fionwe1987

The Federation is out there Com-badge shaped rock in Mars, captured by Curiosity.

Yeah that went from "unrealistic political situation to destroy a planet" to "duh, this is how ours will end".

So let me get this right. Hamas got their asses kicked. So they exchanged a few hostages, those they felt ok to release, for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. And their asses were so kicked they refused to release other hostages, that Israel most certainly wanted, and decided instead to continue fighting? Do you manage to hold a straight face when you make claims like this?

Yeah, no one else is talking about these threads. You see, most of us care about and experience the real world, and come to these threads to discuss that. We don't start with these threads and experience the real world based on the balance of Hamas vs. Israel criticism here. Yet Israel did negotiate with Hamas, and that is how it got back the hostages it did get back. And of course, it liberated those three hostages that escaped. Except they were liberated from life itself. Bravo.

A lot of Trump supporters seem to actively court dislike....from the mainstream/lamestream media, the deep state, the woke blah blah. Vice signalling drives their adherence to Trump, because their language has been warped to the point where they can and do justify all kinds of vice by simply distrusting the messenger, whether that's the media or some person they know.

Clearly they don't? Like, America obviously doesn't think so, and is sending aid and weaponry to Israel's government, no? Did I miss when America sent some Patriots and F-16s to Hamas or something?

Is Kissedbyfire a third party candidate, or Joe Biden's secret ASOIAF account? Not sure why else they'd want anyone's vote...

And? Either Israel is a democracy that holds to international law, or it isn't. You cannot both claim that when it is advantageous, then dispense with it and complain about being held to a higher standards when asked for proof that this is the case. On the flip side, Hamas is trash, and I really expect nothing factual from them. Nor do they make claims to be a norm-abiding democracy though!

That doesn't make much sense to me. You obviously need belief in things you don't have immediate proof for to do anything complex. I'd argue that's one of the central reasons we have any kind of civilization/technology. I rely with 0 evidence on a lot of things, as do you, because I'm pretty sure you didn't sit and invent your own proofs to every bit of math you use, nor did you collect data for every bit of science you believe in. We outsource this stuff to the group, and communicate it using language, and language allows us to interrogate the claims made by other members of the group. No one human can find evidence and prove to themselves all the things they need to belive in and rely on, and that's gonna be true of any other species. And mistaken beliefs, or even theories resting on erroneous data, will happen. Just like errors in copying DNA will happen. So how do you avoid anyone even accidentally taking something on faith that is actually wrong? Now, there's a good way to test whether the belief you're being offered is correct, and ways to separate the horeshit from the gold, but that's an iterative process, so I don't know how a species will come readymade with that ability from the start, and use it in such a way that they never land on explanations that are not supported by evidence. Seems too ideal to be real. As for the rest, I don't think anyone in this discussion has said psychology or anthropology are BS. For myself, I don't even think all evolutionary psych is BS. I just specifically disagreed with this bit of evolutionary psych, which you've said you don't hold to strongly anyway: That causative link is all I disagree with, with respect to Evo psy, in this conversation. Since no one seems to hold this link to be true anyway, maybe we can table the discussion on evolutionary psychology for now?

Trump rallies were always places Trump looked good. He works his crowd, and they go wild, and this was something neither Clinton nor Biden was ever able to pull off (Sanders and Warren could, but that's a different story). Don't judge Trump's chance of success when he's playing just to his base. See what happens if/when he shares the stage with Biden, or when he's trying to address folks who don't have a hardon for him already. Because just that part of the population just can't elect him to office. Found this to be a good explanation of Trump's appeal: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/opinion/trump-voters-iowa-caucus.html?searchResultPosition=2

I think this is why I asked for an explanation. Because what you're saying here isn't what we're discussing. I'm very much a strict materialist, so of course I believe our thoughts are the products of our brains. But that doesn't mean only our brains can produce our kinds of thoughts! Convergent is very much a thing. All I'll say is, maybe lay off on the firm sceintific stances if you don't want to explain them? It seems clear that you read me questioning evolutionary psychology and understood something worlds different. Evo psy being bullshit, often, doesn't rest on thought not being a product of biology. Ok... not sure what point you were making, then. We seem to have spent a lot of words for... not sure what.

Oh absolutely. I don't expect "religion" to be anything similar for any alien society. Indeed, if an alien religion, in content, is anything like any of ours, I'd honestly go back to the drawing board on my beliefs on the validity of that religion. All I'm saying is alien species are likely to have aspects of their experience they do not understand, and will come up with faith based explanations. Whether that will even become organized religion is something we can't be certain of, because that would depend on the social dynamics of of said alien species, which can indeed be very different than ours. I'm with you on the first part, but I'm not sure with what confidence we can say it is a neurotypical human moral to respect authority. At the very least, the nature of authority, and what respect for said authority means, varies very widely. In fact, several polytheistic religions, like Hinduism, have regular humans cursing Gods for their moral failures (and by this I mean actual curses that end up constraining or harming said gods), defying them, for moral reasons, or calling out their immorality. These are the stories I grew up with, and I'd hesitate to say their moral was "awe inspiring figures have authority you must respect". I learned quite the opposite from them, and that's why I hesitate to take it as a given that its typical to tie awe to respect. Awe exists. But respect for authority is a lot more fluid. Social mammals do question authority, and that's what causes social hierarchies to be dynamic. Individuals may have a greater or lesser propensity to respect authority, but we hardly seem to have a universal rule that authority must be respected. I think religion is a byproduct of trying to explain forces larger than the individual. It doesn't provide much at all, except false comfort, most often, but the need to explain larger things seems pretty obvious for any species, and since not everyone will hit on the right explanation, or go through the painstaking process of hypothesis to theory to determine reasonable explanations, you will inevitably have anecdotal explanations that rely on imprecise symbolic and narrative constructs. Those imprecise constructs then become the substrate for religion. Put another way, religion is an inevitable byproduct of the pathway to more testable and robust systems of knowledge like science and mathematics. Is it plausible some species hits on more robust systems right away? Maybe. But I think it is way more plausible that the evolution of science and mathematics inevitably spits out junk on the way, and it takes effort to clear them away. That's not a very evolutionarily plausible biosphere, I think. Something like this can be engineered, maybe. But can you lay out a plausible chain of evolutionary events for this to arise naturally? And what, even, does harmony mean? Our individual bodies don't run in perfect harmony, so I'm kinda confused by the notion of this arising naturally ecosystem wide. Is this biosphere filled with autotrophs only, or are there species who eat the autotrophs? How do you define this "connection"? Is it neuronal? Then harmony is impossible, because data transfer is pretty slow. Do they somehow evolve natural radio communication between different parts of the biosphere? What kind of selective pressure would give rise to that? Honestly, single species ecosystems and all species in an ecosystem being "connected" are nice Sci Fi ideas, but they don't make sense as a naturally evolved thing. Engineered, sure, but I don't have an issue with there being no religion in such cases. I can see religion being overcome, eventually, as a possibility for any species, and sincere hope for ours. That's a non-evolving species, then? What about nature? Such a species would be susceptible to storms, earthquakes, etc, right? The way of interaction can be very very different. But no interactions at all seems implausible. Whyever not? Firstly, I have no idea how a "hyperorganism the size of a planet" is to evolve. The square cube law will have something to say about that. But even if we skip past that hurdle, why isn't a sunset awe-inspiring to such a species. The sun is orders of magnitude larger, and will almost certainly be the sole source of energy to such a being, no? Awe and veneration seem entirely plausible. That's not a realistic animal, though! I'll wager a single planetwide species is way way less plausible than a totally religion-free, linguistic, technologically advanced species, biologically. How? How do you ensure communication with another species without a chance for duplicity? And why would such a thing evolve? Duplicity is very useful, in communication, and very useful evolutionarily. And very expensive to minimize, and close to impossible to eliminate. But even if you overcome all that, you're assuming that this means no religion. What if they believe in a God of Truth? Sorry, I didn't word that right. "it's a far greater reach to imagine a species unbound by time that way that evolves naturally than assuming any naturally evolved species that comes up with linguistic communication will not have some form of religion." is what I meant to say. If you're going to have language to communicate, you're going to have religion-adjacent narratives and concepts to explain things, unless this species hits on truly accurate mathematical modeling of the world right from the get go, somehow. Which, again, doesn't seem very plausible, does it?

Yeah I don't see much value to your assumption, if you won't explain it. Thanks for chatting.

Hardly the point, is it? Israel gets the majority of its weapons from the US, and would make for any trade sanctions with the US, as well. Now you could call for the US to be sanctioned too, of course. And honestly, it should be, both for its past behavior and its current actions, but that's honestly not a viable option till the dollar is shitcanned as the global currency. Which, if I understand my finance friends, is genuinely possible this decade, so we'll have to wait and see.

My issue with evolutionary psych was less about those appallingly stupid hypothesis about rape, etc, and more that evolution acts on genes, and that behavior and psychology are often driven (so far as we've been able to show) by complex gene networks which are in turn very susceptible to developmental environment, which leads for a fairly wide spread of variance in genetics that can underlie seemingly similar behavior/psychology, which makes it hard to come up with testable hypothesis for how such networks would be selected for in evolution. Which isn't to say it's impossible, or hasn't been done, it's just the good examples I've seen rarely try to be overly specific in terms of behaviours.

I'd respond to this, but I think it would be more productive for us to start with you defining what evolutionary psychology is, as far as you're concerned. Because you seem to think it's something else from what I understand it to be, which is that evolutionary pressures select for specific psychological/behavioral traits and tendencies, and this has explanatory power for a significant portion of human psychology and behaviour. You seem to be saying evolutionary psychology=psychology is rooted in and shaped by physiology. The right side of that equation isn't in doubt, but also isn't evolutionary psych. It's actually a very scientific hypothesize that "life doesn't have to be carbon based" because it's dubious to call single observation inferences as absolute truth, and certainly not very scientific. Now, if you want to couch this as "long carbon chain molecules are more stable than long chain silicon molecules, so silicon based life will have different energetics", that comes closer to a scientific hypothesis that is falsiable, as a prediction would be "we'd find more carbon based life that silicon based life, statistically". What you're giving me, though, is "correlation=causation", and "if you haven't seen it before, be more certain it is impossible". Neither of which make sense. I think maybe it would be productive if you understand what hypothesis and falsifiability mean, before we discuss your wonderful ideas on levitation.

I'd like to not have words put in my mouth and conflated with someone else's points. Bad enough to have that in one thread, does this need to spread here now? I explicitly said people shouldn't vote in multiple primaries, because it expects "good/sensible" behavior from the electorate. My proposed solution was to eliminate first past the post elections, in primaries and the general election, which, as others have pointed out, has been tried in this country, so it isn't 0% probable, and even if it was, would still be worth discussing.

The alternative of open primaries where folks get to vote for candidates from both parties is so very high probability?? None of this discussion has much chance of happening. I thought that was rather obvious to everyone. The likeliest thing, right now, is a Trump second term. What we're doing is wishing.

Well, if you're going to build your system on the assumption that people will do what is better, you'll deserve what you get. I think America would be best served by switching from a first past the post election system, more than anything else. Whether in primaries or the general, if you have to keep seeking votes till 50% have really said "you're better than whatever remains of the competition", that does a lot of the heavy lifting of keeping away extremists of any kind.

Certainly some are, but many aren't simply because we don't have any proof of the evolution of psychology. There's no fossilized psychology, we need to infer it from physical evidence, and that physical evidence tends to be sparse, and the risk that our inferences are overfit to those sparse data points is very high. Well, we were discussing alien civilizations, so I wouldn't say these aren't untestable by nature, just currently untestable, and contingent on contact with other alien species. As a comparable analogy, you can use similar logic to yours to claim all life in the universe must be carbon based. And that language and religion can only occur in bipedal species, since all humans are bipedal. Do you believe these to be true?

Thanks. There's a lot of bad evo psych, but there's good stuff out, as well. It's a question of what evidence there is. Hardly all of it is. A lot of evolutionary psychology is plausible sounding hypothesis that's not testable. The specific idea here is that awe is an emotion that evolved as a result of having to deal with authority. That seems a fairly thin hypothesis to me. The shape of our religions certainly is driven by our social organisation, and also language, but neither is necessary for religiosity to evolve.

Ahh. That makes more sense, lol.

Yeah no. We've been discussing Likud's 1977 charter, which you have distracted from by bringing up the irrelevant point that Netanyahu wasn't PM then, and then saying it was established in 1987, not 1977.

Huh? That reply wasn't directed at you. I was defending what you had said, that Likud's charter was older than Hamas, and showing that Lord Tywin was wrong when he said Likud was established much later.

Let me Google this for you. I asked Google "When was the Likud party founded?" Answer: Wikipedia also confirms this, as does Brittanica, as does this link from Likud's own website: https://www.likud.org.il/en/about-the-likud/history-of-the-movement I suppose the internet could be wrong, but you're gonna have to prove that before you hurl further insults at other's factuality.