You still alive ? I thought you had deleted your account...
Who is "they"?

@Thibaud70 Based on your OP I would guess liberal atomism versus communitarianism?

Sealions from a distant shore rather than the subjects of the sentence?

Is that your philosophy?

@skado I don't have a philosophy, just opinions. That's enough.

@KKGator
Ok, so… can it be useful to share opinions?

@skado Occasionally.

And anti-intellectualism is a waste of air, and/or ink, and/or paper, and/or bytes. Every. Damned. Time.

@AlanCliffe Who is being anti-intellectual?

@KKGator You've got one guess, friend.

@AlanCliffe You need to guess again, friend.

Loosely translated? He hates Liberals.

He actually describes Objectivism and an Ayn Rand than anything Liberal though.

@BufftonBeotch Used to be liberalism was the political philosophy of radical individualists like Herbert Spencer, who was similar enough to Ayn Rand. But in the US between the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, liberalism transformed into a more progressivist welfare state ideology. I wonder if the US Democratic Party form of liberalism became more “communitarian” and much less atomistic.

Thibaud70 is coming from a Euro-biased perspective where liberalism may still retain much of its original meaning.

@Scott321 Woody Will was an actual member of the KKK

@Scott321 I think people in the US have some warped ideas about a lot of political ideologies.

So you do not care about others then.

@Fernapple Biologically we are each merely a cohering community of cells, resulting from the advent of multicellularity. These cells have a division of labor and differentiate by specialization during development. This development creates a transitory vehicle serving to pass genetic material (so called immortal coils) to the next generation. That’s the Williams/Dawkins conception of genes that deconstructs individuality. Also sometimes cells defect and strike out on their own, becoming cancerous. The anarchist streak is still lying beneath our surface in a disastrous way.

It’s easy rhetorically to reduce individuality to a lower level of cell lineages and lower still to genes. Individuals are thus “emergent” too. Are we mostly the activity of brain cells? Selfhood seems an alluring illusion. But we also exist embedded in societies or cultures. We aren’t exactly a superorganism like a bee hive or ant colony, but much of what we take for granted are projected social constructs inherited from others, including concepts of individuality and community themselves.

@Scott321 True, yes. But the conversation with Thibauld was only about the individual relative to the community, and while the individual can be further reduced, it does have a single whole. In that it is confined to one space, which the community is not, and if you divide it down to the level of organs, they are not able to survive alone, so in that sense it has an individual unity. While you can reduce a community any way you wish and you may still have surviving communities. Split a community in two and you may have two thriving communities, split an individual in two, and you have two pieces of meat, in that sense of indivisible a person has a material reality that a community does not.

Interestingly of course, it is because of that danger from physical damage, that organisms evolved the mechanism called pain, to help protect them, by making them aware of the dangers of physical damage, at that level of complexity.

Or how many times a person has to go back and reread the sentence and then it still isn't clear.

I love it when the right wing ties to asset that liberals think in lockstep or that we have some type of hive brain. Telling liberals what to think or do is like herding cats.
It is the right wing that goes into near worship mode for leaders, most recently the flim-flam orangutan, but previously bush2. There is a movie called Jesus Camp where they have the kids pray to a cardboard cutout of GWB. It is as creepy as it sounds.

@BufftonBeotch - it was Will Rogers that said "I am not a member of any organized political party ...I am a Democrat."

I think confusion often stems from the varied meanings of the word liberalism. In the US we think of liberalism quite differently than someone from the UK, Australia, or Europe.

The liberal vs communitarian contrast brought up in the OP is an important thing. Might put one to sleep quite easily, but still important to political phliosophers.

Read the damn post.

@AlanCliffe Again? Really? Is that an order? Are you holding your breath? Good. Keep holding...

Not bloody likely.

@Garban Seems to be.

That is university level writing.

Not some random forum.

@Garban Atomistic Individualism

@Garban It is really bad.

He is desperate to prove how much smarter he is than us.

@BufftonBeotch I was already a little tired when I started reading it. But I didn't get very far. It's my evening off, and I wanna enjoy it.