bobthechef

I wonder how much we could reduce A/C usage by changing how we build. Contractors seem ignorant of traditional practices that used to help in part no doubt because they think they can throw A/C at bad design.

For instance, what if we used masonry instead of wood frame houses (masonry tends to insulate better; look at infrared pictures of American wood frame houses and European masonry). Also, orienting houses in proper relation to the sun and arranging rooms in a way that facilitates better air flow (embrace the summer draft). Also, evaporative cooling. I am not proposing we eliminate A/C, only find ways and build in a way that allows us to cool houses for cheaper or even for free.

"suddenly I’m hearing a lot about “brown” identity (we’ve been reduced to a color) from white people and white dominated institutions"

Even here, you're committing the same fallacy by using the term "white people" which is promoted by the same people. There are no "white people". I presume you know something about European history. Try finding unity in that mess that could legitimize the notion of a coherent "white people". One "white" country subjugated the other. Much of the continent was never involved in any colonial endeavors, and it ignores the imperialism elsewhere in the world. "White people" almost smells like an attempt by former colonial powers to diffuse responsibility. They can't deny they were involved, but they can obfuscate it by unjustly spreading the blame across all of Europe, all Europeans. It's also a way to get ahead of the problem and to draw from victim cache by association. You see similar attempts by some to downplay German atrocities during WWII by exaggerating complicity in conquered countries.

But I agree with your general point and the right to your suspicion. There are political incentives to promote this kind of anti-intellectual stuff. All it does is reinforcement racist ideologies that e.g the Americans specialized in. It also results in division and conflict, something political regimes have long used to distract the people and keep the ire of the public away from the ruling class.

It sound like you're talking about, or at least brushing up against, prudential judgement[0]. Sometimes, the optimal move is not to seek the optimum.

An obvious class of problems is where determining the optimum takes more time than the lifetime of the problem. Say you need to write an algorithm at work that does X, and you need X by tomorrow. If it would take you a week to find the theoretical optimum, then the optimum in a "global" sense is to deliver the best you can within the constraints, not the abstract theoretical optimum. The time to produce the solution is part of the total cost. An imprudent person would either say it's not possible, or never deliver the solution in time.

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12517b.htm

The absurd overuse of AC seems like a peculiarity of the United States. Walk into an American household in the summer, and you find people watching TV with blankets or a sweatshirt because the temperature is so low. In the winter, the opposite is true: the house is overheated, so everyone wears short sleeves. You’re pretty much forced to do this in older apartment buildings where you have no thermostat and the landlord cranks the heat up to Saharan temperatures. The only way to regulate the temperature is to open windows, and that doesn’t always work well. Tell me that’s not wasting energy. Maybe start there if you want to actually contribute meaningfully.

Such a bizarre set of practices. The point of HVAC is to bring the temperature to a comfortable level while you wear season appropriate clothing, not to eliminate or invert seasonal differences.

The vulnerable narcissist vs. the grandiose narcissist. That is, the Hollywood-archetypal "nerd vs. jock", though I have also met some grandiose nerds in my time in addition to the vulnerable stock.

On a different node, I also see that accusing someone of "narcissism" can itself be an expression of envy. If you succeed, you can debilitate someone else with doubt and guilt to prevent them from pursuing what they want.

I'm not sure what you mean by karma in this case, but I wanted to note that the word "supernatural" is very often misused. Once you start prodding people about what they mean by "supernatural", you quickly discover that they don't know what "natural" or "physical/material" mean, much less what "supernatural" means, and the whole conversation descends into grumbling.

Here's one definition of "supernatural order" [0].

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14336b.htm

He's not saying "I'm correct whether you like it or not". Instead, he's saying "we are all prone to cognitive errors, whether you like it or not".

Restated: "I'm correct, about us all being prone to cognitive errors, where you like it or not."

charging according to income

Perhaps only as part of a way to ease those with low income. But this is no good in general. You are charging one person more than another for the same good simply because of higher income. This is price discrimination and is unjust. Usury can work in an analogous way, such as when someone raises prices to exploit increased need even though the cost of production of the good sold is the same.

property owners provide almost no value

They provide shelter and must maintain that property. Problems occur when they begin to charge unjustly for services rendered. This calls for regulation, not state ownership. No need to go to extremes.

The current setup creates guettos [sic] by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility

Social mobility isn't the only consideration and not the summum bonum and it exists precisely to allow people to sort themselves into social classes (otherwise, why have social mobility in the first place). People of a given social class tend to live closer to each other because they share class cultural similarities, concerns, and affinities. That doesn't mean there is no contact between people of different classes, but the solution isn't to mix everyone up into a uniform mass. There's a middle way between the hermetically sealed ghetto and uniform distribution, and it doesn't involve violating the principle of subsidiary.

