I like FF games, but they don't advance the art of storytelling at all, and their stories are epic melodramas - a fairly old, established type of story. They are moving and powerful, really, only if you have a fairly limited exposure to the possibilities of narrative. This is understandable: they are oriented toward teenagers.
I think they "tell" more interesting "stories" in the characterizations of the worlds they portray, really, with their fantasy architectures and cultures. In any case, I'm still disappointed that Facade merely got an honorable mention. It doesn't completely work as a game (it is more of a research project: it was developed by 2 people and is released for free) but it definitely did more to truly move storytelling ahead than any of the other candidates.
This contest, or whatever, is broken. For "StarCraft" to be more highly rated for advancing the art of storytelling than "Facade" is a joke. A distortion of real value of Grammy-like proportions.
I don't think the kind of distinction between the artistic and the functional that you imply here is so easily made. For the composer, the "function" of even a commissioned piece that is only intended to be played in a concert hall, rather than as the soundtrack to a commercial, is still his pay, and thus it is "functional." The "function" of the experience of the concert-goers may be personal edification, the pleasure of going out, the experience of the music (an aesthetic function) itself.
And that jingle itself will be effective for aesthetic reasons - it will "work" for reasons related to the reasons that the concert piece will work.
I agree with your protest against the idea that it is silly to compare composing with programming: the two are very much related. I rather think that your protest didn't go far enough.
Unless all offspring of all Australopithecus became Homo sapiens (and they almost certainly didn't) then they can be said to have died out. I agree with your general caution about species (that it is a convention used to characterize a more fluid reality), but the "sliding" isn't "smooth." One sub-population with more adaptive traits may displace its near-relatives without that trait.
The question of the running-over-with-the-car is separate from the question of the cookies. It's considered wrong by most people even if the child was a bratty kid across the street who refused to move, and the driver is in a hurry to get to a vital job interview. But we don't consider the right to move one's car identical with the right to control one's body (or not control it) for 9 months at a time, so the analogy fails all around.
See, the moral link you want to make fails with rape. But if the mother's right to control her body is trumped by the rights of the foetus, then the rape-defense isn't relevant, any more than being drunk, feeling pressured, having birth control fail, having a critical change in one's economic circumstances, learning about severe congenital disorders, or what not. These external factors are all secondary to the basic question.
It is possible to take a position that the fetus has rights, but they are subordinate to the rights of the mother.
If you have a terminal illness, and the only possible treatment for it is for you to take one of my kidneys, I believe I have the right to refuse. This doesn't mean that you aren't alive, nor that you have no rights. Only that my right to determine the fundamental fate of my body trumps it.
One thing that does puzzle me, however: those pro-choice partisans (and I am very much pro-choice) who don't call for drug decriminalization. If the right to choose what happens to your own body is so fundamental, then why is it OK to criminalize the act of putting certain chemicals into it?
As long as those people are free to leave their country and go somewhere else, then the remainder should be free to abrogate any rights they wish.
Emigrating is seldom simple, and often involves leaving behind friends and family. Language plays a major consideration, as well as money. Setting up in a new country is complicated enough when you have a sponsoring employer helping you come in: without a job or resources, it is an overwhelming undertaking.
Now, the "should be free" line begs the question: just what are we talking about here? If you mean to say that other countries should not intervene short of an immanent or ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, I'm willing to agree. If by "should" you mean some kind of normative position, I have to disagree strongly.
There are also other things we don't know exactly why are happening. Gravitational force was, until the last century, very much one of them. I still would not have wanted to stand under a falling piano.
The "increased cost to harvest" is a technological question, not inherent in the supply/demand curve. What if some technology makes it possible to determine the location of increasingly hard-to-find fish? What if some kind of technology uses satellite imaging to determine the few remaining schools of some species? You have a faith in unregulated market forces as approach to some optimum that is entirely unscientific, illogical, and essentially religious.
Of course poaching is profitable because of limits on hunting: if there were no limits on hunting, there would be no such thing as poaching! The circularity of your logic is awe-inspiring. The question, again, is what the consequences to the whole system would be.
You make an excellent point: we remember these events in relative, "lived-in" time, not in absolute historical time. Absolute historical time is very much a late development - the classical historians didn't really use it, and it isn't really "natural" or intuitive. When we recall, for example, when we lost our virginity, when a relative died, and so forth, we refer to our age before we refer to the year it occured; we locate it experientally proximate events (where we were living and working, for example.)
I remember exactly where I was for all the events you listed that occurred during my lifetime, though I know the exact date only for a few of them.
The topic of relative and absolute historical temporalities is well-discussed in a book by Donald Wilcox called The Measure of Times Past.
The market-forces line is misguided, as others have already noted. If the market value of fish climbs because of its rarity, that will inspire more, not less, fishing. This is why poaching is so lucrative.
Increasingly, historians are aware of the problems in relying on "the record" and "the archives" for just the reasons you provide. Hence, the growth of historical archaeology.
When I - and most people - think of an open society, we think of things like freedom of movement, freedom of press, freedom of speech, etc. We really don't think about the free circulation of your credit card number - I don't think that me having possession of your credit card number and social security number, and the freedom to distribute it if I somehow obtained it in a legal transaction, makes this society any more open.
Malaysia has very poor privacy controls, and I would be reluctant to describe it as a particularly open society.
Even if some of these examples are cases of a justifiable aggression, they are aggression - and not defence. The real point, that the semantics are Orwellian in their irony, still holds, even if some case can be made for some of the interventions (and, of course, you happily exclude those interventions in Latin America which are incontrovertibly indefensible.)
Or they could be completely orthogonal. The US (domestically) isn't terribly bad on human rights, but is bad on privacy. Germany is pretty good at both.
Human rights are usually a matter of how the executive functions, particularly in law enforcement. Privacy has more to do with legislation and the private sector: privacy regulations restrict what information about you public and private institutions (insurers, credit agencies, etc.) can distribute, and how it is distributed. It also is a question of how those institutions protect your data, such as your credit card and banking information.
All pretty much completely unrelated to questions of freedom of speech (unless you think there is a free-speech aspect to restricting whether a business can give away your private information.)
I disagree with the idea that it is impossible to be fair and balanced. It is impossible to be completely objective, and the very terms by which one characterizes any situation usually smuggle in a distinct point of view. (Whether it is to described people as "terrorists," "insurgents," or "militias," or to describe people in a regions as "Iraqis," "Sunnis", "Arabs," or to use some other definition - we tend to think in terms of set containers with national boundaries as the most important membership, but that itself is a way of presuming that nationalism is "natural" and/or the rational end-state of social development - it's a Hegelian hangover, really, to assume that, but that is a digression.)
But all that said, it is possible to select those facts which have the least baggage. It is clear to me that "terrorist" has a lot more baggage that "insurgent" does, that "occupation" is far more neutral than either "liberation" or "US imperialist invasion." To be fair and balanced is to eschew hysteria or theatrics, to consider the credibility of sources, to avoid caricature. As news reporting has turned into a kind of theatre of emotion, by which viewers have their worst prejudices pleasurably confirmed, this isn't even sustained as a goal.
You treat the State as if it were completely external to human, social processes, when it really is such a process itself. You've completely essentialized the components of your model to something completely outside of reality.
My own belief is that the inter-related cluster of intellectual practices that include AI, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and contemporary linguistics are going to go back to phenomenology - including much that comes from the continent - with their hats in their hands and a bit more open-mindedness. It really is amazing to read Heidegger - particularly through the lens of Hubert Dreyfus - and see the predictions about the problems that AI (and the cognitive models akin to the GOFAI project) would encounter, come to pass.
Having just witnessed my girlfriend boot up her brand-spanking-new MacBook, I have to say that the "out of the box experience" for OS X (Tiger) is fantastic. It showcases - hell, shows off - the abilities of the hardware, gets important information about the user and the computer environment, makes the user feel like something fun is happening, personalizes without being annoying ("skins" are annoying, only really appealing to a hobbyist mentality, the sort that would pimp out their car; automatically grabbing a video clip of the user and offering to make it the user's icon is a very fun way to personalize.)
