Phi for All

! Moderator Note So what's the consensus? I'd really like to change the title, it sounds too much like an advertisement.

I'm not surprised you see it that way. Historically, you pretend that it's all black and white, have and have nots, But life isn't really like that, and the truth is you ignore all the shades of "don't have enough" that are that way because the system has been stacked against them for the last fifty years. It's not a war, it's about incredibly rich people being incredibly greedy, and all the myriad ways that adversely affects our society. Hatred of the psychological kind you're talking about is not the problem. Crazy hatred is identifiable in most cases, and treatable as long as you don't sell those people guns. But when normal people can't get what they need in life, everything starts to pile up, they feel ripped off, let down, misunderstood, ignored, and downtrodden. In the US, we live in legal corruption, we have 25% of Earth's prisoners, the rich don't want the poor to have healthcare, they barely want to pay for public pools and roads. The business owners in general won't pay living wages and when they can't find enough workers they go to foreign countries. We have all this hypocritical religious crap mixed up in our government, even thought there's supposed to be a clear separation. Christians are supposedly running this country, with their persecution of tolerance, other religions, and lifestyles that aren't theirs. So yes, I think most of the hate you see nowadays is the direct result of conservative policies that have pushed people to the limit over the last several decades. When you feel like you're doing the right thing, being fair with people, upholding the law, but your society keeps kicking you in the teeth, resentment can lead you to much worse places.

! Moderator Note And most likely a different science discussion mechanism is available there to talk about those different laws, but since it doesn't exist here, we're going to save the members some valuable time and close this down. When you can show evidence to support the existence of this different universe, you should still refrain from starting another thread about it.

! Moderator Note I get it! The offense is offering your religion as scientific evidence to support an argument, and the reflex is to toss it in the Trash for breaking several rules you hypocritically agreed to when you joined! Clever.

I've mentioned before your propensity to set up situations with problems and no possible way of solving them. To you, science will continually be "in its infancy", and it will take an inordinate amount of time before we learn enough to satisfy you. When you don't like something, you phrase your dislike in such a way that there's no way to fix it. You also don't answer questions that might form some sort of resolution. Is it necessary that we know "everything" in a possibly infinite universe, or would it be enough for you that we learn to understand what another 50,000 years of progress at our current exponential rate can teach us? Civilizations are only thousands of years old, and the scientific method only hundreds. Why would it take millions of years for us to learn what you think we should know?

A nebulous determination that allows you to ignore the reality of the progress made over the last century at least. Considering how far we've progressed in the last few hundred years, I think you're exaggerating by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. You also invoke a bit of infinity into your thinking when you talk about knowing "everything". Can we ever? Is it possible if the universe is infinite? It could be that we can know everything we need to know in a few thousands or tens of thousands of years. Will that be enough?

What makes you say that?

I don't think of hate as an emotion developed by evolution for survival. I think of it rather as an event, something that is made up of lots of little unrelated bits that get together to form it, like a fire or a tornado or a bomb. I think most of the little unrelated bits are created by the heavy wealth disparity we have in the world today. If more people were modestly prosperous, with fewer in both aching poverty and exorbitant wealth, I think there would be less of the bits that help hatred form. Remove as many of the reasons why people feel the frustration that leads to violence, rather than just stomping on the violence with combat boots, and you smother the fire, the tornado loses the strength to hold itself together, and the bomb is defused.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/7813-science-forums-etiquette/

Come on, put away the "obtuse" card. When I've mentioned not fighting terrorists, I've been very specific in saying it's a mistake, imo, to fight them conventionally. If you're instead actively trying to remove their sources of funding, recruitment, and weaponry, why isn't that fighting them? If conventional warfare has made them grow, why not try a different way? Some fires you don't douse with water (and certainly not with gasoline). You smother them.

We occasionally get Reports requesting deletion of text, presumably after editing has timed out. We prefer not to do this at all, and definitely won't if the post has already been quoted or commented on by other members. It makes a thread look very dishonest to have edits after responses. This is the written word. Learn not to blurt while typing.

! Moderator Note In any case, if you're exploring "the opposite of reality", then science and philosophy aren't the right tools. I'm not sure why you think the concept is meaningful in any way, and you have failed to explain it to anyone's satisfaction. If you were even rational-adjacent then the members could help unravel what you're talking about, but you're not and don't seem to understand why this is a problem. Two pages of wth?! is not a good discussion. If you can figure out a much better way to explain your idea, you can try again in another thread, but if it's like this thread, it will be closed as well. We understand how some concepts are difficult, but you need to work harder at explaining yourself.

! Moderator Note marieltrokan, you are using non-standard definitions to explain why reality exists, making it very difficult to understand. You aren't using any kind of science, and though this is our Philosophy section, we require more logic and rigor in our discussions, even on so airy a topic. There is no point in guesswork. Your posts need clarity. Several people have asked for it, and if you can't show some evidence to support your ideas, or a chain of logic we can follow to assess its validity and soundness, this thread will have to be closed. No need to respond to this modnote here in the thread, since this is part of our rules, but you can Report it if you object to it.

Philosophy bot?

