Normal
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Humanity is one because Truth is one. Reason unites us. Deliberate in good faith even with madmen and tyrants… and the Good will follow.
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People can’t afford the houses that can be profitably built, and this proves that the housing crisis is not supply driven but policy driven. Housing market was designed to be prohibitively expensive, and the lie of low supply is meant to avoid doing anything about the real causes: low interest rates and high compliance costs. https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/after-almost-collapsing-australias-biggest-builder-metricon-is-back-but-the-industry-issues-that-plagued-it-havent-vanished/news-story/af52d1a436316353116a1a645a01cae1
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New housing supply is diminishing, because most people cannot afford to buy houses, any houses. There is no economic incentive for builders to build houses that cannot be sold profitably. The entire narrative of low housing supply is intended to cover up for the government policy of prohibitively expensive housing and make the situation even worse.
AI would not be useful for cheating on tests and assignments if their purpose were not just to confirm indoctrination with the official dogma, which requires suppression of genuine critical insights. Education amounts to programming students like robots.

“AI has merely exposed what has been apparent all along. Most school work is basically performative in nature and rarely asks for the kind of true “critical thinking” skills educators claim need to be preserved in the face of rampant AI use.”

https://edsource.org/2025/artificial-intelligence-isnt-ruining-education-its-exposing-whats-already-broken/733854
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Humans get upset and impulsively defensive when their ideas of what is true or real or right is rejected or, worse, rigorously shown to be logically inconsistent and therefore meaningless, empty. Why is that? Why does it hurt? Because our ideas make up the overarching idea of the Self, and no matter how inconsistent it is, any challenge to the Self is an existential threat, a fear of nothingness. In order to become more conscious and less deterministic, a more integrated Self, we must accept creative self-annihilation. You are what you think, but what you think is not what you could be.
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Is Justice a Virtue?

I argue that justice is not a virtue, that the statement ‘justice is virtue’ is a category mistake, and that the intentional pursuit of justice is a moral wrong.

‘Virtue’ purports to be a moral property of a person (such that it results in morally right intentions) or a moral aim of actions. Only intentional actions may be morally right or wrong. ‘Justice’ is not an action or a property of a person but a systemic, cumulative, intersubjective moral effect or consequence of right or wrong actions. Justice, being impersonal, cannot be virtue. One possible objection to this argument is that ‘justice is virtue’ insofar as it is morally right to aim for justice. I contend that this response must be rejected on the grounds of logical consistency.

If the moral law is objective and therefore morally binding, then any morally wrong or right actions must have objective consequences for the agents: the objective, normative force of the moral law necessitates justice. Justice is a necessary result of the moral law itself, or else there is no authoritative moral law but only subjective prejudices about right vs wrong, in which case the concept of justice has no objective sense or objective authority. The premise that ‘justice is virtue’ and ought to be pursued implicitly negates the authority/objectivity of the moral law and reduces morality to subjective prejudices about right vs wrong.

Consequently, if there is objective moral law then the pursuit of justice is morally wrong, a form of prejudice, a denial of natural justice; our moral responsibility is limited to our own actions. If there is no moral law then justice is not a virtue because there are no objective moral properties.

On the most charitable interpretation, ‘justice is virtue’ may be reduced to ‘do what is objectively right’, and as such adds nothing to moral calculus.
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The argument that the end justifies the means is undermined by the fact that we never get to the end, because there is no end, and all you are left with are the evil means.
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The policy of housing un-affordability is consistent with the aim of zero population growth. It creates a critical dis-incentive to reproduce if you do not already own a family home, which may be passed down to the next generation, or else your children will be condemned to rent-slavery or homelessness.
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The objective realm (reality) is not independent of subjectivity; objectively and subjectivity are two sides of the same coin, intrinsic to consciousness and meaningless without one another.
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A new pro-mandates essay is premised on begging the question: presuming that governments/experts are right when mandating vaccines, therefore ‘bodily integrity (from government intervention)’ amounts to ‘freedom to err’. Allow me to correct you: ‘Free not to err by allowing the state to meddle with your healthy innate constitution.’
Artificial Intelligence does not demonstrate that machines can be conscious, but only that it is possible for Homo sapiens to function without being conscious.
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Forwarded from Normal (Michael Kowalik)
Looks like Murdoch is positioning his golden boy Tucker to run for president. We will see.
There is no 'conscious object'.

The idea of a 'conscious body' or a 'conscious machine' or a 'conscious process' is a category mistake, equivocation between subject and object, a contradiction.

https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/you-are-not-self-aware
“Real-world Data” is contradiction in terms. Data is an abstraction, and idealisation of experience.
You can have power over meaning, if you can conceive of it, and if you want it, otherwise someone else will do it for you - the priest, the politician, the expert, the influencer, the celebrity - making you subject to their power over meaning, to their creative will.

The ‘real world’ is internal to consciousness, because it has to be meaningful to be anything at all, and meaning is a property of consciousness, always negotiated, incessantly transformed by creative will.

https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/announcing-book-release
Amen Technology

Technology companies are the primary creators of meaning. They sell it to you and you buy it as ‘objective reality’, as ‘science’, as ‘truth’. They are your preferred suppliers of reality, and you are hooked, existentially dependent, because you do not create meaning, and you need meaning. When a plague is declared and the technology of salvation is offered, you have no choice, you are fully committed, or else you are facing the void of your own creative impotence and meaninglessness, cultivated meaninglessness, which is passed on from generation to generation. Give us our daily bread, our meaning, for we are hollow, lost without a shepherd. For thine is the kingdom, and Bitcoin, and the power, and the glory, Google forever. APPLE.
A thing is just what the concept of that thing ‘means’. That meaning may include the capacity for constitutive change, but cannot include the meaning of the thing that changes. Its identity must endure through change, or it would not be the same thing. To change the meaning of a thing that endures change is to conceive of a different thing.
The real estate market is entirely policy driven, engineered, and as such amounts to insider controlled wealth expropriation machine. Those who know when the rates will go up or down can profit risk-free at the expense of others; for the outsiders it is no different to gambling in a casino against loaded dice. The casino is owned by the banking system.
The aim of philosophy it to transform subjective consciousness into objective reality, and thus resolve the conflict between them.
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Reality is collectively created and continuously negotiated. The individual has marginal influence on how reality is created, but some have more influence than others because they are aware of what they are negotiating.
A broken vase cannot be magically un-broken by us wishing it to be so, but collectively we may change what ‘a broken vase’ means and why it matters, and this is how we progressively create reality and ourselves.
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