Sorry, I think it's you who has missed my point. What I was saying was that, if the US had the same system as Syria, then those people who claim that Bush would be in jeopardy for damaging the state's image are wrong, because Bush (as leader) would be the state. The initial assumption that we're imagining the US having the same system as Syria is, I think, what you've missed out on and what was behind my comment.
Could you try to be less aggressive when you think someone has missed something? If I really were too stupid to understand the original point, don't you think it would have been more helpful to explain kindly rather than making some sarcastic jibe?
Are we sure that this is purely about freedom of speech?
If someone asked me whether some internet content (child pornography, for example) should be controlled, I would say yes. If they asked me whether I think that the government has a role to play in that control, I would also say yes. Does that mean I approve of "government censorship of the internet? Absolutely not.
The results of the survey are not as clear-cut as it appears at first. For example, while 86.6% of users thought it "necessary" or "very necessary for pornography to be controlled, only 40.9% selected the same categories for political content, and over 30% said that control of political content was "unnecessary" or "very unnecessary".
My government (I voted for the other guy, but that's my tough luck), against whom I protest when I think they're wrong, does bad things. Therefore I (who do not agree with the things my government does) have no moral right to protest against what your government does.
Of course, he wouldn't - the point is that the people in power are the state. Under such a system, Bush can't undermine the prestige of the state because Bush is the state. The people who would be in prison are all those who criticise Bush, despite the fact that, to many outside observers, they are the people who offer hope for their country.
What is the difference between having a trial under an unfair and rights-infringing legal system, and no trial at all? The former gives the illusion of a democratic and fair process, legitimising what is really no better than illegal detention.
Can there be "valid reasons" for a government to censor its citizens' speech? Certainly, undermining the prestige of the state doesn't seem even vaguely valid, as all it means is that you can be prosecuted for criticising the government. So, the people in power can reduce the chance of ever being out of power by simply making it illegal to want them to be out of power.
"Only three years"? Hang on, have I been writing a serious response to a sarcastic post here?
Well, how about trusted email addresses, whose messages get straight through, and any others sit on the server? If this system were widely adopted, you wouldn't "look dumb" to your client who would know when they got an out-of-office autoresponse that there's a chance their message would expire before you got it.
I wasn't talking about art deliberately created with the ratio in mind, though, just that things that look good (it is claimed) often happen to have the golden ratio in them inherently. But you're right about it being pretty tenuous. Still, as something that's touted as being a thing of beauty, I maintain that trying to apply it to music is a worthwhile endeavour - regardless of whether the end result proves or disproves a theory.
The OED bases all of its word definitions on actual usage examples, noting whether those usages are archaic, specific to a certain geographical area, only used in particular trades, and so on. Add to that the fact that you've just seen the phrase used on slashdot, and that while some here have found it odd, others are clearly quite used to seeing and hearing it. In fact, I think the original complaint was about the ubiquity of this phrasing. I'm British, but I've heard it often enough on American TV.
This suggests that your experience isn't broad enough to encompass the vernacular English spoken by every section of the population. Indeed, no-one's is, and that's why we use resources like OED to tell us whether a certain term or phrase is known in common usage or is a simple typo.
And yet a lot of our canonical composers wrote their music in the expectation that the performers would introduce some improvisation. Added parts would be improvised in medieval music, for example, as would harmonies or other lines in the Renaissance, and music of the Baroque period regularly contains movements which are simply a series of chord progressions based upon which the performer is meant to make up his own music. Concertos will often contain cadenzas, passages in which a soloist plays without accompaniment in free time - these sections may be specified by the composer, but are often left to be improvised.
Using the golden section is not particularly clever; the cleverness lies in the golden section itself and its apparent ability to enhance artistic beauty. Since it has been shown to do so in terms of visual arts, I think it's a valid and interesting endeavour to see whether it will have the same effect on music.
Medieval music is also a far cry from what Beethoven or Mozart would call music. A lot of it is far more like ultra-modern music such as minimalism than it is like what we think of as "classical" music. Every era has experimented with sound, and those experiments don't always produce anything one would want to hear. But they're worth the time and the trouble because, occasionally, they produce works of beauty and sheer genius.
