>In truth, I've never heard a Christian attempt to say that climate denial is more aligned to a Christian worldview,
""God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours." - Ann Coulter.
I thought one of the fundamental aspects of modern empirical science is that, unlike a religion, it is ALWAYS open to revision and dispute BY BETTER SCIENCE.
FTFY.
Sorry, but political and money motivated denialism doesn't qualify as "better science".
>Maybe you shouldn't have bought a house with all those "features", if you didn't want them.
Well it's worth considering that neither the realtor nor the sales brochure made any mention of them, the closest being sidelong whispers about "additional security"...
>And it is not exactly rocket science either. DDT, mosquito nets and good draining will go a long way against malaria.
Mmm, DDT.... Sure, because generations of children born with massive birth defects is a much smaller problem than malaria right ? After all, it's black people whose gonna notice right ?
Fucking idiots... no DDT is NOT a solution. I may have had some sympathy if you said "short term DDT, eradicate it once, as soon as you have a malaria-free human population for one generation the mosquitos can't be infected and the problem is gone for good" - only that was tried in the past as well, it doesn't work. Large-scale DDT use produced DDT-resistent mosquitos, if anything they were WORSE !
I'd say it's simple: draftees should be honored, they didn't get a choice. Anybody who volunteers to go kill people deserve no respect at all in my book.
But I will still say the assholes who sent them deserve even less.
Granted I may be on the extreme side - but I grew up in a country mid-in a secret war that was fought with drafted soldiers - I know what it's like to live in a nation where 80% of the adult men I know are PTSD sufferers largely untreated (because the military taught them only faggots go to shrinks) who drink and beat their wives. Now of course, some would have been alcholohics and wife beaters anyway - but there's no discounting that the bush war (Angolan bush - nothing to do with the US presidents) made a lot more. I also don't think it's an excuse for their actions - they are responsible for what they do with the shit they were given, but that doesn't mean I don't hate the politicians who gave them the shit.
The interesting thing is that in 1992 when an electorate made up entirely of people who had fought in that war (and their wives) was asked whether to negotiate with "enemy" they'd been chosen to kill (in a time when "negotiate" meant - let them rule the country, we'll just discuss the system of government they get to use) they overwhelmingly (69%) voted for the peaceful coexistence and majority rule by the same people they had been shooting a few years before.
To put it otherwise... the vast majority of those drafted soldiers hated the war, didn't agree with it or what was being fought for. Even as they bought some of the propaganda, they still hated it, came back broken men whose consciences let them suffer to sleep for ever -and when they got the chance - voted to (basically) surrender.
I think you'll find the same pattern for every war- the vast majority of people who go will end up believing they never should have. A significant majority of the rest will be claiming how right their cause was - mostly to try and convince themselves that their actions wasn't as evil as they keep feeling it was... and a small minority will be convinced that they did a wonderful job. We can place the kind of value systems that allow ANY military action to ever be "a good deed" by the types of society they are associated with: honor, bravery, courage... these are the values that sociologies ascribe to a society that is barbaric, and they are the values that proud soldier embrace because only barbarians can be proud soldiers.
Yes, I know I'll get flamed (and likely modded way down) for that... bring it on, it won't make me wrong.
They should do it Ali G style. Go on debates with the other candidates and accuse them all of equine oral sex. The vast majority of accusations will be entirely accurate too - the only question is, how many of the candidates would flinch...
They've been doing that for years. When Bush invaded Iraq the price of fuel in South Africa jumped up 40% overnight. Food prices followed within the month. The lives of everybody in the country (a poor one for the most part) was made massively worse because a US president wanted to step out of his daddy's shadow. And not one of the people in South Africa has a vote or any other ability to have done anything about it, they didn't elect Bush but many of them starved because of his reckless warmongering. Since South Africa would last all of 30 seconds in a war against the USA - they couldn't even lobby their own government to protect their interests. I am quite sure that every human being in every country on earth now has lived through similiar stories (or the same one) of having their lives adversely affected by the government of an America they cannot vote for (or against).
>which makes it essentially certain that at least Africa invented actual democracy well before Europe.
Just to pick a minor nit. Consensus government is not democracy but a form of anarchism or libertarianism. Nearly all socialist-libertarians and certainly all anarchists believe that government by consensus is the only form that can be held as valid.
I honestly cannot remember, I read it in a book a few months ago - the scene stuck in my head but I can't remember the names involved. I'm sure a few smart google's will turn it up though.
>The Greeks also considered "demokratos" to be equivalent to anarchy.
That's a very ignorant statement. Mostly because there really wasn't such a society as "The greeks". The various greek cities were effectively independent city-states (known as Polis, plural Pollii) with very different cultures and political systems. Some were absolute monarchies, some were democracies (several variations on the theme though none had universal suffrage). About the only thing they had in common was language and religion - their political systems were as different as England and America - in fact, much more so in many cases. Oh and they regularly went to war on each other. Do not imagine for one second that the politics of Sparta and the politics of Athens had anything in common.
The monarchic Greeks indeed considered the democratic cities to be anarchies (and Plato wrote that monarchy is the ideal form of government while democracy is doomed to fall into chaos- but since he lived under one we must consider the possibility that he just wrote what the king would like to hear in a classic case of CYA - especially since his own mentor Socrates had gotten the death penalty for saying things that weren't popular).
So your statement is rather meaningless - much more interesting is how the people living in the democracies described their cities and how they ran them. Tellingly the democracies came with a set of basic behaviours deemed appropriate for a citizen in such a Polis - about how to respectfully getting along with your fellow citizens. The proper behavior for living in the Polis is "to be polite" - which is where the word came from. Those whose daily lives revolved around maintaining law and order in the democracies were the "men of the Polis" - from which we get the origins of modern "policemen" and those elected to govern a polis were Politicians.
Your history lesson is now concluded and you are slightly less ignorant.
> The vast majority of their older work is original.
What ?!?!?!?!
The vast majority of their older work is - if anything- MORE public domain based than their newer work. Stories like The Lion King and Lilo and Stitch at least in theory were original (some serious doubts about the former exist) but their older movies - hell ANYTHING with "classic" in the title are all based on public domain works. In fact no company in history has profited from the public domain as much as Disney - or spent as much to prevent ever having to contribute back to the pool from which they drew so much.
If your argument is that "earlier work" only refers to the short cartoons before Snow White then I suppose you're right - most of that was indeed original, but then there is a LOT less of that than most people think. By the time of the Golden Age of Cartoons the Disney Corporation was barely even involved in the market anymore - several other companies owned the market, the biggest being MGM and Warner Brothers.
>That said, Kodak also was instrumental in developing the digital camera, invented the *.psd image format
This is partly right, but not as simple. The censor at the heart of all digital cameras was invented by a Kodak employee - at a time when Kodak was among the largest patent holders in the world. The executives he showed his design to told him "Forget it, we make film not computer stuff". The result is very much photography's own version of the XEROX-PARC/APPLE saga - as Kodak didn't see the value of what their employee had built, failed to patent it and saw his design being given to all the competition.
Thus came the digital camera revolution - one reason why it had so many competitors so early on was that nobody owned a patent on the censor until it was too late to get one - mostly because the company where it was invented hadn't thought it worth the bother of applying for.
Even if your cynical you could say that if Kodak had foreseen a possible threat from digital they could have patented the censor simply to prevent digital cameras from being made at all.
There's a huge difference between "not paid well" (every good philosopher I ever met [and there's a fair few] or heard off take that as a given) and not being able to pursue that passion while making any living at all. If we relegate it all to the realm of "hobbies" then we lose too much.
I did a double-major in computer science and English Lit. I happen to love both. I am a writer AND a damn good programmer.
But you know what, all the most amazing programs I wrote (and there's probably a couple on your computer right now if you use a linux distribution), and the fortunes that some of my job-work make for the likes of AT&T (one of my customers. Add them all up, and they are worth LESS than even ONE word (even the word "the") in one of my stories.
But I can't write full time and still support myself and my family, so I write part time, I write less than I otherwise would - I write lesser QUALITY than I otherwise would (less time for research, less time for rewrites etc.)
Maybe I'd never sell like a Terry Pratchett or even a Stephanie Meyer does, but I honestly believe I could have written some stories that made a real difference in the world. I still will, but the difference I can make is an order of magnitude smaller than what I'd make if I was able to do it full-time. I don't bitch about not being paid enough, I make a fortune doing something I also love. But I could have done something more valuable to society, if I could have lived doing it.
Now what about those who do NOT have two passions they care about and who cannot do what I did ?
And if YOU having a comfortable standard of living is what you think matters - you won't value their contributions. If you think society progressing, and getting better, and having fewer people sleeping UNDER those bridges is what will allow it to survive in the long run - then it's the philosophers and poets you need.
There will always be people who can do the mundane stuff, but there will never be enough people who can think of the bigger picture.
The definition of value you use is exactly the one that capitalism uses. But value is sometimes more complex than that. The most valuable paintings in the world was made by a guy who in his entire life managed to sell ONE of them, to his own brother, for about the price of a loaf of bread. In the case of the arts (and sciences like philosophy) they have little capitalist percieved value because their output isn't really monetary. How do you put a price on an idea ?
But philosophers are the reason we have CONCEPTS like capitalism or socialism at all. They are the creators of our very ABILITY to have social discourse. How do you reward that ?
Poets (and their relatives like musicians - the vast majority who are not billionaires) are the expressions of our deepest desires, feelings, and "souls" (in a non-metaphysical sense).
These things have value beyond measure, societies that treated them well were longer lived, more stable, more peaceful and wealthier. Societies that didn't have consistently declined.
But how the hell do you work out what people will pay for that ? In fact the majority of people have no concept of the value of this (when last was a nobel-prize winning poet on the New York Times best-seller list ?) Capitalism defines "value" as "what people are willing to pay" and with that extremely narrow definition - supply and demand works great, but when you consider the value of things like arts, philosophy and social discourse the glaringly obvious truth is that the definition is woefully inadequate. They adjusted their definition to fit the limitations of their theory - they did not design their theory to fit the reality of a more plausible definition.
I never claimed I made it up. I did however upon reading it, agree with it, and I stated in my post that I wasn't talking about myself but about an opinion voiced from inside those protests.
You're supposed to be original when trying to understand somebody ELSE'S thinking now ?
And that's the problem right there. Artists, philosophers, lit majors and historians are by far the most valuable members of society. The single most accurate measurement of the stablity (and longevity) of any civilization is the prosperity of it's artists, poets, philosophers etc. The fact that these are the least valuable skills in the capitalist world is simply the most absolute proof you can find that the free market and it's supply/demand concept does NOT price human ability according to it's true value.
You know, all their lives people told these kids "go to university, get a degree or the only job you'll get is flipping burgers." So they went to university, spent a fortune and got in debt, studied and passed. Then they finished and tried to find work. Now you call them "entitled" because they don't want to flip burgers.
The park is indeed private property - the owners have given their permission and support to Occupy all along. In their frontpage demand that the park be cleared the New York Post even tries to talk around "respecting the rights of the owners to allow the protests" and then declares that the right should be trampled ANYWAY.
>Another example would be cars (automobiles for your Americans). All are basically a rectangular block on top of 4 wheels, with 2 or 4 doors. Yet you would have no problem identifying one zooming past you in a second or two.
Actually - that's pretty much not true anymore. My previous car was a Ford Fiesta, on many an occasion I would think "oh another ford Fiesta" while driving and realize as I got close enough to see the logo that it was in fact an Opel Corsa (I believe in the USA they are sold as Chevrolet) or a KIA picanto or any other 4-door compact. Their shape is all but entirely identical.
I now drive an Audi A3 and when I'm not close enough to see the logos I cannot distinguish it from any other 2-Dear semi-luxury car, Japanese, Korean, American or German.
In fact - your argument proves the opposite. Cars shapes are determined - above all - by the laws of aerodynamics. Those laws remain the same regardless of who designs which is why in any given generation most cars converge on the same rough shape - the shape that is - with current engineering skill - the most aerodynamic we can do. For any given class of car - that's the same shape. There is only one most aerodynamic shape for a sedan possible, only one for an SUV, only one for a 4x4 and only one for a compact. You can easily tell the class - but the maker - from shape and design ? No way - because form has to follow function and the function is constrained by the laws of physics that puts a natural limit on creativity. As technology improves the shapes change - but within a year or two everybody else has changed in the exact same way.
The same thing applies here - there are notable constraints on the design placed by what it has to do. It must be portable, maximize screen space, comfortable to work with, easy to rest on any surface etc. In fact the design follows inevitably from the purpose of the device - and all devices converge on it. Star Trek on a purely hypothetical level converged on the exact same design 30 years before the ipad came out.
As for your silly statements about popularity... did it every occur to you that perhaps Korean's don't have the celebrity obsession of Americans ? Samsung certainly doesn't have the kind of fanboism apple has - and thus there is no celebrity. We don't see interviews with their design head because Samsung's users are not "fans" - just people who chose a product that met their needs, they don't idolize the guy who drew the pictures it was made from. Apple has the same celebrity appeal as Angelina Jolie and the same slavish uncritical love from it's fans. Community theater actors may have no less talent, but they don't get followed around by the paparazzi. Now whether geek-celebrity as espoused by apple is something we should encourage or not is beside the point -but it is the reason why we never really hear from the designers in other companies. A little bit in Microsoft - but who is the chief UI designer for Oracle ? Who is the chief UI designer at google (whose interfaces I really like for the slick simplicity). Who is the brilliant designer that designed that slick and elegant interface for my Audi's radio system ? It's familiar to anybody whose used a car radio - yet massively advanced over the cheapo that came in my ford. Audi is a company noted for brilliant designs and ergonomics, but nowhere in the press do I read interviews with their designers either.
Celebrity is an American phenomenon, geek-Celebrity is mostly an Apple pheonomenon, that doesn't mean nobody else HAS people who do these jobs, just that those who do them at other companies don't get interviewed by rolling stone magazine.
Oh right, because the inevitable bullies giving him hell will do wonders for his social skills and won't leave him either suicidally depressed or alternatively leave him with lifelong anger-control issues right ?
I mean who wants him to grow up to be the next Steven Hawking when the school system is perfect to grow him into the next Ted Kazinsky instead ?
> It is possible for Fox News to air something that is true, and there have been instances in evidence of this happening, as hard as that is to believe. So the fact that they said it does not conclusively prove that it is false
No, the fact that Fox cancelled Firefly is conclusive proof that they are always wrong about everything for eternity.
>That's a pretty damn general statement. Keep in mind that a big chunk of conservatives are highly libertarian, and probably support free speech more than anybody. It also ignores the highly intolerant portion of the left, who call for rules against certain types of 'hate' speech. Be more specific with your criticisms.
Right because I was clearly talking about fiscal conservatives... oh wait - no I was very obviously talking about social conservatives. By definition a social conservative is somebody who believes the state should enforce morality as legality.
Look at the bottom of your banknotes. Which "God" you think they are talking about ? The faith may not be the official government but I'm not aware of a single person in that government who does not at least CLAIM to subscribe to this faith - nor do I think any person who doesn't would have the slightest chance at being elected there.
Face it, the Christian faith IS the de-facto rulers of America even if not the de-jure.
That said - I was merely talking about majority population - not political setup. Most "Budhist" nations are not ruled by the Budhist faith either - they are merely countries where Budhists are the majority (and ergo - a non-Budhist would have a very hard time getting elected there).
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>In truth, I've never heard a Christian attempt to say that climate denial is more aligned to a Christian worldview,
""God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours." - Ann Coulter.
Coulter at least CLAIMS to be a Christian.
I thought one of the fundamental aspects of modern empirical science is that, unlike a religion, it is ALWAYS open to revision and dispute BY BETTER SCIENCE.
FTFY.
Sorry, but political and money motivated denialism doesn't qualify as "better science".
In the meantime they tell prospective buyers: "Our neighborhood guarantees that no old men will shout 'get off my lawn you lousy kids'".
They don't mention that this is because any lousy kids who venture on a lawn would get blown to smithereens...
>Maybe you shouldn't have bought a house with all those "features", if you didn't want them.
Well it's worth considering that neither the realtor nor the sales brochure made any mention of them, the closest being sidelong whispers about "additional security"...
>And it is not exactly rocket science either. DDT, mosquito nets and good draining will go a long way against malaria.
Mmm, DDT....
Sure, because generations of children born with massive birth defects is a much smaller problem than malaria right ?
After all, it's black people whose gonna notice right ?
Fucking idiots... no DDT is NOT a solution. I may have had some sympathy if you said "short term DDT, eradicate it once, as soon as you have a malaria-free human population for one generation the mosquitos can't be infected and the problem is gone for good" - only that was tried in the past as well, it doesn't work. Large-scale DDT use produced DDT-resistent mosquitos, if anything they were WORSE !
I'd say it's simple: draftees should be honored, they didn't get a choice. Anybody who volunteers to go kill people deserve no respect at all in my book.
But I will still say the assholes who sent them deserve even less.
Granted I may be on the extreme side - but I grew up in a country mid-in a secret war that was fought with drafted soldiers - I know what it's like to live in a nation where 80% of the adult men I know are PTSD sufferers largely untreated (because the military taught them only faggots go to shrinks) who drink and beat their wives. Now of course, some would have been alcholohics and wife beaters anyway - but there's no discounting that the bush war (Angolan bush - nothing to do with the US presidents) made a lot more.
I also don't think it's an excuse for their actions - they are responsible for what they do with the shit they were given, but that doesn't mean I don't hate the politicians who gave them the shit.
The interesting thing is that in 1992 when an electorate made up entirely of people who had fought in that war (and their wives) was asked whether to negotiate with "enemy" they'd been chosen to kill (in a time when "negotiate" meant - let them rule the country, we'll just discuss the system of government they get to use) they overwhelmingly (69%) voted for the peaceful coexistence and majority rule by the same people they had been shooting a few years before.
To put it otherwise ... the vast majority of those drafted soldiers hated the war, didn't agree with it or what was being fought for. Even as they bought some of the propaganda, they still hated it, came back broken men whose consciences let them suffer to sleep for ever -and when they got the chance - voted to (basically) surrender.
I think you'll find the same pattern for every war- the vast majority of people who go will end up believing they never should have. A significant majority of the rest will be claiming how right their cause was - mostly to try and convince themselves that their actions wasn't as evil as they keep feeling it was... and a small minority will be convinced that they did a wonderful job. We can place the kind of value systems that allow ANY military action to ever be "a good deed" by the types of society they are associated with: honor, bravery, courage ... these are the values that sociologies ascribe to a society that is barbaric, and they are the values that proud soldier embrace because only barbarians can be proud soldiers.
Yes, I know I'll get flamed (and likely modded way down) for that... bring it on, it won't make me wrong.
They should do it Ali G style. Go on debates with the other candidates and accuse them all of equine oral sex. The vast majority of accusations will be entirely accurate too - the only question is, how many of the candidates would flinch...
They've been doing that for years. When Bush invaded Iraq the price of fuel in South Africa jumped up 40% overnight. Food prices followed within the month.
The lives of everybody in the country (a poor one for the most part) was made massively worse because a US president wanted to step out of his daddy's shadow.
And not one of the people in South Africa has a vote or any other ability to have done anything about it, they didn't elect Bush but many of them starved because of his reckless warmongering.
Since South Africa would last all of 30 seconds in a war against the USA - they couldn't even lobby their own government to protect their interests.
I am quite sure that every human being in every country on earth now has lived through similiar stories (or the same one) of having their lives adversely affected by the government of an America they cannot vote for (or against).
>which makes it essentially certain that at least Africa invented actual democracy well before Europe.
Just to pick a minor nit. Consensus government is not democracy but a form of anarchism or libertarianism. Nearly all socialist-libertarians and certainly all anarchists believe that government by consensus is the only form that can be held as valid.
I honestly cannot remember, I read it in a book a few months ago - the scene stuck in my head but I can't remember the names involved. I'm sure a few smart google's will turn it up though.
>The Greeks also considered "demokratos" to be equivalent to anarchy.
That's a very ignorant statement. Mostly because there really wasn't such a society as "The greeks". The various greek cities were effectively independent city-states (known as Polis, plural Pollii) with very different cultures and political systems. Some were absolute monarchies, some were democracies (several variations on the theme though none had universal suffrage). About the only thing they had in common was language and religion - their political systems were as different as England and America - in fact, much more so in many cases. Oh and they regularly went to war on each other. Do not imagine for one second that the politics of Sparta and the politics of Athens had anything in common.
The monarchic Greeks indeed considered the democratic cities to be anarchies (and Plato wrote that monarchy is the ideal form of government while democracy is doomed to fall into chaos- but since he lived under one we must consider the possibility that he just wrote what the king would like to hear in a classic case of CYA - especially since his own mentor Socrates had gotten the death penalty for saying things that weren't popular).
So your statement is rather meaningless - much more interesting is how the people living in the democracies described their cities and how they ran them. Tellingly the democracies came with a set of basic behaviours deemed appropriate for a citizen in such a Polis - about how to respectfully getting along with your fellow citizens. The proper behavior for living in the Polis is "to be polite" - which is where the word came from. Those whose daily lives revolved around maintaining law and order in the democracies were the "men of the Polis" - from which we get the origins of modern "policemen" and those elected to govern a polis were Politicians.
Your history lesson is now concluded and you are slightly less ignorant.
> The vast majority of their older work is original.
What ?!?!?!?!
The vast majority of their older work is - if anything- MORE public domain based than their newer work. Stories like The Lion King and Lilo and Stitch at least in theory were original (some serious doubts about the former exist) but their older movies - hell ANYTHING with "classic" in the title are all based on public domain works.
In fact no company in history has profited from the public domain as much as Disney - or spent as much to prevent ever having to contribute back to the pool from which they drew so much.
If your argument is that "earlier work" only refers to the short cartoons before Snow White then I suppose you're right - most of that was indeed original, but then there is a LOT less of that than most people think.
By the time of the Golden Age of Cartoons the Disney Corporation was barely even involved in the market anymore - several other companies owned the market, the biggest being MGM and Warner Brothers.
>That said, Kodak also was instrumental in developing the digital camera, invented the *.psd image format
This is partly right, but not as simple. The censor at the heart of all digital cameras was invented by a Kodak employee - at a time when Kodak was among the largest patent holders in the world. The executives he showed his design to told him "Forget it, we make film not computer stuff".
The result is very much photography's own version of the XEROX-PARC/APPLE saga - as Kodak didn't see the value of what their employee had built, failed to patent it and saw his design being given to all the competition.
Thus came the digital camera revolution - one reason why it had so many competitors so early on was that nobody owned a patent on the censor until it was too late to get one - mostly because the company where it was invented hadn't thought it worth the bother of applying for.
Even if your cynical you could say that if Kodak had foreseen a possible threat from digital they could have patented the censor simply to prevent digital cameras from being made at all.
There's a huge difference between "not paid well" (every good philosopher I ever met [and there's a fair few] or heard off take that as a given) and not being able to pursue that passion while making any living at all.
If we relegate it all to the realm of "hobbies" then we lose too much.
I did a double-major in computer science and English Lit. I happen to love both. I am a writer AND a damn good programmer.
But you know what, all the most amazing programs I wrote (and there's probably a couple on your computer right now if you use a linux distribution), and the fortunes that some of my job-work make for the likes of AT&T (one of my customers. Add them all up, and they are worth LESS than even ONE word (even the word "the") in one of my stories.
But I can't write full time and still support myself and my family, so I write part time, I write less than I otherwise would - I write lesser QUALITY than I otherwise would (less time for research, less time for rewrites etc.)
Maybe I'd never sell like a Terry Pratchett or even a Stephanie Meyer does, but I honestly believe I could have written some stories that made a real difference in the world.
I still will, but the difference I can make is an order of magnitude smaller than what I'd make if I was able to do it full-time.
I don't bitch about not being paid enough, I make a fortune doing something I also love. But I could have done something more valuable to society, if I could have lived doing it.
Now what about those who do NOT have two passions they care about and who cannot do what I did ?
And if YOU having a comfortable standard of living is what you think matters - you won't value their contributions.
If you think society progressing, and getting better, and having fewer people sleeping UNDER those bridges is what will allow it to survive in the long run - then it's the philosophers and poets you need.
There will always be people who can do the mundane stuff, but there will never be enough people who can think of the bigger picture.
The definition of value you use is exactly the one that capitalism uses. But value is sometimes more complex than that. The most valuable paintings in the world was made by a guy who in his entire life managed to sell ONE of them, to his own brother, for about the price of a loaf of bread.
In the case of the arts (and sciences like philosophy) they have little capitalist percieved value because their output isn't really monetary. How do you put a price on an idea ?
But philosophers are the reason we have CONCEPTS like capitalism or socialism at all. They are the creators of our very ABILITY to have social discourse. How do you reward that ?
Poets (and their relatives like musicians - the vast majority who are not billionaires) are the expressions of our deepest desires, feelings, and "souls" (in a non-metaphysical sense).
These things have value beyond measure, societies that treated them well were longer lived, more stable, more peaceful and wealthier. Societies that didn't have consistently declined.
But how the hell do you work out what people will pay for that ? In fact the majority of people have no concept of the value of this (when last was a nobel-prize winning poet on the New York Times best-seller list ?)
Capitalism defines "value" as "what people are willing to pay" and with that extremely narrow definition - supply and demand works great, but when you consider the value of things like arts, philosophy and social discourse the glaringly obvious truth is that the definition is woefully inadequate.
They adjusted their definition to fit the limitations of their theory - they did not design their theory to fit the reality of a more plausible definition.
I never claimed I made it up. I did however upon reading it, agree with it, and I stated in my post that I wasn't talking about myself but about an opinion voiced from inside those protests.
You're supposed to be original when trying to understand somebody ELSE'S thinking now ?
And that's the problem right there. Artists, philosophers, lit majors and historians are by far the most valuable members of society. The single most accurate measurement of the stablity (and longevity) of any civilization is the prosperity of it's artists, poets, philosophers etc.
The fact that these are the least valuable skills in the capitalist world is simply the most absolute proof you can find that the free market and it's supply/demand concept does NOT price human ability according to it's true value.
You know, all their lives people told these kids "go to university, get a degree or the only job you'll get is flipping burgers."
So they went to university, spent a fortune and got in debt, studied and passed. Then they finished and tried to find work.
Now you call them "entitled" because they don't want to flip burgers.
The park is indeed private property - the owners have given their permission and support to Occupy all along. In their frontpage demand that the park be cleared the New York Post even tries to talk around "respecting the rights of the owners to allow the protests" and then declares that the right should be trampled ANYWAY.
>Another example would be cars (automobiles for your Americans). All are basically a rectangular block on top of 4 wheels, with 2 or 4 doors. Yet you would have no problem identifying one zooming past you in a second or two.
Actually - that's pretty much not true anymore. My previous car was a Ford Fiesta, on many an occasion I would think "oh another ford Fiesta" while driving and realize as I got close enough to see the logo that it was in fact an Opel Corsa (I believe in the USA they are sold as Chevrolet) or a KIA picanto or any other 4-door compact.
Their shape is all but entirely identical.
I now drive an Audi A3 and when I'm not close enough to see the logos I cannot distinguish it from any other 2-Dear semi-luxury car, Japanese, Korean, American or German.
In fact - your argument proves the opposite. Cars shapes are determined - above all - by the laws of aerodynamics. Those laws remain the same regardless of who designs which is why in any given generation most cars converge on the same rough shape - the shape that is - with current engineering skill - the most aerodynamic we can do.
For any given class of car - that's the same shape. There is only one most aerodynamic shape for a sedan possible, only one for an SUV, only one for a 4x4 and only one for a compact.
You can easily tell the class - but the maker - from shape and design ? No way - because form has to follow function and the function is constrained by the laws of physics that puts a natural limit on creativity.
As technology improves the shapes change - but within a year or two everybody else has changed in the exact same way.
The same thing applies here - there are notable constraints on the design placed by what it has to do. It must be portable, maximize screen space, comfortable to work with, easy to rest on any surface etc.
In fact the design follows inevitably from the purpose of the device - and all devices converge on it. Star Trek on a purely hypothetical level converged on the exact same design 30 years before the ipad came out.
As for your silly statements about popularity... did it every occur to you that perhaps Korean's don't have the celebrity obsession of Americans ? Samsung certainly doesn't have the kind of fanboism apple has - and thus there is no celebrity. We don't see interviews with their design head because Samsung's users are not "fans" - just people who chose a product that met their needs, they don't idolize the guy who drew the pictures it was made from. Apple has the same celebrity appeal as Angelina Jolie and the same slavish uncritical love from it's fans.
Community theater actors may have no less talent, but they don't get followed around by the paparazzi.
Now whether geek-celebrity as espoused by apple is something we should encourage or not is beside the point -but it is the reason why we never really hear from the designers in other companies. A little bit in Microsoft - but who is the chief UI designer for Oracle ? Who is the chief UI designer at google (whose interfaces I really like for the slick simplicity). Who is the brilliant designer that designed that slick and elegant interface for my Audi's radio system ? It's familiar to anybody whose used a car radio - yet massively advanced over the cheapo that came in my ford. Audi is a company noted for brilliant designs and ergonomics, but nowhere in the press do I read interviews with their designers either.
Celebrity is an American phenomenon, geek-Celebrity is mostly an Apple pheonomenon, that doesn't mean nobody else HAS people who do these jobs, just that those who do them at other companies don't get interviewed by rolling stone magazine.
Oh right, because the inevitable bullies giving him hell will do wonders for his social skills and won't leave him either suicidally depressed or alternatively leave him with lifelong anger-control issues right ?
I mean who wants him to grow up to be the next Steven Hawking when the school system is perfect to grow him into the next Ted Kazinsky instead ?
> It is possible for Fox News to air something that is true, and there have been instances in evidence of this happening, as hard as that is to believe. So the fact that they said it does not conclusively prove that it is false
No, the fact that Fox cancelled Firefly is conclusive proof that they are always wrong about everything for eternity.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
>That's a pretty damn general statement. Keep in mind that a big chunk of conservatives are highly libertarian, and probably support free speech more than anybody. It also ignores the highly intolerant portion of the left, who call for rules against certain types of 'hate' speech. Be more specific with your criticisms.
Right because I was clearly talking about fiscal conservatives... oh wait - no I was very obviously talking about social conservatives. By definition a social conservative is somebody who believes the state should enforce morality as legality.
Look at the bottom of your banknotes. Which "God" you think they are talking about ?
The faith may not be the official government but I'm not aware of a single person in that government who does not at least CLAIM to subscribe to this faith - nor do I think any person who doesn't would have the slightest chance at being elected there.
Face it, the Christian faith IS the de-facto rulers of America even if not the de-jure.
That said - I was merely talking about majority population - not political setup. Most "Budhist" nations are not ruled by the Budhist faith either - they are merely countries where Budhists are the majority (and ergo - a non-Budhist would have a very hard time getting elected there).