The people who produce the Linux distribs neither understand nor respect non-hobbyist users (which is different from non-technical users) enough to compete. I don't think they should even bother trying. In any case, both Linux and Windows are handicapped by their lack of integration with the computer hardware itself: Apple can create this amazing experience because they have to do so for so very few hardware environments.
Funny, I completed the loop: started out studying philosophy, switched to cog. sci after doing some work in the software field; then, after almost a decade in the software industry, I went back to graduate school in the humanities (albeit in corners of the humanities that are interested in digital culture.)
The most legitimate beef that I think the humanities have against engineers is the latter's tendencies to take the categories in which they work for granted, and to not see their own thinking and practice as part of a social and historical process - that they are too wed to the propositional value of statements and not aware of all the other elements that create discourse. Not to mention the lack of sophistication about aesthetics and conscious experience.
The people who would get upset about this are those people burdened with an impossible completism, who seem to think that they can get one of "everything" in an MMO. It's a goal that is both unrealistic and really neurotic.
The more I look at the world of MMOs - and I play one - the more I see a cesspool of dysfunctional personalities, the exploitation of mental and personal problems, and the exaltation of the worst behaviour. I know many people play them casually and enjoy them (I'd like to think I do), but they are dominated by people I can only describe as lost souls.
And the not-affluent dwellers in the interior get to deal with an influx of wealthier people. Some short-term benefits for homeowners who sell to them, but in the long term - well, ask Spanish youth how much fun it is to try to compete with English property buyers when shopping for their first homes.
No, they aren't. There are only a handful of British subjects left, and there are no new ones. Being a citizen of any country, including Britain, negates the status of being a British subject. More or less the only way to be a British subject is to not be a citizen of any nation, and to be born or resident in a current or former British possession.
Slashdot Mirror
I like FF games, but they don't advance the art of storytelling at all, and their stories are epic melodramas - a fairly old, established type of story. They are moving and powerful, really, only if you have a fairly limited exposure to the possibilities of narrative. This is understandable: they are oriented toward teenagers.
I think they "tell" more interesting "stories" in the characterizations of the worlds they portray, really, with their fantasy architectures and cultures. In any case, I'm still disappointed that Facade merely got an honorable mention. It doesn't completely work as a game (it is more of a research project: it was developed by 2 people and is released for free) but it definitely did more to truly move storytelling ahead than any of the other candidates.
This contest, or whatever, is broken. For "StarCraft" to be more highly rated for advancing the art of storytelling than "Facade" is a joke. A distortion of real value of Grammy-like proportions.
I don't think the kind of distinction between the artistic and the functional that you imply here is so easily made. For the composer, the "function" of even a commissioned piece that is only intended to be played in a concert hall, rather than as the soundtrack to a commercial, is still his pay, and thus it is "functional." The "function" of the experience of the concert-goers may be personal edification, the pleasure of going out, the experience of the music (an aesthetic function) itself.
And that jingle itself will be effective for aesthetic reasons - it will "work" for reasons related to the reasons that the concert piece will work.
I agree with your protest against the idea that it is silly to compare composing with programming: the two are very much related. I rather think that your protest didn't go far enough.
Unless all offspring of all Australopithecus became Homo sapiens (and they almost certainly didn't) then they can be said to have died out. I agree with your general caution about species (that it is a convention used to characterize a more fluid reality), but the "sliding" isn't "smooth." One sub-population with more adaptive traits may displace its near-relatives without that trait.
The question of the running-over-with-the-car is separate from the question of the cookies. It's considered wrong by most people even if the child was a bratty kid across the street who refused to move, and the driver is in a hurry to get to a vital job interview. But we don't consider the right to move one's car identical with the right to control one's body (or not control it) for 9 months at a time, so the analogy fails all around.
