Sounds like you stopped trying, like you didn't go far enough. Have you ever watched any of the interviews of Dr. Richard Feynman? It is possible, though few attain it, to be happy or at least content and still extremely aware, knowledgable, and and intelligent.
Do you really think it is unreasonable to extrapolate that lack of curiosity online indicates lack of curiosity offline? A curious person is curious, regardless of where they are or what medium they are using. Failing to explore options DOES make people less in demonstrable ways. It is a clear failure to take advantage of potential, sourced either in ignorance of that potential, or worse, lack of interest in that potential.
Further, while imagination is an important thing to cultivate, which is why I mentioned it earlier, it is limited always by the real knowledge each person so far acquires.
Ah, I see, so humanity must have suffered constant foot pain before the last few centuries of shoe design. Not so. It's just like RSI, yes, some people get it, but others who go through same conditions twice or thrice over do not develop RSI. Oh, and arthritis is a result of movement itself (where it isn't autoimmune), not 'lack of support'.
Speaking as somebody who found porn before puberty, I was not disgusted, but rather fascinated (heh heh, that's a joke for etymologists). Disgust is not a natural response, but a socially conditioned response, something I didn't really take to.
It is when one is content with ignorance. Do you praise the stagnant mind? Is feeling good a better thing than knowledge, than truth? Then by all means, put amusements first, set on a foundation of comforting lies, and we can cultivate this contentment.
Being content when you know little is easy. Being content when you know much is hard. That's why character is valued.
I tried to come up with a civil way to say this, but I can't. Those must be some dumb kids. If they have such poverty of imagination or lack of curiosity that all they want to know about or see when faced with potential of the entire world comes from the website of a TV network... I am filled with overwhelming pity.
Ugh. Do you have any perception of the world around you? Lift your hand and hold it limp. Is it flat? If yes, see a doctor immediately, you are fucked up. If you place your hand on a flat surface in front of you with no special effort to alter its natural resting form, it 'cups' naturally, in that the center of the palm and the base of the middle digits is raised. (And I raise my middle digit to you.) So tell me, do you need 'support' in the center of your hands when you type? The positioning is not that much different.
Apparently you don't have any thoughts in your head. I was educated for some years in the hazy 'time before computers' and let me tell you, daydreaming is quite a limitless possibility with nothing more than a book and a desk. Indeed, with only a desk. And daydreaming is almost as limitless as the intarnets. If you're not going to focus, you're not going to focus, regardless of what is in immediate reach.
Hey that's a great idea, instead of teaching the kids how to manage their time themselves like they'll have to do the rest of their lives, just create a system that does it for them! That way they can add another item to binge on when they get to college, though granted it'll be a bit down the list from sex and booze.
If you can't teach a child moderation in such a way that they moderate their own behavior, you're a failure. Period. Because even if you can lock them into a framework, if they don't value the underlying principle (which if they valued it they would do it themselves), as soon as they're free of you and your framework they will go crazy nuts for all the things that were forbidden.
Oy, talk about human pattern recognition run amok. You're imputing motivations to inanimate things. In the first place, there is no such thing as 'clean'. When a human being says to themselves 'this is clean and that is dirty' what that really means is 'this is something adapted to me and that is something which is not'. To a human, a pile of poop is not clean, but to the flies and other organisms that consume it, it's a meal. The difference between an apple and a pile of shit is the perspective of the organism assessing it and the needs of that organism. That there are organisms that consume poop is not an example of 'cleaning' because that is only a conceit of perspective.
So, where this applies to one of your examples, natural water filtration is a coincidence. There are processes by which water is made naturally 'dirty' as well (which is also a matter of perspective, the high concentrations of sulfur and other 'undesirable' minerals dissolved in a hot spring are actually necessary and beneficial to some microorganisms that live in those environments).
As this scales up, there is no 'clean' or 'dirty' planet or system. If a star emits some huge gamma ray burst or something, and there's no life in range for it to kill, does it make a sound? In other words, the gamma ray burst would happen whether there was life for it to affect or not. Whatever is happening at 27 myr intervals to this planet has likely been happening since before there was life, and would likely still happen if all life here were to suddenly end. Anthropomorphisizing inanimate processes and projecting your own standards and interpretations of value (another thing that doesn't exist except in a given animal's perception) onto mechanical interactions of matter is irrational and unproductive.
Thing is, one-size-fits-all isn't so effective as you think. That's why Apple has had less than 10% of the desktop and laptop market decade after decade. The hardware and software configurations of the MS world may not be unified or controlled, but the variety has driven the vast majority of the market into its hands over and over. Because MS controls (along with its partners on the hardware OEM side) both the highest and lowest end equipment as well as the widest scope for backwards compatibility it drags a lot of people along by momentum alone.
Also to be kept in mind is all these partner OEMs have each their own marketing and sales mechanisms promoting their shit in scores of different channels and working to adapt to different niches that Apple's one-size-fits-all couldn't fill even if they wanted to. Consumers are assailed by each of these interests, many of which are cheaper and may be offered by still other partners and 3rd parties as promotional items.
None of this is really a defense of the practice, as most of these devices are shitty knock-off kludges done by a team of people who are told 'make something that does this by date x' and have really no inspiration or vision whatsoever. Rather it is just the reality of a market which has, with the exception of the iPhone and iPod, rejected over and over any of Apple's products as worth their limitations at any level of marketshare larger than a quarter.
[Putting] 'the blame on the individual abhorrent behavior' unfortunately does not much mitigate it. 'Blame' is a social concept, and it only works when people give a shit about social norms. People who stalk others to beat the shit out of them because of some flippant comment on a internet forum do not care about social norms. And because law is retributive, not preemptive (nor should it be), only after these wankers lose it can anything happen to them.
All these things being what they are, it is necessary for a certain share of the responsibility to fall on the provider of the means of exchange to create an environment that mitigates the possibility of these sorts of things happening where it can reasonably do so. A degree of anonymity (as there is no absolute anonymity) is a step in creating such an environment, thereby mitigating the possibility of such scenarios, discharging their responsibility, and reducing their liability.
I also take issue with the logic that Blizzard's responsibility for maintaining a level of privacy somehow 'endorses' bad behavior. That's like saying that putting up a fence endorses voyeurism and therefore the fence should be taken down. Somehow in your mind enabling behavior is better than however it is you see it being 'endorsed'.
I am talking about untrained fighting, not what some taijiquan or qigong grandmaster can do after decades of practice and learning. To somebody fighting without training, a slap is just a slap, and it is baldly inferior in effect to a punch or kick. Anything can be raised to a higher level with focus. Tchoung Ta-chen could make a simple shove feel like some unimaginable abstraction of irresistable force and respond to attacks like an immovable object. That's what a lifetime of effort can accomplish gender regardless, but its ridiculous to impute any similar level of capacity to the ex-cheerleader turned accountant who grew up having tea parties with her stuffed animals (to use a stereotype).
My mother wasn't afraid to smack me when I deserved it, and I don't begrudge her in the slightest for it, but slaps and spanks do not a competent fighter make. You can bet I didn't learn any CQC tactics from my mother, and she doesn't know the first thing about weapon retention. (Although with a shotgun she is a better shot than I am still, but her father was a lifelong practiced champion trap shooter.)
How convenient that no written record of daily life in those societies exist. That's a hell of an inference to make about the presence of an item! All Sikhs are supposed to carry a dagger called a kirpan at all times. Just because they possess this item does it make them all warriors? Does it make them all violent? In fact Sikh teaching specifies that the kirpan is for defending the defenseless from violence, it represents a capacity, not a day-to-day behavior or use. Anthropology is a more complex science than physical presence = behavior = social norms.
And, really, other species? Come on. Should we be afraid of women eating their babies just because some species do that? That's not even a serious argument.
I am well aware of the foundations of Wing Chun, however do you think this abbey would have any martial arts at all without the development of previous styles by men? Do you seriously suggest that at no point in their lineage of teaching and learning there were no men? If so I would say you are in denial.
Wing Chun is an eminently effective style of martial art, and no small achievement, but to attribute it absolutely solely to its founder and her immediate predecessors would be as disingenuous as to say a brewer of a really good beer owes nothing to long lineage of brewers who formed and guided the technique of brewing over generations. The 'originator' deserves most of the credit for advancing the discipline in their specific way, but not all of it, for without the longer and larger picture to build upon there would be no specific advancement.
My position is somewhat anachronistic (given that most gladiators of Rome had no choice in the matter, and games were little more than glorified executions), but I nonetheless believe that a person should be able to choose to endanger themselves. This is purely hypothetical, but if I want to have a fight to the death, and another person does also, who are you to say we are not masters of our own lives and destinies? When a person attacks another unbidden, it is assault of course, but when boxers box or wrestlers wrestle, that is not assault because it is consenting (and sometimes they even die, and it is excused because they sign waivers and it's not an understood intent). Why should a gladiatorial fight to the death be treated differently?
If men are learning from each other, who taught them? I rest my case. If you trace any learned behavior back far enough, you come upon those for whom it was something that was just 'in' them. There's always somebody who had to act first without a model to follow. If that can happen once, it can happen many separate times where similar problems are solved by similar solutions, in biology it's called 'parallel evolution'.
Those must be some pretty dumb guys then. Most guys I know would have the bat out of her hands in seconds. But yes, weapons are an equalizer, especially when those weapons are not dependent on physical strength, such as firearms.
I've not argued that women can't be trained (one of my closest female friends was a champion martial artist of several disciplines), rather that they usually need to be trained as opposed to having instincts for the craft.
However I agree with your assessment. There is no substitute for experience. I think society would be much improved by mandatory military service. It establishes a substrate of common discipline on which to build a self-ordering society. Civilizations that grow to state where most citizens are born, live, and die in the softness and insulation of their family home seem to fall into immoderate carelessness and lose the skills necessary to guard themselves. You see this pattern in European and Chinese history very clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you stopped trying, like you didn't go far enough. Have you ever watched any of the interviews of Dr. Richard Feynman? It is possible, though few attain it, to be happy or at least content and still extremely aware, knowledgable, and and intelligent.
Do you really think it is unreasonable to extrapolate that lack of curiosity online indicates lack of curiosity offline? A curious person is curious, regardless of where they are or what medium they are using. Failing to explore options DOES make people less in demonstrable ways. It is a clear failure to take advantage of potential, sourced either in ignorance of that potential, or worse, lack of interest in that potential.
Further, while imagination is an important thing to cultivate, which is why I mentioned it earlier, it is limited always by the real knowledge each person so far acquires.
Actually I was reading William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at 10. I did pick my nose though... still do.
Ah, I see, so humanity must have suffered constant foot pain before the last few centuries of shoe design. Not so. It's just like RSI, yes, some people get it, but others who go through same conditions twice or thrice over do not develop RSI. Oh, and arthritis is a result of movement itself (where it isn't autoimmune), not 'lack of support'.
Speaking as somebody who found porn before puberty, I was not disgusted, but rather fascinated (heh heh, that's a joke for etymologists). Disgust is not a natural response, but a socially conditioned response, something I didn't really take to.
It is when one is content with ignorance. Do you praise the stagnant mind? Is feeling good a better thing than knowledge, than truth? Then by all means, put amusements first, set on a foundation of comforting lies, and we can cultivate this contentment.
Being content when you know little is easy. Being content when you know much is hard. That's why character is valued.
I tried to come up with a civil way to say this, but I can't. Those must be some dumb kids. If they have such poverty of imagination or lack of curiosity that all they want to know about or see when faced with potential of the entire world comes from the website of a TV network... I am filled with overwhelming pity.
Ugh. Do you have any perception of the world around you? Lift your hand and hold it limp. Is it flat? If yes, see a doctor immediately, you are fucked up. If you place your hand on a flat surface in front of you with no special effort to alter its natural resting form, it 'cups' naturally, in that the center of the palm and the base of the middle digits is raised. (And I raise my middle digit to you.) So tell me, do you need 'support' in the center of your hands when you type? The positioning is not that much different.
AC box was checked somehow... that was me.
Actually, guns do make it easier to keep people alive. Some variant of the phrase, 'DROP YOUR WEAPON! DO IT NOW!' is usually involved.
Apparently you don't have any thoughts in your head. I was educated for some years in the hazy 'time before computers' and let me tell you, daydreaming is quite a limitless possibility with nothing more than a book and a desk. Indeed, with only a desk. And daydreaming is almost as limitless as the intarnets. If you're not going to focus, you're not going to focus, regardless of what is in immediate reach.
Hey that's a great idea, instead of teaching the kids how to manage their time themselves like they'll have to do the rest of their lives, just create a system that does it for them! That way they can add another item to binge on when they get to college, though granted it'll be a bit down the list from sex and booze.
If you can't teach a child moderation in such a way that they moderate their own behavior, you're a failure. Period. Because even if you can lock them into a framework, if they don't value the underlying principle (which if they valued it they would do it themselves), as soon as they're free of you and your framework they will go crazy nuts for all the things that were forbidden.
Oy, talk about human pattern recognition run amok. You're imputing motivations to inanimate things. In the first place, there is no such thing as 'clean'. When a human being says to themselves 'this is clean and that is dirty' what that really means is 'this is something adapted to me and that is something which is not'. To a human, a pile of poop is not clean, but to the flies and other organisms that consume it, it's a meal. The difference between an apple and a pile of shit is the perspective of the organism assessing it and the needs of that organism. That there are organisms that consume poop is not an example of 'cleaning' because that is only a conceit of perspective.
So, where this applies to one of your examples, natural water filtration is a coincidence. There are processes by which water is made naturally 'dirty' as well (which is also a matter of perspective, the high concentrations of sulfur and other 'undesirable' minerals dissolved in a hot spring are actually necessary and beneficial to some microorganisms that live in those environments).
As this scales up, there is no 'clean' or 'dirty' planet or system. If a star emits some huge gamma ray burst or something, and there's no life in range for it to kill, does it make a sound? In other words, the gamma ray burst would happen whether there was life for it to affect or not. Whatever is happening at 27 myr intervals to this planet has likely been happening since before there was life, and would likely still happen if all life here were to suddenly end. Anthropomorphisizing inanimate processes and projecting your own standards and interpretations of value (another thing that doesn't exist except in a given animal's perception) onto mechanical interactions of matter is irrational and unproductive.
Thing is, one-size-fits-all isn't so effective as you think. That's why Apple has had less than 10% of the desktop and laptop market decade after decade. The hardware and software configurations of the MS world may not be unified or controlled, but the variety has driven the vast majority of the market into its hands over and over. Because MS controls (along with its partners on the hardware OEM side) both the highest and lowest end equipment as well as the widest scope for backwards compatibility it drags a lot of people along by momentum alone.
Also to be kept in mind is all these partner OEMs have each their own marketing and sales mechanisms promoting their shit in scores of different channels and working to adapt to different niches that Apple's one-size-fits-all couldn't fill even if they wanted to. Consumers are assailed by each of these interests, many of which are cheaper and may be offered by still other partners and 3rd parties as promotional items.
None of this is really a defense of the practice, as most of these devices are shitty knock-off kludges done by a team of people who are told 'make something that does this by date x' and have really no inspiration or vision whatsoever. Rather it is just the reality of a market which has, with the exception of the iPhone and iPod, rejected over and over any of Apple's products as worth their limitations at any level of marketshare larger than a quarter.
That's going to happen whether MS likes it or not...
...which makes it even hotter.
[Putting] 'the blame on the individual abhorrent behavior' unfortunately does not much mitigate it. 'Blame' is a social concept, and it only works when people give a shit about social norms. People who stalk others to beat the shit out of them because of some flippant comment on a internet forum do not care about social norms. And because law is retributive, not preemptive (nor should it be), only after these wankers lose it can anything happen to them.
All these things being what they are, it is necessary for a certain share of the responsibility to fall on the provider of the means of exchange to create an environment that mitigates the possibility of these sorts of things happening where it can reasonably do so. A degree of anonymity (as there is no absolute anonymity) is a step in creating such an environment, thereby mitigating the possibility of such scenarios, discharging their responsibility, and reducing their liability.
I also take issue with the logic that Blizzard's responsibility for maintaining a level of privacy somehow 'endorses' bad behavior. That's like saying that putting up a fence endorses voyeurism and therefore the fence should be taken down. Somehow in your mind enabling behavior is better than however it is you see it being 'endorsed'.
I am talking about untrained fighting, not what some taijiquan or qigong grandmaster can do after decades of practice and learning. To somebody fighting without training, a slap is just a slap, and it is baldly inferior in effect to a punch or kick. Anything can be raised to a higher level with focus. Tchoung Ta-chen could make a simple shove feel like some unimaginable abstraction of irresistable force and respond to attacks like an immovable object. That's what a lifetime of effort can accomplish gender regardless, but its ridiculous to impute any similar level of capacity to the ex-cheerleader turned accountant who grew up having tea parties with her stuffed animals (to use a stereotype).
My mother wasn't afraid to smack me when I deserved it, and I don't begrudge her in the slightest for it, but slaps and spanks do not a competent fighter make. You can bet I didn't learn any CQC tactics from my mother, and she doesn't know the first thing about weapon retention. (Although with a shotgun she is a better shot than I am still, but her father was a lifelong practiced champion trap shooter.)
Goddamn accidental AC check... that was me.
How convenient that no written record of daily life in those societies exist. That's a hell of an inference to make about the presence of an item! All Sikhs are supposed to carry a dagger called a kirpan at all times. Just because they possess this item does it make them all warriors? Does it make them all violent? In fact Sikh teaching specifies that the kirpan is for defending the defenseless from violence, it represents a capacity, not a day-to-day behavior or use. Anthropology is a more complex science than physical presence = behavior = social norms.
And, really, other species? Come on. Should we be afraid of women eating their babies just because some species do that? That's not even a serious argument.
I am well aware of the foundations of Wing Chun, however do you think this abbey would have any martial arts at all without the development of previous styles by men? Do you seriously suggest that at no point in their lineage of teaching and learning there were no men? If so I would say you are in denial.
Wing Chun is an eminently effective style of martial art, and no small achievement, but to attribute it absolutely solely to its founder and her immediate predecessors would be as disingenuous as to say a brewer of a really good beer owes nothing to long lineage of brewers who formed and guided the technique of brewing over generations. The 'originator' deserves most of the credit for advancing the discipline in their specific way, but not all of it, for without the longer and larger picture to build upon there would be no specific advancement.
My position is somewhat anachronistic (given that most gladiators of Rome had no choice in the matter, and games were little more than glorified executions), but I nonetheless believe that a person should be able to choose to endanger themselves. This is purely hypothetical, but if I want to have a fight to the death, and another person does also, who are you to say we are not masters of our own lives and destinies? When a person attacks another unbidden, it is assault of course, but when boxers box or wrestlers wrestle, that is not assault because it is consenting (and sometimes they even die, and it is excused because they sign waivers and it's not an understood intent). Why should a gladiatorial fight to the death be treated differently?
If men are learning from each other, who taught them? I rest my case. If you trace any learned behavior back far enough, you come upon those for whom it was something that was just 'in' them. There's always somebody who had to act first without a model to follow. If that can happen once, it can happen many separate times where similar problems are solved by similar solutions, in biology it's called 'parallel evolution'.
Those must be some pretty dumb guys then. Most guys I know would have the bat out of her hands in seconds. But yes, weapons are an equalizer, especially when those weapons are not dependent on physical strength, such as firearms.
I've not argued that women can't be trained (one of my closest female friends was a champion martial artist of several disciplines), rather that they usually need to be trained as opposed to having instincts for the craft.
However I agree with your assessment. There is no substitute for experience. I think society would be much improved by mandatory military service. It establishes a substrate of common discipline on which to build a self-ordering society. Civilizations that grow to state where most citizens are born, live, and die in the softness and insulation of their family home seem to fall into immoderate carelessness and lose the skills necessary to guard themselves. You see this pattern in European and Chinese history very clearly.