Got an href there, Cap'n?

Good one, Cap'n. My left-lib cousin in NYC launches an ad hominem attack any time I question/raise a fact about B. Obama's murkey past. She appears incapable of distinguishing between fact and opinion. Something to do with inconvenience, I suspect.

Unfortunately, students in the Humanities are taught that there is no such thing as fact. Everything is a matter of opinion, which can be changed by "education" and political activity.

Actually in the example given above both sides are wrong. Much of the problem stems from using the word "is" which makes 2 objects identical. "The sky is blue" is incorrect whereas "The color of the sky is blue" is valid (the sentence isn't true E' but it correctly indicates that we're speaking about an attribute of an object rather than making an invalid assignment. In pseudocode:
sky = blue (incorrect)
sky.color = blue (correct)).

"You're a racist" is another invalid statement as it takes a complex human being and gives it only one attribute, that of a racist. A more appropriate sentence would be "What you have just said would appear to be racist to me"

Part of the problem is that the brains reality generating mechanism is so good that people confuse the artificial reality generated by their brain with external reality which is unknowable. Within a given reality tunnel that people reside one can have absolute truths which are things that work every time they are tried. One of the major problems I see in the US is that there appear to be a number of incongruent reality-tunnels that people inhabit and there seems to be no easy way of making the population aware of this.

The best way of preventing discussions from degenerating is to have people agree to use a more strongly typed form of English (E' is too difficult to speak in). English is a very loosely typed language without any type checking and one can say X is Y regardless of the nature of X and Y.

We have gone from the Romantic era To the Rational than Materialistic. Now its the Age of Emotion. Intelligence is conformity. Values are feelings. Ethics are a matter of social fads or personnel identity. Truth or reality is what we make, not substantive empirical truth. To emote becomes reason, while thought is slave to mass delusion.

I think I have stumbled upon the one true dichotomy that splits people, and here it is. There are two kinds of people in the world; those who want to serve government, and those who want government to serve them.

Revnant Dream - hear! hear! My thoughts indeed.

"According to the most recent statistics available from the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. combined corporate income-tax rate was second highest among the thirty OECD countries (39.3 percent in 2005). However, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the revenue yield of the corporate income-tax system was fourth lowest (2.1 percent of GDP in 2003)."

http://tinyurl.com/5l9pf2

Suck it up, libtards!

The only proper way to appear 'non-racist'to the leftard is to be damn sure that when you respond to anything about anybody that you take race into consideration. If a person of colour states that the sky is yellow,the proper leftoid response is to carefully check the sky that day and then possibly correct the fellow while considering that the person of colour has been raised without the advantages of the white population and that factor is to be part of the response. If a knuckle-dragging redneck like myself says that the sky is yellow,well,it is alright to tell me to check my meds.I believe that taking a person's colour into consideration when judging them is racist,but the left deem it necessary.

Hey, these are the same A-Holes who would brand you a women hater if Hillary had won the nomination and you voted against her. Screw them! Let them live in their bottomless ignorance and hatred.

"Hey, these are the same A-Holes who would brand you a women hater if Hillary had won the nomination and you voted against her. Screw them! Let them live in their bottomless ignorance and hatred.

Posted by: a different Bob"

Well, Bob... that was, em-m-m-m, different. ;-)

I want a kick at this.

Western/capitalist culture has advanced to the point that basic needs are taken for granted. What used to be a matter of life and death is now considered a basic human right.

This mindset was developed by those most gifted by the benefits of western capitalism. Mazlow's hierarchy of needs encompasses the entire continuum, albeit in the individual context.

From a societal perspective, those who have the guarantee of sustenance and status tend to be more aspirational and less practical.

Idealistic one could say.

On the other hand those who are more connected to the blood, spit, snot and effluvia of life are a little more realistic in their expectations of society as a whole.

On Maslow's this would indicate a lower level of development or a higher level of reality.

This might be equated to the rural/urban split in political motivation.

Or I could be completely off my nut.

Syncro

Syncrodox, you're quite correct in that urban dwellers tend to be quite a ways from certain aspects of reality and hence have reality tunnels that can be quite bizarre. Since their fundamental needs are taken care of they can create belief systems which would fall apart in days if applied to outside of city reality, but in the city holding idiotic beliefs won't kill you.

One example is the romantisation of wildlife that city dwellers often engage in and get outraged when people shoot the cute and cuddly furry inhabitents of the wild. Some of these morons will actually attempt to pet wild bears given the chance and when reality asserts itself the results aren't pretty.

