Very sad to learn cornavirus has delayed attempts to make the last living southern white rhino pregnant. She was already old and it may have been the last chance for the species. There were two males in a french zoo, but some people broke in and killed them for their horns, and the only other living male died some years ago.

As for me, I am 60 and I have a masters in philsophy7 from oxford, since you didnt ask but decided to insult me without telling me yours. I have seen alot of people go by like you in my life, some of them ended up in prison, and some of them were shot by their friends. If I had a reason to wish you luck I would, but I am one of the people who similarly had their property destroyed by a black gang, in my case, because I was white and in their way. They also tried to kill me. So you will not impress me with your decisions as to what law should care about and what it should ignore as 'less priority.'

you cant answer direct questions either. If you cant answer direct questions, you will have to live with the injustice you create and not understand why you are responsible. It will be a crushing blow when the realization hits you one day, if you live that long.

how old are you, and what education do you have?

didn't say I didn't care, nor can you derive that from what I said. I said that prioritising the lesser concerns of the white Wendy's owner over the greater concerns of black people dying at the hands of racist white cops is a niche way of thinking, more suitable for right-wing radio jocks than mainstream media. — Kenosha Kid

thats called shaping truth as you want. Sure have it your way. There is no law then, except what you approve of. Other concerns being less important are dismissed. So people then dismiss you, as will happen over time, not unsurprisingly, just as you dismiss them. Dont expect any change because you believe you are right but havent thought it through.

So a guy can have his business burn3ed to the ground and you dont care about him either. He didnt do anything to deserve this. Why should anyone take your views seriously when you are so obviously hypocritical? Its complicity to terrorism. Again.

You ignored what I wrote too. Do you realize how childish you are being? My questions were actually to do about philosophy.

I did. Its in a new post called 'sleeping while black.'

Its called sleeping while black, which discusses your right to sleep anywhere you want at all without expecting to be arrested for trespassing.

Well I started another post for you to comment on then which already contains my reply, since I dont even need to read you any more to know what you are going to say.

Im sorry you seem to be talking to yourself. That has nothing to do with my post. I dont have anything to say about you 'exterminating racism' or 'social injustice.' Nothing atl all. Ive been educated in the philosophy of law and I see nothing in your comments, or in the comments of others not so educated either, that have anything to do with philosophy at all, frankly.

On the political rhetoric that people have substituted for philosophy here, I have nothing to say. I treid discussing the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, and I tried discussing the social contract, and no one who replied except baden even knew what they are. while ridiculing me as an imbecile.

If you actually learn what Descartes' argument was, you will find that doubting should be first on your list of ideas that constitute 'thinking.'

well I woke up today to see a Wendtys on fire in Atlanta. Then I watched CNN, BBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC. All of them had nothing to say at all about the wrongfuness of the arson. The restaurant owner, who normally would be sought for interview but was not even mentioned, had done nothing wrong, and frankly, in most other places in the world today, the people setting the restaurant on fire would have been shot to death on sight. These are acts of terrorism and every one should condemn them. There is no excuse for it.

Regarding elections, elections are not expected to bring about much change at the federal level in the USA due to the tripartite system of government adopted from Montesquieu. While it's well known to have flaws, and has more flaws most people who are not educated in it do not know, on the whole it has proven more resistant to corruption than other systems. But the downside is, it does not allow for rapid change. The slowest moving of the three divisions is the department of justice, and it has a Republican majority now, so democratic concepts are disadvantaged. When both divisions of Congress and the president are republican too, there are very big changes now.

Well my birth certirficate is here so I can now get a passport and leave you people to kill each other. Have a nice day.

As I say, you may be right he should not be acquitted, but he probably will be anyway, but its not really a big issue for me. what is a big issue with me is that I have to live with people mouthing off about their rights all the time as if they were given the rights because they are entitled to them.

If they are mouthing off about infringements on their liberty, they clearly are not entitled to them from a philosophical stance, because that is not why they were given the rights in the first place.
It seems to me highly ironic that Locke conceived a society for us where we could be better judged by God and act for the greater good, and people use those rights to complain about racial prejudice against them.

Given that you totally ignored that point, and were only interested in arguing about a system of justice which as I already stated was flawed, I dont see you are capable of understanding my point.

I dont think its your fautl. It seems to be a cultural prejudice against trtuth that has become so deep, its irreparable, and thats why I think its time for the USA to end as a democracy.

