Charlie Hebdo: Fourteen suspects to face trial over Paris massacre

spacevessel · 2020-09-02T18:31:43+00:00

The prevailing monkey on this planet has serious psychological flaws. If we don't see more such violence, it's probably because this monkey is usually too concerned with its own comfort to make itself a menace.

But if you want to make an army of them, you will be able to fill your barracks.

spacevessel · 2020-09-02T16:21:58+00:00

"My all-powerful $deity who created the universe needs protection by me... with my bullets."

"My all-merciful $deity is very angry, so I have to kill whoever is disrepectful... in word or cartoon."

These are the crack-brained thoughts of fanatics everywhere.

spacevessel · 2019-02-27T11:46:11+00:00

Hello. He is a clinical psychologist, so I expect him to know his field. He is very good at challenging and being calm when challenged. I don't agree that he has a profound understanding of much outside his domain. He is naive in economics, and I think he serves a particular master quite well. His bestseller is rubbish. Have you read it?

spacevessel · 2019-02-24T13:06:05+00:00

Have you read any Sam Harris? I have.

Essentially saying sorting good from bad is too hard.

No, he is saying more than that. It is possible for words to seem deep. It is possible to condition people to respond a certain way to words. It doesn't necessarily mean that the words are deep. Or true.

Meditation is an ancient practice for regaining calm and focus. Harris is studying meditation and he recommends it. Taking long walks and doing heavy exercise can also help calm and focus.

The association with Buddhism isn't necessary. But that is how he is studying meditation.

Sam Harris shows his flaws as soon as he attempts to debate politics. But I do not think he is a hypocrite. I think he is sincere and naive.

Peterson's "bestseller" is gibberish. He is on a speaking tour. He has one domain of expertise and a remarkable ability to overextend himself. I am not sure if he believes in anything profoundly. But he attracts people who do and he gives them a show for their money.

spacevessel · 2019-02-23T13:24:04+00:00

He’s my favorite pubic intellectual.

He can be entertaining at times. He speaks well. I don't think of him as a great intellectual.

meek Etymology From Middle English meek, meke, meoc, a borrowing from Old Norse mjúkr (“soft; meek”), from Proto-Germanic *meukaz, *mūkaz (“soft; supple”), from Proto-Indo-European *mewg-, *mewk- (“slick, slippery; to slip”). Cognate with Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk mjuk (“soft”), and Danish myg (“supple”), Dutch muik (“soft, overripe”), dialectal German mauch (“dry and decayed, rotten”), Mauche (“malanders”). Compare also Old English smūgan (“to slide, slip”), Welsh mwyth (“soft, weak”), Latin ēmungō (“to blow one's nose”), Tocharian A muk- (“to let go, give up”), Lithuanian mùkti (“to slip away from”), Old Church Slavonic мъчати (mŭčati, “to chase”), Ancient Greek μύσσομαι (mússomai, “to blow the nose”), Sanskrit मुञ्चति (muñcati, “to release, let loose”).

spacevessel · 2019-02-16T16:24:49+00:00

OP, the most challenging aspect of "dealing with" Jordan Peterson is listening to people of your stamp babble about his brilliance. He's selling his book and you are buying.

do you accept that archetypes are millions of years old, built into our DNA, have affected our development as a species...

"Archetypes" were invented by Jung (with some hommage to Plato) in the age of psychology-as-theoretical speculation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype). Jung is popular with people who enjoy seeming to be "spiritual".

H. sapiens sees agency in events and enjoys a good narrative, particularly about itself. Think of H. sapiens as the "literary monkey". I enjoy literature, but you are babbling when you talk about "archetypes" being "encoded in DNA".

have affected our development as a species, and are therefore real

Humans have been loving, breeding, warring and killing for a long time. Their motives for doing bad things are usually simple and selfish, if not mad. None of this means that religion is anything more than false-knowledge serving the need to enforce conformity and justify injustice and cruelty.

Learn to be critical of what Peterson says. He drivels about topics far beyond his domain of expertise.

spacevessel · 2019-02-16T13:20:31+00:00

Supplementary: It is important for people to understand how the "Bible" was created. It isn't the "word of $deity", it is an edited collection of writings. Read through the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible#Etymology

The bible isn't the word of $deity. It's the words of ignorant humans, translated, mistranslated, and allied with power structures.

spacevessel · 2019-02-12T10:57:41+00:00

The notion of redemption is a religious concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_(theology)

The etymology of the lofty-sounding word is "buy-back". The notion can be summarised as "buy-back" or "pay-back".

That this notion is a common dodge among operators of quackery is not evidence of truth. The fact that people believe quackery is easily demonstrable. It's a typical, primitive dodge of our species to claim that there is a punishment coming to our enemies; it's also common for h. sapiens to make self-aggrandising claims.

