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Is art a mirror for reality, or a hammer with which to change it? Bertolt Brecht asked.
January 26, 2020 at 13:27
Your report that you feel anxious is a strong indication that you do, in fact, exist. The non-existent feel nothing. They do not engage in this sort o...
January 25, 2020 at 13:33
Are they actually so ignorant? 99% of the time, voters are being asked to vote for one ruling class candidate against another. They are not being aske...
January 22, 2020 at 23:50
You might find this interesting: Quillette has a nice article on some books one should read which will annoy politically correct people--books like Go...
January 21, 2020 at 15:25
Stop that! Nobody is longing for mass deaths. The reason for talking about mass deaths is to impress on policy makers minds that action on climate cha...
January 21, 2020 at 08:48
It would be nice if we could support any size population. We can't. We are up against declining marginal returns on agriculture and fisheries. Nobody ...
January 21, 2020 at 07:50
The Chinese program did work -- fewer children. The problem is that it produces a mushroom-shaped population distribution -- a large cap of elderly pe...
January 21, 2020 at 07:44
Nuance?
January 20, 2020 at 23:04
I can sympathize. I haven't gotten laid in a long time. Seems like there should be an initiative to provide safe and effective annual visits to a... s...
January 20, 2020 at 17:42
Did the Happy Hooker have a special interest in social services for the homeless? After all, wasn't she a high-end service provider?
January 20, 2020 at 16:48
So? That may very well be true, but the early church did not adopt the Jewish messianic myth as whole cloth. In the theology and liturgy of the church...
January 20, 2020 at 16:42
Trump, on the other hand, is more like Judas.
January 20, 2020 at 08:40
We clearly disagree about identity, and what makes a woman a woman and what makes a man a man. That's OK, we don't have to agree.
January 20, 2020 at 05:44
I understand what you are saying, but I can not agree with it. Chromosomes (which are groupings of DNA) are the basis of sex (as far as I know). The s...
January 20, 2020 at 04:12
I may not have emphasized the severity of mental illness in my response, but MI certainly is a factor in helping homeless people. The point of housing...
January 20, 2020 at 02:34
Well, people like Irenaeus and St. Augustine (and numerous others) were intimately involved in building up the Christian community, and teaching what ...
January 19, 2020 at 22:29
Some people like esoteric theology; some people like origami.
January 19, 2020 at 20:04
A fresh quip I have not heard before. Adding it to my repertoire of irrelevance.
January 19, 2020 at 20:02
You didn't ask me, but Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, and others contributed to the idea by the 2nd century, and so did St. Augustine in 412 CE, all drawin...
January 19, 2020 at 19:58
True, but it was only in 1854 that Holy Mother Church got around to settling the matter for those creepy old-line Catholics who buy the idea of papal ...
January 19, 2020 at 19:48
The cause for homelessness in California, where between 25% and 50% of all US homeless live, is a severe shortage of affordable housing. Why do all th...
January 19, 2020 at 06:46
Unemployment in the US was at least 25% during the Great Depression. Job programs helped some, but by no means did the programs help 25% of the workin...
January 19, 2020 at 06:17
I'd vote for either Sanders or Warren. Sanders is 78; Warren is 70. Biden is 77; Pelosi is 79; Bloomberg is 77. Buttigieg is 37. Klobuchar is 59. Trum...
January 18, 2020 at 02:58
I think of science and religion as two separate spheres of human activity with little or no overlap. Where they confront each other antagonistically i...
January 17, 2020 at 19:33
What is harder to conceive is that there is any reason to continue this discussion with you.
January 17, 2020 at 01:58
So you did, and I don't agree with that statement. The identity of an animal is determined by billions of base pairs of DNA. A creature's identity, on...
January 17, 2020 at 00:35
I do agree with your definition of what constitutes "a sex change" as the term is used, to which we can add an official name change. All sorts of peop...
January 16, 2020 at 18:16
No reason that you should care, as far as I know. My main concern about public toilets is that they be well maintained -- clean, supplied. Who else is...
January 16, 2020 at 18:05
How does sex lie deeper than the chromosomes in which reside DNA?
January 16, 2020 at 05:15
Like, "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory" perhaps.
January 16, 2020 at 04:14
Indeed, gender dysphoria is a very serious issue. I would not say otherwise. I also do not say that gender dysphoria is a casual wish. The difficultie...
January 16, 2020 at 04:08
Silly fellow. Why are you invested in the idea that nothing has an inherent identity? If you were a 14th-15th-16th century alchemist you would be tryi...
January 15, 2020 at 23:59
Come on, Frank. Anyone with 3,980 posts (--you, at the time of this post) should know that your topic was doomed from the get go. The least you could ...
January 15, 2020 at 09:50
Sometimes self pity is the only option available.
January 15, 2020 at 09:29
Someone (maybe you) attending the meeting at your place of servitude should have distributed the "Bullshit Bingo" cards (there are various games for v...
January 15, 2020 at 09:24
Can you make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? I think not. Here is a picture of a silk purse. Below the purse is a picture of a sow's ear. Vive la dif...
January 15, 2020 at 09:07
We are, imho, NOT space oddities. As a species engaging in hunting and gathering we did no damage to the planet. The HG regime lasted for most of our ...
January 13, 2020 at 19:47
The Unamerican Activities Committee was itself kind of un-American. In 1954 McCarthy was censured in the US Senate by a vote of 67 for and 22 against ...
January 13, 2020 at 06:13
Fusion is "thermo-nuclear power". What's 'wrong' with fusion is that we haven't been able to sustain it. Fission reactors can be operated at a tempera...
January 13, 2020 at 05:56
Yes, I was aware of the cyanobacteria. They began their oxygen producing career a very long time ago. If your point in asking was to underline the ide...
January 12, 2020 at 23:46
Of course they did not have the opportunity to give or withhold permission. Why on earth would they even be asked? Parents get to make decisions about...
January 12, 2020 at 09:37
I quite agree that the controversy corrupted the images. Some parents who photographed their naked young children (not as art, but just as casual phot...
January 12, 2020 at 09:30
You may remember that in the 1980s there were a series of kerfuffles over Robert Maplethorpe's photography of gay men, some dressed, some not. Piss Ch...
January 12, 2020 at 08:58
It was just a glass of his own urine, not quite a vat; the crucifix was not very big--which is neither here nor there. . The Guardian The Right probab...
January 12, 2020 at 05:15
Is autonomism "Art for art's sake?" Oscar Wilde (as a critic) takes the 'art for art's sake' view. Take two art works that depict an event in Roman my...
January 12, 2020 at 05:09
Jesus prophesied that "the poor you will always have with you". That may have been more of an indictment than a prophecy, but it seems to have come tr...
January 07, 2020 at 07:06
It does matter because lie-based policy involves a lot of screwing with one's mind, and everybody else's. "let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, n...
January 07, 2020 at 02:10
People in the USA are particularly susceptible to 'self evident' fallacies. I disagree for two reasons: #1, no country anywhere on the planet is incon...
January 07, 2020 at 02:06
Yes, and then again, no. The issue of identity and permanence vs. transience which Heraclitus raised remains, and will remain. For practical purposes,...
January 06, 2020 at 21:23
Nuclear bombs could be the end of all our problems, so it's hard to rate it. I voted for Climate Change, and would liked to have chosen overpopulation...
January 06, 2020 at 01:11