#david skrbina

[eretzyisrael]

David Skrbina was a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn from 2003 to 2018 and more recently at the University of Helsinki. While he was in Dearborn he was an active supporter of BDS, writing op-eds and being interviewed as a leading BDS campaigner on campus. 

His personal webpage has a statement written soon after the October 7 attacks, saying, 

STATEMENT ON PALESTINE (1 Nov 2023) I call on all people of conscience to stand with Palestine, and against the criminal Jewish state.    I call on everyone to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel -- permanently.  Through their criminal actions, they have forfeited their right to exist. Recall the words of Martin Heidegger: "planetary master criminals" (in Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy; 2015: 33)

That Heidegger quote is curious. Most people believe that his writings about  "planetary master criminals" refers to Jews.  He elsewhere wrote about “the basis for the peculiar predetermination of Jewry [Judenschaft] for planetary criminality," which aligns with Skrbina's emphasis on the "criminal Jewish state." 

This suggests that Skrbina's hate for Israel is not political but antisemitic. Now we now that is true.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reveals that Skrbina had another persona, "Thomas Dalton PhD.," who is an infamous and prolific neo-Nazi antisemitic author and Holocaust denier.  The ADL describes him:

Thomas Dalton, likely a pseudonym, is an author with numerous Holocaust denial works. ...He has emerged as an unbridled antisemite and Holocaust denier, including by suggesting that “Jews caused World War Two.” He refutes that there was a master plan to murder Jews and claims only 500,000 died at the hands of the Nazis. His books include The Jewish Hand in the World Wars and Debating the Holocaust, and he has edited and/or provided introductions and commentary for numerous editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other antisemitic works. He is a frequent contributor to antisemitic and Holocaust denial publications such as The Barnes Review and the Occidental Observer.

[beardedmrbean]

How do people choose whom to vote for?

In municipal elections, voters prioritise the individual candidate first, with the political party they represent coming second.

That's according to a survey by the Association of Finnish Cities and Municipalities, which found that for 88 percent of respondents, the individual candidate is the most important factor in their voting decision, while 68 percent consider the party a significant aspect.

The importance of political parties has grown since the early 2000s. At the turn of the millennium, only about half of voters viewed the party as a key factor, reports Maaseudun Tulevaisuus.

Alko closes shops

Alcohol use in Finland has steadily decreased since 2007, although it was still found three years ago to be the biggest cause of preventable deaths in 15 welfare regions across the country.

The state-owned alcohol chain Alko is closing nine stores in Finland, including two in central Helsinki, according to Hufvudstadsbladet.

Alko said the decision was a result of a "review of customer flows".

Since grocery stores were granted the right to sell wines with up to eight percent alcohol last year, Alko's sales have been in steady decline. Although alcohol consumption is decreasing in Finland, many people are still losing years off their lives because of alcohol abuse.

Old Finnish marks

The Finnish mark was Finland's currency from 1860 until 2002, when it switched over to euros.

If you have old Finnish marks lying around, you can no longer exchange them for euros at banks. But how can you tell if they have any collector's value?

According to Marko Manninen of the Finnish numismatic association, the value of old markka coins today ranges from absolutely nothing to as much as 64,000 euros.

But generally, anything less than a hundred years old holds little value.

The highest collectible value is found in money made before Finland's independence in 1917. This is especially true for coins. Manninen told Verkkouutiset how one old Finnish coin fetched 53,000 euros at auction. It was a two-mark coin from 1867, and its high price was due to its rarity.

The Bank of Finland accepted markka banknotes printed after 1963 until 2012, at which time 100-mark bills were worth 17 euros.

"Today, no one would pay that price for a worn-out note. Nowadays, it would fetch at most five euros, meaning it has lost its nominal value," Manninen explained.

University of Helsinki terminates contract with alleged antisemitic researcher

The University of Helsinki has terminated its contract with American researcher David Skrbina amid allegations that he led a double life under an antisemitic pseudonym.

