Complicated issue; _really_ complicated issue...and for one you need to lose the feminine pronoun, as there's been a lopsided approach to the question of promiscuity since time immemorial, and it needs to stop.
I chose the feminine pronoun intentionally, but not for the reasons you might imagine. (I agree wholeheartedly with you on the ``it needs to stop'' bit!) The reason I used the feminine is because it is much easier to see how reckless sexual behavior would be harmful to a woman. Men tend to be a bit smug in their invulnerability, and I was trying to make a point. (Around here you'd be likely to get a response of ``Oh, too much sex, cry me a river!'' or something...)
My rather offhand comment about sex addiction is that it's mostly the rich that get treatment for it in rehab...
I guess my image of sex addiction is more from the twelve-step side, rather than the celebrity rehab side. I really don't pay attention to People magazine, but I have known people who seemed to use sex as a substitute when recovering from narcotic addiction. The twelve-step and professional drug treatment communities do seem to treat sex and gambling as potential substitute addictions. (Very few heroin addicts are rich, by the way, at least not by the time they make it to an NA meeting.) This doesn't excuse philandering politicians, any more than the fact that crack is highly addictive excuses Marion Barry.
No it doesn't [demand explanation that fascists obsessed on anti-Semitism or other exclusionist ideologies].
I wasn't saying that a focus on Jews demands explanation, but rather that the need to have an enemy to focus on does. If you want someone to hate, the Jews are indeed the typical choice.
We are fast approaching 3000 years of Jews incurring the wrath of our neighbors.
(As an aside, I assume the `our' was intentional; I don't suppose you've seen The Believer -- that is a very interesting study in Jewish self-hatred, about a Jewish neo-Nazi.)
As it happens, I am TAing a course on the history of anti-Semitism this semester (I'm one of those evil liberal arts geeks), and this is a common misconception that the historical record fails to bear out. Before Christianity, there is no evidence of anything that can be called anti-Semitism in widespread existance in the ancient world. The pagan Romans in fact had a remarkably tolerant policy toward the Jews, who were granted numerous exceptions to Roman law to practice their religion, even after the destruction of the Temple and even after the bloody Bar Kochba revolt of the early second century. (See Gager's Origins of Anti-Semitism for an excellent treatment of this.)
It was the Christians who gave the world a theologically-based anti-Semitism; Judaism and early Christianity were competing proselytizing religions at the time. No other group, until 1948, had any similar anti-Semitic tradition; Jews were no more persecuted in Islamic countries than Christians or Zoroastrians, and had considerably better status than pagans or animists. Whatever role persecution might have played in the self-fashioning of the Ashkenazim or the Spanish Conversos, they are only part of Jewish history. The Jews of Thessaloniki or Baghdad (before 1941 and 1948, respectively) were tolerated and protected minorities.
Fascism in its original form as proposed by Mussolini, and his ideological heirs like Franco was an entirely different animal.
Mussolini did not exterminate Jews, in fact many of his early supporters were Jews.
This is an important point, of which I am sure most people are unaware: fascism per se has nothing to do with racial ideas. It is true that there were Jews in the original Fascist party in Italy, and that the race laws only came about under German pressure much later. However, the fact that most manifestations of fascism (in the generic sense) in the interwar era did obsess on anti-Semitism or other exclusionist ideologies demands explanation. It appears that fascism requires an Other with which to unify the populace, as it denies class divisions. Jews were a popular target for this, in France, in Romania, in Croatia, etc. One might even say that part of the failure of Italian Fascism was that it failed to unify the people against a clearly-defined external enemy (Ethiopia and Albania can only get you so far...)
(I would argue, BTW, that Nazism doesn't deserve the label `fascism' at all, really, as its basis was not the antimaterialist revision of socialism (see Zeev Sternhell's work on this) but a mystical racial ideology.)
So, just thinking as I write, maybe that is support simply for the idea of united action. Is our current Western civilization characterized by unity? I don't think so - perhaps thus is the root of its decline.
I would argue that individual societies have been at their worst when they were unified -- because unification always comes at the expense of an excluded Other. And if Western civilization (whatever that means exactly...) were unified, it would be in opposition to non-Western societies, with not-too-pleasant consequences for those on the other side...
