Apparently, you are incapable of that kind of insight. That suggests you've hit your social/cultural ceiling.
Re:I'd like to take a moment to say: I told them s
on
3G iPhone Expected in June
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm an Apple-critical Mac user (love their designers, really dislike their business practices), and I don't own an iPhone for many of the reasons described in this thread. But the problems with the iPhone are eminently fixable, and I expect the iPhone to become a stronger product over the next couple of years. In Europe, it is a flop. But in the US, it is doing well, and the surprise success it is enjoying as a status symbol among the elite of less-developed nations (as awkward as that is, perhaps, for those of use who might have some qualms about those elites) who are inevitably buying locked phones and unlocking them to get them to work on local networks must be sending a strong signal to Apple. I don't know what the details of their contracts with AT&T, etc., is, but I suspect that they've retrieved a couple of their Rottweiler lawyers from attacking bloggers and supposed trademark and trade secret violators to look for ways to end their exclusivity deals ASAP.
I hope so, because I'm unlikely ever to use AT&T, and I travel overseas far too much not to swap SIMs. (I'm more likely to buy the Japan version of the iPhone than the US one, if push came to shove.)
Don't you think that unlockability (without voiding warranties) is a major issue for European consumers? Swapping SIMs when traveling is something that seems taken for granted. Even my can-barely-turn-on-her-computer mother-in-law does it when she travels between England and Spain.
In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chou En Lai, Mao's foreign affairs minister, about his impression of the legacy of the 1789 French Revolution. Chou responded, "it is still too soon to tell."
No country is free, period. Political entities are created by force, whether economic, cultural or military.
Democracies of any sort are never about anything more than a contingent and provisional freedom. "Freedom" is one of those words, like "democracy", "truth", "morality", and "pizza" that tend to mean whatever you want it to mean at the time.
Well, you had me until you said we'd still be stuck with Bush.
I mean, I want California to break away (and I know a lot of you won't miss us!), and I'm willing to take Schwarzenegger with us when we go. I don't think Austria would know what to do with him, anyway, and I've grown rather fond of the big lug.
This has been described as the difference between the "chess" strategy of the KMT versus the "Go" strategy of the communists. The latter was frankly a better strategy given the circumstances.
Stolen accounts harm more than just the people who have their accounts stolen: they can be a serious inconvenience, or worse, to people who sell things to those accounts or recieve payments from them.
A reasonable attempt at harm reduction is, erm, reasonable.
(And on an unrelated note, in my struggle against a tide of ignorance, the preceding line is a case of begging the question.)
You can't count on changing consumer behavior. And the thing is, that it is not only the people with compromised accounts who suffer: people who accept payment from a stolen account may end up having their orders cancelled, etc.
Anti-phishing measures have become de rigueur for contemporary browsers. I think PayPal is right to exclude Safari.
And I'm a Safari user on Mac. It's good to have PayPal light a fire under Apple's ass.
Simply reading Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Plato without putting it into a context of discussion, interpretation, and history is like studying C without ever writing a program.
Plato's Academy was not a place for the study and preservation of important texts. It was, first and foremost, a place of conversation and discussion. This can, I agree, occur outside of a formal setting. Once one has become caught up in the demands of everyday life, however, it is more difficult to set aside the time - and to find a community of conversants - to do this. (And I do not believe that internet forums are quite the same, largely because there is a difference between discussing with someone whose history, clusters of thought and affect, and background are gradually revealed to you, and responding to isolated opinions in messages.)
Oh right, you yanks are just late developers, high school being roughly the equivalent of our kindergartens. I always forget that. There's a grain of truth to it. The US K-12 is pretty slack. Not as bad as some say, but less demanding than primary and secondary education in Japan, Korea, England, France, Germany etc.
But the university system in the US is more difficult and demanding than its counterparts elsewhere. I'm often surprised by how little English or Japanese undergraduates have to work: it's pretty much a non-stop party in Japan, and England isn't much better. There are statistics floating around that quantify the different in study load between US and non-US higher education systems: I recall that in Japan, a university student spends maybe 1 to 2 hours a days studying, while the average US college student spends about 4 to 5 hours a day studying (on top of attending labs, lectures, etc.) US colleges regularly out-rank those in the rest of the world. Even Oxbridge lags behind the US Ivies and "public Ivies." On a graduate level, the dominance of US institutions is even more marked.
