(08-25-2016, 10:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 06:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Neither of you are particularly normal people.

I can agree with this with considerable enthusiasm.  Eric and I agree with quite a few blue positions, but Eric's mystical slant an my own odd way of looking at things aren't typical.  If I were asked to nominate someone to go on a talk show representing a typical representative of blue values, I'd nominate neither Eric nor myself.

(08-25-2016, 06:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: How many people do you know can identify with scientific or mystic values?

Quite a few, actually.  I worked at a high tech firm on the Route 128 corridor.  I knew a lot of engineers with strong scientific learn-from-the-world ways of looking at things.  That's part of why I was puzzled when you needed to be explained what a scientific world view is.  Around here, I'm not used to having to explain that.  

For a time in my 20s I was actively pursuing the mystical path.  In my experience there are far more scientific and technical people out there than mystical people, but if you look for mystical people one can find them... at least in heavily populated well educated areas like Greater Boston.  I suspect urban California would be similar.  The middle of the country?  I haven't spent significant time there, and when I was there I wasn't in my mystical phase, but I suspect mystics would be rare indeed.

(08-25-2016, 06:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Americans generally come from more or less the same place. A place we call America. You are correct. America has millions who are still tied to American values and the American beliefs that are directly associated with it. Are you familiar with American values? You should be since you been running into them and being pounded by them by a dedicated American that you claim to view as being extreme. I can be an extremely partisan American. Ask yourself a question, is it wise to be be politically associated with people who carry Mexican flags while they're burning an American flag? Is it wise to be associated with racists of other colors? Do Democrats deserve what's eventually coming them? You bet. Do I like Trump or the way he acts? Nope. Do I like Trump vs Hillary? You bet. I can think of no better candidate to unleash against Hillary Clinton.

You are definitely confusing rural red America with America.  You are more or less representative of a whole bunch of folk who share red values.  Ignore the science.  Believe the politician's promises.  Assume one has an ability to read God's mind.  There are similar numbers of people who share blue values.  Depending on where you look, you will find more of one or more of the other.  Depending on when you look, you will find more of one or the other.  The blue New Deal values were born in crisis and dominated through high and awakening.  The red have dominated the unravelling.  I don't see this as accident.  The blue New Deal values of coming together to work for the common good in desperate times reflect what needs to be done in a crisis.  The red take from the poor to give to the rich selfish indulgence is an unraveling thing.

But both the red and the blue are American.  FDR is at least as American as Reagan.  While you seem optimistic that your part of America can continue to dominate, looking at the polls for the upcoming election and looking at demographic data showing younger voters are coming in more secular and Democratic, I can't agree with you.

(08-26-2016, 01:50 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You are making a mistake by associating me with rural red America. I'm a city slicker who was born and raised in a suburban/urban area with a lot of different kinds of people. So, we actually share many of the same values as far as public services that are associated with them. If you want to stick with applying your red stereotype to whoever you want that's fine. All that does is allow me continue to apply my blue stereotype to whoever I want. Sounds silly and unproductive to me. But then again, I'm not supposed be as intelligent as someone like you.

(08-25-2016, 03:03 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 01:06 PM)playwrite Wrote: This is the funniest thing on the Internet today!

[img][/img]


Ann Coulter's Fabulous Twitter Meltdown: My Book! My Book!


Who's left to vote for this guy?  Cynic Hero and Classic Xer???

41-42% of the electorate. Are you ready to embrace the Republicans and their followers who you blamed for the 2008 crash? Good luck with the banana republic during the crisis. Which revolution scares you more as far as finding your yourself directly caught up in, the French Revolution or the American Revolution? The common belief that Bob and I share is harsh lessons must learned in order to bring change. BTW, Anne Coulter ain't my type.

(08-26-2016, 01:18 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: So which Donald Trump are we getting?




