BC

At times I have felt some sort of 'existential fear' about not existing--though not recently. How we think about life, death, life after death, nothin...

Start with a definition: What is dance? Some exercise routines look like solitary dance, and some dance is very vigorous exercise. If one is coaxed or...

Of course I have. Probably regretted such things and worse myself (though I didn't throw any cats off a roof, burning tails or not). But these are pet...

"to turn people into objects to be possessed as one would possesses any other inanimate object"... I wonder how common the "pleasure in power over" ac...

Which rights are you thinking of? Those listed in the Bill of Rights, or those listed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (passed by UN in...

No, I don't think all human beings suffer from death anxiety, but many do. People who believe in evil spirits, hell, the devil, and so on have reason ...

Go ahead and run it through a shredder. It isn't going to last forever anyway, everybody knows what it looks like, there are billions of photos of the...

I don't approve of factory farming practices which subject animals to unnecessary stress, pain, or discomfort. Crowding is a corporate strategy, not a...

Have you made a first hand comparison of a cow being inseminated artificially with a cow being inseminated by a bull? Given that the insemination tech...

Education should at least not drive students crazier than they already are.

Show me an example of where "psychiatry" says "there is nothing wrong with the constraints that society makes you endure". Psychiatrists live in the s...

Frankfurt's On Bullshit looks more promising than Aaron James' Assholes: A Theory, and perhaps less certain than Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of...

Thank you. I am honored.

First, it's not "bullsh*t"; it's "bullshit". If you wish to use a vulgarity, then use it boldly. "bullsh*t" is bullshit. "Bullshit" means "stupid or u...

If their raison d'être is staying in power, what difference does the public good make to them? The public be damned! (That phrase is usually put in th...

What can a political party accomplish if it has no power? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Power is the ability to wield force (not just crude physical force). P...

"The Present Situation" doesn't have to meet the definition of fascism in order for serious trouble to be at hand. Fascism isn't the only threat we mi...

If you locate your mouse over the topic on the landing page, you should see the category appear.

Even if our present situation doesn't meet the definition of fascism, we still have capitalism to contend with; we still have powerful states protecti...

A different sperm and egg would have different results, but even the same sperm and egg would have differing results. If you could run time backward, ...

Thank you, but winning a debate on philosophical grounds and 50¢ won't get me a cup of coffee.

Except that it isn't. What would be normal is a much, much smaller and slower rise in CO2, and a consequent smaller and slower rise in global warming....

SO, there was a minor shooting at a shopping center in Mississippi. Some idiots were arguing over something pointless, one of them pulled a gun, shots...

I'll just spray postmodern deconstructionism on anyone who points a gun at me, and they'll start coming apart at the seams.

I've been checking the news every hour or so this day of Thanksgiving to find out if there has been another hideous gun attack somewhere -- shopping m...

Forget about absolute certainty and perfect truth -- whatever that is. What we can obtain is a reasonable amount of uncertainty. Two concepts: "reason...

You seem to be confident enough that you feel anxious. So... it would appear that some things are not in doubt after all. This is a game you are playi...

Yes, definitely squared. But the unsustainable model is the foundation of the world economy. That doesn't mean that change is impossible, it means tha...

First of all, you definitely will die whether the climate warms up or not. You, along with everybody else. Nobody gets out of here alive. Second, If y...

See, jamalrob could have flown into a rage at your stupid obstinate insistence on putting each cognitive distortion in a separate thread. He realized ...

I would imagine that EVERYONE, at one time or another, has engaged in emotional reasoning. How could it be otherwise, given that our emotions are so c...

Well, how did Roosevelt introduce fascism to the use? True, he served from 1932 to 1945 -- but that was then constitutionally kosher. Two terms were i...

Because beautiful is better than hideous, the same way good food is better than bad food, and a good musician is better than a bad musician.

Friction... I generally talk to my siblings on the phone; in person visits are very inconvenient (I don't drive, they live in rural Minnesota) and the...

As a system, capitalism is remorseless. Of course, it is a system not a person; but actual persons who are not inconvenienced by excessive feelings of...

I've generally been a late adopter, usually a decade late and a dollar short, whether it was kitchen microwaves or smart phones. I grew up in a very s...

Why are there no sherpas? Many of us need a sherpa or two to get through the day. Somebody to carry the groceries home; somebody to help us off the bu...

Good to raise this issue. It may be a bit too soon to know. In the early 1970s, some people in colleges were groping toward a style of education which...

Probably a swamp. Hot, humid, treacherous, snaky, leechy, malarial, pathless.

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Charles Peguy a not too prominent Frenchman said that. For Thanksgiving toasts I will not go for ...

I recognize that parsing the sources of organization and methods is terribly useful for understanding historical developments. Unfortunately, I don't ...

"Fascism" is not ancient; Mussolini invented it in 1915. It isn't a coherent political philosophy, really. It's best defined by its style of operating...

It isn't clear to me what you see as problematic in the 1958 NDEA. What was wrong with the government loaning (or granting) money to students so that ...

Kill daylight savings time. Or at least end it sooner and start it later.

This could be the last great cartoon...https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/1MsZC6neEscJdIAiP-BG8qaXYbWBWpbHEFpjgA36U3OgYGz4KZeYyMIVms07BpsWlsyApYn...

Cinema Soundtracks certainly count as serious music. Elmer Bernstein (Leonard's cousin from the Bronx) did some great soundtracks for westerns; Erich ...

I would definitely include some Mozart and Bach and Handel. Is Gottschalk too obscure? How about Arvo Pärt--Spiegel I'm Spiegel is quite accessible to...

Isaiah 9:2 (KJV) says, "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath...

Amen.

I don't think deer are a big factor in the California forest. A saw a figure of about 500,000 deer population in northern California. Minnesota's hunt...