BC

I hope he has a speedy and complete recovery! Europe's production of random nuns is extremely low, like close to zero. Same in North America. The last...

any number of communities around the world. Ukraine, China, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, Syria, Sudan, D. R. Congo, East Africa, C...

Given the way that AI is compounded, it is (just guessing) sociopathic by necessity. It doesn't have the means of "feeling" guilt, authenticity, or an...

Please stop talking about "brutally frigid weather". Spells of below-zero F temperatures (and lower wind-chill) are not abnormal in this part of the w...

How ChatGPT works is orders of magnitudes above my level of understanding. It is remarkable in its capacity to generate responses that resemble the so...

Some would say that the whole Vatican is a crate full of dicks.

Phalloi and phalli provided various divine services -- promoting fertility, but also protecting communities and marking boundaries, deterring thieves,...

Canned and dry packaged food is generally safe and wholesome way beyond it's "sell by", "best by", or "use by" date. An unopened can of beans or meat ...

Hey, calling our delusional idiocy "off-brand" is an insult! That's a good point. Bad stuff may crawl out of the swamp, but it takes time to coagulate...

Old news in these quarters. Fascism does have many definitions, but "the way it works" is less variable. If some people are operating in a fascistic m...

Around here pizza experts say, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdv-OP0iyDc

I have eaten a few good pizzas. Great food at affordable prices is hard to find in Minneapolis. How much should I spend on travel to New York City in ...

Did you submit a report on your previous pizza making party? Who attended, what was discussed, what intelligence was gained, what assignations were ma...

Wait a minute. The USSR collapsed peacefully, after which Russia went through a period of deformation, then reformation, now deformation again. Is ref...

I'm not arguing against teachers making a decent income, and I wasn't using household income, which of course increases with more than 1 earner. Depen...

I am sure some school districts pay handsomely for the services of experienced teachers, even figures well over $100,000 per year, maybe adding up to ...

There are social gains, political gains, and economic gains. Which GLBT people have gained what, when, and where varies quite a bit. To be fair, GLBT ...

Looking at the economy broadly, working class people -- including minorities and GLBT people -- have not benefitted as much as pundits suppose they ha...

It's an example, not my recommended approach. Garreau published the book in 1981; some of his identifications--like The Foundry--were already out of d...

I thought the saying was "If there is no god, everything is permitted." Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Maybe you have heard of, or read Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America. Garreau divides up the continent into 9 regions that presumably have si...

Why was slavery important enough to fight and to secede over? Money! the collective value of all slaves in the US was $4 billion in 1860. That was a s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQXVHITd1N4

Hosea's warning, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7) comes to mind. The consequences of an act may exceed pro...

I've never thought bananas foster was flambéd with rum, but it sounds like a great idea!

"Matoke" (cooked plantain of some sort) is a popular starch dish in Kenya. It's not bad. They didn't seem to eat it as often in neighboring Uganda. Wh...

I most sincerely hope we are not heading for any kind of Krystallnacht but some equivalent at some point isn't inconceivable. Krystallnacht was not a ...

Perhaps you specified in an earlier post what a proportionate retaliation would be. I don't know what it would be, but it seems like killing 23,000 pe...

I carelessly quoted terms I don't especially like. These terms are clear enough to me. That said, I don't like nouns with the "phobic" suffix. The ter...

I agree. Fascism may be more easily defined by the way fascism operates than a set of beliefs it follows. That isn't to say it has no beliefs. America...

According to a 2020 Gallop Poll, 32% of Americans say they own guns. So, 68% do not. Gun ownership is not a normal distribution across demographics. A...

It might have been Robert Paxton who suggested that fascists are as much identifiable as fascists by the way they operate as by what they believe. Thi...

Labor might well be the bitter and resentful collective Rorty posits. Sufficient economic distress could also motivate white collar, lower-level manag...

Ditto.

My starting position is pro-government (federal, state, county, municipal, township), while granting that government (and any human organization) will...

There are plants that are very sensitive to touch; touch-me-not, for instance, will unravel their seed pods at the slightest touch. Some sensitive pla...

An old joke that has aged well.

Yes, all that. Peaceful protests (with a permit if they plan on marching down a major thoroughfare) breaking up strikes -- authorized or not, and the ...

Police forces generally are constituted locally -- organized, supervised, and paid for locally. That hasn't prevented problems. Agreed, the police rar...

There is a path to subsidiarity in the 10th Amendment of the US constitution -- "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, no...

I'm an old man, but I fear that young people's futures will be dominated by ongoing catastrophic climate heating. Worse, the chance to avoid this is s...

It seems like what you are asking for is a plan for devolution. There are factors (not necessarily means that are under anyone's control) that could l...

Are incels still a thing? Seems so 2020.

I've look at Hegel several times, and quickly decided to look at something else. Granted, lots of people grant him great importance.

Maybe a Geist got into the server where TPF lives and started this rancorous (but quite interesting) exchange; or maybe the Zeitgeist itself is rancor...

That is, indeed, a problem. many people would be even more enraged if they knew more about the government. The rage would be distributed along familia...

Of course we have a large government! The United States is the 3rd largest country - by population - on the planet: 339,000,000. We are, and have been...

God. Terry Gross, of NPR's FRESH AIR program asks, "If Jesus Never Called Himself God, How Did He Become One?" Her guest, Bart Ehrman, says: "John" is...

You do seem quick to take offense, and respond to real or imagined offenses very vigorously if not always appropriately. For instance, several days ag...

It has been a long time since I took classics courses, and memory fades, but as I recollect, "pneuma" was an important concept in classical religion a...