lemur

Imo, majority/up-risings may be subdued to the extent that it fosters democratic discourse where everyone's right to express political will is validated. Popular will is not legitimate in suppressing a minority or an individual (even when the individual is deemed a dictator). The most anyone can achieve, majority or minority, in democracy is the capacity to reason with their opponents and avert the will to authoritarian domination of one prerogative unilaterally over others. Popular insurrection may be "put down on behalf of the people" because the insurrection itself may be a social-movement that itself undermines the ability of the people or sub-segments thereof to freely express and negotiate their political will. People get caught up in majoritarianism and as a result suppress their true interests in favor of bonding together in the hope of political domination against an elite/individual they consider oppressive. This is why, for example, the left rallied not in favor of anything but rather against Bush - i.e. because "overthrowing the dictator" became a political motive that eclipsed any constructive policy goals. This is, in itself, a form of political repression that substitutes assent to opposition for direct subjugation by the regime. People are still diverted from pursuing their political interests democratically, only in the case of majoritarian coalition, they are repressing their own will voluntarily in favor of rallying (expressing solidarity) against some enemy.

I forgot about the part where men dominate women by their worship of men. Where are the feminists to address that conundrum of women's liberation?

Well, I think the ultimatum posed in the OP is the initial question that would draw you into such a bureaucracy. Did you happen to note the inherent trap in the original question? The choice was to either accept arbitrary authority and worship (even insincerely) or be condemned to eternal damnation. By accepting arbitrary authority, you give the devil permission to lie and/or otherwise trick, manipulate, or trap you into accepting condemnation. Satan's only restriction is that he can't deny your free will. Even after you sign the proverbial contract that sells your soul, you always have the free will to go against the contract. Of course, he wants you to believe that by going against the contract you have committed yet another sin and are that much more trapped in hell. So you would submit to the random bureaucracy because you would accept whatever legitimation it offered at face-value without questioning it. You would basically be caught in a bogus contract by your own ignorance of the law. I like the story of the flood of Noah because after God floods the Earth out of anger for the sinfulness of mankind, "He" is said to have realized his mistake and vowed never to slaughter them again, and the rainbow following the flood is supposed to be a symbol of his promise. So I think this can be interpreted as God sinning and feeling sorry for his own sin against himself and promising not to do it again. Also, if humans are capable of sinning, then God must because humans are supposedly "made in His image." I don't think the point of God is to set a moral standard but just to emit enlightenment in various ways that help humans make choices about how to use their free will.

Well, don't underestimate the value of trading in some quality of life for a few increasingly precious life experiences. Like anything else priceless, though, there's no reason extended life should be exploited as yet another means of fiscally stimulating GDP growth. I think you have consumerist capitalism pegged, with its endless series of tricks to inject increasing amounts of money into circulation to be rallied for by anyone and everyone by whatever means. I think you may be making the, in my perception common, mistake of equating this form of capitalism with capitalism generally. I think there is a decent form of capitalism possible, which involves respect for personal property and individual economic/cultural freedom (and even facilitates these with government) while averting consumerism, corporatism, etc. Generally I draw a distinction between "control capitalism" and "free trade capitalism" where one seeks to use business and money as a means of controlling/exploiting others and the other uses them to promote mutually beneficial trade among people who are truly free to reason and resist what is unreasonable. Anyway, I'm getting diverted with the general topic of capitalism. I just want to point out that shifting the healthcare funding-burden to the wealthiest tax-payers is yet another tactic of capitalism to maximize spending and revenues. Using something like healthcare is handy because it seems like such a basic necessity and right that it becomes almost impossible to resist writing a blank check to provide endless revenues for capitalist growth. The question is whether such capitalism is healthy for people even if it is the result of cherishing health as priceless.

Thanks, I didn't know about that aspect of phlogiston history - had forgotten about it altogether actually. So, would you also say that the various empirical information and valid ideas that survived the fallen paradigm were already indicative of some other paradigm that survived phlogiston's? I see paradigms like culture and culture as always mixed in practice. Thinking of a discourse as monoparadigmatic is, imo, like thinking of an empirical social situation as purely monocultural or an empirical thermodynamic system as energetically uniform.

