I think one can recognize the historically racist way of viewing things - a worldview created by a position that was not explicitly racist, yet relied on perpetuating a way of seeing things (that is, the superiority of European civilization and a sense of historical mission to bring "civilization") that had inescapably racist entailments, without declaring Tolkien as particularly racist. My claim is that the genre of 19th and 20th century heroic fantasy relies on ideas about fantasy races that is very much part of the baggage of Victorian Imperialist thinking. Tolkien himself was congenially tolerant and probably did not subscribe to an over-the-top racist ideology. However, he did grow up in South Africa and his family experienced the Boer War: I think his belief system might include a horror of war joined with a sense in which war interfered with the civilizing mission of European colonialism.
The most critical claim one might make is that Tolkien preferred the benign "civilizing" racism of the Victorian Empire to the crude, brutal genocidal racism of fascism, or the dehumanizing industrial state (e.g., the world of the "scouring of the Shire.") He probably wanted to keep Southrons out of the Shire, and had an ideal of ethnic purity without cruelty that might be a little naive at best. (Someone characterized his attitude toward Africans as one of "decent chaps in their own way, with immortal souls and all, but not in England, of course.")
For me, the idea that "race is destiny" is the most significant baggage from the straightforward heroic fantasy genre, and Blizzard tweaks it in interesting ways. Instead of good and evil, WoW seems to suggest both cultural difference, and the cyclical possibilities of corruption and redemption. It's a more sophisticated ethical cosmology from my perspective. (Tolkien himself hemmed and hawed over the question of whether orcs could be redeemed, from a Christian perspective, and indeed whether they had free will at all.) One of the interesting consequences of Blizzard's originality is the we don't know how it will all turn out. In a traditional good-vs.-evil conflict, we know that good will triumph. What we don't know is what is going to happen in WoW: are the Blood Elves going to be corrupted? Will the Orcs stay on a Shamanistic path or not? Which humans are going to peacefully co-exist with other races, and which will not? Etc. The departure from formula creates both more food for thought and longer-term narrative suspense. That there is no final "triumph," but rather simply the continuation of history, is itself something of an achievement for the fantasy genre.
In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft is a critique of the Tolkienesque ideas of good and evil. Tolkien might be said to combine a Christian metaphysics of good and evil with English cultural imperialism: for the most part, the heroes are the "Men of the West" while the villains are "swarthy," dark-skinned, uncivilized, etc.
Blizzard took this set-up and exposed it as being a reflection of European colonialism and imperialism. The Alliance is trying to "clean up" the land, getting rid of those cultures that don't resemble itself sufficiently. The result reveals just what the historical cultural origins of the traditional heroic fantasy categories of "good" and "evil" races really is - a veiled form of racism.
Um, that's some revisionism there. The US may not exactly have been allied with Napoleon, but it was at war with its enemy, England. Louisiana was purchased through negotiation, not by threat or conquest.
Napoleon spoke of his dream as the creation of a United States of Europe.
Not just losers, kind of famous losers in pop-culture way. The ones that were partial inspiration for the parody, Spinal Tap.
And they didn't wear black leather.
The grandparent's capitalization should have been a clue.
Normally it would be just an amusing misread, but you were assuming an air of such worldly sophistication ('perhaps in your one-light Kansas town') when, in fact, you were missing the boat an a snide pop-culture reference that flew right over your overly-literal head.
You're kidding... I've known what a gnu was since childhood. What you say depresses me.
I imagine that most people in the world do know what a gnu is. Just a subset of geeks who don't have an interest in anything that doesn't have electricity coursing through it that don't.
I was about to invent a "if different laundry detergents only worked on some washers" kind of analogy, but the point is better made by observing that software has a lot of interdependencies that aren't reflected by comparison to things like washing detergent.
No Peruvian who has lived through the civil wars of the 80's is as naive as a US commentator with simplistic ideas about what creates "freedom." Try to learn about what it was like before you call other people naive.
The question is whether there is any meaningful freedom in a state of terror. Is Iraq freer and more democratic now that you are more likely to be killed by an insurgent rather than by the representative of a government?
The guerrilla movements in Peru were taking a significant toll on the civilian population. Fujimori, for all his errors, created a freer society by stopping those movements.
For manual skills (that is, ones in which the fingers, hands, arms and indeed the entire body has to learn, not just the memory), I think computer-based simulations are of limited value. Not none, but limited.
Of course I understand this. But what constitutes computer science itself is a complicated topic. Most people in CS programs enter them thinking it is about programming - which it really wasn't, historically. Computer science in its purest form is a hybrid of logic and number theory, and has almost nothing to do with programming at all.
If that is the core of CS, programming, as much as simulation and modeling, can be seen as "satellites" of that core. But programming (which really could be taught on a vocational basis) and certain types of optimization (which really are more "engineering" than "science") have taken the center stage in CS programs, largely catering to the canonical geek core's perception of what the job market is.
I know most of the people here are either concerned with their geek cred or trying to attract a mate, but the vision of CS in the bit you quote - "as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth" - is rather important and compelling. That is a different vision from one focused on optimization and language development - it is one focused on simulation and modelling (and perhaps on data collection) and may, in fact, benefit from an infusion of non-geeks. People for whom computing becomes central to solving problems that are not, themselves, computing problems.
What if CS became a pre-med degree? Or if a CS undergrad was like to go on to pursue graduate studies in genetics or psychology? Developing systems that can handle protein-folding problems, or implementing neural networks, are important aspects of those fields of study. That women have strong presences in the sciences other than computer science suggests, to me, that geek insularity might be a larger problem for the field itself.
I didn't like slavery in the US, but I wouldn't have wanted England to invade to end it. And opposition to a 19th century invasion of America would not have been the same thing is approval of slavery.
That's a load of crap. Granted, there's a "victim" card that gets played at times.
But if I run over you and paralyze you from the waist down, you're a victim of careless driving. If a genocidal political regime puts you into a detention camp, you're a victim of political oppression and genocide. If you get mugged, you're a victim of crime. Gratuitously avoiding the "victim" tag when it applies is pretty ridiculous. Most people don't like being victims, but it happens.
Sometimes, one forgets the historical context of all these events. The siege of Leningrad, for example. That his research really got under way in the early, progressive years of the USSR (the period of constructivist art, experimental theatre, open research, etc.) During dynamic periods of history like that, I often wonder how scientists, artists and such get funding and support, keep producing, etc.
I take Lenin seriously, but I'm not a Leninist either. Nor a Maoist.
The writers to whom I'm closest are Zizek and Althusser, and perhaps, through them, a Hegelian as much as a Marxist. And because I'm actually a member of the middle class, I'm pretty much invested in things that are in the interests of the middle class in terms of my actual political activism: I want to lower my own tax burden, have taxes spent on projects that benefit me, etc. Like any good Marxist, I'm aware of my class interests (which don't happen to be those of the working class) and I pursue them, within the boundaries of my ethics. In some ways, in my skepticism about the perfectibility of the human condition, I'm actually a Burkean conservative. And I'm interested in certain European conservatives as well, particularly Chantal del Sol and Alain de Benoist.
I think the crude "libertarians versus socialists" approach to political discourse in geek circles is intellectually embarrassing, partially because it treats political systems like a game of Civilization. One science fiction author lamented how too much libertarian sci-fi was built around the "a-ha!" moment in which it was revealed that everything would Just Work Out if the Gummint would go away (again, as if the government had shown up one day at the door step, instead of being produced and sustained on a daily basis by people pursuing their interests.)
That said, one writer who does work at the intersection of geek political ontology and the limits of possibility, whose work I generally like, is Ken MacLeod.
That test alone still leaves the family as an organ of the state: even moreso, simply without necessarily having the resources to fulfill its mandates. As it is, that is more or less the current state of affairs, except for the public funding of schools - there is still home schooling, etc.
Besides, how do you ensure that children are not being beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, etc? It requires a substantial social and legal apparatus to make those determinations. And then there's the question of medical care.
As soon as there is a "should," (other than as a moral category) there is the question of force and power. I think we would agree that parents should not be free to create communal societies in which 5 year olds are allowed to be used as sexual objects, and perhaps you may even agree that children should not be left un-vaccinated for diseases like polio. Even these broad dictums require governmental force (and there are religious/cultish communities who, without that force, would practice just those behaviors) and, as a consequence, the public creation and enforcement of a set of standards and expectations for parenting.
My point about the Sopranos is that they create their own government, both internally and within the community. If the "public" government disappeared, there is little that would keep family/private "governments" like the Sopranos from taking hold. Without a governmental authority, those functions currently under the purview of the civil government would have to be handled privately, either within your own family or by others. However, it would still require all the exercise of power.
Libertarians are anarchists who either hope that everyone will subscribe to a set of principles about property that will serve only some of the people, on a voluntary basis, or who believe that people - all people - are generally rational, responsible middle-class agents who will defer their own pleasure, focus on running a household, etc - or at least will stay out of the way of those who don't, and who will resolve conflicts peacefully, and who will somehow coordinate their capital into organs for large-scale projects without creating quasi-governmental institutions. I don't mean to pick on libertarians per se - I think most Marxists and, indeed, most people in general who entertain utopian ideas of one sort or another try to pick and choose the types of people who will populate it, so that they can imagine it existing without force. The real irony is that libertarianism as an ideal is actually based on a fantasy of a classless society, and that even though I'm nominally Marxist (in my analysis, if not my prescription), I don't believe a classless society is remotely realistic, particularly in the era of globalization.
But I think that this is a digression. What was on topic was the relationship between governments, families, and pedagogy: what the limits of public policy about what happens in the home are, what the relationship between in-the-home and not-in-the-home is. My real contention is that the modern family already is a quasi-governmental institution, that governmentality and family structure are intertwined, and that really, it's a matter of degree for any given country just what kind of role the extra-familial authority will have.
If I don't send my kid to a school in Switzerland, there's no problem? If I let them sit in their own filth, it's not an issue? If I'm a 10 year old that wants to leave home, there's no obstacles? Schools aren't licensed? There isn't a comprehensive examination system?
I think the "sovereignty" is itself selectively designed to get the individual to police themselves enough to save the state the effort to do so. I doubt Switzerland is very different that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I think one can recognize the historically racist way of viewing things - a worldview created by a position that was not explicitly racist, yet relied on perpetuating a way of seeing things (that is, the superiority of European civilization and a sense of historical mission to bring "civilization") that had inescapably racist entailments, without declaring Tolkien as particularly racist. My claim is that the genre of 19th and 20th century heroic fantasy relies on ideas about fantasy races that is very much part of the baggage of Victorian Imperialist thinking. Tolkien himself was congenially tolerant and probably did not subscribe to an over-the-top racist ideology. However, he did grow up in South Africa and his family experienced the Boer War: I think his belief system might include a horror of war joined with a sense in which war interfered with the civilizing mission of European colonialism.
The most critical claim one might make is that Tolkien preferred the benign "civilizing" racism of the Victorian Empire to the crude, brutal genocidal racism of fascism, or the dehumanizing industrial state (e.g., the world of the "scouring of the Shire.") He probably wanted to keep Southrons out of the Shire, and had an ideal of ethnic purity without cruelty that might be a little naive at best. (Someone characterized his attitude toward Africans as one of "decent chaps in their own way, with immortal souls and all, but not in England, of course.")
For me, the idea that "race is destiny" is the most significant baggage from the straightforward heroic fantasy genre, and Blizzard tweaks it in interesting ways. Instead of good and evil, WoW seems to suggest both cultural difference, and the cyclical possibilities of corruption and redemption. It's a more sophisticated ethical cosmology from my perspective. (Tolkien himself hemmed and hawed over the question of whether orcs could be redeemed, from a Christian perspective, and indeed whether they had free will at all.) One of the interesting consequences of Blizzard's originality is the we don't know how it will all turn out. In a traditional good-vs.-evil conflict, we know that good will triumph. What we don't know is what is going to happen in WoW: are the Blood Elves going to be corrupted? Will the Orcs stay on a Shamanistic path or not? Which humans are going to peacefully co-exist with other races, and which will not? Etc. The departure from formula creates both more food for thought and longer-term narrative suspense. That there is no final "triumph," but rather simply the continuation of history, is itself something of an achievement for the fantasy genre.
Dan Brown vs. Neal Stephenson? Pshaw.
Umberto Eco. "Foucault's Pendulum." Take the damn training wheels off already.
In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft is a critique of the Tolkienesque ideas of good and evil. Tolkien might be said to combine a Christian metaphysics of good and evil with English cultural imperialism: for the most part, the heroes are the "Men of the West" while the villains are "swarthy," dark-skinned, uncivilized, etc.