People who live in small towns or rural areas often see the results of their decisions immediately and if one creates an incorrect model of local reality the result will often kill you. Having lived in downtown Vancouver for the last decade I find it a refreshing change to be practicing in a much smaller center now as people appear to be much more aware of external reality and are much less likely to create idiosyncratic personal realities. From a medical standpoint this means I don't get asked by patients whether I think it would be more appropriate to see a reflexologist, accupuncturist of iridologist and whether I think their chi is blocked. I now get people who come in and tell me this is what's bothering me, can you fix it? Very refreshing.

The fact that so many people can now live in artificial realities totally divorced from nature (and I'd include the greens here as their romanticized view of nature wouldn't survive contact with the real thing) because of the success of the capitalist system is a good thing, but how to ensure that the artificial realities that they generate are used to advance science and technology is unclear.

Loki

How. That's the question. How does one convince the ideologically intransigent and most highly privileged of our culture that the laws of nature are in fact in force?

Romanticized visions of life are endemic and viewed as reality. Voltaire to the enth degree.

Sad really.

I'm glad to hear you're happy with your new practice in reality, you'll do well.

Syncro

Can we at least TRY to attribute quotes?

Please?

No

DJB

I pulled that from my brainpan....I stand corrected...Descartes.

I stand by my assertion. Unequivocally.

Syncro

How. That's the question. How does one convince the ideologically intransigent and most highly privileged of our culture that the laws of nature are in fact in force?
Syncro, I wish I knew the answer to that question. If I had to pick one key area to concentrate on that would be education. The curriculum here in BC is very left wing and teachers as a group are not representative of the general population. I didn't realize how far the teachers reality tunnels had deviated from the primary social reality tunnel until I came across a rant I'd written about 13/9/2001. One of the things that really pissed me off was the teachers union coming out publically to say that the response to the WTC destruction should be dialog, not conflict.

This type of thinking in an individual is their right as the end result of constantly refusing to fight for anything is their demise at the hands of people who don't mind fighting. Where it is unacceptable is for teachers to be putting forth this view.

Probably the most crucial political positions for us to be after are school board representatives. Many of the current generation of students are likely a lost cause but a concentrated effort to turn around school curriculums would result in people being more in touch with physical reality in 10-20 years. The time course is very long and most people don't think of assuming power this way but Marxists are in it for the long haul and they've infiltrated the schools and universities to mould the thinking out young people. I think the problem with most libertarians/conservatives is that we're just too damn busy doing real work to be bothered with politics.

Syncro asks:"How does one convince the ideologically intransigent and most highly privileged of our culture that the laws of nature are in fact in force?"

A good mugging usually works. Being robbed, beaten and left for dead has made conservatives out of many liberals.

Loki

Busy is as busy does. We get shit done. As far as the marxists...well ensconced but on the downslide...a correction is in order.

Economic downturns like we are facing will separate the wheat from the chaffe.

The pragmatic will rebuild.

The Phantom

I'm all for the liberalization of understanding.

Revnant Dream: "We have gone from the Romantic era To the Rational than Materialistic. Now its the Age of Emotion. Intelligence is conformity. Values are feelings. Ethics are a matter of social fads or personnel identity. Truth or reality is what we make, not substantive empirical truth. To emote becomes reason, while thought is slave to mass delusion."

The problem of course is that, as Ayn Rand said, "Emotions are not tools of cognition". When a society turns from reason to emotion, it commits suicide.

Nicely said, nv53. Modern day political liberalism is highly emotive. Precious little reason and cognition goes into present-day political liberal policy. A couple examples just off the top of my head:

1. Gun bans. Studies show that in jurisdictions where there is a wholesale ban of firearm ownership by citizens, gun-related crimes increase. The empirical data are clear. Yet, the left continues cling to gun bans as a pillar of its political philosophy.

2. Private health care. At least in Canada, this concept is anathema. Yet, liberal dogmatists in this country cling to it as a non-debatable policy. This despite the fact that many countries maintain dual private/public health systems (e.g. Switzerland), have better health outcomes as measured by per capita spending, and ZERO WAIT LISTS. Canadian liberals would prefer 100% delivered public care with wait lists, versus a mixed system with no wait lists. Pure emotion, zero reason.

3. Man made global warming. With liberals it's all warming, all CO2, all with negative consequences, all the time. No evidence to the contrary is accepted, nor is the concept that warming, on balance, may be a good thing.

Syncro, agree that hard economic times will had a significant educational effect on many people.

Phantom, you're right that getting mugged often has quite significant effects on how people see the world. Unfortunately, some people probably need this process repeated a number of times as they take the side of the criminal and go after society for failing the criminal.

nv53: I'm going to have to disagree with you about emotion as people without emotional reactions can't function in society. I disagree with Ayn Rand also but then D'Amasio's research was done after she had finished writing books.