I would see it as a trap, temptation to submit to arbitrary authority with insincere faith as proof of my renunciation of faith in true truth and reasonable/good authority/power. This would be, imo, like the ultimate method that Lucifer uses to take God's place in the worship of humans with the free will to choose to decline. It also seems to be the ideology promoted at many churches, leading you to wonder whether God has been replaced with Lucifer and nevertheless called "God" for idolatry's sake. That's funny. I would think that hell would consist exclusively of social structure with various forms of short-term pleasure followed by agonizing dead-ends. Social structure in hell would be like an infinitely complex bureaucracy with the ability to endless channel you into misery by your own volition as a result of unfavorable choice structuring. What you mean by "free will" sounds like what I read an imam criticize as "freedom to sin." I think God supposedly replicated "His" own free will to humans so that they would be able to choose for goodness and be free to be creative because they had the ability to identify and pursue goodness in their creativity. Imo, all that it means to resist submitting to God is that people/angels resist seeking out goodness in their creative acts. Instead, they become cynical and lose faith in goodness as being good and thus decide to become destructive instead of constructive. I believe I have deciphered a logic to why pride is considered sinful, but it's kind of a detour from this post.

The big curses of leaving the garden of eden were that Adam had to eat of the plants of the fields by the sweat of his brow. In the garden, he supposedly could live from the natural bounty of the trees, which would have been more leisurely. Eve's curse was to experience pain in childbirth, so presumably she could have lived in the garden without worrying about herself, her husband, or her children dying and there would have been enough food to sustain unlimited growth. That would have been a pretty care-free life, don't you think? Living without labor, pain, or worries and being able to devote your life to being fruitful (sexually and in any other constructive/creative undertaking you choose) and multiplying (having children who don't bicker and behave in negative ways - only engage in constructive life-enhancing activities)?

I wondered if such a loop would exhibit inertial characteristics. E.g. if the loop was pushed (accelerated), it could contract in length as it wouldn't be perfectly inelastic. In that case, could the two sides of the loop resist contact because they are going in opposite directions, for example? Also, could the direction of motion produce an energy-concentration asymmetry by redshifting the side going in the opposite direction of motion and blueshifting the side going in the same direction? If so, I wonder if such an asymmetry could result in a form of polarity.

Another way to look at it is that heaven is a conceptual ideal that is only relevant insofar as it can be imagined within the mind of the believer. There may be no actual experience after death, but during life the idea of heaven may be quite inspirational, as can eternal life. Personally, I like to look at eternal life in terms of reincarnation or some other plausible way of fathoming life without death. Then, "heaven" and "hell" can refer to relative states of action-expererience re-inforcement. Life is viewed as non-terminal simply to shift the focus to the "now" in which sustainable patterns are created and maintained. "Heaven," thus would be a sustainable pattern of peace and happiness without fear of death or misery of life. "Hell," on the other hand, would be a growing "fire" of negativity, fear, destruction, hate, unforgiveness, reaction, etc. that consumes people in negative reactions to negativity. "Heaven" is achieved by attaining a sustainable state of forgiveness while "hell" is "ignited" by reacting to the various forms of temptation that make (inner and outer) peace and forgiveness increasingly less fathomable. The concept of eternal life has various spiritual/psychological functions in this sense, imo. 1) It diffuses death as a fear factor or something negative to react against and thus be tempted into negativity (hell). 2) it prevents the thought that happiness is only temporary and therefore sad 3) it prevents the thought that any negative consequences for "sin" will stop at death; which can be a method people use to validate unsustainable choices, e.g. "might as well smoke b/c you have to die of something," "might as well have fun b/c you only live once" etc. Eternal life ideology promotes making lifestyle choices that are potentially sustainable for eternity, if you would live that long. Another way to look at it is that you are setting examples that if younger generations were to replicate would not eventually result in a "hellish" existence for them.

Suppose Hawking radiation generates photons near the perimeter of a black hole. Then, suppose some of those photons occur at a level of gravitation that causes them to radiate outward but gravity-fluctuations subsequently cause the photon to be pulled backward toward the BH again. Maybe at that moment, it could get "bound up with its own tail" electromagnetically and then get carried away from the black hole by gravity waves. It probably sounds far-sought but I don't see what's so implausible about a black hole whose gravity fluctuates/oscillates - although the photon propagating into its own tail end and getting stuck in a loop is a bit more speculative, I think. Still, is there any physical law or reason that would exclude the possibility of an EM wave propagating intensively instead of extensively?

The current game seems to be one of poker with high stakes. The medical providers bill as high of fees as possible and the game is to see who will pay and how much of the total will get paid before they give up. This is necessary because it is illegal to charge higher fees to insurance companies, so the providers set the fees high to get as much as they can from the insurance and people who don't have insurance either avoid seeking care or lose their shirt or go bankrupt when they can't avoid it because the consequences are too serious. This has an important economic effect though; on that's similar to the function of public health care in more socialist governments: i.e. it encourages (or requires) people to accept structured employment instead of pursuing independent economic activities (unless these activities are lucrative enough to pay for high priced private insurance or high fees for care out of pocket. The reason I mention the connection with the will to material prosperity is because of the various ways in which health care and its funding are used to stimulate big capital flows. As I mentioned, there's the motivation to accept full-time employment, which generates a robust labor force for corporate profit-machines. Next, there's the pharmaceuticals, med-tech, operating tables and other furniture, wheelchairs, etc., and hospital construction that channel insurance money into numerous accounts. People see any kind of medical-related job as a route to high-pay, which is why so many people support universal health care; i.e. because it would create more health care jobs. Then people love the idea that the rich are taxed to create all these jobs because they see it as sticking someone else with the bill while their income goes up. The ironic thing, to me, is that the net result of increasing jobs and income through broadening health care access at the expense of wealthy taxpayers is that all that would really happen as a result is that more people would get paid to provide medical services, and then they would go spend that money on other services that they enjoy, which is why they sought high-paying medical jobs in the first place. In other words, the net result is a bunch of healthy people spending and consuming a lot that is produced by their own labor. The only reason the rich people's money even needs to be taxed is to get access to the land, buildings, natural resources, and/or whatever else is needed to put all that labor to work transforming the natural world into more Disney Worlds on every corner. I'm afraid that if people keep pushing for an economy like this, they will end up getting it if the only people resisting are the rich. I thought for a while that the green movement was an ally in the conservation of natural lands and resources, but I think most of them just want a new car and cheap gas for it at this point. So I'm afraid that unless there's a radical cultural awakening, we are headed for expensive universal health care that is going to drive the economy into a hyper-consumption frenzy. At least we'll be healthy while watching the roads widen and fill up with consumer business. I like the idea of free education improving people's health through inexpensive preventive maintenance and interventions, which would give poor people access to better health and knowledge, but then I would also like to see inexpensive basic amenities for them like nice nature parks and bike roads to get around without cars. I don't know why such a lifestyle is unpopular, but many people seem to prefer high-octane consumption driving excessive service industries, materialism, etc. I wonder once they start getting what they want, when would they ever be satisfied?

In reference to the OP: I think you would have to be orbiting the sun parallel to Earth to really see it rotate. If you're orbiting Earth, how can you distinguish between the apparent motion of the Earth due to your rotation and its rotation on its axis? I would pick an orbit as close to Earth's as possible on the sunny side. That way you could watch the day side with backlighting and no glare.

