NOTICE MEEEEEE!!!!

Interesting questions.

I was also likely more tired some nights than others, and perhaps my diet varied both in when I ate and how much I ate so I don’t understand how the mind still knew when to wake up with all of these variables. — Benj96

But if you are consciously or subconsciously aware that you are more fatigued than normal, then you could take this into account when making a time estimation.

Furthermore if we have such a precise measure of time instilled into perception then why do we have periods when “time flys” faster than we expected or drones much slower than it ought to. What rule do you think is involved in biological time keeping? — Benj96

What if time seems to pass by at the same rate, but depending on how quickly or often we are forming new memories during a given time-frame, it seems like a greater or fewer number of moments have taken place?

In an extreme case, losing memories entirely can have the effect of making people feel like they have "lost time". In situations where we are very excited/aroused, and therefore forming new memories very quickly, a short period of time might feel much longer than it really is (especially stressful events).

Regarding your body's circadian rhythms themselves (rather than your conscious experience of time), your body knows when to wake up because of a combination of cues and baselines that emerged out of your daily habits (your body learned), but also evolution itself (your body is designed for a 24 hour repeating cycle).

There are interesting French cave experiments where folks live away from time cues. Turns out that the natural biological clock runs on a slightly longer than 24 hour day. That is folks will choose to go to sleep later and later until they are sleeping during the external "day" and choosing to be awake at "night". — LuckyR

There could be a lot of reasons for this, but one benefit might be that it gives us some wiggle room if we miss sleep or have to keep getting up earlier than normal or going to bed later (like when the days get long at the summer solstice)...

You claimed that the video you posted marked the birth of the alt-right and I said it was wrong. — Judaka

You're leaving out some context and nuance from what was written. I stated that the clip marked a formal launch of the definitive alt-right, unifying its direction. It should be pretty clear that what I have been focusing on is not the decades long history of neo-nazism, but the so called "alt-right" movement that rapidly grew in the 2012-2018 era. I realize that you're vastly unfamiliar with the details of this neo-alt-right, but please understand that trivial issues like when terms first came into use does not address my observations. If you're not familiar with the (internet)cultural/ideological developments that occurred within the alt-right (and in what ways Peterson was used), on what basis are you even objecting?

You posted your comment in a thread about JP, you said it was your long take on JP and then you talked about the alt-right and how JP unwittingly led to its creation. — Judaka

Philosophers have a hard time formulating sound views about Peterson if they can't disentangle his ideas from the polemic theatre that surrounds him. I had to go through it in order to clearly explain my views on Peterson without being misunderstood (and to also implicitly comment on the views of others). Yes, he is an unwitting player in that polemic theatre (he is/was in over his head, as I have said), but I never said he led to the alt-right's creation: he was just an arbitrary milestone along the way. As I have repeatedly clarified, his cardinal error was confusing his psychiatric metaphors for political science.

You said he was completely unaware of this alt-right presence, which, he was aware and especially by 2018. — Judaka

I posted the exact moment that Peterson was forced to accept that early/proto alt-right ideologues were seriously within his orbit. He disavowed "fascism" from day one, but there was too much noise for that to matter. The video is also the exact moment he was abandoned by them. That event just so happened to function like a call to declare sides in the section of anti-SJW's that veered right; it was a catalyzing event.

You claimed he was making money off of his "notoriety" but then you don't even want to commit to saying that JP's base was largely alt-right or "proto alt-right". — Judaka

What does selling books about chaos dragons, room cleaning, and religion have to do with his followers being largely alt-right? I am saying that Peterson couldn't keep himself from shutting up, thus he persisted in making vague and easily abused political statements, many of which were legitimately malformed, so there's no reason for me to pull punches or mince words about this. Why do we need to expect Peterson to have insightful political beliefs? Can't we accept his views as having clinical psychological merit, but no necessary political merit?

Honestly, most of your first post is debunkable and it's just a matter of whether we bother to go through the whole thing. We're not even halfway through, I don't know though if I can be bothered since his reputation here can't get any worse probably. — Judaka

I spent a non-trivial amount of time digging up the exact evidence that you had previously asked for, but here we are at the rhetorical end, kneading the shit about whose hands stink the worst... I honestly felt that my long take on Peterson should help to raise the average opinion that people have of Peterson though, so I'm not sure where your objections really come from. He's not an alt-right ideologue, not an anti-semite, but he certainly did Mr. Magoo his way through an affair with them while they were rapidly growing and organizing. I think his ideas might have genuine merit for his patients, but philosophically they just don't have much going for them, and politically they're vague, average, and repetitive. Religion is a saturated topic, green-haired marxist feminists won't destroy civilization, and there might be more to life than the possibly increased chance of emotional stability that comes from leading a conservative lifestyle.