See, the moral link you want to make fails with rape. But if the mother's right to control her body is trumped by the rights of the foetus, then the rape-defense isn't relevant, any more than being drunk, feeling pressured, having birth control fail, having a critical change in one's economic circumstances, learning about severe congenital disorders, or what not. These external factors are all secondary to the basic question.
It is possible to take a position that the fetus has rights, but they are subordinate to the rights of the mother.
If you have a terminal illness, and the only possible treatment for it is for you to take one of my kidneys, I believe I have the right to refuse. This doesn't mean that you aren't alive, nor that you have no rights. Only that my right to determine the fundamental fate of my body trumps it.
One thing that does puzzle me, however: those pro-choice partisans (and I am very much pro-choice) who don't call for drug decriminalization. If the right to choose what happens to your own body is so fundamental, then why is it OK to criminalize the act of putting certain chemicals into it?
As long as those people are free to leave their country and go somewhere else, then the remainder should be free to abrogate any rights they wish.
Emigrating is seldom simple, and often involves leaving behind friends and family. Language plays a major consideration, as well as money. Setting up in a new country is complicated enough when you have a sponsoring employer helping you come in: without a job or resources, it is an overwhelming undertaking.
Now, the "should be free" line begs the question: just what are we talking about here? If you mean to say that other countries should not intervene short of an immanent or ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, I'm willing to agree. If by "should" you mean some kind of normative position, I have to disagree strongly.
There are also other things we don't know exactly why are happening. Gravitational force was, until the last century, very much one of them. I still would not have wanted to stand under a falling piano.
The "increased cost to harvest" is a technological question, not inherent in the supply/demand curve. What if some technology makes it possible to determine the location of increasingly hard-to-find fish? What if some kind of technology uses satellite imaging to determine the few remaining schools of some species? You have a faith in unregulated market forces as approach to some optimum that is entirely unscientific, illogical, and essentially religious.
Of course poaching is profitable because of limits on hunting: if there were no limits on hunting, there would be no such thing as poaching! The circularity of your logic is awe-inspiring. The question, again, is what the consequences to the whole system would be.
He did, you idiot.
There are those of us who would leave, too, were it not for family and friends. Those connections keep people in even far more repellent places.
You make an excellent point: we remember these events in relative, "lived-in" time, not in absolute historical time. Absolute historical time is very much a late development - the classical historians didn't really use it, and it isn't really "natural" or intuitive. When we recall, for example, when we lost our virginity, when a relative died, and so forth, we refer to our age before we refer to the year it occured; we locate it experientally proximate events (where we were living and working, for example.)
I remember exactly where I was for all the events you listed that occurred during my lifetime, though I know the exact date only for a few of them.
The topic of relative and absolute historical temporalities is well-discussed in a book by Donald Wilcox called The Measure of Times Past.
The market-forces line is misguided, as others have already noted. If the market value of fish climbs because of its rarity, that will inspire more, not less, fishing. This is why poaching is so lucrative.
Increasingly, historians are aware of the problems in relying on "the record" and "the archives" for just the reasons you provide. Hence, the growth of historical archaeology.
When I - and most people - think of an open society, we think of things like freedom of movement, freedom of press, freedom of speech, etc. We really don't think about the free circulation of your credit card number - I don't think that me having possession of your credit card number and social security number, and the freedom to distribute it if I somehow obtained it in a legal transaction, makes this society any more open.
Malaysia has very poor privacy controls, and I would be reluctant to describe it as a particularly open society.
Even if some of these examples are cases of a justifiable aggression, they are aggression - and not defence. The real point, that the semantics are Orwellian in their irony, still holds, even if some case can be made for some of the interventions (and, of course, you happily exclude those interventions in Latin America which are incontrovertibly indefensible.)
Or they could be completely orthogonal. The US (domestically) isn't terribly bad on human rights, but is bad on privacy. Germany is pretty good at both.
Human rights are usually a matter of how the executive functions, particularly in law enforcement. Privacy has more to do with legislation and the private sector: privacy regulations restrict what information about you public and private institutions (insurers, credit agencies, etc.) can distribute, and how it is distributed. It also is a question of how those institutions protect your data, such as your credit card and banking information.
