A consensus has yet to be reached on exactly when the point of no return will be reached. My personal hope is that it's really about 50 years out.
A corporation, nation or other large grouping of people taken as a whole is actually pretty stupid regardless of the intelligence of the individuals comprising it. They behave in primitive ways to very basic stimuli, mostly economic. When we reach the point where it becomes more economically feasable to use some source of energy other than petroleum, as it in all likelihood will before the century is out (or maybe even after just a couple more decades) then we will switch away from it and the CO2 it pumps into the atmosphere, just as surely as an animal will shy away from pain and head towards food.
Potential hazards: physical constants of new universe may not be what you expected. Beware of ultra-high gravity.
Or the wrong ratio of forces, causing all the matter in your body to explode at whatever the speed of light happens to be in those parts.
Actually, this is a major flaw with the scenario. For all we know, habitable universes, or even universes where it's possible for heavy elements such as carbon to form, are very rare.
Yes, it's temptingly easy to get tangled up in terminology. Part of the difficulty you're going to have looking these things up on the Internet is that I'm coming from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, which is a very small minority of English-speaking Christians, so most of what you're going to find won't reflect my meaning exactly. (For example, we rarely apply it exclusively to a Biblical text. Eastern Orthodoxy is much more receptive to oral tradition than most of Western Christianity.)
If you understand what a Roman Catholic means when he talks about the "Apsotolic Deposit", that's close to what I mean by "kerygma" here in the specific sense I intend. What we lack is a doctrine of "dogmatic development" which is why I can't draw an exact equivalence.
I do think we're using "dogma" differently though. As I said, the fundamental attribute of a dogma is that it's the truth. I would think the truth is true whether one is enlightened or not, and it makes little difference whether or not one is apprehending it directly or by mere intellectual understanding. So, although they're always true and therefore never go away no matter how advanced one is, there may come a point where they're no longer necessary for an individual's instruction. (Although such people are always the most lovingly insistent on their truth.)
Do I understand you correctly to mean that Dharma is self-evident to a buddha? I say this because if it were self-evident to everyone, it wouldn't need to be taught. (It is, for example, nothing like self-evident to me.) But here we run into problems of terminology again: What I mean by enlightenment, in a Christian context, is very different from what you mean by it in a Buddhist context. For you it's how you describe the goal, for us it's how we describe setting your foot upon the beginning of the path. Our goal is called by various names, but one of the more common for it is "theosis". (Based on what has been said by those who have acheived it, it doesn't sound all that much like Buddhist enlightenment.) Such people have, by sacrificing the self, voluntarily conformed their wills to the Divine will. This does not necessarily mean they have immediate access to all truth (although they do have what we call "the one thing needful") but they are able to perceive directly many truths that are expressed to the main body of the faithful only verbally. So it's not (for us) so much that there's no more dogma, but rather that for them a dogmatic expression is no longer required for understanding, which then goes deeper than intellection.
More or less. I haven't mentioned most of the ways in which the truth might be manifested. It almost makes me wish we had such a systematic way of organizing things as you do -- but then, as organized religions go we're very disorganized....
The WP article is not entirely correct. It might be used without qualification in the sense they're describing outside Christianity -- and that, perhaps, is the sense in which I ought to have understood you -- but within Eastern Christianity, at least, it has the specific technical meaning I gave you. I left out the "authoritative" part because it's of secondary importance. The underlying truth (perhaps inadequately expressed in language) must be present beforehand. IOW, the primary characteristic of a dogma isn't the authority behind it, but the Truth it's intended to express. So the article puts its emphasis in the wrong place from my point of view.
This is not to say that all the kerygma is expressed dogmatically. (Kerygma isn't as abstract as I may be making it sound. It literally means "preaching", and as I'm using it here it refers to the original preaching of Christ to his Apostles, and of his Apostles to everyone else. It might be equivalent to dharma, if I understand that word correctly in the Buddhist sense.) For much of it an authoritative expression has not been found to be necessary, which simply means there are a variety of expressions that adequately convey it and no one precise formulation is needed.
It might be easy to get the wrong impression from the Web, just as you could from, say, my immediate circle of friends. Mead is popular among Renaissance Faire particiapnts, English Civil War re-enactors and other Living History actors, all of whom have webpages, but relatively few others.
I'll have to add this to my List Of Things To Blame The French For. I'll put it right below Soft Cheeses You Have To Eat With The Rind On.
