Donnadogsoth

The danger here I think lies in people unable to think in metaphysical terms. You're describing people who view transsexualism as part of an existential threat. How can we get people thinking in metaphysical terms? The same with your preference of freedom and safety: nice, but is it metaphysically necessary? Bill Warner talks about how the West is built on two core beliefs: critical thought and the golden rule. Critical thought comes from classical Greece. The Golden Rule comes from the ancient Hebrews. Both were united in Christianity whereby Christ as Logos ("idea, word, reason") embodied man made in the image of God, imago viva Dei, from whom the Holy Spirit flowed (agape, divine love, love of humanity). So men were called to be like Christ: reasonable and agapic, and the mode of this substance of being was developed with increasing fidelity through critical thought and the golden rule. From this we get the goal of happiness for all men, which is expressed in terms of freedom and safety. Would you agree with all this or, if not, how would you correct it? I think it is of capital importance to get the foundations of the West down before we can worry about the merits of the complaints of threats towards any particular group, or even of the majority attempting to identify a threat against itself from the percolating minorities.

Say to anyone "I know so-and-so, they're a transsexual. Their biological sex is male but their adopted sex is female." See if anyone doesn't know what you mean. What are safety and freedom based on? Presuming I am capable of living comfortably without either being the norm in my society, why should I promote "safety and freedom"?

No, if we switch to "natural" you'll start saying that "human interference in the world is natural, too!" and so we need yet another word. There's always another word-change. Biological suffices to distinguish in this context from altered. Everybody knows what we mean. Interestingly enough there's no other place in the world where lgbt, racial minorities, and women would rather be than in the West. Why is that? The West has been extraordinarily generous in liberating these groups. Now instead of joining the goddamn to-hell-with-tradition Left with its history of culture wrecking and ignoring the megadeaths it is responsible for in the Twentieth Century, I encourage you, again, to ask what is it that defines Western civilization and defend that. If that is not defended, we will merely be bickering over which part of the corpse is the most succulent.

Prove it without using your senses.

Except you weren't talking about what dialect they spoke or the types of necklaces they wore at feast days or what colour they dyed their eggs, you're talking about that culture's response to deviants and freaks, as if that response cannot be “turned back” which of course it can. If rainbow people want to fit in and minimise the chances of a reactionary traditionalist backlash that will turn back the clock on society's toleration of them, they ought to find whatever it is that defines Western society (not democracy, not tolerance, not gender studies) and defend that. Make common cause with everyone they can to defend that thing, instead of joining with the hysterically anti-traditionalist liberal socialist Left, even if they are just joining by default. They should be smarter than that and avoid having the Right look at them and go “see, they're all pinkos after all.”

The fact you're trying to change an obvious truth like genetically derived phenotypes being the definitive markers of the biological really irritates me. Yes we can sew an extra couple of heads on (which is medically possible) and start barking on all fours and declaring our profound inner feelings, that does not make us biological Cerberuses. Stop trying to change the damned language. If you want to claim your metaphysical identity and dress and act accordingly, so be it, but I'll not have my words taken away from me. I don't believe you. We might revert to monarchies one day, or dictators. Liberal democracy with its increasing tolerance of, even appetite for, anti-traditionalist weirdness of every description is not necessarily the last word in politics or culture. Suppressed cultures can be revived—Confucianism is returning to China. Cultures can be frozen in time for thousands of years—look at Chinese history. And authoritarian governments like Russia can indeed “turn back the clock”.

You only know about them because of your senses. Please try again.

It's a way of showing you that your monad is easily seen once you realise that there is nothing that can be that isn't an experience.

Perpendicular waves can interfere with each other. Both can be universal and yet have different effects.

Show me something that isn't an experience by a mind.

Emphasising the metaphysical. Nervous systems are an expression of the monad, not the monad of the nervous system.

A man is a being capable of grasping universal gravitation.

When I refer to monads I refer to loci of experience.

You deny men and at least higher animals have experiences?

