It sounds like you're only thinking of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus - the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations does not give mathematics primacy in any way. The later Wittgenstein and the whole of the Continental tradition of philosophy deal much more in questions of ontology, of "why are we here?", and so on, without any reference to mathematics.
I am speaking of the term "libertarian," not liberal. The root of both words far pre-dates the enlightenment.
Moreover, left-anarchism is also in many ways a child of the englightenment.
They collude and create artificial barriers to entry.
A state is actually useful for such a situation, because challengers can use the political system to disturb some of those barriers and what not. You're absolutely right that the state often favors existing players, but the state is not the whole story.
Monopolies, near-monopolies and quasi-monopolies (only a few big vendors) will arise naturally in a purely free market because mergers, buyouts and so on are faster ways of achieving economies of scale than organic growth.
Quasi-monopolies manage have enough market power to distort competition, and more to the point, enough power to coerce unequal transactions. They are a common feature in capitalism because economies of scale are easier to obtain through mergers and buyouts than through organic growth.
What of the kid who cares about his education but comes from a family that doesn't? It seems to me that charity would have difficulty replacing taxation in a capitalist society because giving away money is discouraged the structure of the system; a chartible person is at an economic disadvantage compared to a less charitable peer.
Having to find and maintain (as in dealing with the logistics, not as in grades) a scholarship to attend a private school would be an additional burden on the kid above, and would make him more susceptible to the influence of parents that frowned upon school.
Why I say it's more interesting is that this shows us that beyond the perceptual, cognitive differences between perception of color that we grow up with within our cultures, humans actually have differing physical hardware for perceiving color. We really don't see the world with the same eyes.
I can't source this for you, having learned it in a linguistics class, but most cultures actually do seem to perceive colors pretty much the same. If you lay out a palette with say, 50 shades of red, almost everyone picks a color within a small range of shades as being the "true" or "pure" red. There are a whole bunch of nifty things about the way we all see colors. Search for "basic color terms" if you're interested.
Hillary Clinton does not hail from the progressive wing of the democratic party, which, though small, I think does have genuine goodwill towards the public.
Hillary Clinton is just another corporate politician who does what the focus groups tell her will drive up approval. The true progressive democrats have more in common with the libertarians in regard to personal freedom than the pass-laws-to-ban-scary-things democrats.
based on the results of the student monitoring program has concluded that narcissistic personality disorder, self-loathing and abject depression are far more prevalent than ever thought. Researchers cited the prevalence of posed-for pictures and awful, contrite, self-pitying poetry on "MySpace" as evidence.
Someone already addressed the thing about the poor indeed being poorer today than they were, but here's something about social mobility. It's declining:
And ancedotally, it would seem to me that the rich are screwing over the poor (or at least the non-rich), at least to an extent. I can't think of the companies, but I've heard of at least two companies that recently did pretty big layoffs (one was 3600 employees, iirc), and proceeded to give their top executives massive pay raises. It seems that those layoffs weren't so necessary, though I'd be willing to hear an explanation that put layoffs and pay raises in sync with one another.
And here's some outright bias for you: nobody should be earning what top executives do now. I don't know where I'd draw the line between a high, but legitimate salary and an exorbitant one, but for instance, it's ridiculous to have someone making 50 million a year. That salary could be defensible if trickle-down economics worked, but it doesn't. That's an exaggeration; tt can and undoubtedly does sometimes work, but there's nothing to make it inevitable. People are free to sit on enormous piles of cash that never do much but collect interest, or to spend their money outside the country. There's no guarantee that the money goes back into the economy from which it came. It also assumes a system which isn't gamed to disproportionately reward those already with money.
That said about structural factors working against the poor, they do also have self-defeating economic habits. Positing either of these as the sole cause is wrong.
plot a sphere 150 light years in radius against the size of the milky way galaxy, and you will see it is a non-trivial portion of the entire thing.
