We may pay $30 or $40 for a meal that we finish in an hour and feel we've had a good deal, then pay $10 for a pen with which we will write for over a hundred hours and feel ripped off, then spend $20,000 on a wedding that lasts a day and feel it's well-spent, while thinking that is too much to spend on a car that we will use for 5 years.
Bottom line, Japan is still a lot better than the US
On what basis do you make this claim?
For much of the world, Japan is still the US' most enthusiastic booster, at least in regard to foreign policy. And the civil liberties record in Japan is not exactly ideal. Are you aware of the 99% conviction rate?
Japan and the US, as different as they are as cultures, have some striking similarities in their strange blend of democracy and authoritarianism.
I was recently criticizing the iPhone and a friend accused me, without a tone of irony, of jealousy.
I pointed out that I could, in fact, buy an iPhone if I wanted to. One is usually jealous only of things one can not have or do. The "you're jealous" card seems wildly inappropriate in this case, unless someone really is so impecunious that they simply can't buy one.
For several centuries, Islamic civilization hosted Jews and Christians without incident, allowing them to participate in the highest levels of society, while Christendom was engaged in Inquisitions. Extremist Islam is a recent interpretation of Islam: Wahhabism was reactionary response to what was widely seen as cultural as well as political colonialism and imperialism, and is very much connect to the history of European intervention particularly in the post 140 years or so.
And lest you think that Christian culturecide is a think of the distant past, I would look at the destruction of the religious and cultural practices throughout the Pacific Islands in the past 100 years, and the other effects of missionary activity in the non-West in recent times.
The position reflected in my post makes me unpopular on both the left and the right. The conservative temperment doesn't like the implicit claim that what is hailed as the great humanistic Enlightenment tradition is, at its root, an arbitrary cultural and historical development with its roots in the conflict between social strata; the left doesn't like the values of compassion and egalitarianism questioned or historicized. There's something for everyone to hate about this kind of critique - which is why I believe there's something to it.
No, even if some semblance of a nation (or a federation with a near-autonomous Kurdish region) forms, the neo-cons were wrong. Cheney predicted troops being welcomed with candy and flowers. I have yet to be convinced - in fact, no one is even trying to make this argument - that an incremental approach to behavior change in Iraq would have eventually created a post-Saddam world with far less bloodshed, Iraqi and American.
The idea that peoples' interests are represented by a bureaucratic nation-state in which one participates by voting once every few years, with thousands of people in an arbitrarily designated geographical region, for some representative who will then administer national resources (including military, welfare, and educational systems) better than what was the effective route of political enfranchisement - local, kinship-based affiliations - is what is really presumptuous.
Much of the success that the US is having now is based on the fact that it has largely already capitulated and is letting Iraq form as essentially a Shia state (and, absent the US, probably a client state of Iran) and because Al Qaeda in Iraq are a bunch of psychotic assholes.
You mis-read my post very badly if you believed it was a defense of Christianity. It was, rather, a critique of the uncritical assumption of the universality of humanism.
Yes, it is likely that a practice of complete and utter individualism is unlikely. But that tells us very little, if anything, about their values or how they treat "others": fascists, Stalinist, utopian collectivists, the Mongolian Empire, modern corporations, street gangs, and rural villagers all cooperate, reproduce, and interact socially.
No, Christianity is responsible for a very specific ideology called "humanism."
Other civilizations produced different ideologies, many of which we might see as humanistic in their own way, and often for similar reasons. Buddhism and Islam were also, in their ways, "leveling" religions, appealing to masses of people by removing social strata.
The instinct to confuse the ideology of humanism with any and all expressions of goodness and kindness is only a demonstration of its pervasiveness as a value system in the west.
We are "nicer" - that is, we have what we would call "humanistic" values - because of a very specific history that involves Christianity and the rise of the middle-classes. What we commonly assume are "universal" human values are, at closer inspection, products of the Enlightenment and the secularization of Christian values of compassion and equality. These values themselves came to the fore because they are more "democratic" - that is, they assure people at the lower strata of society that in the after life, the strata disappear. (In crude terms, it is a "slave" religion, though I evoke Nietzsche only with some hesitation.)
The belief that these specific humanistic, egalitarian (sort-of) values, including the transformation of an instinct for compassion into a universal law which assumes that God must, too, be compassionate, are universal values, is a dangerous conceit. It is what motivated the neo-conservatives to create, by sheer force of will, a modern democratic state in Iraq, with the assumption that "deep down inside" the people of that region want nothing but to be what we are.
Now, you have the hubris to extend that presumption to non-terrestrial cultures that we don't even know exist.
"Congress" always has low ratings. Any given district or state's own representatives and senators, however, usually have fairly high ratings. It was ever thus: I hate your bozos, you hate mine. But with both love our own bozos.
Within the context of Iranian politics, President Ahmadinejad is almost powerless. Iran has a very weak executive branch, and he's not particularly powerful or influential now. The US media and political establishment like to keep him in the news because his ravings make good copy, but that doesn't really mean much in terms of the actual level of threat posed by Iran.
Not to mention the wasting effects of cancer: by the time one dies of cancer, one may have been "underweight" for quite a few years.
Bogusness abounds!
Re:natural morality is a real concept
on
Chefs As Chemists
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· Score: 1
In fact, sexual mores are not that universal, and there are many societies that do, in fact, tolerate the sexualization of pre-pubescent children.
You are attempting to get around a critique of a cruel practice - the production of foie gras, by treating some kinds of moral claims as arbitrary and relative, and then sneaking other types of moral claims into a kind of genetic universal. The data, however, doesn't support it. You have ideas of mate selection and parental investment in them that have a lot more to do with the development of modern European culture (and cultures which have developed middle classes, generally.) Given that moral/ethical axioms are always generated culturally and historically and not "genetically," ultimately you are going to have to deal with the possibility of a real conflict of ethical norms that can't be resolved by reference to "nature".
Most of us who actually witnessed the production of foie gras would be as mortified as we would be if we saw a 13 year old boy torturing a cat. I'm not a vegetarian, but the fact that I eat meat doesn't mean that I don't see ethical issues at work in the treatment of animals.
See, I think an appropriate use for technology is to reduce the obligation to be cruel. Farmed tissues could some day replace the slaughter of animals for meat: at that point, I think it really would be immoral to continue to slaughter animals for meat. This article is about the use of chemistry to create interesting new flavours: one would think that some of that inventiveness could be used to create flavorful, less cruel alternatives to foie gras.
I have to disagree. I'm in the 35-50 demographic, and people below 30 seem more open to intergenerational discussion and activities than mine ever did. The internet has eroded a lot of the boundaries between generations, and while generally people are still more comfortable with people of their own age (as am I), I think that this has gotten better over the past couple of generations, rather than worse.
There is some of that - a person who comes of age in the 80's and then is listening to Architecture in Helsinki or Bonobo or such now seems more coherent than one that is listening to, say, Jay-Z or even Danger Mouse (although I do listen to Danger Mouse). The thing is, the independent scene for non-rock draws a lot less interest as well. What I really think has happened is a kind of capitulation: culture is now accepted, uncritically, as a product, except when there is a response based on remix or mash-up. The culture of the mash-up is interesting in its own right, but it doesn't seem to create the generational energy or identity that music in the past did. Perhaps those past ways of responding to music were blinkered in their own right, but I don't see the same strength of aspiration or sense of moment now that existed in the past.
This is strictly a US-based observation at this point, too: I think that things are different elsewhere. There are a lot of external factors that structure youth cultures, and they may be at play.
I have to disagree, actually - I've really seen a lot of parents who still keep up with indie music, whose kids are stuck on mass market stuff. Mom and Dad like The Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, the kid is into Justin Timberlake. And it's not a "rebelling against parents" thing, either - it's more like a substantial aesthetic incuriosity.
For the most part, some of the most timid, fear-driven people I know of are geeks, after a childhood spent targeted by bullies. Bless 'em, but for the most part (and there are exceptions, of course) take-one-for-the-team live-free-or-die courage just isn't their strong suit.
I can't stand the over-use of the expression "hard-wired" when the data only indicates something that is universal. It implies that the structures responsible would develop in that function no matter what, without the experience in the world of, for example, things in sets-of-three, etc.
The data really supports dynamical systems models of cognitive development more than pure innatist ones. Just look at what the brain of someone blind from birth develops into, absent visual input.
I highly recommend the books of Andy Clark, particularly his "Being There," as an introduction that starts to explain just how flawed the seemingly harmless phrase "hard-wired" is.
And those choices aren't binary. My fiance^h^h^h^h^h^hwife (wow, that's so weird) is a foodie like none other (I am too, but she's forgotten more about food than I'll ever know) - and I'm a gamer. I can get a $300 video card - and consoles, and handhelds, etc - and we can go out to $200 meals. We both love to travel. Neither of us care about fancy cars or McMansions, so home and auto expenses are thus lower than they might be for others at our income level.
As long as you make more than you spend, in the long term you'll be fine.
Bushnell's reputation is far overrated. His "great ideas" were simply to take existing breakthroughs - Russell et al's SpaceWar, Baer's, and before him Higenbothen's, tennis game - and turn them into arcade games. He has never been a game designer nor a technological innovator - just a canny impresario who has never had insight into what makes good gameplay (look at what happened to Atari under his guidance.) I seriously doubt he has even played a game made after 1990 for more than 15 minutes.
He has no authority on this topic, and it is a shallow ploy to keep his name in circulation and his speaking fees coming in.
No, that's not necessarily the point of art at all, and it is also the aim of a lot of other things that aren't art (like speechmaking, advertising, and simple threats - which are meant to provoke the emotion of fear.)
One can make the argument that the point of art is produce sensations, and particularly interesting ones, which I feel is more accurate.
In any case, games do produce emotions: the emotion of pleasure at skillful play, frustration at failure, curiosity about the parameters of the game, plus whatever one feels about the thing that the game is simulating or modeling (including its story and artwork). But I think of them as producing, more broadly, all the sensations we associate with gaming, particularly with the management and concentration of attention.
Of course, usually when people mean "emotion," they mean the relatively maudlin and banal elements of melodrama like the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy. Sentimental manipulation isn't aesthetically interesting to me even in film: the drier, more contemplative and less apparently emotional (but aesthetically and intellectually captivating) work of someone like Godard strikes me as a lot more artistic than swelling violins and melodramatics of standard Hollywood fare.
I have to agree. First-person shooters are not foremost about an "immersive experience" in an alternate world. For dedicated players, they are an e-sport. If the peripheral does not improve performance in the game, the players will not be interested. If it does, it might be considered a cheat.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, at least, a lot of the songs in Guitar Hero are easier in real life than in Guitar Hero!
We may pay $30 or $40 for a meal that we finish in an hour and feel we've had a good deal, then pay $10 for a pen with which we will write for over a hundred hours and feel ripped off, then spend $20,000 on a wedding that lasts a day and feel it's well-spent, while thinking that is too much to spend on a car that we will use for 5 years.
Value is not just a function of time of use.
Bottom line, Japan is still a lot better than the US
On what basis do you make this claim?
For much of the world, Japan is still the US' most enthusiastic booster, at least in regard to foreign policy. And the civil liberties record in Japan is not exactly ideal. Are you aware of the 99% conviction rate?
Japan and the US, as different as they are as cultures, have some striking similarities in their strange blend of democracy and authoritarianism.
I was recently criticizing the iPhone and a friend accused me, without a tone of irony, of jealousy.
I pointed out that I could, in fact, buy an iPhone if I wanted to. One is usually jealous only of things one can not have or do. The "you're jealous" card seems wildly inappropriate in this case, unless someone really is so impecunious that they simply can't buy one.
For several centuries, Islamic civilization hosted Jews and Christians without incident, allowing them to participate in the highest levels of society, while Christendom was engaged in Inquisitions. Extremist Islam is a recent interpretation of Islam: Wahhabism was reactionary response to what was widely seen as cultural as well as political colonialism and imperialism, and is very much connect to the history of European intervention particularly in the post 140 years or so.
And lest you think that Christian culturecide is a think of the distant past, I would look at the destruction of the religious and cultural practices throughout the Pacific Islands in the past 100 years, and the other effects of missionary activity in the non-West in recent times.
The position reflected in my post makes me unpopular on both the left and the right. The conservative temperment doesn't like the implicit claim that what is hailed as the great humanistic Enlightenment tradition is, at its root, an arbitrary cultural and historical development with its roots in the conflict between social strata; the left doesn't like the values of compassion and egalitarianism questioned or historicized. There's something for everyone to hate about this kind of critique - which is why I believe there's something to it.
No, even if some semblance of a nation (or a federation with a near-autonomous Kurdish region) forms, the neo-cons were wrong. Cheney predicted troops being welcomed with candy and flowers. I have yet to be convinced - in fact, no one is even trying to make this argument - that an incremental approach to behavior change in Iraq would have eventually created a post-Saddam world with far less bloodshed, Iraqi and American.
The idea that peoples' interests are represented by a bureaucratic nation-state in which one participates by voting once every few years, with thousands of people in an arbitrarily designated geographical region, for some representative who will then administer national resources (including military, welfare, and educational systems) better than what was the effective route of political enfranchisement - local, kinship-based affiliations - is what is really presumptuous.
Much of the success that the US is having now is based on the fact that it has largely already capitulated and is letting Iraq form as essentially a Shia state (and, absent the US, probably a client state of Iran) and because Al Qaeda in Iraq are a bunch of psychotic assholes.
You mis-read my post very badly if you believed it was a defense of Christianity. It was, rather, a critique of the uncritical assumption of the universality of humanism.
Yes, it is likely that a practice of complete and utter individualism is unlikely. But that tells us very little, if anything, about their values or how they treat "others": fascists, Stalinist, utopian collectivists, the Mongolian Empire, modern corporations, street gangs, and rural villagers all cooperate, reproduce, and interact socially.
No, Christianity is responsible for a very specific ideology called "humanism."
Other civilizations produced different ideologies, many of which we might see as humanistic in their own way, and often for similar reasons. Buddhism and Islam were also, in their ways, "leveling" religions, appealing to masses of people by removing social strata.
The instinct to confuse the ideology of humanism with any and all expressions of goodness and kindness is only a demonstration of its pervasiveness as a value system in the west.
We are "nicer" - that is, we have what we would call "humanistic" values - because of a very specific history that involves Christianity and the rise of the middle-classes. What we commonly assume are "universal" human values are, at closer inspection, products of the Enlightenment and the secularization of Christian values of compassion and equality. These values themselves came to the fore because they are more "democratic" - that is, they assure people at the lower strata of society that in the after life, the strata disappear. (In crude terms, it is a "slave" religion, though I evoke Nietzsche only with some hesitation.)
The belief that these specific humanistic, egalitarian (sort-of) values, including the transformation of an instinct for compassion into a universal law which assumes that God must, too, be compassionate, are universal values, is a dangerous conceit. It is what motivated the neo-conservatives to create, by sheer force of will, a modern democratic state in Iraq, with the assumption that "deep down inside" the people of that region want nothing but to be what we are.
Now, you have the hubris to extend that presumption to non-terrestrial cultures that we don't even know exist.
"Congress" always has low ratings. Any given district or state's own representatives and senators, however, usually have fairly high ratings. It was ever thus: I hate your bozos, you hate mine. But with both love our own bozos.
Within the context of Iranian politics, President Ahmadinejad is almost powerless. Iran has a very weak executive branch, and he's not particularly powerful or influential now. The US media and political establishment like to keep him in the news because his ravings make good copy, but that doesn't really mean much in terms of the actual level of threat posed by Iran.
Not to mention the wasting effects of cancer: by the time one dies of cancer, one may have been "underweight" for quite a few years.
Bogusness abounds!
In fact, sexual mores are not that universal, and there are many societies that do, in fact, tolerate the sexualization of pre-pubescent children.
You are attempting to get around a critique of a cruel practice - the production of foie gras, by treating some kinds of moral claims as arbitrary and relative, and then sneaking other types of moral claims into a kind of genetic universal. The data, however, doesn't support it. You have ideas of mate selection and parental investment in them that have a lot more to do with the development of modern European culture (and cultures which have developed middle classes, generally.) Given that moral/ethical axioms are always generated culturally and historically and not "genetically," ultimately you are going to have to deal with the possibility of a real conflict of ethical norms that can't be resolved by reference to "nature".
Most of us who actually witnessed the production of foie gras would be as mortified as we would be if we saw a 13 year old boy torturing a cat. I'm not a vegetarian, but the fact that I eat meat doesn't mean that I don't see ethical issues at work in the treatment of animals.
See, I think an appropriate use for technology is to reduce the obligation to be cruel. Farmed tissues could some day replace the slaughter of animals for meat: at that point, I think it really would be immoral to continue to slaughter animals for meat. This article is about the use of chemistry to create interesting new flavours: one would think that some of that inventiveness could be used to create flavorful, less cruel alternatives to foie gras.
I have to disagree. I'm in the 35-50 demographic, and people below 30 seem more open to intergenerational discussion and activities than mine ever did. The internet has eroded a lot of the boundaries between generations, and while generally people are still more comfortable with people of their own age (as am I), I think that this has gotten better over the past couple of generations, rather than worse.
There is some of that - a person who comes of age in the 80's and then is listening to Architecture in Helsinki or Bonobo or such now seems more coherent than one that is listening to, say, Jay-Z or even Danger Mouse (although I do listen to Danger Mouse). The thing is, the independent scene for non-rock draws a lot less interest as well. What I really think has happened is a kind of capitulation: culture is now accepted, uncritically, as a product, except when there is a response based on remix or mash-up. The culture of the mash-up is interesting in its own right, but it doesn't seem to create the generational energy or identity that music in the past did. Perhaps those past ways of responding to music were blinkered in their own right, but I don't see the same strength of aspiration or sense of moment now that existed in the past.
This is strictly a US-based observation at this point, too: I think that things are different elsewhere. There are a lot of external factors that structure youth cultures, and they may be at play.
I have to disagree, actually - I've really seen a lot of parents who still keep up with indie music, whose kids are stuck on mass market stuff. Mom and Dad like The Arcade Fire and Animal Collective, the kid is into Justin Timberlake. And it's not a "rebelling against parents" thing, either - it's more like a substantial aesthetic incuriosity.
We're talking about geeks here.
For the most part, some of the most timid, fear-driven people I know of are geeks, after a childhood spent targeted by bullies. Bless 'em, but for the most part (and there are exceptions, of course) take-one-for-the-team live-free-or-die courage just isn't their strong suit.
I agree...
I can't stand the over-use of the expression "hard-wired" when the data only indicates something that is universal. It implies that the structures responsible would develop in that function no matter what, without the experience in the world of, for example, things in sets-of-three, etc.
The data really supports dynamical systems models of cognitive development more than pure innatist ones. Just look at what the brain of someone blind from birth develops into, absent visual input.
I highly recommend the books of Andy Clark, particularly his "Being There," as an introduction that starts to explain just how flawed the seemingly harmless phrase "hard-wired" is.
What Google *anything* has killed anything else, other than the vanilla search engine?
And those choices aren't binary. My fiance^h^h^h^h^h^hwife (wow, that's so weird) is a foodie like none other (I am too, but she's forgotten more about food than I'll ever know) - and I'm a gamer. I can get a $300 video card - and consoles, and handhelds, etc - and we can go out to $200 meals. We both love to travel. Neither of us care about fancy cars or McMansions, so home and auto expenses are thus lower than they might be for others at our income level.
As long as you make more than you spend, in the long term you'll be fine.
Bushnell's reputation is far overrated. His "great ideas" were simply to take existing breakthroughs - Russell et al's SpaceWar, Baer's, and before him Higenbothen's, tennis game - and turn them into arcade games. He has never been a game designer nor a technological innovator - just a canny impresario who has never had insight into what makes good gameplay (look at what happened to Atari under his guidance.) I seriously doubt he has even played a game made after 1990 for more than 15 minutes.
He has no authority on this topic, and it is a shallow ploy to keep his name in circulation and his speaking fees coming in.
No, that's not necessarily the point of art at all, and it is also the aim of a lot of other things that aren't art (like speechmaking, advertising, and simple threats - which are meant to provoke the emotion of fear.)
One can make the argument that the point of art is produce sensations, and particularly interesting ones, which I feel is more accurate.
In any case, games do produce emotions: the emotion of pleasure at skillful play, frustration at failure, curiosity about the parameters of the game, plus whatever one feels about the thing that the game is simulating or modeling (including its story and artwork). But I think of them as producing, more broadly, all the sensations we associate with gaming, particularly with the management and concentration of attention.
Of course, usually when people mean "emotion," they mean the relatively maudlin and banal elements of melodrama like the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy. Sentimental manipulation isn't aesthetically interesting to me even in film: the drier, more contemplative and less apparently emotional (but aesthetically and intellectually captivating) work of someone like Godard strikes me as a lot more artistic than swelling violins and melodramatics of standard Hollywood fare.
I have to agree. First-person shooters are not foremost about an "immersive experience" in an alternate world. For dedicated players, they are an e-sport. If the peripheral does not improve performance in the game, the players will not be interested. If it does, it might be considered a cheat.