DocWatts

Member
  • Content count

    2,196
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by DocWatts

  1. High quality 20th century Western philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Alfred North Whitehead all engaged with the problems of Western philosophy that you outline. If you're into Heidegger I'd highly suggest checking out Merleau-Ponty and Alfred North Whitehead in particular. Both do a really good job deconstructing the epistemic problems of materialist philosophy. Merleau-Ponty tackles the meaning of embodiment in a very penetrating way, and Alfred North Whitehead outlines a very sophisticated treatment of the dialectics between Being and Becoming in his process-relational philosophy. Both philosophers are very good for cultivating Construct awareness.
  2. Besides showing what a despicable human being Ron DeSantis is, this is also a good case study for how the SD-Red/Blue doesn't understand SD-Green. Tldw; DeSantis misleads and then strands migrants seeking asylum as part of a political stunt for his racist Voters, and is now being investigated for human trafficking. The hope was that the progressive community at Martha's Vineyard would show themselves to be hypocrites by reacting in the same way that Republicans would when someone needs help; slamming the door in these people's face. Apparently it didn't cross DeSantis's selfish mind that the folks over at Martha's Vineyard would go actually out of their way to help these people. On a related note, I could also mention the disturbing parallels in the contemporary far Right to attitudes common in early 1930s, when Hitler announced to the world that Germany would happily oblige other European countries that wanted to import Germany's "criminals" (ie its Jews). Which was intended to imply of course that it was hypocritical to criticize Germany's cruelty, because of the supposition that everyone else shared the Nazi's contempt for the people it was being cruel to
  3. Just thought I'd share a recommendation for a criminally underappreciated YouTube channel I came across, that does a great job of covering philosophical topics in depth in a very approachable way.
  4. Don't get me wrong, having an online community like actualized.org has been really great, but I've also been yearning for ways to find face to face ways to connect with folks who share a similiar set of values. Which I guess could be loosely described as an appreciation for perspective taking, intellectual and spritual curiosity, or more broadly a contemplative approach towards life. Of course I'm fully aware Yellow values are still pretty rare, so not like I'm surprised that finding folks IRL who appreciate the sorts of things we discuss here is going to be inherently challenging.
  5. Check out John Vervaeke's 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' series on YouTube
  6. Holding others to epistemic standards that you don't hold your own metaphysical beliefs to... Watch out for that shit, as it's probably more ingrained in your thinking than you're aware of. Hence why epistemic humility is a good precept
  7. Alfred North Whitehead talks about this extensively in his ruminations on the epistomology of science. We create reductionistic models in order to simplify Reality, but the reduction can never be complete because Reality itself is inexhaustable, and more complex than we can ever fully capture in our abstractions.
  8. As a society we can't even agree that other humans deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, otherwise things like universal health care and an end to exploitative labor practices would be an uncontroversial as giving women the right to Vote. (I'm writing this as an American). So concern for the well being of animals is sadly a luxury at this point. Which of course doesn't take anything away from how monstrous practices like factory farming are, just that far more people within society need to expand their circle of concern for anything to change.
  9. I was actually thinking of John Vervaeke as I was writing that, and I'll second your recommendation for Russel's 'History of Western Philosophy '.
  10. Sure, but that can be mitigated by seeking out multiple authors who interpret the original work from differing perspectives and with differing areas of emphasis. I wouldn't recommend someone read Heidegger who wasn't already well versed in the history of philosophy, since the entirety of something like Being and Time is an attempt to reevaluate the entire Western philosophic tradition. That said, part of the work of good contemporary academics is to give non-specialists an onramp or starting point to begin to understand what's essentially a circular endeavour.
  11. Problem is that the majority of these texts were written for other academic philosophers, with close to zero consideration given for people who aren't already hyper specialized in that philosopher's sub-field. Then also add to that a language and/or cultural barrier, and the fact that a lot of great philosophers were unfortunately just bad writers. The average person isn't going to get anything out of trying to read Hegel of Heidegger. There are better ways to get the insights of Hegel than by fruitlessly bashing one's head against the Phenomenology of Spirit. That said there are some philosophers that have made an effort to make their ideas accessible to the public (Bertrand Russell comes to mind) but these are the exception. In %90 of cases you'll be better off finding a contemporary author who specializes in making the work of other philosophers more accessible to non-specialists (for example someone like Hubert Dreyfus would be a better go to understand Heidegger than trying to read Heidegger directly).
