Gregg R Thomas

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Why Ideology, not Faith, drives the Culture War.

This article is super-interesting.  I know you’ve got to be clever to do all that statistics stuff.  Evangelicals are conservative and have conservative (i.e., highly patriarchal) views.  Non-religious are mainly liberal and have liberal views.  That makes a lot of sen…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
ask him to justify his framing of almost every issue through the narcisstic lens of Trump. How is it that the president of the USA subordinates the interests of the people he is representing as the ultimate public servant to his own interests?

If you did that, he would ruin you, and possibly have you shot, lol.  Is anyone still…[Read more]

The rationale switched from Theological irrationality to Pseudoscientific irrationality.

Yes, that is a good point and a good distinction. I agree that Classical liberalism did not generate antisemitism. It was probably a 1,000 years too late for that. Classical liberalism attacked the fusion of church and state and religious privilege or legal…[Read more]

Yikes, here I am, late to the party!

Thanks, Reg!!

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
My take (yours may differ) on the cause of the fracture was replacing (or displacing) the concept of universal individual rights in favor of group-identity moral ranking. A lot of modern progressiveness has moved away from treating everyone as equal individuals and toward treating people primarily as members of…

[Read more]

Have a great week!!

After WW2 the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sounded good. But ““Lest we forget” implies history contains lessons that we should learn from and  remember past catastrophes to avoid repeating them. But with human nature this always becomes “History is bunk” and the past becomes obsolete noise and only the present matters.…[Read more]

The UN stated out with noble ideals but it has lost a lot of respect. It was never a moral body, just a diplomatic one that existed to keep states talking to each other. We will never get moral clarity out of a system where Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, and liberal democracies all get equal seats at the table. At best we get a consensus of…[Read more]

@Jake  I can’t disagree with any of your comment regarding intelligence, and I particularly like the capitalised Actual Intelligence. Really good food for thought.

Panpsychism is an attempt to avoid “consciousness from nothing” by baking mind-like properties into the foundations of physics. That is almost like an argument for Creationism. For me, consciousness is an emergent property, not a fundamental physical property. It is not present in parts that can be assembled.  In the same way that water mole…[Read more]

Thanks Reg!

Have a great week everyone!

It only took one monkey to create the entire works of Shakespeare. His first name was William. (rtff)

-9F….wow…stay safe and keep warm!!

You should get to see the Northern Lights this time around – tonight in much of the USA.

jakelafort wrote:
I thought as mass approaches speed of light it becomes infinite?

I think that mass becomes infinite as it approaches the speed of light through space, not time.

jakelafort wrote:
And if big bang is a beginning at what point does blocking become the nature of the thing as a whole?

It’s a shape.  I can’t visualise something in 4D, but I presume we have length, breadth, height, and time.  Eventually, if there’s heat death, then events stop happening and time runs out.

Inside the shape, local events exist a…[Read more]