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  1. Today
  2. MisterSwig
    Thanks. Just got through that first article. "Lived experience" is a term I've heard before but didn't give much thought. Makes me wonder what an "unlived experience" could be?
  3. Yesterday
  4. merjet
    There is another pretty good article on New Discourses. No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why. Much of it is about the philosophical mindset of a typical "Woke" person. It includes the Woke view of racism, oppression, and truth.
  5.    MisterSwig reacted to a post in a topic: Welcome To Reality - new show on YouTube
  6. dream_weaver
    While mowing the lawn, listening to Scott Brick read John Galt's speech, thinking about the police officers that are on the front lines of the executive fight for justice. When the officer is examined in the aftermath, the snap judgements have seemingly with "this shouldn't have happened", as the criteria by which the snap judgement then spreads. In a business, employees are hired and fired on the basis of the objectives of the employer. In politics, the bureaucracy is created to accomplish the political objective. The political objective is influence by the individuals elected to bring about the campaign promises used to get the politician elected. In the United States, most police forces have an elected individual guiding the policies of the department, including the objectives used as the basis of hiring and firing officers. When individuals state that police officers need to be controlled, what is the underlying premise at play? That individuals that choose to become police officers are not capable of learning and performing the actions befitting the post? The call to control the actions of another is reminiscent of another area of control being exercised, when mayors, elected to oversee state operations, faced with a pandemic, deem that their constituents, so wise to select them as their surrogate parent, treat their 'children' as needing to be told what to do, or controlled. (In Galt's Speech, the fear of death, illustrated by the implementation of orders to trying to prevent deaths at any cost, is not the motivation fueled by a love of life.) When a police force reaches the point where a mob can rise up against them and be told by their management not to engage, less the mob become more unruly than they are, when does the question of the underlying cause of the flow of events reveal the role of philosophy behind the scenes on the stage before us to the wider audience? Joseph de Maistre is credited with stating "Every nation gets the government it deserves." Those who embrace objectivity, get the fruits borne by the successful implementation of such activity.
  7. أمال الجميلة أمال الجميلة joined the community
  8. Boydstun
    Hi John, What kind of engineering do you do?
  9. Boydstun
    Hi Jonathan, people here would be delighted see your summaries and notes. Plenty of knowledgable people here to answer questions on Rand's works, for free. --Stephen
  10. Boydstun

