>Well, a meat cleaver is a lot harder to go on a killing spree with than a gun. If you tried attacking a crowd of people with a meat cleaver chances are a lot of them would simply run away from you with a few possibly jumping you from behind, "massacre" over. You stand 30 ft. away and empty a few clips in their general direction and the situation is a bit trickier from their point of view.
If I wanted to go on a killing spree, six months at my local archery club would have me quite capable of hitting most human-sized targets from a rooftop (shooting downward is even easier)... I can check a bow into luggage for an international flight with no clearance or pre-checks or permits. I can make one from a piece of bendy wood an length of string.
The point is - people who want to be violent can always find a way of doing so. A gun makes it a little easier, but that has never stopped anybody. Besides... if I want a REALLY messy rampage, running in to the middle of a crowd wielding two chainsaws sound pretty bloody horrible to me... and if I just swing it round a bit, nobody's going to try and jump me either...
That's the trouble with gun banning laws (even if they DID realistically stop anybody from getting a gun)... you can't stop violence by removing the TOOLS of violence... anymore than you can stop bad sushi by banning chop-sticks. You MAY be able to reduce the predisposition toward violence among citizens though.
>Agreed. I don't think either topic in general reaches the level of 'taboo'. That said, claiming that 'creating life' is the taboo subject ignores both that the content we're talking about is casual sex that doesn't result in reproduction, and that the intent is to limit childrens access to the content (since it's undesirable physiologically and financially for 14 year olds to be pregnant).
Talk about intent failing due to ignorance then... study after study have proven that the younger teenagers (And this is doubly true of girls) start masturbating the OLDER they tend to lose their virginity. Girls who own vibrators and (are encouraged by their parents to) watch porn tend to wait even LONGER.
Simple really - if you know how to deal with your OWN hormones, you don't HAVE to rely on boys to do it for you... and then you can actually choose who you have sex with on more than just "I'm horny right now and I can't control the need" because you've previously learned how to deal with that need on your own, it's not so overwhelming to be near orgasm when you've been past it a few thousand times already.
In short... basically it seems to have the OPPOSITE affect. Honest sex-ed that admits sex is fun, often engaged in for that purpose and can be almost as MUCH fun by yourself is known to reduce pregnancy and STD rates, denial and "condoms break" and "never ever tell the poor mite she has a clitoris" is known to lead to MASSIVE spikes in pregnancy and STD rates...
Of course adding insult to injury for the moral brigade... during the Bush years' insistence on repeating the old abstinence-only sex-ed model (despite it's persistent faillure in the past) it was found by one study that more than 70% of the teenagers who abstained from penetrative sex as a result of those programs practised both oral and anal sex on a regular basis, usually without protection. "I'm saving myself for marriage, fuck me in the ass instead"...
What can I say, I guess the moral brigade has an easy task - they want to stop teenagers from having sex, well that shouldn't be so hard. it's not like teenagers are horny after all... oh wait... remember what it was LIKE to have puberty's hormone levels ? Best thing we can do is give teenagers information, and ACCESS TO RELIEF WITHOUT GUILT... and then let them make their own informed choices.
How many more times must society SEE how every other approach fails disastrously before we figure this out ?
Well now, I've read it, you haven't. The man did his research, and Doctorow has a good writing style for it. He entirely breaks from the fictional flow for about one in three chapters, and gives a very solid, and accurate description of core parts of economic theory, gradually building up as they will all ultimately impact on the plot. It almost reminds me of the Science-of-Discworld books, where even chapters are story, odd chapters are non-fiction genuine science... well lectures.
Here it's not quite so much lecturing (it would make the book rather unappetizing) but that is it's structure, and it's very clear that every single piece of writing on the economy is well researched, solid and factually correct. You can of course dissagree with his biases, he is a clear socialist and much of what he FAULTS in the system, you may degree is how it should be - he will REALLY piss of the libertarians since he seems to think the purpose of the economy is to serve the population (as opposed to the the other way around as in typical capitalism, or nobody at all as in libertarianism) but while you may disagree about what he thinks is good and bad things, this is a conclusion on philosophical grounds. The facts underneath about how he economy WORKS, what determines inflation rates, how does arbitrage work... those facts do not change. Regardless of your political and economic leanings, right now arbitrage works a certain way, and a factually correct description of that process will remain factually correct whether it says "yay for arbitrage" or "therefore arbitrage is a form of parasitic economic activity"...
So yes, debate his conclusions if you want - but unless you've actually READ the novel, you don't GET to tell the person who DOES that a novel about economics is NOT accurate in it's research about economics.
The real irony is this. Forgetting the pejorative claim - you description of what sci-fi SHOULD be used for... is EXACTLY what I described FTW as BEING.
I said specifically it's NOT science fiction, there is nothing fictional about the science there - no technology or ideas that aren't already reality right now. The book isn't ABOUT science, it's not even using science to create a setting per se... it's a book about economics, quite a socialist one at that. About sweatshops, investors and unions. Maybe 3 paragraphs in the entire book actually happen inside games. Everything else, every single event in there is set in the slums of India and China - and is about players OUTSIDE the game. It's no more science fiction than "The guild" is.
>SF means science-fiction. >sci-fi is a pejorative term. It is used for stories that only use science-fiction as a decor. >As I can see from article, "For the win" is science-fiction, not sci-fi.
Who the hell decided that? You DO realize this is a VERY recent development, well I've been reading (and writing) Science Fiction for close on 3 decades now... and I've ALWAYS prefered "sci-fi" for no other reason than this: it's MUCH nicer to SAY. It's pronounceable, a word. SF sounds like you got a lisp and a stutter and are trying to say "yes". In the end, I usually say science fiction - and I usually abbreviate that as "sci-fi" and know for a fact that both Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke did the same so frankly your snobbery does not impress me much cos I got bigger snobs on my side.
>That's not really correct. The cost of copying ideas has always been pretty much zero, That is irrelevant since ideas in themselves have no value. It's only in their realization that they gain value. Right now somebody is trying to change US law to allow for patenting plot ideas - so that he could charge any author for writing a book based on those plot summaries... which is ridiculous. While the old "only 7 stories" joke is not quite true, it has some truth - in that all stories share certain key elements, else they wouldn't BE stories. Allow the ideas to be patented... and it would be all the hazards of the software patent system exponentially worsened... I've had many good story ideas in my life, but I'm far from a successful author. I'm busy with a novel now, and I may finish it (if I do - it gets a CC license) but that's after ten years of trying and failing and learning - AND degree in literature. Writing is hard and when I first decided to be one, I knew it was a hard life (part of why I chose NOT to do it full time). If I could patent all those ideas I had but lacked the skill to realize, I would probably be rich (the movie Underworld used many ideas I had previously had, hell it even used the same NAME for one of them that I had wanted to use - that just proves that any good idea will come up in the minds of many people individually - that's worthless, the REALIZATION of those ideas is what matters). I would have loved to be rich that way - but frankly, I wouldn't deserve to be. If I do finish my book, and it makes money - then I deserve that money, I've earned it through many years of effort to gain the ability to realize my idea. If I could get rich of the idea, why would I (or anybody) ever GO through the effort involved in the realization ? That's why ideas should never be held to have intrinsic value.
