Never did I imply a value in my statements, so it is well outside of the realms of morality. I just implied that people are not able to sway their opinions if you were to put a gun to their head, in the majority of mental illnesses. In this we could say that YES these are arational statements, but this is not a statement of value, this is a statement of fact. If I would say that these are wrong statements, in the moral sense, then this would be a moral judgement. But this is both arational, and amoral, meaning lacking both rational and moral content.
I have not seen any studies proving homosexuality as either a choice or genetic thing. You seem to assume that people rationally weigh all of their decisions in life, which I view as erronious, and detrimental to a functioning society. Life would freeze as we all carefully and rationally weigh all choices. Even if you invoke the word preference, this implies a fully conscious urge.
My liking the color green above the color red is an arational preference. No rationality was invoked. Nor is this statement a moral statement. It is purely preferencial.
From what I noticed about the modern generation of psychologists, is that they are excepting more and more somatic causes of mental illness, and less choice/rationally based causes. Your are anxious because, for the most part, x chemical is out of balance in regard to y chemical, this is assumed to be ill because it deviates from behavioral/chemical profile a, which is normal within certain emperical expectations. It is not my preference to have this imbalance, it is not a rational thing, and nor is it a moral thing.
This becomes illness when one is unable to act compatibly within society, or when ceases to act rationally.
This is the appearence of modern psychology.
I don't completely agree with it, as it commits the same sin which you commit, the sin of dualism. You error in the other direction, towards everything being mind, or violational, and nothing being somatic, or physical.
For clarification, is a broken leg preferencial? Is it irrational? What about the flu? Cancer? Genetic illnesses? Are these irrational, or moral? Nope, they are beyond control. As is most mental illnesses. Point out the seperation between a genetic disposition towards ovarian cancer, and depression/anxiety/OCD/schizophrenia. This might help me understand you POV.
I assume your use of quotes is in the grand spirit of strawmen, since I never used the word irrational, or drew a conclusion beyond A) mental illness being some part physical, and B) as such there is a limited choice or preferential context involved. FYI, they removed homosexuality from the DSM at least 2 revisions ago (more than 10 years ago), so this substancial part of your argument is groundless unless I assumed homosexuality to be a mental illness, which I do not.
But homosexuality puts your original premise in light. Why would one choose to be homosexual (rationally) if they knew it would cause long term hardship? There goes your rationality arguement. Not to say that it is an irrational statement, more like Arational.
I'm a strong adherent to the arational. Irrational entails going against reason. Arational means that reason, as such, is not involved. I take a Heideggerian view on this, that 90% of our action is arational, reason plays very little role in our day to day lives, we exist, and we don't reason until something goes wrong.
Clarify, please. Please tell me you don't think that drugs are THE answer, as in the ONLY answer. Drugs are the LAST answer, or the stop gap measure to ensure that the patient is well enough to receive the real therapy. Drugs should be temporary.
If I read your statement properly I would think that you are dismissing the mind as cause completely. Being that the mind and brain are one in the same, to say that only the brain causes mind issues is absurd, there is a deep interplay between them, though the word interplay is meaningless since they are the same thing. Damn dualism. Drugs cover symptoms, and NEVER cure in the psychological realm. Cures come via full understanding and treatment of the problem, meaning BOTH somatic and mental.
And this would explain people killing themselves due to severe depression how? They have a gun to their heads, quite literally.
Your explanation is bunk. A mental illness is a PHYSICAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL state, and being the both are influencing each other, they are not matters of choice.
If you put a gun to a severe depressives head, and told them you would shoot them if they didn't stop being suicidal, they would smile at you, and say "please".
Mental illnesses are as real as a broken limb or a disease, they can be cured, but they are very much real, and very much not a choice.
As an ex-student of psychology I see where your coming from, BUT disagree on principled grounds. I do not think that lying or concealing aspects of ones condition is ethical, EVER. Sure, some preparation and ground work might be needed before revealing the aspects of ones condition is full is a good idea, but this knowledge should ALWAYS be bestowd on one, since one does, in fact, OWN ones condition, it is a part of their being, and thus they should be entitled to know. If one purposely conceals facts about a person from them, you are putting yourself in a contrived state of "godhood" above them, you are more important than them, as related to their being. In a way you are dehumanizing or objectifying them. While your stance has bigger practical benefits, it is an ethical problem. Ethics should always come above and first, and solutions must be shaped around your principles.
Yes, the problem/solution should and is on the patients shoulders. And a genetic cause can be a crutch to those who know nothing of the mutability of genetics in real life. It is then YOUR responsibility to show this, and present them with the full truth of their situation. Anything else is disingenuous.
If you can't tell, I fled psychology for philosophy because of the inherent errors involved in modern psychology that most take as given.
There is some proof (dealing with spins, I think) that say that QM MUST (logically) be true, to fit the emperical date. I don't have my material here in front of me, but I probably could find it.
This does not mean that it MUST be true, but that logically, given the emperical evidence, it MUST be true unless something else is discovered that throws the previous findings out. QM, for the moment, is a logical necessity that no other explanation can furnish. There might be bits of the vast QM that can be wrong, but as a whole it is true.
I am being schooled in philosophy right now, and my emphasis is in the philosophy of science and epistemology. I always loved the physical sciences, but find them to be overly dogmatic and non-questioning, or non-self-questioning. Philosophy must exist to keep an eye of the sciences to keep them on track, since the sciences do not meta-analyze themselves enough, or ever. Science seems to think it discovers certanty at certain junctures, which is hubris, since there were many historically certain theories which were later proven completely wrong, we might have to accept ANY of our current understandings as wrong as more emperical date comes in.
Emperical data is king though, no theory is worth much without a backing in reality.
One of my friends at ASU doing Physics/Math and I have very nice conversations about such things. Nothing is more intellectually rewardsing that conversations between scientific disciplines and philosophy (not to say that aspects of phi cannot be scientific). Through both we realize a grounding. Philosophy is here to teach others humility, and to show the limitations of logical systems.
Your #2 is as valid as your #1, #1 is bottom up, while #2 is top down. Both are acceptable.
Relativity is based on #2, it was a purely logical with very little to no emperical basis, and only through time has it acheived a high degree of empircal justification.
#3 is getting too common, which is sad for science. Everyone wants to be a sceince superstar now, and somewhere along the way forgot the rigor of the discipline. Sometimes #2 is almost indistinguishable from #3, but that is where Occham must come in, simpler is good. I have particular bones with the avant garde science stuff, like string theory and dark matter, which seem overly kuldgy, whereas STR and GTR were convincing in their utter simplicity, same with much of quantum/partical physics.
Back to my original point, please don't discount the analytic deductive methods from science, inference can only go so far. All that really matters in the end is the general methodic fare.
Drugs don't really make people happy. Happiness must come from within.
Looks like happiness, smells like happiness, must be happiness. I really don't buy that, it smells to much like the grounding of Kants ethics, where source matters more than ends/means. I don't like or buy the distinction. If it leads to happiness, it must lead to happiness, because how can something be indistinguishable from the real thing, but not the thing itself?
Not that I advocate drugs. But I got to run, got a wine tasting.
God I wish I hadn't posted here, so I could mod you up.
Very nice. Clear. Conscise!
People keep on saying we shouldn't have done it because A, B, or C were better options. I keep wanting to scream, what if NONE of them are options?
Though my main beef is with the word WERE. We're not there, we are not the the culture that was then, we are not making the decision. We have no right or ability to judge, just to say it happened. And wether we personally agree by our modern standards. Not whether it was right or wrong, in the big sense.
War is about winning, and mitigating your losses. If you can be moral within that framework, DO SO. But sometime you need to UTTERLY crush someone to protect yourself. But then again I've always valued my family and friends well being above all others, call me sick.
The problem I have with this debate, is the we're trying to use some of our modern liberal morals to JUDGE a decision in the past. I disagree with 90% of the modern liberal morality, but even if I did it has NO APPLICATION to past events that were not made under that implication. Those events enter into history, and judgement is impossible in history. All it becomes possible to say is "by my personal, contemporary standards, this is wrong". But it is impossible to inflict your morality on people of different times, to judge.
Of course by modern 'ethical' standards America was wrong is WWII. The modern view is America is always wrong, egotistical, anyone they act against is a victim dersevring my sympathy. This is a view I find silly, dogmatic, and ultimatly unhelpful.
A helpful judgement should be formed as "IF we were in this circumstance today, AND we do not find the previous solution valid, THEN what ought we to do?" Not, they were wrong! They did what they felt was right, which is all any of us can do.