Schrödinger's cat (from Wiki)



Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e., a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

Whether Donald Trump keeps which of his contradictory promises is not up to the random decay of an atom; it will be up to President Trump himself.  It's easy for me to say spare the cat... we simply need to spare ourselves the danger of an analogous, i f less horrible plight.

(08-26-2016, 09:03 AM)playwrite Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 03:03 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 01:06 PM)playwrite Wrote: This is the funniest thing on the Internet today!

[img][/img]


Ann Coulter's Fabulous Twitter Meltdown: My Book! My Book!


Who's left to vote for this guy?  Cynic Hero and Classic Xer???

41-42% of the electorate. Are you ready to embrace the Republicans and their followers who you blamed for the 2008 crash? Good luck with the banana republic during the crisis. Which revolution scares you more as far as finding your yourself directly caught up in, the French Revolution or the American Revolution? The common belief that Bob and I share is harsh lessons must learned in order to bring change. BTW, Anne Coulter ain't my type.

I know, I know, the zombie apocalypse is just around the next corner.... again.

Can you set a date that you'll give up this hope or is it something you're going to again warn the kids about as they gather around your deathbed (hey, by then, you can be the zombie!)?

At some point, as your tribe fades into memory as a national political force, we'll take you by the hand and try to comfort you.  But for now, we're kind of busy dismantling you - sorry, but that's got to come first.

Given that you all believe you look like this -



but actually more like this -



- it's going to take awhile to get you to climb down.

Bob Butler Wrote:Exercising my personal value of respecting both sides of a dispute, I would say both paradigms have value

Quote:Such folk will look at the numbers and history to determine the weight of merit of the two paradigms.

Quote:Throwing in another example, could Darwin's principle of evolution be considered a paradigm?

Quote:According to his understanding that holy works are unquestionably, absolutely and literally true, it follows that evolution is incorrect.

Quote:...the world views and values of red and blue folk in the United States does effect their perception of the worth of your two economic paradigms.

Quote:I would happily agree with you that the above economic examples ought to be resolved using something similar to the scientific method.

Quote:It's just that political partisans often include these economic paradigms within the realm of their world views, and thus are apt to be no more objective and rational.

Bob Butler Wrote:You are all too correct in that many values issues are resolved by force, either political or physical.  You failed to mention courtesy and tolerance.

Quote:These too are part of a culture's world view and values system.  If one encounters something one doesn't like, is it really necessary to call a lawyer or to throw a rock?  Can smiling, wishing the other guy well and walking away be a possibility that should at least be considered?

Quote:There might be one effective logical, rational and scientific question to ask.  What would Jesus do?

Quote:The supply side paradigm yielded a good outcome in 1920-21

(08-26-2016, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: [quote Bob]
Throwing in another example, could Darwin's principle of evolution be considered a paradigm?

Quote:Of course it is.  It’s one of the fundamental paradigms for biology.  When evolutionary theory matured and developed a fruitful mathematical theory of evolution, biology matured.  And look at the progress since then!  Mature sciences have valid paradigms.  Science in which opposing plausible paradigms are still battling it out, like economics, are still immature.  This isn’t necessarily  because of clashing values. Science is  difficult.

Quote:No it follows that a fundamentalist cannot become a competent biologist because his values conflict with the operating manual of biology.  He can still do chemistry, however.  I know some conservative Christian chemists who could be fundamentalists for all I know. I don’t look to them for religious guidance, just chemistry guidance.

Quote:The best way to resolve this is by experimentation.  We had the opportunity to try to experiment with this in 1920-21, 1929-33, 1970, 1980-82, 1987, 2000 and more recently in 2008-9.  The supply side paradigm yielded a good outcome in 1920-21, and with the Friedman modifications in 1980 and 1987.  It utterly failed in 1929-33.  Demand-side policy was employed successfully after 1933 and unsuccessfully in 1970.  In 2008 we sort of did both policies half-heartedly.  I will leave the interpretation of the results as successful or not to you.

(08-26-2016, 03:17 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

Bob Butler Wrote:You are all too correct in that many values issues are resolved by force, either political or physical.  You failed to mention courtesy and tolerance.

These are not a resolution.  The issue remains, it simply is avoided.

Quote:These too are part of a culture's world view and values system.  If one encounters something one doesn't like, is it really necessary to call a lawyer or to throw a rock?  Can smiling, wishing the other guy well and walking away be a possibility that should at least be considered?

Sure.  But lots of people won’t do that.  They will bring suit as advocates of gay marriage did and as  some who did not like a vendor being unwilling to provide services at a gay wedding did.  And as black folks at a lunch counter in 1960 did. In all these cases they could have walked away, but they did not and so things like this are no longer necessary.  Would you change that for the sake of comity?

(08-26-2016, 03:17 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

Quote:There might be one effective logical, rational and scientific question to ask.  What would Jesus do?

Which is an unknowable thing as there are no reliable records of what Jesus would do in various situations. Amongst our extant manuscripts there exist more differences than there are words in the New Testament.

(08-25-2016, 11:33 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 11:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-25-2016, 07:23 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Question. If you fall in a hole and can't get out are you going to wait for science or pray for science or call out science to either help or assist you with getting out of the hole. I place God's opinion of me above all.

If you believe in either science, God, or both, then you will not let either be your sole means of attempting to escape a dangerous circumstance. You will call for help. You will try to extricate yourself from the dangerous situation. Need I say more/ If God cannot be relied upon for miracles, then science does not lend itself to offering miracles.

Personally, if I were concerned about falling into holes, and if I were given a choice between a cell phone and a crucifix as a precaution against the threat, I'd go with the cell phone.

(08-26-2016, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Since the answer is unclear, this is a fair approach.

(08-27-2016, 12:19 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-26-2016, 02:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Since the answer is unclear, this is a fair approach.

The base point is that when working with someone who is really strong into religion or politics, or perhaps other non-scientific ways of knowing the world, science or any form of observation based analysis can be irrelevant to the other guy in deciding a question or analyzing a situation.  I sense I'm stating this in a way you're not satisfied with, but the base point is that you can't expect others to always defer to your own world view and values.  You may think you are using the one and only obvious and correct way to understand something, but not everyone will agree.  You might as well be bringing a table tennis paddle to a football field.  The rules, the ways of scoring points, the size of the ball, are all different.  People aren't playing the same games.  The gears just don't engage.  If the quarterback throws you a football 50 yards in the air, forget the table tennis paddle, you'd best catch the ball.

Quote:Recently on this thread I've been engaging Classic as the red champion, Eric as the blue, with you championing science.  If all three of you aren't happy with me, perhaps I'm doing something right?    I was hoping, though, that science's champion could be a little more open to new paradigms.  According to my notes, it's supposed to be that way.  When we move towards the subject of guys dancing in white dresses though, your usual scientific objectivity and analysis fades as you operate in the realms of culture and politics.  

Quote:This illustrates what I mean when I say most individuals don't operate in one realm of knowledge.  Most everyone has to shift between various ways of looking at things.  Stock market cycles and guys dancing in white dresses belong in different mental realms.  Most everyone will have to shift between such realms in the course of living their lives, and not be aware that they are doing it.  Different folks will spend different amounts of time in different realms, be most at home in different places, and shift under different circumstances.  There has to be a paradigm in that somewhere.  If one wants to make sense of the convoluted conversations we have around here, it is interesting to keep track of who is working in what realm and maybe even try to follow.

(08-27-2016, 01:00 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I'd choose the cell phone too because I'm not a Christian. The crucifix probably wouldn't do me much good as far as saving me.

(08-26-2016, 07:16 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: From your comment on guys dancing in white dresses, perhaps you disagree. 

(08-26-2016, 03:40 PM)Anthony Wrote:

Quote:The supply side paradigm yielded a good outcome in 1920-21

It did if you didn't die of starvation or exposure in the Forgotten Depression if 1921-22.  But a visit to any large cemetery will show that many, many did in fact die.