Imagine, if you will, walking down the corridor of a large spaceship. At a junction you find some fellow - not in a technician's uniform - messing about with the wiring and plumbing of the life support system.
"Hey! What are you doing!?" you ask.
"I'm just warming up the ship a little. It's ok, trust me."
"Are you part of the engineering team?"
"No, no, but I know what I'm doing."
If you have any sense, you grab his crescent wrench and bean him with it.
Do not fuck with the spaceship's life support system, whether your ship be a Soyuz capsule or Spaceship Earth.
And, as I said, there is licensing involved in the live, semi-realtime play-by-play textual (web, mobile) content..
And that right there is the problem, this idea of "licensing". I do not need a "license" to report what I observe. If I were blogging live from some event, the content created is my creation, not that of the host of the event.
If said event is a party at a private home, sure, the owner can simply ask me to leave on their whim. In a public space such as the grounds of a state university, however, "you might say something that will interfere with our cash stream" is not sufficient grounds for using force to eject someone.
but can't fathom that someone might actually want to, say, "video blog" from an event. Well, why not? Why not "live podcast" an event?
It will never be able to explain everything, only those things that match the method of science. To say that all of reality is subject to science is a belief (and a false one at that).
Read more closely, please. I didn't say "all of reality". I said
"objective consensual reality".
The method of science is what defines objective consensual reality.
Note, however, the double qualification there. "Objective" and "consensual".
If religion didn't have anything to do with objective reality, it would be worthless.
Not at all. The universe revealed by science, the agreement of trained minds on our
collective best knowledge about observable reality, is very interesting and
useful. However, none of us live in objective consensual reality. We
each dwell in our own particular subjective individual experience.
Understanding special relativity does not really help me live my life with
a good relationship to myself and the rest of the universe, or help me
prepare for my eventual death.
Nobody in his right mind would believe in something that he is convinced has nothing to do with reality.
And that's the problem. Too many of us have confused religion with
"something you believe", rather than "something you do".
What if the deep experience you have comes from understanding science?
Perfectly fine! I've had a few of those over the years...I remember the feeling of awe when I understood Godel's Incompleteness theorem. (Briefly...I certainly can't "hold it all in my head", and I haven't had to think about it in any detail in almost 15 years. But when I took a formal logic course back in college, for one moment I could just about perceive the whole thing, from axioms on up.)
I would say that usually these are more aesthetic exeperiences than "mystical" ones; but an instense aesthetic experience can trigger a "mystical" one.
All of us have some sort of aesthetic sense, a sense of beauty. What triggers it may be as varied as Cantor's diagonalization argument about the infinity of the reals versus the infinity of rational numbers, or the Ramones classic punk anthem "Blitzkrieg Bop", or a folk song played in Japanese with harmonica and guitar, but every human being of sound mind possesses the ability to experience the recognition of beauty. We would hold a person without this ability to be damaged, lacking, an object of pity.
Similar to this aesthetic sense, but distinct from it, is what we might call a "mystical sense".(Credit to Raymond Smullyan for this analogy between the aesthetic and mystical senses.) The experience of the mystical is sometimes expressed as the sense of "the presence of the divine", sometimes as an experience of "Cosmic Consciousness", sometimes as "the perception of emptiness" or a "feeling of oneness with the universe", depending on the social conditioning and religious training of the experiencer. But these are all perceptions of the mystical sense, just as things are varied as the beauty of a sunset, of a Bach fugue, and a Zen garden are all perceptions of the aesthetic sense.
Indeed, I would argue many of those rejecting religious dogma and simply exploring subjective inner worlds with religion as a road in are simply doing philosophy; there is no religion left unless they choose to let their minds be hobbled by dogma rather than freely exploring the possibilities.
I think you're taking an overly narrow view of what constitutes "religion": it need not be dogmatic or even theistic. Religion is something you practice, something that "reconnects" you, as the Latin root "religere", meaning "bind again", indicates.
Philosophy is something you study and think about, not necessarily
something you experience in any deep sense. If we consider philosophy to
the the discipline of critical thinking (and I wish I remembered whose
definition that is!), it is certainly a tool that can be applied to
religious ends, to seperate the reasonable from the irrational; but is not the binding process itself.
If you were to come to the nightly drum circle at the upcoming Free Spirit Gathering, for example, and ecstatically dance the
night away around the flickering bonfire until your heart opened to the heavens and you understood
firsthand the love of the moon, that would be a religious experience, not a
philosophical one.
To some extent, religion and philosophy are the Dionysian and Apollonian side of the same coin.
Jesus clarified the problem in the New Testament when he explained that lusting after someone you're not married to is a sin.
That's no "clarification" at all. I am entirely capable of lusting after a hottie whether she is dressed or not, and capable of viewing a naked person whom I don't find attractive without a bit of lust. (And my hormonal reaction is in no way a "sin", an "error", it is exactly healthy functioning of the male human animal. If one posits some sort of "creator" or designer" of human beings, I'm functioning entirely according to their requirements spec when I see a cute redhead go by and my heart skips a beat. Now, what I do in response to that lust, may be wise or may be stupid...)
