It's scary to see how much English has invaded other languages. English words appear often in languages such as Spanish (particularly in Chicano dialects), German, and even in far unrelated languages like Chinese and especially Japanese.
True. However, this is a far cry from the linguistic coup you suggest. It's really more akin to the American penchant for French toss-offs. But spouting "c'est la vie" hardly qualifies me as a francophone.
Here in Taiwan, it's difficult to escape English. From street signs to advertisements to T-shirts and notebooks, to pocket GameBoys, everything seems to be covered with it. Pseudo-English is a trendy toy amongst teens -- nearly everyone knows "hello", "good-bye", "Happy Birthday", or "I [heart] you". Pop singers liberally sprinkle English around in their songs. But for all that, the level of English comprehension even amongst young people is abhorrent, and doesn't appear to be improving. The only English word I know of that's really been "adopted" into the language -- meaning near-universal understanding and usage -- is "bye-bye". And this is heavily-westernized Taiwan.
...with global communications, languages have ceased diverging and evolving each in their own directions. These processes... will eventually result in a nearly uniform version of English.
Don't get out much, do you?:-)
In fact the number of English dialects and creoles worldwide is on the increase, to the point where native English speakers often have great difficulty communicating with each other. I suggest placing a Scotsman, a Nigerian, and an English-speaking Malay in the same room and giving them a copy of, say, the Taipei Times (an English-language Taiwanese publication). English-speaking Taiwanese who have no problems comprehending American English are often reduced to blank stares by Aussie accents.
In fact, like Latin before it, English may be devolving into a family of related languages.
MacLuan's global village has failed to erase our cultural and ethnic differences; neither do I see it conquering linguistic barriers.
Without global comm and fast worldwide travel, American English would have diverged from British English to become as different as Spanish and Portugese are today.
Some say it already has.:-)
There's a world of difference between lexical borrowing and syntactic adaptation. Picking up the odd English word or phrase is one thing. Morphing from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object -- the way Anglo-Saxon did under the influence of French to give birth to modern English -- is another ballgame entirely. So far, I don't see English exerting this sort of influence.
Languages tend to be surprisingly resilient. I'm constantly amazed, for example, at the continued vibrancy of Taiwanese, a local with perhaps a few hundred thousand speakers in central and southern Taiwan. It has remained unscathed and nearly unchanged in the face of the overwhelming domination of Chinese, despite that fact that Taiwanese still has no writing system and nearly all its speakers are natively fluent in both Taiwanese and Mandarin. It would seem to be almost completely superfluous, and yet it remains vibrant and living.
As has been pointed out, the accuracy of my statement depends on who "Caldera" is. Caldera, Inc. owns Lineo, which owns DR-DOS but is not IPO-ing. It also owns CalderaSystems, which doesn't own DR-DOS (though it does sell it) but is going IPO.
All of this merely confuses the branding issue Forbes magazine talks about.
Personally, I think Caldera (Inc., that is), should pull all its children back into the house and concentrate on embedded systems. If the tech prognosticators are correct, there's a lot of money to be made there. Lineo has a great product and seems to be establishing itself as the market leader. This is an area where Caldera could really establish some branding.
True, it's not as sexy, but the folks at Caldera should realize by now that there's no way they're going to be able to catch RedHat in the systems/server space. But RedHat is new to the embedded market; Lineo has more experience there and (IMO) a better product, and there's still a window of opportunity before RedHat can exploit its market leverage to dominate embedded systems.
True. And, as has been pointed out, it hardly helps the branding issue when you can't even say "Caldera" and know who you're talking about.
The internal DR-DOS development team (which had been relocated to the UK) was disbanded well over a year ago, before Lineo became Lineo. What little development there has been in the last two years -- mostly, as I recall, pertaining to fixing up EMM386, and adding experimental LFN support -- has largely come from the outside talent who jumped on board during DR-DOS's brief open-source period, with some help from one or two internal people. But the internal development team was shut down quite a while back.
Which underscores my point: it's too bad Caldera/Lineo reneged on its decision to open the code. DR-DOS does, and always has, run circles around anything out of Redmond. Imagine what the open-source community could have done with it.
Caldera also develups DrDos and as such may not rely on Linux forever.
No it doesn't. Caldera dropped development of DR-DOS almost two years ago. It still owns DR-DOS, still includes it with OpenLinux (the commercial version) and is still happy to sell you a copy. But DR-DOS is no longer under development.
In my book it most definitely is a moral issue... It is... harm to others... which makes them wrong.
Okay, it IS an issue of morality. But my point was that the morality of it has nothing to do with WHY it's illegal.
Which is precisely where we disagree. I say, "Rape is illegal because it is wrong." You say, "Rape is illegal because it hurts other people." I say, "So, what? Who cares if other people get hurt? As long as I don't get hurt, it's no skin off my nose." To which you reply, "But it's wrong to hurt other people."
And I say: Bingo! Rape is illegal because it hurts someone, and it's wrong to hurt someone! And we're right back to morality.
Back to dictionary.com:
morality:
1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct. 2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct: religious morality; Christian morality. 3. Virtuous conduct. 4. A rule or lesson in moral conduct.
I'm operating here under the first definition: society defines rules of "right" or "good" conduct: this conduct is good; that conduct is not. This conduct is right; that conduct is wrong. This conduct is desirable; that conduct is not. Therefore, we pass laws against conduct which, as a society, we do not accept. In particular, we do not accept conduct which hurts other people. Why? Because we think hurting other people is wrong.
Therefore society must protect itself from that person, and lock 'em up.
We throw people in prison for two reasons: to protect society, true. But also to punish. That's why it's called the penal system. We punish, because the criminal has done something deserving punishment - he has done something wrong.
One never hears any objections to imposing our belief in, say, the wrongness of rape on other members of society.
If you agreed with it, they're not "imposing" anything. You'd folow that belief anyway
OK, for the sake of argument, I'll grant that laws against rape are not an imposition on me. They are, however, an imposition on someone -- namely, in this case, the rapist, who disagrees with it.
Generalizing, it becomes apparent that every law is "imposed", because someone disagrees with it. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having laws -- to force compliance on the part of those who disagree with them. Any time someone disagrees with a law, then the law can said to be "imposed", at least on the one disagreeing with it. Yet, that doesn't stop us from imposing the law anyway. I mean, why would we even have a law, unless there were someone who disagreed with it?
Which brings me back to my original statement: it's funny how no one ever calls it "imposing morality" when it's their morality being imposed -- only when they become the imposed-upon.
One point is that those people clamoring for censorship are a MINORITY.
Those who oppose them are also a minority. The great middle doesn't much care one way or the other.
Rape is not an issue of ethics or morality.
Maybe we need to explore our definitions of "morality". In my book it most definitely is a moral issue -- as are things like theft, murder, and kicking the neighbor's dog. It is precisely that -- harm to others -- which makes them wrong.
But what about those who believe that sex inside a marital context is wrong, who in point of fact believe that marriage itself is wrong?
They merely prove my point - that different folks have different first principles. Those who assume that, say, pictures of two women having sex cannot be harmful to minors do so because they depend on a certain set of first principles. Begin with a different set of first principles, and you arrive at a different conclusion.
Everyone's beliefs are their own. They should not be able to impose them on others.
But of course, this is exactly how society functions - by imposing an agreed-upon set of rules of conduct on its members. Take away the rules and you have anarchy.
Funny how it only becomes "imposing their beliefs" when we don't agree with it. One never hears any objections to imposing our belief in, say, the wrongness of rape on other members of society.
Lee Kai Wen (who thinks laws against bestiality are imposing someone's morality)
Puritans? Champions of religious freedom? You mean the folk who drove out the Unitarians? They championed their own religious freedom.
Champions of freedom from government-imposed religious practices and beliefs, then, if you will. A fundamental pillar of American freedoms, if I recall my political theory classes. I did not intend to invoke them as paradigms of modern sensibilities of "religious tolerance".
As for the "Puritan culture of repression" that could use some specification
[Introduction to Calvinist soteriology snipped] (Jonathan Edwards was required reading at my school. Still one of my favorites.)
What you laid out for us being rather typical classical Calvinism, why not say, e.g., "Presbyterian culture of repression"?
As for Calvinism being used to justify slavery, et al., well, proponents of slavery weren't particular. They could be Calvinist when it served, or Deist when it didn't. They were equally adept at employing, e.g., laissez-faire capitalist arguments, or the then-emerging concepts of race, when it preferred their position to do so.
My point remains: Puritans are being scape-goated for a slew of sins which they can hardly be held accountable (or at least unfairly singled-out) for.
The above not withstanding, the original poster intended "Puritan culture of repression" to refer to a system of sexual ethics with which he disagrees, and which he, somewhat ignorantly, ascribed to Puritanism.
Lee Kai Wen (sometime student of American history)
I just re-emphasized certain points I made in the original post which I think you didn't adequately address
I addressed them in the only way they could be addressed -- as unproven first principles -- by pointing out that not everyone shares yours.
by some of the more popular religions, which in turn seek to impose their rules on others.
Such a statement could equally be applied to, say, politics or the National Organization of Women.
Society, by definition, imposes rules on its members. We all live by a set of agreed-upon regulations. Absent that, you have anarchy. But somehow it only becomes "imposing" when we don't agree with.
As for the Puritans, while their culture of repression may be the main problem
Specifics, please. Labels do not make arguments.
As I said, if all you know about Puritans is some alleged "culture of repression", then you're in need of a visit to your local library.
On the other hand, remembering that the Puritans championed such nefarious concepts as freedom of religion and democracy, and "imposed" on Americans such deviancies as the Mayflower Compact and the Protestant work ethic, I can understand why they were make your shit list.
they did burn people who were "different".
Ah, yes, the "Salem Witch Trials". That lasted, umm, twenty years, no six, no, 9 months. And executed, uh, thirty thousand, no fifteen thousand -- er, twenty people. And of course, all the thousands of powerful people involved were Puritans -- those rabid, slathering, wild-eyed, fanatical enemies of all pleasure. And all the victims were, what, Catholic?
Frankly, I don't buy it. Your argument sounds just as simplistic
Since I have made no argument -- other than to point out that your own unproven first principles are not shared by all -- all you appear to be "boiling down to its essence" is a few strawman Puritans and gnostics who are no longer around to defend themselves against all the ills of the modern world.
Lee Kai Wen (who is neither Puritan nor gnostic, nor shares all (who knows, most?) of their views on religion, sexual ethics or, most probably, anything else)
Tell that to all the nice clean suburban drug users you've just offended:P
It was not my intention to impugn the character of upscale druggies. My post, for those who missed its intent, was parody. Which means it was supposed to be bad reasoning.
I fail to see how respecting sex and understanding its role would make modern society "more delirious than sane".
What I said, of course, was precisely the opposite: that one might argue that modern society in its failure to respect sex was more delirious than sane. Re-read my post.
The reason censorious societies are so obsessed with sex is because it's forbidden
I'm not convinced this is true. Many things are forbidden; that doesn't ipso facto turn them into obsessions. Why do we assume it is true of sex?
Conversely, many people seem to obsess over things that aren't forbidden. Alcohol, cars, sports, money, status -- all these can be objects of obsession.
So I don't see any obvious connection between forbidding and obsessing.
treated as simply something natural.
Define 'natural' please. Even the Seven Deadlies (greed, pride, sloth, avarice, etc.) could be said to be 'natural' -- if what you mean is 'part of human nature'. In that case, I seriously doubt anyone considers sex 'unnatural'.
Unfortunately, two fundamentally broken philosophies still exist in our society
All you have done is re-state the original poster's claims without substance. 'My views are right. It's the other guy's views that are broken.'
I'm pretty sure, however, that, beyond their usefulness as epithets, you have little understanding of either puritanism or gnosticism.
Puritans (whom Americans used to call 'pilgrims' and praise as the founders of their country) seem to nowadays be more reviled as the purveyors of a system of sexual ethics which nobody much likes, even while few seem to understand what Puritan sexual ethics really were. If I were a Puritan (I'm not), I would probably be as offended as if I were a Jew constantly having to defend against caracatures of myself as a conniving, money-grabbing cheat.
'Gnosticism'. Did you have in mind Hermetic, Mandean, or Mannichaen? Classical or modern? Jungian or Kabbalistic?
Classical gnosticism, which I think is what you had in mind -- though you misrepresent even it -- championed a secret 'gnosis' or knowledge, roughly spiritual in nature. It gnosticism was inherently dualistic. Some strains, particularly those which syncretised Christianity and Judaism, held physical reality, created by the Demiurge, inimical to the search for gnosis. But the resulting approach took contradictory forms.
Some considered the physical world to be evil, and thus eschewed its pleasures and delights, developing a very aescetical praxis, in which they turned away from 'fleshly desires'.
Other gnostics, however, reasoned that the physical world, being 'unreal', could not be inimical to gnosis, and so hedonistically embraced its pleasures.
Probably more -- it's difficult to say; the sheer variety of ancient gnostics is huge -- neither denied nor particularly embraced physical pleasures.
In any case, you lay some heavy -- albeit unsubstantiated -- charges at the gnostics' feet. How, precisely, has the gnostic search for gnosis caused 'no end of pain, suffering, humiliation and torture'? Any modern gnostics out there who would care to respond to this?
All that aside, what you appear to be championing is a rather unsophisticated hedonism: Sex is good. Therefore whatever forbids sex is bad. Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. Therefore whatever increases pleasure is right. And whatever increases pain is wrong.
Most modern ethicists gave up on this approach to ethics about five minutes after they emerged from puberty.
Lee Kai Wen (who would rather examine arguments than parrot them)
But why block kids from porn sites or racist sites?
My reply was to the comment that "blocking things totally out" of a child's life can cause "irreversible harm". Whether pornography and racism falls into this category is up to the individual parent or society, and falls outside the scope of my argument.
trying to block things out totally from the lives of your children can cause irreversible damage
You were doing great till you leaned too far forward and stumbled over your untied shoelaces.
There are, of course, many things parents "block out totally from the lives of their children", usually with rather positive effect.
My children are not allowed alcohol. My 13 year old daughter is not allowed to date, let alone have sex. They don't get to watch documentaries on setting up your own private meth lab, or sample illegal drugs. They don't get to knock over the local grocery store or shake down their friends for lunch money. They don't get to cheat on their homework. They aren't allowed to lie to an adult -- ever.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I do agree that governmental regulation is not a proper substitute for good parenting. But I think you'll find that, far from looking for ways to avoid their parental responsibilities, most of the parents who are concerned about such things are grasping for all the help they can get in fulfilling the responsibilities they already take very seriously. Torching strawmen will only get you burned.
Why do we insist on attempting to regulate morality?
Hear, hear! We need to do away with all morality-based laws. Meth? Crank? Horse? Barbies? Crack? Ludes? Well, personally I'm against 'em, but who am I to judge? Inner city youths need to make a living, too.
Rape? Incest? Kiddie porn? Spouse abuse? Horrible! Or, well, at least I think so. But I wouldn't want to be mistaken for a religious zealot.
And I would never dream of forcing my belief in, say, the immorality of murder down someone else's throat.
We all know that "morality" is just a code word for "religion", which makes morality in government unconstitutional.
I grew up with porn available to me if I wanted it, and I think I turned out fine
We used to have a saying in Botswana: "The gorilla cannot see the ugliness of his own eyes." We are all the worst judges of our own failures and shortcomings.
Do a survey of peoples' attitudes toward their own sense of ethics, and I can tell you what you'll find: 95% will tell you that their own beliefs are fine -- the problem is the other guy.
This kind of mentality will prevent the formation of a sane society, one that is not afraid of sex and the human body
Or, one might argue a "sane" society is one in which people respected sex and understood its role, responsibilities and consequences, making modern society rather more delirious than sane.
First principles.
Lee Kai Wen Two years of posting and still 89.5% Slashdot pure.
At what point did photographs become harmful to minors?
One could equally ask at what point certain genres of photographs stopped being "harmful to minors".
It all goes back to first principles. Those who believe that sex outside of a marital context is wrong will define material which teaches children otherwise as ipso facto harmful.
The/. moderation system is biased and useless at best. Counterproductive at worst. And weannies who post inane rants at 2 ruin the karma system for everyone.
The best approach is to leave your threshold set at 1 and decide for yourself what's useful.
This issue is simply yet another case of people creating their own problems.
If you don't want to pay for your entertainment, there's a broad body of public domain options available -- from literature to movies to music. The only way there's a problem here is if you insist that your only valid entertainment options are the small percentage of copyrighted works corporations are trying to charge money for.
If you don't want to pay for Stephen King, try Edgar Allen Poe. If you don't want to shell out money for U2, listen to Mozart. If you feel imposed upon when paying $8 for a ticket to the latest Jim Carrey flick, watch the Three Stooges. They're all better entertainment anyway.
The first point that needs to be made is that the bill doesn't say anything about filtering software, so all of the rantings about problematic software are irrelevant. The bill simply says the library must adopt "a policy to restrict access by minors to Internet or online sites that contain obscene material" if it wants state funding.
Filtering software would certainly constitute a policy, but so would restricted library cards, adult supervision, or signs posted on the terminals.
More importantly, however, the law does NOT require libraries to restrict access. It only says those which don't will not receive state funding.
This reminds me of the whole arts funding debate a few years back. When the arts community insisted restricting funding was censorship they were laughed out of court.
Slashdot Mirror
True. However, this is a far cry from the linguistic coup you suggest. It's really more akin to the American penchant for French toss-offs. But spouting "c'est la vie" hardly qualifies me as a francophone.
Here in Taiwan, it's difficult to escape English. From street signs to advertisements to T-shirts and notebooks, to pocket GameBoys, everything seems to be covered with it. Pseudo-English is a trendy toy amongst teens -- nearly everyone knows "hello", "good-bye", "Happy Birthday", or "I [heart] you". Pop singers liberally sprinkle English around in their songs. But for all that, the level of English comprehension even amongst young people is abhorrent, and doesn't appear to be improving. The only English word I know of that's really been "adopted" into the language -- meaning near-universal understanding and usage -- is "bye-bye". And this is heavily-westernized Taiwan.
Don't get out much, do you? :-)
In fact the number of English dialects and creoles worldwide is on the increase, to the point where native English speakers often have great difficulty communicating with each other. I suggest placing a Scotsman, a Nigerian, and an English-speaking Malay in the same room and giving them a copy of, say, the Taipei Times (an English-language Taiwanese publication). English-speaking Taiwanese who have no problems comprehending American English are often reduced to blank stares by Aussie accents.
In fact, like Latin before it, English may be devolving into a family of related languages.
MacLuan's global village has failed to erase our cultural and ethnic differences; neither do I see it conquering linguistic barriers.
Without global comm and fast worldwide travel, American English would have diverged from British English to become as different as Spanish and Portugese are today.
Some say it already has. :-)
There's a world of difference between lexical borrowing and syntactic adaptation. Picking up the odd English word or phrase is one thing. Morphing from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object -- the way Anglo-Saxon did under the influence of French to give birth to modern English -- is another ballgame entirely. So far, I don't see English exerting this sort of influence.
Languages tend to be surprisingly resilient. I'm constantly amazed, for example, at the continued vibrancy of Taiwanese, a local with perhaps a few hundred thousand speakers in central and southern Taiwan. It has remained unscathed and nearly unchanged in the face of the overwhelming domination of Chinese, despite that fact that Taiwanese still has no writing system and nearly all its speakers are natively fluent in both Taiwanese and Mandarin. It would seem to be almost completely superfluous, and yet it remains vibrant and living.
Lee Kai Wen
Lee_Kai_Wen@hotmail.com
As has been pointed out, the accuracy of my statement depends on who "Caldera" is. Caldera, Inc. owns Lineo, which owns DR-DOS but is not IPO-ing. It also owns CalderaSystems, which doesn't own DR-DOS (though it does sell it) but is going IPO.
All of this merely confuses the branding issue Forbes magazine talks about.
Personally, I think Caldera (Inc., that is), should pull all its children back into the house and concentrate on embedded systems. If the tech prognosticators are correct, there's a lot of money to be made there. Lineo has a great product and seems to be establishing itself as the market leader. This is an area where Caldera could really establish some branding.
True, it's not as sexy, but the folks at Caldera should realize by now that there's no way they're going to be able to catch RedHat in the systems/server space. But RedHat is new to the embedded market; Lineo has more experience there and (IMO) a better product, and there's still a window of opportunity before RedHat can exploit its market leverage to dominate embedded systems.
Lee Kai Wen
Caldera inc. is not the company going IPO
True. And, as has been pointed out, it hardly helps the branding issue when you can't even say "Caldera" and know who you're talking about.
The internal DR-DOS development team (which had been relocated to the UK) was disbanded well over a year ago, before Lineo became Lineo. What little development there has been in the last two years -- mostly, as I recall, pertaining to fixing up EMM386, and adding experimental LFN support -- has largely come from the outside talent who jumped on board during DR-DOS's brief open-source period, with some help from one or two internal people. But the internal development team was shut down quite a while back.
Which underscores my point: it's too bad Caldera/Lineo reneged on its decision to open the code. DR-DOS does, and always has, run circles around anything out of Redmond. Imagine what the open-source community could have done with it.
Lee Kaiwen
Caldera doesn't own DR-DOS. Lineo does. Get the companies straight, please. They are not the same.
From the Lineo website:
"Lineo, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Caldera, Inc."
My statement stands.
Lee Kaiwen
No it doesn't. Caldera dropped development of DR-DOS almost two years ago. It still owns DR-DOS, still includes it with OpenLinux (the commercial version) and is still happy to sell you a copy. But DR-DOS is no longer under development.
Too bad they reneged on open-sourcing the thing.
Lee Kaiwen
Okay, it IS an issue of morality. But my point was that the morality of it has nothing to do with WHY it's illegal.
Which is precisely where we disagree. I say, "Rape is illegal because it is wrong." You say, "Rape is illegal because it hurts other people." I say, "So, what? Who cares if other people get hurt? As long as I don't get hurt, it's no skin off my nose." To which you reply, "But it's wrong to hurt other people."
And I say: Bingo! Rape is illegal because it hurts someone, and it's wrong to hurt someone! And we're right back to morality.
Back to dictionary.com:
morality:
1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct.
2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct: religious morality; Christian morality.
3. Virtuous conduct.
4. A rule or lesson in moral conduct.
I'm operating here under the first definition: society defines rules of "right" or "good" conduct: this conduct is good; that conduct is not. This conduct is right; that conduct is wrong. This conduct is desirable; that conduct is not. Therefore, we pass laws against conduct which, as a society, we do not accept. In particular, we do not accept conduct which hurts other people. Why? Because we think hurting other people is wrong.
Therefore society must protect itself from that person, and lock 'em up.
We throw people in prison for two reasons: to protect society, true. But also to punish. That's why it's called the penal system. We punish, because the criminal has done something deserving punishment - he has done something wrong.
Lee Kai Wen
If you agreed with it, they're not "imposing" anything. You'd folow that belief anyway
OK, for the sake of argument, I'll grant that laws against rape are not an imposition on me. They are, however, an imposition on someone -- namely, in this case, the rapist, who disagrees with it.
Generalizing, it becomes apparent that every law is "imposed", because someone disagrees with it. In fact, this is the whole purpose of having laws -- to force compliance on the part of those who disagree with them. Any time someone disagrees with a law, then the law can said to be "imposed", at least on the one disagreeing with it. Yet, that doesn't stop us from imposing the law anyway. I mean, why would we even have a law, unless there were someone who disagreed with it?
Which brings me back to my original statement: it's funny how no one ever calls it "imposing morality" when it's their morality being imposed -- only when they become the imposed-upon.
One point is that those people clamoring for censorship are a MINORITY.
Those who oppose them are also a minority. The great middle doesn't much care one way or the other.
Rape is not an issue of ethics or morality.
Maybe we need to explore our definitions of "morality". In my book it most definitely is a moral issue -- as are things like theft, murder, and kicking the neighbor's dog. It is precisely that -- harm to others -- which makes them wrong.
Lee Kai Wen
They merely prove my point - that different folks have different first principles. Those who assume that, say, pictures of two women having sex cannot be harmful to minors do so because they depend on a certain set of first principles. Begin with a different set of first principles, and you arrive at a different conclusion.
Everyone's beliefs are their own. They should not be able to impose them on others.
But of course, this is exactly how society functions - by imposing an agreed-upon set of rules of conduct on its members. Take away the rules and you have anarchy.
Funny how it only becomes "imposing their beliefs" when we don't agree with it. One never hears any objections to imposing our belief in, say, the wrongness of rape on other members of society.
Lee Kai Wen (who thinks laws against bestiality are imposing someone's morality)
Champions of freedom from government-imposed religious practices and beliefs, then, if you will. A fundamental pillar of American freedoms, if I recall my political theory classes. I did not intend to invoke them as paradigms of modern sensibilities of "religious tolerance".
As for the "Puritan culture of repression" that could use some specification
[Introduction to Calvinist soteriology snipped] (Jonathan Edwards was required reading at my school. Still one of my favorites.)
What you laid out for us being rather typical classical Calvinism, why not say, e.g., "Presbyterian culture of repression"?
As for Calvinism being used to justify slavery, et al., well, proponents of slavery weren't particular. They could be Calvinist when it served, or Deist when it didn't. They were equally adept at employing, e.g., laissez-faire capitalist arguments, or the then-emerging concepts of race, when it preferred their position to do so.
My point remains: Puritans are being scape-goated for a slew of sins which they can hardly be held accountable (or at least unfairly singled-out) for.
The above not withstanding, the original poster intended "Puritan culture of repression" to refer to a system of sexual ethics with which he disagrees, and which he, somewhat ignorantly, ascribed to Puritanism.
Lee Kai Wen (sometime student of American history)
I addressed them in the only way they could be addressed -- as unproven first principles -- by pointing out that not everyone shares yours.
by some of the more popular religions, which in turn seek to impose their rules on others.
Such a statement could equally be applied to, say, politics or the National Organization of Women.
Society, by definition, imposes rules on its members. We all live by a set of agreed-upon regulations. Absent that, you have anarchy. But somehow it only becomes "imposing" when we don't agree with.
As for the Puritans, while their culture of repression may be the main problem
Specifics, please. Labels do not make arguments.
As I said, if all you know about Puritans is some alleged "culture of repression", then you're in need of a visit to your local library.
On the other hand, remembering that the Puritans championed such nefarious concepts as freedom of religion and democracy, and "imposed" on Americans such deviancies as the Mayflower Compact and the Protestant work ethic, I can understand why they were make your shit list.
they did burn people who were "different".
Ah, yes, the "Salem Witch Trials". That lasted, umm, twenty years, no six, no, 9 months. And executed, uh, thirty thousand, no fifteen thousand -- er, twenty people. And of course, all the thousands of powerful people involved were Puritans -- those rabid, slathering, wild-eyed, fanatical enemies of all pleasure. And all the victims were, what, Catholic?
Frankly, I don't buy it. Your argument sounds just as simplistic
Since I have made no argument -- other than to point out that your own unproven first principles are not shared by all -- all you appear to be "boiling down to its essence" is a few strawman Puritans and gnostics who are no longer around to defend themselves against all the ills of the modern world.
Lee Kai Wen (who is neither Puritan nor gnostic, nor shares all (who knows, most?) of their views on religion, sexual ethics or, most probably, anything else)
I disagree with ... umm .. lessee ... uh ...
Nope. Sorry, can't find anything to disagree with in your reply. Thanks.
Lee Kai Wen (who's always disappointed when he can't disagree with something)
It was not my intention to impugn the character of upscale druggies. My post, for those who missed its intent, was parody. Which means it was supposed to be bad reasoning.
Lee Kai Wen (neither 'burb-dweller nor drug user)
What I said, of course, was precisely the opposite: that one might argue that modern society in its failure to respect sex was more delirious than sane. Re-read my post.
The reason censorious societies are so obsessed with sex is because it's forbidden
I'm not convinced this is true. Many things are forbidden; that doesn't ipso facto turn them into obsessions. Why do we assume it is true of sex?
Conversely, many people seem to obsess over things that aren't forbidden. Alcohol, cars, sports, money, status -- all these can be objects of obsession.
So I don't see any obvious connection between forbidding and obsessing.
treated as simply something natural.
Define 'natural' please. Even the Seven Deadlies (greed, pride, sloth, avarice, etc.) could be said to be 'natural' -- if what you mean is 'part of human nature'. In that case, I seriously doubt anyone considers sex 'unnatural'.
Unfortunately, two fundamentally broken philosophies still exist in our society
All you have done is re-state the original poster's claims without substance. 'My views are right. It's the other guy's views that are broken.'
I'm pretty sure, however, that, beyond their usefulness as epithets, you have little understanding of either puritanism or gnosticism.
Puritans (whom Americans used to call 'pilgrims' and praise as the founders of their country) seem to nowadays be more reviled as the purveyors of a system of sexual ethics which nobody much likes, even while few seem to understand what Puritan sexual ethics really were. If I were a Puritan (I'm not), I would probably be as offended as if I were a Jew constantly having to defend against caracatures of myself as a conniving, money-grabbing cheat.
'Gnosticism'. Did you have in mind Hermetic, Mandean, or Mannichaen? Classical or modern? Jungian or Kabbalistic?
Classical gnosticism, which I think is what you had in mind -- though you misrepresent even it -- championed a secret 'gnosis' or knowledge, roughly spiritual in nature. It gnosticism was inherently dualistic. Some strains, particularly those which syncretised Christianity and Judaism, held physical reality, created by the Demiurge, inimical to the search for gnosis. But the resulting approach took contradictory forms.
Some considered the physical world to be evil, and thus eschewed its pleasures and delights, developing a very aescetical praxis, in which they turned away from 'fleshly desires'.
Other gnostics, however, reasoned that the physical world, being 'unreal', could not be inimical to gnosis, and so hedonistically embraced its pleasures.
Probably more -- it's difficult to say; the sheer variety of ancient gnostics is huge -- neither denied nor particularly embraced physical pleasures.
In any case, you lay some heavy -- albeit unsubstantiated -- charges at the gnostics' feet. How, precisely, has the gnostic search for gnosis caused 'no end of pain, suffering, humiliation and torture'? Any modern gnostics out there who would care to respond to this?
All that aside, what you appear to be championing is a rather unsophisticated hedonism: Sex is good. Therefore whatever forbids sex is bad. Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. Therefore whatever increases pleasure is right. And whatever increases pain is wrong.
Most modern ethicists gave up on this approach to ethics about five minutes after they emerged from puberty.
Lee Kai Wen (who would rather examine arguments than parrot them)
My reply was to the comment that "blocking things totally out" of a child's life can cause "irreversible harm". Whether pornography and racism falls into this category is up to the individual parent or society, and falls outside the scope of my argument.
Lee Kai Wen
Those aren't illegal because they are immoral. They are illegal because they actually hurt other people
"Because they hurt people". Which, I gather, you consider wrong. Right?
Maybe you need to turn your own lightbulb up a notch.
Lee Kai Wen
You were doing great till you leaned too far forward and stumbled over your untied shoelaces.
There are, of course, many things parents "block out totally from the lives of their children", usually with rather positive effect.
My children are not allowed alcohol. My 13 year old daughter is not allowed to date, let alone have sex. They don't get to watch documentaries on setting up your own private meth lab, or sample illegal drugs. They don't get to knock over the local grocery store or shake down their friends for lunch money. They don't get to cheat on their homework. They aren't allowed to lie to an adult -- ever.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I do agree that governmental regulation is not a proper substitute for good parenting. But I think you'll find that, far from looking for ways to avoid their parental responsibilities, most of the parents who are concerned about such things are grasping for all the help they can get in fulfilling the responsibilities they already take very seriously. Torching strawmen will only get you burned.
Lee Kai Wen
Hear, hear! We need to do away with all morality-based laws. Meth? Crank? Horse? Barbies? Crack? Ludes? Well, personally I'm against 'em, but who am I to judge? Inner city youths need to make a living, too.
Rape? Incest? Kiddie porn? Spouse abuse? Horrible! Or, well, at least I think so. But I wouldn't want to be mistaken for a religious zealot.
And I would never dream of forcing my belief in, say, the immorality of murder down someone else's throat.
We all know that "morality" is just a code word for "religion", which makes morality in government unconstitutional.
Doesn't it?
Lee Kai Wen
We used to have a saying in Botswana: "The gorilla cannot see the ugliness of his own eyes." We are all the worst judges of our own failures and shortcomings.
Do a survey of peoples' attitudes toward their own sense of ethics, and I can tell you what you'll find: 95% will tell you that their own beliefs are fine -- the problem is the other guy.
And that's a conservative estimate.
Lee Kai Wen
This kind of mentality will prevent the formation of a sane society, one that is not afraid of sex and the human body
Or, one might argue a "sane" society is one in which people respected sex and understood its role, responsibilities and consequences, making modern society rather more delirious than sane.
First principles.
Lee Kai Wen
Two years of posting and still 89.5% Slashdot pure.
One could equally ask at what point certain genres of photographs stopped being "harmful to minors".
It all goes back to first principles. Those who believe that sex outside of a marital context is wrong will define material which teaches children otherwise as ipso facto harmful.
Don't go getting big-headed. Whatever /.-ers may think of themselves, they're still a fairly insignificant bump on the Consumer-o-meter.
(Yeah - like this'll get moderated up!)
Or not.
The /. moderation system is biased and useless at best. Counterproductive at worst. And weannies who post inane rants at 2 ruin the karma system for everyone.
The best approach is to leave your threshold set at 1 and decide for yourself what's useful.
This issue is simply yet another case of people creating their own problems.
If you don't want to pay for your entertainment, there's a broad body of public domain options available -- from literature to movies to music. The only way there's a problem here is if you insist that your only valid entertainment options are the small percentage of copyrighted works corporations are trying to charge money for.
If you don't want to pay for Stephen King, try Edgar Allen Poe. If you don't want to shell out money for U2, listen to Mozart. If you feel imposed upon when paying $8 for a ticket to the latest Jim Carrey flick, watch the Three Stooges. They're all better entertainment anyway.
What's a "healthier attitude towards sex", and who appointed you to define it?
Lee Kai Wen
Filtering software would certainly constitute a policy, but so would restricted library cards, adult supervision, or signs posted on the terminals.
More importantly, however, the law does NOT require libraries to restrict access. It only says those which don't will not receive state funding.
This reminds me of the whole arts funding debate a few years back. When the arts community insisted restricting funding was censorship they were laughed out of court.
Lee Kai Wen