@RichardY All exists to serve man, whether animal, mineral, or vegetable, and whether through beauty, or economic value, or heuristics. Existence is the sum of experiences, you could call an experience a kind of measurement whether or quantity or value. Do animals grasp the future, for example? Do they measure out the future or do they merely wait in anticipation without understanding time?

Xi Appeals to Trump: Let Us "Look Far Ahead and Aim High" https://larouchepac.com/20171102/xi-appeals-trump-let-us-look-far-ahead-and-aim-high?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20171102-daily&utm_content=20171102-daily+CID_7f39f1dc66e9847a7e6a0d4fa36aef3e&utm_source=CampaignMonitorEmail&utm_term=Xi Appeals to Trump Let Us Will Trump lead America into the biggest business deal in history? The investment in China's Belt and Road Initiative is estimated at anywhere from $4 to $20 trillion in an effort to use infrastructure to bind together Eurasia and lift tens if not hundreds of millions out of poverty, as China has done in the past generation. Will Trump smell the rose garden of business and visionary leadership, or will he be lured into the stinking bogs of geopolitics?

Because your comprehensive state is what your body wants to do. Your mind wants to transition; your body absent that will very happily continue expressing a male phenotype based on male genetics. It's tricksy and somewhat disturbing to try and erase this and start defining away biology for the sake of having more political punch. Given the advances that the pro-suicide camp has made recently (e.g., Canada), I think it's certainly not an event “unlikely to ever occur in reality” to have a teenager or even a child that the authorities are or soon will be weighing whether to kill or not. Part of the bigotry you're seeing comes from people concerned about the decline of the West, something that concerns one or two people on this board. Transsexuals have faced bigotry for a long time, but now there is the sense that transsexualism is one more weight on the scale of the anti-traditional against the traditional. You're smart, you should be able to see that the West is in major decline, and the anti-traditionalists, which includes rainbow people, nonwhite immigrants, Muslims, Marxists, postmodernists, and feministicised women, are also associated with transsexuals, whether transsexuals want to be a part of that or not. You've already said you want to be a part of tradition, not in opposition to it (except insofar as tradition stops you from participating in it). Do you see what I'm getting at? That this anti-traditional association the transsexuals have is a source of the modern “bigotry” that traditionalists harbour? Jesus is referring to putting all one has as a person into having faith in God. We are free to do what we wish, but we ought to put God first. In the parable, the rich gave some, the poor widow gave all. This is a parable, it does not mean everyone should donate everything to the Church and be in penury. It means we should live our lives for God's sake.

The previously discussed concept of what constitutes a monad - defined by number (including duration or ontological inertia), form, and beauty - is inaccurate in a very important way. That is, it depends on naive sense-perception when making a judgement of what is real, what is monadic (that which experiences). This is a very animalistic, ad hoc way of looking at things. Strictly speaking, we don't know what the bathmat is, other than the sense-product of the interaction of principles. Anything lacking a nervous system so appears to be an indeterminate thing. That is the ad hoc level of appraisal. The higher level is the principled level, which is dominated exclusively by monads. We can call them principles, ideas, forms, or intentions, but monads will do. These comprise the higher animal life forms - anything with a nervous system - and the discoveries of principle such as Kepler's universal gravitation as the monad of the Solar System. And it is the function of science and art, in their investigative phases, to discover these monads, these actual substances of nature, which lurk beyond and behind the sense-impressions that we commonly and naively term "reality". So we have two levels: sense experience, and cognitive experience. This means that no matter how much we love amoebae, we can't (yet) assert their reality as monads, but rather only as what appears to be an expression of the principles of organic matter. How does beauty fit into all this? Isn't beauty compromised if we face, for example, a beautiful marble statue that we can't identify as a monad because it lacks a nervous system? Well, no. Beauty is a function of appearance. So we have this sensed monad, this statue, and it displays an image, the image (that which is represented) masters the matter (that which is representing), such that, ideally, the image completely obscures the material as material. So there, in the appearance, we have a monad, an idea, a principle of art, a form, a rational intention by the artist. This idea can be copied, and in that sense the monad is non-local. Michelangelo's David can be copied and so reflect out into the universe, similar to how various viewers of the original work will reflect the idea of the statue into their minds. This does not make it more than one monad. Similarly, multiple people can "copy" the monad of the Solar System and yet that monad remains one thing. In summary 1. Sense impressions show monads defined by (a) Number (b) Form (c) Beauty 2. Cognitive discoveries show monads defined by principles, ascertained through solutions to ontological paradox The overlap is that creatures with nervous systems are monads at both levels. Examples of each would be: Sense Impression Monads minerals unicellular life furniture infrastructure Cognitive Monads animal life human beings scientific principles (e.g., principle of the pulley) artistic principles (e.g., Mozart's Requiem)

