I realize it. But successful political parties in the US are always coalitions of interests. The Republican Party is a coalition of big business interests, religious zealots, and other odds and ends. Not all Republicans are evangelical Christians and not all are oil barons. The Democratic Party is a coalition of socially liberal interests, economically liberal interests, big business interests (different businesses from the Republicans), and other odds and ends. Not all Democrats are old hippies, and not all are entertainment moguls. (At least there is a little more commonality between the groups making up the Democrats, if you factor out the Liebermann wing*.) You could have a Liberal Party that doesn't pander to any business interests, but it would consist of maybe a quarter of the population and would never get elected, except for the occasional representative from places such as New York or San Francisco.
A better way to go would be proportional representation. Then smaller parties with more focused agendas could flourish. Still, with 25% of your representatives coming from the Liberal Party, getting any liberal legislation passed at all would be a challenge. On the other hand, giving carte blanche to a President to invade Iraq would be less likely, too, becsuse there might be enough true liberals and true conservatives (both groups would see it as a dangerous idea) to block it. I don't see proportional representation happening in the US anytime in the next couple of decades, but I like the idea.
* Francis: "Whatever happened to the Liebermann wing?" Reg: "He's over there."
No, using the NY Times as a source doesn't make you a right-winger. I think we all figured that out from this statement: "It's a tale that points out the deadly and inconvenient flaws of the type of current leftist political orthodoxy that Vonnegut was a symbol and spreader of." Said statement also demonstrates your meager understanding of Vonnegut (not to mention your meager understanding of "current leftist political orthodoxy", itself a very loaded phrase).
Odd that you take shelter behind the NY Times, then criticize the other poster for "appeal to authority". Mote in the eye and whatnot. I'm just saying.
I've never heard the second position expressed by an actual relativist. That's not to say it doesn't exist or that some who hold it might label themselves relativists, but I would not characterize the view as "moral relativism". It is a view that is close to (if not quite) amorality, with the exception that it allows (but doesn't require) one to have a personal code of conduct. Or maybe it's just the immature view of somebody who hasn't thought things through.
My own view is that morals are utilitarian. That is, they are constructed to protect some system of values. Not everyone's values are going to be in agreement, which makes the resulting morals relative. There will be some commonality in a given society, and even (to a lesser extent) between societies that are centuries and continents apart. When those commonalities are great enough within a society, the morals usually get written into law. Sometimes the controlling parties will enact laws that support their own moral system even though it doesn't represent the views of the larger society very well, and you get bad laws (meaning the values they uphold don't represent any kind of societal consensus).
The converse of my sig is that a relativist doesn't believe in the absolute supremacy of any moral system. That does not mean that a relativist won't find system A to be superior (note comparative rather than superlative form of the adjective) to system B, insofar as system A's ability to protect some particular value.
As applied to your example, if a relativist -- by which I mean one who holds the utilitarian view I describe -- witnesses a murder, then he is certainly behaving consistently in reporting the crime, assuming the relativist values the protection of human life that the law affords. The same relativist might decline to report his neighbor when he finds that the neighbor is growing pot, if he doesn't value whatever it is that the drug prohibition laws are designed to protect, or if he places a higher value on the freedom to practice agriculture.
I don't know how close this is to your non-cognitivist view. I'd never heard the term before I read your post, and I haven't digested the wikipedia article in full yet, so I can't say that I understand it well enough to render an opinion on it.
You personally love Bluebeard, so why not put it in the second tier? These are your tiers, after all.
I agree with most of your ratings, but quibble with a few. I'd put Sirens up in the first tier. I'd put Timequake and Bluebeard in the second tier. Bluebeard is actually my favorite of the later Vonnegut novels, where I define "later" as anything after Breakfast of Champions.
I'm ambivalent about Galapagos. I like the concept of this novel, but I think he takes his familiar technique of foreshadowing future events too far here, so that by the time the narrative reaches the actual time of an event, you already know exactly what transpired. OTOH, it does have an evolutionary twist that is pure Vonnegut. So I can't decide between the second and third tiers for this one.
For the two you haven't read:
Player Piano: Vonnegut's most conventional novel (this was early on in his career, before he found his own unique style, after all). Judged by more conventional standards, it's pretty good, and does hint at some of his later themes. I'd put it in the second tier, 'cause it's a good story, but it's atypical for the Vonnegut canon.
Deadeye Dick: It's been so long since I read it. I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than how the title character got his nickname. From what I can recall, it's probably close to breaking into the second tier, if not quite actually in it.
I started rereading all the Vonnegut novels a while back, in order of publication, and got through Mother Night, but I've been interspersing them with other authors and haven't returned to the sequence yet. Looking forward to picking up Cat's Cradle soon!
To be exact, the book already had verse and chorus. Ambrosia added a new verse, slightly modified the chorus, inserted the bridge "I wanted all things to make sense/so we'd be happy instead of tense" from elsewhere in the book, and put it to music -- and did so very nicely.
For another excellent Vonnegut-inspired song, I recommend Al Stewart's "Sirens of Titan".
The Constitution *is* a means, not an end. I have mod points and would gladly be the one to troll-mod you per your request, but I've already posted in this discussion, so I can't.
Are you suggesting that it is inconsistent for a moral relativist to have someone arrested for murder? That moral relativists shouldn't believe that laws can have a utilitarian purpose warranting enforcement?
You're both reading too much into that post. There is nothing to suggest that he is a nihilist. Taoists are not nihilists. Neither are relativists. He could be either of those two (or both).
Incidentally, it's Rodney's son who opens the door in that scene. He is played in the movie by Keith Gordon, who would later go on to direct the film adaptation of Vonnegut's "Mother Night."
I did not know that! In "Mother Night", Vonnegut also made a brief appearance. The main character passes him on the street. The camera moves in on Vonnegut's face which has a sad expression. (The whole movie had a sadder, grimmer tone than the novel, which precluded any kind of commercial success for the film.)
Somebody in one of my college labs plugged an erasable programmable ROM (the kind with the clear window over the die for the UV erasure; who remembers those?) into its socket backwards, reversing power and ground, thereby inventing the light-emitting EPROM. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a one-time use device.
I'm not aware of any data, one way or the other, comparing the safety record of 70s designs to later designs; the usage in the 70s was not very widespread so there might not be sufficient data points to draw a meaningful conclusion. Either way, I didn't draw one.
Read what I posted in the context of the included link, which talks about airbags being "reborn" as supplemental restraints. When I mentioned the 70s, I was not referring to whether airbags were safer then or now. I was referring to the fact that airbags were not promoted as "supplemental" in the 70s. You seem to be violently agreeing as far as that statement is concerned.
Today's airbags, I repeat, are NOT a primary restraint, regardless of the intent in the 70s, and your belief that they are is pure nonsense. So whether you used the term sarcastically or not is just irrelevant. Go ahead and drive without using seatbelts if you prefer (I'm sure you are aware if it is legal or not to do so in your area), but I would never trust an airbag alone. For the majority of accident scenarios, a seatbelt plus shoulder harness plus head restraint (aka "headrest") are sufficient protection, but you can't pick the scenario in an accident, so having the airbag is a plus (i.e., a supplement).
That's all I have to say since this thread is already way off-topic.
What you say may have been true of the early airbags in the 70s, but what do you think the "SRS" you see on your airbag stands for? Answer. In fact, an airbag is useless in the event of a secondary impact, which is one reason belts and airbags should be used together.
Your point about injuries resulting from airbag deployment causing sometimes fatal injuries to small persons isn't lost. That is why in recent years, for models sold in the U.S., it is possible to disable passenger-side airbags. In the same time period, designs have improved to mitigate these hazards. I'm not quibbling with that. Your original statement seemed to suggest that, ideally, airbags should only deploy if a seatbelt is not being worn -- as if it is merely a substitute for the seat belt, which is just plain wrong. Airbag or not, you are always safer wearing the seat belt.
I grew up in a world without bike helmets or mandatory seatbelts or airbags. And I survived.
Lucky for you (and me). Many people didn't.
Not to mention that sometimes the fix is worse than the problem, as anyone who has been hit by an airbag even though they were wearing a seatbelt can attest.
That statement is just plain puzzling. Airbags are not meant as a substitute for seatbelts. In fact, using all three elements (seat belt, shoulder harness, and airbag) together provides greater safety than any one or two. An airbag alone simply doesn't provide much safety. I wonder if the people you have in mind would rather have hit the steering wheel or dashboard instead.
You forgot to account for the pirates (or lack thereof)!
Re:If you can only use WEP, then VPN or SSH tunnel
on
WEP Broken Even Worse
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· Score: 1
Especially cross-platform, between Windows and Linux boxes, for example. The best documentation I could find on this topic was here. But there will certainly be questions beyond what's covered there (Use L2TP? I chose not to. Firewall configuration? For Linux 2.6.x, you need to set up iptables to accept and mark incoming ESP packets, so that the decrypted packet will be accepted after Openswan routes it back through the firewall.) Tricky stuff.
