Boethius

I've read that other countries (like UK and Australia) would have more lax gun controls if not for the bad example that the USA sets on this issue. So as an American I could ask what are y'all so afraid of?

I'm an introvert who has been living in lockdown for the past year, only leaving the house once a week to go grocery shopping. But I'm starting to get out more as the pandemic draws to an end (fingers crossed, at least) and it seems more people are out of their houses as well (of course, the good weather is helping to bring people out). It seems I'm going to have to work on managing symptoms of social anxiety as life returns to normal. Some things I've noticed Always bumping into people (mainly strangers) wherever I go. It's like there's always someone just around the corner in the grocery store as I'm pushing my cart around. It get's annoying not being able to walk 10 feet without running into someone, and that's not to even get started on people with their carts in the middle of the aisle. All the small talk, but also the sheer emotionality of it all. I guess that's why extroverts in America love small talk so much -- it gives them an opportunity to share emotional connections with each other. Always being observed and feeling self-conscious about it. Walking down the street from my house, realizing I forgot something, turning around to go get it and then worrying that someone might have observed my "erratic behavior" and hence think of me as some weirdo. Maybe I was just grumpy pre-covid with regards to interacting with people in public. I'd like to be both confident and pleasant to the people I meet, but I can't say I've really enjoyed the heightened interactions with people, at least not with my current perspective on it all. I don't mean to be tone deaf in posting what are certainly incredibly minor inconveniences and nuisances during a time when over 2.7 million people have died worldwide. But I thought this thread might be of interest and use to people who are also working with readjusting socially to a re-opened society. So thoughts or advice?

Let me demonstrate my contention with an example: (1) Physics tells us that water consists of a series of molecules that contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. (2) When I am standing at the side of a creek, bend down to the water, and cup my hands together to draw some water up to my face, there is no way in which the statement from (1) registers in my direct experience of the water that is sloshing around in my hands. In fact, in terms of direct experience I couldn't even tell that the water consists of molecules at all, let alone their precise composition. So a statement like (1) is a mere intellectual abstraction -- in terms of my direct experience you could tell me that water is H0_2 and I couldn't tell that you were lying to me. Maybe you contend that I can look at water through a very powerful type of microscope in order to literally see the molecular structure of water. Well, with all due respect, what I can affirm is that when looking through this particular piece of scientific instrument I am able to see a particular image that (apparently) confirms this abstract claim you have made about the "scientific" nature of water, and yet it still doesn't tell me much of anything about my direct experience of water itself because the scientific instrument has been placed in between my eyes and the water. I don't know, maybe all of this is obvious to people (in which case, apologies for making you read it all!) but I do suspect a large part of why we struggle to understand the "nature" of scientific truth claims stems from our inability to translate such claims into our direct experience of the world at large. Instead we are trained to walk around paying homage to a series of essentially abstract assertions about the nature of physical reality (60% of my body is water, most of my body consists of empty space, my brain consists of a series of neurons and synapses, etc). So it's not so much that scientific claims are true or false (though, to be clear I do accept the truth of them in an empirical sense). More it's that "most" scientific claims/statements are meaningless in terms of our direct experience of the world. Thoughts?

You should look up why there are no longer almost any Buddhists in India, even though India was the birthplace of Buddhism.

I thought Jonathan Pageau put it well when he said "Earth is round and the world is flat". But if you start telling people the world is flat they tend to think you're a conspiracy nut, so I generally keep those thoughts to myself ?

@tatsumaru I am wording everything in terms of a certain naturalistic framework wherein there is some objectively observable reality "out there" that is available to my senses. I don't personally believe that to be true. I have, for example, observed that the colors of the world appear to be brighter on days when I'm happy than on days when I'm feeling down. And apparently science has provided some sort of "verification" than this observation about my subjective experience can be scientifically recorded: https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-quirky-brain-how-depression-may-alter-visual-perception But it's very trippy to consider that my perception of the world is somehow dependent upon my state of mind. Aside from cultivating a good mental, emotional, and spiritual life, I'm not sure it's very wise to try to alter how one perceives the "external" world. Though I might feel differently if I were committed to a Buddhist path that gets into that sort of stuff.

Taking a cue from what tatsumaru wrote, I could say that my direct experience of this object is not as a static image. Depending on how one looks at it (depending on how and where one focuses one's sight while looking at the image) one sees it as moving in one way, moving in another way, static, etc. If I were being a bit playful, I might say that this is an image that has personality to it. And who or what could tell me I was wrong in that? Science? The Magic Eye books are popular for a reason ?

I hadn't thought about that. Like you could use scientific models to predict the first day of winter when water starts to freeze, which certainly is something that registers in one's direct experience. For some reason this reminds me of how Native Americans were experts as recognizing natural patterns like how the agitation of certain animals predictably came before the start of bad weather. I guess you can, to some extent, develop a science that is based purely on direct experience without the aid of any scientific instruments. True!

How are Republicans adjusting to the reality of a Biden presidency instead of a Trump presidency? I'm thinking here about how the transition for me (a generally progressive-minded guy) from Obama to Trump felt like the world had turned upside down, and then from Trump to Biden it felt like the world turned right side up again. So even though I disagree with their politics, I do feel sympathy for conservatives who might feel like the world has "gone to shit" once again now that Democrats are back in control. So for the conservatives in our forums, how does the new political situation feel and is there anything us left-leaning folk can do to help the conservatives in our lives feel more comfortable with the changes?

"King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine" is a classic, written in 1991 from a Jungian perspective. Some things I really love about this book are that it views working with one's masculinity as being a part of maturing as a man, that it's more about balance than going to extremes, it identifies "toxic masculinity" as being an unhealed boyhood rather than an overdeveloped manhood, and there is no hint in the book that man is being painted as superior to woman. It's a book that allows for meaningful and deep personal exploration and development while at the same time passing most of the "smell tests" of contemporary PC culture.

This is the Eastern Orthodox view of these topics.

Learn to doubt your doubts. And as far as atheism, theism, rationalism, etc., maybe it's not so much about being on the right side or wrong side of the truth so much as it's about knowing truth in different ways.

@Epikur That's a very fair point. My own spiritual upbringing was quite fragmented and my mother was basically a new age hippie. When I was 11 we left the Presbyterian church of my childhood and went with neighbors to what I remember as a more conservative evangelical church for over a year. My mom then revealed to our neighbor that my mom was thinking of dating women (after having just divorced my dad, she thought she would given women a try instead of men) and my mom was told that she needed to receive an exorcism to remove the demon of homosexuality as a condition of continuing attendance. Thankfully, we never went back. Though my mom did after that invite the LDS elders to her house to tell her about Mormonism! Then we ended up bouncing around between Spiritualism and Unitarian Universalism until I left for college. Had my only experience of religion been the conservative evangelical church, I would probably have an extremely different view of religion today.

I feel a lot of atheists are like this guy https://www.youtube.com/c/TheraminTrees/videos who has been making anti-religious youtube videos for the past 12 years. So it's like you didn't appreciate your (fundamentalist) religious upbringing, so much so that you declared yourself an atheist and have made it your mission to "debunk" religion altogether, and yet don't you realize how absurd and lacking in self-awareness it is to keep hammering on about it year after year after year? I'm just waiting for the day when TheraminTrees declares that he has started attending an Eastern Orthodox church. Because that does seem to be the path for a lot of the atheists who just can't let religion go.

I ditched a lot of the "conservative" views on things back as a teenager in order to become "counter cultural". I'm thinking about things like (a) don't do drugs (b) don't be promiscuous (c) respect authority I would say it probably is kind of naive and even immature to take those proscriptions at face value, and yet there are natural limitations to going in the opposite direction. What is a fun weekend drinking habit in your 20s, for example, can start to become a problem in your 30s (especially when it becomes your primary way of relieving the inevitable stresses of life). So my interest in Blue has been trying to find the wisdom in their more limited worldview, or at least in their defense of their worldview, while still acknowledging that I'm never putting the genie back in the bottle of thinking something like "my mom told me to not do drugs, so that's how I know that I should never do drugs"!

The Critical Race Theory perspective is that racism = prejudice + power Since white people are seen as having all of the power when it comes to setting racial discourse and institutionalizing racialized policies, it follows that it is impossible to be racist against white people. Whether or not the average person on the street would agree with this conclusion, this is a very standard belief for someone who subscribes to the CRT worldview.

How do we manage to do this without reinforcing racist classification systems in the very first place? I'm thinking here specifically of all of the multiracial folk, whose existence demonstrates that race exists along a continuous spectrum from "total descendant" of European ancestors on the one hand and "total descendant" of African ancestors on the other hand. Do we simply replace notions of race with notions of ancestry as the problem of racism (hopefully) recedes?

