TheVat

Interesting speculation. There was a letter he wrote late in life that seemed to clarify his view of religion, which letter was auctioned in London in 2008 after being in a private collection for over fifty years. (from The Guardian) Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. In the letter, he states: “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.” Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel’s second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God’s favoured people. “For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people...."

And you're smarter than to think I'll just accept that a pretrial diversion (which is what Sunbreak would require) is purely voluntary. No court would accept a jail alternative that someone could just walk away from, without consequence. Mr Walton can spit shine that idea all he wants, but adding formal arrests to the picture then turns the gears of the legal system, which tends to see a diversion from prosecution as a binding agreement. It's seen as risky and expensive to just let someone go and maybe have to later reprocess them and incarcerate them. I have no problem with prosecuting and incarceration of the violent segment you also mentioned. Isn't that already what law enforcement does? Do you have citations for this spectre of muggers and killers prancing around freely while police ignore them? I know your Morley smoking boss doesn't think much about the rule of law, but I know you do, and your idea needs a way to make sure that it's actual lawbreakers who are inside the fence after going through due process.

Tha article appears to contradict itself. First, it says: "It is designed to welcome all homeless persons, each of whom may come and go as they please." So, starting out on a nice 14th Amendment respecting note. Sounds truly empowering and helpful. It then goes on to describe a free shuttle that takes Sunbreakers downtown or wherever. Sweet. Then later there is the implication that Sunbreak will be mandatory if one opts for it as a diversion program instead of jail. All the defecators and loiterers and sleepers outdoors will be rounded up, formally arrested, and then presumably have to stay at Sunbreak if they choose the get out of jail card. Stay. As in: can't leave. So which is it? A voluntary program and you can check out of the Hotel California anytime you like? Or a detention unit with better light and services that will send you back to jail if you decide to leave? If the latter, then the solution proposed, with undoubtedly some features that are better than a county jail, is still a prison camp, and we are still criminalizing the condition of having no home (i.e. no roof, no toilets, no place to sleep but a public venue, etc.). I think these folks need to clarify which program they are envisioning here.

This proposal for Sunbreak Ranch is a voluntary program. In the article, it is stated that residents can come and go as they please. In posting this, I feel you may be conceding the point so many here have made regarding the problems with involuntary camps.

I was making a joke, too. Riffing off yours. Sorry if that was not clear. I have far more support for the fast food detox camps than I do for the homeless camps idea. DISCLAIMER: ALSO A JOKE.

I find it interesting that even great spiritual figures who were formally associated with theism, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, seem to avoid the bearded rainmaker. Merton (a truly spiritual person I've long admired) said something like: God is not a being, but rather the process of being. And becoming. There are passages in Merton's books that sound rather Buddhist to me. I have no problem with seeing God in this way, as a sort of foundational essence of conscious being rather than some personal entity, and see no reason it would interfere with doing science. And yes, Einstein seemed Spinozist in his views. There will always be an ontological puzzle at the heart of the universe, something our minds cannot access through science, which in no way diminishes or demeans science. Many scientists I know have this mystical feeling, ranging from deism to panpsychism.

Really, you're unsure about this? By all means, let's consider the relative merits of Nazis and...mothers. 😏

This is just bizarre.... Minus 15 F. last night here. Up to about five above now (early afternoon local time) which is the warmest it's been in three days.

Just wanted to shout "plus one" from a rooftop. Nice to hear from someone with actual work experience that relates to the topic. The Fourth amendment, as well as Article I, and the Fourteenth, is going to make that part tricky.

This appears to contradict your OP proposal. If you believe your comment is true, then forcibly herding addicts into camps would not work at all. Homeless people form encampments for multiple reasons. Those actually committing felonies should be arrested - that's not in dispute. The question is what to do for those who are just sick and need treatment, and this is where cities do not generally have "plenty of resources" or off-street residential options. Perhaps more hard data is needed here before you make further assertions.