Many conductors I've worked with are egotistical, loud, and prone to temper-tantrums. At least these musicians won't have to put up with having obscenities hurled at them because they looked at the conductor the wrong way!
Um, yes, it is. The Oxford English Dictionary notes it as a valid idiomatic usage, documented since the 1960s, not a typo.
Idioms which are a reverse of their literal meaning could include "fat chance" (the chance is, in fact, very slim). "Sick" has come to mean "very good" in certain idiomatic usage, just as "bad" did in the early 90s. "Cool" and "hot" can mean the same thing. There is also the use of irony and euphemism idiomatically, of course. For example, the phrase "sweetness and light" is used to indicate that someone/something is quite the opposite. "Break a leg" means that you want the person to do well. And how about "head over heels"? How many of us don't have our head above our heels?
The point is that idioms are often figurative, and the "literal" meaning of their words doesn't add up to the pragmatic meaning the phrase has as a whole.
Yes, there were very limited applications of something like copyright before Shakespeare's birth. But the GPs point is that concepts of copyright as we now understand it were not really available. Certainly, in some special circumstances, one might gain a limited monopoly over the publication of one's work. But that is hardly the same as our modern system, in which copyright is implicit in the creation of an original work, can be extended for more than a person's lifetime, and throws up significant barriers to derivative works.
Shakespeare's plays didn't have original plots, on the whole. Some were taken from old, old stories. Others he probably encountered from contemporary sources. Either way, he used them for his work, and this was entirely accepted practice. If Shakespeare had had lived under anything like the intellectual property system we have now, he would never have written the works he did.
you can't deny its marked effect on millions of people. I'd use this as the primary indicator of literary value.
I'd say that's an indicator of cultural value rather than literary value. And I'd also argue that only time will tell whether Rowling outperforms Shakespeare on this, considering the huge cultural impact of Shakespeare's works centuries after they were written. Will there be a Royal Rowling Company, dedicated to cutting-edge theatre based on Rowling's works? Will there be re-workings and re-writings of Rowling's ideas into a thousand different genres in a thousand different languages? Probably not, I would say, at least partly because lawyers for the Rowling estate in five hundred years' time will sue any aspiring Baz Luhrmann into the ground for making a film updating Rowling's stories for a modern audience.
It's an idiom. They often don't make logical sense and don't partake of a fixed system of meaning, rather their meaning relies on an accepted cultural understanding. In contrast, modern English spelling is a fixed system, and you should know that the word is "grammar" and not "grammer" if you're going to make a complaint like this.
Yup, okay - makes sense. I see what you're saying about watching your kids too. I was old enough to be given some freedom to go out alone long before I was ready to read, say, "American Psycho". (Not sure I was ever ready to read that one, in fact.) And yet I could have bought it from any bookshop whereas I would have been asked for ID if buying the film.
I must say, though, that the age limit of 18 (according to TFA) bothers me a little. If they want to protect kids, they need a rating system rather than a catch-all which would stop a 17-year-old from buying a textbook about sex! (Apparently such books fall under the law's remit.)
Absolutely right. Personally, I have a big thing about blue shirts. It's a particular shade of blue, and makes me weak at the knees just to see photos of people wearing this particular kind of apparel. I could make a big coffee-table book of such pictures, just to titillate myself. Should it be banned, despite featuring only fully clothed people, just because of the author's personal feelings?
Equally, recently at a conference I gave an academic paper about masculinity and pornography. There were a heck of a lot of PowerPoint slides, but my purpose in putting this together was to produce a (hopefully) insightful look at the material I'd gathered. Nonetheless, I wouldn't dream of presenting such a thing to someone under 18.
I would disagree. We can't imagine passages from Chaucer or Shakespeare being titillating because, on the whole, the language and idiom are pretty foreign and we are used to a far higher level of sexual content. I think Chaucer's description of the Wife of Bath was intended to be very racy, for example, and Shakespeare was certainly trying to titillate his audience occasionally, especially in the comedies.
If we're talking about cases where the whole work is intended to be titillating, we only have to look at some of John Donne's poetry, and once we're into the Restoration some of the "greats" are writing pretty strong stuff - Jonathan Swift is a good example, and the Earl of Rochester basically writes pornography in the form of verse. There are even English poems going right back to the Anglo-Saxons whose entire point is to make smutty riddles in which an everyday item is described as though it were a penis or some such.