"Remember that the point of attending a university is to get a *well rounded* education."
No, no it's not.
The point of university is to tot That is what graduate school is for, at least in the US. The undergraduate degree is more or less high-school plus plus (with some elements of finishing school, Bildung, networking, and playtime thrown in.)
There is an element to social adaptation that is a skill which improves with practice and time. Even if you start off as awkward and shy, simply spending time around others will improve your ability to understand and communicate with other people, particularly if they are people unlike yourself.
Likewise with mathematics, programming, writing, and surfing: you may not be a genius in any of those types of categories, but some time invested in them will pay off.
The issue isn't that people with technical skills are inherently maladapted. It's that they are disinclined to go through the awkward initial stages involved in learning new social skills, and often retreat back into the solace of their expertise. Of course, that goes both ways.
While usage wins in the end, contesting "recent" trends is part of usage, as well, particularly when what at stake is a phrase and not just a single term. The more recent use of the term is itself
When there are different schools of usage, there's a sociolinguistic aspect to the critique. Someone who uses "beg the question" incorrect betrays the weaknesses in their educational background.
Besides, most of the "usage rules" folk I know wince when the current US president pronounces "nuclear" the way he does. Seems a little arbitrary, don't you think?
Reducing the incidence of crime is only one of the reasons for punishment. Retribution/restitution is another, at least for those who ascribe to an idea of moral agency that at least implies a principle of free will.
But yes, the act of punishing to create disincentives for crime (and thus causing people to be disinclined to do them) and remove criminals from the social body is completely consistent with an account of human decision making that is completely deterministic.
There are, oddly enough, religious traditions that believe something analogous to that, from some schools of Vedic and Buddhist belief to some versions of Gnosticism. And they conceived it for many of the same motivations that are at play here: to reconcile the recognition that mental states also responded to the laws of cause and effect while preserving a basis for moral judgment.
I like Baudrillard (and he's not exactly a Debord recycler, though the two have things in common) but I think of him as a cultural commentator (and Debord a more politicized version of the same) than as a philosopher per se. Too much of the response to these thinkers is to assume they're all doing the same thing - I've seen people attack Latour, Foucault and Derrida without realizing that they are largely in different fields, and when their fields abut, they are very mutually critical (and Latour considers himself a positivist.)
But as far as the point, it's that much analytic philosophy has such a narrow and dessicated ontology of action and decision - by trying to be "analytic" and formal, it tries to move to some kind of completely neutral action (x chooses to do y) that robs the actual phenomenon of choice of all the context, scale and circumstances by which we can get a handle on it.
The problem appears in the way that compatibilist accounts are set up, which is itself introduced by this gesture of formulization: most compatibilist accounts still rely on a fairly uncritical account of action as represented in consciousness, conflating meaning with conscious representation, then introducing conditions in this model under which a subject could be said to be acting freely (unconstrained from multiple activities, capable of representing those options as available, and then choosing one course of action over another.) Continental philosophy is much more comfortable working with things like ideology, the "unconscious," the base/superstructure, interpellation, etc. in which real questions about how choices are produced and how decisions occur without their conscious representation.
I'm not going to say that "analytical philosophy is rubbish" or anything. I think it can rightly take credit for much of the progress in computer science, for example, and artificial languages. I'm all for learning and teaching logic (part of the problem is that logic is taught rather early on in the educational system in France and Germany, so it isn't considered part of philosophy per se: it's a prerequisite to it. In the US, at least, training in logic occurs only in selected undergraduate courses - it tends to get foregrounded as the object of philosophy itself.) I find a lot of work on reference and meaning in the anglophone tradition to be worth reading and intriguing. But when it comes to the human subject - including philosophies of action and ethics - its ahistoricism and desire to be "pure" knowledge leads to cul-de-sacs.
