Forum Philosophy Update

I don’t want Prismatic to feel ashamed. I want him to realize that by making those comments, he is not communicating effectively and that he is reducing the level of communication in general.

I don’t think I said it was clearly insulting, but now that you mention it, yeah it clearly is:

if you don’t think that falling off a ladder repeatedly will lead to increasing discomfort, then I think you should fall off a ladder repeatedly and get back to me about it.

Breaking it down, we have:

if you don’t think that falling off a ladder repeatedly will lead to increasing discomfort = If I’m that stupid

then I think you should fall off a ladder repeatedly = I should be punished for being stupid.

and get back to me about it = so he can gloat.

If I am that stupid, then I should get hurt because of my stupidity and display my crippled self before his ego.

I’d prefer he simply call me stupid than make such a drama out of it, which is far more insulting. How do you see it differently?

I’m not avoiding anything. What obligations of patrons?

Nothing here viewtopic.php?f=7&t=193363&start=25#p2693526

Here you said viewtopic.php?f=7&t=193363&start=25#p2693656

He now has bunch of obligations placed on him. At the same time, those who appear on the webcam, seem to have no obligations. They have a lot of new rights.

I said no new rights, but the same old rights of free speech.

Here you said viewtopic.php?f=7&t=193363&start=25#p2693786

So the pub owner gets added obligations but the patrons have no added obligations even if the owner has a clearly expressed policy on use of the webcam and the patrons have agreed to the policy. Is that your position?

And that is where we are now. What obligations would the patrons have because the pub owner decided to do something? If the pub owner makes a choice, the obligations are on him; not the patrons.

Your accusation that I’m avoiding addressing your point smells of malicious intent to discredit me. Slander - the action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person’s reputation. But it’s ok… I’m not going to make a big deal out of it; just saying.

I don’t want to say anything to offend you because I enjoy our conversations. I’m just asking that you not accuse me of immoral activity without evidence.

You see? This is how we handle things without moderators. I say “here is how you’re coming across” and you say “oh I didn’t mean it like that” and we go on. We come to a mutual understanding of each other’s issues and consequently make different choices in future interactions.

Yup

Why?

I told you the situation. Schiff and other invitees were arguing on CNBC’s video tape. It is precisely the same as you and I arguing on Carleas’ forum. Exactly the same. So it boils down to: Does Carleas have the right to prevent you from displaying your conversation with me on another medium? It’s a simple question.

Of course, to my knowledge, Schiff has never addressed his own censorship because, presumably, it would undermine his philosophy of sucking the capitalist dong.

What I meant was that I wish I could help in your effort to call others out, but I can’t keep up with my own postings.

You said here viewtopic.php?f=7&t=193363&start=25#p2693787

I have tried to keep the discussions at least a bit philosophical. But I’m tired of it.

So I said I wish I could help.

What are the negatives that you see?

Ok, but that’s teleological.

Because it would seem that if you believe in natural selection, then you would also believe in natural selection for communities. Yet you don’t seem to, which seems odd to me. Why believe it is not necessary to have a god to guide humanity while at the same time believing we need moderators to guide humanity?

A majority of human beings are dumb herd animals, only a wise or intelligent dictatorship can lead them. A benevolent philosophical sheep herder is needed.

I try not to rock the boat too much around here as people get spooked rather easily. Seen plenty of people get banned over the years here. I admit however that I’m not always on my best behavior where I’ve been trying to reign in on myself. I’ve been getting better I like to think compared to my younger years as an adolescent.

I don’t think that making someone feel shame is the right thing to do. I don’t think it’s how people ought to interact.

I don’t think that one has to be theist (or atheist) to see that a hockey game plays better, faster, smoother with referees. The players can concentrate on the game instead of worrying about and arguing about infractions.
If a player refuses to play by the rules, then he gets warned, penalized and ultimately ejected from the game. Those rules and their enforcement make the game itself possible.

This forum is a game of sorts with rules.

Guess that’s the way you see it.
I would brush it off.

“malicious”
“slander”
“accuse me of immoral activity”
:-k
Well, well, well.

Yeah, not impressive. Definitely not something that I want.

Except I would not say “oh I didn’t mean it like that”. And we would not “go on”.

You told me your version of the story. You told me what you wanted me to hear about it.
To know what is actually going on, I would have to check the CNBC version and the YouTube version and the Schiff version. Then could make an intelligent evaluation.

How did the people come into being? Who was the herder before there were herders?

It seems you’re thinking that by some remarkable luck we’ve made it this far in our evolution, so we should immediately take the reigns or we’ll go off a cliff.

Let’s say, just for example, that you believe the white race is superior (whatever that means), so would you believe there was someone directing folks coming out of africa on which way to go in order to evolve into white people? Who was the herder? Even if you think they didn’t come from africa, they had to come from somewhere and who guided them?

Whatever it is that you think is good that needs the protection of a dictator begs the question of how it arrived in the first place without said dictator dictating how things should be. If you claim remarkable luck, then that remarkable luck has been remarkable for a remarkably long time because 1 million years ago we could have said it was all remarkable luck so far, so why shouldn’t the luck continue without a guide?

