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ifsothen

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I said in 1980 not the 1980s. And this stuff started as a minority viewpoint inside a small corner of the academy. It took many years to blossom into what it is now. People have always been writing stupid things.

Your solution is useless for all but the 10% most tech literate users. And also involves carrying around a veritable toolkit of adapters and multiple cables.

I see this response a lot. It's a cop out and deflection. Sure, it's always been political. But there are times when the politics of science has hued much more closely to the pursuit of truth than it currently does. It's not hard to see why when modern, powerful political movements say that "objectivity is a tool of white supremacy" or of the "patriarchy." Such positions would have been laughed out of the room in 1980 but now they are widely held within the academy.

Native Americans are allowed to operate casinos on their land, state laws to the contrary be damned. So if there's an Indian reservation near your cities, banning gambling is a waste of time and just gives the Indians a monopoly. Might as well make some of the money yourself.

The first part of the article is basically “I’m sorry, so sorry, that I’m about to say something online cosmopolitan types won’t like, please, I’m so sorry, I promise I don’t mean it like that, I’m sorry, I promise I am not saying that, did I mention that I’m sorry”.

This is what it’s like to share ideas under your real name in modern America.

It's not "jingo rhetoric." Many of the government leaders south of the border are literally in cahoots with the cartels to commit thousands of murders a year, either directly or through peddling fentanyl, in the US. The rest of them have decided to go along with it out of fear. That is an act of war. The US should respond wisely and carefully, but people should remember these are literally ongoing acts of war committed against us. And what you propose the cartels would respond with is unlikely to work and would only elicit the directed ire of the US at the particular groups that ordered it, so would not be a rational move.

We are spending billions of dollars and killing many Russian soldiers and civilians to fight Putin, but Mexico is responsible for more American deaths and mayhem than Putin ever dream of.

That's not true. Unions are only practically possible because labor laws make it illegal to fire someone for advocating for unionizing, to fire someone for joining a union, and to fire someone for striking (kind of). The law also makes it legally mandatory to negotiate in good faith with a union. Without any of these government interventions, unions could never work.

And a lot of that violence spills over the border into the US. Bloody cartel murders, extortion, and such are common in the southwest US and beyond. The Mexican government and politicians are all somewhere in between being controlled by the cartels and too scared to do anything about them. That is casus belli, legal grounds for war, by any reasonable understanding of international law.

Exploring ideas like panpsychism doesn't mean you're committing to them being true. We can't know everything, and we can't always link new ideas deductively to things we are certain about, but we can notice the inadequacy of current explanations, say "suppose this explanation is true" and proceed from there. Every good philosopher knows that they're doing that. And the fact that people defend their position and attack opposing views is just part of the adversarial process for testing ideas. Yeah, of course ego and pride and hubris happen to many philosophers, and the academic profession is frankly in a bad state, but that doesn't mean the fundamental approach is bad.

Just because you hang a press pass around your neck doesn't mean you should be allowed to recklessly spread highly damaging lies about people with impunity.