Skrbina, who had a visiting researcher contract with the university until the end of 2025, was dismissed last week, the university confirmed to Yle.

The decision follows an Yle report in late March suggesting Skrbina may have secretly operated under the name Thomas Dalton, an antisemitic writer known for publishing Holocaust denial material. Dalton is a pseudonym, and the true identity behind the name has never been confirmed.

Skrbina has denied being Thomas Dalton.

Suspicions arose after Skrbina appeared in a public video discussion using two separate profiles, one under his own name and another as Thomas Dalton. Several other pieces of evidence have also suggested the two individuals may be the same person.

[darkmaga-returns]

Note: David Skrbina joins at the 29 minute mark.

In the wake of CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione becoming a folk hero, an anti-genocide fighter getting arrested for targeting genocide perpetrators, and less-defensible non-state-sponsored violence reaching epidemic proportions in the USA, it’s a good time to talk about the minuscule fraction of human violence that isn’t perpetrated by governments.

Philosophy professor and technology critic David Skrbina returns to the Truth Jihad podcast to discuss the hoopla around Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s influence on American young people in general, and CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione in particular. While teaching at the University of Michigan, Skrbina corresponded extensively with the imprisoned Kaczynski and served as his editor. He writes: “This whole issue extends beyond technology to that of any corrupt social system (like health care) and how people might respond.”

Excerpt from the interview:

David Skrbina: Again, that's, again, an interesting parallel between Luigi and Ted, right? They were both combating a larger system, of which they are a very small part. And so there's this perennial dilemma of a large organizational structure which is unjust or illegal or needs to be reformed or changed or overthrown. How does an individual or a small group of individuals have any effect on this process? With an organizational structure that contains hundreds or thousands of people, (violence) doesn't really do any good. Even if you kill one or two of them, the system will just work around it and will replace them and it will move on. So so all you can do is gain attention, gain the notoriety, maybe use that to get a message out, maybe to send a message right to others that that extreme action is being taken by by individual people out there. So, in Ted's case, he was willing to take extreme action and he was willing to send a detailed message in terms of the manifesto. We can only guess in Mangione's case that he's maybe willing trying to send a message like like these CEOs cannot act with impunity and that they will somehow pay a price for extremely unjust action. I guess we can assume that that's really what Luigi had in mind. It's hard to know unless we hear from him directly.

[keith-hancock]

"COSMO-EMOTIVISM" !!?

The Scientific and Medical Network (SMN) in the UK recently stated that “We are told that the Cosmic Mind or God is beyond our understanding.” It promised an examination of qualities “we may infer in the Cosmic Mind” suggested by author, philosopher, and professor of philosophy David Skrbina. He talks of such things as “Cosmo-Emotivism: Emotion, Thought, and Feeling in the Cosmic Mind.” SMN…

[volumeofvalue]

The Jesus Hoax

BOOK REVIEWThe Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Yearsby David Skrbina 2019 About the AuthorDavid Skrbina (sker-BEE-na), PhD, was a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Dearborn from 2003 to 2018. He taught a graduate course in Technology and Sustainability at the University of Helsinki in fall, 2020. His areas of interest include…

[ramrodd]

The Jesus Hoax with Dr. David Skrbina

COMMENTARY: 

The only hoax presented in this video is Dr. David Skrbina's general thesis, beginning with the fallacy that there was no written record.

According to Tertullian, Pilate sent an intelligence report to Rome that impelled Tiberius to propose elevating Jesus to the status of a legal god in the Roman Parthenon, which the Senate vetoed because they weren't consulted before hand. In his proposal, Tiberius introduced the label "Christian" to the Roman elite. '

The text of Pilate's intelligence report was a version of Mark 15, which is Roman testimony of their encounter with Jesus and  the circumstances of His resurrection. I don't know how long it took a priority signal to get from Caesarea to Rome at that time, but it was at least enroute before the Ascension of Jesus at Pentecost. Rome was religiously bureaucratic and the idea that Pilate wouldn't report an event like Resurrection is the product of an academic who has never spent anytime in the miliary  or similar government service.

