to me you seem to display scorn for the "Jung, psychotheraputic" etc. etc.
Yes, scorn is a good word. I frankly see little in the way of insight from modern Western psychology which rises above a repackaging of the insights of ancient philosopher-theologians from Gung-Tzu (Confucius) to the Buddha, to the insights of medieval Christian mystics from Anthony to Walter Hilton. In large measure, in fact, I find the ancient insights superior.
In any case, modern psychological theories remind me of the weather in Seattle: if you don't like the current batch, wait ten minutes and it'll change.
these people have a contribution to make to what humans understand
My point was that within a certain limited cultural context they have some valid things to say. Divorced from that context, however, their worth is greatly diminished. In, for example, a Buddhist culture such as Taiwan's, which presupposes a vastly different understanding of human nature, Western psychologists have much less to say.
And this was the point of my message: where one accepts the presuppositions of modern Western psychology -- a certain reductionist view of human nature, a hyper-scientific understanding of the human psyche, a denigration or outright scorn of spirituality -- their insights make sense. Where one's presuppositions differ, their value is reduced. And, it would appear, even large segments of your own society do not share those presuppositions -- at least where it comes to human sexuality.
All these evolve, and I don't think dismissing entire fields of knowledge (like Jung) is appropriate
But if I don't share their premises, how can I accept their conclusions?
dismissing Freud because you think he's labelling you a sexual misfit (he's not).
Certainly, he isn't. But Angst Bear was so labelling me, or at least a point of view which I happen to share.
But to get back to my original point: rather than acknowledge the possibility of a legitimate difference of opinion on the part of his opponents, Angst Bear chose to launch an ad homineim attack against their character. Rather than engage their arguments, he chose to question their sanity. All of which might play well to the/. crowd, but does little to advance the quality of debate.
And 'terror' and 'oppression' are the sorts of words used in connection with these issues, exactly because 'terror' etc. are typically experienced
Terror? Opression? Really? "Typically"? By whom? The society in which I live does not, by and large, support the kind of sexually permissiveness attitude (yes, "free-for-all" was my word; but then after Angst's tirade I think I'm due one) that Angst Badger's post reflects. I guess by Angst's (and your? and Freud's?) definition my culture is insane.
In any case, my point was that Angst's entire post was simply an extended ad homineim (as an AC pointed out) which was much more interested in attacking the character of his opponents than it was in addressing their arguments.
you may wish to ask yourself just where "your" opinion came from
As should all of us, of course. But I suspect all of us -- you, me, Angst, Freud, Fromm -- would come up with the same answer: a combination of upbringing, cultural influence, and personal experience. Are yours somehow more valid than mine?
It's our very own...
Your very own, thank you.
western psychology and psychotheraputic studies which have produced insights into our unacknowledged sexual "stuff".
I'm truly happy for you that Western culture after all these thousands of years finally has the tools it needs to analyze itself sexually, (though I bet those "repressed oppressive" Aristoteleans would be shocked to discover they were incapable of any meaningful sexual insights simply because they were born a few millenia too early). However, the rest of us were having insights into our sexual natures centuries before the world was blessed with Jung, or Masters and Johnson. And, sorry to say, we don't always agree.
Why? First principles. Any conclusion is only as good as its presuppositions. And modern Western psychology's are not shared by a good portion of the rest of us. Nor even, it would appear, by a significant portion of your own society. Does that mean you're wallowing in sanity while us Victorian domestic terrorists are being driven by our sexual phobias to the edge of mental illness? If so, then I'll keep my sexual phobias, thanks.
Just out of curiosity, why is that some folks insist on labelling any who don't agree with their free-for-all attitude toward sex as "morbid", "deeply afraid of sexuality", "loathing of females", "repressed"/"oppressive", "Victorian", and/or otherwise "mentally ill"?
Rather than whipping out our thesauri to see how many derisive labels we can slap on our opponents, I suggest a more productive approach would be to start by assuming what we have is a legitimate difference of opinion rather than a conspiracy by psychopathic "domestic terrorists".
Aside from incenting the choir (or, in this case, the moderators), rants like yours tend rather to set back the debate than to advance it. Whether you agree with them or not, the first step in winning over your enemies is to acknowledge their humanity. Respect your enemy and he will listen to you. Spew verbal abuse, and you will only entrench him.
(BTW, what the heck is an "instinctual imperative"?)
As even the editor himself has now acknowledged, the issue has to do with capabilities not permissions, so I was correct (see option D of my original post). I know how disappointed you must be that there's no conspiracy to take away your rights; just a misreading by a Slashdot editor, as I predicted.
This has got to be a classic Slashdot kneejerk: informational message gets mistaken for legalese, and the whole community is up in arms! Sometimes I think the editorial staff at Slashdot needs some remedial classes in how to use those grey cells God gave them.
Of course, as has been pointed out, this is either A) a hoax; B) a fake; C) a fraud; or just plain D) the sound and fury of some Slashdot editor who didn't bother to read carefully or apply a modicum of rational thought before tossing this out to the Slashdot lemmings.
Actually, it appears to be the Info page from some standard text reader. I suspect the legalese is standard generic boilerplate the software throws up on the screen without regard to the actual text being displayed. Alice in Wonderland itself is, of course, public domain and cannot be restricted in any of the aforementioned ways, as I'm sure even the lawyers at Adobe would acknowledge. It's far more likely that pigdogs.org will get slapped with a lawsuit for displaying a screenshot of the software than you will for reading it to your kids.
