Deleteduserrc

Yes, people vote based on memes and always have. It's always a circus. But the point is you have to court people, dumb as they are, as susceptible to ...

Well that was surely the intended effect of his speech - to demonstrate, to others, how people will interpret 'german idealism' as Nazism (which incid...

Let's imagine though that the soul is preserved in a sort of spiritual 'storehouse' of the type Wayfarer described. And that it reappears on the world...

I guess the problem with that is that it's not leadership. But also no one really cares, I guess. The german idealism thing is funny but also that dud...

I'm not sure what "assimilation takes time" has to do with my post but I guess that's true. As to SJWs, you seem especially upset with this lot. You p...

Yeah, I guess the silver lining is that that maybe that at least gives us a bit of defense against fascism? Hitler felt deeply about certain things, b...

If you knowingly provide a place for racists, xenophobes, anti-semites and sexists to loudly proclaim their views to a large audience, and express no ...

I understand what you're saying, but the point of such thought experiments is not to consider extraordinary events in-and-of-themselves, but rather to...

@"John" has drawn a distinction between the transcendental and the empirical (the ontological and the ontic, the conditions of experience and experien...

I think this is an interesting direction to go on. Can you expand on what you mean by memory itself though?

I'd like to cut this rational justification/ emotional response knot and simply say : Nearly all of us would be scared if condemned to torture & we'd ...

gotta crash, but I'll respond tomorrow to all. Thanks for all the interest in this thread!

That's just it though! I'm trying to make the aporia obvious and explicit, no matter what your spiritual background. (I agree that there's no way to a...

@"dukkha" I'm not ignoring you - you just have a much longer post - I'm mounting a response.

But you weren't experiencing pain or death (beyond the pain of anxious apprehension) waiting. in the hallway, to be caned. So why be frightened? What ...

Ok, but at this point you've already settled on an answer - an unanalyzable spiritual connection. And that's fine, but there's nowhere left to go from...

But they're not the same person, are they? How could the present child be identical to the child in the future? Has literally nothing changed in the i...

I already explicitly anticipated and addressed that response though, in the OP. Imagine it's someone you love who wasn't, for whatever reason, 'comple...

That's true. But for the people for whom it's not obvious, it's usually not obvious for religious/mythological reasons. & I'm not saying they're wrong...

As I said to John, I'm not concerned, for the purposes of this thread, with answers (ancient or otherwise) to the first question. In saying that, I'm ...

I understand the confusion about the first question. It's hard to phrase it right. It applies to heaven/hell and classic reincarnation, but I actually...

I have a hunch that you've read more Foucault than I have, but I'm familiar with the general contours of his thought. I think it's fair to say that ma...

Fair enough. I'll revise my understanding of your statement to be something like "I have had some personal experiences of leftists talking about Islam...

Listen, you made the claim that leftists make no attempt to understand the Qu'aran, Mohammad's place in history etc. and that it's entirely Queer theo...

@"TheWillowOfDarkness" You do realize that to be consistent, you have to also extend your radical moral largesse to the KKK and neo-nazis, right? Unle...

Both candidates "mentioned the word." (Probably because the question they were responding to was literally something like: What's your stance on the i...

Well anecdote (which means here an actual course listing at an actual top tier college) beats bare assertion which is all you've offered but I assume ...

I'll leave you with this though, the course offerings for Islamic Studies at Georgetown University: - ISLAMIC STUDIES ARAB-351-352 Introduction to Ara...

Listen, if you want to pretend that this should have been charitably understood as this: " I was making a comparison of the amount and level of critic...

Nah, you were being pretty dumb.

It strikes me that there's one very obvious reason why anglo-european countries would have significantly deeper and richer scholarship re: christianit...

Whatever one thinks about the left's relationship with Islam, this: is a dumb thing to say. There are tons of books on these subjects. I took a middle...

That's an angle I hadn't considered, and it does make sense. @"Thorongil" Is it possible he was trolling?

I disagree - his analysis clearly exceeds the bounds of a neutral analysis of motivation.

Ok, gotcha. It does seem complicated though. What allowed someone so constantly on guard and critical to let his guard down, to think so wishfully? I ...

Yes, 'spiritual theocrats' are oppressed by liberal democracies if, by 'oppressed,' we mean 'not allowed to be theocrats.' That's true.

Are you saying that Foucault wouldn't accept the Iranian revolution while other, less canny thinkers would? Or that Foucault qua analyst of power woul...

I already explained this. I explained it in the post you're referencing: & I have already addressed the confusion over "good reason" in my long break-...

Well I think we all agree the remarks of Thorongil's professor are pretty dumb, and, if rendered accurately in the anecdote, suggest a pretty facile r...

survive the encounter - i know it has a very specific meaning here - but survive the encounter sounds about right.

Yes, I think it comes down to an individual stance. And I think being an adult is probably finding a way to balance the two tendencies and knowing whi...

Another way to look at this is that societies aren't sustainable and inevitably collapse themselves. I guess this is my view. And I guess I'm not a fi...

I agree with you, which is why I think it's too easy to reject leftism flat out. But I also think many of TGW's points are spot-on.

By which I mean: it's utopian to dream of a world without utopian thinkers. Dreaming is baked into being, for better or for worse.

But there's one really big problem with this view. The conservative is wise enough to confront the problems that arise as they are and then determine ...

What I mean was that it was a wake-up-call about how narcissistic and useless white self-flagellation is for understanding and interacting with non-wh...

Great post. Sincerely, though. I disagree with much of it, but you've argued your case persuasively. I kinda feel bad fisking it. Isn't this almost ta...

This I agree with entirely, buut.... I don't agree with this. I think both conservatives and liberals can take up the comic-book vision, and I think b...

Ok, I think we're mostly on the same page. I guess all I'm saying I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a large social (religious/ethical/mythologi...

First, the idea that racial attitudes can be neatly separated from media virtual reality doesn't make sense to me. Second, I was introduced to Obama b...