Pilate was  a creature of the Praetorian Guard insofar as he was on the same diplomatic/military career path as Julius Caesar as Perfect of Palestine due to the intervention of Sejanus, who was the Perfect of the Praetorian Guard. These people didn't fuck around by withholding vital intelligence from higher commands and Resurrection represented an important military potential . The fact is that Christianity as a Roman franchise wouldn't have happened if the Mark 15 intelligence report had not been sent to Rome and would have disappeared with the destruction of Jerusalem as just another Jewish messianic cult.

We don't know if Tiberius received this Mark 15 intelligence report before Sejanus was dragged off the floor of the Senate and brutally executed after his plot to replace Tiberius as Emperor was discovered. bjt Pilate remained in place until 36, when Tiberius recalled him for unspecified reasons. Pilate was the most successful governor of Palestine at the time and what ever purges took place in Rome surrounding the Sejanus plot, which was uncovered in 31, seemed to have passed him by. My opinion has formed that the hostility to Christians by the Roman elite, which proceeded the evangelizing of Peter and Paul and et al, was a result of the revulsion towards Tiberius and the death of Sejanus.

The label "Christian" is a product of the Roman soldiers in the same manner as we called the community soldiers in Vietnam "Charley" and the British called the American patriots "Yankee Doodles". The Jerusalem Jewish Christians called themselves Followers of the Way (or JesusP and the Jerusalem Jews called them "Jesus Followers". The term "Χριστιανούς." didn't migrate from Rome to Antioch until 42 or 43 and it wasn't widely adopted by early Jesus Followers until Nero's persecutions.

Tiberius died in 37 and whatever prompted Pilate's recall is lost. There are different legedns as to what happened to Pilate but he essentially ceased to be a factor in the Roman Christian franchise.

However, his most senior centurion, remained in Caesarea until Luke shows up in 59 and acts as the curator of what we call the Quelle source, which was the intelligence reports that were gathered about Jesus after He appeared above the Roman military horizon as the designated leader of a potential insurgency when He was baptized by John the Baptist and was handed control of John's constituency. These spy reports lay fallow in the Roman intelligence archives until Cornelius was compelled by the Holy Spirt to seek out Peter and Peter was compelled by the Holy Spirit to abandon the Jewish purity protocols and to convey his confession of the ministry of Jesus to Cornelius. The essential consequence of this meeting was the Gospel of Mark, which is actually the creation of Cornelius as a follow-on intelligence report to Rome on the Christian question and an abstract of the Quelle source, based on Mark 15 and working backwards to the first reports of Jesus collected by the Roman spy network.

Although John Mark is attributed to have written the Gospel of Mark, he became an editor and the publisher of the manuscript in Alexandria and, ultimately, the author of the Gospel of John as a companion narrative to the Gospel of Mark. Cornelius composed this narrative and forwarded it to Rome by 40 and it is clear that Matthew used it as a template for his Gospel after the Council in Jerusalem ro produce a polemic to support the Judaizer impulse of Peter and the Jerusalem Church and that both gospels were available to Luke when he was researching his own gospel as an agent of

Theophilus who was probably the equine officer in charge of the Palestine Desk in the Rome headquarters of the Praetorian Guard. Theophilus was also the Bishop of the clandestine Christian fellowship of the centurions of the Italian Cohort spread through out the Roman Empire by the legions. Claudius took Christianity to Britain and was probably aware of it's existence.  Theophilus had a role like George Smiley in John LdCarres version of MI6 and was the author of Hebrews, which is the manifesto of what has become the Holy Roman Church, and which he caused to be distributed to all the  Italian Christians he mentions in Hebrews 13:24, who were part of the Christian cabal.