All pretty much completely unrelated to questions of freedom of speech (unless you think there is a free-speech aspect to restricting whether a business can give away your private information.)
It measures privacy. Not openness of discourse, or human rights, or other questions. The US has weak privacy protections: this is pretty well known.
I disagree with the idea that it is impossible to be fair and balanced. It is impossible to be completely objective, and the very terms by which one characterizes any situation usually smuggle in a distinct point of view. (Whether it is to described people as "terrorists," "insurgents," or "militias," or to describe people in a regions as "Iraqis," "Sunnis", "Arabs," or to use some other definition - we tend to think in terms of set containers with national boundaries as the most important membership, but that itself is a way of presuming that nationalism is "natural" and/or the rational end-state of social development - it's a Hegelian hangover, really, to assume that, but that is a digression.)
But all that said, it is possible to select those facts which have the least baggage. It is clear to me that "terrorist" has a lot more baggage that "insurgent" does, that "occupation" is far more neutral than either "liberation" or "US imperialist invasion." To be fair and balanced is to eschew hysteria or theatrics, to consider the credibility of sources, to avoid caricature. As news reporting has turned into a kind of theatre of emotion, by which viewers have their worst prejudices pleasurably confirmed, this isn't even sustained as a goal.
You treat the State as if it were completely external to human, social processes, when it really is such a process itself. You've completely essentialized the components of your model to something completely outside of reality.
My own belief is that the inter-related cluster of intellectual practices that include AI, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and contemporary linguistics are going to go back to phenomenology - including much that comes from the continent - with their hats in their hands and a bit more open-mindedness. It really is amazing to read Heidegger - particularly through the lens of Hubert Dreyfus - and see the predictions about the problems that AI (and the cognitive models akin to the GOFAI project) would encounter, come to pass.
Having just witnessed my girlfriend boot up her brand-spanking-new MacBook, I have to say that the "out of the box experience" for OS X (Tiger) is fantastic. It showcases - hell, shows off - the abilities of the hardware, gets important information about the user and the computer environment, makes the user feel like something fun is happening, personalizes without being annoying ("skins" are annoying, only really appealing to a hobbyist mentality, the sort that would pimp out their car; automatically grabbing a video clip of the user and offering to make it the user's icon is a very fun way to personalize.)
The people who produce the Linux distribs neither understand nor respect non-hobbyist users (which is different from non-technical users) enough to compete. I don't think they should even bother trying. In any case, both Linux and Windows are handicapped by their lack of integration with the computer hardware itself: Apple can create this amazing experience because they have to do so for so very few hardware environments.
Funny, I completed the loop: started out studying philosophy, switched to cog. sci after doing some work in the software field; then, after almost a decade in the software industry, I went back to graduate school in the humanities (albeit in corners of the humanities that are interested in digital culture.)
The most legitimate beef that I think the humanities have against engineers is the latter's tendencies to take the categories in which they work for granted, and to not see their own thinking and practice as part of a social and historical process - that they are too wed to the propositional value of statements and not aware of all the other elements that create discourse. Not to mention the lack of sophistication about aesthetics and conscious experience.
The people who would get upset about this are those people burdened with an impossible completism, who seem to think that they can get one of "everything" in an MMO. It's a goal that is both unrealistic and really neurotic.
The more I look at the world of MMOs - and I play one - the more I see a cesspool of dysfunctional personalities, the exploitation of mental and personal problems, and the exaltation of the worst behaviour. I know many people play them casually and enjoy them (I'd like to think I do), but they are dominated by people I can only describe as lost souls.
And the not-affluent dwellers in the interior get to deal with an influx of wealthier people. Some short-term benefits for homeowners who sell to them, but in the long term - well, ask Spanish youth how much fun it is to try to compete with English property buyers when shopping for their first homes.
No, they aren't. There are only a handful of British subjects left, and there are no new ones. Being a citizen of any country, including Britain, negates the status of being a British subject. More or less the only way to be a British subject is to not be a citizen of any nation, and to be born or resident in a current or former British possession.