People who have damage to the right orbitofrontal cortex score completely normally on all tests of cognition and are very rational with only one minor problem -- their lives are a mess. They can't seem to make good decisions in their work life or their social life. Dr D'Amasio is a neurologist who studied such people and came up with a test that can demonstrate their defect.

What people with right orbitofrontal cortex damage lack is the ability to generate somatic markers (or gut feelings). This is the right hemisphere's way of telling the body to either perform an action or not to. Rationality alone is insufficient.

When I do medicine now, it is primarily on the basis of somatic markers and I know within seconds of walking into the room with a patient what I'm looking for. Verifying that my gut feeling is correct is completely rational and goes in a stepwise logical manner but my right frontal cortex has reduced an incredibly large parameter space to a much smaller volume which I can then explore with the left hemisphere. If I had to rely on logic alone I'd be spending 2-3 hours with each patient instead of having the right diagnosis at hand in at most 30 seconds 95% of the time.

Cognition and emotion have to work in parallel for an individual to function in society. Where the imbalance is in either direction people have problems and some of the most rational people I've seen have been manics on psych wards who had created an incredibly detailed rationalization of what brought them there. Similarly, people who rely on emotion only are impossible to reason with and are probably the type of people you are referring to.

Loki

As I understand it the connection between the cognitive, affective and psycho-motor processing of info is a circular process.

Think, feel, do, or feel,do,think or do think feel.

The sanity lies in the integration of all three domains.

A man who feels , thinks and fails to act is a quiff.

A man who thinks, acts and fails to feel is a jackass

A man who fails to think is a liberal.

Syncro

How does one convince the ideologically intransigent and most highly privileged of our culture that the laws of nature are in fact in force?

A collision with a comet.

Oh come on now the the St Charles Darwin said that there are no real 'fixed' in this world. Given the right stimulus anything can and will evolve into something better. Human nature isn't fixed! Why with the right inputs humanity can truly make its manifest destiny and have a 'Great Leap' forward.

Or as our liberal friends like to do, if you don't like the answer, move the goal posts!

Loki said: "The best way of preventing discussions from degenerating is to have people agree to use a more strongly typed form of English (E' is too difficult to speak in). English is a very loosely typed language without any type checking and one can say X is Y regardless of the nature of X and Y."

This is strictly a function of education, and in that context, language instruction since the days of the "new math" (boy, did I just date myself), language training has been a dismal failure. On average, we are far less literate (and all that that implies) than we were, up to about 1970.

I learned the relational nuances of fact and language that you highlight in grade and high school, and expanded on it into the abstract in University.

Based on the sample set that is comprised of my younger colleagues, (even those with university degrees in English!), these relational language skills have not been taught for decades. Most of my colleagues, even when their core language is English and they have university educations, are, in my view, functionally illiterate. This is disturbing in an environment where the interpretation of language and its application has serious real-life consequences on people's welfare.

Add to the mix the reality of the ESL impact on Canadian (and on English-speaking countries in general), and you have a significant loss of the ability of the language users to convey accurate information to one another.

Canada's policy of official bilingualism exacerbates this problem significantly. Because of the very small numbers of individuals who are truly literate in both languages, we have a situation where those who were raised in Quebec in the French language, and learned a modicum of English for practical purposes in North America, are now preferentially being placed in management positions, especially in government.

Unfortunately, the English language comprehension of most of these individuals is sub-par for the jobs that they have. Not only can they not convey their messages in anything approaching correct English language usage, its not clear that their comprehension of English allows them to actually understand the information passed to them.

The Federal government's emphasis om "plain language" writing is an attempt to dumb down English to a level that can be understood by the large number of Canadians, both in and out of government, who are ESLs. The inherent problem in this is that as the language is dumbed down, so is its ability to convey a precise and accurate message. English is very rich in vocabulary for this reason. Many who promote this approach, ESLs themselves, fail to understand the problem, partly because of their own lack of language skills, and partly because their native language (e.g. the Romance languages of Europe) is less robust in terms of vocabulary.

I would lay much of the blame for many societal issues and political conflict, not just on ideology, but on the intellectual failure of education, both in the conveyance of facts and concepts, and on the language necessary to define and separate them.

A man who fails to think is a liberal.
Syncro
Posted by: syncrodox at October 27, 2008 2:49 AM

This reminds me of a saying I read somewhere, at some time: a young person who is conservative has no heart, an older person who is liberal has no brain.

(Or, something to that effect).