Once I set it up for Windows and Linux, though, adding a Macbook to the network was a piece of cake by comparison, although OS X uses Racoon instead of Openswan, so I had to do even more research, and write a custom startup script.
I don't see how that helps with what must have been the biggest problem with the DST change: meeting schedules.
Let's say you have a 9 AM meeting every Friday, so you set it up as a recurring meeting. You're in PST8PDT so you set it for that time, which is translated to 1700 GMT. Your scheduling software (still unpatched as of the time you set up the meeting) thinks DST starts April 1, so it adjusts the time, for those occurrences after April 1, to 1600 GMT. But starting in the week of March 11, 1700 GMT is now 10 AM PDT, so when the patch is made, your meeting shows up at 10 AM for three weeks, which is the wrong time.
To make matters worse, by the time you find out, you find that somebody has already nabbed the conference room for that 9 AM slot. Or IT instructs you not to make the change manually, as "we are working on it". The latter happened in my case, and only on March 12 did they find that my system needed Service Pack 2 to recognize the change. I'm still getting annoying messages every time I boot, saying some program was unable to write to address 0, apparently a side effect of the SP2 upgrade.
Besides record stores, you could buy your singles at the drug store (for us that was the nearest place). A slight correction to my original post: I don't think the automatic turntables adjusted the speed for you; at least on ours it was a manual setting (you could get chipmunk voices by playing your 45s as 78s).
OK, that makes sense. I wouldn't be aware of that since I use Firefox for browsing, and the command line for file management, but that's just me and my strange ways. I've only fired up Konqueror a few times, and that was to try out "fish:" to access the filesystem of a Zaurus (which is a pretty neat feature of Konqueror that, AFAIK, isn't found anywhere else).
My brothers and I used to have plenty of 45s -- up until albums like Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and the first couple by Led Zeppelin came out. Then my older brothers, who had jobs and could afford them, started buying albums, which in turn hooked me. I think there may still be some of our old 45s lying around my Mom's house, but probably not in great condition. I'm sure if I could find our old copy of "Rain/Paperback Writer", and it's still playable, it would be fairly valuable.
As far as playing multiple singles, you could stack 45s fairly high, and when the stack was done, you lifted the whole stack, turned it over, and placed it back on the spindle to play the B sides. Before the player dropped a disk from the stack onto the platter, the automatic tone arm would lift and tap the side of the stack to determine if it held 45s or 33s, adjust the speed and queue the first track accordingly.
Single-play turntables came into vogue after albums eclipsed 45s in popularity.
KLOS still has "The 7th Day"? That's encouraging. Maybe I should start listening to them again. I suppose night is the only time worth tuning in; I can't stand the morning drive-time DJs, and the afternoon ones aren't a whole lot better. The one area station I listen to regularly for music is KCRW, especially Gary Calamar on Sunday nights, but even they have declined since the days of Eden Epstein and the late Deirdre O'Donohue.
In the days when artists like Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Genesis, and so on were at their prime, you could count on radio stations to play more than just a single or two from each album. Sometimes you'd be able to hear three or four consecutive songs, an entire side, or (if it's a brand new release) the full album -- whatever the DJ felt like playing. That was good promotion for that sort of album. Nowadays there's less incentive for a band to put together 40 minutes or more of excellent music when only two 3-minute singles are all that will ever get airplay. *Sigh* I miss progressive rock radio.
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A better way to go would be proportional representation. Then smaller parties with more focused agendas could flourish. Still, with 25% of your representatives coming from the Liberal Party, getting any liberal legislation passed at all would be a challenge. On the other hand, giving carte blanche to a President to invade Iraq would be less likely, too, becsuse there might be enough true liberals and true conservatives (both groups would see it as a dangerous idea) to block it. I don't see proportional representation happening in the US anytime in the next couple of decades, but I like the idea.
* Francis: "Whatever happened to the Liebermann wing?" Reg: "He's over there."
Odd that you take shelter behind the NY Times, then criticize the other poster for "appeal to authority". Mote in the eye and whatnot. I'm just saying.
I've never heard the second position expressed by an actual relativist. That's not to say it doesn't exist or that some who hold it might label themselves relativists, but I would not characterize the view as "moral relativism". It is a view that is close to (if not quite) amorality, with the exception that it allows (but doesn't require) one to have a personal code of conduct. Or maybe it's just the immature view of somebody who hasn't thought things through.