I think we need to find out who is arming the extremists, and go after them. Without access to military weaponry, extreme views are much more easily dealt with from within the culture, which is probably the only way any of this is going to end well. The vast majority of Islamic people don't view their religion in this extreme way. Don't glorify terrorist actions in the press, denounce them in the streets. We also need to stop fighting terrorists as if they were normal combatants. Shock and awe only makes the terrorist ranks swell. It may sound counter-intuitive to focus on defense, but removing overwhelming response leaves the recruiters with fewer fervent supporters. Leave families intact and there are fewer survivors willing to blow themselves up to avenge a loved one. And we truly need to rethink this whole military industrial setup we've let get out of control. We're running the war on terrorism on a for-profit model, and then wondering why it keeps growing. At what point are we looking for more places to drop the bombs we've already bought, instead of buying bombs to fight with? You can't trust that the same folks who profit from warfare aren't the same folks who armed the extremists in the first place.

Perhaps the Christians are misusing "cure" to mean "fix". Twain obviously considered Christianity a disease to be expunged, where the Christians see a neglected structure in need of repairs. Needs more Bible.

A bible store owner who misunderstands is one thing, but obviously none of the customers gets it either, which really makes this noteworthy. At a real library, I've seen people report typos on the bulletin boards flyers. How many people reading Christian books are actually learning anything?

This seems to be a simple case of wanting something to be a certain way, and making up the facts to support it. If the OP thinks this is intellectually honest, it's probably why he misunderstands how science really operates. Better the caricature to make fun of than to actually try to understand reality.

So we should have spent more, used more troops, dropped more bombs, does that sum it up? I thought that had been tried many times and failed. Is there a number of dollars or bombs that you think would do it right? The point is, terrorism isn't normal warfare, and it shouldn't be fought normally. The last 16 years should have shown you that. In much the same way, the Donald isn't a normal politician, and he shouldn't be treated normally. Nobody else at the executive level gets away with schoolyard name-calling and outright lies on the scale he does, and it's impossible to discuss anything meaningful as long as he's only interested in put-downs and bigotry.

The need for excessive enforcement of the law in the US is part of our problem with wealth disparity, imo. If we adjusted the tax system to stop sparing the wealthiest people and corporations, came up with a livable minimum wage, stopped running prisons for profit (and use more pre-trial services, saving bail for the really bad guys), and shored up our social programs so there was a healthier middle class with fewer families at the extreme ends of the spectrum, how would it affect crime overall, and specifically crimes that rate the death penalty? I don't think civilized countries need the DP, but I think we need to change the circumstances that have deteriorated in the US since Nixon in order to truly make that judgement. A happier, healthier citizenry that isn't worried about making ends meet (in one of the wealthiest nations in the world) tends to commit fewer capital crimes.

It's very good indeed then that science isn't such a single line. And that it has a far better track record than intuition and improvisation. Scientific method, or "winging it"? I'll go with the rational methodology.

I think this is perhaps a problem in academia these days. There are many, like you, who seem to view the challenge as more important than actually having evidence to support it. Convention is convention for a reason, because it's usually the current best explanation. I find most objections to mainstream knowledge aren't rationally based, or are formed from misunderstanding the science involved.

Again, my comments came on the heels of those about how it was the zoo's fault for having an enclosure for a dangerous animal that a 3-4 year old could get into. The gorilla is dead, and I can only hope that it's not for nothing. Future zoos will be built differently, and I hope parents will take some extra time with the toddlers to explain why our friends at the zoo are behind those barriers and what those barriers mean. Is it ever OK for a child to cross those barriers? NO. I think we have an extra obligation to set the standards for our children about how public resources are treated. That means not letting them play with the automatic door-openers at the library that we bought for handicapped people. That means teaching them to treat public facilities at least as well as they treat their bathrooms at home. That means telling them they can't pick the flowers at the campsite, or leave trash for others to pick up. And if you don't think your child can handle those responsibilities, then maybe you need to make special arrangements.

Terrorism is what you resort to when your views are marginalized. Extremists don't usually have access to armies and military grade weapons (not on a scale to wage war), so they strike in ways that make a big splash in the media. They make a cheap video of beheadings, or improvise an explosive that kills civilians. They stir up emotions, where conservative thinking is weakest, and hope that we'll go mental and spend $10,000 for every $1 they spent. Terrorism is only effective if we respond out of proportion, which is exactly what the conservative response is. How many hundreds of billions of dollars have we spent since 9/11? What fraction of that have the terrorists spent? At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda numbered in the hundreds, and after all Bush did, their numbers only grew. Fundamentalist terrorism in the Middle East is based in large part on the premise that Christians and Jews are working together to destroy Islam. This is a very emotional, irrational, conservative fear that we did very little to discourage for a long time. Bush's military even named operations with Islamic concepts like Infinite Justice, which only made the fear worse. In our own country, conservative fear of losing our freedom drove us crazy enough to toss ourselves inside the prison of the Patriot Act. The more hate and division the Donald preaches, the more fear and irrational action come together to limit our overall successes. Virtually every time the US suffers in some way overall, there are billionaires profiting by it. The idea that an opportunist billionaire like Donald would ever try to help the US in a general way at the expense of his rich friends is not supported by history or common sense. And he's destroying our best hope of combating Islamic terrorists effectively, the support of the enormous majority of Muslims who aren't terrorists. All this hatred over Mexican immigrants, when Mexican immigration is net negative, and all this fear over terrorists when 94% of all terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005 were by non-Muslims makes it sound like Donald is a hater just for the hate of it.

Let's be clear here. I consider Obama's drone program to be an example of his conservatism helping to fuel terrorism. It's one of the things conservatives in both parties like about him. I know Sanders would dismantle it. Clinton is both more hawkish and slightly more conservative than Obama, so I doubt she'd give it up. The drone program is probably why Trump only needs four hours of sleep a night, he's so excited about the new potential consequences of criticizing him.