If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music. (And no bullshit answers about giving it away and making their money off concerts and t-shirt sales. Suggest a solution which doesn't involve simply giving up all that sales revenue.) If you can't come up with anything better than what's out there now, why would you be surprised that they can't either, and are desperately experimenting with so many bad ideas?
This seems a little over-the-top to me. Consider this example. Ford has just "invented" the assembly line. It's now possible to build cars extremely cheaply. In other words, the cost or reproduction has gone down by an order of magnitude. Let's say there had been car-makers before that, but they made custom cars to order, one at a time. They would see this sudden new method of production as a threat, and try to artificially maintain inflated prices. Would they be justified in shutting Ford down?
I'm well aware this analogy doesn't really work, but there are elements of it that are important. Firstly, the real change here is in production. Music distributors DO NOT MAKE MUSIC. That's what bands do. So when you buy a CD from a Warner or whatever, you're not paying Warner for the music, you're paying Warner for the CD. Of course, you're also paying Warner to market the CD, you're paying them to possible promote the band. And part of your money is actually going to fund the band itself.
So essentially the music industry has become a big middle man. They don't make music, they promote and distribute it. But now they are no longer needed for distribution. The method of production has gotten cheaper and anyone with a PC can do it. They arguably don't need to promote it either - with the internet it's possible to disseminate information for free - or almost.
So before you, or anyone gets all high and mighty about "they make a living selling music, blah blah blah" you have to ask yourself - are they really needed any more? And if not, then why should we keep them around? We don't keep blacksmiths around either. Of course the industy has a vested interest in keeping itself alive, but that doesn't mean we have to roll over and let them extort money from us when they no longer really have much to offer us.
So what should replace this business model? Clearly bands need to get paid or we won't have full-time artists anymore. So money needs to change hands. That is clear. I'd recommend dropping the price on physical CDs considerably - like $5 bucks a pop. If the good is sufficiently elastic you'll make the m oney back in increased revenue. Shift to an online model. There are plenty of sites that want to sell music cheap. Reduce the price for an mp3 to 10 cents or something. Share the profits more equitably between distributor and band. There you go. Let fan sites handle promoting.
That may or may not be the perfect solution, but here's the key point. It's not the consumer's job to come up with a new business model. And if the currrent business model has become irrelevant, we don't have an obligation to develop a new one before pointing out that the current one is irrelevant.
Let's be realistic. Change is inevitable. The industry can fight it, and be crushed eventually, or they can downsize and reinvent themselves. Painful, yes, but nothing like the alternative.
I'm looking for the Thomas Jefferson quote I alluded to, and will post it when I find it.
In the meantime I'll just say this. Thomas Jefferson clearly advocated a seperation of church and state, but the problem is the term that he meant when he said "church" is not the same as what many Americans mean when they say church.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is to say that while a seperation of church and state is inherent to American gov't, a seperation of religion and state is not. Gov't should be seperated from any particular establishment of religion, but it should not necessarily be seperated from religion in general. Those who seek to outlaw the pledge of allegiance (yes, I know "under God" was introduced in the 1950's) and essentially chase God from the public view are misguided, misuse the "seperation of church and state" clause, and, as I said in my initial post - tend to radicalize.
1. I think by dampen the ones that try to fuel the fire he probably meant the ones that were explicitly inciting further violence. So we're (you, me and parent) are probably in agreement that those specific guys could have their free speech rights truncated in interests of greater public safety.
2. Perhaps that's because we have better religious freedom? I think more than just religious freedom it might have to do with the fact that the French state is a secular one. When they beheaded their king back in the French Revolution they were not just doing away with the monarchy, they were also symbolically dethroning God. Ever since they have had an aggressively secular government. So it's no wonder that a minority group that is extremely religious feels at odds with a government that borders on anti-religious.
This is in contrast with American government, which was not founded as a secular state. People who say it was are misreading the Constitution and ignoring history. I'm not saying it was Christian, but it was at least fundamentally theist. Just read the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, certainly not a Christian by any conventional standard, began attending a Christian church when he was president. Why? He explained that he felt that the Christian faith tended towards the betterment of society and thus it was up to him to set a good example and attent. The "seperation of church and state" was really only intended to be a seperation between the state and any specific establishment of religion - not to set the state against religion or expel God from the state.