Ultimately, it is poverty that is a problem, not having a lower or higher income as such.

Our culture is in love with bullshitting. If you can bullshit to get what you want (ostensibly), then you're the man. Notice how getting away with things is glorified. It's like you managed to hack the Matrix or steal the cookie from the cookie jar your mommy didn't want you to touch. It's the childish satisfaction that you're hot shit because you got past the grown ups.

Of course, you can get away with a lot of bad things. The question is: should you do such things? The answer is: no. No one of any sense of dignity will lie, cheat, steal, or bullshit. No one who know how harmful it is to themselves to do such things will do them. It is beneath them and their love themselves too much to want to harm themselves. It's degrading. Wine won through illicit means tastes like urine anyway, if it tastes like anything at all. It's like the devil has offered you a glass of Chateau Lafite under the condition that you hand him your taste buds, or that you let him take a dump in it first.

Give a shit about things worth giving a shit to the degree that they are worthy of being given a shit about. Don't worry about approval from others. Virtue is its own reward. Don't whine. Don't be envious.

in awe of the natural world as some do with religion

I have a real problem with the distinction between "religious people" and "non-religious people" because it presumes a distinction that I don't think exists. Everyone takes something to be the highest good. Most philosophers (for most of human history, anyway) and what you call religious people typically take God to be the highest good, the supreme summum bonum. Others worship pleasure or power or Man or nature or whatever else. In this sense, everyone is religious. We just differ about what the highest good is and what Man's orientation toward that good is.

What you call religious people do experience awe at creation. Indeed, God is not generally knowable directly, but creation is taken to tell us about the creator or first cause (what is in the effect must be in some way in the cause for you cannot give what you do not have).

mysticism can be fun in a world with rules.

Two problems. First, mysticism isn't obscurantism. I believe Rahner somewhat obnoxiously called mystery "inexhaustible intelligibility" which is to say that true mystery is fully intelligible, but we cannot exhaust the knowing of that thing. I might imagine this to be something like trying to swallow the Nile. There's no end to it. The mystery par excellence for Catholics, then, is the beatific vision.

Second, what do you mean by "rules"? There are no rules, but things do have natures and what we call "scientific laws" are just shorthand descriptions of tendencies of things of a certain nature. There are no externalized laws "out there" that "govern" the world from without, imposing order onto what is otherwise some kind of unintelligible chaos. Things themselves are ordered by virtue of what they are. It's important not to commit the reification fallacy here w.r.t. "law". Furthermore, it almost sounds like you're saying that what you call religion is somehow antithetical to there being natures and principles. On the contrary, that is essential to something like Catholicism. Read the first few verses of the Gospel of John. Jesus is identified with the Logos, which is to say something like the order of the universe which was made incarnate in the hypostatic union. Natural law theory, something traditionally embraced by the Catholic Church, presupposes not only the utter intelligibility of the universe, but that things have natures and that the basis for ethics is human nature.

So what I sense here is a number of presuppositions, among them that "religion" (a word itself too broad and vague) is essentially (and only) an emotional phenomenon, which, in the case of something like Catholicism, isn't true.

This is where a sense of humor would come in handy.

These are subsaharan Africans, not African Americans.

Indeed. But I also wonder how common this is.

Imagine you have a deal with a friend who is a stock broker. You supply him with insider information to make trades. You give him your money and he makes trades on your behalf, and to conceal the deal, he trades Apple stock uniformly across all clients. He doesn't do anything that would make you stand out.

Or let's say his greed doesn't get the best of him and he doesn't invest anything but conservative sums of his own money in Apple stock using this information, and then, to launder kickbacks, you start a small company unrelated to investing that he pays for something intangible (like a "membership" or "retainer"), or he pays you cash.

I would find it difficult to believe that this sort of stuff isn't happening all over the place.

Indeed, deduction, while of course important, is downstream from conceptualization. If you begin with muddled concepts, your deductions aren't good for anything. Even a small error in the beginning leads to big errors in the end.

And strictly speaking, mechanical deduction is a simulation of deduction that exploits the formal properties of propositions. You cannot analyze the conceptual terms (e.g., predicates) in this fashion because, by definition, the content of those terms are exactly what formalism excludes. Formalism provides us with essentially this: that we can deduce the shape of the (or a) conclusion regardless or for any such terms from the shapes of the premises alone with no concern for the concepts involved.

Isn't this exactly an example of you assuming you know better? How have you verified your own position, your own beliefs about transgenderism and gender dysphoria? Is your position actually coherent and defensible? Putting aside how gender theory conflicts with common sense, there are plenty of philosophers and scientists who, as philosophers and scientists, find gender theory incoherent. Not just wrong, but incoherent. You wouldn't know that by listening to the journalistic fluff and ideologues, but these gatekeepers of "reality" are precisely those whom we need to be wary of. Have you tried to examine the best arguments against gender theory?

