Notices by Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 (adrianriskin@kolektiva.social)

We are Jewish Americans who have varying perspectives. We’ve come together to highlight and oppose the unprecedented and damaging role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allied groups in US elections, especially within Democratic Party primaries. We recognize that the purpose of AIPAC’s interventions in electoral politics is to defeat any critics of Israeli government policy and to support candidates who vow unwavering loyalty to Israel, thereby ensuring the United States’ continuing support for all that Israel does, regardless of its violence and illegality.

#AIPAC #Israel #Palestine #USPol #USPolitics

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/a-statement-from-jewish-americans-opposing-aipac/

@HeavenlyPossum @holyramenempire @MisuseCase Exactly. This whole conversation is based on the blurring of the difference between voluntarily adopted hierarchical social forms, e.g. the pirate ship, and hierarchical social forms that require the massive application of violence and the threat of violence to maintain their day-to-day survival. If people aren't naturally anarchists why does the ruling class require so many cops and soldiers to prevent anarchy from thriving?

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom @stinky There's no existence claim that refers to nontangible objects that can be proved or disproved. But no, that's no reason in itself to be agnostic about them.

I'd argue, e.g., that the claim that God exists and the claim that quarks exist have the same epistemic status. Neither object is directly perceptible. All evidence for either is circumstantial.

But that's not a reason to be agnostic about the existence claims. People believe or disbelieve such claims based on the worldview they're operating under. If the existence of a intangible object contributes to the functionalit's of the worldview it exists. If its existence detracts it doesn't. If it's neutral then agnosticism is an option.

Do you think it's possible to prove an existence claim outside of mathematics, where those words have merely technical meanings? Can you give an example of such a proof?

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom perceptible means you can sense it with your senses. Quarks are imperceptible and all the evidence for their existence is circumstantial. The world reacts to inquiries as we would expect it to if quarks exist. This can't reasonably be called proof since it's essentially deducing the antecedent from the consequent, but it's all we can do in science. Even freaking Karl popper thought so.

But that's exactly the kind of evidence there is for the existence of God. Assuming God exists has adequate explanatory force in some people's authentic worldviews. Just not yours, though.

None of this is anything like mathematical existence proofs, which are either constructive=perceptual, like your group example, or non-constructive, like nothing outside of mathematics.

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom pathogens are mostly visible under under microscopes so I have no problem with saying that existence claims about pathogens can be proved. I believe my eyes. It's existence claims about imperceptible objects like quarks and God that I don't think can be proved. But also I don't think the impossibility of proof requires agnosticism. I'm also dubious that such claims can be disproved, but I'm not as sure about that as I am that they can't be proved.

Can you give an example of an imperceptible object whose existence you think can be proved and a proof that it exists?

Do you not accept non-constructive existence proofs in mathematics?

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom because it doesn't have any in yours. How can you know about other people? If they're getting along in the world they must have an understanding of the world that allows them to get along. What possible evidence could you have that they're wrong about the explanatory force of that worldview?

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom Why do you think those claims are checkable in principle? You can't prove that they are. In any case they're only checkable from within the worldview, which supplies the criteria for truth. Without coming to accept the worldview all the checking in the world won't convince. It's the same with claims regarding the existence of God.

Have you given up your generally accepted socially constructed knowledge argument?

Also there are plenty of people who believe in God who reject all arguments from authority, so that's kind of a red herring

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom who said it was intimate? It's not. There are literally huge numbers of people organized into myriad communities with socially constructed knowledge of God. Many many more people are involved in this than in socially constructing the existence of quarks.

The existence of quarks only directly explains anything to at most a few tens of thousands of people. I bet no more than a hundred thousand over all of human history. Everyone else is just taking it on authority. On the other hand more than 4 billion people alive right now are either Christian or Muslim.

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom And what's the difference between that kind of knowledge and knowledge of the existence of God? In both, once you accept the worldview in which the evidence makes sense the objects have explanatory power. That's how academic knowledge works, that's how religious knowledge works.

I don't know why this is controversial. It's not possible to prove that either God or quarks exist. The reasons to assume they do are of the same nature.

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom this happens in science too. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book about it. Also there are mathematicians who don't accept non-constructive existence proofs and they already have studied it for a lifetime. There's no assurance that you'll accept scientific existence claims after enough study, and your claim that there is is not only an article of faith but there's evidence against it.

It's the same with God. Not everyone who immerses themselves in the worldview comes to accept it sufficiently to feel the explanatory force, but that's legitimately true of science as well. Just ask a mathematical intuitionist about the law of the excluded middle or Albert Einstein about quantum entanglement.

@magitweeter @Radical_EgoCom I'm not talking about nonexistence. Ive only ever talked about existence, which is something I understand much better.

If you said you were convinced quarks did not exist I certainly wouldn't point you at anything or try to convince you. I have no stake in anyone's opinion on the existence of quarks. I would instead have interrogated you on how you came to be certain of the nonexistence of an imperceptible object. To me that's a thorny epistemological problem that I find fascinating.

I don't do that with people who are sure that God doesn't exist due to negative experiences in the past. But you seem to be pretty reasonable, so if you want to tell me how you've come to be certain that an imperceptible object like god doesn't exist I'd be interested to hear about it.

