There is a pandemic, a national lockdown and I'm away from my family so of course I'm a bit more nervous than usual. Not sure what in my posts you're interpreting as connotative of that. I'm doing fine though, hope you are too!Diebert van Rhijn wrote: ↑Mon Mar 23, 2020 9:31 amPossibly nothing more than a bad remake though ;-) And actually you sound a bit more nervous and overcompensating than usual.
No they don't "simply" mean abuse of office because that is an umbrella term for why impeachment happens. I don't think you even know what you're arguing for/against at this point.No, high crimes & misdemeanor simply means abuse of office. It's not part of the criminal law where crimes are legally defined and upheld by court..... because that is what gross misconduct effectively means in this and all such contexts. The Senate doesn't decide the veracity of the charges, it decides whether or not to pursue them.
The power to judge is shared. Congress determines what comprises Presidential criminality then charges, Senate tries.Impeachments work exactly like indictment under criminal law and the Senate acts like the judge or jury, to determine if abuse has taken place.
It didn't show there was no evidence. It showed there wasn't enough, according to the fact checker, to assert the bill's centrality in causing incarceration. Moreover, the fact checker cited opinions contradicting their own, indicating they admit plurality. That is not quite the same as refuting Hedges' claim. Even less is it an affirmation of the ad hoc semantic distinctions you have accused me of straddling.So you forgot that this was about Chris Hedges claiming that Biden was instrumental in the doubling of prison numbers and that I posed a well documented fact check showing convincingly that there was no evidence for that claim at all. And that's what you try to oppose for some reason!the significance of Biden's bill as a cause of mass incarceration is very much moot given you claimed it isn't a cause and the article did.
I'm not just talking about riots. Many actions that were illegal or extralegal were at various points of time catalysts or agents of change in laws or changes in the various factors that determine the nature of laws. Again, you have to explain why *actual* freedom of speech is *uniquely* reducible to what *you* claim is the abstract allowance of abuse contained within the idea of free speech, and which *you* claim informs *actual* free speech laws.That's just some obscure postulation. It's hardly any argument against my point that free speech is intricately bound to that, meaning that one is free to speak against such freedom. It's a paradoxical but essential feature in my view. If it's sustainable, that's another question. And what is "freedom"?[riots] are intricately bound with what "freedom" came to mean in various countries.
Meanwhile, I can refute your argument easily by pointing out that 1>>actual free speech laws, even in theory, do not unconditionally allow people to speak against them 2>>provisions for amendment or repealment are hardly unique to free speech laws, or derivative of them.
Socialised production guided by commonly held, genuinely universal values (ideally wisdom), which result from the synthesis of material reality and traumatic fragmented consciousness thereof. The basic structure is present in the vast majority of our species' history. The ideal form was approached to various extents by the Vedic, Buddhist, Cha'an, Confucian etc monastic movements, maybe one or two monotheistic variants of same. And likely several other unrecorded instances.The self is a lot like that, too. But do you have something to compare this all with apart from obscure or experimental theories?a decadent system of wanton consumption based on shifting the costs thereof to somewhere and someone else for ever and ever, then making stuff up to cover up that simple reality, unravels as I speak.
I was never after any "superpowers", just accurate understanding of big realities, things that bothered me (and why). QRS just happened to be the starting point. Don't get me wrong Dan, it was a good one all things considered! But it was unquestionably always a solo journey, even though I wasn't documenting every step or all of my suspicions about QRS' own output. It's unlikely *nobody* learned anything from me, just not the regular posters. There are probably some non-bot forum lurkers still around. Besides, I haven't really tried to teach anyone. My internet existence has mostly been interjecting in arguments/threads started by others 4 teh lulz and organising/fleshing out ideas.You wasted a lot of time figuring that out. And what would make that you? The same but worse because nobody even believed they learned something from your own simple, objective judgements. So on the conman-scale, you'd suck way harder. It's more likely that you're really young and angry that you didn't get the superpowers you were after, like all young men desire!It's a shame Genius forum, its founders and members (except me) were not what they claimed they were, people who value wisdom above all else. Instead they valued the *feeling* of being wise, of having access to special insights, of speaking harsh truths that shock and confuse people, of passing simple, objective judgments about things they can't fully and exhaustively understand after 3 minutes of deep meditation.
As for anger, well firstly you need to separate my flamboyant aggressive persona from actual arguments. That isn't so hard to do since I drop the persona and address points seriously, if valid, serious points are indeed being made instead of relentless intellectually lazy/comatose nonsense or just downright right-wing ambiguous "trolling" that I can counter-troll to my great mirth.
You are partly right, though. I do feel some anger towards QRS and this community, because I took comfort in the thought that some people somewhere shared my uncompromising full-spectrum skepticism driven by a longing for the real instead of tacky middle class pretensions of "rational skepticism". That view of QRS has eroded to ~0 since 2016-17, due to developments I have analysed elsewhere. That makes me feel bad, but I'm also not the same person I was 10 years ago. Engagement with QRS themselves or specifically QRS ideas stopped being central to my intellectual life long ago. There is also a sadness or regret that comes from ruthlessly attacking old friends and fellow travellers.
But people had to be forced to reveal what they really think, all of the hidden comfortable premisses making their thoughts arrange themselves a certain way needed to be smoked out. Doing that can get ugly, and it did. Judging by Dan's response, it still is. Perhaps too much so even for a forum about harsh truths. But the alternative would have been a forum full of people endlessly arguing around each other's pleasant daydreams and proxies of actual opinions - a nightmare as far as I'm concerned.
I know I've hurt feelings; if so, I'm sorry to whomever was hurt. It wasn't/isn't personal, people come here expecting certain strains of reactionary thought to be the norm and I was the only one successfully making sure they weren't, while also developing my thoughts. Wisdom can't be retrofitted into your existing opinions, or crafted to the specifics of your abstract notions about what "objective" and "neutral" opinions might be. It is a radical, chaotic, lifelong process. The only constant is your will to stay awake despite all barriers and temptations, which only you can uphold, for your own reasons. If anyone reading feels like talking with me about these things, they can pm me and I'll see what I can do. I have plenty of time for online conversations these days!
Declamations about irrational human activity bound to cause big problems in some vague future can end up in a lot of places other than genuine wisdom.Perhaps they are silent because they already talked for decades on various media? In 2009 the swine flu infected between 700 million - 1.4 billion and between 151,700-575,400 died globally. It might get worse this time but it has little to do with "wisdom", trying to save the economy or reform it.They are all silent, now, at a time when wisdom is needed more than ever, because they never had it.
What could be interesting though is to map the psychological challenges for those people forced to change social rituals and dependencies.