And nevermind that power corrupts. That’s another line of attack on the monarchical theory of the universe. As well as benevolence being an impossibility because in order to love you must hate that which threatens what you love, so no one can be absolutely benevolent.

Alan Watts on this:

[i]You see, you never really know in which direction progress lies. And this is today a fantastic problem for geneticists. The geneticists, you know, because they think they are within some degree of controlling the DNA and RNA code, believe that it is really possible, perhaps, to breed the kind of human beings that we ought to have. And they say, “Hooray!” But they think one moment and they think “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! But what kind of human being?” So they’re very worried.

And just a little while ago, a national committee of graduate students and geneticists had a meeting at the University of California, and they asked a group of psychologists, theologians, and philosophers to come and reason with them about this and give them some insight. And I was included. That means that they are really desperate. :slight_smile:

So I said, “I’ll tell you what, the only thing you can do is to be quite sure that you keep a vast variety of different kinds of human beings, because you never know what’s going to happen next. And therefore we need an enormous, shall I say, varied battery of different kinds of human intelligence and resources and abilities. So that there will always be some kind of person available for any emergency that might turn up.”

So you see, there’s a total fallacy in the idea of preaching to people. This is why I abandoned the ministries; I’ve often said, not because the church didn’t practice what it preached, but because it preached. Because you cannot tell people what sort of pattern of life they ought to have, because if they followed your advice, you might have a breed of monsters.[/i]

A plague of righteous people :laughing:

But I’m here to tell you that anytime you get a similar group of organisms together in one spot, they’re going to be wiped out. Nature wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to chow down on such a plentiful snack. If you have all pine trees, the pine beetle makes itself at home and leaves you with nothing. The more you try to dictate what is good, the more you expose yourself to the possibility of extinction for lack of variety.

How long have you been here? I thought you were new per the date on your thingy there.

Why do you feel that shaming is the wrong thing to do?

That’s a good observation that seems right at first, but the reason for referees is that there are only 2 teams, so we need a 3rd person for a judge. Communities have many independent “teams” and don’t require a referee to judge since any member can chime in with an opinion on a situation and act as a referee.

OK, then what were you doing with Prismatic where you talked about his psychology, where you referred to his posts as hilarious and did not explain how? The links above that is.
And it’s not about being a daddy, it is all about being a peer. To use the term ‘shaming’ is on the polemic side, but it will certainly be experienced as shaming by many if their patterns of behavior are pointed out to them and criticized. And referring to someone’s psychology and referring to their posts, for the gallery, as hilarious, is functionally shaming. You are pointing at them publically.

So you would brush off the insult or brush off the noninsult? Brushing it off implies you’ve determined it to be an insult or you wouldn’t have said you’d brush it off.

You forgot “smells” :wink:

You accuse me of not addressing your point when I’ve been wearing myself out addressing your points. Maybe it’s an honest mistake; I don’t know, but it smells malicious. That means it’s consistent with what a person who is looking for a way out via discreditation would do, but leaves open the possibility of an honest mistake. It’s hard to prove intent.

Why not? Would you prefer to be banned than scolded?

Why not? You accuse me of avoiding your question, I refute that with evidence but say it’s ok, let’s move on, then you say you don’t want to move on? Why would you do that? I’m friendly :animals-bunny:

Fine. Make it hypothetical then. Suppose you and I are having a conversation on Carleas’ forum; would you consider it right if Carleas forbid you from displaying that conversation on some other medium?

If you can’t answer that one, then I can make a pretty strong case that you actually are avoiding the question lol

Though the specific approach you took was more like shaming. You addressed third parties, you mocked. Look, maybe you reacted in ways in a specific interaction that you don’t stand behind in general. It’s not to catch you out. I do find it telling that even though I confused who you were, it still turned out you had reacted to Prismatic in a manner that, if he took it seriously, would like cause shame. These kinds of responses to not necessarily have to cause shame. A person might immediately get it, and just shift, not being attached to the way they were behaving. My goal would not be shame, but to be honest about it, it is likely that calling someone out on their behavior is shaming

People do not change easily for the most part. I don’t think the first step is to go general. It might be a simple: hey, when you insult me, I lose interest. Or, you are not responding to my points and this makes it less interesting to talk to you. But once a general pattern is present and gentle responses are having no effect, the other person needs motivation.

Here with Iambiguous you are really getting into a more general response - it is ad hom about motivations and presumably comes out of some generalized frustration. He may or may not feel shame when he reads this, but most people, when confronted with such a post, if they realized it was true, would feel shame.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=190026&p=2662397&hilit=iambiguous#p2662385

I found these posts all fairly quickly. I am not going to go digging to see if there are even better examples in response to Iambiguous, Prismatic or someone else. Perhaps you don’t support what you did in these posts. If so, I would suggest that certain people drove you to a point where you felt there were pernicious patterns to their behavior, enough to drive you to ad hom comments (not arguments) and point out these patterns. I think that is valid peer response. It is not being a Daddy, though that would not necessarily be wrong. It is an adult response to patterns of poor behavior. You may be right, you may be wrong, but that person has gotten strong feedback about their habits. If they keep getting it from peers, they need to take it seriously. Of course even consensus could be wrong, but it is good information to have about the community one is in. Perhaps these guys are just fine and we are off. Well, they might thrive in another community. And both Iambiguous and Prismatic, from what I have seen, are not the kind of people who get banned. Still, they can really bring down a forum, I think.

