Doctors know that when the available resources make it impossible to save everyone, they are required to choose who is to live and who is to die, based on their assessment of the net residual value of individual lives, and it is reasonable to assume that doctors would seek to save themselves ahead of any patient, precisely because they regard their capacity to make this kind of decisions as extremely valuable.

People get offended because of their own beliefs.

If over the last two years the roles of Israel and Palestine were reversed, then the situation would, without hesitation, be characterised as the Holocaust, and so it must be characterised as the Holocaust irrespective of roles. By applying the standard of the perpetrator, the state of Israel is committing the Holocaust.

Every Self has the sense of ‘I am’. This self-relation requires being a ‘something’ to relate to and from, but it is not conditional on the meaning of that something. The Self is essentially consciousness, but it is imperfect because of inconsistencies in the representations of its meaning content: the self-relation is corrupted if the ‘something’ is imperfectly reflected. What does consciousness want Consciousness wants perfection, which is the ultimate self-interest.

The challenge lies not in Who is self-relating but in the consistency of self-relating. It is rather ‘How’ you relate to yourself that matters. Traditional methods pursed self-nihilation, self-erasure to avoid inconsistent self-relating, which was analogous to killing yourself to avoid infections, thus contradicting the ultimate purpose, not fulfilling it. They are all false.

There are no shortcuts, no gurus, no salvation by proxy; you must do all the hard work yourself.

The sense of ‘experience’ is that it relates to something beyond our subjective state of mind or point of view, that we experience something other than ourselves, something ‘real’, and that this realness is the same for every subject, therefore objective. As such, experience is already an interpretation, of something that happens to us subjectively, according to a common standard of realness or truth. Experience is truth-apt only to the extent that its meaning is falsifiable. Since we have no first person awareness of the subjective states of others, validation of our experiences is a purely conceptual challenge, a logical test of the integrity of the world as we know it that includes other beings of the same kind and in which the conceptual content is sustained only via meaningful communication with others. Objectivity of what our subjective experience is about is thus inextricably dependent on the subjectivity of others.

The fact that “vaccine-exemptions” were recognised is of itself a proof that nobody could consent to mandatory vaccination, in the same sense that saying “yes” to a rapist to save your job is not “consent” to sex. Exemption implies compulsion, which in turn precludes consent to what one is already compelled to submit to.

Fact Check: Partly False. Interest rate cuts make it cheaper to create money under the guise of bank credit. It is not true that any of the existing money is borrowed when bank credit is given. Credit is money creation, whereby the banks extract value (equal to the ‘loan’ principal) from everyone’s wallet by creating new units of currency, and charge interest on it. The principal is never repaid to the original wallets and the interest is embezzled by the banks. TLDR: Rates cuts increase the rate of monetary embezzlement by the banks while the little people are bedazzled by the nominal increase in the value of their homes.

The majority of people agree that those who refuse to style their moral judgement according to the authoritarian prejudices of the majority must be subjugated. Democracy is a form of group tyranny; it never had legitimacy beyond the renunciation of moral status that voting entails. Trump and Putin (in fact all democratic governments) accept this renunciation as their mandate to subjugate, albeit most rulers are less transparent about it than Trump and Putin.

It is conceivable that democracy is only nominally about the majority rule but is essentially a moral test: those who are willing to impose their preferences on others by the arbitrary standard of being in the majority are implicitly denying that preferences can be objectively right or wrong in their own right, thus negating the rationality of their choices and the authority of their own preferences. It then follows that this collective self-negation has representative priority over the negated preferences. If this is right then the abusive, humiliating, deceitful and exploitative governments are not a failure of democracy but express its proper function, provided it is applied only to those who vote.

A minority can never defend itself against the will of the majority by means of representative democracy, but by declaring itself as not represented and rejecting the premise of representation, it invalidates democracy, and thus becomes powerful as a disrupter of the premise of democratic authority.