There are dangers in giving into the demands of the religious right - ID and all the nonesense. But by the same token, if we allow America to continue to be secularized (ala banning the Pledge of Allegiance and essentially declaring the Declaration of Independence itself to be ruled "unconstitutional") we are perhaps setting the stage to follow France towards an inevitable confrontation between the forces of religion and atheism.
I'm not saying that it is only religious tension that has resulted in the French violence, but it is certainly an exacerbating element.
Wow. You really do work 40 hours a week. Like I said, best of luck with that, and you have my sympathies. I'm starting a program to get my masters in 11 months while I work full time in May... I'm not really looking forward to going back to that insanity.
Hey - I don't think you should feel so ostrasized. I hate epic fantasy. From Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks to David Eddings - I can't stand the stuff. Tolkien I love, but I don't consider it part of a genre. And Jackson did a good job except with training Frodo to shoot for biggest wuss in a movie award. I don't like the Dukes of Hazard, I've never had Velveeta or Spam, and i've never seen the A-Team.
So relax - we're all weird here.
Oh yeah, and I was a philosophy major for a while, but I dropped it and switched to math when the philosophy professors got on my nerves too much.
Dude - you are full time and work 40 hours? I never understand that. That's just not possible to do. There are only 168 hours in a week. If you take out 40 for work and 15*3 = 45 for a full course load of classes and then another 15*3 = 45 for a very light homework load you're only left with 168 - (40 + 45 + 45) = 38 hours. In a whole week. that's like 5.5 hours a day. In that 5.5 horus a day you'd have to eat, sleep, travel, brush your teeth, etc. I just don't think that's possible on a long-term scale. You're either taking a full load as an English or psych major or something (where you can skimp on homework), or you can do homework while you work or time-share in some other way. I was utterly swamped by my last semester as an undergrad with a full load (math major) and just a couple of part-time jobs (about 25 hours a week). Then again, it also depends on the job. I was doing pretty professional-grade stuff not run-of-the-mill student work, so that's different too.
But hey, maybe you can get by on less sleep than me (I get 8 hours now and I'm still exhausted every morning). Seriously though - best of luck with that. I just graduated in May of '05, so the memories are fresh and painful.
Anyway, maybe because of that exhaustion you didn't really read my post thoroughly. "Pelt" to me implies more than just a negative or judgmental context. Take snowballs. If I lob a snowball at you, that's one thing. But if I "pelt" you, then there have to be lots of snowballs, coming quickly. Like, a whole barrage. So I restricted my negative comments to a few barbs. I got a little carried away, but I think you're really just nit-picking here.
As far as "what makes you think the poster is conversant". The whole point of the word converant as I was using it is that it needs to be followed by the prepositional phrase "with ______". You see, I was NOT criticizing the parent poster for not liking Star Wars, or for dismissing it as "pretentious crap". I let that pass, along with LoTR the movie with comments that boiled down to "hey, I disagree, but I see where you're coming from".
That's because we're all conversant with pop culture - the realm of Star Wars and Jackson's LoTR. What I took issue with was the dismissal as "pretentious crap" of Tolkiens LoTR. See to me, dismissing that requires more than just being converant with pop culture, but also being conversant with literature.
Maybe you are, and maybe the parent poster is, conversant with that topic. But nothing either you or him as has said makes me think that you are. Then again, you only said you didn't like Star Wars. That's fine - as I've said before.
But the poster dismissed LoTR out of hand. As I told him, and I'm telling you, it's fine not to like it. But when you dismiss one of the classics without any evidence you have any idea that you understand why it's a classic in the first place, the only think you make look silly - or like pretentious crap - is yourself.
You know, as a joke article I think this could be really funny. But after reading through it, I'm pretty sure it's just further evidence that anyone who wants an English degree should have to base a basic IQ test before graduating. Some of these guys just shouldn't be let out in the wild.
Sometimes something is so awful it's difficult to point out any one thing that's wrong with it. Not because there's a lack of weak points, but because there are simply too many targets. This article is one such piece. Nevertheless, I'll take a few whacks.
Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. "This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level," one of John Ashbery's works begins.
Now, if Star Wars had any line of dialogue in the whole movie that hung together that well, there may have been hope for the series. The article could use this point to humorously emphasize how bad the dialogue of Star Wars was, but apparently our kindly author is oblivious to any irony except the dramatic kind he invents himself.
As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure,
In other words, the characters were so damn unbelievably bad that I couldn't watch the movie without wondering why Lucas had to try so hard to shoe-horn his 2d characters into what could have been a very interesting plot.
The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.
"But all my english professors loved it when I copied phrases I heard them use in class to papers that I turned in!" Or, from another viewpoint: the Star Wars fans were so desperate to see a good movie that they saw one even though Episode I was playing in on their screens.
The Force is the power of plot.
So... the plot is powered by mitochalorians that appeared only briefly in Episode I?
Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film.
Oh, now I see the problem. I went to see a movie about Jedis. My bad.
Lucas now says that he's finished with popular filmmaking and wants to return to the experimentalism of his early career
But wait - wasn't the WHOLE POINT of this article how experimental and edgy Star Wars was? This is the line that really sinks the whole article. If Star Wars was popular as opposed to experimentalism (I'm not the one saying the two are mutually exclusive, the author just did) then didn't he just torpedo the thesis of the whole article?
Hey, you're entitled to your opinion. I'm not going to pelt you with anything. But I have to wonder - when you have an opinion that the "Lord of the Rings" novel is crap - and yet that novel was pretty consistently voted the best book of the 21st century, do you ever - in the dead of night - suspect that you just might be missing something?
I think you're wrong about the original Star Wars movies and about the LoTR movies - but I see your point. There's a lot to crticize in both. Star Wars was cheesey, and Frodo only had two expressions in the movie: "oh sam!" (the silly grin) and "ugghhhh" (the hobbit pushing out a man-size turd grimace).
But the LoTR? I mean, in high school I thought a lot of the books I was told to read sucked. I still have papers I turned in ridiculing Kafka's "Metamorphis", Hesse's "Siddhartha" and pretty much every other book I had to read. But to me the only thing that looks ridiculous now is how self-assured I was at age 14 that I was smarter than all the novelist, critics, and readers who had read the books for years, decades, or centuries before I was born. It took me a few years to realize that even when I really disliked a "classic" novel (I hate Moby Dick) the only thing I achieved by stating categorically that the works "sucked" was to make myself look like an utter idiot.
It's not that I've learned to bow before the group consensus - I still really disllike "Siddhartha" for example, and for a lot of the same reasons I had when I first read it. But I would be hesitant to call widely acclaimed books that have stood the test of time "a bunch of pretentious garbage". Instead, it's better to be conversand on WHY they books are lauded in the first place - and to respond to that ongoing discussion. It's not like the "classics" are all universally hailed by English professors everywher either.
But hey, I guess you're just way more perceptive than all the millions of people, some of whom have devoted their lives to words, novels, and literature, who love Tolkien's works. Maybe you should consider becoming conversant with the external context of a work before you display your unabashedly uninformed categorical opinions on it. I wouldn't say for every Coke commercial you see on TV you need to exercise this degree of care - and hey, you don't HAVE to do it at all. But when you come across a work of truly significant stature you can either converse, or you can whine. It's your pick.
You're welcome to your opinion, whatever it may be, but some opinions cast you in a worse light then you could ever cast the object of the opinion in.
You cleary have either 0 artistic taste (and probably keep wondering why those annoying butt-heads in Mystery Science Theater keep ruining good movies by talking during them) or are simply, hopelessly, desperately in denial. That's OK. I was once as you are now.
I found out about the new movies when I was in middle school. Back in 1995. I had heard rumors, but that was when I found out they were going to be made for sure. I can still remember the day I found out, how excited I was, trying to figure out how I could ever wait 4 years.
When Phantom Menace rolled around I was ready. I got my parents to drop me off at the theater at 11am the day before tickets went on sale. I was #5 in line. I spent a fun night there, plotting to throw soda cans at the car that kept driving by yelling at the fans, winning two out of two games of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, and strolling down the line that by nightfall went all the way from the entrance of the theater to the rear wall. By the time the tickets went on sale the next day - the line wrapped around the entire theater.
Two weeks later the movie actually came out and I was there hours early, waiting in a "line" that was in fact a densely-packed mob that was worse then any crowded show I've ever been too. But I managed to stake out an entire row in the theater for me and mine.
To be succinct: the movie sucked. The "Duel of the Fates" scene was awesome. Well, the music was anyway. The music was so good I felt like I was watching Star Wars. But the rest sucked.
And yet I watched it. Not just then, but SIX MORE TIMES. Why? Beccause I had waited for Star Wars since 1995. It was an essential part of my childhood. I grew up on Star Wars, I loved Star Wars, I read the novels (until they started sucking too) and I just could not give up on Lucas - I kept willing the movies to somehow, miraculously, stop sucking.
So there are your three reasons for the movie being a blockbuster even though it sucked.
1. People are so desperate for Star Wars that they go no matter how much the movie sucks. It still has lightsabers, Jedi, spaceships and Yoda. It's awful, but it lets them back into the Star Wars universe.
2. People have invested so much in the movie - emotionally - that they can not bear to admit what they realized deep-down the first time they saw the movie: it sucks.
3. The same star wars freaks who probably thought the Halo novelization was good, and keep buying assinine Star Wars novels, are the same dweebs who just have no sense of taste or style whatsoever. They simply don't know that the movie sucked anymore than they understand the basic need to take a shower every now and then. Don't mean to offend people. I'm sure there are some perfectly hygenic Star Wars fans out there who just simply CAN NOT see that the movies sucked. That's OK. As long as they're happy.
Now to your other question: why did the movie suck?
Well, you can't really quantify the "goodness" of a movie. It's subjective, so you can always argue any side of the issue. But some movies are just so universally AWFUL that a general consensus emerges. So, what are the reasons that Star Wars sucked? Here's just a brief, off-the-top-of-my-head list:
1. Jar-Jar.
2. All the rest of the gun-gedins (or however you spell it). I mean really, throwing purple blobs at droids? The Ewoks with their sticks and stones were less unabashedly stupid.
3. Mitocholorions. Or however you spell it. So awful that, like Jar-Jar, they got more or less dropped after the 1st movie. Talk about killing the magic. "The force is not strong with you? Try new mito-booster! It'll send your mito-count through the roof in no time! You too can have super-jedi powers..." Give me a break, I'm surprised Lucas didn't really try to market a beverage based on it. Admit it - you'd buy it.
4. The Dialogue. This is #4 on the list, but it's really the #1 reason the movie sucked. George apparently simply can not write dialogue. I mean
What's interesting to me is that we even have a concept of "natural". Philosophically, we'd most likely presume a fish doesn't have a concept of wet because it is always wet. Without an opposing concept, the concept itself disappears into the paradigm.
Yet we as humans have this concept of "natural" and generally consider ourselves to be exempt from it. Silly vegetarians are the best example of this. It's wrong for people to eat animals. But apparently OK for animals to eat animals because that's "natural". But on what basis do we presume to conclude that people and animals are fundamentally different after all? (Not that all vegetarians are silly by any means. There are good ethical arguments, but your run of the mill high school / college "radical" will provide a textbook example of this strange phenomena.)
Another example is the global warming argument. Many people act as though humans are somehow the deus ex machina - we've dropped in unanounced from the rafters to save - or in this case destory - the planet. And this is not only a bad thing in the sense that we may all die, but is in fact a "bad thing" in the sense of rather naughty and immoral. But it can really only be immoral if we are ultimately responsible. And we can only be fundamentally responsible if we are somehow distinct from nature. A billion cows farting hurts the environment, but is part of nature. You don't blame the cows - they are just part of the natural ecosystem. A billion cars are some how removed from nature. How? Along the continuum from a gorilla testing the depth of a river with a stick and a fisherman using sonar to test the depth of a river or lake does the tool - and with it the tool-user - cease to be "natural"?
