Gregory Salmieri
@GSalmieri
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Philosopher. Co-Editor of *Foundations of a Free Society* & *A Companion to Ayn Rand*.
Austin, TX
Joined July 2009
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The NZ shooter is ideologically on the same side as the Jihadists: he's moved by the idea that people are essentially parts of tribes, defined by ancestry & tradition, that are vying to “replace” or repress one another. This idea must be opposed in all its forms.
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Individualism isn't about denying that our lives are and should be interconnected; it's about learning how to make the interconnections voluntary, thereby enabling them to be more extensive and more intricate, so that each of us can get so much more out of life.
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"Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered." (1)
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Altruistic morality of war: If you can defeat your enemy, it’s immoral to do so, & it’s moral for them to persist in attacking you. You may defend yourself moderately, letting them kill a fair number of your population while you give them occasional slaps on the wrist.
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“Left” & “right,” as these terms are used in contemporary politics, do not denote opposite poles on any ideological spectrum. They just denote rival factions, like the Montague & Capulet or Crip & Blood.
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Of course those few of us who oppose the governmental wealth redistribution schemes ought to accept whatever money is due to us under them (as Rand advocated doing). We can't opt out of paying into such programs, and refusing the payments would only compound their injustice.
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The misery in Gaza is and always has been primarily caused by the people living there, not by their Israeli neighbors. /1
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It’s an attack on free speech (not a defense of it) to sue a private employer for firing someone on the grounds of speech they find abhorrent.
X is funding a lawsuit filed today by Chloe Happe against her former employer, Block.
Block fired Chloe because of the political opinions she expressed on X. Chloe had two pseudonymous accounts on X,
@bronzeageshawty
and the now-deprecated
@samsarashawty
. She did not reference
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I’m pleased that
@UTAustin
protected free speech today by ejecting those who sought to force themselves on the campus community and to intimidate those who disagree with them into silence.
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The people on campuses shouting “free free Palestine” (and those encouraging them to shout it) are more responsible for the fact that Gaza isn’t free than are any of the institutions they denounce.
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The idea that there could or should be a “level playing field” in life presupposes two morally perverse premises: that life is essentially like a game, and that human relationships are essentially competitive.
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Unpopular opinion: Mass, in-person protests are almost always immoral, regardless of the cause.
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Boycott and ostracism are part of the mechanism by which the “marketplace of ideas” enabled by the right to free speech operates. If the tech giants are wrong to shun any of the people or companies they have, it’s not because of free speech.
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But that self-interest was precisely the good element in the 60’s protests!
Those kids didn’t want to fight and die in a war they didn’t understand and they knew that it was wrong for anyone to force them to make such a sacrifice.
That moral truth was one part of the
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How to "prove" the existence of God (in five easy steps):🧵
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Early in the pandemic, when people commented about their new -found appreciation for “essential workers,” I always pointed out that the most essential worker in this period was
@JeffBezos
. It’s sad to see him retire from Amazon, and I wish him well in his future endeavors.
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What actually occurred: home owners tepidly tried to remove trespassers who had commandeered their home to preach the antisemitic delusions that have kept Palestinians in misery for generations.
Catherine Fisk, a professor at Berkeley Law, ASSAULTS a Muslim Hijabi law student, while her husband Erwin Chemerinsky, DEAN of Berkeley Law screams LEAVE OUR HOUSE.
In the end, violent white supremacists with fancy degrees.
These elite institutions are 🤬
cc: bayareapym
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The way to admit many more immigrants with needed skills is to admit anyone who has a job lined up (and who passes a background check). Neither Biden, Trump, nor or their minions have any clue which workers are needed. Employers do.
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The right of people who operate platforms to decide what can be said on their platforms is essential to the right to free speech. Anyone who denies this right (as opposed to merely criticizing a platform operator's decisions) is not a defender of free speech.
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Oil prices have gone negative for the same reason that farmers are pouring tons of milk down the drain. The process of human life isn't limited to circulating blood. It includes producing, processing and transporting oil milk and countless other goods. (1/2)
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Trump never met an autocrat who didn’t make him weak in the knees.
Trump honors Viktor Orban for being an autocrat: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He says, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.”
