rarely are we driven by the environment to wear clothes. IF one lives...
September 14, 2020 at 03:40
And you will find that the Universe is utterly indifferent to your choice.
September 13, 2020 at 21:59
Is it? I find that the end of the world pretty much quashes my desire for pleasure.
September 12, 2020 at 05:31
Any one alive to the possibility that we may be bringing about our final act and scenes on the world's stage, must revise their consciousness to accou...
September 12, 2020 at 04:25
Alas, I don't think it is possible for a group as small as 1000 or maybe 100 to not only see the necessity of proactive measures, but to actually impl...
September 11, 2020 at 23:03
I think we've gone too far in claiming that there is no such thin as race. That view is reactionary to the idea of race being equivalent to ethnicity....
September 06, 2020 at 05:05
I don't seem to be having any difficulty putting my socks on, so I have not investigating how a given method might be faulty. One issue: If one has ro...
September 06, 2020 at 00:28
Must sex be brought up at every opportunity? Disgusting.
September 06, 2020 at 00:23
"Doff" is a shortened version of the short phrase "do off". And, appropriately, "don" is short for "do on". This goes back to Middle English.
September 06, 2020 at 00:22
Preferring to fuck guys is certainly a critical part of what a homosexual is (like 90%) but it isn't all of it. It's also who you like to spend the mo...
September 05, 2020 at 21:24
The perennial unanswerable question. Some? many? most? all? humans are subject to "polymorphous perversity" -- capable of deriving sexual pleasure in ...
September 05, 2020 at 21:10
There are many holes in the Bible. Jesus appeared in a time and place of religious and political ferment. He was not, by any means, the only inside ag...
September 03, 2020 at 19:28
This is circular: black people produce black culture which causes crime. If this were so, wouldn't all black people be criminals? Culture as a Determi...
September 01, 2020 at 03:25
@"Unenlightened"'s answer, "leisure" seems on the mark; and in another sense, it means the 'psychological space' to afford thinking about radical alte...
August 31, 2020 at 19:50
In order to use a time machine to change the course of history, one has to kill quite a few babies, not just one. Suppose one wanted to protect the We...
August 31, 2020 at 18:23