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aleph_1

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Everything posted by aleph_1

  1. Ignorant ad hominem seems to rule the day. I take issue with your point 3. You say "Some of these effects can include benefits to white people today from injustices done to persons of color in the past." So, am I to infer that all white people benefit from past racial discrimination? I call BS. In what way do I benefit from my ancestors deserting from the army of northern Virginia to join the Pennsylvanian army during the civil war and then losing all they had after the war because there was no going back to Virginia? How do I benefit from my ancestors' being discriminated against during WWI because they spoke German? I should count myself fortunate because all white people benefit today because some blacks suffered in the past. I grew up dirt poor and all I have I earned, but I should count myself fortunate because all white people benefit from past racial discrimination. Pray tell, how precisely did I benefit because I'm having a hard time reconciling the penury of my past with your uniform assertion.
  2. The problem, 2046, is not an unwillingness on the part of whites to accept responsibility for historical wrong. White guilt is too prominent. The problem is having racism literally spat in your face unjustly. I will have no more of this original sin. When I wiped that spit off of my face I was made clean and whole, baptized into blamelessness.
  3. Don't talk to me about racism! (lol) I think an anecdote is in order. I am white but married to a non-white and have mixed race children. Once, I took a rental application from a black man but could not verify his employment. I was going to return his application fee and had arranged to take another application at about the same time. When the black man saw the white woman I was taking an application from (to whom I did not end up renting), he spat in my face, said "You just don't want to rent to a black man" (I was already renting to more that one black family) assaulted me, robbed me, and left. It's pretty hard for me to accept charges of racism uncritically.
  4. Well put, Plasmatic. I would just like to put additional stress on the idea that racism is an attempt to claim value by group association. It is an immediate corollary that racists view those whom they claim are different to have less value or even disvalue. In this way, racism derives from collectivism, not individualism. Leftists view everything through the polarizing lens of groups. Leftist racialist theories are merely a defense mechanism. It will be very difficult to persuade such a one, their whole world-view being at stake.
  5. It is my experience that police ignore petty crimes by the poor since there is no hope of collecting the fines, while focusing on enforcing fines against the middle class. What is more, I have witnessed an hispanic cop cover for an illegal alien at my expense. (The cop was hispanic. The cop let the car that hit mine be towed and then left the scene without taking a report from me, leaving no evidence of an accident.) Cops targeting poor people in black communities seems implausible to me without more evidence.
  6. Whoa! Hold on there. What is lacking here is good epistemology. We do not know the details of this case at this point. I'm not sure that even peaceful protests are justified yet, much less violence. We now know that Treyvon Martin's death (not police caused) was fully justified. Michael Brown's death was fully justified. We don't know about the current case yet. I recommend caution until good information is known. The utter lack of restraint demonstrated by our leaders shows just how poor our leaders' judgments are. Those who stoke the flames of violence by rushing to judgment should be treated with scorn. They demonstrate the effective use of poor epistemology.
  7. I don't know who invented the idea of renting but I'm pretty sure that a feudal serf couldn't rent anything. Well-established property rights are a prerequisite to rents. There may have been numerous inventions and re-inventions of rentals throughout history. What I am familiar with is the feasibility of rents. At base, it is worth owning if the costs of ownership are less than the costs of renting. "Costs" should be interpreted to include financial and nonfinancial costs. If a rental makes you money but consumes your life then it may not be worth it. As an example, I bought a 6-plex in Sacramento, CA that was in reasonably good shape and fully rented. When I bought it the rents just covered the mortgage. As units became available, my wife and I would fix them up and turn them around at a higher rent. By the time we sold the 6-plex (one year), the rents had increased by 50% and we were making a tidy profit month-to-month. However, the property value had doubled so we sold (2001). In addition, we had some "problem tenants" that made my wife miserable. On a 3-plex we owned, in the course of three years the rents tripled (after renovations) and so did the property value. We could have kept the 3-plex and received a few thousand dollars per month in rent or sell it and get several hundred thousand dollars cash in hand. At the time (2002) I reasoned that if someone bought the property from me and tried to do what I was doing (rent the units), and if the new owner put 20% down and had a large loan, then the new owners would lose money month-to-month. This indicated to me that property values had risen too much too fast and this it was a good time to sell. What I didn't know is how irrationally markets can behave when goosed by the fed. The Greenspan bubble was burst by Bernanke in 2006. The housing market teetered over in 2007 and crashed in 2008. I was completely out of California real estate in 2005. It just didn't make sense to me. All of my US real estate is now in Texas. Concerning peer-to-peer rentals, the same analysis applies. Ownership is preferable if the rents cover the financial and personal costs. Renting may be the way to go if the cost of renting is less than the cost of ownership. For example, in my experience boats and RV's are better rented than owned. The same is often true of vacation property. The historical problem with renting many assets is the cost of advertising relative to the rents received. This is becoming mitigated by the internet. One must still consider the losses due to theft, damage, wear and tear, and the amount of one's life spent in the endeavor. Dealing with people can also be problematic. Going to court costs you more than small claims fees and payment to execute writs. It is also a lot of stress. I know. And you can't get blood from a turnip. Good luck!