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A razor for arguments that some nation is committing genocide against some people: Does the argument made against it apply equally well to what Sherman did in Georgia or the Allies did in Germany? (If so, it’s not genocide, since it’s essential to that concept that it be
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@clairlemon
@JenandZen
@EverydayFinance
“Eugenics” in its justly reviled sense is about controlling other people’s reproductive choices to conform with one’s vision of what genes should predominate in future generations. Helping people take greater control of their own reproduction is the opposite of this.
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@Ayaan
’s essay “Why I’m Now a Christian” is 28 paragraphs, but the essential content is just seven words that one can read between the lines: “Because I no longer care what’s true.”
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“Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.” 1/3
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“How many people are you willing to let die to open the economy?” is the wrong question. The right question is: “How much are you willing to force people to remain in their homes to decrease the risk of death we each run when we choose go out?”
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@RubinReport
@yhazony
@benshapiro
@DennisPrager
@jordanbpeterson
Logic & morality cannot be grounded on faith in the unknowable. And they don't need to be, because they're based in perfectly knowable facts about the nature of existence and of human beings. Facts like that things are what they are, and that humans survive by reason.
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" Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives." (3)
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The important distinction in US politics today is between pragmatists and nihilists (both of which exist on both sides of the Left-Right divide). Both are bad, but the pragmatists are far less so.
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Part of what’s destructive about public education is that it paralyzes the minds of educators . It’s especially harmful to the *business* side of education—including to anyone’s ability to identify underserved market segments, craft and prove new products to fill their needs.
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Anyone under the delusion that the any of the SCOTUS conservatives respect the rights to property or contract should note their rejection of "the freewheeling judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York". (1)
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"Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to [a pregnant woman] what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?" (2)
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"That so-and-so, claiming to be a defender of capitalism and Americanism, has come out against abortion. If he doesn't respect so fundamental a right, he cannot be a defender of any kind of rights." (Rand re Reagan in 1976)
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"The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals." (4)
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This idea that somehow Trump was right or prescient about China is absurd. Trump's position on China was to love and envy what's evil about the country (its authoritarianism) while rescenting and fearing good about it (its economic growth and cheep exports).
@FLVinny
Of course. He single-handedly reversed decades of foreign policy consensus on China.
Prevented us sleep-walking into oblivion. He won't get enough credit for that
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Almost everything one reads about “blank-slates” today makes a strawman of what was meant by philosophers like Locke or Aristotle who used this metaphor or its equivalents. (1/4)
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The pretense that Rowling is anti-trans does more harm—especially to vulnerable people (trans and otherwise)—than do any errors of Rowling’s. It’s good to see more (and more prominent) challenges to this pretense.
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There’s nowhere near enough info in this post to tell whether the poster’s friend is making a wise or a foolish decision, but there’s enough to tell that the poster has a stunted soul (and is a bad friend).
Friend of mine has a house, a wonderful wife, two great kids, a good job.
And he’s quitting it to go back to grad school for a career he’s more “passionate” about.
This will involve little income for a few years and 200k in loans.
Wish I could stop him.
“You must be
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Nihilistic movements take the form of grievance-focused attacks on objectivity. Often there is an element of legitimacy to (at least some of) the grievances, but these grievances function as a pretext for destruction—especially for the destruction of the standards, values, and
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A good article by
@mikemazzareal
on the unprofessional treatment by philosophers of Rand’s ethics:
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This is true whatever injustices Israel may be guilty of. These injustices serve as a pretext for hating Israel. It’s really hated because of its virtues—including that it hasn’t sacrificed itself to spare its neighbors the consequence of the premises driving their society. /2
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A belated Valentine’s tweet: a hero we should all be thankful for on this day is Margaret Sanger who did so much to enable us to enjoy romance without the burden of unwanted pregnancy. (That she was imperfect doesn’t detract from the debt of gratitude almost all couples owe her.)
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“You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think – if you want to know what to do – if you want to know what goals to choose – if you want to know how to achieve them.” (Rand, PWNI 133, cf. Atlas 1015) 3/3
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Prolonged freezes or disruptions of these processes will cause suffering and death. Some of this may be the unavoidable result of the virus. But much of it is due to the continuing panicked anti-freedom responses from policy makers. (2/2)
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That a person or group purports to be for “freeing” or “liberating” someone or something is no evidence that they’re for freedom (and hasn’t been for at least a century).
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Anyone anywhere who is not attending to this distinction when accusing one population of committing genocide against another in the context of an armed conflict is just using the word “genocide” as a smear term for military action they dislike.