>Furthermore, it's long been known what attributes are necessary for a free market to work, in the sense of producing optimal allocation of goods and resources (optimal in the sense economists mean when they say something is optimal). Economists know exactly what happens to a free market when the cost of production approaches or reaches zero. You no longer get optimal resource allocation.
Well it's always been a largely theoretical thing. Roddenberry suggested that the invention of matter replication technology would in fact lead to the end of the free market system all-together, in fact to the end of money. In the absence of scarcity we can imagine a society able to function without a value-meter like money, and still have a meritocratic promotion of effort, though the rewards would be different to money or luxury (as these are no inherently equally available to all). For that matter, money is already a fully intangible reward, it's more an idea now than a thing, has been for a very long time. Why would replacing one intangible reward with another be hard ?
>And it has long been known how you can fix that. There are two general ways. The first is to take the market out of the picture. Some entity, most likely the government, would fund the production of new works, and anyone would be free to copy them. The advantage of this is that consumers get the goods for their marginal cost (zero or near zero).
You're forgetting option 3: let it happen and call it progress. Or option 4 - change the system altogether or option 5... you get the point I'm making.
>The disadvantage is that the government decides what works get produced. Not good, but not altogether different from the system of patronage (and incredible censorship in combination) that persisted throughout most of human history. It's worth remembering that every single one of Shakespeare's plays would be considered to be copyright infringement if written under today's laws - yet we remember old Will, and not the people he copied from, because his versions were so much better. When you study him - you also find entire passages added purely for the purposes of pleasing t
A few points of import. The goldfarmers in the novel never steal accounts. They just play the game, and build up large banks of gold to sell. While all WoW players know that a significant part of the banks that the goldsellers sell were acquired through account-theft, these are not the people that FTW is about.
I don't think you can call playing the game 18 hours a day a crime. The fact that they subsequently sell the gold - well that's only a crime in the concept of breaking a EULA... which is not something I have EVER heard a/. poster speaking AGAINST.
Furthermore, the world in the book is a bit different, it's set a few years in the future - and the games are no longer MEANT to be a closed economy there. There are official channels of gold trade, where real stockbrokers invest in game gold much as they would invest in any other currency. The goldfarmers in the book use black-markets though because they are excluded from these official channels of trade (which is in fact the game-companies' largest source of income).
I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say - this is not a a novel about thieves who live of other people's hard work. It's a novel about hard workers being exploited and demanding a better life. It uses the MMORPG world as a millieu but it's really a book about economics and a scathing attack on the world of sweatshop workers - in all it's forms. It includes solid chapters on economic fundamentals, inflation (and how the kind of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe came to be) how it works, and how often it doesn't.
In short, it's a very, very good book. As SIFI I wouldn't call it groundbreaking, it writes about technology that's every day life NOW. There are some minor practical changes to the games concept in the time of the book but nothing that all gamers aren't expecting now. It's not science fiction, it's a much more a kind of social activism fiction, which happens to use a technological mileu. Mind you, I didn't consider Little-Brother to be science fiction either, 99% of the technologies in THAT novel are things that you can download right this second. What it was, was an excellent novel that happens to also teach the fundamentals of crypto, privacy and security systems.
So in short, I really LIKE Doctorow's niche, he uses his fields of expertise, to set novels with a much wider social message - that's to me what good writing is all about.
>You make a lot of claims, but despite numerous searches on my part (on all sorts of wild conspiracy ideas about the Iraq War), I've never found one record anywhere to back any of the claims I've seen, including these. If you have any of that evidence, please, present it. It should be trivial on your part, if it was a front page scandal.
Honestly I can't remember - but I read it in one of the notable British papers a few years ago (I believe the Guardian but I could be wrong). Maybe if you ignore wild conspiracy theories and search for actual news you may find something ? I wish I could remember the names... it will come to me - and I'll post them.
>And for the record, my vote for President of the United States would never go to a man who lies to his constituents.
>Anti-war folks like to blame the administration for not knowing facts that came to light months or years after the decision to go to war was made.
If only that were true... we have proof that the Bush administration actively MANUFACTURED A cause for war. We have the records of meetings between the CIA and MI5 where the CIA request (and MI5 agrees) to cook intel to make it look like there is a solid case that Iraq has WMD's... True the records of these meetings only came out a long time after the war started - it came to light later. But that's the EVIDENCE of the lie coming to light later - I think saying those who TOLD the lie couldn't know about it before-hand is a bit silly ?
It's clear from said records that the CIA agents in that meeting were there under ORDERS from then President Bush. He had tasked them to find him an excuse for an invasion - or create one if they couldn't- and they were meeting with MI5 to request their help in that act of fiction.
The MI5 agents and the commanders who approved it were prosecuted and punished. It was a major scandal in Britain and frontpage news for weeks... nobody on the US side was punished - and nobody even thought of maybe IMPEACHING the president who MANUFACTURED FALSE INTELLIGENCE to excuse a war that the vast majority of the population did NOT support (evidence: two years into the Iraq war Mister Bush's approval ratings not only hit his personal all-time low, but the lowest of any president in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES). I kid you not... Bush managed to remain president unimpeached and unchallenged while he was LESS liked than Abraham Lincoln in the South the day before the civil war started !
This in the country that impeached one president for spying on his political enemies and another for getting a blowjob... you know somehow I think (and I always thought Clinton was a bit of a so-so president) but all politicians lie... personally I'd choose the guy who lies about a blowjob over the guy who lies to start a war any day.
[quote]Ouch... That's why you generally want a central bank that acts as a kind of brake on that sort of stuff. So those traders end up losing money.;)[/quote]
We've got one - they failed then - it led to a bunch of new regulations. On the upside, there hasn't been a repeat. But it also brought out how human nature acts -which is often overlooked.
There was ZERO recovery in prices as the rand recovered. Even though import costs came down again - local shop prices STAYED where they had been, and the shops were happy to now just write a much bigger margin. They've been going up ever since. With the occasional spike when international events made import costs rise above average (like the Iraq war starting).
But basically - when your currency value recovers from an undervalued position - your prices do NOT improve. That means retailers get benefit from that recovery - but the entire rest of the economy never does, because the effective value of the currency (that which it can buy) is devalued PERMANENTLY.
And up to the judgement of the jury in the specific case. Beastiality and incest are also pretty infamous crimes but the jury found that Larry Flynt was NOT guilty of Libel when he accused Fallwell of same - because it was utterly obvious from the text that these weren't serious accusations - they were accusations made purely to insult.
That is an entirely subjective question -and one we cannot answer without having read the text. When some kid calls you a "fag" in a gaming session - nobody would take that as a serious accusation of homosexuality. Context and choice of words are incredibly important in assessing that. We have none of that - all we have is HER accusers explanation - which would obviously be biased to show the terminology in the worst possible light.
Right now there is a major hit song on the Afrikaans airwaves, a very tongue-in-cheek rap song in which the singer addresses a fictional competitor who "believes he is cooler than me" and then uses a whole string of funny metaphors to explain why the person is wrong. The singer is notorious for dirty lyrics... one line reads (my translations) "I grab babes / you grab little kids"... yet I doubt ANYBODY thinks he is seriously accusing whoever inspired the song (or rather the entire stereotype he is attacking) of pedophilia- instead he is simply trying to insult the person as much as possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRzFqW4Xh2k Juvenile humor indeed, but - the person we're talking about here IS a juvenile !
We have absolutely NO reason to believe that the page wasn't using the same kind of "accusation purely for humorous insult" that we find in this song - if it can be parody in a bad rap song (and watch the linked video, this is even parody of rap) - why NOT on a mock myspace page ? I'd say considering typical adult uptight responses to such humor, and the age of the kid involved that the odds are BETTER for this explanation. I can't prove it- since I haven't seen the page, but you can't prove it WASN'T like that either.
What I have however just done is given you a very clear example of an accusation of pedophilia that is obvious parody and meant only to be insulting, not as a serious accusation. The existence of such an example proves we must consider the possibility that indeed that is what she did. We don't KNOW however, and those who DO know aren't saying - so we're speculating.
The fact of the matter that we DO have however -is that her accusers have TESTIFIED that nobody who knew the person had taken it seriously, that is tantamount to "no reasonable informed person would have believed the claims made" - and the law in the US makes it clear that, that by itself makes it NOT libel. It makes it, in fact, protected parody.
We can debate for hours about how GOOD the parody was, but without being able to see it - we're speculating with no way to actually inform ourselves and even if we COULD see it - judgement of humor is a highly subjective matter. A great many people find bash.org to be tasteless, racist and horrible... I find it hillarious - you can say that about just about every joke in the world ever told. The point is that your response is uninformed. I get on my own high horse about false accusations of pedophilia and how horrible it is to live in a guilty-even-after-proven-innocent society like we do - and many of my past posts were about that, but in this case we have absolutely NO grounds for thinking she actually DID that.
Right, and that has never been used to, oh I don't know, excuse corporal punishment (it was still legal when I was in school) on somebody for correcting a teacher who was factually incorrect... guess I'm the only one then.
>>these days nobody GET'S a comfortable retirement anymore.
>No, they gotta plan and work for it.
Except that's not true. What happens these days is people spend their lives saving... and then get to retirement age to discover their savings have lost value faster than their investments grew - and all the money they put away for all those years can't pay the bills for 5 years, let alone the 20 they were planning on.
>>Fundamental to Maltus's law is the reality that there are always too few resources... that being true isn't the absolutely STUPIDEST thing we can EVER do to let the little there is be concentrated among an elite few ?
>Thing is, it's more difficult than ever to actually liquidate those amounts of resources without their 'value' dropping substantially.
I think we spoke past each other. I was referring to physical survival resources - particularly food and the assets to produce them rather than capital per se.
The thing is - no matter how much money there is in the economy - the value in it doesn't change from day to day (year to year and decade to decade yes, but no day to day). There's X amount of products on the market. They have a value of Y. Z is the amount of money in the world. As long as X and Z is the same things are fairly okay... If Z however is increased... X doesn't increase, all that it means is that the money becomes worth less. Money measures value but doesn't HAVE value. Keep it up enough, and you end up with Zimbabwe, but pretty much every country is doing the exact same thing - only slower. And of course, if you want to see something REALLY ugly - try taking a peek at what happens when Z is signifanctly LOWER than X... because there is no faster way to destroy an economy and impoverish everyone than deflation... You'd think keeping X and Z at roughly the same value wouldn't be THAT difficult.
I'd say, that considering this, allowing currency trade is one of the stupidest ideas we ever had... you're now trading and influencing the amount of Z, in a way that is entirely disconnected from the value X...
I've lived through what that can do. A few years ago, a number of investors worldwide decided to cash in via South African Rand. So they dumped it... lots... in a week they drove it from a fairly realistic (at the time) R5.50 to the dollar to under R14 a dollar.
Our export industries appeared to boom (their rates suddenly looked WAY cheaper in dollar) so they got some business they may not otherwise have... except the money they got for it was worthless of course. Our import industries suffered, price of computers went up by 150% for example, food did the same (even locally produced food needs to be moved around - primarily with foreign oil).
It was the worst period of internal inflation in South Africa's history and massively impoverished the population. Of course as it hit the low, the speculators stocked up - but nice and slowly this time - so it didn't spike again. Wait six months and normal trade has it recovered - and you've made a killing... while your actions have driven thousands of people to bankruptcy and left hundreds of thousands suddenly starving.
And people wonder why we're not impressed with capitalism.
[quote]Your idea won't work with mandatory education.[/qoute]
Except that it can, and has, in several non-western mandatory education systems it worked like that for thousands of years. That pretty much debunks the entire rest of your post as well.
[quote]Right, by who's morality? Yours? Self-disclipine is the ability to choose long-term goals over short-term instinct satisfaction; this, on the other hand, souds more like what Pratchett called "a whip in the soul" in "Interesting Times".[/quote]
Well that is not what it's intended to sound like. I am sorry if I wasn't clear. This about respecting other peoples lives, property and dignity, nothing more. It's CERTAINLY not about respecting tradition or authority.
As for whose morality ? Your own. But build on basic principles that are important for society as a whole - respect for other people, their property, their lives. The golden rule and the preference of non-violent solutions. Everything else is (rightfully) personal and relative - and I have an issue with schools trying to teach more than that.
[quote]Do the right thing because you are afraid of being caught, or because you're a Nietschean ubermensch and have chosen doing the right thing as part of your identity, or because you think you'll go to Hell if you won't, or because you want to change the world, or whatever! These are all good reasons to do the right thing.[/quote]
Sadly - none of them are I think. They deny that right and wrong are important in their own right.
[quote]But saying "because it's the right thing to do" sounds like wishy-washy circular reasoning to me, and suggests that you haven't really bothered to think it through. You certainly aren't going to convince anyone else to do likewise with it.[/quote]
I completely disagree. I believe that we can all draw "am I harming somebody else" line -the same line that, in theory, forms the basis of the legal system in any free country. Teaching people - never harm another, because that's wrong, it makes you a bad person - and the fewer bad people we have the better off we all are (or as I stated above - in a golden rule manner, that they right way to treat others is with the same dignity and respect you would want to receive from them) and then letting them make up their own minds on the rest... that's useful.
[quote]After all, people who question the rules will also question why they should give a rat's ass of something being right or wrong. It's better to have a good answer ready.[/quote]
No, I should teach them to be able to come up with a good answer themselves. It's no use merely encouraging them to question - they have to learn how to come up with good answers to. That is just as true of rules. Teach people to respect other people - and make up the rest for themselves, and we'll have a much more dynamic system. To answer your Pratchett reference with one of my own: "I'm sure we can pull together sir" Said De Word. "Oh I do hope not" replied Vetinary, "pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all sorts of directions, it's the only way to make progress"
I didn't blame the USA... I blamed the entire western world.
And the French revolution didn't 'spread a bit' - it changed the face of politics globally more massively than any prior event in human history. Moreso than the roman empire. Just because it wasn't covered in your syllabis doesn't mean it didn't happen. I can imagine it not being much in the US syllabis because frankly - you were the one country not really affected.
On the other side of the world it directly led to the Cape Colony becoming a British Colony (it had been dutch... but the Dutch monarchy at the time got overthrown by a revolution).
Most of the countries in Europe had revolutions. Unlike France itself though, most returned to monarchy later - but this time as constitutional rather than absolute monarchies.
On the final bit- nope, I was being utterly serious. And they SHOULD blame us because it is NOT just the actions of their government. It's the actions of our corporations. Their government allowing those corporations to act this way, for the sake of self-enrichment is something they will blame their government for. The corporations doing it... is something the parent countries of those corporations will be blamed for (at least, if they have any sense of blaming whose responsible).
And finally - yes, they owe a pretty major debt of blame to us, the citizens of those country, who live of their suffering. The best I can do for them - is refuse to buy sweatshop labor. No nikes' for me, no CK jeans. I buy locally made clothes, locally grown food. Sometimes it costs a lot more, often a lot less (because locally made clothing doesn't charge me for a label) - but I don't buy anything "made in china". Because I want to do a little bit - to make it MORE profitable to pay those workers properly - by sending a message, pay them properly and people like me become customers instead of haters of your brand.
[quote]Yeah, but these are teenagers we're talking about. Is there such a thing as a socially responsible, intelligent teenager? Yes. And they will find socially responsible, intelligent ways to influence society. I do not want society adjusting to the desires of the average teenager. Which wouldn't work, anyway. No matter what society is like, most teenagers will disapprove of it and their place in it.[/quote]
And thank goodness for that ! That's the only thing LEFT in society that leads to some critique and questioning, that means maybe some of them will not vote for whoever their dad voted for simply BECAUSE he did. It's practically the only remaining force for change in the world - teenagers lacking the power ot effect that change is what tempers it, as they grow older though - they retain the desire and gain the power - and can now make more mature decisions about how to use it. But if you quell the desire...
Oddly, MY biggest complaint about todays teenagers are that they AREN'T unhappy enough with the status quo. Most of them are simply following in the consumerist footsteps of their parents. They care only about the latest nikes... at least in my day we had grunge, we had Alanis.. we THOUGHT about things, we got sad about things, we CARED...
Kurt Cobain... Hannah Montanah... you tell me which one was the better artist, who inspired the better state of mind. My vote is firmly on Cobain.
Self discipline is about removing BOTH the carrots AND the stick - and instead teaching right and wrong itself. Carrots and sticks are hardly the only ways to teach those. There are entire cultures built around teaching such self-discipline, entire societies have formed and thrived in this manner.
Just because it's radically different from anything you've ever encountered, doesn't mean it's impossible and doesn't mean it's not massively better.
Done correctly, the disruptor becomes the most valuable member of the class instead - he becomes the soundboard against which the teacher can bounce his ideas. Never forget that 9/10 times the most disruptive kid in a class is the smartest one there - nothing makes a kid more likely to be bored out of his skull and genuinely disruptive than if he understood everything in the syllabys before he even got into the class... years before even.
I should know - I WAS that kid.
When I got to university... oddly, I was every lecturer's favorite student. Suddenly questioning, disrupting, disagreeing with the lesson plan was deemed a GOOD thing -and alone of my classmates, I got there knowing how to DO that. I got consistent A's by basically always ensuring that in my exams I argued in favor of a theory the lecturer had stated a personal dissagreement with and ensuring my arguments were sound and well researched. In University - this got me A's - lecturers LIKED being challenged.
Why is it that in school.. the same ability had gotten me punished ? If school is really THAT different from University then it's the schools that need to change - after all, their supposed to prepare you FOR university - and this skill, which every academic I know considers the single most important skill any university student ought should have when he graduates, is JUST as important for the kid who chooses to become a car mechanic or a plumber... but none of those EVER get taught that.
Which is detrimental to society as a whole, because they STILL get to vote.
I personally believe the single best model for a school in all of human history, is also the very FIRST one. Before it was redesigned first by religion (monastic influence - hell "chancellor" used to mean senior monk in a monastry) and then by the German industrial revolution to create little soldier-sausage-factories.
Now let's go look back at Plato's academy, the first university, the first school really... where every student was also EXPECTED to teach. Where your marks were based not on your understanding of some previously decided syllabus - but on your contribution to the collective knowledge of the group.
Perhaps the model as-is would not work today where trade-skills are a crucial part of education, but we could definitely learn some things from it, incorporate some of it's best elements into our lessons. I am reminded of a movie I really loved, even if it was a straight-to-video-flop called "Accepted" - though it never mentions it - it is essentially about a group of students who for various reasons never make it to college, so they start their own - and run it on essentially a modern version of the academy model, which works really well. Of course a movie isn't a practical guide to how to do things, but it can certainly be a valid source of inspiration for such - and this one, I think a lot of people need to watch and then give serious thought to the possibilities presented.
An interesting case in point. Rare as they are - there are "schools for the gifted" all over the world - they ALL operate using this model... I stand by my belief that there is no need for you to be exceptionally gifted to benefit from it, all students would become better and more productive members of society if taught in this manner than they are now.
The LAST thing we need our schools producing is people with the do-as-your-told mindsets of soldiers and factory workers. In case you haven't noticed, very very few of your students will do those things for a living.
>Schools must be able to respond to actions that effect them by disciplining or excluding the student. That's independent of any civil or criminal actions brought against the students by the libelled individuals, and the police and prosecution services.
Ipso facto students MUST be able to respond to school actions they feel are wrong, excessive or unfair. One way to do so if through critical speech, parody, writing etc. In my day - we on occasion had school strikes. Where we felt the school was truly behaving wrongly, we would simply after break all go down to the rugby field, sit on the stands and refuse to return to class until our grievances were heard, and we had an assurance that the situation in question would change.
In this manner we forced our school to switch from a demerit system of punishment to a system of detention - as we believed demerits to be unfair (you can't just take your punishment, learn and move on... now you are permanently punished for silly little things).
Yeah it disrupted a few classes here and there, then again in my entire high school career it happened all off... 3 times I think.
It was an extreme measure we used when we believed all other attempts at communicating the students position had failed. On those occasions - the teachers LISTENED to us... and would be forced to negotiate the situation - so we could actually have SOME say in how a good third of our LIVES were run.
The fact that nobody was ever punished, and that the school (and believe me I went to a school so authoritarian that it makes the average midwestern american high school look like a roman orgy) actually looked upon the practice amiably as proof of teaching involved students - is my single least bad memory of my entire school career. There was a mutual respect there. The teachers recognized and respected that for cases we felt were extreme, we had a right to recourse to extreme reactions - like protests, and that these rare disruptions of classes were over-all MORE productive to teaching as it allowed those grievances to be addressed, resolved and not interfere with teaching PERMANENTLY.
Those differences are not essentially relevant. The law says it's not libel if a reasonable person wouldn't believe the claims. It's clear from the testimony that nobody is saying a reasonable person WOULD. It's clear that the school had no fear that the principle may face genuine believe of the claims - and instead were concerned about the claims ridiculing him and breaking down his authority.
Whatever ELSE this may be - it's definitely parody. How funny was it ? How ridiculous the choice of wording ? Those are subjective things which we cannot judge as we haven't seen the text - but when the accusers have testified that they don't think anybody believed the claims - that makes it not libel.
Well then... here's the weird bit... walk up the stairs in the inn next time, Strath is set BEFORE Darrowshire, you'll find the still alive little Pamela on the second story, with her little doll...
Slashdot Mirror
>Well, a meat cleaver is a lot harder to go on a killing spree with than a gun. If you tried attacking a crowd of people with a meat cleaver chances are a lot of them would simply run away from you with a few possibly jumping you from behind, "massacre" over. You stand 30 ft. away and empty a few clips in their general direction and the situation is a bit trickier from their point of view.
If I wanted to go on a killing spree, six months at my local archery club would have me quite capable of hitting most human-sized targets from a rooftop (shooting downward is even easier)... I can check a bow into luggage for an international flight with no clearance or pre-checks or permits.
I can make one from a piece of bendy wood an length of string.
The point is - people who want to be violent can always find a way of doing so. A gun makes it a little easier, but that has never stopped anybody. Besides... if I want a REALLY messy rampage, running in to the middle of a crowd wielding two chainsaws sound pretty bloody horrible to me... and if I just swing it round a bit, nobody's going to try and jump me either...
That's the trouble with gun banning laws (even if they DID realistically stop anybody from getting a gun) ... you can't stop violence by removing the TOOLS of violence... anymore than you can stop bad sushi by banning chop-sticks. You MAY be able to reduce the predisposition toward violence among citizens though.
>Agreed. I don't think either topic in general reaches the level of 'taboo'. That said, claiming that 'creating life' is the taboo subject ignores both that the content we're talking about is casual sex that doesn't result in reproduction, and that the intent is to limit childrens access to the content (since it's undesirable physiologically and financially for 14 year olds to be pregnant).
Talk about intent failing due to ignorance then... study after study have proven that the younger teenagers (And this is doubly true of girls) start masturbating the OLDER they tend to lose their virginity. Girls who own vibrators and (are encouraged by their parents to) watch porn tend to wait even LONGER.
Simple really - if you know how to deal with your OWN hormones, you don't HAVE to rely on boys to do it for you... and then you can actually choose who you have sex with on more than just "I'm horny right now and I can't control the need" because you've previously learned how to deal with that need on your own, it's not so overwhelming to be near orgasm when you've been past it a few thousand times already.
In short... basically it seems to have the OPPOSITE affect. Honest sex-ed that admits sex is fun, often engaged in for that purpose and can be almost as MUCH fun by yourself is known to reduce pregnancy and STD rates, denial and "condoms break" and "never ever tell the poor mite she has a clitoris" is known to lead to MASSIVE spikes in pregnancy and STD rates...
Of course adding insult to injury for the moral brigade... during the Bush years' insistence on repeating the old abstinence-only sex-ed model (despite it's persistent faillure in the past) it was found by one study that more than 70% of the teenagers who abstained from penetrative sex as a result of those programs practised both oral and anal sex on a regular basis, usually without protection.
"I'm saving myself for marriage, fuck me in the ass instead"...
What can I say, I guess the moral brigade has an easy task - they want to stop teenagers from having sex, well that shouldn't be so hard. it's not like teenagers are horny after all... oh wait... remember what it was LIKE to have puberty's hormone levels ?
Best thing we can do is give teenagers information, and ACCESS TO RELIEF WITHOUT GUILT... and then let them make their own informed choices.
How many more times must society SEE how every other approach fails disastrously before we figure this out ?
Well now, I've read it, you haven't.
The man did his research, and Doctorow has a good writing style for it. He entirely breaks from the fictional flow for about one in three chapters, and gives a very solid, and accurate description of core parts of economic theory, gradually building up as they will all ultimately impact on the plot. It almost reminds me of the Science-of-Discworld books, where even chapters are story, odd chapters are non-fiction genuine science... well lectures.
Here it's not quite so much lecturing (it would make the book rather unappetizing) but that is it's structure, and it's very clear that every single piece of writing on the economy is well researched, solid and factually correct. You can of course dissagree with his biases, he is a clear socialist and much of what he FAULTS in the system, you may degree is how it should be - he will REALLY piss of the libertarians since he seems to think the purpose of the economy is to serve the population (as opposed to the the other way around as in typical capitalism, or nobody at all as in libertarianism) but while you may disagree about what he thinks is good and bad things, this is a conclusion on philosophical grounds. The facts underneath about how he economy WORKS, what determines inflation rates, how does arbitrage work... those facts do not change. Regardless of your political and economic leanings, right now arbitrage works a certain way, and a factually correct description of that process will remain factually correct whether it says "yay for arbitrage" or "therefore arbitrage is a form of parasitic economic activity"...
So yes, debate his conclusions if you want - but unless you've actually READ the novel, you don't GET to tell the person who DOES that a novel about economics is NOT accurate in it's research about economics.
The real irony is this.
Forgetting the pejorative claim - you description of what sci-fi SHOULD be used for... is EXACTLY what I described FTW as BEING.
I said specifically it's NOT science fiction, there is nothing fictional about the science there - no technology or ideas that aren't already reality right now.
The book isn't ABOUT science, it's not even using science to create a setting per se... it's a book about economics, quite a socialist one at that. About sweatshops, investors and unions.
Maybe 3 paragraphs in the entire book actually happen inside games. Everything else, every single event in there is set in the slums of India and China - and is about players OUTSIDE the game.
It's no more science fiction than "The guild" is.
>SF means science-fiction.
>sci-fi is a pejorative term. It is used for stories that only use science-fiction as a decor.
>As I can see from article, "For the win" is science-fiction, not sci-fi.
Who the hell decided that? You DO realize this is a VERY recent development, well I've been reading (and writing) Science Fiction for close on 3 decades now... and I've ALWAYS prefered "sci-fi" for no other reason than this: it's MUCH nicer to SAY. It's pronounceable, a word. SF sounds like you got a lisp and a stutter and are trying to say "yes".
In the end, I usually say science fiction - and I usually abbreviate that as "sci-fi" and know for a fact that both Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke did the same so frankly your snobbery does not impress me much cos I got bigger snobs on my side.
>That's not really correct. The cost of copying ideas has always been pretty much zero,
That is irrelevant since ideas in themselves have no value. It's only in their realization that they gain value.
Right now somebody is trying to change US law to allow for patenting plot ideas - so that he could charge any author for writing a book based on those plot summaries... which is ridiculous. While the old "only 7 stories" joke is not quite true, it has some truth - in that all stories share certain key elements, else they wouldn't BE stories. Allow the ideas to be patented... and it would be all the hazards of the software patent system exponentially worsened...
I've had many good story ideas in my life, but I'm far from a successful author. I'm busy with a novel now, and I may finish it (if I do - it gets a CC license) but that's after ten years of trying and failing and learning - AND degree in literature. Writing is hard and when I first decided to be one, I knew it was a hard life (part of why I chose NOT to do it full time).
If I could patent all those ideas I had but lacked the skill to realize, I would probably be rich (the movie Underworld used many ideas I had previously had, hell it even used the same NAME for one of them that I had wanted to use - that just proves that any good idea will come up in the minds of many people individually - that's worthless, the REALIZATION of those ideas is what matters).
I would have loved to be rich that way - but frankly, I wouldn't deserve to be. If I do finish my book, and it makes money - then I deserve that money, I've earned it through many years of effort to gain the ability to realize my idea. If I could get rich of the idea, why would I (or anybody) ever GO through the effort involved in the realization ?
That's why ideas should never be held to have intrinsic value.
>Furthermore, it's long been known what attributes are necessary for a free market to work, in the sense of producing optimal allocation of goods and resources (optimal in the sense economists mean when they say something is optimal). Economists know exactly what happens to a free market when the cost of production approaches or reaches zero. You no longer get optimal resource allocation.
Well it's always been a largely theoretical thing. Roddenberry suggested that the invention of matter replication technology would in fact lead to the end of the free market system all-together, in fact to the end of money. In the absence of scarcity we can imagine a society able to function without a value-meter like money, and still have a meritocratic promotion of effort, though the rewards would be different to money or luxury (as these are no inherently equally available to all). For that matter, money is already a fully intangible reward, it's more an idea now than a thing, has been for a very long time.
Why would replacing one intangible reward with another be hard ?
>And it has long been known how you can fix that. There are two general ways. The first is to take the market out of the picture. Some entity, most likely the government, would fund the production of new works, and anyone would be free to copy them. The advantage of this is that consumers get the goods for their marginal cost (zero or near zero).
You're forgetting option 3: let it happen and call it progress. Or option 4 - change the system altogether or option 5 ... you get the point I'm making.
>The disadvantage is that the government decides what works get produced.
Not good, but not altogether different from the system of patronage (and incredible censorship in combination) that persisted throughout most of human history. It's worth remembering that every single one of Shakespeare's plays would be considered to be copyright infringement if written under today's laws - yet we remember old Will, and not the people he copied from, because his versions were so much better.
When you study him - you also find entire passages added purely for the purposes of pleasing t
Personally, I've always prefered scifi myself, but seriously - we all knew what I meant :P and I didn't even use my OWN favorite term.
A few points of import. The goldfarmers in the novel never steal accounts. They just play the game, and build up large banks of gold to sell. While all WoW players know that a significant part of the banks that the goldsellers sell were acquired through account-theft, these are not the people that FTW is about.
I don't think you can call playing the game 18 hours a day a crime. The fact that they subsequently sell the gold - well that's only a crime in the concept of breaking a EULA... which is not something I have EVER heard a /. poster speaking AGAINST.
Furthermore, the world in the book is a bit different, it's set a few years in the future - and the games are no longer MEANT to be a closed economy there. There are official channels of gold trade, where real stockbrokers invest in game gold much as they would invest in any other currency. The goldfarmers in the book use black-markets though because they are excluded from these official channels of trade (which is in fact the game-companies' largest source of income).
I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say - this is not a a novel about thieves who live of other people's hard work. It's a novel about hard workers being exploited and demanding a better life. It uses the MMORPG world as a millieu but it's really a book about economics and a scathing attack on the world of sweatshop workers - in all it's forms.
It includes solid chapters on economic fundamentals, inflation (and how the kind of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe came to be) how it works, and how often it doesn't.
In short, it's a very, very good book. As SIFI I wouldn't call it groundbreaking, it writes about technology that's every day life NOW. There are some minor practical changes to the games concept in the time of the book but nothing that all gamers aren't expecting now. It's not science fiction, it's a much more a kind of social activism fiction, which happens to use a technological mileu.
Mind you, I didn't consider Little-Brother to be science fiction either, 99% of the technologies in THAT novel are things that you can download right this second. What it was, was an excellent novel that happens to also teach the fundamentals of crypto, privacy and security systems.
So in short, I really LIKE Doctorow's niche, he uses his fields of expertise, to set novels with a much wider social message - that's to me what good writing is all about.
>You make a lot of claims, but despite numerous searches on my part (on all sorts of wild conspiracy ideas about the Iraq War), I've never found one record anywhere to back any of the claims I've seen, including these. If you have any of that evidence, please, present it. It should be trivial on your part, if it was a front page scandal.
Honestly I can't remember - but I read it in one of the notable British papers a few years ago (I believe the Guardian but I could be wrong). Maybe if you ignore wild conspiracy theories and search for actual news you may find something ? I wish I could remember the names... it will come to me - and I'll post them.
>And for the record, my vote for President of the United States would never go to a man who lies to his constituents.
Aaah, so you don't vote then ?
>Anti-war folks like to blame the administration for not knowing facts that came to light months or years after the decision to go to war was made.
If only that were true... we have proof that the Bush administration actively MANUFACTURED A cause for war. We have the records of meetings between the CIA and MI5 where the CIA request (and MI5 agrees) to cook intel to make it look like there is a solid case that Iraq has WMD's...
True the records of these meetings only came out a long time after the war started - it came to light later. But that's the EVIDENCE of the lie coming to light later - I think saying those who TOLD the lie couldn't know about it before-hand is a bit silly ?
It's clear from said records that the CIA agents in that meeting were there under ORDERS from then President Bush. He had tasked them to find him an excuse for an invasion - or create one if they couldn't- and they were meeting with MI5 to request their help in that act of fiction.
The MI5 agents and the commanders who approved it were prosecuted and punished. It was a major scandal in Britain and frontpage news for weeks... nobody on the US side was punished - and nobody even thought of maybe IMPEACHING the president who MANUFACTURED FALSE INTELLIGENCE to excuse a war that the vast majority of the population did NOT support (evidence: two years into the Iraq war Mister Bush's approval ratings not only hit his personal all-time low, but the lowest of any president in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES). I kid you not... Bush managed to remain president unimpeached and unchallenged while he was LESS liked than Abraham Lincoln in the South the day before the civil war started !
This in the country that impeached one president for spying on his political enemies and another for getting a blowjob... you know somehow I think (and I always thought Clinton was a bit of a so-so president) but all politicians lie... personally I'd choose the guy who lies about a blowjob over the guy who lies to start a war any day.
[quote]Ouch... That's why you generally want a central bank that acts as a kind of brake on that sort of stuff. So those traders end up losing money. ;)[/quote]
We've got one - they failed then - it led to a bunch of new regulations. On the upside, there hasn't been a repeat. But it also brought out how human nature acts -which is often overlooked.
There was ZERO recovery in prices as the rand recovered. Even though import costs came down again - local shop prices STAYED where they had been, and the shops were happy to now just write a much bigger margin. They've been going up ever since. With the occasional spike when international events made import costs rise above average (like the Iraq war starting).
But basically - when your currency value recovers from an undervalued position - your prices do NOT improve. That means retailers get benefit from that recovery - but the entire rest of the economy never does, because the effective value of the currency (that which it can buy) is devalued PERMANENTLY.
And up to the judgement of the jury in the specific case. Beastiality and incest are also pretty infamous crimes but the jury found that Larry Flynt was NOT guilty of Libel when he accused Fallwell of same - because it was utterly obvious from the text that these weren't serious accusations - they were accusations made purely to insult.
Now see my other post here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1674788&cid=32467582 - where I show you how we have no grounds to believe this was any thing different.
That is an entirely subjective question -and one we cannot answer without having read the text.
When some kid calls you a "fag" in a gaming session - nobody would take that as a serious accusation of homosexuality. Context and choice of words are incredibly important in assessing that. We have none of that - all we have is HER accusers explanation - which would obviously be biased to show the terminology in the worst possible light.
Right now there is a major hit song on the Afrikaans airwaves, a very tongue-in-cheek rap song in which the singer addresses a fictional competitor who "believes he is cooler than me" and then uses a whole string of funny metaphors to explain why the person is wrong. The singer is notorious for dirty lyrics... one line reads (my translations)
"I grab babes / you grab little kids"... yet I doubt ANYBODY thinks he is seriously accusing whoever inspired the song (or rather the entire stereotype he is attacking) of pedophilia- instead he is simply trying to insult the person as much as possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRzFqW4Xh2k
Juvenile humor indeed, but - the person we're talking about here IS a juvenile !
We have absolutely NO reason to believe that the page wasn't using the same kind of "accusation purely for humorous insult" that we find in this song - if it can be parody in a bad rap song (and watch the linked video, this is even parody of rap) - why NOT on a mock myspace page ? I'd say considering typical adult uptight responses to such humor, and the age of the kid involved that the odds are BETTER for this explanation.
I can't prove it- since I haven't seen the page, but you can't prove it WASN'T like that either.
What I have however just done is given you a very clear example of an accusation of pedophilia that is obvious parody and meant only to be insulting, not as a serious accusation. The existence of such an example proves we must consider the possibility that indeed that is what she did. We don't KNOW however, and those who DO know aren't saying - so we're speculating.
The fact of the matter that we DO have however -is that her accusers have TESTIFIED that nobody who knew the person had taken it seriously, that is tantamount to "no reasonable informed person would have believed the claims made" - and the law in the US makes it clear that, that by itself makes it NOT libel. It makes it, in fact, protected parody.
We can debate for hours about how GOOD the parody was, but without being able to see it - we're speculating with no way to actually inform ourselves and even if we COULD see it - judgement of humor is a highly subjective matter. A great many people find bash.org to be tasteless, racist and horrible... I find it hillarious - you can say that about just about every joke in the world ever told.
The point is that your response is uninformed. I get on my own high horse about false accusations of pedophilia and how horrible it is to live in a guilty-even-after-proven-innocent society like we do - and many of my past posts were about that, but in this case we have absolutely NO grounds for thinking she actually DID that.
Right, and that has never been used to, oh I don't know, excuse corporal punishment (it was still legal when I was in school) on somebody for correcting a teacher who was factually incorrect... guess I'm the only one then.
It's okay, I lol'd
Which part of "non-western" didn't you understand ?
True the school systems of Japan was martial - but not like WE think of them.
>>these days nobody GET'S a comfortable retirement anymore.
>No, they gotta plan and work for it.
Except that's not true. What happens these days is people spend their lives saving... and then get to retirement age to discover their savings have lost value faster than their investments grew - and all the money they put away for all those years can't pay the bills for 5 years, let alone the 20 they were planning on.
>>Fundamental to Maltus's law is the reality that there are always too few resources... that being true isn't the absolutely STUPIDEST thing we can EVER do to let the little there is be concentrated among an elite few ?
>Thing is, it's more difficult than ever to actually liquidate those amounts of resources without
their 'value' dropping substantially.
I think we spoke past each other. I was referring to physical survival resources - particularly food and the assets to produce them rather than capital per se.
The thing is - no matter how much money there is in the economy - the value in it doesn't change from day to day (year to year and decade to decade yes, but no day to day). There's X amount of products on the market. They have a value of Y. Z is the amount of money in the world. As long as X and Z is the same things are fairly okay...
If Z however is increased... X doesn't increase, all that it means is that the money becomes worth less. Money measures value but doesn't HAVE value. Keep it up enough, and you end up with Zimbabwe, but pretty much every country is doing the exact same thing - only slower.
And of course, if you want to see something REALLY ugly - try taking a peek at what happens when Z is signifanctly LOWER than X... because there is no faster way to destroy an economy and impoverish everyone than deflation...
You'd think keeping X and Z at roughly the same value wouldn't be THAT difficult.
I'd say, that considering this, allowing currency trade is one of the stupidest ideas we ever had... you're now trading and influencing the amount of Z, in a way that is entirely disconnected from the value X...
I've lived through what that can do. A few years ago, a number of investors worldwide decided to cash in via South African Rand. So they dumped it... lots... in a week they drove it from a fairly realistic (at the time) R5.50 to the dollar to under R14 a dollar.
Our export industries appeared to boom (their rates suddenly looked WAY cheaper in dollar) so they got some business they may not otherwise have... except the money they got for it was worthless of course.
Our import industries suffered, price of computers went up by 150% for example, food did the same (even locally produced food needs to be moved around - primarily with foreign oil).
It was the worst period of internal inflation in South Africa's history and massively impoverished the population. Of course as it hit the low, the speculators stocked up - but nice and slowly this time - so it didn't spike again.
Wait six months and normal trade has it recovered - and you've made a killing... while your actions have driven thousands of people to bankruptcy and left hundreds of thousands suddenly starving.
And people wonder why we're not impressed with capitalism.
[quote]Your idea won't work with mandatory education.[/qoute]
Except that it can, and has, in several non-western mandatory education systems it worked like that for thousands of years. That pretty much debunks the entire rest of your post as well.
[quote]Right, by who's morality? Yours? Self-disclipine is the ability to choose long-term goals over short-term instinct satisfaction; this, on the other hand, souds more like what Pratchett called "a whip in the soul" in "Interesting Times".[/quote]
Well that is not what it's intended to sound like. I am sorry if I wasn't clear. This about respecting other peoples lives, property and dignity, nothing more. It's CERTAINLY not about respecting tradition or authority.
As for whose morality ? Your own. But build on basic principles that are important for society as a whole - respect for other people, their property, their lives. The golden rule and the preference of non-violent solutions.
Everything else is (rightfully) personal and relative - and I have an issue with schools trying to teach more than that.
[quote]Do the right thing because you are afraid of being caught, or because you're a Nietschean ubermensch and have chosen doing the right thing as part of your identity, or because you think you'll go to Hell if you won't, or because you want to change the world, or whatever! These are all good reasons to do the right thing.[/quote]
Sadly - none of them are I think. They deny that right and wrong are important in their own right.
[quote]But saying "because it's the right thing to do" sounds like wishy-washy circular reasoning to me, and suggests that you haven't really bothered to think it through. You certainly aren't going to convince anyone else to do likewise with it.[/quote]
I completely disagree. I believe that we can all draw "am I harming somebody else" line -the same line that, in theory, forms the basis of the legal system in any free country. Teaching people - never harm another, because that's wrong, it makes you a bad person - and the fewer bad people we have the better off we all are (or as I stated above - in a golden rule manner, that they right way to treat others is with the same dignity and respect you would want to receive from them) and then letting them make up their own minds on the rest... that's useful.
[quote]After all, people who question the rules will also question why they should give a rat's ass of something being right or wrong. It's better to have a good answer ready.[/quote]
No, I should teach them to be able to come up with a good answer themselves. It's no use merely encouraging them to question - they have to learn how to come up with good answers to. That is just as true of rules. Teach people to respect other people - and make up the rest for themselves, and we'll have a much more dynamic system.
To answer your Pratchett reference with one of my own:
"I'm sure we can pull together sir" Said De Word.
"Oh I do hope not" replied Vetinary, "pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all sorts of directions, it's the only way to make progress"
I didn't blame the USA ... I blamed the entire western world.
And the French revolution didn't 'spread a bit' - it changed the face of politics globally more massively than any prior event in human history. Moreso than the roman empire. Just because it wasn't covered in your syllabis doesn't mean it didn't happen. I can imagine it not being much in the US syllabis because frankly - you were the one country not really affected.
On the other side of the world it directly led to the Cape Colony becoming a British Colony (it had been dutch... but the Dutch monarchy at the time got overthrown by a revolution).
Most of the countries in Europe had revolutions. Unlike France itself though, most returned to monarchy later - but this time as constitutional rather than absolute monarchies.
On the final bit- nope, I was being utterly serious. And they SHOULD blame us because it is NOT just the actions of their government. It's the actions of our corporations. Their government allowing those corporations to act this way, for the sake of self-enrichment is something they will blame their government for. The corporations doing it... is something the parent countries of those corporations will be blamed for (at least, if they have any sense of blaming whose responsible).
And finally - yes, they owe a pretty major debt of blame to us, the citizens of those country, who live of their suffering. The best I can do for them - is refuse to buy sweatshop labor. No nikes' for me, no CK jeans. I buy locally made clothes, locally grown food. Sometimes it costs a lot more, often a lot less (because locally made clothing doesn't charge me for a label) - but I don't buy anything "made in china".
Because I want to do a little bit - to make it MORE profitable to pay those workers properly - by sending a message, pay them properly and people like me become customers instead of haters of your brand.
[quote]Yeah, but these are teenagers we're talking about. Is there such a thing as a socially responsible, intelligent teenager? Yes. And they will find socially responsible, intelligent ways to influence society. I do not want society adjusting to the desires of the average teenager. Which wouldn't work, anyway. No matter what society is like, most teenagers will disapprove of it and their place in it.[/quote]
And thank goodness for that ! That's the only thing LEFT in society that leads to some critique and questioning, that means maybe some of them will not vote for whoever their dad voted for simply BECAUSE he did. It's practically the only remaining force for change in the world - teenagers lacking the power ot effect that change is what tempers it, as they grow older though - they retain the desire and gain the power - and can now make more mature decisions about how to use it.
But if you quell the desire...
Oddly, MY biggest complaint about todays teenagers are that they AREN'T unhappy enough with the status quo. Most of them are simply following in the consumerist footsteps of their parents. They care only about the latest nikes... at least in my day we had grunge, we had Alanis.. we THOUGHT about things, we got sad about things, we CARED...
Kurt Cobain... Hannah Montanah ... you tell me which one was the better artist, who inspired the better state of mind. My vote is firmly on Cobain.
Self discipline is about removing BOTH the carrots AND the stick - and instead teaching right and wrong itself. Carrots and sticks are hardly the only ways to teach those. There are entire cultures built around teaching such self-discipline, entire societies have formed and thrived in this manner.
Just because it's radically different from anything you've ever encountered, doesn't mean it's impossible and doesn't mean it's not massively better.
Done correctly, the disruptor becomes the most valuable member of the class instead - he becomes the soundboard against which the teacher can bounce his ideas. Never forget that 9/10 times the most disruptive kid in a class is the smartest one there - nothing makes a kid more likely to be bored out of his skull and genuinely disruptive than if he understood everything in the syllabys before he even got into the class... years before even.
I should know - I WAS that kid.
When I got to university... oddly, I was every lecturer's favorite student. Suddenly questioning, disrupting, disagreeing with the lesson plan was deemed a GOOD thing -and alone of my classmates, I got there knowing how to DO that. I got consistent A's by basically always ensuring that in my exams I argued in favor of a theory the lecturer had stated a personal dissagreement with and ensuring my arguments were sound and well researched.
In University - this got me A's - lecturers LIKED being challenged.
Why is it that in school.. the same ability had gotten me punished ? If school is really THAT different from University then it's the schools that need to change - after all, their supposed to prepare you FOR university - and this skill, which every academic I know considers the single most important skill any university student ought should have when he graduates, is JUST as important for the kid who chooses to become a car mechanic or a plumber... but none of those EVER get taught that.
Which is detrimental to society as a whole, because they STILL get to vote.
I personally believe the single best model for a school in all of human history, is also the very FIRST one. Before it was redesigned first by religion (monastic influence - hell "chancellor" used to mean senior monk in a monastry) and then by the German industrial revolution to create little soldier-sausage-factories.
Now let's go look back at Plato's academy, the first university, the first school really... where every student was also EXPECTED to teach. Where your marks were based not on your understanding of some previously decided syllabus - but on your contribution to the collective knowledge of the group.
Perhaps the model as-is would not work today where trade-skills are a crucial part of education, but we could definitely learn some things from it, incorporate some of it's best elements into our lessons. I am reminded of a movie I really loved, even if it was a straight-to-video-flop called "Accepted" - though it never mentions it - it is essentially about a group of students who for various reasons never make it to college, so they start their own - and run it on essentially a modern version of the academy model, which works really well.
Of course a movie isn't a practical guide to how to do things, but it can certainly be a valid source of inspiration for such - and this one, I think a lot of people need to watch and then give serious thought to the possibilities presented.
An interesting case in point. Rare as they are - there are "schools for the gifted" all over the world - they ALL operate using this model... I stand by my belief that there is no need for you to be exceptionally gifted to benefit from it, all students would become better and more productive members of society if taught in this manner than they are now.
The LAST thing we need our schools producing is people with the do-as-your-told mindsets of soldiers and factory workers. In case you haven't noticed, very very few of your students will do those things for a living.
>Schools must be able to respond to actions that effect them by disciplining or excluding the student. That's independent of any civil or criminal actions brought against the students by the libelled individuals, and the police and prosecution services.
Ipso facto students MUST be able to respond to school actions they feel are wrong, excessive or unfair. One way to do so if through critical speech, parody, writing etc.
In my day - we on occasion had school strikes. Where we felt the school was truly behaving wrongly, we would simply after break all go down to the rugby field, sit on the stands and refuse to return to class until our grievances were heard, and we had an assurance that the situation in question would change.
In this manner we forced our school to switch from a demerit system of punishment to a system of detention - as we believed demerits to be unfair (you can't just take your punishment, learn and move on... now you are permanently punished for silly little things).
Yeah it disrupted a few classes here and there, then again in my entire high school career it happened all off... 3 times I think.
It was an extreme measure we used when we believed all other attempts at communicating the students position had failed. On those occasions - the teachers LISTENED to us... and would be forced to negotiate the situation - so we could actually have SOME say in how a good third of our LIVES were run.
The fact that nobody was ever punished, and that the school (and believe me I went to a school so authoritarian that it makes the average midwestern american high school look like a roman orgy) actually looked upon the practice amiably as proof of teaching involved students - is my single least bad memory of my entire school career. There was a mutual respect there. The teachers recognized and respected that for cases we felt were extreme, we had a right to recourse to extreme reactions - like protests, and that these rare disruptions of classes were over-all MORE productive to teaching as it allowed those grievances to be addressed, resolved and not interfere with teaching PERMANENTLY.
By your logic... that is no longer allowable ?
Those differences are not essentially relevant. The law says it's not libel if a reasonable person wouldn't believe the claims. It's clear from the testimony that nobody is saying a reasonable person WOULD.
It's clear that the school had no fear that the principle may face genuine believe of the claims - and instead were concerned about the claims ridiculing him and breaking down his authority.
Whatever ELSE this may be - it's definitely parody. How funny was it ? How ridiculous the choice of wording ? Those are subjective things which we cannot judge as we haven't seen the text - but when the accusers have testified that they don't think anybody believed the claims - that makes it not libel.
Well then... here's the weird bit... walk up the stairs in the inn next time, Strath is set BEFORE Darrowshire, you'll find the still alive little Pamela on the second story, with her little doll...