Remember also that this character was not the "Satan" of today: the evil rebel. He was more like God's prosecutring attorney than an enemy: a nasty guy in God's employ working towards the greater good rather than a rival. The Adversary was not explicitly made evil until much later, nor was the snake connected with this new view of Satan until much later as well.
Any Valar would be able to wipe the floor with Sauron. Not even in the same leauge! And this would sort of make Gandalf the White something of a liar, because he does claim to BE Gandalf, and even tells the story of how he was brought back to life.
This theory, I think, has nothing going for it other than that it tickles some people's fancy. But maybe that's enough. It makes even less sense though, in the context of the other stories that Tolkien wrote about Bombadil, which are pastoral and silly.
I think the strangest piece of evidence we have to deal with concerning Bombadil is that Gandalf goes to speak with him at the end of LOTR after Sauron falls. Why? What's the connection?It's never explained.
---in the same spirit as God's appearance as a crazy old hermit in Douglas Adams' writing.---
If we're talking about the same hermit, that guy isn't meant to be God. He was apppointed by the universe's political leaders as the best solution to the political quandry of how to find the best leader: you find someone who has no idea what's going on, no sense of power to abuse. In Douglas Adam's world, God is the one who wrote that big firey message we see at the end of SLOATATF.
Just to be clear on this, Tolkien WAS a Roman Catholic Christian, and quite passionate about it. But maybe the "n't" on "wasn't" was a typo, because the rest of your post DOES seem to acknowledge that he was a Christian.
---The compassionate, the ones who work for others win out in the end, the evil ones loose since they often turn on their own kind (e.g. orcs). Although it would be difficult to find a Christ figure in the trilogy, his teachings of love and compassion are one of the main themes of the work.
---
And these themes are _uniquely_ "Christian" how....? Compassion, rewards for the humble and trustworthy, love: these things are appreciated and praised almost universally. Tolkien may well have thought that teaching love was equal to teaching Christianity specifically, but that's really only so if you take the rather smallminded view that Christians hold a monopoly on the concept of love, forgiveness, mercy, etc. LOTR is a tale written by a Catholic inspired by Christian concerns, but which in the end is about very human concerns that are quite appealing to almost everyone (except those snobs who think it's boring or childish just because it has elves in it). This is because the concerns of Christianity, like most religions and ideologies, are simply aspects of the concerns common to all humanity.
It's probably more fair to call Lewis an ex-theist agnostic: he was not the kind of non-believer that simply does not believe, but rather the kind that petulantly rebels against a belief he actually did hold, then concedes to later on. Lewis believed in a creator, but he refused to care or worship about it, and denied it. Tolkien is rightly credited with turning him around. He later took to saying that he was once an atheist proper, because that helped his evangelical works, though he ridiculously mischaracterized atheismfor effect anyway. He essentially proves in his works that claiming that "god does not exist" is an unsupportable claim (which it is, but it isn't unique or distinctive to atheism per se), and then concluded that his god must then exist (neglecting entirely the fact that the burden of proof rests on believers to prove, not on non-believers to disprove). Of course, for the majority of atheists who simply feel that there is no valid reason to believe THAT there is a god, this argument looks a little shifty, especially when Lewis makes grand claims about having "refuted" atheism: as if atheism were even necessarily a "position" to refute!
But redemption is not originally or exclusively a Christian concept. The idea or redemption existed long before people decided that Yaweh should start forgiving people for acting how he made them. You find it as a theme in mythic stories not only predating Christianity, but even going back to the very begginings of human history.
Part of the problem here, however, is that Christians, including Tolkien, have this habit of assuming that Christianity invented or dominates things like forgiveness and friendship and good vs. evil. So, they consider having written a story that emphasizes those themes to be distinctly emphasizing Christianity, when in fact they are quite universal in character.
This could exaplain why Tolkien believed himself to be writing a very Christian story, but in fact one that rarely comes accross like that to anyone not interested in forcing the comparison.
Just having lots of natural water available on the planet is good enough to help out some form of colonization, even if we don't go for a large scale project like you're discussing. It also might be possible to do something midway between what you're talking about and domes, setting up moderately controlled walled up environments on Mars without worrying about making the whole planet livable.
But I do like your idea as using Mars as a testing ground for potentially dangerous concepts. How about Buckminster Fuller's mile radius spherical floating (but tethered) city? I've always wanted to see that proof of concept idea attempted.