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Altruism continued: If you’re strong, capable, and prosperous you’re thereby in the wrong in any assertive action you take, whereas if you’re week, poor, and miserable, anything you do is at least understandable (indeed it must somehow be the fault of some stronger party).
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Why a country that cannot tell the difference between taking down a statue of Thomas Jefferson and taking down a statue of Jefferson Davis does not deserve a statue of Thomas Jefferson:
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There are some legitimate questions about the justice of Trump’s conviction in NY, but his supporters’ concern that the justice system has been politicized is a pretense. Trump has been the one demanding a politicized DOJ for 8 years now. To care about this issue is to oppose a
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Thinking about what to say this afternoon in the closing lecture of my Introduction to Political Philosophy course on a campus that’s just become a center of national attention on issues very much related to themes of the course.
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Application of altruism to Gaza: precisely because the Israelis could defeat the Gazans, it’s immoral for them to do so. And for this same reason, it’s ok for the Gazans to persist in “resisting”—to kill, rape, and imprison Israelis and to get their own children killed.
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There can be no such thing as a just admission policy to a publicly funded school. The policies were unjust before Affirmative Action, and during it, and they’ll be unjust now that SCOTUS has ended it. Nevertheless the decision looks like a small step in the right direction.
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If you're committed to believing something regardless of evidence, it's always easy to find evidence that seems (if you don't look too closely) to support it, and thereby to pretend to yourself and others that you're being rational. (1/2)
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Almost all thinking about universities (& other institutions) is collectivist—about some function they allegedly serve for society as a whole and about how they're failing to do this, etc.
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In fact, the chief wrong that Israelis have committed against themselves and the Palestinians is accepting and practicing (to the extent it can be practiced) this immoral morality for generations.
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Porn is & ought to be legal; should it be on Twitter? If not, the issue isn’t about freedom of speech at all. It’s about what sorts of content policies can promote a healthy exchange of ideas among a population that has wildly divergent views.
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
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@SamHarrisOrg
(1) It’s wholly focused on avoiding negatives, rather than achieving positives. (2) It treats conscious states as all that matters to us, rather than as the way we experience things mattering to us.
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Me and Onkar Ghate taking a few years ago with
@AlexEpstein
about why the right to have an abortion is a vital part of the right to life: . I think we made some points that bare recalling in light of today’s anti-life ruling.
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I disagree with
@pmarca
& David Friedman here: Money is the technology which motivation by love scales.
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Everyone who holds, spreads, or rationalizes an irrational idea has a share in the responsibility when it motivates someone to commit an atrocity.
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There are no points in time at which moving objects stand still (at points in space). Space and time don’t come in points.
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A video from a few years ago where Onkar Ghate,
@AlexEpstein
and I discuss the why there's a right to abortion, and why abortion is often morally admirable. (Despite the title, this isn't a debate, the panelists are largely aligned.)
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“Reality confronts man with a great many ‘musts,’ but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: ‘You must, if –.’ and the ‘if’ stands for man’s choice: ‘– if you want to achieve a certain goal.’ You must eat, if you want to survive. 2/3
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Facebook and Moderna get my votes for the two most unjustly maligned companies of the month.
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Essential to all rights is the right to dissociate from others and withdraw one’s support.
Part of free speech is the freedom to withdraw one’s support from those whose views one loaths.
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It’s galling to hear Democrats criticize “MAGA Republicans” for wanting to cut Medicare or Social Security cuts, when part of what freedom-lovers hate about Trump is that he lead the GOP to repudiate what tepid interest it had in such badly needed entitlement reform.
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@lexfridman
@yaronbrook
is the best to debate on the pro-Israel side of this issue. I leave it to people more sympathetic to the other side to say who they think makes the best case for it.
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Biden’s final paragraph is true, but the reality about which we need to be clear-eyed is that individuals and societies suffer for *their own* immorality and that of their representatives (as well as from that of others).
I won't mince words.
The overwhelming majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.
In fact, they're also suffering as a result of Hamas' terrorism. We need to be clear-eyed about that reality.
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An implication of my earlier post: talk about culture or institutions moving “to the left” or “to the right” is literally meaningless.
“Left” & “right,” as these terms are used in contemporary politics, do not denote opposite poles on any ideological spectrum. They just denote rival factions, like the Montague & Capulet or Crip & Blood.