Do you have evidence that rising crime rates are due to specific law enforcement practices? There are other factors driving crime, which makes analysis complex and challenging. There are Constitutional protections that mean citizens cannot be "removed" as you describe. You cannot detain and incarcerate people without due process of law, i.e. arrest them without a warrant and without their consent. Merely being homeless is not a crime. Nor is mental illness and addiction, unless it leads to specific chargeable offenses. And "rural, government supervised camp" sounds disturbingly like a concentration camp. Welcome, backward Uighurs! It's not ethical that a wealthy society cannot provide public toilets, housing for the poor, and sufficient mental health services and social workers and medical care, with this neglect leading to the result that people in dire circumstances have no choice but to "take over" public parks, grassy verges, sidewalks, riversides, etc. It's not ethical that fat comfortable people in 2000+ sq ft houses with five tv screens and climate control and home security systems, sit around whining about the horrifying prospect of paying an extra percent in taxes to help people huddled out in the cold and shitting in some bushes and wondering when someone might sneak up and clonk them on the head and steal what little they have.

Sorry, I missed the link you surely posted about Ukraine invading a sovereign nation and killing civilians en masse and committing mass war crimes and issuing threats to multiple NATO countries. I mean, I assume that's the story I missed that would make sense out of your equivalency between Russia and Ukraine.

Oh there's nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you.... (from The Music Man) I propose a new variant of Godwin's Law which says that all web discussions will eventually turn to partisan divisiveness in the US. Or manifest it. Anyway, to the degree that Putin's apparatchiks have helped generate that partisan division he is running an effective CW.

One, I will cherish this mental image for some time. Two, I have heard from a reliable source that the Mothership has told them to "just hold it." Absolutely. There is solid evidence of aerial phenomena that are unidentified.

Love it or hate it, one thing you can say about globalization of the economy is that it makes a world war really unattractive for just about any country. Global supply chains were a tiny sliver of what they are now, back in WW1&2. One way to avoid war has been to make it too economically punishing for the parties involved. Putin is an aberration, an exception to this, and now that we are entering a second year of the conflict, the slower deeper effects of sanctions will begin to manifest. Russia will have to back down and the global appeal of authoritarian governance might take a downturn. It's already gotten a nice kick in the pants with Bolsonaro's ouster and Trump's ongoing alienation of the GOP power brokers.

It's a speculative thread, so I don't see why we can't still post sightings (as Moon was planning to do yesterday) and there could be debate as to their quality of data, what are reasonable testable hypotheses, etc. And I would like to see more academic institutions send (as happened in Texas with the university sending a team of science grad students and prof to look at the Marfa lights) investigation teams to study the anomalous and possibly extraordinary.

Well, who would dispute that the present is far from complete acceptance and complete equality before the law? Really, this present line of discussion seems to be turning on the degree to which personal reactions of distaste affect social progress for groups who are discriminated against. Like @zapatos I can agree that it would be better for all to jetisson such distastes while also questioning if that should be the primary focus in a world where people try to take positive action. Pulling on the levers of law and politics and grassroots solidarity would seem more fruitful (absolutely NPI) than rooting out all the bad turnips in our heads. That direction, in my reading of history, seems to run the risk of thought policing. (which seems to drive the real bigots even further into entrenchment and extremity)

Sociopath and psychopath are both used to refer to what's clinically known as ASPD, or antisocial personality disorder. What's disturbing is that the horrible things that happen in war are mostly done by ordinary people who are not in the 1-2% of the population estimated to have ASPD. Plain old human nature, conditioned in a certain way, can wreak atrocities.

I look at voting from the perspective of collective action. Which works when people believe in it. My individual vote doesn't probably make a difference but the votes of everyone like me do. So it's something one could view as an expression of confidence in yourself as part of a larger whole that is a democracy. It has a psychological value, overcoming stasis and apathy and cynicism, which ripples causally through the rest of your life. And who knows it might encourage someone else you know to vote. So there's a sort of chain reaction possibilty there, maybe. I'd encourage all you butterflies to flap the wings a bit.

I keep seeing comments from IntoSci et al mischaracterized this way, and am still puzzled. I think people are especially sensitized to the real issues of homophobic oppression, so that even harmless distaste comes under the lens of what-must-be-fixed. In a few years hopefully things will reach some normality where personal differences of taste and preference can be laughed about and not taken as a threat.