You do get what you pay for though: M-W has a lot of non-standard definitions, some of which are holdovers from the time when it was fashionable to smuggle connotations into definitions that had more to do with the compiler's political and religious beliefs than had to do with the words. Oxford has for the most part purged itself of such things, as well as being MUCH more extensive about documenting all sorts of different meangins and even their origins, which is why it is the preferred source. However, regular users (like me) aren't apt to encounter the differences.
---I'd also be most interested to see a link or anything to this supposed evidence of yours indicating that Japan was just on the edge of their seats waiting for us to ask them to surrender so that they might throw down their arms and welcome US hegemony in the Pacific with open arms.----
If any of that mess was what I said...
But, maybe read a history book next time? Japan was already negotiating surrender: the only major problems were that a) russia was involved b) they had one major condition: that the emprorer have immunity. This isn't revisionist history, this is well known.
But, just a note: you can't do history by stringing together a bunch of superlatives together and huffing and puffing when I don't run away screaming in the face of your pathetic straw man recapitulation of what I said.
that Cafe on Luke's Planet = The Prancing Pony Hoth = Cahadras George Lucas = Barrow Wight, looking for something to breathe life back into its decript corpse.
Oh, ho ho! What a comeback. Now, if you could just say anything vaguely sensible to recover the tattered shambles I made of your "points" about economics... If you could demonstrate any of this "understanding" that you claim to have... But I suppose that would be asking too much....
---If that army landed on a Japanese beach, over 100,000 Americans would have died, and it's unlikely that once it broke through the defenses it could have been restrained before millions of "Japs" were killed.---
Again, this old trope. Invasion was not a necessary option. Holding it out as one half of a false dilemna is simply a diversionary tactic.
---Truman had one alternative---
This is the part that is bullshit. Truman did not have only one alternative. He had many. That he chose this particular one doesn't mean that it was inevitable or the best choice. The moral reasoning here was atrocious: faced with total victory in reality and in public vs. total victory in reality with perhaps a little less of a perception of total victory in public, Truman chose to massively increase the scale of brutality just to acheive an extremely minor gain. And this act has had percussions echoing far into history. Osama Bin Laden even cited it as the reason he came to believe that terrorists attacks against civilians were justified to acheive objectives in war. And I guess that's my final point: moral depravity to innocent life is contagious. Sometimes, we have to be very wary of our good name.
They could at least have tried to guarantee that the content of the adds wouldn't be so embarrassingly stupid. Burger King actually seems to think that anyone finds a pun based on the word "BEHOLD" to be funny! Get it: it's like, Old English! Tolkien was English! EAT BURGERS FATTIES!!!!
And the bunch of "warriors" hacking at each other in the woods is just as dumb. Oh look, french fries! Let's stop massacring each other to enjoy some mechanically separated chicken bits!
Hello? Moderators? Posts reminding posters what the topic is are not "offtopic." Geez: my post mentions the word "Nobel" and the original post doesn't, it's rated a four, while I'm demoted to 0? Some justice...
---I dont feel cheated for having to pay $10 to see a POS movie or $20 for its sound track. I mean, it's fuckin cheaper to sit in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium then it is to see a movie these days.---
Since when are you OWED the right to see a movie or listen to a soundtrack? How much money did you put up to MAKE the film or soundtrack? None? Then SHUT THE HELL UP! The makers of the product can charge whatever they want for it, and if you think it's too much DON'T PAY. And sure, you can steal as an alternative. But I'm sick and tired of all this self-righteous whining about how it's right and just that you do so, just because you don't like the pricing.
Am I missing something? What's the connection here to Nobel Prizes? Does this mean that I should maybe crack a few blonde jokes in the "Science: 3D Images Of Valles Marineris" discussion to increase my karma? Is this "Slashdot, Night at the Improv!" or what?
---Japan and the japanese were prepared to fight to the end.---
This may have been a comforting and popular theme in Japan towards the end of the war, but it certainly wasn't what was going on politically. Japan was already trying to negotiate surrender by the time we dropped the bombs: their only hold out was immunity for the emporer: a condition we eventually agreed to anyway. However, we had said publically that the surrender must be unconditional: so we couldn't let a little loss of face get in the way of a little terrorism. So, at the time we dropped the bomb, we knew that the Japanese were willing to surrender on conditions that we were comfortable with (and were even LESS amenable to Japan than what we eventually did for them). But nothing short of total victory was acceptable in the public eye. Now, we can argue about the value of that vs. leaving the Japanese perhaps a little less than morally devastated, but the fact is that the "otherwise we would have had to invade and lose more lives" is bunk. That was simply NOT the only other possible outcome.
---Based on what we now know about the bomb's after affects, no.---
Forget the aftereffects: is murdering a civilian population just to send a political message a moral way to act? Claiming that the Japanese did it too is no excuse. Claiming that it was a war is no excuse: this was the final signature of a war that was already over: all that was at stake was how much power to dictate terms we wanted. And we really could have pursued other options rather than bombing a largely undamaged and peaceful city: we could have picked a more directly military target for one thing: perhaps even one with a better view of Tokyo (though in retrospect the radiation would hav emade that a bad choice, but we didn't know that then). Obviously, other options have other risks, but the fact is that we did not even pursue any of those options. Our moral depravity was even more apparent in the reason that we picked Hiroshima: because it was largely undamaged, we would have a better test subject to see what our weapon could do.
---Well, actually, the first guy wasn't so far off the mark.---
Of course it was. It was based on unfounded accusations about the motives of the entire field of economics! This is like impugning "philosophy." It's pointless. Simply studying tradeoffs and productivity doesn't make you a monster.
Also, most people conception of what an actual "economist" is and does is almost completely wrong. This is largely because of the sad fact of so many people with economic degrees going to work for rightist or leftist think tanks. But then, some physical scientists are willing to fake data for money too. Why single out economics?
---but there are a lot who choose to see the truth the way brilliant and thoughtfull men like Joseph Stiglitz do: if supporting government meddling buggers things up in the long run, well, that's job security for us economists---
You're no better than the original poster: you're simply inventing motives for people to demonize them.
---Indeed, I've never seen choice in the utility function in a macro model---
Well duh: choice is reflected in the fact that descriptive and even normative economics requires one to simply accept people's stated preferences as is. Choice is a GIVEN for the logic of "social welfare" to even make any sense!
---The problem with maximizing ``social welfare'' is that it neglects individual welfare. It leads to depriving people of their freedom and controlling them, to keep the little bastards from maximizing their own welfare rather than society's.---
You know NOTHING about what "social welfare" is if you can claim this. Social welfare is simply the lump SUM of everyone's _private_ welfare!
---No economist ever calls for such things (I hope), but if we start maximizing social welfare, that is the logical final step: if they won't do what we say is best for them, we'll make 'em... if they resist, we'll kill 'em. After all, we know so much more than they do.---
That is sheer nonsense. Economics has no pretentions to "what is best for them." In economics "best" is simply: "whatever maximizes the happiness of each person: whatever bundle of goods they most want." Social welfare is simply the sum of everyone's own welfare. Economists are (or should be) utterly indifferent to what people's actual preferences are: if the top brass at GM want to work to make 10 million dollars in profits, that's absolute no better or worse than if they want to meditate in Tibet and obtain spiritual enlightenment that they collectively value at 10 million dollars. In fact, the general bent of an economist is like this: suppose we have an economic model we're studying. We come across a market that doesn't seem to fit the model: say shoeselling. What is a good economist first trained to think? NOT: "Well, they're doing something wrong." Instead, they're trained to think: "well, shoesellers probably know more about selling shoes than economists! So I'd better figure out what's not taken into account by the model."
---There is a tremendous lot of arrogance in this view of the world, whether we call it the ``Whiteman's burden'' or ``addressing market failure''.---
Whatever, you've done nothing here but convince me that you're a crackpot who doesn't know the first thing about economics.
True, and that it primarily my beef with her, though I'm still not certain that that means her Nobel is undeserved (unless dishonesty is against the interests of peace). A remarkably good book on this subject is called "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" by David Stoll, which was actually the one to research her claims and present a more balenced view of things, and one that I would argue is much more honestly concerned with Guatemalans that Menchu's politicized stories. And it is a brillant examination of the problem of having one person be held of as the voice of an entire people.
Sadly, this is just not so. Memory is not like a videotape, despite the popular understanding. And while some things you might not remember at the moment do exist in your memory, that doesn't mean that they are hidden, or that EVERYTHING is there somewhere. Memory "recovered" via hypnosis has proven so grossly unreliable and so susceptible to suggestion that courts no longer consider testimony based on this technique, and even cast serious doubts on people who claim to have recovered their memories this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember also that this character was not the "Satan" of today: the evil rebel. He was more like God's prosecutring attorney than an enemy: a nasty guy in God's employ working towards the greater good rather than a rival. The Adversary was not explicitly made evil until much later, nor was the snake connected with this new view of Satan until much later as well.
Any Valar would be able to wipe the floor with Sauron. Not even in the same leauge! And this would sort of make Gandalf the White something of a liar, because he does claim to BE Gandalf, and even tells the story of how he was brought back to life.
---Perhaps he is Illuvatar himself---
This theory, I think, has nothing going for it other than that it tickles some people's fancy. But maybe that's enough. It makes even less sense though, in the context of the other stories that Tolkien wrote about Bombadil, which are pastoral and silly.
I think the strangest piece of evidence we have to deal with concerning Bombadil is that Gandalf goes to speak with him at the end of LOTR after Sauron falls. Why? What's the connection?It's never explained.
---in the same spirit as God's appearance as a crazy old hermit in Douglas Adams' writing.---
If we're talking about the same hermit, that guy isn't meant to be God. He was apppointed by the universe's political leaders as the best solution to the political quandry of how to find the best leader: you find someone who has no idea what's going on, no sense of power to abuse. In Douglas Adam's world, God is the one who wrote that big firey message we see at the end of SLOATATF.
What would he have said was particularly "Catholic" about it, as opposed to Protestant? Lembas = communion wafers?
Just to be clear on this, Tolkien WAS a Roman Catholic Christian, and quite passionate about it. But maybe the "n't" on "wasn't" was a typo, because the rest of your post DOES seem to acknowledge that he was a Christian.
---The compassionate, the ones who work for others win out in the end, the evil ones loose since they often turn on their own kind (e.g. orcs). Although it would be difficult to find a Christ figure in the trilogy, his teachings of love and compassion are one of the main themes of the work.
---
And these themes are _uniquely_ "Christian" how....? Compassion, rewards for the humble and trustworthy, love: these things are appreciated and praised almost universally. Tolkien may well have thought that teaching love was equal to teaching Christianity specifically, but that's really only so if you take the rather smallminded view that Christians hold a monopoly on the concept of love, forgiveness, mercy, etc.
LOTR is a tale written by a Catholic inspired by Christian concerns, but which in the end is about very human concerns that are quite appealing to almost everyone (except those snobs who think it's boring or childish just because it has elves in it). This is because the concerns of Christianity, like most religions and ideologies, are simply aspects of the concerns common to all humanity.
It's probably more fair to call Lewis an ex-theist agnostic: he was not the kind of non-believer that simply does not believe, but rather the kind that petulantly rebels against a belief he actually did hold, then concedes to later on. Lewis believed in a creator, but he refused to care or worship about it, and denied it. Tolkien is rightly credited with turning him around.
He later took to saying that he was once an atheist proper, because that helped his evangelical works, though he ridiculously mischaracterized atheismfor effect anyway.
He essentially proves in his works that claiming that "god does not exist" is an unsupportable claim (which it is, but it isn't unique or distinctive to atheism per se), and then concluded that his god must then exist (neglecting entirely the fact that the burden of proof rests on believers to prove, not on non-believers to disprove). Of course, for the majority of atheists who simply feel that there is no valid reason to believe THAT there is a god, this argument looks a little shifty, especially when Lewis makes grand claims about having "refuted" atheism: as if atheism were even necessarily a "position" to refute!
But redemption is not originally or exclusively a Christian concept. The idea or redemption existed long before people decided that Yaweh should start forgiving people for acting how he made them. You find it as a theme in mythic stories not only predating Christianity, but even going back to the very begginings of human history.
Part of the problem here, however, is that Christians, including Tolkien, have this habit of assuming that Christianity invented or dominates things like forgiveness and friendship and good vs. evil. So, they consider having written a story that emphasizes those themes to be distinctly emphasizing Christianity, when in fact they are quite universal in character.
This could exaplain why Tolkien believed himself to be writing a very Christian story, but in fact one that rarely comes accross like that to anyone not interested in forcing the comparison.
Just having lots of natural water available on the planet is good enough to help out some form of colonization, even if we don't go for a large scale project like you're discussing.
It also might be possible to do something midway between what you're talking about and domes, setting up moderately controlled walled up environments on Mars without worrying about making the whole planet livable.
But I do like your idea as using Mars as a testing ground for potentially dangerous concepts. How about Buckminster Fuller's mile radius spherical floating (but tethered) city? I've always wanted to see that proof of concept idea attempted.
Hello? It's "offtopic" to clarify some things in my ontopic post?
Oh, very funny mr. anonymous moderator.... I didn't know the moderation system was for personal humor instead of regulating content.
You do get what you pay for though: M-W has a lot of non-standard definitions, some of which are holdovers from the time when it was fashionable to smuggle connotations into definitions that had more to do with the compiler's political and religious beliefs than had to do with the words. Oxford has for the most part purged itself of such things, as well as being MUCH more extensive about documenting all sorts of different meangins and even their origins, which is why it is the preferred source. However, regular users (like me) aren't apt to encounter the differences.
---I'd also be most interested to see a link or anything to this supposed evidence of yours indicating that Japan was just on the edge of their seats waiting for us to ask them to surrender so that they might throw down their arms and welcome US hegemony in the Pacific with open arms.----
If any of that mess was what I said...
But, maybe read a history book next time? Japan was already negotiating surrender: the only major problems were that a) russia was involved b) they had one major condition: that the emprorer have immunity. This isn't revisionist history, this is well known.
But, just a note: you can't do history by stringing together a bunch of superlatives together and huffing and puffing when I don't run away screaming in the face of your pathetic straw man recapitulation of what I said.
that Cafe on Luke's Planet = The Prancing Pony
Hoth = Cahadras
George Lucas = Barrow Wight, looking for something to breathe life back into its decript corpse.
Oh, ho ho! What a comeback. Now, if you could just say anything vaguely sensible to recover the tattered shambles I made of your "points" about economics...
If you could demonstrate any of this "understanding" that you claim to have...
But I suppose that would be asking too much....
---If that army landed on a Japanese beach, over 100,000 Americans would have died, and it's unlikely that once it broke through the defenses it could have been restrained before millions of "Japs" were killed.---
Again, this old trope. Invasion was not a necessary option. Holding it out as one half of a false dilemna is simply a diversionary tactic.
---Truman had one alternative---
This is the part that is bullshit. Truman did not have only one alternative. He had many. That he chose this particular one doesn't mean that it was inevitable or the best choice. The moral reasoning here was atrocious: faced with total victory in reality and in public vs. total victory in reality with perhaps a little less of a perception of total victory in public, Truman chose to massively increase the scale of brutality just to acheive an extremely minor gain. And this act has had percussions echoing far into history. Osama Bin Laden even cited it as the reason he came to believe that terrorists attacks against civilians were justified to acheive objectives in war. And I guess that's my final point: moral depravity to innocent life is contagious. Sometimes, we have to be very wary of our good name.
They could at least have tried to guarantee that the content of the adds wouldn't be so embarrassingly stupid. Burger King actually seems to think that anyone finds a pun based on the word "BEHOLD" to be funny! Get it: it's like, Old English! Tolkien was English! EAT BURGERS FATTIES!!!!
And the bunch of "warriors" hacking at each other in the woods is just as dumb. Oh look, french fries! Let's stop massacring each other to enjoy some mechanically separated chicken bits!
Hello? Moderators? Posts reminding posters what the topic is are not "offtopic." Geez: my post mentions the word "Nobel" and the original post doesn't, it's rated a four, while I'm demoted to 0? Some justice...
---I dont feel cheated for having to pay $10 to see a POS movie or $20 for its sound track. I mean, it's fuckin cheaper to sit in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium then it is to see a movie these days.---
Since when are you OWED the right to see a movie or listen to a soundtrack? How much money did you put up to MAKE the film or soundtrack? None? Then SHUT THE HELL UP! The makers of the product can charge whatever they want for it, and if you think it's too much DON'T PAY. And sure, you can steal as an alternative. But I'm sick and tired of all this self-righteous whining about how it's right and just that you do so, just because you don't like the pricing.
Am I missing something? What's the connection here to Nobel Prizes?
Does this mean that I should maybe crack a few blonde jokes in the "Science: 3D Images Of Valles Marineris" discussion to increase my karma? Is this "Slashdot, Night at the Improv!" or what?
---Japan and the japanese were prepared to fight to the end.---
This may have been a comforting and popular theme in Japan towards the end of the war, but it certainly wasn't what was going on politically. Japan was already trying to negotiate surrender by the time we dropped the bombs: their only hold out was immunity for the emporer: a condition we eventually agreed to anyway. However, we had said publically that the surrender must be unconditional: so we couldn't let a little loss of face get in the way of a little terrorism.
So, at the time we dropped the bomb, we knew that the Japanese were willing to surrender on conditions that we were comfortable with (and were even LESS amenable to Japan than what we eventually did for them). But nothing short of total victory was acceptable in the public eye. Now, we can argue about the value of that vs. leaving the Japanese perhaps a little less than morally devastated, but the fact is that the "otherwise we would have had to invade and lose more lives" is bunk. That was simply NOT the only other possible outcome.
---Based on what we now know about the bomb's after affects, no.---
Forget the aftereffects: is murdering a civilian population just to send a political message a moral way to act? Claiming that the Japanese did it too is no excuse. Claiming that it was a war is no excuse: this was the final signature of a war that was already over: all that was at stake was how much power to dictate terms we wanted. And we really could have pursued other options rather than bombing a largely undamaged and peaceful city: we could have picked a more directly military target for one thing: perhaps even one with a better view of Tokyo (though in retrospect the radiation would hav emade that a bad choice, but we didn't know that then). Obviously, other options have other risks, but the fact is that we did not even pursue any of those options. Our moral depravity was even more apparent in the reason that we picked Hiroshima: because it was largely undamaged, we would have a better test subject to see what our weapon could do.
---Well, actually, the first guy wasn't so far off the mark.---
... if they resist, we'll kill 'em. After all, we know so much more than they do.---
Of course it was. It was based on unfounded accusations about the motives of the entire field of economics! This is like impugning "philosophy." It's pointless. Simply studying tradeoffs and productivity doesn't make you a monster.
Also, most people conception of what an actual "economist" is and does is almost completely wrong. This is largely because of the sad fact of so many people with economic degrees going to work for rightist or leftist think tanks. But then, some physical scientists are willing to fake data for money too. Why single out economics?
---but there are a lot who choose to see the truth the way brilliant and thoughtfull men like Joseph Stiglitz do: if supporting government meddling buggers things up in the long run, well, that's job security for us economists---
You're no better than the original poster: you're simply inventing motives for people to demonize them.
---Indeed, I've never seen choice in the utility function in a macro model---
Well duh: choice is reflected in the fact that descriptive and even normative economics requires one to simply accept people's stated preferences as is. Choice is a GIVEN for the logic of "social welfare" to even make any sense!
---The problem with maximizing ``social welfare'' is that it neglects individual welfare. It leads to depriving people of their freedom and controlling them, to keep the little bastards from maximizing their own welfare rather than society's.---
You know NOTHING about what "social welfare" is if you can claim this. Social welfare is simply the lump SUM of everyone's _private_ welfare!
---No economist ever calls for such things (I hope), but if we start maximizing social welfare, that is the logical final step: if they won't do what we say is best for them, we'll make 'em
That is sheer nonsense. Economics has no pretentions to "what is best for them." In economics "best" is simply: "whatever maximizes the happiness of each person: whatever bundle of goods they most want." Social welfare is simply the sum of everyone's own welfare. Economists are (or should be) utterly indifferent to what people's actual preferences are: if the top brass at GM want to work to make 10 million dollars in profits, that's absolute no better or worse than if they want to meditate in Tibet and obtain spiritual enlightenment that they collectively value at 10 million dollars. In fact, the general bent of an economist is like this: suppose we have an economic model we're studying. We come across a market that doesn't seem to fit the model: say shoeselling. What is a good economist first trained to think? NOT: "Well, they're doing something wrong." Instead, they're trained to think: "well, shoesellers probably know more about selling shoes than economists! So I'd better figure out what's not taken into account by the model."
---There is a tremendous lot of arrogance in this view of the world, whether we call it the ``Whiteman's burden'' or ``addressing market failure''.---
Whatever, you've done nothing here but convince me that you're a crackpot who doesn't know the first thing about economics.
True, and that it primarily my beef with her, though I'm still not certain that that means her Nobel is undeserved (unless dishonesty is against the interests of peace). A remarkably good book on this subject is called "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" by David Stoll, which was actually the one to research her claims and present a more balenced view of things, and one that I would argue is much more honestly concerned with Guatemalans that Menchu's politicized stories. And it is a brillant examination of the problem of having one person be held of as the voice of an entire people.
Sadly, this is just not so. Memory is not like a videotape, despite the popular understanding. And while some things you might not remember at the moment do exist in your memory, that doesn't mean that they are hidden, or that EVERYTHING is there somewhere.
Memory "recovered" via hypnosis has proven so grossly unreliable and so susceptible to suggestion that courts no longer consider testimony based on this technique, and even cast serious doubts on people who claim to have recovered their memories this way.