Delta1212

You can teach history without erecting monuments to people who should not be celebrated. Stick it in a museum. Maybe a historical battlefield. There are places to teach history and places to celebrate history. And some history belongs exclusively in the "teaching" circle of that particular Venn diagram.

Do the people interviewed in this documentary sound like their primary motivation was defending a Southern War Hero's statue: What "Southern heritage" apparently looks like: It's all equivocation meant to provide cover for Nazis. Full stop.

Did anyone else watch Trump's statement this afternoon? I'm kind of shell shocked...

What makes that the rational decision?

Whether it is collusion or not, I doubt it is random happenstance. Trump is an enraged bull in a china shop. Undermining anyone who could potentially corral him or ruling up and fostering paranoia amongst those he works with in some capacity is a pretty straightforward way of keeping the trainwreck going. He doesn't need to be actively cooperating if you can just slap a "kick me" sign on someone's back knowing that he won't be able to help himself.

In what way are electromagnetic forces "actions at a distance"?

A good way to avoid being alone is to be altwo.

How does that mesh with, say, involuntary reflexes to painful stimuli that don't even reach the brain before inducing a response as in, e.g. jerking your hand away from a hot stove. You can get a reflex action that never enters the conscious mind. Given that, consciousness can't simply be "the survival instinct" as the two exist separately and independently.

Dark matter doesn't have anything to do with The Big Bang.

Two things: "The seed is strong" was about Robert's children, not Jon Arryn's. All of his bastards had black hair no matter what their mother's hair color, but all of "his" children with Cersei had blond hair. Robin doesn't really enter into it. Also, Bronn's House never gets brought up because he doesn't have one, as far as we know. He was just a mercenary Tyrion hired, not a member of the nobility.

Envy is when you want something someone else has. Jealousy is when you're afraid they will take something you have. You look at other people's things with envy and jealously guard your own things.

What makes you superior?

You know, it's actually kind of weird that more deeply religious don't embrace The Big Bang as part of their creation story. The surface of last scattering practically represents a literal "Let there be light!" moment.

Ok, it sounded like you were making a blanket statement about anything that could be made by man rather than anything that man has already created. In which case, I agree.

What does the treatment of the soldier's family have to do with the treatment of this guy? Which of their rights do you think the government violated? I mean, yeah, I'm more sympathetic to that family than his family, but so what? Civil rights aren't a popularity contest. So I agree, he should have been arrested and extradited for murder and then tried on the evidence. But that's not what happened. And because it's not what happened, it fundamentally undermined the ability to bring justice in this case. The fuck-up is not giving restitution to the person whose rights were violated. The fuck up that robbed the family of the slain soldier of a just and fair resolution was the decision by our governments to chuck the rule book that we have created for achieving that outcome when in came to this person in the first place.

If rights don't apply to despicable people then they aren't really rights. I'm of the opinion that if you establish that a government is allowed to violate the rights of citizens who are obviously guilty, or who are guilty of particularly heinous crimes, that you have effectively eliminated the protections they are supposed to provide for everyone. As such, I would hold that restitution for a violation of rights needs to come before and regardless of whatever else the person has done or been accused of doing. This can sometimes lead to outcomes I don't particularly like or benefit people I do not like, but I suspect I would like rather less living under a government that was allowed to develop for any significant period without being forced to treat that as a red line that it should not cross.

Why couldn't they?

I am, in fact, familiar with it, and I don't think that it offers an actual explanation as to what consciousness is, where exactly it comes from or why it exists at all, and it certainly doesn't do so in a scientific way, which requires a testable model of consciousness in order to qualify.

Are all self-referential systems conscious then? I'm asking not for the mathematics of self-referential systems (i.e. Strange loops) but for a mathematical model of consciousness based on the math of strange loops that gives testable and accurate predictions about consciousness. Without that, we don't "know" consciousness is a strange loop, nor does consciousness being "a strange loop" tell us anything particularly useful about what consciousness is. It's just one neat idea among many.

Empirical evidence that consciousness is a strange loop? Can you use the definition of a strange loop to tell whether something definitely is or isn't conscious? Can you even use it to give an accurate probability of whether something is conscious? Is there a mathematical model that describes the process by which consciousness arises based on it being a strange loop?

If you keep doing it, and I keep picking you to be my representative then it's my own fault that I'm being ripped off, but it's still a rip-off.

If I give you my cow to sell at market and you read it for a handful of beans that turn out to be decidedly not magical, the fact that I freely chose you to be my representative in the transaction doesn't make it not a rip-off. And if the buy slipped you $50 on the side, I'm still getting ripped off.

We don't know. Full stop. We even truly know what in the world is or isn't conscious. We don't know what the requirements for consciousness actually are. We are only really pretty sure other humans are conscious by extrapolation from our personal experience. The question of why we have subjective experience instead of just being highly complex but "perspectiveless" automatons has no currently defined answer.

Pretty sure I've encountered at least a few, yes.

I disagree that no one would vote for a politician on a platform of going to war and/or interfering with other countries. Many a political figure has risen to prominence on just such promises throughout history.