It is clear that Paul had read the Gospel of Mark, or was familiar with what we call Quelle as he uses Χριστιανούς. 19 times in his 13 epistles, including 6 times in Philippians which he wrote after his triumph of his defense of Romans to the Praetorian Guard. Χριστιανούς. is a Roman signals transmittal protocol that translates, bureaucratically, as a message for the eyes of the Emperor, first. It is translated as "gospel" in Mark, but it may have been the Roman codeword for the Jesus intelligence portfolio Cornelius was maintaining and transferring to Theophilus. Paul used the term Χριστιανούς. in Galatians before the Council in Jerusalem, which compelled Matthew to compose his gospel. There is a political motivation of contemporary apologists for the Total Depravity Gospel of the Pro-Life Christian movement associated with the treason of the January 6 conspiracy which requires Paul to have created the first writing about Jesus, but hey are factually and theologically mistake.

Like Bart Ehrman and Dale Martin, Dr.=Skrbina employs the post modern historical deconstruction of dialectical Marxism to construct his arguments. I suppose this is a legacy of the spirit of the SDS that abides in Ann Arbor, but, in the final analysis, it is just another version of the Jesus Seminar, different only in degree from that particular Marxist denunciation of the Gospels.

If he understood Hegel the way  William F. Buckley understood Hegel, he's find another hobby horse to reprise the campus cultural wars of the 60s. Of course, that's true of Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier and all the rest of the evangelical anti-theist on the circuit.

Jesus is exactly who He says He is and Mark 15 is what conveyed that reality to Rome and history.

[perkwunos]

Regarding Aristotle, we know that he viewed the psyche or soul as the form (or structure) of living things. Accordingly, non-living things have no soul—hence, technically, Aristotle was no panpsychist. But the question remains whether non-living things have something soul-like in them.

First, we note that there is a kind of evolutionary imperative in Aristotle’s thinking. He envisioned all of nature as continually striving toward “the better” or “the good” (see Physics 192a18; On Generation and Corruption 336b28; Eudemian Ethics 1218a30). By “better” Aristotle has in mind certain specific qualities; he comments that being is better than non-being, life better than non-life, and soul better than matter. Thus, as Rist (1989: 123) points out, there is a meaningful sense in which “the whole of the cosmos is permeated by some kind of upward desire and aspiration”—upward in the sense of toward form, life, and soul.

...

Aristotle argued that all natural (as opposed to manmade) objects possess an inherent “principle of motion” (Physics 192b9). This fact permits one to see such motion as “an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things” (Physics, 250b12). ...

The life-energy in all things had to be grounded in some kind of substance, in order to be manifest in the real world. So Aristotle adopted, perhaps via Anaximenes, the notion of the pneuma. The pneuma is not, strictly speaking, mind or soul; rather, it is something soul-like. As he says in Generation of Animals, it is the “faculty of all kinds of soul,” the “vital heat” (thermoteta psychiken), the “principle of soul” (736b29).

The soul-like pneuma is ubiquitous in the natural world, penetrating and informing all things. It not only brings soul to the embryo and to the spontaneously-generated creatures, but it accounts for the general desire of matter for form, and for the good. Aristotle is explicit and unambiguous that all things are inspirited by the pneuma. With rather stunning clarity he informs us:

Animals and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in earth, and pneuma in water, and in all pneuma is vital heat, so that in a sense all things are full of soul (Generation of Animals 762a18-20).

Echoing panpsychist thinking from Thales to Plato, Aristotle apparently came to the conclusion that something soul-like, of varying degrees, inhered in all objects of the natural world.

