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shirgall

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Everything posted by shirgall

  1. shirgall
    Family dinner. Game night. Going to a show. There's plenty of traditions. One of ours is watching Christmas Vacation on Black Friday.
  2. shirgall
    Email [email protected] with your question and get on the show and talk about it.
  3. shirgall
    Or, all good men are hooked.
  4. shirgall
    Just a straightforward pun. "What Women Actually Want in a Man" -> their hooks.
  5. shirgall
  6. shirgall
    People are disconnected from consent like they are disconnected from the operational principles of sausage-making. I spent much of my life reminding them of this while trying to eke by.
  7. shirgall
    War is horrifying, but not incomprehensible. People make gods as placeholders for systems they do not understand and feel incapable of ever understanding. When they impose those placeholders on people who might be capable of understanding the underlying systems, they are wrong to indoctrinate them away from understanding or at least interest in understanding. Why would you assume that free will is my superordinate principle? My superordinate principle relates to consent: and the classification is between natural things which ignore my consent (null), and interactions with people that are either consented to (positive) or not consented to (negative). My point is, and I first learned of the idea from Searle, that we probably wouldn't even consider the mind/body problem a problem if we didn't have different words for mind and body.
  8. shirgall
    I dunno why there's a lot of controversy or interest in religion with respect to determinism. The mind/body problem is orthogonal. In fact it's purely caused by language imposed dualism. Everyone is born an atheist. What happens next depends on indoctrination.
  9. shirgall
    If "you" can make any difference in the universe by choosing to do so, then you aren't a determinist. I do not deny the physical world has an effect, even causal, in most things. I'm saying that "free will" as an operating principle and emergent property of sufficiently expressive brain matter will garner you better results than flowing down the river of atomic choices made on your behalf. https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-brain-zap-saps-destructive-urges.html
  10. shirgall
    This is why video has become the essay format of choice now.
  11. shirgall
    I call determinism rationalization because I think the operating principle is free will. Determinists can't help but they the way that they do. There's no loop, just a dead end.
  12. shirgall
    It stands to reason that they would offer the best examples of injustice, but you are right, it also stands to reason that a kitchen sink of questionable cases that are too plentiful to investigate is compelling to lazy people.
  13. shirgall
    How do you get that living your life like you don't have free will was positive from what I wrote? Free will justifies being proud of your accomplishments and empathetic to your fellow man's troubles.
  14. shirgall
    People can't help but bring up determinism again. Determinism is a rationalization that going through the motions is not only sufficient but your highest aspiration.
  15. shirgall
    https://infogalactic.com/info/Lapland_War
  16. shirgall
    What the Finns have most to be proud of is documented shooting of communists *and* fascists in World War II. They got that part right at least.
  17. shirgall
    Because of how long ago this happened, the maxim of possession being 9/10 of the law holds. Here's the conundrum: rights only exist for entities that can express and defend them from attack. This is why rights are not universal, but different from culture to culture. I prefer truth and universality. I also prefer to live on to carry on my genes to the next generation.
  18. shirgall
    One could claim all of these problems were caused by Charlemagne (certainly the world wars in Europe and the conflicts in the middle east), but others could claim the Roman Empire caused them first.
  19. shirgall
    It's difficult to pin the title initiator on people when there's a state involved as most states are older than any living being subject to them. The force was initiated by an ancestor. The states that recognize their actions are force and therefore limit those actions tend to be better than those who do not care. The invocation of the "social contract" is gaslighting intended to pacify the herd and prevent stampedes.
  20. shirgall
    I've watched some of Shaun's videos now, and I looked specifically at the one about the American Indian genocide. He makes cogent arguments there, and has sources of data, but why doesn't he call into the show?
  21. shirgall
    There's been other things in the call-in shows, but there's a number of criticisms in the first minute alone of this video.
  22. shirgall
    You missed the discussion of the bombing in Syria over the chemical weapons claim? Plenty of other criticisms, too.
  23. shirgall
    What you are describing does not sound like dampening but rather ignoring them. People perceive me as dispassionate most of the time, but that's because I so greatly dislike emotional behavior in rational discussions. Comes from getting yelled at a lot as a kid. That doesn't mean I don't feel the same emotions as everyone else.
  24. shirgall
    You don't turn off feelings, you make use of what they are telling you to map your way through a situation. Mindfulness of your emotions is part of it. Self-knowledge as to the drivers of those feelings is the next (corresponding to your rediscovery of your values). Learning to understand and navigate the situation is the final part. I used fear as an easy example. Emotions are an unconscious reaction to a situation. It's better to use them than attempt to control them. People are not very good at controlling the unconscious... that's why it's called unconscious. Mindfulness and self-knowledge are used in arguments, art, personal interactions, and more.
  25. shirgall
    You cannot control how you feel but you should control how you behave. In your example, Gavin De Becker has a book called "The Gift of Fear" that helps you deal with that particular emotion. That fear usually manifests before abuse is an important warning. The basic idea is to channel that feeling (and the energy that an adrenal response will generate) into plans you have made in advance to deal with whatever has triggered your anxiety. Yes, it's important to work on your values, but it's also important to deal with your plans. Plans give us the ability to be rational in the face of an expected, or at least nearly expected, situation. The confidence to comes with having an appropriate response ready makes for a completely different situation.
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