  8. This, I think, is the crux of the problem. It is also the source of a great many math student errors (including my own). It is my observation that people learn most everything intuitively and functionally but not formally. This explains why very few people know what anything is. People can use a table but cannot define the term adequately, for example. Most of the time, a formal understanding is necessary in order to avoid functional errors. The common aversion to formal understandings explains the blizzard of errors we see among men.
  9. Grand Minnow has answered this definitively. What I wish s/he would opine on is whether s/he knows of any logical systems for which P->~P is a contradiction. I do not know of any.
  10. In response to Harrison D's remarks about infinity being inferred from unboundedness, I would like to make a fine distinction. One might think of "unboundedness" as being the very definition of "infinity", but one must be careful then not to use "infinity" as a noun. One may also be careful not to collect things like natural numbers into a "set" in order to keep "infinity" from becomming a noun, or from possessing the properties of other sets that are closer to how perceivable concepts are organized. "Infinity" is not perceivable. In the extended real numbers infinity is added as a noun and certain arithmetic operations are defined for it. Perhaps this should be thought of as a convenient fiction that is not directly traceable to perception. People use "infinity" in very flexible ways that often have no particular meaning. Therefore, one must be careful about the use of this term.
  11. My god! How easily we forget. There are easily obtainable images of Zykon-B on the web, as well as images of Nazi stockpiles of the poison. That the "final solution" was ordered by Hitler and carried out by the SS is an historical fact supported by many documents. Murder is often refered to euphemistically in these documents so don't expect them to say, "We intend to kill so and so many Jews." Rather, expect terms like "special actions" and "treated accordingly". The camps themselves testify to the meaning. The euphemisms testify to the fact that these same Nazis' knew that what they were doing was wrong. We have the testimony of thousands of conteporary witnesses who tell us of the gas chambers and crematoria. There is no excusing the genocide. What is more, there is no excusing the genocide deniers such as David Irving. When I first read your post I thought, "I hope no one replies to this post since it doesn't deserve a reply." Perhaps the lessons of history need to be reviewed lest they be forgotten.
  12. I have enjoyed reading your other comments but this one struck me as not fully formed. Spacetime's time vectorfield cannot be extended earlier than the big bang and so time has no meaning "before" the big bang. Time is part of spacetime so asking what happened before spacetime existed does not make sense. What is more, the big bang is forever hidden behind an impenetrable thermal wall and can never be observed. We can only theorize about what happened in the early moments of the universe and extrapolate based on what can presently be observed. This is why it is not possible to have a scientific, absolute idea about what happened in the early moments of the universe.
  13. To even have taken pictures of this woman with the intent of posting them so that you and others can laugh at her is sick. Deriving happiness and a sense of superiority over others due to their corpulent stature is to let others determine your value. Physical humor is the lowest form, and when used to shame someone is despicable.
  14. "'A sale,' said Rearden slowly, 'requires the seller's consent.'" -Atlas Shrugged, p. 366
  15. But we already pay property taxes. Where I live, property taxes are 2.65%. Perhaps Georgism might have made sense when taxes were 3% but not today when the government consumes 20%+ of gdp. Let's slash government to 3% of gdp and then we'll talk.
  16. I don't understand how I am supposed to live without privately owned land. What is the alternative? Are we supposed to share all land in common? The agricutural revolution would never have happened. Without privately owned land wouldn't we all be nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes reduced to a neolithic subsistence?
  17. This video also assumes that words like "singularity" have no definite meaning. Note that 180 degrees is equal to pi radians. In attempting to sum the digits of pi, the partial sums diverge to infinity. Does this imply a divine origin or message in numbers? Or, does this imply that most people have no definite idea of what anything means and so can be fooled into extrapolating meaningless nonsense from their abstractions?
  18. I guess the Republicans in Indiana are very powerful if they can overturn the Civil Rights acts of the 1960's that were instituted by the federal government. I didn't know that Indiana had that sort of clout. So Nicky, do you live by permission? Are all rights by permission? Do people need permission to sell or not sell? I pity you. The way that "Christians" was used above was as a monolithic actor. Such a body does not exist. Its use was equivalent to how socialists use Society as a monolithic actor. It too does not exist. What is more, I am not supporting any group. Rather, I am advocating for the view that rights are inalienable. We do not need permission to use our own judgment. If you wish to change someone's mind, you should not do it at the barrel of a gun but by persuasion. I am an advocate of persuasion while you, through mere ignorance I am sure, are the advocate of guns. I support the free exercise of one's conscience. Freedom means the freedom to do things that are not in one's own best interests, are disagreeable, or unpopular. I support this freedom while you advocate coercion. You advocate sticking your nose into my business while I say, "Get the hell out of my way!"