The entire nation is insane. It has no idea why it is doing what it is doing, acting on primcipals it destroyed by removing God from the basis of its law, and is lurching along like a Frankenstein. What uis remarkable is that one can see thousand sof posts now on the horrific wrong done to this man when in fact the rights claimed to justify protecting his life are not honored for the purpose they were given. We have taken a beautiful theory that no one even cares to think about and twisted it into a selfish ghoul, then parrot on in dead and mechanical ways about how we are entitled to things in a dead parody of actual thought.

Unfortunately, he was on lethal drugs and had a prior existing heart condition, and he did not die while he was in a neck hold. The prosecutor cannot prove that the policeman caused the death. He might have died at exactly the same time, and been out of breath at exactly the same time, even if he had not been in a neck hold.

As I said, the other stuff is ancillary, but when courts are on such public display as this one will be, they will not want the fact that murder can't be proven be the first bad fact about Floyd that the public has to confront.

You wouldnt know I started working in gun control because, in 2014, I asked some members of a revived Tea Party group, who were part of the new wave of gun lovers, if they'd shoot someone in the back yard for stealing an apple from an appletree. Alot of them said they would, so I asked, what if it turned out to be a child you had shot? And they all did the same thing. They all called an attorney to defend their right to shoot a child. I was surprised about it, so I did ask alot of people. About 1,500 in total. Of the people who said they'd shoot a child, all of them said they were entitled to do so, so it was the right thing to do.

If I wanted to argue about whether it was the right thing to shoot children, they said, I could argue with the attorney who had told them it was legal. Then their attorney would show me snippets of prior cases proving it was perfectly in their clients' rights to shoot children for stealing an apple off a tree in their back yard. Many of the attorneys then scolded me for upsetting their clients who had thought there was nothing wrong with killing children for stealing apples like the attorneys had told them.

I did try to raise it as a moral issue, but that didnt count.They said, it was in their cleints' rights to shoot children, so it was the right thing to do.

Since that time, the gun lovers don't argue with me any more. This year, people of that mindset just insult me. So its now become an established fact, perhaps because of me in part, that shooting children to death is morally good when in 'justifiable circumstances.'

I never actually wanted to get into arguments about when people are 'entitled' to shoot children. Now it seems to me people have already decided they are entitled to judge policeman, usually based on 10 seconds of videotape, as racist murderers. On the whole, policemen are rough, because they deal with rough people. They have reduced the crime rate from 4.5 million in 1990 to <3 million last year, with an inverse increase of people in prison. This appears too much for people of whom a substantial number not only believe its in their rights to shoot children, but also, the right thing to do.

So I don't think its a legal issue. I think Americans have decided they know everything better than the experts. Americans think they know what they should do because they have rights to do it, and therefore do not need morality. Americans think they know what their rights are because they have decided what their rights are.

Americans are taught in first grade that their natural rights are 'self-evident.' In fact, they are not. France has different natural rights, and France thinks its own natural rights are self-evident too. So rights of individuals are not self-evident. It transpires Jefferson chose life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness because:
* taking a person's life imposes our free will over the ability of God to judge that person, hence, we have right to life.
* we must be free to make our own choices so that God can judge us too, hence we have right to liberty
* acting for the greater good, rather than for our own, results in the greatest joy, therefore, we have a right to pursue happiness.
But when Americans hear that, they have physical revulsion. Ive seen it. its like they are about to vomit. Its so contrary to the purely selfish motives they had assumed their rights self-evidently entitled them, they get physically ill just hearing it.

So authority was meant to promulgate from natural rights to constitutional rights, but it has God in it, which is even more offensive. I could say alot more on that, but by then I am referred to attorneys, who these days argue the law is true because it says so, not having any better argument left.

Its the same as what people say when they say obviously police should be disbanded. When I say that would cause alot more deaths and crime, they say crime and murder would not go up because they say so. So in the end, it turns out I actually agree with you. I dont particularly think there is anything so sacrosanct about what the law says should happen either, because the USA has entirely given up on concepts of the promulgation of authority from higher principals, and regards everything in terms of some kind of self-aggrandizement game and nothing else.

However, the fact remains, the law says, Floyd could have died anyway, and could have been out of breath anyway, so there is no way to prove that the policeman is guilty of murder. Sorry.

