the.crooked

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth I meant to delete this and write: Thus we can again see that morality as a normative set of concepts can nnot be ascribed to religion. It seems to follow then that if religion is merely a means to dissiminate ethical standards, then religion follows morality, but the relationship is not transitive.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth I think that is a bit too much credit to give to religion as far as the derivation of morals. Ethics and morality as a concept have been concieved and discussed since Aristotle. Altruism is seen as one of the defining characteristics of humanity, but is seen in expressions among other animals. That animals, whom we can assume to know nothing of their thought processes, seem to express some of the same moral or ethical tendencies as us seems to imply that perhaps it must have a shared origin. As religion is known unto man and not animal, it follows that if religion is the origin of morals, then animals should not act as if they had them let alone concieved of them. So, if there is a connective tissue between the similarly ethical actions of both humans and animals, then it appears as if religion could not be the origin of such a moral drive. Religion uses the dogmas to put forth general philosophies on morality. Each religion has its own set of ethical codes by which their attendents are supposed to live. In so much as each religion also claims a sort of credibility over any other religion, it causes a contradiction as to which one's specific ethics are correct. Thus we can see that morality as a standard concept can not be ascribed to religion, but merely as a means to put forth a concept of morality. I have yet to take an ethics or aesthetics class, but I think I will find them to be amazing. Neitzche pretty much wrecked shit when it comes to ethics and morality. Even people such as Spinoza developed their entire metaphysical philosophies as to derive some sort of standard moral procedure for mankind. As his interpretation of the universe and god stood as being one and the same. He expressed the first attempt within philosophy to reconcile diesm from a rational base. What he ended up finding is that if the unfolding of the universe throughout time reflects that which is the infinite essence of God, than the exact actions that we take are the correct ones. This is easy to confuse with determinism and could essentially be said that its a matter of title and not actual ideological difference. Yet, Spinoza felt that within human free will lied the answer to determinism and the key to the morality from which we should conduct ourselves. Not in so much as to follow impulse, but that the expression of ones free will expressed the subjective and standard morality of humanity while at the same time playing out the entirety of that which is God. Pretty crazy shit. I think its all pretty awesome. In my humble opinion, I think morality is more so an extended version of survivalistic instinct as animals. In so much as our rational capacity is quite larger than most animals, I think we have developed and recognized these "rules" for living so that we may find a common ground amongst ourselves. This sort of goes along with many of the states of nature proposed by enlightenment political thinkers. For if man is by virtue of nature solitary, then it follows there is no non arbitrary set of standard ethics that could be transfered through out. But, in so much as we have the rationality and compulsion to do otherwise, we do so as to create a sense of community to increase our chance of survival as an animal competing for resources. Take the many considerations of why people would join into a social contract together. Locke felt it was to protect property. If this intuitive greed is in fact the impetus behind such social interactions than it makes perfect sense that we would also intuit some sort of method by which to make those social interactions happen. Thus we have the formation of ethics. A set of intuited codes, which vary by some degree or another(thus their subjective nature), by which to allow for an interaction that is created to protect and enable the resources by which we shall procreate. This is also related to my belief that racism, classicism and any other sort of divisive prejiduce will exist so long as we act upon that instinctive urge to acquire and protect resources. i.e. social interaction guided by intuited subjective morality. the real question at hand is why i just spent fifteen minutes typing this rather than writing a paper thats due tomorrow on the role and implication of the realist/anti-realist argument in philosophy of science on theory confirmation about unobservable entities?... i am not gonna get to sleep tonight.

yeah man, fox news is an amazing thing. two semesters ago Noam Chomsky spoke at my school on the issue of manufacturing consent for the war, the reason for it, and the implications of it. It was really interesting. I was high as shit. Most people couldn't follow his monotonous speaking patterns, but it was just fine for my stoned ass. Needless to say, he spoke a lot about the patterns and means in which news is let out to the american public. Dawood- yeah man, shrooms will do that shit. Not to continue the drug talk, but those revelations within trips have never left me. It always takes me a couple weeks of retrospection after a trip to extrapolate what the actual revelation was. Crazies on the street however, I think, seem to be stuck in those more existential patterns of thinking and such their reality is contained within that, comparative to the shared reality that we all hold through shared forms of rationality. enough of a digression... missles. building. bang. lie. war. impeach.

freestyle freestyle with lil flip and paul wall. cham has second verse. trendsetter flow ive got more if anyone ends up wanting it.