Your little rant on terrorism exemplifies this problem. Your putting a modern ethic onto a past dillema. 9-11, Afganistan, Iraq have NOTHING to do with Hiroshima/Nagisaki. The inferance does not exist. It's not that the Japanese were BAD PEOPLE, as you quaintly put it, they were GENOCIDAL, SUICIDAL, and generally PSYCHOTIC. They attacked an undeserving victim (yes, the US as a victim!), they raped and murdered hundreds of innocents. Not bad people. It's like calling Hitler a Naughty Boy, or Jefery Daumer a Problem Child.
Umm... Please... Reality is calling you, drop the happy-hippy Peace crap. Violence is as human as language, and art. Revenge might not equal justice (a term in need of definition, if ever there was one), but retaliation can STOP further violence too. The secret is when to retaliate, and when to cut your losses.
I am one of the few people I know who still support Truman's decision to nuke Japan. It was needed to keep further American casaulties. It was needed to stop the stupid war in the (fully Japanese caused) pacific.
Why is it that no one ever bitches about the unprovoked causalties in Pearl Harbor, only the Japanese, who started the damn war (or our involvement), and who did god-knows what atrocities on Americans and Chinese.
My opinion is they got what they deserved. And if it wasn't for Hiroshima and Nagisaki tens of thousands of more Americans would have died fighting the suicidal psychotic Japanese.
Mind, I have nothing against them now. But then... The morals and ideas of today have NOTHING to do with the past. They don't apply, and all atempts to make them do so are idiotic and delusional.
Err... This goes beyond china, the Japanese were also "not very nice" to Americans during the war.
Also all speculation of a Japanese surrender without nukes is silly. THEY WERE WILLING TO DIE. We had to show them what lengths we would go to to finish the silly war.
The Germans were saintly compaired to the Japanese.
Socrates probably did exist, there are 3 authors who wrote contemporaneously with him. Aristophanes' play The Clouds, was based on him, and was written while he lived. Also Xenophon wrote of him as well, supplying more background that was ommited by Plato, meaning that both needed a common source for this imformation. That source would be Socrates, the man (who was mortal, I might add).
As for his words being true to him, philosophical scholarship generally admits that his earlier dialogues were pretty true to his words, but later Plato started stretching his words to his own bent. But if you actually look at his trial, it is about him being an enemy of democracy, and that is why he was executed. He supported, and taught several people who later tried to overthrow the Athenian assembly.
For further reading, I would recommend I.F. Stone's brilliant The Trial of Socrates.
Sadly, I've had this view for much longer than the last couple of elections. The thing is that democracy is fundamentally flawed. It requires an informed populance. America's education system sucks. Meaning we are not informed. Meaning we vote based on what we see on television, or stupid leftwing/rightwing/libertarian idiocy we learn from our biased news sources of choice, or whatever we think is cool. Meaning people vote for the most idiotic things. Meaning democracy is the art of dumb people, makeing dumb decisions that everyone has to suffer from.
Democracy = people. people = stupid.:. democracy = stupid
Democracy has always been stupid, it always will be stupid. And I hold this view, not because of Bush being elected (come on, Kerry was a moron too, as was EVERY canidate, and their dogmatic party stances), I actually like Bush more than Kerry, politicians should have actual beliefs, not poll results.
If the average person resorts to NewAge mumbo-jumbo, how informed do you think they are about politics? Do you think they actually research anything? Know anything beyond what their told? Any sane person would not be able to group themselves with an ism, since they are all dogmatic stances for those too lazy to research and think for themselves.
Plato didn't like democracy. You see, its a pretty old dislike, not based in the 1800's, or even the poor liberals, and libertarians distaste of the last election. Hell:
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." ~Winston Churchill
I frequent a coffee shop by my college, and it has free WiFi, but seems to keep the social atmosphere, somehow. While there is always students plugging away on laptops, there still is a fair amount of activity in the outside smoking area, and in the shop itself.
I think it is because there is always something social going on there (live music, poetry, etc...), that keeps people coming there for reasons other than free WiFi and homework. I generally go there for a cup of yerba and a BBQ Beef sandwich, with my laptop. But people still come by and talk, at which point I gladly shut down my computer, realizing that I am in a public/social place, not a private space, so I must meet the demands of my enviroment.
Funny, and somewhat related, story. Yesterday I went to a Starbucks with my friend, we sat outside to smoke. The guy inside, his back to the window, was reading all of his buisness email. We were reading all of his buisness email. Some of it was rather sesative too, project notes, one about a possible merger. Very funny. Then he was reading/. an hour later... Even funnier.
Does any company have a policy about reading email at hotspots? Not very secure when two people can read sesative documents behind your back.
The pacing, and amount of stuff is why I love Ran, and would rank it as one of the best moves ever. Not only is the story solid and poignant (it's Shakespeare, how can it be bad?), but the scenes were GODLIKE, matching what is going on in the film. It's like Hero for adults.
I just don't think that Seven Samarai shines as much as Rashomon and Ran. I'm also admitting I'm wrong, I confused Yojimbo with it's sequal(ish) Sanjuro, which had the safe samarai sex diaglogue (a good samarai keeps his sword seathed!). But even then the character of Sanjuro is probably one of the deepest and most complete characters in a film.
I also quite enjoy EpIV, I rented it after watching EpIII (which I also liked) for the first time in probably 6 years. It was very well done, and nuanced. I was expecting it to be crap now that I'm watching it as a more mature individual. But it seems to hold the test of time rather well. Unlike RotJ and NH. (I doubt Ep's I-II will either).
The Redux version is better... The french parts rock, make it from a war movie, to an antiwar movie, as it was intended by FFC.
To make this non-Redundant. Ever Read Jean Paul Baudrillard, the post-modern philosopher? According to to Apocalypse Now was more real than the actual war, in the public eyes (the hyperreal) than the are itself, so infuencial it was.
Personally it is among my top ten. The acting is great. It comes right after The Godfather. The original, of course. It is one of those movies that prove that Marlon Brando was a God.
My friend always had the idea of using LCDs on a blank keyboard, to make it instantly configurable. I like this idea, but his original idea would have the whole thing as a touch screen, meaning it would lack feedback, and such. What good is typing if you don't make little clicky noises?
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Then why do they not type in english? I've noticed that the people I know who learned to type before IM clients became a big deal, when they use IM they type in full sentences, with puntuation. When people use 'em who learned after, they constantly abbreviate, and use numbers (2, 4, etc...).
This is odd, come to think of it. Since most the people I know used IRC and various BBS chat formats. But we still type like adults. The only colloquial chat slang crap I still use it things like LOL and ROFL, since they mapped to actions on one of my old mBBS boards.
I just gave someone my AIM name, they are of my generation, and are in college for English, so i expected them to have some skills. But then I get a random IM from them, "dud, u wanna go 2 party?:)" After a couple messages like that, I blocked them.
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My freshman year (also '94) they were just phasing out their old AT&Ts (no GUI, nice green/black monitors) for a network of 3.11 boxes (which they promptly quit the next year, to phase in 95), but I never really learned touch typing, since the teacher learned that me and my friend were protogeeks and he put us to work ripping up the old boxes for parts, and installing network cards. So up until a year ago I never touch-typed, since I could hunt-peck at roughly 60wpm. Never looking at the keyboard.
It took a 50 page paper in college to make me learn touch. And when I got a lap top with a small keyboard it really helped.
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Am I the only person on earth who still just wants a plain old keyboard? Everytime I go shopping of a new keyboard, I spend HOURS looking for a decent one, that isn't larger than my modest desk,that does not have more superfluous buttons than actual keys.
The happiest I've ever been with a keyboard was a small black wireless one, sans num keys, but I have an extra (wired) set of num keys, if I so need them. It was small (about the size of a 12" laptop keyboard), meaning my fingers needed less play to type.
My other favorite keyboard was the giant IBM behemoth keyboard, that could, if you so choose, protect you from bullets and on-comming traffic.
Whats so special about top buttons, anyway? Most of the keyboards hat have them have a silly software prog that has to be running all the time. If your so lazy that you NEED to have everything at finger level, and not at mousing desktop level, then... well... I'm speachless. You can move your mouse a whole inch for the same program...
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Never did I imply a value in my statements, so it is well outside of the realms of morality. I just implied that people are not able to sway their opinions if you were to put a gun to their head, in the majority of mental illnesses. In this we could say that YES these are arational statements, but this is not a statement of value, this is a statement of fact. If I would say that these are wrong statements, in the moral sense, then this would be a moral judgement. But this is both arational, and amoral, meaning lacking both rational and moral content.
I have not seen any studies proving homosexuality as either a choice or genetic thing. You seem to assume that people rationally weigh all of their decisions in life, which I view as erronious, and detrimental to a functioning society. Life would freeze as we all carefully and rationally weigh all choices. Even if you invoke the word preference, this implies a fully conscious urge.
My liking the color green above the color red is an arational preference. No rationality was invoked. Nor is this statement a moral statement. It is purely preferencial.
From what I noticed about the modern generation of psychologists, is that they are excepting more and more somatic causes of mental illness, and less choice/rationally based causes. Your are anxious because, for the most part, x chemical is out of balance in regard to y chemical, this is assumed to be ill because it deviates from behavioral/chemical profile a, which is normal within certain emperical expectations. It is not my preference to have this imbalance, it is not a rational thing, and nor is it a moral thing.
This becomes illness when one is unable to act compatibly within society, or when ceases to act rationally.
This is the appearence of modern psychology.
I don't completely agree with it, as it commits the same sin which you commit, the sin of dualism. You error in the other direction, towards everything being mind, or violational, and nothing being somatic, or physical.
For clarification, is a broken leg preferencial? Is it irrational? What about the flu? Cancer? Genetic illnesses? Are these irrational, or moral? Nope, they are beyond control. As is most mental illnesses. Point out the seperation between a genetic disposition towards ovarian cancer, and depression/anxiety/OCD/schizophrenia. This might help me understand you POV.
I assume your use of quotes is in the grand spirit of strawmen, since I never used the word irrational, or drew a conclusion beyond A) mental illness being some part physical, and B) as such there is a limited choice or preferential context involved. FYI, they removed homosexuality from the DSM at least 2 revisions ago (more than 10 years ago), so this substancial part of your argument is groundless unless I assumed homosexuality to be a mental illness, which I do not.
But homosexuality puts your original premise in light. Why would one choose to be homosexual (rationally) if they knew it would cause long term hardship? There goes your rationality arguement. Not to say that it is an irrational statement, more like Arational.
I'm a strong adherent to the arational. Irrational entails going against reason. Arational means that reason, as such, is not involved. I take a Heideggerian view on this, that 90% of our action is arational, reason plays very little role in our day to day lives, we exist, and we don't reason until something goes wrong.
Clarify, please. Please tell me you don't think that drugs are THE answer, as in the ONLY answer. Drugs are the LAST answer, or the stop gap measure to ensure that the patient is well enough to receive the real therapy. Drugs should be temporary.
If I read your statement properly I would think that you are dismissing the mind as cause completely. Being that the mind and brain are one in the same, to say that only the brain causes mind issues is absurd, there is a deep interplay between them, though the word interplay is meaningless since they are the same thing. Damn dualism. Drugs cover symptoms, and NEVER cure in the psychological realm. Cures come via full understanding and treatment of the problem, meaning BOTH somatic and mental.
Drugs are merely stabilizers.
And this would explain people killing themselves due to severe depression how? They have a gun to their heads, quite literally.
Your explanation is bunk. A mental illness is a PHYSICAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL state, and being the both are influencing each other, they are not matters of choice.
If you put a gun to a severe depressives head, and told them you would shoot them if they didn't stop being suicidal, they would smile at you, and say "please".
Mental illnesses are as real as a broken limb or a disease, they can be cured, but they are very much real, and very much not a choice.
As an ex-student of psychology I see where your coming from, BUT disagree on principled grounds. I do not think that lying or concealing aspects of ones condition is ethical, EVER. Sure, some preparation and ground work might be needed before revealing the aspects of ones condition is full is a good idea, but this knowledge should ALWAYS be bestowd on one, since one does, in fact, OWN ones condition, it is a part of their being, and thus they should be entitled to know. If one purposely conceals facts about a person from them, you are putting yourself in a contrived state of "godhood" above them, you are more important than them, as related to their being. In a way you are dehumanizing or objectifying them. While your stance has bigger practical benefits, it is an ethical problem. Ethics should always come above and first, and solutions must be shaped around your principles.
Yes, the problem/solution should and is on the patients shoulders. And a genetic cause can be a crutch to those who know nothing of the mutability of genetics in real life. It is then YOUR responsibility to show this, and present them with the full truth of their situation. Anything else is disingenuous.
If you can't tell, I fled psychology for philosophy because of the inherent errors involved in modern psychology that most take as given.
There is some proof (dealing with spins, I think) that say that QM MUST (logically) be true, to fit the emperical date. I don't have my material here in front of me, but I probably could find it.
This does not mean that it MUST be true, but that logically, given the emperical evidence, it MUST be true unless something else is discovered that throws the previous findings out. QM, for the moment, is a logical necessity that no other explanation can furnish. There might be bits of the vast QM that can be wrong, but as a whole it is true.
Agreed. I wish I had mod points.
I am being schooled in philosophy right now, and my emphasis is in the philosophy of science and epistemology. I always loved the physical sciences, but find them to be overly dogmatic and non-questioning, or non-self-questioning. Philosophy must exist to keep an eye of the sciences to keep them on track, since the sciences do not meta-analyze themselves enough, or ever. Science seems to think it discovers certanty at certain junctures, which is hubris, since there were many historically certain theories which were later proven completely wrong, we might have to accept ANY of our current understandings as wrong as more emperical date comes in.
Emperical data is king though, no theory is worth much without a backing in reality.
One of my friends at ASU doing Physics/Math and I have very nice conversations about such things. Nothing is more intellectually rewardsing that conversations between scientific disciplines and philosophy (not to say that aspects of phi cannot be scientific). Through both we realize a grounding. Philosophy is here to teach others humility, and to show the limitations of logical systems.
Your #2 is as valid as your #1, #1 is bottom up, while #2 is top down. Both are acceptable.
Relativity is based on #2, it was a purely logical with very little to no emperical basis, and only through time has it acheived a high degree of empircal justification.
#3 is getting too common, which is sad for science. Everyone wants to be a sceince superstar now, and somewhere along the way forgot the rigor of the discipline. Sometimes #2 is almost indistinguishable from #3, but that is where Occham must come in, simpler is good. I have particular bones with the avant garde science stuff, like string theory and dark matter, which seem overly kuldgy, whereas STR and GTR were convincing in their utter simplicity, same with much of quantum/partical physics.
Back to my original point, please don't discount the analytic deductive methods from science, inference can only go so far. All that really matters in the end is the general methodic fare.
Drugs don't really make people happy. Happiness must come from within.
Looks like happiness, smells like happiness, must be happiness. I really don't buy that, it smells to much like the grounding of Kants ethics, where source matters more than ends/means. I don't like or buy the distinction. If it leads to happiness, it must lead to happiness, because how can something be indistinguishable from the real thing, but not the thing itself?
Not that I advocate drugs. But I got to run, got a wine tasting.
God I wish I hadn't posted here, so I could mod you up.
Very nice. Clear. Conscise!
People keep on saying we shouldn't have done it because A, B, or C were better options. I keep wanting to scream, what if NONE of them are options?
Though my main beef is with the word WERE. We're not there, we are not the the culture that was then, we are not making the decision. We have no right or ability to judge, just to say it happened. And wether we personally agree by our modern standards. Not whether it was right or wrong, in the big sense.
War is about winning, and mitigating your losses. If you can be moral within that framework, DO SO. But sometime you need to UTTERLY crush someone to protect yourself. But then again I've always valued my family and friends well being above all others, call me sick.
The problem I have with this debate, is the we're trying to use some of our modern liberal morals to JUDGE a decision in the past. I disagree with 90% of the modern liberal morality, but even if I did it has NO APPLICATION to past events that were not made under that implication. Those events enter into history, and judgement is impossible in history. All it becomes possible to say is "by my personal, contemporary standards, this is wrong". But it is impossible to inflict your morality on people of different times, to judge.
Of course by modern 'ethical' standards America was wrong is WWII. The modern view is America is always wrong, egotistical, anyone they act against is a victim dersevring my sympathy. This is a view I find silly, dogmatic, and ultimatly unhelpful.
A helpful judgement should be formed as "IF we were in this circumstance today, AND we do not find the previous solution valid, THEN what ought we to do?" Not, they were wrong! They did what they felt was right, which is all any of us can do.
Your little rant on terrorism exemplifies this problem. Your putting a modern ethic onto a past dillema. 9-11, Afganistan, Iraq have NOTHING to do with Hiroshima/Nagisaki. The inferance does not exist. It's not that the Japanese were BAD PEOPLE, as you quaintly put it, they were GENOCIDAL, SUICIDAL, and generally PSYCHOTIC. They attacked an undeserving victim (yes, the US as a victim!), they raped and murdered hundreds of innocents. Not bad people. It's like calling Hitler a Naughty Boy, or Jefery Daumer a Problem Child.
Umm... Please... Reality is calling you, drop the happy-hippy Peace crap. Violence is as human as language, and art. Revenge might not equal justice (a term in need of definition, if ever there was one), but retaliation can STOP further violence too. The secret is when to retaliate, and when to cut your losses.
I am one of the few people I know who still support Truman's decision to nuke Japan. It was needed to keep further American casaulties. It was needed to stop the stupid war in the (fully Japanese caused) pacific.
Why is it that no one ever bitches about the unprovoked causalties in Pearl Harbor, only the Japanese, who started the damn war (or our involvement), and who did god-knows what atrocities on Americans and Chinese.
My opinion is they got what they deserved. And if it wasn't for Hiroshima and Nagisaki tens of thousands of more Americans would have died fighting the suicidal psychotic Japanese.
Mind, I have nothing against them now. But then... The morals and ideas of today have NOTHING to do with the past. They don't apply, and all atempts to make them do so are idiotic and delusional.
Err... This goes beyond china, the Japanese were also "not very nice" to Americans during the war.
Also all speculation of a Japanese surrender without nukes is silly. THEY WERE WILLING TO DIE. We had to show them what lengths we would go to to finish the silly war.
The Germans were saintly compaired to the Japanese.
Socrates probably did exist, there are 3 authors who wrote contemporaneously with him. Aristophanes' play The Clouds, was based on him, and was written while he lived. Also Xenophon wrote of him as well, supplying more background that was ommited by Plato, meaning that both needed a common source for this imformation. That source would be Socrates, the man
(who was mortal, I might add).
As for his words being true to him, philosophical scholarship generally admits that his earlier dialogues were pretty true to his words, but later Plato started stretching his words to his own bent. But if you actually look at his trial, it is about him being an enemy of democracy, and that is why he was executed. He supported, and taught several people who later tried to overthrow the Athenian assembly.
For further reading, I would recommend I.F. Stone's brilliant The Trial of Socrates.
politicians, aliens... is there a difference?
Sadly, I've had this view for much longer than the last couple of elections. The thing is that democracy is fundamentally flawed. It requires an informed populance. America's education system sucks. Meaning we are not informed. Meaning we vote based on what we see on television, or stupid leftwing/rightwing/libertarian idiocy we learn from our biased news sources of choice, or whatever we think is cool. Meaning people vote for the most idiotic things. Meaning democracy is the art of dumb people, makeing dumb decisions that everyone has to suffer from.
:. democracy = stupid
Democracy = people.
people = stupid.
Democracy has always been stupid, it always will be stupid. And I hold this view, not because of Bush being elected (come on, Kerry was a moron too, as was EVERY canidate, and their dogmatic party stances), I actually like Bush more than Kerry, politicians should have actual beliefs, not poll results.
If the average person resorts to NewAge mumbo-jumbo, how informed do you think they are about politics? Do you think they actually research anything? Know anything beyond what their told? Any sane person would not be able to group themselves with an ism, since they are all dogmatic stances for those too lazy to research and think for themselves.
Plato didn't like democracy. You see, its a pretty old dislike, not based in the 1800's, or even the poor liberals, and libertarians distaste of the last election. Hell:
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
~Winston Churchill
don't forget "Fucktard"
By far my favorite word ever. It just sums up some people so damn well.
I frequent a coffee shop by my college, and it has free WiFi, but seems to keep the social atmosphere, somehow. While there is always students plugging away on laptops, there still is a fair amount of activity in the outside smoking area, and in the shop itself.
/. an hour later... Even funnier.
I think it is because there is always something social going on there (live music, poetry, etc...), that keeps people coming there for reasons other than free WiFi and homework. I generally go there for a cup of yerba and a BBQ Beef sandwich, with my laptop. But people still come by and talk, at which point I gladly shut down my computer, realizing that I am in a public/social place, not a private space, so I must meet the demands of my enviroment.
Funny, and somewhat related, story. Yesterday I went to a Starbucks with my friend, we sat outside to smoke. The guy inside, his back to the window, was reading all of his buisness email. We were reading all of his buisness email. Some of it was rather sesative too, project notes, one about a possible merger. Very funny. Then he was reading
Does any company have a policy about reading email at hotspots? Not very secure when two people can read sesative documents behind your back.
The pacing, and amount of stuff is why I love Ran, and would rank it as one of the best moves ever. Not only is the story solid and poignant (it's Shakespeare, how can it be bad?), but the scenes were GODLIKE, matching what is going on in the film. It's like Hero for adults.
I just don't think that Seven Samarai shines as much as Rashomon and Ran. I'm also admitting I'm wrong, I confused Yojimbo with it's sequal(ish) Sanjuro, which had the safe samarai sex diaglogue (a good samarai keeps his sword seathed!). But even then the character of Sanjuro is probably one of the deepest and most complete characters in a film.
I also quite enjoy EpIV, I rented it after watching EpIII (which I also liked) for the first time in probably 6 years. It was very well done, and nuanced. I was expecting it to be crap now that I'm watching it as a more mature individual. But it seems to hold the test of time rather well. Unlike RotJ and NH. (I doubt Ep's I-II will either).
The Redux version is better... The french parts rock, make it from a war movie, to an antiwar movie, as it was intended by FFC.
To make this non-Redundant. Ever Read Jean Paul Baudrillard, the post-modern philosopher? According to to Apocalypse Now was more real than the actual war, in the public eyes (the hyperreal) than the are itself, so infuencial it was.
Personally it is among my top ten. The acting is great. It comes right after The Godfather. The original, of course. It is one of those movies that prove that Marlon Brando was a God.
Yojimbo WAS NOT his best. The whole "A good samarai keeps his swords sheathed." Thing at the end was BAD. Very safe sex.
Seven Samarai was as boring as Roots, Shaka Zulu, or Shogun.
His best was Ran. Ran is probably in my top 5. Wonderful visuals. Great story (Hamlet). The directing is great.
My friend always had the idea of using LCDs on a blank keyboard, to make it instantly configurable. I like this idea, but his original idea would have the whole thing as a touch screen, meaning it would lack feedback, and such. What good is typing if you don't make little clicky noises?
Then why do they not type in english? I've noticed that the people I know who learned to type before IM clients became a big deal, when they use IM they type in full sentences, with puntuation. When people use 'em who learned after, they constantly abbreviate, and use numbers (2, 4, etc...).
:)" After a couple messages like that, I blocked them.
This is odd, come to think of it. Since most the people I know used IRC and various BBS chat formats. But we still type like adults. The only colloquial chat slang crap I still use it things like LOL and ROFL, since they mapped to actions on one of my old mBBS boards.
I just gave someone my AIM name, they are of my generation, and are in college for English, so i expected them to have some skills. But then I get a random IM from them, "dud, u wanna go 2 party?
My freshman year (also '94) they were just phasing out their old AT&Ts (no GUI, nice green/black monitors) for a network of 3.11 boxes (which they promptly quit the next year, to phase in 95), but I never really learned touch typing, since the teacher learned that me and my friend were protogeeks and he put us to work ripping up the old boxes for parts, and installing network cards. So up until a year ago I never touch-typed, since I could hunt-peck at roughly 60wpm. Never looking at the keyboard.
It took a 50 page paper in college to make me learn touch. And when I got a lap top with a small keyboard it really helped.
Am I the only person on earth who still just wants a plain old keyboard? Everytime I go shopping of a new keyboard, I spend HOURS looking for a decent one, that isn't larger than my modest desk,that does not have more superfluous buttons than actual keys.
The happiest I've ever been with a keyboard was a small black wireless one, sans num keys, but I have an extra (wired) set of num keys, if I so need them. It was small (about the size of a 12" laptop keyboard), meaning my fingers needed less play to type.
My other favorite keyboard was the giant IBM behemoth keyboard, that could, if you so choose, protect you from bullets and on-comming traffic.
Whats so special about top buttons, anyway? Most of the keyboards hat have them have a silly software prog that has to be running all the time. If your so lazy that you NEED to have everything at finger level, and not at mousing desktop level, then... well... I'm speachless. You can move your mouse a whole inch for the same program...