Peterkin

I just didn't know that bonobos had ever worn clothes to begin with, or that covering whatever skin was not already covered by fur had ever been a concept known to their culture. Nor was I aware of a close biological or psychological connection between bonobo and H. sapiens. Still, if having more consensual sex served to blunt some of our more destructive aggression, then by all means, Make Love, Not War.

That's not about principles of education or the administration of educational facilities; teenage psychology is about cultural norms, stages in social maturation, mating rituals and sexual taboos. The co-educational public school has a whole lot more to its social dynamics, as well as its standard of pedagogy, than what students are wearing. So do segregated, parochial, vocational and specialized schools. What??? Please vet your source for that.

It's partly a question of POV. When everyone is wearing a swimsuit, or nothing, no big deal. If everyone is weirdly or partly clad, it's just another Saturday night in la-La land - but not appropriate for work or school. If everyone is naked or nearly so, while you alone are fully dressed, you're a pasha - and that should feel wrong. If everyone else is fully dressed while you alone are naked, you're in a nightmare or on display - if that doesn't feel terribly wrong, seek help asap. Whatever people get used and accept as normal soon becomes unremarkable. I'm told it takes no more than a couple of hours for someone (with a reasonably healthy self-image) who always wears clothes in ordinary life to get accustomed to a nudist colony. What a young man most fears before entering is his response to naked women; in fact, the biggest obstacle is self-consciousness about his own nakedness. (That of course, is because he's seen lots of female bodies exposed in glossy magazines, on screen and probably on a live stage, where they were on display, but this is his first experience of being himself publicly exposed.) But it's mostly a question of norms. What is the current generally accepted standard of decency? The limits can be poked, bent, stretched, challenged and changed - but there is an unavoidable process and an unpredictable price.

Yes, loose light-coloured cotton garments are best for heat. Far better than bare skin because of the UV's. I don't think anyone moves to Canada for the weather. Why would anyone need to argue that? Most uniforms already come in summer in winter variants; most indoor workplaces are heated and cooled artificially. Because they mistakenly believe that two arguments are stronger than one. Is this the psychological component of your topic? Or is this: The first one is debatable; the second is not. There can't be any right or wrong in the matter of clothing. There are social rules, norms, conventions and expectation; there is challenge and change to those rules; there is scientific evidence for the health and safety benefits/detriments of specific items of apparel; there is institutional and religious stricture; there is fashion and individual proclivity. Each of those frames of reference can provide a standard of rightness or wrongness - in any given debate over clothing, you have to chose one frame - if you ever want a resolution. As for what students wear in school, that's up to the school. Their house, their rules. Maybe segregated high schools were not such a bad idea. Maybe school uniforms were not such a bad idea. I'm up for discussing the merits of different approaches to education - but not in psychology. In any case, I don't think a discussion of who wears what where why can productively include a response to sexual assault.

What has anyone's mental health got to do with a law protecting minority rights?

Then you need to change "the standard definition". To withhold belief from a concept does, indeed make one an a- or non- ist. An ism requires commitment to a belief or system of thought. A theist subscribes to the cult of deity, just as relativists, socialists, pragmatists, hedonists etc. subscribe to a set of philosophical principles. Yes. Is that the only possible way to phrase the question? What do you mean by a capitalized God? Why are you asking whether an undefined entity exists? Nobody could answer such a question intelligibly. A strong theist would likely say "Yes, He does exist." A weak theist might hedge and say "Yes, I believe he exists". Whereupon you would either have to proceed on the assumption that both interlocutors are referring to same undefined entity (in which case you will have lost all claim to a philosophical exchange and moved on to a theological one between coreligionists) or ask "Which God?" , which could get complicated. Even if you managed to sort out the divine identity in question, you would then still have to face the questions "How do you know?" and "Why do you think your sources of information are reliable?" And at the end of all that, you still only got as far as "I believe a god of some kind exists." Now, why would a philosopher open that can in the first place, when they had the option of defining their terms and delimiting the scope of their inquiry before phrasing the first question? Maybe. But you can't ever be sure what an atheist will answer. I, for instance, usually say "I haven't bought that insurance policy." Asking a question does not oblige your respondent to choose one of your two answers. It very often is. That option is also included. There goes that 'standard definition' again! I thought we'd established that it's useless.

Would you settle for categories? Then, there is the Dawkins scale... (he can be a off-putting, too, which doesn't mean he's right and doesn't prove he's wrong) Here is some interesting commentary and more scales - Agnostic Universe (anonymous blog) Having indulged in all that sorting, rating and decimal counting, I have to wonder: How important is it to identify one's exact shade of unbelief? They're certainly more precise from the other perspective, which is far more important to some people: the types and degrees of deviation from a doctrine considered as the norm or standard - nonconformist, reformer, misbeliever, schismatic, skeptic, recusant, dissenter, apostate, heretic, iconoclast, infidel....

I'm not sure what a serious atheist is. Hitchens? Okay, he was a bit smug and off-putting, poor guy. Russell and Huxley, I found quite engaging. Maybe it's the advantage of having a very class English at the tip of their pens. There are several types - flavours? yes - of Western atheism in the early 21st century, but the major challenge to all of them is the aggressive resurgence of state religion. If atheists are too loud and shrill, it's because they're shouting back at a hurricane.

What purpose would it serve in modern philosophy? If it didn't appear 12th - 19th century European philosophy, that may have been because the Christian god was taken for granted - indeed, had to be taken for granted, because questioning his existence was subject to punishment ranging from social disapprobation to public execution. In the definition you cite, there is a nod to other religions (gods) that would not have occurred to a European philosopher in the 1700's - they were all more theologians than philosophers: their categorization of thought-systems was quite different from those of the ancient Greeks, their Asians counterparts and modern ethicists. The god(s) thing is an afterthought; none besides Jehovah and his two alter egos is seriously considered as objects of faith between 400AD and 1900AD. How do you know this? And why is it relevant? Is this accurate? I don't think philosophical reference books do stop at that skimpy definition. For instance, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy: It goes on to explore seven main aspects of the question in detail. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has a short entry (by William Clifford) that reads, in part: So he's expressly putting atheism in opposition to one other belief, and not in any larger context. If theism is referred-to as a 'positive state', that reveals a fundamental bias - one that was prevalent in Eurocentric philosophy of the 19th and early 20th century. It places one single belief at the center of a world-view which is not further elaborated. But the seeds of dissent were present in the late 19th, and non-, as well as anti-religious thought surged in the second half of the 20th century. Euro-phil is liberated from the Christian doctrine by Bertrand Russell and his cohort, c 1930. One idea does not make a philosophy. A belief in gods, ghosts, Manifest Destiny, Justice, Fate, the Unity of all Things, dark matter or the Rules of Acquisition, is but one aspect of a world view, a basis for one's attitude to life, other life forms, the physical world, moral standards, social organization and the drafting of laws. A conscientious philosopher would not regard either the lack of belief or the denial - even the vehement denial - of a single proposition as an end in itself, but proceed to explore the conceptual worlds to which that proposition logically gives rise. Of course, in the past century and a half, quite a few philosophers have done so. Do most of the people you know, in cyberspace or walking life, describe their own conviction about anything in academic terms? I suspect your internet atheists describe themselves that way, because they have, at some point, broken with a religious dogma, but not troubled to build an entire philosophy of their own, and the 'activists' are referring to a particular political issue, rather than a fully formed world-view. They're limiting their definition to a specific issue or context.

You have probably been in buses and airplanes, able to move from one part of the vehicle to another, without once getting plastered to the rear wall. You are moving at the same speed and direction as the vehicle, relative to the ground, but a different speed and direction relative to the interior of the vehicle.

No need for shame! I'm not discommoded in the least.

So, we're still at 0 prosecutions and 0 firings for refusing to use the preferred pronoun. OK. Well, at least you've had a little tempest over a rude comedian.

Is that an example of legal or job-related repercussions of pronoun usage? And you've fact-checked it? And you found that it fits the criteria of establishment persecution of non-conformity? What percent of the LGBTQ community - assuming such a community can be counted accurately - has done what, precisely, to force Netflix to cancel a show? Have they called the police? Launched a lawsuit? Have they succeeded? If so, how many people were fired by Netflix for using the wrong pronoun? "Somebody somewhere is unhappy about something" is not proof of government persecution.

Can you cite those examples, please? I must have missed them.

Yes, I believe some folk do feel that way. Others, however are clinging onto that assertion, not because they believe it, but because they don't. Buying into the "they're just delusional" and "it's just their affectation" stance allows the people who are uneasy with the subject of non-binary gender to avoid thinking about, learning about, questioning, reflecting on and finally understanding "it". This happens with every subject that can't be answered with two unambiguous tick-boxes - Y/N; F/M; B/W; G/E; C/A - some people will always be uncomfortable with complexity and uncertainty, and some people always express discomfort as anger. Making the one who introduced uncertainty into their life, their culture, their world-view or self-perception out to be the oppressor and themselves to be the freedom-fighter means they don't have to deal with the actual issue. (Also, of course, nobody likes to be disapproved of. So, when they disparage other people's convictions and opinions and modes of speech, they're just exercising their right. When other people disparage their public remarks, they are being oppressed, censored and shut-down.)

^^ Exactly! According to Major Winchester: "Do one thing at a time, do it very well, then move on." The very difficult trick is to decide when a task is finished. Like the artist who is dabbing on just one more touch of blue even as the painting is being hung in the gallery. How to make that end-point a little easier is to post the next item on the agenda well ahead of time. Giving yourself a new project really helps in letting go.

It doesn't go anywhere near there. Some people say things that sound silly to other people, even though it may make sense to the person who says it, and the person who thinks it's silly does nothing about it. Lots of people say lots of things that other people disapprove of, get angry about, are hurt by, and they sometimes respond, using words the other people get angry about and feel hurt by, etc. And --- nothing happens. Just like nothing happens to society when someone writes an op-ed piece against the latest fad, or somebody complains about sex in the movies, or somebody proposes a new national holiday to commemorate Michael Jackson. What Peterson falsely claims is that the government is policing his speech and forcing him to pronounce a few syllables that he doesn't think should enter the language. He seems to want - demand - what all the anti-PC protests seem to be on about: "Respect my disrespect of others." We have the same right to disrespect him as he has to disrespect us - genius or not.

Great! You do live longer if you relax a bit. Once a concern has been addressed, leave it alone and move on. That may take some practice, but it's a worthwhile aim. It sounds as if you've been wrestling with the diet question for a long time. You will already have collected a huge pile of information, and been sorting through it all methodically, trying out this regimen and that, asking advice, considering options, etc. That's all done. You already have a pretty good idea what doesn't work, and have discarded those methods. So you're down to a couple of routines that do work. Pick the more pleasant one, and trust yourself to stay with that as long as it delivers the desired results. The key phrase: Trust yourself. It's working - you can stop fixing it. Of course you will find something else to obsess over - if you're that sort of personality, it's inevitable. But it's also okay, because, while a perennial unsolved problem is stressful, every new challenge is exhilarating, liberating, rejuvenating. It's only deciding when to move on that's hard.

Proof: everything Peterson very publicly says; how little hampered he is by the rules of common courtesy or respect for the the opinions of others - and he's still at large.

As long as you're managing the condition, that's fine.

Fruit, vegetables, whole grains, cooking from scratch, and lots of time spent among trees. Simple is best, I think: less self-obsessing (which tends to be stressful), less remembering what goes with what and comes next (which occupies brain cells that could be more happily employed) and less effort to maintain (complication tends to cause high failure and non-compliance rates.)

Meh, a fern is a fern. Lots of plants haven't changed since his time. An he'd like something else, we'll re-animate some of its favourites. Wouldn't you, for such a lovable dino? Jurassic parks, yes. Too expensive (Bezos is building a space station, not a petting zoo) expensive, too extensive, too impractical. That's why I'd only bring back a few species that could take the place of some recently or soon-to-be extinguished species in the present ecosystem.

Pig-Footed Bandicoot, - because the world needs more marsupials. Ibermesornis - because it's blue Triadobatrachus - an amphibian to replace the frogs we're losing Aquilops - just to have a nice, herbivorous dinosaur around They're all very small, so that territory where they can roam free shouldn't be a problem. I always worry, when somebody talks about cloning giant prehistoric animals: Where will you put them, when the elephants and bison have no space? It's better to be extinct than to live in confinement.

I guess they have the Imperial/metric conversion under control by now. It'll be fine! We'll all be glued to our little screens watching it go through its paces, just like we did with the Voyagers.

That's why I don't take their loyalty for granted, nor their personal ideas of what patriotism requires of them. They may be wearing uniforms, but underneath, they're still individuals, to a point. Those soldiers (not active, I believe, but retired?) who participated in the riot didn't do so in their capacity as members of the armed forces, but as private citizens with a particular conviction about some aspect of a Great Again America. The crucial question regarding the actively serving armed forces is how the proportions work out: how many high- and mid-level officers side with the usurper vs how many side with the legally constituted authority, and only then, which ones are obeyed by how many of their troops. As for the veterans who were not at Trump's clambake, who know how they're all thinking, what they each want, how they would respond in a national emergency? That's a lot of people with combat training. Then, as matters military unravel further, there is the question of state militias, state and municipal police forces: who commands them, where their loyalty lies, whether they'll obey this or that kind of order. And since so many intransigent positions have already been taken, so much bile accumulated, so much propaganda spewing out of so many radios and websites, so many of the untrained, undisciplined, volatile civilian population is also heavily armed.... Martial law might not be as neat as simple as the man who invokes it imagines.