Chamilionaire is a lot better than most you people have prolly heard. Listen to a bunch of the older freestyles of you can get your hands on em. Get ya mind correct was a great indie release by him and paul wall. In fact, I'll link up a couple good cham verses.

ehh, i feel like it happens with specific things. Plus when I can't find things in the related links, i get a lil concerned. For the abc news one, there were 267 related articles for the nsa wiretaps, but that one was not in them. Whereas another topic had a related link count over a hundred times larger. So, to me it would suggest that at the least, even if the source has been shuffled as they tend to do, that the article would still be categorized within the list of related links. However, it often happens that this is not the case. Perhaps im gettin a lil paranoid, but im glad that someone else has seen this same sorta shit happen. fightin the shadows...

^^good idea.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth that was always the first question when people found out i am athiest... them:"so you dont have morals?" me: "more than you...dick"

coffee- I leave it unpersonalized. I think doing so leaves a view much more reflective of what most people will see. casek- yeah man, that shit freaks me out. I feel like im watching the duping of a lot of people as its happening. It's pretty scary to me. There was a kid at my school this last semester who went a bit insane, too much news and too much delouse. The really sad thing was when he was having his episode, the seemingly neurotic shit he was saying was really just the truth, but because of how he was saying it, sounded insane. Made me think about how many people you hear blathering on the streets about conspiracies, how many of them are real. Delta project...

a dream indeed.

thanks coffee, but i have the article in my browsers history. I was more concerned with the way google allows headlines to sit and to what side the way they present stories and links might lean.

i think some of those other angles were in that presentation i mentioned. I was never able to pin down a copy of the presentation and it has since dissappeared. Every link that I had to it was taken down within a couple weeks after it floated around. The fact that information has been dissappearing on the internet is very disheartening to me. I need to start a thread on the headline patterns of Google news. For two years now I have been reading google news almost every couple hours, (as my life permits, because im not a wacked out nutto who does nothing but this) and i have seen some crazy shit happen in terms of the running times and actual links to different articles. Time and time again Ill see an article with some rather stirring implications that will out of no where be gone, and in its place an article of the opposite opinion is placed using the same thumbnail and similar headling wording. Yesterday I read an article I was linked to by google news, about abc news making claims that the government is sifting through their phone records to find the upper government leaks. The page refreshed itself, as it is scripted to, and in the place of that link, was a simlarly titled article but was pro NSA wiretapping. I searched through six pages of related stories to the NSA phonetapping and could not find the original article from which I had been linked. Same shit happened with the recent environmental reports that have been coming out. All in all i think some fucked up shit is going on, but im not gonna say that on the phone though.

pop shots on tha bandwidth.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth what a dick.

There are tons of viable theories as to what the government could have done with plane loads of people. Government sponsered acts to start wars are no new thing. We tend to believe that we are above that, but is an administration whose policy is lying and killing above that? I think not. Even if they did not have a direct hand in the events of that day, I am convinced that they allowed it to happen and supplemented certain aspects of what was to happen. There is way way too much coming out in the last year about that day that does suggests some sort of involvement, be it direct or otherwise, by the officials within our government. There is a kid at my school whose free time is dedicated to the 9/11 truth movement. These people are not hackneyed conspiracy theorists, they are regular people who use the means available (freedom of information act), to gain as much information about that day as possible. When you find out such things as a relative of bush being head of security for two years with the contract ending a week before the date of the attack, one starts to get a lil concerned as to possible connections. All im trying to say is that it is as bad to simply dismiss the possibility of the current administration being involved in the events of 9/11, than to flip the opposite way and blanketly believe that they did everything. That is what is scary, is that fairly reasonable people are starting to find stuff that does implicate them in some fashion or another.

hey symbols. show us your tits... on topic: Back to what this thread is actually about. angelofdeath: Yes I know that posse comitatus can be changed in times of war and through acts of congress, but my concern lies within the intent of the decision. For a president whose initial platform included the strong progression of NAFTA through programs such as a possible open boarder with Mexico, he has done quite the opposite. As a resident of texas, I remember hearing much discussion when the now president of Mexico was being elected. One of the largest selling points of his platform was that he had direct ties with bush as to help increase the ability of mexico's citizens to pass freely back and forth. Now, I know that it unrealistic, but I think it tells something interesting of the current situation. Basically I still maintain that this entire issue of immigration is being brought up for two reasons. One, to detract national and media attention from the NSA discussions, and also for the gear up for war with Iran. Two, to once again allow for the use of Military Forces for a domestic policy issue in which their force isn't really needed. gah... i need to go write a paper, so ill be back for this later.

same here. 2.26 pm central.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth i typed out a huge, massive response.... and lost it all... fucking laptops... ill do it again later. it was good. oo, fermentor, i used to be shape1369. i never really posted much but I was always around.

Also, as a person who has lived in texas their entire lives. I have never witnessed this issue of immigration to be such a huge deal. We recognize full well that our economy is dependent upon the in/outflow of such a low wage labor force. Anyone else notice that this all of a sudden became america's number one issue, at the same time that large amounts of information about the nsa wire tapping became public? Coincedence I think not. Listen to the language used when Immigration policy is being discussed by pundits and beaurocrats on television. More specifically, today on fox news I listened to someone say that the american public has never been this concerned about any one issue. The day before, Hadley, a security advisor to the pres, stated that this issue is what concerns the american public most out of anything else right now, and thats why the president is acting on it. cough...bullshit...cough. I tend to think this question of immigration reform, as with many other obvious issues in america, was picked up merely as a sponge to absorb a large amount of public interest away from such dire things as the loss of individual privacy from the government. But I will not go on anymore bout the wire taps as I will move to that thread.

I would just like to insert this idea into the discussion. Does not the possible use of national gaurd as a supplement police force further incredulate the protections we have made in our own government to prevent such? In 1878 we set out to make sure that the executive branch does not have the right to use military force to execute domestic policy, unless specifically heralded by the congress or constitution. Regardless of the actual role that the national guard will play in protecting the boarder, the fact that it is on paper as presidence of using Military Force as as police force allows for such future acts as the smothering of dissention against executive desicions among the american public through military force. I am not contending that this is the short term goal of the administration, but thing about the long term implications of such a thing. A while ago I was on infowars and found something that relates to this quite well. While I don't ever really read too much into what Alex Grey says, there was one relevant thing I think should be noted. There was a section on his site dedicated to the concept of militarizing the police force and showed pictures of "ongoing excersizes" in which to train such military personal to take on these domestic policing roles. I can not state the validity of the pictures, but there are pretty messed up. Scenes of american troops standing around people dressed as civilians within barbedwire detention centers. Anywho, my point is this. That the precedent has been set twice now, katrina and now the border issue, of using military to perform police duties, is way fucked. Our legal system is based on precedent and to determine that which is legal in regards to such things as the limitation of military for posse comitatus in the future may be quite blurred because of these actions now.

co-signed to the fullest. astrocreep-2000 is still my fav though.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth fermentor. I've always appreciated most things you've had to say to this board, and this is no exception. I do feel though, that science has been stuck in speaking of absolutes as to its own methodology, and in such decries some of the validity it is trying to establish. I have been diggin on this concept of 'constructive empericism.' From what I understand of it, it is more so the consideration that 'while one may maintain a literal construal of a theory, there is no necessitation of the belief in the theory or the entities contained within, for the theory to be "valid." I take it to be a small shift from the observational/theoretical quandry posed by Quinne/Duhem, in so much as it reflects the subjective ability of a person to maintain central theories but not to particularly invest much belief in the actual existence of its implications. Quinne felt that the way we monitor and analyze theories is parallel to that of a web of such things. The beliefs in theories which we hold to be the most true are central to use and we either accept or deny other theories based on their support or validity of our central beliefs. That is not to say that a shift in the locality of that central base is not possible. If in fact there is some theory which ends up being more amiable to a person, than large portions of the aformentioned web can shit, where we end up with a new set of central and outer beliefs. Thuse one can see the relation of such an idea of central beliefs, to that of the conditional belief of theories presented within constructive empericism. There is an argument against such a case, that I have been trying to make stronger, not only for my own want to have a concrete base in which to believe in the "scientific method" and the theories it produces, but also for a paper. Such an argument follows that, " we can in fact validate the existence of unobservable entities (theory confirmation) in so much as we can use causal properties of such entities to learn about other unobservables." An example of such would be to use our given understanding and set of theories around electrons to create an experiment in which those previous theories provide a means to study the weak force." Essentially, that because we are able to gain emperical data which is consistent with a theory (or in this case, experiment) that was based on previous assumptions about electrons, necessitates the existence of such electrons, for how could the experiment work if they did not exist. This seems pretty substantive in and of itself, but it will come to pass that it in fact has its weaknesses. Namely that if one were to consider a person recieving communion, they would find an analogous situation to the latter in so much as the reception of the wine as the blood of christ is much like the use of electrons in the experiment. That one may recieve communion (the establishment of an experiment based on previously assumed causal relations of eletrons) necessitates the existence of the manifestation of Christ's blood (that we may learn of other things through such assumed causal relations). However, this is rediculous. You and I know full well that recieving communion does not in fact turn wine in to blood. Therefor the previous argument is shown to be faulty in some cases, and such in all cases. It is in my own humble opinion, however, that the solution to the issue of theory confirmation lies within that which we allow as previous knowledge. For this to be true, I think there must be something more substantial to present as previous knowledge than the theoretical propositions already debunked as not good enough. (I get this idea from Hume. His s of impressions being the base from which all cognition is derived gave rise to the idea of 'prior grounding epistemology.' It is from this that I will try to progress further.) In so much as to provide a more emperically sound "prior grounding" I look to previous experiments. Namely that of the electron scattering experiments that established questions of the role of the observer within particle and quantam phsyics. Such an experiment provides the methedology, results, and implications that are needed to support the theoretical relations of electrons that had been assumed in the first experiment. This however begs the question, and I realize this. I have been having a hard time progressing from this, but I think I came to an answer yesterday. Ironically enough I find the support for my previous statements in the main opposition to that of Hume. Immanuel Kant, proposes within his transcendental argument of space, that by begging the question one entails the existence of those ideals. Or, that by taking a skeptical reductionist stance, as that of the anti-realist viewpoint already discussed, you are assuming that such theories can be validated or invalidated in terms of themselves. More specifically, it is impossible to seperate the reality of the theories we maintain from the terms and language of those theories. In such we find that because we look to substantiate claims of reality of entites and such unobservables within theories, by means of the same methods and language, we necessitate the possibility and in fact, existence of those entities. Thus we are provided with a means to accept the empirical data with which we assume to use as a base for the confirmation of theories to begin with. I know I could explain this a little better, but it's almost five and I actually have to write this paper tomorrow rather than blather on about it to you. hopefully you found this interesting. I'll come back tomorrow and clear up the last paragraph as I feel it needs more exposition than the rest.

same reason that i dont have the same name as i did when i originally registered with the site. names change.

so who saw the entire thing? It was amazing. mr bush left with a quickness. Colbert said some pretty ballsy shit. No applause for a good portion of it except for the little bit that you could hear in the very back. Shit he stopped just short of saying he caused 911. Either way. I am suprised that it happened and that he said what he did. Good job Stephen Colbert for a very patriotic speech.

Re: the nature of the creator of the heavens and earth No worries about where you took the thread at all. In fact I am all for the type of discussion you brought up. I wasnt really trying to say that numbers are infallible, just that within the philosophy you were discussing, much of it was considered to be. umm, what else did i want to say.... uhh... o yeah, ok. Descarte was a rationalist, and therefor considered that truth could be determined independent of experience. Thus there exist such things as inherit truths, that if you think very strongly about will prove to be true in to yourself. For him, simple arithmetic was one of those things. Expressions such as 2+2=4 were true to him becuase he couldn't concieve of it being any other way. The specific expressions for what they numbers were, eg 1, 2, 3, etc. were not important as the concepts they represent could be understood inheritely within the mind. This is based on the concept that having a thought necessitates the possibility and existence of other thoughts. Thus concepts of numbers are inherit to the mind as one thought distinguishes an entire number system. If not simple, it is elegant. So, that is why Descarte saw that certain things within math were immutably true. Becuase no matter how hard you may try to question it, the inherit concepts of distinguishing thoughts allows as a prettty solid base for the possible truth in simple arithmetic.