    Ballet

    Boydstun replied to Boydstun's topic in Aesthetics

    CARAVAGGIO — act II (6 minute pax de deux) dancers — Vladimir Malakhov and Leonard Jakovina choreographer — Mauro Bigonzetti music — Bruno Moretti and Claudio Monteverdi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kywtasof2Go&list=PLC287eAgIud-97Szrcu-8e5tlTfArk6de&index=2
  11. Jonathan Weissberg
    Hey John, I'm Sydney CBD based currently.
  12. Jonathan Weissberg
    Hi, I'm joining because I'm started to read through lots of Ayn Rand's works. My interest is primarily in the use of philosophy for self-improvement, i.e., reducing mental conflicts, reducing inefficient thinking, increasing intellect, ability to formulate plans and principles for good decision making at work, relationships and in life. I'm starting to see that if I'm competent philosophically, i.e., have abstract frames for viewing life and the things that happen to me day-to-day, I'm more in control of who I become rather than being a product of my environment. I am starting to see philosophy as a lever on myself and the world. I have many, many questions & will be posting summaries or notes from some of the works I'm reading. If there's anyone here who is deeply familiar with Rand's work and has studied it extensively, I'd be interested in finding someone I could speak to and ask my questions about what I'm reading on a paid basis- so if you know anyone just point them to my username or posts.
  13. Jonathan Weissberg Jonathan Weissberg joined the community
  14. Last week
  15. Gus Van Horn blog
    Four Things 1. It has been a long season in more ways than one for this Arsenal fan, but the FA Cup win has me looking forward to the club's first full season under new coach Mikel Arteta. Rico of the Highbury House blog puts it well: Mikel Arteta is the first man to captain and coach Arsenal to winning the FA Cup. (Image by Ronnie Macdonald, via Wikimedia, license.) When Mikel Arteta took over at Arsenal, there were doubters. Certainly from the media because Arsenal were in such a bad place, the job was too big for a novice. A reasoned and understandable opinion at the time I think, although odd if compared to the fine appointment Frank Lampard was considered to be by the same people just a few months previous. His time managing Derby was obviously deemed to be more beneficial than working alongside Pep Guardiola for three years. Like most Arsenal fans I suspect, I was just relieved Unai Emery had gone. Then, only time would tell if Mikel Arteta was the right appointment. Not six weeks, not six months but a sustained period of time. Time during which continued improvement is key.As much as I respected Arteta as a player and agreed he would probably go on become a good coach, I was among the doubters, because I thought he needed more time. I have good reason to hope I was wrong: Soon after Arteta took the helm, I started liking what I saw during games, even when results did not go Arsenal's way. And soon, there were also good results to match, starting with his first big win, over Manchester United during the season. This continued after the long break in play, and the Gunners would later defeat runaway league champions Liverpool and, en route to the cup win, Manchester City and Chelsea. I don't remember the last time Arsenal defeated all of those clubs in one season, but all this happened after Arteta took charge. 2. My wife and I are slowly working our way through the science fiction series, The Expanse, in which humanity has colonized the solar system. By coincidence, I ran into a hand-drawn map of all "the Solar System's solid surfaces stitched together" around the time we started watching. Earth and Venus put together appear to make up over half. 3. The world's largest museum exhibition to date of Bob Ross paintings is ongoing at a small museum in British Columbia:The DePaul Art Museum in Chicago was the first gallery to make contact, says BRI [Bob Ross, Inc.]; in April 2019, four paintings appeared there in the exhibition New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival. Later that year, the Franklin Park Arts Centre (Purcellville, Va.) opened Happy Accidents, a show devoted to Ross's TV paintings. When the PAG [Penticton Art Gallery] came calling, BRI says they were fielding similar requests from galleries around the world. Three paintings are now on view at ArkDes in Sweden (they're part of a salute to ASMR, the oddly satisfying genre of which Ross is hailed as the permed patron saint). Another solo exhibition is scheduled to open at the Museum MORE in the Netherlands this November. And a brand new attraction, a shrine to the man himself, will open this October in Muncie, Ind., long-time home of The Joy of Painting. [links and emphasis in original]ASMR? Some of the susceptible call it "brain tingles." More on that here. 4. For any Harry Potter fans with unusual file storage requirements, I have an app for you: horcrux-ui will let you "split a file into horcruxes." I see no need for that myself at present, but then again, I didn't for magic wormhole, either, and I now use it from time to time. -- CAV Link to Original
  16. merjet
    Coronavirus – clinical trials #3 Coronavirus – clinical trials #4
  17. Boydstun

    My Verses

    Boydstun replied to Boydstun's topic in Member Writing

    (Click on photo.)
  18. Eiuol
    Clarification: you shouldn't make inferences of what someone means if they don't even establish a causal or logical connection between statements. This can be fine in discussion, because then you ask for clarification. Except clarification in this case is apparently just throwing out more words.
  19. dream_weaver
    Leaked video from a body cam(s?) provides a bit more insight into the context surrounding the event. Daily Mail article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8576371/Police-bodycam-footage-shows-moment-moment-arrest-George-Floyd-time.html Video only: https://videos.dailymail.co.uk/video/mol/2020/07/30/4049160131241488932/480x270_MP4_4049160131241488932.mp4
  20. Eiuol
    No, he wasn't talking about shutting down economic relations. He said: "I shut it down; I closed down the greatest economy ever in history. I closed it down. Now we're opening it." I would be perfectly fine if he said he shut down international economic relations with China, but that's not what he said. An interesting strategy he has is to talk about related topics such that we would want to infer what he probably meant in order to make sense of why he would bring up to topics right next to each other. When we get down to the words themselves, there is no causal relationship between his claims. Psychologically this is effective because people on average try to establish a sensible causal story connecting a series of statements. But if the speaker doesn't actually use causal connectors between facts, then you can't make up the connection for them.
  21. merjet
    You guys talked about the philosophical motivations of the protesters. This article is about that. It is written by one of the authors of the soon-to-be-released book Critical Theories.
  22.    Boydstun reacted to a post in a topic: Ballet
  23. MisterSwig

    Ballet

    MisterSwig replied to Boydstun's topic in Aesthetics

    They used music from Light Rain's 1978 album Dream Dancer.
  24. MisterSwig
    Trump has his contradictions, but here there are two issues to distinguish. He was talking about banning travel from China and Europe to protect America from further infection. So he partially shut down international economic relations, which is probably what he was referring to. Then there is the issue of shutting down domestic economic relations, which he doesn't even have much control over. That's been handled by local and state officials.
  25. Boydstun

    Ballet

    Boydstun replied to Boydstun's topic in Aesthetics

    William, I don't know of a connection to a song. The "Light Rain" ballet premiered in New York in 1981. Here are the other acts of this short ballet. (There is a minute of black screen in the middle, which is just a divide to the next section of it.) Lively joy. https://vimeo.com/79831863
  26. William Hobba
    Everybody has studied Euclidian Geometry at school. That is reason laid bare. I will not go deeper into it - you can do that yourself and make up your own mind if you agree with what Ayn Rand says or not. I have my own views, very close to Ayn Rand's - but not quite the same - I call it a modelling perspective. But geometry contains the essence of it. What you figure out for yourself, using of course discussions, readings etc as pert of the process, you always understand better. Thanks Bill
  27. whYNOT
    If anyone is under any illusion that the Democrats have been so sick for power, they will go to any lengths to gain and keep it, the rule-of-mob riots and their soft handling - more like aiding and abetting - of by some governors and mayors should disabuse you. Now a Dem Senator has refused to condemn Antifa (citing "their freedom of speech" - right, like invited speakers on many campuses had their freedom upheld by Leftists...) at a hearing. And the msm spews the deceit of "peaceful protests". Why should the Left condemn Antifa and BLM? These are their attack dogs, brute force available on tap to cow opponents into submission. Although they will find the leashes are around their necks, if they ever want to curb Antifa. Put the shoe on the other foot, and if it were white supremacists and the Aryan Brotherhood rampaging, violently occupying and frightening people in cities for some pretext of an injustice suffered to one of their own. You can bet that they'd be instantly condemned and stopped - by Republicans and conservatives. Then of course the white racists would draw international vilification instead of obeisance. Thankfully they've been quiet. Here's the 'wakky-ness on both sides' which Yaron sees and finds moral equivalence in. For moral character and value in the country and respect for the Constitution, not even close.
  28.    MisterSwig reacted to a post in a topic: Ballet
  29. MisterSwig

    Ballet

    MisterSwig replied to Boydstun's topic in Aesthetics

    I didn't get it with "Light Rain" as the title. Then I saw that that is the name of the song's composer. The song name "The Sword Dance" helps clarify the dance routine. Ballet is great. I also like the women's gymnastics floor routines. But I have to turn down the volume because the commentators ruin the experience. Then I can't hear the music, and it makes me want to strangle the people in charge.
  30. MisterSwig
    We take a look at Portland and consider the situation from both sides of the conflict.
  31. Eiuol
    I find it interesting that when I hear people say things like Trump is only doing it to the media, they don't realize that he is doing it to the people as well. WhyNot doesn't recognize how he is been manipulated, even if you point it out. Just to remind some people, Trump has gotten his supporters to either believe that he didn't want to close down the economy in order to maintain economic health, and also to believe that he did want to close down the economy in order to save lives. The brilliant thing about Trump is that he manages to hold two positions at once, and people get distracted when they only argue about one of those positions at a time.
  32. Gus Van Horn blog
    Some time in the past week, I saw someone, on Twitter, I think, express the hope that one day, it would be just as socially unacceptable for someone to express sympathy for communism as it now is regarding Nazism. Coincidentally, I also ran across an answer to a question stemming from Andrew Jackson's culpability for the Trail of Tears. The reply reads in part: It is also worth asking yourself why some statues are safer than others these days. (Image by Steve Harvey, via Unsplash, license.) The following are [professor R.J.] Rummel's 12 most murderous regimes (from his article in the Encyclopedia of Genocide, 1999): (1) USSR, 62 million deaths, 1917-'87; (2) People's Republic of China, 35 million, 1949-'87; (3) Germany, 21 million, 1933-'45; (4) nationalist China, 10 million, 1928-'49; (5) Japan, 6 million, 1936-'45; (6) prerevolutionary Chinese communists ("Mao Soviets"), 3.5 million, 1923-'49; (7) Cambodia, 2 million, 1975-'79; (8) Turkey (Armenian genocide), 1.9 million, 1909-'18; (9) Vietnam, 1.7 million, 1945-'87; (10) Poland, 1.6 million, 1945-'48; (11) Pakistan, 1.5 million, 1958-'87; (12) Yugoslavia, 1.1 million, 1944-'87. Three additional "suspected megamurderers," as Rummel puts it, are North Korea, 1.7 million deaths, 1948-'87; Mexico, 1.4 million, 1900-'20; and czarist Russia, 1.1 million, 1900-'17. Rummel goes on to identify the top nine killers: (1) Joseph Stalin, 43 million dead, 1929-'53; (2) Mao Tse-tung, 38 million, 1923-'76; (3) Adolf Hitler, 21 million, 1933-'45; (4) Chiang Kai-shek, 10 million, 1921-'48; (5) Vladimir Lenin, 4 million, 1917-'24; (6) Tojo Hideki (Japan), 4 million, 1941-'45; (7) Pol Pot, 2.4 million, 1968-'87; (8) Yahya Khan (Pakistan), 1.5 million, 1971; (9) Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito (Yugoslavia), 1.2 million, 1941-'80.It is worth noting that these numbers do not include deaths from war -- which such regimes foment -- or that are due to their policies, such as Communist China's 20 million famine deaths from 1959 to 1962. Nazi Germany ranks third in the number of "democides" -- behind two communist regimes. To be clear, judging an ideology or its adherents is not as simple as counting the bodies of its victims, although it is highly relevant that communism had killed an average of a million people a year by the time of the widely-celebrated (!) centenary of the establishment of the Soviet Union. It would be ridiculous, for example, to rank communism as "more evil" than Nazism based on body count or proportion of the population killed: At this point, it is clear that both result in governments exterminating human beings. Furthermore, the deaths, alone, leave room for people to excuse the ideologies for not having been implemented faithfully or, much worse, praise them for being moral, but impractical. Nazism excused the state robbing, injuring, and killing certain groups of people on the basis of their ancestry. Communism does so on the basis of the fact that some people own things that others do not. Theft, assault, and murder are wrong, no matter what the motive. Such crimes are not somehow purified by having been committed by the state in the name of "the people." Nor are they when motivated by an altruistic motive. Speaking of altruism, Ayn Rand once said:There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one "package-deal": (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance. Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value -- and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes. ("Introduction", The Virtue of Selfishness, p. viii.) [bold added]Until the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," is recognized as immoral, we will continue to see people evading and excusing the evil of communism, which is on a par with that of Nazism. Nazism was wrong, not because it harmed members of ethnic groups, but because it harmed individual human beings. The same is true of communism, despite its posturing to the effect that harming one individual somehow benefits another. -- CAVLink to Original
  33. Boydstun

    Ballet

    Boydstun replied to Boydstun's topic in Aesthetics

    LIGHT RAIN — Pax de Deux (8.5 min.) dancers — Lucia Lacarra and Marlon Dino choreographer — Gerald Arpino music — Douglas Adams and Russ Gauthier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8wMMMgHcfk
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