MSC

Lol trust me we aren't flooding in and I'd never have been able to get a work visa without a specialized degree and experience in some kind of job that pays 6 figures. Me meeting my wife was a fluke. That said, in two years I'll be eligible to naturalise and I'll just be another crazy American! Oh it can get worse and with individuals like Trump, who like to blame others for their failures, it's only a matter of time before they accuse their own followers of not being loyal enough in a deranged screaming fit. I recall an early youtuber who went that way and was like Trump in so many ways. Trumps advanced age and being in cognitive decline, self control will go out the window eventually and the unmasking begins. Having all eyes on you is also it's own type of stress and narcissists like Trump can't deal with being seen in a negative light for too long. The fact that he's getting pushback from republicans and his own supporters now and that cracks are starting to show will create a panic in him. I mean some idiots will support him no matter what and even if they can acknowledge his worsening mental state they'll blame it on democrats for "Witch hunting" him... but not all of them will do that. His supporters aren't a monolith either and support him for different reasons. Us viewing them all as the same is a mistake and if you look back over the last decade until 2016 you'll notice that he chips away at his own supporters with increasing levels of alienation and blocks do fall away as time goes on. Right now he's losing support amongst woman, not just because Harris is a woman but because of how Trump speaks about her.

Donald Trump infuriates his supporters. The above is a link to a DailyMail story detailing how Trump supporters view Trumps attempts to grow his base. Trump has really boxed himself in it seems as he has radicalised his base so much, that if he attempts to engage in any form of moderate/independent attracting speech, he will alienate his own supporters, some of whom are claiming "I just won't vote" unless Trump backs policies that contribute toward a net negative immigration outcome. On another note; Trump is apparently obsessively rewatching the footage from the attempt on his life and some are of the opinion he's developing PTSD. Honestly I kind of feel like he may be about to have a nervous breakdown, a very public one! One that will be very hard for anyone to claim it is anything but unhinged.

It's not beyond a possibility at least and the optics of that would look better than throwing him in jail, in the sense that it can done in the name of caring for Trumps well-being. His base by itself isn't enough to win the electoral college and he's done everything he can do discourage his voters from even bothering to show up at the ballot box. Why vote if you think it's rigged? Unfortunately he hasn't grown his base at all while Harris is enjoying bipartisan support from Republicans and evangelicals who see a vote to protect the country from a potential dictator, as patriotic. Another aspect to this election though, and one that could upend my prediction, is actually if Kennedy drops out of the race. At first he seemed to pull a few supporters from both dems and republicans but now it's clear he has been pulling more voters from Trump than Biden or Harris. When running hypothetical matchups, Harris polls better than Trump with Kennedy in the race. Kennedy also seems crazy enough not to drop out even though he has no hope of winning. A ceasefire in Gaza I think would increase support for Harris. I don't know how much by, but it could. There is also a camp of independent and Republican voters (a very small camp) who won't be voting for either the Democrat or Republican candidate and intend to do a write in vote for their local senators and congressional reps. On a personal note; I convinced a Trump supporter yesterday that one thing they have been told is a complete lie. I'm a greencard holding immigrant and as such it is a fact that I cannot vote for nor contribute to any candidate for federal offices. When they suggested that maybe I just don't know I'm allowed to vote, I shut that down by saying straight that I want to vote in this election so bad that if any new law showed up giving me that right, I'd absolutely know about it. Maybe in some local municipalities somewhere in the states I have a right to vote as a lawful permanent resident but definitely not at the federal level. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to give greencard holders the right to vote in federal elections would require an act of congress. Is that correct? Fat chance of that happening when Republicans control the house.