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/claims-about-pentagon-ufo-program-how-much-is-true/ (from the SWR section of article) Supposedly haunted and filled with all kinds of cryptids and paranormal phenomena, it was purchased in 1996 by Robert Bigelow to study its alleged phenomena. Members of Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) stayed on the ranch to do a careful first hand study. One of them was Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., co-author of the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker. Another was Dr. Eric Davis, an astronomer who now works at Dr. Hal Puthoff’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, studying weird physics. Despite Bigelow’s funding and the investigators’ unfettered access to the alleged phenomena, So, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men and all the King’s cameras and electronic recording devices could not document anything paranormal occurring at the Skinwalker Ranch, in spite of scientists spending several years onsite trying to do so. NIDS never did document anything much happening anywhere, so Bigelow shut down NIDS in 2004. In 2016 he sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate, LLC, whose once-anonymous owner has just revealed himself to be Brandon Fugal, a wealthy real estate investor from Salt Lake City. Fugal had previously been involved in weird science projects, like “an attempt to create a gravitational reduction device that could produce clean energy”. (....) Not only was the yearslong monitoring of “Skinwalker” by NIDS unable to obtain proof of anything unusual happening, but the people who owned the property prior to the Shermans, a family whose members lived there 60 years, deny that any mysterious “phenomena” of any kind occurred there. The parsimonious explanation is that the supernatural claims about the ranch were made up by the Sherman family prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow. Many of the really bizarre alleged incidents described in Hunt for the Skinwalker were witnessed only by Terry Sherman, who stayed on the ranch as a caretaker after it was sold to Bigelow.

I'm game (he said, warily). 😀 Seriously, debunking implies an agenda, which as Swan points out is not what a scientific evaluation is about. It's really just seeing where, if anyplace, a set of observations and measurements and so on takes us as to a conclusion. Some events are just inconclusive in the traces they leave, some leave evidence that strongly suggest a terrestrial origin (the Marfa Lights seem to be an optical phenomenon with different temperature layers of desert air bending light from cars, IIRC), and some fall short of proving any hypothesis but do suggest possible hypotheses for future testing (like irradiated patches of soil, or EMF interference).

You are reframing my question. I was asking why personal tastes, not shared and not fueling bigoted conduct, should be discarded in this case. I didn't form the impression from @Intoscience that his distaste was driving epithets, prejudicial behavior, or advocacy of discrimination towards anyone. How does distaste, in this restricted sense, harm others? Why hope to eliminate it, especially when it's unclear that such a retrofit of personal tastes is achievable? Can I be made to like gangsta rap, and is that needed so that members of some hip-hop subculture won't feel bad? What about SMBD play? Should I discard all sentiments I might have regarding those practices lest someone somewhere feel oppressed? (it helps me if you can quote the entire paragraph here, btw, so context of questions is clear)

Most of the hype about dark chocolate comes, oddly enough from the chocolate industry. Pure cocoa (a nice cup of hot chocolate, add a little sugar) is good for you (polyphenols, nitric oxide boosting, vasodilation, improved insulin sensitivity, antidepressant, etc) but adding lots of saturated fats and sugars to make it into chocolate is not really improving it (in terms of health benefits; flavor is another matter) - and processing reduces the flavonol content generally. The higher cost for 100% is probably because fewer people buy that (it probably is more bitter and lacks the other ingredients that create a better mouthfeel), so the production runs are smaller. Small batch production always raises the price per unit.

I did infer that specificity and my reply was that the statement was wrong. It is wrong in the domain of human genetics, and is wrong more broadly applied as well. The field of study, behavioral genetics, studies the role of genes in behavior and psychological traits, and has no theoretic models in which everything is determined by genetics. Such a theory would be viewed as ridiculous, given the role that environmental influences play, and the way environment and epigenetics overlap with gene expression, and the way complex behaviors (particularly in humans and higher mammals) can emerge especially in novel situations. Also: A lot of this behavioral genetics material was covered earlier in the thread. @CharonY in particular took some time to cover this. Not reading the thread is a path to getting completely lost.