What is real? We know from the principle of A=A that existence itself must exist, that absolute nothingness is incoherent and therefore unreal. From that we traipse to the realisation that absolute nothingness can't be real anywhere, including inside of things where their souls should be. In other words, existence is the sum of experience for all real things must have experiences, and these real things we call, after our esteemed and big-bewigged colleague Gottfried Leibniz, monads. The canny problem arises when we think to ask where are the monads, as in, what has a monad and what doesn't? For it's clear that humans and at least the higher animals have monads. We all experience, we know that much (get stuffed, Descartes). But what about a centipede? An amoeba? My sofa? Let's do some decomposing: never mind being real, to be noticed something requires three traits. One, it must participate in Form, having a distinct shape of some kind (e.g., “chair”). Two, it must participate in Number, having a quantitative element (e.g., “this chair”). Three, it must contain some degree of Beauty, to allow the observer to care enough to notice it (e.g., “this moderately beautiful chair”). These three dimensions should be enough for us to triangulate the location of monads. Let's see if it works: since existence is the sum of experience, if something could not be experienced it could not be said to exist. In other words an unexperienced thing would not be part of the universe at all since the universe (Leibniz again) is the sum of all monads which reflect each other ad infinitum. So all real things must be beautiful to some degree. (Even the devil! Of course the devil has made it an art and a science to make himself as awful as possible, so we can put him down as the minimum of beauty. But note that he uses beautiful things to seduce us, so even he cannot put pure ugliness to use—rather that is his reward.) Ugly things are not real, then, to the degree they are ugly. Allow me a syllogism: Nothing ugly is real Brokenness is ugly Brokenness isn't real In other words, suppose we have a skeleton of a cat. A thing with number, form, and beauty—a monad! But suppose we dismantle the skeleton and throw the bones into in a random pile. What has happened? The skeleton is now broken, leaving us with this pile. Does the pile have a form? No, or rather it participates in what we might call the Form of clutter, a sort of highly extended monad. In this it has number and beauty, but a rather chaotic number and a dim beauty, more interesting than beautiful. Things with nervous systems seem to be the lower limit of extending individuality to organic things. Things without nervous systems, like amoebae, should therefore properly be akin to organic clutter, or the Form of microscopic organic matter, another extended monad. And, the sofa participates in the Form of sofa, but in a more general sense in the Form of furniture, whereby it would have its extended monad. Extended monads are monads whereby the existing masses of things have a unity: tools, furniture, infrastructure, clothing, vehicles, microscopic organic matter, clutter, various sorts of raw materials, stellar bodies, and principles. So the galaxies, no respecters of scale, share a single monad, that is the unity of their beauty, their number, and their form. So what is real? Anything beautiful is real, and such would be accompanied by number and form. And anything wholly broken is unreal, just a conflation or confusion of manifestations of monads, perhaps forming the ultimate extended monad of the Void or minimum order, minimum of beauty—the detail where the devil is lurking.

How do we know Schiller's theory of beauty is correct? At first it seems as though Schiller's theory of beauty is apprehended intuitively—the concept of the appearance of things apprehended and labelled by thought as “true”. But, this will not satisfy the sceptic who demands reason and evidence—conceptual thought rather than intuitive. How can we answer such people? (1) humanity is the freest thing in the universe. (2) human happiness is associated with the development of such freedom and this association is the standard of mental health. (3) freedom is seen throughout the nonhuman universe and is a source of happiness for mentally healthy humans. (4) the word we give for freedom that leads to happiness is “beauty”.

