Do I get a prize? Five interconnected godwinations by the same poster? No? damn.
If what others believe is just a subjective impression, and is `as right' as what you believe, it would be the height of arrogance to attempt to convince others of anything.
Not so. This line of reasoning is coherent only if any exchange of view and opinion is assumed to end with a conversion, or "victory" of one side over the other. One of the fundamental principles behind fora of discussion (whether informed discussion or uninformed: I'll leave it up to the observers to decide which of these/. qualifies as) is that views, and the rationales for those views, may be exchanged for the mutual education and enlightenmant of the disputants. I'm not discussing this with you because I believe you will change your mind. You clearly won't; you are a fanatic and have not at any time in this discussion attempted to justify your opinion. Your rhetorical technique is sufficiently primitive that your only defence appears to be increasingly desperate attempts to compare your opponents to Nazi sympathisers. Therefore, even had I originally intended to change your mind, since your second post it has been clear that would be futile. I am engaged at this point in this discussion because it is interesting to exchange views with another (intelligent?) human being. To an extent, I'm engaged in this discussion because it is interesting to see how my considered viewpoint and rationale statnds up to an assault from a bombastic, ill-educated and unsubtle quarter, rather than the kind of intellectual debate I usually end up in. Thank you for your contribution to this iteration of my eternal self-test process.
You were a temporarily amusing troll but your beard has been publicly trimmed and you would be well-advised to retreat under your bridge, as I'm going on to the market town.
Actually, that's not my argument at all. Physics and mathematics are quantitative. Morality is qualitative. Quantitative systems can be assessed objectively. Qualitative ones are by definition subjective. If morality is subjective it is not absolute. Quod erat sum.
I was illustrating that subjectivity, using your own chosen illustration. You brought up the subject of changed moral codes, as an attempt to illustrate their absoluteness... I still don't follow that particular leap of illogic.
Enter their ips on the major backbone routers, and blackhole their traffic.
This makes it fairly clear that you have a rudimentary if any understanding of internetworking. 'the major backbone routers': what major backbone routers??
In every autonmous system (at least 25500 and counting) there are backbone routers. In terms of the networks through whose backbones let us say maybe 65% of the traffic on the internet will pass at some point, you're still talking about 15 or so ASn, each of which will have 2 or 3 figures of backbone routers. You cannot persuade that many competeing corporate entities to go to that much trouble just because you don't like a particular content provider. Their customers, for a start, would scream blue murder.
This is, of course, a very different position from that held by our Founders, who established the free speech rights we are discussing. They really did `hold these truths to be self-evident'.
Well done, observant of you. Irrelevant, though. In what way does the fact that this poster's opinion differs from that of the founding fathers have any reflection on the validity of this poster's opinion? Also, you make a fairly radical assumption in referring to the Founders as 'our'.
you cannot make any claim that your belief is more right than the belief of those commiting genocide.
Good point, well expressed. You're absolutely right: (assuming that 'you' in this post actually means 'one') one can indeed not make any claim that one's belief is "more right" than anyone elses.
This is simply incorrect. If you surrender the idea of an external, universal, and objective moral criteria, you lose all grounds to ever consider any action to be better than another.
I'm sorry, what is simply incorrect? I said several things in my post.
If you espouse the concept of external, universal, and objective moral criteria, where do they come from and who has the authority to set the limits? Is it you? If so, why? If not, who? The basis of philosophical thought, and the basis of the concept of individual autonomy, is that every individual human makes their own subjective judgements regarding acts and concepts. Mathematics is fairly absolute. Pretty much everything else is kind of subjective.
I must also point out that you've missed my point entirely, this being illustrated wonderfully by your comment about slavery. My argument was not that the previous poster was 'right', or 'wrong'. My argument was that the previous poster was confusing a current philosophical belief (in your example, the current philosophical belief was that slavery was right) with a moral absolute (people mostly now believe slavery is wrong). You have thus eloquently illustrated my point, which was that things people believe to be moral absolutes change, and are therefore by definition not absolute.
basic, universal ideals such as free speech [...] some things are objectively wrong
There is no such thing, and no they aren't. "Wrong" is by definition subjective, for a start. There is also no such thing as a universal human right. No-one is born having rights to free speech and the pursuit of happiness. The fact that a group of intellectuals signed a document 200 years ago saying that they held that certain things were good only means that they held that certain things were good.
Not saying that free speech is not good. Just pointing out that like many people, you have confused a current philosophical belief with an absolute truth.
Mainly because a) it's in a great many other places as well and b) if you ignore the dating, and do a little research, a good many things begin to mesh.
Treating these points in reverse order: claiming that the Bible says the world is ~5000 years old is a literary fallacy which started 300 years or so ago. It is based on an arithmetical treatment of the Pentateuch, averaged out for approximate generational ages and with a few hacks to deal with the unlikely ages given for certain individuals in the geneaologies (eg. Methuselah). The problem with this methodology is that 'son of', or 'begat', which are the two usual translations into English from Latin for the link-words in the genealogy lists, do not literally mean 'this person was this other person's direct child'. In the original, the phrase used translates into English best as 'descendent of'. ie, you can't add up the list and arrive at an age for the earth.
Social evidence for a period of catastrophic seismic activity and large-scale flooding shows up all over the place; Persia, Israel, Norse mythology, Chinese mythology, Mayan/Aztec/Inca mythologies, Canadian mythology, Mongolian mythology... even the Australian aborigines. Every race of mankind which has any kind of serious oral tradition (that I've ever studied) has a flood myth, usually tied fairly closely to the creation myth. This is anecdotal, obviously, as all historical sources must be. However, there's a great many of them, from totally un-linked cultural backgrounds. There is a certain amount of weight built up by this.
Thus, one can reasonably argue that within the self-conscious history of the human race there was a period of catastrophic activity involving earthquakes, volcanos and floods which made a fairly serious impact on people's minds. As it happens, geologists tell us that around 22,500 years ago there was indeed a catastrophic period of seismic activity and serious floods, which affected a very long list of places.
So there is not necessarily any reason to argue that the various flood myths are constructed out of whole-cloth. Several of them are clearly constructed out of each other mind you (eg. the Genesis flood myth being based clearly on the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh).
This is an interesting argument given that what created the United States in the early 1800s was the building of a significant, reliable, and (relatively) comprehensive rail network.
Unfortunately, in most companies, your service is *not* valued *or* marketed. It's *assumed*. In the same way that a guy who comes round to fill the water cooler is assumed. IT is something that is just supposed to exist. IT engineers are people who fix your IT. Very few manglement, (90% of whom seem to be salesmen by profession... ) have ever actually wondered what the hell they mean by IT.
Contract? What contract? I didn't sign any contract with anyone....
Now, I live in.uk and have satellite not cable, but the situation is at least comparable. And before they'd activate channels, I had to sign a contract.
Now, I don't *recall* anything being in it about advertising at all. I'm fully intending to check that mind you.
Assuming the person you address is a) under 30 and b) brought up in the US, UK or any other western country, the answer is statistically almost certain to be a resounding yes!.
Good post. THis is, btw, a classic implementation of the quote from someone or other (can't remember who said it first, but a great many people have said it since) about government. In any state which recognizes basic freedoms, government has power over populace only if they break the law. The innocent man has nothing to fear from government and therefore no driving compulsion to obey it. Therefore, in order to have government, one must have legally enshrined guilt; ie, activities must be made illegal. To have complete control of the populace, which (fundamentally) is the aim of any free-market government, everyone must be guilty. Therefore, construct your laws in such a way that any choice leads to guilt. You can then *choose* who you prosecute (ie, you can take anyone you want, because everyone is guilty of something) and thus you have total control over your populace.
The 'Illuminatus' trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. It's a bit complex. Fnord denotes that the preceding concept is to be viewed as disturbing by the un-illuminated populace. It was a joke.
Invading Iraq will not solve problems. Bombing Iraq will not solve problems. Killing Saddam Hussain will not solve problems. Surgical bombing does not work, as illustrated (in but one example) by the bomb destruction of a BBC transmitting office in Kabul by bombs aimed at a site nearly half a mile away. Politics has no answer for religion. Fanatics cannot be controlled, and if you intend to kill all fanatics you are yourself a fanatic.
Need I go on? I quote, as I did in one of my previous posts on a related subject, the/.er who said of the 9/11 attacks, "I can't believe this is happening here. This belongs in, I don't know, Beiruit or something".
The national and cultural paradigm this (frequently heard at the time) comment is illustrative of is a terrifying thing.
Iraq has a murderous dictator in charge who has waged genocide against his own people and is developing weapons of mass destruction. If we really were a country that believed in freedom and good will towards men, we would have bombed the shit out of Iraq years ago
You can't see the internal contradiction in this at all, can you?
"Great power comes with great responsibility." We sure as hell have the power but we're just sitting around on our lazy asses so that we only have to pay $1.25 a galloon to drive the/. PT Crusier.
I don't think anyone this century has been rash enough to accuse a government of having responsible agendas. Governments exist to self-perpetuate. Fnord.
~cHris
PS: if you don't get this reference, please reply and query rather than modding a joke a troll.
I don't think that it's satire. Have you ever read a publication called The National Review?
As it happens, yes. However, I would still argue that this piece is satirical. I've lost the link now, and therefore can't go back and look it up to give specific textual analysis, but a) the feel was of a satire and b) in the light of the use of 9/11 by the far-right government of the US to attack national and *international* civil liberties and human rights, it is particularly easy to see why a satire of this specific nature might be conceived of at this particular time.
With regard to the right wing, it's not the right/left thing that's relevant, imo. Extremes of any sort are bad. This is not a political statement, it's a philosophical statement. Extremes of alcohol are bad; fanatical abstinance is as damaging to a person and their social group as helpless alcoholism is. The damage is less socially indexable, usually, but it exists. Extreme, proselytising religious beliefs are fundamentally damaging, whether they be on the 'god exists' or on the 'god does not' side of the question. Extreme politics, right or left, is a fundamentally flawed, blinkered and inhibited world-view.
Moderation is healthy. If I was going to get truly zen, I would then argue that if you take an etreme far enough it becomes a moderation, you're just facing the other way at the time. That might be a little difficult to support.
Fair enough, so long as you avoid the trap of believing that "myth" == "false".
Myth != false. Myth does, however, almost always equal 'not 100% factual'. Mythology is designed to convey ideas via the medium of a good story. It's not designed to recount exact events. Some elements of the Torah, however (Deuteronomy and the two books of Kings spring to mind) are designed as records of actions and dates. They should therefore be read as historical primary sources, and assessed and synthesised with all other such primary sources, giving appropriate attention to bias, politics, corruption through translation etc.
It's more precise to say that the Bible includes works in many literary forms, including poetry, letters, and history... all inspired by God and completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers
I must disagree. I would argue that is a decidedly imprecise way to describe them. It relies on a function of faith as well as several of belief, before it can be accepted as precise. I do not share that faith and belief. Therefore, for me, that statement is not precise.
If you had said 'fair' or 'complete', then you'd have been closer; precision is a mathematical concept, fairness is a subjective one. On the other hand your comment 'completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers' is a very important point that I did not sufficiently clarify . Regardless of whether you accept that the Torah, the Apocrypha and the New Testament are divinely inspired, or whether you treat them as antiquarian handbooks for life much like the faerie legends of Ireland or the spider-and-monkey tales of western Africa, all of the above must be read with due regard to what they meant to the people who wrote them rather than what we may want to read into them. [1]
In order to be true to the subject line I really ought to mention Shakespeare. I will never forgive Victorian England for what it did to Shakespeare's faeries. His faeries were proper ones; ie, powerfull, morally ambiguous, and occaisionally down-right nasty. Not the blinkin' flower-faeries you see in most productions of Mid-Summer Night.
Shakespeare wrote soem absolute dross, but he also wrote some superb drama and some superb poetry. The film Shakespeare in Love made this point beautifully. Marlowe didn't write any clangers, but then Marlowe lived 35 years less and wrote less than a fifth of the amount of material Shakespeare did.
And to finally arrive at the same point as the end of the biblical discussion, the point with Shakespeare isn't how we see him now. It's how his contemporaries would have understood what he wrote. This is why Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet is worth watching for me, as a serious Shakespeare buff. Baz Lurhman managed to show a lot of people, people who have not spent (wasted?;) the time to learn enough about Elizabethan England to see it in the text, what Shakespeare's audiances saw when he performed Romeo and Juliet.
~cHris, who's mildly annoyed that his first post got modded 'Troll'. If I want to troll I can do a much better job than that!
[1] A good example is the policy of the Roman church not to ordain women. Originally this was a survival trait (the men were more expendable). By the middle ages, it had become patriarchal politics, and the main scriptural quote was from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. He's been ranting at the women of the church of Ephesus about heckling, basically. He then says (in a common English translation from the Latin) 'For do you believe that the word of god has been revealed only to you?' and goes on to say 'sit down and shut up while they're preaching, please!'.
This looks like an injunction to the women of the church not to talk in church, which means they can't teach, and therefore can't be ordained. There's only one problem with that reading. In the Greek in which it was written, the pronoun 'you' in the sentence I quoted has male gender.
Paul has stopped talking to the women, and has turned around to the men and said 'And as for you lot, writing to me and asking me to shut your wives up for you, do you believe that the word of god has been given only to you?'... shortly afterwards he re-inforces this by referring to the prophetic teaching he himself accepted from the Seven Sisters of Capernaum.
Classic misunderstanding, used for political ends. Isn't human nature a bugger?
AFAICR, the decision to make a new 'Children's Best Seller' list by the NYT was not because the Harry Potter series (and specifically, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) were fantasy. It was because they were childrens'. No children's book had ever been number 1 on the NYT best seller list. They were proud of this. They looked at the figures. They realized suddenly that in a week's time they were going to have to publish a best-seller list where number 1 and number 2 were both a children's book. They changed the rules.
As I said, this is as far as I can recall, not 'truth' as such. Anyone confirm/deny?
It's got some pretty strange shit, like a race of giants having children with earthly women.
Some parts do read like a fantasy or a sci-fi. There's a reason for this. It's what they are.
Credentials check: Father is a minister, also an active academic who does his scriptural study in the original languages, hence I've grown up with a reasonable appreciation of hebraic culture and history, etc.
The Torah and what is now (since the ecumenical councils of Rome and Ephesus in the fourth century) known as the Apocrypha were written down based on fixed-form oral tradition (this is fundamentally different from fluid-form oral tradition). The stories were told for a reason. They were designed to show the world to people from a usefull perspective, rather than an obvious one. This is much the same as the purpose of satire in modern society (cf. Mr. Pratchett) but lacks the ridicule element of a good satire. It's more, in fact, like Aesop's fables and the stories in the Mabinogion. Interesting, memorable, dramatic stories which have a very simple point, such as 'Pork doesn't keep well in a desert' and 'If you screw your brother's wife, keep a good eye out for flying spears'.
They get deeper and more interesting than that, but this is basically what it boils down to. They're a combination of mythology and history, and should be read as such. If you read the biblical books as primary historical sources, then it is quite easy to synthesise them using the standard techniques of history 101. If you view them as being word-for-word literal truth, you haven't done your homework.
And Jesus didn't exactly advocate the American Suburban life.
Too right. Jesus advocated some dead basic principles; look after your own problems before having a good judge-session; be nice to people, it'll come back and haunt you otherwise; once physical needs are satisfied, luxury can be good but not at the expense of spiritual/emotional needs; that kind of thing.
I must first say, I'm glad someone actually read what I'd written. You clearly know your US constitutional history better than I do. I got the only facts I had off the website I cited.
However, you've either missed one of my points, or are trolling here:
Actually, yes, it is right. Any government which does not acknowledge the fundemental freedoms of it's citizenry is, inherently, a bad government.
Um, no? For a start good and bad are not the same thing as right and wrong. They are different concepts. I'd find it easier to agree with the statement that limiting 'fundamental' freedoms is 'bad' government: there is a defensible argument for this. However, you simply can't state that a document as politically, ethically and philosophically contentious and controversial as the US Constitution is "right". To do so implies a level of judgemental authority that no human being can legitimately claim. A constitution or a declaration of state-established rights can be adjudged as effective, or rational, or liberal, etc; it can't be declared right in absolute terms, which is what you're doing here, and what I was ridiculing in the original poster.
As a secondary point which I noticed as I went along; no, the rights noted in the Constituion are notinherent to all human beings, built-in and present at the time of birth. It may well be your opinion that they are: if you live your life by that opinion, I have the greatest of respect for you. However, the fact that it is your opinion, or Adam Smith's opinion, or the constitutionally enshrined opinion of the US Government that these rights are inherent, does not in any way imply that they actually are. Please understand the concept of philosophical plurality.
~cHris, and yes, my point about the Ammendments was a pure troll. The real point is the one we're still debating.
Speech and information are fundamental. They are so fundamental that The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution is Freedom of Expression. Not the second, not the tenth.
Two things that really have to be said here.
Firstly, you speak as if the United States Constitution is in some way 'right'. That it can be used as a yardstick for Human Rights Correctness. Is there any rational grounds for claiming this? It may be one (one) of the seminal works in the development of the modern concepts of human rights, but it is certainly not any kind of fount of divine and inviolable wisdom.
Secondly; when composing this did you not notice that Freedom of Speech was the first Ammendment to the Constitution? I.E, that it was clearly not sufficiently fundamental as to be included in the original document? That it was not considered as important as the rights of the Government (the intellectual elite, selected largely by default) to raise taxes, punish criminals and suppress Treason against the Government (ie, claim the old rights of the Aristocracy). It should also be noticed that the first ten Ammendments, ie. including the ammendment which dealt with free speech, was not ratified and made law within the states of Massachusetts, Georgia and Connecticut until 1939 [1].
Just had to point that out.
~cHris
[1] Specifically, Massachusetts, March 2, 1939; Georgia, March 18, 1939; and Connecticut, April 19, 1939. Source: The House
Slashdot Mirror
GODWIN!
Do I get a prize? Five interconnected godwinations by the same poster? No? damn.
Not so. This line of reasoning is coherent only if any exchange of view and opinion is assumed to end with a conversion, or "victory" of one side over the other. One of the fundamental principles behind fora of discussion (whether informed discussion or uninformed: I'll leave it up to the observers to decide which of these /. qualifies as) is that views, and the rationales for those views, may be exchanged for the mutual education and enlightenmant of the disputants. I'm not discussing this with you because I believe you will change your mind. You clearly won't; you are a fanatic and have not at any time in this discussion attempted to justify your opinion. Your rhetorical technique is sufficiently primitive that your only defence appears to be increasingly desperate attempts to compare your opponents to Nazi sympathisers. Therefore, even had I originally intended to change your mind, since your second post it has been clear that would be futile. I am engaged at this point in this discussion because it is interesting to exchange views with another (intelligent?) human being. To an extent, I'm engaged in this discussion because it is interesting to see how my considered viewpoint and rationale statnds up to an assault from a bombastic, ill-educated and unsubtle quarter, rather than the kind of intellectual debate I usually end up in. Thank you for your contribution to this iteration of my eternal self-test process.
You were a temporarily amusing troll but your beard has been publicly trimmed and you would be well-advised to retreat under your bridge, as I'm going on to the market town.
Yours in amusement,
~cHrisActually, that's not my argument at all. Physics and mathematics are quantitative. Morality is qualitative. Quantitative systems can be assessed objectively. Qualitative ones are by definition subjective. If morality is subjective it is not absolute. Quod erat sum.
I was illustrating that subjectivity, using your own chosen illustration. You brought up the subject of changed moral codes, as an attempt to illustrate their absoluteness... I still don't follow that particular leap of illogic.
~cHrisEbay uses Passport. To name but one.
~cHris
This makes it fairly clear that you have a rudimentary if any understanding of internetworking. 'the major backbone routers': what major backbone routers??
In every autonmous system (at least 25500 and counting) there are backbone routers. In terms of the networks through whose backbones let us say maybe 65% of the traffic on the internet will pass at some point, you're still talking about 15 or so ASn, each of which will have 2 or 3 figures of backbone routers. You cannot persuade that many competeing corporate entities to go to that much trouble just because you don't like a particular content provider. Their customers, for a start, would scream blue murder.
~cHrisWell done, observant of you. Irrelevant, though. In what way does the fact that this poster's opinion differs from that of the founding fathers have any reflection on the validity of this poster's opinion? Also, you make a fairly radical assumption in referring to the Founders as 'our'.
Good point, well expressed. You're absolutely right: (assuming that 'you' in this post actually means 'one') one can indeed not make any claim that one's belief is "more right" than anyone elses.
~cHrisI'm sorry, what is simply incorrect? I said several things in my post.
If you espouse the concept of external, universal, and objective moral criteria, where do they come from and who has the authority to set the limits? Is it you? If so, why? If not, who? The basis of philosophical thought, and the basis of the concept of individual autonomy, is that every individual human makes their own subjective judgements regarding acts and concepts. Mathematics is fairly absolute. Pretty much everything else is kind of subjective.
I must also point out that you've missed my point entirely, this being illustrated wonderfully by your comment about slavery. My argument was not that the previous poster was 'right', or 'wrong'. My argument was that the previous poster was confusing a current philosophical belief (in your example, the current philosophical belief was that slavery was right) with a moral absolute (people mostly now believe slavery is wrong). You have thus eloquently illustrated my point, which was that things people believe to be moral absolutes change, and are therefore by definition not absolute.
~cHrisThere is no such thing, and no they aren't. "Wrong" is by definition subjective, for a start. There is also no such thing as a universal human right. No-one is born having rights to free speech and the pursuit of happiness. The fact that a group of intellectuals signed a document 200 years ago saying that they held that certain things were good only means that they held that certain things were good.
Not saying that free speech is not good. Just pointing out that like many people, you have confused a current philosophical belief with an absolute truth.
~cHrisMainly because a) it's in a great many other places as well and b) if you ignore the dating, and do a little research, a good many things begin to mesh.
Treating these points in reverse order: claiming that the Bible says the world is ~5000 years old is a literary fallacy which started 300 years or so ago. It is based on an arithmetical treatment of the Pentateuch, averaged out for approximate generational ages and with a few hacks to deal with the unlikely ages given for certain individuals in the geneaologies (eg. Methuselah). The problem with this methodology is that 'son of', or 'begat', which are the two usual translations into English from Latin for the link-words in the genealogy lists, do not literally mean 'this person was this other person's direct child'. In the original, the phrase used translates into English best as 'descendent of'. ie, you can't add up the list and arrive at an age for the earth.
Social evidence for a period of catastrophic seismic activity and large-scale flooding shows up all over the place; Persia, Israel, Norse mythology, Chinese mythology, Mayan/Aztec/Inca mythologies, Canadian mythology, Mongolian mythology... even the Australian aborigines. Every race of mankind which has any kind of serious oral tradition (that I've ever studied) has a flood myth, usually tied fairly closely to the creation myth. This is anecdotal, obviously, as all historical sources must be. However, there's a great many of them, from totally un-linked cultural backgrounds. There is a certain amount of weight built up by this.
Thus, one can reasonably argue that within the self-conscious history of the human race there was a period of catastrophic activity involving earthquakes, volcanos and floods which made a fairly serious impact on people's minds. As it happens, geologists tell us that around 22,500 years ago there was indeed a catastrophic period of seismic activity and serious floods, which affected a very long list of places.
So there is not necessarily any reason to argue that the various flood myths are constructed out of whole-cloth. Several of them are clearly constructed out of each other mind you (eg. the Genesis flood myth being based clearly on the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh).
~cHris
Data is not the plural of anecdote.
~cHris
This is an interesting argument given that what created the United States in the early 1800s was the building of a significant, reliable, and (relatively) comprehensive rail network.
~cHrisMuch as I appreciate it as a breath of fresh air (in that you're expressing a nice idea, on Slashdot) you're a dialectic idealist.
~cHrisUnfortunately, in most companies, your service is *not* valued *or* marketed. It's *assumed*. In the same way that a guy who comes round to fill the water cooler is assumed. IT is something that is just supposed to exist. IT engineers are people who fix your IT. Very few manglement, (90% of whom seem to be salesmen by profession... ) have ever actually wondered what the hell they mean by IT.
~cHrisNow, I live in .uk and have satellite not cable, but the situation is at least comparable. And before they'd activate channels, I had to sign a contract.
Now, I don't *recall* anything being in it about advertising at all. I'm fully intending to check that mind you.
£0.02 from the other side of the pond.
~cHrisAssuming the person you address is a) under 30 and b) brought up in the US, UK or any other western country, the answer is statistically almost certain to be a resounding yes!.
~cHrisGood post. THis is, btw, a classic implementation of the quote from someone or other (can't remember who said it first, but a great many people have said it since) about government. In any state which recognizes basic freedoms, government has power over populace only if they break the law. The innocent man has nothing to fear from government and therefore no driving compulsion to obey it. Therefore, in order to have government, one must have legally enshrined guilt; ie, activities must be made illegal. To have complete control of the populace, which (fundamentally) is the aim of any free-market government, everyone must be guilty. Therefore, construct your laws in such a way that any choice leads to guilt. You can then *choose* who you prosecute (ie, you can take anyone you want, because everyone is guilty of something) and thus you have total control over your populace.
~cHrisThe 'Illuminatus' trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. It's a bit complex. Fnord denotes that the preceding concept is to be viewed as disturbing by the un-illuminated populace. It was a joke.
Invading Iraq will not solve problems. Bombing Iraq will not solve problems. Killing Saddam Hussain will not solve problems. Surgical bombing does not work, as illustrated (in but one example) by the bomb destruction of a BBC transmitting office in Kabul by bombs aimed at a site nearly half a mile away. Politics has no answer for religion. Fanatics cannot be controlled, and if you intend to kill all fanatics you are yourself a fanatic.
Need I go on? I quote, as I did in one of my previous posts on a related subject, the /.er who said of the 9/11 attacks, "I can't believe this is happening here. This belongs in, I don't know, Beiruit or something".
The national and cultural paradigm this (frequently heard at the time) comment is illustrative of is a terrifying thing.
~cHrisYou can't see the internal contradiction in this at all, can you?
I don't think anyone this century has been rash enough to accuse a government of having responsible agendas. Governments exist to self-perpetuate. Fnord.
~cHris
PS: if you don't get this reference, please reply and query rather than modding a joke a troll.
As it happens, yes. However, I would still argue that this piece is satirical. I've lost the link now, and therefore can't go back and look it up to give specific textual analysis, but a) the feel was of a satire and b) in the light of the use of 9/11 by the far-right government of the US to attack national and *international* civil liberties and human rights, it is particularly easy to see why a satire of this specific nature might be conceived of at this particular time.
With regard to the right wing, it's not the right/left thing that's relevant, imo. Extremes of any sort are bad. This is not a political statement, it's a philosophical statement. Extremes of alcohol are bad; fanatical abstinance is as damaging to a person and their social group as helpless alcoholism is. The damage is less socially indexable, usually, but it exists. Extreme, proselytising religious beliefs are fundamentally damaging, whether they be on the 'god exists' or on the 'god does not' side of the question. Extreme politics, right or left, is a fundamentally flawed, blinkered and inhibited world-view.
Moderation is healthy. If I was going to get truly zen, I would then argue that if you take an etreme far enough it becomes a moderation, you're just facing the other way at the time. That might be a little difficult to support.
~cHrisUm. It's a satire. Are you entirely unaware of the idea of taking someone's point of view and arguing it so badly that they look stupid?
~cHrisFair enough, so long as you avoid the trap of believing that "myth" == "false".
Myth != false. Myth does, however, almost always equal 'not 100% factual'. Mythology is designed to convey ideas via the medium of a good story. It's not designed to recount exact events. Some elements of the Torah, however (Deuteronomy and the two books of Kings spring to mind) are designed as records of actions and dates. They should therefore be read as historical primary sources, and assessed and synthesised with all other such primary sources, giving appropriate attention to bias, politics, corruption through translation etc.It's more precise to say that the Bible includes works in many literary forms, including poetry, letters, and history... all inspired by God and completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers
I must disagree. I would argue that is a decidedly imprecise way to describe them. It relies on a function of faith as well as several of belief, before it can be accepted as precise. I do not share that faith and belief. Therefore, for me, that statement is not precise.
If you had said 'fair' or 'complete', then you'd have been closer; precision is a mathematical concept, fairness is a subjective one. On the other hand your comment 'completely true in the message conveyed to the original readers' is a very important point that I did not sufficiently clarify . Regardless of whether you accept that the Torah, the Apocrypha and the New Testament are divinely inspired, or whether you treat them as antiquarian handbooks for life much like the faerie legends of Ireland or the spider-and-monkey tales of western Africa, all of the above must be read with due regard to what they meant to the people who wrote them rather than what we may want to read into them. [1]
In order to be true to the subject line I really ought to mention Shakespeare. I will never forgive Victorian England for what it did to Shakespeare's faeries. His faeries were proper ones; ie, powerfull, morally ambiguous, and occaisionally down-right nasty. Not the blinkin' flower-faeries you see in most productions of Mid-Summer Night.
Shakespeare wrote soem absolute dross, but he also wrote some superb drama and some superb poetry. The film Shakespeare in Love made this point beautifully. Marlowe didn't write any clangers, but then Marlowe lived 35 years less and wrote less than a fifth of the amount of material Shakespeare did.
And to finally arrive at the same point as the end of the biblical discussion, the point with Shakespeare isn't how we see him now. It's how his contemporaries would have understood what he wrote. This is why Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet is worth watching for me, as a serious Shakespeare buff. Baz Lurhman managed to show a lot of people, people who have not spent (wasted? ;) the time to learn enough about Elizabethan England to see it in the text, what Shakespeare's audiances saw when he performed Romeo and Juliet.
~cHris, who's mildly annoyed that his first post got modded 'Troll'. If I want to troll I can do a much better job than that![1] A good example is the policy of the Roman church not to ordain women. Originally this was a survival trait (the men were more expendable). By the middle ages, it had become patriarchal politics, and the main scriptural quote was from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. He's been ranting at the women of the church of Ephesus about heckling, basically. He then says (in a common English translation from the Latin) 'For do you believe that the word of god has been revealed only to you?' and goes on to say 'sit down and shut up while they're preaching, please!'.
This looks like an injunction to the women of the church not to talk in church, which means they can't teach, and therefore can't be ordained. There's only one problem with that reading. In the Greek in which it was written, the pronoun 'you' in the sentence I quoted has male gender.
Paul has stopped talking to the women, and has turned around to the men and said 'And as for you lot, writing to me and asking me to shut your wives up for you, do you believe that the word of god has been given only to you?' ... shortly afterwards he re-inforces this by referring to the prophetic teaching he himself accepted from the Seven Sisters of Capernaum.
Classic misunderstanding, used for political ends. Isn't human nature a bugger?
Note: I have no source for this.
AFAICR, the decision to make a new 'Children's Best Seller' list by the NYT was not because the Harry Potter series (and specifically, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) were fantasy. It was because they were childrens'. No children's book had ever been number 1 on the NYT best seller list. They were proud of this. They looked at the figures. They realized suddenly that in a week's time they were going to have to publish a best-seller list where number 1 and number 2 were both a children's book. They changed the rules.
As I said, this is as far as I can recall, not 'truth' as such. Anyone confirm/deny?
~cHrisI highly reccomend actually reading the bible.
Seconded.
It's got some pretty strange shit, like a race of giants having children with earthly women.
Some parts do read like a fantasy or a sci-fi. There's a reason for this. It's what they are.
Credentials check: Father is a minister, also an active academic who does his scriptural study in the original languages, hence I've grown up with a reasonable appreciation of hebraic culture and history, etc.
The Torah and what is now (since the ecumenical councils of Rome and Ephesus in the fourth century) known as the Apocrypha were written down based on fixed-form oral tradition (this is fundamentally different from fluid-form oral tradition). The stories were told for a reason. They were designed to show the world to people from a usefull perspective, rather than an obvious one. This is much the same as the purpose of satire in modern society (cf. Mr. Pratchett) but lacks the ridicule element of a good satire. It's more, in fact, like Aesop's fables and the stories in the Mabinogion. Interesting, memorable, dramatic stories which have a very simple point, such as 'Pork doesn't keep well in a desert' and 'If you screw your brother's wife, keep a good eye out for flying spears'.
They get deeper and more interesting than that, but this is basically what it boils down to. They're a combination of mythology and history, and should be read as such. If you read the biblical books as primary historical sources, then it is quite easy to synthesise them using the standard techniques of history 101. If you view them as being word-for-word literal truth, you haven't done your homework.
And Jesus didn't exactly advocate the American Suburban life.
Too right. Jesus advocated some dead basic principles; look after your own problems before having a good judge-session; be nice to people, it'll come back and haunt you otherwise; once physical needs are satisfied, luxury can be good but not at the expense of spiritual/emotional needs; that kind of thing.
/rant.
~cHrisUm. Nokia is a European company. Finland, to be precise.
~cHris
I must first say, I'm glad someone actually read what I'd written. You clearly know your US constitutional history better than I do. I got the only facts I had off the website I cited.
However, you've either missed one of my points, or are trolling here:
Um, no? For a start good and bad are not the same thing as right and wrong. They are different concepts. I'd find it easier to agree with the statement that limiting 'fundamental' freedoms is 'bad' government: there is a defensible argument for this. However, you simply can't state that a document as politically, ethically and philosophically contentious and controversial as the US Constitution is "right". To do so implies a level of judgemental authority that no human being can legitimately claim. A constitution or a declaration of state-established rights can be adjudged as effective, or rational, or liberal, etc; it can't be declared right in absolute terms, which is what you're doing here, and what I was ridiculing in the original poster.
As a secondary point which I noticed as I went along; no, the rights noted in the Constituion are not inherent to all human beings, built-in and present at the time of birth. It may well be your opinion that they are: if you live your life by that opinion, I have the greatest of respect for you. However, the fact that it is your opinion, or Adam Smith's opinion, or the constitutionally enshrined opinion of the US Government that these rights are inherent, does not in any way imply that they actually are. Please understand the concept of philosophical plurality.
~cHris, and yes, my point about the Ammendments was a pure troll. The real point is the one we're still debating.Two things that really have to be said here.
Firstly, you speak as if the United States Constitution is in some way 'right'. That it can be used as a yardstick for Human Rights Correctness. Is there any rational grounds for claiming this? It may be one (one) of the seminal works in the development of the modern concepts of human rights, but it is certainly not any kind of fount of divine and inviolable wisdom.
Secondly; when composing this did you not notice that Freedom of Speech was the first Ammendment to the Constitution? I.E, that it was clearly not sufficiently fundamental as to be included in the original document? That it was not considered as important as the rights of the Government (the intellectual elite, selected largely by default) to raise taxes, punish criminals and suppress Treason against the Government (ie, claim the old rights of the Aristocracy). It should also be noticed that the first ten Ammendments, ie. including the ammendment which dealt with free speech, was not ratified and made law within the states of Massachusetts, Georgia and Connecticut until 1939 [1].
Just had to point that out.
~cHris
[1] Specifically, Massachusetts, March 2, 1939; Georgia, March 18, 1939; and Connecticut, April 19, 1939. Source: The House