Its like watching one of those giant marble machines, which has no idea what it is doing at all, chew itself to pieces. All the marbles carry on bouncing around, but none of them have the faintest idea what they are actually doing. Floyd--of course he could be on the verge of death when he was arrested as a result of his own behavior, but according to current opinion, that no longer matters. Its like we are just marbles or something. Likewise, we are not responsible for the murders that would happen if we demand the police be entirely disbanded. It's like we don't actually control our own lives any more.

We are driven by drugs we can't control, and hatred we can't stop, in a world whose evil justifies any action we decide is right because we think so, without even understanding how we had those rights in the first place, and if we learn wny we have those rights, we are so repulsed we get physically ill.

In that respect, the police are really no different than anyone else.

While I have medical training, I dont think thats the issue. The issue is, if the policeman pleads not guilty, that he cannot be proven beyond doubt to have been responsible for the death. It is only enough for the autopsy to produce another possible reason for his death, and then he cannot be found guilty beyond doubt.

But thats not going to be said right away, by all evidence of this and prior cases, first the defense will point out that he was in jail eight times before, the last time for holding a gun to a woman's chest while his friends plundered her house, for which he was only in prison for five years because he cut a plea bargain with the police by handing in his friends. His prior arrest history has also not been reported in national news, and I did eventually find an investigative reporter for the Daily Mail, in the UK, had obtained images of his court records. So first of all they will say that, which no one in the USA wants to hear, and then they will probably have a mistrial if they can possibly do so while the public absorbs the fact that he was on drugs at all. Which most people still dont know.

If you are looking for better representation, china's single-party system is far superior, with 3,0000 members of the national people congress representing 1.4 billion. Also the USA federal districting is extremely biased. My congressional district in california has 600,000 people represented by one congressman.

The US position is that russia and china's single-party systems result in corruption, particularly, the USA has charged russia and china with croneyism and nepotism that does not happen in the USA.

Well thats ludicrous. Did you hear trump's stepson announce all coronavirus and racial problems have now been fixed? I think that was Monday.

Meth and fentanyl are a deadly combination by themselves, even without a pre-existing heart condition.

Im not sure the USA is capable of functioning like that any more. The increasing polarity between the parties has allowed everything to become part of a single, two-sided bickering. Today I saw miniature busts of Trump appearing in the grass areas of NYC for dogs to pee one, and I listened to talk radio decide, after two weeks' argument, that Michelangelo was racist for depicting Jesus as white. Facts no longer seem to matter, its just an all-out mud slinging match by everyone. The Speaker of the House should not be ripping a speech by the President behind his head in one of the only occasions a year the two of them are within 50 feet of each other.

Russia seems to be doing much better. Its even expanding again, its now got the Crimea properly annexed, and we let Puerto Rico suffer through devastating storms doing virtually nothing because Intel and others make a fortune by paying workers there two dollars a day. I don't see it getting better, is the problem here, nothing seems to exist to reverse the trend.

You mean this autopsy?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/us/george-floyd-independent-autopsy/index.html

Or what are you referring to? — Christoffer

What Im saying is that this report does not provide conclusive evidence that floyd would not have died anyway, and the fact that the coroners are arguing about it means the policeman will have to be acquitted.


https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/george-floyd-cause-of-death-autopsy/

When Aristotle confronted this problem, he said all had to be given equal rights of speech, regardless education. History has shown that is necessary for democracies to function, but it remains a question whether democracies should *continue* to function. One of the founders, I forget which, said the USA should be disbanded after a hundred years.

What percentage of cops are racist? — Harry Hindu

My own experience, which has been ridiculed of course, is only in San Jose, where I was wrongfully arrested and put in jail for a while after I evicted a room mate for taking cocaine in my house, after explicitly telling him I would not tolerate it, I had to physically force him out the door, so he filed assault charges. I was acquitted, but not being familiar with the process at all ended up being put in prison while I found someone to pay the bail and a lawyer.

During that time I could rather unequivocally say there is NO racism. They are equally nasty to all people who have been found criminal, right or not. They dont really care what color people are, it just happens to be true that some cultures do not fare as well as others in a capitalist society.

If I were actually trying to make a valid rational argument about it, I would point to the eskimoes in Russia. For thousands of years they have lived in very low temperatures, so they have very short limbs, because that reduces heat loss. If I were to be like those complaining of racism here, I would get angry and even violent over the fact that eskimoes cannot play basketball as well as other people. I would demand laws to enable eskimos be included in basketball teams despite they tupically being 5' or less. And an occasional eskimo would appear who is much taller and good at basketball to validate the point that basketball authoriities unduly discriminate against eskimos.

