Marianne

“When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.) / It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.” — Wittgenstein, On Certainty, sec. 141-42

I don’t know where to fit this in, but…

Christopher Columbus did not actually discover America because he maintained until his death that he had reached some portion of Asia. Doubts were emerging but it was Amerigo Vespucci who fully realized that the Americas were truly something else, calling them a “new world.”

The point: You can only claim…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
And the capital and most of the underlying ideas for all of it came from the West. Credit where credit is due indeed

Science grows based on what discoveries and developments came before.

The claim that Russia’s postwar successes were all (every single one, apparently) based on ideas that came from “the West” (as if…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
Do Americans even have the credibility to condemn authoritarian dictatorships these days? Our new allies are North Korea and Russia. Our enemies are Europe, Canada and Mexico.

Exactly. Trump is ignoring the “coequal branches” thing and is using his chief executive role to ruin America. Whatever America’s faults, he’s taking us…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
My concern is not with being “balanced” but being right.

If by “right” you mean “to the right”  then yeah, I get it.

The questions you pose are very hypothetical and are thus unanswerable. They are also polluted by unstated and/or unsupported assumptions and presumptions.

A lot of the criticism of Russia, yours incl…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Bernie Sanders supported the Soviet Union that created Vladamir Putin and the Putineers, and Bernie still wants their saw-bones health care system for Americans. Here’s an assessment I got from the Brave browser’s built-in AI (the italics):

As I expected, your characterization of Bernie’s views is brimming over with a…[Read more]

Well, it’s time for everyone to write and tell their GOP legislators at every level plus their governors that Trump is making a widespread turn toward the Democrats a near certainty if he continues down the road he’s on, starting with the writer’s vote.

I decided sometime during Trump’s campaign that he couldn’t possibly not understand that his proposed tariff policy combined with his intended mass deportation of a large proportion of our farm workers would devastate the economy.

So, yeah, it’s intentional. Thom Hartmann is stating what was obvious to me.

I also posted this elsewhere, but it’s worthy of being posted here as well. By quoting Napoleon’s  “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’s basically announcing that he’s prepared, has mentally justified to himself, moving into the full dictatorship phase where he obeys no one but himself. Not the courts, not the congress, and…[Read more]

Trump goes full dictator, posting Napoleon’s  “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” What it means is that he doesn’t feel bound by the courts, congress, or even the Constitution he swore to defend.

@ Reg and Strega

I don’t think a country can claim to be democratic unless it adopts a one person one vote system, allows all (adults anyway) to vote, and holds fair election unblemished by significant political interference.

The United States fails on all counts.

And now, with Trump all but coronating himself Emperor, we may never even have…[Read more]

@ Reg

You use the term “fully democratic.” How many “democracies” are “fully democratic”? Would you regard the United States to be fully democratic?

What is the basis for a Zionist state? It’s that God gave the general area of Palestine/Israel to the Jews. That is their only claim and it’s as relevant as one’s belief in God.

From Gemini AI (emphasis mine):

The belief that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people is a common view among many religious Christians and some American Jews,…[Read more]