Nerdy Keith

Permit me Jake the indulgence of extending my most effulgent approbation for your recent prolix perambulations through the luxuriant lexicon of our beloved English tongue. Your sesquipedalian predilections, far from being an impediment to intelligibility, represent a salubrious balm upon the oft-diminished art of articulate articulation.

Indeed,…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
cromulent

Umm, you know, I have a far larger vocabulary than the average American, yet I had to run to the dictionary.

A little advice: if you want to be a smart communicator and not just a narcissistic egghead show off, use the common vocabulary.

The dictionary gives several synonyms: fine, acceptable or normal;…[Read more]

Watched the video. Was dumbfounded at the Nazi (or Naziesque) palm-down salutes.

_Robert_ wrote:
The “Free Palestine” camp should be allowed to express their misguided opinions like everyone else AND be punished for rule breaking like everyone else. That should be the focus of the effort, but it’s not. The focus is on crushing education and replacing learned people with easily controllable idiots wearing red dunce caps. Defun…

[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
You could have teamed with Eli Whitney and made a Strawman Assembly Line with that line of thought.

Slaves, of course, are morally blameless for their condition

If you accept determinism, as I do, then everyone is blameless for their condition.

That said, slaves have rebelled and freed themselves. There are many examples…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Perhaps atheism asserts nothing but an atheist can assert that God doesn’t exist and here I am doing it.

God does not exist because he/she/it is impossible like a round square, counting to infinity, or unringing a bell. If that is true, then God’s nonexistence is true to a mathematical-level certainty.

Consider an…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
If empathy is what it takes for us to do the right things, that’s great. However, the dichotomous situation of living standards always throws me for a loop.

In a recent Facebook post answering a person who likes to remind leftists like me that the Democrats were very keen on the KKK and it was a Republican who freed the slaves, I…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
@unseen you made the exact point that I also thought. Empathy is the feeling when you can relate to an injury or event because you have been through similar events and you  feel knowledgable sympathy. You do not feel anyone else’s experience.

Indeed, if I stub my toe and keep quiet about it, who is going to say “I feel your pa…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Try explaining what water is to a fish.

I think the limiting factor there is probably the fish’s level of intellection.

You can certainly explain to a human of reasonable intelligence who’s awake what air is.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
In other words, Nielsen would agree with Wittgenstein’s skepticism about the internal comparison but lean even harder toward dismissing the worry as philosophically idle — what matters is shared public criteria for use, not metaphysical guarantees of inner sameness.

I think that is essentially the conclusion Wit…[Read more]

Try explaining what water is to a fish.

In Wittgenstein’s famous discussion of pain and private language he points out that there is no way to know what someone else senses. If you and I coincidentally stub our toes at the same time and react simultaneously in a similar fashion, is this sufficient to declare that we both feel the same thing? No, and there’s no way to verify the not…[Read more]

This new London Tube map is excellent!  Article.

But if I see you stub your toe, and I am at all sympathetic with you, then I will feel your pain by empathy. We’ve evolved that as part of the human suite of cooperative abilities.

What is it like to be a Bat?

Simon Paynton wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:
Come on now. The billionaires need that money. You think those inflatable lips, tits and tender boats for their mega-yachts are cheap?

You’re right, they are that bad. There’s a narrative in the UK that Trump’s tariff earnings are going to promote tax breaks for his rich friends.

Trump is a sociopath. He ha…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
But if I see you stub your toe, and I am at all sympathetic with you, then I will feel your pain by empathy.

Not by empathy. You may empathize but you experience no actual pain. Rather memories of pain are brought forth. So, it’s by analogy, not empathy. If I see someone stub their big toe hard, it brings forth a memory of a…[Read more]

The article on consciousness gets into an area I’ve always found fascinating.

Consciousness is an illusion in the sense that our perception of the world is given to us by our brain. Is an orange orange in color out there in the world? No, because outside of a nervous system, what we call orange isn’t a color at all, it’s a wave length. In that…[Read more]

Have a great week!

Once MAGA replace all the State Library boards, the mess will be cleaned up. But the range of books will be all under the same section. The Dewey Decimal system will become redundant. They will probably have hundreds of copies of the same book. Any other books will require crayons.