Further, considering the interest of historical morals and literary standards, often a work of "titillating" literature will be "important" precisely because of its content. It's a way to judge the limits of literary production.
None of this, of course, means that you would want your child reading this stuff. But maybe it's your job to make sure she isn't getting hold of things she shouldn't, not the bookseller's?
Okay, yes. Thanks for the - it's helped me sort out my ideas about this: The person has to look real; the situation/action only has to look realistic. So a picture of a real woman being raped on the White House lawn would probably be illegal, even though you know full well that the chances of it being real are infinitesimally small. In contrast, a picture of a rubber doll really being attacked with a hatchet is fine because, even if the violence is real, the woman (however realistic) cannot be mistaken as being real.
I see what you mean about the "rational person" test, but still no rational person could mistake even the best of CGI for a real person, and any policeman or judge who argued otherwise would be blown out of the water by easily winnable legal challenges. The threshold is not that they look "realistic" but that they look "real", which is a very different thing. It's the difference between making a CGI model of a woman being raped, and photoshopping a photograph of a real human being so that it looks as though she is being raped.
The real problem here is not for pornographic art or animation. It's for the kind of pornography which depicts two real people acting out a fantasy involving serious pain or injury. It doesn't matter that the injury was faked, or that the photograph itself was faked, the image will still be illegal.
Because the people who set about getting this law believe that looking at this kind of image can make people commit violent acts. They have no evidence for their belief. What they have is one guy who both liked extreme porn and murdered a woman, and overwhelming public opinion which finds such material sickening and believes that anyone who reacts differently is mentally ill or evil.
If no-one sane and healthy could want to view this material, and if this material is dangerous to innocent people, why not legislate against it? The fact that neither of these "ifs" is objectively proven matters very little since they are subjectively already proven in people's minds.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I think it's you who has missed my point. What I was saying was that, if the US had the same system as Syria, then those people who claim that Bush would be in jeopardy for damaging the state's image are wrong, because Bush (as leader) would be the state. The initial assumption that we're imagining the US having the same system as Syria is, I think, what you've missed out on and what was behind my comment.
Could you try to be less aggressive when you think someone has missed something? If I really were too stupid to understand the original point, don't you think it would have been more helpful to explain kindly rather than making some sarcastic jibe?
Are we sure that this is purely about freedom of speech?
If someone asked me whether some internet content (child pornography, for example) should be controlled, I would say yes. If they asked me whether I think that the government has a role to play in that control, I would also say yes. Does that mean I approve of "government censorship of the internet? Absolutely not.
The results of the survey are not as clear-cut as it appears at first. For example, while 86.6% of users thought it "necessary" or "very necessary for pornography to be controlled, only 40.9% selected the same categories for political content, and over 30% said that control of political content was "unnecessary" or "very unnecessary".
My government (I voted for the other guy, but that's my tough luck), against whom I protest when I think they're wrong, does bad things. Therefore I (who do not agree with the things my government does) have no moral right to protest against what your government does.
Yup, that works.
Of course, he wouldn't - the point is that the people in power are the state. Under such a system, Bush can't undermine the prestige of the state because Bush is the state. The people who would be in prison are all those who criticise Bush, despite the fact that, to many outside observers, they are the people who offer hope for their country.
What is the difference between having a trial under an unfair and rights-infringing legal system, and no trial at all? The former gives the illusion of a democratic and fair process, legitimising what is really no better than illegal detention.
Can there be "valid reasons" for a government to censor its citizens' speech? Certainly, undermining the prestige of the state doesn't seem even vaguely valid, as all it means is that you can be prosecuted for criticising the government. So, the people in power can reduce the chance of ever being out of power by simply making it illegal to want them to be out of power.
"Only three years"? Hang on, have I been writing a serious response to a sarcastic post here?
Well, how about trusted email addresses, whose messages get straight through, and any others sit on the server? If this system were widely adopted, you wouldn't "look dumb" to your client who would know when they got an out-of-office autoresponse that there's a chance their message would expire before you got it.
