I actually feel sorry for his dad.

I didn’t agree a whole lot with Ron, but I had respect for him. Though I didn’t necessarily share his principles, they were obviously deeply held and sincere.

Rand, on the other hand, appears to have no meaningful principles at all, and I can’t work out if it’s because he’s too dishonest or too stupid, and I have the sneaking suspicion it’s actually both.

Somehow reminds me of Life of Brian:

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

That’s unfortunate - you credited me with debating in good faith, yet won’t do the same.

You rather obviously knew that the way you attempted to frame my position was disparaging - if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have felt the need to add that proviso to the end of your post. What you clearly attempted to do with that was to disparage the position, while asserting that you didn’t mean it personally.

Ah well.

Ah…

Yes - now it all fits together.

I remember those days, but I wasn’t on Reddit then.

god of the gaps

supernatural

Without those obvious pejoratives, that would’ve been a pretty good summation of at least that aspect of my position.

With those obvious pejoratives, it was reduced to an unfortunate expression of bias.

I believe that it’s not simply that science doesn’t yet fully understand how the brain works, but that it’s not even really equipped to deal with consciousness, which while clearly a manifestation of physical processes, is not itself physical.

That and we’re in an era in which “science” (scare quotes because part of the problem IMO is a misunderstanding of what science can do and does) has largely moved to the forefront of the pursuit of understanding, but humanity is still to some significant degree stuck in a quasi-religious mindset, so all too many have merely shifted from a devout faith that their religion provides every answer to everything ever to a devout faith that “science” provides every answer to everything ever.

The problem then comes when they run up against something for which science can’t provide an answer. And the common response then is to blithely insist that that thing must not and cannot exist at all, since the alternative is to face the fact that science potentially cannot provide every answer to everything ever. And that’s generally accompanied by an immediate assignment of whatever it is that’s in question to the other half of their wholly binaristic worldview - if it’s not amenable to science, it must and can only be religion/magic.

Reality, IMO, is vaster than that.

Because people who do not have the approval of party power brokers and wealthy donors are effectively locked out, leaving only people of which the power brokers and donors approve.

The primary requirements of the power brokers and donors are that the would-be candidate has no principles that might interfere with them getting whatever it is that they want but have enough skill and/or charisma to project the illusion of principles to the voters. They want someone they can count on to exclusively serve their interests while maintaining enough of an appearance that they serve the interests of the people to win an election, then maintain at least enough support to function in office.

And since they control, as the case might be, the nomination process and the funding of campaigns, they get what they want.

Because there are points at which, exactly as seems to be the case, we consciouly choose to follow one particular path in spite of the fact that we could just as easily have chosen another.

And I agree on both counts.

Because it’s not an illusion.

Determinism seems reasonable only because people have an inaccurately simplistic conception of causation, such that they believe that consciousness and choice violate it, rather than being a part of it.

Causation isn’t a simple linear thing - it’s an enormously complex web in which any number of things can be causes and/or effects of any number of things.

Free will (properly understood) is just one part of that enormously complex web.

The point isn’t whether it works or not - the point is why it comes to be in the first place - why and how people reach a point at which they embrace it.

And that’s when they come to see that their government is failing them - most often, when it’s serving its own interests and the interests of a wealthy few rather than the interests of the people at large.

And here’s a tip - you can’t combat it by deriding the people who embrace it. If anything, that just makes them double down on it, since, to them, that’s just further evidence that you’re an elitist piece of shit who doesn’t care about them or their needs, so they’re going to turn to these other people over here who (say they) do.

Again, there’s one and only one way to counter populism - governmental reform. The problem is that people see that the government isn’t doing enough to serve their needs. The solution is for the government to do more to serve their needs.