I had a look at your blog, by the way. Traditional mead isn't really undergoing much of a revival here, at least as far as what you can get commercially. I live not too far from the winery that makes Chaucer's Mead and the way they make it it's more of a sweet dessert wine. The real thing is more beer-like. I tried making some Monastery Mead once -- this is the Russian style you can still find over there. It's actually hopped, and when I tried it I wished I'd primed the bottles. It was rather like a slightly sweet flat beer. I suppose beer and ale used to be flat too, back when they brewed it wooden kegs.
Ironic that you're mostly finding American resources. About the only reference I could find about it at the time, other than a Russian cookbook, was a little booklet at the local homebrewers' shop written by a couple of Englishmen. (This was mostly, but not entirely, pre-WWW.) They advocated strongly the wine-style, with threats of disapproval from your peers if you were to go public with any other kind.
Monastery mead isn't too different from this one. The recipe I used expected you to rely on wild yeasts for fermentation and wanted you to expose the finished must (or maybe it's a wort in this case) to the air for a while to collect them before capping it off with the airlock. I got penicillium in my first batch instead, and ended up using an ale yeast. I don't recall that fermentation took anything like a month, but YMMV I suppose.
That's true. It would have taken me at least twice as long to reply point-by-point to your entire rant in a reasoned way. I know you didn't bother with a reasoned response yourself, but I don't do angry sermons as well as you do.
It's really a laugh when you say, "top with the personal attacks" and follow it up with "you haven't the fortitude of character to read the rest." Have you ever considered the possibility that you're just tiresome?
Well, I have to admit you're more sophisticated than most trolls, but like all trolls you cease to be amusing after a while. Respond further if you like; I won't bother reading. Neither will anyone else at this point.
I disagree with the statement "the ethics it[Buddhism] advocates are found in the form of dogmas. This means they're based on revealed truths regardless of the source of the revelation."
"Dogma" was your word, not mine. I was just taking you at your word. A dogma is an expression or a formulation of a revealed truth, a kerygma. Sorry if I misunderstood you, but perhaps "dogma" wasn't the word you were looking for. I don't claim to be an expert on Buddhism and was basing what I said on my understanding of what you said.
However, I don't know that we actually have much clash here. Certainly, true moral behavior must follow internal understanding consistent with an individual's growth. (If I've restated this accurately.) But to begin with I was thinking more pragmatically. For a society to be able to function its members must behave to some minimum moral standard, whether or not the individual members of that society have reached the point you're describing. This is pretty much what I was talking about when I mentioned teaching moral/healthy/intelligent behavior and letting the reasons (or better in this case, true moral judgement) come later. However, I would tend to agree with the Buddhist idea you're explaining about the potential harm in such an "external" morality -- perhaps on other grounds since I'm not familiar with the reasons given in the texts.
No, we got to Heidegger. But to be honest, it's been more than 20 years since I read many of these people and I'm mainly remembering the impression I got at the time. It was, as you say, the problem of epistemology. But I'd have to do some catch-up reading to remember the exact issues right now.
materialism
1. Philosophy. The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
I meant exactly what I said.
Since the rest of your post reveals you were unaware of this primary meaning of materialism and that you were using it exclusively as what that dictionary lists as the third definition, there's little reason for me to address the rest of what you say based on it. Regardless of your educational background, this doesn't give me much of a sense that you know what you're talking about.
Can you even read? I mentioned that there's little agreement among philosophers as to what constitutes "the Good". You reply by listing the widest possible divergence of opinion and then telling me it shows I was wrong. (You seem to think Plato regarded the ideal plane to be unreal. He actually considered it more real than the material.)
There were also a lot of writers between those I mentioned, with different opinions yet.
That's called the Socratian method.
What you're thinking of is more often called the "Socratic method" but that's not what she used. I didn't say she led the class by questioning and I don't know why you'd read that in. It was more of a dialectic. It wasn't really a Hegelian approach though, since if there was a synthesis to be formed she left it up to the individual students and didn't force it.
he went to the kings of each Mycenae and Macedon attempting to prevent the spread of the method,
I'm not terribly familiar with Democritus other than a bare outline of his philosophy, but I do know that Mycenae had been a ruin for over 500 years before he was born and certainly had no king in his lifetime. Check your facts before you start preaching next time.