This is an article talking about "the history of the alt-right"... in 2016! Can you clarify for me whether you dispute this? — Judaka

You have repeatedly stated that you don't know about the relationship between Peterson and the alt-right, but are you at least aware that there is some sort of connection? (It's the answer to why Peterson is associated with the alt-right in the first place, while himself disavowing it).

My post chronicled the rise of the alt right as it intersected Peterson's claim and rise to fame. I thought I explained fairly clearly how once the proto alt-right elements of the SJW crowd (which was large and diverse) evolved toward ethnocentric ideology, before ultimately signalling their abandonment of Peterson.

Yes the alt-right as a term existed prior to Peterson's emergence on the scene, but he himself was an unwitting pivot point for the sudden rise of the alt-right in 2016-2017 and onward.

:lol:

The communist government urges the Antifas and BLMs to break everything, then blame the Trump supporters and expel them not only from political life, but from human society. — Banjo

When did Biden come out as a communist, and when did he urge Antifa and BLM to break everything, blame it on Trump supporters, and then exile them?

Do you realize that it sounds like you live in a stupid fantasy world of common internet low-IQ delusions?

Do you also believe in the Illuminati or the Anunaki (lizard aliens?)

It doesn't matter that you "specifically" explained your narrative, I asked for any evidence — Judaka

You asked for evidence of a claim that I didn't make. In my view, the alt-right was still coalescing, and really began to take off around the time of the video clip/Holodomor question (the boiling point). Given that they abandoned Peterson as a matter of course, I can't very well give you evidence that his base was "alt-right" before it really existed, nor did I aver anything about a "large percentage" of his base. I'm well aware that neo-nazis and white supremacists have existed for decades, including Spencer, but they were stuck far on the fringe until the alt-right got going (in recent American history).

He specifically, repeatedly and consistently said the major problem was that the law policed language by forcing people to speak in the mandated way as opposed to forbidding them from speaking in a certain way. The slew of new pronouns was not the main issue he had but what makes you think it was? Do you have any evidence to support your claim? I know I can find a lot to back up mine if I need to. — Judaka

Skip to 32:00.

You can see throughout the video how reliant Peterson is on his views as a "personality psychologist". He talks about language use from that perspective, and likes to draw distinctions between singular pronouns and "linguistic control" he says is found in dictatorships like the Soviet Union.

Here's another, skip to 25:20

From Wiki:

The series of videos drew criticism from transgender activists, faculty, and labour unions; critics accused Peterson of "helping to foster a climate for hate to thrive" and of "fundamentally mischaracterising" the law.[103][8] Protests erupted on campus, some including violence, and the controversy attracted international media attention.[104][105][106] When asked in September 2016 if he would comply with the request of a student to use a preferred pronoun, Peterson said "it would depend on how they asked me.… If I could detect that there was a chip on their shoulder, or that they were [asking me] with political motives, then I would probably say no.… If I could have a conversation like the one we're having now, I could probably meet them on an equal level."[106] Two months later, the National Post published an op-ed by Peterson in which he elaborated on his opposition to the bill, saying that gender-neutral singular pronouns were "at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."[107] — wiki

It's not strictly the invented pronouns that he was objecting to, it was the compelled use of language to begin with (which he sees as a psychological intrusion). The singular pronouns were just at the center of it all. In two of the three sources I gave Peterson clarifies that he is not averse to using preferred standard pronouns, and in one he states that he normally uses the pronoun that people present as.

I would consider myself anti-SJW though I think what people mean by SJW is generally intersectional feminism. I also actually know enough about the alt-right to say that their ideology is NOT based on anti-SJW ideas. I automatically assume anyone talking about the alt-right has no idea what the alt-right is, nothing personal but it's become a term for "something I don't like" for too many. We're talking about anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, white nationalism, white supremacy. — Judaka

You do realize that the alt-right is largely a reactionary movement against SJW/intersectional feminist woke-ism right? The right flank of the SJW crowd broke off and veered far right. Being opposed to intersectional feminism myself, I don't think I'm accusing the entire SJW crowd of habouring alt-right ideas. But how can you deny that the alt-right is a reactionary movement against their extreme portrayal of social justice movements?

semantics is an illusion or that it can be reduced to syntax. What say you? — TheMadFool

It's not the case. Semantics are indeed rooted in symbols that appropriate syntax can do logic-like actions on, but the validity and meaning of the symbols comes from a high dimensional set of associations that involve memorable sets of multi-modal sensory experiences, along with their associations to related or similar memorable sets... The truth of the high level symbols that we assign to them (or the truth of the relationships between them) depends on how accurately they approximate the messy real-world phenomenon that we think they're modelling or reflecting.