So you think Trump will win based only on the views of Trump supporters? As it stands; pollsters and betters believe Harris is going to win the electoral college and the popular vote; while the race is still competitive, the race has completely changed as Harris is polling very well among women and independent white working class voters. Not just in terms of support but the percentages of people who say they are excited to vote for her are way up. Her campaign is re-engaging people who weren't happy with either choosing Trump or Biden. Trump is also shooting himself in the foot by not only ignoring policy in favour of personal attack strategies that most are just bored with, but by suggesting he will stop infrastructure works in swing states, effectively destroying a large amount of construction jobs on roads and bridges. Also everything Trump said of Bidens age is now coming to bite Trump in the ass as now he's the old hasbeen fart in the race. Not to mention that they have been throwing those kind of insults at Biden, since 2020 when he was 78/79, the same age Trump is now. Look, Trump still has a very loyal base, but that's all and his current strategy seems to be to pander to that base instead of trying to win independents and moderates. He's completely setting the stage for another big election lie if/when he loses. Lastly, we are less than 5 weeks away from Trump being sentenced, and with his remarks about fleeing to Venezuela if he loses the election (Keep in mind Trump is out on bail right now) then his multiple prosecutors may very well decide to ask the courts to hold trump until sentencing in one case or trials in other cases and considering he has means and has now shared publicly a desire to flee, it isn't too much of a stretch to see his bail being revoked. The guy is a flight risk, plain and simple. Obviously he wouldn't flee to Venezuela, but Saudi Arabia or Russia maybe. Now I've hated trump the whole time he's been in politics but even I can say that he was smarter in 2016 when he won and he is in serious decline. Big box of tictacs + little box of tictacs = inflation... that's his arguments now, that's what people get when he does talk about economics. No policy ideas, no plan on how to reduce the cost of living for the working and middle-class. Just "Dont vote for a woman with a crazy laugh who was always Indian then suddely became black". My concern isn't that Trump will win the electoral college as I don't think he is going to; my concern is whether his margin of loss will be small enough for the supreme court to interfere with the election and essentially crown him by themselves with some legal fuckery.

Yeah it's when you realise there is no no way to escape checkmate and you've lost already, now you have to pick between forfeit or letting your opponent play out their moves for a satisfying win.

Depends on the policy, but no, not on their own. In this case; if the impact of a policy leads to voters in swing states, gaining or having friends or family gain new jobs, that wouldn't be available without those policies, that ripples. Policies definitely can contribute towards an election win though, not on their own but then I'm not making my claim that Harris will win, based solely on policy. My claim is made in relation to a variety of factors. This might even be an election where the VP pick has far more impact than it has in previous elections. I'd never really heard much about Walz for example but that in itself is an advantage as anyone more known would have been lambasted for awhile by Republicans talking hypotheticals, like Buttiegieg for example. I guess you'd call it a kind of insult based attrition where the longer Trump and his brood cult have to focus on you, the harder it is to overcome the damage to your image whether what is said about you is true or not. I don't know why but when I look at everything together, my mind just screams "Harris will win barring any major changes to the political landscape." If Trump drops out or is assassinated, thats one. Kennedy dropping out or those ballet exclusions making it through the courts could also skew it as he's likely to take more votes from Trump than Harris. Obviously I'm completely wrong if Harris is assassinated. If compelling evidence came to light of her committing a crime of moral turpitude that could also derail her campaign. 3 months is a long time in politics sure, but not a lot of time to work on constructing a factory in the new American battery belt or to work in solar panel manufacturing or to build roads and bridges. Those folk will be working those jobs for much longer than 3 months and it's only looking like more jobs will need to be created in those sectors in the future and there will be claimable subsidies and tax credits from the inflation reduction act for the next decade. These are some of the areas voters are most concerned about. Inflation is now at 2.9%, first it's been below 3% since 2021 and the federal reserve is already having discussions on when to cut interest rates. People care very much about the abortion issue still also. I'd say more on that but it's late, I'm tired and I've got peaches to pick tomorrow early before they fall!

Fair. I'm still certain she will win though and it isn't just polls or wishful thinking but policy impact during Biden's time in office and a variety of other factors that make me say that. It's still no more than an educated guess, but I got the last one right so I'm swinging for a second. If this was who wants to be a millionaire and this was for £1,000,000 (sorry USA Chris Tarrant was the best host so British version it is lol) I'd be locking in Harris. The energy and excitement in, around and about her campaign is very reminiscent to Obamas campaign, people seem to like her running mate Walz, Trump is badly floundering and seems to be in cognitive decline too now or isn't handling the stress of facing a more energetic opponent so well and it's getting harder and harder for republicans to defend him, the entire tone of the election has changed and the economic impact of Bidens infrastructure deal and the inflation reduction act, in swing states particularly (Solar panel manufacturing in Georgia as an example) but lots of clean energy subsidies and tax credits are being filed for in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere too. The race in Florida has now come within the polls margin of error so they are literally neck and neck, in Florida. The context of the race is also important since Biden is still president. If a serious gaffe happens within the federal government now, Harris can distance herself and Biden doesn't lose anything to take the blame (for example if there was a massive mishandling of a public health emergency within the next few months). No, short of assassination or a serious health issue, I do think Harris is gonna win it, and the 3 months in politics can still work in her favour too if whatever happens can benefit her run over Trumps. Hell, a new good reason to think he'll lose, comes out of his mouth every time he speaks now.

