While the word "belief" is just a word to describe a kind of sentimental wishful thinking, I can see the value in what one might call an orientation toward that which is not ones' self, if for no other reason that just what the "self" is only can come into clarity by orientation toward something else. Even the greediest, most avaricious, "selfish" bastard is being driven by something that they don't have, and either want to acquire or experience. (Acquisition is, existentially, just the possibility of future experience, after all.)
What it means to be "greater" or "lesser" than the self is usually left unspecified. For the most part, I think even those Westerners who think they are beyond the Judeo-Christian religion still rely on assumptions, categories and concepts that are very much based on Christianity, and sentiments like the above are demonstrative.
It is an idiomatic expression, not set theory. It indicates a precarious and undetermined situation. So, unlike a tautology, it does provide information: that the state is unknown, "too close to call."
And the eternal battle between linguists and set theorists continues.
That may be your imaginary made-up definition of socialism, but it has little to do with the word as used by most of the rest of the world. I could call "capitalism" a system in which people are not allowed to help each other, in which everything must be paid for by the beneficiary, and therefor the US isn't capitalist because the fire department will come to help you even if you don't pay them, but that would also be a ridiculous mis-characterization.
I suggest you actually read the writings and philosophies of people who have described themselves as socialist (Proudhon, G.B. Shaw, the Fabian society, etc.)
Lenin figured that communism wasn't going to just happen from capitalism, as Marx said it would. So, Lenin came up with socialism to ease the population into communism.
Your grasp of the history of both Marxism and socialism is laughably bad.
Socialism pre-existed Marxism as both an idea and in practice. Marx actually said very little about what comes after capitalism, except that involved the political dominance of the working class and the public ownership of means of production.
It is a misreading of what I wrote to treat it as a defense of communism. I am criticizing a two-handed approach by which liberal capitalism's casualties are dismissed with a "can't make omelets without breaking some eggs" approach, while other systems' casualties are considered damning.
No, I'm saying that Korean society was a different political entity than African societies were. It was the parent poster who seems to have a cultural, rather than structural, explanation at hand.
Again, your history is flat on the ground. The Russian economy expanded with only a few hiccups right into the 60's. Communism was effective in transforming an almost exclusively agricultural economy with unheard of speed. The rate of industrialization has never been matched, and only rivaled by German 19th century industrialization and Japanese pre-war industrialization.
Where it lagged behind, of course, was the consumer market. The economic crisis the precipitated the fall of Communism was largely a product of the the failure to create an effective consumer economy, and of "last mile" distribution problems. This isn't to defend centrally-planned economies, but you have a master narrative for economic history that only works when you leave out very significant places and times. Within the same thread that you accuse critics of colonialism of a kind of romantic disregard for derogatory elements of non-Western cultures, you craft a fictitious history in order to tell another romantic story of the triumph of liberal capitalism.
Will you then give credit to the role of Communism in creating two of the world's greatest powers and its most dynamic economy? In producing the greatest economic leaps forward of the 20th century? And then hand-wave over the millions of casualties it caused? Or is your "que sera, sera" attitude selective?
The Mongols, Aztecs and Incas were, in their own way, as horrid. But we don't live in a global system created by those societies. We very much live in the world created by English and, later, American world dominance. What you are doing is telling someone who has been beaten up for the last 50 years that they shouldn't complain about the person beating them, because 200 miles away, there used to be people who did something at least as bad.
The Victorian English actually were pretty superlatively horrid, yet they are upheld as the pinnacle of civilization. Also, totalitarianisms are singled out for their atrocities and that is used as an argument against socialism, when the Victorian presence in India, uncontroversially responsible for 10 million deaths, can be laid at the feet of the rigorous enforcement of contracts and the introduction of "free" markets. That aspect is left out of a self-aggrandizing history of progress by which Western society looks at the "backwards" non-West and tells it how to behave.
The point is that those Communist societies now repudiate Stalinism (viz. Khrushchev) and the devastation created by the Great Leap Forward in China, even though they sometimes use the "it was necessary and now things are better for it" line that you seem to proffer for Western colonialism. The parallels are far closer than you think: the British engineered a famine in India (in the name of "getting people to respect contracts and the rule of law") that they would have otherwise survived, in a more direct and culpable way than even those who died under Mao.
India is a good example. I can see that you have little intention of actually reading anything the compromises your set beliefs, so I'll tell you: the Indian economy reversed its growth when the British entered, and only recovered it after 1947. The same is true of many African economies, as well, though most haven't quite recovered from colonialism yet.
Your history of Korea is actually quite wrong, as well. While it was colonized, it never had the radical socioeconomic restructuring and pillage that Africa or India experienced. South Korea, like post-war Japan, enjoyed a massive reconstruction project, and already existed as an essentially modern society (in many senses) as early as the 18th century. Comparing an early-modern society, which can recover from colonialism and build a nation-state rather quickly, with a cluster of societies and cultures that included hunter-gatherers and non-urban, non-state agricultural societies, is fatuous at best.
I again recommend the Davis text. The claim that these regions advanced economically under colonialism is actually incorrect.
The idea is not to blame the West as an idea. It is to recognize that the Western expansion of the 16th through 19th centuries has more or less created most of the day's crises. And I think you are selective about your "forgiveness." It can be argued that the Communist societies also "recognized their own colonialism," etc. There was considerable discourse about the morality of militarism and self-determination in both pre-modern China and in the Islamic world.
One does not need to get mythical and utopian about the past to recognize how deeply and profoundly fucked up colonialism and imperialism were. There's a book that I regularly refer people to in order to get a sense of just how profound the socioeconomic effects of European domination were: Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis. I'd also recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a look at 19th century sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
We tend to be indoctrinated about 20th century atrocities, particularly those of the Nazis and the Soviets. Democides involving millions were perpetrated in the century before, but aren't nearly as much part of day to day historical memory.
The point is that much of the science fiction from the 50's and 60's, and much of what is called "hard" science fiction (that is, SF in which scientific and technological speculation itself is the centerpiece) becomes dated quickly insofar as it gets proven unworkable, and most such technologically speculative fiction as such will get proven unworkable almost instantly now. I argue elsewhere for the existence of a technosocial science fiction which has considerably more longevity, and is probably more relevant to a current-day reader in any case. Both this hard SF and what I called "social realist SF" are distinct from space opera.
I recommend Thomas Disch's book, "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made From" for a good critical reading of science fiction.
I agree with your general layout, but extend it by gently critiquing that very mythic aspect of cyberpunk and holding as a counter-example what we might call "science-fiction social realism." Writers that might fill that bill include Thomas Disch and Kim Stanley Robinson: there, the interest in the social (and thus, ultimately, in the subjective) effects of technological change is not wed to a sense of the mythic, but as much to one of the everyday. What I find powerful about such an approach is that it illuminates how my own everyday experience is also a product of technosocial change and also produces it.
That's still backing away from the work of "hard sci-fi", though, isn't it? If you are using plot mechanisms to avoid having to explain technological change, that brings you back to space opera, rather than "hard sci-fi."
In that case, it could be said that hard science fiction has become almost impossible. Conjectures about future technologies are as hard as WG says, and any given writer is going to have to face the likelihood that their conjectures get shown as flawed very quickly. Scientific accuracy is hard enough for scientists now: a physicist will probably not have the ability to recognize biological impossibilities; a geneticist will botch sociology and economics. Yet a comprlling story will have value even if the science is flawed.
What is "procedural" about Spore is its game and interface design. Much of it is conceptually procedural. It is comparable to the sort of parameterization that you might find in a 3D design tool (Solidworks, Inventor, etc.)
I'm almost certain that it is implemented mostly in C++ and other modern, mostly OO languages.
The delusion that even humans are deep-down-inside more-or-less the same is what propelled fiascos like the invasion of Iraq (they want our freedoms! They just don't know it yet!) It is a combination of hubris and naivete to think the even other humans share what we could call "humanist" values. Those values produced by subjects participating in national states in modern economies with media-rich, commodity-dense markets, including markets for labor - these factors determining where we cooperate and where we compete, where we identify ourselves as sharing interests and where it's "pull your own weight/each for themselves", how we are subjected to power and how we represent ourselves to it, etc. How much more delusional to extend that expectation of universality to non-human, non-terrestrial cultures.
I'm not accusing you, the parent poster, of holding this belief: the Hawking quote is appropriate. What might be chilling is the fact that an "advanced" interstellar society might also hold that belief in "universal" values, and see our planet the way that the US sees Iraq - backward, rife with religious delusions, and ready to greet their way of life - and the forces that bring it - with "candy and flowers."
There are also limitations on what they can contractually demand from you, or the reasons they can throw you off your property. If they walk up to you halfway through the film, and say, "I'm sorry, we just noticed that you're black, and we don't want black people to watch this film," the fact that there may be fine print on the back of the ticket allowing them to do this won't matter a bit in the US: they would be sued to the stone age, and possibly even face prosecution. The same for, say, demands for sexual favors.
If there is determined to be a constitutional right to a certain level of privacy, then there are certain limitations that might come into play as far as waiving those rights are concerned. The contract itself could be illegal.
There is also an unfortunate misconception: nerds and geeks aren't just smart people. They're smart people with social deficits and, often, low cultural capital. There are smart people who are also popular, charismatic, and confident.
Slashdot Mirror
While the word "belief" is just a word to describe a kind of sentimental wishful thinking, I can see the value in what one might call an orientation toward that which is not ones' self, if for no other reason that just what the "self" is only can come into clarity by orientation toward something else. Even the greediest, most avaricious, "selfish" bastard is being driven by something that they don't have, and either want to acquire or experience. (Acquisition is, existentially, just the possibility of future experience, after all.)
What it means to be "greater" or "lesser" than the self is usually left unspecified. For the most part, I think even those Westerners who think they are beyond the Judeo-Christian religion still rely on assumptions, categories and concepts that are very much based on Christianity, and sentiments like the above are demonstrative.
It is an idiomatic expression, not set theory. It indicates a precarious and undetermined situation. So, unlike a tautology, it does provide information: that the state is unknown, "too close to call."
And the eternal battle between linguists and set theorists continues.
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
That may be your imaginary made-up definition of socialism, but it has little to do with the word as used by most of the rest of the world. I could call "capitalism" a system in which people are not allowed to help each other, in which everything must be paid for by the beneficiary, and therefor the US isn't capitalist because the fire department will come to help you even if you don't pay them, but that would also be a ridiculous mis-characterization.
I suggest you actually read the writings and philosophies of people who have described themselves as socialist (Proudhon, G.B. Shaw, the Fabian society, etc.)
Lenin figured that communism wasn't going to just happen from capitalism, as Marx said it would. So, Lenin came up with socialism to ease the population into communism.
Your grasp of the history of both Marxism and socialism is laughably bad.
Socialism pre-existed Marxism as both an idea and in practice. Marx actually said very little about what comes after capitalism, except that involved the political dominance of the working class and the public ownership of means of production.
Well, one difference is that most of us have dozens of CDs, and not one Blue-Ray disk.
It is a misreading of what I wrote to treat it as a defense of communism. I am criticizing a two-handed approach by which liberal capitalism's casualties are dismissed with a "can't make omelets without breaking some eggs" approach, while other systems' casualties are considered damning.
In the case of the Incas, it would be a misplaced knot on the quipu. Same mathemetical error!
Sadly, I do not believe that we have quipu-based demographic information that lets us know anything about pre-colonial Cusco.
No, I'm saying that Korean society was a different political entity than African societies were. It was the parent poster who seems to have a cultural, rather than structural, explanation at hand.
Again, your history is flat on the ground. The Russian economy expanded with only a few hiccups right into the 60's. Communism was effective in transforming an almost exclusively agricultural economy with unheard of speed. The rate of industrialization has never been matched, and only rivaled by German 19th century industrialization and Japanese pre-war industrialization.
Where it lagged behind, of course, was the consumer market. The economic crisis the precipitated the fall of Communism was largely a product of the the failure to create an effective consumer economy, and of "last mile" distribution problems. This isn't to defend centrally-planned economies, but you have a master narrative for economic history that only works when you leave out very significant places and times. Within the same thread that you accuse critics of colonialism of a kind of romantic disregard for derogatory elements of non-Western cultures, you craft a fictitious history in order to tell another romantic story of the triumph of liberal capitalism.
Will you then give credit to the role of Communism in creating two of the world's greatest powers and its most dynamic economy? In producing the greatest economic leaps forward of the 20th century? And then hand-wave over the millions of casualties it caused? Or is your "que sera, sera" attitude selective?
The Mongols, Aztecs and Incas were, in their own way, as horrid. But we don't live in a global system created by those societies. We very much live in the world created by English and, later, American world dominance. What you are doing is telling someone who has been beaten up for the last 50 years that they shouldn't complain about the person beating them, because 200 miles away, there used to be people who did something at least as bad.
The Victorian English actually were pretty superlatively horrid, yet they are upheld as the pinnacle of civilization. Also, totalitarianisms are singled out for their atrocities and that is used as an argument against socialism, when the Victorian presence in India, uncontroversially responsible for 10 million deaths, can be laid at the feet of the rigorous enforcement of contracts and the introduction of "free" markets. That aspect is left out of a self-aggrandizing history of progress by which Western society looks at the "backwards" non-West and tells it how to behave.
The point is that those Communist societies now repudiate Stalinism (viz. Khrushchev) and the devastation created by the Great Leap Forward in China, even though they sometimes use the "it was necessary and now things are better for it" line that you seem to proffer for Western colonialism. The parallels are far closer than you think: the British engineered a famine in India (in the name of "getting people to respect contracts and the rule of law") that they would have otherwise survived, in a more direct and culpable way than even those who died under Mao.
India is a good example. I can see that you have little intention of actually reading anything the compromises your set beliefs, so I'll tell you: the Indian economy reversed its growth when the British entered, and only recovered it after 1947. The same is true of many African economies, as well, though most haven't quite recovered from colonialism yet.
Your history of Korea is actually quite wrong, as well. While it was colonized, it never had the radical socioeconomic restructuring and pillage that Africa or India experienced. South Korea, like post-war Japan, enjoyed a massive reconstruction project, and already existed as an essentially modern society (in many senses) as early as the 18th century. Comparing an early-modern society, which can recover from colonialism and build a nation-state rather quickly, with a cluster of societies and cultures that included hunter-gatherers and non-urban, non-state agricultural societies, is fatuous at best.
I again recommend the Davis text. The claim that these regions advanced economically under colonialism is actually incorrect.
The idea is not to blame the West as an idea. It is to recognize that the Western expansion of the 16th through 19th centuries has more or less created most of the day's crises. And I think you are selective about your "forgiveness." It can be argued that the Communist societies also "recognized their own colonialism," etc. There was considerable discourse about the morality of militarism and self-determination in both pre-modern China and in the Islamic world.
One does not need to get mythical and utopian about the past to recognize how deeply and profoundly fucked up colonialism and imperialism were. There's a book that I regularly refer people to in order to get a sense of just how profound the socioeconomic effects of European domination were: Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis. I'd also recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a look at 19th century sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
We tend to be indoctrinated about 20th century atrocities, particularly those of the Nazis and the Soviets. Democides involving millions were perpetrated in the century before, but aren't nearly as much part of day to day historical memory.
Insurance rates are about average statistics, not exceptions.
The point is that much of the science fiction from the 50's and 60's, and much of what is called "hard" science fiction (that is, SF in which scientific and technological speculation itself is the centerpiece) becomes dated quickly insofar as it gets proven unworkable, and most such technologically speculative fiction as such will get proven unworkable almost instantly now. I argue elsewhere for the existence of a technosocial science fiction which has considerably more longevity, and is probably more relevant to a current-day reader in any case. Both this hard SF and what I called "social realist SF" are distinct from space opera.
I recommend Thomas Disch's book, "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made From" for a good critical reading of science fiction.
I agree with your general layout, but extend it by gently critiquing that very mythic aspect of cyberpunk and holding as a counter-example what we might call "science-fiction social realism." Writers that might fill that bill include Thomas Disch and Kim Stanley Robinson: there, the interest in the social (and thus, ultimately, in the subjective) effects of technological change is not wed to a sense of the mythic, but as much to one of the everyday. What I find powerful about such an approach is that it illuminates how my own everyday experience is also a product of technosocial change and also produces it.
That's still backing away from the work of "hard sci-fi", though, isn't it? If you are using plot mechanisms to avoid having to explain technological change, that brings you back to space opera, rather than "hard sci-fi."
In that case, it could be said that hard science fiction has become almost impossible. Conjectures about future technologies are as hard as WG says, and any given writer is going to have to face the likelihood that their conjectures get shown as flawed very quickly. Scientific accuracy is hard enough for scientists now: a physicist will probably not have the ability to recognize biological impossibilities; a geneticist will botch sociology and economics. Yet a comprlling story will have value even if the science is flawed.
Agreed, the original article is crap.
What is "procedural" about Spore is its game and interface design. Much of it is conceptually procedural. It is comparable to the sort of parameterization that you might find in a 3D design tool (Solidworks, Inventor, etc.)
I'm almost certain that it is implemented mostly in C++ and other modern, mostly OO languages.
The delusion that even humans are deep-down-inside more-or-less the same is what propelled fiascos like the invasion of Iraq (they want our freedoms! They just don't know it yet!) It is a combination of hubris and naivete to think the even other humans share what we could call "humanist" values. Those values produced by subjects participating in national states in modern economies with media-rich, commodity-dense markets, including markets for labor - these factors determining where we cooperate and where we compete, where we identify ourselves as sharing interests and where it's "pull your own weight/each for themselves", how we are subjected to power and how we represent ourselves to it, etc. How much more delusional to extend that expectation of universality to non-human, non-terrestrial cultures.
I'm not accusing you, the parent poster, of holding this belief: the Hawking quote is appropriate. What might be chilling is the fact that an "advanced" interstellar society might also hold that belief in "universal" values, and see our planet the way that the US sees Iraq - backward, rife with religious delusions, and ready to greet their way of life - and the forces that bring it - with "candy and flowers."
I never thought I'd say this. Ever. But....
"I, for one, welcome..."
There are also limitations on what they can contractually demand from you, or the reasons they can throw you off your property. If they walk up to you halfway through the film, and say, "I'm sorry, we just noticed that you're black, and we don't want black people to watch this film," the fact that there may be fine print on the back of the ticket allowing them to do this won't matter a bit in the US: they would be sued to the stone age, and possibly even face prosecution. The same for, say, demands for sexual favors.
If there is determined to be a constitutional right to a certain level of privacy, then there are certain limitations that might come into play as far as waiving those rights are concerned. The contract itself could be illegal.
The real obstacle is poor social skills.
There is also an unfortunate misconception: nerds and geeks aren't just smart people. They're smart people with social deficits and, often, low cultural capital. There are smart people who are also popular, charismatic, and confident.
Life's not fair.