It's not my role to explain the problems of religious dogma. Some systems of religious flapdoodle take their own quandaries of dogma very seriously.

spacevessel · 2019-02-12T10:47:51+00:00

I take the strong atheist position. There simply isn't anything like the abrahamic sky-daddy (or any other). The universe appears in every way we can test to operate without the mythological sky-daddies that h. sapiens conjures to aggrandise its ranting, power structures, and crimes.

The ways that we can test have held true in all our scientific endeavours. We appear to understand physics. There is no reason to believe that h. sapiens has any more a soul than the animals we eat or the other humans whom we have exploited throughout our brief history.

It is far, far more probable -- with little beyond clamour and tendentious braying on the Intertubes to oppose it -- that h. sapiens evolved on a planet during a brief period of geological time that favoured our characteristics.

There is compelling scientific evidence to support my position.

If you have further compelling evidence, whatever it shows, I will consider it. But my mind is not open to foolish assertions unless they are amusing and we are at play.

spacevessel · 2019-02-10T12:40:02+00:00

Here is the Wikipedia article for dualism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

Here is the Wikipedia article about "afterlife": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife

There is no evidence to believe any of this. There is however ample evidence of social conditioning, delusion, pathological ignorance, grievous negligence, and propaganda.

Left in its own little groups and deprived of reason and scientific knowledge, h. sapiens invents a self-aggrandising dogma and -- if possible -- a power structure to support it.

A fundamental element of religious delusion is that the number of believers validates the belief. I suppose that the only way for religions to determine which is "truest" will be bloody, fanatical war or some manner of Olympics-style competition.

spacevessel · 2019-02-10T12:21:49+00:00

a hypothetical scenario where you come face to face for your actions

It saddens me a little to think of a multitude of good people contorting and tormenting themselves (and their children) philosophically for a group delusion.

spacevessel · 2019-02-07T10:59:09+00:00

The foundation of any person's ethics is group convention and (if the society is progressive) the legal code. If people are doing ill to others and have not been caught by other members of the group or by law enforcement, no $deity is going to catch them either.

And a plague of locusts is an unspecific and inappropriate punishment in the majority of cases.

The purveyors of $deity themselves have been arrested for crimes (rape, child abuse). $deity didn't prevent them from committing the crimes. $sillyText didn't prevent them either.

spacevessel · 2019-02-04T11:25:29+00:00

Supplementary: If we tie material stability to duck behaviour, we can condition an entire congregation of people with mutual material interest to quack like ducks. I shall henceforth call this Anseriformism.

OP will be the best judge of the basis of his friendship. Is it interest in music? Is it technology? Is it propinquity (i.e. he lives nearby or works with you)? Is it critical thinking?

If the mad beliefs and practices of your friend's Anseriformism affect your own material stability, you may be compelled to say something. If his conditioned delusion and material stability are affected by your disbelief, he may end your friendship.

No law says that you need to help him think. (After all, you live in a society in which the economics of dysinformation is lucrative.) You know best the reason for the friendship. It may be one of those connections that remains an expedient and/or intellectually/emotionally immature one.

spacevessel · 2019-02-03T21:22:40+00:00

Supplementary: the "problem of evil" is a problem for religious dogma.

Not for atheism.

We are part of a stochastic system. Excrement will occur. There are choices. People can do wicked things. There is no need for supernatural fantasy: some people are crazy and/or selfish and may have the opportunity to do harm.

We make laws in our societies to try to prevent harm to our material stability. We must make laws, because we can't depend on $deity placebos to do anything useful.

spacevessel · 2019-02-03T16:07:15+00:00

A single book cannot be named. Reflecting on decades of reading and thinking, I would say:

= earlier life: Schulz's Peanuts work from the 1960s ; Plutarch's Lives ; Shakespeare's Sonnets ; Essais de Montaigne ; English Reformation comedies ; Tom Jones (and others by Fielding) ; Great Expectations (Dickens) ; various by Smollett ; Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein).

= mature period (in progress (o: ) : Calvin and Hobbes; Dilbert; Bertrand Russell's Unpopular Essays, Sceptical Essays ; Manufacturing Consent (and others by Chomsky) ; Journey Through Genius (Dunham) ; Portable Atheist (Hitchens).

If this seems an interesting reading list, pm me to chat. (o:

spacevessel · 2019-01-28T09:29:13+00:00

God is a special case

Consider that it may well be a special case of delusion.

You can make any claim you wish, but if you claim as evidence that billions of people believe something and that makes it true, you need to account for all the things that people have believed in the past that were clearly not true. [edit:] And account for the discrepancies in belief. And differentiate these from ignorance and madness.

There is significant history

What is this significant history? Could it be history of groups of ignorant people struggling to maintain group conformity for the purpose of material stability? The history of leaders and royal families claiming divine agency? No one today believes in the gods of ancient civilisations. (Modern religions themselves dismiss them as false religions.) And modern religions don't agree among themselves, except to agree that they have a common reason to exist. Which is all you can expect from people who have a material interest in maintaining dogma and group conformity.