A practical example: If we do mere syntactical transformation with words like "gravity", the results will only ever be as good at accurately describing gravity as our best existing definition for it. In order to build an explanatory model of gravity (to advance the accuracy of the term "gravity" itself), real world information and testing is required: experimentation; raw high dimensional information; truth signals from the external world. That's what mere syntax lacks. The real purpose of semantic symbols is that it allows us to neatly package and loosely order/associate the myriad of messy and multi-dimensional sets of memorable experiences that we're constantly dealing with.

Although we pretend to do objective logic with our fancy words and concepts, at the root they are all based on messy approximates that we constantly build and refine through the induction of experience and arbitrary human value triggers (which are built-in/embedded within our biology). Our deductive/objective logic is only as sound as our messy ideas/concepts/feelings/emotions are accurate descriptions of the world. If we had some kind of objectively true semantic map-of-everything, perhaps syntax alone would suffice, but until then we need to remember that it is our ideas which should be fitted to reality, and not the other way around.

Are you trying to suggest that a large percentage of JP's base was alt-right? If so, do you have any evidence for this and if not, why are you talking about the alt-right as though it plays a huge role in JP's success? — Judaka

I specifically explained how and why JP played a role in the emergence of the alt-right, which schism'd off from the anti-SJW crowd:

The absurdity and specificity of the question shows some of the wacky conspiratorial depths that the proto alt-right was immersed in at the time, and Peterson's "failure to answer the question" was interpreted by them as a complete betrayal/sign that he is the enemy. He was abandoned by the now minted "alt-right" overnight. The clip itself was a kind of formative signal that in my opinion formally launched the alt-right as a movement and unified its direction. Them that bandwagon'd to abandon Peterson over the above clip became the definitive alt-right base. The rest is our horrendous recent history... — VagabondSpectre

He specifically rejected them on the basis of free speech, I can easily find him saying this more than once, I can also find him saying that he would call a transgender person by the pronouns they asked provided it was within reason. But you are making the claim that the reason Peterson became popular with the anti-SJW centre was that the narrative was that he refused to use he/she as asked to do so, so, can you show me anything to verify this? — Judaka

Free speech was included in his initial argument/protest, but what made him fervent was, as he explained, the fact that being forced to memorize a slew of new pronouns and to tip-toe around them was too much of a cognitive burden to expect anyone to endure. That was his argument as a psychologist (it's nested in the original viral video IIRC). I am also aware that he never refused to call people by their preferred pronouns within reason, but that nuance was lost on just about everyone who interviewed him (and it attracted some of the ideological ingredients of the alt-right toward him early on). He wasn't aware enough of what was happening to properly clarify even that. The subject of transexuality/transgender in general has been a singularity of controversy and noise for about a decade, so it's understandable why he could not control that aspect of his own narrative.

But what I'm pointing to is the overall stochastic effects that the rapidly warping and escalating narrative around Peterson had on some groups and individuals within the anti-SJW crowd. The video where some random idiot asks Peterson about the Holodomor is around the point when the escalating narrative boiled over completely, and it had already long been out of Peterson's hands...

Here's the long take on JP:

Jordan Peterson rose to prominence among the right (including the anti-SJW center/left) partially due to a coincidence: as a professor he protested some type of mandate about invented pronouns during a time when "anti-wokeness" was at it's peak on social media. The anti-wokeness crowd instantly took a liking to Jordan Peterson because he was an academic authority that was preaching against invented pronouns (the anti-feminist/SJW crowd was desperate for an academic counter to intersectional feminist theory).

The alt-right didn't really exist when his first protest went viral; at the time the main driver of the movement was simply a rejection of progressivism gone wild. Peterson merely rejected the use of new/invented pronouns, but the narrative quickly escalated to the idea that he rejected using the pronouns that his transsexual students presented as (he/she, or they upon request). Because of this, Peterson instantly became popular both with the large and amorphous anti-SJW center, but especially popular with any anti-SJW element that was also transphobic (and by extension, the overlaps of transphobia).

With the momentum from his original viral exposure, he naturally started exporting his various ideas in conversations and interviews, many of which take the form of religious or conservative metaphors (as a talk-therapist, simple ideas to help troubled people focus/improve is his specific area of expertise). But this was also the time period where the alt-right was beginning to coalesce and solidify. It would take too long to recount all the bat-shit ideological developments of the alt-right movement (and it's not a pretty picture), so in short, Peterson was one of the original anti-SJW rallying-poles that conservative-leaning (and especially young and stupid) anti-SJW's gathered and grouped around.

