Quote from: comrade simba on Jan 20, 2025, 09:02 PMI try to keep three maxims in mind:
I don't know.
I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
Interesting set of maxims to live by. I'm not in this club, as anyone who has read my material for a while knows. Let me address them each in turn.
#1- I don't know.
What is knowable and what is not? Can you know that 1+1=2? If a tree falls in the forest and you weren't there, can you know if it made a sound? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, do you know it's a duck? You could make philosophical arguments that show you can't know these things for sure, but my POV is they all reach my test of being beyond reasnable doubt. So my POV is I know them as true, and you would need to present some really good arguments to convince me otherwise.
Of course, most things aren't quite so clear cut, but for every question out there, at a certain point I have enough evidence to make my own determination of the truth, and that's what I know. To change my mind, you have to present arguments that show me why I am wrong. I'm always interested to hear such arguments and examine them. At least as long as the arguments are presented respectfully without insults, obfuscation, ad hom attacks, strawmen, appeals to authority and bad faith. There are other things people will do in an argument to get it off track too, but those are the main ones I don't tolerate.
The Diner is supposed to be a place where people with a genuine interest in topics related to the collapse of industrial civilization can present their viewpoints and discuss them, in the effort to ferret out The Truth from the vast quantity of misinformation ejaculated on the net. So I welcome members who enjoy telling me what they know also. Then we can compare the differences to get a better understanding and hopefully get closer to the truth. At the end of the process, hopefully everyone knows a little more than when we began.
#2 I Don't Care
I have spent the last 15 years digging into this subject and written reams of material to examine what is going on. You don't spend that much time on something you don't care about. Kdog also has spent a long time immersed in the topic, he cares about it also. It's probably the most important question of our time, so it's hard for m to understand how so many people don't care about it.
#3 It doesn't matter
If the future of the planet and of the civilization of homo saps doesn't matter, what does? We may just be a fly speck in the universe and when we're gone nobody will be around to care, but WE ARE THE FLIES. So what happens does matter to us. Does what we say here matter? Well, since so few people read it, it doesn't matter to the vast majority of the global population, but it DOES matter to those of us who are members of this flyspeck on the internet on the flyspeck of the planet. If the Diner doesn't matter to you, why bother spending time chatting here?
RE