Phi for All

I'm not sure if the fastest human runner can overcome gravity's effect on our mass. The tail helps the lizard because of the way his legs work, but he isn't pulled down into the water as quickly, so his swimmy/runny locomotion takes advantage of the surface tension in a way we never can.

I think you'll find that any of the ways to maintain an equilibrium between momentum, weight distribution, balance, and the rapidity of your stride are going to be short-lived. How long can you run at your fastest speed while taking short, choppy strides so your feet don't go too far under the water? Iirc, the lizard's hind legs are splayed out wide, and they get that whole body including the tail in on the movement so they are really moving fast. That won't work for us. I've seen guys attempt this running on from the shores of a lake (not the hoax guys), and while you need speed we'll never have, you also need to take your next step before your last one can sink. This requires short steps at high speed, something that is difficult/impossible to maintain.

I'm not afraid that if I offer the benefits without demanding a pledge, that I'll get screwed. I'm confident that honor is going to be a big part of being a citizen of a country that prizes it's People. So yes, I'm offering all the things I've talked about with no strings attached, other than you pay your taxes when you earn money, and obey the laws of the land. And if it's all done the way it's been done in the distant past, society is overall more prosperous. I guess to conservative folks who are well-off, this makes their own success seem less worthy for some reason, almost the same way some people think gay marriage makes heterosexual marriage worth less. I believe humans who agree to be part of a society are already giving up a lot, and that it's the society who gains the most, if only all its members could see that.

Well, that's just unworkable bullshit that sounds good to you, and has zero historical support. And I can point to our current woes with tons of evidence that much of it is because of stupid, unprecedented amounts of wealth disparity. Or ignoring stupid, unprecedented amounts of carbon in our air. Or supporting corporate interests that continue to post stupid, unprecedented profits while our infrastructure crumbles as they dodge their fair share of taxes. I think your perspective supports hate and haters. I think we need to fix the system, and leave the hate for people out of it. I don't hate anybody, and I think accusing people of it is partially a distraction.

Really?! For nothing, I want you to have access to food, shelter, and clothing if you need them. For nothing, I want you to be treated with respect and dignity simply for being a human, second for being a citizen of my country. For nothing, I grant you the protections offered by the Constitution that governs us. For absolutely nothing on your part, I want you to have the best opportunity to be part of this society, and contribute to it as much as your prosperity allows you to. And if the person with the shadow yacht today loses it all tomorrow, I want them to have access to the same things I offer you. Does that sound like hate?

OK, good luck with this. Make it about hating the people, instead of about fixing a broken system. It's a nice strawman, and you seem to love it a lot. With diligent maintenance and perseverance of the kind you've shown, you should be able to keep it going as long as you need it. Meanwhile, I'll still assert that taxing wealth above a certain uber level is necessary and productive, and together with changes in business that favor the middle class workers, our economy could be more well-rounded, with less disparity and more prosperity. And it's hard to hate when things are going really well. Let tar and people like him think it means we're coming for their stuff, instead of simply adjusting our economy to a more Eisenhower-era, prosperous approach to being American. Maybe tar can find us some links to all the stories about Ike taking away middle class stuff from citizens like him back in the day. There must be something behind this inordinate fear that higher taxes on the uber-wealthy will mean he loses his stuff.

It's difficult, because the same quirk also makes him think I'm talking about him when I talk about people with shadow yachts. Somehow, the quirk turns my implication that the wealthy should pay more in taxes into "I want your stuff, tar". I long ago gave up on actually being understood.

I can hate the apathy and despair in that statement, right?

If we did, in the US, what the wealthiest nation on Earth is capable of doing for its citizens, I think many of the situations that foster hate just evaporate. Imagine if you knew you wouldn't cripple your family by needing surgery to save your life. You could focus on taking the best care of them, rather than on earning the right to do so. Imagine if you knew that you can go to school to learn anything that will make you more productive as a citizen. If you can look towards higher education instead of just getting by, or train for a better job instead of turning to crime, you aren't exposed to as many situations where your thoughts turn dark. Imagine if you didn't need to worry that it will be easy for someone with a grudge to get hold of the ultimate hate-amplifier, a loaded weapon. You don't need to worry about having a gun to defend yourself, because they don't outnumber you in your own country. You don't have to worry about the police shooting you because all their policies change the moment guns aren't in so many waistbands and glove compartments. Your whole outlook changes, you realize the power your neighbors and neighborhoods have now that the likelihood of being threatened with guns is radically reduced. Suddenly our police and other security measures become much more effective, and it becomes much easier to find out who has illegal weapons. Imagine if desperately poor people, as well as ludicrously rich people (shadow yacht types), were as hard to find as truth at a Trump rally. Imagine if the relationship between productivity and middle class wages were reestablished, so that more citizens were more prosperous overall with far less at the extremes. Imagine if you remove the jealousy that turns to hatred that happens when good people doing the right thing are crushed by insensitivity and systems that appear rigged against them. There will always be hate, but it doesn't need the help that our elite conservative leadership is shoveling on top of it, feeding it, tending it. We don't need to hate the haters, we just need to be willing to fix the system they've rigged against us. Hate the greed, not the greedy, and you can use the extra energy to keep their hands out of the cookie jars.

! 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.