While Peterson thought he was exporting his clinical talk-therapy ideas to a culture that needed them, his "followers" were actually festering in darkened internet-corners, fuelling and reinforcing their shared delusions. They parlayed their starting nest-egg of sexism/racism/transphobia/anti-semitism/xenoiphobia into full blown Nazi ideology. There is actually a specific moment that in my opinion marked the official beginning of the alt-right (but at the very least it marks the point when Peterson was confronted with the reality of his followers' agendas, and also the point when the alt-right movement abandoned him and started searching for actual white supremacists). It's captured on video:



The absurdity and specificity of the question shows some of the wacky conspiratorial depths that the proto alt-right was immersed in at the time, and Peterson's "failure to answer the question" was interpreted by them as a complete betrayal/sign that he is the enemy. He was abandoned by the now minted "alt-right" overnight. The clip itself was a kind of formative signal that in my opinion formally launched the alt-right as a movement and unified its direction. Them that bandwagon'd to abandon Peterson over the above clip became the definitive alt-right base. The rest is our horrendous recent history...

Peterson was so easily misunderstood that he even misunderstood himself. He suddenly found himself being asked to make extensive political commentary (low-hanging anti-marxist rhetoric was crowd pleasing, so he kept playing the hits) but he didn't actually have any political experience or understanding outside of his niche as a clinical therapist. Drawing on his idiosyncratic religious and conservative therapeutic metaphors was all he could do to be persuasive as a speaker (and it did earn him some basic wins against basic idiots), but it turned out that experience in talk-therapy does not a political scientist make. He was completely unaware how thoroughly he was being misunderstood by his followers and detractors alike, and he was therefore unable to navigate the landscape. (Ben Shapiro is an example of a similar early alt-right rally-point, but because he actually understood what was happening, he was able to successfully dissociate himself from it).

Being in over his head from the get-go, it was all he could do to make money from his notoriety (he likely couldn't resist not shutting-up even if he understood what was happening from the beginning, and that he was entirely in-over-his-head). The philosophers that have had conversations with Peterson tend to bump up against his arbitrary use of metaphor and religion (seldom or never being able to correctly categorize the therapy-centric nature of his concoctions). Peterson himself believes that his borderline spiritual ideas have some kind of real world truth merit outside of being emotionally useful to some of his patients, so he can't even himself correctly situate the "truth" component of his ideas and worldview. That is or was his cardinal error, but really it's all one big tragic-comedy of errors...

I'm not sure what he has been saying since his return from Russia (where as far as I know, he spent over a year detoxing from a "clonazepam" addiction which he was using it to treat his mounting anxiety), but that's how it all went down.

Non-human animals can think rationally, I don't deny that but they can't do it as well as humans just like we can't ratiocinate as well as a computer can [given the right conditions]. It's in the difference of degrees that we see a distinction between computers, humans, and non-human animals. — TheMadFool

So there's actually a couple sneaky issues with the thrust that AI has no emotion...

Firstly, it depends on the kind of AI we're talking about; with the right design, we can indeed approximate emotion in simulated AI agents and worlds (more on this later...).

Secondly, human minds/bodies are still far better at "general-purpose thinking" than any other known system. Computers do arithmetic faster than us, and in some respects that might give computer-bound intelligent systems an advantage over our wet-ware, but we haven't yet made a system that can out-think humans across any reasonably broad spectrum of task domains and sensory/action modalities. We haven't yet made any competent high level reasoning systems whatsoever (they're all just narrow models of specific tasks like image recognition or chess/go).

Emotions are a really massive part of how humans pull it all off: emotions are like intuitive heuristics that allow us to quickly focus on relevant stimulus/ignore irrelevant stimulus, and this guides our attention and thoughts/deliberations in ways that we can't do without. For example, when something messy or unpredictable (some new phenomenon) is happening around us, there might be some part of our brain that is automatically aroused due to the unfamiliarity of the stimulus. The arousal might lead to a state of increased attention and focus (stress in some cases), and depending on what the new stimulus can be compared to, we might become expectant of something positive, or anxious/fearful of something unknown/bad. Just entering this aroused state also prepares our neurons themselves for a period of learning/finding new connections in order to model the new phenomenon that must be understood.

Furthermore, to at least some degree, we should not expect computers to be able to understand our human-emotion laden ideas (and therefore interact with us appropriately and reciprocally) unless they have something like emotions of their own (eg: can a sophisticated non-emotion having chat-bot ask meaningful questions about subjects like "happiness"?). The most advanced language AI models like GPT-3 are capable of generating text that is uncannily human, but the actual content and substance of the text it generates is fundamentally random: we can prompt it with some starting text and ask it to predict what should come next, but we cannot truly interact with it ("it" doesn't understand us, it is just playing memory games with arbitrary symbols that it doesn't comprehend; it's not even an "it").

GPT-3 is the largest language model ever trained, but it's not good enough to function as a philosophy bot. Unless some extraordinary breakthrough is made in symbolic reasoning AI, it looks like human level understanding is too much to ask for using only current and standard AI approaches (it takes too much compute just to get the pathologically lying homonculus that is GPT-3).

