It looks like you are not living in a real world, but in a fictional reality that exists only in your mind.
But if you look around you, you might realise that essentially ALL works created in the past 100 years or so are copyrighted. Sure, we can exempt the few GFDL and CC works, but how many influencial works are among them? Several, but not many. There are also political speeches and press-releases which aren't copyrightable. And some government reports. And some factual data sheets. But the rest, the overwhelming majority of recent works are copyrighted. Are you saying that there are no influencial works among them? That everything worth mentioning are public domain works produced 100+ years ago?
That is clearly nonsense. Our thinking is shaped by copyrighted works and our inability to share and reuse them freely is clearly a form of thought control. No matter how much faulty logic you use and ridiculous claims make, it doesn't change this simple fact.
You really should read and re-read what dada21 and others like him write. You might actually get it.
First of all, copyright does NOT control your thoughts and actions. By copyrighting something, I do NOT control you. This is simply wrong. You aren't looking deep enough. When a work is popular, it is entering the public mind, it becomes the common cultural heritage, it shapes the way people think, it changes their language, their perception of the world, etc. If that work is copyrighted, that essentially means that a corporation has control over a significant part of your mind.
Copyright is all about control. The recepient has to relinquish almost all freedom related to the creative work being consumed. The copyright owner controls pretty much every related action of the reader/viewer/listener.
The fact that I am able to choose NOT to obtain the content (your implication that I can obtain the content elsewhere is, of course, 100% wrong if we are talking about specific content and if all content was interchangeable, there would be zero point in having copyright) doesn't mean there is no control once I decide to obtain it.
You are either a victim of brainwashing or simply have poor understanding of logic. Either way, your perpetration of myths and obviously wrong ideas about copyright is not good.
In these old posts we spoke about calculating the "random song that I would like".
Incidentally, a few days after having this discussion I accidentally stumbled upon a very interesting project - Music Genome Project and the Internet radio based on that database that streamed random music similar to what you vote up.
It is amazing. I didn't expect this functionality to already exist in some form. Looks like the opening of the media is on schedule.:)
With zero distribution costs consumption of and payment for the media are bound to separate.
I did study philosophy and the above is not true. Ethics is essentially interchangeable with morals, though it does also mean the field of study and it can be (but isn't necessary) specific to a group. Google for "ethics vs. morals", there are many discussions of this.
In everyday language the word unethical means "wrong", not "violating a particular code of ethics". In the BBC article we have the words:
"South Korea introduced a bioethics law in January."
"However, opponents argue that creating and experimenting with human embryos is unethical."
"Being too focused on scientific development, I may not have seen all the ethical issues related to my research"
"The excellent research carried out by Hwang and his team must continue, but in a way that considers the ethics in an appropriate way"
The implication is that ethics were violated and not just professional code of conduct. This is an incorrect implication and the BBC "journalist" (though I doubt he is aware of the complexity of this issue, being just another online scribbler) is using the "guilt by implication" fallacy.
Faster internet connections solve the problem yes, but in many places game data counts are going up much faster than internet connections.
Game data size is going up almost precisely at the speed at which disk capacity goes up.:) With the holographic disks already available the size will continue to increase fast. All this doesn't mean Steam will fail, it just means online distribution is not read to overtake physical media distribution yet.
He is forced to lie because of the artificial and arbitrary barriers that the public builds to prevent scientists from doing research.
He should be commended for paying for eggs from his own pocket, his assistants should be commended for donating their eggs. These people are doing everything they can to move science forward.
It is confusing to call this an ethical problem, because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with ethics, but only with so-called "professional ethics".
There is nothing whatsoever ethically wrong with using eggs from your teammates. But it does violate some code of conduct that people somewhere made up. This is a technical mistake that absolutely should not make man ashamed.
The guy who stirred everything and made the noise about this issue (Gerald Schatten) is scum and a moron. It is he who should resign and kill himself, not professor Woo-suk.
Technologies rarely develop backwards, they usually improve, so you are correct here.
I expect P2P 2.0 to be even more network-transparent than existing clients like Shareaza. That could lead to separation of networking code into separate plugin dlls, so that you can use your favourite interface with all systems and you could even add P2P functionality to other software, e.g. a P2P plugin for Winamp.
It would also have some form of P2P library (link portal) creation. You already can create "collections" of links in some clients, but this idea could be developed much further. If someone can make a large distributed database of media using some unique identifiers like AISN, IDSN or something better that finding what you want can be made even easier.
Ideally this should be as simple as: 1) In Winamp: click "listen to random song that I would like". 2) Download automatically (stream?), listen, find that you like it. 3) Download all songs from this album (or by this artist). 4) Send a payment of the amount you choose directly to the artist.
Or 1) Click on a "media" link on the Web (a media link should neither link to a specific location like a http:/// link, nor to a specific file, like ed2k://, but to a particular work, e.g. episode 3 of the film with AISN "XXXX", possibly even including the time/page range inside the work). 2) Have the P2P module automatically find trusted files, pick the optimal one automatically or ask you (do you want lower-quality version that you can immediately stream or a full-quality version with Dolby TrueSpace sound?). 3) Have the media downloaded and displayed automatically.
And to ensure the quality of the experience the network management should be moved to the next stage. Traffic management, redundancy, geographical distribution etc. should be managed in a smarter way.
There was recently a study of P2P traffic worldwide. I don't recall the source, but it found that BT and ed2k were significantly more popular than FT. In Europe ed2k was the king, in the USA BT ruled and Asia had a mix of technologies, including (I may be wrong here) WinMX and some other unusual stuff.
Personally I find my ed2k experience quite solid - the ed2k links were perfect for universal file identification and the system already has Kademlia in place for serverless searching.
This doesn't sound like a good idea, really... I am 25, I have a 140+ IQ, I am well-adjusted, have good social skills, extremely smart, successful, etc. My mother taught me to read when I was 3 years old, I went to school at 5. I was always the brightest kid in the class, even when I entered a specal school for gifted kids in 8th grade. I am hardly the stereotypical dumb kid that should lose in our darwinian game.
And yet, I sticked needles into an electric socket, I burned paper on a stove (holding it in my hand), I once stuck a small part of a constructor in my nostril (my "friend" in kindergarden talked me into it, and I had to be taken to hospital) and probably did some other dumb stuff, while "exploring the world".:) Granted, I mostly stopped doing dangerous things around 5 years or so, but still.
Raising kids is difficult and some kids are especially tricky. And while I agree that in some cases parents should be blamed, I don't think this is one of them. If you want to start a Sue The Parents foundation, I suggest you start with suing them for infanticide, physical and mental abuse and not cultivating love for learning in them.
Coffee can be hotter than boiling water. All it requires is for McDonalds to start selling it in sealed containers under pressure. Just imagine it - you make a order in a drive-through, get it, open the coffee container and experience the wonderfully tasty pressurized 500-degrees Celsium coffee.
People may not want hot coffee, because it is impossible to drink boiling water. Every customer who buys the coffee served at that temperature has to wait for it to cool down, otherwise the insides of the mouth would be burned and they would have to go to a hospital. This isn't a matter of taste, this is a matter of boiling water causing burns. If you don't believe me, please go ahead and drink some 90-degree (that's Celsius) water. Please have someone nearby to call 911 (you may not be able to say anything afterwards) and please report back to us.
