DocWatts

On a related note, kudos to Biden for explicitly calling out and condemning the calls to political violence from the Right in his speech last night. Every one of us with a sense of social responsibility needs to be calling out dog whistle rhetoric that's advocating for political violence whenever we come across it, so as to deny those who are using it the plausible deniability they need for this sort of thing to become normalized.

A combination of renewables and nuclear energy seems to be the most realistic path forward imho. There are legitimate concerns about nuclear energy, but those are that of cost, logistics, and waste rather than safety. Newer nuclear reactor designs are far safer than stuff that was built half a century ago, and let's not forget that air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year. The primary challenge rather is that a typical nuclear power plant costs tens of billions of dollars to construct, and takes around a decade to become operational. And of course there's the issue of nuclear waste, but again this has to be weighed against the immediacy of catastrophic climate change from carbon pollution. And it's worth keeping in mind that nuclear energy is non-renewable, and if we used nuclear at the same rate as fossil fuels we'd have perhaps one to two centuries of nuclear fuel before it became cost prohibitive due scarcity. So nuclear can be part of a broader move away from fossil fuels, but it can't be the lynchpin of that strategy.

Much of the confusion and antagonism around gender dynamics stems from a more general lack of construct awareness, which leads to black and white thinking about a subject that requires a degree of nuance. Sex is biological. Gender is socially constructed. Socially constructed does not mean arbitrary, but it does mean that gender is not a determinate characteristic. Rather, it's a social identity that correlates with some aspects of biological sex but is in no way synonymous with it.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union and the person most responsible for ending the Cold War, passed away at the age of 91 yesterday. RIP Gorby, may you be remembered as a good man who tried your best to make the world a better place, despite the many obstacles you encountered. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-62732447

What you're most likely looking for is metamodernism. It's an emerging post-poatmoder meta-paradigm which takes a developmental view that transcends and includes both modernism and postmodernism. https://www.google.com/search?q=metamodernism&oq=metamodernism&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l7.3332j0j7&client=ms-android-gotron&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 If you're looking for a book on the subject, The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht is the first book I'd recommend. If you prefer fiction / essays, David Foster Wallace was an early metamodern author who might be worth checking out as well

Higher education is pretty much a requirement if you want to Be able to transition into a career doing work that you enjoy and find meaningful Be able to better your circumstances and not be trapped in a series of dead end, exploitative jobs Be able to contribute to society through your career, especially if that career involves any sort of certification (ie bring a teacher, lawyer, doctor, engineer, etc) Participate in democracy in an informed way The only way that any of this happens is through support structures that give ordinary people access to opportunities. Not wanting to spend the rest of your life trapped in an exploitative, low wage job (which is the default for people who don't find a career in our society) isn't a sign of greed, as you project. It's a sign of wanting to self actualize and do something meaningful with one's life. And to be able to self actualize requires first being able to meet one's basic needs, which in our society is acquired with money.

Not really sure what you're asking. Are you asking who here voted for Biden? Who's in support of student loan forgiveness? Or are you asking if an executive action was the right way to handle this?

Projecting much? Actually I'm curious as to what you think a conscious approach to politics is supposed to mean (you are on a conscious politics forum, after all). Because compassionate concern for your fellow beings is foundational to conscious politics, and the libertarian stance you seem to be embodying just ain't gonna cut it here.

@Devin If your views are that a quality education is something that should be considered a privilege for those able to afford it rather than a Right, I have to wonder what you're seeking to gain from participating on a conscious politics forums. Because your view is the opposite of compassionate.

This was done via an executive act. He did this now specifically to help his party in the midterms, as voters have a notoriously short memory. I'll post a link with the actual details, but here's the TLDR: $10k debt forgiveness for people making under $120k That goes up to $20k if you are/were a Pell Grant recipiant (something like half of all college students received this) If your income is under %225 of the federal poverty line your monthly payments go down to 0 A revised Income Based plan with a maximum rate of %5 of monthly income (down from %15). If you're on the lower/mid end of the earnings scale, expect your monthly payment to go down substantially Under this new Income Based Plan, loans that are paid on time each month no longer accrue interest https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/24/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-student-loan-relief-for-borrowers-who-need-it-most/

The problem with that solution is that it does nothing at all to address the inflated cost of education. (Which to be fair, student loan forgiveness does not address either). The reason that college is so insanely overpriced in the US is a glaring lack of public funding for higher education, combined with bandaid "solution" of the easy availability of loans, and also a college degree being a barrier of entry for the majority of jobs that pay a livable wage The way you address this is by replacing student loans with a publicly funded higher education system that's divorced from the private market, ala what already exists in much of the developed world.

Okay fine, let's actually use that example then. And let's be charitable and try to pay that loan off in 4 - 5 years instead of two. That's about $32k a year after taxes, and less than that if you're paying health insurance premiums. Anyone who's actually tried surviving on their own on around $30k a year (after taxes) when asked to set aside literally half of thier take home pay for student loans, would most likely laugh in your face at the suggestion. The only way that becomes even remotely feasible is if you're being subsidized by someone else (such as your parents) paying your other living expenses. And hey no shame in that if you're fortunate enough to have that option, but let's not pretend that a $50k in debt isn't a real burden on a typical person graduating college.

How much do you think people with a bachelor's degree are earning right out of college? lol. Either you're trolling or have no idea how the real world works.

I also live in the area and went to Wayne State, so I know what I'm talking about lol. Tuition costs are about $14k a year. Over 4 years that comes out to about $48k. Add in books and supplies and that's over $50k. That's around $50k of debt after graduating, not $50k a year in case that wasn't clear from my earlier post. https://wayne.edu/financial-aid/resources/cost-of-attendance

Wayne State University in Detroit (a very poor city) is considered one of the more affordable public universities in this region of the country, and even then base tuition costs $50k - 60k. And that's excluding room and board, not to mention books, supplies, parking, etc. College tuition is broken in many of the same ways as our privatized health care system in America; elite services for the affluent, and a crippling debt burden for everyone else. Hopefully I don't have to explain to you why entire generations having to forestall (or simply not being able to) buy homes and start families because basic necessities (such as education, healthcare, and housing) have become unaffordable is a really bad thing for society. If we're not ready to join the rest of the civilized world by making public education free (or at least highly subsidized), at least stop charging interest on the loans we have to take out in order to have the opportunity to transition to a job that pays a livable wage.

I'll second this. 20 years seems to strike a good balance between the value of having experienced and knowledge legislators, and nudging Congress to be more age representative of the rest of the country (median age in the US is 38 years old). That said, term limits for legislatures is secondary in importance to having term limits for the Supreme Court, and the difference in importance is not even close.

Perhaps surprisingly, the debt forgiveness is actually going to be less impactful than some other things contained in this act for a lot of people. As someone with about 80k of student loans, the lowered cap on income based payment to %5 of gross income will have a far bigger impact on my life than having $10k of debt forgiven. Also (and this is huge), the loans won't accrue interest as long as payments are being made every month under this new income driven repayment plan. What this means in practice is substantially lower payments for most people with federal student loans. In addition, for people making under %225 of the federal poverty line won't have to make any payments at all.

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.