DocWatts

While it's par for the course for Sam Harris to have bad political takes as part and parcel of his "enlightened centrism", on this count I don't think he's entirely wrong. (1) Hitler didn't have access to nuclear weapons. And was never going to, if only because of the irrationality of Nazi ideology that rejected nuclear physics as "Jewish science". (2) Hitler wasn't in position to prevent the most powerful country in the world from taking urgently needed steps to avert a potentially civilization ending climate apocalypse. That's not to say that Trump is 'worse' that Hitler (however you define worse), just that because of technological advancements States are far more impactful and dangerous today than they were in the 1930s and 40s. Far more is required of heads of State these days than a century ago, and bad judgement could literally lead to hundreds of millions of deaths; either through a bad judgement call that unintentionally triggers a nuclear war, or through large swaths of the planet literally being rendered uninhabitable for humans due to runaway Climate Change.

Most scientists (or at least those with any degree of sophistication) would readily concede this point. But most would stop short of questioning the metaphysical assumption that Reality itself is "objective", even if they are willing to admit that science itself can't reach the lofty goal of pure objectivity. To a mind that's not construct aware the only alternative to an "objective" Reality is solipsism, but that's only the case if one seeks an Absolute ground in one of the two poles of subject-object dualism. The thought that we can live in a shared Reality that's intersubjective (non-determinate and unable to be fully articulated) takes some epistemic work to arrive at. Even something as seemingly self evident as an "object" isn't something that exists in nature, because Reality itself is undifferentiated. Rather, "objects" are how Reality is disclosed to embodied beings such as ourselves who need to manipulate our surroundings in order to survive.

Objectivity does not (necessarily) equate to Truth. Objectivity is a construct that attempts to bypass the role that consiousness plays in constituting the world, in an attempt to gain a "view from nowhere." Of course a "view from nowhere" is a contradiction in terms, because Reality is always viewed from a somewhere; from particular perspective. The shared world we live in intersubjective rather than objective. Insofar as science forgets that objectivity is a second order derivation from our direct experience, it falls into epistemic error.

Pro tip: don't begin inquiries around race with the phrase "I'm not racist, but..." Just ask whatever you're going to ask without prefacing it in a defensive manner.

There are a handful of avenues you could take for learning political epistemology, which include: Studying sociology, history, and political science Becoming more media literate Studying general (non-political) epistomology Gaining a general knowledge of how biases work, and learning how to apply that to your own cognitive processes Studying how paradigms work Learning how rhetoric is used in political forms of speech (so you can begin to recognize rhetorical tactics like dog whistles for instance) Cultivating dialectical and systemic forms of thinking Cultivating a compassionate outlook on life, which includes empathetic listening and genuine curiosity about people with different life experiences than your own Learning how to unpack ideologically loaded terms such as: socialism, fascism, postmodernism, etc. Learning how conspiracy theories work

The difference in how the issue is framed (and thus understood) from differing perspectives, and then how we are to evaluate the relative validity of those perspectives, is exactly the issue at heart. As far as my assumptions, I'll fully admit to being biased towards finding dialectical systems thinking on the whole to be more Truthful than Nationalism. Not because Nationalism came earlier, but because Nationalism is a far more partial and ultimately selfish way of looking at the world.

The difference between the Left wing and Right wing critiques of globalization is the difference between critiqueing something from Below rather than from Above. Those critiquing from Below (ie Right wing critiques of globalism in this instance) will tend to misconstrue sociological critique that's rooted in systems theory as a Conspiracy Theory, simply because they don't understand the former. It's really not all that different from the ways that the Right wing misunderstands something like Critical Race Theory, which they misconstrue as a plot by Leftists to make white people feel bad about their history and culture, versus what it really is (I'd a systems level theory of structural inequality, where whether or not individuals are personally racist is entirely besides the point).

Well, there's a portion of his supporters that are willing to start a Civil War on his behalf.....

Looks like the Trump's passports were seized by the FBI in the raid, which is generally something that happens when a suspect is considered a flight risk. Which naturally leads to asking what form will the inevitable violence from Trump's followers will take when their leader is formally charged.

The normalization of political violence as a symptom of fascism is a troubling sign of a potential civil conflict in our future. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/12/fbi-attacker-trump-capitol-riot-truth-social https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/08/14/phoenix-fbi-trump-supporters-armed-mar-a-lago-search-vpx.cnn

While what they were able to pass is far less than what we were hoping for with the far more ambitious $2T Build Back Better plan, all due credit for still being able to get a sizable Climate Change bill passed considering the obstacles that Democrats are facing in getting any major legislation passed with a razor thin majority that includes two conservative Senators with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

The selfishness and utter disregard of any underlying principles of the MAGA crowd can be quite clearly seen in the whiplash of these folks going from 'back the Blue' to 'defund the FBI' in a heartbeat when it's someone they're simping for who's implicated. "Law and order for thee, not for me."

Bump. Bernardo Kastrup does a great job dismantling panpsychism. The biggest issue with panpsychism (other than using a dualistic reduction base) is the so called 'combination problem', which is the problem of how atomistic units of consciousness are somehow able to combine into the unified consiousness that we inhabit in our direct experience. Kastrup correctly points out that the is as much of a crippling issue for panpsychism as the problem of how consiousness can arise out of non conscious matter, and in this regard panpsychism is little better than the materialist paradigm it's trying to supplant.

Trump's sycophants know full well that one of the most powerful people on the planet has innumerable tools at his disposal to make sure that he can't be held accountable for his actions, not the least of which being a cucked Republican Party that's actively working to kill any investigation into Trump's crimes because it implicates them. And in any case they don't apply that impossibly high bar of evidence towards accusations aimed at their political opponents such as Hilary Clinton or Biden. But this is how Cults tend to operate, so nothing unexpected there. The egoicly gratifying empowerment narrative they get from a charismatic person attacking their imagined enemies overrides any considerations of what might be good for the country (if that's even given any consideration at all).

It will be interesting to see Trump's Cult bend themselves into pretzels to hand wave away a former president stealing highly classified nuclear weapons documents. The fact that a small handful of these folks somehow make their way to a conscious politics forum is baffling... As to Trump, the Rosenbergs were put to death in the 50s for nuclear espionage. I don't support the death penalty, but if ever there was a case where it could be justified it's that of a former head of State selling (or intended to commit blackmail with) highly classified documents about weapons that could literally end civilization.

Andrew Yang also made many of these same points, and apologies for being blunt but it's a bad political take. Anyone who would frame this as a politicalization of the FBI is almost certainly already immersed within a far-right echo chamber. (Not to mention that the head of the FBI who signed off on this was appointed by Trump). Similiar to how if you believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that Jan 6 was a false flag carried out by antifa you're certainly not a centrist or even a "moderate" conservative. Not investigating federal crimes and breaches of national security out of concern for the sensibilities of a radicalized political faction within the country sets a terrible precedent that having a radicalized political base places you above the law.

Former presidents arent supposed to be above the law. Raiding a house to gather evidence for an investigation of someone who committed treason against the United States by orchestrating an attempted coup is an appropriate use of the FBI, despite what Trump's cult would have you believe. *** Apparently what the FBI is searching for are classified national security documents that Trump wasn't supposed to have with him when he left office, and that are illegal for him to be in personal possession of.

I guess I'll be the odd one out and posit some of the limitations I've noticed with Spiral Dynamics, which have less to do with the model itself and more to do with how easy it is to misuse. Spiral Dynamics is best used as a sociological model which maps out the dialectics behind meta-paradigms shifts within human societies. It really shouldn't be used as a model of personal development. Precisely because Spiral Dynamics is a meta model it becomes very easy to apply it in a reductionist way as a form of sociological bypassing that explains away its subject matter. In this way it's not all that dissimiliar to taking the insights of someone like Marx into a class reductionism that's used to explain away multi-faceted problems.

While I don't have a link handy, I do recall Ken Wilber more or less admitting that he had developed a shadow around SD-Green from his time in academia, stemming from the uphill battle he had in getting his ideas to be taken seriously in an environment that was still paradigm locked to post-modernism. So I would take Wilber's predictions and proclamations around Green with a grain of salt due to his biases in this area.

Just to give people who may not be aware of the direction that the States is headed in, there were recently Votes held in the US House of Representatives to codify gay marriage, the right to access birth control, and the right to interracial marriage into Law. An all three of these, the Republican Party overwhelming voted NO. No to gay marriage. No to birth control. And no to interracial marriage... In 2022. People here can sense the direction that the wind is blowing, and are rightly frightened about the prospect of US democracy collapsing. A recent poll said that roughly half of the US thinks a Civil War is likely in the near future. It's a bad time to be living in America, and anyone who tells you otherwise either has thier head buried in the sand, or has some sympathies towards fascism.

In my case, I can list some of the books which deepened my understanding of epistomology, and thus helped me break away from the Materialist paradigm: The View From Nowhere - Thomas Nagel The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn The Embodied Mind - Evan Thompson, Fransisco Varella, and Elenore Rosch Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Ken Wilber Science Ideated - Bernardo Kastrup Being and Time - Martin Heidegger

They were arrested for blocking a street during a protest in front of the Supreme Court

Proud to say that the representative for my district was at that protest and among those which were arrested. The aging and out of touch leadership of the Democratic Party needs to be challenged, because 'business as usual' isn't going to cut it when US democracy is on the verge of collapse against a rising tide of fascism.

I think it's safe to assume that we're in agreement about the problems with the physicalist paradigm; namely that that the mental isn't reducible to the physical. That said, while forms of objective Idealism that use consciousness as its reduction base are one alternative, a form of dual-aspect monism which treats mind and matter as dual aspects of something more fundamental is another (for example Whiteheads's process-relational ontology). For my part I fall squarely in the camp of agnosticism between the latter two options. Moving away from a flawed and outdated paradigm (physicalism) is of more importance than which of these more promising alternatives is more correct, imho.