No, Siegfried, love and value and subjectivism are irrelevant. The objective standard is freedom, and we can determine that the natural hierarchy of freedom in ascending order is the mere existing, the living, and the thinking. In other words, mankind himself is the absolute standard of beauty because he represents the greatest capacity for freedom in the universe. When he views the natural world he sees a friend in the sense that the natural world expresses freedom, a lower order of freedom than he is capable of at his best but freedom nonetheless. So we can understand that ugliness is a fact, derived from the breaking of freedom, as much of a fact, and with as much effects on the human beings and human society, as the breaking of justice. It is the death of beauty which destroys hierarchies of value and leads people to hate the unnatural order they find themselves in, but with no remedy because all roads return to the same wicked and ugly Rome. Thus people perish in apathy and misery. You as someone on a libertarian board should be able to see the connection between beauty and freedom. They go down together. "Freedom!" the libertarians cry. "So what? Life under freedom will be as ugly as it ever was!" cries the masses.

What is the Ugly? A dangerous topic, but, one that many of the more sensitive among us must resonate with, for it seems as though ugliness is welling up all around us. Friedrich Schiller said that beauty is freedom in the appearance. To this we must add that there are different levels of freedom. The freedom of what merely is, such as a sand dune, is inferior to the freedom of what lives, such as a forest glade, which in turn is inferior to what thinks, such as a troop of boy scouts. Beauty's zenith is the achievement of the rational purpose of man: the good society, the successful society, the transformation of the Universe into that which we need to survive as a species. The ugly, by contrast, is harshness, compulsion, violation of freedom. The ultimate example of the ugly would be the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ: here is a man who was completely free morally, who suffered a harsh, compelling violation of his physical freedom. Thus a well-made crucifix is both a horribly ugly symbol (worn smooth by familiarity), and a symbol of absolute freedom of the (good) will. This shift from ugliness to beauty we call the sublime. The essence of ugliness is decaying meat. Decaying vegetation can be beautiful—who doesn't love the Autumnal display in the temperate, sylvan regions? But a decaying cat? Less beautiful because it is closer to mankind. And a decaying human cadaver? Very ugly—the pinnacle of ugliness if it is the remains of someone you knew and loved. That freedom of the person, the freedom of love, is taken from them through death, and reinforced by the sight of their body rotting. There is a museum that opened a few years ago in Winnipeg, Canada, called the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. It's about what you'd expect, but, the contents are not what are noteworthy, rather, it's the form of the building: it has no freedom to it, just the freedom of a committee of concept artists putting “meaning” into the superstructure: all glass and unfinished concrete, nothing resembling the living world or even the dead. It most resembles a hunk of garbage. Thus humans are the source of most of the ugliness in the world. A snake devouring a mouse violates the freedom of the latter, but expresses the freedom of the former. Overall it is the freedom of the natural cycle. But, humans produce garbage that has no purpose, serves no cycle, that are distorted and perverse images, as in women's magazines, that transcend even the organic ugliness of rotting meat and become a kind of eternal ugliness, creatures in pain longing to be cremated and attain the freedom of smoke. Also, context is very important. A burning house may be a beautiful display of the freedom of fire, but in the context of the human tragedy it represents it is ugly, the blackened remains the blackness of Hell. Or, a healthy big elm tree splintering and falling in a storm, the splinters may be beautiful, the expression of the activity of the wind, the fallen trunk and branches becoming part of the landscape, but as a living being, useful and beautiful in its own right, it is an ugly event, a harsh compulsion and violation of the tree's freedom. Or, take cancer: ugly, even on the microscale. Very little can be said to be beautiful about cancer. It is a horrible violation of the freedom of that which thinks and that which lives, but even cancer has a freedom to it. A freedom worse than the freedom of an avalanche or a hand caught in machinery or a gerbil in the blender. Take war: a hugely destructive violation of human freedom: life, limb, mind, and architecture. Yet the sight of a burning enemy city at night must have been beautiful for the Allies in the Good War. In the grand sense, of the war's necessity, then, there is a freedom to the preservation of a superior form of human civilisation inherent in the waging of an otherwise horrific war. And, from the other side: we have Nazi Germany: beautiful in its freedom of nationalism, as evinced by something like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, but morally ugly: totalitarianism, imperialism, genocide. Thus, it was in essence the anti-sublime. None of these descriptions of the ugly should come as a surprise: most of us understand them intuitively, but the postmodern condition is to stamp out our recognition of ugliness in favour of the dreadful, cynical, teeth-gritting assertion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”--this above all is the death of us, because it represents the destruction of all hierarchies of quality, and thus the absolute triumph of equality over liberty. Beauty is freedom of the appearance; ugliness is slavery. Let not the jaws of the postmodern wolf slaver over the beauty needed to create a free and rational society.

