Philosophy Now Forum

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:37 pm ...this was not my belief to be taken literally...

Yeah. You don't believe they're "activists." We know. And your were grousing about the term. But it appropriately designates a judge who makes judgments for activist (i.e. ideological) reasons, rather than impartially, on the basis of the merits of the case.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:48 pm

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:37 pm ...this was not my belief to be taken literally...

Yeah. You don't believe they're "activists." We know. And your were grousing about the term. But it appropriately designates a judge who makes judgments for activist (i.e. ideological) reasons, rather than impartially, on the basis of the merits of the case.

...And is being misapplied by MAGA cultists to mislabel good judges who rule against their bad abuses of power. Well done, you made over the line.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:56 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:48 pm

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:37 pm ...this was not my belief to be taken literally...

Yeah. You don't believe they're "activists." We know. And your were grousing about the term. But it appropriately designates a judge who makes judgments for activist (i.e. ideological) reasons, rather than impartially, on the basis of the merits of the case.

...And is being misapplied by MAGA cultists...

Let's see if those judges ruled fairly, or whether higher courts determine they were acting for ideological reasons. Then we'll know what term to apply.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 7:01 pm

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:56 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 6:48 pm
Yeah. You don't believe they're "activists." We know. And your were grousing about the term. But it appropriately designates a judge who makes judgments for activist (i.e. ideological) reasons, rather than impartially, on the basis of the merits of the case.

...And is being misapplied by MAGA cultists...

Let's see if those judges ruled fairly, or whether higher courts determine they were acting for ideological reasons. Then we'll know what term to apply.

You'll have forgotten by then. You always have some new judges to call "activist".

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 30, 2025 3:30 pm MUST – STOP – TRUMP

Here’s how …

Just keep those activist judges busy. They have more power than the POTUS.
(Not according to the constitution.)

But they don't have any guns.

Something must be done about these courts. District courts and now international trade courts are starting to issue these nationwide injunctions that are overreaching, unlawful, and politically motivated. Sorry, rulings that dictate to the executive what it can do on foreign and immigration policy are not kosher. What’s next? District courts signing off on troop deployments?
Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa ... n-n2657850

Mister Can says you aren't allowed to call them activist judges until SCOTUS has ruled against them, and you aren't allowed to at all if it doesn't.

Walker wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 12:10 pm

Darkneos wrote: ↑Fri May 30, 2025 6:38 pmUnder determinism, responsibility as an idea is incoherent because "you" didn't "do" the thing, other factors made it happen. Blaming you for it would be logically incoherent, like prosecuting a tornado. Again, plenty of determinists wrote on this and I cited one.

- Your statement is incoherent.
- If you did the thing, factors that shaped your doing are the causes for doing it.
- Because you did it, you are responsible for doing it, and your appeal to authority on the grounds that you can’t prosecute a tornado, is also incoherent.
- The court sentences you to contemplation, not further appeals to authority.

In nature:
- A human is a factor in everything it does, says, and thinks.
- A human does, says, and thinks what it must.
- A human has no choice but to do that.
- Everything a human does, a human must do.
- Therefore, the human not responsible for the creation of its body, is responsible for what that body does.
- Humans are responsible for doing what it is, that they have to do.
- Contradictions in nature don't exist.


- If you talk to another person as if you are an oaf, it's because you were caused to do that by biology and the effect of external forces upon that biology. You were caused to think and speak in oafish ways, like a stupid person, and this compelled your need to keep doing it.
- Should you happen to be an oaf, and need to change your ways and acquire couth and sophistication because in the world of grow-ups oafishness isn't working out in terms of meeting your needs, then that need to change your savage ways is a choiceless factor in the shaping of events.
- You don't choose to change. Change is too difficult for people, and they can't choose it. Just look at all the people who choose to stop smoking, or overeating, and cannnot. The illusion of choice makes it too hard.

- Need causes change, not choice.
- Neither does choice cause need, although ...

Invention is the mother of necessity (because of clinging to the new).

Contradictions can exist in nature, evolution certainly has a few quirks like that. Choice does cause change though, or at least belief in it does. If you didn't believe you have choice then there would be no incentive to change right?

But you're still wrong in that if outside forces made you do it then you have no bearing or responsibility for the action. Even by your words they couldn't have done otherwise, so blaming them or holding them responsible is incoherent. Again, plenty of determinists use this line of logic. Some further would argue there is no "you" at play in any of this like Susan Blackmoore. Again, Robert Sapolsky wrote a whole book on it (not that I agree with it) even saying concepts like "blame" and "deserving" don't hold under it. Responsibility is incoherent under determinism, because "one" has no "Choice" in the matter, it's the result of factors playing out.

Maybe you are just stupid...

Walker wrote: ↑Fri May 30, 2025 10:10 pm

Darkneos wrote: ↑Fri May 30, 2025 6:38 pm

You are responsible for the evil you have done, Darkneos, and also your evil intentions.

Your flimsy justifications of an elementary understanding of Determinism, or simply claiming to have made a bad choice, won’t persuade karma to pass you by, although there are plenty in the Democrat Party that Hates America who will give you a pass, some of them judges, especially if you’re an illegal immigrant who jumped the border at The Democrat Party’s invitation.

You can tell karma that you're a Determinist and not responsible for what you did, even though you had to do it, and karma will say: haw haw haw.



The best haw haw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnoNj9OU3_g

Empty replies like before, if you're gonna bait at least put effort into it.

You're the only one who doesn't get determinism and why responsibility is not a coherent concept under it. Not even gonna repeat how our legal system operates under the assumption of free will.

Again...easier to call you stupid then put any effort into it. I learned that with BigMike.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 3:00 pm They are using the term "activist judges" to signify any judge who dares rule in favour of the law rather than the regime. That quote refers to a panel of judges on a specialised international trade court who ruled, in line with the constitution and centuries of law, that the president lacks the authority to apply global sanctions. This is just a matter of legal fact, Trump cannot win this case on the merits, facts or law because all go against him, so he wants to win it by not being held to the law or constrained by balances of power. Like his dictator buddies aren't.

The other "activist judges" have all been simply holding Trump to the law of the land. None of them invented new law or procedure and none of his appeals has ever worked out because of that. The only time new law was created was when his pet supreme court awarded him special magical immunity.

You may be quite sure that you have a fair and correct view of the issue, I remain skeptical not solely of your opinion but because I sense huge power-struggles between power-sectors and I am uncertain if I have enough of an understanding of ‘the facts’.

Some opinionators I read (or watch talk) have a different view of this dramatic power-battle. Your views are largely similar to those I get from my reading of the NYTs — and I see it as largely corrupt.

This phase of American politics and world politics is far too opaque for me. I know that I cannot trust the superficial reading of events — what comes to all of us from media-systems — but I cannot discern what is really, or ultimately, at stake.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 9:52 pm

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 3:00 pm They are using the term "activist judges" to signify any judge who dares rule in favour of the law rather than the regime. That quote refers to a panel of judges on a specialised international trade court who ruled, in line with the constitution and centuries of law, that the president lacks the authority to apply global sanctions. This is just a matter of legal fact, Trump cannot win this case on the merits, facts or law because all go against him, so he wants to win it by not being held to the law or constrained by balances of power. Like his dictator buddies aren't.

The other "activist judges" have all been simply holding Trump to the law of the land. None of them invented new law or procedure and none of his appeals has ever worked out because of that. The only time new law was created was when his pet supreme court awarded him special magical immunity.

You may be quite sure that you have a fair and correct view of the issue, I remain skeptical not solely of your opinion but because I sense huge power-struggles between power-sectors and I am uncertain if I have enough of an understanding of ‘the facts’.

Sure, you have always been a conspiracy theorist and always will be, so you will always be peering through that prism.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 9:52 pm Some opinionators I read (or watch talk) have a different view of this dramatic power-battle. Your views are largely similar to those I get from my reading of the NYTs — and I see it as largely corrupt.

This phase of American politics and world politics is far too opaque for me. I know that I cannot trust the superficial reading of events — what comes to all of us from media-systems — but I cannot discern what is really, or ultimately, at stake.

Sure, conspiracy theorist stuff, I get it, but I can't fix that part of your mind, I can only deal with the real world and facts and stuff.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 2:50 pm

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 8:06 amAll I am saying is that I don't know. Nor do you.

Here's what we both DO know: physics cannot (yet, let us say) do those things. And that also means that, at least for now, you have absolutely no reason to believe physics ever can. To think it will be able to eventually is totally suppositional on your part, and unsupportable by any evidence, and contrary to what you recognize as true of present physics knowledge.

Does that work for you?

No, it is based on your misinterpretation. Again, all I am saying is that I don't know whether there are phenomena that will never be explicable in terms of the function of the universe, nobody does. The exact nature of matter is open to debate. For instance, there are philosophers and scientists who take panpsychism seriously. I don't subscribe myself, but if some version turns out to be true all of a sudden consciousness becomes fundamental to physics. Which is not me saying it will.

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 10:55 pm Sure, conspiracy theorist stuff, I get it, but I can't fix that part of your mind, I can only deal with the real world and facts and stuff.

The “real world ‘n’ facts ‘n’ stuff” can be examined to be the material that enters your viewing world through your phone and computer — which is to suggest that it is not, not necessarily, a view of what is real, but differing forms of interpretation and reduction.

Your implication is that the lens (ourselves, our mind) is corrupted and cannot focus on ‘reality’, and distorts what is there, and I agree very strongly that masses of people are caught within inner webs that slant and distort how they interpret what comes before them.

But my view is that what is presented to us (i.e. the NYTs and other opinion-molding information purveyors) pre-digest information and concoct perspectives which a given audience desires to buy — because the views sold to them conform to their internal state and ‘the lens’ that is their self and ourselves.

The viewers who view — the vast audience that is witnessing these bizarre and dramatic events going on world-wide — are spectators and very limited participants. Their perspectives are like ‘moods’ and have limited power to influence events. So it seems to me with this established that power and power-groupings take advantage of the “captivated audience captured by moods” and attempt to mold things according to the designs of power.

The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is a term referring to an overheated mind that colors everything according to pre-determined patterns. It is not only likely but factual that everyone who looks sees to some degree through a distorting lens.

So, Alexis Jacobi teaches self-examination as a starting-point. The viewers who view, instead of focusing on the TeleScreen, shuts out the TeleScreen and takes an inventory of the lens, the inner landscape, the interpretive structure which conditions what is seen.

So let us suppose that the program of the MAGA Movement, if seen as Steve Bannon presents it as ‘genuine populism’, is legitimate and even desirable. That is, geared toward better outcomes for the masses of the under-represented, the non-powerful, the frustrated and the super-angry who have had their stable world ripped out from under them (see here). But, powerful interests interpose themselves, distort the program, make it unrealizable, and take advantage of it to achieve their own ends …

This is really what the nutjob denizens of PN have said about Trump et al in other threads, right? But they project their own inner content and bickering, disturbed nature — just as you, Flash, must necessarily do because that’s what you are here for. A dysfunctional dopamine rush as you rot like a decomposing head of lettuce into a soggy mess in your hovel and the hovel of your distorting mind.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jun 01, 2025 1:38 pm

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat May 31, 2025 10:55 pm Sure, conspiracy theorist stuff, I get it, but I can't fix that part of your mind, I can only deal with the real world and facts and stuff.

<insert generic conspiratorial wank here>

Case proven

Best laugh of the day.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jun 01, 2025 1:38 pm This is really what the nutjob denizens of PN have said about Trump et al in other threads, right? But they project their own inner content and bickering, disturbed nature — just as you, Flash, must necessarily do because that’s what you are here for. A dysfunctional dopamine rush as you rot like a decomposing head of lettuce into a soggy mess in your hovel and the hovel of your distorting mind.

I can understand why you’d see poor Flash’s fate as funny, but if you think it through a bit more you might realize how tragic it is.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Jun 01, 2025 2:28 pmI can understand why you’d see poor Flash’s fate as funny...

I doubt it Gus.