Where did this tendency arise to consider ourselves somehow seperate and distinct from nature? The frequent reasoning, if it can be called such, is an appeal to our "intelligence". What is implicit in this argument is that since we are intelligent we can "make up our own minds". That is, the plants, animals, birds, glaciers, stars and elements all around us are just part of a kind of Newtonian billiards table. You can't hold them responsible because their are merely conduits for causality. You hit a billard ball, it rolls in a pretedermined fashion. You can't ask "why did you roll this way?" and expect an answer any different from the fact that it got hit a certain way. You don't ask a shark "why did you eat this surfer?". It's just a more complex billiards table. Yet we alone are somehow detached, isolated, unique and above all free. Somehow we are considered not merely conduits, but origins of causality.
Perhaps it's not surprising that we humans should have this grand perception of ourselves. It is, in fact, perhaps a result of evolution. It may serve to increase our own sense of self, and thus fuel our drive for self-preservation. All the ape-men ancestors who pondered "but am I really distinct from this tree?" were eaten before they could procreate.
But what IS so surprising is that such a fundamentally critical presupposition of human thought is so rarely the target itself of criticism and analysis. The "free-will debate" is largely relegated to obscure philosophical debates, and hardly ever reaches beyond theology in terms of broader scope. And yet it seems clear to me that much of our fundamental understanding hinges on answering, addressing, or at the very least acknowledging this essential question.
I don't think the distinction between intelligent design and evolution - in this context at least - is as clear as you'd like to think it is. You contend that the difference is that computer programmers are intelligent. You write:
"However, the crucial difference is that the hackers are intelligent. They have an aim in mind when they alter the virus; mutation in nature does not."
But the crucial factor here is not intelligence - it's free will. If a human agent is considered independent, then there is a causal disconnect between the purely biological forces of evolution and at least some of the behavior of that human entity. But that's a might big "if".
If the human is considered from a deterministic model - meaning that every aspect of human behavior can be explained as a product of genetics and non-independent interaction with the system, then the human being becomes indistinquishable from the system. And in that case the virus is a product of evolution by extension. Then again, by the same argument fashion is also a product of evolution.
In any case, the determinist vs. compatabilist vs. free-will advocate argument is millenia old. We're not going to resolve it on Slashdot today. (unless someone quotes Wikipedia).
Sure, the article was written from a personal standpoint. But the point of the article for the general community - how do we feel about our nicknames when, in a digital community, it's our only genuinely unique identifier is both interesting and relevant to as much of the Slashdot community as any other post.
You guys need to chill out. When CmdrTaco starts writing diatrabes about how much he hates the service at his local Taco Bell, then the integrity of slashdot is being challenged. But as long as what he posts is interesting and relevant who cares if it happens to come from an actual personal experience of his?
Good post Violated. I love my nickname - which I alternatively use in shortened form "stormin" or long-form "theStorminMormon". Sometimes in IRC chats I would be inundated with people who had never met me (in person or on line) but felt compelled to attack me because of my religion. Just to avoid unending debates I would use "stormin" sometimes. On the other hand, when I played Planetside I loved the varied reactions I got from people - positive and negative - to my nickname.
I feel very attached to my nickname, which some friends in college gave me. And more importantly - I think that as the numbers of online users swell this is increasingly going to become an issue. Part of what draws people into online communities of all sorts is the chance for reinvention. I know a lot of people that, like me and Taco here, take their names with them wherever the go online. They have the same name on messageboards, MMORPGs, and FPS's. But there's no guarnatee that they can take the name with them.
As the online community gains importance in our lives, so will the name we choose to assume in that world. And yet those names can be removed, destroyed, or stolen more easily than our birth names (which we don't choose). I don't know what all the implications of this are, but I'm curious to see what others think.
In general I think you're right. Even the preview alone of "Doom" is enough to make me cringe. Video games have a history of utterly awful adaption to film, and the industry is definately lacking for fresh ideas recently. But think about it - that's because most video games (especially shooters) have only enough story to get you through a 2 minute cut scene and back into action. There's no substance to make a movie out of.
But there are some very compelling reasons to think that Halo might be an exception to this problem. You see Bungie put far more love and backstory into their game then the average shooter. In fact more than any shooter that I've ever seen before.
If you want an idea of the depth and breadth of artistic talent behind Halo, you should really consider listening to the I Love Bees story. It was part of a viral marketing game before Halo 2 came out. I love audio storytelling. Everything from unabdridged novels to radio adaptations of sci-fi, and the I Love Bees series is far and away one of the most compelling and involving storytelling experiences I have ever had. It tells a fantastic, exciting and complex tale of life on Earth as humanity begins to face the reality of their own iminent annhilation, weaving narratives from 5-6 different characters and from several timelines to a tightly focussed climax that had me up at 3am listening instead of sleeping before school.
There is a depth of realism (in the artistic sense of "characters that seem like real people in situations that, given the general premise, are realistic" obviously not in the "this could really happen" sense) to the Halo universe that could easily provide an utterly fantastic movie experience. The story - the material - is there.
The real question is just whether or not they manage to capture some of the real essence of the Halo universe. I Love Bees did that by going beyond the shoot-em-up mentality of the game and exploring human issues with an awesome and diverse cast of characters. Master Chief wasn't even a character in the series. Then again the books, I'm ashamed to say I read all 3, were nothing but a quick hack job. Just a way for Halo addicts to get one more hit.
Although you make valid points, there are some pretty good reasons to have certifications. At least in theory.
The first, and most obvious, thing to realize is that certifcations are not really for programmers/technicians, etc. The certifications are actually for the non-technical people that need to hire the technical people. A certificate can establish that a person has at least the minimum required technical skills to do a job.
Then an employer can restrict the pool to just people who are minimally competent. Some may be worthless potential employees because of other problems (anything from social skills to a lack of ability to apply the knowledge that they have).
The problem with certificates is that a lot of people see it as a way to make a cheap buck. There's no serious capital involved once the test is established. You're just selling a piece of paper.
So then you get a ton of people with their eye on the bottom line out there tacking on the miniumum amount of training (got to keep an eye on that bottom line). And you get a lot of people who can't rely on their skills and want to just pass a test and get a pay raise.
So the system fueled by certifications has a lot of downside even though the essential idea is good.
As far as my poor showing goes, I thought we'd moved beyond condesencion, but clearly we haven't. If in fact I'm missing a point, would you mind at least pointing me in the right direction? I'm not exactly uninformed on the topic, but if there's some truly major aspect I'm missing, please send me in the right direction and rest assured I'll do the reading. But in the meantime lay off the tone or I'll whip out your amazing lack of understanding of both theology ("religious dogma, where the "truth" was cast in stone in ages past, and can never be changed, ever" is about the most unenlightened critique of dogma I've ever heard) and basic logic (straw man != ad hominem). But we don't need to go back to that level, so let's not.
Look, when people debate (on or off the internet) it's extermely rare that one person will ever admit being wrong on even an accessory point, let alone concede whatever the topic of the debate is. Because of that, there's a lot of grandstanding in debate. You're not really trying to convince the person your debating, you're trying to crush and grind them so that anyone watching will come away with the impression that you're right. It's essentially a spectator sport. This way you can support people who share your opinion and sway those who are unsure.
But because of this process, a lot of spurious stuff get's thrown into debates. It's easier to launch attacks then to defend against them, and so for this reason people like to lace their arguments with all kinds of implied attacks, relevant or not, just to put the other guy in the difficult position of having to write extremely boring, long rebuttals, or let the implied attacks stand as stated. In most debates neither the pro nor con representative really sticks to the logic necessary to the topic.
But here's my point - there is NO ONE else reading this. It's just you and me. So really, why are you still making all these asumptions about me? You say you're a scientist. I haven't questioned that. And when you say I'm so wrong it's poor, I actually ask you for more info (though you haven't convinced me of anything yet). I've made no assumptions about you, your profession, your lifestyle, your intentions, or your background. Contrast that with your "suprise" that I know who Kuhn is, your insinuation that I'm trying to "witness" to you, and was it you that had me down as the guy with the herbal remedy books on my bookshelves?
Look man, I don't feel any psychological need for your respect, but your approach presents us with 2 problems. First, you're just muddying the water, and second you seem to be revealing that you're more interested in an appeal to your own authority than in the strength of your claims.
It's clear to me that although you logically concede that theories are never certain, you haven't doubted the superiority of your own position since the time this debate started. And not on the basis of your logic, but because you're assumptions about me (the religious bumpkin, you probably think I live in Utah or Idaho too) only serve to bolster your own appeal to authority argument (yet another common logical fallacy). Your authority. You probably see that as a result of the strength of your position. I see it is as evidence of your dogmatic approach to your own belief system - and I don't care if you picked it up from the Hindu's, the Mormons, Nietzshce, or anywhere else. Though I've demonstrated time and time again that science is not sufficient to understand the policy elements of this issue, you continue to ignore that and act as though all the non-scientific disciplines, from economics to philosophy, have no valid right to be in this debate.
Look, all I'm saying is that it would be nice if you'd drop the arrogance. That's the worst thing about giving someone a PhD. They just never get over it ever.
Send me some links, or some article/books, and I'll try to find the gaping wholes in my analsysis. But if you're just going t
You like the Kuhn reference? Yeah, I'm just full of suprises. I think we're winding down here, not because we've reached agreement but because we're starting to hit on philosophical issues at such a depth that I just don't have the time necessary to begin to go into the expositions of my own positions. I'm glad you've found the convo to be beneficial, in any case.
What do we consider a human being I don't think that this argument is as easy to reduce as you do. You give the examples of killing cells or a finger, and say that these are "nonsensical examples". But I think that they are actually quite clearly illustrations that it's really not that difficult to tell between cells and a human being. The cells you destroy do not cause a human life to end (assuming we're not talking embryos here). This is not really any different than the natural death epidermal cells are going through all the time. But there's a simple, clear, and obvious difference between killing a few cells and and killing enough cells to end a human life. In my case you'd have to kill a lot of cells, or at least very specific ones, in order to kill me. In the case of an embryo, it's fewer cells. But in either case the important fact is that if you kill the right amount of cells, the individual dies. I think this is a clear and obvious, you do not. We'll just have to agree to disagree for now.
Alleviating suffering I just don't have time to get into the whole "quality" of life thing. Let's just say that while I think the idea is sound at its very heart, it's been so wantonly misused that it does more harm than good at this point. Case in point, most people think it's a kindness to allow MD-assisted suicide in the case of someone with a terminal illness or major disability. But in actuality most people in that position who request death, when psychologically evaluated, turn out to be clinically depressed. After treatment for depression most decide not to die. So while I'm not saying we shouldn't allow people to be able to choose their own fate at all, I am saying that when people get carried away with the slogan they end up practicing an egregious form of bias. Namely if a healthy person attempts suicided we recognize it as a cry for help, but if a quadrapalegic tries it the whole "quality of life" argument has us refuse what is equally likely to be a cry for help. And after all, who needs more help? This is the reason the diabled community was so disgusted by "Million Dollar Baby". The "quality of life" and "right to day" movements are really thinly-veiled versions of American consumerism. We are the ones judging the lifes of others and finding their quality lacking. Americans throw things out instead of fixing them, and now we're starting to apply the mentality to people. As I said - we should allow the diabled to choose their own fate, but only in the context of even more support than we provide to our healthy population. If we're more likely to hand a sick man the cyanide than our attention and love, what does that say about us as a people? There's a lot more to this, and believe me I know this issue rather well, but we can carry on in email if you're really interested. I think you're falling for the hype.
Meta-ideologySure, there's a common thread throughout all (almost all) cultures. But I think peopel drastically overestimate the meaning this has for us right now. The differences tend to be more important, and even the "gut instinct" needs to be well-informed or it can lead to serious trouble. In case you hadn't noticed, the major religions share a common past of oppresion and bloodshed that's just as deep and long as their teachings of love and acceptance. And remember what they say about good intentions (eugenics, anyone?)