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The claim that we are born tabula rasa is simply the claim that the we are born without any pre-installed *knowledge*. (3/4)
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@donswriting
Agreed! As I’ve been saying for a few years, a nation (or a movement) that sees no difference between a statue of Thomas Jefferson and one of Jefferson Davis, doesn’t deserve to keep the former, and won’t be able to.
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Step 5. Ask rhetorically how the universe could be as it is (with the relevant feature) without God.
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"For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone’s benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings." (5)
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Campaign finance law is non-objective and unjust, and it’s not a good thing that the first felony trial (and now, conviction) of an American president should be on charges related to it. (However abysmal his character, however guilty of other crimes he may be, and even if it
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Looking forward hearing Don Wakins (
@donswriting
) talk this Friday about why You Shouldn't Serve a Cause Greater than Yourself." If you're in the Austin area join us in person on campus at 6pm (info in the link).
Join us Friday, May 6th for a talk with bestselling author Don Watkins. For more information, visit:
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@SarahTheHaider
Do you also think the concept of “human nature” is incoherent? If not, doesn’t it make sense that *by our nature* there are certain conditions we need to flourish? If that includes certain *social* conditions that’s all you need for a coherent concept of rights.
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In so doing, they’ve made it possible for the Palestinians to continue for generations a cultural orientation that ensures that they will be poor, miserable, and a continual threat to the Israelis (and their other neighbors).
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And they regard thinking in principle as a "freewheeling" and "unprincipled approach." (3)
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My first attempt at a tweet and I make a typo. Oh strange new world with no edit functionality in it.
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They are essentially acts of disrupting others’ lives and attempting to intimidate by show of potential physical force, rather than attempts to communicate ideas.
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Julia Sweeney's brilliant monologue "Letting Go of God" is the most insightful of the works on atheism from the 2000s. After mentioning it in an interview with
@RubinReport
, I realized how few people even knew about it. I'm glad to lean that it's on YouTube legally.
I have FINALLY, after many years, put my show Letting Go of God on YouTube for all to see for free. (Had to take down many unauthorized uploads, with many thousands of views.) But now I have it on there myself (YAY!)) & I'm vowing to answer any comments
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The Wagner Act is unjust and destructive (as are parts of the Taft-Hartley act, which sought to mute its destructive effects without undoing its essence). If there were a real pro-freedom political movement in America this is one of the things it would be working to overturn.
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“He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin / He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in / He's the neighborhood bully.”
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@KeithWoodsYT
@lexfridman
Exposed as what? As someone who understands that Israel faces different threats than does the US and therefore needs different policies? As someone who knows the difference between people who want to murder Israelis and people who want to work for Americans?
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It often goes unremarked that “red-pilled” and “woke” are equivalent metaphors. We are all comfortably deluded, but then something *sudden* happens that enables some of us to see aright the horrible reality that needs to be fought.
Your occasional reminder that, if you haven't done so yet, once you take the red pill, the world starts making so much more sense, and the cognitive dissonance load you carry day after day drops precipitously. Other people think you're crazy because you're finally sane.
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Morality’s modus ponens is five justices’ modus tollens?
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Today’s pragmatists are institutionalists. They like something about the country, and they have some things they’d like to improve about it, but they don’t see either the existing good or the improvements they’d like to make in broad principles. Instead they’re wonkish, focused
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In other words: They're willing to be radical and break with long-standing precedent only to abridge currently protected rights, not to protect the rights previous courts let congress violate. (2)
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Two questions into the VP debate. Neither candidate was interrupted this time, but neither answered the question asked.
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And there would have been be such a constituency long ago if people from other countries hadn’t spent decades encouraging Palestinians to prioritize hating Israel over loving their own lives.
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Step 4. Assume that nothing other than God could have the feature (chosen in Step 2) or any of its consequences unless they were bestowed on it by the God (to which the feature was attributed in Step 3)..
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Serious arguments over whether the claim is true involve reflection on what counts as knowledge or content, and how to understand the relation between the forms and content of our awareness. (4/4)
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@yhazony
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting has little to do with Christianity and a lot to do with Capitalism and material abundance. That’s why it’s hated by nehlists of all stripes (including many religionists) and is a focus for these sorts of protests.
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Moreover those who summon large groups have a moral obligation to ensure that they will in fact be peaceful, which almost none of them take seriously.
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To say that people are born as blank slates is not to say that we enter the world with no characteristics at all, or with no differences among individuals. These things aren’t even true of literal blank slates. (2/4)
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