Jeremy Taylor wrote:

There's nothing unChristian about patriotism, unless it becomes a virulent nationalism. Patriotism is just love of your country and the belief it be protected.

In this case, I was responding to a belief that someone's country has enemies and is under attack from the inside (by liberals or whatever other politically loaded curse word one might use). It was clearly virulent ideological bias. And since that's evidently permissible, let's carry on in the same manner.

Has anybody else noticed how pro-Trumpism attracts pro-Putinism like a magnet? For example here https://consortiumnews.com/2018/09/21/the-new-york-times-as-judge-and-jury/

And have you found yourself thinking that all those violent shots at "corporate/elite media", even when coupled with thin slogans for free speech, are actually calls to divest the last remaining semblance of free speech?

Etzelnik wrote:

Trump's ascendancy is an indicator of how desperate conservatives are to protect their increasingly at-risk liberties.

When the likes of Trump are in ascendancy, is it really out of desperation to protect liberties? Looks more like an attempt to avoid anarchy by establishing despotism instead.

And, broader, have you ever thought how un-Christian patriotism (of any country) is? Particularly militant patriotism, where you think of any foreign country as the enemy of your own country, as if the people of that foreign country (as opposed to govt) mattered less.

Ouros wrote:

Hello everyone.

You all certainly heard about the naturalist meta-narrative of history:

Our ancestors were a bunch of superstitious people who put supernatural being and substance beyond every natural phenomen. But with the progress of science/philosophy/whatever fields, we now know that it's false.
So, by extending this idea, we can be sure that everything that can't be explained in natural ways now, will be in some future.

What about that?
Is there some truth in that, or is it more like a distorted view of history?

Our ancestors were indeed superstitious, but not in the sense of only assuming supernatural being and substance beyond natural phenomenon. What these days is called supernatural, was part of natural order back then. There was no such difference or distinction between natural and supernatural as there is now.

As to the second sentence, with all the progress of science and philosophy, we do not know at all that the supernatural is false or not there. We know that there are undesirable aspects to superstitious attitude, yes, but shouldn't it be obvious that people are like that because it actually works? And there are people who are above it because that works too? So, these days we make a distinction between natural and supernatural, we have reoriented our metaphysical perspective - and, by and large, that's all we know. Who has shown that the supernatural is false or not there?

Since the second sentence is dubious, no point to extend or extrapolate it into a universality.

Miguel wrote:

A good introduction and summary of contemporary economics for lay people - not economics students.

Preferably impartial and uncontroversial. So, mainstream and orthodox leaning. No Austrian school or socialism or anything of this sort.

A while ago, I started the exact same quest myself. I found that there is no such thing as impartial uncontroversial economic mainstream. Or, to put it another way, the thing called mainstream in economics is a kind of ideological attitude, instead of a science.

I have confirmed this with a close friend of mine, who is a professional econometrician. He is ashamed of the state of economics as a science. His recommendation: Learn the basics of accounting and be suspicious of anything that deviates from this. When someone posits a "model" that has no connection to the basics of accounting, it's appropriate to ignore him.

The state of economics is comparable to what happened in philosophy: the fashionable mainstream used to be postmodernism in many universities, which is really a trend of art criticism, but it managed to pose as a school of philosophy for decades. In case of economics, it's been going on much longer without any proper challenge to the economists.

Edit: If your real aim is to get to know economics as actually practised, and not those boring principles of accounting (whose wider applications you would have to discover yourself with time-consuming individual work, likely arriving at something completely different than what economists are used to), then read the classics and the textbooks. None of this is uncontroversial or impartial, but that's how economics is.