Yes, I can write 5 long paragraphs and still not have time to reply point by point to these astonishingly lengthy rants of yours. Nor do I have time to respond to this one.
And just because your silly remarks about CP/M is right on my screen here -- it's the only part of your rant I can see as I type -- Sorry, but I was there. I worked for a small VAR that provided custom, or customized, applications among their services. I worked on several CP/M systems for several different customers, but there was only one MP/M installation we supported that I know of. Perhaps I had a myopic view of the business, but at least it was a real view, and I'm not making anything up. When programming in CBASIC there was little practical difference between them anyway. (No, I don't expect that to impress you, but that's what nearly everything I saw for CP/M was written in, from games to business apps.)
Your guesswork about my opinions and experiences is almost completely wrong, but you probably never check your assumptions against reality, do you? Certitude is so much easier that way.
I wasn't thinking of Buddhism when I said "atheist" primarily because the ethics it advocates are found in the form of dogmas. This means they're based on revealed truths regardless of the source of the revelation. In other words, they're founded on principles directly based on the experiences of the enlightened, and not reasoned from some set of first principles. Perhaps "materialist" would have been a better word than "atheist".
I'm familiar with western non-theistic ethical systems having surveyed a number of them back in school. We covered all the major philosophers from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein. There was little agreement among them as to even what "the good" is, let alone how to achieve it. Part of the method of the class was a dialogue between the professor and the students. The professor had an interesting method: she would get a sense for the consensus opinion of the class and then argue against it, whatever it was (and I'm sure, in some cases, contrary to her personal opinions.) The fact that one side or the other was always -- always able to puncture whatever ethical system was under discussion is part of what led me to my conclusion.
This is moot in any event. No materialist I've ever spoken with has ever referred to any of these systems.
I don't have time to respond you your entire diatribe, except to say you're coming from a remakably naive point of view. I can tell a 5-year-old that his spinach has vitamins that will help him grow, and he'll eat it for that reason? Do you actually think 5-year-olds are motivated by rationalisms, and that by giving him a reason he doesn't really understand (no, sorry, 5-year-olds don't understand nutrition) he'll do something he doesn't want to? Don't be ridiculous. Talk to me after you've had one or two of your own.
There's a difference between refusing to explain your reasoning, and realizing that an explanation won't achieve your goals. Certainly you should be forthcoming if it's appropriate. But there are situations where it's not helpful. What I left unstated in my very brief mention of GOTOs was that I had in mind beginning instruction. You'd think that this is the time when you'd most want to explain your reasoning, but how much will that really mean to a room full of high-school students half of which are only in the course to fill out their schedules? You could explain until you're blue in the face and you'll only make an impression on a minority. It's more worthwhile to save it for the advanced classes where the students actually give a damn.
If you read my post more carefully anyway, you'll find I suggested nothing like a blanket "harrass[ment](!)" of GOTOs. You've obviously read me through some kind of prejudicial filter, which you're going to have to put aside if you want a rational conversation. If that's not what you want -- well, this is Slashdot. I'm not shocked.
As to why I mentioned morals, RTFA please. But it's very amusing to hear you contrast humanistic morality with religion and tell me the former has reasons while the latter doesn't. That just says to me you know very little about religion. On the other hand, I've questioned a number of atheists over the years about the reasoned or philosophical grounds for their moral code and not one of them could give me a coherent answer. Can you? (Perhaps you can, and I've just been talking with unusually unthoughtful atheists. I have an open mind on the possibility of a genuine, well-reasoned atheist morality. Just because I've never found one, despite years of looking, doesn't mean it can't exist.)
I'm not sure why you assume I'm particularly young. I know what Slashdot's demographic is like, but I've also encountered enough outliers to not make that assumption about anyone without good reason. I'm not particularly old either. My first professional programming experience was on CP/M machines back when they were mainstream.
From the article: "I don't believe people should do things for reasons they don't understand--things like looking healthy, eating spinach, or avoiding GO TO statements. Rules without reasons focus on the appearance of things, not the substance."
No, rules without reasons help a person develop healthy habits and to benefit from them before he learns the reasons for them. That can come in its own good time.
It rarely does any good to try to explain to a child why he should eat his spinach, you just get him to eat it. By the time he understands why it's good for him he's in the habit of eating it and has benefited from the nutrition in the meantime.