The issue here is not an over-reaching legal department, but simply poorly designed software. I just feel sorry for the poor schmucks at Adobe on the receiving end of all those angry but misinformed Slashdot e-mails.
The disgusting thing is that these companies inflict their own political and religious agendas on their own customers and nobody is the wiser.
Well, SmartFilter, at least, publishes its definitions of each category, so if "nobody is the wiser" then perhaps it's because "Nobody" hasn't made the effort to inform himself.
...they are regulating the public.
No, they aren't. They are regulating those who freely choose to subscribe to their service. This is the salient point: The association is voluntary. IF it were a case of the government imposing filtering on every public and private machine with Internet access, THEN you might have a complaint. It's not, so you don't.
These./ whinings strike a bit like complaining the New York Times is censoring the public simply because it doesn't print everything you want to read.
Here's a radical thought: if you don't like filtering software, don't use it! And if your school/employer forces you to use it, complain to your employer (I suggest/RANT mode), not SmartFilter.
The only way to force these companies to behave ethically...
I.e., the bastards ought to go straight to hell because censorship is evil ! I suspect the only "ethical" thing these companies could do in your eyes is put themselves out of business.
As I understand it, SmartFilter sorts, you select. If you want chat but not porn, do it. If you want cult/occult but not "shock", no problem. I believe the customer can also circumvent the filter on a site-by-site basis. Strikes me as quite reasonable.
The fact is, your company/school owns the hardware you're surfing on, and probably feels it has the right to a modicum of control over the activities being performed on its property. If you disagree, then do your surfing from home.
Remember that almost all censorware out there has a Christian Fundie slant
Ooh! Yes!! Trash a fundie and rake in the karma! Substitute "Jew" for "Christian", however, and this same post would be floundering down at -1 Troll.
Apparently, some people need a demon to help them make sense of the world, and since the "evil empire" has exited stage right, Christian fundamentalists seem to be the most convenient target. After all, nobody I know actually knows any of "them", so where's the harm?
Sometimes the/. mentality is truly frightening. The fact that moderators actually REWARD such blatant racism only further blackens Slashdot's eye. Any moderator who +1-ed this tripe ought to hang his head in shame.
Note: IAMACF (I Am Not A Christian Fundamentalist). But sometimes I can really sympathize with them.
You cannot establish a situation in which content must be labeled. It leads directly to censorship, period. Its ONLY purpose is censorship.
"How DARE you label that book 'history and geography', you book burner!"
"Slap a 'social sciences' call number on that book and I'll have the ACLU all over you for violating my constitutional rights!"
"Look, lady, all I want to do is find the classical music section. What do you mean, 'Just look around'?"
"So, honey, is this a murder-mystery movie or a comedy?"
"Ms. Smith, would you please file this under 'old business'?" "Sorry, sir, I can't do that, First Amendment being what it is, and all."
"You mean I can't build an adult book store here just because there's an elementary school next door? Are you, sir, labeling the content of my business?"
Good point. Since we're talking about the mainland, that'd be simplified. There are a few enclaves still using the traditional script -- Hong Kong, for example, or here in Taiwan, though most can still read the traditional script, even if they can't write it.
The expression, as I recall it when I was living in France was "You speak French like a Spanish cow." There was never any love lost between the French and the Spanish.
Course, the same can be said for the French and the Germans, or the French and the English. Come to think of it, the French don't seem to get along with anyone they share a border with.
True, Mandarin is numerically the most-spoken language in the world; however, it is relatively geographically isolated.
As the Chinese economy develops, so will Chinese influence, and you may begin to see some internationalization of Mandarin. But this is several decades into the future, at least.
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly
Okay, point taken. I guess I can't judge this, as I haven't been around enough foreign speakers of either English or Chinese to judge which badly spoken language is the more difficult to understand. I have been known to say, however, that it's too bad circumstances have forced English on the world. I even told some British English teachers here that I thought one of the worst things England ever did was give English to the world. They were wont to agree with me.
I would also agree with you about the writing system. I would not, myself, propose Chinese as a world-language candidate for precisely that reason. Spoken Chinese is, I think, relatively easy to learn. No verb conjugations, no tense, and a basic vocabulary which tends to be non-specific almost to the point of ambiguity; where English speakers, for example, have to select between "see", "watch", "look at", "view", and "read", or "speak", "say", "tell" and "talk", Chinese provides a single word.
I would have to go with "English is one of the hardest languages to learn." I've also studied French. You have a valid point about verb conjugations in French -- and when coupled with gender, it can be quite complicated indeed. However, in its favor, I'd say spelling is much more consistent, and French has managed to avoid the worst traits of the horribly complex English verb -- one of the most difficult of any language.
The problems with English start with the fact that it's an amalgam of Old German (a verb-final language) and French (a verb-medial language). This has connotations beyond simply where the verb in a sentence occurs; it affects word order in all phrases, as verb-final languages tend to put the heads of all their phrases at the end - adjectives preceed nouns; main verb follows auxiliary verb; and so forth. While English has largely adopted and adapted itself to verb-medial patterns, it retains many vestiges of its Germanic origins; as a result, even where one might reasonably expect consistency, English has the tendency to surprise.
In addition, English has amassed a large number duplicate vocabulary: pig/swine, deep/profound, small/little, big/large and so forth. Pig, profound, little, big, et alia, come into the language via its Latin roots, while it draws the others from its Germanic heritage.
