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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/21/17 in all areas

  1. I'll denounce white supremacy until it goes away but what do I after that? The left is not going to believe me and they will call me a racist because I'm not one of them.
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  2. Interesting. It's as if one points out an example of anti-white bias, ergo joining with neo-Nazi campaign becomes okay. Earlier they said if the campaign was "Air is good" and it turned out to be a Clinton group behind the scenes, they would react with horror and work to expose the propaganda. I think there's explanations for this. Wittgenstein said that when otherwise sane and rational people say crazy, obviously false things, it's because they are in the grip of a picture. Thomas Kuhn wrote about an experiment that was performed by some psychologists investigating cognitive biases, where the subjects were given brief, controlled exposure to certain playing cards. Most of the cards were normal, but some had been altered, such as a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. The cards were turned over and the subjects identified them as normal, red or back of whatever. Without awareness of the anomaly, it was fitted into a conceptual category prepared by prior experience. They were not prepared to recognize the aberration because it diverged from a lifetime of prepared conception. Only after repeated exposure did some subjects notice that there was something wrong with it. A few subjects never did. In other words, a mind accustomed to working with certain frameworks will have trouble recognizing deviations from that framework. If one expects "the left" to be the major threatening force to their political identity, anti white, anti market, and "the (alt)right" answer as pro white, pro freedom, pro borders that is what one will see. Even if contrary evidence is introduced, it will be dismissed as nonessential. That's why they don't care when I introduce a hypothetical benign Clinton slogan. Clinton is "left," enemy, "white" is what we are, defend, good. It doesn't register as hypocrisy because they are in the grip of a picture. The left is the threat. The neo-Nazis are rightwing and they're not a threat, they're just misguided goofballs of the right. And we are "on the right" because we oppose the left. The fact that neo-Nazis started this campaign can be dismissed then. It literally becomes cognitively invisible. I think the picture is one where they see a left faction and a right faction, and they see themselves as part of this right faction. They have not dismissed individualism, in their minds, they just can't see the contradictions with it. Those become invisible, we must fight "the left." Doesn't matter if the slogan is neo-Nazi, we expect the left to be wrong and anti white and the right to oppose them. They see what they expect, just like the card experiment. After all, millions of Americans are in the grip of the same picture, for example when they vote and support Republicans because they are "pro free market" or when they vote Democrat because they are "pro little guy." It doesn't matter when Reps and Dems both support corporate statism, that becomes an invisible background. Reps use free market rhetoric and Dems use humanitarian rhetoric, and so that's what people expect to see. Im just trying to think of how we can both see the same thing and come up with two different viewpoints. There is also the concept of "entryism," where a smaller political movement attempts to capture a larger one and seize its resources or divert its message. Left wing radicals have been using entryism successfully, and now white nationalist groups are targeting libertarians. They will inevitably succeed on the margins, as many libertarians and Objectivists too lack rational defense of their views, and see themselves as a part of the same "right" or "anti left" faction, rather than as primarily individualists. As long as you're opposing those pesky "SJWs," they literally blank out the white nationalist connection, it just doesn't even register.
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  3. I'd suggest that we should blame Plato, not Aristotle. Consider this: Aristotle was forgotten for ages, and the middle-ages were their slow-moving self not because of him but in spite of him. On could argue that the discover of Aristotle was a catalysts to bring the middle ages into the Renaissance. In which case, science was retarded by his absence and helped by the rediscovery of Aristotle. Meanwhile, Plato's influence on Christianity was strong, and his rationalism jived well with spiritualism. There's a good case to make for Plato being a foundational influence on epistemology of the the middle-ages. So, with the discovery of Aristotle, but by people mired in Platonic epistemology, it is no wonder they treated Aristotle as if his text were scripture. Even if Aristotle was wrong, and even if he had not yet made the leap to the ideas made explicit by Bacon, we still see nuggets of the scientific method within his approach. IF people who re-discovered Aristotle had not approached him with their rationalist/spiritualist epistemology, they would have questioned his approach. Indeed, this is what Galileo did. If the church was not so mired in Platonism, perhaps a Galileo like figure would have arisen earlier, without needing to be scared of recriminations: someone far earlier, who did not need the protection of the Medici that helped Galileo be brave. So, no: Aristotle did not retard science. That was the doing of Plato and Aristotle. Blame St. Paul.
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  4. In the battle for the mind, how does "groupthink" factor in? Each individual mind needs to do the work independently to arrive at a valid conclusion. The exchange of ideas can help to reduce the amount of time to discover valid conclusions, or conversely it can hinder reaching a valid conclusion. In order to streamline the process, those committed to such a task need establish the veracity of their idea(s) prior bringing them to the table. When a valid conclusion is served properly, it can then be consumed on the basis of its own merits.
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  5. Disturbed—The Sound Of Silence
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  6. "It's OK to be white" is what flashes through my mind when halfwit protesters scream that all white people are somehow guilty of anything and it gets ongoing attention from media organizations. It's not something I would think otherwise. And no, "the protesters" are not "black people." It's any screaming idiot.
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