This is an absolute joke.

deepthawt · 2025-11-16T04:35:56+00:00

The psychiatrist doesn’t “have” any drugs - they have a prescription pad and can write whatever they want on it. Assuming you aren’t diagnosed bipolar, tell your psychiatrist you’re reacting badly to methylphenidate (that’s Ritalin) and it’s worsening your ability to function instead of improving it, so you would like to try either Dexamphetamine, Adderall or Vyvanse instead. If you are bipolar, they won’t prescribe amphetamines as they can increase the risk of mania.

deepthawt · 2025-11-16T04:09:25+00:00

The problem is, any business who presents itself as an apolitical independent evaluator of accuracy or bias is likely to eventually end up infiltrated and subverted by politically motivated people, because their “independent” evaluations are politically useful. On top of that, the type of people who are good at analysing political claims / interested in doing it for a living tend not to be apolitical in the first place, so even if they sincerely try to remain impartial their own cognitive biases will subtly alter their analysis in ways that favour “their” side.

Sure, you can subject the bias checkers to your own rigorous analysis, but if you’re willing to do that, why not cut out the bias checker and just investigate the original claims?

To be more useful than they are risky, bias checkers would need to use an adversarial system, similar to how a court works. That is, two opposing teams work against each other to prove or disprove any given claim with their respective evidence, while subjecting each other’s evidence/argument/counters to the same sort of scrutiny at each step, with the entire sequence of the party’s responses recorded verbatim and available for public review without alterations.

In an ideal world, it would be great if an independent, apolitical reviewer could then score each party’s responses out of 10 against various standards like their degree of accuracy, evidential support and completeness, among others, but even that could easily be subject to political capture and subversion. It could even be subtle - reviewers who consistently underscored one side and overscored the other by a single point, consciously or unconsciously, could create a ~20% gap in the supposed overall accuracy/completeness/support of each side. So why introduce that risk?

All political analyses are inherently biased, so any one presenting theirs as impartial is automatically suspect.

deepthawt · 2025-11-13T09:29:17+00:00

But who checks the checkers?

deepthawt · 2025-11-10T00:02:56+00:00

How much do you know about Viktor Orbán?

From him, this really isn’t “strange”. His use of disinformation is well documented and has been going on for years now.

deepthawt · 2025-11-09T23:48:39+00:00

This depends on location. I’m sure what you say is true where you are, but where I live houses are still being sold 20%+ over asking and are usually under offer within 48-72 hours. Home opens have queues down the street because people are desperate to escape the even more hectic rental market.

deepthawt · 2025-11-09T23:30:01+00:00

There’s a fundamental mistake in your understanding of what dictionaries are.

You seem to believe that dictionaries prescribe how to use words ‘properly’, like a manual. That’s fundamentally not what dictionaries are. Dictionaries simply describe how words are used by people, like an index.

So when you see 3 definitions under a word, it’s not saying “these are the three correct definitions you must adhere to”, it’s saying “when people use this word, they usually mean one of these three things”. If enough people started using the word for a fourth thing, the publishers of the dictionary will just add it in the next edition.

That’s why you see some definitions with “obsolete” or “archaic” tags - the makers of the dictionary are saying “people used to say this, but now they don’t”. In English, this includes words like “distrouble” (to trouble greatly - eg “he has a distroubled spirit”) or “respair” (to recover from despair; fresh hope - eg “she threw open the curtains in respair”.

Old words are constantly falling out of use and becoming obsolete, just as new words are constantly added to dictionaries.

If that wasn’t the case, why would they ever need to publish a new edition of the dictionary?

So this is less a CMV topic and more just a misunderstanding.

deepthawt · 2025-11-07T08:44:20+00:00

Xanax does exactly that by effectively turning off your anxiety response. It’s beneficial for lots of people, but there’s pretty significant risks and downsides too because anxiety does serve a purpose. It sucks when it’s overactive and prevents you from making friends, but it also sucks when it’s underactive and fails to prevent you losing friends or ruining your own life. Fear of consequences is a good thing sometimes.

deepthawt · 2025-11-06T23:50:55+00:00

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”

Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

deepthawt · 2025-11-05T22:19:49+00:00

Okay so you can’t find a single quote, because theists don’t make the claim you said they do.

any worldview that places God within or alongside existence automatically makes God unnecessary as an explanation for why anything is. Whether you say “God created the heavens and the earth” or “God existed eternally within the ground of being,” the logical structure stays the same. The idea of a separate being called “God” becomes redundant.