There is also the problem of the Great Vowel Shift -- also a result of the Anglo-Saxon merger with French. While pronunciation changed, written English has retained much of its pre-Shift spelling, resulting in more confusion. This problem was exacerbated by the borrowing of so many words from the French, whose phonetic written system differs so drastically from the German. The result is that there is rarely just one way to represent a phonetic sound in English, and English seems to delight in taking advantage of this fact. I can, for example, write the long o sound as "ow", "ough", "oe" "oa", "o--e", "oo", "eau", "ew", "ou", or of course "o". Conversely, a single letter or combination can have several different pronunciations, even within the same word. In "circle", for example, "c" is pronounced two different ways.
What's more, some English letters are entirely redundant. C, for example, merely duplicates K and S, with no phonetic identity of its own. And Q is entirely anachronistic; to begin, it never occurs without U; and the QU combination could, phonetically speaking, be completely replaced by KW. PH (a hold-over from Greek) merely duplicates the efforts of F. And so forth.
English isn't the most difficult language in the world. For that honor I'd nominate Lingasa, a central African language full of implosives, clicks, gutterals, and a seven-state gender system which includes animate/inanimate, rock/non-rock and climbs trees/swims, and a conjugation system that depends in part not just on person and number like English, but also the time of day (day or night) the utterance is made, who makes it (males and females conjugate differently; vocabulary also differs between the sexes) and to whom it is made (male or female, child or adult), social status, and whether or not it's currently raining outside (I'm not kidding!). Bottom line: while nobody knows for sure, estimates suggest each and every Lingasan verb has between fifteen and twenty five thousand possible conjugations. Kind of makes French look like a child's game.
So, no, I wouldn't say English is the most difficult language in the world to learn. But I do think there are much easier ones.
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words
True, but mucking up the tone is no grosser a sin than mispronouncing a vocoid. It is very difficult, for example, for Chinese to distinguish between the short a and short e sounds in English, which, phonetically, are really very close; learning to consistently distinguish "bet" and "bat" takes years of practice. Of course, context helps tremendously: where, in isolation, I might not be able to distinguish the two, I can be relatively certain you didn't say, "He hit the ball with a baseball bet."
By the same token, it can be difficult for a non-native Chinese speaker to distinguish between "horse" and "mother" in Chinese (to use the famous example), but in context, generally speaking a native Chinese is going to be able to figure out that you didn't say, "I like to ride mothers."
Tones are just another phonetic component of a Chinese utterance; my impression is that Westerners trying to learn Chinese entirely too much time worrying about them.
A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences
You can find similar examples in any language, some which will even confuse a native speaker; the fact that one turns out to mean something incomprehensibly insulting merely adds dramatic impact.
imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!
I will grant that learning to read and write Chinese is more difficult, even for native speakers, than learning to read and write English. However, it's not so difficult as all that, and Chinese is helped along by the fact that it isn't a purely pictographic system. In practice, it is partly phonetic and partly phonemic.
There are 214 "radicals" in Chinese; all Chinese characters are simply combinations of these. While 214 approaches an order of magnitude more than the 26 characters in the English alphabet, it means that the basic building set is not nearly so limitless as Americans tend to believe. Whereas to the American eye a Chinese character appears to be an undifferentiated mass of lines, to my eye, I see it as a collection of one or two or three radicals; when I see a new Chinese character, I can reproduce it immediately. Much the way an English speaker would see the word "seeing" not as six individual characters, but more as a combination of two morphemes: "see" and "ing".
Further, while not phonetic or phonemic to the extent of the English writing system, written Chinese does have phonetic and morphemic components; sometimes these provide clues as to the pronunciation and/or meaning of new characters.
So it's not like I have to flat-out memorize five thousand (the average adult written vocabulary) completely arbitrary pictographs.
My experience has been that the first hundred or so Chinese characters are the hardest part for foreigners. After that, as they begin recognizing the radicals and patterns, they begin picking up characters much more quickly.
Taiwan (and Japan), both of which use Chinese characters, have near 100% literacy.
Hmm, more or less true (not true, strictly speaking; especially amongst the older generation, there are large literacy gaps). But not perhaps for the reasons you're thinking.
As a native speaker of both Chinese and English, and a product of both educational systems (I spent most of my teen years in the US, before my family relocated back to Taiwan, and had to play catch-up with my Taiwanese classmates as a result), I'd say the Taiwanese educational system places a much greater emphasis on written literacy, for the simple reason that written Chinese is harder to learn. It may be true that literacy rates are equivalent at comparable grade levels, but only because the Chinese student puts much greater effort into it.
In Taiwan, young children are taught to read and write using bopomofo (aka the Taiwan Phonetic System), a phonetic representation for Mandarin which allows children to learn to read and write while they're working on proficiency in written Chinese. That proficiency (it takes a vocabularly of between 2000 and 2500 characters just to read a newspaper), on average, seems to come somewhat later for Chinese children than for Western children; so in the meanwhile, they rely on bopomofo.
As for being able to input Chinese more quickly than English, this depends in large part on the input method being employed. There are several common methods available; I'd say the only one that is faster is handwriting recognition.
You are correct about the "densities" of the languages. This is not true necessarily, however, simply because of the relative character densities, but also because Chinese tend to speak in shorter sentences, using more compact language. For example, where in English I would say "I have a question," the Chinese equivalent utterance would be simply, "have question".
When you say Chinese - are you speaking of Mandarin or Cantonese (i would assume Mandarin)?
When you say Mandarin - are you speaking of Mandarin (Northern), Cantonese (Southern), Hakka, Fuchow (Eastern), Amoy-Swatow, Wu (Shanghai), or one of the eight or so smaller dialects scattered across the country, some of which are mutually unintelligible. Even within Chinese borders, linguistic variation is enormous. It's really the written language which keeps the country linguistically unified (and I doubt many non-Chinese want to bother learning that!).
what i was trying to say is if it's bad for society or not
Understood. But I think we need to ask what it does to the individual -- particularly his attitude toward women in general. The more one immerses oneself in porn -- the more one's interaction with females becomes interaction with female objects rather than the real thing -- the more one begins to view women as sex objects, and the less one begins to see them as people. In its extreme forms, this leads to a view of women as nothing BUT objects for sexual gratification. The more one is exposed to images of women as willing sexual participants -- e.g., in the form of hard core pornography -- the more one begins to expect this behavior of all women.
Even if the effects are subtle and difficult to quantify, I have to wonder whether pornography provides any redeeming values to society to offset even such subtle losses due to its inherent objectification of women.
Granted, this is an extreme picture, and, in its extreme form, only applies to a small minority of men who tend to be relatively isolated in their cross-gender social relationships. But in its less extreme and more subtle forms, my concern is that this kind of attitude tints (or taints) most men's views of women.
same with the video game example.. as long as the viewer knows how to diffrentiate fantasy from reality
I know this argument is commonly used to justify violence in video games: Yeah it's violent, but most people can separate fantasy from reality.
But let's try modifying the violence just a little and see what we think of the argument.
Instead of killing, slashing and maiming, I propose a game built around sexual violence, specifically forced sexual relations. And -- since teenagers make up such a large portion of the video game market -- I'm going to make the target of our attacks teenage girls.
Yes, what I have is a video game whose object is to force yourself sexually on as many teenage girls as you can. The more 12- and 13-year old girls you rape, the higher your score. And to defend my concept I argue that it's just a game and, after all, most people can separate fantasy from reality.
How far do you think I'd get trying to market such a game? Before I'd so much as proposed the concept to my manager, I'd be lynched by everyone from the Posse Commatatus to the Traditional Values Coalition to the NOW and the Eagle Forum. And deservedly so. It's a vile concept that should never see the light of day, period.
So if we don't accept the "fantasy-from-reality" argument in this case, what makes it legitimate in the case of more "mainstream" forms of violence? I'd argue that violence in and of itself is a repugnant concept -- just as the sexual molestation of children is -- and should not be celebrated or glorified, and which has, or ought not to have, no greater entertainment value than the concept of committing acts of sexual violence against children.
It bans political speech ranging from campaign finance reform to the Second Amendment to Minnesota newspapers' election coverage
Set me straight on something here: Are you saying that with BESS in place it is impossible to view the above anywhere on the Internet, or only that some particularl site which happened to contain these particular three inoffensive topics get caught in the filters?
In other words, if I'm a student at a BESS-filtered school, and I type "Second Amendment" -- or "political speech", or "Minnesota election coverage", or "Slashdot" even -- into my favorite search-engine, do I come up blank? Or is it just that three out of the, say, 17,208 sites carrying the 2nd amendment get caught in the filter?
It's the difference between legitimate research and witch hunt. Personally I think, without having done any of the former, that this is merely a case of the latter.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
...and have you stopped beating your wife yet?
on
Mandated Mediocrity
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· Score: 1
Out of curiosity, is anyone here actually supporting censorship?
Of course, if you frame the question that way, you're merely begging the question.
Alternatively, I could ask, "Does anyone here support allowing kids to access porn?" An equally badly-formed question.
Of course, *everyone* supports censorship in one form or other. Stores aren't allow to sell Hustler to minors. Much of what Hollywood produces is rated "restricted". Certain words are banned from broadcast media. Yelling Fire! in a crowded movie house is verboten. The expression of racist ideas is -- while not illegal in the US -- frowned upon and outright banned in certain fora. It would be inappropriate to display the publicly-funded "Piss-Christ" in publicly-funded schools. The list goes on.
The question, even in America, isn't so much "do you support censorship", but "do you support inappropriate forms censorship?" This is where the real battle is: Who gets to define "inappropriate"?
Wake up! Its human nature. It is the nature of your average man's sexuality. It is the reason that we are here.
Speak for yourself, please.
"It's human nature" could also be applied to, say, tax fraud and spousal abuse.
the top three religions seem to have a large preoccupation with the "BIG TWO": sex and death.
Well, the afterlife, anyway. Which, last time I checked is closely associated with one of the two subjects you mentioned (I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to determine which:-)).
A curious child might decry his parents' preoccupation with hot stoves. Perhaps religion's pre-occupation with sex merely reflects "human nature"'s preoccupation with its abuse. Though, as a practicing adherent of one of the "big three", I'd have to say I can't remember the last time sex came up in any of my religious discussions.
shouldn't it really be up to Miss Porter herself whether she objects her pictures being looked at...?
Of course. But it's irrelevant to the question of whether objectification has taken place. Every Playboy model in history has signed a contract consenting to the use and viewing of her images. That has little to do with whether I am objectifying her when I view said images.
if the woman in question does not mind being objectified.. or even likes it.. is it wrong?