Deleuze and Guattari, writing together, are being playful and often contradictory. I enjoy their work, but I don't think it's the most substantive stuff in the world: it's a little too giddy. From Deleuze, I actually really like his "What is philosophy?", even if it makes strange claims at times. The most succinct expression of Deleuze is his early Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature. Deleuze, at the end of the day, is strongly tied to the English (or rather Scottish!) empiricist tradition.
Badiou's main book is "Being and Event" (clearing trying to put himself after Heidegger and Sartre - I think of Sartre as something of a misapprehending populizer of Heidegger, but even though he's not popular in continental philosophy any more and is dismissed as a lightweight, I can't help but be fond of him, and suspect that some of his work will enjoy a revival some day.) To some extent, he's kind of negotiating a rapprochement between Althusser and Heidegger/Sartre, but it is there that his idea of the event as a situation that produces subjects. He suggests that most of the time, we are not subjects - we just bumble along following the contours of the episteme (he uses a different term and framework for it, but it's pretty much a similar idea) - but certain events call us forth to choose, such as falling in love or committing to a resistance.
I'm a former student of Searle. I'm pretty familiar with the state of Anglo-American philosophy. I've simply come to the conclusion that, while certain thinkers such as Putnam, Austin, Strawson, Ayers, Feyeraband and such have produced interesting work, that the analytical tradition is not really the mainstream of philosophy, and that it is increasingly consigned to a "god of the gaps" position by its ahistoricism and positivist posture (even when its content isn't positivist, its rhetoric is.)
Too often there are claims made that should be made empirically, such as Dreyfus' insistence that computers could never become competent chess players, or accounts of choice that assume rationality (that is, the conscious or symbolic representation of possible outcomes before choice.) There is a profound reluctance to do real metaphysics, and so much of the analytic work strikes me as moving chairs around the desk of the Titanic.
Why aren't there thinkers of the scope and profundity of Hegel, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty? Why is Deleuze's reading of Hume so much more compelling than those of any of the anglo critics? When did philosophy become so timid and twee?
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Nice try, but no.
"Retarded" is declassé in every English-speaking country I've been to. The OP actually has the sense to realize that he took a word from his equivalent to a "locker room" and applied in a more general space, which weakened his stature.
Apparently, you are incapable of that kind of insight. That suggests you've hit your social/cultural ceiling.
I'm an Apple-critical Mac user (love their designers, really dislike their business practices), and I don't own an iPhone for many of the reasons described in this thread. But the problems with the iPhone are eminently fixable, and I expect the iPhone to become a stronger product over the next couple of years. In Europe, it is a flop. But in the US, it is doing well, and the surprise success it is enjoying as a status symbol among the elite of less-developed nations (as awkward as that is, perhaps, for those of use who might have some qualms about those elites) who are inevitably buying locked phones and unlocking them to get them to work on local networks must be sending a strong signal to Apple. I don't know what the details of their contracts with AT&T, etc., is, but I suspect that they've retrieved a couple of their Rottweiler lawyers from attacking bloggers and supposed trademark and trade secret violators to look for ways to end their exclusivity deals ASAP.
I hope so, because I'm unlikely ever to use AT&T, and I travel overseas far too much not to swap SIMs. (I'm more likely to buy the Japan version of the iPhone than the US one, if push came to shove.)
Don't you think that unlockability (without voiding warranties) is a major issue for European consumers? Swapping SIMs when traveling is something that seems taken for granted. Even my can-barely-turn-on-her-computer mother-in-law does it when she travels between England and Spain.
In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chou En Lai, Mao's foreign affairs minister, about his impression of the legacy of the 1789 French Revolution. Chou responded, "it is still too soon to tell."
No country is free, period. Political entities are created by force, whether economic, cultural or military.
Democracies of any sort are never about anything more than a contingent and provisional freedom. "Freedom" is one of those words, like "democracy", "truth", "morality", and "pizza" that tend to mean whatever you want it to mean at the time.
Well, you had me until you said we'd still be stuck with Bush.
I mean, I want California to break away (and I know a lot of you won't miss us!), and I'm willing to take Schwarzenegger with us when we go. I don't think Austria would know what to do with him, anyway, and I've grown rather fond of the big lug.
This has been described as the difference between the "chess" strategy of the KMT versus the "Go" strategy of the communists. The latter was frankly a better strategy given the circumstances.
Stolen accounts harm more than just the people who have their accounts stolen: they can be a serious inconvenience, or worse, to people who sell things to those accounts or recieve payments from them.
A reasonable attempt at harm reduction is, erm, reasonable.
(And on an unrelated note, in my struggle against a tide of ignorance, the preceding line is a case of begging the question.)
You can't count on changing consumer behavior. And the thing is, that it is not only the people with compromised accounts who suffer: people who accept payment from a stolen account may end up having their orders cancelled, etc.
Anti-phishing measures have become de rigueur for contemporary browsers. I think PayPal is right to exclude Safari.
And I'm a Safari user on Mac. It's good to have PayPal light a fire under Apple's ass.
You may want to look into the history of Hawaii. There's still a Hawaiian nationalist movement.
Wouldn't that be Maonnaise?
Oddly enough, moral relativism isn't a problem for China. They seem quite secure in their morality. It just happens to be different from yours.
I take Amtrak twice a week, in theory. In practice, I always bring my car just in case.
Simply reading Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Plato without putting it into a context of discussion, interpretation, and history is like studying C without ever writing a program.
Plato's Academy was not a place for the study and preservation of important texts. It was, first and foremost, a place of conversation and discussion. This can, I agree, occur outside of a formal setting. Once one has become caught up in the demands of everyday life, however, it is more difficult to set aside the time - and to find a community of conversants - to do this. (And I do not believe that internet forums are quite the same, largely because there is a difference between discussing with someone whose history, clusters of thought and affect, and background are gradually revealed to you, and responding to isolated opinions in messages.)
But the university system in the US is more difficult and demanding than its counterparts elsewhere. I'm often surprised by how little English or Japanese undergraduates have to work: it's pretty much a non-stop party in Japan, and England isn't much better. There are statistics floating around that quantify the different in study load between US and non-US higher education systems: I recall that in Japan, a university student spends maybe 1 to 2 hours a days studying, while the average US college student spends about 4 to 5 hours a day studying (on top of attending labs, lectures, etc.) US colleges regularly out-rank those in the rest of the world. Even Oxbridge lags behind the US Ivies and "public Ivies." On a graduate level, the dominance of US institutions is even more marked.
No, no it's not.
The point of university is to tot That is what graduate school is for, at least in the US. The undergraduate degree is more or less high-school plus plus (with some elements of finishing school, Bildung, networking, and playtime thrown in.)
There is an element to social adaptation that is a skill which improves with practice and time. Even if you start off as awkward and shy, simply spending time around others will improve your ability to understand and communicate with other people, particularly if they are people unlike yourself.
Likewise with mathematics, programming, writing, and surfing: you may not be a genius in any of those types of categories, but some time invested in them will pay off.
The issue isn't that people with technical skills are inherently maladapted. It's that they are disinclined to go through the awkward initial stages involved in learning new social skills, and often retreat back into the solace of their expertise. Of course, that goes both ways.
While usage wins in the end, contesting "recent" trends is part of usage, as well, particularly when what at stake is a phrase and not just a single term. The more recent use of the term is itself
When there are different schools of usage, there's a sociolinguistic aspect to the critique. Someone who uses "beg the question" incorrect betrays the weaknesses in their educational background.
Besides, most of the "usage rules" folk I know wince when the current US president pronounces "nuclear" the way he does. Seems a little arbitrary, don't you think?
No, it doesn't.
Reducing the incidence of crime is only one of the reasons for punishment. Retribution/restitution is another, at least for those who ascribe to an idea of moral agency that at least implies a principle of free will.
But yes, the act of punishing to create disincentives for crime (and thus causing people to be disinclined to do them) and remove criminals from the social body is completely consistent with an account of human decision making that is completely deterministic.