Making this poll as I'm at the point where I feel I have seen enough to know how this is going to turn out. My prediction, Harris is going to win. I'm curious to see what you all think of the race so far and who you believe will win. Doesn't have to be based on who you want to win, just who you think will win.

And I'd just add that what little you do know, is PR. Like the humble billionaire who drives a pos car. It's bs. Ultimately Elon Musks rage can be summed up as butthurt. Butthurt that he had dreams of owning a cloud fief like Zuckerberg and Bezos, but because he threw his lot in with Alt-right crap, Nazis etc, advertisers bombed away from twitter so less people to buy data from the data mine of us. He literally thinks he'll gain more power with twitter (not calling it X because I will not enable musks alphabefetish/lazy naming conventions.) If public policy is rolled back to how it was before the 60s and advertisers can overtly be as openly horrible as he is without ruining their reputations because they are backed by a Trump presidency or some other wannabe fascist nutbag. It's the same story as Trump. Elon is getting investigated by the feds and he feels a move to technofuedalism under the heel (or to be the heel?) of a dictator is what will get him out of the fire and the frying pan, and able to continue on with abusive business practices with zero consequences. Also a lot of the things that Elon chooses to take an interest in, when looked at together, look suspiciously like supervillain plans. He wants self driving cars to efficiently move all his worker drones to where they need to go for their 16hr shift in their 7 day work weeks, he wants to have a space fleet, he puts satellites all over the globe and wants to put computer chips in everyones brains, so they can mentally connect to twitter where his posts are given massive amounts of artificial exposure and he has the power to bore into the earth and create as many supr villain hidden fortresses as he wants. Honestly the satellite thing freaks me out the most. There was an episode of stargate that was just a vision Daniel was given, of the sort of evil shit he would do if given the knowledge of the Goa'uld and he straight up went darkside and deployed satellites all over the globe in a eerily Elon Musk like manner, slowly turning more batshit as the power went to his head aaaannndd.. boom. His satellites attack every spot on the planet. I know it's highly unlikely, but I bet you he is just narcissistic enough to believe he can do that one day. Seriously, a chip in your brain, in the right place, connected to twitter, Elon tweets and all of a sudden, pleasure centers are stimulated and before long you are addicted to Musk tweets and him. They were doing experiments like this in the sixties and research participants would end up completely infatuated with the researcher who had control of the electrical stimulation in the pleasure centers of their brains. Obviously all just speculation on my part that Elon is intending to do that but I really really don't trust the mf and his motivations are creepy at best, evil at worst.

@dimreeprI'm sorry for what I said. It was hurtful and really just spoke of my frustration with myself for not knowing how to communicate with you. There are things we aren't understanding about one another and that is resulting in this conflict between us. I don't know how to simplify the sort of things I talk about but I can tell that you aren't getting a lot of it and that's probably on me for not being able to figure out how to relay some of the more complex ideas to you. I don't think I'm always right, I don't think my ideas are perfect but I've been studying this all long enough to be aware that there are some people out there who will find some pragmatic value in some of my ideas and there is a coherent enough framework there to help at least me through some of the obstacles of life and it really has done that for me, in many ways. Leaving it there. There is no TL;DR but please just find the time to read it Dim. I hate being angry at people or feeling like I want to hate them. So I'm letting it go.

This bothers me. Being new here sucked, a lot. But more engagement is good for the site really and newbies being discouraged or driven away isn't good for the forum or for science. Maybe if Dim sees this he can find the time to read and realise that we don't want him to stop interacting with us or the forum, just that he enjoys the time he likes to spend here not at the expense of others. This isn't a safe space but respecting each other and trying to keep it friendlier here than other forms of social media would go far and remembering that it is a science forum so reading is kind of important. Disagree with me and critique me and everyone else, but do so sincerely, in good faith and from a place of being informed. If there is an attention span issue, legitimately what can be done to help with that? Would putting some of the longer comments through a text to voice software help? There are ways. Or maybe limiting yourself to less engagement but better quality? I don't know. I'm spitballing solutions. When my frustration subsides I just feel bad for Dim a bit. I'm not a fucking saint either. Is it naive of me to try to hold myself to a high standard of inclusivity and to try to diplomatically reason with people? Even if they are (by their own admission in Username) a little dim? Am I really just angry at myself for not knowing how to communicate with Dim?