When I'm in a hard-core Rousseauian mood, I can appreciate the desire to urge (Rousseau would compel) the subjection of individuals' particularistic wills to the cause of the common good. However, I am always reminded of the terrible outcome of historical examples of forcing this.
I am also easily reminded that my views are often widely divergent from those of the bulk of society. When mine is the view that doesn't agree with the spiritual/religious/moral teachings of society, how can I urge unity? I would like everyone to agree with me, but only if it's their views that change, not mine!;)
If I knew how to get the world to unify behind an ideology of common good, I'd have my Nobel by now... For now I'll just have to settle on internationalism and social democracy...
Add unstable to your apt sources, pin everything but mozilla and upgrade.
I have done this for a variety of packages (running some from woody/updates for security reasons and some from sid), but last time I tried this for Moz there were a lot of deps that couldn't be satisfied on a Sarge box. My desktops need to be available as close to 100% as possible, so I don't mess with Sid...
I actually normally use Galeon, but its upgrade has been blocked for a long time by Moz's being frozen at 1.0... I'll check out Firebird. I assumed (wrongly apparently) that it depended on an up-to-date Moz like Galeon does...
And then there's testing, which contains all of the New and Improved! packages from unstable after they've had a few weeks to sit and haven't had any bug reports filed against them.
I probably deserve the label of `Debian fanboy' (I won't run nothing else...) but even I'm getting a bit tired of Mozilla 1.0. Testing still has 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1. And it's not apparently getting into Testing any time soon, because it can't build on ARM...
The world can be devided in two; free and non-free.
Whew! I must have missed the part where it became 1956 again.
Seriously, that really sounds like Cold War rhetoric. If it is -- and Vietnam is non-free because it's a socialist state -- then Singapore must be part of the Free World. And China is getting freer every day.
Or are we basing it on having a parliamentary democracy? That's not very Cold War (because it makes most of the Free World bastions in South America, for example, non-free until the 1990s or so), but it's a possible definition. Then Iran, which has universal suffrage and a functioning parliament, is free -- but the U.S. electoral college system and non-proportional representation in Congress are problematic.
I find that I prefer a 24-bit display, but if you find that one-bit raster images give you a more faithful representation of the world, enjoy.
What you view as destructive, wasteful behavior (say, skiing), I may view as a fun way to spend a weekend. The government should get out of the business of prosecuting "victimless" crimes.
I'm certainly not arguing against that here... I was not advocating hunting down sex and love addicts and forcing them into institutions or twelve-step programs! I was arguing that, rather than condemn them, in is in our interest to assist (however possible -- I'm not a treatment specialist) those whose behaviour has become destructive to themselves and who want to stop.
I quite enjoy a drink from time to time, and I would resent being arrested for sipping on my Lagavulin. However, if my drinking became destructive -- I got thrown out of the university, my marriage was wrecked, I developed health problems -- I would be grateful if society saw fit to help me stop the cycle of self-destruction.
I was suggesting that a pathological philanderer might be accorded the same help as an alcoholic.
recently we've seen people being treated for sex addiction (I regard this as an excuse for philandering)
I will agree that there is an unfortunate confusion with the terminology. However, you focused on ``going back despite nasty experiences... or knowledge that it is maladaptive'' as criteria of addiction. How is someone who ruins her life through reckless promiscuity -- and doesn't change behavior after getting herpes, or being raped, or being rendered sterile by a botched abortion -- not fulfilling your criteria? If as a society we are interested in a healthy citizenry, let's not focus on whether or not people are making excuses, but on helping them be healthy, whether they are drunks or junkies or philanderers or gamblers or whatever.
100% Liberalism and anarchy are very different things. They're at extremes of two different axes: the liberal-conservative axis, and the authoritarian-libertarian axis. Liberal != Libertarian.
That's only true if you accept the redefinition of `liberal' that has happened in modern American politics. Liberal means, in the original sense, that you want basic guarantees of civil and human rights, legal equality, and no messing with private property (i.e., pro-business). Check out the platforms of European parties which call themselves Liberal, as opposed to Socialist or Social Democrat, and you'll see the difference. Really, American Libertarians are the closest to pure liberalism in the States.
I think that, before the word `liberal' became a dirty word among right-wingers (so that the Libertarians don't want to be tarred with it), it was used by the left to distance themselves from socialism. If they called themselves, as their continental counterparts did, Social Democrats, they would be accepting a connection between their ideas and Marxism or whatever was the bogeyman-du-jour. `Liberal' sounded safe, even if what they espoused (affirmative action, state-funded medicine, whatever) was counter to true liberal ideals.
As far as axes go, I can construct many schematic representations of political ideologies, none of which are wholly satisfactory. The libertarians' favored schema, which you mention, is only one way of looking at things. The axes could as well be revolution/reaction and materialism/antimaterialism, for example...
Although I am not a history expert, I have the sense that these heights were characterized by strong religious, spiritual and moral impulses.
But let's not forget the following (just things that are fresh in my mind at the moment): Spanish Inquisition, Taleban, Nazis (not religious, but mystical/spiritual and antimaterialistic), Stalin's terror (atheistic, but arguably religious in a sociological sense -- the Bolshevik doctrine can be said to have filled the same social function as religion).
I don't have an answer here -- sometimes it seems that to eliminate evil we must also eliminate beauty...
On the other hand there was a recent study, which I think was on Slashdot as well, that pointed out that the scientific brilliance of men wanes if they get married.
I've just been reading the autobiography of Semen Kanatchikov, a turn-of-the-century radical worker in Russia. He had something of a phobia of women, because, as he saw it, women => marriage => family => no revolutionary work. Women have had to bear the rap for the fact that when men are happily paired off, they tend to be less motivated to get their self-worth from other areas. In/. terms, geeks who have the option of meaningful social interaction with a loving partner are less likely to spend 36 hours straight hacking the kernel...
You can do this with anything--I wouldn't be surprised if some site somewhere lets you "hear" the Sun's recent plasma ejection.
I think there is. The other night some kid I talked to at a cafe was on about the cool noises the sun makes... I figured he was just really, really stoned.
Nothingness is something you can never, under any conditions interact with.
You've clearly never tought a course to freshmen...
Re:2 reasons for the West's dominance
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
scripsit back_pages:
(Not that these Muslims were world famous or well received for their contributions, but place-value number systems and algebra were just as phenomenally world-shattering in the year 1000 as the theory of relativity in 2000.)
I think you've backed into an important problem with the methodology of this study -- it priveleges the work of individuals who get credit as individuals. Who invented zero? Ahmed Cipher? We don't have his name, so even though he (it probably was a he...) invented one of the most important mathematical concepts of all time, he gets zero paragraphs of mention.
On the flipside, ancient thinkers may be overrated, because of the tendency of premodern thinkers to attribute their ideas to ancient authorities even when they were original. There are plenty of authors we know only as Pseudo-Dionysus or the Pseudo-Areopagite -- how many other works were written by people we don't know of and given `Aristotle' or whomever for an `author'?
Re:2 reasons for the West's dominance
on
Human Accomplishment
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
scripsit benzapp:
Capitalism and Communism both fail because they measure value in materialistic terms only....
When you realize this, it makes perfect sense that culture is destroyed by capitalism and communism.
I don't know if you realize this, but you just about quoted Mussolini there. This is exactly the Fascist critique of socialism and liberal democracy -- they are solely materialistic and therefore soulless.
This is not a flame, by the way -- I in no way am suggesting you would agree with any other fascist ideas.
Out of curiosity, what would your `third path' be? How would your antimaterialist order work? Is it simply traditional conservatism (of the throne-and-altar type), or something different?
I've always felt like the world is in a period of decline despite the amazing advances in the sciences and arts.
This is hardly an uncommon view, now or through history.
There really isn't a good way to measure this sort of decline, since it is by nature not measurable (How do you quantify `moral and spiritual'? With apologies to my social sciences colleagues, I say you don't...) The interesting thing to me is not whether some decline is occurring, but that there is a persistant discourse of decline -- a study of this discourse (of which the reviewed book is a part) would be quite interesting.
`Well-formed' is a concept that applies uniquely to XML -- the example in question is, indeed, not well-formed XML.
Non-wannabes, of course, are aware that the concept of validity is still, um, valid for XML applications like XHTML. If it passes validation against its DTD, it is valid. It can be invalid XHTML, though, and still be well-formed XML.
ESR's fragment is also invalid as XHTML (there is no XHTML DTD against which it would validate), not just not well-formed as XML.
What you're dealing with is an argument that, despite the accepted standards of statistical research, a given method is valid and acceptable. If I heard such an argument, as a scholar I would ask to see the article where this was demonstrated. If it was a new idea and had not been published, I would encourage the scholar in question, if he or she really could demonstrate it, to publish it. If they haven't published it, it's probably because it's a fudge good enough to feed to undergrads, but would get them laughed at if they tried to use it professionally.
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit Flamerule:
Post hoc ergo propter hoc -- one of the stock logical fallacies.
scripsit Oddly_Drac:
I chose the feminine pronoun intentionally, but not for the reasons you might imagine. (I agree wholeheartedly with you on the ``it needs to stop'' bit!) The reason I used the feminine is because it is much easier to see how reckless sexual behavior would be harmful to a woman. Men tend to be a bit smug in their invulnerability, and I was trying to make a point. (Around here you'd be likely to get a response of ``Oh, too much sex, cry me a river!'' or something...)
I guess my image of sex addiction is more from the twelve-step side, rather than the celebrity rehab side. I really don't pay attention to People magazine, but I have known people who seemed to use sex as a substitute when recovering from narcotic addiction. The twelve-step and professional drug treatment communities do seem to treat sex and gambling as potential substitute addictions. (Very few heroin addicts are rich, by the way, at least not by the time they make it to an NA meeting.) This doesn't excuse philandering politicians, any more than the fact that crack is highly addictive excuses Marion Barry.
scripsit Magila:
<pedantic>Um, more importantly I don't think whatever architecture it uses will be binary-compatible with ia32...</pedantic>
scripsit benzapp:
I wasn't saying that a focus on Jews demands explanation, but rather that the need to have an enemy to focus on does. If you want someone to hate, the Jews are indeed the typical choice.
(As an aside, I assume the `our' was intentional; I don't suppose you've seen The Believer -- that is a very interesting study in Jewish self-hatred, about a Jewish neo-Nazi.)
As it happens, I am TAing a course on the history of anti-Semitism this semester (I'm one of those evil liberal arts geeks), and this is a common misconception that the historical record fails to bear out. Before Christianity, there is no evidence of anything that can be called anti-Semitism in widespread existance in the ancient world. The pagan Romans in fact had a remarkably tolerant policy toward the Jews, who were granted numerous exceptions to Roman law to practice their religion, even after the destruction of the Temple and even after the bloody Bar Kochba revolt of the early second century. (See Gager's Origins of Anti-Semitism for an excellent treatment of this.) It was the Christians who gave the world a theologically-based anti-Semitism; Judaism and early Christianity were competing proselytizing religions at the time. No other group, until 1948, had any similar anti-Semitic tradition; Jews were no more persecuted in Islamic countries than Christians or Zoroastrians, and had considerably better status than pagans or animists. Whatever role persecution might have played in the self-fashioning of the Ashkenazim or the Spanish Conversos, they are only part of Jewish history. The Jews of Thessaloniki or Baghdad (before 1941 and 1948, respectively) were tolerated and protected minorities.
scripsit BenitoM:
This is an important point, of which I am sure most people are unaware: fascism per se has nothing to do with racial ideas. It is true that there were Jews in the original Fascist party in Italy, and that the race laws only came about under German pressure much later. However, the fact that most manifestations of fascism (in the generic sense) in the interwar era did obsess on anti-Semitism or other exclusionist ideologies demands explanation. It appears that fascism requires an Other with which to unify the populace, as it denies class divisions. Jews were a popular target for this, in France, in Romania, in Croatia, etc. One might even say that part of the failure of Italian Fascism was that it failed to unify the people against a clearly-defined external enemy (Ethiopia and Albania can only get you so far...)
(I would argue, BTW, that Nazism doesn't deserve the label `fascism' at all, really, as its basis was not the antimaterialist revision of socialism (see Zeev Sternhell's work on this) but a mystical racial ideology.)
scripsit under_score:
I would argue that individual societies have been at their worst when they were unified -- because unification always comes at the expense of an excluded Other. And if Western civilization (whatever that means exactly...) were unified, it would be in opposition to non-Western societies, with not-too-pleasant consequences for those on the other side...
When I'm in a hard-core Rousseauian mood, I can appreciate the desire to urge (Rousseau would compel) the subjection of individuals' particularistic wills to the cause of the common good. However, I am always reminded of the terrible outcome of historical examples of forcing this.
I am also easily reminded that my views are often widely divergent from those of the bulk of society. When mine is the view that doesn't agree with the spiritual/religious/moral teachings of society, how can I urge unity? I would like everyone to agree with me, but only if it's their views that change, not mine! ;)
If I knew how to get the world to unify behind an ideology of common good, I'd have my Nobel by now... For now I'll just have to settle on internationalism and social democracy...
scripsit Crazy Eight:
I have done this for a variety of packages (running some from woody/updates for security reasons and some from sid), but last time I tried this for Moz there were a lot of deps that couldn't be satisfied on a Sarge box. My desktops need to be available as close to 100% as possible, so I don't mess with Sid...
scripsit MystikPhish:
I actually normally use Galeon, but its upgrade has been blocked for a long time by Moz's being frozen at 1.0... I'll check out Firebird. I assumed (wrongly apparently) that it depended on an up-to-date Moz like Galeon does...
scripsit Jaeger:
I probably deserve the label of `Debian fanboy' (I won't run nothing else...) but even I'm getting a bit tired of Mozilla 1.0. Testing still has 2:1.0.0-0.woody.1. And it's not apparently getting into Testing any time soon, because it can't build on ARM...
scripsit twitter:
Whew! I must have missed the part where it became 1956 again.
Seriously, that really sounds like Cold War rhetoric. If it is -- and Vietnam is non-free because it's a socialist state -- then Singapore must be part of the Free World. And China is getting freer every day.
Or are we basing it on having a parliamentary democracy? That's not very Cold War (because it makes most of the Free World bastions in South America, for example, non-free until the 1990s or so), but it's a possible definition. Then Iran, which has universal suffrage and a functioning parliament, is free -- but the U.S. electoral college system and non-proportional representation in Congress are problematic.
I find that I prefer a 24-bit display, but if you find that one-bit raster images give you a more faithful representation of the world, enjoy.
scripsit Glock27:
I'm certainly not arguing against that here... I was not advocating hunting down sex and love addicts and forcing them into institutions or twelve-step programs! I was arguing that, rather than condemn them, in is in our interest to assist (however possible -- I'm not a treatment specialist) those whose behaviour has become destructive to themselves and who want to stop.
I quite enjoy a drink from time to time, and I would resent being arrested for sipping on my Lagavulin. However, if my drinking became destructive -- I got thrown out of the university, my marriage was wrecked, I developed health problems -- I would be grateful if society saw fit to help me stop the cycle of self-destruction.
I was suggesting that a pathological philanderer might be accorded the same help as an alcoholic.
scripsit Oddly_Drac:
I will agree that there is an unfortunate confusion with the terminology. However, you focused on ``going back despite nasty experiences ... or knowledge that it is maladaptive'' as criteria of addiction. How is someone who ruins her life through reckless promiscuity -- and doesn't change behavior after getting herpes, or being raped, or being rendered sterile by a botched abortion -- not fulfilling your criteria? If as a society we are interested in a healthy citizenry, let's not focus on whether or not people are making excuses, but on helping them be healthy, whether they are drunks or junkies or philanderers or gamblers or whatever.
scripsit KDan:
That's only true if you accept the redefinition of `liberal' that has happened in modern American politics. Liberal means, in the original sense, that you want basic guarantees of civil and human rights, legal equality, and no messing with private property (i.e., pro-business). Check out the platforms of European parties which call themselves Liberal, as opposed to Socialist or Social Democrat, and you'll see the difference. Really, American Libertarians are the closest to pure liberalism in the States.
I think that, before the word `liberal' became a dirty word among right-wingers (so that the Libertarians don't want to be tarred with it), it was used by the left to distance themselves from socialism. If they called themselves, as their continental counterparts did, Social Democrats, they would be accepting a connection between their ideas and Marxism or whatever was the bogeyman-du-jour. `Liberal' sounded safe, even if what they espoused (affirmative action, state-funded medicine, whatever) was counter to true liberal ideals.
As far as axes go, I can construct many schematic representations of political ideologies, none of which are wholly satisfactory. The libertarians' favored schema, which you mention, is only one way of looking at things. The axes could as well be revolution/reaction and materialism/antimaterialism, for example...
scripsit under_score:
But let's not forget the following (just things that are fresh in my mind at the moment): Spanish Inquisition, Taleban, Nazis (not religious, but mystical/spiritual and antimaterialistic), Stalin's terror (atheistic, but arguably religious in a sociological sense -- the Bolshevik doctrine can be said to have filled the same social function as religion).
I don't have an answer here -- sometimes it seems that to eliminate evil we must also eliminate beauty...
scripsit October_30th:
I've just been reading the autobiography of Semen Kanatchikov, a turn-of-the-century radical worker in Russia. He had something of a phobia of women, because, as he saw it, women => marriage => family => no revolutionary work. Women have had to bear the rap for the fact that when men are happily paired off, they tend to be less motivated to get their self-worth from other areas. In /. terms, geeks who have the option of meaningful social interaction with a loving partner are less likely to spend 36 hours straight hacking the kernel...
scripsit Black Perl:
I think there is. The other night some kid I talked to at a cafe was on about the cool noises the sun makes... I figured he was just really, really stoned.
scripsit October_30th:
You've clearly never tought a course to freshmen...
scripsit back_pages:
I think you've backed into an important problem with the methodology of this study -- it priveleges the work of individuals who get credit as individuals. Who invented zero? Ahmed Cipher? We don't have his name, so even though he (it probably was a he...) invented one of the most important mathematical concepts of all time, he gets zero paragraphs of mention.
On the flipside, ancient thinkers may be overrated, because of the tendency of premodern thinkers to attribute their ideas to ancient authorities even when they were original. There are plenty of authors we know only as Pseudo-Dionysus or the Pseudo-Areopagite -- how many other works were written by people we don't know of and given `Aristotle' or whomever for an `author'?
scripsit benzapp:
I don't know if you realize this, but you just about quoted Mussolini there. This is exactly the Fascist critique of socialism and liberal democracy -- they are solely materialistic and therefore soulless.
This is not a flame, by the way -- I in no way am suggesting you would agree with any other fascist ideas.
Out of curiosity, what would your `third path' be? How would your antimaterialist order work? Is it simply traditional conservatism (of the throne-and-altar type), or something different?
scripsit an AC:
Oddly, every textbook I've read recently was written by a non-dead author. Some died after they wrote the books, of course, but none before.
scripsit under_score:
This is hardly an uncommon view, now or through history.
There really isn't a good way to measure this sort of decline, since it is by nature not measurable (How do you quantify `moral and spiritual'? With apologies to my social sciences colleagues, I say you don't...) The interesting thing to me is not whether some decline is occurring, but that there is a persistant discourse of decline -- a study of this discourse (of which the reviewed book is a part) would be quite interesting.
I for one welcome our new Western overlords...
Um...
scripsit swillden:
`Well-formed' is a concept that applies uniquely to XML -- the example in question is, indeed, not well-formed XML.
Non-wannabes, of course, are aware that the concept of validity is still, um, valid for XML applications like XHTML. If it passes validation against its DTD, it is valid. It can be invalid XHTML, though, and still be well-formed XML.
ESR's fragment is also invalid as XHTML (there is no XHTML DTD against which it would validate), not just not well-formed as XML.
scripist b1t r0t:
If what you're trying to do is not use AOL, then yes, not running Windows is very helpful.
scripsit sporty:
What you're dealing with is an argument that, despite the accepted standards of statistical research, a given method is valid and acceptable. If I heard such an argument, as a scholar I would ask to see the article where this was demonstrated. If it was a new idea and had not been published, I would encourage the scholar in question, if he or she really could demonstrate it, to publish it. If they haven't published it, it's probably because it's a fudge good enough to feed to undergrads, but would get them laughed at if they tried to use it professionally.