I think that I already answered but maybe I was not clear enough.

So:

I don’t think that I lose the right to use my part of the conversation unless I specifically sign it way. IOW, I can always use the statements that I made in the conversation if I exclude his statements. Admittedly, if I wanted to post it somewhere with his part edited out, it would look pretty silly.

If I signed away all my rights, then it’s my bad. I can’t use any part of the conversation. I should have read the agreement more closely. Honestly, I’m too lazy to read it again and check.

I also think there is an unwritten agreement in effect. If he asked me not to use the conversation, then I would not use it unless I thought that there was some serious issue of public welfare or a specific person’s welfare at stake. But maybe that’s just me.

That’s not going to make the game play better, faster, smoother … multiple “teams” making calls is only going to make it worse.

Thanks for the heads up.

I have reviewed those links and some other threads.

I think that some of my posts were purely statements of fact and ought not to be taken in any other way. Some were statements of fact which were not clear and could have been misinterpreted as something else.

I think that some of the posts were my attempts to manipulate, to accuse, to bully and to shame. I regret those. I do not condone that behavior. I brought down the level of the forum.

I need to be more on guard so that it doesn’t happen again. Think twice, post once.

There is hard division between ‘insult’ and ‘non-insult’ when it comes to words like “retard”.
It’s not clearly divided when dealing other statements like “fall off a ladder”. You place it into ‘insult’ and I put into ‘non-insult’. When faced with these different evaluations, my reaction is to “brush it off” as falling into a debatable, unclear, unsettled regions. You haven’t convinced me that it’s an insult and I haven’t convinced you that it’s not an insult. We’re not going to dwell on it, are we?

Given the example, I would prefer to be banned.

Evidence? You just accused me of all sorts of ‘extreme’ motivations and intentions. That’s stuff you can’t possibly know. I don’t consider that to be evidence.

WEll, I suppose I am glad you found it useful. For me we lost some useful communal feedback.

Just for the record, anyone here can respond to me in any manner they see fit. If someone feels I deserve to be ashamed of my contributions here, shame away.

Still, my point regarding that which is of interest to me philosophically – how ought one to live in the is/ought world? – is basically that feeling shame doesn’t really make much sense. Why? Because in recognizing that my views here are in turn [subjectively/subjunctively] just existential contraptions, I acknowledge right from the start that I once rejected them before and, given new experiences, relationships and access to information/knowledge, I may well reject them again.

Indeed, with respect to identity, value judgments and political economy, and given how grim, how bleak and how utterly cynical my frame of mind is here and now, a part of me would very much like to “think up” a way to jettison all that.

Then I too might engender the sort of “comfort and consolation” that I construe to be embodied in the objectivists among us. I have access to none of that here and now.

Given the moral and political interactions of mere mortals in a No God world, I honestly do believe “in my head” that “I” live in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that segues eventually into oblivion.

And if some are able to convince themselves that their own interactions with others revolve around an essentially meaningful world that segues eventually into one or another rendition of immortality and salvation then, hey, come in, who “wins” in the end here?

Me?!!!

Really, just out of curiosity, how might I manage to bring this particular forum down? The bulk of my contributions here revolve around those things that largely distract me from my “philosophy of life”. Mundane irony, song, film.

I think in part though I tend to discomfit the “serious philosophers” among us. And that is because my own philosophy of life revolves almost entirely around exposing the profound limitations of philosophy – at least with respect to that which I deem to be its most important function of all: probing the existential factors embedded in human social, political and economic interactions. The part where words meet worlds.

In my view, once Will Durant’s “epistemologists” among us get closer and closer to that, the more philosophy itself begins to seem less relevant to the actual interactions that we engage in from day to day.

They move on.

Or so it seems to me.

Well, you ask for help with your dilemma, but never take any advice. You keep repeating the same ideas, using the same words and examples. There is no evidence of any progress, or even movement is a particular direction, in the discussions.

“Moving on” seems logical and inevitable.

I do not wish to hijack this thread where I welcome your input of this conversation in the following threads where I will do my best to address all your points. Also, I’ve been on this forum under various guises and usernames since 2007.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=193832

What does it really mean to take someone’s advice with regard to the hole that I have dug myself into?

All I can do is to ask them to note the extent to which they are not down in the hole themselves.

And then to speculate as to the extent to which I might think or feel or behave in the same way.

Really, what else is there?

At least I’m not arguing that if they’re not down in the hole with me, they are wrong.

And they can always choose to stay exactly where they are: convinced that human interactions are not essentially meaningless and absurd in a No God world. Some even manage to conjure up one or another set of beliefs regarding immortality and salvation.

And, here, psychologically, something is almost always better than nothing.