  12. Also worth keeping in mind for context the brutal survival conditions under which communism was actually tried. Imperial Russia and China prior to communism were both backwards countries under the thumb of brutal and incompetent dictatorships. So it should be no surprise that a revolutionary vanguard consisting mostly of SD-Red had the best chance of winning a power struggle (and civil war) under those conditions. Had communism been tried under more favorable survival conditions perhaps things could have turned out differently. We'll never know. One thing that's certain though is that Marx was dead wrong in his prediction that communism would take hold in the most advanced countries first, which should have been a warning that, his excellent critique of capitalism notwithstanding, his theory of what would replace capitalism was fundamentally flawed. Which isn't the damning condemnation of Marx that it might seem, as plenty of other brilliant people have been insightful in some areas while being dead wrong in aspects of their theory. And I'd argue that there's plenty that can be salvaged from Marx, as people like Richard Wolfe have demonstrated.
  13. Political scientists who study democracy tend to categorize the United States as a flawed democracy.
  14. Okay then a more nuanced take for how to rebuild the US prison system could be use the Scandanvian model of humane treatment as a baseline, with privileges being rescinded for bad behavior, for truly heinous crimes, and for repeat offenses in a reformed criminal justice system where there exist support structures that give individuals a realistic chance to succeed once they leave prison. Build different types of facilities that prisoners are sent to depending on the severity of the offender's crimes. No reason that someone who was sentenced for stealing a car should be locked up in the same facility as someone who's committed multiple murders. The threat of having one's comforts rescinded or being sent to a different type of facility if the bad behavior is eggregius enough would be a better way of incentivizing good behavior; far better than using harsh punitive measures such as solitary confinement (which the UN considers to be torture) for that purpose. And it should go without saying that we shouldn't be sending nearly as many people to prison as we are, so these reforms would have to coincide with sweeping reforms to our criminal justice system, systemic anti poverty measures, and an end to the (racist) war on drugs. Not that any of this is a realistic political possibility any time soon; rather it's what a potential SD-Yellow prison system in the United States could look like someday.
  15. If the choice is between the human rights abuses and hellish conditions of the US prison system, and a system that's humane at the cost of affording a comfortable existence to some of its worst offenders, that's not a difficult choice to make.
  16. The world will never "run out" of uranium (or oil). It's just that the difficulty of extraction and associated costs (including externalities) become too high for it to be a viable energy source, once a certain threshold of scarcity has been reached.
  17. "Our prison system is so inhumane and cruel that it's more merciful to put people to death" is if anything damning confirmation that we need substantive prison reform to end exactly the abuses you describe, than it is a good argument for the death penalty. There's no justifiable reason that prisons have to be anywhere near as bad as they are in places like the United States. Just because it's easier to kill people than to end the numerous human rights abuses in our prison system, doesn't mean that the easier solution is the correct one.
  18. To everyone here who says that the death penalty is more humane than locking someone up in a cruel prison system that's rife with human rights abuses, would that still be your view if we had a far more humane prison system (like the ones that exist in the Scandinavian countries, for example)?
  19. Questions are perfectly okay if they're being asked in Good Faith. That said, not every topic is deserving of respect and consideration (ie Climate Change denial).
  20. Problem is that if someone is wrongly convicted for a life sentence, they can be exonerated and released later. Can't do that for someone who was put to death. Considering that in America at least the legal system is weaponized against the poor, and that two people of different socioeconomic backgrounds convicted of the same crime will have likely very different outcomes in the legal system, I can't in good conscience support the death penalty. If it has to be supported, then the death penalty should be reserved for crimes against humanity. Actions that lead to the deaths of thousands or millions of people (and imho this should include fossil fuel executives who lie and delay action on Climate Change, as well as gross negligence and abuse of power for people in position of authority that lead to deaths).
  21. Well, the context matters a lot here. Eminem is adopting a fictional and exaggerated persona for comedic purposes, which can still be problematic, but isn't remotely the same thing as someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson pushing fascistic rhetoric that's intended to encourage acts of political violence (again, with a thin veneer of plausible deniability). If you want to call the glamorization of violence in certain works artistic expression irresponsible I might agree with you, but it's an entirely different matter when the violent rhetoric is coming from a political party or former head of State.
  22. Thanks. Both sources seem to be in agreement that using commercially existing reactors, we'd have about two centuries worth of Uranium. A new generation of breeder reactors which can use spent fissile material as fuel sound extremely promising, and I'm fully on board with public investments into R&D for nuclear energy alongside renewables.
  23. (Your link wasn't working, fyi). According to Scientific American the existing supply of Uranium would last us about two centuries. Of course that's using uranium based fission, it fusion ever becomes viable that would change things significantly. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/#:~:text=According to the NEA%2C identified,today's consumption rate in total.