What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles.

It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance

Are you certain about these claims? You seem to be fairly confident. While your interlocutors may not have the sophistication to have reasons for their positions (I don't know), that doesn't mean there aren't valid arguments against your convictions, and yet you seem quite certain that there aren't, whereas I claim that there are.

I think what needs to be underscored is that, in the typical course of affairs, we make best judgements based on our prior beliefs and revise them when we have sufficient reason to revise them. You may not have come across such reasons (again, I don't know), but if you did, would you consider revising your position? Do you have good arguments for your position?

I never liked the term.

It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.

This borders on solipsism. The same argument can be made about any human being. At the very least, we presume there is pain by observing the behavior of animals in response to stimuli and interpreting what we see analogically. An in light of certain reasonable assumptions (like "natura nihil frustra facit"), we can quickly rule out a host of preposterous interpretations to conclude that the sensation felt is painful. That

We don't need to factor into the moral calculus the possibility that no pain is felt since the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that infants do feel pain. What reason could there possibly be to believe that they don't that isn't some stretched exersize in special pleading and evasion? The baby is human!

I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering.

I'm not sure that's the case. Most people believe dogs feel pain by observing them, for example. Indeed, it is the most immediate common sense conclusion one can make based on observation. It wasn't until modern philosophy, specifically Descartes, characterized animals as zombie meat machines (pure res extensa). Aristotle, by contrast, did not deny non-human animals sensation or pain, as is evident in De Anima in which he reasons that sensation is in fact necessary for animals (this occurs in the context of determining the necessary faculties entailed by the nutritive soul, the sensitive soul, and the intellectual soul).

technically it's a minor basilica, not a cathedral)

This is a category mistake, no? A cathedral isn't an architectural term, but a designation granted to the central church of a diocese (i.e., the seat of a bishop, hence "cathedra" which means "seat" in Latin). A basilica is both an architectural term and a designation.

How is it not binary? There's no reason to obfuscate the issue. All you need to do is to answer two questions:

1. Are human beings _human beings_ beginning with conception?

2. Is it ever licit to kill an innocent human being intentionally?

W.r.t. (1), if you answer "no", then the second question is moot. It may still be the case that abortion would be morally illicit, but that would be a different question. If you answer "yes", then you must answer the second question. If you answer "yes", then you are a utilitarian/consequentialist. The conflict has largely shifted to the second question over time.

(For the sake of clarity, the word "intentionally" is important. Treating an ectopic pregnancy to save the mother by removing the affected implanted tissue will result in the death of the unborn, but this is not an intended consequence, only a tolerable side effect given what's at stake. These sorts of situations are not the subject of the abortion debate.)

A Procrustean view.

The law isn't perfect, and in that sense, it is like software in that it is constantly changing in anger. With the law, however, you're also in the situation of having many different interpreters. Given that the law is imperfect and requires refinement and adaptation in anger, given the imperfect knowledge of law givers, it is expected that there would be multiple interpretations.

Law does not determine justice by virtue of its codification. Morality does. Law is just the determination of general moral principles. A ruled-based system blindly followed by a machine would be a disaster outside very narrow, niche applications.

I reject the notion that aesthetics is arbitrary. It is not. I also reject the mystification and the dismissive progressive fallacy that the only reason anyone might oppose change is because they're crusty old reactionary humbugs (of course, if aesthetics is arbitrary, "progress" has no meaning). Le Corbusier's Paris is objectively hideous. It is objectively a nightmare. It would objectively be immoral to inflict something like that on Parisians. It would objectively harm the common good. A nihilistic misanthrope consumed with hatred for humanity, and himself, could do no better. For this reason, I detest language like "clinging to an aesthetic past". It is a hollow comment that begins from faulty assumptions about aesthetics.

Of course, we often make aesthetic judgements in a relative fashion. People visiting Paris today might say Paris is beautiful, but what they mean is more beautiful than some other point of reference. Spend enough time in a beautiful city and your standards will shift such that you will be disappointed by aesthetically inferior cities you had previously thought were beautiful when you revisit them. This is good. Let our tastes become more refined so that we may make the world a more beautiful place. Let us resist mediocrity and ugliness.

So perhaps those critics of Haussmanian Paris were making such a comparison. I certainly don't think Paris is the most beautiful city, but if you had grown up in a Corbusian nightmare or some aesthetically lesser locale, then it would certainly be an upgrade and perceived as such. Still, Haussmanian Paris is at least built according to classical principles and that is the most important factor.

Of course, I am not opposed to development in the realm of art and architecture and so on, but modernist travesties like the ones pictured are not an authentic development, but a barbaric revolt against the past rooted in hubris, madness, or some other defect.

Broadly, no political order functions in the absence of a moral society.

We've become rather fixated on the notion of systems that can somehow produce good outcomes no matter how vicious its members are. The problem here is that any political and social order is only as good as its members and governing bodies. There isn't some disembodied "system, out there" that can strap us all into externally imposed restraints and put us all in cages to constrain our bad actions. The quality of a society is absolutely dependent on its members respecting the common good which includes respecting good laws. (That's another point. Leaders are not free to impose any old law and claim it is legitimate. Laws can only determine the general good as proscribed by natural law, i.e., human nature.) Indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a society of savages in which a tyrant exercises such control. This is precisely the lesson to be learned from Hobbes' Leviathan: the more immoral a society becomes, the most governments clamp down to try to maintain order and the viability of that society.

That doesn't mean we can't discuss better or worse political orders. Indeed, political orders are determined by law and law by objective moral principle.

And a word on equality. So far, crypto seems to be a place for wild speculation and the amassing of (real or imagined) wealth by a relatively small number. That's probably a large part of the appeal, like the lottery. But more to the point: equality is not a virtue. Justice is. But who said we are all due the same? We're not. No two people are economically equally valuable (nor is economic value all there is). The problem is poverty, or the excess influence of money in politics and culture, or usury and left, or unjust pay, but not inequality. How is crypto a solution to these social problems, and in ways that surpass traditional currencies?

A sense of humor would be appropriate here.

(A digression, since you made the point. This isn't a contest between Nazism and a free-for-all. A society can be overly inclusive, of bad behaviors, ideologies, and other objective threats to its common good, in which case such inclusiveness does weaken the country[0]. I think it is fair to say you'd want to exclude Nazism and other aberrations from your country's political order?)

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/01/barron-on-diversity...

That sort of naive libertarian view is grounded in a false atomistic anthropology. We are individuals, yes, but intrinsically social animals who need society to live and to thrive, and language is a matter of the common good.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

Indeed, this racist condemnation of all "white" people is compounded by its anglocentrism. The etymology[0] of the word "slave" is also historically interesting[1].

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=slave

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe

The Poles, the Baltic states, etc. know Russia all too well and have an fear of Russian power that is justified. However, NATO is not some simple fix as current events demonstrate. Central Europe is a region between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Russian imperial propensities are not appeased. On the other, NATO (vel American) incursion and regime change has provided a pretext for grievance and military action.

The only long term stable geopolitical option for the region is the historic option: a powerful regional state and/or bloc that can simultaneously dampen Russian imperialism as well as "Western" ambition, like this one[0] which is a nascent project that I suspect can lead to a high degree of regional solidarity that will stabilize all of Europe and therefore contribute to the stability of the Eurasian landmass.

[0] https://3seas.eu/

Indeed. People pleasers and "nice" people are prime targets because of insecurities and the lack of courage to be honest. "Oh, I can't refuse to meet later even if I don't want to because I might offend them." That kind of thinking. So they live out the charade and allow boundaries to be trampled just to avoid disapproval because they fear it that much.

It doesn't take much to notice this vice in a person who has it. Most people pick up on it rather quickly, even if subconsciously.

The presumption here is that there is something to be liberated from. That men and women are generally better suited toward different aspects of parenting is not an artificial construction. Ideological commitments have taken the place of reason.

The result will be that those who do live in a way more aligned with human nature and the specializations each sex entails will out breed those who don't.

This is rather worrying. A game isn't an argument. It's not even evidence! Movies suffer the same problem in that we can couple causes with effects in ways that bear no relationship to reality. Just look at how Hollywood has contributed to deforming how people understand relationships. That's just one domain. It doesn't even need to be intentional, as Chomsky has argued, so no conspiracy is required as long as interests converge. Rather, the corporate-media-education complex is a self-reinforcing system where most of its actors do not even realize they are reinforcing the presuppositions of the system by excluding and punishing that which would threaten the existence of the system, regardless of whether the presuppositions are themselves good or correct. Most people even believe they're doing good (not that malicious actors don't exist, but most people don't give any of these presuppositions any consideration).

Arguments may be bloodless, but they have substance. Theater, interactive or not, is capable of deceiving. Your emotional response is not fact. What you would be presented with in a game about some historical event is a recasting of historical events in terms of our modern sensibilities. Movies do this all the time, this subtle anachronistic and theatrical re-presentation of history. This can be an impediment to understanding, not an aid.

Besides, while recreation has its place, we waste too much time on entertainment. Movies, games, and so on. These are like the cave in Plato's allegory. Instead of leaving the cave, we have doubled down.

Enter THE METAVERSE.