David Skrbina, IEP article for panpsychism

[chrisengel]

Panpsychism 19th century In the 19th century, panpsychism was at its zenith. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, C.S Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, Eduard von Hartmann, F.C.S. Schiller, Ernst Haeckel and William Kingdon Clifford as well as psychologists like Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.[5] Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality which was both Will and Representation (Vorstellung). According to Schopenhauer: "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".[citation needed] Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist held that reality was a "world self", a conscious being that comprised everything, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems". The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce espoused a sort of Psycho-physical Monism in which the universe was suffused with mind which he associated with spontaneity and freedom. Following Pierce, William James also espoused a form of panpsychism.[13] In his lecture notes, James wrote: Our only intelligible notion of an object in itself is that it should be an object for itself, and this lands us in panpsychism and a belief that our physical perceptions are effects on us of 'psychical' realities[2] In 1893, Paul Carus proposed his own philosophy similar to panpsychism known as 'panbiotism', which he defined as "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live."[14]:149[15] 20th century In the 20th century, the most significant proponent of the panpsychist view is arguably Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).[5] Whitehead's ontology saw the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction. These elementary events (which he called occasions) are in part mental.[5] According to Whitehead: "we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature."[2] Bertrand Russell's neutral monist views tended towards panpsychism.[2] The physicist Arthur Eddington also defended a form of panpsychism.[6][16] The psychologist Carl Jung, who is known for his idea of the collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing".[17] The psychologists James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.[18][14]:158[19] The geneticist Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that the birth of consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, therefore implying these properties were in the most elementary particles.[20] Contemporary The panpsychist doctrine has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism" and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism."[21] Its prominent proponents in the United States include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin,[1] and David Skrbina.[5][14] In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson,[22] Gregg Rosenberg,[1] Timothy Sprigge,[1] and Philip Goff.[6] The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness."[23][24] The Canadian philosopher William Seager has also defended panpsychism.[25] In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A New theory of the relationship of mind and matter", a paper propounding a panpsychist theory of consciousness based on Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics.[citation needed] Bohm has a number of followers among philosophers of mind both in the United States (e.g. Quentin Smith) and internationally (e.g. Paavo Pylkkänen).[citation needed] The doctrine has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.[26] Science editor Annaka Harris explores panpsychism as a viable theory in her book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing the view.[27][28] The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems.[29] However, it does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others.[29] Koch has referred to IIT as a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.[30]

wikipedia

[brthrx]

Ted Kaczynski - Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto) a Collection

Ted Kaczynski – Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto) a Collection

Ted Kaczynski – Industrial Society and Its Future (Unabomber Manifesto) Audiobook THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: https://libgen.rocks/ads.php?md5=e96e321397dc6714a712f0d89f152cb8 Podcast Breaking Down: Collapse Episode 86 – Anti-Technology and the Unabomber with David Skrbina This week we interview David Skrbina, an author and professor who writes about his anti-technology philosphy. David has written a…

[theculturedmarxist]

I dunno, Bananadog might be right.

Why is Democracy the Dominant Political Form of the Modern World? The argument about democracy set forth in my letters to David Skrbina of October 12 and November 23, 2004 (pages [283-285] and [292-296] of this book) is incomplete and insufficiently clear, so I want to supplement that argument here.

The most important point that I wanted to make was that democracy became the dominant political form of the modern world not as the result of a decision by human beings to adopt a freer or a more humane form of government, but because of an “objective” fact, namely, the fact that in modern times democracy has been associated with the highest level of economic and technological success.

To summarize the argument of my letters to Dr. Skrbina, democratic forms of government have been tried at many times and places at least since the days of ancient Athens, but democracy did not thrive sufficiently to displace authoritarian systems, which remained the dominant political forms through the 17th century. But from the advent of the Industrial Revolution the (relatively) democratic countries, above all the English-speaking ones, were also the most successful countries economically and technologically. Because they were economically and technologically successful, they were also successful militarily. The economic, technological, and military superiority of the democracies enabled them to spread democracy forcibly at the expense of authoritarian systems. In addition, many nations voluntarily attempted to adopt democratic institutions because they believed that these institutions were the source of the economic and technological success of the democracies.

As part of my argument, I maintained that the two great military contests between the democracies and the authoritarian regimes—World Wars I and II—were decided in favor of the democracies because of the democracies’ economic and technological vigor. The astute reader, however, may object that the democracies could have won World Wars I and II simply by virtue of their great preponderance in resources and in numbers of soldiers, with or without any putative superiority in economic and technological vigor.

My answer is that the democracies’ preponderance in resources and numbers of soldiers was only one more expression of their economic and technological vigor. The democracies had vast manpower, territory, industrial capacity, and sources of raw material at their disposal because they—especially the British—had built great colonial empires and had spread their language, culture, and technology, as well as their economic and political systems, over a large part of the world. The English-speaking peoples moreover had powerful navies and therefore, generally speaking, command of the sea, which enabled them to assist one another in war by transporting troops and supplies to wherever they might be needed.

Authoritarian systems either had failed to build empires of comparable size, as in the case of Germany and Japan, or else they had indeed built huge empires but had left them relatively backward and undeveloped, as in the case of Spain, Portugal, and Russia. It was during the 18th century, as the Industrial Revolution was gathering force, that authoritarian France lost to semidemocratic Britain in the struggle for colonization of North America and India. France did not achieve stable democracy until 1871, when it was too late to catch up with the British.

Germany as a whole was politically fragmented until 1871, but the most important state in Germany—authoritarian Prussia—was already a great power by 1740[1] and had access to the sea,[2] yet failed to build an overseas empire. Even after the unification of their country in 1871, the Germans’ efforts at colonization were half-hearted at best.

Like the English-speaking peoples, the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking peoples colonized vast territories and populated them thickly, but the manpower of their territories could not have been used very effectively in a European war, because these peoples lacked the economic, technical, and organizational resources to assemble, train, and equip large armies, transport them to Europe, and keep them supplied with munitions while they were there. Moreover, they lacked the necessary command of the sea. The Russians did not need command of the sea in order to transport their men to a European battlefield, but, as pointed out on page [340] of this book, note 34, the Russians during World War II did need massive aid from the West. without which they could not have properly equipped and supplied their troops.

Thus the Allies’ preponderance in resources and numbers of troops, at least during World War II, was clearly an expression of the democracies’ economic and technological vigor. The democracies’ superiority was a consequence not only of the size of their economics, but also of their efficiency. Notwithstanding the vaunted technical efficiency of the Germans, it is said that during World War II German productivity per man-hour was only half that of the United States, while the corresponding figure for Japan was only one fifth that of the U.S.[3]

Though the case may not have been as clear-cut in World War I, it does appear that there too the Allies’ superiority in resources and in numbers of troops was largely an expression of the democracies’ economic and technological vigor. “In munitions and other war material Britain’s industrial power was greatest of all…Britain…was to prove that the strength of her banking system and the wealth distributed among a great commercial people furnished the sinews of war…”[4] Authoritarian Russia was not a critical factor in World War I, since the Germans defeated the Russians with relative ease.

Thus it seems beyond argument that democracy became the dominant political form of the modern world as a result of the democracies’ superior economic and technological vigor. It may nevertheless be questioned whether democratic government was the cause of the economic and technological vigor of the democracies. In the foregoing discussion I’ve relied mainly on the example of the English-speaking peoples. In fact, France, following its democratization in 1871 and even before the devastation wrought by World War I, was not economically vigorous.[5] Was the economic and technological vigor of the English-speaking peoples perhaps the result, not of their democratic political systems, but of some other cultural trait?

For present purposes the answer to this question is not important. The objective fact is that since the advent of the Industrial Revolution democracy has been generally associated with economic and technological vigor. Whether this association has been merely a matter of chance, or whether there is a causative relation between democracy and economic and technological vigor, the fact remains that the association has existed. It is this objective fact, and not a human desire for a freer or a more humane society, that has made democracy the world’s dominant political form.

It is true that some peoples have made a conscious decision to adopt democracy, but it can be shown that in modern times (at least since, say, 1800) such decisions have usually been based on a belief (correct or not) that democracy would help the peoples in question to achieve economic and technological success. But even assuming that democracy had been chosen because of a belief that it would provide a freer or a more humane form of government, and even assuming that such a belief were correct, democracy could not have thriven under conditions of industrialization in competition with authoritarian systems if it had not equalled or surpassed the latter in economic and technological vigor.

Thus we are left with the inescapable conclusion that democracy became the dominant political form of the modern world not through human choice but because of an objective fact, namely, the association of democracy, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, with economic and technological success.

It is my opinion that we have now reached the end of the era in which democratic systems were the most vigorous ones economically and technologically. If that is true, then we can expect democracy to be gradually replaced by systems of a more authoritarian type, though the external forms of democratic government will probably be retained because of their utility for propaganda purposes.

Talking dog in a banana costume

[koolwebsites]

Predators acquire Brian Boyle from Devils for second-round pick, re-acquire Cody McLeod

Predators acquire Brian Boyle from Devils for second-round pick, re-acquire Cody McLeod

CLOSE

Predators GM David Poile on getting Brian Boyle Paul Skrbina, The Tennessean

Predators general manager David Poile hinted Tuesday he was ready to make a deal or two.

On Wednesday, he did just that when he made two.

Poile traded a second-round pick in the 2019 draft to the Devils for forward Brian Boyle.

Boyle, 34, is in his 12th season. The 6-foot-6, 245-pounder will be…

[boltsradio]

Here’s the Game Plan for Lightning Power Play, for November 20th!

Midnight-4 a.m.- Next Day Replay, Lightning at Predators (11/19/18)

4 a.m.-5 a.m.- Lightning Lunch with Erik Erlendsson with guest Corey Long 

5 a.m.-6 a.m.- Lightning Power Play Live with Greg Linnelli with guests Darren Dreger and Paul Skrbina 

6 a.m.-8 a.m.- Next Day Replay, Lightning at Predators (11/19/18)

8 a.m.-9 a.m.- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale 

9 a.m.-10 a.m.- *NEW* Game MizConduct with Rob Kennedy 

10 a.m.-10:30 a.m.- Jesse Spector Is... with Jesse Spector with guest George Richards 

10:30 a.m.-11 a.m.-On the Bench with Seth Kushner with guest Charley Belcher 

11 a.m.-12 p.m.- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale 

12 p.m.-1 p.m.- *NEW* Game MizConduct with Rob Kennedy 

1 p.m.-2 p.m.- *NEW* *LIVE* Lightning Lunch with Erik Erlendsson 

2 p.m.-3 p.m.- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale 

3 p.m.-4 p.m.- *NEW* Game MizConduct with Rob Kennedy

4 p.m.-5 p.m.- Lightning Lunch with Erik Erlendsson 

5 p.m.-6 p.m.- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale 

6 p.m.-7 p.m.- *NEW* *LIVE* Lightning Power Play Live with Greg Linnelli 

7 p.m.-7:30 p.m.- Fantasy Forecast with Nick Alberga with guest David Pagnotta 

7:30 p.m.-8 p.m.- The Rink Rat with Rob Brender with guests Dave Poulin and Louie DeBrusk 

8 p.m.-9 p.m.- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale

9 p.m.-10 p.m.- *NEW* Game MizConduct with Rob Kennedy 

10 p.m.-10:30 p.m.- Jesse Spector Is... with Jesse Spector with guest George Richards 

10:30 p.m.-11 p.m.- On the Bench with Seth Kushner with guest Charley Belcher

11 p.m.-Midnight- *NEW* Crunch Time with Lukas Favale 

[perkwunos]

