Phi for All

! Moderator Note Copying and pasting the work of others is plagiarism, and is against our rules here. You are suspended for a week.

I have no idea what this sentence means. I can't believe it's in response to my post asking you for more rigor about a sensitive topic. I don't think "too sentimental" is a clinical diagnosis. I don't think "romantic" is a term most professionals use wrt suicide prevention. I can't find it anywhere in the literature I've read on the subject. Again, I find it a bit offensive that you're posting these highly subjective observations of yours as if they were part of some general mental health journey you're advocating. There are places for that kind of guesswork, but the Medical Sciences section of a science discussion forum isn't one of them. I'm really concerned that someone trying to read this thread for help is going to take statements like this seriously, as if it's advice from a mental healthcare professional. I've never heard a mental health expert talk about "spirituality" or anybody being "spiritually weak". You are NOT using clinical terminology, and your assessments are guesses that are either too broad to be meaningful or just word salad like the above. Science. Discussion. Forum.

You got down into the dermis, like a tattoo needle. Ouch! That sounds like a long-haul, painful recovery. Triple ouch! Glad you're still with us.

! Moderator Note You need to STOP attacking people if you can't discuss a topic civilly. I'm more than happy to give you a short vacation from posting if you think personal abuse is appropriate.

Hemostasis is the first step, forming a clot to stop the bleeding and form a scab. Inflammation flushes debris and micro-contaminants from the wound and introduces nutrients to help form new tissue. Rebuilding the tissue forces the scab off eventually, which should remove any macro-contaminants (like cotton or other bits). Your skin grows from the bottom layers to the top, so anything trapped on a layer will eventually be forced to the surface and shed with other skin.

! Moderator Note I'm not following you. Restart what, exactly? This is a science discussion forum. We talk about sciencey stuff, in a threaded, written format. Each conversation basically stands on its own merit. From scratch? Other than post count, why begin again? This isn't something Moderators can do, so I want to know this isn't some whim before I drag an Admin away from trying to earn their funding or get out ahead of their lab work.

! Moderator Note Not a philosophical question. Thread closed.

! Moderator Note Advertising links removed per our rules. As mentioned above, we're a discussion forum. We aren't a blog and don't promote religions, we discuss various subjects in a reasoned manner. If this isn't a drive-by spam attack, please respond and tell us what you'd like to discuss about this church and its beliefs, or I'll have to close this thread.

From the Greek myth about a guy who goes blind from grasping his serpent too often, right?

According to the Yankovic horoscope, you should try to avoid any Virgos or Leos with the Ebola virus. You are the true Lord of the Dance, no matter what those idiots at work say.

While I can easily see alternatives to Christo-Fascism gaining in popularity as the white supremacists in the US are taking off their hoods, I do wonder how the recent rise in social media, YouTube video followings, and TikTok lifestyle livestreams have affected the numbers. Certainly it's much easier to count your following today than it was in 1990. How many of these new pagans have always been pagans, just uncounted or misnamed as "free spirits"?

! Moderator Note We don't review videos. If you want to discuss the rise of paganism, we can do it without padding the views on a YT video. Videos are notoriously difficult to discuss scientifically in a forum like this, and nobody has the time to watch and try to catch all the inconsistencies. If you're only here to support the video, I need to close this, but if you're truly interested in discussing the rise of paganism, you need to present your arguments here, and not require that folks watch a video in order to participate. Also, we'll do it civilly or we won't do it at all. We attack ideas here, not people.

OMG, this is a disgusting response to what I said. Fallacy much?? I won't insult your reading abilities the way MigL does with mine, but you can shove this strawman appropriately. I'll wait for a better thread, or start one myself. Thanks for engaging, FWIW.

I did NOT claim all black Americans need to be compensated for government sanctioned redlining practices. My claim is that all black Americans who were victims of government sanctioned redlining practices need to be compensated. YOU keep claiming that means we're only using skin color to determine who was victimized, and YOU keep ignoring that we have records of the cities where this type of discrimination was practiced. And YOU keep moving the goalposts on my argument to include the Civil War and other incidents where reparations are being discussed. Again, I wish we could have a focused discussion on JUST the issue of redlining, where I don't think your "you can't use skin color or it's racist" argument holds any water at all.

No. 21 pages in and it's still NO. If we somehow discovered we'd been systemically discriminating against people with albinism, those with almost no melanin, denying them the potential to prosper because of the way they look, what other factors do you want to consider besides those that make them albino? Seriously, this objection has NEVER made any sense to me. If a judge determines a thief who stole my money must pay that money back, is the judge practicing thievery by using money as a factor?

! Moderator Note We can't do anything about your rep count, other than what The Vat did. We saw your report but by that time enough people had disagreed with the negatives.

At this point, I still have major problems with the argument you and MigL have put forth, that any solution that involves using skin color as a factor is automatically going to be racist. I think this argument is not only wrong (and I've explained why several times), it's what is keeping you both from seeing the reasoning behind the solutions that have been proposed.

Demonstrably false. The representatives that drafted the laws that caused the problems are dead, but those laws were still operating even after they died, and some of the people affected by those laws are still alive. The US doesn't throw out laws (or our responsibility to follow them) just because those who drafted them have died.

Except in the cases highlighted most recently in this thread, the people who did something wrong were The People, as in We, The People of the United States of America. We're not dead, we're not gone, and there are more of us than ever. Btw, that's not what "An eye for an eye" means. If you run into someone's car and agree to pay for it, it's reparation or compensation. An eye for an eye would be more like, "You ran into my car, so I'm going to run into yours!"

This is especially important since many black families have had to flee the cities where this kind of oppression was at its worst, which then allows the wealthy to buy up the distressed properties and gentrify the areas, completing the cycle of discrimination. Cash right now would allow many to update their homes and neighborhoods so they can stay where they are, and take advantage of the improved home value.

Only in the way you keep dancing around with the goalposts. I truly thank you for letting us take your topic off on all kinds of tangents, but I think if I really want to talk to you about, say, reparations for victims of government redlining practices, it's going to have to be in a thread specifically about that. Otherwise, you're going to keep ignoring that the injustices we're talking about are based on race, and insisting that it's impossible for any solution to also be based that way.

Let's start out with a really key concept in science. "Theory" isn't a guess, it isn't even an educated guess. For something to be considered a theory, it starts as an hypothesis and goes through tons of observation, experimentation, analysis, prediction, and peer review. Then it has to stand up to every test it's put to, and when it can do that, we call it a theory. A theory is the strongest explanation science can offer. You don't just "come up with" a full-blown theory on your own. "Theoretically" means "according to the assumed facts", which doesn't describe most people's ideas. It can also mean "untested, on paper only", but most scientists don't use it that way. It's popular with popular science writers and television writers though, so the word often gets misused. And Bufofrog mentioned another key concept in science, falsifiability. In order for an hypothesis to progress, there must be a possibility that it's wrong, that it can be proven false in some way. Then we can test it to see if it consistently passes or if it fails even once. Anything involving infinities can't be falsified so we can't test it (we'll never have enough time or space or energy or density or whatever). So this idea is unscientific. We have no way to disprove or support it using current methodology.

What if it's "My grandmother had to go to a crappy school, live in a sub-par home in a polluted neighborhood, and was denied loans based on where she lived because of discriminatory government sanctioned redlining practices"? That gives us a basis to start calculating average earnings that were lost. We already know the differences between what white families in the same cities earned on average as opposed to those who were victims of redlining.

If YOU were the victim of a discriminatory government policy that kept you from prospering on a par with others who weren't discriminated against, would anything other than cash be appropriate for all those concerned? If the .gov instead offered free college courses, interest-free loans, contracts for .gov work and other opportunities, would that be able to cover all the victims? Or would you prefer cash so everyone can apply the reparation in a way that best suits their circumstances?

I can consolidate my arguments on this subject. We can discuss politics, because we can disagree on how much to spend on national defense or fixing the highways. Those are political issues. We can't discuss racism, child abuse, and discrimination in the same way, because these are moral issues. They're just wrong, and it's very frustrating that some folks here are trying to make it seem less wrong.