Common sense is problematic. By which I mean that the average person on the street has all sorts of implicit biases that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, jingoistic, etc. If the Left's goal were merely to win a bunch of elections then it would probably be more successful in that by coaxing the ego of the average person on the street and by refraining from challenging that person's toxic attitudes. But that's not the only goal of the Left; the Left also wants to shift the culture away from such toxic attitudes in the very first place. So there's a balancing act here between (a) gaining enough political power to meaningfully dismantle the systems of oppression that guide American society while (b) maintaining the moral clarity and witness necessary to challenge such cultural and political systems in the first place. The Left is still in the process of striking the correct balance in pursuing these two goals, but to pretend that the only goal here is (a) is to misunderstand the nature of the contemporary Left.

Christopher Rufo's answer to this question is that West Coast cities are applying a very ideologically Green approach to solving the problem of homelessness (throw money at the problem) that does not address the fundamental root causes of homelessness (mental illness and drug addiction). The refusal to address root problems is borne out of a (misguided) desire to avoid "blaming" the homeless for their problems. And the result of all this is an ever increasing homeless population. I'm not familiar enough with these issues to know how definitive is Rufo's take on the problem, but I do know that a truly compassionate approach to solving homelessness should involve helping people solve their personal problems that led to homelessness in the first place (without blaming/shaming people for these problems, of course).

I can't help but detect a whiff of trans-erasure in this comment of yours. Do you not think there are trans people who strongly identify with the gender role of the gender with which they identify?

We will probably never agee on how we should be discussing gender in the very first place. That is, discussion of normative gender roles is one way of talking about gender, as is discussion of gender as a social construct, and these two ways of talking about gender are really coming at the subject from two different directions. The inability to agree on how to properly discuss gender is probably why these conversations tend to be so polarizing. On the other hand, I think we're coming to a place where we can agree that every person has the (pretty much absolute) right to express and experience their own personal relationship to gender in whatever way feels most comfortable. So how we do or do not discuss gender is really secondary to people simply living their lives as best as they know how. Quite honestly, I think we might all be happiest if we ultimately allow gender to be a bit of mystery

@Carl-Richard I agree, of course, that empathy divides Obama and Trump. I guess what I'm trying to express is that there is (as I understand it) a difference between (a) the personality trait known as narcissism and (b) narcissistic personality disorder I doubt most presidents aside from Trump could be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, even as many of them may well score highly on narcissism as a trait. Personally I don't view it as a problem that the average politician scores highly on the narcissism spectrum relative to the general population since they are representing a country that can be said to be rather "narcissistic" in nature. Or at least, it's not a problem so long as we continue to support the "myth" of American exceptionalism.

I feel one of the most under-examined questions in the world of Social Justice is why anyone would want to engage with the work of social justice in the very first place. I worry that people might even find this line of inquiry itself to be a bit of a provocation, which is not my intent. Instead I suspect that those of us who are interested in Social Justice have a variety of different reasons and motivations for engaging, and that it could be enlightening and useful to lay out some of those reasons and motivations. So why do you care about Social Justice?

There is a reason why psychologists (before the 45th president) were deeply wary of "diagnosing" politicians with various conditions like narcissism. For example, isn't the idea of American exceptionalism in itself rather narcissistic? And so does that mean that a politician who can speak to American exceptionalism in a particularly charismatic way is themself narcissistic? For me the takeaway is that I don't think we should be comparing politicians against members of the general populace but against other politicians. I would argue that Obama compares favorably to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (to say nothing of how he compares to the 45th).

Nationalists pretty much by definition want to maintain a uniform and traditional "sense" of the nation as a whole. So they are deeply sceptical of immigration and not all that interested in "participating within global networks". Overall, I just can't help but read your comment as a Green indictment of Blue, per se. And yes, in the US nationalism gets mixed up with white supremacy. Just for this reason alone, I am deeply wary of nationalism in the US. But I don't know if hostility to nationalism is "helpful" in the larger scheme of things. I mean, if people on the Left decide (as we basically have) that nationalism in the US is simply verboten, then are we not preparing the way for more unhealthy manifestations of the (apparently basic) human yearning for national solidarity? I am thinking, of course, of the 45th president when saying this.