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Pfhorrest

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Regarding psychosomatic effects, it's perfectly ordinary for mental states to cause physical states: me changing my attention to a closer or further o...
December 09, 2020 at 09:39
Generally, "social science" is not one thing, so it's not "a" anything. There are many social sciences. And they fit perfectly into the structure of t...
December 09, 2020 at 06:47
Inasmuch as it aims to be a descriptive science and per physicalism everything descriptively real is physical. It’s an adaptation of the Quadrivium’s ...
December 09, 2020 at 04:58
I may be wrong, but isn't the whole point of filing for bankruptcy to get off the hook for debt, and the entire purpose of the limited liability that ...
December 09, 2020 at 02:14
I was never expecting an actual coup. I was expecting a sad Trump temper tantrum while cooler heads (even among the GOP, who never followed Trump but ...
December 09, 2020 at 00:05
It was never Trump in particular stacking the Supreme Court, it was the GOP more generally, especially Mitch McConnell, who is far worse than Trump co...
December 09, 2020 at 00:00
Short version of mine (long version at the link above): Philosophy is not religion, nor sophistry, nor science, nor ethics, nor math, nor art. Philoso...
December 08, 2020 at 23:57
I never said anything about a "non-growth" economy. Rent and interest don't drive growth, they just extract wealth from those who already lack it for ...
December 08, 2020 at 23:41
No, you’re just asking questions about how things would work in a world that was like that, so I’m discussing a hypothetical world that is already lik...
December 08, 2020 at 11:19
That is exactly the choice that owners of businesses today face, and there's no difference in my hypothetical world, except that the equivalent of "bo...
December 08, 2020 at 10:03
I would invest my capital in companies besides my own, yes. I wouldn't just lend it for free out of the goodness of my heart, but I'd buy a stake in t...
December 08, 2020 at 09:19
That is already the case now, and I'm not proposing changing that. The factory will make excatly as much in profit as it does already, because nothing...
December 08, 2020 at 09:10
I repeat it because you seem to have missed the point in its entirety. Right now someone is already paying the price: the workers and consumers (who a...
December 08, 2020 at 07:15
We went over all this four days ago:
December 08, 2020 at 04:17
In today’s world, they would have to borrow it from someone else who had been saving it. In a better world, they would be the ones who had been saving...
December 08, 2020 at 04:05
Only because plans to grant them land from the plantations they had been working were scrapped, basically substituting chattel slavery for rent-and-wa...
December 08, 2020 at 02:46
You’re just begging the question if you’re implying that we do depend on rent and interest, i.e. there is no possible way to have a society without it...
December 07, 2020 at 22:02
There are already certain kinds of contracts that are not legally valid. You can’t sell yourself into slavery, for example. That is the intention. I d...
December 07, 2020 at 21:33
I agree, but that also sounds like a good description of much of the American populace as a whole. This sounds like a good explanation for the above.
December 07, 2020 at 16:51
The technical language is necessary to properly understand the nuance of the situation, but I can try to dumb it down for you a little. I'm not agains...
December 07, 2020 at 08:41
This misses the point. Even now that they're rich, I don't expect that they're statistically very different from people who aren't rich, psychological...
December 07, 2020 at 07:51
That's largely what I've been trying to say in this thread as well. My expectation is that the 1% are ordinary people as far as psychology goes. Unlik...
December 07, 2020 at 04:47
I think capitalism is the last vestiges of feudalism still clinging to the freer markets enabled by a post-agrarian economy. There has always been a s...
December 07, 2020 at 01:38
The problem here is failing to distinguish a free market from capitalism, and a command economy from socialism. Free markets have helped pull people o...
December 07, 2020 at 01:14
You earlier seemed to agree with my elaboration upon that thought: that it's growing up with wealth that shapes people's personalities, even if dumpin...
December 06, 2020 at 23:32
I think the source of this problem is the existence of gendered language to begin with. Imagine for a moment that we spoke some alternate English wher...
December 06, 2020 at 23:23
Even if it turns out that all of your "new" ideas have already been had by someone before, if it's someone who hasn't received enough attention for th...
December 06, 2020 at 21:11
Or at least phenomenalism, which I see as a feature, not a bug. Proper physicalism is phenomenalist; proper phenomenalism is physicalist. The real que...
December 06, 2020 at 20:26
It's not necessarily just giving someone a pile of cash that does this, but having a long history of wealth (especially during early developmental yea...
December 06, 2020 at 07:29
The two bits you posted look like they're suggesting two things: - one, that entrepreneurs have certain personality traits - and two, that people who ...
December 06, 2020 at 07:24
(Disclaimer for perspective first: I'm nonbinary/pangender/genderfluid/genderqueer/something I don't really care what, and don't give a crap about my ...
December 06, 2020 at 05:23
That was sort of the point of my last comment about direction of causation. I expect that rich people tend to be just like anybody else would be if th...
December 06, 2020 at 02:27
Whatever personality traits there might be in common between rich people, it’s worth bearing in mind the different potential causal relations there. D...
December 05, 2020 at 02:09
To clarify Kenosha's point, I think: If dark matter exists at all, it is necessarily a kind of matter. It still might not exist at all. Something else...
December 04, 2020 at 22:56
Regarding the new title: all valid arguments show in the conclusion nothing more than was present in the premises, which seems to be what you mean by ...
December 04, 2020 at 20:35
If one of them honestly wanted to do that, then more power to them. But I find it unlikely that someone with such immense power would voluntarily work...
December 04, 2020 at 10:17
I’m not sure if you’re suggesting Trump would unmake landlords? The guy whose main business has been being a landlord?
December 04, 2020 at 09:28
Technically it requires inaction: it needs to stop doing something it already does (enforcing certain contracts). But yeah, practically speaking it sh...
December 04, 2020 at 09:27
I agree completely. Inaccessibility of home ownership is my #1 economic concern, and the biggest root of pretty much all the other problems IMO. Or we...
December 04, 2020 at 08:36
...until another second party takes the place of the GOP, as is inevitable under our FPTP system. And that second party may very well be a progressive...
December 04, 2020 at 08:00
The collective venture that they already work for, of which they are part owners. Or in other words: themselves, with nobody else siphoning all the cr...
December 04, 2020 at 07:46
Because all of the wealth is held by someone else instead. Which is exactly the problem. Consider for a moment society as a black box, with no insight...
December 04, 2020 at 04:23
Only if someone else has all the money, not the workers. Why is all the money collected somewhere else that the workers need to borrow it from, instea...
December 04, 2020 at 01:38
If the Republican party implodes because of Trumpism, what do you all expect the resultant new status quo will be? FPTP guarantees a two-party system....
December 04, 2020 at 00:01
Thoughts both about what is real and about what is moral predate the differentiation of methodologies into religious and non-religious. In the earlies...
December 03, 2020 at 23:54
...Total Landscaping Company.
December 03, 2020 at 22:26
You take it from here, it's your thread and I don't feel like fighting your fight for you, I have more important life stuff I need to spend my time on...
December 03, 2020 at 09:29
People charging whatever they can get away with (profit motive) is fine, so long as those people are the ones actually doing the work, and not just so...
December 03, 2020 at 09:22
The alternative is supposing that somewhere out there in space or hidden away in some kind of alternate dimension you could discover the object which ...
December 03, 2020 at 07:28
In the same sense that they "exist", yes. In the sense of patterns in observable phenomena, then yes, obviously: patterns in observable phenomena are ...
December 03, 2020 at 07:24