All I'm saying here is that both God and quarks have explanatory force within which appropriate worldviews. It's slightly disingenuous to say they're unspecified. Like I said there are over four billion Christians and Muslims. Many of them believe in God, which means God must have explanatory force in their worldviews. That's a specification.

@Radical_EgoCom @abhayakara @magitweeter No, it wouldn't. Literally no one authentically believes in invisible unicorns as part of a functional explanatory system for the world.

@guyjantic I don't have an alternative system and I don't want to say that nothing works. What I want to say is this:

Various people have various authentic explanatory systems of the world. The only way to define the truth of an explanatory system is if it allows people to get along in the world. So I want to say that all authentic explanatory systems are true, and all are a matter of faith. I.e. everything that works works and if it works there are no grounds for saying it's false.

If people have beliefs about god that explain aspects of the world to them and they get along in the world using these beliefs there's no objective way to call them false. It's possible to interpret them into other explanatory systems and say that they'd be false in that system, but that doesn't mean they are false. If they're false, how do they allow their adherents to get along?

Also, your reasons for being partial to logic are your reasons, but they're not objective reasons for anyone to be partial to logic. E.g. you prefer internal consistency, but other people don't care so much. Can they get along in the world? If so, how can you say that they're wrong?

Finally, I don't know what you mean by "logic" anyway. Logic itself doesn't offer up any conclusions or explanations about the world, and science isn't strongly related to logic. It's not logic based in any sense of logic that I understand, and it certainly has no moral implications. It might be helpful if you gave just one concrete example of a conclusion offered up by logic, not just the conclusion but actually how it's a conclusion "offered up" by logic.

To me none of the things you list in part (c) are derived from logic. They may be presented partly in logical terms as part of the communication style of the community of knowers that know them, but it's never essential. Again, a concrete explanation of what you mean by logic and how it relates to any of these things would be helpful.

@Radical_EgoCom @abhayakara @magitweeter There's no such thing as a logical belief. Logic as an explanatory system for the world is faith-based. The idea that explanations of the world must meet logical standards is not only a tool of oppression but displays a deep misunderstanding of logic.

Absolutely triumphant Los Angeles taggers cover abandoned high rise!

Also, why are 27 stories of abandoned condos vacant in downtown Los Angeles while homeless people are dying on the sidewalk below?

“With all due respect, shit’s abandoned, doing nothing. Let’s put some color on this bitch and do what we do if they ain’t gon finish the job,” one ... tagger, Hopes, said.

#LosAngeles #Graffiti #DTLA #LA #OceanwidePlaza #Tagging #Anarchism #PropertyIsTheft #DowntownLosAngeles #StreetArt #MastoArt #UrbanArt

https://lamag.com/news/downtown-high-rise-graffiti-artists-speak-out

@AnthonyJK @timo21 @scottsantens 🎯 also because they're an effective cover for government sponsored upwards wealth transfer. E.g. in the name of "solving homelessness" governments can spend a lot of money on ineffective private contractors to build, lease, and administer shelters. They can allow valuable zoning loopholes in the name of providing privately owned "affordable" housing. And so on.

If they just announced they were handing over money and entitlements to their cronies there'd be scrutiny and resistance, but visible homelessness is horrifying to enough people that they don't look deeply into what's actually going on, which is mostly a grift rather than an attempt to help anyone or solve anything.

@benfell @lethargilistic @anarchismhub "If we're nicer to cops they won't be so violent" 🙃

Cops use excessive force because it's part of their job. They're paranoid because many people rightfully hate them. Being nice to them, being orderly, is doing their job for them. Being mean to them is more effective than electoral politics right now.

Just for instance LAPD is presently down over 8% from their target staffing level. They can't recruit enough new cops to match the attrition rate so the gap will grow. Police union officials explicitly tie this to Angelenos' "lack of respect" for cops. Where in this country has polite orderly politics ever resulted in an 8% reduction in police staffing?

@Brendanjones @apophis @gwit 12,000,000 forcibly imported African slaves, among many, many millions of other victims from the end of the fifteenth century to the present day may not find this argument so convincing.

A popular response to anticapitalist discourse is that capitalism is intrinsically good but it was corrupted at some point in the recent past and whatever anticapitalists are complaining about is really due to that fall from grace rather than capitalism itself. The election of Ronald Reagan is popular for this.

People who sincerely believe this are so historically illiterate that it's impossible to have a serious discussion with them so I don't (usually) engage, and when I do it's disappointing. But if they could talk sense about it what I'd really want to hear from them is when do they think capitalism got good? A fall from grace implies a prior state of grace and when was that for capitalism?

For hundreds of years, since its beginning, capitalism was fueled by slavery, murder, torture, armed robbery. Marx's famous characterization of its birth as "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" is an understatement. When did this end, do they think?

I mean, explicit slavery is mostly illegal, although that only happened generally within my great-grandparents' generation, so not that long ago, but slavery was pretty seamlessly replaced with systems of exploitation that were and are only *visibly* less violent. This has to be the case because the profits never shrank. When did capitalism get good in order to be able to get bad in the 1980s?

Anyway, yes, this is a subtoot. Since they're incapable of responding sensibly I'm shouting it into the void instead.

#Capitalism #Slavery

Edited for autocorrect and typos

@inthehands @montyoblivion all of this would be marginally more convincing if students weren't required by law to attend under threat of police violence against them or their parents. Which benefits are so good that it's worth inflicting violence to force attendance?