In retrospect? How much of America's power infrastructure was diverted to the development of centrifuges for creating the materials needed for nuclear weapons? It was fortunate, it turns out, that we had those big New Deal projects after all. Meanwhile, Hitler had trouble keeping his airplanes and tanks fueled as early as 1943. I'm sure that a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Nazis seemed like an imminent threat in those days. In retrospect, not so much.
****A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.****
I notice you put emphasis on only the portion of the text that you care about. I participated in a series of essays that argued the topic in detail, although not entirely about the 2nd amendment, but using that as an example. Here's the link if you are interested in a logical argument about it. It's too prolix to reproduce here. In short, I pointed out how the 2nd amendment, unlike the other rights in the Bill of Rights, is not a simple imperative but an argument that contains a distinct antecedent and a consequent. Since it is an argument, that means certain things about it could be examined and tested for truth, raising the possibility that there are contexts where the right can be regulated without being infringed (specifically in cases where professional police and military forces are hired). David Cooney argued the other side, but I don't feel that he addressed the important points. I'm always interested in discussion about it.
I like what you said and I think it's largely true.
Notice that I called out "monopoly" capitalism, which is the kind that happens when you don't believe that there is "enough" capital to go around. When Darwinism takes over (competition instead of cooperation), then we tend to hoard things and make people into capital too. When people become instruments of capital rather than owning their own productive property, then you have businesses that act as mini states, as we now see is the way of things in America.
So, why don't people just "take their capital back"?
"The government has to be involved in everything since the state owns everything"
A nice summary of Communism. Now, change "The government" to "Business" and "state" to "corporation" and you have a nice summary of monopoly Capitalism. The two systems are only different sides of the same coin. You just change who owns most of the capital; a handful of rich and powerful people in either case.
On large books, it takes several seconds just to turn a page.
It can take even longer to add a highlight, plus the additional annoyance of using the little joystick for navigating. A stylus would be great if it were possible to use it with this type of display. I notice the same slowness on the Kindle for PC software (even on a fast machine), but at least I can use the mouse there.
The Kindle is terribly unresponsive for typing notes. It can't keep up with two slow thumbs on those awful little keys and you nave to pop open the symbol screen just to get a comma because there is no key for it (among many other common symbols).
Worst of all is the DRM. The Kindle saves each highlight to a plain text clippings file which might have been useful for study notes. About one third of the way through a very large (and expensive) ebook, I found that my clippings file was full of messages stating that I had exceeded my limit for clippings for that book. I guess they put some limit in there in order to prevent people from using highlights to extract the whole book into the clippings text file, thereby defeating DRM. What it really prevents is legitimate study. Due to this stupid technical deficiency, I should have been noting these passages by hand in a notebook. But the Kindle didn't warn me that this limitation existed, nor did it stop me when I reached it.
The Kindle hardware is an interesting novelty and I see potential in the technology, but it is not good for serious reading or for study. It's too slow and the DRM puts me back in the age of pencil and paper anyway, so why bother? Picking up the actual book is more efficient and convenient than using the Kindle.
There are lots of "third way" groups out there who advocate against both capitalism and communism/socialism.
One of the main principles of "third way" economic thinking is subsidiarity. This is a "first things first" mentality that puts the area of production and consumption as close together as possible. It also seeks the widest possible distribution of capital in the form of productive <i>private</i> property.
There have been back-to-the-land movements that fit nicely into third way thinking. A lot of these people place high value on individual and community trades, on craftsmen, artisans, farmers, etc., who all work for themselves and in local small businesses. One of the benefits of subsidiarity is in fact a reversal of "environmental destructiveness" because the emphasis is removed from production for the sake of profit to production for the sake of consumption. Production is naturally scaled to local needs.
Early Roland samples were pretty poor, but they synthesized some amazing patches from what they had. The strength of the MT-32 sound module, as I remember it, was the ability to program it and also the tone generators. The Sierra folks always came up with the greatest patches and sound effects; they were so much better than what came programmed on the card (LAPC-1 is what I had. I traded mine for a 1st gen MT-32 after the day of the ISA bus had long ended). If you had software to program the module via SysEx, you could make some great sounds.
The Sound Canvas modules were sample-based, so the GM/GS units had more realistic sounds built-in. The synthesis became subtractive in the Roland gear, but it really wasn't proper synthesis anymore: just stored sampled instruments that were supposed to allow songs to reliably port from one module to the next. You could engineer some filters and things like that. The game industry started targeting GM for a little while since it was an actual standard rather than a "de-facto" standard.
These days I guess we just get everything recorded in a studio and ship the pre-recorded digital audio (storage is cheap), so the strength of the modern sound card is in its audio playback unless you want to do production work--then you want recording and sampling. If you want synthesizers now, you still buy MIDI or USB hardware that sits external. The MT-32 is useful with modern hardware to this day.
Anyway, the Roland modules were great production gear, but not something that many could afford to cram into their PCs. They still sound great, though.
They already have population control. It comes in a surprising number of natural flavors: poverty, disease, crime, disaster. For some strange reason, we demand population control only on the procreative terminus.
Actually, I know the reason: it's because a biologist by the name of Garrett Hardin wrote an essay in 1968 called the "Tragedy of the Commons" in which he claimed that humans must adopt a new kind of outlook in order to protect the earth's common resources. There is this class of problems, you see, that has no technical solution and the only way around them (according to Hardin) is to reprogram our sense of morality--of what our legitimate Rights are.
If we give up the natural and human right to procreate and have families, abdicating that right to a managerial class, then we can continue to enjoy "the greatest good for the greatest number" (proportionally speaking).
This entire argument is predicated on the unexamined assumption that the overriding human purpose is not a teleological one, but an instinctual one: the individual need to have, at minimum, "my fair portion" of the commons. It is an assumption of greed or avarice as the natural human state--the idea that people will typically maximize their own "good" even if doing so ruins the commons for everyone else. Although Hardin's essay contains some rather unassailable logic in it, I find scientists have always made poor philosophers, ethicists, sociologists, and so forth.
So, while your argument for population control (and by this you mean restricted procreation) is a valid one, it is not the only approach to this problem that has no technical solution.
Historically is was a place for science and mathmatics. Since those disciplines now have there own fields, what the hell good is philosphy?
Well, philosophy is about discovering the nature of being and the nature of knowledge. What is reality? How reliable is a given predicate or assertion? How can we say that something is "true" or "false"? For any given axiom, must it obey its own rule (suggesting an even more fundamental axiom), or will it exclude itself (hence a contradiction...)? Is there a fundamental and universal truth?
Philosophy is incredibly useful. It allowed the scientific method to be based on empiricism and mathematics to remain in abstractions. It brought much order and reason to theology and government. Philosophy contemplates things like Rights, which are foreign to math and science. Philosophy considers how diverse and seemingly unrelated phenomena can interact to produce unities. With philosophy, we can begin to explore how the mind senses meaning and significance in things. Philosophy influences disciplines as modern as computer programming, where logic and good ontological representations are important in crafting useful software.
Always (it seems to me) there will be arrogant people who suppose that the universal truth has been found. They will point to some shaky and tenuous axiom as evidence for their superior enlightenment. In past eras, we expected such people to emerge from the various religious facets of society. Primitive society hadn't developed any other source of knowledge.
Today's True Believers come increasingly from the secular religion of Scientism in which certain scientific discoveries are subconsciously combined with other invisible values in order to "answer" the hard questions and thus create a system of ethics, morality, etc. What these True Believers don't see (and therefore rarely examine) is their own way of assigning meaning and value to the things they claim are significant and real. They often call themselves "skeptics," yet they stop examining their own beliefs.
There are tell-tale signs of these deluded souls: They say things like "the most basic philosophical questions have been answered," or they constantly need to cite studies (that they didn't conduct), or they have a list of "red flags" indicating when something should be doubted, or they profess allegiance to one system of epistemology (evidentialists, typically) even though they usually don't know what epistemology is, or they have a tendency to scoff and ridicule, or they like to rattle on about the primacy of critical thinking... They are dogmatists, just like those they despise; and they go about shaping the world in their own image.
I digressed into a bit of a rant there, but I mean to say with all of this that philosophy is as important today as it ever was. We haven't answered any of the hard questions yet, but we have found some good heuristics along the way.
Carrol Quigley disagrees with you. But then, you probably accuse him of being the Jesuit historian who "re-wrote" history.
This is the usual way with "debunkers" who seek to tear down a mass movement in order to supplant it with another. Hitler desperately needed a Jewish devil, so he accused the Jews of rewriting their history. Actually, it was Hitler who invented a new history in which the Jew became a sub-human perpetrator of evil. In the same way, as you have demonstrated, the anti-Christian demands a Christian devil and will commonly accuse Christians of rewriting their own history (the same accusation is frequently leveled against any of the numerous denominations: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, etc). Typically this is accompanied by a certain "guilt by association" argument. In your case, not only is Christianity associated with Nazism according to your own flavor of revisionist history, but it becomes the driving force behind it. Christian zealots are now to be blamed for every major ill the world has ever seen, including the holocaust. Christians are sub-human genocidal maniacs. Where do we go from there?
Make no mistake: the Nazi movement was not a Christian movement, nor were it's principal roots found in Christianity. While plenty of Christians were sucked into the movement itself (mass movements are interchangeable, as Eric Hoffer pointed out; it is the quality of the belief rather than the thing believed in that is important to the True Believer), Hitler viewed all religion as competition to his own power. Hitler had no god but power. Nazism was merely one possible reification of Nietzsche's philosophy combined with any other power doctrines that could be extracted from social Darwinism, paganism, Christianity, and so forth.
The successful and powerful are successful and powerful precisely because they are most fit. Therefore, they are the most likely to survive, or most fit to survive.
It isn't good or evil, just "business." Opportunism. Evolution.
Good only means "fit to survive." Big business is good. The rich are good. The Arian race is good... Right?
The rest of us are victims of fate and bad genes. Luckily we will be cleansed by the pure forces of business, by the rich and powerful. We can die knowing that we contributed to the glorious future of perfection where humanity fits perfectly on the bell-curve it made for itself.
Thank you, h4rm0ny and jgagnon, for the thoughtful comments.
There are good arguments in favor of empirical, rational, and religious epistemologies. They each fail and succeed at various times, complementing each other to provide useful heuristics that help us find meaning in our individual lives.
At any given time in history, the outlook of a group or culture is dominated by one of these systems. When a person or group advocates his religion, philosophy, or science (scientism) as a basis upon which universal regulation will be founded, he supposes to have a degree of monopoly on the "truth."
It is one thing for groups of like-minded people to regulate (govern) themselves, but when it comes to the total regulation of diverse people and groups, tyranny ensues. This is because each of us is conscious of the truth in a different way; hence "conscience."
The True Believer desires to shape the world according to his own conscience, at the expense of all others. He is, at that moment, a religious person in the sense that his motivations are driven by an inner conviction.
In the case of the empiricist, he must enter into a little contradiction in order to advance this agenda because he has no evidence for abstract entities such as right and wrong, good and bad, and so forth.
This is the irony that I was talking about. The kinship that the empiricist activist shares with the religious is that he is motivated by something that isn't empirical when he makes value statements about things (e.g. "It's 'bad' for people to believe in religious nonsense"). But he can no further prove that truth exists without reference to itself or exclusion from its own laws (both logical contradictions); he cannot find the substance of rights or of duty. There is no evidence to be found for beauty or magnificence. To advocate his outlook as something "good," he must therefore shed his mantra of evidentialism and become, with the religious, a man of faith.
Wow, an anti-rationalist evidentialist rants against people whose epistemic system accepts sources for knowledge outside of the One True Prophet of Scientific Method. It's a pity that the author of the post is probably unaware of his kinship with those he apparently despises.
The religious--even the godless religious--always advocate regulating conscience in favor of absolutism. To them, "real information" is a definite known. It is "truth." The True Believer will not tolerate competition. It's easy to spot true believers; I have enough true believer in me to recognize the language. It's full of "outlaw" and "ban" and other such hate talk.
Fortunately for Americans, we have the "Establishment clause" which is designed to protect a certain basic right of conscience from the well-meaning but misguided people who know what is true and best for everyone else. It doesn't matter if one's religion is godless, as the modern secularism is; it is anything but irreligious. Parents have a right to their children, their own flesh and blood; to pass on their traditions and beliefs as they see fit. Contrary to the religious fanatics of all persuasions, we need not all be the same.
Some may consider this to be sound logic. But is it?
In this case, I believe that the purposes and methods of association are important to consider.
We have a right of association, but not all ways of associating are equal. We have a right to speech, but not all ways of speaking are equal. Thus, just as not all speech is protected, not all association is protected.
It must be examined in what ways the exchange of money for political favor constitutes "speech." Is it speech? Is it bribery? Should it be protected or restricted?
Suppose a corporation issues a statement or argument in favor of a political agenda. Is that the same thing as donating a large sum of money to a candidate who may feel obligated to "honor" the goodwill by reciprocating with specific votes or legislation?
Is speech still free when the only kind worth listening to comes with dollars attached to it? Does that give everyone a voice? There is only one effective type of association when "anything goes": the one made for profit.
All hail the experts. People like this are responsible for the hell that can sometimes be 21st-century childhood.
Make no mistake: Though clothed in the garb of positivism, this kind of language reveals a hypocritical, raving, megalomaniacal True Believer.
Apparently only certified, licensed evidentialists are qualified to "adjust" children. Not only does their evidence tell them all about the physiological nature of pathology, but it also somehow reveals exactly how we should feel about (and value) the information in order to act upon it. We now can see that there is only One True Path for dealing with such calamities. Scientism has spoken, and it is more Mystical than we ever knew!
The stunning irony is how this "evidence" worshiper has arrived at such astonishing and illogical conclusions about what the parent post is trying to say. If that's how we treat evidence, we're in big trouble.
So long to learn? Bah! Programming is the merest triviality; an appendage easily acquired by those who have more useful things to accomplish. Programming is a tool used by craftsmen. If they are spending their lives learning it then they are wasting their time. Any tool that takes a lifetime to learn is more trouble than it's worth.
The Center for American Progress published (or syndicated) a lot of Mooney's articles until very recently. I've read enough of "Unscientific America" to know that it propagates exactly the sort of thing it evangelizes against. And that is the problem: the book is a type of evangelism by a True Believer.
What Chris Mooney doesn't seem to accept is that science only tells us how to understand and quantify things that can be empirically experienced. Science can answer certain questions about the physical world, but it will never give us is the Value or Meaning of such facts in some other context, such as philosophical, social, ethical, or theological. Science may give a certain direction to epistemic systems, such as to the reliablists or empiricists; but science can't in the end say anything at all about "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "bad."
What Chris Mooney wants us to believe, in my opinion, is that given a certain "scientific literacy," heretofore superstitious Americans will necessarily assume a different stance on morality (there are shades of Garrett Hardin in this argument). What is not clear is how scientific understanding, or understanding of an empirical or scientific method, translates into moral subjectivity. There is in fact no experiment yet devised that can examine and measure the metaphysical, subjectively experienced qualities of a moral system. Rather, Mooney appears to be part of a group of technologists who are replacing outmoded priests with a new religion. I do not see many differences between the followers of the new system and the followers of the old one.
I have heard about unschooling, and there are some aspects of it that I find appealing. The appeal has to do with my philosophy about the role of education.
Our schools are presently designed to help kids be successful in the context of economy (as we understand economy today). American schools are beginning to fall behind in this aspect, but the point is that they are designed to produce kids who work well together as managers, employees, businessmen, etc. We want our kids to get good jobs, be competitive, and become wealthy (or "successful"). This kind of system was imported from Europe, where it continues to enjoy good success toward these ends. There are a lot of amazing things that can be accomplished when people work together this way, there is no doubt about it.
On the other hand, people like me don't buy into the economic argument for schooling. I'm interested more in the educational, or intellectual aspect that Thomas Jefferson advocated. Schools should seek to build character and create men and women who are suitable for democracy, because they know how to think as individuals and follow their own, unique paths through life. Perhaps there is more emphasis on argument than on cooperation -- I don't know. We do not seek to bend to other people as employees, citizens, etc. Schools should engender the love of learning and help students discover their passion and life's work. The hope is that students will be able to find whatever it is that calls them to action, and then master it. We believe that talent is naturally profuse and must be developed outside of a strict format. This isn't facilitated by the "factory" style public schooling that is operated from the top down. It is more of a ground-up approach, but it could still work as a public system (in my opinion). True, it may not produce massive economic wealth or compete favorably in a capitalistic society, but I am convinced that it can contribute greatly to personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
What I find is that all my kids are autodidacts. I don't remember actively "teaching" the subject of reading, yet we read together all the time and my son quickly became the best reader of his peer group. On the other hand, some areas that he is not interested in still lag behind his friends because we don't force him to improve in those areas. We expect that he will eventually see a need to develop them. Under such circumstances, it appears to take far less time to learn the subjects that traditionally waste years of our time in formal schools. There, everyone must progress at more or less the same pace; not so with homeschool.
I realize that people who step outside of the accepted social norm, like I have done with homeschooling, can be feared by others. What if we are too dumb to raise our own kids? For instance, I am lucky to have a high-school diploma, yet I teach my own children. To some, that sounds like madness. What if we ruin the social commons by producing dysfunctional adults? Shouldn't our government protect us from that?
It's true that sometimes the plans that other people make for us are superior to our own plans for ourselves and our children. Maybe it can be argued that others really do know better, based on some official standard. What I worry about is the ability of these true believers, some who have posted to this story right here on Slashdot, to eliminate the sovereignty of parents over their families. In America, at least, I believe we still subscribe to the idea that regular human beings are fit to guide their own destinies. For me, that is the appeal of homeschool.
In my somewhat un-researched and largely intuitive opinion, the most religious medical arguments on the planet are just opposite what you have described.
I find it difficult to swallow the notion that so much pathology is completely unrelated to environmental causes, including those causes that we have significant control over. Oddly, the only cures for these no-fault maladies are synthetic substances invented by scientists in some pharmaceutical laboratory.
It strikes me that, if this is our modern fatalistic view of human health, it's a miracle we're even here as a species. Biological evolution has largely failed us by leaving out so many important defenses that we only now can artificially provide for ourselves.
No, I claim that illness is largely a human art. All of the great plagues and diseases might have been mitigated with better hygiene, better nutrition, and fewer risky habits. If we were less urban and less artificial, I think our health would greatly improve. It appears that artificial medicine is merely a reaction to artificial living.
Like many of our great social and economic machines, the medical establishment tends to be a self-regulating, self-preserving entity. The medical industry requires adequate input in order to maintain a healthy, robust profitability. We can be assured that it will continue to provide us with ample synthetic treatments for all of our ailments without actually threatening the supply of invalids. Rather, it will ease our symptoms and make us into satisfied repeat customers.
A core belief in this religion of medicine, is that there is great difficulty in prevention and cure. Whatever happens to our bodies, at least we will know it probably wasn't our own fault (and so why worry about it?). A second article of faith possibly states that what we can do for ourselves will be artificial and costly. Ours is a reactionary, last-things-first system with built-in excuses: wait until you get sick (unavoidable), then require a highly trained medical team with state-of-the-art synthetics and equipment.
We are now such deluded adherents of this format, that we begin to say it is our natural right to such artifice. And we begin to plan how we are going to provide everyone with last-things-first medicine.
My take on this is that people will be moral by choice... not because of legislation.
A conscience will stop you from doing something "wrong", and the fear of repercussions may do the same thing.
If the law says that prostitutes are illegal, does the mere fact of the law stop you from going to one? Or does your moral conscience?
Some people have internal standards, while others might honor the law only for fear of the consequences of breaking it. Only the very desperate will break laws where they think there might be a significant risk of consequence.
It is always the case when legislation is enacted, that when it is enforced by that authority which gives it effect, the violation of such is not so common.
Law is only as effective as the sovereign; thus, it is not merely the law, but the implied authority that it conveys. It is always the case that there is a man with a gun or a big stick who will coerce compliance from the disobedient, who after all, would be foolish to enter into that "state of war" against a greater power.
So we can see that moral action, at least, can indeed be produced by legislation.
Also there are lots of laws that have no moral basis. There's no moral reason for me to wear a seatbelt. My obligation to my family has changed my perception far more than any threat of a $75.00 fine.
Wherever there is human action, there is a moral dimension. It would be imprudent and irresponsible of you not to wear a seat belt. Imprudence and irresponsibility are forms of immorality, thus even the seat belt law has a moral aspect.
What does that mean: "You can't legislate morality?" People say this all the time, and what they seem to mean by it is that government shouldn't coerce behavior from people based on an abstract standard of "right" and "wrong."
And yet... that's just what "law" is. Someone must interpret what is wrong, make it illegal, and then stand behind it with sufficient authority to discourage people from doing it. Most governments, for instance, insist that it is "wrong" to kill your neighbor or anyone else. They also commonly claim that it is "wrong" to steal and to lie. Now, I consider these to be moral statements because they talk about what is right and wrong, which are abstract ideas that don't have empirical tests. Of course, rules against killing, stealing, and cheating are all quite easily legislated, as I think we might all agree.
So, I wonder why we say silly things like "you can't legislate morality." Because that is exactly what legislation is, by definition.
Ah, yes. And, of course, you know that it is a shadow, and that it is the earth's shadow, and that the sun provides the light source for it, and that the moon isn't self-illuminating with some internal source of the shadow.
I could come up with the earth-shadow hypothesis myself, you know. And I could use it to demonstrate that the earth is probably round in shape.
But that would fall short of an actual theory, because I haven't done anything to demonstrate that my hypothesis is the only reasonable explanation.
Luckily, others have done so. And I believe them. It seems intuitive, it is well explained, it fits with other bits of information from other sources (including my own observations), and I have no reason to believe that my 2nd-hand evidence is fabricated.
So, I too "know" that the earth is round. Just not first-hand.
Slashdot Mirror
In retrospect? How much of America's power infrastructure was diverted to the development of centrifuges for creating the materials needed for nuclear weapons? It was fortunate, it turns out, that we had those big New Deal projects after all. Meanwhile, Hitler had trouble keeping his airplanes and tanks fueled as early as 1943. I'm sure that a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Nazis seemed like an imminent threat in those days. In retrospect, not so much.
****A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.****
I notice you put emphasis on only the portion of the text that you care about. I participated in a series of essays that argued the topic in detail, although not entirely about the 2nd amendment, but using that as an example. Here's the link if you are interested in a logical argument about it. It's too prolix to reproduce here. In short, I pointed out how the 2nd amendment, unlike the other rights in the Bill of Rights, is not a simple imperative but an argument that contains a distinct antecedent and a consequent. Since it is an argument, that means certain things about it could be examined and tested for truth, raising the possibility that there are contexts where the right can be regulated without being infringed (specifically in cases where professional police and military forces are hired). David Cooney argued the other side, but I don't feel that he addressed the important points. I'm always interested in discussion about it.
I like what you said and I think it's largely true.
Notice that I called out "monopoly" capitalism, which is the kind that happens when you don't believe that there is "enough" capital to go around. When Darwinism takes over (competition instead of cooperation), then we tend to hoard things and make people into capital too. When people become instruments of capital rather than owning their own productive property, then you have businesses that act as mini states, as we now see is the way of things in America.
So, why don't people just "take their capital back"?
"The government has to be involved in everything since the state owns everything"
A nice summary of Communism. Now, change "The government" to "Business" and "state" to "corporation" and you have a nice summary of monopoly Capitalism. The two systems are only different sides of the same coin. You just change who owns most of the capital; a handful of rich and powerful people in either case.
On large books, it takes several seconds just to turn a page.
It can take even longer to add a highlight, plus the additional annoyance of using the little joystick for navigating. A stylus would be great if it were possible to use it with this type of display. I notice the same slowness on the Kindle for PC software (even on a fast machine), but at least I can use the mouse there.
The Kindle is terribly unresponsive for typing notes. It can't keep up with two slow thumbs on those awful little keys and you nave to pop open the symbol screen just to get a comma because there is no key for it (among many other common symbols).
Worst of all is the DRM. The Kindle saves each highlight to a plain text clippings file which might have been useful for study notes. About one third of the way through a very large (and expensive) ebook, I found that my clippings file was full of messages stating that I had exceeded my limit for clippings for that book. I guess they put some limit in there in order to prevent people from using highlights to extract the whole book into the clippings text file, thereby defeating DRM. What it really prevents is legitimate study. Due to this stupid technical deficiency, I should have been noting these passages by hand in a notebook. But the Kindle didn't warn me that this limitation existed, nor did it stop me when I reached it.
The Kindle hardware is an interesting novelty and I see potential in the technology, but it is not good for serious reading or for study. It's too slow and the DRM puts me back in the age of pencil and paper anyway, so why bother? Picking up the actual book is more efficient and convenient than using the Kindle.
There are lots of "third way" groups out there who advocate against both capitalism and communism/socialism.
One of the main principles of "third way" economic thinking is subsidiarity. This is a "first things first" mentality that puts the area of production and consumption as close together as possible. It also seeks the widest possible distribution of capital in the form of productive <i>private</i> property.
There have been back-to-the-land movements that fit nicely into third way thinking. A lot of these people place high value on individual and community trades, on craftsmen, artisans, farmers, etc., who all work for themselves and in local small businesses. One of the benefits of subsidiarity is in fact a reversal of "environmental destructiveness" because the emphasis is removed from production for the sake of profit to production for the sake of consumption. Production is naturally scaled to local needs.
Early Roland samples were pretty poor, but they synthesized some amazing patches from what they had. The strength of the MT-32 sound module, as I remember it, was the ability to program it and also the tone generators. The Sierra folks always came up with the greatest patches and sound effects; they were so much better than what came programmed on the card (LAPC-1 is what I had. I traded mine for a 1st gen MT-32 after the day of the ISA bus had long ended). If you had software to program the module via SysEx, you could make some great sounds.
The Sound Canvas modules were sample-based, so the GM/GS units had more realistic sounds built-in. The synthesis became subtractive in the Roland gear, but it really wasn't proper synthesis anymore: just stored sampled instruments that were supposed to allow songs to reliably port from one module to the next. You could engineer some filters and things like that. The game industry started targeting GM for a little while since it was an actual standard rather than a "de-facto" standard.
These days I guess we just get everything recorded in a studio and ship the pre-recorded digital audio (storage is cheap), so the strength of the modern sound card is in its audio playback unless you want to do production work--then you want recording and sampling. If you want synthesizers now, you still buy MIDI or USB hardware that sits external. The MT-32 is useful with modern hardware to this day.
Anyway, the Roland modules were great production gear, but not something that many could afford to cram into their PCs. They still sound great, though.
A question from the ignorant:
I always thought of the stuff in peppers as highly acidic.
Capsaicin is an "alkaloid," whatever that is. Does it mean that peppers are caustic and not acidic?
They already have population control. It comes in a surprising number of natural flavors: poverty, disease, crime, disaster. For some strange reason, we demand population control only on the procreative terminus.
Actually, I know the reason: it's because a biologist by the name of Garrett Hardin wrote an essay in 1968 called the "Tragedy of the Commons" in which he claimed that humans must adopt a new kind of outlook in order to protect the earth's common resources. There is this class of problems, you see, that has no technical solution and the only way around them (according to Hardin) is to reprogram our sense of morality--of what our legitimate Rights are.
If we give up the natural and human right to procreate and have families, abdicating that right to a managerial class, then we can continue to enjoy "the greatest good for the greatest number" (proportionally speaking).
This entire argument is predicated on the unexamined assumption that the overriding human purpose is not a teleological one, but an instinctual one: the individual need to have, at minimum, "my fair portion" of the commons. It is an assumption of greed or avarice as the natural human state--the idea that people will typically maximize their own "good" even if doing so ruins the commons for everyone else. Although Hardin's essay contains some rather unassailable logic in it, I find scientists have always made poor philosophers, ethicists, sociologists, and so forth.
So, while your argument for population control (and by this you mean restricted procreation) is a valid one, it is not the only approach to this problem that has no technical solution.
Historically is was a place for science and mathmatics. Since those disciplines now have there own fields, what the hell good is philosphy?
Well, philosophy is about discovering the nature of being and the nature of knowledge. What is reality? How reliable is a given predicate or assertion? How can we say that something is "true" or "false"? For any given axiom, must it obey its own rule (suggesting an even more fundamental axiom), or will it exclude itself (hence a contradiction...)? Is there a fundamental and universal truth?
Philosophy is incredibly useful. It allowed the scientific method to be based on empiricism and mathematics to remain in abstractions. It brought much order and reason to theology and government. Philosophy contemplates things like Rights, which are foreign to math and science. Philosophy considers how diverse and seemingly unrelated phenomena can interact to produce unities. With philosophy, we can begin to explore how the mind senses meaning and significance in things. Philosophy influences disciplines as modern as computer programming, where logic and good ontological representations are important in crafting useful software.
Always (it seems to me) there will be arrogant people who suppose that the universal truth has been found. They will point to some shaky and tenuous axiom as evidence for their superior enlightenment. In past eras, we expected such people to emerge from the various religious facets of society. Primitive society hadn't developed any other source of knowledge.
Today's True Believers come increasingly from the secular religion of Scientism in which certain scientific discoveries are subconsciously combined with other invisible values in order to "answer" the hard questions and thus create a system of ethics, morality, etc. What these True Believers don't see (and therefore rarely examine) is their own way of assigning meaning and value to the things they claim are significant and real. They often call themselves "skeptics," yet they stop examining their own beliefs.
There are tell-tale signs of these deluded souls: They say things like "the most basic philosophical questions have been answered," or they constantly need to cite studies (that they didn't conduct), or they have a list of "red flags" indicating when something should be doubted, or they profess allegiance to one system of epistemology (evidentialists, typically) even though they usually don't know what epistemology is, or they have a tendency to scoff and ridicule, or they like to rattle on about the primacy of critical thinking... They are dogmatists, just like those they despise; and they go about shaping the world in their own image.
I digressed into a bit of a rant there, but I mean to say with all of this that philosophy is as important today as it ever was. We haven't answered any of the hard questions yet, but we have found some good heuristics along the way.
Carrol Quigley disagrees with you. But then, you probably accuse him of being the Jesuit historian who "re-wrote" history.
This is the usual way with "debunkers" who seek to tear down a mass movement in order to supplant it with another. Hitler desperately needed a Jewish devil, so he accused the Jews of rewriting their history. Actually, it was Hitler who invented a new history in which the Jew became a sub-human perpetrator of evil. In the same way, as you have demonstrated, the anti-Christian demands a Christian devil and will commonly accuse Christians of rewriting their own history (the same accusation is frequently leveled against any of the numerous denominations: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, etc). Typically this is accompanied by a certain "guilt by association" argument. In your case, not only is Christianity associated with Nazism according to your own flavor of revisionist history, but it becomes the driving force behind it. Christian zealots are now to be blamed for every major ill the world has ever seen, including the holocaust. Christians are sub-human genocidal maniacs. Where do we go from there?
Make no mistake: the Nazi movement was not a Christian movement, nor were it's principal roots found in Christianity. While plenty of Christians were sucked into the movement itself (mass movements are interchangeable, as Eric Hoffer pointed out; it is the quality of the belief rather than the thing believed in that is important to the True Believer), Hitler viewed all religion as competition to his own power. Hitler had no god but power. Nazism was merely one possible reification of Nietzsche's philosophy combined with any other power doctrines that could be extracted from social Darwinism, paganism, Christianity, and so forth.
Of course.
The successful and powerful are successful and powerful precisely because they are most fit. Therefore, they are the most likely to survive, or most fit to survive.
It isn't good or evil, just "business." Opportunism. Evolution.
Good only means "fit to survive." Big business is good. The rich are good. The Arian race is good... Right?
The rest of us are victims of fate and bad genes. Luckily we will be cleansed by the pure forces of business, by the rich and powerful. We can die knowing that we contributed to the glorious future of perfection where humanity fits perfectly on the bell-curve it made for itself.
Thank you, h4rm0ny and jgagnon, for the thoughtful comments.
There are good arguments in favor of empirical, rational, and religious epistemologies. They each fail and succeed at various times, complementing each other to provide useful heuristics that help us find meaning in our individual lives.
At any given time in history, the outlook of a group or culture is dominated by one of these systems. When a person or group advocates his religion, philosophy, or science (scientism) as a basis upon which universal regulation will be founded, he supposes to have a degree of monopoly on the "truth."
It is one thing for groups of like-minded people to regulate (govern) themselves, but when it comes to the total regulation of diverse people and groups, tyranny ensues. This is because each of us is conscious of the truth in a different way; hence "conscience."
The True Believer desires to shape the world according to his own conscience, at the expense of all others. He is, at that moment, a religious person in the sense that his motivations are driven by an inner conviction.
In the case of the empiricist, he must enter into a little contradiction in order to advance this agenda because he has no evidence for abstract entities such as right and wrong, good and bad, and so forth.
This is the irony that I was talking about. The kinship that the empiricist activist shares with the religious is that he is motivated by something that isn't empirical when he makes value statements about things (e.g. "It's 'bad' for people to believe in religious nonsense"). But he can no further prove that truth exists without reference to itself or exclusion from its own laws (both logical contradictions); he cannot find the substance of rights or of duty. There is no evidence to be found for beauty or magnificence. To advocate his outlook as something "good," he must therefore shed his mantra of evidentialism and become, with the religious, a man of faith.
Wow, an anti-rationalist evidentialist rants against people whose epistemic system accepts sources for knowledge outside of the One True Prophet of Scientific Method. It's a pity that the author of the post is probably unaware of his kinship with those he apparently despises.
The religious--even the godless religious--always advocate regulating conscience in favor of absolutism. To them, "real information" is a definite known. It is "truth." The True Believer will not tolerate competition. It's easy to spot true believers; I have enough true believer in me to recognize the language. It's full of "outlaw" and "ban" and other such hate talk.
Fortunately for Americans, we have the "Establishment clause" which is designed to protect a certain basic right of conscience from the well-meaning but misguided people who know what is true and best for everyone else. It doesn't matter if one's religion is godless, as the modern secularism is; it is anything but irreligious. Parents have a right to their children, their own flesh and blood; to pass on their traditions and beliefs as they see fit. Contrary to the religious fanatics of all persuasions, we need not all be the same.
Some may consider this to be sound logic. But is it?
In this case, I believe that the purposes and methods of association are important to consider.
We have a right of association, but not all ways of associating are equal. We have a right to speech, but not all ways of speaking are equal. Thus, just as not all speech is protected, not all association is protected.
It must be examined in what ways the exchange of money for political favor constitutes "speech." Is it speech? Is it bribery? Should it be protected or restricted?
Suppose a corporation issues a statement or argument in favor of a political agenda. Is that the same thing as donating a large sum of money to a candidate who may feel obligated to "honor" the goodwill by reciprocating with specific votes or legislation?
Is speech still free when the only kind worth listening to comes with dollars attached to it? Does that give everyone a voice? There is only one effective type of association when "anything goes": the one made for profit.
Come now. The sort of prophecy which you engage in at the end of your post belongs to the religious and political extremists that you criticize.
Reasonable people do not speak in such absolutes.
All hail the experts. People like this are responsible for the hell that can sometimes be 21st-century childhood.
Make no mistake: Though clothed in the garb of positivism, this kind of language reveals a hypocritical, raving, megalomaniacal True Believer.
Apparently only certified, licensed evidentialists are qualified to "adjust" children. Not only does their evidence tell them all about the physiological nature of pathology, but it also somehow reveals exactly how we should feel about (and value) the information in order to act upon it. We now can see that there is only One True Path for dealing with such calamities. Scientism has spoken, and it is more Mystical than we ever knew!
The stunning irony is how this "evidence" worshiper has arrived at such astonishing and illogical conclusions about what the parent post is trying to say. If that's how we treat evidence, we're in big trouble.
So long to learn? Bah! Programming is the merest triviality; an appendage easily acquired by those who have more useful things to accomplish. Programming is a tool used by craftsmen. If they are spending their lives learning it then they are wasting their time. Any tool that takes a lifetime to learn is more trouble than it's worth.
The Center for American Progress published (or syndicated) a lot of Mooney's articles until very recently. I've read enough of "Unscientific America" to know that it propagates exactly the sort of thing it evangelizes against. And that is the problem: the book is a type of evangelism by a True Believer.
What Chris Mooney doesn't seem to accept is that science only tells us how to understand and quantify things that can be empirically experienced. Science can answer certain questions about the physical world, but it will never give us is the Value or Meaning of such facts in some other context, such as philosophical, social, ethical, or theological. Science may give a certain direction to epistemic systems, such as to the reliablists or empiricists; but science can't in the end say anything at all about "right" and "wrong" or "good" and "bad."
What Chris Mooney wants us to believe, in my opinion, is that given a certain "scientific literacy," heretofore superstitious Americans will necessarily assume a different stance on morality (there are shades of Garrett Hardin in this argument). What is not clear is how scientific understanding, or understanding of an empirical or scientific method, translates into moral subjectivity. There is in fact no experiment yet devised that can examine and measure the metaphysical, subjectively experienced qualities of a moral system. Rather, Mooney appears to be part of a group of technologists who are replacing outmoded priests with a new religion. I do not see many differences between the followers of the new system and the followers of the old one.
I have heard about unschooling, and there are some aspects of it that I find appealing. The appeal has to do with my philosophy about the role of education.
Our schools are presently designed to help kids be successful in the context of economy (as we understand economy today). American schools are beginning to fall behind in this aspect, but the point is that they are designed to produce kids who work well together as managers, employees, businessmen, etc. We want our kids to get good jobs, be competitive, and become wealthy (or "successful"). This kind of system was imported from Europe, where it continues to enjoy good success toward these ends. There are a lot of amazing things that can be accomplished when people work together this way, there is no doubt about it.
On the other hand, people like me don't buy into the economic argument for schooling. I'm interested more in the educational, or intellectual aspect that Thomas Jefferson advocated. Schools should seek to build character and create men and women who are suitable for democracy, because they know how to think as individuals and follow their own, unique paths through life. Perhaps there is more emphasis on argument than on cooperation -- I don't know. We do not seek to bend to other people as employees, citizens, etc. Schools should engender the love of learning and help students discover their passion and life's work. The hope is that students will be able to find whatever it is that calls them to action, and then master it. We believe that talent is naturally profuse and must be developed outside of a strict format. This isn't facilitated by the "factory" style public schooling that is operated from the top down. It is more of a ground-up approach, but it could still work as a public system (in my opinion). True, it may not produce massive economic wealth or compete favorably in a capitalistic society, but I am convinced that it can contribute greatly to personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
What I find is that all my kids are autodidacts. I don't remember actively "teaching" the subject of reading, yet we read together all the time and my son quickly became the best reader of his peer group. On the other hand, some areas that he is not interested in still lag behind his friends because we don't force him to improve in those areas. We expect that he will eventually see a need to develop them. Under such circumstances, it appears to take far less time to learn the subjects that traditionally waste years of our time in formal schools. There, everyone must progress at more or less the same pace; not so with homeschool.
I realize that people who step outside of the accepted social norm, like I have done with homeschooling, can be feared by others. What if we are too dumb to raise our own kids? For instance, I am lucky to have a high-school diploma, yet I teach my own children. To some, that sounds like madness. What if we ruin the social commons by producing dysfunctional adults? Shouldn't our government protect us from that?
It's true that sometimes the plans that other people make for us are superior to our own plans for ourselves and our children. Maybe it can be argued that others really do know better, based on some official standard. What I worry about is the ability of these true believers, some who have posted to this story right here on Slashdot, to eliminate the sovereignty of parents over their families. In America, at least, I believe we still subscribe to the idea that regular human beings are fit to guide their own destinies. For me, that is the appeal of homeschool.
In my somewhat un-researched and largely intuitive opinion, the most religious medical arguments on the planet are just opposite what you have described. I find it difficult to swallow the notion that so much pathology is completely unrelated to environmental causes, including those causes that we have significant control over. Oddly, the only cures for these no-fault maladies are synthetic substances invented by scientists in some pharmaceutical laboratory. It strikes me that, if this is our modern fatalistic view of human health, it's a miracle we're even here as a species. Biological evolution has largely failed us by leaving out so many important defenses that we only now can artificially provide for ourselves. No, I claim that illness is largely a human art. All of the great plagues and diseases might have been mitigated with better hygiene, better nutrition, and fewer risky habits. If we were less urban and less artificial, I think our health would greatly improve. It appears that artificial medicine is merely a reaction to artificial living. Like many of our great social and economic machines, the medical establishment tends to be a self-regulating, self-preserving entity. The medical industry requires adequate input in order to maintain a healthy, robust profitability. We can be assured that it will continue to provide us with ample synthetic treatments for all of our ailments without actually threatening the supply of invalids. Rather, it will ease our symptoms and make us into satisfied repeat customers. A core belief in this religion of medicine, is that there is great difficulty in prevention and cure. Whatever happens to our bodies, at least we will know it probably wasn't our own fault (and so why worry about it?). A second article of faith possibly states that what we can do for ourselves will be artificial and costly. Ours is a reactionary, last-things-first system with built-in excuses: wait until you get sick (unavoidable), then require a highly trained medical team with state-of-the-art synthetics and equipment. We are now such deluded adherents of this format, that we begin to say it is our natural right to such artifice. And we begin to plan how we are going to provide everyone with last-things-first medicine.
My take on this is that people will be moral by choice... not because of legislation. A conscience will stop you from doing something "wrong", and the fear of repercussions may do the same thing.
If the law says that prostitutes are illegal, does the mere fact of the law stop you from going to one? Or does your moral conscience?
Some people have internal standards, while others might honor the law only for fear of the consequences of breaking it. Only the very desperate will break laws where they think there might be a significant risk of consequence. It is always the case when legislation is enacted, that when it is enforced by that authority which gives it effect, the violation of such is not so common. Law is only as effective as the sovereign; thus, it is not merely the law, but the implied authority that it conveys. It is always the case that there is a man with a gun or a big stick who will coerce compliance from the disobedient, who after all, would be foolish to enter into that "state of war" against a greater power. So we can see that moral action, at least, can indeed be produced by legislation.
Also there are lots of laws that have no moral basis. There's no moral reason for me to wear a seatbelt. My obligation to my family has changed my perception far more than any threat of a $75.00 fine.
Wherever there is human action, there is a moral dimension. It would be imprudent and irresponsible of you not to wear a seat belt. Imprudence and irresponsibility are forms of immorality, thus even the seat belt law has a moral aspect.
What does that mean: "You can't legislate morality?" People say this all the time, and what they seem to mean by it is that government shouldn't coerce behavior from people based on an abstract standard of "right" and "wrong."
And yet... that's just what "law" is. Someone must interpret what is wrong, make it illegal, and then stand behind it with sufficient authority to discourage people from doing it. Most governments, for instance, insist that it is "wrong" to kill your neighbor or anyone else. They also commonly claim that it is "wrong" to steal and to lie. Now, I consider these to be moral statements because they talk about what is right and wrong, which are abstract ideas that don't have empirical tests. Of course, rules against killing, stealing, and cheating are all quite easily legislated, as I think we might all agree.
So, I wonder why we say silly things like "you can't legislate morality." Because that is exactly what legislation is, by definition.
How about calling them hypotheses?
Let's reserve "theory" for something that actually has solid evidence.
Ah, yes. And, of course, you know that it is a shadow, and that it is the earth's shadow, and that the sun provides the light source for it, and that the moon isn't self-illuminating with some internal source of the shadow.
I could come up with the earth-shadow hypothesis myself, you know. And I could use it to demonstrate that the earth is probably round in shape.
But that would fall short of an actual theory, because I haven't done anything to demonstrate that my hypothesis is the only reasonable explanation.
Luckily, others have done so. And I believe them. It seems intuitive, it is well explained, it fits with other bits of information from other sources (including my own observations), and I have no reason to believe that my 2nd-hand evidence is fabricated.
So, I too "know" that the earth is round. Just not first-hand.