A novice programmer might not understand why GOTOs are to be reserved for a small number of special situations, but you impose standards enforced via peer review that makes him avoid them when unnecessary anyway. By the time he understands why they're undesireable he's accustomed to coding without them to the point where it's become second nature, and in the meantime the code he's written is more maintainable by others.
Insisting that people learn the reasons for moral (or otherwise desireable) behavior before they adopt those behaviors is simply not workable in the real world.
plenty of other professionals work long thankless hours to get ahead without half the whining geeks manage.
First, if they're "getting ahead" then the long hours aren't thankless. Getting ahead is the reward for the long hours. The problem is when you work the long hours and get nothing in return for it. This is the situation in which many programmers find themselves. In fact, if you work hard enough to damage your ability to perform in the long run, and after that's happened you find yourself not qualified for a different job paying the same or better, you've done the exact opposite of getting ahead, haven't you?
Second, I think you'd have to look awfully hard to find another profession where working 20 hours of unpaid overtime a week is regarded as a norm. It's certainly not tolerated in any unionized job. Not even doctors do this absent emergencies, after they finish their internships.
No matter how many other people are doing this, it's still unhealthy. Join the lemming rush if you like; I'm going to be having a picnic on the edge of the cliff and watching you go over.
(And yes, I know lemmings don't actually do this. It's a useful metaphor anyway.)
Yup. And your feet are under your kilt, no? It's an old joke, actually.
I wonder what they wear under a running kilt?
There's at least one claim of regimental running. I hope it's not too common. Split-side running shorts get blown around enough, and they're anchored in the middle.
So here's an example where the host claims the show was forced off the air, the group that did the forcing claims they forced the show off the air, and you say they're both wrong because... why, exactly? Just because you want to be right?
In the real world things aren't strictly Darwinian, not even evolution, and many factors affect whether or not a show can find sponsors. In the case of Dr. Laura there was a concerted campaign threatening boycotts of anyone sponsoring her show. Businesses are very sensitive to that kind of thing. It's very difficult to measure how much trade you're getting out of a single sponsorship -- but if you get a thousand letters saying the writers will definitely not use your product if you sponsor a program that's measurable, and they also figure that a single letter is representative of a larger number with the same sentiment who aren't bothering to write. This is what both sides claim was done to Dr. Laura. Tell them they're wrong and see if they believe you.
If other "conservative" shows are succeeding on the air, it's because for whatever reason there's no campaign against them. Why is this not being done to, say, Bill O'Reilly? Ask someone who hates him. Personally, I just don't watch.
Sorry, but if you think no one was watching these shows you're just not paying attention to what the "Red State" population wants to see. It's a matter of record that there was considerable pressure put on advertisers to pull their ads from these shows and that this pressure was successful in a great many cases. One group is still bragging about it.
I was once working a crossword and the clue for a 5-letter word was "What a Scotsman wears under his kilt". Naturally I put "SOCKS". It turned out the answer they were looking for was "TREWS"!
At that point I decided that ignoramuses had no business making up crossword puzzles.
Anyway, I'm only joking a little bit here. Get a load of the Running Kilt. They claim that someone won a road race wearing it "commando". That's mildly frightening. Wool stays where you put it, more or less. Not so Supplex.
And my point exactly is that what you're talking about isn't the equivalent of a lynching in this century or any other. It's a needlessly hyperbolic metaphor rather like, as the AC pointed out, a Hitler comparison. It's impossible for a thinking person to take you seriously, but for those who do it dilutes the meaning of a real lynching until it's no longer clear what the word means.
Silly young women who allow themselves to be talked into sex and then have morning-after regrets might call it "rape", but it dilutes the meaning and cheapens the ordeals of women who really have been the victims of brutal sexual assualts or rendered unable to resist with drugs. Your use of "lynch" here is the same kind of thing.
I despise comparisons like this. It's nothing like a lynching. A mob torturing someone to death -- that's a lynching. It has really happened in this country, and fairly recently too. They're just now getting around to prosecuting some of the most notorious cases from time of the civil rights movement. Making this kind of comparison, especially when none of the people we're talking about have actually been silenced in a larger sense, cheapens the word.
Since real lynchings (as opposed to individual hate crimes) are practically non-existent these days, we arguably have more free speech than ever before. Of course there's still some amount of risk involved. That will never be completely eliminated outside some utopia that can never exist in a world populated by real people. But we're very close. The Internet, and the essential anonymity that comes with it, is a very much a boon in this case.