Author of the provocative and scandalous L'Homme Machine, LaMettrie was the first thinker to unabashedly (though anonymously) claim that man was purely a natural automaton and did not require an immaterial soul to account for his behavior. LaMettrie had been trained as a physician, and his study of human anatomy, along with the scientific advances of the day, seemed to support his views. LaMettrie was a staunch materialist, but this ran against the grain of the time. Pure materialism had been out of favor for nearly 1,500 years, particularly since the rise of the Christian worldview. Virtually all philosophers and natural scientists after the Stoics had claimed that there was some non-material, incorporeal aspect to reality. Hobbes broke with this tradition in the middle of the seventeenth century and met with severe condemnation. Descartes indirectly supported materialism by eliminating the spirit from nearly all aspects of the physical world, save the human. To Descartes, animals were unfeeling natural automata, in a different class of existence than humans. And as science explained more about physical reality, the need for an active incorporeal realm lessened. There was increasingly less reason, from a physiological standpoint, to distinguish between humans and other animals. By the early 1700s, LaMettrie could speculate that either the soul did not exist or, if it did exist, it was essentially identical with the workings of the human body. In openly denying the immaterial soul, he was effectively breaking new ground in Continental philosophy. LaMettrie is also widely pronounced a mechanist; however, this is not correct, and the distinction is quite important. The mechanistic view sees matter as fundamentally lifeless and inert. If one believes that motion and mind somehow arise purely through physical interaction of inert and lifeless atoms, then one is a mechanistic materialist. This approach follows from Descartes' view of matter--pure extension, completely dead. To account for the human mind/soul, the mechanistic philosopher must resort to supernatural dualism, epiphenomenalism, or eliminativism. These were not viable options for LaMettrie. To him, mind was a very real entity, and clearly it arose from a material cosmos. An obvious solution, therefore, was to see matter itself as inherently dynamic, capable of feeling and even intelligence. Motion and mind can derive from some inherent powers of life or sentience that dwell in matter itself or in the organizational properties of matter. This view, sometimes called vitalistic materialism, is the one that LaMettrie (and later Diderot) adopted. Commentators often portray LaMettrie as a mechanist because it is assumed that anyone who denies the spiritual realm must see all things, and in particular all living things, as mere inanimate machines, products of dead matter. It is quite common, even today, to equate materialism with mechanism. But, as has been noted, the two are logically independent. In fact, LaMettrie's philosophical work attacked the Cartesian notion of animals as unfeeling machines, calling such a position "a joke"

David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West

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The Christian worldview divided reality between earthly and heavenly realms, the former the domain of the body and the latter of the soul or mind. This division was reinforced by Descartes' distinction between the res extensa (matter) and the res cogitans (mind). It was further supported by theories, advocated by Newton and others, that the universe was a law-driven, mechanistic system; according to these theories, mind or soul was undeniable and yet clearly not material and thus was a separate (second) aspect of reality. The theory of evolution and the secularism of the twentieth century tended to undermine this duality, driving many contemporary thinkers to a materialist monism according to which mind is a reducible or derivative entity. Yet the absence of a convincing theory of monism, combined in many cases with religious beliefs and/or intuitive feelings, has kept the concept of ontological dualism alive.

David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West

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A second class of materialist monism, in a similar vein as the identity theory, is functionalism, which argues that mental states are real and that they are identical with a particular "process state," or state of information. The process state is determined entirely by the causal role played by the system. Anything that instantiates the appropriate information state (e.g. a computer) will, eo ipso, adopt the corresponding mental state. In other words, the mental property can be thought of as a second-order effect, the functional role of the physical system being primary. Thus, functionalism can be seen as a kind of generalization of the identity theory: not just a brain, not just a nervous system, but any physical system is capable of giving rise to a mental state. Recent advances in computer science and artificial intelligence have bolstered the case for functionalism, especially with such high-profile examples as the defeat of the chess champion Garry Kasparov by the computer program Deep Blue. Certain identity theorists, including D.M. Armstrong and Hillary Putnam, are sometimes viewed as functionalists, and William Lycan and Daniel Dennett (in his early writings) have put forth functionalist theories.

David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West