DocWatts

My two cents... Political violence, even against an objectively terrible person, will only make an already bad situation worse. But don't let them change the narrative - Project 2025 and Trump's plans to become a vengeful dictator are still the top story here. Let's be real - anyone attending a Trump rally in 2024 is the contemporary American equivalent of a Nazi (note that I wouldn't have made this strong of a claim in 2016 or 2020 - no more plausible deniability anymore about who Trump is and what his intentions are ). Let's not kid ourselves that they'd be denouncing violence if the situation were reversed. From the attack on the Capitol to the thwarted plot to kidnap and execute the governor of my home state of Michigan, MAGA fascists have a proven track record of supporting stochastic terrorism - so long as it's aimed at thier political opponents. So continue to denounce political violence. But let's be clear - Trump isn't a victim, as he's done more than anyone to cultivate the toxic political environment, and normalization of violence, that we've been living through.

The idea that factual truth and malignant disinformation (ie, Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 election) deserve equal hearing in the name of 'balance' is destroying American democracy. Responsible non-partisan journalism requires fact checking. Not just dropping misinformation alongside truths with zero context on which is which. Epistemologically, I do find it interesting how the far-right have ironically appropriated the most pernicious aspects of postmodern skepticism towards Truth to push their bullshit.

If the Leopard that wants to eat you is telling you that he's going to eat you, it's not a conspiracy, FFS. Project 2025 was listed on the Heritage Foundation website, and a bunch of Trump's former staffers contributed to it. Trump's only trying to distance himself from it now that it's getting attention in mainstream media, and ordinary people are becoming aware of how extreme it is.

My point was more that Trump wasn't elected because a majority of Americans wanted him in office or agreed with his vision for the country. Rather, he became president in no small part because of structural flaws baked into America's antiquated electoral system. Where a candidate who loses by 3 million votes can win a presidential election. (Note that I'm not saying that Trump 'stole' the 2016 election, just that the rules of the game were weighted in his favor). The reason I'm emphasizing this is because of bad narratives from both the far-Left and the far-Right that the American people supposedly want (or by contrast 'deserve') a vengeful Trump autocracy. When in actually the system is heavily weighted in favor of the %30-40 of the country who find Trump's narcissistic authoritarianism appealing. In this respect there's a parallel to be drawn with misconceptions that a majority of Germans supported Hitler. In the last free Weimar election the Nazis were only got a third of the vote, then proceeded to exploit structural flaws within the Weimer constitution to end German democracy.

Let's just call it for what it is - a judicial coup against constitutional democracy. As LegalEagle pointed out in his vid on the topic, it's like the SCOTUS effectively amended the Constitution to gut the checks and balances against the Executive Branch of the US government. And short of a constitutional convention, we have little to no recourse on this ruling. The decision is a coup against democracy because it gives any future president a rubber stamp to set themselves up as Putin style autocrat - able to break the law to keep themselves in power, with legal impunity. This will go down as the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court, alongside the Dred Scott ruling which decreed that black Americans were not US citizens and didn't have any rights, leading directly to the US civil war. The salt in the wound is that 5 of the 6 justices responsible for this coup were themselves appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. My take? Looking like US democracy is probably fucked... Of course we still need to keep Trump out of the White House, but it's hard to see a way where this decision isn't going to be horribly abused by some future president, even if it's not Trump.

According to the skewed rules of the game he won, I wouldn't call it 'fair and square ' since he lost the popular vote by 3 million.

The subset of the US population that feels this way also happens to be the ones who are supporting the Christian Nationalist's efforts to end US democracy. It's marginalized people within the US, along with Leftist and progressives who aren't on board with American imperialism who will end up suffering the most from the collapse of US democracy. Not the willfully ignorant, morally superior subset of the population that you're alluding to. US Hateriots expect Trump to be 'thier' dictator, and they're the worst of the worst as far as being oblivious to the harm that the US causes in other parts of the world. I'd re-examine that punitive attitude if I were you. It's the equivalent of thinking that Germans in 1930s are getting thier 'just desserts' for World War 1, not recognizing the gravity of a vengeful dictator for people outside of Germany.

It almost sounds like you think that American citizens are deserving of collective punishment because of the actions of the US government over the past 100 years. Not a very compassionate take, especially since much of that clandestine foreign policy was done without the American public's informed knowledge or consent. I wonder if you'd apply the same logic to the 1.3 billion people living in China for the actions of the Chinese Communist Party.

Hello again fellow actualizers! I thought I might share another section of the philosophy book I'm writing which delves into the epistemology of categories, using an analogue of the 'map is not the territory' metaphor. In it I suggest that reason is inherently embodied, and not a purely intellectual activity - meaning that our reasoning abilities are derived from our concernful involvement with the world. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ CATEGORIES ARE ALWAYS CONTEXTUAL Orienting Metaphor : Categories are like handheld models that help us grasp aspects of Reality that are relevant to us. Just as we wouldn’t confuse a model airplane with an actual aircraft, we shouldn’t confuse our constructed categories for Reality itself. The Model Is Not The Manifestation Throughout our exploratory journey we’ve been assembling a tentative framework for understanding knowledge, grounded in the importance of the living body to what minds are and how thought works. Rather than getting bogged down in a thicket of abstract theorizing that’s disconnected from everyday experience, our aim has been to elucidate our concernful involvement with the day-to-day world. From this foundation, we proceeded to highlight the centrality of nonconceptual knowledge for navigating daily life. We suggested that concepts depend upon a background of familiarity with the world that’s nonconceptual, attained through everyday practices and activities. Lastly, we analyzed how this grounding within Reality, termed Being-In-The-World, is foundational for conceptual thinking - including scientific understanding, logical reasoning, and beliefs. Taken together, the epistemology, or theory of knowledge, we’ve been constructing is called ‘Enactivism’ - named for its overarching premise that minds actively bring forth, or ‘enact’, a lived Reality. A key facet of this framework is that the world itself is central to who and what we are, inseparable from our ‘being’, and no definitive boundary that delineates where ‘I’ end and ‘the world’ begins. This lack of an absolute boundary between ‘self’ and ‘world’ may sound like a highly abstract or even spiritual point. However, it has direct applicability for the epistemological ground we’ll be covering in this chapter. The next stop on our exploratory journey brings us to categories, and their influence on our perceptions of the everyday world - how they illuminate, and how they obscure. To that end, we’ll examine everyday dualisms (paired, oppositional categories) such as ‘self and other’ or ‘inside and outside’. We’ll also cover abstract concepts such as ‘space’ and ‘time’, which are fundamental to how we reason about Reality. With this requisite groundwork now in place, we turn to our third ‘Provisional Truth’, which is that categories are always contextual. The orienting metaphor that will clue us into its meaning is a handheld model, like a model airplane. The gist of the metaphor is that categories are like handheld models, helping us grasp aspects of Reality that are relevant for us. Just as we wouldn’t confuse a model airplane on our desk for an actual aircraft, we shouldn’t conflate our constructed categories for Reality itself. The key takeaway here is that the model is not the manifestation - meaning that models are not a replacement for what they represent. A model vehicle can’t be used as transportation, nor is plastic fruit edible. Moreover, models are not replications of their real-world counterparts - even a highly detailed model can’t hope to replicate the millions of mechanical parts within a Boeing 747. So if a model airplane isn’t a replacement for, or a replication of, an actual aircraft, then what is it? In essence, it’s a collection of curated surface details - such as rigid wings, a cockpit, and an engine - which combine to form a unified impression of a more complex whole. This intuitive connection between a model plane and an actual aircraft is arrived at through imaginative projection that’s derived from our embodied experiences within a world that contains airplanes. So that’s the ‘model’ side of our orienting metaphor. Now that we have a more precise understanding of what a model is, let’s extrapolate the metaphor to our exploration of categories. The basic parallel is that just as a model plane is not an actual aircraft, our constructed categories are not objective features of Reality. Both model airplanes and mental categories create an intuitive impression of a more complex whole, by emphasizing certain of its selective features. Crucially, these selective features aren’t arbitrary - they stand out to us because they are relevant to us for some reason. This relevancy is derived from our concernful involvement with the world, which arises from everyday practices and activities that we engage with through our living body and our culture. Consequently, categories aren’t a straightforward ‘retrieval’ of pre-existing distinctions that are ‘out there’ in the world. They are instead an anthropomorphized schema that we impose upon Reality, which helps us make sense of our embodied experience. Recall that a schema is a template for organizing and interpreting information within a given domain. Describing this schema as anthropomorphized indicates that it’s tied to human capacities, needs, and purposes. In sum, categories are functional rather than objective - meaning that they’re useful to us, even though they’re not objective features of Reality. The basic purpose of a category is to help us make predictive generalizations about what we encounter within the world, which is integral to our ability to reason. Reason is our capacity to manipulate and extend these ‘predictive generalizations’, using them to draw inferences, predict patterns, and reflect upon our embodied experience. The gist of our ‘Provisional Truth’ is that categories aren’t absolute - they are always tied to a biological, cultural, and personal context. What a context refers to are the background situation and circumstances that inform our interpretation of something. For example, consider how spoken language is informed by tone and body language, and how a conversation’s meaning depends upon its circumstances and our relationship with the speaker. While it’s easy to grasp how the meaning we derive from spoken language depends upon a host of contextual factors, this is also true of the categories that we use to make sense of the world. Recognizing that categories are inherently contextual has huge ramifications for how we think about knowledge, but this comes with the potential for misunderstandings as well - so let’s address those right out of the gate. Acknowledging the contextual nature of categories is not to suggest that categories are arbitrary - as we’ll see, there are sensible reasons for why our categorization shifts in different types of contexts. Likewise, the suggestion that categories aren’t objective features of Reality isn’t to imply that categories are purely subjective either (i.e., purely a matter of an individual’s whims and preferences). In fact, the distinction between subjective and objective is a type of everyday dualism that we’ll be scrutinizing in this chapter. Instead, the overall goal is to articulate a more nuanced understanding of categories which seeks to acknowledge their many benefits as well as their limitations.

Agreed. The Trump Immunity decision needs to be framed in discussions and the media as a Judicial Coup against constitutional democracy, because that's exactly what it is.

The most awful part is that regardless of if Trump wins the election, the Supreme Court has initiated a judicial coup which gives any future president all of the tools they need to become an autocrat. LegalEagle describes it as if the Supreme Court just effectively amended the Constitution to end checks and balances (which the Founding Fathers very much intended) for the Executive Branch. The president now has broad legal immunity to take bribes, make efforts to overturn election, attempt a military coup, or assassinate political opponents. The salt in the wound is that 5 of the 6 justices who gave the president the powers of a King were themselves appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. So in short, American democracy looks to be fucked. Hybrid regime here we come.

They're not mutually exclusive, having a life purpose doesn't necessitate sticking your head in the sand about the society and culture in which you're living.

You should trust what Trump says on any topic as far you can throw him (which isn't far, considering that he's an obese man).

The 'Deep State', in the way Trump and his cohorts use the term, is a right-wing conspiracy theory - a dishonest justification for giving an autocratic strongman dictatorial powers. Period. What's being disingenuously referred to with this conspiracy theory is the administrative apparatus of federal, non-political employees that literally every modern country in world uses and depends upon. It's the 21st century equivalent of the 'stabbed in the back' conspiracy theory, which blamed Jews and socialists for Germany's loss in World War 1, which the Nazis skillfully used to seize power Stop spreading this BS, it's antithetical to a Conscious Politics forum.

Mark my words, the Trump immunity ruling, which officially places the US president above the law and the US Constitution, will go down as the worst ruling since the Dread Scott decision, where the SCOTUS ruled that black people were not citizens and thus not protected by the Bill of Rights - leading directly to the US civil war. People who are downplaying the importance of this ruling need only imagine Biden sending a team of Navy Seals to assassinate Trump, since the ruling places the US president outside of the rule of law. Biden could claim that because assassinating political opponents was carried out in the execution of his presidential duties it's by definition legal - and thanks to this decision, he'd be correct. It's an insane ruling that effectively ends up US democracy, even if it's actual effects are gradual. The salt in the wound is that five of the size justices that voted to end democracy were themselves appointed by presidents who got into office despite losing the popular vote.

There are elements of truth in this, but remember that there are developmental aspects to left-right politics. The right is far worse about forcing simple solutions on a complex world, because conservative psychology has its roots in fear, projection, and a denial of Reality. The Left is of course also capable of reductionist thinking (an idealogy like Marxism can be a good example of this). But the ways that the Left denies Reality tends to be more subtle, and less aggressively ignorant, than thinking that all your problems are because of feminism or immigrants, for example. It's been reliably shown that as people become more educated they become more Liberal. Moving Left entails being able to think more in terms of systems and systems thinking, which is why topics like Systemic Racism or Structural Inequality are incomprehensible to people who lack this capacity.

You might be interested in this write-up for my philosophy book, which goes into the embodied, biological roots of meaning. In essence, meaning isn't some transcendental aspect of a supposedly 'neutral' or objective Reality - it always exists for a particular someone, and within a particular context. _____________________________________________________________________________________ MINDS DISCLOSE WORLDS Orienting Metaphor : World disclosure is the mind’s way of constructing a home for us within Reality. What Is A World? And What Do Worlds Have To Do With Minds? If this book can be likened to a ‘guided tour’ of a seven story building, with the executive suite on the top floor representing our relationship to our beliefs about Reality, then the premise we’ll be exploring on this ground floor is that minds disclose worlds. Our orienting metaphor for this section is a home, and the central idea we’ll be exploring is that minds create homes for us within Reality. And just like a house is constructed to be compatible with the lifestyle of human beings (houses aren’t built underwater, nor are their doorways accessed from the ceiling), minds construct a version of Reality for us to live within that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. The process by which minds turn Reality into a home for us to reside in is called world disclosure. What a world refers to is a cumulative whole of meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships for a living Being. We can think of a world as what Reality is on an experiential level for an individual. To disclose is to reveal or uncover something. So world disclosure is the process of revealing a meaningful world within the whole of Reality. SIDE NOTE: The way we are using the term world denotes a more specific meaning than what’s normally meant by ‘the world’. ‘A world’ refers to an individual’s experiential world. While ‘the world’ is a cumulation of the broader social, cultural, and ecological environments that exist on our planet. What’s being referred to here is the former rather than the latter. What’s important here is the capacity for meaning that’s created by world disclosure. As living beings whose survival hinges on our ability to appropriately interpret and respond to what we encounter in the world, we do not and could not reside within a bare Reality. What we reside within is a meaningful world. In our metaphor of home construction, houses of course don't build themselves. Rather, they are constructed from building materials that are put together through the labor of people. Likewise, minds disclose worlds from the opportunities and demands of a particular environment, through the organizational structure of a living body. And just as houses are built to different specifications for specific environments, living beings experience different forms of world disclosure based on their distinct evolutionary adaptations. Hence, it is only through the living body that a mind has access to a world of people, places, and things. Another way that this could be stated is that minds are inherently embodied. Therefore, when we speak of a mind we’re also necessarily speaking of a living body as well. The term somatic is used to describe ideas and practices that deal with our direct experience of the living body. Thus, what we are articulating is a somatic theory of mind. Consequently, minds do not ‘invent’ worlds independently from the living body, nor does world disclosure take place in isolation from our broader shared Reality. This is because world disclosure is fundamentally relational. Which puts world disclosure at odds with philosophical theories such as solipsism, which deny the existence of a shared Reality beyond one’s own mind. In case the distinction between an environment and a world is still a bit unclear, an ‘environment’ refers to the physical and social spaces which exert evolutionary selection pressures on a living being. In contrast, a ‘world’ denotes the meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships that a mind experiences throughout its life. Alternatively, we can think of worlds as what environments become through minds which are hardwired to experience meaning. The difference between an environment and a world can also be likened to the difference between a house and a home. For a home isn’t just a physical space, but a significant place which has been suffused with a rich tapestry of familiarity and meaning. The larger implication of all this is that minds aren’t passive spectators that are ‘parachuted’ into a preexisting world with fixed features. Instead, minds actively shape the characteristics of the worlds they inhabit. However, this doesn’t mean that minds are free to reside within just any type of world; nor are the characteristics of a world a ‘choice’ that individuals make. Rather, the type of world that a mind resides within is a consequence of its bodily structure, along with the opportunities and demands of its environment. Therefore, a world is not solely a product of a mind, nor is it an inherent feature of physical Reality. In fact, it is not a ‘thing’ at all! Rather, a world is a process that’s created and sustained by the interaction of a mind and its environment. How this process unfolds for a living being is a direct consequence of how that individual uses its evolutionary adaptations to meet its survival needs. Consequently, what Reality is for a living being can’t be asked in isolation from what that organism does. Using ourselves as an example, there are aspects of our physiology that are especially important for the types of world disclosure that human beings experience. These include highly expressive and communicative faces, a bipedal posture that’s oriented along a front-back axis, highly dexterous hands that are used to manipulate our surroundings, and forward facing eyesight that serves as our primary navigational sense.

In political science, the term for a mixed authoritarian-democratic form of government is known as a 'hybrid regime'. In a modern context, they're a function of failed democracy . They're not a state of affairs that we should aspire to - and they're certainly not some higher, more conscious 'synthesis' between autocracy and democracy. They are what happens when democratic institutions, and the civil society that supports those institutions, weaken to the point where an unaccountable elite (whether that's an individual or a small group) is able to place themselves above the law, and game the system to stay in power.

On the whole, Biden has been a good president whose legislative accomplishments have done more good for ordinary Americans than any administration in the past 50 years. The problem is that he's failed to build a sustainable democratic coalition that can bulwark against the far-right's efforts to turn America into an autocracy. If Biden loses against Trump that is the only thing he'll be remembered for.

The structure of our Electoral College and Senate is such that it gives rural folks with stage Blue values an undemocratic, outsized influence in US federal elections. Both institutions are effectively a form of Affirmative Action for conservatives. If US presidential elections were decided by national popular vote, it would be almost impossible for the Republican Party to win. The structure of the US Senate is quite undemocratic, since it gives small rural states like Wyoming the same amount of Senators as states like California that have 40x's its population. In other words, our institutions are quite outdated and flawed, which is why someone like Donald Trump who has the support of maybe a third of the country has better than even odds of becoming president. Voter suppression efforts in red states make this problem even worse, ever since the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

The problem is that a sizeable portion of country has been groomed, through decades of propaganda, for an American version of fascism. They think that Trump is going to be 'thier' dictator, who's going to protect them from a litany of imagined threats. Of course, many of these working class MAGA types are going to be left holding the bag when the US government under a Trump autocracy degrades to the point where its unable to fulfill many of its basic functions. These are the same people who will be crying foul and looking for a scapegoat when they're kicked off from their government subsidized healthcare, when someone close to them is forced to carry a non-viable fetus in thier womb for nine months, when they lose their job due to a recession that's triggered by plutocratic economic policy.

The Supreme Court is effectively giving Trump all of the tools he needs to be America's version of Putin.

Welp, looks like the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, decided to celebrate the 4th of July by decreeing that Presidents are officially above the law, and have broad immunity from being prosecuted for crimes they commit while in office. The six MAGA judges aren't even trying to hide the fact that they're going out of their way to set Trump up as an autocrat. By this Supreme Court's logic, Biden should just go ahead and have Trump black bagged, and claim legal immunity because it was in the execution of his presidential duties. (Not seriously suggesting that Biden do this, but holy fuck does this decision set a dangerous precedent). https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-due-rule-trumps-immunity-bid-blockbuster-case-2024-07-01/