Finally there's the problem of epistemological grounding from the AI's perspective. In short: how does the AI know that what it is doing is "logic" and not just some made up bull-shit in the first place? At present, we just feed language transformer AI systems examples of human text and get it to learn a Frankenstein's model of language/concepts, and we can never cut humans out of that equation, else the bots would just be circle-jerking their own nonsense.

Another way of looking at the "truth signal"/epistemological grounding issue for AI is that they would need to actually have an experience of the world in order to test their ideas and explore new territory/concepts (otherwise they're just regurgitating the internet). For the same reason that we need to actually test scientific hypotheses in the real world to know if they are accurate, general artificial intelligence needs some input/output connection to the real world in order to discover, test, and model the various relationships that entities have within it.

Conclusion: The first chat bots that we actually want to interact with will need to be somewhat human/animal like. They will most likely exist in simulated worlds that approximate the physical world (and/or are linked to it in various ways), where "embodied" AI systems actually live and learn in ways that approximate our own. Without emotion-like heuristics (at least for attention), it's really difficult to sort through the high dimensional sensory noise that comes from having millions of sensory neurons across many sensory modalities. That high dimensional experience is necessary for us to gather enough data for our learning and performance, but it creates a dilemma of high computational cost to just *do logic* on all of it at once; a gift/curse of dimensionality. Emotions (and to large degree, the body itself) is the counter-intuitive solution. The field of AI and machine learning isn't quite there yet, but it's on the near horizon.

mods should be pleased to see feelings flare up in the forum - insults, rejoinders, expletives, name calling, etc. all indicate a population of normal human beings instead of a swarm of chatbots. — TheMadFool

If we selected for signs of emotion rather than the use of logic, I fear we would devolve into the philosophical equivalent of the above GIF.

P.S the concept that chat-bots may one day become an issue in that way is an interesting topic (that we would hence need a reverse turing test), but I'm not sure what part of your OP to take seriously.

As long as the chat-bots are posting good philosophical discourse, would there be any meaningful difference between them and us, their meat-sack counterparts?

Careful what you wish for...

This post is a grammatical nightmare. Constant use of all-caps text, ellipses, slang, etc, make it unsuitable from the get-go, but the overall lack of coherent structure renders it as a stream-of-consciousness rant-like post.

Stream-of-consciousness style writing isn't all that bad, but it's not suitable for a serious philosophical article. There might be very interesting and useful ideas in your post, but they're not likely to see much daylight given their dressings. My advice is to pick a single idea that you think is important and that you wish to defend, and start a thread that introduces the idea and gives a supporting argument. Making a series of posts to defend the premises of your article's titular conclusion is probably the best way to give it air-time and critical attention.

It is a very interesting time that we're living in...

After 4 whole years of Trump, most of America and its corporate patrons have finally and fully rejected Trump and Trumpism, but I think it took too long to get here...

Some small nucleus of morons are so emotionally invested at this point (small compared to the entirety of America, but still a significant portion of conservatives), that it's unlikely many of them will ever reconcile. The ideological schism within the GOP is cementing itself, with neo-cons and fox on one side (who are willing to leave Trump behind), and the OANN + Newsmax + Qanon idiots on the other side (a big chunk of what used to be politely called "religious conservatives" I think). It's also unclear if OANN and Newsmax can live off Trump going forward...

Now that the GOP itself has basically lost everything, with a permanently fractured base, what will become of it? For how many years will we be hearing that nucleus of idiots say things like "the election was stolen from Trump" as a matter of course? What set of rocks are they going to scurry under given that they are the world's chosen reserve laughing stock? And what sort of fungus are they wont to spawn... More ridiculous internet conspiracy games? Emotionally unstable and potentially violent extremists and extremism? Maybe Trump will just keep holding rallies, and somehow the circus/show will go on?

In short, are political tensions about to escalate, or de-escalate, and in what ways?

Politicians have and will contest the election results and express doubt about the winner, as is their right. Elizabeth Warren, Hilary Clinton, Al Gore, Stacy Abrahms have all done it. Hell, we had to put up with the nonsense of Russian collusion for years, and people like Jimmy Carter saying Trump is illegitimate. That's why I treat these claims with utter suspicion. No amount of glittering generalities such as "undermining our democracy" are persuasive, even as propaganda. The ability to contest election results, to express doubt, and to share with others those beliefs is a feature of democracy. Criminalizing and censoring that doubt is undemocratic. — NOS4A2

This is irrelevant. Trump questioned the election results until the cows came home, as was his right, but then he rabble roused a mob and flung it directly at the capitol building. By compromising the safety of congressmen and senators (or at least contributing to it), he committed a high crime or at least a misdemeanour (even if he was too stupid to realize what he was doing, which is itself a misdemeanour). By doing it during an allegedly important electoral session, he therefore also undermined the process of democracy, unequivocally and unambiguously.

In Trump's own words, the demonstration was designed to sway the hearts and minds of senators (sway them toward unconstitutional de-certification of the election results) through an on-site show of strength.

Yes, Congress can invent "high crimes and misdemeanours" at their whim and fancy and impeach their opponents for it while absolving themselves of the same crime. They have already done it. My contention is that it is wrong and sets a dangerous precedent. — NOS4A2

Congress is supposed to invent high-crimes and misdemeanors as necessary. It's by design. Since congress is also elected by the people and sworn to uphold the constitution, it's actually their duty to make decisions about what constitutes an impeachable offence when necessary. It's one of the adversarial setups that is built in to the madisonian government structure you lauded earlier.

What kind of precedent would be set if they did not impeach him? First, it would show that American democracy is a complete joke to the rest of the world, and it would show corrupt American politicians that anything can be gotten away with as long as your are unapologetic and control the senate, including mobilizing street thugs to exert political control, which is what Trump did at the capitol.

Louis Gomert recently quoted Nancy Pelosi talking about "uprisings" and calling Trump an "enemy of the state" on the House floor. Journalists were actually complaining that he was inciting violence. This is peak clown world. These nutters have lost their minds. — NOS4A2

But I thought that it was Pelosi's right to openly express doubt about the President's loyalties? If it's Trump's right to outright lie about election fraud, then Pelosi is allowed to call him an enemy of the state. That's only fair, don't you think?

All the "it's his right!" and "but what if?" defences that you raise for Trump can also be raised for the nutty dems. I could sit here and feign some moral-esque political belief like: "The congress are elected by the people to exercise their judgment and initiate impeachment proceedings if they honestly believe it is necessary. It is in fact their duty to initiate these proceedings to uphold the constitution, regardless of how much it hurts the feelings of weak-spined ideologues."

Given that impeachment is not a matter of criminal law, the reasonable person test is irrelevant. All that matters is the congressman/senator test.

It wouldn't be a miscarriage of truth to admit that Trump spent almost an entire year rabble-rousing and spreading false rumours about voter fraud in a way that both undermined American democracy and also fuelled violent unrest. There's no need for quote mining or trying to cite legal precedent; "high crimes and misdemeanours" is so vague that it could refer to anything, and the way Trump pointed a rally/protest/whatever at the capitol building during electoral proceedings can certainly pass for both.

Regarding the "incitement of insurrection" charge, if the senators believe what happened at the capitol can be called an insurrection, and if they believe Trump incited it to some or any degree, then they could call it a high crime and impeach him for it, and it would be just execution of the US constitution.

Both.

Do you understand why the electoral college was established? — Brett

Yes.

House Dems move to amend the constitution and abolish the electoral college. Goodbye America — NOS4A2

So the true purpose/meaning of America is to have an electoral college? I'm curious as to how you would rationalize that America evaporates with the electoral college...

Do you mean to say that since the Democrats would foreseeably win the next few election cycles, the sky would fall? Are you just making a partisan quip with no supporting argument or premise?

Too funny not to share...

It took a real and concerted effort to turn the election around. It was done with cunning, with fraud, and with brute-force cheating — god must be atheist

Dude, you're dreaming. Despite a concerted effort by Pelosi et al to sabotage their own party, Trump's performance was just that bad. There's not really any good reason to believe that fraud or brute force cheating took place in the general election.

This fundamentally misunderstands NOS and far right-wingers in general! — Maw

I think it understands and encompasses them perfectly.

But let's not so quickly forget that Trump was legitimately elected president by hordes of people who are typically persuaded along the exact moral and ideological/memological lines that Nos usually draws from (whether you believe Nos is a shill or a troll aside, the things he says are representative of right wing rhetoric). Disregarding all of them as deplorable and idiotic trolls is about as effective as telling people to pokémon-go-to-the-polls-because-I'm-a-woman. To repeat, ignoring Nos and others like him does not work: we tried that, it failed, and the Trump presidency was the result. The stronger our emotional rejection of Trump and his supporters, the deeper they can become entrenched in resentment that enables ad-hoc rationalization of whatever.

We are now in a world so saturated with information, noise, and attention seeking outrage that it is harder than ever before to reach any kind of nuanced consensus (we still all agree about bread and games). "Democracy" is therefore a harder thing to do, and we have no choice but to try it anyway. Depending on whether the younger generations develop the capacity to filter out digital bull-shit (thanks to being born and raised in it), or whether they just get segmented and tribalized into so many piles of idiots, the future of democracy is uncertain.

It's fairly handy to have someone seemingly earnestly trot out les memes du jour, especially since this is a mostly left-leaning forum. Becoming familiar with right-wing arguments, and deploying/refining them in legitimate rhetorical standoffs, is really the best way to develop persuasive power over those that accept them in the wild.

As sad as this might sound, Nos is pretty much representative of the bleeding edge of republican rhetoric. Whatever he deploys here is exactly the kind of thing that we are likely to see republican echo chambers reflect. He gets a chance to test and refine his shtick, and we get the chance to map and neutralize it (if only for ourselves).

They were not attacking anyone, as far as I’m aware. They were certainly breaching the barricade. They were certainly pushing past police and destroying windows and a door. The victim certainly tried to crawl through the broken window. But she was shot before she could get through, as evidenced by her falling back into the room. The shooter, a man in a suit (secret service) was at the other window hiding behind a wall pointing his gun at people — NOS4A2

"Breaching the barricades"...

You once likened the George Floyd unrest/riots to "insurrection", but breaching barricades in a capitol building and getting shot for it is an ambush?

It was like an ambush. He suddenly swung to shoot her as she tried to enter, seemingly without warning or care. I cannot say whether he thought his life was in imminent danger. — NOS4A2

Looking at the video you linked, the secret service agent clearly had his gun drawn and hanging out of the door for quite a while before he fired. We cannot see his mouth or hear properly through the noise, but it's likely that he was verbally warning them (But I mean, come on; if you break into a secure federal government compound and start climbing over barricades, you should know you're liable for getting shot, right?).

.....


I want to say it feels like this should put an end to the circus, but I know better than that by now...

Congress continues:



A few republican goons are objecting to Pennsylvania's votes

Imagine if the DNC didn't sabotage Bernie as the democratic nominee way back in 2016...

How much different would the world be today?

Do you reckon there is any chance of anything close to reasonable making its way to the supreme court?

I'm curious to know what the boofer would say/do.

This thread is hilarious. Reminds me of Fry and Laurie

Fyodor Dostoevsky once said: "The degree of a civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." — The Questioning Bookworm

As far as assertions go, it definitely passes the sniff test. I'm of a moral persuasion that only tolerates incarceration as a form of intervention/rehabilitation. Prisons in America are far from places of reform; they're places of suffering we use to extract blood and sweat as a proxy for justice, and which are obviously meant to serve as deterrents to would be criminals.

Given that America's strategy of crime prevention through threat is failing so despicably, there's no good defence for the on-going torture and destruction of millions of people. Imagine being incarcerated for drug possession (addiction), and then being extorted and murdered in prison by the racist gangs that thrive in its system of neglect and deprivation...

That's justice in America...

US incarcerations rates will drop if there's a real effort to stop incarcerating non-violent offenders and legalizing drug use...

...I did see, by the way, that Oregon decriminalized heroin, cocaine, and meth, reducing the sentence to the equivalent of a traffic ticket. — Hanover

Even though it's only a half step, the American legal/punitive system is so far behind in this that it would do an unfathomable amount of good.

The conflict of interest apparent in private prison systems in general makes them hard to justify (Canada has an issue here as well: our incarceration rate may only be 1/6th of America's, but the quality of our prisons isn't too much better).

Nope. It's more like this:

Brains evolved to make useful anticipations, and so we're hard wired to make connections between disparate stimulus that correlates (so we can make inferences from the model of the world that we build).

As a result, we're inherently superstitious. If we see someone do a certain dance, and then lightning strikes shortly after, we're downright liable to assume that the dance caused the lightning bolt. To make even more sense of things, we assume that there is some human-like agency behind the lightning bolt to further explain the supposed mechanism.

Any significant beliefs that we hold can lead to the formation of new neural pathways because they are held more at the forefront when we appraise new stimulus (in search of those pesky correlations). In other-words, if you're terrified of witchcraft, you're more likely to go around finding circumstantial evidence supporting that belief. Before long, magic becomes so integrated into your worldview and understanding that you will start ignoring rational evidence in favor of preserving existing dogma. It can even go to the point of creating over-fancy explanations and arguments from evidence that is wholly unrelated to begin with...

If you want to ensure that you win at least one then you want to place all your bets on a single game as there's a better chance of winning. — Michael

If I could cover extra bases in a single game, then yes. (are we buying tickets to be drawn or selecting numbers on a wheel, or are we buying scratch tickets?).

To answer one of the main questions from your OP, without additional context there is no way to say which one is better. Given that the theoretical risk/reward ratios are functionally the same, it seems that we can only appeal to the needs/desires/circumstances of the gambler to rationally discriminate between the two options in terms of "value"...

is there a reason to play at all? — Michael

For instance, the sheer thrill of risk and the feeling of being a lucky winner (or even just the flashing lights of the lottery machine that have become associated with those feelings). I would guess these are the most popular causes of gambling addiction.

Word on the hill is that the radical leftists almost cost the Dems the election by being too left.

It's definitely not the case that foisting Biden ahead of Bernie as the DNC nominee replaced genuine enthusiasm with status quo fan-fare...

...

Still trying to wrap my head around the logic...

Corporate America sabotages the left for financial gain, nearly costs them the election, and then starts blaming the left... for financial gain...

Yay Schumer! Yay Pelosi!

Hopefully the dems won't get the senate, so that no matter how criminally the radical socialists and their base rant and rave, Biden won't have to do a damn thing!

Allow me to tweak and probe the hypothetical slightly:

Assuming that we *must* play, what are the consequences of going bust?

In other words, what is the utility difference between my starting chip count and zero, and what is the utility difference between my starting chip count and double my current chip count?

In situations where losing (ending up with 0$ or a very low amount) is disproportionately bad, I would play both games to reduce the chance of going bust. If given the option, I would place as many single bets on as many games as possible to ensure that I would win at least one of them.

Another situation might be that I need to double my current chip count in order to afford some necessary utility, where it's pretty much all or nothing. In this case, betting everything on a single shot would actually be superior because it is a more likely path to a large chip-count increase.

There's a real world example that fits pretty well here: Chinese businessmen looking to convert Yuan to USD while avoiding government regulations purchase a $100,000,000 vacation package at casino resorts in Macau. The resort package comes with 100 million of complimentary casino chips, but to make them redeemable (in USD), they must be risked at least once at the casino. They will usually sit at an ultra-high stakes black-jack table (or something simple like roulette) and will bet a small portion across numerous rounds until all their chips have been risked. It's pretty easy to understand why they don't risk everything on a single hand; even though they could double their money, the risk is too great, and they aren't interested in increasing their wealth (they just want to move it around). Making a single bet would defeat the entire charade.

I made a thread a few years back about more or less the same strategic ambiguity, although I complicated it with individual vs collective utility considerations.

I heard it said that solipsism can't be refuted because it's logically impeccable, but does that make it true?

I heard that a statement can be logically valid but not true and that truth isn't the same as validity? Is that what they mean by solipsism, that it's logically perfect but it can't be known to be true?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept. — Darkneos

It's more like this:

Solipsism cannot be deductively falsified (we cannot prove that it is untrue).

This doesn't make it "valid" though. Validity refers to arguments with conclusions that correctly follow from their premises. There is no such argument for solipsism. It's more of a hypothetical possibility that we cannot really work with in terms of deductive reasoning.

Here's something interesting that I found through Trump's most recent retweet:


The second tweet in the above picture is a video of an anchor emphatically repeating that there is "no winner yet" in the election. He immediately shifts into "we're getting reports of more and more voter fraud", and finally sums it up with "phizer got a vaccine, yay!".

The first tweet is obviously a subscription advertisement...

For anyone who doesn't known "OAN" (One America News) is basically the lowest brow form of conservative pander-tainment that can be found. OAN is to Fox News as Fox News is to CNN...

Given that Fox has shown signs of capitulation, OAN is poised to snag millions of upset Trump voters who don't want to hear it...

Given that Fox is a fairly important apparatus that the GOP uses to organize its constituents, what might a significant schism in viewership between Fox and OAN do to the future of the GOP?

his only rhetorical skills are built around gloating — Wayfarer

His present level of sophistication is reminiscent of an upset toddler



"I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT, AND JOE BIDEN IS MEAN!"

But it won't happen, because Americans are as dumb as they come...keep doing the same thing and wonder why everything sucks, idiots. — Merkwurdichliebe

What if they run again with Trump in 2024? — ssu

I seriously doubt he will have the energy in 4 years, but I imagine it would be a sequel to the circus we just survived.

Kanyé is going to run again in 2024. A Trump/Kanye ticket could be fun...

Either way, I don't see how the GOP can afford to keep Trump in any kind of serious play. He is and always has been a constant liability and source of stress/controversy. Now that he is no longer the president, they have less reason to part their cheeks. I suppose it might depend on how Trump's voters feel about things in a few years time...

but if they're the kind who believe this then I can't see how that's at all possible. — Michael

It takes an obscene amount of effort to dissuade these folks, (See: "The flat earth movement" for a similar cast of confusion).

Wacky conspiracies are as old as Alex Jones, and the QAnon thing has been around for many years. The problem is that it takes an attention span greater than the length of time it takes to say "night of the long knives" to actually get anywhere. Given that our attention spans are presently hacked to pieces, nonsense like QAnon and flat-earth have an easier time gaining traction...

...Why can't people just believe in normal stupid shit like ghosts, aliens, and religion?