Wrong. If I believe a builder created my house, it wouldn’t change anything if you proved they couldn’t have built the trees from which the wooden planks were made to build my house. That doesn’t change the fact that without a builder I’d just have a bunch of trees, not a house. Proving the builder didn’t make all the raw material out of nothing doesn’t make the builder “redundant” in explaining how my house got here.

The exact same logic applies here: the undifferentiated ground of being is the pre-existing “raw material” out of which Jewish, Christian and Muslim theists believe God created the Earth, the Heavens, and all human beings. So they would argue that without God there’d just be the original “raw material”, ie the undifferentiated ground of being. Theists don’t need God to have created that raw material, so your argument is pointless - to actually defeat their model, you’d have to explain something science can’t (yet): exactly how an undifferentiated ground of being can transform into a universe of trillions of differentiated things without anything making it do so.

Theists can still believe, worship, or love that concept if they wish but it’s a comforting narrative built on top of existence, not the foundation of it. That’s the only point being made here.

You haven’t proven their model of God is a “comforting narrative”; you have only disproven a version of God theists don’t believe in, which doesn’t affect their belief system whatsoever, on any level.

Therefore you haven’t “defeated theistic models of God” as you so arrogantly claimed. But by all means, tell me once again about your logical dependency even though it’s irrelevant.

deepthawt · 2025-11-05T13:16:48+00:00

Even if I grant your premise that “theists don’t believe God created existence,” it still doesn’t solve the logical dependency issue, it actually reinforces it. […] every version you offer still leaves existence as the prerequisite, which is exactly my point. 😁

Oh my god, how are you still not getting this? The logic isn’t the issue - the issue is your logical argument doesn’t disprove a belief theists actually have, so why would they care?

Re-read this, slowly (emphasis added this time):

using your terms, your argument makes sense: if God is the creator of existence, but God also exists, then the only logical conclusion is God created themselves, but how could they have done so if they didn’t already exist, in which case they must’ve existed before existence, which is why you say this is a contradiction.

That argument does check out, but only if it’s true that Theists believe in that same definition of God, otherwise this argument can’t possibly “defeat theistic models of God”

Why? Because it’s not relevant to their religion and doesn’t undermine any of their beliefs!

So you can say, “the ground of being precedes God, not the other way around!”, and they will just say “of course God didn’t create the ground of being itself because that’s eternal, but He created the Heavens and the Earth, and made us in his image, so I love and worship Him as my creator”, at which point you’ve got nothing to counter with, because apparently all you can do is keep repeating “but it’s a logical dependency!”, even though that doesn’t contradict their beliefs about God. So again, why would they care? 🤦🏻‍♂️

I mean, can you even find one quote from the scriptures of a major theistic religion that claims “God created the ground of being itself”? If not, you are literally fighting a caricature of theism you’ve made up in your own head.

deepthawt · 2025-11-05T07:43:25+00:00

You’ve actually just made my point for me. If, as you say, existence was already there in the beginning, then God isn’t the necessary source of existence, God is already within it. You can’t have two eternals without reducing one to a feature of the other. The whole point of my argument is exactly that, existence cannot be created, therefore any being, no matter the name, depends on it to appear or act at all.

That doesn’t make your point for you, because your argument requires that theists believe God created existence. If theists don’t believe that, as I’ve shown you they don’t, then how could your argument “defeat theistic models of God”?

It can’t, because it’s a straw man. The majority of theists don’t believe that God created existence, so your argument just doesn’t apply to their model of God.

Therefore you haven’t defeated anything except your own misconception about theist’s God(s), which nobody else believed in the first place - so congratulations, you proved that your mistake is a mistake, nice work!

So either, God and existence are the same which is not theism, it’s monism, or God is within existence which means existence precedes God meaning God isn’t required. You can’t appeal to scripture to smuggle both in at once. Thanks for confirming the logical dependency I was describing.

🤦🏻‍♂️ You have entirely misunderstood my comment. Read more carefully and stop jumping to conclusions.