I wasn't talking about art deliberately created with the ratio in mind, though, just that things that look good (it is claimed) often happen to have the golden ratio in them inherently. But you're right about it being pretty tenuous. Still, as something that's touted as being a thing of beauty, I maintain that trying to apply it to music is a worthwhile endeavour - regardless of whether the end result proves or disproves a theory.
The OED bases all of its word definitions on actual usage examples, noting whether those usages are archaic, specific to a certain geographical area, only used in particular trades, and so on. Add to that the fact that you've just seen the phrase used on slashdot, and that while some here have found it odd, others are clearly quite used to seeing and hearing it. In fact, I think the original complaint was about the ubiquity of this phrasing. I'm British, but I've heard it often enough on American TV.
This suggests that your experience isn't broad enough to encompass the vernacular English spoken by every section of the population. Indeed, no-one's is, and that's why we use resources like OED to tell us whether a certain term or phrase is known in common usage or is a simple typo.
"certain publications"... yeah. You know that a survey of your friends is not scientific, I assume?
And yet a lot of our canonical composers wrote their music in the expectation that the performers would introduce some improvisation. Added parts would be improvised in medieval music, for example, as would harmonies or other lines in the Renaissance, and music of the Baroque period regularly contains movements which are simply a series of chord progressions based upon which the performer is meant to make up his own music. Concertos will often contain cadenzas, passages in which a soloist plays without accompaniment in free time - these sections may be specified by the composer, but are often left to be improvised.
Using the golden section is not particularly clever; the cleverness lies in the golden section itself and its apparent ability to enhance artistic beauty. Since it has been shown to do so in terms of visual arts, I think it's a valid and interesting endeavour to see whether it will have the same effect on music.
Medieval music is also a far cry from what Beethoven or Mozart would call music. A lot of it is far more like ultra-modern music such as minimalism than it is like what we think of as "classical" music. Every era has experimented with sound, and those experiments don't always produce anything one would want to hear. But they're worth the time and the trouble because, occasionally, they produce works of beauty and sheer genius.
Many conductors I've worked with are egotistical, loud, and prone to temper-tantrums. At least these musicians won't have to put up with having obscenities hurled at them because they looked at the conductor the wrong way!
Um, yes, it is. The Oxford English Dictionary notes it as a valid idiomatic usage, documented since the 1960s, not a typo.
Idioms which are a reverse of their literal meaning could include "fat chance" (the chance is, in fact, very slim). "Sick" has come to mean "very good" in certain idiomatic usage, just as "bad" did in the early 90s. "Cool" and "hot" can mean the same thing. There is also the use of irony and euphemism idiomatically, of course. For example, the phrase "sweetness and light" is used to indicate that someone/something is quite the opposite. "Break a leg" means that you want the person to do well. And how about "head over heels"? How many of us don't have our head above our heels?
The point is that idioms are often figurative, and the "literal" meaning of their words doesn't add up to the pragmatic meaning the phrase has as a whole.
Yes, there were very limited applications of something like copyright before Shakespeare's birth. But the GPs point is that concepts of copyright as we now understand it were not really available. Certainly, in some special circumstances, one might gain a limited monopoly over the publication of one's work. But that is hardly the same as our modern system, in which copyright is implicit in the creation of an original work, can be extended for more than a person's lifetime, and throws up significant barriers to derivative works.
Shakespeare's plays didn't have original plots, on the whole. Some were taken from old, old stories. Others he probably encountered from contemporary sources. Either way, he used them for his work, and this was entirely accepted practice. If Shakespeare had had lived under anything like the intellectual property system we have now, he would never have written the works he did.
I'd say that's an indicator of cultural value rather than literary value. And I'd also argue that only time will tell whether Rowling outperforms Shakespeare on this, considering the huge cultural impact of Shakespeare's works centuries after they were written. Will there be a Royal Rowling Company, dedicated to cutting-edge theatre based on Rowling's works? Will there be re-workings and re-writings of Rowling's ideas into a thousand different genres in a thousand different languages? Probably not, I would say, at least partly because lawyers for the Rowling estate in five hundred years' time will sue any aspiring Baz Luhrmann into the ground for making a film updating Rowling's stories for a modern audience.
It's an idiom. They often don't make logical sense and don't partake of a fixed system of meaning, rather their meaning relies on an accepted cultural understanding. In contrast, modern English spelling is a fixed system, and you should know that the word is "grammar" and not "grammer" if you're going to make a complaint like this.
Yup, okay - makes sense. I see what you're saying about watching your kids too. I was old enough to be given some freedom to go out alone long before I was ready to read, say, "American Psycho". (Not sure I was ever ready to read that one, in fact.) And yet I could have bought it from any bookshop whereas I would have been asked for ID if buying the film.
I must say, though, that the age limit of 18 (according to TFA) bothers me a little. If they want to protect kids, they need a rating system rather than a catch-all which would stop a 17-year-old from buying a textbook about sex! (Apparently such books fall under the law's remit.)
Slashdot Law 2.0: if someone uses a female pronoun/username, the probability of smutty comments approaches 1. Very quickly. ;)
Absolutely right. Personally, I have a big thing about blue shirts. It's a particular shade of blue, and makes me weak at the knees just to see photos of people wearing this particular kind of apparel. I could make a big coffee-table book of such pictures, just to titillate myself. Should it be banned, despite featuring only fully clothed people, just because of the author's personal feelings?
Equally, recently at a conference I gave an academic paper about masculinity and pornography. There were a heck of a lot of PowerPoint slides, but my purpose in putting this together was to produce a (hopefully) insightful look at the material I'd gathered. Nonetheless, I wouldn't dream of presenting such a thing to someone under 18.
I hope you're being ironic? Parents who can't keep track of where their children are and what they're doing need some kind of a wake-up call.
I would disagree. We can't imagine passages from Chaucer or Shakespeare being titillating because, on the whole, the language and idiom are pretty foreign and we are used to a far higher level of sexual content. I think Chaucer's description of the Wife of Bath was intended to be very racy, for example, and Shakespeare was certainly trying to titillate his audience occasionally, especially in the comedies.
If we're talking about cases where the whole work is intended to be titillating, we only have to look at some of John Donne's poetry, and once we're into the Restoration some of the "greats" are writing pretty strong stuff - Jonathan Swift is a good example, and the Earl of Rochester basically writes pornography in the form of verse. There are even English poems going right back to the Anglo-Saxons whose entire point is to make smutty riddles in which an everyday item is described as though it were a penis or some such.
Further, considering the interest of historical morals and literary standards, often a work of "titillating" literature will be "important" precisely because of its content. It's a way to judge the limits of literary production.
None of this, of course, means that you would want your child reading this stuff. But maybe it's your job to make sure she isn't getting hold of things she shouldn't, not the bookseller's?
(BTW, are you really Alan Dershowitz?)
Okay, yes. Thanks for the - it's helped me sort out my ideas about this: The person has to look real; the situation/action only has to look realistic. So a picture of a real woman being raped on the White House lawn would probably be illegal, even though you know full well that the chances of it being real are infinitesimally small. In contrast, a picture of a rubber doll really being attacked with a hatchet is fine because, even if the violence is real, the woman (however realistic) cannot be mistaken as being real.
I see what you mean about the "rational person" test, but still no rational person could mistake even the best of CGI for a real person, and any policeman or judge who argued otherwise would be blown out of the water by easily winnable legal challenges. The threshold is not that they look "realistic" but that they look "real", which is a very different thing. It's the difference between making a CGI model of a woman being raped, and photoshopping a photograph of a real human being so that it looks as though she is being raped.
The real problem here is not for pornographic art or animation. It's for the kind of pornography which depicts two real people acting out a fantasy involving serious pain or injury. It doesn't matter that the injury was faked, or that the photograph itself was faked, the image will still be illegal.
Because the people who set about getting this law believe that looking at this kind of image can make people commit violent acts. They have no evidence for their belief. What they have is one guy who both liked extreme porn and murdered a woman, and overwhelming public opinion which finds such material sickening and believes that anyone who reacts differently is mentally ill or evil.
If no-one sane and healthy could want to view this material, and if this material is dangerous to innocent people, why not legislate against it? The fact that neither of these "ifs" is objectively proven matters very little since they are subjectively already proven in people's minds.