Democracy could work only in a tightly knit, highly interactive group of peers who agree on principles, which could include at most one hundred individuals. On the national scale it is a bad joke, an aberration.

We transcend democracy once we realise that Power (the “brick wall at the back of the theatre” F. Zappa) is the primary reality. All we have to do then is deal with reality: the brick wall at the back of the theatre. This is transcendent of all the illusions: freedom, democracy, equality under law… all just part of the show. Once you think about it, it is not that bad; dealing with the actual Power is not as difficult as overcoming the illusion of freedom, and this interaction is subject to rules we can grasp; seemingly absurd things start to make sense.

Consider ‘a tree’ that you perceive as real. What you see, smell and touch is precisely what you think you experience: it matches exactly the concept of a tree that you have, and that is how you identify ‘a tree’ as the object of your experience. The only means of revision of the conception of what you experienced is additional experience, subject to systemic consistency of all experience, including the testimony and the conceptual criteria of identification maintained by others. Your initial ‘experience’ is therefore inherently unreal, subject to being systemically validated by others. You never experience ‘reality’ but only the temporal continuity of your conceptual world-model and then infer whether it was ‘real’ on the basis of cohesion with the world-models of others.

You need the input of others to deduce what is real, and therefore there is nothing real ‘in itself’. The real consists in the conceptual integrity of the meaning held in common.

I can accomodate the distinction between ‘no-thing’ and ‘not zero’. When I say ‘nothing’, as in ‘no thing’, I mean no object-identity that could be consistently posited at the empirical level, but there has to be some meta-level (above empirical) essence that animates the whole system. At the meta-level we find the laws of sense, and of course the self-evident, immanent sense of ‘I am’, which is reflexive consciousness as far as we can reduce it. Consciousness is not a thing (not an object) but also not zero, it has meaning, a structure, which is above the world and also permeates the world, like Logos: the metaphysical framework in which all empirical content becomes possible. In a sense, only Logos is real, absolutely, whereas the empirical is not strictly real, but only a system of quasi-linguistic, infinitely contingent relations that depend on the real to signify anything at all.

The immanence of ‘I am’ is conditional on the meaning content of identity and on external relations, which are governed by sense. There is no ‘I am’ without ‘sense’. Moreover, the laws of sense dictate (necessitate) that ‘I am’ is essentially a multiplicity, each ‘I’ sustained by reflexive relations with other ‘I’s’, and dis-integrates otherwise. For these reasons I take ‘I am’ and the laws of sense as belonging on the same level, both being part of the same immanence.

An argument wins if it is consistent with the structure of being, irrespective of whether it persuades anyone else. A winning argument enlightens us to choose the right actions to reliably serve our ultimate interest. Everything else leads either to failure or to self-destruction. It is in everyone’s interest to be persuaded by the winning argument… or else suffering and self-nihilation is bound to follow.
Those who destroy themselves or sabotage their own ultimate interest need not be persuaded that their reasoning is wrong; their wrongness is corrected by failure and nihilation.

Based on the dominant narrative, I suspect that the collapse of the real estate bubble will be triggered by a sudden glut of high-rise apartments hitting the market all at once. Who lives in those appartments: foreign students, a convenient scapegoat that can then be recycled to argue how essential mass immigration is to the ‘economy’.

Empirical ‘Science’ is a misnomer; it does not have the capacity to generate knowledge. Science is focussed on the conceptual integration of theory and phenomena, and thus can be more precisely characterised as cognitive technology. It does not discover any pre-existing meaning of reality but augments reality to fit the theory. Some scientific theories can be persuasively integrated with phenomenology, but no scientific theory is perfectly consistent or ‘true’, because ‘reality’ is neither conceptually definitive nor complete.

Doubt is uncertainty where uncertainty is due.

It is not the case that Science gives us Evidence. Even just to accept what is reported as ‘evidence’ is already an act of faith. We may nevertheless be rationally justified is considering the possibility that ‘it could be evidence’, and then evaluate what this hypothesis would entail.