As for the rest, I'm afraid the tinfoil hat clashes with your jacket.
It ought to be axiomatic, or nearly so, that you can't impose a democracy on a people. If it's going to work, it must be a genuine dissent from the people and not a regime imposed from without. That's why Iraq is probably a doomed experiment. We didn't come to the aid of an existing revolutionary movement that was in difficulty, we just swooped in, took over, and said, "Hey, you're a democracy now! Is that cool or what?" To which many Iraqis now say, "Yeah, well this sucks too."
However, that doesn't mean we can't lend a hand when we see a real dissenting movement being actively suppressed. It's not easy to throw off tyranny. Sometimes you just need a little help from your friends.
That's true, but in none of these cases was it the government that was doing the censoring. In the Harvard case (assuming for the moment that you're recalling correctly) the death threats were actually illegal, and if it came to the government's attention who was behind them they'd be prosecuted.
This kind of censorship doesn't come only from the one side. Both Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh had to withdraw from TV because their supposedly oppressed political and moral opponents put enough pressure on advertisers that they withdrew, and the production companies couldn't afford to keep them on the air. And now there's pressure being put on Sinclair Communications for its pre-election anti-Kerry program.
Dissenting from the mainstream, in any way at all, not just politically, carries risks. Slashdot users should know this better than anyone. I bet most of us here had a harder time of it in high school (or still are) because we dress and/or behave differently from the herd. So what? The point is that in the US you can, and if there are any risks they won't come from the laws of the land -- which in fact are written to mitigate the risks to a great degree.
Or why is this site still functioning with all the politically incorrect material that's posted here?
Slashdot Mirror
A corporation, nation or other large grouping of people taken as a whole is actually pretty stupid regardless of the intelligence of the individuals comprising it. They behave in primitive ways to very basic stimuli, mostly economic. When we reach the point where it becomes more economically feasable to use some source of energy other than petroleum, as it in all likelihood will before the century is out (or maybe even after just a couple more decades) then we will switch away from it and the CO2 it pumps into the atmosphere, just as surely as an animal will shy away from pain and head towards food.
OK, important safety tip!
Or the wrong ratio of forces, causing all the matter in your body to explode at whatever the speed of light happens to be in those parts.
Actually, this is a major flaw with the scenario. For all we know, habitable universes, or even universes where it's possible for heavy elements such as carbon to form, are very rare.
If you understand what a Roman Catholic means when he talks about the "Apsotolic Deposit", that's close to what I mean by "kerygma" here in the specific sense I intend. What we lack is a doctrine of "dogmatic development" which is why I can't draw an exact equivalence.
I do think we're using "dogma" differently though. As I said, the fundamental attribute of a dogma is that it's the truth. I would think the truth is true whether one is enlightened or not, and it makes little difference whether or not one is apprehending it directly or by mere intellectual understanding. So, although they're always true and therefore never go away no matter how advanced one is, there may come a point where they're no longer necessary for an individual's instruction. (Although such people are always the most lovingly insistent on their truth.)
Do I understand you correctly to mean that Dharma is self-evident to a buddha? I say this because if it were self-evident to everyone, it wouldn't need to be taught. (It is, for example, nothing like self-evident to me.) But here we run into problems of terminology again: What I mean by enlightenment, in a Christian context, is very different from what you mean by it in a Buddhist context. For you it's how you describe the goal, for us it's how we describe setting your foot upon the beginning of the path. Our goal is called by various names, but one of the more common for it is "theosis". (Based on what has been said by those who have acheived it, it doesn't sound all that much like Buddhist enlightenment.) Such people have, by sacrificing the self, voluntarily conformed their wills to the Divine will. This does not necessarily mean they have immediate access to all truth (although they do have what we call "the one thing needful") but they are able to perceive directly many truths that are expressed to the main body of the faithful only verbally. So it's not (for us) so much that there's no more dogma, but rather that for them a dogmatic expression is no longer required for understanding, which then goes deeper than intellection.
More or less. I haven't mentioned most of the ways in which the truth might be manifested. It almost makes me wish we had such a systematic way of organizing things as you do -- but then, as organized religions go we're very disorganized....