Do you mean that democracy can't use force by definition of it being discursive? I think there's a difference between force used for liberation or authoritarian purposes. You can use force to break up a fight without silencing and intimidating the participants into submission or you can use it to do so and thus achieve authoritarian order. Of course not. My point was that people assume western democracies aren't religion-based when in many ways they are. Secularism can often distract from the religious roots of laws in values that preceded their secular institutionalization. Stealing was an easy example because it's one of the ten commandments yet many people think of property rights as a natural secular value. Communism abolishes property rights according to a moral value of mandatory sharing. A satanic regime could promote stealing and killing as a means of promoting survival of the fittest, i.e. whoever can steal and kill the most without themselves losing too much property or getting killed wins and is better suited to having more children (who could eventually kill them and steal their property, for example). The fact that neither of these values have been adopted by western "secular" regimes suggests that they are basically faithful to certain religious values. So why shouldn't a secular Islamic regime have similarly secularized versions of Islamic religious values?

Another approach is to simply avoid the reifying imagery of paradigms altogether and just treat them as networks of related ideas that facilitate sense-making for certain knowledge or other ideas. In that sense, you wouldn't have to worry about paradigms being totally undermined, discarded, replaced, etc. because they would be nothing more than contextualization patterns. Granted, it was a shock to me when I read Popper's criticism of Marxist class-conflict analysis as being essentially tautological but it didn't ultimately undermine it as a paradigm for me - I just learned to treat it as a non-falsifiable interpretative lens that isn't really useful for proving or disproving anything per se'. I can't presently think of any other examples where paradigmatic context is challenged to the point of rendering knowledge fundamentally baseless, but I think any undermined paradigm can only shed further light on how knowledge predicated on that paradigm can/must be developed and/or understood to maintain validity. The only real examples of total paradigm-undermining I could imagine would occur in cases where knowledge was systematically built on a radically false assumption. Even then, though, certain aspects of research could involve valid knowledge (according to some paradigm) despite other aspects being paradigmatically misguided. I guess the issue here is that no knowledge is mono-paradigmatic.

You're strawmanning me as saying that the ad hominem attack related to the sarcastic approach to expressing it. The post compared me negatively with Einstein instead of addressing the content of my post. That's ad hominem. It was basically said that I am too stupid or unqualified to even consider something I would say. The poster should have addressed the content of my post or not bothered. If they would have wanted to make a comment about Einstein's methods and techniques because it was relevant, fine. But it was just unconstructive to make a fuss over Einstein to reject the validity of my post as coming from me. If you consider my posts not worth reading because they come from me, why read and respond in the first place? I.e. why attack? Personal emotional issues?

Is he referring to some threshold of voltage needed to overcome the initial resistance within the conducting medium, maybe?

It is a conceptual basis for various forms of social power/domination/control. By delineating it according to boundaries, the concept of territory is created along with territorial "belonging" or "misplacement." This, in turn, allows for the projection of natural-legitimation for removal or retention of certain elements/objects/people/etc. in order to "relegate" things to "their proper places." This bounding and separation of space into multiple "spaces" (areas/regions/territories) then allows for differentiation between inside and outside. These are used as basic concepts for psychological associations with behavioral rewards and punishments, including that of ego-identification ("my" or "our" territory as "insiders," "the place where I belong," etc.) This, in turn, is connected with psychological/cultural differentiations between public and private "spaces" where different activities are allowed or resisted with the effect of generating general psychological partitioning and differentiation between plural regions/spaces, which have come to seem naturally distinct and different. Free of spatial-containment cognition, people would have to directly interact with other people and objects without reliance on assumptions about super-individual authority. They would also have to commit actions directly and actively instead of being able to engage in indirectness and passive-reactionism. These are some social-political implications of spatial sorting, which are somewhat derived from or associated with physical science's use of spatial ontology but of course applied in rather different contexts and discourses.