I'd have to disagree on that one. First, that should be "diameter" instead of "radius" - our radio waves weren't always that powerful. Second, the Milky Way is about 100,000 ly in diameter, and about 1000 ly thick in the disk. The Earth-radio wave bubble is about 2x10^4 ly^3 in volume, compared to a volume of 7.85*10^12 ly^3 for the galaxy. Pretty insignificant.
Furthermore, 40 isn't some widely accepted upper limit on the Drake Equation. My pet calculations get me in the 1000-10000 range, which makes even our little bubble more significant.
I tend to think, though, that we're almost certainly a pretty young race, and probably pretty worthless to pay attention to.
The use of names is not related to innate linguistic abilities. It's a social construct.
IAALM (I'm a linguistics major) and while I haven't heard of that study (or people, for that matter) that'd be pretty extraordinary. If you're talking about names of anything, period, it's false. All human languages have proper nouns or their equivalent - words that refer to some specific thing independent of context. I wouldn't say it's not possible for them to not have names for themselves, but it definitely strikes me as unlikely for social, self-aware beings.
I'm not an engineer, but I am a pretty good writer. I attribute it to reading. Since I was a little kid, I've always read for pleasure. I don't think it matters too much what you read, as long as the sentences are well-constructed. Which is virtually every author. Most sci-fi authors can't write worth a damn, but their fundamentals are fine. People don't learn language so much as acquire it (I'm a linguistics major), and so something like reading which is semi-passive (you're not paying attention to the words and structures - just the plots) is perfect for absorbing good writing skills.
Reality Master, I completely agree with you, and any others who claimed I was a cultural relativist, except for the white supremacist downthread.
Not all cultures are equivalent, and there's a base of morality that isn't relative. You listed a bunch of cultures that are indeed poisoned.
I was sort of replying to someone's post, and sort of commenting on the thread itself. The part of the guy's post (I can't find it now) I quoted struck me as someone making pretty superficial judgements, which I thought was stupid, and morally wrong. If you reject someone for being a white supremacist, or for endorsing barbaric practices, more power to you. I honestly didn't really have in mind the kind of cultures you listed, RealityMaster. I was thinking more along the lines of rejecting a black kid just because he spoke in ebonics or something like that, which no doubt a lot of people perceive as inferior (linguistically, and IAALinguist, it's no different than any other vernacular or dialect). Situations to that effect.
Now Jim-Callahan thinks he has me trapped as a hypocrite because while I identify with American culture (the melting pot thing is true to an extent, but we have a ton of obvious shared cultural norms), I say that we shouldn't discriminate, amd discrimination is the basis of culture. The thing here is that he's using two different definitions of discriminate. Cultures exist because the peoples of them discriminate against each other, which is to say, they note and recognize their differences from one another. There's another definition of discriminate, which cultures sometimes but do not necessarily do, which means treatment, adverse treatment in this case, without regard to individual merit or capability. It's the latter form of discrimination which I am against.
There was also an anonymous poster downthread, a borderline white supremacist, who said that WASP/white/European culture is obviously the best. Despite their flaws and mistakes, people of European descent have done so much to advance our technology (objectively true) and are so good looking (completely subjective) that they must be superior. Just that they accomplished these things does not mean they were the only ones capable of doing so. If you want a better explanation as to why Europe and its descendants have been ascendant in modern times, I suggest Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies as a starting place. There are plenty of great attributes to western culture, and the "tireless
" protestant work ethic, a significant underpinning of American culture, is one of these, or at least responsible for so much success. But this is a cultural meme, not a genetic trait.
It means that 90% of racism is culture, not skin color. And I have absolutely no problem with rejecting someone out on their ass based on their (or lack of) culture.
.
WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) is not the pinnacle of culture. Other cultures are seen as inferior only because they are different, and practiced by minorities. Are you really comfortable rejecting someone on those grounds alone? I wouldn't be so morally smug if that's the case.
Real security will only come from dealing with the root causes which create the threats. This means that we must listen to what, for example, Osama bin Laden has to say.
From Aljazeera, a portion of a transcript of one of his videos:
Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom.
If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example - Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 - may Allah have mercy on them.
No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.
But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
The rest can be found here . I'll make no claims as to whether or not he is "right" - but that's irrelevant. What matters is understanding how he came to adopt the perspective he now operates under. Those are the roots causes, and only addressing those will provide security. The current strategy of sabotaging or defeating the threat isn't nearly as effective as eliminating it.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you're only thinking of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus - the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations does not give mathematics primacy in any way. The later Wittgenstein and the whole of the Continental tradition of philosophy deal much more in questions of ontology, of "why are we here?", and so on, without any reference to mathematics.
Because then you'd only get 2 units of energy from every person (on their way in and out). With sliding blocks, you get a unit every step.
Not interfering with the economy is fine and well if you're a libertarian, but most of us aren't. So I'm not sold on the guy.
So what you're saying, is that they're not being paid appropriately for their labor input? ;)
I am speaking of the term "libertarian," not liberal. The root of both words far pre-dates the enlightenment. Moreover, left-anarchism is also in many ways a child of the englightenment.
They collude and create artificial barriers to entry. A state is actually useful for such a situation, because challengers can use the political system to disturb some of those barriers and what not. You're absolutely right that the state often favors existing players, but the state is not the whole story.
The meaning of words change, and rather than attempting to regress back to the meaning common a hundred years ago, you should deal with the terminology at hand. Nobody complains about American libertarians "stealing" their word from the left-anarchists who followed Mikhail Bakunin.
Monopolies, near-monopolies and quasi-monopolies (only a few big vendors) will arise naturally in a purely free market because mergers, buyouts and so on are faster ways of achieving economies of scale than organic growth.
Quasi-monopolies manage have enough market power to distort competition, and more to the point, enough power to coerce unequal transactions. They are a common feature in capitalism because economies of scale are easier to obtain through mergers and buyouts than through organic growth.
How are the vouchers funded?
What of the kid who cares about his education but comes from a family that doesn't? It seems to me that charity would have difficulty replacing taxation in a capitalist society because giving away money is discouraged the structure of the system; a chartible person is at an economic disadvantage compared to a less charitable peer.
Having to find and maintain (as in dealing with the logistics, not as in grades) a scholarship to attend a private school would be an additional burden on the kid above, and would make him more susceptible to the influence of parents that frowned upon school.
Marijuana.
I can't source this for you, having learned it in a linguistics class, but most cultures actually do seem to perceive colors pretty much the same. If you lay out a palette with say, 50 shades of red, almost everyone picks a color within a small range of shades as being the "true" or "pure" red. There are a whole bunch of nifty things about the way we all see colors. Search for "basic color terms" if you're interested.
Holy shit! The Christian Coalition and MoveOn.org are...working together?
False. According to 2005 rankings, Sweden had the 12th freest press in the world; the United States is 46th. US press freedom in Iraq is 147th.
Hillary Clinton does not hail from the progressive wing of the democratic party, which, though small, I think does have genuine goodwill towards the public. Hillary Clinton is just another corporate politician who does what the focus groups tell her will drive up approval. The true progressive democrats have more in common with the libertarians in regard to personal freedom than the pass-laws-to-ban-scary-things democrats.
based on the results of the student monitoring program has concluded that narcissistic personality disorder, self-loathing and abject depression are far more prevalent than ever thought. Researchers cited the prevalence of posed-for pictures and awful, contrite, self-pitying poetry on "MySpace" as evidence.
Someone already addressed the thing about the poor indeed being poorer today than they were, but here's something about social mobility. It's declining:
An article from the Economist
An article originally published in Business Week
And ancedotally, it would seem to me that the rich are screwing over the poor (or at least the non-rich), at least to an extent. I can't think of the companies, but I've heard of at least two companies that recently did pretty big layoffs (one was 3600 employees, iirc), and proceeded to give their top executives massive pay raises. It seems that those layoffs weren't so necessary, though I'd be willing to hear an explanation that put layoffs and pay raises in sync with one another.
And here's some outright bias for you: nobody should be earning what top executives do now. I don't know where I'd draw the line between a high, but legitimate salary and an exorbitant one, but for instance, it's ridiculous to have someone making 50 million a year. That salary could be defensible if trickle-down economics worked, but it doesn't. That's an exaggeration; tt can and undoubtedly does sometimes work, but there's nothing to make it inevitable. People are free to sit on enormous piles of cash that never do much but collect interest, or to spend their money outside the country. There's no guarantee that the money goes back into the economy from which it came. It also assumes a system which isn't gamed to disproportionately reward those already with money.
That said about structural factors working against the poor, they do also have self-defeating economic habits. Positing either of these as the sole cause is wrong.
I'd have to disagree on that one. First, that should be "diameter" instead of "radius" - our radio waves weren't always that powerful. Second, the Milky Way is about 100,000 ly in diameter, and about 1000 ly thick in the disk. The Earth-radio wave bubble is about 2x10^4 ly^3 in volume, compared to a volume of 7.85*10^12 ly^3 for the galaxy. Pretty insignificant.
Furthermore, 40 isn't some widely accepted upper limit on the Drake Equation. My pet calculations get me in the 1000-10000 range, which makes even our little bubble more significant.
I tend to think, though, that we're almost certainly a pretty young race, and probably pretty worthless to pay attention to.
IAALM (I'm a linguistics major) and while I haven't heard of that study (or people, for that matter) that'd be pretty extraordinary. If you're talking about names of anything, period, it's false. All human languages have proper nouns or their equivalent - words that refer to some specific thing independent of context. I wouldn't say it's not possible for them to not have names for themselves, but it definitely strikes me as unlikely for social, self-aware beings.
I'm not an engineer, but I am a pretty good writer. I attribute it to reading. Since I was a little kid, I've always read for pleasure. I don't think it matters too much what you read, as long as the sentences are well-constructed. Which is virtually every author. Most sci-fi authors can't write worth a damn, but their fundamentals are fine. People don't learn language so much as acquire it (I'm a linguistics major), and so something like reading which is semi-passive (you're not paying attention to the words and structures - just the plots) is perfect for absorbing good writing skills.
Reality Master, I completely agree with you, and any others who claimed I was a cultural relativist, except for the white supremacist downthread.
Not all cultures are equivalent, and there's a base of morality that isn't relative. You listed a bunch of cultures that are indeed poisoned.
I was sort of replying to someone's post, and sort of commenting on the thread itself. The part of the guy's post (I can't find it now) I quoted struck me as someone making pretty superficial judgements, which I thought was stupid, and morally wrong. If you reject someone for being a white supremacist, or for endorsing barbaric practices, more power to you. I honestly didn't really have in mind the kind of cultures you listed, RealityMaster. I was thinking more along the lines of rejecting a black kid just because he spoke in ebonics or something like that, which no doubt a lot of people perceive as inferior (linguistically, and IAALinguist, it's no different than any other vernacular or dialect). Situations to that effect.
Now Jim-Callahan thinks he has me trapped as a hypocrite because while I identify with American culture (the melting pot thing is true to an extent, but we have a ton of obvious shared cultural norms), I say that we shouldn't discriminate, amd discrimination is the basis of culture. The thing here is that he's using two different definitions of discriminate. Cultures exist because the peoples of them discriminate against each other, which is to say, they note and recognize their differences from one another. There's another definition of discriminate, which cultures sometimes but do not necessarily do, which means treatment, adverse treatment in this case, without regard to individual merit or capability. It's the latter form of discrimination which I am against.
There was also an anonymous poster downthread, a borderline white supremacist, who said that WASP/white/European culture is obviously the best. Despite their flaws and mistakes, people of European descent have done so much to advance our technology (objectively true) and are so good looking (completely subjective) that they must be superior. Just that they accomplished these things does not mean they were the only ones capable of doing so. If you want a better explanation as to why Europe and its descendants have been ascendant in modern times, I suggest Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies as a starting place. There are plenty of great attributes to western culture, and the "tireless " protestant work ethic, a significant underpinning of American culture, is one of these, or at least responsible for so much success. But this is a cultural meme, not a genetic trait.
I just made another post, so in the hope that you'll see one or the other: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98 FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm