I posted this in the retard thread but later realized that thread has been shifted to rant house. So, it though that i should post this again in the main forum so all posters can read it.
with love,
sanjay
First realize that the word “retard”, from “retarded” means “slowed down”, note that it is past tense. They were not born that way, but affected after birth such as to slow their ability to learn and react thoughtfully. It became very common in the USA after WW2 (we need not go into why just yet). Psychologists during the 1960’s discouraged parents and society from letting the children know that they were retarded, so as to hide both the social effects and those who caused it all. That led to many malignant after effects, one of which is that now as adults, these people genuinely believe themselves to be the smart people and thus have no reason to listen to others; “My opinion is just as good as anyone else’s” - further slowing any learning.
You have presented the argument that it is the “ill mannered” who are the problem, not the retarded. The question is whether there are ill mannered (to the degree of concern here) who are not the retarded.
How does one remain ill mannered and not be a slow learner?
Of course if one were to remove all of the slow learners, who would we have left to talk to? 
Ecmandu and Bigus could keep the disks of this server spinning for decades. And like daytime TV serials, you can miss a week or a month, come back, and not even notice any change. Remove those who can never learn how to converse and come to agreement, and what do you have left? What would you do without sexual stratification and conflicting goods?
Without learning there can be no resolve. But who here is actually learning versus preaching their own story? I believe this. You believe that. When does that ever change on the internet? In the real world, such things can be resolved. But on the internet learning and resolving issues are very, very retarded.
…and that seems to apply to all of the forums, changing merely in nuance degrees.
I liked the what was implicit in this.
What have you learned here, recently, James?
To depend on people on the internet to say that response when given the slightest opportunity. 
You have commented on RM:AO. But have you ever actually learned anything about it? Noooo…
That is “ill mannered”, is it not? 
James doesn’t learn shit. Everything is affectance and that’s all there is to it. He already knows everything. Case closed.
Like you should talk.
Again, more of the same.
Let’s not introduce any political correctness censorship please.
Um. That was a straight question on my part, not a negative question. I was glad to hear the implicit message that you learn things here. I had not got that impression. Then I thought, well, I could see someone getting that same impression from me. I do mention sometimes what I have learned, but this is usually in longer posts. Most recently I learned some things through interacting with Iambiguous. How certain beliefs I have actually are based on certain ‘animist’ epistemological ideas. IOW in trying to understand what I considered problematic (not simply incorrect) about some of his implicit ideas, I had to see what my own ideas are and lay them out. I make no claims to how well I did this and certainly not about whether you would or would not agree. From your thread on analytical minds, I found some limitations in my own mind. That there is a kind of shortcutting I do and which you are less likely to do. You want to know every step. I only want this on occasion. This makes it much more likely that you can lay out a whole system. I am not conceding yours is the better mind, but I became more clear about a weakness that in general I do not see you share. I can see how the different ways we post here may mean it is less easy to see shortcuts in your thinking, but I nevertheless consider it likely that you move with greater care, step by step, as a general rule than me. This led me to mull over my own choices and what I am doing, what advantages and disadvantages my approach here and in general leads to.
I learn all the time here, James, but it can often take a number of probes over quite a bit of time until I get at something I can directly appreciate. Often I am learning about where other minds seem to sidestep, in a sense like I can find my own mind sidestep and jump in meditation. In my first forays into the internet years ago I was shocked that people could actually type out those sorts of jumps and not notice them - it is another matter when the mind is unrecorded doing this in thinking or introspection alone. Now I am used to this phenomenon, though still often amazed in the specfic situation.
So, again, James. I was not saying, at all that you are not learning. I assumed, given the way it was implicit in your post that you do learn and that you value this. The way you post, I have gotten the impression you were basically finished and complete, in your own estimation, and as then, as said, thought immediately how my own way of posting could lead others to think I have the same self-sense.
So what have you learned recently here? Specifically. Perhaps even a link to a post where this happened and your sense of something changed.
I think the kinds of things that most of us learn on the internet forums revolves around what to expect from other people on the forums (which isn’t really a good measure of the populous in general). And actually that is exactly what I first came here to do - test my theories and thoughts against the crazies.
Dr. Doolittle … talks to the animals. But where did he learn that if not through experience? Zoot or Smears would make a better Dr. Doolittle than I, but I’m sure everyone here has learned a little more of what to expect from this kind of crowd and how to say things to aim a little more toward their intention. Although it does appear that some still just can’t see themselves and realize what is going to happen as soon as they say what is first on their mind.
Mostly people are just too tangled up in their masks.
On rare occasion, I have picked up actual technical knowledge from arguments here (to call them “debates” is a bit overly generous). For example in that year along argument with Eugene, although my intent was, as I said, to learn what to say to people like that, I was pleased that phyllo was desperately trying to show me up in a more meaningful way. While I was explaining to Eugene how I deal with infinities, phyllo jumped in to mention “Hyperreal numbers”. The theory of numbers was the ONLY math course that I never took in college thus I had never heard that term. I looked it up and found, sure enough, there is what I was trying to explain to Eugene. And then when I told Eugene that it was those hyperreal numbers and gave him the link, he declared that such was “nonstandard math” and thus unimportant and not to be accepted. And also phyllo jumped back in to claim, “You never heard of hyperreal until I told you!!”. I explained that I didn’t know they were calling it that. I was just doing what made logical sense … well … except to Eugene. So I learned that back in circa 1948 Edward Hewitt proved to the math world that sure enough, one can add one infinity to another or even multiply them and make sense of it.
In another ranting, raving, spew thread our beloved “HatingMeIsEasier” (or some such name) espoused, along with the greatness of his genius that there were 72 moons around Jupiter. I asked where he got that number because the last time I had checked it was much lower than that. After a very long rant about how absolutely stupid I was, I found that during the last 10 years or so, they have been naming just about everything that floats in space around anything a “moon”. Well so okay. He went on ranting but I learned that tidbit (not that I will ever need to know such).
Also I have learn just how much confusion concerning quantum physics has invaded the minds of the populous … and why - way, way, way too much.
But mostly what I have gotten from this forum is in the field of psychology … what is really motivating these kind of people to what degree and direction, why, and what could or couldn’t be done about it (that is the really tricky part). As is well documented, explaining anything to them in terms of logic does very little, although not a total waste. But I was already familiar with how to merely pathos persuade and not interested in going there. They say to not cast pearls before swine, but sometimes, ya just gotta give’m the chance.
James, don’t you go insulting the swine around here. They might get offended.
For very many people, mirrors are very insulting. I know that I have to squint a little when I look into one.
:-"
Thank you for taking the question seriously. Good to know.
I have certainly gotten stray facts from people. I have also learned a lot over time from conservatives. This has been in conjunction with my own getting at what I really experience and the roots of my own thinking and feeling. IOW stripping away conditioning you could say on my own. But in interaction with conservatives - with quite a range of types, you, Uccisore, portions of Satyrs ideas, even some of they young turkeys that have migrated here recently - I was pressed into considering the bases for ideas I had, some of which I no longer have. For example, I really enjoyed Uccisore’s, well, if the practice idea has been around a long time it should be the default until proven faulty arguement. Embracing what gets called a fallacy. I do not take that on now as a justification or at least not in general, but it was a new angle for me and he has used it well to fend off certain attackes. You could say that politically I have learned a much broader skepticism, especially when it comes to the solutions that get presented in the mainstream. I am not a conservative now. I have never been a liberal, more radical. But I now fit in in almost no political context. I would outrage nearly everyone, every category. And much as I can enjoy a gadfly role, there is an unpleasantness to this, at least as I moved toward it, less so now.
I agree about the psychology. I have also been fascinated to probe and reprobe and reclarity in relation to people with other beliefs and this has taught me a lot about my own unfounded optimism. This can be self-congratulatory. Oh, I am so smart and deep seeing and wow how impervious they are. But actually that is not the experience for the most part.
There are two main parts to this: 1) I see my own failings to face up to the situation I or we are in, where people are like this. 2) I often find that when I finally articulate myself well, it is something I need to here. The situation is not me with the clean right brain and the other with the messed up brain, but rather that I am complex in not positive ways. There are parts of me that still believe things the core of me does not. Or I feel guilt or shame for believing something or noticing something and in writing to the other, the guilt or shame or confusion dissipates to some degree, generally in small steps.
I can talk about what I communicate here about with like-minded IRL, with people I have a great deal of trust with. And that is good and positive, but this can gloss over the ways I am not sure or my mind is sloppy since the discussions may engage in shorthand and with good reason. So here, in safety, I can explore fully other people and deal with the reflections as well as dealing with them as others.
Anyway. Just wanted to explore the learning aspect a little more and see what you did.
You have come off, to me, as kind of finished. I know it, nothing more for me, when will people get it. Period. So when you implied the situation was not that simple, I jumped on it. Because it helps and changes my impression. And by the way, it is not like I sat and thought ‘Oh, James thinks he has nothing to learn.’ But the unformulated conclusion affected me. Now it is not the conclusion and I like that.
It is rare in discussion forums to have metacomments. I think it adds a lot with the right partners.
Allow me please to put my conflict with James in perspective by yanking a recent post of mine from the “psychology and mind” forum and inserting it here:
[b][i]As I have patiently explained time and time again, my friend, I choose the abortion issue because…
1] it is a moral/political conflict we are all familiar with
2] it is an issue that literally revolves around life and death
3] it is the issue that prompted me [over time] to abandon my own predilection for the “objectivist mind”
But also, time and again, I ask the moral/political objectivists – those who insist their own value judgments reflect the most or the only rational manner in which approach these conflicts – to choose their own issue. Then “out in the world” we can discuss the extent to which using the tools of philosophy one is able to encompass an argument such that they have demonstrated it is the moral obligation of all rational men and women to behave in one manner rather than another.
Now, you tell me, James: When have you ever done this? When has ecmandu ever done so?
And when/where/how have you managed to tie together RM/AO and the Real God so as to encompass them in an issue like abortion? Aside from merely insisting that your argument is logical because you insist in turn that your own definitions must be the starting point for judging it?
As for dasein, here is the manner in which I situate it out in the world of conflicting human behaviors: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Now, how is this not applicable to you pertaining to your own moral/political values expressed here in the manner in which I construe a political prejudice?
Or, as I noted for Moreno on another thread:
I use the term dasein because I was struck by Heidegger’s conjecture regarding “thrownness”. We are each and everyone of us “thrown” adventitiously into a particular world at birth – historically, culturally, experientially. Being “here” and not “there”, being “now” and not “before” or “later”.
Thus: to what extent is that relevant or irrelevant relating to the manner in which we come to acquire a particular identity, a particular moral and political narrative?
What [using the tools of philosophy] can be determined as [essentially] true here for all of us objectively and what becomes considerably more intertwined [existentially] in a set of personal opinions/prejudices. [/i][/b]
Now folks like James [and mr reasonable] can explain to us just how far removed this point of view is from “serious philosophy”.
When it comes to the abstracts of natural philosophy, you are right. My RM:AO project very seriously payed off. And after going through all of the physics that I already knew, the computer emulation results, a few years of goading critics into challenges, and all of the pictures and explanations concerning every tiny refined detail, there just simply isn’t any room for the slightest doubt that RM:AO is the answer to natural philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics. That book can close.
But there is something that I actually share with Bigus and that is the thought that real life isn’t about the abstract ideals and designs (“up there” as he would say). Real life (the dasein “down here”) is actually about experiencing what is current in one’s life and applying whatever abstract notions might help out. But us analytical, troubleshooting types like to make sure that the train is on the right track before we steam up the engine. Think BEFORE acting … I know it is highly uncommon, but still… can’t beat it.
So the thought that I have ALL of this crap finally resolved doesn’t bring me to feel that nothing is left, merely that nothing is left to think so deeply about. Now I know what it is about. I know where it came from and to where it is going. I know what to love and what to hate. What I know now, I should have been taught when I was 8 years old … as should have everyone else for the past 5000 years. Life is about using that basic understanding, not about trying to find it. It is like mathematics. A good engineer is not one who is still trying to figure out mathematics. Learn the abstracts, then spend your life using them with ongoing experiences. And that is what the SAM Coops are about … not finding the good, but causing it.
So now I am ready to start actually living.
… except for the obvious … 
A whole thread about retards and nobody is considerate enough to name drop me. Everyone here is so self centered, you should start thinking about others for a change.
Turd,
Read the OP carefully. This thread is not about retards. I dismissed them from the very beginning. They do not deserve that much importance as you are thinking.
This thread is about those who have been crossed retardness but have not achieved some wisdom yet, though they tend to think other way around, and how they should be handled by the moderators.
In which category do you fit, according to yourself?
Please stay strictly on the topic while answering.
With love,
Sanjay
Well, that confirms the sense I had that you considered yourself finished.
Ah, just realized you mean Iambiguous. A few times you mention people’s names, like say, Eugene, and I have wondered if you know all the personal nicknames of people here. Or you are referring to people I have never encountered.
Though as I have said to Iamb, I find him to be nearly entirely ‘up there’. For him down here is discussion John and Mary’ decision. And learning by experience, other than the experience of arguing via abstractions, is not on the table for him. He does not come across, as you have, as considering himself finished, until you interact with him. Then the finished and impervious become clear or at least, seem clear. I do not know what shifts are taking place behind the mask of the internet. But in practical terms as Iambiguous. I am not saying this merely to trash him, but to note the tricks in disentangling up there and down here. Down here will often be lived through the filters up there, including of course, what up there tells you you cannot know and does not exist. The blind spot in our vision is not interesting because of what we miss most of the time in that patch, but rather the filling in the mind does so we do not see the blind spot. In fact the whole field of vision is in part created as a guess. (I know you know this. I follow lines in my communication.) To Iamb both you and I foolishly ignore Occams’ Razor. We add entities needlessly. You have a fully worked out metaphysics and thus view physics form a completed system, and critique physics from that vantage. I also have a metaphyics, but I am not interested in organizing it in the way you have and then moving towards physics from it. I know there are entities and phenomena that current scientific consensus rules out because they sit uneasily - they think at least - with their models. For me this is empirically based, though I have come critically at this consensus via the philosophy of language - delaing with their metaphors and models - which they tend not to be savvy about, and then also via epistemology. But for me an issue like say, what the results of the double split experiments mean, is not so important, though I like aiming back at mainstream consensus their own consensus opinions which often do not fit with current models and how they rule things out. I am scattershot here, where you are precise and step by step. I have focused more on honing intuition and clearing brainwashing.
That old experiment where you hypnotize someone and tell them there is no chair in the room. This creates a negative hallucination. They will say there is no chair. They would pass a lie detector while saying there is not chair. But they will avoid walking into it. When asked they will justify why they changed direction. Which is a lovely metaphor or really example of how the minds works. Occam, who considered God the only entity that could not be questioned or be superfluous, has been used maliciously as if there are only positive hallucinations. As if dasein could not suppress as well as interpret. I find this the hardest thing for most people to imagine, their possible negative hallucinations. Well, that and getting people to see the full range of consequences of the beliefs they keep insisting they have, but actually only have compartmentalized from their other contradictory beliefs.
You can build a self top down or bottom up of via a combination. I used the former to give direction to the latter and give permission to the latter. You seem to have worked top down. These things make our approaches quite different.
But either way one must have courage. Not the running up the hill to take the machine gun nest courage, which may well be something else other than courage anyway.
Had to look up SAM Coops. I am taking this as literal. A group of people, re social, but the anentropic I am unsure of. I am assuming it is not that the group is literally non-entropic, or at least, this is not all they are. Oddly when I look at the phrase Social Anentropic Molecularism, it comes off as sounding rather Deleuzian, but I find it hard to believe you would have much in common with Deleuze. I can see the term in a number of posts here and have looked through a number of these. I can interpret it as what for most would be a kind of science fictiony term or as a state of consciousness. Presumably it is a balance point, but from there I am not sure. In any case I do not know what kind of ‘actually living’ which you mention below, this would lead to.
This is not a philosophical journal. It is not a collection of papers. It is not a set of formal debates. In fact the title of the forum contains an emotion.
It is not the I am precise philosophically forums. It is I love philosophy. That it’s title is centered on affect - not in the broad Jamesian sense of affect but emotions - is not coincidental to how the communication is carried out here. I doubt anyone actually thinks that formal philosophy includes insults.
AFter our long history as a species we have come to realize, at least some of us, that clear, seemingly logical, cooly presented ideas can lead to the deaths of millions. Calmly stated ideas, but people whose blood pressure stays at normal levels throughout speaking can, if believed, lead to patterns of self-hate and acceptance of tyranny.
I am sure there are posters who feel, if not always think, that when they insulted, they won a round. They might not say that an insult can replace a good argument, but the having just insulted quale gives them a state of satisfaction the functions as if that were the case.
And yes, this is a problem. At the same time, this is a meeting of persons, not merely the meeting of ideas. It is also a membrane where ideas meet organisms. Part of our reactions to the intrusion of ideas is emotional. Emotions are part of the cognitive immune system. Of course this does not mean that if idea X makes person B angry or scared, idea X must be wrong. Hardly. Most humans are confused, hyper or hypoallergic. So there are many ‘wrong’ but real reactions.
But to rule out the emotional reactions is a bad idea, I think.
It is an appealing idea to those who want to control and suppress their own emotions and whose skills are in the upper chakras and on the white side of those chakras.
It is a problem when emotional responses are conflated with arguments, but they have a place in interactions. There are many reasons for this. Even if the person in question is ‘wrong’ or wrong, their reaction is part of reality. Their emotional reaction. Too often the idea men have come and pushed changed and changed the surface, and never dealt with the deeper issues locked in the unconscious or based on intuition. In fact the idea men often have known much less than they realize and the people they considered irrational understood, but on a more intuitive level, the problems that would arise from accepting the seemingly utterly rational arguments. There are other reasons, but it would take more effort than I want to make now to present them.
Insults come out of that. That does not mean that any particular instance of an insult is a good thing, but I do not want the restriction. It is good however to point out when an insult or outbursts is being presented as an argument.
But then from the other side. So much hatred can be containing in cool impersonal language and via implication. And it is very hard to show to the colder minds what they are actually doing here.
The outburst need not be seen as a logical step in an argument, but a necessary expression in a process for the person expressing it. And by the way, that his not a condescending analysis. That person may well be correct. The logical or ‘logical’ ideas coming at them may well contain real violence and hatred of life, but the demonstration of this is, at this moment, or even longer term, impossible to do for the person prsenting those logical or seemingly logical ideas. The outburst is a placemaker. Like an objection that is noted in the soul of the person making the outburst.
I would not want a rule to remove them.
I tend to agree, though I am likely to consider a much broader set of valid intents.
Two ‘northerners’ who we know through their writing, where they did not throw hissy fits. Who knows how they would have behaved meeting each other or us in a social setting or on the internet. So two issues. A specific cultural approach being presented as superior, but without justification, based on not necessarily relevent evidence, their writings. But also as I argued above, we have seen how the calm proliferation of ideas can cause real world deaths and also the diminishment of life (though guilt - ideas of Original Sin, say or judgments of sexuality by cooler less passionate minds who need control - or instilled self-hatred, or the implicit denials of selfhood found in many religions and in collectivized philosophies like various communisms or the shame and self-hatred that is created by calmly presented ideas about capitalism). Sometimes calm ideas have a great deal of hate or condescension in them and an outburst is natural and healthy response. To presume that the other person would see their own hatred if presented with some, necessarily incredibly long presentation to have a chance, is not grounded in reality. To call a Monsanto PR person an apologist for death, however calmly he was presenting the ‘research findings’ is not somethign I want to rule out, even here in a philosophy forum. Bystanders may also find themselves woken up out of the trance the ‘logical’ spell has them in. This does not mean that if someone is insulted we should assume they are wrong or bad. It does mean that sometimes an outburst breaks the spell, says no, forms a wall. To go on in those situations ONLY arguing calmly and logially is dishonest, because to do so implies that it is one kind of interaction when really it is another kind of interaction.
I think this is speculative at best. Adn their distaste at the way people move today - having freed their bodies from Puritanical restrictions - or any of a number of others things we have gotten used and this are fine - might well be rather fierce. But that is also speculative.
Sure, no one can rest easy these days. Those days are gone.
Exactly. 
Now put the person’s view of his own behavior as the chair.