We find naked people extra-sexy only because we live in a culture that tells us that nakedness is sexy. Spend a few days in a clothing-optional environment and the excitement quickly dissipates - indeed you may find people wearing sexy clothes more interesting than the naked ones!
In fact, this whole "war" between science and religion is doing horrendous things to both sides. Let science be science and let religion be religion.
The problem is clarifying what is "religion". As long as people try to use religion to understand or explain objective consensual reality, and posit all sort of supernaturalism and superstitions, conflict with science is inevitable. And sadly, that's pretty much the bulk of contemporary mainstream American Christianity.
The reason these people feel threatened is because if you take away this sort of gobbledygook, there's not much left in the religions that they've made the center of their lives.
Meanwhile, you're got people like Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, some of the more contemplative Catholics and Jews, many Western Buddhists, a large percentage of Neopagans, a bunch of Sufis, and others using religious tools of myth, ritual, and contemplation to understand their subjective internal worlds. They know that the question of how old the earth is will not be settled by these means, and is in fact irrelevant to the question of how we should best live our lives.
It's unfortunate that the term "religion" has to be stretched to cover all of these.
Your example with the candy and the money would clearly not
be considered reasonable.
It is every bit as reasonable as the case with the computer and the
right to sue.
If you like, though, replace the content of the "contract" with
something more "reasonable" - "By eating this candy, you agree to subscribe
to my diet analysis service, cost $10,000 per month, minimum term one year,
non-refundable."
Point is, if a piece of paper in a computer box is a valid means of creating a contract, then a piece of paper in a candy box is also a valid means of creating a contract.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for the courts to
recognize the impracticality of requiring that EULAs be read or signed
before every sale
Impractical for whom? Certainly it would be difficult for predatory
companies to screw over customers by means of this despicable institution of
the "End User License Agreement" if they were read and signed before sales;
customers would tend to say, "screw you", and go simply buy software like they buy books, rather than enter into complex and disadventageous "licenses" for software.
...the summary of the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 decision? The judge makes many good points. At no time while I was reading the summary did I feel that the court had lost its grip on reality.
Easterbrook claims: "Payment preceding the revelation of full terms is common for
air transportation, insurance, and many other endeavors. Practical
considerations support allowing vendors to enclose the full legal terms
with their products. Cashiers cannot be expected to read legal documents to
customers before ringing up sales." But that's nonsense. Requiring terms to
be disclosed in advance is an enormous market pressure to keep them simple;
allowing this "contract-in-a-box" bullshit is laying a trap for the
consumer.
The existence of situations where payment precedes revelation of
terms is a serious failure, not a justification for creating more such
situations!
Given that courts have ruled this legal several times (see: ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, and - of course - Rich Hill and Enza Hill, v. Gateway 2000, Inc.), consumers should BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU AGREE TO.
People should be careful what they agree to, yes.
That courts have found that not returning a product based on some objectionable clause in a piece of paper in the packaging, is "agreeing" to something, is just another bit of evidence that our courts are not part of the reality-based community.
Perhaps I should sent one of these judges a box of candy with "By eating any of this, you agree to give me all your money" written in fine print inside one of the wrappers.
If it reduces litter, I don't mind. I've travelled the world and the UK is the dirtiest and most litter-infested by far.
Let's review. The U.K. is a surveillance society. The U.K. is dirty and
litter-infested. Therefore, what can we conclude as to whether being a
surveillance society makes a nation litter free?
To twist the cliche, those who would trade privacy for clean streets,
deserve neither.
But yeah, people looking at me when I go outside is
obviously very, very bad.
I don't have a problem at all with people looking at me with their own
eyeballs when I'm in public. I see them, they see me, an equal relationship.
But when agents of the state, with the legal authority to point guns at me,
want the ability to look at me through cameras (sometimes hidden cameras)
without me being able to look back, that's
corrosive to democracy and liberty.
C'mon out and stand on the
streetcorner to see and been seen, guys. We'll chat. Maybe you'll get
over that "thin blue line" bullshit; maybe ordinary citizens might trust
police again.
...but crime is still there. Let's hire more police.
I'd rather have more police than more surveilance cameras, especially if those police are subject to sousveillance.
But I'd rather have fewer police, much better trained and paid and held to much higher standards, and dedicated to stopping actual crime (that is, threats to other people's rights) rather than locking up drug users and prostitutes.
Where did you pull that number out of? I thought there were estimates of thousands of years of fissionable uranium deposits based on current energy usage...
Maybe if by "current energy usage" you mean the current amount of electricity generated by fission. Or if by "deposits" you mean every atom of uranium on the planet, regardless of the cost to collect it.
MIT's report of the future of nuclear power concluded that "the world-wide supply of uranium ore is sufficient to fuel the deployment of 1000 reactors over the next half century and to maintain this level of deployment over a 40 year lifetime of this fleet." That's based on 1000 reactors of 1000 MW each, which they estimate would supply about 20% of world electrical demand. If we scale that up by 5 to meet all world demand, that's less than 20 years of reserves.
They considered the "once-through" cycle, not breeders, saying that once-through "has advantages in cost, proliferation, and fuel cycle safety", and finding that "reprocessing and one-pass fuel recycle with current technology...[increase by] about 4.5 times the fuel cost of the once-through cycle." Even if you assume a breakthrough in reprocessing could increase the practical reserves by a order of magnitude, that's only 200 years.
A reply below mentions what become economical at $400-500 per pound of uranium. That's absurd. At that price it becomes even more clear that fission is a poor choice.
in the same sense hitching a lift 800km along a 1000km journey "leads nowhere"...
If the end of that 800km lift leaves you stranded in the middle of the desert, yes, it does lead nowhere. Much better to walk around the corner and find the train that goes all the way.
Waste shouldn't be "stored", it should be recycled.
Only applies to spent fuel. You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels. And reprocessing still leaves the fission products to deal with, as well as mining and processing tailings.
No, the problem with waste is that a chain of political idiots and their energy department appointees
The problem is that reprocessing isn't economical at current conditions - which is why initial U.S. attempts failed and why Germany is ending their program.
This might change if all the external costs were included; but then if all the external costs were included, we wouldn't even be considering plutonium and uranium fission.
(We wouldn't be considering biofuels from food crops either - biowaste, algae, and fuel crops like hemp and switchgrass, maybe bamboo. Growing food-grade corn to make fuel-grade ethanol is just plain stupid, and has more to do with lining the pockets of agribusiness than with meeting energy needs.)
And breeders aren't a perpetual motion machine. You still run out of uranium in the order of decades ro centuries. (Unless you go to thorium, in which case spallation "energy amplifiers" are a much better design. Those, and fusion, are where we should be looking to nuclear technologies.)
This completely overlooks the fact that unless you build a breeder reactor specifically for the purpose of making pure Pu-239 for nuclear weapons, you get a mix of Pu isotopes which absolutely can not be detonated
Google for "Iran nuclear", and tell me that we're going to let every country on earth have a couple of plutonium factories, on the assumption that they're all too dumb to be able to do that.
Separation is not easy, but certainly not impossible. Many of the claims of difficulty of obtaining weapons-grade fissionables are based on the difficulty of handling highly radioactive waste. When you have martyr wannabe's standing by, though, a lot of these problems are solved. Shielding? Feh. "Come here, unskilled uneducated believer-type. You will die a glorious death for $CAUSE and be assured of a rewarding afterlife if you handle this Rock of the Gods exactly as I tell you..."
Indeed, given the fears of a "dirty bomb", bad guys don't even have to seperate, or achieve a fission bomb. Take a chunk of mixed Pu, stick it in the middle of a Ryder truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer, and drive into the center of $BIG_CITY. Let the good times roll.
I process cards for customers every day that have 'ask for id' in big letters on them.
And those cards - unless they are both signed and say "ask for ID" - are not valid.
Issuers require card members to sign the card as an acceptance of the terms of the contract. Visa says:
Some customers write "See ID" or "Ask for ID" in the signature panel, thinking
that this is a deterrent against fraud or forgery; that is, if their signature is not
on the card, a fraudster will not be able to forge it. In reality, criminals don't take
the time to practice signatures: they use cards as quickly as possible after a
theft and prior to the accounts being blocked. They are actually counting on you
not to look at the back of the card and compare signatures--they may even have
access to counterfeit identification with a signature in their own handwriting.
"See ID" or "Ask for ID" is not a valid substitute for a signature. The customer
must sign the card in your presence, as stated above.
If you are accepting these, either you or your employer are violating the terms of your merchant agreement.
Certainly, Harry Fox delenda est, and copyright-as-we-know-it is an idea whose time has passed (if it was in fact every a good idea to start with). But HFA has not been successful in removing tab from the web.
Nine years ago, I was interviewed for this article about the original OLGA kerfuffle.
Nine years. You'd think that after that long, the traditional music publishing industry might have learned something from their complete inability to stop the spread of on-line guitar tabs.
Hey, publishers: It's over. You lost. You're not going to get to stop people from talking about how to play music. Quit whining, join the world in the 21st century, and you might yet find a way to profit.
"let me illustrate a point through an analogy that lets me oh so subtlely and matter of factly mention my athletic or fighting prowess."
Nah, I assure you, my "fighting prowess" is pretty damn low, despite two decades of trying. Which is why when a rare moment like what I mentioned occurs, my conscious reaction (once "I" catch up) is "hey, cool". But do something long enough, and you'll have a few cool moments now and then.
Martial arts examples crop up a lot when talking Zen. Partly for historical reasons related to its adoption by the samurai, partly for practical ones (it was the practical ones that made for its adoption by the samurai in the first place). And partly because they're just more vivid than "so we were jamming and the piano player started modulating back and forth between minor and major keys in the melody line, but without thinking I just went into a progession of suspended chords, and it stayed tight." (I don't even know if that example makes sense, some jazz guy feel free to correct with something meaningful.)
It happens that I have significant first hand experience with the martial arts; should I then draw on somebody else's secondhand reports, rather than my own experience, so that you don't think I'm a "geeky narcissist"? Would it be better if I said, "when a boxer slips a punch and yadda yadda yadda"?
Voice mail is probably the most important one, and it is included on cell phones; but you need to purchase it separately on landlines.
Depends on your provider; I get it for free, but I prefer an answering machine - my own private storage over my telco's thank you very much.
I don't talk much, but when you need to call (or to receive a call) it's essential - like when you need to call someone from the car and ask for directions.
When you really need to call - as in, call 911 - a landline can be a lifesaver: the number is tied to an address so help can be on it's way fast, and I have wired phone (yes, a wired phone) next to the answering machine (see above), that doesn't have to worry abut battery charge or getting lost in my jacket pocket. You're also much less likely for the service to go down in an emergency. POTS sets the bar in terms of reliability
A landline with a wired phone (pick one up at Goodwill) is a communications backup that could save your life.
Present moment awareness...the expansion of consciousness will allow us to bypass thought, and will allow us use other senses in our bodies to take action or create a reaction to situations in an instant with out much thought process. The solution isn't more processing power in our brains, its being able to turn it off thought so other more powerful forces within us can take over and do the calculations needed to live our lives.
Present moment awareness can be considered type of thought, just a very different type than the verbal chattering monkey-mind that most of of live with for all but rare moments.
There's a passage from D.T. Suzuki:
Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.
But it is an error to think that this thinking-without-thinking does not come from (or at least involve) the brain. Sometimes people talk about these thinks as "reflexes", which is inaccurate.
When I'm on the dojo floor and someone tries to kick me in the head, me slipping the kick, moving in, and countering with a punch is not a verbal-mental activity - if I stopped to talk it over I'd get hit. By the time verbal consciousness has caught up, it's to label and assess what's already happened - "hey, that was pretty cool". But it is not a reflex, it is all happens with the coordination of the brain.
A reflex only involves the spinal cord interneurons. Touch a hot stove and your hand jerks back before the pain signal even gets to the brain. Step on a tack and your foot jumps up before your brain knows what's going on. But anything more complicated than that is brain activity.
There's no reason that more processing power in the brain - provided that it's dedicated to the right processes - can't help with present moment awareness.
I am telling you that some people have found it great for them to have multiple simultaneous romantic relationships; that is a simple report of fact.
And I am telling you that to label this as "morally incorrrect" is at best confused, at worst actively harmful; that is an analysis.
And again it's obvious that spending less time with more people will result in 'shallower' relationships than spending more time with less people, that's just how things work.
You assume that the depth of a relationship is solely a function of time spent together, and a monotonically increasing one at that. Neither is true.
Our population is quite sustainable at current levels.
Not with current technolgy and lifestyle choices; if it were, we would not be witnessing environmental degredation.
The only resource we actually "consume" in the sense of destroying is (usable) energy, and the Sun provides way more than we need
We do not yet have a practical method of extracting solar energy.
Topsoil and clean fresh water are being consumed. Of course the atoms and molecules are not destroyed, but the resources are rendered unusable.
The amount of food calories per acre we know how to produce is ridiculously high
High yield farming requires petrochemical feedstocks, high energy inputs, leads to pollution, and consumes topsoil and water. Current mainstream farming practices are in no way sustainable.
Living space is just a matter of building up.
Living space is more that enclosed area to warehouse bodies. Most people want sunlight, fresh air, some presence of a natural environment.
An obligation to accurately understand something does not compel you to immerse yourself in something.
Agreed, you do not have to immerse yourself in something to understand it.
As to the issue at hand, open relationships mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
Yes, so its up to each couple/trio/network to come to their own understanding.
I personally find it difficult to really believe deep down that at least some individuals involved aren't repressing guilt, jealousy, or other pain by having the open-ness 'imposed' on them; especially as proponents tend to make rubbish arguments about how its more 'enlightened' and that finding it distasteful represents a personal failure of character -- but I understand that some people may genuinely be able to make it work.
An imposed "openness" is no openness at all.
I don't hear poly folk calling polyamory "more enlightened". I do hear them saying that honest, open, non-prejudicial discussion of relationships is "more enlightened"; and that being open to your neighbor making different choices is "more enlightened". But I've never heard anyone argue that those who prefer monogamous relationships for themselves are somehow backward.
That said, I find it dubious that those same people could not make a monogamous relationship work for them too if they chose to; after all there is no social prohibition on having as many close friends as you like.
Actually many monogamous relationships run into problems when one partner gets too close to a friend, even if they are sexually exclusive with their partner.
Regardless of who you go to be with, if one is polyamorous - that is, wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person - pretending that you only love one person is living a lie.
So perhaps its best for the well being of society for monogamy to persist.
Has anyone suggested that it's going to go away? If you want it, choose it for yourself. Just don't try to choose it for me.
When you sleep around, get disease and my work pays for your treatment.
It is much more likely that you will get heart disease from bad diet and I'll have to pay for your treatment, than that someone non-monogamous but taking elementary precautions (regular testing and proper condom use) will contract and spread a serious STD. (That's a generic you, I have no idea how you specifically eat). If you're going to call my sexual behavior non-private because of the risk of STDs, the same argument about health costs applies to just about every area of human behavior, and leaves nothing in the realm of private choice.
As for sexually abusing children or animals, neither of those is a consensual choice, so is clearly outside the scope of this discussion; public sex is clearly not a private choice, again already excluded.
STDs, abusive sex, and public sexual behavior are also found among people practicing serial monogamy.
I gather from your link that you're buddhist? How does polyamoury meet with your moving towards celibacy as an upasaka
I suppose if you wanted to label me a Buddhist, I'd have a hard time refuting the charge, but I identify as a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian.
Who says I want to be an upasaka? I want to save all sentient beings, that's all. Sex can be a tool towards that end.
Buddhist teachings on sex vary widely; HH the DL hardly speaks for everyone. Google Ikkyu and red thread Zen. I discuss my own interpretation of the precept regarding sexual behavior at the link I gave before, here.
As for polyamory and Buddhism, it's interesting that polygamy was not unknown in the Buddha's time, and as far as I know he did not speak out against it for his lay followers. He was however opposed to the exploitive relationship of keeping concubines.
Incidentally I know he's a Tibetan buddhist but assume that sex is considered a route towards negative emotion (jealousy etc.) in all branches. Please correct me where appropriate.
While (just about) every Buddhist would agree that sex, like any desire, can be a source of suffering and should be handled with care, beyond that teachings vary. Many Tantric Buddhists think it's a "bad thing" but can be used to good ends in this "degraded" age. Many monastically-centered Theravedans would say that the only way to freedom is renunciation of sex. The "Red Thread" Zen tradition says sex is just as much Buddha-nature as anything; as Ikkyu put it, "The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation."
if it results in kids then who is going to look after them?
This is not relevant to the question of how many sexual partners I have. People who have only one lover can still have unplanned pregnancies. Even statistically, if I have two lovers but have sex with each only half as often as someone with one partner, the odds of pregnancy are the same.
Your argument, such as it is, applies to all non-marital sex - a man should only be permitted to have sex with a woman to whom he has made a financial commitment, on the off chance that she gets pregnant.
(Hmm, you've just given me an idea: private pregnancy insurance.)
Amyway, if one of my lovers gets pregnant by me and chooses to have a child, then I will provide financial support. Heck, I'd proably get sued for child support anyway.
So your objection has no bearing on the issue at hand. Try again.
Birth control is not 100% effective even when properly used.
Aborting a pregnancy is a sure way to control births, though of course has risks and costs and should only be used if safer and cheaper contraception fails.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine, if you will, walking down the corridor of a large spaceship. At a junction you find some fellow - not in a technician's uniform - messing about with the wiring and plumbing of the life support system.
"Hey! What are you doing!?" you ask.
"I'm just warming up the ship a little. It's ok, trust me."
"Are you part of the engineering team?"
"No, no, but I know what I'm doing."
If you have any sense, you grab his crescent wrench and bean him with it.
Do not fuck with the spaceship's life support system, whether your ship be a Soyuz capsule or Spaceship Earth.
And that right there is the problem, this idea of "licensing". I do not need a "license" to report what I observe. If I were blogging live from some event, the content created is my creation, not that of the host of the event.
If said event is a party at a private home, sure, the owner can simply ask me to leave on their whim. In a public space such as the grounds of a state university, however, "you might say something that will interfere with our cash stream" is not sufficient grounds for using force to eject someone.
I don't know, why not? Fine by me.
Read more closely, please. I didn't say "all of reality". I said "objective consensual reality".
The method of science is what defines objective consensual reality.
Note, however, the double qualification there. "Objective" and "consensual".
Not at all. The universe revealed by science, the agreement of trained minds on our collective best knowledge about observable reality, is very interesting and useful. However, none of us live in objective consensual reality. We each dwell in our own particular subjective individual experience. Understanding special relativity does not really help me live my life with a good relationship to myself and the rest of the universe, or help me prepare for my eventual death.
And that's the problem. Too many of us have confused religion with "something you believe", rather than "something you do".
Perfectly fine! I've had a few of those over the years...I remember the feeling of awe when I understood Godel's Incompleteness theorem. (Briefly...I certainly can't "hold it all in my head", and I haven't had to think about it in any detail in almost 15 years. But when I took a formal logic course back in college, for one moment I could just about perceive the whole thing, from axioms on up.)
I would say that usually these are more aesthetic exeperiences than "mystical" ones; but an instense aesthetic experience can trigger a "mystical" one.
I wrote a little more about this recently here:
I think you're taking an overly narrow view of what constitutes "religion": it need not be dogmatic or even theistic. Religion is something you practice, something that "reconnects" you, as the Latin root "religere", meaning "bind again", indicates.
Philosophy is something you study and think about, not necessarily something you experience in any deep sense. If we consider philosophy to the the discipline of critical thinking (and I wish I remembered whose definition that is!), it is certainly a tool that can be applied to religious ends, to seperate the reasonable from the irrational; but is not the binding process itself.
If you were to come to the nightly drum circle at the upcoming Free Spirit Gathering, for example, and ecstatically dance the night away around the flickering bonfire until your heart opened to the heavens and you understood firsthand the love of the moon, that would be a religious experience, not a philosophical one.
To some extent, religion and philosophy are the Dionysian and Apollonian side of the same coin.
That's no "clarification" at all. I am entirely capable of lusting after a hottie whether she is dressed or not, and capable of viewing a naked person whom I don't find attractive without a bit of lust. (And my hormonal reaction is in no way a "sin", an "error", it is exactly healthy functioning of the male human animal. If one posits some sort of "creator" or designer" of human beings, I'm functioning entirely according to their requirements spec when I see a cute redhead go by and my heart skips a beat. Now, what I do in response to that lust, may be wise or may be stupid...)
We find naked people extra-sexy only because we live in a culture that tells us that nakedness is sexy. Spend a few days in a clothing-optional environment and the excitement quickly dissipates - indeed you may find people wearing sexy clothes more interesting than the naked ones!
The problem is clarifying what is "religion". As long as people try to use religion to understand or explain objective consensual reality, and posit all sort of supernaturalism and superstitions, conflict with science is inevitable. And sadly, that's pretty much the bulk of contemporary mainstream American Christianity.
The reason these people feel threatened is because if you take away this sort of gobbledygook, there's not much left in the religions that they've made the center of their lives.
Meanwhile, you're got people like Unitarian Universalists, Quakers, some of the more contemplative Catholics and Jews, many Western Buddhists, a large percentage of Neopagans, a bunch of Sufis, and others using religious tools of myth, ritual, and contemplation to understand their subjective internal worlds. They know that the question of how old the earth is will not be settled by these means, and is in fact irrelevant to the question of how we should best live our lives.
It's unfortunate that the term "religion" has to be stretched to cover all of these.
It is every bit as reasonable as the case with the computer and the right to sue.
If you like, though, replace the content of the "contract" with something more "reasonable" - "By eating this candy, you agree to subscribe to my diet analysis service, cost $10,000 per month, minimum term one year, non-refundable."
Point is, if a piece of paper in a computer box is a valid means of creating a contract, then a piece of paper in a candy box is also a valid means of creating a contract.
Impractical for whom? Certainly it would be difficult for predatory companies to screw over customers by means of this despicable institution of the "End User License Agreement" if they were read and signed before sales; customers would tend to say, "screw you", and go simply buy software like they buy books, rather than enter into complex and disadventageous "licenses" for software.
Easterbrook claims: "Payment preceding the revelation of full terms is common for air transportation, insurance, and many other endeavors. Practical considerations support allowing vendors to enclose the full legal terms with their products. Cashiers cannot be expected to read legal documents to customers before ringing up sales." But that's nonsense. Requiring terms to be disclosed in advance is an enormous market pressure to keep them simple; allowing this "contract-in-a-box" bullshit is laying a trap for the consumer.
The existence of situations where payment precedes revelation of terms is a serious failure, not a justification for creating more such situations!
People should be careful what they agree to, yes.
That courts have found that not returning a product based on some objectionable clause in a piece of paper in the packaging, is "agreeing" to something, is just another bit of evidence that our courts are not part of the reality-based community.
Perhaps I should sent one of these judges a box of candy with "By eating any of this, you agree to give me all your money" written in fine print inside one of the wrappers.
Let's review. The U.K. is a surveillance society. The U.K. is dirty and litter-infested. Therefore, what can we conclude as to whether being a surveillance society makes a nation litter free?
To twist the cliche, those who would trade privacy for clean streets, deserve neither.
I don't have a problem at all with people looking at me with their own eyeballs when I'm in public. I see them, they see me, an equal relationship.
But when agents of the state, with the legal authority to point guns at me, want the ability to look at me through cameras (sometimes hidden cameras) without me being able to look back, that's corrosive to democracy and liberty.
C'mon out and stand on the streetcorner to see and been seen, guys. We'll chat. Maybe you'll get over that "thin blue line" bullshit; maybe ordinary citizens might trust police again.
I'd rather have more police than more surveilance cameras, especially if those police are subject to sousveillance.
But I'd rather have fewer police, much better trained and paid and held to much higher standards, and dedicated to stopping actual crime (that is, threats to other people's rights) rather than locking up drug users and prostitutes.
I agree with you and with Steve Mann - cameras on people, ok; cameras making your city a Panopticon prison, bad.
Maybe if by "current energy usage" you mean the current amount of electricity generated by fission. Or if by "deposits" you mean every atom of uranium on the planet, regardless of the cost to collect it.
MIT's report of the future of nuclear power concluded that "the world-wide supply of uranium ore is sufficient to fuel the deployment of 1000 reactors over the next half century and to maintain this level of deployment over a 40 year lifetime of this fleet." That's based on 1000 reactors of 1000 MW each, which they estimate would supply about 20% of world electrical demand. If we scale that up by 5 to meet all world demand, that's less than 20 years of reserves.
They considered the "once-through" cycle, not breeders, saying that once-through "has advantages in cost, proliferation, and fuel cycle safety", and finding that "reprocessing and one-pass fuel recycle with current technology...[increase by] about 4.5 times the fuel cost of the once-through cycle." Even if you assume a breakthrough in reprocessing could increase the practical reserves by a order of magnitude, that's only 200 years.
A reply below mentions what become economical at $400-500 per pound of uranium. That's absurd. At that price it becomes even more clear that fission is a poor choice.
If the end of that 800km lift leaves you stranded in the middle of the desert, yes, it does lead nowhere. Much better to walk around the corner and find the train that goes all the way.
Only applies to spent fuel. You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels. And reprocessing still leaves the fission products to deal with, as well as mining and processing tailings.
The problem is that reprocessing isn't economical at current conditions - which is why initial U.S. attempts failed and why Germany is ending their program.
This might change if all the external costs were included; but then if all the external costs were included, we wouldn't even be considering plutonium and uranium fission.
(We wouldn't be considering biofuels from food crops either - biowaste, algae, and fuel crops like hemp and switchgrass, maybe bamboo. Growing food-grade corn to make fuel-grade ethanol is just plain stupid, and has more to do with lining the pockets of agribusiness than with meeting energy needs.)
And breeders aren't a perpetual motion machine. You still run out of uranium in the order of decades ro centuries. (Unless you go to thorium, in which case spallation "energy amplifiers" are a much better design. Those, and fusion, are where we should be looking to nuclear technologies.)
...until you separate them out, or change your bomb design to account for a different mix of isotopes. In 1962, the U.S. detonated a bomb made from "reactor grade" plutonium. (See 15th page of the PDF, footnote 5.)
Google for "Iran nuclear", and tell me that we're going to let every country on earth have a couple of plutonium factories, on the assumption that they're all too dumb to be able to do that.
Separation is not easy, but certainly not impossible. Many of the claims of difficulty of obtaining weapons-grade fissionables are based on the difficulty of handling highly radioactive waste. When you have martyr wannabe's standing by, though, a lot of these problems are solved. Shielding? Feh. "Come here, unskilled uneducated believer-type. You will die a glorious death for $CAUSE and be assured of a rewarding afterlife if you handle this Rock of the Gods exactly as I tell you..."
Indeed, given the fears of a "dirty bomb", bad guys don't even have to seperate, or achieve a fission bomb. Take a chunk of mixed Pu, stick it in the middle of a Ryder truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer, and drive into the center of $BIG_CITY. Let the good times roll.
And those cards - unless they are both signed and say "ask for ID" - are not valid.
Issuers require card members to sign the card as an acceptance of the terms of the contract. Visa says:
If you are accepting these, either you or your employer are violating the terms of your merchant agreement.
Oh, really?
Certainly, Harry Fox delenda est, and copyright-as-we-know-it is an idea whose time has passed (if it was in fact every a good idea to start with). But HFA has not been successful in removing tab from the web.
Nine years ago, I was interviewed for this article about the original OLGA kerfuffle.
Nine years. You'd think that after that long, the traditional music publishing industry might have learned something from their complete inability to stop the spread of on-line guitar tabs.
Hey, publishers: It's over. You lost. You're not going to get to stop people from talking about how to play music. Quit whining, join the world in the 21st century, and you might yet find a way to profit.
Nah, I assure you, my "fighting prowess" is pretty damn low, despite two decades of trying. Which is why when a rare moment like what I mentioned occurs, my conscious reaction (once "I" catch up) is "hey, cool". But do something long enough, and you'll have a few cool moments now and then.
Martial arts examples crop up a lot when talking Zen. Partly for historical reasons related to its adoption by the samurai, partly for practical ones (it was the practical ones that made for its adoption by the samurai in the first place). And partly because they're just more vivid than "so we were jamming and the piano player started modulating back and forth between minor and major keys in the melody line, but without thinking I just went into a progession of suspended chords, and it stayed tight." (I don't even know if that example makes sense, some jazz guy feel free to correct with something meaningful.)
It happens that I have significant first hand experience with the martial arts; should I then draw on somebody else's secondhand reports, rather than my own experience, so that you don't think I'm a "geeky narcissist"? Would it be better if I said, "when a boxer slips a punch and yadda yadda yadda"?
Depends on your provider; I get it for free, but I prefer an answering machine - my own private storage over my telco's thank you very much.
When you really need to call - as in, call 911 - a landline can be a lifesaver: the number is tied to an address so help can be on it's way fast, and I have wired phone (yes, a wired phone) next to the answering machine (see above), that doesn't have to worry abut battery charge or getting lost in my jacket pocket. You're also much less likely for the service to go down in an emergency. POTS sets the bar in terms of reliability
A landline with a wired phone (pick one up at Goodwill) is a communications backup that could save your life.
Present moment awareness can be considered type of thought, just a very different type than the verbal chattering monkey-mind that most of of live with for all but rare moments.
There's a passage from D.T. Suzuki:
But it is an error to think that this thinking-without-thinking does not come from (or at least involve) the brain. Sometimes people talk about these thinks as "reflexes", which is inaccurate.
When I'm on the dojo floor and someone tries to kick me in the head, me slipping the kick, moving in, and countering with a punch is not a verbal-mental activity - if I stopped to talk it over I'd get hit. By the time verbal consciousness has caught up, it's to label and assess what's already happened - "hey, that was pretty cool". But it is not a reflex, it is all happens with the coordination of the brain.
A reflex only involves the spinal cord interneurons. Touch a hot stove and your hand jerks back before the pain signal even gets to the brain. Step on a tack and your foot jumps up before your brain knows what's going on. But anything more complicated than that is brain activity.
There's no reason that more processing power in the brain - provided that it's dedicated to the right processes - can't help with present moment awareness.
I'm not telling you that it's great for you to have multiple simultaneous romantic relationships. That's for you to decide. Do as thou wilt - it's not not a good idea, it's the Law.
I am telling you that some people have found it great for them to have multiple simultaneous romantic relationships; that is a simple report of fact.
And I am telling you that to label this as "morally incorrrect" is at best confused, at worst actively harmful; that is an analysis.
You assume that the depth of a relationship is solely a function of time spent together, and a monotonically increasing one at that. Neither is true.
Not with current technolgy and lifestyle choices; if it were, we would not be witnessing environmental degredation.
We do not yet have a practical method of extracting solar energy.
Topsoil and clean fresh water are being consumed. Of course the atoms and molecules are not destroyed, but the resources are rendered unusable.
High yield farming requires petrochemical feedstocks, high energy inputs, leads to pollution, and consumes topsoil and water. Current mainstream farming practices are in no way sustainable.
Living space is more that enclosed area to warehouse bodies. Most people want sunlight, fresh air, some presence of a natural environment.
Agreed, you do not have to immerse yourself in something to understand it.
Yes, so its up to each couple/trio/network to come to their own understanding.
An imposed "openness" is no openness at all.
I don't hear poly folk calling polyamory "more enlightened". I do hear them saying that honest, open, non-prejudicial discussion of relationships is "more enlightened"; and that being open to your neighbor making different choices is "more enlightened". But I've never heard anyone argue that those who prefer monogamous relationships for themselves are somehow backward.
Actually many monogamous relationships run into problems when one partner gets too close to a friend, even if they are sexually exclusive with their partner.
Regardless of who you go to be with, if one is polyamorous - that is, wired so that you are sometimes in love with more than one person - pretending that you only love one person is living a lie.
Has anyone suggested that it's going to go away? If you want it, choose it for yourself. Just don't try to choose it for me.
It is much more likely that you will get heart disease from bad diet and I'll have to pay for your treatment, than that someone non-monogamous but taking elementary precautions (regular testing and proper condom use) will contract and spread a serious STD. (That's a generic you, I have no idea how you specifically eat). If you're going to call my sexual behavior non-private because of the risk of STDs, the same argument about health costs applies to just about every area of human behavior, and leaves nothing in the realm of private choice.
As for sexually abusing children or animals, neither of those is a consensual choice, so is clearly outside the scope of this discussion; public sex is clearly not a private choice, again already excluded.
STDs, abusive sex, and public sexual behavior are also found among people practicing serial monogamy.
I suppose if you wanted to label me a Buddhist, I'd have a hard time refuting the charge, but I identify as a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian.
Who says I want to be an upasaka? I want to save all sentient beings, that's all. Sex can be a tool towards that end.
Buddhist teachings on sex vary widely; HH the DL hardly speaks for everyone. Google Ikkyu and red thread Zen. I discuss my own interpretation of the precept regarding sexual behavior at the link I gave before, here.
As for polyamory and Buddhism, it's interesting that polygamy was not unknown in the Buddha's time, and as far as I know he did not speak out against it for his lay followers. He was however opposed to the exploitive relationship of keeping concubines.
While (just about) every Buddhist would agree that sex, like any desire, can be a source of suffering and should be handled with care, beyond that teachings vary. Many Tantric Buddhists think it's a "bad thing" but can be used to good ends in this "degraded" age. Many monastically-centered Theravedans would say that the only way to freedom is renunciation of sex. The "Red Thread" Zen tradition says sex is just as much Buddha-nature as anything; as Ikkyu put it, "The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation."
This is not relevant to the question of how many sexual partners I have. People who have only one lover can still have unplanned pregnancies. Even statistically, if I have two lovers but have sex with each only half as often as someone with one partner, the odds of pregnancy are the same.
Your argument, such as it is, applies to all non-marital sex - a man should only be permitted to have sex with a woman to whom he has made a financial commitment, on the off chance that she gets pregnant.
(Hmm, you've just given me an idea: private pregnancy insurance.)
Amyway, if one of my lovers gets pregnant by me and chooses to have a child, then I will provide financial support. Heck, I'd proably get sued for child support anyway.
So your objection has no bearing on the issue at hand. Try again.
Aborting a pregnancy is a sure way to control births, though of course has risks and costs and should only be used if safer and cheaper contraception fails.