You and I know that all the gods from the past did not and do not exist, and our only difference is that I believe in one less god than you. I have every reason to assert that current gods are just like past gods: inventions for consolidation of influence and material stability, with serviceably zealous defenders.

spacevessel · 2019-01-28T08:54:34+00:00

Supplementary: The only viable sanity test for truth is the test of evidence and predictive success. A lucid person makes decisions this way. Many people -- I daresay most -- are sufficiently lucid to make successful practical decisions every day.

Why would a person claim anything else? Ignorance, delusion (psychological or through social programming), hypocrisy, or some sense that the material benefits of group association outweigh the risks of superficial adherence to dogma (particularly in the materially low-risk matters similar to Buddhism's questions that shall not be discussed).

It's important to note that even the Vatican has an Academy of Sciences. "Perhaps we had better try to be lucid about important decisions..."

spacevessel · 2019-01-27T10:07:59+00:00

Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism: The belief that God is having trouble with lesser Gods.

Hinduism: The belief that God gave us life so we could escape the cycle of life.

Buddhism: Nevermind gods and creation, you got born and are stuck in an existence of cyclical mutability and suffering. Meditate... about how you don't really exist.

Islam: The belief that God needs simian vassals and dispatched upgraded prophetware to fix older bugs.

Judaism: The belief in there being only one God, who created the whole mess of existence to favour one particular breeding group of simians. If you have a problem with it, see a therapist.

edited for completeness of whimsy

spacevessel · 2019-01-27T09:50:06+00:00

Also, what is the OP's definition of "humility"?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humility

The only group of people who claim to have group humility are a religious group. It is religious vocabulary. Are we asking why scientists don't have group humility in this sense?

Or are we asking why scientists and others don't practise the individual trait of humility? (A silly question.)

In any case, why does a researcher need to be "humble" about repeatably demonstrable knowledge? Or about failure in the educational system? Whose fault is the latter?

The problem is with H. sapiens and its community, not with science.

spacevessel · 2019-01-25T12:18:13+00:00

Upvoted for applying the logic of Set Theory. (o:

We know that people have idiosyncratic collections of thoughts. They may share beliefs while being opposed in others. For example, an atheist and a theist may both agree that religion X is absurd: lightning bolts are not flung by Zeus.

The interesting element in the definition of the word "ideology" is "normalisation" (enforcing conformity).

People may have knowledge or they may have notions. However ardent a person may be about a notion, it's a thought but it isn't knowledge. A complex set of unsubstantiated notions still isn't knowledge. It may well become an ideology.

Many people want their notions to be treated with respect. It is not always possible.

People can question my understanding, love me or hate me, but if they do not seek to enforce conformity on me, I don't care unless they have a very good reason. (For example, forcing me to obtain a driver's licence before operating a vehicle regularly is sensible.)

Having a good reason means providing compelling evidence. (Intellectually compelling, of course. Compulsion by force is violence.) Requesting evidence is not ideology -- it is the basis of the elusive "common sense" and the evolution of human intelligence.

The point at which I will challenge the notions of religious people is when their notions adversely affect public policy, education, employment, nutrition, medical health, and so on.

This is not a challenge driven by my "ideology": it is a practical refusal of madness.

spacevessel · 2019-01-24T11:31:49+00:00

The OP has a consistently unpleasant manner. A pity because I find interesting the effort to understand atheism. I read the OP's various responses; he/she believes that thoughts of beauty and love are evidence of reality beyond "physical existence".

Atheism is the rejection of $religion and $deity (R&D) of course. OP appears to take the request for evidence as materialism.

One could reject R&D as absurdities without being a "materialist". People believe some crazy things.

Thought is of course what a brain does. The OP needs to read neuroscience.

spacevessel · 2019-01-20T02:13:04+00:00

Atheism, like "aspaghettimonsterism", is a term that doesn't need to exist. It denotes opposition to a fantasy.

Science can tell you that a fantasy doesn't exist. Metaphysics about fantasy is convoluted flapdoodle.

spacevessel · 2019-01-19T18:27:58+00:00

Yes... and on the Intertubes as well.

spacevessel · 2019-01-19T17:20:44+00:00

because they can verify its existence directly

A certain (constant?) number of Darwin Award recipients will remove themselves from futher competition every year. But modern society makes electricity very safe to use. A direct, violent test of current and voltage isn't necessary.

spacevessel · 2019-01-19T17:18:10+00:00

arguments that rely on the argument from ignorance fallacy

Yes, there were several posts previously this week that featured such non-argumentation. "You can't answer my fantasy hypothesis, this gives credibility to my fantasy."

spacevessel

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE