erikdalen wrote:
> If they weren't authoritarians, they wouldn't care about changing the world.
why wouldn't they? Because the essential characteristic of an authoritarian/activist is his need to derive emotional satisfaction from his relationship with his environment. Therefore, this is about being emotionally needy vs. being emotionally self-resourceful. The emotionally self-resourceful have no need to change the world -- to alter their relationships with the world -- in order to feel secure and satisfied.
Now, does anyone (or could anyone) actually inhabit either of these two extremes -- _zero_ capacity for emotional self-resourcefulness vs. _total_ capacity for emotional self-resourcefulness?
So you mean that everyone that votes is an authoritarian because they care (to some small extent) about changing the world..
a) A non-authoritarian might be voting to humbly go along with the status quo.
b) An individual's vote has no effect on the world. If an authoritarian votes, it may be because he doesn't realize this.
c) An authoritarian might vote to derive emotional satisfaction from carrying out his duty to his community/country.
d) Many people who vote might do so with some feeling of repulsion at how the world is going and either want to do their part to change it, or don't want to be blamed ["Don't blame me! I voted for {insert losing candidate here}"]. These average voters are moderately authoritarian. BTW, this brings up another important characteristic of the A/A personality: propensity for feeling repulsion. The world needs to be a certain way for the authoritarian and so when confronted with what he perceives to be proof of a heinous crime (say, "proof" that the NAZIs were bad, bad people who did bad, bad things to Jews and _wanted_ to do something even worse), he feels repulsion toward the guilty party.
decade_null wrote:
Your induction of the logical meaning of the word goes so far that it renders the whole word meaningless. It's an eduction of the essential factor common to all authoritarians that would explain their behavior in other circumstances. This is similar to the concept of the single g factor of intelligence having wider explanatory value than the concept of disparate multiple intelligences.
You seem to be saying that the word authoritarian means "people who have a desire to change the world", and in some level that includes every living person on the earth. Yes, but, how about instead, "people who desire to be in a position to exert control over the world." The relationship between the authoritarian and his world seems to be important, so how about assuming that changing a world you have a relationship with also changes your relationship. Then we could say, "Authoritarians are people who have a desire to exert control over their relationship with their environment." This would then neatly include solipsists, followers of a particular doctrine declaring one always and only exists in absense of any environment.
That kind of definition of the word simply is of no use for anyone. It has wide explanatory power and so it serves the purposes of those who wish to explain relationships and corellations between otherwise-observed-to-be-disparate phenomena.
"Of course, all philosophers are activists/authoritarians"
Are you saying that even a desire to observe and understand the world makes a person authoritarian? Since gaining a greater understanding of the world would change a subject's relationship with it, an authoritarian subject, one that derives or seeks to derive emotional satisfaction from controlling his relationship with his environment, could use observation and understanding of the world to further his fundamental agenda. Therefore, exhibition of desire to observe and understand the world is correlated with authoritarianism.
A non-A/A can exhibit desire to observe and understand the world if he does not seek to gain emotional satisfaction from the change in his relationship with his environment this would lead to.
It should be noted that there are degrees of authoritarianism. A subject could be a bit authoritarian, but still be able to largely accept constrictive conditions on his relationship with his environment. Hyper authoritarians tend to make names for themselves -- Stephen J. Gould, Carl Sagan, Madonna, Ernest Hemingway, Aristotle -- and rabid cults to automatically form around their ideas, because of the tantrums they throw when they don't receive complete satisfaction from their relationships with their environments.
RMS should rightly be called a hyper-authoritarian to distinguish him from the bulk of humanity.
Huh. Surely you jest. Even under your definition of the term authoritarian, there are definitely philosophers who do not qualify. The solipsists, for example. The solipsists qualify because, like all philosophers, they find other world views unacceptable. Like all philosophers, they are activists -- they seek to modify their relationships with the world. Like all philosophers, they abuse. They seek to forcefully wring emotional satisfaction, just like despots and activists, from their relationships with the world around them -- a world the solipsists, ironically, profess to believe does not exist.
Solipsists refuse to accept the world at face value -- they refuse to accept the world as it is presented to them.
Solipsism is an example of running faster into the arms of that which you run _from_, the faster you run from it. See _Fight Club_ for another example of this.
However, I think I have to conclude... It isn't necessary to endlessly discuss yourself. A simple statement would suffice. When you include discussions of yourself in your statements, it is impossible to discern whether a simple answer refers to your discussion of yourself or to the statement you made.
For example, if I answered "Yes" to the statement as phrased, an observer would be unable to tell if I meant, "Yes. You do think that," or, "Yes. That makes sense."
...that under your definition, you're an authoritarian. Yes.
You appear to care whether I believe you or not. There is a correlation between a subject appearing to have a motivation and that subject actually having that motivation. The correlation is always less than 100%.
This makes you just as much an authoritarian as Tom Paine... Yes. Both Tom Paines's and my actions correlate highly with authoritarianism.
...by your rules By the force of reason. Any other conclusion reduces to an absurdity.
hearingaid wrote:
"There is a definition of authoritarianism which is logically consistant with its usage. This is not necessarily the definition you will find in a dictionary."
Aha!
Words have no meaning.
Words have popular meaning and words have logical meaning which can be inducted from their popular meanings. It can be seen that defining "authoritarian" and "activist" as distinct from each other reduces to an absurdity, whether or not the words are popularly used in this logical way.
Words only have the meaning ascribed to them by human beings. That's why private definitions are not useful. This is sixth-grade playground talk...but go on.
If you wish to claim that, fundamentally, activists ("people who care about a cause") and authoritarians ("people willing to use force to maintain their control") are coextensive groups, you need to prove it either by showing a large number of examples of people belonging to both groups, or by some form of logic. It has wider explanatory power to assume that _people popularly termed "activists" share a fundmental motivation below their caring about a cause; that people popularly termed "authoritarians" share a fundamental motivation below their willingness to use force to maintain their control; and that these fundamental motivations are one and the same_ than to assume that activists and authoritarians have distinct motivations. It has wide explanatory power to call that shared fundamental motivation "propensity for non-acceptance."
This explains why the grown-up hippies who have children and try to raise them in a fundamentally different way than drill sargeant parents would, end up with the same result -- children who show the signs of having been subjected to the abuses of indoctrinaires.
To go further, an activist is an abuser. An authoritarian is an abuser. The activist uses his cause. The authoritarian uses his subjects. Abusers use things to get emotional satisfaction. Hippy-dippy summer-of-love parents abuse / drill-sargeant parents abuse. "It's the same difference," says the model with shampoo in her hair.
Your logic skills are a bit weak, though. Go read some Russell. He's good for that too:) Logic, because it is based on g-loaded IQ, cannot be taught. Either one is either stuck thinking logically, or one is stuck thinking like Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russel was an activist, BTW. Or an authoritarian. Take your pick.
Of course, all philosophers are activists/authoritarians, and they tend to miss that fundamental point. One would think fundamental points would be important in a discipline like philosophy. You know, seeing how disparate things relate and correlate. Seeing the common threads. IOW, Bertrand Russell, because he was incapable of making inferences with wide explanatory power, was mentally retarded.
hearingaid wrote:
Zounds, you have a funky definition of authoritarian then. My definition of authoritarian is somebody who uses force to force individuals to toe the line. I think I'm closer to the O.E.D. than you are.;).
The inconsistency is between a definition of authoritarian based on popular usage and a definition of authoritarian based on a logical interpretation of the worldview driving the actions of a subject acting in the way an authoritarian is popularly said to act. If not enough people to warrant a definition in the OED notice that _both activists and traditionally thought-of authoritarians must, by force of logic, have the same non-acceptance worldview that drives their often disparate actions_ , it ain't my fault.
There is, on the one hand, going for popular accuracy; and there is, on the other hand, going for a logically consistent definition that has wide explanatory power. If it can be seen that the world can't be explained with given tools, new tools can be made -- not arbitrarily, but according to logical consistency -- that will explain the world.
AC wrote:
The anarachists are not free from being governed and ruled over so they want to abolish government and other forms of oppression and authoritarianism. You claim they are authoritarians for forcing some kind of change on the world. What we have now is authoritarianism. To achieve a anarchist goals or the goals RMS wants you do not have to force your will on others. You have to exert your will on the world to change it. It doesn't matter what you are changing it to.
Your usage of the word authoritarian is inconsistent with that of most definitions of the word. Within the tyrant's world are his subjects, and he wishes to make them do as he pleases. Within the activists world is the world, and he wishes to make it do as he pleases. The superficial differences between these two men can be discarded and they can be seen to be unity.
They are not asking for a blind obedience to authority or attempting to attain powers such as those held by a dictator. People who write these dictionary definitions are not charged with identifying the essential similarities between commonly perceived as disparate things. If people falsely perceive similar things as disparate, that's how it gets recorded in a dictionary.
They are trying to abolish these things. Possessors of dictatorial personalities long to be in a position wherin they can abolish things. Ditto with possessors of activist personalities. "It's the same difference," as the old shampoo commercial went.
The problem is your circulating your own private definition of authoritarian. There is a definition of authoritarianism which is logically consistant with its usage. This is not necessarily the definition you will find in a dictionary.
Watts Martin wrote:
This is essentially an assertion that one can't desire to improve the world without being an authoritarian. Yes.
Given thet any expression of a strongly-held opinion... Every opinionable person is an authoritarian. An old saying goes, "The opiniable are not worth persuading." You would have a hard time convincing an authoritarian of this (and I just said it wouldn't be worth trying) because it would force him to see his own authoritarianism once he saw authoritarianism in others.
...about how a given subject should be dealt with could be considered "a desire to improve the world,"... A desire to exert control over the world.
...this essentially leaves us with a choice between inaction--more than inaction, a virtual silence--... "The silence was deafening," i.e. inactions are actions too and within the proper context can be disruptive of the normal flow of things, i.e. potential activist tactics.
...and oppression. I guess you mean the oppression of the world by your own action. Oppression isn't a problem for non-A/A's, but it sure is for the other A/A's in the world. So, what would happen is the other A/A's would be oppressed and the non-A/A's really wouldn't because they'd just go along with it.
You're not just dismissing Marx and Zappa (a curious combination, if I may say so) but everyone who's urged one approach to anything in preference to another. The supposed differences between authoritarianism and liberation (or any kind of) activism can be boiled down to logical absurdities and, therefore, authoritarianism and activism are unity. Individual actions like urging particular approaches are correlated with authoritarianism/activism, but the person is not truly an authoritarian/activist unless he feels deep within himself about "the way the world _is_ and the way it _ought to be_." Evidence of more and more instances of authoritarian/activist behavior correlates increasingly strongly with authoritarianism/activism and an observor can then say with increasing confidence that the particular subject under observation is, in fact, an authoritarian/activist. But an observor can never know for sure -- just with really high confidence, as is the case with the celebrities we are naming.
You dismiss disparate icons such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi in one fell swoop. Can I help it if these fine folks display behavior correlated with A/A personality? They are, deep down inside, the same person.
That's a pretty dismal view of the world, honestly. :(
It's also implicitly founded on the false premise that arguing a point is the same as forcing a point. Arguing a point is not the same as forcing a point, but it is correlated with an A/A worldview.
Obviously, anyyone who favors one approach to a problem over another approach will be at odds with people who don't, The people who don't favor any particular approach might not be inclined to put up a fight. I mean, you know, since they don't care and all...
and when someone in a position of power favors a given approach he will impose it on others. I guess that's why they call them positions of power.
This is a hardly a sign of bias or authoritarianism; It's not conclusive, but there is always a correlation, no matter how small, between disruptive behavior and A/A personality. A totally non-A/A person could occupy a position of power and hand out dicatorial rulings left and right. The deciding factor ultimately is not _what_ a subject has done, but _why_ he did it.
choosing to leave something alone (whether that means to the whims of nature, the whims of market forces or whatever) is just as much a moral choice as intervention is, A/A's always make moral choices and non-A/A's never do. This is because A/A's are moral and non-A/A's are amoral. Related to this: A/A's always speak the truth and non-A/A's never speak the truth. This is because A/A's know what the truth is and non-A/A's have no idea what the truth is.
and thus just as subject to controversy. Non A/A's can certainly rouse controversy. The question is, "Do they get their rocks off doing it?"
AC wrote:
(Non-)Authoritarians?? What you are talking about is just acceptance and activism. Yes. Authoritarians cannot accept the world as it is presented to them. They want it their way -- so they become activists.
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with what you are discussing - the two concepts here are not interchangable. I'm boiling authoritarianism down to a propensity for non-acceptance. I'm boiling activism down to a propensity for non-acceptance. Therefore, these two concepts are unity.
What you're said is essentially right -- it's the people who don't accept the status quo who end up changing the world. However, what you are trying to say is different -- trying to change something does not make you an authoritarian.
Authoritarians have a low propensity for acceptance and therefore are wont to change things. Now, according to set-logic this would not necessarily make every world-changer an authoritarian, but I am saying that, in fact, every world-changer does have authoritarian tendencies because, in fact, there is no way to distinuish what authoritarianism boils down to, a propensity for non-acceptance, and what activism boils down to, a propensity for non-acceptance.
hearingaid wrote:
I've actually read a lot of Marx's stuff. He's not an authoritarian. The man's an anarchist. He was opposed to the anarchists, but just like them he was an anti-oppressionist. The fact that the Marxists and anarchists took a distaste to the oppression they observed makes them de-facto authoritarians. These anti-oppressionists felt a desire to exert some influence on the world to allow it to, in their eyes, right itself -- and they would not take "no" for answers. Why? Because they were authoritarians. There was a right way for the world to be, and they were going to make it that way or bust.
The fact that they didn't want the people of the world to allow them to rule like dictators didn't make them authoritarians any less. The point is, they wanted the world to fit a standard they would personally find beautiful. The particular world taste of an authoritarian, whether oppressive or non-oppressive, is beside the point. It's important that they simply had a world taste at all.
The first word in authoritarian is "author". These folks wanted to be the authors of the world. Not everyone views the world as wrong and needing fixing when they are born. Authors (authoritarians) do.
In any case, your argument seems to be that anyone who cares about the world is an authoritarian. Yes.
I guess that would make Tom Paine an authoritarian too. Yes.
AC wrote:
Karl Marx was an authoritarian?... Marx several times dissolved organisations he was head of because he didn't like the way they were going or because he thought they were becoming too centralised around himself.
"the purpose of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change it" --Karl Marx
The specific instruments by which the authoritarian changes the world and the ultimate state he wants to change it to are secondary to the point that what makes him an authoritarian is the fact that he wants to change it at all. Karl Marx was an authoritarian because, in his case, he wanted to make the world non-authoritarian.
Transcendent wrote again:
"Fusion doesn't exist and would be more expensive than fission if it did."
-I thought that was understood in this discussion... after all, we're discussing possible energy sources... not sources that we've researched, mastered, and manufactured in abundance... Fission has been proven, but not exploited yet. It therefore qualifies as a possible enrgy source. Fusion has been proven on paper to not be a workable energy resource for the forseeable future. Figuring out how to get energy out of fusion reactions does not equal designing an economically competitive _electricity_ power plant. Fusion has been proven on paper to not be economically competitive even assuming a miracle breakthrough will occur in fusion reactor technology. IOW, we're talking about electricity power plants here, not just heat generation technologies. We;ve done the math and we know fusion electricity won't be cheap _no matter what happens in fusion reactor research_. Fission hasn't even been perfected yet. Why not take proven good things and make them even better?
"If you want to put money into energy research where it will count, research how to better extract uranium from seawater."
-You don't think putting money into fusion research would count at all?? That's right, I don't. Yes, I've researched this issue to death.
Naaaa... lets just save a coupla bucks instead of creating a more efficient and beautifully clean power source. By exploiting fission, we can create resources that can then be used to gamble on fusion research -- in centuries to come, not this century. It's instructive to keep in mind that fusion and breeder reactor reseach were instigated because of a fear that slow-neutron fission would not remain practical for more than ~70 years. Thanks to research showing how simple and cheap it is to collect uranium from seawater with special plastic adsorbants (note the spelling on _adsorbants_), we now know that there is no hurry to research alternatives.
Humans should research everything we can think of, for we never know when out findings might just come in handy... Research costs resources. Let's stockpile the necessary resources and then do the research. Thanks to the 4.5 billion tons of easily collectible uranium in the world's oceans, we are assured of a safe, clean energy supply for at least the next few thousand years using existing reactor technology. It's within this type of climate, once we get enough fission reactors built, that we can profitably commence research on breeders and fusion reactors.
arkanes wrote:
Granted the basic validity of your other arguments, but solar cells and wind plants don't generate any toxic waste at all when used 6 billion power plants would create siginificantly large mountains of toxic waste in their manufacture. Solar panels in particular leave us with mountains of cadmium to deal with. Guess what the half life of non-radioactive cadmium is.
I'm curious if you have any hard, factual solutions to some of the problems with fission - fuel disposal being a big one. The spent fuel disposal problem was solved fifty years ago. Spent fuel can be turned into rocks via vitrification (glassification) or, more popular lately, ceramicizing (turning into a ceramic). Then, these rocks can be stored in the natural habitat of rocks -- deep underground -- at virtually no cost per KWH of energy provided and with ultrahigh safety factors. In 500 years these rocks are less radioactive than the uranium they were mined from.
Safety record aside (which is, overall, pretty good) a nuke plant that goes up goes up in a BIG way - but if your wind turbine breaks down, thats all that happens - your turbine breaks down. When wind turbines break they can kill people. The most tragic accident involving a single wind turbine of any size would kill (depending on your definition of tragic) either every person on this planet or about half the people on the planet now and half the people in every future generation, totaling casualties in the quadrillions at least.
The largest imaginable breakdown of wind turbines in the world would shut off electricity for everyone on the planet. Most of the world's population would die within a few days and most of the rest within a few weeks.
Remember, you've got 6 billion of these things. You'd better get out your leatherman and get to work fixin'!
The largest possible nuclear accident would kill the same amounts of people. Ditto with coal. Ditto with baby carriages. Ditto with high heels. Ditto with Bic pens. Ditto with paper clips.
Almost all of the casualties from a 1-in-a-billion nuclear accident would suffer some form of DNA damage from the radiation. In 10 years, this threat will be diminished by medical science most of the way toward zero. In 50 years, people will wonder why anyone ever worried about it. For the time being, to protect yourself from fission product release, stock some prohpylactic iodine pills. If you get ripped off at the store, these pills will cost you the unholy amount of 10 cents apiece.
Also remember that it doesn't have to be just one type of power generation - retrofit those tropical oil platforms into the (forgot acronym)... OTEC
...thermal conversion plants others have talked about, Dangerous, dirty, expensive.
install wind farms where it's practical, Dangerous, dirty, expensive.
advocate the usage of solar power in homes So environmentally sustainable grid electricity prices would go up and our mountains of toxic cadmium would get even higher. BTW, my solar panels have snow on them right now and my lead-acid batteries are almost dead. Could you please climb onto my roof (careful not ot slip and break your neck!) and clean them off? Thank you ever so much.
(side note: My mother is a teacher, and her small rural building runs off solar and makes a small amount of money by selling power back to the grid. The grid is required to buy it, unfortunately.
Theres no reason this wouldn't be practical in new buildings, especially given government incentives) How about, it's too expensive, no one wants to live under a mountain of toxic cadmium, the roofs aren't big enough by a factor of thousands, solar access rights would require all trees to be cut down, etc...
You're talking about instigating an ecological nightmare to live out your personal solar wet dream.
AC wrote:
Interesting... there is also lots of gold in the world's oceans (no, not worth getting out with present day techniques;-) The titanium, vanadium, and cobalt is worth getting out.
However! The energy stream impinging on the world ocean from the Sun is several orders of magnitude that what is contained in the uranium being leached out into same ocean. And it's all being used by the ocean ecosystems.
So, if energy is what you are looking for in the ocean, look no further than the temperature difference between surface and deep water in the tropics (OTEC). That really could support a tripled current world population at Kuwaiti consumption levels, if that's what we really want;-) Energy is not what I'm looking for in the ocean. A concentrated, safe, inexpensive, clean, sustainable supply of primarily electricity and secondarily industrial process heat is what I _was_ looking for before I found it in nuclear fission.
Solar OTEC has nothing to do with those qualities.
hearingaid wrote:
And, FWIW, RMS is not a control freak: he's a fanatic. Control freaks do not come up with things like the GPL, something designed to reduce central control.
Yes, they do. This is typical behavior of authoritarians. Authoritarians can't stand to be told what to do, so, often, they will form or work strongly within anti-oppression movements. Look at Frank Zappa. Look at Karl Marx.
All activists, of any stripe, are authoritarians. If they weren't authoritarians, they wouldn't care about changing the world. You have to look past their arguments about how morally wrong a situation is (and therefore deserves to be forcefully changed), and see that they use this supposed moral wrongness as a pretext for authoritarian intervention.
Non-authoritarians take the world at face value. Therefore, you don't see them forming or active within liberation movements. This is not a paradox. It's perfectly logical.
You can see right through Marx; you can see right through Zappa; and you can see right through RMS. You can also see right through authoritarian Eric Hoffer, author of _True Believer_, a treatise on authoritarians' attractions to mass movements. It takes one to know one, and he must have realized this soon after the book was published because he never wrote on the subject again (even though he later authored many other books).
Alpha State wrote:
Doesn't sound too good until you realise that the input energy is free....
The real question is how much money, resources and most importantly energy is needed to built and maintain the plant.
This is the argument put forth by Amory Lovins, and it is fallacious. His statement hinges on his non-falsifiable belief that using energy is simply wrong (IOW, if you had access to infinite, free non-polluting energy, it would be wrong to use it). Lovins believes you do the least wrong when you use the least amount of energy, period.
There are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the world's oceans. It is constantly being renewed by rivers. It is extractable cheaply, efficiently and cleanly with plastic adsorbents (note the spelling). This resource can supply the world's energy needs at rates of usage much higher than today's for at least 6 billion years -- when the sun turns into a red giant.
squaretorus wrote:
For example, the average suburban house has enough sunlight and wind to cater for all its energy needs.
Irrelevant. This is more dangerous and more expensive and more polluting than centralized nuclear fission.
If we make solar and wind capture more efficient, every garage could have a small 'charger' cracking Hydrogen and storing it for the car.
If we make seawater mining more efficient, every nuclear power plant will have enough fuel to last for thousands of years.
By turning the energy model on its head, away from the current 'few big power stations' model to 'millions of tiny power stations' model we not only get better efficiency but less polluting powerstations because they are in EVERYONES back yard.
Efficiency by itself is irrelevant. Millions of tiny power stations would be expensive, fantastically hazardous to install and maintain, and produce mountains of toxic waste.
Kwil wrote:
I believe the general fear is the disposal of the radioactive by-products. Given the half-life of the stuff, there's really no way that we currently can safely dispose of the crap without eventually affecting our food supplies short of shooting it into space.
What we do is turn it into rocks (vitrify {glassify} or ceramicize it) and then store it in the natural habitat of rocks. There are many poisonous things with infinite half lives habitating in the natural habitat of rocks. Those things tend to stay down there and so does rockified nuclear waste.
All things considered, this is a more environmentally friendly way of producing power than any other generation technology, bar none.
Slashdot Mirror
erikdalen wrote:
> If they weren't authoritarians, they wouldn't care about changing the world.
why wouldn't they?
Because the essential characteristic of an authoritarian/activist is his need to derive emotional satisfaction from his relationship with his environment. Therefore, this is about being emotionally needy vs. being emotionally self-resourceful. The emotionally self-resourceful have no need to change the world -- to alter their relationships with the world -- in order to feel secure and satisfied.
Now, does anyone (or could anyone) actually inhabit either of these two extremes -- _zero_ capacity for emotional self-resourcefulness vs. _total_ capacity for emotional self-resourcefulness?
So you mean that everyone that votes is an authoritarian because they care (to some small extent) about changing the world..
a) A non-authoritarian might be voting to humbly go along with the status quo.
b) An individual's vote has no effect on the world. If an authoritarian votes, it may be because he doesn't realize this.
c) An authoritarian might vote to derive emotional satisfaction from carrying out his duty to his community/country.
d) Many people who vote might do so with some feeling of repulsion at how the world is going and either want to do their part to change it, or don't want to be blamed ["Don't blame me! I voted for {insert losing candidate here}"]. These average voters are moderately authoritarian. BTW, this brings up another important characteristic of the A/A personality: propensity for feeling repulsion. The world needs to be a certain way for the authoritarian and so when confronted with what he perceives to be proof of a heinous crime (say, "proof" that the NAZIs were bad, bad people who did bad, bad things to Jews and _wanted_ to do something even worse), he feels repulsion toward the guilty party.
-nukebuddy
decade_null wrote:
Your induction of the logical meaning of the word goes so far that it renders the whole word meaningless.
It's an eduction of the essential factor common to all authoritarians that would explain their behavior in other circumstances. This is similar to the concept of the single g factor of intelligence having wider explanatory value than the concept of disparate multiple intelligences.
You seem to be saying that the word authoritarian means "people who have a desire to change the world", and in some level that includes every living person on the earth.
Yes, but, how about instead, "people who desire to be in a position to exert control over the world." The relationship between the authoritarian and his world seems to be important, so how about assuming that changing a world you have a relationship with also changes your relationship. Then we could say, "Authoritarians are people who have a desire to exert control over their relationship with their environment." This would then neatly include solipsists, followers of a particular doctrine declaring one always and only exists in absense of any environment.
That kind of definition of the word simply is of no use for anyone.
It has wide explanatory power and so it serves the purposes of those who wish to explain relationships and corellations between otherwise-observed-to-be-disparate phenomena.
"Of course, all philosophers are activists/authoritarians"
Are you saying that even a desire to observe and understand the world makes a person authoritarian?
Since gaining a greater understanding of the world would change a subject's relationship with it, an authoritarian subject, one that derives or seeks to derive emotional satisfaction from controlling his relationship with his environment, could use observation and understanding of the world to further his fundamental agenda. Therefore, exhibition of desire to observe and understand the world is correlated with authoritarianism.
A non-A/A can exhibit desire to observe and understand the world if he does not seek to gain emotional satisfaction from the change in his relationship with his environment this would lead to.
It should be noted that there are degrees of authoritarianism. A subject could be a bit authoritarian, but still be able to largely accept constrictive conditions on his relationship with his environment. Hyper authoritarians tend to make names for themselves -- Stephen J. Gould, Carl Sagan, Madonna, Ernest Hemingway, Aristotle -- and rabid cults to automatically form around their ideas, because of the tantrums they throw when they don't receive complete satisfaction from their relationships with their environments.
RMS should rightly be called a hyper-authoritarian to distinguish him from the bulk of humanity.
-nukebuddy
hearingaid wrote:
...that under your definition, you're an authoritarian.
...by your rules
All philosophers?
Huh. Surely you jest. Even under your definition of the term authoritarian, there are definitely philosophers who do not qualify. The solipsists, for example.
The solipsists qualify because, like all philosophers, they find other world views unacceptable. Like all philosophers, they are activists -- they seek to modify their relationships with the world. Like all philosophers, they abuse. They seek to forcefully wring emotional satisfaction, just like despots and activists, from their relationships with the world around them -- a world the solipsists, ironically, profess to believe does not exist.
Solipsists refuse to accept the world at face value -- they refuse to accept the world as it is presented to them.
Solipsism is an example of running faster into the arms of that which you run _from_, the faster you run from it. See _Fight Club_ for another example of this.
However, I think I have to conclude...
It isn't necessary to endlessly discuss yourself. A simple statement would suffice. When you include discussions of yourself in your statements, it is impossible to discern whether a simple answer refers to your discussion of yourself or to the statement you made.
For example, if I answered "Yes" to the statement as phrased, an observer would be unable to tell if I meant, "Yes. You do think that," or, "Yes. That makes sense."
Yes.
You appear to care whether I believe you or not.
There is a correlation between a subject appearing to have a motivation and that subject actually having that motivation. The correlation is always less than 100%.
This makes you just as much an authoritarian as Tom Paine...
Yes. Both Tom Paines's and my actions correlate highly with authoritarianism.
By the force of reason. Any other conclusion reduces to an absurdity.
-nukebuddy
hearingaid wrote:
:)
"There is a definition of authoritarianism which is logically consistant with its usage. This is not necessarily the definition you will find in a dictionary."
Aha!
Words have no meaning.
Words have popular meaning and words have logical meaning which can be inducted from their popular meanings. It can be seen that defining "authoritarian" and "activist" as distinct from each other reduces to an absurdity, whether or not the words are popularly used in this logical way.
Words only have the meaning ascribed to them by human beings. That's why private definitions are not useful.
This is sixth-grade playground talk...but go on.
If you wish to claim that, fundamentally, activists ("people who care about a cause") and authoritarians ("people willing to use force to maintain their control") are coextensive groups, you need to prove it either by showing a large number of examples of people belonging to both groups, or by some form of logic.
It has wider explanatory power to assume that _people popularly termed "activists" share a fundmental motivation below their caring about a cause; that people popularly termed "authoritarians" share a fundamental motivation below their willingness to use force to maintain their control; and that these fundamental motivations are one and the same_ than to assume that activists and authoritarians have distinct motivations. It has wide explanatory power to call that shared fundamental motivation "propensity for non-acceptance."
This explains why the grown-up hippies who have children and try to raise them in a fundamentally different way than drill sargeant parents would, end up with the same result -- children who show the signs of having been subjected to the abuses of indoctrinaires.
To go further, an activist is an abuser. An authoritarian is an abuser. The activist uses his cause. The authoritarian uses his subjects. Abusers use things to get emotional satisfaction. Hippy-dippy summer-of-love parents abuse / drill-sargeant parents abuse. "It's the same difference," says the model with shampoo in her hair.
Your logic skills are a bit weak, though. Go read some Russell. He's good for that too
Logic, because it is based on g-loaded IQ, cannot be taught. Either one is either stuck thinking logically, or one is stuck thinking like Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russel was an activist, BTW. Or an authoritarian. Take your pick.
Of course, all philosophers are activists/authoritarians, and they tend to miss that fundamental point. One would think fundamental points would be important in a discipline like philosophy. You know, seeing how disparate things relate and correlate. Seeing the common threads. IOW, Bertrand Russell, because he was incapable of making inferences with wide explanatory power, was mentally retarded.
-nukebuddy
hearingaid wrote: ;).
Zounds, you have a funky definition of authoritarian then. My definition of authoritarian is somebody who uses force to force individuals to toe the line. I think I'm closer to the O.E.D. than you are.
The inconsistency is between a definition of authoritarian based on popular usage and a definition of authoritarian based on a logical interpretation of the worldview driving the actions of a subject acting in the way an authoritarian is popularly said to act. If not enough people to warrant a definition in the OED notice that _both activists and traditionally thought-of authoritarians must, by force of logic, have the same non-acceptance worldview that drives their often disparate actions_ , it ain't my fault.
There is, on the one hand, going for popular accuracy; and there is, on the other hand, going for a logically consistent definition that has wide explanatory power. If it can be seen that the world can't be explained with given tools, new tools can be made -- not arbitrarily, but according to logical consistency -- that will explain the world.
-nukebuddy
AC wrote:
The anarachists are not free from being governed and ruled over so they want to abolish government and other forms of oppression and authoritarianism. You claim they are authoritarians for forcing some kind of change on the world. What we have now is authoritarianism. To achieve a anarchist goals or the goals RMS wants you do not have to force your will on others.
You have to exert your will on the world to change it. It doesn't matter what you are changing it to.
Your usage of the word authoritarian is inconsistent with that of most definitions of the word.
Within the tyrant's world are his subjects, and he wishes to make them do as he pleases. Within the activists world is the world, and he wishes to make it do as he pleases. The superficial differences between these two men can be discarded and they can be seen to be unity.
They are not asking for a blind obedience to authority or attempting to attain powers such as those held by a dictator.
People who write these dictionary definitions are not charged with identifying the essential similarities between commonly perceived as disparate things. If people falsely perceive similar things as disparate, that's how it gets recorded in a dictionary.
They are trying to abolish these things.
Possessors of dictatorial personalities long to be in a position wherin they can abolish things. Ditto with possessors of activist personalities. "It's the same difference," as the old shampoo commercial went.
The problem is your circulating your own private definition of authoritarian.
There is a definition of authoritarianism which is logically consistant with its usage. This is not necessarily the definition you will find in a dictionary.
-nukebuddy
jschrod wrote:
You should visit a course on Logic 101. There the difference between implication and equivalence is taught.
Logic professors teach deductive reasoning, so, no thanks. Inductive reasoning (the creation of new knowledge) is better.
-nukebuddy
Watts Martin wrote:
...about how a given subject should be dealt with could be considered "a desire to improve the world,"...
...this essentially leaves us with a choice between inaction--more than inaction, a virtual silence--...
...and oppression.
This is essentially an assertion that one can't desire to improve the world without being an authoritarian.
Yes.
Given thet any expression of a strongly-held opinion...
Every opinionable person is an authoritarian. An old saying goes, "The opiniable are not worth persuading." You would have a hard time convincing an authoritarian of this (and I just said it wouldn't be worth trying) because it would force him to see his own authoritarianism once he saw authoritarianism in others.
A desire to exert control over the world.
"The silence was deafening," i.e. inactions are actions too and within the proper context can be disruptive of the normal flow of things, i.e. potential activist tactics.
I guess you mean the oppression of the world by your own action. Oppression isn't a problem for non-A/A's, but it sure is for the other A/A's in the world. So, what would happen is the other A/A's would be oppressed and the non-A/A's really wouldn't because they'd just go along with it.
You're not just dismissing Marx and Zappa (a curious combination, if I may say so) but everyone who's urged one approach to anything in preference to another.
The supposed differences between authoritarianism and liberation (or any kind of) activism can be boiled down to logical absurdities and, therefore, authoritarianism and activism are unity. Individual actions like urging particular approaches are correlated with authoritarianism/activism, but the person is not truly an authoritarian/activist unless he feels deep within himself about "the way the world _is_ and the way it _ought to be_." Evidence of more and more instances of authoritarian/activist behavior correlates increasingly strongly with authoritarianism/activism and an observor can then say with increasing confidence that the particular subject under observation is, in fact, an authoritarian/activist. But an observor can never know for sure -- just with really high confidence, as is the case with the celebrities we are naming.
You dismiss disparate icons such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi in one fell swoop.
Can I help it if these fine folks display behavior correlated with A/A personality? They are, deep down inside, the same person.
That's a pretty dismal view of the world, honestly.
:(
It's also implicitly founded on the false premise that arguing a point is the same as forcing a point.
Arguing a point is not the same as forcing a point, but it is correlated with an A/A worldview.
Obviously, anyyone who favors one approach to a problem over another approach will be at odds with people who don't,
The people who don't favor any particular approach might not be inclined to put up a fight. I mean, you know, since they don't care and all...
and when someone in a position of power favors a given approach he will impose it on others.
I guess that's why they call them positions of power.
This is a hardly a sign of bias or authoritarianism;
It's not conclusive, but there is always a correlation, no matter how small, between disruptive behavior and A/A personality. A totally non-A/A person could occupy a position of power and hand out dicatorial rulings left and right. The deciding factor ultimately is not _what_ a subject has done, but _why_ he did it.
choosing to leave something alone (whether that means to the whims of nature, the whims of market forces or whatever) is just as much a moral choice as intervention is,
A/A's always make moral choices and non-A/A's never do. This is because A/A's are moral and non-A/A's are amoral. Related to this: A/A's always speak the truth and non-A/A's never speak the truth. This is because A/A's know what the truth is and non-A/A's have no idea what the truth is.
and thus just as subject to controversy.
Non A/A's can certainly rouse controversy. The question is, "Do they get their rocks off doing it?"
-nukebuddy
AC wrote:
(Non-)Authoritarians?? What you are talking about is just acceptance and activism.
Yes. Authoritarians cannot accept the world as it is presented to them. They want it their way -- so they become activists.
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with what you are discussing - the two concepts here are not interchangable.
I'm boiling authoritarianism down to a propensity for non-acceptance. I'm boiling activism down to a propensity for non-acceptance. Therefore, these two concepts are unity.
What you're said is essentially right -- it's the people who don't accept the status quo who end up changing the world. However, what you are trying to say is different -- trying to change something does not make you an authoritarian.
Authoritarians have a low propensity for acceptance and therefore are wont to change things. Now, according to set-logic this would not necessarily make every world-changer an authoritarian, but I am saying that, in fact, every world-changer does have authoritarian tendencies because, in fact, there is no way to distinuish what authoritarianism boils down to, a propensity for non-acceptance, and what activism boils down to, a propensity for non-acceptance.
-nukebuddy
hearingaid wrote:
I've actually read a lot of Marx's stuff. He's not an authoritarian. The man's an anarchist.
He was opposed to the anarchists, but just like them he was an anti-oppressionist. The fact that the Marxists and anarchists took a distaste to the oppression they observed makes them de-facto authoritarians. These anti-oppressionists felt a desire to exert some influence on the world to allow it to, in their eyes, right itself -- and they would not take "no" for answers. Why? Because they were authoritarians. There was a right way for the world to be, and they were going to make it that way or bust.
The fact that they didn't want the people of the world to allow them to rule like dictators didn't make them authoritarians any less. The point is, they wanted the world to fit a standard they would personally find beautiful. The particular world taste of an authoritarian, whether oppressive or non-oppressive, is beside the point. It's important that they simply had a world taste at all.
The first word in authoritarian is "author". These folks wanted to be the authors of the world. Not everyone views the world as wrong and needing fixing when they are born. Authors (authoritarians) do.
In any case, your argument seems to be that anyone who cares about the world is an authoritarian.
Yes.
I guess that would make Tom Paine an authoritarian too.
Yes.
-nukebuddy
AC wrote:
Karl Marx was an authoritarian?... Marx several times dissolved organisations he was head of because he didn't like the way they were going or because he thought they were becoming too centralised around himself.
"the purpose of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change it" --Karl Marx
The specific instruments by which the authoritarian changes the world and the ultimate state he wants to change it to are secondary to the point that what makes him an authoritarian is the fact that he wants to change it at all. Karl Marx was an authoritarian because, in his case, he wanted to make the world non-authoritarian.
-nukebuddy
Transcendent wrote again:
"Fusion doesn't exist and would be more expensive than fission if it did."
-I thought that was understood in this discussion... after all, we're discussing possible energy sources... not sources that we've researched, mastered, and manufactured in abundance...
Fission has been proven, but not exploited yet. It therefore qualifies as a possible enrgy source. Fusion has been proven on paper to not be a workable energy resource for the forseeable future. Figuring out how to get energy out of fusion reactions does not equal designing an economically competitive _electricity_ power plant. Fusion has been proven on paper to not be economically competitive even assuming a miracle breakthrough will occur in fusion reactor technology. IOW, we're talking about electricity power plants here, not just heat generation technologies. We;ve done the math and we know fusion electricity won't be cheap _no matter what happens in fusion reactor research_. Fission hasn't even been perfected yet. Why not take proven good things and make them even better?
"If you want to put money into energy research where it will count, research how to better extract uranium from seawater."
-You don't think putting money into fusion research would count at all??
That's right, I don't. Yes, I've researched this issue to death.
Naaaa... lets just save a coupla bucks instead of creating a more efficient and beautifully clean power source.
By exploiting fission, we can create resources that can then be used to gamble on fusion research -- in centuries to come, not this century. It's instructive to keep in mind that fusion and breeder reactor reseach were instigated because of a fear that slow-neutron fission would not remain practical for more than ~70 years. Thanks to research showing how simple and cheap it is to collect uranium from seawater with special plastic adsorbants (note the spelling on _adsorbants_), we now know that there is no hurry to research alternatives.
Humans should research everything we can think of, for we never know when out findings might just come in handy...
Research costs resources. Let's stockpile the necessary resources and then do the research. Thanks to the 4.5 billion tons of easily collectible uranium in the world's oceans, we are assured of a safe, clean energy supply for at least the next few thousand years using existing reactor technology. It's within this type of climate, once we get enough fission reactors built, that we can profitably commence research on breeders and fusion reactors.
-nukebuddy
arkanes wrote:
...thermal conversion plants others have talked about,
Granted the basic validity of your other arguments, but solar cells and wind plants don't generate any toxic waste at all when used
6 billion power plants would create siginificantly large mountains of toxic waste in their manufacture. Solar panels in particular leave us with mountains of cadmium to deal with. Guess what the half life of non-radioactive cadmium is.
I'm curious if you have any hard, factual solutions to some of the problems with fission - fuel disposal being a big one.
The spent fuel disposal problem was solved fifty years ago. Spent fuel can be turned into rocks via vitrification (glassification) or, more popular lately, ceramicizing (turning into a ceramic). Then, these rocks can be stored in the natural habitat of rocks -- deep underground -- at virtually no cost per KWH of energy provided and with ultrahigh safety factors. In 500 years these rocks are less radioactive than the uranium they were mined from.
Safety record aside (which is, overall, pretty good) a nuke plant that goes up goes up in a BIG way - but if your wind turbine breaks down, thats all that happens - your turbine breaks down.
When wind turbines break they can kill people. The most tragic accident involving a single wind turbine of any size would kill (depending on your definition of tragic) either every person on this planet or about half the people on the planet now and half the people in every future generation, totaling casualties in the quadrillions at least.
The largest imaginable breakdown of wind turbines in the world would shut off electricity for everyone on the planet. Most of the world's population would die within a few days and most of the rest within a few weeks.
Remember, you've got 6 billion of these things. You'd better get out your leatherman and get to work fixin'!
The largest possible nuclear accident would kill the same amounts of people. Ditto with coal. Ditto with baby carriages. Ditto with high heels. Ditto with Bic pens. Ditto with paper clips.
Almost all of the casualties from a 1-in-a-billion nuclear accident would suffer some form of DNA damage from the radiation. In 10 years, this threat will be diminished by medical science most of the way toward zero. In 50 years, people will wonder why anyone ever worried about it. For the time being, to protect yourself from fission product release, stock some prohpylactic iodine pills. If you get ripped off at the store, these pills will cost you the unholy amount of 10 cents apiece.
Also remember that it doesn't have to be just one type of power generation - retrofit those tropical oil platforms into the (forgot acronym)...
OTEC
Dangerous, dirty, expensive.
install wind farms where it's practical,
Dangerous, dirty, expensive.
advocate the usage of solar power in homes
So environmentally sustainable grid electricity prices would go up and our mountains of toxic cadmium would get even higher. BTW, my solar panels have snow on them right now and my lead-acid batteries are almost dead. Could you please climb onto my roof (careful not ot slip and break your neck!) and clean them off? Thank you ever so much.
(side note: My mother is a teacher, and her small rural building runs off solar and makes a small amount of money by selling power back to the grid.
The grid is required to buy it, unfortunately.
Theres no reason this wouldn't be practical in new buildings, especially given government incentives)
How about, it's too expensive, no one wants to live under a mountain of toxic cadmium, the roofs aren't big enough by a factor of thousands, solar access rights would require all trees to be cut down, etc...
You're talking about instigating an ecological nightmare to live out your personal solar wet dream.
-nukebuddy
AC wrote: ;-)
;-)
Interesting... there is also lots of gold in the world's oceans (no, not worth getting out with present day techniques
The titanium, vanadium, and cobalt is worth getting out.
However! The energy stream impinging on the world ocean from the Sun is several orders of magnitude that what is contained in the uranium being leached out into same ocean.
And it's all being used by the ocean ecosystems.
So, if energy is what you are looking for in the ocean, look no further than the temperature difference between surface and deep water in the tropics (OTEC). That really could support a tripled current world population at Kuwaiti consumption levels, if that's what we really want
Energy is not what I'm looking for in the ocean. A concentrated, safe, inexpensive, clean, sustainable supply of primarily electricity and secondarily industrial process heat is what I _was_ looking for before I found it in nuclear fission.
Solar OTEC has nothing to do with those qualities.
-nukebuddy
hearingaid wrote:
And, FWIW, RMS is not a control freak: he's a fanatic. Control freaks do not come up with things like the GPL, something designed to reduce central control.
Yes, they do. This is typical behavior of authoritarians. Authoritarians can't stand to be told what to do, so, often, they will form or work strongly within anti-oppression movements. Look at Frank Zappa. Look at Karl Marx.
All activists, of any stripe, are authoritarians. If they weren't authoritarians, they wouldn't care about changing the world. You have to look past their arguments about how morally wrong a situation is (and therefore deserves to be forcefully changed), and see that they use this supposed moral wrongness as a pretext for authoritarian intervention.
Non-authoritarians take the world at face value. Therefore, you don't see them forming or active within liberation movements. This is not a paradox. It's perfectly logical.
You can see right through Marx; you can see right through Zappa; and you can see right through RMS. You can also see right through authoritarian Eric Hoffer, author of _True Believer_, a treatise on authoritarians' attractions to mass movements. It takes one to know one, and he must have realized this soon after the book was published because he never wrote on the subject again (even though he later authored many other books).
-nukebuddy
Alpha State wrote:
Doesn't sound too good until you realise that the input energy is free....
The real question is how much money, resources and most importantly energy is needed to built and maintain the plant.
This is the argument put forth by Amory Lovins, and it is fallacious. His statement hinges on his non-falsifiable belief that using energy is simply wrong (IOW, if you had access to infinite, free non-polluting energy, it would be wrong to use it). Lovins believes you do the least wrong when you use the least amount of energy, period.
There are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the world's oceans. It is constantly being renewed by rivers. It is extractable cheaply, efficiently and cleanly with plastic adsorbents (note the spelling). This resource can supply the world's energy needs at rates of usage much higher than today's for at least 6 billion years -- when the sun turns into a red giant.
-nukebuddy
fraggedtroller wrote:
The Rocky Mountain Institute's (Lovins company)website is http://www.rmi.org
They're involved in a lot of other interesting energy efficent projects.
Efficiency is irrelevant to sustainablility. Perhaps that is why Amory Lovins focuses on it so much.
-nukebuddy
DaoudaW wrote:
By using hydrogen generation as an energy storage and transportation medium, the benefits of windpower can be extended to all energy using sectors.
It could do the same for nuclear energy, a cheaper and more sustainable form of energy than wind.
-nukebuddy
squaretorus wrote:
For example, the average suburban house has enough sunlight and wind to cater for all its energy needs.
Irrelevant. This is more dangerous and more expensive and more polluting than centralized nuclear fission.
If we make solar and wind capture more efficient, every garage could have a small 'charger' cracking Hydrogen and storing it for the car.
If we make seawater mining more efficient, every nuclear power plant will have enough fuel to last for thousands of years.
By turning the energy model on its head, away from the current 'few big power stations' model to 'millions of tiny power stations' model we not only get better efficiency but less polluting powerstations because they are in EVERYONES back yard.
Efficiency by itself is irrelevant. Millions of tiny power stations would be expensive, fantastically hazardous to install and maintain, and produce mountains of toxic waste.
-nukebuddy
Neutron_F1uX wrote:
Pound for pound, Nuclear Energy is far cleaner and environmentally friendly then coal power plants,
How about _kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour_?
-nukebuddy
PM4RK5 wrote:
Hydrogen is also the most plentiful element there is
Hydrogen is a source of energy?
-nukebuddy
lazytiger wrote:
Hemp SHOULD BE one of the main alternative energies of the future.
This is called biomass energy. It is a form of solar energy and, as such, is neither cheap nor environmentally friendly.
Nuclear fission is both cheap and environmentally friendly.
-nukebuddy
RussP wrote:
But I don't have time to educate you empty-headed morons on nuclear power.
Thankfully, Richard L. Garwin and Georges Charpak do.
-Nukebuddy
AC wrote:
The moon spins around the earth, just use its magic power of moving oceans
This is called tidal power and it is not as environmentally friendly as nuclear fission.
-nukebuddy
Kwil wrote:
I believe the general fear is the disposal of the radioactive by-products. Given the half-life of the stuff, there's really no way that we currently can safely dispose of the crap without eventually affecting our food supplies short of shooting it into space.
What we do is turn it into rocks (vitrify {glassify} or ceramicize it) and then store it in the natural habitat of rocks. There are many poisonous things with infinite half lives habitating in the natural habitat of rocks. Those things tend to stay down there and so does rockified nuclear waste.
All things considered, this is a more environmentally friendly way of producing power than any other generation technology, bar none.
You can learn more here.
-nukebuddy