The health care discussion really has two separate parts. One is the issue of people who need or want better health care for themselves or their families. The other is people who want more opportunities to make more money and consume more and acquire more wealth. People look to health care for both of these goals: medical treatment and other health care and jobs and business opportunities to make more money. But the shadow side of the discussion is what kind of wealth and consumption do people want to increase along with the quality of their health care? In other words, people want healthy and even medically-enhanced bodies, but that is not all. They also want to adorn these bodies in attractive clothes and jewelry, tatoos, and hair-styles. Then they want to parade these bodies around in expensive vehicles that consume fossil fuel. They want to display themselves in elaborately decorated venues like restaurants and other public stages where the decor quietly says, "this is not just another Walmart." Producing and maintaining all these material venues, goods, and (less material) services that go with them cost enormous amounts of labor and resources and the more people have the means to consume them, the more abundant and elaborate they need to be. Is there enough materials and labor for everyone to gain increased consumption and wealth access, or are at least a certain number of people stuck with a glass-ceiling on their level of consumption and wealth accumulation? If so, is there a way for these people to gain access to adequate health care without having access to the means to spoil their care-givers with the lavish lifestyles they expect and presumably deserve for their great contribution to human wellbeing? Or is it necessary to withhold health care access as part of the general economic strategy of withholding economic access from the poor to avoid having to curtail it for the non-poor?

Thanks. This appears to be exactly what I am thinking of. The wiki article says that the energy would probably "leak away" even if the thing was stable enough to remain intact. I wonder what basis there is for thinking an EM wave can "leak?" Do/can photons fragment? How can they considering that their energy is quantized? If such a loop could form, I would think it would feed on itself insofar as photon-propagation seems to be related to complimentarily and exclusion between electric and magnet fields. It's like the one field draws on the other to propagate itself to its next replicant. Put another way, it's like the electric field generates a magnetic field, which in turn generates a new electric field, which "pulls" the energy of the first electric field forward because of conservation of energy. Anyway, I don't know if I'm assuming too much from relatively intuitive understandings of these waves and their fields but I don't see why energy would just randomly "leak" out of a closed system. Maybe it would help if I had some more knowledge of quantum gravity theories.

I'm not sure what kind of "more detail" you're talking about. Your post has got me thinking about the difference between energy-concentration (heat) differentials and charge differentials between positive and negative ions. Since heat is literally kinetic energy, it is different than charge, which is potential energy since it is a force-attraction or repulsion, right? On the other hand, having a concentration of negative ions is like having a pressurized system of electrons, right, whereas the positive ions would be like a low-pressure system of electrons (relative electrostatic vacuum?). So it is as if electron pressure is dissipating through the conductor to attain charge-equilibrium. This seems directly analogous to, say, a pressurized container being allowed to evacuate into a vacuum-pumped container; but can it also be analogous to a container of hot material being allowed to conduct heat through a wire into a heat sink of cold material? In a sense, I would say yes because of a vague association between heat and pressure, but since heat is technically molecular motion regardless of volume/density and pressure/density is only really directly related to heat in gasses, I'm not sure. I wonder if there is some validity in considering heat within a solid or liquid that's not melting or evaporating as pressure within the confines of the substance. In that sense, you could say a hot substance has a higher concentration of pressure-energy in the same sense as a pressurized gas, only the pressure is naturally contained by the phase-state of the particular substance. This in turn raises the question of whether ionization is akin to a phase-state of electrons, but that would mix up the configuration of the atoms/molecules with that of their surplus charge.

There's no page. Is there some other name to search under?

Here's why "local, cultural idiosyncrasies of each people" are not a basis for national independence/statehood: Cultural differentiation occurs through cultural contact. So no culture is attributed to an individual or group until there is some "Other" created internally/externally to use as a contrast in describing and defining culture as structured and "one's own" or "other/different." What's more is that the moment such cultural contact occurs to allow the construction of difference/otherness to occur, this in itself already constitutes a merging (a moment of fertilization through intercourse if you will) between the two cultures. Thus no two cultures can ever really exist separately from the moment they are known in each others terms, and this fact renders them both hybrids colonized by contact with "the Other." Cultural homogeneity, on the other hand, is constituted through contrast with difference but prior to that moment, no such homogeneity exists because different individuals or even different moments of the same individual's life are regarded as cultural difference. The transition from childhood to adulthood, for example, is ritualized as a cultural shift and a corresponding change in identity, status, roles, etc. So the fact that culture is always defined and identified dialectically prevents it from ever being self-originating, at least in the sense of identification and territorial-attribution. International law can be viewed as a culture of its own (or part of some other specific culture) and thus its assumptions of equality and autonomy should be treated as culturally relative as culture can be relative, no? They could be protecting him from mob violence (after all it is easier to evacuate an individual and prevent him from causing trouble than it is to evacuate thousands of refugees and ensure that none are spies, saboteurs, terrorists, etc. Maybe they aren't removing him in solidarity with his opponents as much as they are catering to popular will in order to install a representative government that will allow popular ideologies to critique each other instead of unifying against repressive authority. These are some constructive possibilities. There are also cynical ones to speculate about but those conjure up images of oppressive conspiracies, covert elite exploitation, and cooperative multiple dictatorships and puppet dictatorships; but I don't feel like worrying about these since even if they were true, they would never survive to the point of being legitimately recognized as valid. Even the claims of corruption that are cited as reason for the current popular uprisings sound like ungrounded accusations on the part of people who are simply fed up with their economic situation. The accusations could be completely true, but politics still always has a way of countering with just enough uncertainty to render provocative claims suspect just by virtue of being provocative.

That a very interesting idea and elegantly stated. I will have to think about it and create some permutations in the form of concrete scenarios. Also well put. Basically I picture electrons by thinking of the repellant invisible field of a bar magnet without the bar attached. I suppose it would be the attractive field in its attraction to the nucleus. So the "slippery stretch water-balloons" analogy is more like a way of describing what it feels like to push two magnets together against their same-pole repulsion. Then I just imagine that if such fields were internally cohesive due to some kind of quantum inability to split into sub-quanta, they would stretch and bend and be otherwise malleable insofar as different parts of them would be subject to different amounts and directions of force vis-a-vis different sources (e.g. one part of an electron could be getting pulled by positive charge while another part could be getting squashed by an oncoming electron repelling it). Yes, it makes sense to me that objects behave differently according to the level and circumstance of interactions with other objects/substances. The same lake, for example, can easily engulf a stone dropped from 1m and completely smash a car driving off a cliff. Likewise, I have been thinking about the solid/liquid viscosity distinction and whether non-spherical objects would become viscous because they vibrate with enough energy to move relative to each other in between collisions (i.e. their shapes no longer are packed tightly enough to lock each other in). Anyway, this is just an example and shouldn't divert from the thread. Btw, why you use the term "quantum object," does "quantum" refer to the necessary/natural discreteness of quantities or just to the minuscule scale of the (sub)atomic level? I sometimes feel like the two terms are used interchangeably when they shouldn't because it overgeneralizes the meaning of the word, "quantum/quanta."

Interesting approach; the best "proof of external reality" I've heard yet actually. However, I'm not so convinced that the Kant and Wittgenstein logic you cited is completely logical. Who is to say that an individual's mind couldn't be sufficiently divided and/or steadfast to generate the same level of fixity that we assume can only come from external facts/factors? If you look at how steadfast people can be in regarding institutionalized facets of even their own personality nuances as fixed (e.g. they think being late or argumentative is just in their nature - or they think there personality is fixed as a function of astrology, etc.) - why wouldn't this psychological potential be extendable to an elaborate world-fantasy in which all aspects of their personal universe are regarded as external to their own mind AND incontrovertible to themselves as such despite any amount of critical inquiry and testing according to their own rules (and maybe even the rules of imaginary others in their fantasy social world)?

This sounds like "the law of attraction" described in the movie, "the Secret," which basically proposes that positive or negative thinking/belief "attracts" positive or negative events to occur in one's life. Movies/books/seminars like this often make reference to quantum physics, I think because it allows them to promote the idea that there are inconceivable, almost magic-seeming phenomena happening at the most fundamental physical level and yet they can explain larger-scale phenomena with law-like accuracy. Also, I think maybe they read about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or Schrodinger's cat or something like that and interpreted it as meaning that human observation and/or thought exercises direct influence on chains of minuscule physical events that somehow determine very complex social events in radically transformative ways.