Blizzard took this set-up and exposed it as being a reflection of European colonialism and imperialism. The Alliance is trying to "clean up" the land, getting rid of those cultures that don't resemble itself sufficiently. The result reveals just what the historical cultural origins of the traditional heroic fantasy categories of "good" and "evil" races really is - a veiled form of racism.
Um, that's some revisionism there. The US may not exactly have been allied with Napoleon, but it was at war with its enemy, England. Louisiana was purchased through negotiation, not by threat or conquest.
Napoleon spoke of his dream as the creation of a United States of Europe.
Not just losers, kind of famous losers in pop-culture way. The ones that were partial inspiration for the parody, Spinal Tap.
And they didn't wear black leather.
The grandparent's capitalization should have been a clue.
Normally it would be just an amusing misread, but you were assuming an air of such worldly sophistication ('perhaps in your one-light Kansas town') when, in fact, you were missing the boat an a snide pop-culture reference that flew right over your overly-literal head.
Whoosh.
Electrochemical doesn't count!
You're kidding... I've known what a gnu was since childhood. What you say depresses me.
I imagine that most people in the world do know what a gnu is. Just a subset of geeks who don't have an interest in anything that doesn't have electricity coursing through it that don't.
I was about to invent a "if different laundry detergents only worked on some washers" kind of analogy, but the point is better made by observing that software has a lot of interdependencies that aren't reflected by comparison to things like washing detergent.
No Peruvian who has lived through the civil wars of the 80's is as naive as a US commentator with simplistic ideas about what creates "freedom." Try to learn about what it was like before you call other people naive.
The question is whether there is any meaningful freedom in a state of terror. Is Iraq freer and more democratic now that you are more likely to be killed by an insurgent rather than by the representative of a government?
The guerrilla movements in Peru were taking a significant toll on the civilian population. Fujimori, for all his errors, created a freer society by stopping those movements.
For manual skills (that is, ones in which the fingers, hands, arms and indeed the entire body has to learn, not just the memory), I think computer-based simulations are of limited value. Not none, but limited.
Of course I understand this. But what constitutes computer science itself is a complicated topic. Most people in CS programs enter them thinking it is about programming - which it really wasn't, historically. Computer science in its purest form is a hybrid of logic and number theory, and has almost nothing to do with programming at all.
If that is the core of CS, programming, as much as simulation and modeling, can be seen as "satellites" of that core. But programming (which really could be taught on a vocational basis) and certain types of optimization (which really are more "engineering" than "science") have taken the center stage in CS programs, largely catering to the canonical geek core's perception of what the job market is.
You have to sue them enough to regret it, to make them change their ways.
$20,000 is chump change. They'll shrug, say "oh, well," and it's business as usual.
I know most of the people here are either concerned with their geek cred or trying to attract a mate, but the vision of CS in the bit you quote - "as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth" - is rather important and compelling. That is a different vision from one focused on optimization and language development - it is one focused on simulation and modelling (and perhaps on data collection) and may, in fact, benefit from an infusion of non-geeks. People for whom computing becomes central to solving problems that are not, themselves, computing problems.
What if CS became a pre-med degree? Or if a CS undergrad was like to go on to pursue graduate studies in genetics or psychology? Developing systems that can handle protein-folding problems, or implementing neural networks, are important aspects of those fields of study. That women have strong presences in the sciences other than computer science suggests, to me, that geek insularity might be a larger problem for the field itself.
Who are you going to blame for your irritation at people blaming other people?
Dementia also hits men sooner and more often than it does women. Granny not only live longer, she stays sharper longer.
No, it's not a binary choice.
I didn't like slavery in the US, but I wouldn't have wanted England to invade to end it. And opposition to a 19th century invasion of America would not have been the same thing is approval of slavery.
"You're only a victim when you admit to be."
That's a load of crap. Granted, there's a "victim" card that gets played at times.
But if I run over you and paralyze you from the waist down, you're a victim of careless driving. If a genocidal political regime puts you into a detention camp, you're a victim of political oppression and genocide. If you get mugged, you're a victim of crime. Gratuitously avoiding the "victim" tag when it applies is pretty ridiculous. Most people don't like being victims, but it happens.