However, the issue is not rational, as far as I can determine. It matters not what facts are, nor what people do, once it has reached the point of emotional and phsyical violence, people are not persuaded by rationality. Instead they are persuaded by physical force, and fear of physical force.

I illustrate the lack of rationality as follows. A gang of people on this forum has been ridiculing those who say disbanding the police would result in more crime and murder. While its certainly true the police have insufficient reasons to treat potential criminals, or actual criminals, with greater dignity, on the other hand, the call has been to disband the police entirely, in order to save livesm, in particular, black lives.

In the USA, the police interrupt ongoing acts of physical violence about 300,000 times a year. If the police were disbanded, all those people would be at greater risk of death, and many would die. When the police were merely ordered to pull back, and not completely disbanded, in Baltimore after the Black Lives Matter riots there in 2015, the murder rate tripled in all-black communities. These are rather undeniably facts, but none of the people saying the police should be disbanded care at all about those deaths.

Thus it is rather clear, empirically, even in the philosophy forums here, that many people are incapable of accepting the basic facts of reality, or even acting with compassion towards their own kind, because they are overtaken by blind anger, and racism just happens to be the nom du jour for its justification.

Well I have to say, until recently I would have agreed with you. It was watching wild males fight in David Attenborough's excellent nature TV shows that I started to realize that a large number of men still behave like they are wild animals and are unaware of it. Since then Ive tried holding conversations with them, but its pointless, because they start ridiculing me and attacking my points as soon as they realize I am not a subservient creature in their herd. And 'creature' is the right word, because once they decide I am their inferior, they no longer can speak with any compassion to my perspective at all.

I am not the first to have observed, this is far more frequent behavior in the USA and middle east than anywhere else. The British upper classes regard the USA as having rampant animals running all over it, and were extremely critical of my decision to move back, instead of staying after Oxford. Since about 2015 I have to say the rampant animals have increasingly been taking over.

I used to have all kinds of ideas about the human spirit being capable of more than apparent, but after continued efforts in the last five years to inform various peoiple in this country that their opinions were complicit to murder, it has had no effect at all, and I no longer beleive all human beings are capable of genrealized altruism, and a sizable number may look like human beings, but are incapable of acting with genuine humanity at all. The problem is, there is no reliable external indication, besides behavior, so there is no way to isolate them and leave them to their own devices. The USA has had some success capturing them and training them to be soldiers, and putting them in prisons, but the nation has no effective competitor to justify a larger army, and the prison population is already higher than for any nation ever. Bush Junior had a very good idea to get alot of people working in 'security' which temporarily forestalled the problem.

Most recently, no USA paper has had the courage to report that the dead guy killed by the police was on a lethal combination of meth and fentanyl, as well has having several pre-existing heart conditions. This means he could have died without being placed in a nech hold at all. As the policeman cannot be proven guilty beyond doubt, he will be acquitted of at least murder charges. Ive even heard 'Black Lives Matter' leasers state on TV that they will raze the country to the ground if one more event happens that they dont approve of, and quite a large percentage of people, at least over half speaking on the subject, have declared similar intents.

so it seems they will all be killing each other very soon now. I had thought it was going to be a world war, but frankly, not even Iran has gone as insane as the USA, because its political leaders dont benefit from violence. The democrats are currently delighted, but if the democrats had been in power, the republicans would have been delighted. the animalistic violence in this country is now endorsed by its own leadership against itself, from one side or the other, it makes no difference, and the end result it, well I am emigrating, personally. I had enough of it.

That is to say, I wish violence could be rationally explained and categorized, and sometimes its useful to think that way. On the other hand, we are one of the few species which consistently kills its own, and we just seem to have been getting very enthusiastic about that, overall, in the USA over the last five years for some reason.

Just out of curiosity, are you an American citizen?

and there you have it. Not only are you a terrorist too, you're not even American. Thanks so much for egging on the less foresightful to more violence.

!0-year-old 'you are stupid and I am not' again? He will be aquitted. You know it. And you know what happens after that too. Might as well take a cruise or something, we didnt even need to drop nucleqar bunker busters on Korea or attack Iran. Weve destroyed our country by ourselves. Im waiting for my passport man, Im not sticking around for it. the rest of history will be laughing at how well we did ourselves in.

you have programmed yourself to see everything in one light, havent you?

The policeman cant be proven guilty because the man on lethal drugs and had two bad heart conditions, so he could have died anyway. So the policeman will be acquitted. You better start complaining about 'innocence without irrefutable proof' now.

