When I establish my Manufactory of Fine Psychocerametry, I shall seek out a fair plot of unimproved land. And hang upon it a shingle:
40 Acres and an Ass
As previously, this thread will be a place where I post (and occasionally respond to) various #administrivia issues.
Thinks like who I am, various policies / practices / interests. And in a moment, where things stand in migrations or lack thereof between various Mastodon instances.
Some further profile migration #administrivia:
I'm trying to rationalise settings between my various currently extant Mastodon profiles:
- mastodon.cloud, my old primary
- mastodon.social, a never-really-used secondary
- and this, toot.cat, my new primary.
(There's another former instance on a now-dead server, keep reading.)
Things are slightly borked presently.
One convention I've followed is that ⭕ typically indicates my active profile, ❌ various inactive ones.
Problems:
- Once you redirect a Mastodon profile, it's not possible to edit account settings further.
- To edit my mastodon.cloud profile, just to change one character in the account name, I had to un-redirect it.
- Redirections are only available once every 30 days. So that profile will remain w/o a redirection for another month.
- In the moments between clicking "edit profile" and "save changes", mastodon.cloud fell over again. so that profile is now in an undesired and indeterminate state.
Again, toot.cat is my new primary. mastodon.cloud is my old, deprecated profile. mastodon.social is another back-up account. And the since deceased mammouth.cafe was my original home on the Fediverse:
- Primary: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius
- Deprecated: https://mastodon.cloud
- Back-up account: https://mastodon.social/@dredmorbius
- Defunct: https://mammoth.cafe/@dredmorbius (now redirects to some ecommerce site). Internet Archive has some captures.
Just a general note: if your approach to coversation is that you're going to club me over the head with whatever pre-formed, reinforced-concrete belief systems or ideology you've already ingested, formed, cured, and coated in diamond-titanium cladding, we'll be having Very Short Discussions. And likely similarly for relationships.
The more so if you're going to do so from ignorance or Telling Me What I Think or Who I Am. Also, come to think of it, in ignorance.
If you do wish to explore questions, even from widely differing sides, with an aim at uncovering some greater truth, or even simply understanding one anothers' viewpoints more clearly, there is likely to be far greater interest in discussion.
I do not claim to be right on All Things. More importantly, I put an extreme importance on Not Insisting on Being Wrong. That's combined with an (I hope) somewhat well-tuned Bullshit Filter, and, as I enter my senility, a somewhat diminished patience with same.
Put more simply, it's the difference between rhetoric and dialectic.
It's the old story of the Sophists versus the Philosophers, more at .
(I'm also a sucker for good stories, bad puns, cute cats (there is no other type), relevant news, arcane philosophy, and miscellaneous other amusements, etc.)
For more on the Sophists, see the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/
I'd also recommend the HoP episode:
https://historyofphilosophy.net/sophists
Audio: https://hopwag.podbean.com/mf/feed/6qa8mu/HoP_014_Making_the_Weaker_Argument_the_Stronger___the_Sophists.mp3
References:
J.M. Dillon and T. Gergel, The Greek Sophists (London: 2003).
G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: 1981).
#sophists #sophistry #philosophy #HistoryOfPhilosophy #podcasts
COVID-19 Informational Resources
COVID-19 trends by region, country, state/province, U.S. metropolitan area, or U.S. county:
https://outbreak.info
COVID-19 projections:
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Financial Times Covid-19 tracker:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/
CovidTrends; New cases (weekly average) vs. total cases, by country:
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
Worldometers Coronavirus live statistics:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
US realtime state Rt estimates and tracker:
https://rt.live
The Economist excess mortality tracker:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries
Covid19 projections:
https://covid19-projections.com/
Imperial College London Covid tracking 7 estimation model (US):
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19usa/
Our World in Data Coronavirus tracker:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus map (US):
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map
ArcGIS visualizer:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d1c643c195314e/
@rysiek 's "scary" National comparison grapher:
https://rys.io/covid/
@dredmorbius I had a good cackle at this. Thank goodness he wasn't using comic sans... 🤣
@dredmorbius i think philosophy is actually far more rhetorical than logical. Will make a separate toot arguing this position.
@Gotterdammerung Would that be philosophy-as-practiced or philosophy-as-defined?
I'd argue that there's a great deal of what's cast as philosophy which is in fact rhetorical. Probably especially in the Continental school, in the past couple of centuries.
There's a vast amount that's really theology, starting during Roman times, and extending through ... at least the Renaissance, probably to at least the Enlightenment. (Speaking of Western tradition here.)
But there's also much, including quite a bit of the theological material, which concerns reason, logic, perception, and establishment of truth. Much of that's now been subsumed into science as opposed to philosophy, though not entirely all.
@dredmorbius both my good sir. Philosophy as practiced and as defined.
This redefinition of philosophy as a rhetorical practice led me to the following conclusion:
In Philosophy Proper, truth is absolute.
The history of Philosophical truth is contingent.
Therefore, there is no such thing as Philosophy Proper. Only philosophers!
An homage to https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766
Which was an homage to https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw
Which was an homage to a long-lost G+ post (prolly somewhere on IA's WBM).