Sometimes, one forgets the historical context of all these events. The siege of Leningrad, for example. That his research really got under way in the early, progressive years of the USSR (the period of constructivist art, experimental theatre, open research, etc.) During dynamic periods of history like that, I often wonder how scientists, artists and such get funding and support, keep producing, etc.
I take Lenin seriously, but I'm not a Leninist either. Nor a Maoist.
The writers to whom I'm closest are Zizek and Althusser, and perhaps, through them, a Hegelian as much as a Marxist. And because I'm actually a member of the middle class, I'm pretty much invested in things that are in the interests of the middle class in terms of my actual political activism: I want to lower my own tax burden, have taxes spent on projects that benefit me, etc. Like any good Marxist, I'm aware of my class interests (which don't happen to be those of the working class) and I pursue them, within the boundaries of my ethics. In some ways, in my skepticism about the perfectibility of the human condition, I'm actually a Burkean conservative. And I'm interested in certain European conservatives as well, particularly Chantal del Sol and Alain de Benoist.
I think the crude "libertarians versus socialists" approach to political discourse in geek circles is intellectually embarrassing, partially because it treats political systems like a game of Civilization. One science fiction author lamented how too much libertarian sci-fi was built around the "a-ha!" moment in which it was revealed that everything would Just Work Out if the Gummint would go away (again, as if the government had shown up one day at the door step, instead of being produced and sustained on a daily basis by people pursuing their interests.)
That said, one writer who does work at the intersection of geek political ontology and the limits of possibility, whose work I generally like, is Ken MacLeod.
That test alone still leaves the family as an organ of the state: even moreso, simply without necessarily having the resources to fulfill its mandates. As it is, that is more or less the current state of affairs, except for the public funding of schools - there is still home schooling, etc.
Besides, how do you ensure that children are not being beaten, sexually abused, deprived of food, etc? It requires a substantial social and legal apparatus to make those determinations. And then there's the question of medical care.
As soon as there is a "should," (other than as a moral category) there is the question of force and power. I think we would agree that parents should not be free to create communal societies in which 5 year olds are allowed to be used as sexual objects, and perhaps you may even agree that children should not be left un-vaccinated for diseases like polio. Even these broad dictums require governmental force (and there are religious/cultish communities who, without that force, would practice just those behaviors) and, as a consequence, the public creation and enforcement of a set of standards and expectations for parenting.
My point about the Sopranos is that they create their own government, both internally and within the community. If the "public" government disappeared, there is little that would keep family/private "governments" like the Sopranos from taking hold. Without a governmental authority, those functions currently under the purview of the civil government would have to be handled privately, either within your own family or by others. However, it would still require all the exercise of power.
Libertarians are anarchists who either hope that everyone will subscribe to a set of principles about property that will serve only some of the people, on a voluntary basis, or who believe that people - all people - are generally rational, responsible middle-class agents who will defer their own pleasure, focus on running a household, etc - or at least will stay out of the way of those who don't, and who will resolve conflicts peacefully, and who will somehow coordinate their capital into organs for large-scale projects without creating quasi-governmental institutions. I don't mean to pick on libertarians per se - I think most Marxists and, indeed, most people in general who entertain utopian ideas of one sort or another try to pick and choose the types of people who will populate it, so that they can imagine it existing without force. The real irony is that libertarianism as an ideal is actually based on a fantasy of a classless society, and that even though I'm nominally Marxist (in my analysis, if not my prescription), I don't believe a classless society is remotely realistic, particularly in the era of globalization.
But I think that this is a digression. What was on topic was the relationship between governments, families, and pedagogy: what the limits of public policy about what happens in the home are, what the relationship between in-the-home and not-in-the-home is. My real contention is that the modern family already is a quasi-governmental institution, that governmentality and family structure are intertwined, and that really, it's a matter of degree for any given country just what kind of role the extra-familial authority will have.
When asked what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" looked like, Marx suggested that it was what was happening during the Paris Commune.
Sovereign individuals?
If I don't send my kid to a school in Switzerland, there's no problem? If I let them sit in their own filth, it's not an issue? If I'm a 10 year old that wants to leave home, there's no obstacles? Schools aren't licensed? There isn't a comprehensive examination system?
I think the "sovereignty" is itself selectively designed to get the individual to police themselves enough to save the state the effort to do so. I doubt Switzerland is very different that way.