This is not to say that all the kerygma is expressed dogmatically. (Kerygma isn't as abstract as I may be making it sound. It literally means "preaching", and as I'm using it here it refers to the original preaching of Christ to his Apostles, and of his Apostles to everyone else. It might be equivalent to dharma, if I understand that word correctly in the Buddhist sense.) For much of it an authoritative expression has not been found to be necessary, which simply means there are a variety of expressions that adequately convey it and no one precise formulation is needed.
It might be easy to get the wrong impression from the Web, just as you could from, say, my immediate circle of friends. Mead is popular among Renaissance Faire particiapnts, English Civil War re-enactors and other Living History actors, all of whom have webpages, but relatively few others.
I had a look at your blog, by the way. Traditional mead isn't really undergoing much of a revival here, at least as far as what you can get commercially. I live not too far from the winery that makes Chaucer's Mead and the way they make it it's more of a sweet dessert wine. The real thing is more beer-like. I tried making some Monastery Mead once -- this is the Russian style you can still find over there. It's actually hopped, and when I tried it I wished I'd primed the bottles. It was rather like a slightly sweet flat beer. I suppose beer and ale used to be flat too, back when they brewed it wooden kegs.
Ironic that you're mostly finding American resources. About the only reference I could find about it at the time, other than a Russian cookbook, was a little booklet at the local homebrewers' shop written by a couple of Englishmen. (This was mostly, but not entirely, pre-WWW.) They advocated strongly the wine-style, with threats of disapproval from your peers if you were to go public with any other kind.
Monastery mead isn't too different from this one. The recipe I used expected you to rely on wild yeasts for fermentation and wanted you to expose the finished must (or maybe it's a wort in this case) to the air for a while to collect them before capping it off with the airlock. I got penicillium in my first batch instead, and ended up using an ale yeast. I don't recall that fermentation took anything like a month, but YMMV I suppose.
I'm going to look even sillier than usual if ðese don't come out right.
It's really a laugh when you say, "top with the personal attacks" and follow it up with "you haven't the fortitude of character to read the rest." Have you ever considered the possibility that you're just tiresome?
Well, I have to admit you're more sophisticated than most trolls, but like all trolls you cease to be amusing after a while. Respond further if you like; I won't bother reading. Neither will anyone else at this point.
"Dogma" was your word, not mine. I was just taking you at your word. A dogma is an expression or a formulation of a revealed truth, a kerygma. Sorry if I misunderstood you, but perhaps "dogma" wasn't the word you were looking for. I don't claim to be an expert on Buddhism and was basing what I said on my understanding of what you said.
However, I don't know that we actually have much clash here. Certainly, true moral behavior must follow internal understanding consistent with an individual's growth. (If I've restated this accurately.) But to begin with I was thinking more pragmatically. For a society to be able to function its members must behave to some minimum moral standard, whether or not the individual members of that society have reached the point you're describing. This is pretty much what I was talking about when I mentioned teaching moral/healthy/intelligent behavior and letting the reasons (or better in this case, true moral judgement) come later. However, I would tend to agree with the Buddhist idea you're explaining about the potential harm in such an "external" morality -- perhaps on other grounds since I'm not familiar with the reasons given in the texts.
No, we got to Heidegger. But to be honest, it's been more than 20 years since I read many of these people and I'm mainly remembering the impression I got at the time. It was, as you say, the problem of epistemology. But I'd have to do some catch-up reading to remember the exact issues right now.
What, like this one?
materialism 1. Philosophy. The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. I meant exactly what I said.Since the rest of your post reveals you were unaware of this primary meaning of materialism and that you were using it exclusively as what that dictionary lists as the third definition, there's little reason for me to address the rest of what you say based on it. Regardless of your educational background, this doesn't give me much of a sense that you know what you're talking about.
Can you even read? I mentioned that there's little agreement among philosophers as to what constitutes "the Good". You reply by listing the widest possible divergence of opinion and then telling me it shows I was wrong. (You seem to think Plato regarded the ideal plane to be unreal. He actually considered it more real than the material.)
There were also a lot of writers between those I mentioned, with different opinions yet.
That's called the Socratian method.
What you're thinking of is more often called the "Socratic method" but that's not what she used. I didn't say she led the class by questioning and I don't know why you'd read that in. It was more of a dialectic. It wasn't really a Hegelian approach though, since if there was a synthesis to be formed she left it up to the individual students and didn't force it.
he went to the kings of each Mycenae and Macedon attempting to prevent the spread of the method,
I'm not terribly familiar with Democritus other than a bare outline of his philosophy, but I do know that Mycenae had been a ruin for over 500 years before he was born and certainly had no king in his lifetime. Check your facts before you start preaching next time.