Yes. This isn't a "it's a me or him" situation, that would be stupid but this; Can we all agree that the bare minimum for a good faith discussion is that we actually read what each other has to say. I've read through a mix of really long comments made by others, some insightful, some brilliant, some I whole heartedly take issue with, but I read it. When someone says to me that they didn't read what I had to say but they still think what I said was stupid or wront, its maddening. Not because it actually makes me think what I said was stupid, but for how insulting it is for someone like Dim who has shown they are more than capable of holding conversations and contributing toward discussions to flipflop between that and this troll like behaviour that seems to be intended to do nothing more than to get a rise out of people. I never know what to expect from Dim, I just don't, I never really know where he stands on an issue, I never know if he's understood what is being said to him and I never know if he's being serious or being deliberately provocative and for my autistic brain none of it computes and it makes talking with him and trying to include him really stressful. I had him on my ignore list but it still indirectly tells you when someone you're ignoring comments and again, sometimes Dim has insights so I don't want to ignore him all the time and he seemed to back off me for a bit so I took him off and then it started back up again but I also see him doing it to others. I got year long time outs from this forum, for very rare meltdowns during very stressful periods of my life, not consistent nearly every day trolling of most members.

We need to talk about Dim. Who tf does he think he is? Coming onto threads, openly admitting he isn't reading anything longer than a few lines of text and shitting over everything anyone has to say half the time. It's trolling plain and simple. If I openly claimed I wasn't reading half of what any of you were saying and was just being purely reactionary to whatever words I happen to understand and just delivering thinly veiled insult all the time I'd have been banned. Is anyone else picking up on this behaviour or is it just to covert for anyone but the people who have had to live with people like Dim their whole lives? Honestly every time he comments I just want to stop engaging and I feel like he just ruins so many good conversations and riles people up and for what? When does he ever say anything particularly useful or insightful? Once in a blue moon? Honestly I really enjoy coming here and talking to the majority of you but he makes this place miserable.

I did pick up on the Kantian influences earlier. However I believe I said earlier, or have said elsewhere on this forum if not here, that context relativism is a biocentric claim not an anthroprocentric one. I'll use humans as an example most frequently but altogether where you say moral agents across all possible worlds, I say "living beings" and leave it at that. Are you familiar with Schweitzer? I mean I feel like it's both, those arent mutually exclusive roles and I personally believe the roles of an ethicist are a bit broader than that, however my first subject of study was psychology, and moved onto philosophy and then ethics from there. So mine is a multidisciplinary approach and it isn't just confined to human psychology. Context relativism is useful for delineating situations by context typology to arrive at a dynamic description of the moral cognition of living beings, by way of having a lot of explanatory power for the very purpose of inferring facts about morality among all moral agents. Not to mention it gives language a roomier place to go when describing the moral landscape we find ourselves in with this world. When you give language a place to go, and have more to quantify, the more you can design scientific experiments and research to better arrive at truth, moral or otherwise. What is historical case law if not examples of experiments in applied ethics? What people believe is absolutely relevant. You're people, I'm people. I tend to side with Hume and his views on philosophers doing more to engage with the common person. See here is the thing, you've suggested that an ethicist is a sort of scientist, but if that were true, or at least if you were truly an ethicist with that kind of spirit in mind, you'd make "Ability to explain moral disagreement and conflict" as one of your selection criteria for a normative theory, because if your normative theory of ethics can't explain observable phenomenon in the behaviours of moral agents, in what way would that be a "true" theory? There is also a bit of an irony in trying to define freedom, by limiting freedom of definition to only your definition of freedom. That's totally unrelated and I'm not trying to make any real point with that, more just pointing out something kind of humourous to me. I could argue that such a moral intuition is coercion by way of removing or reducing your ability to make a free choice that leads you away from a negative consequence, due to what could amount to genetic baggage. Plenty of racists have a "gut feeling" that they just don't trust them *insert any race here* and it could be an old evolutionary remnant of some survival based psychological fear of any outsider due to fears of disease and the like, which isn't so relevant for most humans who aren't part of some uncontacted tribe. I do think you do need to spend a bit of time researching emotional phenomenology and I do think you'd find it interesting but intuition is a very very tricky thing to discuss and define. And look I've been down that rabbit hole of apriori reasoning but no matter how I turn it around in my head, we just don't reason like that. Everything we do is based on obsrvation and experience, if not ours then our ancestors. It's inescapable. You cannot seperate morality from moral agents and you can't turn away one group of moral agents beliefs as irrelevant when they are part of your study group and you yourself are locked into the moral cognition of a human being, which operates on the basis that ethics and morality are context dependent, it has to operate on that assumption because every situation it finds itself in is a different context unless you increase the scale of your region of locality to Earth, Sol, Milky way etc but you'll always come back to certain greater contexts we find ourselves in, like being a living being, being a free agent, in our case, being human and being ethicists of some form. Although again, moral psycjologist roles and duties are kind of locked in to what I do with context relativism maybe more so than ethicist. Didn't you already admit you aren't reading the majority of what we say? So how tf would you know dim? Just piss off, getting on my nerves like seriously go see a therapist. This trolling bullshit has to stop. Get help. Your reading comprehension is off. I said, no, that's not what I meant. End of discussion. Back on the ignore list for you. Don't know why TF I gave you a second chance but you've blown it. You are so transparent anytime two or more people are having a discussion that you dont understand or in this case, even care enough to read, your jealousy reaction spikes because you don't understand what all the big words are. You're bitter and miserable and that's why you're constantly here everyday pissing and shitting on everything everyone has to say. Every now and then you happen to say something that isn't trash but then a broken clock is right twice a day. Then you go and act like you dont know exactly what you're doing whenever people have had enough of you pressing their buttons. Just fuck off away from me mate. You drive me absolutely crazy with this shit. Admitting you don't fucking read what we say then having the audacity to just say everyone is wrong. How TF would you know?! Don't speak to me on here again. No more chances just get out of my face already. All I fucking talk about is the nature of thought. Please kindly go back under your bridge. Don't you have goats to pick on?

That is a good point to make, the bigoted elephant in the room. That may have even been some of my hesitation in advocating for someone other than Biden because in the end he was a white male and accounting for superficiality in the electorate, seemed like the safe option, but in the end I have to question whether that itself is just a manifestation of my own biases. How do you gauge when America is really ready to make that change, until it makes it? Is it wrong to discourage the people fighting to make that change happen? Trump or no Trump? There is another aspect to that superficiality in virtue signalling though, call it what you want but some people may very well vote for Kamala Harris just so they can say they are not racist. Whether that means they are or aren't bigots I don't know but it is something to keep in mind. At the moment if that is something that prompts people to vote Harris, I'll take that W. There is a bit of a silver lining in that really we only have to gauge if whether or not a few swing states are ready to vote for a black woman. The popular vote I think is most definitely ready for that. It's voted for a black person and a woman before. Hilary Clinton won the popular vote, Obama won pop and electoral college, and due to Trump's odious personality I think that maybe this is the perfect candidate for a black lady to beat. Black lady Whitehouse! (Guess the reference)

If you'll recall though I did say people were being too critical of Biden and I will hold up my hand and say I was wrong for saying dropping Biden for anyone else would be political suicide for the dems so close to the election. Do I still think people were being overly judgemental of Biden? Yes. However in political terms, based on how a lot of people felt about it, Biden had lost the faith of enough voters for him to recognise that the political wind just wasn't there for him. So yeah, I was wrong. However it isn't or wasn't the same as the running mate nomination discussion since Kamala promoted out of that position leaving it to be filled by someone else who hasn't been picked yet. Once they are picked though, I'm totally onboard with what you are laying down. Strategic unity to beat MAGA all the way. Shapiro, Buttiegieg, Kelly, all are better than Just dance Vance and Scrooge McTrump! D-MAGA, don't make America Gag again. One person in the running I don't think would be a good choice is Pritzker. Having lived in Illinois for three years while he was governor I just feel he never really improved the place. Also, Illinois is pretty safely Democrat with or without Pritzker. If he could have flipped a swing state maybe but IL is a safe bet and the other midwest states have little reason to fall behind Kamala just because Pritzker is hypothetically on the ticket.