There are, oddly enough, religious traditions that believe something analogous to that, from some schools of Vedic and Buddhist belief to some versions of Gnosticism. And they conceived it for many of the same motivations that are at play here: to reconcile the recognition that mental states also responded to the laws of cause and effect while preserving a basis for moral judgment.
I like Baudrillard (and he's not exactly a Debord recycler, though the two have things in common) but I think of him as a cultural commentator (and Debord a more politicized version of the same) than as a philosopher per se. Too much of the response to these thinkers is to assume they're all doing the same thing - I've seen people attack Latour, Foucault and Derrida without realizing that they are largely in different fields, and when their fields abut, they are very mutually critical (and Latour considers himself a positivist.)
But as far as the point, it's that much analytic philosophy has such a narrow and dessicated ontology of action and decision - by trying to be "analytic" and formal, it tries to move to some kind of completely neutral action (x chooses to do y) that robs the actual phenomenon of choice of all the context, scale and circumstances by which we can get a handle on it.
The problem appears in the way that compatibilist accounts are set up, which is itself introduced by this gesture of formulization: most compatibilist accounts still rely on a fairly uncritical account of action as represented in consciousness, conflating meaning with conscious representation, then introducing conditions in this model under which a subject could be said to be acting freely (unconstrained from multiple activities, capable of representing those options as available, and then choosing one course of action over another.) Continental philosophy is much more comfortable working with things like ideology, the "unconscious," the base/superstructure, interpellation, etc. in which real questions about how choices are produced and how decisions occur without their conscious representation.
I'm not going to say that "analytical philosophy is rubbish" or anything. I think it can rightly take credit for much of the progress in computer science, for example, and artificial languages. I'm all for learning and teaching logic (part of the problem is that logic is taught rather early on in the educational system in France and Germany, so it isn't considered part of philosophy per se: it's a prerequisite to it. In the US, at least, training in logic occurs only in selected undergraduate courses - it tends to get foregrounded as the object of philosophy itself.) I find a lot of work on reference and meaning in the anglophone tradition to be worth reading and intriguing. But when it comes to the human subject - including philosophies of action and ethics - its ahistoricism and desire to be "pure" knowledge leads to cul-de-sacs.
Deleuze and Guattari, writing together, are being playful and often contradictory. I enjoy their work, but I don't think it's the most substantive stuff in the world: it's a little too giddy. From Deleuze, I actually really like his "What is philosophy?", even if it makes strange claims at times. The most succinct expression of Deleuze is his early Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature. Deleuze, at the end of the day, is strongly tied to the English (or rather Scottish!) empiricist tradition.
Badiou's main book is "Being and Event" (clearing trying to put himself after Heidegger and Sartre - I think of Sartre as something of a misapprehending populizer of Heidegger, but even though he's not popular in continental philosophy any more and is dismissed as a lightweight, I can't help but be fond of him, and suspect that some of his work will enjoy a revival some day.) To some extent, he's kind of negotiating a rapprochement between Althusser and Heidegger/Sartre, but it is there that his idea of the event as a situation that produces subjects. He suggests that most of the time, we are not subjects - we just bumble along following the contours of the episteme (he uses a different term and framework for it, but it's pretty much a similar idea) - but certain events call us forth to choose, such as falling in love or committing to a resistance.
I'm a former student of Searle. I'm pretty familiar with the state of Anglo-American philosophy. I've simply come to the conclusion that, while certain thinkers such as Putnam, Austin, Strawson, Ayers, Feyeraband and such have produced interesting work, that the analytical tradition is not really the mainstream of philosophy, and that it is increasingly consigned to a "god of the gaps" position by its ahistoricism and positivist posture (even when its content isn't positivist, its rhetoric is.)
Too often there are claims made that should be made empirically, such as Dreyfus' insistence that computers could never become competent chess players, or accounts of choice that assume rationality (that is, the conscious or symbolic representation of possible outcomes before choice.) There is a profound reluctance to do real metaphysics, and so much of the analytic work strikes me as moving chairs around the desk of the Titanic.
Why aren't there thinkers of the scope and profundity of Hegel, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty? Why is Deleuze's reading of Hume so much more compelling than those of any of the anglo critics? When did philosophy become so timid and twee?