Pretty much.

"A few months ago I told the american people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart, and my best intentions, still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R67CH-qhXJs

Except he didn't trade arms for hostages, he SOLD arms indirectly to Iran because he wanted to arm the anti-communist forces in Nicaragua and congress had forbidden it.

So he had Israel give Iran a bunch of American-made weapons so Iran would negotiate for the release of seven American hostages being held in in Lebanon by a group of Islamic extremists with ties to Iran and Hezbollah. Israel was given replacement weapons and gave the US the cash they got selling the original weapons to Iran.

The money was then used to finance and train the Contras because Reagan had a huge hard-on for anyone who said they were anti-communist regardless of how vile and brutal they were.

Pretty much everyone involved in this little "affair" as it was called got almost zero punishment.

And here we are today with the Republicans still bitching and whining about Hillary's emails and screaming for her blood.

A correction : I meant Nero, not Caligula.

Caligula's speeches were written by Gore Vidal.

I'm converting to memedumpsterism because it feels good.

"Stupid" is not the opposite of "rational", "irrational" is. One can be stupid and rational, stupid and irrational, intelligent and rational, intelligent and irrational, or any various shade of meaning in-between. This is a common error; in fact, it is an error which Mr Potholer himself makes over the course of this video!

Also, according to Wikipedia, Gore Vidal was born in 1925. Caligula died in the year 41. I do not believe Caligula's speeches were written by Mr Vidal.

Ashtar, you will literally be the only adherent. I sure ain't!

"Stupid" is a highly technical term, I in no way said it was an opposite of anything. You are presenting a false dichotomy, but don't sweat it, it's in your genes.

I think absolute rationality is dependent on having access to absolute facts. Such a thing is easy with things like science (most of the time) but gets a lot harder to do for things like politics and current events.

mainly because The Truth is rarely known by those reporting on it in the media, and even sometimes if it is, it gets covered up by a more comfortable narrative. And there are outright lies reported as facts, corporate news parroting press releases for fear of losing access to important politicians, lazy reporters picking "facts" written in op-ends by a biased party and regurgitating them in their own, blogger "journalists" etc etc etc. Being rational when almost all your knowledge of a subject is based on ignorant reporting or lies is futile at best, so most people just pick whichever side is most comfortable to them and filter all inputs to support that (see: the sloppy blowjobs some people on BoE and PoE keep giving to sanders)

No, being rational is a method. The media's bullshit is obvious.

You cant be absolutely rational without access to concrete facts, otherwise you're just trying to apply rationality to whatever narrative appeals to you the most. ie, you're given two plates of bullshit and you say this one is probably candy because the other one tastes worse.

Rationality is certainly difficult -- takes most of us half a lifetime to get anywhere near half-rational -- but the principal is quite simple: when your internal view conflicts with external evidence, do you change your view or deny the evidence?

SolRo, I'm not surprised this is something of an alien concept for you. At the same time I feel kind of guilty for destroying you in those earlier threads -- especially since you remind me of a younger and more stubborn me. I want to say that I wish you well and am confident you're going to grow into an amazingly smart, aware, happy person.

If you apply rationality to a false narrative it destroys it.

"You cant be absolutely rational without access to concrete facts..."

Then no first fact would have ever been discerned and no rationality could exist.

"you're just trying to apply rationality to whatever narrative appeals to you the most."

You should absolutely do this. If your narrative is bullshit, rationality will destroy it. You're confusing actual critical thinking with what people do when it is said they are "rationalizing" which is rhetoric. Rhetoric and critical thinking are not remotely compatible states of mind.

"you're given two plates of bullshit and you say this one is probably candy because the other one tastes worse."

That isn't being rational, that's voting, which when characterized that way makes politics look like long term spousal abuse.

There is one question you need to keep in mind your whole life, (and I promise you this is the ONLY shot I have at ever saying anything wise, because I never have before) "how would I know if I'm wrong?" If you can't know, it's bullshit.

"This plate tastes terrible, I bet this other one is candy. Wait, how would I know if it really isn't candy and I only think it is...?"

One out of one hundred million humans, maybe, will ask this question in their entire lives.

The scariest day of your life may be when you realize none of your teachers ever remotely tried to teach you critical thinking, and you only know it because you accidentally stumbled upon it while dicking around on the Internet. That not one of them may have even had the rationality themselves to simply state "you can observe anything, conclude anything about it, and predict how it will be in the future based on your conclusions, then reality will correct you if you're wrong, assuming you're honest enough to keep watching."

That's some impressive auto-filiation.

You still cant wrap your atrophied mind around the idea that rationality requires experiencing The Basic Truth and applying that to future experiences. If you've never known the actual truth about a subject, you cannot be rational when forming an opinion about it. It's impossible.

You could try guessing at what is rational, and it might even resemble an actual rational opinion if it's a lucky guess, but you don't really know, because you -are- just guessing. But you just picked whichever side's argument you found most in-line with your biases.

And get it into your philosophy rotted brain that physical facts are a prerequisite to forming rationality, not the other way around.

- "Stupid" is a highly technical term, I in no way said it was an opposite of anything.

You implied it, by juxtaposing "stupid" with "rational", and suggesting that the one cancels out the other. ("Rationality is a task dependent toolset, our DNA defaults to stupid.")

Still, the important thing is you agree with me, so that's fine.

"That's some impressive auto-filiation.

You still cant wrap your atrophied mind around..."

Done.

I'm sorry, and I actually really am fucking sorry, but you're never going to get it. You're rhetorically programmed. You're lost. You can only communicate in animals noises, and you're going to be manipulated by every critical thinker you encounter your whole life.

You're going to have to manage the world and your lifetime in it without reason. It's going to suck and you're never going to be satisfied in it.

I feel like shit now.

:(

EH, you're trolling and I know you can think critically, you do it all the time for comedic effect.

I feel like shit about SolRo not being in this club, help?

you are so much smarter than the rest of these assholes

Let me try to help. SolRo, you seem to be confusing rationality with purely deductive logic, in which case conclusions can only proceed from absolutely established already known Truth. While it's impressive how far you can get with just this limited tool (a lot of maths for instance) you can't navigate through life this way, and if you try you're going to invent a lot of bullshit axioms for yourself like 'Russia is always right'. Luckily INDUCTION also has a big place in rationality, you just have to keep critically checking your inferences. Please Google up how the 'scientific method' can be said to derive from Bayes's Theorom; it might do you good.

Tl;dr: memedumpster is fight, you kids should listen to him.