Karl

If you cast your mind back, I petitioned to specifically open up the debate you began regarding the Jewish involvement in the Bolshevic revolution. It must be said that Jews aren't Angels, but neither are any other groups that are playing in the political power stakes. None of that is new, we covered it. Is it your intention to continually mention the Jewish involvement in that revolution, to single out that one group in every post ? You have still managed to avoid my challenge to you. What is it you want to achieve ?

@walker Reminded me of getting on the Chinese mono-rail and as the speed ramped up and the buffeting began, in my head I heard the words "fuck, this is built by the Chinese Government".

It's an enormous can of worms that historians have been throwing themselves at for 100 years. Finding truth in one tiny detail in a painting doesn't reveal anything about the picture. Churchill made it clear "I fear history will judge me badly which is why I will write it" Both wars were unnecessary, the Bolshevik revolutions were unnecessary, the Maoist revolutions were unnecessary. In the vast scale of murder and misery you want to bung the sins of the world on the Jews, beginning with disproving the holocaust appearing exactly as historians recorded it. When you start unraveling everything to find the truth, what exactly do you think you will discover ? Is it that Israel shouldn't have been created, or that much of Germany including the military were not anti-semetic. That lies were added on top of lies until the pile is hundreds of layers deep-so much so that the protagonists now believe their own lies. Nothing is quite what it seems in war. Don't you know that truth is its first casualty ? It's not an arbitary saying, it's that war deposed reason for the initiation of force.

Why don't you and Sionnach stop beating around the bush and be explicit, because at this point you are trolling to stir up your anti- semetic agenda. What exactly do you want done with Jews ? Let's see if you have any courage, or will you just shuffle back into your shell and say 'your just putting it out there for discussion ? That's as bad as those who jump on the SJW band waggon. If you don't want anything done, then please stop posting.

I don't usually use this acronym but OMG :-0 Read between the lines 'still in recession' and 'the country that has given them so much' substitute 'government' for 'country' and the tirade makes more sense. Kennedy used this "don't ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" an equivocation on the word country. In the first it refers to independence, in the second it refers to Government/ state.

Yep.

What do you mean by 'separate things' ? Can you first define 'duality' ? This being the thing you are arguing against, except by the strange use of a negative concept.

Done already :-)

I merely presented a definition Brian. If you want to challenge the definition, or present an alternative definition that's up to you. This is the concept as I understand it and as the dictionary defines it. It's not proof of anything other than defining the terms we are using. If I thought I was using it a corrupt way then I go to the dictionary first to see what is commonly regarded as the definition. If I was wide of the mark then I would have to rethink through the entire argument, to, in a sense, pick up the dropped stitch. I tried explaining this before, but you insist that I'm just here to batter heads and gain points. I don't gain anything by twisting rhetoric, all I will do in fact is to fuck up my own mind through evasion. I'm just as happy to be proven wrong as am to be proven right. Indeed I get quite a thrill and a laugh out of realising I had harboured a foggy definition, or floating abstraction. It's a sort of Easter egg hunt for me.

I don't prove negatives as it's an impossibility, I won't be proving there aren't fairies, God or a whole host of other non-existents. You think I'm wrong, produce the evidence that trees are fully conscious.

A tree isn't conscious. You been reading too many books about Ents. :-)

You haven't reached a conclusion. All you are saying here is "you can't know that, no one can know anything for certain" or "that maybe true for you, but not for me". Infact it is you who refuses to believe in absolutes, by the method of issuing an absolute that you can't know. This is simply an admission that you can't know anything and thus you disqualify yourself from the discussion. To begin an argument with the premise that nothing can be proven is to utter the absolute 'nothing can be proven' - I don't know if you can see what I'm saying by this ? It's just giving up Ralis, it's refusing to think, to say the problem is that we have a mind and are ignorant because we can think. That we have eyes, but are blinded by them.

Does a tree experience the wind ? Your individual cells do not experience anything. All experience is cognitive perception. In other words you are consciously aware of an effect, a feeling, a thought, a sensation. A cell has no cognitive faculty. The problem here is a lack of understanding of the meaning of experience. Words are used haphazardly for instance a writer might say a ship 'experienced a storm', but what we are really saying is that the people onboard the ship, or any people viewing the ship experienced the storm. Even here we are using complex concepts. A new born baby onboard the ship could not even yet even begin to understand what it experienced. A young child might only note the ships motion, noise, a feeling of sickness, falling over and the smell of vomit-none of these things can he yet put together as the concept of an experience of a storm. It's very important to understand the concept behind the words that are being used. As far as radiation and cells, we can only confirm by scientific measurement that there is an 'effect'. Here we have the nature of radiation interacting with the nature of cells which are seen to become cancerous. Cancer is another concept and at some point we might experience the pain, discomfort or illness of something we are told is cancer- up until then, unless we actually knew the issue, we could only point to the symptoms- which is exactly why the doctor asks us 'what are your symptoms' ? He is not asking our cells, he is asking our minds, he is asking us.

Wrong, but you made me laugh anyway.

Race is an artificiality created by one group to protect it from another. On a basic level it's tribalism. Two villages a mile apart convincing themselves that they have the right to attack the other village and take what they have not earned. In today's world this now applies to a wider array of groups.

Difficult to know if I did, or didn't, you're statement was ambiguous. I was making a general point that agreement/consensus is not proof. That we have to search for proof by careful use of logic and reason. Wisdom might be better thought of as a willingness to confront our beliefs and apply scrupulous reason in order to tease out our errors, or to confirm through proof. You often say 'question everything' but this is not wisdom, it's a mantra; thinking about something is not the same as doing it. We are always thinking-but the problem is that we are not always applying discrimination to our thoughts. This lack of discrimination is true of reading-we call ourselves literate because we can read the words, but we don't actually read in a way in which we review the message-as a test, if you read properly (not pure pulp fiction), then your book will be full of pencilled notes and highlighting, if not, then you are not reading, you are binging. It is irrelevant to me that someone agrees or does not agree. It only matters what I know and can prove to myself. Discussion is constructive because it opens my own awareness of concepts I may have inadvertently left floating. I might think I have proof, when I have lazily accepted a concept without completely grasping it. We shouldn't be here to confirm our bias, or gain false friendships by consensus, but to challenge ourselves to discover the truth as far as we can push ourselves to do so. Being wrong isn't a problem, it's refusing to think that is. Ralis said he disagreed. In effect he refused to continue the discussion. This is neither my loss, nor my gain, it is the equivalent of a bird that stops singing, or a motor lying unused and silent. Things come in to awareness, things go out of awareness.

Yes, it is, but it's also possible, but maybe Occam's razor applies here. Perhaps the 'vote rigging' narrative is part of something entirely different. It does not mean that there is a large group promoting the idea. Unless we understood the motive we are lost. It's nothing to do with misogyny, it's to do with a general distrust of the system that has lied and obfuscated for so long that those who aren't doing as well as their leaders tell them, are no longer engaged. The way to bring them back to the fold is to give them the illusion of a dragon and the knight which will kill it. Election rigging is just dragon fire. It's a big old show designed to bring back the crowds. It needs a goody and a baddy. Perhaps, initially at least, the idea was to cast Trimp as the baddy, but it turns out the baddy is well liked-the only real suprise in this kind of narrative. It isn't the elections that are rigged, the point is that it's all a big con, it's all rigged. If the elite can make the audience take 'rigging' seriously, the crowd gasps at the wicked 'doings' and the emotional connection gets notched up. The worst thing for the elites is not Trump being elected, it's that no one has any interest in their system, or their messages. An apathetic electorate has a smouldering kind of anger which is dangerous if it isn't routed as the French Revolution aptly demonstrated. Can't beat those circuses for bringing the serfs out of their hovels. "Are you not entertained?"

It's just another form of value which is why it is rational. We do it because it makes us feel happy and happiness is the moral purpose of life. As our own lives are the ultimate measure against which we judge all values, with happiness our moral purpose, production our noblest activity and reason as our only absolute, then by helping others, we reinforce our own values/ethics/philosophy. It is akin to catching ourselves in the mirror on a particularly good day :-)

Or maybe Trump is just taking an acting role.

It's possible to form compartments in which the operators are unaware they are even actors. They can be fed false stories which ends up as mis-direction. Not saying it's happening here, but neither should it be excluded. Even the 'vote rigging' maybe mis-direction. That's the nature of these things. Eventually you don't know what is fact, nor fiction and therefore stop trying to figure it out, or go mad trying. The point of it is to get you to the polling booths and get you to endorse the system. Who gets voted in doesn't count, only the fact that you voted. Monkey took the peanut, everything nominal.

Not agree, true knowledge is that which we can prove to our own satisfaction. Consciousness isn't as indestructible as we portray it. It can shrink and atrophy. All we need do is to refuse to think, or to evade. The danger isn't as obvious as the physical, but it is far worse. Our minds are our only tool of survival, they are are only means of production and our happiness is dependent on us knowing that.

I had no doubts that you wouldn't.

The key word here is 'stability'. The work is to cling to the mediocre, because the mediocre aren't ambitious, they won't object, nor question. A little bit of pressure applied through fear mongering is enough to keep the hens in their battery cages. Give them the illusion of freedom and then steal their eggs for lunch. Instability is a threat to the elite, they can't even admit that they don't have control, they have deluded themselves for years. One day that illusion of control will evaporate and the wheel they had long thought were steering the car with, will turn out to be a kids plastic toy. It will be worse for them because they have maintained the belief for a long time, but the rest of the country have, by degrees seen their lives going down the pan and no longer believe in their omniscience. It's really just the beginning. One big jolt is enough to begin a fire. Funnily enough, I suspect, like Brexit, Trump might delay things going nasty. However, neither Trump, nor Brexit can solve the current financial and structural mess of either country. The fuse is definitely lit.

'I' is implied in 'experience' and conscious awareness is the corollary of both. If there was no identity then there would be no residue. You would simply not have remembered the experience. As you clearly have remembered, then it was you (Ralis) that had to have had that experience. The reason it appears as if there was no identity is because you switched off your mind. Don't you find this when engrossed in some kinds of entertainment, or driving a car ? sometimes you just trip out, there is no one there, but the film ends and the link begins to break. We can feel this happening as if we woke from a light sleep-which is exactly what it is. When the state is broken we suddenly become aware of the lights, audience, the stiffness of our legs, or the dryness of our eyes. We know we watched the film and drove the car, but we seemed absent from the scene.

Couldn't agree more. :-) Moores opinion is confusing.