With all due respect, you seem to be letting your dislike of economic markets prevent you from seeing the metaphore. You like science, you don't like free markets, so they can't be similar. Good point, sorry and thanks for politely noting this. OK, let me reconsider the idea of science as free markets. I certainly agree that it has some of the qualities - the key is whether these qualities are important in the context we first started talking about science. Let me check the history now... OK, I reread it. I don't want to look stubborn, so let me repeat that 1) I am trying very hard not to be ideologically biased here and 2) I do admit that science shares some characteristics of a free market.
But... You say: "The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy - ideas (supply) compete for a limited number of minds (demand) - just don't make it more than a metaphore." But the idea of a market is not a competition between supply and demand, it's the idea of price-mediated equilibrium between them. Competition is not equal free markets. Nature and natural selection are not markets. Sport is not a market. Science has competition between ideas, but it makes it more like evolution than like a market.
Googling for "market ideas science", I didn't find many references (example) and so I question whether "market of ideas" is actually a common metaphore for science.
But thanks for making me reconsider this. If you have some arguments for why it makes a good metaphore, I'd be interested to hear them.
So pre-communism does well if it can 2) maintain power and 1) return a profit for investors. That sounds just like your description of the "capitalist elite"!
The similarity is superficial. This is just basic economics - you need to have a surplus, you need to spend some of it on capital goods and you need a functioning economic system. This isn't specific to either communism or capitalism.
By the mid-70s, some areas weren't producing enough food on their collective farms to feed the farmers themselves. The government started allowing people to grow food on personal plots and let the farmers trade or sell the excess above their quotas, as part of "New Communism". All of the sudden, they have excess food production. There is no "all of a sudden", when we are talking about an economy of 1 billion people. By no means the reduction in hunger (not elimination - China and India share the dubious honor of having the most malnourished people in the world, as of 2005) was caused by allowing private farms. The Chinese government has started many different programs to improve food production, most of them unrelated to small-scale individual production. Even if we just apply some common sense - how can individual farming magically be much more efficient than capital-intensive organised farming? This is simply impossible, the invisible hands can't perform miracles.
Similar things apparently happened in Russia, where small, personal gardens produced more food than large, collective farms. This statement betrays an almost total lack of factual knowledge on your side, sorry. The production on individual farmland in Soviet Union was, let me check... About 25% of all food production. But please note that individual farmlands were integrated into the system of collective farms. The peasants used the equipment, the supplies, the fertilizer, fuel, services of mechanics and other specialists, etc. that belonged to the collective farms. Small scale "individual" production was used for products were it was relatively efficient and where there was a synergetic effect between the individual work and the collective farm. For example, about 40% of potatoes were produced on individual farms, but only 16% of milk, 20% of eggs, 16% of meat, ~0% of grain. It is completely nonsensical to claim that individual farmland was more efficient than large collective farms, they were part of one whole, not indepen
Look, after reading all the hype for Serenity on Slashdot for so many years, I went to see it. And the last thing I want now is a Firefly DVD. I'd rather take a memory wipe.
Serenity is a crappy B-movie that has nothing to do with space or sciene. It is retarded beyond belief, with it's fake physically impossible ion-clouds taken straight out of PC space-sims, with no communications delay and with plotholes the size of Jupiter orbit. Why would anyone choose not to send the very important video over the comlink and physically fly on a space ship, while arranging that over videoconference, is beyond my comprehension.
It is also profoundly anti-science, sending a message that scientists are not to be trusted and that scientific research doesn't usually involve a preliminary experiement on rats or a small clinical study before unleashing a mind-controlling chemical on the whole planet with the side effects including turning 90% of people into plants and 10% into flesh-eating cannibals.
Serenity is crap for escapist luddite geeks (and I use geeks in its original meaning). Anyone who finds it great needs to see a shrink.
And not the old outdated Kubrick's one, but the new one. BBC has made a great docudrama on manned exploration of Solar System. 5 astronauts set on a scientifically correct journey around the Solar System, starting with a brief landing on Venus, then going for a 3-week stay on Mars and then to the outer planets. As of today this is undoubdly the best movie about space with the possible exception of Contact. Yes, others have more action, better directing or have been more influential in the past, but overall Space Odyssey wins.
Can you give me another source than the "100 questions and answers"? Anything pulled from that book hardly qualifies as statistics. Take, for instance, the sentence you quoted: " According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom". Five times as much -- of what? Translated titles, or books printed? I am afraid I can't. Finding good statistics on Soviet Union online is difficult and getting my ass to a large library would take too much time. I concede that the authors may have picked a more flattering indicator, but I don't think they needed to lie about that.
I didn't say it was exotic. It was simply perceived as such, because the number of titles was very small, especially compared to the present situation. 27% compared to 45% is not small.
It was one of the quirks of the situation -- if you're locked in, everything that comes from the outside world seems good to you. This seems true. The illusion of greener grass on the other side of the road.
This doesn't make it OK to ban them. Every decision is a compromise. If there are social and political reasons to ban a book (because the author wrongly attacks the Soviet system) AND the book sucks, then the decision to ban the book is more justified than banning 1984 (which actually wasn't about the Soviet Union).
Examples, please? (I find my knowledge lacking in this area) Just click randomly on the people in that list. It's written right there. It looks like most of the guys there were dissidents, whose books were not published because they were just attacks on the Soviet system. I mean, I can certainly understand why a book titled "KGB revealed" or something (it's in that list) would not be allowed in the USSR.
Your first point is impossible to argue because there aren't, to my knowledge, any reliable statistics, as officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, meaning that there was no reason to keep official records of it. There were official laws about what kind of books can't be brought into Soviet Union. These included pornographic books, books that promoted hate and violence and books that attacked Soviet order. See this search, for example. Of course, the question of whether a book meets these criteria is never easy. The lists of samizdat literature (like the one you provided) can also serve as a good indicator, as well as the books published after the 1990. To this day I am not aware of a significant number of books that were prohibited in the Soviet Union. Clearly, if there were many of them, we would know it by now.
The fact that censorship is widespread is extremely relevant. We can't blame Soviet Union for what is common practice (e.g. Canada, the US, the UK, France and many other "democratic" countries have lists of "prohibited items").
The third point is actually a supporting point for points 4 and 5 - yes, indeed, the top 100 classic books are probably published in every country.
As for 4th and 5th points, please take your time, I'd be interested to hear what you think about them.
As fascinating as that culture is to me, the ends don't justify the means. In this world the ends always justify the means. The correct interpretation of this saying is that a cost-benefit analysis is usually required, you can't outright justify any bad means with a positive end.
It is fundamentally wrong to say "X is wrong, because X required limiting freedom Y". You always need to consider the benefits and the costs.
But the reason why they had such an attitude towards Western authors was because everything Western was exotic.
Well, books of foreign authors certainly weren't exotic where I lived. The statistics show that 77,500 foreign titles were published with the total number of copies 2 billion 400 millions (as of 1980). According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom, 2 times as much as Japan, US and France.
I don't see how the numbers that you gave showed that Western literature was exotic. Estonia was a part of the Soviet Union, not a part of the United States. Of course, it published more books of Russian authors.
So while some people may have preferred books of Western authors, because they were Western, that was their personal problem and certainly didn't indicate that those books were "exotic". Also, I can't see how that is a fault of the Soviet Union. And while we are on the subject of Estonia, I don't think in any other countries minorities were treated as well in literary respect as in Soviet Union. In no other country does the government care as much about trasnlating books into minority languages and supporting authors of minority nationalities. Just thought I'd mention it.
No, I don't. I only have at hand this list of authors, most of them Russian, who were "nepodcenzurnye" at some point or to some extent. That's a very small list, especially considering that most of these aren't known as authors, but simply as dissidents (and it appears that the literary quality of works of most authors was questionable), that many of them actively worked against the Soviet Union and the few decent authors in that list usually had only some of their works censored. So if this list is any indication, it demonstrates that censorship didn't have a noticeable negative effect on availability of good books.
Well, I don't think it's so much about me not willing to participate but about us two quite clearly having different ideas of what the Soviet Union was. While this is certainly true, I am a big fan of basing my worldview on facts. I readily admit that some of the prohibited books were good and would have been valuable. But my point is that the number of prohibited books were relatively small, that the practice of banning books is common in most countries and that overall the number of great books published in Soviet Union in all languages was very large, that people read a lot and that the government supported reading by any means possible. Most importantly, the books were cheap (that's why there were shortages), so they were accessible to everyone, not just the relatively rich.
This isn't really a matter of opinion, that's a matter of facts. I am not going to argue against the facts. Yes, Orwell's and Bulgakov's books are good, but I don't see how not publishing them was such a tragedy.
The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy Yes, of course, but it's a wrong one. Amazon isafreemarketofideas, science is not.
The path of altering human nature is quite different, and even if it is possible, I just don't see the point. If tech will get us there no matter what, why the community ownership?
First, because 80 years ago we weren't certain that the technology-only path would work. Second, because improving lifes of people today is also important. And third, because we need equality and social emphasis on human development before we can feel safe about opening the Pandora box.
Since collective ownership is not required in this type of labor-free society (people would almost never be required to interact) I can't even call it communism. That wouldn't be communism, you are right. But the system before that might be. It makes sense that humans will first become economically self-sufficient and only some time after that the society will cease to exist. In between voluntary communist cooperation makes more sense than free markets.
China, though, is doing much better now that they've allowed some private ownership. China is doing well because 1) they have influx of foreign investment and 2) the communist party kept political control. The private ownership was only a means to getting the investment. In today's world getting investment for a socialist economy is a hard sell, but this isn't related to the efficiency of the system, just to preferences of the political elite. For example, Belarus has the most successful economy of all former republics (excluding the Baltic states that thrived on Western handouts and transit of oil and goods plundered in Russia), but there aren't many foreign investments wanting to invest there. Actually, there aren't many investors wanting to put money in Russia either, but that's a different story. Anyway, explaining Chinese success with allowing private ownership is not fully warranted. Capital expenditure helps regardless of the economic system.
And I really do believe that free markets will get us to the posthuman stage faster than any artificial system. The progress mostly depends on the amount of basic and applied research funding. That isn't related to free markets at all. Soviet Union was as advanced scientifically and technologically as the US. Scientists and engineers don't care about the economic system, they just want to get paid and have necessary equipment bought.
And the biggest problem is not getting fast to the posthuman stage, it's getting there in good shape. You don't want to go into posthumanity when the rules are set by multinational corporations and imperialist politicians and when large fractions of population are denied economic and other opportunities.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any data at hand. But I have a nagging suspicion that neither do you. Your nagging suspicion is wrong. Although I certainly can't find the percentage of books that were not read, the data on the number of books printed is easily available. It is indeed hard to find comparable statistics. But studies today show that Russians spend about 7.1 hours weekly reading, compared with 6.5 hours world average and 5.7 hours in the US. (NOP World, link). It wouldn't be difficult to adjust that 7.1 hours figure for the changes outlined below. That's not hard evidence (difficult to find statistics for 1980s online, especially for the Soviet Union), but imho it's telling enough.
Charts. 3-27 - books and booklets published (mln), 3-28 - circulation of magazines, 3-29 - circulation of magazines in Tatar language, 3-30 - films produced, 3-31 - theatre visits.
I said that people bought them because they were Western. This is ridiculous. May be in Estonia, among some crazy nationalists, but normal people enjoyed reading good literature regardless of the nationality of the author.
I'd say that "a few good books..." is an understatement at best I'd say you don't know what you are talking about. There were laws and it's common for all countries (e.g. Canada to have lists of prohibited works. The criteria are similar - I don't see why hate literature is worse than anti-soviet literature. Anyway, you don't seem to have any evidence that the number of books was significant.
The brilliance of your rebuttal completely overwhelmed me. Clearly, my intellect is no match to your infinite wisdom. Yes. This is why I have little to say to you. We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate.
Tons of them. Spiderman 1 (bad guy is even rich, too), War of the Worlds, John Q (again, the rich are the bad guys), Get Rich or Die Tryin', North Country. The "hard working American" vs "the rich and powerful" is the biggest cliche in Hollywood.
So it seems that the answer to the first question is none.:) BTW, Spiderman has a student as a main character (I don't recall if his father was working class). War of the Worlds does have a working class character, yes. Don't know about other films. It is a cliche, but virtually never the job is portrayed positively. My point wasn't that there are no workers at all, but that their job is either ignored or shown like in 8 Mile.
Wow, do you ever have that backward. Science is free inquiry, and all of its results are tenative, thats why falsifiability is part of any scientific theory. No, it's you who have it backward. Opinions are not falsifiabile! Science is not a free market, because the criteria are not supply and demand, but agreement with experiments. Can you imagine Microsoft saying "Yes, we agree that MacOS is a superior product, we will stop making Windows now"? But that's exactly how it works with science.:)
I have nothing against someone saying "Look, you all have been wrong all the time, but I figured everything out, check out my proof". But that's not what opinions are about. Opinions are about saying "Evolution is just your opinion - I disagree" or "Solution chemistry is just your opinion - I think homeopathy works". Please try to understand this distinction. I am not against dissent, but I am against the right to uninformed opinions. I am not about questioning the conventional wisdom, I am against saying that wisdom doesn't matter, every moron has a right to an opinion.
If you're saying communism is the "One True Way", then it's a religious position, not a scientific one, and I won't disagree too strongly. "Disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it" is clearly stating "I know the truth, don't question me". Not at all and I never meant it. Once you find out that Drug X works and FDA agrees, it makes sense to start giving it to the sick. If we come upon evidence that it's dangerous, it makes sense to revise our confidence and investigate. Same with political systems. Once we find out that system X works and is good, it makes sense to switch to that system. If we see evidence that the system no longer works very well, it makes sense to reevaluate. Obviously, it's not as easy to switch political systems as it is to prescribe a new drug, but you should see my point.
If we can have a currently generally accepted theory in science, why no in political science? Well, the answer is because politics is a vehicle for the ruling class to promote their interests, but that doesn't mean the theory that they offer (liberalism, free markets, capitalism) is valid.
So you're at war with human nature, good luck with that. Well, there is no such thing as "human nature", there are only certain traits. Some of them are good, some are not so good. Upbringing in all societies exists to suppress some of the traits (e.g. propensity to violent actions). The war on so called "human nature" has been going on since antiquity and so far we've made huge progress.
According to you, if a capitalistic society reduces all prices to zero (or close to it), it is no longer capitalist. I'd say that if a communistic scociety reduces the amount of work to zero (or to only fun work), is to no longer communist. If technology alone can get us to communism, then you aren't dealing with an economic or political theory, but more of a transhumanist one. Completely wrong. If you read Marx (as well as some of the later marxists), you would realise that communism is actually a way to liberate man from labor. Work leads to alienation and communism is supposed to free the man from it. There won't be work, there will only be creative s
Did some of the Soviet people buy classics just to have them on their shelves? Yes, of course. Did most of them buy them to read them? Yes, indeed. Did most of them read classics? Yes, they certainly did.
I don't see your argument. Do you have any data contradicting what I said or do you think that unrelated anecdotes (which, I suspect didn't even happen in Soviet Union, as I don't remember books being sold with uncut pages there) are enough? I saw an Italian with bad teeth. Therefore all Italians must be dirty animals without the idea of personal hygiene. Can you see why such "arguments" are invalid?
Which Western authors are you talking about? In my recollection only the best authors had their books translated and published in the Soviet Union. I certainly don't remember seeing all the crap that flooded bookstands now.
yet the ones that somehow disagreed with the official ideology were hidden away in special depositories. You lack of coherent arguments is typical. Yes, a small number of works were hidden away. So what? United States and Canada have lists of prohibited books too. Today. That a few good books were not available is more than compensated by the thousands of great books that were. You can't read ALL books anyway.
because educated people are much easier to govern than uneducated masses What you are saying is ridiculous.
The system was an egalitarian one only in theory. In practice, there was an elite. There were "elite" schools, schools that were considered better than others; not everyone was admitted to these schools. I graduated from the best school in Leningrad. Everyone was admitted there if they passed the entrance exams. Your own achievements were the only factor. I also studied in an ordinary school before that and found it perfectly adequate. Elite schools in the Soviet Union had nothing in common with the schools for the elite in the West.
A lot of people would rather play most of the time, and not work at all.
This is a social question - what view does society promulgate. In Russia today 56% of people (2001 FOM poll) think that all able-bodied people must work. In Soviet time the percentage was surely much higher. If you raise the kids believing that labor is noble, if you promote it through movies, newspapers, schools, etc., and if you continuously improve working conditions and make work more interesting, then people will think of labor much better.
How many Hollywood films can you name that glorify industrial workers (the so called "hard-working Americans")? How many films where worker is a main character? Of course American people want to be rock stars, NBA players or retired millionnaires...
What about the goals they don't share? That's fine. But the defining factor is whether the goals you share are social or anti-social. It's when I hear "I'd like to be rich and not work" or "I am thinking about my own income, not about other people" that I see a problem.
Relativism is fashionable in Western democracies ("everyone is entitled to his opinion"), but I share Lenin's outlook on political epistemology - disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it. I am actually against "the free market of ideas"... Science is not a free market, quakery and religious cults are. Truth is generally not relative and opinions are only good as temporary hypothesis, not as something to cling to forever.
You don't have kids, or you'd know "Mine!" is up there with "No!" on the list of annoying words kids say. Yes, I know that. But a good mentor/teacher would teach the kids to behave socially. To share the toys, to play together, to give to others... I remember a tradition from my childhood of bringing candies on your birthday to give to everyone. A monkey (kid) is selfish, but education and upbringing can shape that monkey into a human being.
Exactly! This was what I was talking about earlier. You have to disallow something in order to banish free markets. Temporarily - yes. To have a just society with equality today you need state intervention. It can often be done at the lower local levels, it can also be done in a traditional way of peasant communes, but there needs to be some pressure.
But the other path is obviously to remove the shortage. Once you get digital, material shortage disappears (though a shortage of original content may still remain) and you kill markets. Of course, that doesn't mean disappearance of all competition, but that competition is not market in nature. What that means is that you eliminate the direct connection between demand and your satisfaction. You can write a great song even if only 100 people listen to it. You don't have to "pander to the masses", because your income from that song is exactly 0 in either case.:) You can still be an "attention whore" and attempt to create the most popular blog, but you don't have to.
Producers are not forced to follow what the customers tell them. And customers aren't forced to consume what the producers like to make. This is modern harmony! Obviously, this only works if there is large enough pool of voluntarily created products and if there are no manufacturing/distribution costs. This is already the case with the Internet. This will be the case with mature nanotechnology and AI.
With help of these two technologies it will be easy to eliminate material shortages. As an added benefit they would destroy capitalists' grasp on the means of production. The result would essentially be communism - people do what they aspire to and get everything they need. The market forces would be eliminated, because 1) you can't compete with free and 2) you can't compete with people who can copy your products for free.
Now we get to the one exception - if culture can act as the surrogate, and banish one of your prerequisites without using state power, th
I am sorry, I don't have a link handy, but there was recently an article about a study that compared essays written by modern students and students 20+ (or 40) years ago. The conclusion was that quality has increase, students now use larger vocabularies, have better grasp of complex grammatical constructions, etc. It was either done in the UK or in the US (don't remember).
There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.
This is not true. In Soviet Union the arts where a matter for everyone. All works of art were for everyone. Museums, theatres, classical music, classical literature, all of that was intended for everyone, to farmers, workers, engineers, scientists, other artists. It was a matter of state interests to improve first the literacy, then education and cultural level of all people. And it worked. Of course, with the collapse of the socialism publishers decided to get some quick profits, turned to printing pulp, people became interested to check it out, they initially liked it, because it didn't require as much thinking, then publishers stopped printing classics and good modern books and people didn't have a choice, but had to read the pulp. Finally, some demand emerged again for the classics, but now the print runs are small, the prices are high and the rich tend to buy good books, while the poor read low-quality dreck.
And although the Soviet Union clearly lead in the quest for literacy and high culture for everyone, other countries tried to follow. Read The Classics in the Slums, an article about British workers in late 19th century - early 20th century. They had a huge interest in reading, art and learning and a lot of them (a majority?) were interested in classical literature (Greek tragedies, Shakespear, poetry), classical music and education. For them it was a matter of personal development and a break from the monotony of the jobs. Not everyone could easily accept that because of class prejudice - "They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn't know that you read. Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space. . . . You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. "Margaret's a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know."" It's today that people actually sit and gaze into space. It's called TV.
A UK survey of pupils (1940) in a below average group showed that 62% of boys and 84% of girls had read some poetry, their favorites including Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, 67% of girls and 31% of boys had read plays and students averaged six or seven books per month (this excludes texts required in schools).
A USA study of adults ("Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America", 2002) showed that 43% of American adults had not read any books at all (other than those required for work or school), only 12.1% had read any poetry and only 3.6% had read any plays.
Another interesting article is As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor - On the Uses of a Liberal Education, an amazing experiement in teaching humanities to poor people. 50% graduated from the course and liberal education DID help poor people to improve their lives. It not only increased students' self-esteem, but also their abilities to divine and solve problems. They enrolled in colleges, got jobs, became politically active.
Read something like Against School to get some understanding on why Western school is so bad. It is by design, the system goes back to German schools and was intended to sustain the difference between the classes. The children of the elite got classical education, while the masses got dumbed down education. It is sometimes called the "two corridors model".
This is another area, where Soviet system shined. There was only one system of education, starting with the kindergarden and ending with post-graduate studies. A worker could (and was encouraged
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like you are not living in a real world, but in a fictional reality that exists only in your mind.
But if you look around you, you might realise that essentially ALL works created in the past 100 years or so are copyrighted. Sure, we can exempt the few GFDL and CC works, but how many influencial works are among them? Several, but not many. There are also political speeches and press-releases which aren't copyrightable. And some government reports. And some factual data sheets. But the rest, the overwhelming majority of recent works are copyrighted. Are you saying that there are no influencial works among them? That everything worth mentioning are public domain works produced 100+ years ago?
That is clearly nonsense. Our thinking is shaped by copyrighted works and our inability to share and reuse them freely is clearly a form of thought control. No matter how much faulty logic you use and ridiculous claims make, it doesn't change this simple fact.
You really should read and re-read what dada21 and others like him write. You might actually get it.
First of all, copyright does NOT control your thoughts and actions. By copyrighting something, I do NOT control you.
This is simply wrong. You aren't looking deep enough. When a work is popular, it is entering the public mind, it becomes the common cultural heritage, it shapes the way people think, it changes their language, their perception of the world, etc. If that work is copyrighted, that essentially means that a corporation has control over a significant part of your mind.
Copyright is all about control. The recepient has to relinquish almost all freedom related to the creative work being consumed. The copyright owner controls pretty much every related action of the reader/viewer/listener.
The fact that I am able to choose NOT to obtain the content (your implication that I can obtain the content elsewhere is, of course, 100% wrong if we are talking about specific content and if all content was interchangeable, there would be zero point in having copyright) doesn't mean there is no control once I decide to obtain it.
You are either a victim of brainwashing or simply have poor understanding of logic. Either way, your perpetration of myths and obviously wrong ideas about copyright is not good.
In these old posts we spoke about calculating the "random song that I would like".
:)
Incidentally, a few days after having this discussion I accidentally stumbled upon a very interesting project - Music Genome Project and the Internet radio based on that database that streamed random music similar to what you vote up.
It is amazing. I didn't expect this functionality to already exist in some form. Looks like the opening of the media is on schedule.
With zero distribution costs consumption of and payment for the media are bound to separate.
In everyday language the word unethical means "wrong", not "violating a particular code of ethics". In the BBC article we have the words:
The implication is that ethics were violated and not just professional code of conduct. This is an incorrect implication and the BBC "journalist" (though I doubt he is aware of the complexity of this issue, being just another online scribbler) is using the "guilt by implication" fallacy.
Hope this clears things up.
Faster internet connections solve the problem yes, but in many places game data counts are going up much faster than internet connections.
:) With the holographic disks already available the size will continue to increase fast. All this doesn't mean Steam will fail, it just means online distribution is not read to overtake physical media distribution yet.
Game data size is going up almost precisely at the speed at which disk capacity goes up.
He is forced to lie because of the artificial and arbitrary barriers that the public builds to prevent scientists from doing research.
He should be commended for paying for eggs from his own pocket, his assistants should be commended for donating their eggs. These people are doing everything they can to move science forward.
And yet the fucking society blames them.
It is confusing to call this an ethical problem, because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with ethics, but only with so-called "professional ethics".
There is nothing whatsoever ethically wrong with using eggs from your teammates. But it does violate some code of conduct that people somewhere made up. This is a technical mistake that absolutely should not make man ashamed.
The guy who stirred everything and made the noise about this issue (Gerald Schatten) is scum and a moron. It is he who should resign and kill himself, not professor Woo-suk.
Technologies rarely develop backwards, they usually improve, so you are correct here.
I expect P2P 2.0 to be even more network-transparent than existing clients like Shareaza. That could lead to separation of networking code into separate plugin dlls, so that you can use your favourite interface with all systems and you could even add P2P functionality to other software, e.g. a P2P plugin for Winamp.
It would also have some form of P2P library (link portal) creation. You already can create "collections" of links in some clients, but this idea could be developed much further. If someone can make a large distributed database of media using some unique identifiers like AISN, IDSN or something better that finding what you want can be made even easier.
Ideally this should be as simple as:
1) In Winamp: click "listen to random song that I would like".
2) Download automatically (stream?), listen, find that you like it.
3) Download all songs from this album (or by this artist).
4) Send a payment of the amount you choose directly to the artist.
Or
1) Click on a "media" link on the Web (a media link should neither link to a specific location like a http:/// link, nor to a specific file, like ed2k://, but to a particular work, e.g. episode 3 of the film with AISN "XXXX", possibly even including the time/page range inside the work).
2) Have the P2P module automatically find trusted files, pick the optimal one automatically or ask you (do you want lower-quality version that you can immediately stream or a full-quality version with Dolby TrueSpace sound?).
3) Have the media downloaded and displayed automatically.
And to ensure the quality of the experience the network management should be moved to the next stage. Traffic management, redundancy, geographical distribution etc. should be managed in a smarter way.
There was recently a study of P2P traffic worldwide. I don't recall the source, but it found that BT and ed2k were significantly more popular than FT. In Europe ed2k was the king, in the USA BT ruled and Asia had a mix of technologies, including (I may be wrong here) WinMX and some other unusual stuff.
Personally I find my ed2k experience quite solid - the ed2k links were perfect for universal file identification and the system already has Kademlia in place for serverless searching.
This doesn't sound like a good idea, really... I am 25, I have a 140+ IQ, I am well-adjusted, have good social skills, extremely smart, successful, etc. My mother taught me to read when I was 3 years old, I went to school at 5. I was always the brightest kid in the class, even when I entered a specal school for gifted kids in 8th grade. I am hardly the stereotypical dumb kid that should lose in our darwinian game.
:) Granted, I mostly stopped doing dangerous things around 5 years or so, but still.
And yet, I sticked needles into an electric socket, I burned paper on a stove (holding it in my hand), I once stuck a small part of a constructor in my nostril (my "friend" in kindergarden talked me into it, and I had to be taken to hospital) and probably did some other dumb stuff, while "exploring the world".
Raising kids is difficult and some kids are especially tricky. And while I agree that in some cases parents should be blamed, I don't think this is one of them. If you want to start a Sue The Parents foundation, I suggest you start with suing them for infanticide, physical and mental abuse and not cultivating love for learning in them.
Coffee can be hotter than boiling water. All it requires is for McDonalds to start selling it in sealed containers under pressure. Just imagine it - you make a order in a drive-through, get it, open the coffee container and experience the wonderfully tasty pressurized 500-degrees Celsium coffee.
People may not want hot coffee, because it is impossible to drink boiling water. Every customer who buys the coffee served at that temperature has to wait for it to cool down, otherwise the insides of the mouth would be burned and they would have to go to a hospital. This isn't a matter of taste, this is a matter of boiling water causing burns. If you don't believe me, please go ahead and drink some 90-degree (that's Celsius) water. Please have someone nearby to call 911 (you may not be able to say anything afterwards) and please report back to us.
Well, I just tried a search for my home city and this is the first result: http://photos.adultfriendfinder.com/photo-ffadult- r40-s2-31677125_39194.15147514.gallery.gif :) But other than that the photos seem genuine. Don't overestimate the deception.
With all due respect, you seem to be letting your dislike of economic markets prevent you from seeing the metaphore. You like science, you don't like free markets, so they can't be similar.
Good point, sorry and thanks for politely noting this. OK, let me reconsider the idea of science as free markets. I certainly agree that it has some of the qualities - the key is whether these qualities are important in the context we first started talking about science. Let me check the history now... OK, I reread it. I don't want to look stubborn, so let me repeat that 1) I am trying very hard not to be ideologically biased here and 2) I do admit that science shares some characteristics of a free market.
But... You say: "The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy - ideas (supply) compete for a limited number of minds (demand) - just don't make it more than a metaphore." But the idea of a market is not a competition between supply and demand, it's the idea of price-mediated equilibrium between them. Competition is not equal free markets. Nature and natural selection are not markets. Sport is not a market. Science has competition between ideas, but it makes it more like evolution than like a market.
Googling for "market ideas science", I didn't find many references (example) and so I question whether "market of ideas" is actually a common metaphore for science.
But thanks for making me reconsider this. If you have some arguments for why it makes a good metaphore, I'd be interested to hear them.
So pre-communism does well if it can 2) maintain power and 1) return a profit for investors. That sounds just like your description of the "capitalist elite"!
The similarity is superficial. This is just basic economics - you need to have a surplus, you need to spend some of it on capital goods and you need a functioning economic system. This isn't specific to either communism or capitalism.
By the mid-70s, some areas weren't producing enough food on their collective farms to feed the farmers themselves. The government started allowing people to grow food on personal plots and let the farmers trade or sell the excess above their quotas, as part of "New Communism". All of the sudden, they have excess food production.
There is no "all of a sudden", when we are talking about an economy of 1 billion people. By no means the reduction in hunger (not elimination - China and India share the dubious honor of having the most malnourished people in the world, as of 2005) was caused by allowing private farms. The Chinese government has started many different programs to improve food production, most of them unrelated to small-scale individual production. Even if we just apply some common sense - how can individual farming magically be much more efficient than capital-intensive organised farming? This is simply impossible, the invisible hands can't perform miracles.
Similar things apparently happened in Russia, where small, personal gardens produced more food than large, collective farms.
This statement betrays an almost total lack of factual knowledge on your side, sorry. The production on individual farmland in Soviet Union was, let me check... About 25% of all food production. But please note that individual farmlands were integrated into the system of collective farms. The peasants used the equipment, the supplies, the fertilizer, fuel, services of mechanics and other specialists, etc. that belonged to the collective farms. Small scale "individual" production was used for products were it was relatively efficient and where there was a synergetic effect between the individual work and the collective farm. For example, about 40% of potatoes were produced on individual farms, but only 16% of milk, 20% of eggs, 16% of meat, ~0% of grain. It is completely nonsensical to claim that individual farmland was more efficient than large collective farms, they were part of one whole, not indepen
Look, after reading all the hype for Serenity on Slashdot for so many years, I went to see it. And the last thing I want now is a Firefly DVD. I'd rather take a memory wipe.
Serenity is a crappy B-movie that has nothing to do with space or sciene. It is retarded beyond belief, with it's fake physically impossible ion-clouds taken straight out of PC space-sims, with no communications delay and with plotholes the size of Jupiter orbit. Why would anyone choose not to send the very important video over the comlink and physically fly on a space ship, while arranging that over videoconference, is beyond my comprehension.
It is also profoundly anti-science, sending a message that scientists are not to be trusted and that scientific research doesn't usually involve a preliminary experiement on rats or a small clinical study before unleashing a mind-controlling chemical on the whole planet with the side effects including turning 90% of people into plants and 10% into flesh-eating cannibals.
Serenity is crap for escapist luddite geeks (and I use geeks in its original meaning). Anyone who finds it great needs to see a shrink.
And not the old outdated Kubrick's one, but the new one. BBC has made a great docudrama on manned exploration of Solar System. 5 astronauts set on a scientifically correct journey around the Solar System, starting with a brief landing on Venus, then going for a 3-week stay on Mars and then to the outer planets. As of today this is undoubdly the best movie about space with the possible exception of Contact. Yes, others have more action, better directing or have been more influential in the past, but overall Space Odyssey wins.
d yssey/
See the information about it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/spaceo
Get it off the BitTorrent (sadly it doesn't seem to be available on DVD yet):
Part 1
Part 2
Can you give me another source than the "100 questions and answers"? Anything pulled from that book hardly qualifies as statistics. Take, for instance, the sentence you quoted: " According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom". Five times as much -- of what? Translated titles, or books printed?
I am afraid I can't. Finding good statistics on Soviet Union online is difficult and getting my ass to a large library would take too much time. I concede that the authors may have picked a more flattering indicator, but I don't think they needed to lie about that.
I didn't say it was exotic. It was simply perceived as such, because the number of titles was very small, especially compared to the present situation.
27% compared to 45% is not small.
It was one of the quirks of the situation -- if you're locked in, everything that comes from the outside world seems good to you.
This seems true. The illusion of greener grass on the other side of the road.
This doesn't make it OK to ban them.
Every decision is a compromise. If there are social and political reasons to ban a book (because the author wrongly attacks the Soviet system) AND the book sucks, then the decision to ban the book is more justified than banning 1984 (which actually wasn't about the Soviet Union).
Examples, please? (I find my knowledge lacking in this area)
Just click randomly on the people in that list. It's written right there. It looks like most of the guys there were dissidents, whose books were not published because they were just attacks on the Soviet system. I mean, I can certainly understand why a book titled "KGB revealed" or something (it's in that list) would not be allowed in the USSR.
Your first point is impossible to argue because there aren't, to my knowledge, any reliable statistics, as officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, meaning that there was no reason to keep official records of it.
There were official laws about what kind of books can't be brought into Soviet Union. These included pornographic books, books that promoted hate and violence and books that attacked Soviet order. See this search, for example. Of course, the question of whether a book meets these criteria is never easy. The lists of samizdat literature (like the one you provided) can also serve as a good indicator, as well as the books published after the 1990. To this day I am not aware of a significant number of books that were prohibited in the Soviet Union. Clearly, if there were many of them, we would know it by now.
The fact that censorship is widespread is extremely relevant. We can't blame Soviet Union for what is common practice (e.g. Canada, the US, the UK, France and many other "democratic" countries have lists of "prohibited items").
The third point is actually a supporting point for points 4 and 5 - yes, indeed, the top 100 classic books are probably published in every country.
As for 4th and 5th points, please take your time, I'd be interested to hear what you think about them.
As fascinating as that culture is to me, the ends don't justify the means.
In this world the ends always justify the means. The correct interpretation of this saying is that a cost-benefit analysis is usually required, you can't outright justify any bad means with a positive end.
It is fundamentally wrong to say "X is wrong, because X required limiting freedom Y". You always need to consider the benefits and the costs.
But the reason why they had such an attitude towards Western authors was because everything Western was exotic.
Well, books of foreign authors certainly weren't exotic where I lived. The statistics show that 77,500 foreign titles were published with the total number of copies 2 billion 400 millions (as of 1980). According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom, 2 times as much as Japan, US and France.
I don't see how the numbers that you gave showed that Western literature was exotic. Estonia was a part of the Soviet Union, not a part of the United States. Of course, it published more books of Russian authors.
So while some people may have preferred books of Western authors, because they were Western, that was their personal problem and certainly didn't indicate that those books were "exotic". Also, I can't see how that is a fault of the Soviet Union. And while we are on the subject of Estonia, I don't think in any other countries minorities were treated as well in literary respect as in Soviet Union. In no other country does the government care as much about trasnlating books into minority languages and supporting authors of minority nationalities. Just thought I'd mention it.
No, I don't. I only have at hand this list of authors, most of them Russian, who were "nepodcenzurnye" at some point or to some extent.
That's a very small list, especially considering that most of these aren't known as authors, but simply as dissidents (and it appears that the literary quality of works of most authors was questionable), that many of them actively worked against the Soviet Union and the few decent authors in that list usually had only some of their works censored. So if this list is any indication, it demonstrates that censorship didn't have a noticeable negative effect on availability of good books.
Well, I don't think it's so much about me not willing to participate but about us two quite clearly having different ideas of what the Soviet Union was.
While this is certainly true, I am a big fan of basing my worldview on facts. I readily admit that some of the prohibited books were good and would have been valuable. But my point is that the number of prohibited books were relatively small, that the practice of banning books is common in most countries and that overall the number of great books published in Soviet Union in all languages was very large, that people read a lot and that the government supported reading by any means possible. Most importantly, the books were cheap (that's why there were shortages), so they were accessible to everyone, not just the relatively rich.
This isn't really a matter of opinion, that's a matter of facts. I am not going to argue against the facts. Yes, Orwell's and Bulgakov's books are good, but I don't see how not publishing them was such a tragedy.
The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy
Yes, of course, but it's a wrong one. Amazon is a free market of ideas, science is not.
The path of altering human nature is quite different, and even if it is possible, I just don't see the point. If tech will get us there no matter what, why the community ownership?
First, because 80 years ago we weren't certain that the technology-only path would work. Second, because improving lifes of people today is also important. And third, because we need equality and social emphasis on human development before we can feel safe about opening the Pandora box.
Since collective ownership is not required in this type of labor-free society (people would almost never be required to interact) I can't even call it communism.
That wouldn't be communism, you are right. But the system before that might be. It makes sense that humans will first become economically self-sufficient and only some time after that the society will cease to exist. In between voluntary communist cooperation makes more sense than free markets.
China, though, is doing much better now that they've allowed some private ownership.
China is doing well because 1) they have influx of foreign investment and 2) the communist party kept political control. The private ownership was only a means to getting the investment. In today's world getting investment for a socialist economy is a hard sell, but this isn't related to the efficiency of the system, just to preferences of the political elite. For example, Belarus has the most successful economy of all former republics (excluding the Baltic states that thrived on Western handouts and transit of oil and goods plundered in Russia), but there aren't many foreign investments wanting to invest there. Actually, there aren't many investors wanting to put money in Russia either, but that's a different story. Anyway, explaining Chinese success with allowing private ownership is not fully warranted. Capital expenditure helps regardless of the economic system.
And I really do believe that free markets will get us to the posthuman stage faster than any artificial system.
The progress mostly depends on the amount of basic and applied research funding. That isn't related to free markets at all. Soviet Union was as advanced scientifically and technologically as the US. Scientists and engineers don't care about the economic system, they just want to get paid and have necessary equipment bought.
And the biggest problem is not getting fast to the posthuman stage, it's getting there in good shape. You don't want to go into posthumanity when the rules are set by multinational corporations and imperialist politicians and when large fractions of population are denied economic and other opportunities.
Unfortunately, no, I don't have any data at hand. But I have a nagging suspicion that neither do you.
Your nagging suspicion is wrong. Although I certainly can't find the percentage of books that were not read, the data on the number of books printed is easily available. It is indeed hard to find comparable statistics. But studies today show that Russians spend about 7.1 hours weekly reading, compared with 6.5 hours world average and 5.7 hours in the US. (NOP World, link). It wouldn't be difficult to adjust that 7.1 hours figure for the changes outlined below. That's not hard evidence (difficult to find statistics for 1980s online, especially for the Soviet Union), but imho it's telling enough.
Charts. 3-27 - books and booklets published (mln), 3-28 - circulation of magazines, 3-29 - circulation of magazines in Tatar language, 3-30 - films produced, 3-31 - theatre visits.
I said that people bought them because they were Western.
This is ridiculous. May be in Estonia, among some crazy nationalists, but normal people enjoyed reading good literature regardless of the nationality of the author.
I'd say that "a few good books..." is an understatement at best
I'd say you don't know what you are talking about. There were laws and it's common for all countries (e.g. Canada to have lists of prohibited works. The criteria are similar - I don't see why hate literature is worse than anti-soviet literature. Anyway, you don't seem to have any evidence that the number of books was significant.
The brilliance of your rebuttal completely overwhelmed me. Clearly, my intellect is no match to your infinite wisdom.
Yes. This is why I have little to say to you. We can't have a retional fact-based discussion if you aren't prepared to participate.
Tons of them. Spiderman 1 (bad guy is even rich, too), War of the Worlds, John Q (again, the rich are the bad guys), Get Rich or Die Tryin', North Country. The "hard working American" vs "the rich and powerful" is the biggest cliche in Hollywood.
:) BTW, Spiderman has a student as a main character (I don't recall if his father was working class). War of the Worlds does have a working class character, yes. Don't know about other films. It is a cliche, but virtually never the job is portrayed positively. My point wasn't that there are no workers at all, but that their job is either ignored or shown like in 8 Mile.
:)
So it seems that the answer to the first question is none.
Wow, do you ever have that backward. Science is free inquiry, and all of its results are tenative, thats why falsifiability is part of any scientific theory.
No, it's you who have it backward. Opinions are not falsifiabile! Science is not a free market, because the criteria are not supply and demand, but agreement with experiments. Can you imagine Microsoft saying "Yes, we agree that MacOS is a superior product, we will stop making Windows now"? But that's exactly how it works with science.
I have nothing against someone saying "Look, you all have been wrong all the time, but I figured everything out, check out my proof". But that's not what opinions are about. Opinions are about saying "Evolution is just your opinion - I disagree" or "Solution chemistry is just your opinion - I think homeopathy works". Please try to understand this distinction. I am not against dissent, but I am against the right to uninformed opinions. I am not about questioning the conventional wisdom, I am against saying that wisdom doesn't matter, every moron has a right to an opinion.
If you're saying communism is the "One True Way", then it's a religious position, not a scientific one, and I won't disagree too strongly. "Disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it" is clearly stating "I know the truth, don't question me".
Not at all and I never meant it. Once you find out that Drug X works and FDA agrees, it makes sense to start giving it to the sick. If we come upon evidence that it's dangerous, it makes sense to revise our confidence and investigate. Same with political systems. Once we find out that system X works and is good, it makes sense to switch to that system. If we see evidence that the system no longer works very well, it makes sense to reevaluate. Obviously, it's not as easy to switch political systems as it is to prescribe a new drug, but you should see my point.
If we can have a currently generally accepted theory in science, why no in political science? Well, the answer is because politics is a vehicle for the ruling class to promote their interests, but that doesn't mean the theory that they offer (liberalism, free markets, capitalism) is valid.
So you're at war with human nature, good luck with that.
Well, there is no such thing as "human nature", there are only certain traits. Some of them are good, some are not so good. Upbringing in all societies exists to suppress some of the traits (e.g. propensity to violent actions). The war on so called "human nature" has been going on since antiquity and so far we've made huge progress.
According to you, if a capitalistic society reduces all prices to zero (or close to it), it is no longer capitalist. I'd say that if a communistic scociety reduces the amount of work to zero (or to only fun work), is to no longer communist. If technology alone can get us to communism, then you aren't dealing with an economic or political theory, but more of a transhumanist one.
Completely wrong. If you read Marx (as well as some of the later marxists), you would realise that communism is actually a way to liberate man from labor. Work leads to alienation and communism is supposed to free the man from it. There won't be work, there will only be creative s
Did some of the Soviet people buy classics just to have them on their shelves? Yes, of course. Did most of them buy them to read them? Yes, indeed. Did most of them read classics? Yes, they certainly did.
I don't see your argument. Do you have any data contradicting what I said or do you think that unrelated anecdotes (which, I suspect didn't even happen in Soviet Union, as I don't remember books being sold with uncut pages there) are enough? I saw an Italian with bad teeth. Therefore all Italians must be dirty animals without the idea of personal hygiene. Can you see why such "arguments" are invalid?
Which Western authors are you talking about? In my recollection only the best authors had their books translated and published in the Soviet Union. I certainly don't remember seeing all the crap that flooded bookstands now.
yet the ones that somehow disagreed with the official ideology were hidden away in special depositories.
You lack of coherent arguments is typical. Yes, a small number of works were hidden away. So what? United States and Canada have lists of prohibited books too. Today. That a few good books were not available is more than compensated by the thousands of great books that were. You can't read ALL books anyway.
because educated people are much easier to govern than uneducated masses
What you are saying is ridiculous.
The system was an egalitarian one only in theory. In practice, there was an elite. There were "elite" schools, schools that were considered better than others; not everyone was admitted to these schools.
I graduated from the best school in Leningrad. Everyone was admitted there if they passed the entrance exams. Your own achievements were the only factor. I also studied in an ordinary school before that and found it perfectly adequate. Elite schools in the Soviet Union had nothing in common with the schools for the elite in the West.
A lot of people would rather play most of the time, and not work at all.
:) You can still be an "attention whore" and attempt to create the most popular blog, but you don't have to.
This is a social question - what view does society promulgate. In Russia today 56% of people (2001 FOM poll) think that all able-bodied people must work. In Soviet time the percentage was surely much higher. If you raise the kids believing that labor is noble, if you promote it through movies, newspapers, schools, etc., and if you continuously improve working conditions and make work more interesting, then people will think of labor much better.
How many Hollywood films can you name that glorify industrial workers (the so called "hard-working Americans")? How many films where worker is a main character? Of course American people want to be rock stars, NBA players or retired millionnaires...
What about the goals they don't share?
That's fine. But the defining factor is whether the goals you share are social or anti-social. It's when I hear "I'd like to be rich and not work" or "I am thinking about my own income, not about other people" that I see a problem.
Relativism is fashionable in Western democracies ("everyone is entitled to his opinion"), but I share Lenin's outlook on political epistemology - disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it. I am actually against "the free market of ideas"... Science is not a free market, quakery and religious cults are. Truth is generally not relative and opinions are only good as temporary hypothesis, not as something to cling to forever.
You don't have kids, or you'd know "Mine!" is up there with "No!" on the list of annoying words kids say.
Yes, I know that. But a good mentor/teacher would teach the kids to behave socially. To share the toys, to play together, to give to others... I remember a tradition from my childhood of bringing candies on your birthday to give to everyone. A monkey (kid) is selfish, but education and upbringing can shape that monkey into a human being.
Exactly! This was what I was talking about earlier. You have to disallow something in order to banish free markets.
Temporarily - yes. To have a just society with equality today you need state intervention. It can often be done at the lower local levels, it can also be done in a traditional way of peasant communes, but there needs to be some pressure.
But the other path is obviously to remove the shortage. Once you get digital, material shortage disappears (though a shortage of original content may still remain) and you kill markets. Of course, that doesn't mean disappearance of all competition, but that competition is not market in nature. What that means is that you eliminate the direct connection between demand and your satisfaction. You can write a great song even if only 100 people listen to it. You don't have to "pander to the masses", because your income from that song is exactly 0 in either case.
Producers are not forced to follow what the customers tell them. And customers aren't forced to consume what the producers like to make. This is modern harmony! Obviously, this only works if there is large enough pool of voluntarily created products and if there are no manufacturing/distribution costs. This is already the case with the Internet. This will be the case with mature nanotechnology and AI.
With help of these two technologies it will be easy to eliminate material shortages. As an added benefit they would destroy capitalists' grasp on the means of production. The result would essentially be communism - people do what they aspire to and get everything they need. The market forces would be eliminated, because 1) you can't compete with free and 2) you can't compete with people who can copy your products for free.
Now we get to the one exception - if culture can act as the surrogate, and banish one of your prerequisites without using state power, th
I am sorry, I don't have a link handy, but there was recently an article about a study that compared essays written by modern students and students 20+ (or 40) years ago. The conclusion was that quality has increase, students now use larger vocabularies, have better grasp of complex grammatical constructions, etc. It was either done in the UK or in the US (don't remember).
There has never been a time or a place where this has not been the case. Literature, the arts and so on has always been a matter for a cultural "elite" (and I don't mean it in the republican/conservative sense) and the low-to-middle class people that aspire to it.
This is not true. In Soviet Union the arts where a matter for everyone. All works of art were for everyone. Museums, theatres, classical music, classical literature, all of that was intended for everyone, to farmers, workers, engineers, scientists, other artists. It was a matter of state interests to improve first the literacy, then education and cultural level of all people. And it worked. Of course, with the collapse of the socialism publishers decided to get some quick profits, turned to printing pulp, people became interested to check it out, they initially liked it, because it didn't require as much thinking, then publishers stopped printing classics and good modern books and people didn't have a choice, but had to read the pulp. Finally, some demand emerged again for the classics, but now the print runs are small, the prices are high and the rich tend to buy good books, while the poor read low-quality dreck.
And although the Soviet Union clearly lead in the quest for literacy and high culture for everyone, other countries tried to follow. Read The Classics in the Slums, an article about British workers in late 19th century - early 20th century. They had a huge interest in reading, art and learning and a lot of them (a majority?) were interested in classical literature (Greek tragedies, Shakespear, poetry), classical music and education. For them it was a matter of personal development and a break from the monotony of the jobs. Not everyone could easily accept that because of class prejudice - "They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn't know that you read. Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space. . . . You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. "Margaret's a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know."" It's today that people actually sit and gaze into space. It's called TV.
A UK survey of pupils (1940) in a below average group showed that 62% of boys and 84% of girls had read some poetry, their favorites including Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth, 67% of girls and 31% of boys had read plays and students averaged six or seven books per month (this excludes texts required in schools).
A USA study of adults ("Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America", 2002) showed that 43% of American adults had not read any books at all (other than those required for work or school), only 12.1% had read any poetry and only 3.6% had read any plays.
Another interesting article is As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor - On the Uses of a Liberal Education, an amazing experiement in teaching humanities to poor people. 50% graduated from the course and liberal education DID help poor people to improve their lives. It not only increased students' self-esteem, but also their abilities to divine and solve problems. They enrolled in colleges, got jobs, became politically active.
Read something like Against School to get some understanding on why Western school is so bad. It is by design, the system goes back to German schools and was intended to sustain the difference between the classes. The children of the elite got classical education, while the masses got dumbed down education. It is sometimes called the "two corridors model".
This is another area, where Soviet system shined. There was only one system of education, starting with the kindergarden and ending with post-graduate studies. A worker could (and was encouraged