My own view is that morals are utilitarian. That is, they are constructed to protect some system of values. Not everyone's values are going to be in agreement, which makes the resulting morals relative. There will be some commonality in a given society, and even (to a lesser extent) between societies that are centuries and continents apart. When those commonalities are great enough within a society, the morals usually get written into law. Sometimes the controlling parties will enact laws that support their own moral system even though it doesn't represent the views of the larger society very well, and you get bad laws (meaning the values they uphold don't represent any kind of societal consensus).
The converse of my sig is that a relativist doesn't believe in the absolute supremacy of any moral system. That does not mean that a relativist won't find system A to be superior (note comparative rather than superlative form of the adjective) to system B, insofar as system A's ability to protect some particular value.
As applied to your example, if a relativist -- by which I mean one who holds the utilitarian view I describe -- witnesses a murder, then he is certainly behaving consistently in reporting the crime, assuming the relativist values the protection of human life that the law affords. The same relativist might decline to report his neighbor when he finds that the neighbor is growing pot, if he doesn't value whatever it is that the drug prohibition laws are designed to protect, or if he places a higher value on the freedom to practice agriculture.
I don't know how close this is to your non-cognitivist view. I'd never heard the term before I read your post, and I haven't digested the wikipedia article in full yet, so I can't say that I understand it well enough to render an opinion on it.
"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
I agree with most of your ratings, but quibble with a few. I'd put Sirens up in the first tier. I'd put Timequake and Bluebeard in the second tier. Bluebeard is actually my favorite of the later Vonnegut novels, where I define "later" as anything after Breakfast of Champions.
I'm ambivalent about Galapagos. I like the concept of this novel, but I think he takes his familiar technique of foreshadowing future events too far here, so that by the time the narrative reaches the actual time of an event, you already know exactly what transpired. OTOH, it does have an evolutionary twist that is pure Vonnegut. So I can't decide between the second and third tiers for this one.
For the two you haven't read:
Player Piano: Vonnegut's most conventional novel (this was early on in his career, before he found his own unique style, after all). Judged by more conventional standards, it's pretty good, and does hint at some of his later themes. I'd put it in the second tier, 'cause it's a good story, but it's atypical for the Vonnegut canon.
Deadeye Dick: It's been so long since I read it. I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than how the title character got his nickname. From what I can recall, it's probably close to breaking into the second tier, if not quite actually in it.
I started rereading all the Vonnegut novels a while back, in order of publication, and got through Mother Night, but I've been interspersing them with other authors and haven't returned to the sequence yet. Looking forward to picking up Cat's Cradle soon!
For another excellent Vonnegut-inspired song, I recommend Al Stewart's "Sirens of Titan".
The Constitution *is* a means, not an end. I have mod points and would gladly be the one to troll-mod you per your request, but I've already posted in this discussion, so I can't.
You're welcome. I'm afraid there will always be people who don't get Vonnegut, though.
Are you suggesting that it is inconsistent for a moral relativist to have someone arrested for murder? That moral relativists shouldn't believe that laws can have a utilitarian purpose warranting enforcement?
You're both reading too much into that post. There is nothing to suggest that he is a nihilist. Taoists are not nihilists. Neither are relativists. He could be either of those two (or both).
I did not know that! In "Mother Night", Vonnegut also made a brief appearance. The main character passes him on the street. The camera moves in on Vonnegut's face which has a sad expression. (The whole movie had a sadder, grimmer tone than the novel, which precluded any kind of commercial success for the film.)
Somebody in one of my college labs plugged an erasable programmable ROM (the kind with the clear window over the die for the UV erasure; who remembers those?) into its socket backwards, reversing power and ground, thereby inventing the light-emitting EPROM. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a one-time use device.
I'm not aware of any data, one way or the other, comparing the safety record of 70s designs to later designs; the usage in the 70s was not very widespread so there might not be sufficient data points to draw a meaningful conclusion. Either way, I didn't draw one.
Read what I posted in the context of the included link, which talks about airbags being "reborn" as supplemental restraints. When I mentioned the 70s, I was not referring to whether airbags were safer then or now. I was referring to the fact that airbags were not promoted as "supplemental" in the 70s. You seem to be violently agreeing as far as that statement is concerned.
Today's airbags, I repeat, are NOT a primary restraint, regardless of the intent in the 70s, and your belief that they are is pure nonsense. So whether you used the term sarcastically or not is just irrelevant. Go ahead and drive without using seatbelts if you prefer (I'm sure you are aware if it is legal or not to do so in your area), but I would never trust an airbag alone. For the majority of accident scenarios, a seatbelt plus shoulder harness plus head restraint (aka "headrest") are sufficient protection, but you can't pick the scenario in an accident, so having the airbag is a plus (i.e., a supplement).
That's all I have to say since this thread is already way off-topic.
Your point about injuries resulting from airbag deployment causing sometimes fatal injuries to small persons isn't lost. That is why in recent years, for models sold in the U.S., it is possible to disable passenger-side airbags. In the same time period, designs have improved to mitigate these hazards. I'm not quibbling with that. Your original statement seemed to suggest that, ideally, airbags should only deploy if a seatbelt is not being worn -- as if it is merely a substitute for the seat belt, which is just plain wrong. Airbag or not, you are always safer wearing the seat belt.
Lucky for you (and me). Many people didn't.
Not to mention that sometimes the fix is worse than the problem, as anyone who has been hit by an airbag even though they were wearing a seatbelt can attest.
That statement is just plain puzzling. Airbags are not meant as a substitute for seatbelts. In fact, using all three elements (seat belt, shoulder harness, and airbag) together provides greater safety than any one or two. An airbag alone simply doesn't provide much safety. I wonder if the people you have in mind would rather have hit the steering wheel or dashboard instead.
You forgot to account for the pirates (or lack thereof)!
Once I set it up for Windows and Linux, though, adding a Macbook to the network was a piece of cake by comparison, although OS X uses Racoon instead of Openswan, so I had to do even more research, and write a custom startup script.
Q: How much more broken can it be? A: None. None more broken.
I don't see how that helps with what must have been the biggest problem with the DST change: meeting schedules.
Let's say you have a 9 AM meeting every Friday, so you set it up as a recurring meeting. You're in PST8PDT so you set it for that time, which is translated to 1700 GMT. Your scheduling software (still unpatched as of the time you set up the meeting) thinks DST starts April 1, so it adjusts the time, for those occurrences after April 1, to 1600 GMT. But starting in the week of March 11, 1700 GMT is now 10 AM PDT, so when the patch is made, your meeting shows up at 10 AM for three weeks, which is the wrong time.
To make matters worse, by the time you find out, you find that somebody has already nabbed the conference room for that 9 AM slot. Or IT instructs you not to make the change manually, as "we are working on it". The latter happened in my case, and only on March 12 did they find that my system needed Service Pack 2 to recognize the change. I'm still getting annoying messages every time I boot, saying some program was unable to write to address 0, apparently a side effect of the SP2 upgrade.
Besides record stores, you could buy your singles at the drug store (for us that was the nearest place). A slight correction to my original post: I don't think the automatic turntables adjusted the speed for you; at least on ours it was a manual setting (you could get chipmunk voices by playing your 45s as 78s).
OK, that makes sense. I wouldn't be aware of that since I use Firefox for browsing, and the command line for file management, but that's just me and my strange ways. I've only fired up Konqueror a few times, and that was to try out "fish:" to access the filesystem of a Zaurus (which is a pretty neat feature of Konqueror that, AFAIK, isn't found anywhere else).
As far as playing multiple singles, you could stack 45s fairly high, and when the stack was done, you lifted the whole stack, turned it over, and placed it back on the spindle to play the B sides. Before the player dropped a disk from the stack onto the platter, the automatic tone arm would lift and tap the side of the stack to determine if it held 45s or 33s, adjust the speed and queue the first track accordingly.
Single-play turntables came into vogue after albums eclipsed 45s in popularity.
KLOS still has "The 7th Day"? That's encouraging. Maybe I should start listening to them again. I suppose night is the only time worth tuning in; I can't stand the morning drive-time DJs, and the afternoon ones aren't a whole lot better. The one area station I listen to regularly for music is KCRW, especially Gary Calamar on Sunday nights, but even they have declined since the days of Eden Epstein and the late Deirdre O'Donohue.
In the days when artists like Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Genesis, and so on were at their prime, you could count on radio stations to play more than just a single or two from each album. Sometimes you'd be able to hear three or four consecutive songs, an entire side, or (if it's a brand new release) the full album -- whatever the DJ felt like playing. That was good promotion for that sort of album. Nowadays there's less incentive for a band to put together 40 minutes or more of excellent music when only two 3-minute singles are all that will ever get airplay. *Sigh* I miss progressive rock radio.