7952 pts · January 21, 2014
Neat! Thanks!
OK, then... Herman Melville? Or Charles Dickens? I'm just saying: you can find philosophy anywhere as it asks questions about human existence, morality, etc, and that comes up in fiction everywhere. But that doesn't make authors "philosophers" as they don't really work with the philosophical argument so much as exemplify the existence of a philosophical perspective. BUT I concede that it is DEFINITELY a gray area; I'm mostly trying to show why it isn't UNREASONABLE to claim that Rand isn't one.
Can you tell me about the ablution part? Do Muslims wash hands (or feet) before prayer? Or is there a more complicated ablution? Is there a prayer for the ablution part as well? (No need to answer if you don't want to; I'm just curious and can PROBABLY google it myself if you just want to tell me to f off)
Well that's true, but on the continuum between "just tells you what to think" and "establishes a theoretical justification for her views," she's more in the former camp. I would say that a philosopher must engage with philosophical ideas / argument, and I don't think she really does that. So I would say that objectivism is a philosophy in SOME sense, but Ayn Rand isn't really a philosopher any more than any other writer of fiction. E.g. Is Kurt Vonnegut a philosopher for The Sirens of Titan?
No, I think the fox news metaphor is pretty on point. She doesn't really support her arguments; it's mostly just set down in fiction as a kind of morality play. Very few philosophers take her seriously as a philosopher. That isn't to say that people don't take libertarianism seriously as a philosophy, but that Rand isn't really doing something "philosophical" except kind of telling you her moral conclusion. It's like how Fox News is journalism-LIKE but is mostly just made up bullshit.
I think the second sentence is right but the first one might be wrong. Like, the Hegelian dialectic "dance" is the process by which humans learn from past mistakes and become more free to make unconstrained choices (e.g., Greek conventional morality where you unthinkingly follow what is culturally allowed -> Socrates preaches individual morality -> New generation of thinkers and massive cultural shift). I am not sure how you square that with determinism. I could be wrong though!
I have an armchair understanding of knot theory and every time someone asks me to untie a shoelace or yarn or something that's badly knotted, I fumble with it for a while and then declare "Eh, it's homeomorphic to the unknot" and hand it back to them.
Centrists can fuck themselves. Anyone who isn't going to vote against the GOP by now can't be helped. That said, Hong would have been best, but Crowley does have some good ideas!
Adding to this, just get a raspberry pi and install pi hole yourself! Takes basically no know-how. There are great guides that take you through step-by-step. The TRICKY part isn't setting up the raspberry pi, it's learning how to configure your network! But even that isn't all that hard to do, and you can always ask for help online.
IN 2020 the presidential election margin was only like 3.5%. Dems have been performing at ~12 points over baseline in special elections. I'm not saying it's certain, but I'm not certain it's a foregone conclusion that it's over, either?
Didn't a lot of people turn out mostly to argue with him? He kind of survived on rage-baiting sensible people, and I think he was killed while making flippant remarks in response to someone pointing out how dumb he was. I'm just saying that the crowd may not have been all MAGA.
#41 did you know its name is actually Clippit and people just collectively decided its name is "Clippy"?
Did you even read the article in the last 5 minutes, bro? Here's just one quote: "“The idea that WikiLeaks was acting as an unwitting agent of the Russian government has never been plausible,” said former U.S. intelligence analyst Ned Price... “We have to remember the people behind the operation are not naifs—technical or otherwise,” Price said of WikiLeaks. “This outfit knew exactly what it was doing and who was behind its ill-begotten goods.”
I mean, the man described Hillary Clinton as a "demon" and had literally nothing to say about Donald Trump. Anyone who actually thinks Hillary Clinton is worse than Donald Trump is brainwashed, stupid, or up to something. Do I have any great love of Hillary? Absolutely not. But he was very clearly acting on behalf of republican / Russian interests and against Dem interests, and his motivations were pretty clear.
Were you politically aware in 2016? I ask because it seems like this was hard to miss. Assange pretty clearly aided Russian state actors' 2016 election interference campaign. Among other things. https://politifact.com/article/2019/mar/18/wikileaks-russias-useful-idiot-its-agent-influence/
Fine, but fuck Julian Assange. He's a right-wing stooge, a Russian asset, and almost certainly a rapist, and he was REALLY instrumental in helping Trump get elected in 2016.
I know what it means now, but in context OP's post does this mean someone who has stairs in their house?
You might even say that it will 23-skidoo
What the hell does this even mean?
Look man, I hate Israel as much as the next guy, but as a jewish person, this feels like antisemitism. The point of anti-zionism is that "israel" is not equal to "judaism," and here you are posting a picture where Trump is dressed like an orthodox jew. There are better ways to make this point without trying to conflate symbols of judaism with symbols of hate.
Great comments all around. Thanks!
So this is the mind game I play: is it better to shop local and spend the money OR to shop online (for cheap) and donate the difference to a good cause? I almost always try to opt for the former, since it seems intuitively better, but is it?What got me there: I think people with Teslas that have "I bought this before he went crazy" stickers should have to get QR code stickers that take you to a website with (a) the license plate number and (b) the causes they've donated to to make up for it.
Yeah I like that; it's kind of the difference between moral responsibility and moral blame. You always have a moral responsibility to do right, but you don't necessarily receive blame if you have to make unethical choices when no reasonable ethical option was provided to you. And I would express that broadly, in the sense that if someone has to drive an hour out of their way to buy ethical goods they can't afford, that probably isn't a "real option".
To elaborate a bit more, my CONCERN is that saying "there's no ethical consumption" gives people permission (in some sense) to not make moral choices in terms of their consumption when they have no choice but to consume. E.g., "I might as well buy a tesla as anything else because if I buy a Tesla or a Volvo doesn't matter" or "I might as well get stuff from Amazon because ALL consumption is unethical so buying from a local store isn't better."
I've wondered about this a lot recently. I think it's not so black and white as that. For example, I live in a capitalist society, and so it's hard for me to get food for my family WITHOUT purchasing it. But it's very intuitive that it's better to buy from my local organic co-op (that pays its workers living wages and supports my community) than to buy from Walmart. So although all rely on capitalist systems in some ways, there are still moral choices to be made.
Not really relevant, but does the paradox of intolerance advocate for STATE censorship of intolerance? Or is it more about, like, ethos? I ask because I think Nozick was probably right that if you give those levers of power to the government you can more easily fall into fascism if the wrong person gets elected (e.g., Trump claiming that DEI is "intolerant" and deserves censorship).
Put another way, literally 100% of everyone I know hates him. There have been Jewish conservatives in the past (Joe Lieberman comes to mind) but they had principles. I strongly suspect that anyone in the Trump admin who calls themselves Jewish is using it as cover. I'm not saying Jews can't also be hateful - certainly anyone can - but to directly curry the favor of white supremacists and Nazis just proves it for me.
As a Jewish person, I know that there are a lot of people who are not religiously Jewish but consider themselves "culturally Jewish" (which is a complicated topic because it's kind of an ethnoreligion). However, I suspect that for Miller, calling himself Jewish is just a useful facade, and that he really doesn't have any connection to Judaism, either cultural or religious. It's the "porosity" of the Jewish ethoreligious reality that makes it hard to claim he's NOT Jewish.
This; Democrats have historically worked on fundamentals (strong job market, better regulation on monopolies so that small businesses can compete, worker protections so you get sustainable growth), while Republicans have tended to gut those and just pump up the stock market until the economy overheats, leading to a crash. But for a brief, shining moment, shareholder value was really maximized.
Trump and Netanyahu don't just make me feel unsafe in the sense that I think the wrong person is at the wheel. They are the actual reason I am statistically much less safe than I was before. It's not JUST that I disagree with their politics, it's that they are enabling and stoking the flames of antisemitism, probably because both of them stand to gain from antisemitism.
Neat! Thanks!
OK, then... Herman Melville? Or Charles Dickens? I'm just saying: you can find philosophy anywhere as it asks questions about human existence, morality, etc, and that comes up in fiction everywhere. But that doesn't make authors "philosophers" as they don't really work with the philosophical argument so much as exemplify the existence of a philosophical perspective. BUT I concede that it is DEFINITELY a gray area; I'm mostly trying to show why it isn't UNREASONABLE to claim that Rand isn't one.
Can you tell me about the ablution part? Do Muslims wash hands (or feet) before prayer? Or is there a more complicated ablution? Is there a prayer for the ablution part as well? (No need to answer if you don't want to; I'm just curious and can PROBABLY google it myself if you just want to tell me to f off)
Well that's true, but on the continuum between "just tells you what to think" and "establishes a theoretical justification for her views," she's more in the former camp. I would say that a philosopher must engage with philosophical ideas / argument, and I don't think she really does that. So I would say that objectivism is a philosophy in SOME sense, but Ayn Rand isn't really a philosopher any more than any other writer of fiction. E.g. Is Kurt Vonnegut a philosopher for The Sirens of Titan?
No, I think the fox news metaphor is pretty on point. She doesn't really support her arguments; it's mostly just set down in fiction as a kind of morality play. Very few philosophers take her seriously as a philosopher. That isn't to say that people don't take libertarianism seriously as a philosophy, but that Rand isn't really doing something "philosophical" except kind of telling you her moral conclusion. It's like how Fox News is journalism-LIKE but is mostly just made up bullshit.
I think the second sentence is right but the first one might be wrong. Like, the Hegelian dialectic "dance" is the process by which humans learn from past mistakes and become more free to make unconstrained choices (e.g., Greek conventional morality where you unthinkingly follow what is culturally allowed -> Socrates preaches individual morality -> New generation of thinkers and massive cultural shift). I am not sure how you square that with determinism. I could be wrong though!
I have an armchair understanding of knot theory and every time someone asks me to untie a shoelace or yarn or something that's badly knotted, I fumble with it for a while and then declare "Eh, it's homeomorphic to the unknot" and hand it back to them.
Centrists can fuck themselves. Anyone who isn't going to vote against the GOP by now can't be helped. That said, Hong would have been best, but Crowley does have some good ideas!
Adding to this, just get a raspberry pi and install pi hole yourself! Takes basically no know-how. There are great guides that take you through step-by-step. The TRICKY part isn't setting up the raspberry pi, it's learning how to configure your network! But even that isn't all that hard to do, and you can always ask for help online.
IN 2020 the presidential election margin was only like 3.5%. Dems have been performing at ~12 points over baseline in special elections. I'm not saying it's certain, but I'm not certain it's a foregone conclusion that it's over, either?
Didn't a lot of people turn out mostly to argue with him? He kind of survived on rage-baiting sensible people, and I think he was killed while making flippant remarks in response to someone pointing out how dumb he was. I'm just saying that the crowd may not have been all MAGA.
#41 did you know its name is actually Clippit and people just collectively decided its name is "Clippy"?
Did you even read the article in the last 5 minutes, bro? Here's just one quote: "“The idea that WikiLeaks was acting as an unwitting agent of the Russian government has never been plausible,” said former U.S. intelligence analyst Ned Price... “We have to remember the people behind the operation are not naifs—technical or otherwise,” Price said of WikiLeaks. “This outfit knew exactly what it was doing and who was behind its ill-begotten goods.”
I mean, the man described Hillary Clinton as a "demon" and had literally nothing to say about Donald Trump. Anyone who actually thinks Hillary Clinton is worse than Donald Trump is brainwashed, stupid, or up to something. Do I have any great love of Hillary? Absolutely not. But he was very clearly acting on behalf of republican / Russian interests and against Dem interests, and his motivations were pretty clear.
Were you politically aware in 2016? I ask because it seems like this was hard to miss. Assange pretty clearly aided Russian state actors' 2016 election interference campaign. Among other things. https://politifact.com/article/2019/mar/18/wikileaks-russias-useful-idiot-its-agent-influence/
Fine, but fuck Julian Assange. He's a right-wing stooge, a Russian asset, and almost certainly a rapist, and he was REALLY instrumental in helping Trump get elected in 2016.
I know what it means now, but in context OP's post does this mean someone who has stairs in their house?
You might even say that it will 23-skidoo
What the hell does this even mean?
Look man, I hate Israel as much as the next guy, but as a jewish person, this feels like antisemitism. The point of anti-zionism is that "israel" is not equal to "judaism," and here you are posting a picture where Trump is dressed like an orthodox jew. There are better ways to make this point without trying to conflate symbols of judaism with symbols of hate.
Great comments all around. Thanks!
So this is the mind game I play: is it better to shop local and spend the money OR to shop online (for cheap) and donate the difference to a good cause? I almost always try to opt for the former, since it seems intuitively better, but is it?
What got me there: I think people with Teslas that have "I bought this before he went crazy" stickers should have to get QR code stickers that take you to a website with (a) the license plate number and (b) the causes they've donated to to make up for it.
Yeah I like that; it's kind of the difference between moral responsibility and moral blame. You always have a moral responsibility to do right, but you don't necessarily receive blame if you have to make unethical choices when no reasonable ethical option was provided to you. And I would express that broadly, in the sense that if someone has to drive an hour out of their way to buy ethical goods they can't afford, that probably isn't a "real option".
To elaborate a bit more, my CONCERN is that saying "there's no ethical consumption" gives people permission (in some sense) to not make moral choices in terms of their consumption when they have no choice but to consume. E.g., "I might as well buy a tesla as anything else because if I buy a Tesla or a Volvo doesn't matter" or "I might as well get stuff from Amazon because ALL consumption is unethical so buying from a local store isn't better."
I've wondered about this a lot recently. I think it's not so black and white as that. For example, I live in a capitalist society, and so it's hard for me to get food for my family WITHOUT purchasing it. But it's very intuitive that it's better to buy from my local organic co-op (that pays its workers living wages and supports my community) than to buy from Walmart. So although all rely on capitalist systems in some ways, there are still moral choices to be made.
Not really relevant, but does the paradox of intolerance advocate for STATE censorship of intolerance? Or is it more about, like, ethos? I ask because I think Nozick was probably right that if you give those levers of power to the government you can more easily fall into fascism if the wrong person gets elected (e.g., Trump claiming that DEI is "intolerant" and deserves censorship).
Put another way, literally 100% of everyone I know hates him. There have been Jewish conservatives in the past (Joe Lieberman comes to mind) but they had principles. I strongly suspect that anyone in the Trump admin who calls themselves Jewish is using it as cover. I'm not saying Jews can't also be hateful - certainly anyone can - but to directly curry the favor of white supremacists and Nazis just proves it for me.
As a Jewish person, I know that there are a lot of people who are not religiously Jewish but consider themselves "culturally Jewish" (which is a complicated topic because it's kind of an ethnoreligion). However, I suspect that for Miller, calling himself Jewish is just a useful facade, and that he really doesn't have any connection to Judaism, either cultural or religious. It's the "porosity" of the Jewish ethoreligious reality that makes it hard to claim he's NOT Jewish.
This; Democrats have historically worked on fundamentals (strong job market, better regulation on monopolies so that small businesses can compete, worker protections so you get sustainable growth), while Republicans have tended to gut those and just pump up the stock market until the economy overheats, leading to a crash. But for a brief, shining moment, shareholder value was really maximized.
Trump and Netanyahu don't just make me feel unsafe in the sense that I think the wrong person is at the wheel. They are the actual reason I am statistically much less safe than I was before. It's not JUST that I disagree with their politics, it's that they are enabling and stoking the flames of antisemitism, probably because both of them stand to gain from antisemitism.