u/No_Dragonfruit8254

The standard transliteration of “America” is “ma Mewika in toki pona. Personally I strongly dislike using “America” to refer to the United States of America because I think it’s a very culturally American thing to do. It gives off the implication that the USA is all “America” is, whereas in reality all nations in North and South America ought to have claim to the term.

In my own life I much prefer the terms “USAmerica” and “USAmerican”, but these are pretty clunky to transliterate directly. Is there some established culturally neutral term for USAmerica in toki pona that specifies that it’s just referring to the USA? If not, what’s an elegant way to make this distinction?

I hear a lot of people retroactively calling the m1 carbine a PDW. I’m not sure that’s coherent? Yes it was designed for back-line troops, but PDW was not a concept in 1942 and it was used in front line service anyway in Korea and Vietnam, especially by the South Vietnamese.

My question is basically like, PDW is often defined as “the sub-caliber weapon you give to people who don’t actually need a weapon (tank drivers, pilots, logistics teams, dudes in bases, etc)” but I’m not sure it makes any sense to say that those folks don’t need a primary arm? Yes, they probably don’t need a full-size or full-caliber rifle, but the PDW as a concept was developed in the 80s to match new NATO standard. Per NATO standard, PDWs are not sub-caliber carbines, they’re their own Thing.

And in an age of intermediate caliber rifles and carbines, the tank crews and logistics drivers are just getting carbines. The only people who get PDWs are like, guards for diplomats and sometimes the “high speed low drag” teams. So like, what’s going on here? It doesn’t seem like it makes literally any sense to retroactively define the m1 carbine as a PDW given how different firearms development was in the 1980s vs the 1940s (even totally ignoring firearms development today).

So, I do believe that dialectical materialism is *literally true*, in that as a theory it has the most accurate explanatory power for the systems present in the world. I’m well-versed in communist theory in general, but I haven’t been able to find any relevant works about this issue specifically.

I have schizoaffective disorder, and over the past few years I’ve experienced increasingly intense and severe long-lasting religious delusions, often accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations. I’m sort of not sure how to square this circle.

On the one hand, I strongly believe that dialectical materialism is descriptive of our social forces, class dynamics, and conflict in general. On the other hand, strict materialism seems to be incompatible with religious thinking. I know that there are “Christian Anarchists” who ground their belief in anarchism in God’s authority, but I’m not actually convinced that that’s a coherent position at all. I am a communist, I do believe in materialism, and yet I have direct experiential data that says “yes there are gods and prophets and magic”.

What can I do here? Has anyone written on grounding materialism for someone who has direct evidence of the supernatural? Barring that, is there any materialist position in the communist tradition that is compatible with supernatural beliefs? I don’t want to reject my own experiences out of hand, mostly because they’re my experiences.

I’ve posted something very similar here a few years ago, and I got some great responses. In the interim since that post I’ve also taken multiple (200 level) ethics classes, and I can’t say that I really understand why there are good reasons to be moral.

I know that there are good *pragmatic* reasons to be moral, but that has always seemed to me to be a cop out. My concern is about moral motivation under its own power. If “moral” means “the thing that ought to be done” or “the thing you ought to do,” are there good reasons to be moral?

For the most part, aside from the pragmatic approach, it seems to me that there are two fundamental baselines for morality. If you ask at every step of the process of looking at a moral system: “why should I do this” or “why should I care,” you generally get answers like “empathy/care for others is the baseline” or “because it’s your duty”. Both of these answers seem to be not actually about morality.

I’ve been using the example of a psychopath to explain this. (This might not be congruent with how psychopathy actually works but bear with me.) Imagine a person who does not care for others, does not experience empathy, and is about to do something wrong (let’s say stealing a small amount) in a situation where we know for sure (for the sake of the thought experiment) that they cannot suffer any consequences from their actions.

What arguments can we use to derive a good, compelling reason that this person should still do the right thing? They don’t care about anyone else, pragmatic reasons don’t apply here, and they don’t care that morality is just “the thing you should do”. This is the kind of argument that I think would convince me that there is a good reason to be moral. An argument that comes from wholly non-subjective premises, that doesn’t rely on duties or definitions, and that doesn’t require a model of/feelings for others.