Merely agreeing on the problem can be problematic. Witness the debate over anthropogenic global warming, which probably pretty cleanly, though not per...
China, and perhaps large swaths of the Middle East likely have no vigorous public political discourse and debate because the state or attendant monarc...
True, however, the situation for one country doesn't necessarily smoothly translate to another. For one thing, the Commerce Clause of the US Constitut...
It's times like this that I wish Sarah Palin were back running the show in Alaska. It was only her steely resolve, diplomatic finesse, and deep knowle...
No, there really isn't, actually. As your own Judicial Watch article indicates, most of the abnormally high registration is due to people having moved...
I'm all for cleaning up voter rolls, but this has little to do with voter fraud per se. These outdated, bloated rolls are mostly due to people having ...
We more or less did it to ourselves, but the majority of voters did not vote for Trump, as Clinton won the popular vote. Recall how Trump was fulminat...
Yea, Palin sucks, but nobody's perfect. It doesn't mean that he was so debased, crass, and opportunistic that one ought not to consider him a "real Am...
Actually, I've seen Lysenko discussed in a number of sources. Carl Sagan, arguably one of the most prominent advocates for scientific reason in the la...
Even if this somewhat sanitized picture of the relationship between Catholicism and evolution is true, it does not tell the whole story. For one thing...
Yes, and the theory of evolution and religion have lived happily ever after since then... :smirk: (BTW, saying that Lamarck "discovered evolution," is...
Does it always, though? Science does sometimes seem to concern itself with particular events, the conditions for which may not have been replicated at...
I'm not so sure about that. You should hear some of the Republican politicians grovel before Rush Limbaugh, for instance. Having right-wing media turn...
It's interesting/amusing/depressing how Trump supporters' proclamations about Trump's wall have changed. When Trump talked about building a wall encom...
I agree. It would be a peculiar situation, to say the least, if a logical truth could be put to an empirical test (as Aristotelian physics can be). Oh...
In thinking about this topic recently, an ill-formed thought has been niggling in the back of my mind that there is something logically suspect about ...
Not something I ever claimed. But the mere fact that we're discussing the wrongness of Aristotelian physics means that very smart people can sometimes...
I didn't "command" anything, and I never called you stupid. However, your repeatedly mistaking disagreement for lack of understanding perhaps indicate...
You are only insistently repeating things you've already said, while passing them off as indubitable conclusions. I get that you are very convinced of...
I largely agree with your treatment of this question, Sophisticat. However, the above assumption (i.e. that the falling bodies behave as if they're se...
Quite right. Theology is intellectual tennis without a net. When it comes to "my religion vs. yours," contradictions for thee, but not for me. Torture...
This is painting with a very broad brush. Doctors' professional lives and compensation vary greatly depending upon where they work, which field of med...
I've never understood how Aristotelian physics (specifically, the claim that heavier bodies fall faster than light ones) is supposedly disproven a pri...
There is some precedent for ex-generals becoming President, and pretty good ones at that. I can in fact think of 3 off the top of my head (viz. Washin...
Even if I accepted the logical force of Kant's argument, it would have little effect on my practical reasoning. I would still lie, and accept that I w...
Then perhaps your thread should have been titled "Why Science (and theology, and testimony, and mathematics, and philosophy, and personal reflection, ...
Which methods of obtaining knowledge, if any, would you say do bring certainty? That science doesn't bring certainty is true, but only trivially so, i...
The first line of your post was "One problem with your theory is proving that mental states exist at all," which I took to be your questioning the exi...
You make a valid point that some preliminary research on motivation and decision-making does indicate that our brain makes at least some decisions pri...
If anyone wishes to demonstrate that "mental phenomena have physical effects," one needn't appeal to such arcana as experiments purporting to demonstr...
Not to just dump a link without discussion, but this blog post by philosopher Alexander Pruss may be interesting to some of you, and is somewhat a pro...
What does it even mean to "simulate" subjective, first-person experience? As Descartes pointed out so long ago, it doesn't even seem possible that I b...
I think it's more accurate in this case to say that merely because a person is smart in their areas of expertise, that doesn't imply that they're smar...
I was responding to point #2 in your above post wherein you implored Democrats to provide an alternative which doesn't rely on tribalism/identity poli...
And yet she still won more votes than Trump. Guess the electorate really didn't like him, then. And did I read you right that Democrats are leaning to...
Those are his legislative accomplishments and judicial appointments, but he's done more via Executive Order, including ordering the relocation of the ...
Like virtually every other philosophical thesis, no observation really can count for or against idealism, and so we're left with endless a priori spec...
It's always a bizarre non-sequitur to me when people conflate a legal or constitutional right to free speech with the "right" to not have said speech ...
Don't worry: the next time the NAACP and I meet to update our agreement wherein I am empowered to be the white guy who speaks for black people the wor...
No, I'm not black, but rest assured that black people (f/k/a "colored people" or "negroes") have empowered me to speak blackly on their behalf on all ...
Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you implored the opposition to be more "ruthless" and to abandon decorum. If your definition of "decorum" is merely s...
I agree. The thing is, people don't seem to mind when it benefits them, American institutions be damned. Perhaps were the roles reversed, Democrats wo...
If the only way to salvage American democracy is to abandon it, then the fight is already lost, and further struggle will avail us nothing. We may as ...
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