baker

Apart from the relatively small group of people who have found themselves forced by external circumstances not to have children, antinatalist views ar...

In Early Buddhism, such an insight is a starting point for the quest for the end of suffering.

And, of course, what if you're an orphan?

And your parents can pass the buck to their parents, and they to theirs, and so on, back to Adam and Eve, or the Primordial Soup. Where exactly does t...

If you want to be prudent, you need to prepare for everything, including natural catastrophes and the collapse of economy. For this, billions are need...

It's fashionable, and it's a way to leverage power. A few years back, when some young-ish actress (I won't mention her name for fear of revenge) who o...

Pshaw! HR don't concern themselves with that. Why do people fear HR? Because HR has power. So it has always been, so it will always be.

Of course there is such a reason: safety. Since time immemorial, people have strived to amass wealth in an effort to guarantee as much safety for them...

Blondie's third term.

The relevance is that they don't lose sleep over such things, while philosophers do. Now, who's better off? Then how is lack of critical thinking a pr...

Stand up for yourself -- and get hit on the head, with nobody to blame but yourself.

And my question still stands:

I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't see how any argument could change the way both proactive and defensive pronatalists view procreation favora...

My point is that the theists themselves are not troubled by their circular thinking. They can go about their days just fine, and they pretty much rule...

What do you mean? IRL, power imbalances are the norm in most interactions. One cannot simply pretend they don't exist.

Yay!

Why? It's not like they feel troubled by those circularities. And invite their wrath?! Justify them beating me up (metaphorically or literally)?!

I think the real issue is the plebeification of royalty (!). But this is complex and unpalatable to put into words, so it's easier to focus on some ra...

I don't know whether you need to give a justification or not. I don't know whether there is someone to whom you need to justify your moral principles,...

Well, religious people generally don't seem to have any problems with circularity. So this one is on us, the outsiders.

I don't know. Like I said, I can't imagine what that is like, to live in a world where one isn't demanded to justify one's moral principles to others....

Because it doesn't imply that all women are like this, but that some women are like this.

I think this awareness and ambivalence are inherently human. Not sure what you mean here. Do you envy them their "animalistic", thoughtless, going-thr...

There's a simple cure for this naivete: Enroll in a college course to earn a degree in art.

Per Clarke's Third Law, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. IOW, if it seems like magic (or the "supernatural"), it'...

As far as literature goes (and this has implications for other forms of art): Studying literary theory can go a long way in both demistifying art and ...

But for Plato, that doesn't matter, does it? Humanses are ephemeral, but it's the ideas that are eternal, and this is all that matters.

Do you speak German? I don't know any English sources directly for this.

Absolutely! Since there is such moral diversity in the world, in order to navigate said diversity, one might acutely feel the need to justify one's se...

To which theists tend to respond along the lines that one ought to do what God commands not out of fear of punishment, but out of love of God -- that ...

For example, when I was a vegetarian, a Christian made clear to me that I was wrong to be a vegetarian, and he said, and this is from memory, but almo...

I asked them. They aren't open to discussion.

Then how can they possibly believe in God? Metaphorically?

What if God placed that interest in the hearts of men to begin with?

That's taking for granted the theory of evolution. I'm not going to do that, I need something more robust, something that isn't at the whim of empiric...

It's no so indiscriminate, though. An upper class pronatalist surely isn't glad if a lower class woman gives birth. And vice versa. White pronatalists...

Note that replying "I don't want to say anything" and similar metacommunicative utterances indicate that the power relationship between the communicat...

There are no true Scotsmen!

It wouldn't. One has to make one's silence heard, in order to distinguish one's silence from one's absence. Replying "no comment" signals that you act...

Take, for example, Christians and their professed belief in the Ten Commandments, or their professed belief in "love thy neighbor". How would you go a...

Where??? Where I live, it's quite unacceptable, it earns one a stigma. Eh? Who are those "many"? Pfft. Looks matter. A lot.

Which would make sense in a monoculture, but not in most modern culturally and racially diverse societies.

If one feels attracted to an elf or a mermaid, is one racist ...

I don't see how this works in practice. I don't see how one could see through a person's strategizing and cunning.

Ah, putting hopes in the "final solution". I live in a traditionally Catholic country. Catholics officially abhor suicide. And yet traditionally, peop...

This is interesting! Can you say more about it?

People who grew up with the PWE probably also have a deeply ingrained contempt for idleness and failure. So I don't think they are likely to engage in...

Well, it suffices to be a barren young married woman or an aging spinster, and one is thrown into the matter at the deep end. The Early Buddhists woul...

But how can we know what a person truly believes? If we ask them point blank, how can we be sure they won't lie or otherwise give a deceptive answer? ...

Fiktionalitätskompetenz (roughly translated as "fictionality competence") is what one needs in order to interact with art wisely.