Yes, I can write 5 long paragraphs and still not have time to reply point by point to these astonishingly lengthy rants of yours. Nor do I have time to respond to this one.
And just because your silly remarks about CP/M is right on my screen here -- it's the only part of your rant I can see as I type -- Sorry, but I was there. I worked for a small VAR that provided custom, or customized, applications among their services. I worked on several CP/M systems for several different customers, but there was only one MP/M installation we supported that I know of. Perhaps I had a myopic view of the business, but at least it was a real view, and I'm not making anything up. When programming in CBASIC there was little practical difference between them anyway. (No, I don't expect that to impress you, but that's what nearly everything I saw for CP/M was written in, from games to business apps.)
Your guesswork about my opinions and experiences is almost completely wrong, but you probably never check your assumptions against reality, do you? Certitude is so much easier that way.
I'm familiar with western non-theistic ethical systems having surveyed a number of them back in school. We covered all the major philosophers from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein. There was little agreement among them as to even what "the good" is, let alone how to achieve it. Part of the method of the class was a dialogue between the professor and the students. The professor had an interesting method: she would get a sense for the consensus opinion of the class and then argue against it, whatever it was (and I'm sure, in some cases, contrary to her personal opinions.) The fact that one side or the other was always -- always able to puncture whatever ethical system was under discussion is part of what led me to my conclusion.
This is moot in any event. No materialist I've ever spoken with has ever referred to any of these systems.
There's a difference between refusing to explain your reasoning, and realizing that an explanation won't achieve your goals. Certainly you should be forthcoming if it's appropriate. But there are situations where it's not helpful. What I left unstated in my very brief mention of GOTOs was that I had in mind beginning instruction. You'd think that this is the time when you'd most want to explain your reasoning, but how much will that really mean to a room full of high-school students half of which are only in the course to fill out their schedules? You could explain until you're blue in the face and you'll only make an impression on a minority. It's more worthwhile to save it for the advanced classes where the students actually give a damn.
If you read my post more carefully anyway, you'll find I suggested nothing like a blanket "harrass[ment](!)" of GOTOs. You've obviously read me through some kind of prejudicial filter, which you're going to have to put aside if you want a rational conversation. If that's not what you want -- well, this is Slashdot. I'm not shocked.
As to why I mentioned morals, RTFA please. But it's very amusing to hear you contrast humanistic morality with religion and tell me the former has reasons while the latter doesn't. That just says to me you know very little about religion. On the other hand, I've questioned a number of atheists over the years about the reasoned or philosophical grounds for their moral code and not one of them could give me a coherent answer. Can you? (Perhaps you can, and I've just been talking with unusually unthoughtful atheists. I have an open mind on the possibility of a genuine, well-reasoned atheist morality. Just because I've never found one, despite years of looking, doesn't mean it can't exist.)
I'm not sure why you assume I'm particularly young. I know what Slashdot's demographic is like, but I've also encountered enough outliers to not make that assumption about anyone without good reason. I'm not particularly old either. My first professional programming experience was on CP/M machines back when they were mainstream.
No, rules without reasons help a person develop healthy habits and to benefit from them before he learns the reasons for them. That can come in its own good time.
It rarely does any good to try to explain to a child why he should eat his spinach, you just get him to eat it. By the time he understands why it's good for him he's in the habit of eating it and has benefited from the nutrition in the meantime.
A novice programmer might not understand why GOTOs are to be reserved for a small number of special situations, but you impose standards enforced via peer review that makes him avoid them when unnecessary anyway. By the time he understands why they're undesireable he's accustomed to coding without them to the point where it's become second nature, and in the meantime the code he's written is more maintainable by others.
Insisting that people learn the reasons for moral (or otherwise desireable) behavior before they adopt those behaviors is simply not workable in the real world.
First, if they're "getting ahead" then the long hours aren't thankless. Getting ahead is the reward for the long hours. The problem is when you work the long hours and get nothing in return for it. This is the situation in which many programmers find themselves. In fact, if you work hard enough to damage your ability to perform in the long run, and after that's happened you find yourself not qualified for a different job paying the same or better, you've done the exact opposite of getting ahead, haven't you?
Second, I think you'd have to look awfully hard to find another profession where working 20 hours of unpaid overtime a week is regarded as a norm. It's certainly not tolerated in any unionized job. Not even doctors do this absent emergencies, after they finish their internships.
No matter how many other people are doing this, it's still unhealthy. Join the lemming rush if you like; I'm going to be having a picnic on the edge of the cliff and watching you go over.
(And yes, I know lemmings don't actually do this. It's a useful metaphor anyway.)
Yup. And your feet are under your kilt, no? It's an old joke, actually.
I wonder what they wear under a running kilt?
There's at least one claim of regimental running. I hope it's not too common. Split-side running shorts get blown around enough, and they're anchored in the middle.
In the real world things aren't strictly Darwinian, not even evolution, and many factors affect whether or not a show can find sponsors. In the case of Dr. Laura there was a concerted campaign threatening boycotts of anyone sponsoring her show. Businesses are very sensitive to that kind of thing. It's very difficult to measure how much trade you're getting out of a single sponsorship -- but if you get a thousand letters saying the writers will definitely not use your product if you sponsor a program that's measurable, and they also figure that a single letter is representative of a larger number with the same sentiment who aren't bothering to write. This is what both sides claim was done to Dr. Laura. Tell them they're wrong and see if they believe you.
If other "conservative" shows are succeeding on the air, it's because for whatever reason there's no campaign against them. Why is this not being done to, say, Bill O'Reilly? Ask someone who hates him. Personally, I just don't watch.
Sorry, but if you think no one was watching these shows you're just not paying attention to what the "Red State" population wants to see. It's a matter of record that there was considerable pressure put on advertisers to pull their ads from these shows and that this pressure was successful in a great many cases. One group is still bragging about it.
At that point I decided that ignoramuses had no business making up crossword puzzles.
Anyway, I'm only joking a little bit here. Get a load of the Running Kilt. They claim that someone won a road race wearing it "commando". That's mildly frightening. Wool stays where you put it, more or less. Not so Supplex.
Silly young women who allow themselves to be talked into sex and then have morning-after regrets might call it "rape", but it dilutes the meaning and cheapens the ordeals of women who really have been the victims of brutal sexual assualts or rendered unable to resist with drugs. Your use of "lynch" here is the same kind of thing.
I despise comparisons like this. It's nothing like a lynching. A mob torturing someone to death -- that's a lynching. It has really happened in this country, and fairly recently too. They're just now getting around to prosecuting some of the most notorious cases from time of the civil rights movement. Making this kind of comparison, especially when none of the people we're talking about have actually been silenced in a larger sense, cheapens the word.
Since real lynchings (as opposed to individual hate crimes) are practically non-existent these days, we arguably have more free speech than ever before. Of course there's still some amount of risk involved. That will never be completely eliminated outside some utopia that can never exist in a world populated by real people. But we're very close. The Internet, and the essential anonymity that comes with it, is a very much a boon in this case.
As for the rest, I'm afraid the tinfoil hat clashes with your jacket.
It ought to be axiomatic, or nearly so, that you can't impose a democracy on a people. If it's going to work, it must be a genuine dissent from the people and not a regime imposed from without. That's why Iraq is probably a doomed experiment. We didn't come to the aid of an existing revolutionary movement that was in difficulty, we just swooped in, took over, and said, "Hey, you're a democracy now! Is that cool or what?" To which many Iraqis now say, "Yeah, well this sucks too."
However, that doesn't mean we can't lend a hand when we see a real dissenting movement being actively suppressed. It's not easy to throw off tyranny. Sometimes you just need a little help from your friends.
This kind of censorship doesn't come only from the one side. Both Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh had to withdraw from TV because their supposedly oppressed political and moral opponents put enough pressure on advertisers that they withdrew, and the production companies couldn't afford to keep them on the air. And now there's pressure being put on Sinclair Communications for its pre-election anti-Kerry program.
Dissenting from the mainstream, in any way at all, not just politically, carries risks. Slashdot users should know this better than anyone. I bet most of us here had a harder time of it in high school (or still are) because we dress and/or behave differently from the herd. So what? The point is that in the US you can, and if there are any risks they won't come from the laws of the land -- which in fact are written to mitigate the risks to a great degree.
Or why is this site still functioning with all the politically incorrect material that's posted here?
Whoever patents the Beach Kilt(tm) is going to make a fortune!