Thy Plague Doctor

Unseen wrote:

Simon Paynton wrote:
So Unseen, your point seems to be that any human choice is imaginary, and therefore, any human behaviour based on choice has no meaning.

Umm…no. Nothing is imaginary once properly understood and categorized. Of course, we make choices. Confronted with chocolate or vanilla, we choose one or the other. The q…

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John Oliver did a segment on ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ last Sunday night.  The problem is worse than I though it was possible to be.

That’s the slimy underhanded manipulative swamp of religious recruitment. I hope she gained some kind of lesson from it. I could not be more thankful this kind of garbage rarely happens here.

It’s pretty hard for me to find any example in developed western democratic country where atheists lure people by offering a service that helps them with a…[Read more]

No Jake I don’t think that if a term becomes bothersome it should be dispensed with. You’re making a bad slippery slope argument there. Evil is a term that is so saturated with religious baggage, cultural baggage and covers such a broad range of extremely different behavioural patterns that it is really best to the flames. Good luck finding more…[Read more]

David Boots wrote:
My view is that this conviction should serve as a warning that your liberty to voice an opinion is threatened and has been for some time. Either people wake up soon to this or we will all have to submit to religious oppression and in our lifetime.
As I’ve said before. The United States has a very unique and quite extreme a…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Evil on other hand describes deliberate harm and intentional cruelty to a shocking degree.

Unfortunately it is not that simple. Unseen is right in two ways. First, Evil is a terribly terribly vague term and it does not objectively describe a certain kind of human behaviour but instead many overlapping patterns of human…[Read more]

Can you operate with never using the word ‘evil’?  Would there be an obstacle to your communications without this word?  It’s a ‘magic thinking’ word, and since no human is all bad or all good, it would appear to be an invalid term

_Robert_ wrote:
Davis, you certainly have Putin’s number. I would think after 100’s of years of asshole leadership, Russians would have had enough. I really don’t understand why they put up with it.

Totally. First they had the mongol invasion. Then most Russians suffered the misery of serfdom for centuries. Then a violent revolution. Then a viole…[Read more]

Not really. Bad, awful, mean, unkind, spiteful, hateful…  there’s no need for ‘evil’ because you endow the act with some kind of superpower. People can be arseholes.

The proper antonym of ‘good’ is ‘bad’. The term ‘evil’ is a giving up of the possibility to make the ‘bad’ become less so, or even good.   It’s populism can most probably be linked to religion or group thinking.  There is no real antonym to ‘evil’   I don’t believe in ‘evil’, I think it’s a perjurative term.

I read (probably on Twitter) that Macron the French had warned Russia in advance of the blitz over the weekend.  I was trying to find supporting information for this, and came up with the FT article here http://www.ft.com/content/ab5c6d60-3f15-11e8-b7e0-52972418fec4

Ask him what the point of a vacation is if you’re just going to go home afterwards 🙂

Regardless of the motivations for dropping those bombs, or how low all three leaders (Trump, May, Macron) and achievement-less they are right now…I consider it a next gain if (IF!) some chemical weapons factory was blown up. If it were against a terrorist target…I would be worried. But Assad’s is a cold calculating target who won’t respond by…[Read more]

Chicken and egg situation, really Jake.  Does religion cause violence in humans, or are humans inherently violent and this is reflected in group or tribe behaviour?

It’s funny, in the West over the years, we see Muslims as more violent, and Hindus as more peaceful, but this is a fallacy.  I spent some time in Fiji, for example, where the Hindus are aggressive and the Muslims gentle.  I had always thought that Buddhists were extremely peaceful, and then I learned of the Buddhist aggression in Myanmar.  It seem…[Read more]

I’m with Reg.  Fuck that way of thinking