I do not believe in the fact/value distinction nor that the supposed is-ought problem is actually a problem.

And I'm not the only one. Hillary Putnam wrote an entire book about it, and you'd be a fool to simply dismiss him.

Go read it first.
amazon.com/Collapse-Value… As Putnam notes, the fact/value dichotomy fails because it never manages to actually distinguish the two entirely, due to a kind of necessary entanglement (or kinds) between putative "facts" and "values."

Uses "word salad" in this way, instead of even trying to address my point (which is of course the correct answer).

Blocked.

https://twitter.com/ItsAndyRyan/status/1709134764811210835

This is one of my rules. I use language quite carefully. When someone response to something I have said by calling it "word salad," nothing is lost by blocking them.

There is no possibility they are being an honest interlocutor.

This does *seem like* a huge incoherence in transgender ideology.

It seems as if it is absurd on its face to say that children can consent to medical "transition" and a lifetime of medicalization and sterilization, but not consent to smoking a cigarette or having a beer.

https://twitter.com/JamesEsses/status/1702394282697470412

And we who are opposed to transgender ideology should continue to press this point in this way.

An honest atheist (if there were such a thing) might say that he does not believe in an uncreated creator. No!—he must pretend that the concept of an uncreated creator is nonsense!

As if everything that does an action need be susceptible to such an action!

https://twitter.com/sasilik/status/1700388953675710638

Water drowns men. So what drowns water?

Fire burns up wood. So what burn up fire?

Light illuminates the darkness. So what illuminates light?

A bullet kills a man. What kills a bullet?

Both modes have strengths and weaknesses but picture thinking is terrible with abstractions/things that can’t be imaged.

"I think in words" - Jordan Peterson #shorts youtube.com/shorts/Bq2FSSJ… A lot of picture-thinkers will form an image of what’s being talked about and then think something that only belongs to the image belongs to the idea itself. Which in turn causes them to miss/reject other cases that instantiate the idea but don’t fit their particular image.

This is of course wildly false, and depends on an equivocation of the term "natural."

For example, PLASTIC is NATURAL in the sense that it is made of (mostly) carbon.

But it is UNNATURAL is the sense that it is MAN-MADE, ARTIFICIAL.

Plastic does not OCCUR in nature. In THIS case, there are behaviors and states of being that are UNNATURAL to a creature given its NATURE.

For example, diseases are natural, but it does not belong to the nature of an animal TO BE DISEASED.

Judith Jarvis Thomson, the philosopher who came up with the famous "violinist" thought experiment in an effort to justify abortion, did so precisely BECAUSE she thought attempts to deny fetal personhood were simply factually doomed.

And this was with 1971 technology! Mary Ann Warren, an other philosopher who wrote one of the more famous and influential defense of abortion, notes that it is "both impractical and emotionally abhorrent to deny full moral status" to human beings who are not MORAL AGENTS:

@DrFrankTurek Because the Christian Faith is not repugnant to logos/reason, but rather completes it, and thereby teaches how God's grace, Incarnate in Christ, makes possible the completion of what for philosophy is an endless task of approximation. @DrFrankTurek Because philosophy aims at truth and Christ is the truth. Hence philosophy by its very nature aims at Christ, even when it doesn't know it, or only knows it obscurely.

Suppose there is a car crash and as a result person A is thrown through a windshield and lands, unconscious in B's yard.

Is A trespassing?

No. A isn't DOING anything, despite A's being splayed out on B's lawn. A is not, while unconscious, a MORAL AGENT who is DOING THINGS. A is, however, a MORAL PATIENT. If B decided to shoot the unconscious A, to punish A for "trespassing", B commits murder.

A can't DO any moral wrong, being unconscious, but CAN BE DONE moral wrong, while unconscious.

"Bodily autonomy" doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with your body.

The rapist and the abortionist make the same argument (fortunately no one accepts the rapist's claims): "It is MY body. I can DO WHAT I WANT with MY body!" A small child can detect the moral falsehood in a rapist's claim to be able to do whatever he wants with HIS body. Namely, that the thing he wants to do with HIS body is at the same time something he is doing to SOMEONE ELSE'S body.

The abortionist wants to run the argument that the less a human being is developed, the more justified one is in killing them.

