GENIUS FORUMS

Trump is able to use this splintering to push people's buttons, to spin them big-sounding dreams, to nod and wink conspiratorially at specific groups (such as the white supremacists), and to wriggle out of being pinned down for anything he has said in the past. This is all second-nature to him, of ...

jupiviv wrote:You're obsessing over a non-issue so you can prove that we are votaries of Trump, and thus justify your desire to solder liberal politics onto wisdom.

What's wrong with liberal policies? Do you dislike freedom?

Just a repeat of this earlier quote of Prof. Lessig, as it captures better what I was trying to say initially, where in hindsight, the choice of the word "genius" at the Genius Forum was not wise, considering all the obvious connotations. Then again, I do assume basic comprehension abilit...

So this is what it has come down to: “Everyone's perspective is equally valid”. “Everyone is unique and special”. “We are all geniuses”. That's not what Weininger is arguing. That’s right. It was you, Diebert, and jupiviv who were doing the arguing. For some strange reason, all three of you suddenl...

Frankly, Trump has turned out to be much worse than I had anticipated and I figured he'd be pretty bad. For me, it’s all unfolding exactly as I expected. I looked into his soul last August and saw immediately that Trump as president would be a disaster on every level. It’s all so very predictable. ...

Repeatedly saying that people are "insane" because they think Trump is superior to Clinton (and the SJWs) is pointless, because those people will in turn think that you are insane for having such thoughts. They see things which you do not see (whether it be a "streaker" or whate...

encode_decode wrote:What causes forever?

Memory, abstraction, a sense of time, the delusion that things can objectively existence, etc.

One becomes more attuned to the formlessness and intangibility of everything. One begins to see more and more clearly that nothing really exists. Nothing really exists? Hm, not quite on the money but close. True, it does not describe the situation precisely. But it can rustle up a sense of how free...

1. If the universe did not have a beginning, then the past would consist in an infinite temporal sequence of events. 2. An infinite temporal sequence of past events would be actually and not merely potentially infinite. 3. It is impossible for a sequence formed by successive addition to be actually...

Physical Creation Consider the birth of a human being, for example. the parents would constitute the main "cause" of the child, while space would merely be a "background condition". The latter would be relegated to its lowly status because, although it is necessary for the child...

Glostik91 wrote:How can a human mind speak on the wisdom of the infinite?

How can it not?

It’s fair enough to focus on cause and effect because it is fundamentally the method by which we come to an understanding of anything. However causality is not the whole enchilada here. While experiencing a thing, one doesn’t actually experience causality. Causality isn’t an experience; it is the f...

We will soon have the ability to design whatever kind of human being we want. No we won't. Seriously, this is tantamount to saying "the crocodile god from the river bank will give us rain next year". The crocodile god is well on his way. We already have a very good understanding of large ...

Pam Seeback wrote: Quote: David: The Buddhas do not shun samsara, as it is Nirvana. On manifesting themselves in the world, they seize dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry. - Huang Po 1. If samsara is nirvana, there can be no relating the ...

Why have the whites turned their back on their heritage and reduced themselves to aping the Muslims and the blacks? This is a great question. I think it has to do with the way the media has for the past fifty years set out to emasculate and demoralize white men, while portraying women as wise and a...

You know, underneath the jocularity, I am detecting some authoritarian impulses..... . . . . Even in a classically 'democratic' society it was established as a given that only a well-ordered man would be able to function in democracy. So, the ordering of men was predicated as the base for construct...

Space - this could be fun. So in my universe of ones - totality is already there - the universe contains everything necessary to create a total of x amount of ones; x being a very large number. Now lets say it is not a universe of ones but instead a universe of any numbers. A certain amount of ones...

Speaking of mathematical examples - I have used this example before elsewhere in life, when chatting with people on and off the internet - it is not necessarily causal the way I have written it but it could possibly be picked apart to make it causal in nature. I imagine the number one - lots of one...

David: The Buddhas do not shun samsara, as it is Nirvana. On manifesting themselves in the world, they seize dung-shovels to rid themselves of all such rubbish as books containing metaphysics and sophistry. - Huang Po 1. If samsara is nirvana, there can be no relating the two. That's akin to assert...

Hello everyone. I haven't been able to read through this entire thread yet (I plan to), but I'm just going to get right into it. All of this Anti Trump hysteria is absurd. With all due respect to David, he sounds like an old cat lady who spends too much time reading the Huffington Post and Salon. F...

Is enlightened consciousness the same as ordinary consciousness? Or is it different? Do you know the answer to that? Koans - the genuine ones at least - are meant to be deductions that reveal the extremity of logic. That is certainly the established view of modern Buddhism, but it is wrong. Koans a...

The whole purpose of spiritual life, and intellectual-spiritual life, and moral and ethical life certainly, is to recover the primal connection and then to work out, one by one, the rules by which we shall live. The whole purpose of a reform movement --- and this is what GF is, in essence (or was) ...

that the concept of money is an effective way to enable business transactions, that a police force is needed to help prevent crime... Are we going to dismiss all these views simply because they are "established"? The effectiveness is relative, most of the examples you mentioned weren't ba...

Your spirited defense of 'personal freedom', as I see it, reveals that you fail to grasp that 'personal freedom' is a sort of code for licence. And it is this licence that is, essentially, at the root of hyperliberalism. It does not lead to freedom and responsibility, but rather to enslavement to a...

There is nothing wise about taking a loaded gun from a toddler? Nothing particularly or inherently . But perhaps we're making too much out of this. Eating or distributing poison doesn't make sense but I'd not call someone who avoids poison and keeps himself or others alive that way a sage. The reas...