Objectification occurs regardless of the consent of the woman in question. Even if she agrees to the uses made of her image, it's still objectification. The issue is less the consent of the woman, and more the attitude in the mind of the viewer.
This is where any ethical discussion of objectification should start.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Charging the condemned for the cost of the bullet?
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SDMI *NOT* Cracked!?
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I must admit, the idea of watching the RIAA spend billions implementing a system which then immediately crashes and burns is attractive. The problem is that it would end up hurting all the wrong people.
The implementation costs for any system the RIAA ultimately imposes will be passed on to consumers and hardware manufacturers in the form of higher CD prices and burdensome licensing fees (which will also be passed on to the consumer), and consumers will be forced to adopt a technology which, though not technically secure, will nonetheless manage to inconvenience hundreds of millions of music lovers globally. Waiting until after the fact to crack that system would simply be a case of adding stink to the shitpile. Then it becomes not just a case of onerously burdening the consumer, but -- worse -- onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created. Which means a new system will be developed and implemented, with yet more implementation costs futilely ripped from consumer wallets.
No. Better to break the watermarks now and let the SDMI implode from the political backlash. It's not about helping the RIAA. It's about protecting ourselves from stupid, bull-headed money-changers who are concerned about anything but our welfare.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, scorn is a good word. I frankly see little in the way of insight from modern Western psychology which rises above a repackaging of the insights of ancient philosopher-theologians from Gung-Tzu (Confucius) to the Buddha, to the insights of medieval Christian mystics from Anthony to Walter Hilton. In large measure, in fact, I find the ancient insights superior.
In any case, modern psychological theories remind me of the weather in Seattle: if you don't like the current batch, wait ten minutes and it'll change.
these people have a contribution to make to what humans understand
My point was that within a certain limited cultural context they have some valid things to say. Divorced from that context, however, their worth is greatly diminished. In, for example, a Buddhist culture such as Taiwan's, which presupposes a vastly different understanding of human nature, Western psychologists have much less to say.
And this was the point of my message: where one accepts the presuppositions of modern Western psychology -- a certain reductionist view of human nature, a hyper-scientific understanding of the human psyche, a denigration or outright scorn of spirituality -- their insights make sense. Where one's presuppositions differ, their value is reduced. And, it would appear, even large segments of your own society do not share those presuppositions -- at least where it comes to human sexuality.
All these evolve, and I don't think dismissing entire fields of knowledge (like Jung) is appropriate
But if I don't share their premises, how can I accept their conclusions?
dismissing Freud because you think he's labelling you a sexual misfit (he's not).
Certainly, he isn't. But Angst Bear was so labelling me, or at least a point of view which I happen to share.
But to get back to my original point: rather than acknowledge the possibility of a legitimate difference of opinion on the part of his opponents, Angst Bear chose to launch an ad homineim attack against their character. Rather than engage their arguments, he chose to question their sanity. All of which might play well to the /. crowd, but does little to advance the quality of debate.
Terror? Opression? Really? "Typically"? By whom? The society in which I live does not, by and large, support the kind of sexually permissiveness attitude (yes, "free-for-all" was my word; but then after Angst's tirade I think I'm due one) that Angst Badger's post reflects. I guess by Angst's (and your? and Freud's?) definition my culture is insane.
In any case, my point was that Angst's entire post was simply an extended ad homineim (as an AC pointed out) which was much more interested in attacking the character of his opponents than it was in addressing their arguments.
you may wish to ask yourself just where "your" opinion came from
As should all of us, of course. But I suspect all of us -- you, me, Angst, Freud, Fromm -- would come up with the same answer: a combination of upbringing, cultural influence, and personal experience. Are yours somehow more valid than mine?
It's our very own ...
Your very own, thank you.
western psychology and psychotheraputic studies which have produced insights into our unacknowledged sexual "stuff".
I'm truly happy for you that Western culture after all these thousands of years finally has the tools it needs to analyze itself sexually, (though I bet those "repressed oppressive" Aristoteleans would be shocked to discover they were incapable of any meaningful sexual insights simply because they were born a few millenia too early). However, the rest of us were having insights into our sexual natures centuries before the world was blessed with Jung, or Masters and Johnson. And, sorry to say, we don't always agree.
Why? First principles. Any conclusion is only as good as its presuppositions. And modern Western psychology's are not shared by a good portion of the rest of us. Nor even, it would appear, by a significant portion of your own society. Does that mean you're wallowing in sanity while us Victorian domestic terrorists are being driven by our sexual phobias to the edge of mental illness? If so, then I'll keep my sexual phobias, thanks.
Rather than whipping out our thesauri to see how many derisive labels we can slap on our opponents, I suggest a more productive approach would be to start by assuming what we have is a legitimate difference of opinion rather than a conspiracy by psychopathic "domestic terrorists". Aside from incenting the choir (or, in this case, the moderators), rants like yours tend rather to set back the debate than to advance it. Whether you agree with them or not, the first step in winning over your enemies is to acknowledge their humanity. Respect your enemy and he will listen to you. Spew verbal abuse, and you will only entrench him.
(BTW, what the heck is an "instinctual imperative"?)
This has got to be a classic Slashdot kneejerk: informational message gets mistaken for legalese, and the whole community is up in arms! Sometimes I think the editorial staff at Slashdot needs some remedial classes in how to use those grey cells God gave them.
Actually, it appears to be the Info page from some standard text reader. I suspect the legalese is standard generic boilerplate the software throws up on the screen without regard to the actual text being displayed. Alice in Wonderland itself is, of course, public domain and cannot be restricted in any of the aforementioned ways, as I'm sure even the lawyers at Adobe would acknowledge. It's far more likely that pigdogs.org will get slapped with a lawsuit for displaying a screenshot of the software than you will for reading it to your kids.
The issue here is not an over-reaching legal department, but simply poorly designed software. I just feel sorry for the poor schmucks at Adobe on the receiving end of all those angry but misinformed Slashdot e-mails.
Well, SmartFilter, at least, publishes its definitions of each category, so if "nobody is the wiser" then perhaps it's because "Nobody" hasn't made the effort to inform himself.
No, they aren't. They are regulating those who freely choose to subscribe to their service. This is the salient point: The association is voluntary. IF it were a case of the government imposing filtering on every public and private machine with Internet access, THEN you might have a complaint. It's not, so you don't.
These ./ whinings strike a bit like complaining the New York Times is censoring the public simply because it doesn't print everything you want to read.
Here's a radical thought: if you don't like filtering software, don't use it ! And if your school/employer forces you to use it, complain to your employer (I suggest /RANT mode), not SmartFilter.
The only way to force these companies to behave ethically...
I.e., the bastards ought to go straight to hell because censorship is evil ! I suspect the only "ethical" thing these companies could do in your eyes is put themselves out of business.
As I understand it, SmartFilter sorts, you select. If you want chat but not porn, do it. If you want cult/occult but not "shock", no problem. I believe the customer can also circumvent the filter on a site-by-site basis. Strikes me as quite reasonable.
The fact is, your company/school owns the hardware you're surfing on, and probably feels it has the right to a modicum of control over the activities being performed on its property. If you disagree, then do your surfing from home.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Ooh! Yes!! Trash a fundie and rake in the karma! Substitute "Jew" for "Christian", however, and this same post would be floundering down at -1 Troll.
Apparently, some people need a demon to help them make sense of the world, and since the "evil empire" has exited stage right, Christian fundamentalists seem to be the most convenient target. After all, nobody I know actually knows any of "them", so where's the harm?
Sometimes the /. mentality is truly frightening. The fact that moderators actually REWARD such blatant racism only further blackens Slashdot's eye. Any moderator who +1-ed this tripe ought to hang his head in shame.
Note: IAMACF (I Am Not A Christian Fundamentalist). But sometimes I can really sympathize with them.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
"How DARE you label that book 'history and geography', you book burner!"
"Slap a 'social sciences' call number on that book and I'll have the ACLU all over you for violating my constitutional rights!"
"Look, lady, all I want to do is find the classical music section. What do you mean, 'Just look around'?"
"So, honey, is this a murder-mystery movie or a comedy?"
"Ms. Smith, would you please file this under 'old business'?" "Sorry, sir, I can't do that, First Amendment being what it is, and all."
"You mean I can't build an adult book store here just because there's an elementary school next door? Are you, sir, labeling the content of my business?"
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Good point. Since we're talking about the mainland, that'd be simplified. There are a few enclaves still using the traditional script -- Hong Kong, for example, or here in Taiwan, though most can still read the traditional script, even if they can't write it.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Course, the same can be said for the French and the Germans, or the French and the English. Come to think of it, the French don't seem to get along with anyone they share a border with.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Shenme? Wo kan de dong ni siao mao de mintzi, inwe wo shuo fa-wen. Keshir, j'aime des chiens meilleurs parce qu'ils sont plus amicaux que des chats.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
As the Chinese economy develops, so will Chinese influence, and you may begin to see some internationalization of Mandarin. But this is several decades into the future, at least.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly
Okay, point taken. I guess I can't judge this, as I haven't been around enough foreign speakers of either English or Chinese to judge which badly spoken language is the more difficult to understand. I have been known to say, however, that it's too bad circumstances have forced English on the world. I even told some British English teachers here that I thought one of the worst things England ever did was give English to the world. They were wont to agree with me.
I would also agree with you about the writing system. I would not, myself, propose Chinese as a world-language candidate for precisely that reason. Spoken Chinese is, I think, relatively easy to learn. No verb conjugations, no tense, and a basic vocabulary which tends to be non-specific almost to the point of ambiguity; where English speakers, for example, have to select between "see", "watch", "look at", "view", and "read", or "speak", "say", "tell" and "talk", Chinese provides a single word.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
The problems with English start with the fact that it's an amalgam of Old German (a verb-final language) and French (a verb-medial language). This has connotations beyond simply where the verb in a sentence occurs; it affects word order in all phrases, as verb-final languages tend to put the heads of all their phrases at the end - adjectives preceed nouns; main verb follows auxiliary verb; and so forth. While English has largely adopted and adapted itself to verb-medial patterns, it retains many vestiges of its Germanic origins; as a result, even where one might reasonably expect consistency, English has the tendency to surprise.
In addition, English has amassed a large number duplicate vocabulary: pig/swine, deep/profound, small/little, big/large and so forth. Pig, profound, little, big, et alia, come into the language via its Latin roots, while it draws the others from its Germanic heritage.
