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baker

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Posting from a phone -more like trying to post from a phone - adds a whole new layer of frustration. I think I'll have to quit the forum altogether.
January 10, 2024 at 05:46
Do you really believe this or is it just rhetoric?
January 09, 2024 at 23:18
How do you tell which is which? And how do you distinguish between who a person is and who you think said person is? "Closely"? I think it's quite obv...
January 09, 2024 at 22:56
Thank you for formulating this so eloquently!
January 09, 2024 at 22:43
What do you mean by "appearance"? And what by "who they are"?
January 07, 2024 at 22:25
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Into_the_Jaws_of_Death_23-0455M_edit.jpg They've given their lives for what?
January 07, 2024 at 22:17
Bear in mind that within Buddhism, this view that you sketch out above is criticized. In short, by doing certain "Buddhist practices" while being deta...
January 07, 2024 at 22:09
The effects of comfort and standard of living are not to be underestimated. They can make people what some older cultures would consider "shallow" and...
January 07, 2024 at 21:58
That's not good enough. Do you really think you can convince a bunch of authoritarians with this kind of liberal relativism??
January 07, 2024 at 19:39
The problem is that you (plural) don't know whom you're up against and you don't even care to find out what it would take to win against them. This "p...
January 07, 2024 at 19:37
This is pretty much a description of a Buddhist monk (albeit an incomplete description). In a traditional Buddhist society, yes, actually. From a worl...
January 07, 2024 at 19:34
It's not possible to defeat authoritarians with kumbayah. And you _are_ up against authoritarians.
January 07, 2024 at 19:16
The problem is much broader: in that the issue is framed as a matter of "offending people or hurting their feelings", rather than as a matter of moral...
January 07, 2024 at 19:14
You know it when you see it. It's just hard to put it into exact, systematic, interpersonally verifiable concepts.
January 07, 2024 at 18:56
No, they "need" education on the authority and validity of psychology. If his actions "undermined confidence in the system" then there wasn't any wort...
January 07, 2024 at 18:32
But what would such a state of mind even be like? If we had satisfactorily resolved all our questions about first causes and unmoved movers, would we ...
January 07, 2024 at 18:29
Would a reasonable person go on criticizing Trump the way so many of his critics do, on and on and on? This is from the film "The Ides of March" (2011...
January 07, 2024 at 18:22
Then what is the answer?
January 03, 2024 at 21:00
In: Bannings  — view comment
^Sorry, posting from the phone, it doesn't let me edit posts.
January 02, 2024 at 15:08
In: Bannings  — view comment
I sometimes wonder whether this is actually the point of those "discussions". To verbally and vicariously extend and participate in the war that is be...
January 02, 2024 at 15:07
In: Bannings  — view comment
... in polite society.
January 02, 2024 at 14:56
In: Bannings  — view comment
Will you give up acting like a lawyer at a philosophy forum? Not the threads/topics themselves do this, but the adversarial approach to interaction wi...
January 02, 2024 at 14:55
With Nietzsche, I can never tell what is merely rhetoric and what is it that he really means. Perhaps it was his intention to make a point of this dic...
January 01, 2024 at 20:27
Thank you for this reference. Eco's list of 14 features of ur-fascism seems rather general. But I agree, it confirms my intuitive suspicion that there...
January 01, 2024 at 19:47
More than this: people are typically not democratic to begin with. They like democracy insofar it means that the political option they favor can win (...
January 01, 2024 at 19:26
On the contrary, his, let's call that "specific business practices" are possibly what many people can relate to the most, because they themselves use ...
January 01, 2024 at 19:15
From what I understood, the theory of informal logical fallacies seems to be a rather novel development, and that in the past, what are now considered...
January 01, 2024 at 18:41
Lol. The self-importance!
January 01, 2024 at 18:33
This has got to be a Western phenomenon, though, because in Eastern philosophy, the distribution seems to be more even. There, some desirable, positiv...
January 01, 2024 at 18:30
It seems to me that overall, Nietzsche (and Rand etc.) are trying to do something similar as Machiavelli did with The Prince, except that unlike Machi...
January 01, 2024 at 15:36
This is obviously not true on the face of it, as evidenced by many broken people who have survived a serious physical injury or disease, or a socio-ec...
January 01, 2024 at 15:01
From the introduction to a Hare Krishna book: There's a pattern for dismissing some potential readers, and it can be found all over the places and gen...
January 01, 2024 at 14:48
I just want to know what John Galt and co. eat and who is cleaning their toilets. In other words, Rand always struck me as a plebeian attempt to reima...
January 01, 2024 at 14:33
How can someone still rightfully be called "strong" if they can be overcome by germs, entrapments, etc.?
January 01, 2024 at 10:32
You first said: I don't understand. How is morality "a trick of the weak to constrain the strong"? Where's the trickery? Even when it is in reference ...
January 01, 2024 at 10:31
Things like this are often said, but I need something more to become convinced of this. From what I've seen of Trumpistas and the like, they aren't "b...
December 27, 2023 at 20:58
Let's just hope it doesn't take (much of) the rest of the world with it.
December 27, 2023 at 20:43
What many people don't seem to realize is that this, too, is democracy. The problem isn't Trump, isn't Orban, it's the very phenomenon of democracy it...
December 27, 2023 at 20:29
O sancta simplicitas!
December 27, 2023 at 19:59
Thus, ego-friendly. With a vague approach like yours, you can always feel good about yourself and always feel that you have prevented or relieved more...
December 27, 2023 at 19:42
Are you saying this because you actually believe this, or are you saying it merely for rhetorical purposes?
December 27, 2023 at 19:41
It's vital to the topic at hand. (Waiting for @"Joshs" to chime in.) You said: If you want to "prevent or relieve" _more_ "suffering than you cause", ...
December 27, 2023 at 19:33
Actually, I heard about the need for hatred from you for the first time. I was quite taken aback. But some things started to make sense. Is it even po...
December 27, 2023 at 19:17
We don't dump them because in order to be able to dump them safely, without adverse consequences for ourselves, other people would have to dump them a...
December 27, 2023 at 19:09
I have been faced with similar situations when I approached some religions/spiritualities. But I wasn't actually sure that something I enjoyed was wro...
December 27, 2023 at 19:04
If only it would be clear what "moral" means, in any particular instance. Hating your enemies (the persons), like the Jews do? Stoning infidels, like ...
December 27, 2023 at 18:52
Insanity. Insanity. It seems to me that the implicit assumption in all this is that people don't know, aren't sure about what is moral and what isn't....
December 27, 2023 at 17:10
While you believe in a god who kills babies en masse.
December 27, 2023 at 16:50
So you argue in favor of physicalism?
December 27, 2023 at 16:47
It seems the OP and several other posters here take for granted that the meaning of hate/harm (as well as goodness, evil, etc.) _should_ be transparen...
December 27, 2023 at 16:46