Thanks much for taking the time to respond. I really still don't understand some of your views, though, and you conveniently ignore a lot of the meat of what I said. Just a couple things:
What does "commercial" mean here? Anytime that someone accepts any compensation in return for providing a copy of a copyrighted work?
Yes. A sale is a sale, it shouldn't matter if one illegal copy was sold or a million. There's actually something tangible there.
To me, there's where I get confused, although perhaps you have a different definition of "sale." But I said "compensation" for a specific reason -- a person might give me a recording of one thing in exchange for another recording, or a person might buy me dinner when I give him a copy of my music collection. Is that a problem? I'm being "compensated" for distributing copies of something. I'm not getting actual currency, but items of value are being exchanged between two (or more) people. Under different conditions, some of that "compensation" might be paid to artists instead, but it's not. Once again, the content has inherent value (at least for most people), whether or not you choose to believe it has monetary value.
Are you allowed to make a recording of this "service" and distribute it freely?
Why not? A concert is more than music, and agiain, this only helps the artist. The Grateful Dead, who got little airplay, would have never had the popularity they enjoyed had they not encouraged bootlegs of their live performances. I have friends who post lossless copies of their shows on archive.org, as thousands of other artists do.
If your friends distribute copies of their own shows, fine. But I'm a little more hazy on when you decide to do this on your own. You're right -- for many (even most) bands it's free advertising. But don't they get to make the choice? Why do you get to choose? Also, again I'm still trying to pin down what exactly you're paying for at this concert. What is the "service" you say that you're paying for, if not being able to hear/see that performance? If you then provide that "service" to others for free, presumably again because you're claiming that the content is "free," then what were you paying for?
Are you allowed to sneak some people into the concert to enjoy hearing it as well, as long as they don't disrupt other people?
Thats silly, of course not.
Why? What hair are you splitting that says you can record a concert and distribute it freely to others, but you can't actually distribute that material directly to them by helping them get into the concert hall? I'm not asking a legal question here, because that answer may vary. From a moral standpoint, I really don't see a difference. If the band says they don't want their concert recorded and redistributed, and you do that, I don't see any difference between that and allowing people to sneak into a concert hall to experience that performance. In both cases, you're allowing someone who didn't pay for the "service" to experience it. If the band says it's okay to record, fine, but otherwise you're breaking the rules in both cases. After all, most concert halls are private spaces; you're choosing to pay for admission, which usually means you agree to their policies.
I can buy a recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" by some crappy orchestra for less than $5. I can buy a CD that looks exactly the same except for some cover art, but it was just recorded by some hip new group in Italy, and I'll pay $18 for it.
You can buy a copy of a Britney Spears CD for $20 or a CD from a local band that actually has some talent for $5. I don't see the point of your argument. The content is the "carrot" that gets you to spend the money on the physical object.
You conveniently snipped out the most important part of my argument there, which is why you don't see the point. The point is that the new recording got made
If by ignorance you allude that your friend did not know about the Holocaust, then yes, your story is very troubling.
My friend was very aware of the Holocaust. Did you not even notice that I mentioned the swastika clearly had elements that differentiated it from a Nazi swastika, or did you follow the link to the Wikipedia article and read about various kinds of swastikas and their uses over thousands of years?
If he had essentially drawn a Nazi flag with the correct colors, etc., they might have a point about its offensiveness. But it was a pencil drawing with a bunch of dots that looked something like this. I think it may even have been "left-facing," because he was actually even trying to differentiate it more from Nazi versions, like these.
Do you really want to deny use of symbols that are important to some religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) that have over a billion followers because an unrelated group of people (Nazis) adopted a similar symbol and persecuted another religious group?
If I were the parent of that child, I would have some serious problems with they way they handled that case and would have pursued resolution and/or settlement.
It's been awhile, but if I remember correctly, my friend hid the situation from his parents at first out of embarrassment, but eventually his mother did get involved and had a long talk with someone in the administration about religious symbols. In the end, I think they still held to their guns about asking him to remove the cover, since he was not using those symbols for religious purposes, merely as decorative doodles about something he was currently interested in.
The fact that it is still protected speech is sufficient in my opinion. People are still allowed to express their views both for and against it. It's good.
Oh, I wasn't contradicting your original post. I was just pointing out that even though we don't have government censorship in the U.S., many institutions and groups still feel the need to police symbols of Nazism or the Confederacy, even out of ignorance.
Although not directly related to the Civil War, witness the recent debate in Rhode Island arguing to shorten its name from the original "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations." Why? Because the word "plantation" is apparently taboo these days because at some point later in history some "plantations" were in the South and many of those had slaves at some point. Never mind that the word had none of these connotations in the 17th century when the colony was named. In the end, they've decided to let the voters decide, so again, it's all good. But I do think legislatures deciding to remove words or alter historical names of things would be a kind of censorship, even if rather innocuous. And it's especially bad when done out of ignorance... something I think is a disturbing trend these days in the U.S., even if it's not officially government-sanctioned "censorship."
The U.S. didn't respond to the history of the civil war by banning any and all rebel markings.
True, although the confederate flag has been under fire in recent years.
Also, swastikas seem to cause a great deal of worry even in the U.S., even if they are not legally censored. A few years back, my best friend in high school drew a swastika on his book cover. You see, he was becoming intrigued by Eastern religions, and he had drawn a few different religious symbols on his book cover. The form of the swastika was clearly not the Nazi type (since it contained dots, etc.), but my friend was led off to the principal's office for a talk. I believe he was then made to go to a few sessions with the guidance counselor, even after removing the book cover and attempting to explain what the symbol meant for thousands of years before appropriation by the Nazis.
This is what happened to someone near the top of his high school class and who never had been in any trouble in school before. All because he drew a picture of a random religious symbol. Ah, ignorance....
For example, the NPD (National Democratic Party) has had representatives in the national government for years now
Sorry -- the NPD only has seats on parliaments at the state level, not representatives in federal parliament. My mistake. But I know from friends in Germany that they have been really fighting for greater national recognition, and lots of people are worried about it.
I agree that denying access to free speech is not the answer. There is enough collective German guilt still around to keep neo-Nazis in check for quite a while.
It's been over 60 years, Germany. You don't have to worry about symbolism bringing back the Nazi party; most of them are dead.
That's not quite true, though. Yes, most original Nazis are dead, but with their death also comes a greater tendency to forget the dangerous tendencies that got things started.
For example, the NPD (National Democratic Party) has had representatives in the national government for years now (and it receives 5-10% of the vote in some regions). They are widely portrayed as being associated with Nazi ideals, and though I think the media is a little overboard about such things, I start to wonder when their official party statements are concerned about "alliances of Jews and Negroes" threatening to take over the world (from the Wikipedia article):
In November 2008, shortly after the 2008 United States Presidential Election, the NPD published a document entitled "Africa conquers the White House" which stated that the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the United States was the result of "the American alliance of Jews and Negroes" and that Obama aimed to destroy the United States' "white identity." The NPD claimed that "A non-white America is a declaration of war on all people who believe an organically grown social order based on language and culture, history and heritage to be the essence of humanity" and that "Barack Obama hides this declaration of war behind his pushy sunshine smile." The NPD also stated that the extensive support for Obama in Germany "resembles an African tropical disease."
Do I think this is a reason to suppress speech? No. But I do think Nazi symbols could exacerbate some of the right-wing, who does seem to adhere to tenets similar to the rhetoric of the early Nazi Party.
You make some good points about various historical issues which may be relevant if we were debating the RIAA and MPAA's policies. I agree that there has been a lot of inconsistency in their positions over the years, but (as I said in my previous reply), I'm not trying to defend them. I'll admit that I overstated (or perhaps didn't clarify) some things, though, and you've brought a lot of great points out.
That said, I'm really confused about the places you decide to split hairs. For example:
Commercial copyright infringement isn't just illegal, it's wrong.
I have to admit I was surprised by that statement in context of your post. I'm guessing that you want distribution of copyrighted content to be allowed as long as no one is making a profit? What does "commercial" mean here? Anytime that someone accepts any compensation in return for providing a copy of a copyrighted work? Or does it have to be on a large scale? What if someone facilitates commercial infringement by making content available in a form that makes it easier to copy? I'm just trying to understand where you draw the line.
By the way, I'm sympathetic to your view, and I understand that much of the "pirate" market consists of people who wouldn't pay for the content anyway (and, for many, if they find something valuable enough, they will pay).
But I simply can't agree with this:
When I go to a concert I'm not buying anything. I'm paying for a service, just like when my employer pays me for my time or I pay a barber to cut my hair or tip my bartender. When I buy that band's CD I'm buying a CD. When I hear them on the radio, it's free. When I tape it off the radio it's free. The content is free, the CD and service (concert) are not.
I understand the distinction you're trying to draw about a "service," but you choose a very interesting place to draw the line. Are you allowed to make a recording of this "service" and distribute it freely? Are you allowed to sneak some people into the concert to enjoy hearing it as well, as long as they don't disrupt other people? They aren't interfering with the "service" for anyone, and since you aren't buying anything, what does it matter?
I would think that the latter sounds immoral. It does to me. You're paying to hear that performance, whether you want to call it a "service" or whatever, just like part of the profits earned on the CD you buy go to pay the artist for performing in the studio and making the CD. Yeah, if a performance gets played on the radio, you can hear it for free, just as a band can hold a free concert. But it does not follow that the content of a recording has no inherent monetary value. If I go to the grocery store, and they have a "buy one, get one free sale" on cans of peas, it doesn't mean that cans of peas are "free" in any absolute sense. If I show up on the first day they're selling a new computer application, and they give me one for free as a first customer, that doesn't mean it was "free" in an absolute sense, and I should just go home and give the software to everyone. Playing something on a radio or even allowing legal taping of "free" performances on the radio does not make every recording of that performance in every medium "free."
And even if you think it does, it does not follow that the "content" of CD is free. Come on. It's particularly noticeable in classical CDs. I can buy a recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" by some crappy orchestra for less than $5. I can buy a CD that looks exactly the same except for some cover art, but it was just recorded by some hip new group in Italy, and I'll pay $18 for it. If the "content" of the CD is free, then what the hell am I paying $13 more for? I'm paying for a better performance (or at least a newer one or one that's more in vogue). Classical labels are small enough that new orchestral recordings simply won't pay unless they sell CDs; how else do you justify getting 50-100 musicians together to provide
That's the thing -- we've NEVER paid for content, we pay for its container, whether it be a book, a newspaper, an album, or a DVD.
This is absolute nonsense. The next thing you'll be telling me is that when you pay to go to a concert, you're only paying for the actual paper ticket rather than the "content" of the performance. Or maybe you're paying for the privilege of admission to a concert hall, but never actually paying for the "content" of the performance on stage.
Seriously? Of course you're actually paying to hear that performance, just like you're paying to be able to hear a specific performance from a CD, DVD, etc. Sure, there's the overhead cost of the medium, but that's not why you buy the ticket or the CD or the DVD or even the newspaper.
We were always free to tape friends' LPs and we were always free to record TV shows and movies on VHS (well, since the advent of the VCR anyway). We didn't buy music, we bought records. We didn't buy movies, we bought tapes. We didn't buy news, we bought newspapers.
In the past, a couple friends made copies of something. Nobody cared. But the content wasn't "free"; it's just the potential for abuse was small. However, if you went on the street and started selling bootlegged copies taped off your friends' LPs, you could very well be charged with copyright infringement. Now, with digital distribution, the same guy who just made a single tape of an LP could also make that recording available to thousands or millions of people with a few clicks.
Don't get me wrong. I hate the RIAA and its tactics (as well as related groups). But your imaginary distinction between form and content never existed. It's just that in the past it was too hard for the average Joe to distribute bootlegged content on a massive scale.
When dealing with legal matters, there shouldn't be any question as to what something says. It's the same reason ships' logs are written in all-caps.
The reason "all-caps" have less uncertainty is because the way most people write block capitals is more standardized. There's nothing inherently more ambiguous about a cursive style. If we were all trained in a standard cursive style and told that the letterforms must look a certain way, it would be just as clear. But although there were a few standard cursive styles around in the early 20th century, today most people write in hybrids (combining cursive styles and/or combining cursive letterforms with print), which mean there is no standard. That's the real problem in your example.
All-caps writing is usually easier to read than all-caps typing, anyway, in my experience. The upper-case letters in most fonts aren't designed to be written exclusively, they're only supposed to be at the beginning of words. You want to see something even more fatiguing to read? Try writing something in all-caps, cursive.
Did you really just make that argument?? After arguing that most fonts aren't meant to be used in all-caps, you proceed to criticize cursive writing in all-caps, which definitely is not intended to be used that way?
As for legible cursive, my mom was born in the 30s, and I can barely read her (cursive) writing.
Maybe you just haven't had a lot of experience reading various kinds of cursive? Or maybe there's something different about your mother's writing? I'm not arguing that all people above a certain age have/had better handwriting, only that better writing was more common in the past because it was emphasized more, since you weren't expected to type everything you wrote (as most people expect nowadays).
Younger people may be more sloppy, but cursive in general is just harder to read, well-written or not. Why do you think printing presses used block letters instead of cursive-like letters?
Uh, printing presses used block letters because they were imitating formal handwritten manuscript writing styles of the time they were invented. The modern cursive script arose in the 16th-17th centuries. Although there were older "cursive" styles used for quick writing, they looked different. Rather than following the trend toward cursive, printing presses tended to move toward the new italic scripts instead as alternatives, though in a number of ways printing press styles continued to imitate handwritten scripts in their use of ligatures and various kinds of signs of abbreviation. You think cursive is hard to read? Try reading the some of the blackletter Fraktur styles that were common for most of the history of printing.
Really, you have no historical perspective on this. Scripts are easier to read if they're standardized. That's the real issue here, not the letterforms of any particular script.
That's what non-cursive writing (printing) is for. It's much more legible to people other than the writer.
I'd rather be forced to read the cursive writing of any of my four grandparents (only one of whom even graduated high school) than the printing of most high school students today. (I've taught high school recently, so I've spent a lot of time grappling with the problems of modern handwriting trends.)
The legibility problem is caused by a lack of practice in handwriting in general. Cursive has a number of standard forms and a few standard variations even in very calligraphic scripts. If you use a standard form of cursive well, it's just as legible as printing.
Take a look at public records written before typewriters; for the most part, they're pretty easy to read if you're familiar with standard cursive forms (abbreviations are often more a problem than sorting out what the letters are).
(Btw, I'm not arguing for continuing education in cursive. But the problem of legibility is more about lack of practice in proper handwriting than the particular script used.)
No one's ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing, unless they were a calligrapher.
Funny how I've spent lots of time looking in archives at public records -- including records of many legal proceedings -- from the 19th century and earlier, and the vast majority of these things are perfectly legible. Even marginal notes and such are often quite easy to read. Definitely much more legible than the average printed script of a high-school student these days.
The fact is that handwriting in schools has been downplayed for decades. Also, there's a modern impatience that doesn't allow the time to write legibly (or to take the time to learn how to write legibly in a fast manner -- it can be done). I've seen my parents' high school yearbooks, and almost all of the the comments written in them by their friends are perfectly legible. (And about 75% of them are in cursive.) In my own yearbook, less than half were as neat as those in my parents' yearbooks, even though many more were printed. A couple years ago, I signed yearbooks for some students, and the vast majority of the comments by friends looked like the same scribbles I saw when I graded their exams.
I'm not arguing that we need to teach cursive anymore, since most of its advantages are no longer relevant (better when writing for longer periods, better for old types of pens, etc.). And handwriting has become less relevant as typing has become ubiquitous in the computer age.
BUT -- the modern inability to write legibly (in cursive or in print) is a result of the lack of training and practice, and claiming that "no one has ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing" is simply ignorant. Have you never tried reading the writing of anyone born before about 1950? The vast majority of them had/have legible handwriting, even in cursive.
OH, AND BY THE WAY, READING STUFF WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS IS ACTUALLY RATHER FATIGUING (AND NOT ACTUALLY MORE LEGIBLE, THOUGH YOU'RE LESS LIKELY TO SEE INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS IN UPPERCASE COMPARED TO LOWERCASE)... HERE'S A SAMPLE IN CASE YOU'VE NEVER ENCOUNTERED THOSE PEOPLE BORN BEFORE 1950 TRYING TO CORRESPOND ON THE INTERNET WITH THE CAPS LOCK BUTTON ON....
Normally I wouldn't respond to a post days after a discussion was over, but since you already responded to me days after my post, I figure I should return the favor.
Are you seriously suggesting that I should admit that I'm wrong because a troll makes fun of me? He admits that he isn't familiar with the literature he's claiming to talk about -- he explicitly claims he doesn't need to read about philosophy of science, and although I suggested to him that he read the historical books he's talking about (e.g., Galileo, Kepler, etc.), he doesn't seem to show any direct knowledge of them... only anecdotes and vague claims that you'd read about in summaries of the history of science of the time.
Part of my research involves reading quite a bit about 17th century science. I've spent a lot of time with these treatises, and have read large parts of them in the original Latin or Italian. I can demonstrate what I'm talking about, and you want me to admit I'm wrong and move on to someone who more-or-less ignores my objections (without disproving them with any facts) and then proceeds to suggest I go read an undergraduate math textbook?? Come on. How the heck is that a "correction" to what I said? It doesn't even make sense. (By learning about tensors from an undergrad math textbook, I should be able to evaluate historical claims about Galileo better?!?)
If you don't think my previous post was correct, try reading up a bit about Tychonic systems of astronomy; it was actually still mainstream science for the entirety of the 17th century, since observationally one couldn't differentiate between it and the modified Copernican system of Kepler. The only reason to assert the superiority of one over the other was by appealing to some other philosophical position, e.g., Aristotelean physics (if one were Tychonian) or some sort of Occam's Razor argument (if one were affiliated with Galileo and Kepler). There's a brief summary in the Wikipedia article (I can give you more scholarly citations, if you like, but this only has a few minor issues and is more accessible): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Tychonic_astronomy_after_Tycho
Similarly, if you think anything I said about Kepler or Newton is incorrect, at least take a look at the Wikipedia articles, even if you go no further. If you start doing more detailed research in actual writings on the history of science, you'll find even more. I'll admit that I could clarify my point about Newton more in retrospect; I was writing quickly and didn't mean that the Principia used a Tychonic system throughout (if anyone read it like that)... I just meant that it assumes it in places, as can be easily demonstrated. Clearly Newton was somewhat ambivalent about various models and used convenient models for computational purposes (as some others did with Copernican models, even if they didn't believe they represented physical reality).
As for Galileo, the fact is that his primary role in the so-called "scientific revolution" really dates to the mythology created in the 19th century. (Much of what we think we know about history was invented in the 19th century; most of it is true to some extent, but the dramatization of the history of ideas as we now understand it is greatly enhanced during this time.) This is not at all to downplay Galileo's intellect or contributions to science; I am the first to acknowledge him as the genius that he was. And what the Church did to him was censorship and was wrong to those of us who value intellectual freedom. But he didn't play by the rules they set up, and he was making assertions about the validity of one astronomical system that he actually could not prove merely from the data. And he wasn't the first scientist to experiment -- that sort of thing had been growing in science for centuries. Many other scientists of the day (both in the church and outside it) performed experiments, and collected and analyzed data
Indeed, estimating most of the values of the variables in the Drake equation is pure guesswork. Until (and unless) we find a number of examples of life elsewhere, we won't have any data on which to base estimates for most of the variables.
Which leads me to ask a question -- why is it that a story about SETI gets a pretty normal (and generally positive) response around here as well as in the scientific community, even though the fact that we have no way to estimate the variables in the Drake equations means that SETI could be an utter waste of time and money? In contrast, somebody brings up other "pseudoscience" around here, like alternative medicine, and they get pounced on. See, for example, the discussion on this recent story: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/16/2043242/In-Britain-Better-Not-Call-It-Bogus-Science
Don't get me wrong: I think most "alternative medicine" is BS, but at least a lot of people think they are getting results from it. Even if most positive results are due to a placebo effect, at least it does good for some people. What good does SETI do that normal astronomers wouldn't be doing anyway? And where are all the posts about falsifiability and quackery here?
If Drake and Sagan and others didn't just make up numbers that fit their theory so that we'd spend millions of dollars searching the skies, would we consider the search for aliens today to have anything to do with science? What are these new "estimates" except other shots in the dark drawing conclusions based on one piece of anecdotal evidence (i.e., life on earth)? Just asking.
One other thing -- my Dad worked in the "mercury room" at a plant that manufactured liquid mercury for industrial use in the 1960s. When he first got there, they basically had no regulations. But only one employee had ever shown significant poisoning symptoms, and he had been there for many years. Finally, they instituted some basic regulations about cleanup, basic decontamination showering, etc. after my Dad had been there a few years. Nothing like you'd see today. And yet neither my Dad nor any of his colleagues but that one ever had symptoms (one other guy apparently complained of headaches, which led to the new regulations), and they handled literally tons of liquid mercury every day without any real protection. My Dad still talks about how it was difficult to get it out of one's clothes and the color it turned your skin.
Given those stories, and the fact that I can read a MSDS sheet, I really can't understand the current mercury scare insanity. Avoid environmental contamination -- of course. But the idea that miniscule amounts of mercury constitute a reason to close a school?
Once in my college chem lab, the student working next to me broke a mercury thermometer. The lab assistant who was supervising us (who was either a chemistry or ChemE grad student) went rather nuts, made me move all my equipment and do my work elsewhere, and he dumped a crazy amount of sulfur on the floor. He was worried about what else he should do. All this for a few grams of mercury.
At the end of the lab period that day, I went up to him and showed him the MSDS sheets for all the chemicals we were using in that lab experiment that day. Basically, elemental mercury was less harmful than every compound we were using in that experiment. Why wasn't he running around acting like an idiot whenever we poured or moved any of the other chemicals? And this was someone who was a grad student at a major university who should know better.
I still don't understand the insanity surrounding mercury, particularly elemental mercury. The EU has basically banned it; the US is working on doing the same. Organic mercury is a real problem, and we need to worry about contamination on large scales. But the amount of mercury in a thermometer isn't going to kill anyone. An old barometer has quite a bit, and it should require careful cleanup and disposal, but anyone with some training of handling chemicals (like a chemistry teacher) is more than qualified... it's certainly no where near the most dangerous substance used in a chem lab.
Well, I'm the one who made the mistake of responding to a troll. I won't make it again. You don't know anything about my background (for the record, I have multiple undergraduate credentials in science and engineering from probably the best engineering school in the world and am well-versed in tensors), and you show yourself increasingly to be ignorant of the actual trajectory of the history of science as it was understood by those at the time. I could write more to try to explain how your assumptions about what I said are incorrect concerning the history of science (hint, I do know which equations Newton solved, and just because he might have admitted the possibility of non-Copernican systems at times doesn't preclude his use of mechanics that make other assumptions), but it seems pointless, since you are close-minded enough to assume that you know everything about me and proceed to insult every group that you imagine I am part of, just because I have a different opinion about a philosopher of science than you do.
And, by the way, go back to my previous post where I said I thought Feyerabend goes too far for me. I don't actually agree with him, but perhaps you don't understand how one could recognize that an argument can contribute something to your perspective on the world, even if you don't agree with it completely? Of course you don't. Everything's black-and-white for you. Here's a newsflash -- I actually believe deeply in science and depend on statistical arguments about complex datasets in my research all the time. But I also recognize that, like every human endeavor, science is flawed in a number of ways. It was even more flawed, and the dividing lines were more difficult to draw, in the 17th century. Feyerabend is a crackpot in some things, just like Kepler was, but he also has some interesting things to say. And maybe by thinking about his arguments, we might improve science.
Oh, and one last thing -- when Feyerabend argues that the scientific method is flawed, he means in a logical sense. That doesn't mean it isn't real and that it doesn't work sometimes. But at many critical junctures in history, he argues that no ACTUAL method (whether formalized or not) consistently decides in favor of scientific progress. The methods we have either choose for the wrong side (because science is conservative about core beliefs), or they can't choose between two alternative theories. That's a logical problem, and it isn't solved by naively chanting "observe, hypothesize," etc. over and over. All this may sound like blather to you, but unless scientists consider this problem seriously, they risk ignoring various kinds of innovators or getting stuck in loops of research that go nowhere.
In all seriousness, I do hope that if you are a scientist, you try to think about some of this stuff sometime. You're absolutely right that there are a lot of idiots in the humanities who jumped on the Kuhnian bandwagon and started writing "deconstructive" analyses of science they know nothing about. They are morons, and you rightly criticize them. But that doesn't mean that there isn't real stuff to be gleaned from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, et al., all of whom had some significant training in technical fields.
One small clarification -- I realize that my post may be misunderstood in the statement "clearly many astronomers continued to believe that (including your cited Kepler)..." I didn't mean to imply that Kepler believed in geocentrism, rather that he did acknowledge in most of his treatises that the Tychonian system was still consistent with the data, even if Kepler thought his own model was better. Anyhow, that doesn't change the fact that Kepler's ideas didn't catch on immediately, and many of the implications of his laws were not understood until well after his death.
You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.
Have you read Feyerabend, or are you just assuming what's in his book? Contrary to popular belief, Feyerabend is not arguing against science or even against method (despite the title), but rather pointing out that the so-called "scientific method" is fundamentally flawed, whether you take the naive empiricist view, the Popperian view, or Lakatos's more complex model of science. All of these methods, when applied to the Galileo situation, fail to provide a firm way to evaluate which side was correct. It's a rather complex argument, and he's not interested in condemning the actions of either side or declaring either side to be "correct" in some absolute sense.
But, anyhow, why let the facts about a person stand in your way of being a "jerk"?
Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.
Ah, yes, I guess that's why much of the scientific establishment held onto the Tychonic model well into the 18th century. Even Newton's Principia assumes a Tychonic system, even in later editions. It really wasn't until Bradley's measurement of stellar aberration in 1729 that one really had proof that the earth was actually orbiting around the sun, and clearly many astronomers continued to believe that (including your cited Kepler), for another century after Kepler and Galileo.
Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets.
Ah, yes, that same Kepler who published his third law in the Harmonices mundi, which he discovered while looking for musical harmonic intervals in the heavens. Do you remember those wonderful glissandi that the planets make as they move? Oh, yeah, and all the astrology in that treatise? We're really talking about modern science here -- what were those churchmen thinking?
And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.
Not sure who has the ax to grind here, or who is revising history. There's a good reason why my usernamesake (Kircher) had a larger audience for his books in the 17th century than Newton, and it wasn't just because Newton's stuff was harder to read. Despite the fact that Newton published more on religion than science, believed in astrology, worked steadily in alchemy, and apparently also wasn't enough of an astronomer to "see what was going on" and reject the Tychonic system, he also was seen as an occult figure for proposing those strange "forces" acting at a distance. The worldview of forgotten scientists, like Kircher, was much more tolerable to many scientists of the day (though Kircher was clearly suspected of charlatanism, so I don't want to hold him up as a model). And this proves Feyerabend's point -- Galileo was unsuccessful in part because he didn't just have to show evidence for the Copernican system; he needed to overturn the whole Aristotelian system of physics. Otherwise, celestial mechanics would not be working on the same principles as those of the rest of physics, and that inconsistency is enough for a rational scientist of the age to doubt a new theory, particularly when you have another (the Tychonic system) that agrees with measurement data and is consistent with the rest of science at the time.
Really, before you have a tirade, go back and actually read all those books that you mention in your post. You might realize how very different -- and unscientific -- everyone sounds to a modern reader, on both sides of the Galilean controversy. And then you might see how it's difficult to project our modern scientific standards back then to judge who was right and who was wrong (at that time).
till, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said
Why are you associating the current Pope with this statement more than its author, i.e., Paul Feyerabend, from his book "Against Method." Feyerabend is a serious philosopher of science who has some detailed criticisms of the way that science actually works compared with the idealized "scientific method" that we claim is at the heart of science. (Yes, the Pope quoted him, but your post doesn't say where this quotation came from; it's not some crazy churchman.)
I personally think Feyerabend goes a little too far, but he has some legitimate things to say about how the history of science is not as neat and tidy as we would like it to be.
but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not.
Perhaps. But if we're arguing about science and scientific method, surely we should at least consider whether the ideas win out because they adhere to the science and reason, rather than winning out by luck, political circumstance, or simply waiting for the older generation to die off... hence the reason why the Kuhns and Feyerabends of the world have made some important contributions to the philosophy of science.
Agreed. TFA worries about how scientists can also worry about public relations. Perhaps the first thing that needs to be done is getting people interested enough that they might care about science in the first place, and not just in a facile way of "wow--isn't that neat?" I'm mainly talking about teaching science in primary and secondary school. Currently, the anti-intellectual climate (which is often anti-science as well) isn't helped by bad schools, bad teachers, and bad curriculum choices.
Example of the problem. I taught high school math and physics for a few years in the early 2000s in the US. In my physics classes, I encouraged a lot of analysis and actual thinking to earn a good grade. We would do lots of hands-on experiments, from which we'd derive data, and then analyze that data and compare it to theory. I encouraged students to bring in their own questions they encountered in daily life that were related to the things we were discussing, and we'd investigate them. A lot of students balked when I required them to think on tests, rather than just regurgitate information or solve another problem exactly like one they did ten times on a homework assignment, but eventually most of them learned a lot of critical thinking skills. By the end of the year, I'd trust most of them to set up an experiment, collect data, and analyze results in the real world, as well as to critically evaluate that sort of task done by others, at least using the limited mathematical tools they had at their disposal. Many of them also left with a much more curious attitude about how the world worked than when we began the year.
This worked great in the private school I taught in, since we have freedom over the curriculum. Contrast this to my first year teaching in a lower middle class public school where I was straightjacketed by a state curriculum.
I had to teach algebra II to a bunch of kids who had crappy preparation. Many of them had a substitute teacher for much of algebra I, most had little understanding of even pre-algebra, and some of them couldn't even do basic arithmetic without a calculator. (By "basic" arithmetic, I mean things like 12 minus 7.)
I came into this classroom late in the fall, because the previous teacher quit after she refused to try to teach algebra II to students who couldn't even understand basic math. She wanted to do remedial work so they might actually learn something useful, rather than just how to move meaningless symbols around. Almost all of my 140 students were juniors or seniors, and for most, this would be the last math class they would ever take. Very few would go to college. What did we teach them?
One example: we spent almost 6 weeks on conic sections. Mostly on how to put equations in standard form and name the various characteristic parts, since that was required by the state curriculum, and my high school cared much more about that than whether the students actually could do anything. When we got to exponential equations, I tried to give them an application involving compound interest and loans, and I found that only 2 out of my 140 students knew what compound interest was. And most of them couldn't follow the application anyway, because before they took my class, they had never been asked to use algebra to actually DO anything before; to them it was just moving meaningless symbols around until they solved for a variable. The only reason they were taking a second year of algebra was because in that state it qualified them for a better diploma.
So, in other words, we were graduating a bunch of students who could put the equation of a hyperbola in standard form, even though they didn't really know what a hyperbola was, but they had never heard of compound interest and had no tools for evaluating the terms of a loan. (Maybe this has something to do with the economic fiasco?) And I couldn't spend more time on the latter, because the state curriculum required me to move on.
I'll agree with you that the Republic is open to interpretation. And this is not the forum for lengthy debate, so this will be my last post on the matter.
You've proven that you can summarize overall structure of the Republic. And I didn't mean to assert that your quotation was invalid or even off-topic. But I believe that even if you think that is the one true definition of justice given by Plato in all his works, it's more than a bit misleading when taken out of context. It requires a significant amount of context and interpretation to understand what that "definition" means, which was not at all clear from your original post. Nor it is yet clear to me that you understand what that quotation means (since your response was to summarize the Republic, rather than provide appropriate context and explanation for the relevant quotation, except in one paragraph), though I agree with most of what you said in your summary, at least in general.
Moreover, I think there is also the issue of what Plato (and/or Socrates) says about justice in many other works, particularly those that address justice and social order explicitly, such as the Crito, the Laws, etc. You're right -- the Republic is the longest work that intends to address what justice is, but that's not what your comment was about. It was in response to someone who gave an interpretation of Plato in general, not of the Republic, nor of a specific phrase in the Republic when someone says: "Justice is..."
So I'll repeat what I originally said -- I don't agree with the original wording of the above post on Plato's views. But I think that someone could reasonably argue that Plato did not have a coherent single standard of justice (since Socrates proceeds to demonstrate justice by the harmoniousness of the soul and the city, which is a dynamic process of interaction rather than a single standard). Moreover, he does clearly make the argument that it is okay to create a false appearance (and justification) of social order by lying to the citizenry about their class structure and place in a society. That strikes me as very close to creating the "appearance" of justice within a society, rather than "true" justice (whatever that is). (Recall that justice is defined by the harmoniousness of the interactions of people in a society, so arguing that that very harmony is constructed on a lie to appear to be well-ordered is really creating only an appearance of a just society.) So, in its essence, I understand where the original post was coming from, though I don't really agree with it completely. It was not "completely wrong," though perhaps the poster's understanding was incomplete, and your first response to it was incomplete as well.
Lastly, I'll just note that there is also the problem of interpretation of what constitutes "justice" for Plato (and/or Socrates). For you, apparently we decide it by finding the place in the largest Platonic dialogue where Socrates says something like "Justice [dike] is..." But there are plenty of other places justice is discussed, plenty more where it is not named explicitly, and even more when some other related concept not indicated by the Greek word "dike" (which is not completely rendered by the English word "justice"). Despite your continued assertion that you are relying on a direct quotation, it is not. It is a translation which does not carry the complete semantic content of the original, and the content the quotation does carry is in part metaphorical and requires considerable exegesis. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that one can point to a single place in a translation that says, "X is" and say that's the only valid way to determine what Plato's entire view on X was, particularly in a work as complex as the Republic.
If you want to refute the original post, I can see plenty of ways to argue about its incompleteness, and many of them could have been expressed in a paragraph. But your citation of a single out-of-context quotation does not resolve the matter, nor does your lengthy summary of a work that is even further off-topic than the present digression.
What? Plato didn't say that. That's completely wrong. Plato explicitly defined justice in the Republic.
First off, I didn't see quotation marks around the grandparent's post. It was: "Plato said that there..." which implies that it isn't an exact quotation. So he didn't "make up quotes" -- it isn't a quote.
Second, the Republic never comes to a clear consensus on defining justice, although many possible ideas are offered and debated. The idea that because you take one random phrase out of the Republic and claim that to be the final word on "justice" demonstrates quite a bit of ignorance to me.
Finally, while I don't quite agree with the original poster's wording, in essence, I think Plato does not come to a consensus, hence there is no "true measure" of justice. Instead, the explanation seems more to be about Socrates giving an exposition of an ideal model for a city (and its reflection of a soul) that exemplifies a just society, rather than an explicit definition of justice. An Plato clearly thought that appearance of justice was just as important, if not more important, than actual "justice" (whatever that is). Hence all of the "noble lies" that Socrates endorses to be told to maintain the appearance of a just and ordered society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
Don't just make up quotes and attribute them to Plato. It makes philosophers really angry.
I don't know about professional philosophers, but ignorant citations of random quotations rather than demonstrating a real understanding of the text makes people who actually have read the Republic (and thought deeply about it) really angry.
Try some searches yourself; the error rate is far above one in a million. As I've started using Google Books in my research, I've encountered these sorts of errors frequently enough that I don't really trust search results in Google Books to turn up things I expect, if those searches depend on metadata.
For example, take the criticism of incorrect dating given in the article. Try picking a well-known author of classic literature not mentioned in the article. (Google appears to be working on the ones that are mentioned in that article, so you can't get good stats.) Then restrict dates to the years before the author was born. Just trying a few searches like that seems to indicate that this particular error occurs about 1 in 1000 times for major authors of classic literature in the Google Books database.
That's only one type of error, and that's not even including all the other possible errors in dating that aren't as blatant as having the publication date before the author was born. Factor in the other kinds of metadata errors mentioned, and I would bet that more than 1% of records have some significant error that would cause them to be left out of reasonable searches requiring metadata.
That sort of error rate significantly decreases the usefulness of Google Books. Is Google Books a great thing? Of course. But its usefulness is not only in getting access to texts, but in being able to search for an find those books. If a telephone directory had an error giving the wrong name, number, or address in more than 1 out of 100 entries, it would be considered a major problem. If you can't find something in a database, it significantly decreases the usefulness of having all the materials there in the first place.
Yeltsin resigns; Putin is left in charge. George W. Bush decided to run for President of the U.S. The Columbine massacre in the U.S. leads to all sorts of political and social fallout.
In geek news, Napster is founded, changing the way media files are shared, and Apple releases the iBook, which initiates a new phase in laptop design.
And let's not forget the other legacies we must live with from 1999... like SpongeBob SquarePants and the new Star Wars trilogy....
No, nothing that happened 10 years ago is in any way relevant to what's going on today... do you seriously believe that?
Catholics have always believed that sex between a married hetrosexual couple was a holy, good act.
Yes, as long as the couple's intentions are correct. They must have goals of unity (of their love) and procreation in mind. See the catechism:
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm#2360
2363 The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.
The conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity.
A sex act, even between married heterosexual couples is not necessarily a good holy act, unless by doing so they are expressing love and intending to have children. If they have in mind sex for pleasure's sake (hedonism) or their own desires, rather than love (selfishness), the act is NOT good, as the summary implies.
See another part of the catechism:
2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
So, yes, sex is encouraged, but only for particular goals. Any heterosexual married couple who engages in sex without the explicit intent to procreate is NOT engaging in a "holy, good act." That probably means most sex acts between married couples do not conform to your claim... hence apparently the need to encourage prayer, as stated in the summary. That's how it's news.
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What does "commercial" mean here? Anytime that someone accepts any compensation in return for providing a copy of a copyrighted work?
Yes. A sale is a sale, it shouldn't matter if one illegal copy was sold or a million. There's actually something tangible there.
To me, there's where I get confused, although perhaps you have a different definition of "sale." But I said "compensation" for a specific reason -- a person might give me a recording of one thing in exchange for another recording, or a person might buy me dinner when I give him a copy of my music collection. Is that a problem? I'm being "compensated" for distributing copies of something. I'm not getting actual currency, but items of value are being exchanged between two (or more) people. Under different conditions, some of that "compensation" might be paid to artists instead, but it's not. Once again, the content has inherent value (at least for most people), whether or not you choose to believe it has monetary value.
Are you allowed to make a recording of this "service" and distribute it freely?
Why not? A concert is more than music, and agiain, this only helps the artist. The Grateful Dead, who got little airplay, would have never had the popularity they enjoyed had they not encouraged bootlegs of their live performances. I have friends who post lossless copies of their shows on archive.org, as thousands of other artists do.
If your friends distribute copies of their own shows, fine. But I'm a little more hazy on when you decide to do this on your own. You're right -- for many (even most) bands it's free advertising. But don't they get to make the choice? Why do you get to choose? Also, again I'm still trying to pin down what exactly you're paying for at this concert. What is the "service" you say that you're paying for, if not being able to hear/see that performance? If you then provide that "service" to others for free, presumably again because you're claiming that the content is "free," then what were you paying for?
Are you allowed to sneak some people into the concert to enjoy hearing it as well, as long as they don't disrupt other people?
Thats silly, of course not.
Why? What hair are you splitting that says you can record a concert and distribute it freely to others, but you can't actually distribute that material directly to them by helping them get into the concert hall? I'm not asking a legal question here, because that answer may vary. From a moral standpoint, I really don't see a difference. If the band says they don't want their concert recorded and redistributed, and you do that, I don't see any difference between that and allowing people to sneak into a concert hall to experience that performance. In both cases, you're allowing someone who didn't pay for the "service" to experience it. If the band says it's okay to record, fine, but otherwise you're breaking the rules in both cases. After all, most concert halls are private spaces; you're choosing to pay for admission, which usually means you agree to their policies.
I can buy a recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" by some crappy orchestra for less than $5. I can buy a CD that looks exactly the same except for some cover art, but it was just recorded by some hip new group in Italy, and I'll pay $18 for it.
You can buy a copy of a Britney Spears CD for $20 or a CD from a local band that actually has some talent for $5. I don't see the point of your argument. The content is the "carrot" that gets you to spend the money on the physical object.
You conveniently snipped out the most important part of my argument there, which is why you don't see the point. The point is that the new recording got made
If by ignorance you allude that your friend did not know about the Holocaust, then yes, your story is very troubling.
My friend was very aware of the Holocaust. Did you not even notice that I mentioned the swastika clearly had elements that differentiated it from a Nazi swastika, or did you follow the link to the Wikipedia article and read about various kinds of swastikas and their uses over thousands of years?
If he had essentially drawn a Nazi flag with the correct colors, etc., they might have a point about its offensiveness. But it was a pencil drawing with a bunch of dots that looked something like this. I think it may even have been "left-facing," because he was actually even trying to differentiate it more from Nazi versions, like these.
Do you really want to deny use of symbols that are important to some religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) that have over a billion followers because an unrelated group of people (Nazis) adopted a similar symbol and persecuted another religious group?
If I were the parent of that child, I would have some serious problems with they way they handled that case and would have pursued resolution and/or settlement.
It's been awhile, but if I remember correctly, my friend hid the situation from his parents at first out of embarrassment, but eventually his mother did get involved and had a long talk with someone in the administration about religious symbols. In the end, I think they still held to their guns about asking him to remove the cover, since he was not using those symbols for religious purposes, merely as decorative doodles about something he was currently interested in.
The fact that it is still protected speech is sufficient in my opinion. People are still allowed to express their views both for and against it. It's good.
Oh, I wasn't contradicting your original post. I was just pointing out that even though we don't have government censorship in the U.S., many institutions and groups still feel the need to police symbols of Nazism or the Confederacy, even out of ignorance.
Although not directly related to the Civil War, witness the recent debate in Rhode Island arguing to shorten its name from the original "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations." Why? Because the word "plantation" is apparently taboo these days because at some point later in history some "plantations" were in the South and many of those had slaves at some point. Never mind that the word had none of these connotations in the 17th century when the colony was named. In the end, they've decided to let the voters decide, so again, it's all good. But I do think legislatures deciding to remove words or alter historical names of things would be a kind of censorship, even if rather innocuous. And it's especially bad when done out of ignorance... something I think is a disturbing trend these days in the U.S., even if it's not officially government-sanctioned "censorship."
The U.S. didn't respond to the history of the civil war by banning any and all rebel markings.
True, although the confederate flag has been under fire in recent years.
Also, swastikas seem to cause a great deal of worry even in the U.S., even if they are not legally censored. A few years back, my best friend in high school drew a swastika on his book cover. You see, he was becoming intrigued by Eastern religions, and he had drawn a few different religious symbols on his book cover. The form of the swastika was clearly not the Nazi type (since it contained dots, etc.), but my friend was led off to the principal's office for a talk. I believe he was then made to go to a few sessions with the guidance counselor, even after removing the book cover and attempting to explain what the symbol meant for thousands of years before appropriation by the Nazis.
This is what happened to someone near the top of his high school class and who never had been in any trouble in school before. All because he drew a picture of a random religious symbol. Ah, ignorance....
For example, the NPD (National Democratic Party) has had representatives in the national government for years now
Sorry -- the NPD only has seats on parliaments at the state level, not representatives in federal parliament. My mistake. But I know from friends in Germany that they have been really fighting for greater national recognition, and lots of people are worried about it.
It's been over 60 years, Germany. You don't have to worry about symbolism bringing back the Nazi party; most of them are dead.
That's not quite true, though. Yes, most original Nazis are dead, but with their death also comes a greater tendency to forget the dangerous tendencies that got things started.
For example, the NPD (National Democratic Party) has had representatives in the national government for years now (and it receives 5-10% of the vote in some regions). They are widely portrayed as being associated with Nazi ideals, and though I think the media is a little overboard about such things, I start to wonder when their official party statements are concerned about "alliances of Jews and Negroes" threatening to take over the world (from the Wikipedia article):
In November 2008, shortly after the 2008 United States Presidential Election, the NPD published a document entitled "Africa conquers the White House" which stated that the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the United States was the result of "the American alliance of Jews and Negroes" and that Obama aimed to destroy the United States' "white identity." The NPD claimed that "A non-white America is a declaration of war on all people who believe an organically grown social order based on language and culture, history and heritage to be the essence of humanity" and that "Barack Obama hides this declaration of war behind his pushy sunshine smile." The NPD also stated that the extensive support for Obama in Germany "resembles an African tropical disease."
Do I think this is a reason to suppress speech? No. But I do think Nazi symbols could exacerbate some of the right-wing, who does seem to adhere to tenets similar to the rhetoric of the early Nazi Party.
That said, I'm really confused about the places you decide to split hairs. For example:
Commercial copyright infringement isn't just illegal, it's wrong.
I have to admit I was surprised by that statement in context of your post. I'm guessing that you want distribution of copyrighted content to be allowed as long as no one is making a profit? What does "commercial" mean here? Anytime that someone accepts any compensation in return for providing a copy of a copyrighted work? Or does it have to be on a large scale? What if someone facilitates commercial infringement by making content available in a form that makes it easier to copy? I'm just trying to understand where you draw the line.
By the way, I'm sympathetic to your view, and I understand that much of the "pirate" market consists of people who wouldn't pay for the content anyway (and, for many, if they find something valuable enough, they will pay).
But I simply can't agree with this:
When I go to a concert I'm not buying anything. I'm paying for a service, just like when my employer pays me for my time or I pay a barber to cut my hair or tip my bartender. When I buy that band's CD I'm buying a CD. When I hear them on the radio, it's free. When I tape it off the radio it's free. The content is free, the CD and service (concert) are not.
I understand the distinction you're trying to draw about a "service," but you choose a very interesting place to draw the line. Are you allowed to make a recording of this "service" and distribute it freely? Are you allowed to sneak some people into the concert to enjoy hearing it as well, as long as they don't disrupt other people? They aren't interfering with the "service" for anyone, and since you aren't buying anything, what does it matter?
I would think that the latter sounds immoral. It does to me. You're paying to hear that performance, whether you want to call it a "service" or whatever, just like part of the profits earned on the CD you buy go to pay the artist for performing in the studio and making the CD. Yeah, if a performance gets played on the radio, you can hear it for free, just as a band can hold a free concert. But it does not follow that the content of a recording has no inherent monetary value. If I go to the grocery store, and they have a "buy one, get one free sale" on cans of peas, it doesn't mean that cans of peas are "free" in any absolute sense. If I show up on the first day they're selling a new computer application, and they give me one for free as a first customer, that doesn't mean it was "free" in an absolute sense, and I should just go home and give the software to everyone. Playing something on a radio or even allowing legal taping of "free" performances on the radio does not make every recording of that performance in every medium "free."
And even if you think it does, it does not follow that the "content" of CD is free. Come on. It's particularly noticeable in classical CDs. I can buy a recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" by some crappy orchestra for less than $5. I can buy a CD that looks exactly the same except for some cover art, but it was just recorded by some hip new group in Italy, and I'll pay $18 for it. If the "content" of the CD is free, then what the hell am I paying $13 more for? I'm paying for a better performance (or at least a newer one or one that's more in vogue). Classical labels are small enough that new orchestral recordings simply won't pay unless they sell CDs; how else do you justify getting 50-100 musicians together to provide
That's the thing -- we've NEVER paid for content, we pay for its container, whether it be a book, a newspaper, an album, or a DVD.
This is absolute nonsense. The next thing you'll be telling me is that when you pay to go to a concert, you're only paying for the actual paper ticket rather than the "content" of the performance. Or maybe you're paying for the privilege of admission to a concert hall, but never actually paying for the "content" of the performance on stage.
Seriously? Of course you're actually paying to hear that performance, just like you're paying to be able to hear a specific performance from a CD, DVD, etc. Sure, there's the overhead cost of the medium, but that's not why you buy the ticket or the CD or the DVD or even the newspaper.
We were always free to tape friends' LPs and we were always free to record TV shows and movies on VHS (well, since the advent of the VCR anyway). We didn't buy music, we bought records. We didn't buy movies, we bought tapes. We didn't buy news, we bought newspapers.
In the past, a couple friends made copies of something. Nobody cared. But the content wasn't "free"; it's just the potential for abuse was small. However, if you went on the street and started selling bootlegged copies taped off your friends' LPs, you could very well be charged with copyright infringement. Now, with digital distribution, the same guy who just made a single tape of an LP could also make that recording available to thousands or millions of people with a few clicks.
Don't get me wrong. I hate the RIAA and its tactics (as well as related groups). But your imaginary distinction between form and content never existed. It's just that in the past it was too hard for the average Joe to distribute bootlegged content on a massive scale.
When dealing with legal matters, there shouldn't be any question as to what something says. It's the same reason ships' logs are written in all-caps.
The reason "all-caps" have less uncertainty is because the way most people write block capitals is more standardized. There's nothing inherently more ambiguous about a cursive style. If we were all trained in a standard cursive style and told that the letterforms must look a certain way, it would be just as clear. But although there were a few standard cursive styles around in the early 20th century, today most people write in hybrids (combining cursive styles and/or combining cursive letterforms with print), which mean there is no standard. That's the real problem in your example.
All-caps writing is usually easier to read than all-caps typing, anyway, in my experience. The upper-case letters in most fonts aren't designed to be written exclusively, they're only supposed to be at the beginning of words. You want to see something even more fatiguing to read? Try writing something in all-caps, cursive.
Did you really just make that argument?? After arguing that most fonts aren't meant to be used in all-caps, you proceed to criticize cursive writing in all-caps, which definitely is not intended to be used that way?
As for legible cursive, my mom was born in the 30s, and I can barely read her (cursive) writing.
Maybe you just haven't had a lot of experience reading various kinds of cursive? Or maybe there's something different about your mother's writing? I'm not arguing that all people above a certain age have/had better handwriting, only that better writing was more common in the past because it was emphasized more, since you weren't expected to type everything you wrote (as most people expect nowadays).
Younger people may be more sloppy, but cursive in general is just harder to read, well-written or not. Why do you think printing presses used block letters instead of cursive-like letters?
Uh, printing presses used block letters because they were imitating formal handwritten manuscript writing styles of the time they were invented. The modern cursive script arose in the 16th-17th centuries. Although there were older "cursive" styles used for quick writing, they looked different. Rather than following the trend toward cursive, printing presses tended to move toward the new italic scripts instead as alternatives, though in a number of ways printing press styles continued to imitate handwritten scripts in their use of ligatures and various kinds of signs of abbreviation. You think cursive is hard to read? Try reading the some of the blackletter Fraktur styles that were common for most of the history of printing.
Really, you have no historical perspective on this. Scripts are easier to read if they're standardized. That's the real issue here, not the letterforms of any particular script.
That's what non-cursive writing (printing) is for. It's much more legible to people other than the writer.
I'd rather be forced to read the cursive writing of any of my four grandparents (only one of whom even graduated high school) than the printing of most high school students today. (I've taught high school recently, so I've spent a lot of time grappling with the problems of modern handwriting trends.)
The legibility problem is caused by a lack of practice in handwriting in general. Cursive has a number of standard forms and a few standard variations even in very calligraphic scripts. If you use a standard form of cursive well, it's just as legible as printing.
Take a look at public records written before typewriters; for the most part, they're pretty easy to read if you're familiar with standard cursive forms (abbreviations are often more a problem than sorting out what the letters are).
(Btw, I'm not arguing for continuing education in cursive. But the problem of legibility is more about lack of practice in proper handwriting than the particular script used.)
No one's ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing, unless they were a calligrapher.
Funny how I've spent lots of time looking in archives at public records -- including records of many legal proceedings -- from the 19th century and earlier, and the vast majority of these things are perfectly legible. Even marginal notes and such are often quite easy to read. Definitely much more legible than the average printed script of a high-school student these days.
The fact is that handwriting in schools has been downplayed for decades. Also, there's a modern impatience that doesn't allow the time to write legibly (or to take the time to learn how to write legibly in a fast manner -- it can be done). I've seen my parents' high school yearbooks, and almost all of the the comments written in them by their friends are perfectly legible. (And about 75% of them are in cursive.) In my own yearbook, less than half were as neat as those in my parents' yearbooks, even though many more were printed. A couple years ago, I signed yearbooks for some students, and the vast majority of the comments by friends looked like the same scribbles I saw when I graded their exams.
I'm not arguing that we need to teach cursive anymore, since most of its advantages are no longer relevant (better when writing for longer periods, better for old types of pens, etc.). And handwriting has become less relevant as typing has become ubiquitous in the computer age.
BUT -- the modern inability to write legibly (in cursive or in print) is a result of the lack of training and practice, and claiming that "no one has ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing" is simply ignorant. Have you never tried reading the writing of anyone born before about 1950? The vast majority of them had/have legible handwriting, even in cursive.
OH, AND BY THE WAY, READING STUFF WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS IS ACTUALLY RATHER FATIGUING (AND NOT ACTUALLY MORE LEGIBLE, THOUGH YOU'RE LESS LIKELY TO SEE INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS IN UPPERCASE COMPARED TO LOWERCASE)... HERE'S A SAMPLE IN CASE YOU'VE NEVER ENCOUNTERED THOSE PEOPLE BORN BEFORE 1950 TRYING TO CORRESPOND ON THE INTERNET WITH THE CAPS LOCK BUTTON ON....
Normally I wouldn't respond to a post days after a discussion was over, but since you already responded to me days after my post, I figure I should return the favor.
Are you seriously suggesting that I should admit that I'm wrong because a troll makes fun of me? He admits that he isn't familiar with the literature he's claiming to talk about -- he explicitly claims he doesn't need to read about philosophy of science, and although I suggested to him that he read the historical books he's talking about (e.g., Galileo, Kepler, etc.), he doesn't seem to show any direct knowledge of them... only anecdotes and vague claims that you'd read about in summaries of the history of science of the time.
Part of my research involves reading quite a bit about 17th century science. I've spent a lot of time with these treatises, and have read large parts of them in the original Latin or Italian. I can demonstrate what I'm talking about, and you want me to admit I'm wrong and move on to someone who more-or-less ignores my objections (without disproving them with any facts) and then proceeds to suggest I go read an undergraduate math textbook?? Come on. How the heck is that a "correction" to what I said? It doesn't even make sense. (By learning about tensors from an undergrad math textbook, I should be able to evaluate historical claims about Galileo better?!?)
If you don't think my previous post was correct, try reading up a bit about Tychonic systems of astronomy; it was actually still mainstream science for the entirety of the 17th century, since observationally one couldn't differentiate between it and the modified Copernican system of Kepler. The only reason to assert the superiority of one over the other was by appealing to some other philosophical position, e.g., Aristotelean physics (if one were Tychonian) or some sort of Occam's Razor argument (if one were affiliated with Galileo and Kepler). There's a brief summary in the Wikipedia article (I can give you more scholarly citations, if you like, but this only has a few minor issues and is more accessible): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Tychonic_astronomy_after_Tycho
Similarly, if you think anything I said about Kepler or Newton is incorrect, at least take a look at the Wikipedia articles, even if you go no further. If you start doing more detailed research in actual writings on the history of science, you'll find even more. I'll admit that I could clarify my point about Newton more in retrospect; I was writing quickly and didn't mean that the Principia used a Tychonic system throughout (if anyone read it like that)... I just meant that it assumes it in places, as can be easily demonstrated. Clearly Newton was somewhat ambivalent about various models and used convenient models for computational purposes (as some others did with Copernican models, even if they didn't believe they represented physical reality).
As for Galileo, the fact is that his primary role in the so-called "scientific revolution" really dates to the mythology created in the 19th century. (Much of what we think we know about history was invented in the 19th century; most of it is true to some extent, but the dramatization of the history of ideas as we now understand it is greatly enhanced during this time.) This is not at all to downplay Galileo's intellect or contributions to science; I am the first to acknowledge him as the genius that he was. And what the Church did to him was censorship and was wrong to those of us who value intellectual freedom. But he didn't play by the rules they set up, and he was making assertions about the validity of one astronomical system that he actually could not prove merely from the data. And he wasn't the first scientist to experiment -- that sort of thing had been growing in science for centuries. Many other scientists of the day (both in the church and outside it) performed experiments, and collected and analyzed data
Indeed, estimating most of the values of the variables in the Drake equation is pure guesswork. Until (and unless) we find a number of examples of life elsewhere, we won't have any data on which to base estimates for most of the variables.
Which leads me to ask a question -- why is it that a story about SETI gets a pretty normal (and generally positive) response around here as well as in the scientific community, even though the fact that we have no way to estimate the variables in the Drake equations means that SETI could be an utter waste of time and money? In contrast, somebody brings up other "pseudoscience" around here, like alternative medicine, and they get pounced on. See, for example, the discussion on this recent story: http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/09/16/2043242/In-Britain-Better-Not-Call-It-Bogus-Science
Don't get me wrong: I think most "alternative medicine" is BS, but at least a lot of people think they are getting results from it. Even if most positive results are due to a placebo effect, at least it does good for some people. What good does SETI do that normal astronomers wouldn't be doing anyway? And where are all the posts about falsifiability and quackery here?
If Drake and Sagan and others didn't just make up numbers that fit their theory so that we'd spend millions of dollars searching the skies, would we consider the search for aliens today to have anything to do with science? What are these new "estimates" except other shots in the dark drawing conclusions based on one piece of anecdotal evidence (i.e., life on earth)? Just asking.
One other thing -- my Dad worked in the "mercury room" at a plant that manufactured liquid mercury for industrial use in the 1960s. When he first got there, they basically had no regulations. But only one employee had ever shown significant poisoning symptoms, and he had been there for many years. Finally, they instituted some basic regulations about cleanup, basic decontamination showering, etc. after my Dad had been there a few years. Nothing like you'd see today. And yet neither my Dad nor any of his colleagues but that one ever had symptoms (one other guy apparently complained of headaches, which led to the new regulations), and they handled literally tons of liquid mercury every day without any real protection. My Dad still talks about how it was difficult to get it out of one's clothes and the color it turned your skin.
Given those stories, and the fact that I can read a MSDS sheet, I really can't understand the current mercury scare insanity. Avoid environmental contamination -- of course. But the idea that miniscule amounts of mercury constitute a reason to close a school?
Once in my college chem lab, the student working next to me broke a mercury thermometer. The lab assistant who was supervising us (who was either a chemistry or ChemE grad student) went rather nuts, made me move all my equipment and do my work elsewhere, and he dumped a crazy amount of sulfur on the floor. He was worried about what else he should do. All this for a few grams of mercury.
At the end of the lab period that day, I went up to him and showed him the MSDS sheets for all the chemicals we were using in that lab experiment that day. Basically, elemental mercury was less harmful than every compound we were using in that experiment. Why wasn't he running around acting like an idiot whenever we poured or moved any of the other chemicals? And this was someone who was a grad student at a major university who should know better.
I still don't understand the insanity surrounding mercury, particularly elemental mercury. The EU has basically banned it; the US is working on doing the same. Organic mercury is a real problem, and we need to worry about contamination on large scales. But the amount of mercury in a thermometer isn't going to kill anyone. An old barometer has quite a bit, and it should require careful cleanup and disposal, but anyone with some training of handling chemicals (like a chemistry teacher) is more than qualified... it's certainly no where near the most dangerous substance used in a chem lab.
Well, I'm the one who made the mistake of responding to a troll. I won't make it again. You don't know anything about my background (for the record, I have multiple undergraduate credentials in science and engineering from probably the best engineering school in the world and am well-versed in tensors), and you show yourself increasingly to be ignorant of the actual trajectory of the history of science as it was understood by those at the time. I could write more to try to explain how your assumptions about what I said are incorrect concerning the history of science (hint, I do know which equations Newton solved, and just because he might have admitted the possibility of non-Copernican systems at times doesn't preclude his use of mechanics that make other assumptions), but it seems pointless, since you are close-minded enough to assume that you know everything about me and proceed to insult every group that you imagine I am part of, just because I have a different opinion about a philosopher of science than you do.
And, by the way, go back to my previous post where I said I thought Feyerabend goes too far for me. I don't actually agree with him, but perhaps you don't understand how one could recognize that an argument can contribute something to your perspective on the world, even if you don't agree with it completely? Of course you don't. Everything's black-and-white for you. Here's a newsflash -- I actually believe deeply in science and depend on statistical arguments about complex datasets in my research all the time. But I also recognize that, like every human endeavor, science is flawed in a number of ways. It was even more flawed, and the dividing lines were more difficult to draw, in the 17th century. Feyerabend is a crackpot in some things, just like Kepler was, but he also has some interesting things to say. And maybe by thinking about his arguments, we might improve science.
Oh, and one last thing -- when Feyerabend argues that the scientific method is flawed, he means in a logical sense. That doesn't mean it isn't real and that it doesn't work sometimes. But at many critical junctures in history, he argues that no ACTUAL method (whether formalized or not) consistently decides in favor of scientific progress. The methods we have either choose for the wrong side (because science is conservative about core beliefs), or they can't choose between two alternative theories. That's a logical problem, and it isn't solved by naively chanting "observe, hypothesize," etc. over and over. All this may sound like blather to you, but unless scientists consider this problem seriously, they risk ignoring various kinds of innovators or getting stuck in loops of research that go nowhere.
In all seriousness, I do hope that if you are a scientist, you try to think about some of this stuff sometime. You're absolutely right that there are a lot of idiots in the humanities who jumped on the Kuhnian bandwagon and started writing "deconstructive" analyses of science they know nothing about. They are morons, and you rightly criticize them. But that doesn't mean that there isn't real stuff to be gleaned from Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, et al., all of whom had some significant training in technical fields.
One small clarification -- I realize that my post may be misunderstood in the statement "clearly many astronomers continued to believe that (including your cited Kepler)..." I didn't mean to imply that Kepler believed in geocentrism, rather that he did acknowledge in most of his treatises that the Tychonian system was still consistent with the data, even if Kepler thought his own model was better. Anyhow, that doesn't change the fact that Kepler's ideas didn't catch on immediately, and many of the implications of his laws were not understood until well after his death.
You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.
Have you read Feyerabend, or are you just assuming what's in his book? Contrary to popular belief, Feyerabend is not arguing against science or even against method (despite the title), but rather pointing out that the so-called "scientific method" is fundamentally flawed, whether you take the naive empiricist view, the Popperian view, or Lakatos's more complex model of science. All of these methods, when applied to the Galileo situation, fail to provide a firm way to evaluate which side was correct. It's a rather complex argument, and he's not interested in condemning the actions of either side or declaring either side to be "correct" in some absolute sense.
But, anyhow, why let the facts about a person stand in your way of being a "jerk"?
Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.
Ah, yes, I guess that's why much of the scientific establishment held onto the Tychonic model well into the 18th century. Even Newton's Principia assumes a Tychonic system, even in later editions. It really wasn't until Bradley's measurement of stellar aberration in 1729 that one really had proof that the earth was actually orbiting around the sun, and clearly many astronomers continued to believe that (including your cited Kepler), for another century after Kepler and Galileo.
Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets.
Ah, yes, that same Kepler who published his third law in the Harmonices mundi, which he discovered while looking for musical harmonic intervals in the heavens. Do you remember those wonderful glissandi that the planets make as they move? Oh, yeah, and all the astrology in that treatise? We're really talking about modern science here -- what were those churchmen thinking?
And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.
Not sure who has the ax to grind here, or who is revising history. There's a good reason why my usernamesake (Kircher) had a larger audience for his books in the 17th century than Newton, and it wasn't just because Newton's stuff was harder to read. Despite the fact that Newton published more on religion than science, believed in astrology, worked steadily in alchemy, and apparently also wasn't enough of an astronomer to "see what was going on" and reject the Tychonic system, he also was seen as an occult figure for proposing those strange "forces" acting at a distance. The worldview of forgotten scientists, like Kircher, was much more tolerable to many scientists of the day (though Kircher was clearly suspected of charlatanism, so I don't want to hold him up as a model). And this proves Feyerabend's point -- Galileo was unsuccessful in part because he didn't just have to show evidence for the Copernican system; he needed to overturn the whole Aristotelian system of physics. Otherwise, celestial mechanics would not be working on the same principles as those of the rest of physics, and that inconsistency is enough for a rational scientist of the age to doubt a new theory, particularly when you have another (the Tychonic system) that agrees with measurement data and is consistent with the rest of science at the time.
Really, before you have a tirade, go back and actually read all those books that you mention in your post. You might realize how very different -- and unscientific -- everyone sounds to a modern reader, on both sides of the Galilean controversy. And then you might see how it's difficult to project our modern scientific standards back then to judge who was right and who was wrong (at that time).
till, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said
Why are you associating the current Pope with this statement more than its author, i.e., Paul Feyerabend, from his book "Against Method." Feyerabend is a serious philosopher of science who has some detailed criticisms of the way that science actually works compared with the idealized "scientific method" that we claim is at the heart of science. (Yes, the Pope quoted him, but your post doesn't say where this quotation came from; it's not some crazy churchman.)
I personally think Feyerabend goes a little too far, but he has some legitimate things to say about how the history of science is not as neat and tidy as we would like it to be.
but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not.
Perhaps. But if we're arguing about science and scientific method, surely we should at least consider whether the ideas win out because they adhere to the science and reason, rather than winning out by luck, political circumstance, or simply waiting for the older generation to die off... hence the reason why the Kuhns and Feyerabends of the world have made some important contributions to the philosophy of science.
Agreed. TFA worries about how scientists can also worry about public relations. Perhaps the first thing that needs to be done is getting people interested enough that they might care about science in the first place, and not just in a facile way of "wow--isn't that neat?" I'm mainly talking about teaching science in primary and secondary school. Currently, the anti-intellectual climate (which is often anti-science as well) isn't helped by bad schools, bad teachers, and bad curriculum choices.
Example of the problem. I taught high school math and physics for a few years in the early 2000s in the US. In my physics classes, I encouraged a lot of analysis and actual thinking to earn a good grade. We would do lots of hands-on experiments, from which we'd derive data, and then analyze that data and compare it to theory. I encouraged students to bring in their own questions they encountered in daily life that were related to the things we were discussing, and we'd investigate them. A lot of students balked when I required them to think on tests, rather than just regurgitate information or solve another problem exactly like one they did ten times on a homework assignment, but eventually most of them learned a lot of critical thinking skills. By the end of the year, I'd trust most of them to set up an experiment, collect data, and analyze results in the real world, as well as to critically evaluate that sort of task done by others, at least using the limited mathematical tools they had at their disposal. Many of them also left with a much more curious attitude about how the world worked than when we began the year.
This worked great in the private school I taught in, since we have freedom over the curriculum. Contrast this to my first year teaching in a lower middle class public school where I was straightjacketed by a state curriculum.
I had to teach algebra II to a bunch of kids who had crappy preparation. Many of them had a substitute teacher for much of algebra I, most had little understanding of even pre-algebra, and some of them couldn't even do basic arithmetic without a calculator. (By "basic" arithmetic, I mean things like 12 minus 7.)
I came into this classroom late in the fall, because the previous teacher quit after she refused to try to teach algebra II to students who couldn't even understand basic math. She wanted to do remedial work so they might actually learn something useful, rather than just how to move meaningless symbols around. Almost all of my 140 students were juniors or seniors, and for most, this would be the last math class they would ever take. Very few would go to college. What did we teach them?
One example: we spent almost 6 weeks on conic sections. Mostly on how to put equations in standard form and name the various characteristic parts, since that was required by the state curriculum, and my high school cared much more about that than whether the students actually could do anything. When we got to exponential equations, I tried to give them an application involving compound interest and loans, and I found that only 2 out of my 140 students knew what compound interest was. And most of them couldn't follow the application anyway, because before they took my class, they had never been asked to use algebra to actually DO anything before; to them it was just moving meaningless symbols around until they solved for a variable. The only reason they were taking a second year of algebra was because in that state it qualified them for a better diploma.
So, in other words, we were graduating a bunch of students who could put the equation of a hyperbola in standard form, even though they didn't really know what a hyperbola was, but they had never heard of compound interest and had no tools for evaluating the terms of a loan. (Maybe this has something to do with the economic fiasco?) And I couldn't spend more time on the latter, because the state curriculum required me to move on.
These students had no critical thinki
I'll agree with you that the Republic is open to interpretation. And this is not the forum for lengthy debate, so this will be my last post on the matter.
You've proven that you can summarize overall structure of the Republic. And I didn't mean to assert that your quotation was invalid or even off-topic. But I believe that even if you think that is the one true definition of justice given by Plato in all his works, it's more than a bit misleading when taken out of context. It requires a significant amount of context and interpretation to understand what that "definition" means, which was not at all clear from your original post. Nor it is yet clear to me that you understand what that quotation means (since your response was to summarize the Republic, rather than provide appropriate context and explanation for the relevant quotation, except in one paragraph), though I agree with most of what you said in your summary, at least in general.
Moreover, I think there is also the issue of what Plato (and/or Socrates) says about justice in many other works, particularly those that address justice and social order explicitly, such as the Crito, the Laws, etc. You're right -- the Republic is the longest work that intends to address what justice is, but that's not what your comment was about. It was in response to someone who gave an interpretation of Plato in general, not of the Republic, nor of a specific phrase in the Republic when someone says: "Justice is..."
So I'll repeat what I originally said -- I don't agree with the original wording of the above post on Plato's views. But I think that someone could reasonably argue that Plato did not have a coherent single standard of justice (since Socrates proceeds to demonstrate justice by the harmoniousness of the soul and the city, which is a dynamic process of interaction rather than a single standard). Moreover, he does clearly make the argument that it is okay to create a false appearance (and justification) of social order by lying to the citizenry about their class structure and place in a society. That strikes me as very close to creating the "appearance" of justice within a society, rather than "true" justice (whatever that is). (Recall that justice is defined by the harmoniousness of the interactions of people in a society, so arguing that that very harmony is constructed on a lie to appear to be well-ordered is really creating only an appearance of a just society.) So, in its essence, I understand where the original post was coming from, though I don't really agree with it completely. It was not "completely wrong," though perhaps the poster's understanding was incomplete, and your first response to it was incomplete as well.
Lastly, I'll just note that there is also the problem of interpretation of what constitutes "justice" for Plato (and/or Socrates). For you, apparently we decide it by finding the place in the largest Platonic dialogue where Socrates says something like "Justice [dike] is..." But there are plenty of other places justice is discussed, plenty more where it is not named explicitly, and even more when some other related concept not indicated by the Greek word "dike" (which is not completely rendered by the English word "justice"). Despite your continued assertion that you are relying on a direct quotation, it is not. It is a translation which does not carry the complete semantic content of the original, and the content the quotation does carry is in part metaphorical and requires considerable exegesis. I'm sorry, but I don't believe that one can point to a single place in a translation that says, "X is" and say that's the only valid way to determine what Plato's entire view on X was, particularly in a work as complex as the Republic.
If you want to refute the original post, I can see plenty of ways to argue about its incompleteness, and many of them could have been expressed in a paragraph. But your citation of a single out-of-context quotation does not resolve the matter, nor does your lengthy summary of a work that is even further off-topic than the present digression.
What? Plato didn't say that. That's completely wrong. Plato explicitly defined justice in the Republic.
First off, I didn't see quotation marks around the grandparent's post. It was: "Plato said that there..." which implies that it isn't an exact quotation. So he didn't "make up quotes" -- it isn't a quote.
Second, the Republic never comes to a clear consensus on defining justice, although many possible ideas are offered and debated. The idea that because you take one random phrase out of the Republic and claim that to be the final word on "justice" demonstrates quite a bit of ignorance to me.
Finally, while I don't quite agree with the original poster's wording, in essence, I think Plato does not come to a consensus, hence there is no "true measure" of justice. Instead, the explanation seems more to be about Socrates giving an exposition of an ideal model for a city (and its reflection of a soul) that exemplifies a just society, rather than an explicit definition of justice. An Plato clearly thought that appearance of justice was just as important, if not more important, than actual "justice" (whatever that is). Hence all of the "noble lies" that Socrates endorses to be told to maintain the appearance of a just and ordered society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie
Don't just make up quotes and attribute them to Plato. It makes philosophers really angry.
I don't know about professional philosophers, but ignorant citations of random quotations rather than demonstrating a real understanding of the text makes people who actually have read the Republic (and thought deeply about it) really angry.
Try some searches yourself; the error rate is far above one in a million. As I've started using Google Books in my research, I've encountered these sorts of errors frequently enough that I don't really trust search results in Google Books to turn up things I expect, if those searches depend on metadata.
For example, take the criticism of incorrect dating given in the article. Try picking a well-known author of classic literature not mentioned in the article. (Google appears to be working on the ones that are mentioned in that article, so you can't get good stats.) Then restrict dates to the years before the author was born. Just trying a few searches like that seems to indicate that this particular error occurs about 1 in 1000 times for major authors of classic literature in the Google Books database.
That's only one type of error, and that's not even including all the other possible errors in dating that aren't as blatant as having the publication date before the author was born. Factor in the other kinds of metadata errors mentioned, and I would bet that more than 1% of records have some significant error that would cause them to be left out of reasonable searches requiring metadata.
That sort of error rate significantly decreases the usefulness of Google Books. Is Google Books a great thing? Of course. But its usefulness is not only in getting access to texts, but in being able to search for an find those books. If a telephone directory had an error giving the wrong name, number, or address in more than 1 out of 100 entries, it would be considered a major problem. If you can't find something in a database, it significantly decreases the usefulness of having all the materials there in the first place.
What happened even ten years ago now has only limited importance.
Really?? Check out the things that happened in 1999... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999
Yeltsin resigns; Putin is left in charge. George W. Bush decided to run for President of the U.S. The Columbine massacre in the U.S. leads to all sorts of political and social fallout.
In geek news, Napster is founded, changing the way media files are shared, and Apple releases the iBook, which initiates a new phase in laptop design.
And let's not forget the other legacies we must live with from 1999... like SpongeBob SquarePants and the new Star Wars trilogy....
No, nothing that happened 10 years ago is in any way relevant to what's going on today... do you seriously believe that?
Catholics have always believed that sex between a married hetrosexual couple was a holy, good act.
Yes, as long as the couple's intentions are correct. They must have goals of unity (of their love) and procreation in mind. See the catechism: http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c2a6.htm#2360
2363 The spouses' union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.
The conjugal love of man and woman thus stands under the twofold obligation of fidelity and fecundity.
A sex act, even between married heterosexual couples is not necessarily a good holy act, unless by doing so they are expressing love and intending to have children. If they have in mind sex for pleasure's sake (hedonism) or their own desires, rather than love (selfishness), the act is NOT good, as the summary implies.
See another part of the catechism:
2351 Lust is disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
So, yes, sex is encouraged, but only for particular goals. Any heterosexual married couple who engages in sex without the explicit intent to procreate is NOT engaging in a "holy, good act." That probably means most sex acts between married couples do not conform to your claim... hence apparently the need to encourage prayer, as stated in the summary. That's how it's news.