Peterkin

Isn't5 it more of a locomotion, speech and thought police thing? The teeshirts, flags, hats, machine-guns and torches offer some clues, as well.

What would that mean? Subjective consciousness, we all have, or think we have, and if one is capable of thinking, one may be forgiven the presumption of claiming consciousness, and most of us are willing, in some varying degrees, to share this presumption with [some of] our fellow organisms. I can't imagine a definition, or even a description for 'objective consciousness'. I have no objection, BTW, to sharing the presumption with the two unicellular fellow organisms in the above example. I have a vague notion that the bacterium is more self-aware than the neutrophil, derived from the fact that the bacterium will make a concerted effort to survive and the neutrophil won't... Only, that was the assumption, back when i was learning immunology. I now wonder how true that is.

Mask mandates have very little to do with criminality.

Now Is Not The Time.

Some other amends, OTOH, can become interesting, optically speaking. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-estate/2021/09/20/housing-reparations-black-homeowners-evanston/5622731001/?gnt-cfr=1 Oh, great, you stepped into my merge! really, as absorbing as are many of the issues that surfaced, bobbed along for a while and submerged here, I think The peterson question was laid to rest some time ago, the Biden question will resolve itself and the R/D question will self-immolate on its own schedule. The thread is no longer, TMM, seriously-takeable.

Gasp! You mean Biden is taking $10,000 a year off Kavanaugh's salary and tacking it onto Brown's? I'd actually be okay with that. but I don't think he can

I don't believe this is accurate. For one thing, i don't see where a judge, even a supreme court judge, has the power to enact an entire law. Without a citation, I can only surmise that an unnamed judge in some unspecified court, upheld a law enacted by a misguided government to drop the mask requirement. That's what happened in Ontario. Our Provincial Premier in his Fatheaded Wisdom, ended official mask mandate in public places. I think 'moving on' is code for giving up, and maybe a lot of judges think so, too. But they can't enforce a law that's not on on the books anymore. My personal response was to buy an even better mask and stop frequenting store that have given up trying to regulate customers.

No -- just keep appeasing them, knowing that an inch, a foot, a yard, a mile can never be enough. Because we're L osers. Evil always wins, because it's unhampered by scruples, manners, compassion or shame.

That is, with members of own species, which is hit-and-miss - judging by the history of our species. With members of species we have co-opted it works a little more reliably, since the relationship of subject and interlocutor tends to be one-to-one, rather than mass-to-mass. With members of species with which we have no common language more recent than, say 50,000,000 years, it's subjective. Any genera beyond that evolutionary crotch, we tend to objectify categorically. But degree of realishness and sanishness doesn't get us a definition of 'self' or 'awareness', let alone the combination of the two. I wasn't questioning its validity; I'm questioning whether it's sufficiently informative.

That, I conjecture, is because you start from an anthropocentric definition of self-awareness. It keeps coming back to that: we can only have our perspective. Many things can be said, and even sound profound, if not entirely plausible, as long as you don't put too fine a point on the meaning of words.

Perennially fascinating to philosophers, psychologists, neurologists and biologists since forever, I guess. We just can't stop touching that yellow dot on our forehead.

The molecular models are available, too, and look better than mine did. The springs all got lost eventually, so you could only make the stiff dowel connections. There is quite an amusing building toy of magnetic bricks, Hot wheels makes some car kits and there are over-coloured plastic thingies for the very young. But the market does seem heavily dominated - colonized, infested, overrun - by Lego products of every kinds of speciality. I had a set of building blocks that came in square, oblong, triangle, cylinder, arch and semicircle, each piece small enough for four-year-old hands. They were smooth and unpainted, restful to look at, a pleasure to touch. You can still get them, and other construction toys made of wood, but they're really expensive. I made a set for a grandchild some years ago, but she preferred the large Duplos from which you can make tall structures and knock them over with a big crash. (Imagine the melodrama of her teens! You know how wish upon your children the kind of children they were? I got my wish.)

I'm not obsessed with 'optics'.

Meccanos, yes! They were my brother's. Little strips of metal under every rug and sofa cushion. My favourite was Tinkertoy when younger, then the molecular model kit and the Visible series. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_214319

Whatever for?

Somebody seems to be in something.... It's a pattern-recognition problem, not an optical one; optics are changed by snip-and-tuck.

Sorry! Forgot to put in irony brackets.

That's true, but it limits us to the species with which we can communicate - for most people, that's just other people, pets and computers. For species with whom we have no common language, we can usually read body language: if the subject is trying to run away from you, bite your hand or steal your shiny cufflink, it's aware. If it just stands there and shows no response to being kicked, it's probably unconscious. But, yes, on the whole, that's the only convincing test: ask them.

They're not mutually exclusive. Dictators hold elections all the time. Their elections are rigged. That could never, ever happen in the United States of America, could it? So it's okay for the judiciary to be political, right?

To the extent that we each understand ourselves.

I have a problem with the premise of this question. Who does the testing? By what means have you determined that you are the agent capable of judging whether other entities are conscious? You must have started with an presumption that you yourself are conscious - without having passed any tests or posited any standards of qualification - and have thereby also become the sole authority on the subject of consciousness. (IOW: I am the alpha and the omega) In fact, all you can do, with no matter how sophisticated or wily a test, is compare others to your own currently perceived state of consciousness.

No, i did not say that. That, minus the gratuitous bracketed bit, is a fragment of what i did say. And there you have the whole problem of optics as produced by partisan kaleidoscopes. Going around a twenty-seventh time won't make it any different.

Unless you read the rest of the post, maybe.... I It did.

In that case, you can create a race of mad robots. Might not be a good idea, though!

BTW One court appointment, or one cabinet appointment, doesn't constitute discrimination against all those who were not appointed. If an entire identifiable group is absent from both court and cabinet, one has cause to question whether the reason is systemic discrimination. Each appointment has to come from one group and no other. If every group but one is considered, it's probably discrimination. If only one group is considered, it's certainly discrimination. It the makeup of the body as a whole does not closely reflect the proportions in the general population, there can be many reasons, and these can be discovered with due diligence; a fair judgment can be brought, and possibly suggestion for improving the balance can be suggested. Like, say: "Why not appoint a Black Woman to the Supreme Court?" "All right, if the judiciary committee agrees, I will." Something like that could happen.