But she really cannot, since this entails killing newborns and young children is less bad than killing adults—which ordinary moral sense rejects. So the abortionist needs a threshold, past which a growing human being, but "not-a-person" because a person.

At first, BIRTH seem promising, since it marks a seeming qualitative change, a leap, in an otherwise gradual development.

"Children are born."

Explain what exists before a child does, and more importantly, HOW and WHY a non-child becomes a child?

Birth is an important event in the life of an organism, but there's no magical transformation that occurs from going from inside to outside the mother.

https://twitter.com/atriana/status/1688847796487553024

The 2nd stage of labor, the pushing stage, lasts from 15 minutes to a few hours—what is being birthed, if not a child? At what instant does what is being birthed become a child? Is a child with one toe still inside NOT a child? Why not? What's the magic of the toe being outside?

We not only do not but could not have good reason to believe this proposition. As I’ve note with other versions of the argument from evil, we’d need to be both omniscient (to know all relevant to evaluating the proposition) and morally perfect (to be able to judge correctly).

https://twitter.com/philip_goff/status/1687446758031269888

As I have often noted, God and God alone is capable of making an argument from evil against His existence—but He of course does not.

Re: Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Why do you care?"

We care because you are trying to force us to use the language you demand (treating it as a crime not to), ruining women's sports, the military, firing us, denying us access to banking and medical care for not going along ... "Why do you care?"

It is a sin to lie and you are trying to use the law and every possible social sanction to force everyone to participate in a lie—you are literally demanding everyone place their souls at risk of damnation for your insane political agenda.

Moreover, there is good reason to think any real friend of women would be opposed to feminism, any real friend of the poor opposed to socialism, and any real friend of liberty opposed to libertarianism.

https://twitter.com/FeserEdward/status/1686810792044490752

Why? This is easy.

Feminism hurts women and makes them less happy.

Socialism hurts everyone, and the poor most of all.

Libertarianism leads to anarchy and thence to tyranny, the two worst hell-states humans can bring about on earth.

As everyone can see from this little exchange, atheists do not believe in the burden of proof. When confronted with their own obligation of proof (by their own principle) they just lie and say they didn't make any claims, even while claiming many things.

On full display:

https://twitter.com/TropicOfChaos/status/1677979369254318080

Don't play this game.

First, you have neither a moral nor a rational obligation to accept this fallacious demand.

The Supreme Court absolutely made the right decision in striking down the so-called "affirmative action."

It was *always* a bad idea, and I believe *always* unconstitutional. It is literally a system of racial preferences. That is directly contrary to the core American idea. "Affirmative action" is the precursor to Critical Race Theory style "anti-racism", in which an unjust system of racial preferences are deployed (supposedly) to counteract an unjust system of racial preferences.

But you cannot fight injustice BY DOING MORE OF IT.

The law professor's error is that he accepts the false doctrine of legal positivism.

He believes the laws CREATE all reality, rather than ACKNOWLEDGE it.

This especially becomes a problem in cases of natural right and justice.

https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1669145623637925888

It is very clearly an anti-American idea, since the American idea is that the state is CREATED in order to PROTECT NATURAL RIGHTS (which precede the state and do not depend upon it for their existence).

This professor thinks the state CREATES rights.

Just heard Jordan Peterson make an excellent point

When God dies, people no longer attribute to God what is God's and attribute to Caesar what is Caesar's. They start to attribute what is God's to Caesar, which contaminates the political with the religious. What we need to realize, even self-described secularists, is that some of the axioms of perception and cognition are so deep they are outside the realm of the political, and possibly outside the realm of the philosophical, in the realm of the sacred.

[End paraphrase of JBP]

WHY would anyone be even remoted surprised that Foucault was raping little boys?

He goes on at length about how that's such a good thing to do.

It isn't like it was a secret.

https://twitter.com/Rob_ThaBuilder/status/1665852038947717120

At Berkeley, they called him "that French Pervert."

Do you know how degenerate, sick, and twisted you have to be to get the people at BERKELEY to call you "pervert"?

It's a high bar, let's just say.

There is a good deal of confusion in the Judge's ruling.

https://twitter.com/EveKeneinan/status/1666193214544519170

"As the person goes through life, the person also has a gender identity—a deeply felt internal sense of being male or female."

I was talking about this the other day. Is there such a "sense of being male or female"? I doubt it.