No, that part is all well and good, as is citing previous philosophical thinking to critique it. The tribalistic component revolves around school of thought and institutional narrative/politics. Simply put, if I am an advocate for theory X but the school I study at tends to be an advocate for theory Y, the institutional bias may see me suffer academically not for the actual quality of my work, but just for what the work is about. Or to those that safely agree with their mentors... And there is more than a strong chance that most modern philosophers still don't understand Wittgenstein. Also, how would you gauge whether or not I know of what I speak, when you won't commit to reading for nuance and detail and instead want everything in bite sized slices where some points invariably have to be left out. Do me a favor Dim, stop assuming. If you don't know what I mean by a word, ask. The actual meaning is based on the use of the word, not your interpretation of it.

Oh fine. Very simply, in the primer he used one value attributive word (better) to define another value attŕibutive word (good). In metaethics this is a nono. Your root value word has to be cleary defined. In Humes terms, the dude built a bridge, claiming it could cross an ocean and he made it about 10 miles from shore. The rest is mostly just me egoicly mirroring his own attitude and talking about how my moral normative theory, is his moral theories daddy! The irony being that folk within philosophical acadamia are as tribalistic as everyone else is, their tribes just have more nuance. I'm a cosmopolitan who's never stepped foot in a formal philosophy class so I always find it hilarious that they need clear answers from the outside looking in. They claim to care about truth, then put limits on how the truth is allowed to present itself to them, which gets them further away from what is true and probably makes Wittgenstein and many others turn in their graves that these folk are given the chance to get PHDs. I also take issue with how the OP mislead us into thinking he was a member of faculty when really he meant he went to this school at one point. He's not faculty and this is just his little pursuit. Can't figure out his own theory, so he's crowdsourcing it.

I'm not helping you duck out on reading.

You having a short attention span, explains a lot.

No need for an immigration hawk when Dems can just correctly point out that the Republicans killed attempts to push through new immigration policies while they controlled the house just to not give Biden a win in an election year. You can't even give these people what they want without them biting your hand.

Firstly; scenario two is a lot of language just to say "You do nothing." But there is a problem with freedom consequentialism as laid out in the primer. You've tried to define, good, bad and neutral in terms of "better" and "worse" which are both still value attributions but as yet undefined by freedom consequentialism/You. In short, you've not bridged the is/ought gap because you've not described what good or bad is to start with and your definition was circular. What is better? More good? What is good? Better than bad? Is bad better than worse? Earlier you mentioned moral intuition and later coercion. You didn't relate the two but moral intuition, or intuition more broadly is most likely a psychological phenomena relating to partially recalled memory. It's like a mental calling card for "This is so because it fits with a past experience of mine." And since we can never engage in moral learning from a clean slate, from birth to now, what we were taught about it, informs our intuitions. Stealing feels intuitively wrong to me and you, because that is what we were taught all along. Facts about quantum mechanics feel weird and counterintuitive because we've all spent our lives using our eyeballs observing how matter moves around at our level, all our lives. Literally spooky action at a distance is Einstein having a wtf reaction to quantum entanglement and how an apparent information exchange between two entangled particles can seem to happen faster than the speed of light. Why? Because he'd always observed nothing can break the speed of light. Rounding back to why I related this to coercion; our moral intuitions are essentially coercions by our past experiences and the fallibility of human recall. When I feel intuition, I ask myself what I'm forgetting, then from there I figure out whether or not the original root memory was correct and if it was useful intuition or just bias coming out. Are you making simplicity a criteria for simplicity's sake or are you implying that the truth is not complex? Okay, having now read everything, I'm going to be honest, I won't be entering this competition. It's not because I believe freedom isn't something to value, it is, and context relativism definitely gives limelight to consequentialism but it doesn't drop everything. Context relativism is actually a response really to the rut philosophers find themselves in based on "Moral intuition." This, "there can be only one" mentality. A monopoly on moral thought where everything can only be viewed through one lens or that one moral framework that is supposed to guide and get everyone through everything, morally and physically unscathed and that itself is just not based on reality. There is such a thing as moral ecology and context relativism isn't a normative theory about right and wrong, it's the set of all theories of right and wrong together, in a linguistic toolbelt, designed to help people figure out the rights and wrongs of their own moral thoughts in relation to other living beings doing the same, how to grow, change and adapt and recognize that in some situations, putting any one value, in this case freedom, isn't always going to lead you to good consequences in every situation and may lead to a failure or a tragedy of sorts. I'm a parent so honestly I've had about 1001 thought scenarios of all the things that could go wrong for my kids as they grow up and plenty of those scenarios are possible and for some of them the right choice is me lying about committing a crime and taking a fall for my kids, in the scenarios where they are about to be a victim of a broken justice system. So about 5 years ago, I came to the realization that moral philosophers and ethicists, when you ignore all the arguing and the tribalism and just, listen, without assuming, you realize that these old squabbling dead and living philosophers are discovering more and more about all the different ways humans think about right and wrong and I've yet to meet a single person who can really be called just a utilitarian, consequentialist, deontologist or even a pragmatist. A lot of philosophers are arguing about the right one or most true one and the answer is that it will always be context dependent. Our planet, our world, it's a context. On this planet, if I dropped you from a cliff you might die, if I drop you from a cliff on a different celestial body, with far weaker gravity, you might just get to experience what it would be like to be a feather. And yes, I realize the irony in that I still came up with a paradigm where I can say everyone is really a contextualist, so there is almost a "There can be only one" type vibe, the difference is that you are arguing for which is the best colour on the human moral tapestry, while I'm calling the tapestry a tapestry and really just avoiding the debate altogether because what we are looking at just wouldn't be the same without the majority of all the colours present (except for the parasitic one, a topic for another day. Freedom consequentialism is true... Until it's not. It is true that some people will think about right and wrong in these terms, weighing up freedom is a real phenomenon but... It's just not a complete normative theory because it doesn't, like many others, explain why all these disagreements exist in the first place, nor does it acknowledge the existence of moral situations and problems where different outcomes wouldn't relate to freedom threats. Contextualism does. Contextualism also acknowledges the inherent complexity of existence and while having epistemic tools to try and make things easier, it never ever makes them simple. There are only two simple facts; Nothing is ever simple and there are two simple facts.... That's it. Phew, sorry if I sounded overly polemical toward the end there, was just getting into the flow of these kinds of debates again. Keep it coming! Oh, last thing, when we care about truth, it's best to offer a prize for changing your mind too, else we aren't acknowledging the truth that we can always be mistaken because we are all fallible. My prize can just be more conversation though, keep your money. Seriously why are you offering a prize of 10k for this?

I think something to keep an open mind about is whether or not Shapiro can support Harris foreign policy agendas that might conflict with his views as governor. A hard stance on Israel for example; if the Harris administration felt compelled to take a hard action against Israel, sanctions etc, can Shapiro take to that?

Hi Daniel, I'm working my way through and came across this; Now I can understand completely where you are coming from with both subjectivism and most forms of relativism. However, my approach would be arguing for moral realism through objectively derived context relativism. Which is termed as new relativism in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Rounding back to context relativism, it isn't a theory of what ought to be, it's a theory of what is already the case and is more of a statement on the observable truth of our moral psychology. The ought in context relativism, is that we ought to explicitly figure out the nature of our context dependent value attributions so we can understand how we already view morality and truth, understand contention, confusion and disagreement. Like I said however, I do understand where you are coming from and if I decide to take a crack at your challenge once I've finished the primer, I will. But definitely need to address the rejection of all relativism and I will make a case in a submission for why context relativism should not be a cause for exclusion, based on it's merits as a form of objective moral realism, that adheres not only to moral sentiment but discoveries made about the physical nature of the universe. It also deconstructs why other forms of relativism, like cultural relativism are incorrect, by identifying non-uniformity of moral thought within nearly every given culture. I'll leave it there and maybe you can let me know if there can be an exception for this relativism, as ultimately what really separates moral realism and moral subjectivism when it comes to relativism, is what we are saying things are relative to. I'll probably add more questions as I continue reading btw. Hope you are well and thanks, this has been pretty engaging so far.

Based on some new information I think you're right. New polling data shows her gaining in some swing states but not Pennsylvania, however she is due to attend a campaign rally in Philadelphia and is expected to attend with her VP pick who will be announced there. Why announce in philly if you're not going to pick Shapiro? Would be like visiting the Catholic part of Glasgow and saying you're a Rangers supporter. Dead on arrival! No way she'd be stupid enough to kick a swing state in the teeth like that.