OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
Re: transmen - I think our culture sees male as the default, and women as a defective male who needs special accommodations because of this defect. Things like birth control, abortion, and protected maternity leave seek to even the playing field between men and women, a necessity because the game we are all playing assumes a male player. Gender by Ivan Illich spells out the argument that this is a necessity in an industrialized society.
Transmen are a manifestation of this expectation that male is the default. They feel like a defective man, therefore they take steps to reduce the defect.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
This highlights the difference between a deontological vs consequential framework. Using an inverse categorical imperative, I have a hard time pin pointing exactly what actions Israel has done that I would forbid everywhere and that would have changed the outcome. I admit that in total the actions of the Israelis has caused grief in the region. I don't see a way out without an atrocity on the part of Israel or Hamas. Several of Israel's individual actions are bad, but the substantive, broad strokes actions that created the bulk of the mess seem ethical to me.
Regardless of what Jews called their organization (at a time when "Colonialism" was an acceptable activity, and therefore calling it that might have been propaganda to make their actions appealing to Euopeans), the majority of Jews came as refugees. They had a real, genuine, rational fear for their lives in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. They don't have anywhere they could conceivably go back to. Jews have always lived on "other people's land."
Let's play alternative Earth. Groups of Indigenous people in South America are under severe persecution by their governments. Simultaneously, the Native American lobby in the USA is able to convince the Federal Government to fast track immigration for these persecuted refugees. Both refugees and locals buy large swaths of Wyoming over several dozen years through legal and fair transactions. Several thousand white Americans lost their homes and were evicted as their landlords sold their houses out from under them, but they were able to move to other parts of Wyoming or the US. These people were upset and anti-Native American sentiment increased.
Gradually the number of South American refugees outnumber the local Wyoming Native American population 10:1, and achieve parity with the white Wyoming population. The local Wyoming Native American population mostly does not mind, and is happy to bond with the newcomers over shared history and goals.
Fifty years later, the US Federal Government decides Manifest Destiny was a bad thing with terrible consequences. Therefore, they are reducing their territory to just the original 13 States. Every other state is going to need to self-govern. They want to do this with the least amount of bloodshed, and the case of Wyoming poses a problem. The Federal Government is aware that the white population of Wyoming hates the natives, and left to their own devices without US Marshals keeping the peace, a massacre will likely happen. Therefore, the Federal Government performs one last act, splitting up Wyoming into two seperate States. The Native Americans agree to the deal, the Whites attack the Native Americans once the Federal Government exits. Astoundingly, Native Americans win, and even take over more territory than was allocated to them by the Federal Government.
Which parts of this process would you object to? Which specific action would you universally outlaw?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
I would much rather the life of a peasant, but it's not possible to live such a life now. They ate well, had well made (if fewer) clothes, and largely happy lives. But such prosperity depended on the existence of the commons, from which peasants could obtain firewood, fish, trap small animals, etc. Once enclosure made these illegal, the common people chose to move to the cities and become wage slaves. It was preferable to attempting to be peasants under the current private property regime. Given that they had direct experience with both realities, I trust their judgement that I would not want to be a peasant without access to a commons and a traditional community.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
I wish we could amend Article 14 and change it to "convicted of insurrection in a court of law" or something like that. Most restrictions to office are ones that can be resolved by a simple glance at a birth certificate or official register.
By "I wish we could" I mean that the political will to come together and amend the Constitution no longer exists and I do not expect it to ever exist again. It is ironic that an article intending to defend against insurrection might be a cause of one.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8mo ago
The one thing that I'm fairly certain of is that existence cannot be simply explained by an infinite casual chain. Lets say there was an infinite line of people, each has their hands by their side. They all have the command that when the person to the left of them raises their hands, they will raise their hand. If no one has their hands raised, then no one ever will raise their hands. It doesn't matter if they're standing in a circle. It doesn't matter how many infinities of people there are.
(Edit: This doesn't mean that there can't be a infinite causal chain, just that by itself it doesn't answer the question at hand.)
The question of "why something, instead of nothing?" does not rely on the universe having a beginning. It begins with the attempt to explain the existence of a single thing, here and now, that has the potential to be many other things, and going on from there.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8mo ago
Why is it that the universe needs to be created but God needs no creator?
The universe is composed of parts that change. Everything that changes is composed of the actual (what it currently is) and the potential (all the states it could be in.) Everything that is composite like this needs some sort of explanation for why it is in this current condition and not a different state.
The classical theist definition of God solves this problem by proposing something that has no composition, no change. Because there is nothing else that it could be, its current state needs no explanation. This changeless, fully actual thing is that which we call God. Based on knowing that it is without composition, fully actual, philosophers can then derive proofs for the other common attributes of God.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
“No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc.” is not a serious objection to the argument.
People who make this claim – like, again, Dawkins in The God Delusion – show thereby that they haven’t actually read the writers they are criticizing. They are typically relying on what other uninformed people have said about the argument, or at most relying on excerpts ripped from context and stuck into some anthology (as Aquinas’s Five Ways so often are). Aquinas in fact devotes hundreds of pages across various works to showing that a First Cause of things would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and so on and so forth. Other Scholastic writers and modern writers like Leibniz and Samuel Clarke also devote detailed argumentation to establishing that the First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes.
Of course, an atheist might try to rebut these various arguments. But to pretend that they don’t exist – that is to say, to pretend, as so many do, that defenders of the cosmological argument typically make an undefended leap from “There is a First Cause” to “There is a cause of the world that is all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” – is, once again, simply to show that one doesn’t know what one is talking about.
To give these arguments takes pages and pages, here is a very hasty version missing all the background for the purpose of fitting into a comment. Chapter 6 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides a much more detailed argument.
Several attributes seem to follow immediately and obviously from God’s being Pure Act. Since to change is to be reduced from potency to act, that which is Pure Act, devoid of all potency, must be immutable or incapable of change (ST I.9.1). Since material things are of their nature compounds of act and potency, that which is Pure Act must be immaterial and thus incorporeal or without any sort of body (ST I.3.1–2). Since such a being is immutable and time (as Aquinas argues) cannot exist apart from change, that which is Pure Act must also be eternal, outside time altogether, without beginning or end (ST I.10.1–2).
As the cause of the world, God obviously has power, for “all operation proceeds from power” (QDP 1.1; cf. ST I.25.1). Moreover, “the more actual a thing is the more it abounds in active power,” so that as Pure Act, God must be infinite in power (QDP 1.2; cf. ST I.25.2). In line with the mainstream classical theistic tradition, Aquinas holds that since there is no sense to be made of doing what is intrinsically impossible (e.g. making a round square or something else involving a self-contradiction), to say that God is omnipotent does not entail that he can do such things, but only that he can do whatever is intrinsically possible (ST I.25.3).
The Fifth Way, if successful, establishes by itself that God has intellect. Furthermore, intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent ones in that the latter, but not the former, possess only their own forms. For an “intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower” (ST I.14.1). That is to say, to understand some thing is for that thing’s essence to exist in some sense in one’s own intellect. Now the reason non-intelligent things lack this ability to have the form of another thing is that they are wholly material, and material things can only possess one form at a time, as it were. Hence immaterial beings can possess the forms of other things precisely because they are immaterial; and the further a thing is from materiality, the more powerful its intellect is bound to be. Thus human beings, which, though they have immaterial intellects are also embodied, are less intelligent than angels, which are incorporeal. “Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality … it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge” (ST I.14.1). This argument presupposes a number of theses in the philosophy of mind and cannot be evaluated, or even properly understood, unless those theses are first understood. We will explore these theses in chapter 4.
We can also conclude, in Aquinas’s view, that “there is will in God, as there is intellect: since will follows upon intellect” (ST I.19.1). Why do will and intellect necessarily go together? For Aquinas, things naturally are inclined or tend towards their natural forms, and will not of themselves rest, as it were, until that form is perfectly realized; hence the acorn, for example, has a built-in tendency towards realizing the form of an oak, and will naturally realize that form unless somehow prevented by something outside it. What we are describing in this example is of course the goal-directedness of the acorn as something having a final cause. But other sorts of thing have final causes too. In sentient beings, namely animals, this inclination towards the perfection of their forms is what we call appetite. And in beings with intellect it is what we call will. Thus anything having an intellect must have will. (We will return to this topic in the next chapter.) Of course, since God does not have the limitations we have, he does not have any ends he needs to fulfill, any more than he needs to acquire any knowledge. Thus, as with our attribution of power, intellect, and other attributes to God, our attribution of will to him is intended in an analogous rather than a univocal sense.
Since something is perfect to the degree it is in act or actual, God as Pure Act must be perfect (ST I.4.1). Given the convertibility of being and goodness, God as Pure Act and Being Itself must also be good, indeed the highest good (ST I.6).
Feser, Edward. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides) (pp. 95-96).
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
As a different perspective, avoiding fantasizing about things that would be bad to do in real life sounds like an aspect of virtue ethics. It is neurotic and unhealthy to focus on something that will never happen. Epicureans would focus on obtainable pleasures. Buddists would say that these desires cause suffering. And so forth.
I think @SubstantialFrivolity is arguing that there is a very real moral and psychological injury being done to the people engaged in making and consuming these AI Generated images. I don't know if they would extrapolate to porn in general, but I would.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
The difficulty with meta-studies on saturated fat vs unsaturated fat is that studies use lard or chicken fat as their example of saturated fat, when in reality those two fats are highly unsaturated. This leads to farces like "Learning and Memory Impairment in Rats Fed a High Saturated Fat Diet" They analyze the fatty acid composition of their lard and it is only 30% saturated. Despite this, the study uses lard as their Saturated fat intervention.
Specific to Hooper et al. (2020) that your linked article uses for it's argument, I am looking at their studies and am having trouble finding which showed a benefit from substituting polyunsaturated fat with saturated fats. At the most, I see some that show benefits from reducing fat entirely, which I would agree with. Reducing all fat will reduce the amount of total linoleic acid and a High Carb, low fat diet would be good from my understanding. (Low fat means < 15% calories from fat, most low fat studies have 30% of calories from fat, which is practically the normal amount of fat intake in a SAD, but that's another story.)
Hooper's results don't seem really indicative of anything. Your link extols the results of this figure, but outside the couple tails where they got the Saturated fat intake really low, there doesn't seem to be a clear correlation between increasing Sat Fat and disease. Under 9% of Sat fat only has data on a few risk events, which makes me think that there are only a handful of studies with that amount of sat fat. I'm trying to figure out if this data point reflects the studies that went with High carb, low fat.
However, the figure in question still shows that when dietary saturated fat reaches >12% of calories, markers improve! Risk of Stroke goes way down. CVD goes down.
Weight isn't studied in the Meta-analysis at all.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
I'm going to give you advice from a woman's perspective and from the perspective who's been paying attention to the latest in nutrition.
Diet will have more affect on weight gain than exercise, especially as you both age. To stop gaining weight, decrease mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fat. Dairy, coconut, palm kernal oil, and tallow are good fats. Everything else is on thin ground.
To lose weight, cut protein down to around 50g/day. This is a temporary measure, but it will rev up the metabolism quite nicely.
One thing to check before all else - is your wife pregnant? Have you really ruled it out? Are you sure? Ok then, read on!
How to get your wife to join in: Tell her you are interested in contributing to Science! (TM) You are getting really interested in SMTM's Potato studies, and you would like to help provide more data on what the effect would be on someone in the healthy weight range. This would involve eating only butter and potatoes for a month straight, but most people who try it like it.
Just one problem - There's no way you'd be able to do this if you have someone eating normal meals in the house. The fridge space of preparing two meals, the mental effort to avoid eating other food, it's too much. Would she be able to try it with you? It doesn't have to be for the whole time, just long enough to get in the groove. Would she like to weigh herself with you every day so she can be a trial participant as well?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Yes, I am in favor of more palliative care options and honest counseling. But the question isn't whether you would let the child die but rather would you let the parents kill the child? Maybe the distinction is meaningless to your ethical system, but it is not to many people's ethical systems.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3mo ago
I agree that the policies targeting websites are more nebulous and throw a wrench into the matter. But most people don't even seem aware what the current legality of pornographic content even is. That people think pornography is protected shows that most people (even well-educated people on the Motte) have no idea what is currently on the books. This is an area where it seems the law and the culture have diverged dramatically without much attempt to update the laws. Alternatively, many very-online people have no idea what the average US citizen thinks of Porn use and how available it ought to be.
The only sane application of the law to me would be to streamline a system where parents can sue content distributors or individuals for serving a specific pornographic image to their specific minor without sufficient age verification. That keeps half the burden of proof on the parent to show A) their kid saw porn, B) the party being sued is responsible for the child viewing the porn and C) the party being sued did not use sufficient age verification (defined by the state.) Depending on the damages and how simple this is to file, this could have a dampening effect on even less-than-legit-venues and individual actors on Discord.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
I don't want to discuss metaphysics, you are the one who started this conversation. You are the one who made the bold claim that the Cosmological Argument was debunked decades ago and then linked to a source that clearly doesn't understand what the word 'cause' even is. It's not a hard word to understand!
Then after I demonstrated that I knew more on the topic than you, you still linked to the Wikipedia article on God of the Gaps, like I wouldn't have ever encountered that phrase before. You keep setting yourself up as an expert, but when I get in the weeds with you, you back out. Stop setting yourself up as an expert in the Cosmological Argument.
All I was doing before you started this topic was demonstrating that Bishop Robert Barron was a public intellectual given the criteria provided.
A huge problem is that you are wading into a discussion that has a lot of back and forth. It's not the same as a Holocaust denier that is talking only to Holocaust deniers. Loke is formulating a response, referencing well-known models and terms, to atheistic philosophers of religion (there are many, such as Linford who is referenced throughout Loke's argument.) Unlike the disdain that people who argue with Holocaust deniers might express, atheistic philosophers of religion find the whole topic of great enough importance to devote a lifetime to, and support the position that "it is possible to rationally believe in God."
The Ekyroptic universe is a physics theory you might have heard popularized as "The Big Bounce." It was proposed by some pretty important theoretical physicists, Burt Ovrut, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok. Using the accurate scientific term to refer to a theory is not a knock against the argument.
The cosmological argument is explicitly not a God of the Gaps argument. It is not pointing out a gap in scientific knowledge. It is not:
- We don't know what started the universe
- Therefore God.
The above would be a God of the Gaps argument. Instead, the Cosmological argument is a logical argument based on the same metaphysical assumptions required to conduct scientific inquiry in the first place.
Edit: I don't really want to argue for the First Cause here. I realize I end up presenting a lot of arguments for the first cause in order to support my point, but I am not going to "make my point legibly" because my point is not that God exists.
The point that I am arguing for is that your arguments are incredibly outdated, and were wrong even back when you formed them. But despite this, you are completely, irrationally, confident in your belief that the cosmological argues for something it does not.
It would be like if I said, "I closed the tab once your scientist started talking about evolution. Don't you know that was debunked a century ago?" and then I link to an old web page that asks where the missing link is. Then I say, "If your scientist believes in evolution as the origin of living species, explain how non-living viruses can cross between species?"
It's fine to not follow this debate in detail, everyone has their own bandwith. But you never understood what theists ever meant by the cosmological argument. That is my point I am trying to make legibly.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
So the original sin is illegal immigration and porous borders, if we can use such terms when discussing the Ottoman Empire?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8mo ago
The changeless thing exists out of time and knows all its actions before, during, and after them. It is without emotion. If that is incompatible with your understanding of the Judeo-Christian God then I don't know why that matters to this conversation.
The changless thing is allowed to casually affect things, in fact, that is it's nature entirely. The changeless thing's nature is entirely, wholly, and simply to act, to bring into existence. You would need to present a really good argument for why this would imply the universe is part of God. It is contingent on God, and is possibly inevitable based on God's nature, but has a different nature.
Edit: One classical theist described God as an "omnipotence trope," if that helps conceptualize what theists are talking about.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1yr ago
What stance do you think I hold, based on the tagline, that would qualify as partisan or inflammatory? We have several people here who could probably be described as such, from atheists who meditate for 4 hours a day to full blown Catholic monarchists. I am neither, but it amuses me to describe myself this way.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?
If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
Cartesian Dualism separates mind from matter and attempts to study matter separate from qualia or mental properties. The difference between ESP and Magnetism is that Magnets exist outside of an independent observer. There could have been a universe without life, but still had an electro-magnetic field. A universe without life wouldn't have psychokinesis, ESP, etc, because these are all things that require a mind.
That isn't to say that they couldn't be observed in a scientific and methodological way, nor that the laws governing them couldn't be discovered. But that is why they are typically withheld from the Materialist worldview.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
How many explanations, books, and tutors did it take for you to go from a child's understanding of zoology to a doctor's understanding of biochemistry? That this topic is difficult to understand without gaining a background in metaphysics is not a serious argument against it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4mo ago
Bishop Barron has been on the Ben Shapiro Show, delivered lectures for the Heritage Foundation, been interviewed by Lex Freidman, and many more. If you look in the comments on his Youtube channel it does seem like many atheists, protestants, and members of other faith traditions watch him regularly.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5mo ago
Collagen is good, and one reason why I supplement glycine. But most protein sources are high in branch chain amino acids, which seem to cause insulin resistance in the metabolically unhealthy. Insulin resistance increases infIamation. I am trying to reduce BCAAs to 8g a day, at least temporarily. I'm not trying to reduce other amino acids, but as a consequence my overall protein is pretty low for this experiment.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8mo ago
There could be three fewer stars in the universe, and the universe would still make sense as a concept, but the effects of the gravity of the stars would no longer exist. Within the universe, we can talk about things having cause and effect, firing a bullet really does cause a broken window.
The imagined God would not have such cause and effect internal to it.
What would be the appropriate response from the courts if Obama tried to run for a third term? What if he was really popular?
The issue at hand, which I don't think most of the comments here are addressing, is that a significant number of politicians, lawyers, etc believe that President Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in the same way that Obama is disqualified from the ballot. They mostly come to this conclusion by looking at the January 6th report.
The most significant thing is that the court ruled that the January 6th report could be admitted into evidence and is being used as fact. The Supreme Court of the United States cannot contest that as it is a state-level decision, and the USC decides matters of law, not fact.
The cries that this is anti-democratic is missing the point. Restrictions on our elections are intentionally anti-democratic, but our books are full of them. Term limits, age limits, etc. This suits me, as I much prefer to live in a Republic than a Democracy.
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