There is also the problem of the Great Vowel Shift -- also a result of the Anglo-Saxon merger with French. While pronunciation changed, written English has retained much of its pre-Shift spelling, resulting in more confusion. This problem was exacerbated by the borrowing of so many words from the French, whose phonetic written system differs so drastically from the German. The result is that there is rarely just one way to represent a phonetic sound in English, and English seems to delight in taking advantage of this fact. I can, for example, write the long o sound as "ow", "ough", "oe" "oa", "o--e", "oo", "eau", "ew", "ou", or of course "o". Conversely, a single letter or combination can have several different pronunciations, even within the same word. In "circle", for example, "c" is pronounced two different ways.
What's more, some English letters are entirely redundant. C, for example, merely duplicates K and S, with no phonetic identity of its own. And Q is entirely anachronistic; to begin, it never occurs without U; and the QU combination could, phonetically speaking, be completely replaced by KW. PH (a hold-over from Greek) merely duplicates the efforts of F. And so forth.
English isn't the most difficult language in the world. For that honor I'd nominate Lingasa, a central African language full of implosives, clicks, gutterals, and a seven-state gender system which includes animate/inanimate, rock/non-rock and climbs trees/swims, and a conjugation system that depends in part not just on person and number like English, but also the time of day (day or night) the utterance is made, who makes it (males and females conjugate differently; vocabulary also differs between the sexes) and to whom it is made (male or female, child or adult), social status, and whether or not it's currently raining outside (I'm not kidding!). Bottom line: while nobody knows for sure, estimates suggest each and every Lingasan verb has between fifteen and twenty five thousand possible conjugations. Kind of makes French look like a child's game.
So, no, I wouldn't say English is the most difficult language in the world to learn. But I do think there are much easier ones.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words
True, but mucking up the tone is no grosser a sin than mispronouncing a vocoid. It is very difficult, for example, for Chinese to distinguish between the short a and short e sounds in English, which, phonetically, are really very close; learning to consistently distinguish "bet" and "bat" takes years of practice. Of course, context helps tremendously: where, in isolation, I might not be able to distinguish the two, I can be relatively certain you didn't say, "He hit the ball with a baseball bet."
By the same token, it can be difficult for a non-native Chinese speaker to distinguish between "horse" and "mother" in Chinese (to use the famous example), but in context, generally speaking a native Chinese is going to be able to figure out that you didn't say, "I like to ride mothers."
Tones are just another phonetic component of a Chinese utterance; my impression is that Westerners trying to learn Chinese entirely too much time worrying about them.
A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences
You can find similar examples in any language, some which will even confuse a native speaker; the fact that one turns out to mean something incomprehensibly insulting merely adds dramatic impact.
imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!
I will grant that learning to read and write Chinese is more difficult, even for native speakers, than learning to read and write English. However, it's not so difficult as all that, and Chinese is helped along by the fact that it isn't a purely pictographic system. In practice, it is partly phonetic and partly phonemic.
There are 214 "radicals" in Chinese; all Chinese characters are simply combinations of these. While 214 approaches an order of magnitude more than the 26 characters in the English alphabet, it means that the basic building set is not nearly so limitless as Americans tend to believe. Whereas to the American eye a Chinese character appears to be an undifferentiated mass of lines, to my eye, I see it as a collection of one or two or three radicals; when I see a new Chinese character, I can reproduce it immediately. Much the way an English speaker would see the word "seeing" not as six individual characters, but more as a combination of two morphemes: "see" and "ing".
Further, while not phonetic or phonemic to the extent of the English writing system, written Chinese does have phonetic and morphemic components; sometimes these provide clues as to the pronunciation and/or meaning of new characters.
So it's not like I have to flat-out memorize five thousand (the average adult written vocabulary) completely arbitrary pictographs.
My experience has been that the first hundred or so Chinese characters are the hardest part for foreigners. After that, as they begin recognizing the radicals and patterns, they begin picking up characters much more quickly.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Hmm, more or less true (not true, strictly speaking; especially amongst the older generation, there are large literacy gaps). But not perhaps for the reasons you're thinking.
As a native speaker of both Chinese and English, and a product of both educational systems (I spent most of my teen years in the US, before my family relocated back to Taiwan, and had to play catch-up with my Taiwanese classmates as a result), I'd say the Taiwanese educational system places a much greater emphasis on written literacy, for the simple reason that written Chinese is harder to learn. It may be true that literacy rates are equivalent at comparable grade levels, but only because the Chinese student puts much greater effort into it.
In Taiwan, young children are taught to read and write using bopomofo (aka the Taiwan Phonetic System), a phonetic representation for Mandarin which allows children to learn to read and write while they're working on proficiency in written Chinese. That proficiency (it takes a vocabularly of between 2000 and 2500 characters just to read a newspaper), on average, seems to come somewhat later for Chinese children than for Western children; so in the meanwhile, they rely on bopomofo.
As for being able to input Chinese more quickly than English, this depends in large part on the input method being employed. There are several common methods available; I'd say the only one that is faster is handwriting recognition.
You are correct about the "densities" of the languages. This is not true necessarily, however, simply because of the relative character densities, but also because Chinese tend to speak in shorter sentences, using more compact language. For example, where in English I would say "I have a question," the Chinese equivalent utterance would be simply, "have question".
Take care,
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
When you say Mandarin - are you speaking of Mandarin (Northern), Cantonese (Southern), Hakka, Fuchow (Eastern), Amoy-Swatow, Wu (Shanghai), or one of the eight or so smaller dialects scattered across the country, some of which are mutually unintelligible. Even within Chinese borders, linguistic variation is enormous. It's really the written language which keeps the country linguistically unified (and I doubt many non-Chinese want to bother learning that!).
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Understood. But I think we need to ask what it does to the individual -- particularly his attitude toward women in general. The more one immerses oneself in porn -- the more one's interaction with females becomes interaction with female objects rather than the real thing -- the more one begins to view women as sex objects, and the less one begins to see them as people. In its extreme forms, this leads to a view of women as nothing BUT objects for sexual gratification. The more one is exposed to images of women as willing sexual participants -- e.g., in the form of hard core pornography -- the more one begins to expect this behavior of all women.
Even if the effects are subtle and difficult to quantify, I have to wonder whether pornography provides any redeeming values to society to offset even such subtle losses due to its inherent objectification of women.
Granted, this is an extreme picture, and, in its extreme form, only applies to a small minority of men who tend to be relatively isolated in their cross-gender social relationships. But in its less extreme and more subtle forms, my concern is that this kind of attitude tints (or taints) most men's views of women.
same with the video game example.. as long as the viewer knows how to diffrentiate fantasy from reality
I know this argument is commonly used to justify violence in video games: Yeah it's violent, but most people can separate fantasy from reality.
But let's try modifying the violence just a little and see what we think of the argument.
Instead of killing, slashing and maiming, I propose a game built around sexual violence, specifically forced sexual relations. And -- since teenagers make up such a large portion of the video game market -- I'm going to make the target of our attacks teenage girls.
Yes, what I have is a video game whose object is to force yourself sexually on as many teenage girls as you can. The more 12- and 13-year old girls you rape, the higher your score. And to defend my concept I argue that it's just a game and, after all, most people can separate fantasy from reality.
How far do you think I'd get trying to market such a game? Before I'd so much as proposed the concept to my manager, I'd be lynched by everyone from the Posse Commatatus to the Traditional Values Coalition to the NOW and the Eagle Forum. And deservedly so. It's a vile concept that should never see the light of day, period.
So if we don't accept the "fantasy-from-reality" argument in this case, what makes it legitimate in the case of more "mainstream" forms of violence? I'd argue that violence in and of itself is a repugnant concept -- just as the sexual molestation of children is -- and should not be celebrated or glorified, and which has, or ought not to have, no greater entertainment value than the concept of committing acts of sexual violence against children.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Set me straight on something here: Are you saying that with BESS in place it is impossible to view the above anywhere on the Internet, or only that some particularl site which happened to contain these particular three inoffensive topics get caught in the filters?
In other words, if I'm a student at a BESS-filtered school, and I type "Second Amendment" -- or "political speech", or "Minnesota election coverage", or "Slashdot" even -- into my favorite search-engine, do I come up blank? Or is it just that three out of the, say, 17,208 sites carrying the 2nd amendment get caught in the filter?
It's the difference between legitimate research and witch hunt. Personally I think, without having done any of the former, that this is merely a case of the latter.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Of course, if you frame the question that way, you're merely begging the question.
Alternatively, I could ask, "Does anyone here support allowing kids to access porn?" An equally badly-formed question.
Of course, *everyone* supports censorship in one form or other. Stores aren't allow to sell Hustler to minors. Much of what Hollywood produces is rated "restricted". Certain words are banned from broadcast media. Yelling Fire! in a crowded movie house is verboten. The expression of racist ideas is -- while not illegal in the US -- frowned upon and outright banned in certain fora. It would be inappropriate to display the publicly-funded "Piss-Christ" in publicly-funded schools. The list goes on.
The question, even in America, isn't so much "do you support censorship", but "do you support inappropriate forms censorship?" This is where the real battle is: Who gets to define "inappropriate"?
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Speak for yourself, please.
"It's human nature" could also be applied to, say, tax fraud and spousal abuse.
the top three religions seem to have a large preoccupation with the "BIG TWO": sex and death.
Well, the afterlife, anyway. Which, last time I checked is closely associated with one of the two subjects you mentioned (I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to determine which :-)).
A curious child might decry his parents' preoccupation with hot stoves. Perhaps religion's pre-occupation with sex merely reflects "human nature"'s preoccupation with its abuse. Though, as a practicing adherent of one of the "big three", I'd have to say I can't remember the last time sex came up in any of my religious discussions.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Of course. But it's irrelevant to the question of whether objectification has taken place. Every Playboy model in history has signed a contract consenting to the use and viewing of her images. That has little to do with whether I am objectifying her when I view said images.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
Objectification occurs regardless of the consent of the woman in question. Even if she agrees to the uses made of her image, it's still objectification. The issue is less the consent of the woman, and more the attitude in the mind of the viewer.
This is where any ethical discussion of objectification should start.
Lee Kai Wen - Taiwan, ROC
The implementation costs for any system the RIAA ultimately imposes will be passed on to consumers and hardware manufacturers in the form of higher CD prices and burdensome licensing fees (which will also be passed on to the consumer), and consumers will be forced to adopt a technology which, though not technically secure, will nonetheless manage to inconvenience hundreds of millions of music lovers globally. Waiting until after the fact to crack that system would simply be a case of adding stink to the shitpile. Then it becomes not just a case of onerously burdening the consumer, but -- worse -- onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created. Which means a new system will be developed and implemented, with yet more implementation costs futilely ripped from consumer wallets.
No. Better to break the watermarks now and let the SDMI implode from the political backlash. It's not about helping the RIAA. It's about protecting ourselves from stupid, bull-headed money-changers who are concerned about anything but our welfare.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC