The institutions that have managed the collection of prejudices which have valued and devalued one person from another are the core and center of soci...
Damn right! More: Exactly! Those miserable lazy heathens are always screwing up progress. Where's the whip? One might think that Kipling was talking a...
Is 'thinking' necessarily 'conscious'? I am not conscious of all that goes on in my brain to produce this sentence. I am aware of the result as it flo...
Racial justice has suddenly (like a bolt of lighting) become a hot issue for all sorts of people who are not generally subject to discrimination, and ...
The brain does a lot; not all of it is thinking. Regulating breathing, heart, balance -- all those basal activities -- is not part of thinking. Emotio...
The Minneapolis City Council claims it has a veto-proof majority to pursue a plan to dismantle the MPD over time (not in one fell swoop). We will see ...
Part of the problem is that the police are only one, but maybe the most visible, of the problems many (not all) black people have to deal with: substa...
The number of black on black murders should be a stumbling block to the anti-police demonstrators, but it doesn't seem to be. In 2018 about 2600 black...
"Does systemic racism exist in the US?" I'm not sure how many kinds of racism there are, but does racism exist in the US? Is the Pope Catholic? Of cou...
Professional journalists share common training. Networks and stations offer economical programming formats which the public is familiar with. The publ...
MPR might have had a significant effect on the narrative followed by the US pubic radio audience, since the event was here, and they covered it thorou...
Indeed. I get most of my news from Minnesota Public Radio, here in Minneapolis. MPR was very much social-justice-forward in their treatment of Floyd's...
I blame the media for a lot, but a little bit of recent history first: The critical event on May 25 was captured on video by bystanders and was posted...
You do not sound at all like a misanthrope. 10% - 20% of people annoy you. Only 20%? We are an inherently annoying species. Being annoyed by other peo...
It helps to remember CLASS when analyzing race relations. Here's a quote from an article on "the paradox of Minneapolis" "White, non-Hispanic resident...
One piece of the problem that may or may not have been mentioned here is the role of police unions. In some places, Minneapolis among them, the police...
It's helpful to remember that the crates of tea thrown into Boston Harbor were a large, valuable shipment -- about a year's worth of tea drinking for ...
Is inaction morally wrong? Real world example (no trolleys involved): One of four police officers on the scene of a nonviolent crime kneels, knee on t...
What species would that be? Butterflies moving their wings as a root cause of hurricanes are a figure of speech. If someone hadn't uttered that phrase...
Buddhist joke: Don't just do something, stand there. (Don't just do, just be) TO BE is an immensely complicated verb compared to TO DO. Doing things i...
IMHO, it's a metaphor; it's good, and very convenient because our understanding of how the brain actually works has been (and still is) limited. Take ...
Think of the long period of time that people have lived--let's say 500,000 years (not an exaggeration). During those 500 millennia, people lived as hu...
I wasn't comparing PhDs with high school dropouts--I was just citing a range, FROM high school dropout TO PhD. The break-point of difference is really...
Well, that's pretty much the way it is now in large stretches of the world. I grew up in a very small town--2000 people. Everyone did not know everyth...
isn't "economic liberalism" a political and economic philosophy based on strong support for a market economy and private property in the means of prod...
Brain activity would be severely limited because the brain requires input from the getgo to function--not just normally, but to function at all. Well,...
We need to identify and understand the facts on the ground right now -- the ones that we keep tripping over. We won't get anywhere without doing that....
If Marxism is a method of analyzing the nature of society, the answer would have to be a resounding "NO". Clearly we are born into established conditi...
Marx said, "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spe...
The orthodox marxists I know dismiss reform out of hand. As humane people, they of course want the state to protect working people from the vagaries o...
No. They might not like the world as it is (who does?) but existing methods of production (a vast topic encapsulated in a brief phrase), the existing ...
One of my favorite topics is how we got from Jesus to Christianity. When one looks at the topic as a historical problem rather than the unfolding plan...
Yes. Such demanding questions you ask, and it's a holiday to boot. Probably more social than philosophical. Above I confessed to being some sort of sh...
What I know about the history of cultural criticism (structuralism, et al) would fit on a 3x5 card. I should do better, but... F. Scott Fitzgerald (di...
Marxists will also quarrel with the notion that there is such a thing as "human nature". Clearly, and irrefutably, we are a species which manifests va...
Like @"fdrake" I'm probably some sort of shoddy Marxist. Societies are always trying to shape ""human nature", and to some extent they are successful,...
"Reality" is always a good starting point, whether one sets out to remake the bathroom or remake the world. Ah, but "reality" is a tricky word. Who wi...
Yes, I think that is true; most people are not clinically depressed, and managing one's thoughts about the world is a good idea. Conscious effort is r...
I've had depression (diagnosed, treated with meds) for...35 years or so. I worked diligently at helping myself, and achieved some beneficial results. ...
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