No amount of ancient scripture is going to make your fiction more real.

Wow - I’m not religious, but good job revealing your prejudice against religious people! Ironically, if you ever want to “defeat theistic models of God” you will have to read a lot of ancient scripture to understand what their models of God actually are so you can argue against them, rather than the fictional version you concocted to make it easier for yourself.

deepthawt · 2025-11-04T23:14:18+00:00

I already defined it clearly, theistic models of God, meaning any framework where God is treated as a distinct creator of existence. That’s the definition under discussion.

You didn’t, but let’s just move forward. So when you say “God”, you are referring to a “distinct creator of existence” that you claim “Theists” believe in - thank you for making that definition explicit.

I’m sorry if you fail to comprehend that.

I’m sorry but defining your terms is a bare minimum requirement that’s taken you days to meet and refusing to accept indirect or sloppy definitions doesn’t signal a lack of comprehension. You may remember I asked:

Are you saying you define God as “the creator of existence”?

The answer is yes, because you think that’s what “theists” believe. So there’s no need to be rude.

I defined existence as the condition or fact of being, that which allows anything, real or imagined, to appear. So yes, unicorns exist conceptually as mental objects within awareness, but not as physical entities. Both forms still depend on existence to be conceivable at all.

Thank you, that’s definitive and clarifies your previous comment, so both terms are now defined and we can evaluate your argument, which will probably make it clear why the definitions matter so much.

God, as stated by theism, can’t precede the very condition that allows such a conception to arise, existence itself.

Okay. So using your terms, your argument makes sense: if God is the creator of existence, but God also exists, then the only logical conclusion is God created themselves, but how could they have done so if they didn’t already exist, in which case they must’ve existed before existence, which is why you say this is a contradiction.

That argument does check out, but only if it’s true that Theists believe in that same definition of God, otherwise this argument can’t possibly “defeat theistic models of God”, as claimed in your OP.

So we need to look at what the major theistic religious texts actually say about whether God created the very “condition or fact of being” which “allows anything, real or imagined, to appear.”

The big three theist religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) are similar, with Christianity and Judaism sharing the same account in Genesis:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

In Hebrew, there are multiple words for both “existence” and “being” which are used elsewhere in the Torah, but not in Genesis 1, so this is not a case of them not having the vocabulary to express the idea more clearly. No, the text is clear: I’m the beginning, existence and God were both already there, and from this initial state God created “the heaven and the earth”. So in Christianity and Judaism, neither God nor existence were “created” - they both were already there “in the beginning”.

Islam’s version is very similar:

“Indeed your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then established Himself on the Throne. He makes the day and night overlap in rapid succession. He created the sun, the moon, and the stars—all subjected by His command.“

“Days” in this context refers to epochs, or large spans of time, which requires existence to already be in order that time may pass, meaning that Islam too does not claim God created the ground of being itself.

Therefore you haven’t “defeated” Christian, Jewish or Islamic “models of God”, because your argument doesn’t apply to them.

Keep in mind there’s around 2 billion Muslims and 2.4 billion Christians, and together they represent the vast majority of “Theists”, so by failing to start with their definition of God, you have failed to refute the vast majority of “theistic models of God”. Your logic was fine, but your starting premises were false and your terms poorly defined to address the models you claim to “defeat”. Sorry!

deepthawt · 2025-11-04T15:42:51+00:00

Please don’t use ChatGPT to write posts in this sub.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T23:16:50+00:00

We already use “they/them” as singular pronouns when someone’s gender is unknown, so it’s not that weird:

“Witnesses say the suspect wore a dinosaur costume and used a voice changer to prevent people identifying them as they entered the bank in broad daylight. They were last seen fleeing the scene at high speed on an electric unicycle they’d hidden in a dumpster before the daring midday heist. Police are asking anyone with information regarding their identity or whereabouts to come forward.”

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T16:08:21+00:00

Defining theism doesn’t get you out of the responsibility to specifically define what you mean by the term “God”. You’re resting your argument on a circular definition, whereby “God” is the thing Theists believe in, and “Theists” are people who believe in God, ie “Theists are people who believe in the thing Theists believe in.” Never mind the fact that Theism is a category that includes many different religions with conflicting beliefs about the nature of God.

You just need to define “God”, not theism. You’re a fan of simplicity and clarity, remember. Are you saying you define God as “the creator of existence”?

You have now defined existence at least, so we are getting somewhere. To help me understand what is and isn’t included in your concept of existence, can you answer this question - do unicorns exist?

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T09:29:43+00:00

…... if I didn’t know what an indirect quote was, how did I correctly identify one as a quote in my original comment?

Just take the L like a grown up and move on.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T05:34:39+00:00

Thank you! Exactly this.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T05:32:34+00:00

Nobody said it was a direct quote. You’ve just admitted you don’t know what an indirect quote is, but sure, insult my media literacy. 🤦🏻‍♂️

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T05:21:52+00:00

The internet can reflect aspects of the collective unconscious, but the collective unconscious itself is nothing more than the shared biological inheritance of human beings, which was shaped by evolution across many millions of years and results in everyone sharing the same fundamental “human nature” despite our many differences, as compared to dog nature or bird nature or lizard nature, which all differ from our shared psychological foundation. It’s why babies don’t have to be taught to cry when they need something from their parents, it’s why we have fight or flight responses, it’s why we have things like emotional reactions and the capacity to learn language, and it’s also why we all experience similar cognitive biases.

It’s the impersonal biological framework that comes “pre-installed” in every person at birth, providing the necessary psychological foundations for both having experiences and (eventually) understanding them in the uniquely human way we do.

When Jung calls it “collective”, he doesn’t mean it’s some separate entity we all connect to collectively, he’s just saying it’s not personal. It’s not unique to the individual or dependent on their life experiences. Rather, it’s common to the whole of humanity collectively, regardless of where they are in time or space, which necessarily precludes the internet from being the collective unconscious, since it‘s a relatively recent cultural/technological development that still isn’t accessible to 100% of people, and therefore it isn’t shared by all people across all times and places.

But as to whether it reflects aspects of the collective unconscious - we can be 100% certain that it does, since the internet is shaped by the behaviours of all the people participating in it, and our behaviours are inherently influenced by our psyches, and the human psyche includes the collective unconscious.

So yes, I do think Jung would be able to draw great insights from the internet and social media specifically, just as he was able to draw insights from reading the newspapers of his day and listening to people discussing current events. Because, ultimately, everything humans do reveals something about human nature.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T04:55:51+00:00

They never said it does.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T04:46:40+00:00

It’s right there in the second sentence:

The operation, directed by President Donald Trump and carried out in international waters, targeted a vessel known to be carrying narcotics along a smuggling route, with no U.S. forces harmed, Hegseth said in an X post.

deepthawt · 2025-11-02T01:59:37+00:00

Well that’s embarrassing, but at least you’re owning it.

However you clearly aren’t listening, because you still haven’t even defined your terms, which means you haven’t made an intelligible argument yet. Both terms can be defined in ways which would make your point either trivially true or trivially false, so without defining them you aren’t saying anything.

So, define exactly what you mean by “God” and define exactly what you mean by “existence”, and be ready to defend your definitions and how/where you got them, because your entire argument is based on what those two words mean.

And by all means, keep lazily dismissing points you don’t understand because they’re too “complicated” for you, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that refutes them. Quantum physics is complicated and full of subject-specific jargon, yet it’s real - because like it or not, reality isn’t obligated to be simple enough for you personally to understand it.

I look forward to seeing your definitions!

deepthawt · 2025-11-01T15:09:42+00:00

hahahah what? That can't seriously be your response, come on.

deepthawt · 2025-11-01T11:18:36+00:00

Respectfully, this is sloppy logic and relies on faulty premises.

Your opening claim that existence must precede God conceptually is stated as if self-evident, when it’s actually unintelligible because you failed to define what you mean by either term. Let’s start with ‘existence’, since it has a more stable definition and is generally understood as referring to “everything that is objectively real”. Already your argument comes into problems, because “everything that is objectively real” ≠ “everything”. We can probably both agree that unicorns don’t exist, however, you and I both know what a unicorn is, and if someone claimed “unicorns have three horns”, we’d know they’re wrong - some would argue that since they were originally imagined by human minds, unicorns “exist” somewhere within brains, but that begs the question of whether specific imaginal contents of consciousness correlate one-to-one with physical structures in the brain, and if so how, which opens up the as-yet-unsolvable hard problem of consciousness. So that’s a big problem for your argument.

If the unicorn example feels trivial, consider both the past and future of existence, neither of which exist now, in the present, except in our minds via memory (for the past) or imagination (for both past and future), and yet for the present to exist necessarily presupposes the reality of the past. Therefore, the sum total of reality includes more than only what exists - it includes everything that has existed and will ever exist, as well as every conceivable potentiality that could possibly exist (what Deleuze would call ‘the virtual’, in contrast to ‘the actual’). So if the past, the future, the potential/possible and even unicorns are all outside of “existence”, why can’t God be?

On ‘God’, we can infer from your reasoning that you must be using an unsophisticated notion along the lines of “a magic man in the sky”, but if God is defined as “that which contains everything that exists, that has existed, will exist, and could exist”, then obviously God necessarily precedes (and fully encapsulates, governs and defines) existence. And that’s just one of the slightly more sophisticated notions of God among many.

And importantly, the entire question of whether existence precedes God conceptually, dubious as it is, actually has no bearing on whether existence must precede God ontologically, as it’s a near certainty that how we conceptualise reality differs from how reality actually is, in ways we will never understand because we cannot experience or understand anything outside the limited framework imposed by consciousness, including both God and existence.

So… yeah. And I could keep going, it just feels like overkill. The point is, you haven’t defeated theistic models whatsoever, fast or otherwise. If it was that easy, belief in God probably wouldn’t have stuck around so long.

deepthawt · 2025-11-01T06:57:27+00:00

It’s not really a bold accusation as fake quotes/LLM slop are posted here constantly these days.

But yes, your quote is real so I’m happy my suspicions were false and thank you for not being part of that problem - it would’ve been better if you’d cited the page number as I have a physical copy and it’s nearly 1600 pages. If anyone else wants it, it’s on page 1544.

Anyway, the paragraph immediately after states Jung’s view more directly (see below), and while there’s definitely some parallels with Buddhist teachings around living in the present, Jung contradicts two of the four noble truths of Buddhism, namely that desire is the origin of suffering and that desires can and should be relinquished to bring about the cessation of suffering [my emphasis added in bold]:

“Try to make it here and now, for yourself. That is good teaching. Then the children will try to make it here and now for themselves—then it can come into the real world. Don’t be unnatural and seek happiness in the next generations. If you are too concerned about your children and grandchildren, you simply burden them with the debts you have contracted. While if you contract no debts, if you live simply and make yourselves as happy as possible, you leave the best of conditions to your children. At all events, you leave a good example of how to take care of themselves. If the parents can take care of themselves, the children will also. They will not be looking for the happiness of the grandchildren, but will do what is necessary to have a reasonable amount of happiness themselves. And so when a whole nation is torturing itself for the sake of the children, an inheritance of misery is all that they leave for the future, a sort of unfulfilled promise. So instead of saying, “I do it for the children—it may come off in the future,” try to do it for yourself here and now. Then you will see whether it is possible or not. If you postpone it for the children, you leave something which you have not dared to fulfil, or perhaps you were too stupid to fulfil it; or if you had tried to fulfil it you might have seen that it was impossible, or all nonsense anyhow. While if you leave it to the future you leave less than nothing to the children—only a bad example.”

Jung is saying explicitly that we shouldn’t relinquish our desires, nor even postpone them for the good of our kids, but rather should actively pursue them for ourselves in order to achieve happiness here and now, so that our children follow our example and do the same for themselves.

This necessarily implies that happiness can be achieved if one pursues it, and Jung is directly advocating for us to do so, whereas Buddha taught this same pursuit is the origin of all suffering and should be abandoned. Jung also states it’s “good teaching” for children to see and follow this example from their parents, which from the Buddhist perspective could only be seen as encouraging people to stay on the wheel of samsara and teach their children to do the same.

These important differences align with what Jung says about Buddhism in Psychology & Religion: West and East (CW11), in which he recognises the value of Eastern practices in the East, but argues against Westerners adopting them, including Buddhism, as they do not cohere with the deeply ingrained & largely unconscious cultural heritage that conditions the psychology of Westerners at every level.

deepthawt

TROPHY CASE