  19. The title of this thread is "The right to discriminate for religious reasons". One should have the right to discriminate for any reason. Businesses that close their doors to some lose business to those willing to cast a broader net. The market punishes discrimination. The problem is not a law granting permission to discriminate. The problem is that permission had to be granted since rights are not given by permission.
  20. Referring to "Christians as some monolithic group is the same sort of floating abstraction as "society". Saying Christians do this or that is equivalent to saying society does this or that and is absurd. Your hatred of "Christians", which is itself a form of otherism, permits you to behave in a unprincipled way concerning related issues. What is more, any law that creates protected classes, such as the civil rights laws of the 60's, violates the principle of Equal Protection. We should be protected from laws that do injustice. People should do as they please. The parts of the civil rights laws that strike down unjust laws are good. The rest is a violation of individual rights. In damning laws that allow people to act according to their own conscience and in advocating the status quo, you seem to be unprincipled in this area of thought.
  21. This is just a ridiculous overgeneralization that is beneath you SNerd. What is more, laws restricting free-association, including discrimination, are a violation of rights. The marketplace can more than compensate for any perceived wrong.
  22. Hi NeuEv, You are likely to spend the better part of a decade thinking through issues. Concerning Rands characters, you need not worry about reaching some ideal. Just live for yourself and find the greatest expression of your own virtues. Her characters represent logical extremes of moral choices. What dark areas would you like to discuss?
  23. This author makes some interresting points about how war changes nations. Among the ideas presented are the Hobbsian idea that governments that hold absolute power are preferred to the human natural state which is brutal and short. The alternative is the Kantian idea that democratic governments are better because they are less likely to go to war. Another historian said that war makes nations and nations make war. In this sense, perhaps the disease of war is a product of the nation state. The last part of the book concerns the way the US and other governments spy on their own citizens and keep secret much of the operations of the state. This reverses the 4th ammendment of the US, part of the bill of rights, which was based on the premise that government should know little about the people but the people should know about how their governments are run. After all, knowledge is power. The book points out that J Edgar Hoover regularly spied on people and used the information against them to accomplish his own political ends. What the IRS scandal and the Snowden revelations tell us is that Hoover was piker. This book is a good read.
  24. Deductive reasoning is ALWAYS axiomatic reasoning and remains as good as the axioms. Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle's deductive reasoning is defective in that it can lead to pure rationalism--good logic applied to concepts disconnected from reality. Galileo's marble experiments overthrew Aristotle's presumption of the sufficiency of rationalism and demonstrated the necessity of reduction to perception, I.e., induction. What is the geometry of the universe? Einstein transformed geometry from a purely deductive science into an inductive one. (Riemann, some 60 years before Einstein, hypothesised that physical laws have a geometric basis but was unable to find the right formulation.) While we will never know the extrinsic geometry of the universe because we cannot remove ourselves from it in order to make the necessary measurements, we can determine some of the intrinsic geometry of the universe by reduction to perception. Geometric theories of gravitation predict that time runs more rapidly away from the surface of the earth. Mass dilates time. This was observed by Gravity Probe A. Accounting for this time dilation is necessary for GPS systems for without doing so they will lose accuracy eventually amounting to errors measured in kilometers. Geometric theories of gravity also predict that gyroscopes in orbit around the earth will drift in small but measurable amounts compared to purely Euclidean theories. This drift was measured by Gravity Probe B--one of the most important gravitational experiments in the last decade. Curvature of space-time caused by masses is necessary to explain Mercury's perihelion advance. It is necessary for explaining the shift in spectral lines called gravitational red shift. It is necessary for explaining the bending of light on the limb of the sun. This theory is indispensable for explaining much of what we observe both terrestrially and astronomically. Since geometry has been reduced to an inductive science, it does indeed require some humility on our part. We can only make assertions concerning those geometries that we know of and that are constrained by observation. In the class of possible geometries that we know of, Einstein's original theory remains viable. Euclid's does not. Since we have not reduced the possible viable geometries to one, the fate of the arrows remains outside of our ability to deduce. Concerning infinity, speaking of it as though it were an entity is pure rationalism as you point out. It would be arrogant to make any assertion about the size of the universe since we cannot reduce those assertions to observations. Is it bounded or not? Until informed by experiment, both possible geometries remain viable. Humility concerning the fate of the arrows is in order. By the way, the mathematics involved in Riemannian geometry is hard. That of non-Riemannian geometries is harder. Good luck.
  25. aleph_1

    50 Shades

    I hope that the modified post leaves more grist for the mill, however meager given the subject matter.
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