2.(a) Existence can't not exist, because absolute nothingness is incoherent. Absolute nothingness would necessarily be equal to itself, meaning the principle of A=A would apply, meaning there was not absolutely nothing but nothing + the principle of A=A. (b) The principle of sufficient reason (psr) states that everything is the way it is for a reason and not for no reason. Does the psr have a sufficient reason to exist? Suppose one thing in the universe lacked sufficient reason, that would make it irrational. Except the universe by definition is one thing, with everything reflecting everything else. Gravity, e.g., doesn't end at a certain distance, it merely becomes extremely weak. So if one particle of the universe is irrational, the entire universe is irrational. What does irrationality look like? Well, take a mallot and squash an orange on your kitchen counter. You've made that orange less rational-looking, haven't you? In other words, you've reduced the order and increased the chaos. But, microscopic analysis of the squashed orange would show it still had amazing levels of order in it, structure, rationality. So, the purely irrational would be the minimum of structure, which would mean nothing. Except we already debunked absolute nothingness in step (a), which means that the universe necessarily has sufficient reason, which means the psr has sufficient reason to exist. (c) If a brain existed without a mind, it would be absolute nothingness inside, which as stated cannot exist. Therefore, everything which is real must have experience or psyche. Given the observed structural sophistication of the human nervous system compared to, say, a piece of sandstone, we find sufficient reason for the existence of the human mind as we experience it. On “biologically” versus “sexually” male, I think “biologically male” fits because it refers to your comprehensive natural state, aside from your metaphysical condition. Without artificial intervention you would exhibit a male phenotype and without gene surgery you retain a male genotype. 3.I'm not sure where you draw the line on when someone should be given an assisted suicide. How sad does a teenager have to be and for how long, before we let a doctor kill her? Same with a transsexual who is barred from transitioning for whatever reason. 4) A relevant passage: Mark 12:41-44 (NIV) The Widow’s Offering 41 Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. 43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”

1.(a) Blonde hair isn't significant enough in terms of effect on society to merit a pronoun. Male and female represent significant psychological differences associated with behavioural expressions. If we must we can assume a third pronoun for in-between people, but most people, even most transsexuals, don't wish to transcend the heterosexual order, but merely realign themselves within it. (b) Just as gay people can be “questioning” so can transsexuals: confused. If they are not expressing the full panoply of characteristics which biology indicates naturally associates with their “gamete production” type, they are malfunctioning. That is science. Morality is to not mock people with missing limbs, or facial disfigurements, or other malfunctions or defects. It is not wicked to notice defects, it is wicked to use them as an excuse to treat an innocent person as less than human. 2.Illusory for whom? An illusion by definition needs a perceiver. Sound of falling trees and all that. ***I'm afraid I can't continue with the Damoclean sword of my nonexistence hanging over me. Either I prove to myself I exist or else I am uninterested in bandying assumptions. Any suggestions?***

If my government told me my children would all be idiots I would line up for sterilisation. You have already told me that you are morally inferior because you worry about the state having too much power without worrying about the whims of the herd having too much power.