Juice

Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn't happened yet or wasn't the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn't happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.

Okay, I apologize I went back and read your first post which said something like "the self doesn't exist is a fun concept to play with" when I was pretty sure you had said just "the self doesnt exist." I'm sitting here trying to find the thread that connects "the self doesn't exist" with your seeming acknowledgement of every aspect of it.

I agree its useful to test "wrong conclusions" for the reasons you state. You end up constructing consistent logic justifying it, and can witness for yourself where the reasoning goes wrong, and can speculate as to why. I think it makes relating to people convinced by faulty logic and conclusions easier to relate to, as well as gives you a hint to where their reasoning is off and you cans start to argue against it

But what is experience, how can you find experience without a self doing the experiencing? I'm not trying to put it on you but it is consistent with your logic, as I understand it

I haven't played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.

It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there's no plan for a 3rd season

I played the first two

Famously, Kant stripped away all his preconceptions and could prove only the subjective (I think therefore I am), whereas you seem to deny everyone their subjectivity, even your own. In any case since you're interested in these questions, I assume then you'll reach a better understanding of these questions, just keep studying and growing on your own terms (which is contradictory to your own thesis, but the whole is always defined by contradiction.)

For people inside NATO its surprising how much credibility they have considering how much just straight terrorism they've carried out over the years. Defensive alliance my arse

I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked

I agree with a lot of your analysis, but I think a lot of these conclusions are highly contingent on historical circumstance. For example, I think Trump is a lot more unpopular than the current narrative regarding Trump. The Dems do not want to be so wrong about Trump's chance of winning as they were in 2016. A dynamic that could play out in this election is that many of the groups you identified (and were right to do so) feel so threatened by a Trump presidency (in part because of Dems successful and good organizing against him) causes those groups to unite and keep him out of office. This could lead to a split between the pragmatic republican movement concerned with maintaining the status quo, and the pro-Trump MAGA militants who are not as homogenous of a group as may first appear.

But feel free to "neener neener" about it if I end up being wrong in a few hours. My point is, things change, a disparate group of different interests can unite into an unbreakable bloc, and vice versa, in a traumatizingly short amount of time if recent years can be a teacher

Well I disagree that "we can't find it". I think the inability to find the self is a result of the limitations of empiricism, whereas dialectical and materialist analysis has no problem locating the self within the changing relationships that define the individual, history and nature in context of each other.

And this is what empiricism really fails at: its great at defining an object, defining the parameters that constitute it, and isolating it as a subject of study, but absolutely falls short at being able to identify the relationships between "things" or the historic circumstances that give rise to them.

As observers, an over-reliance on one theory of knowledge, or epistemology, verges on the kind of ideological blindness usually associated with fringe fundamentalism. We wouldnt us a ratchet to hammer a nail, why would we insist that a single epistemic "tool" is the only one that is capable of determining truth?

Honestly I probably agreed with you more some years ago before reading Sam Harris's Free Will, which was so bad it set me on a very different path of inquiry.