It doesnt make any difference any more. When the autopsy report is read in the trial, showing the dead guy could have died of an overdose of meth and fentanyl he was on anyway, Black Lives Matter has already promised to raze the entire country.

Just to let you folks know, the left has again demonstrated its moral superiority, this time by putting little statues of Trump in NYC for dogs to pee on.



Way to go democrats, that shows who is in the wrong doesnt it. Maybe its time to do way with all the moral righteousness anyway and just reduce it to pure hatred. Seems to be working for the black community.

Im sure they will get to whether alien abductions are racist eventually. You will have to wait your turn.

how more people would accept systemic racism exists — Judaka

Yes people are definitely accepting it. I never heard people comnplain so much of depictions of Jesus as a white person before, especially as he was Middle Eastern, and therefore a possible terrorist too.

Just in the space of the time driving occasionally, I heard of how dozens of renaissance painters were racist for depicting Jesus as white, with Michelangelo as even more racist, for depicting Adam and Eve, and God too, as white in the vatican, which the catholics never condemned, and therefore the entire christian church is racist. And it was repeatedly pointed out that jesus was from the Middle East, and therefore he should not be regarded as white at all.

There probably is a better way. We'd have to look at the examples in detail. — Echarmion

Well, they have been arguing on talk radio for several weeks now whether religion is racist for depicting jesus as a white person. It was only when a listener was abducted by an alien and wanted to know about alien abductions in the bible that they thought something else had come up which was more important.

So depicting Jesus as a white person must be a good example of something worth examining in detail. From the sounds of it, if it hadn't been interrupted by alien abduction, they could have argued about it all year.

The good news is, they were discussing how the bible substantiates alien abductions on the radio today, instead of why religion is racist for depicting Jesus as a white person, which was a heated topic for several weeks. So things are definitely starting to return to normal.

Un deux trex cat sank.

the fatal mistake in reductionism is not the reductive process, but thinking that the resulting model necessarily correlates with reality. My favorite example is Philip Jose Farmer's theory that this solar system is actually a copy of the original one inside an energy-emitting sphere outside the orbit of pluto, which recreates the appearance of starfields indistinguishably from the original. His point was, God could have created dinosaur bones as a joke during a 7-day creation, but that was so unpopular at the time he could not even say it.

Some people find the notion upsetting, but the fact is, science only attempts to provide a predictive model. As long as the model's predictions are useful in explaining observed events, it doesn't actually matter how accurately the model represents reality. The components of the model may be simplifications, such as in Newtonian physics, which doesn't claim any particular 'center.' It is a mathematical simplification to consider the earth going around the sun. Nothing really 'orbits' anything except in our own perception. That is the model's terminology to explain what we observe in reductionist terms. It doesn't mean there needs to be an evolutionary process, just as there doesnt really need to be an 'orbit,' except in how we observe events predicted by those concepts.

Much of the time, the correlations are observable and straightforward enough in normal human discourse, but too frequently it takes a wild dip into the insane, such as astronomers deciding pluto is not a planet, as if there really has to be such a thing as a 'planet' that astronomers have led themselves to believe they can define better than anyone else in the first place.

The Pluto planethood debate is an excellent example of the biggest fallacy in reductionism, that a simpler model necessarily describes reality.

Camden NJ did not close their police dept down, they just fired everyone and then rehired them to make people like you shut up. 90% of the staff are the same as before and their budget was unchanged.

Is it even worth talking to you people any more. Its pointless. Unless someone actually says something besides 'you are wrong because I say so' and make easily falsifiable claims, Im not bothering to respond again.

Im not sure what you expect me to say any more. I pointed out, getting rid of the police entirely, as the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor said it wants to do, is going to result in organized crime moving into the city, and the murder rate going through the roof.

People who support the move ridicule me for saying that, and frequently call me racist too. I dont know why they make themselves appear so convinced that they make themselves tacit accomplices to those murders. I have good reason to doubt their motives are sincere. That also includes 'Black Lives Matter' now, which has threatened to raze the country if there is another event it does not like, which is a terrorist threat.

So thats all I have to say now.

"Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself." — tim wood

I think honor is simply a call for public approval and can be for whatever a particular culture considers desirable. My experience has been historically it is bestowed for valor in war, often by those who are battling each other, and often for acts performed without patriotic reasons, and so has little to do with any particular virtue,