so far we're at one Christmas Brexit argument (at least somewhat good-natured) in the blooparent household, let's see if we can avoid any more

I discovered I have a student working in the cabinet office as a policy adviser. I'm torn between disowning him and hitting him up so that he remembers us when he's parachuted into a safe seat and the department of education.

Yeah it’s really hard to get the “both sides are bad” incisive analysis outside this thread

Radical centrism is such a unique position. It’s good thing we have you and bloo in here to take up that torch or we’d have to resort to...you know...like 80% of every news outlet in the world.

The map seems to indicate there are 0 troops in West africa, so what gives?

"Deployments of fewer than 50 troops not shown on map"

the war on Christmas was fought and won by trump so now i can say:

merry Christmas mets.

50/50 me thinks.

Was there a fight? Is as simple as say merry Xmas to someone and if they have different beliefs they simply answer happy holidays or say thanks.
If someone tells me happy holidays my response is thanks you too or happy holidays to you!
I’m not religious. Whatever makes people happy I’m good with it.
The issue is when people are upset that someone didn’t tell them merry Xmas but instead told them happy holidays and they say some dumb **** like:
Dis mERICA is merry Christmas here!!

i think tucker carlson and jake tapper are supposed to be on opposite political spectrums, but i can't tell them apart.

let's see if i can embed this tweet https://twitter.com/_NativeInLA/stat...21965774516224

Bernie nails it here:

LOL this "great" economy.

Did I post this already? Dunno, but coming back to some of trump's videos after a few weeks off focusing on UK politics, he sounds truly deranged. We're all boiling frogs and we ain't know it.

Yup, Uber driving, deliveroo & Amazon warehouse stacking, welcome to our glorious new economy.

i just read that richest 3 people in the world made 231 billion in the last decade, so that's almost 8 billion a year each, maybe 650 million a month. over 20 million a day? is my math right?

that's a truly disgusting amount of wealth

"Worldview" is too individualistic to substitute for "organized religion", and it is too broad to encompass "religion" more generally. It's semantics, but afaict religion is used to refer to a higher power from which humanity derives its own meaning/purpose; "worldview" extends beyond that to include things like nihilism & humanism.

I want to stress disagreement with:

Science is structurally superior to other approaches to knowledge because it has greater predictive success. It is imperfect (observation bias, eg), but compared to its alternatives, its shortcomings pale.

I stress this disagreement because the attitude you are expressing here might be the most dangerous one you have ever uttered itt. It opens the door for complete epistemological capture. Science is founded upon repeatable, shared observations, and the logical relations between them. Take that away and you're left with the military fiat of the European Middle Ages that triggered Master's selectively prejudicial damnation.

In other news, Trump is exploring the use of eminent domain to seize hundreds of miles of private land in Texas for his wall.

Sounds like a win for both major US political blocs.

bernie would probably win texas if trump did that

Your ideas of religion are too "Western" to fully encompass human experience and would involve too much hair-splitting in trying to determine "does xyz count as higher powers or not?".
Nihilism and humanism offer systems of ethics in the same way that Buddhism and Christianity do. But there are varieties of Buddhism (zen in particular) in which you'd be hard pressed to find a higher power. Ultimately worldview is what you're left to work with.
I think you've misunderstood me.
There is a dichotomy that some people posses between what they consider to be religion and what they consider their own views to be. And there is a large amount of arrogance that goes into thinking that. And it's that arrogance that should be considered dangerous. The point wasn't that science should be dismissed or that it doesn't have validity. It is more that people pick and choose what science to believe in and what science to not believe in, in much the same manner that other more traditional religious hypocrites pick and choose which tenets of religion to follow.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Do you have an example of what you're talking about?

No. Hinduism & Daoism both stem from a conception of greater-than-thou'ness (Brahma & Dao, respectively), and Buddhism is a hybrid of the two. Zen Buddhism is closer to Daoism; Mahayana Buddhism is closer to Hinduism. It's actually the Western concept of Jesus, God-as-man, that paves the way for the humanism of the 20th century (I recommend this book for more on this point).

Nihilism does not offer a system of ethics; it is fundamentally an amoral approach to living.

This digression is probably less interesting that your other point, which I'm responding to next.

The important difference is that religion has no empirical basis, so it is epistemologically trivial to countermand or "update" traditional, religious dictates.

Scientific knowledge otoh is anchored in experience. One does not scientifically "pick and choose" which observations to heed, as one might wrt variant gospels. You can't say "well, Newton's laws were declared in a different culture" in order to refute the theory that moving objects will continue so to move until otherwise acted upon.

I'm sure you're thinking of things like climate science, sexual biology, and maybe even evolutionary psychology (which is barely properly considerable as "science", if at all), since these disciplines carry social/political, discursive weight, but I think you'll see that the disputes in those areas are not premised on each side succumbing to selective observation. I echo EB's request for examples you have in mind, if you're interested in scrutiny.

a materialist's electoral map (no wonder the fly-over's think progressives are crazy):

structural racism at the heart of US income equality

eta: and/or vice versa?