IgnoranceI'd love to have an interesting conversaion about faith. Personally I believe that knowledge, in an absolute sense, is unavailable to us. All we have our theories. This isn't to undercut science. Well-tested theories c
OK, the debate has moved to the other thread. But you're confusing an ad hominem attack and a straw man attack. An ad hominem attack is when you attack a person then use that personal attack as basis for refuting their points.
A straw man attack is different. That's when you pretend that someone espouses a particular view, and attack that view (even though the person may not espouse it). Usually you add a little subterfuge to this. For example, if I say I'm pro-life, and then you attack me because I would criminalize abortion and send women to jail who seek to end their pregnancies even to even to save their own lives, you would be using a straw man attack (because being pro-life doesn't necessarily involve prosecuting women under any circumstances, let alone when their life is on the line!) and the subterfuge comes in because someone who's not very well informed may think that "straw man" you are attacking is in fact the genuine article.
So the two are related (especially if you use a straw man attack to then make me look like an idiot to then launch an ad hominem attack based on me being an idiot - an extremely common double-fallacy of internet debating), but not the same.
I think we can safely assume that at this point no one else is reading this thread. But the debate is interesting, and so I don't mind continuing. And furthermore you've said a few things that I just can't let slide. Not that they make me angry or anything, but they are issues I can't resist addressing.
First of all I really don't think the question "what is life" is the question we need to be asking. That is a nice zen-type riddle, and equally useless from a policy standpoint. The question we do need to ask is what do we consider a human being, and what do we not? No matter how difficult this issue may be to resolve it is NOT one that we can simply ignore.
In the past Jews, Africans, Hell, practically everyone has been considered subhuman at some point or other. Even Mormons were considered by some scientists for a short time to be a new, regressive race of humanity more akin to the "orientals" then to the ordinary white Americans. I can find a referrence for you if you'd like. Admittedly, it was scientists at a conference over a hundred years ago, but let's try to avoid the fallacy of assuming we are smarter than our predecessors, or somehow less prone to error in general.
And so my point is that if we want to avoid some of the most tragic mistakes in history, we need to have a solid, workable understanding of who we want to extend human rights to. And while you say that life in general may pass mystically from generation to generation, I say that it is our best interest to lay down a line for when a unique instance of human life begins, and when it ends. We already have a working definition for when it ends. The cessation of all brain activity, if I'm right. We pronounce people dead, we write out death certificates. So, even though there's some ambiguity right at the very fringes (as with persistant vegitative state, and some people being resucitated after technically being dead) we have a decent, working cap for when life ends. So it's not like we're on some mystic journey here. We're just trying to put a lid on the other end to match the first end.
So that's my case for why we need a definition of when life begins, and for why I believe it's practicable. I don't want to go through my whole spiel again of why I think conception is the best candidate.
What you say is complicated beyond all measure is, in fact, not such a complicated question after all. On the other hand, what you claim is simple "alleviate suffering" is not simple at all. The obvious flaw in that little slogan is the text of a lot of B-sci fi moives. The surest way to eliminate suffering is to prevent/end life. I think you need to engage in a little more careful thinking about what exactly you mean by "alleviate suffering" because I don't think it's at all clear. Wouldn't you be alleviating suffering to wander about capping people who are depressed? It's an extreme example, but it's logically sound. If you're afraid of causing suffering to family and friends, no matter. Just start offing people who are terminally ill. Do it secretly. That way you cause no more suffering than would already be there, and alleviate a lot of painful suffering for everyone if the patient were to keep living for another few months, years, or whatever.
Finally we stumble on what I believe is your most crucial flaw: "you can't answer the question according to one particular ideology."
You seem to believe that there is a way for a person to find a non-specific meta-ideology. But this is simply not possible. There's really no use to searching for a neatral ideology, all ideologies are inherently biased. All you can do is work with one that has as few internal inconsistencies as possible, and be open to changing your idealogy as you grow as a person. But you seem to have the (unconscious?) opinion that a man of science can elevate himself above the masses of the religiously-biased. But science carries it's own biases with it. I suggest you do some reading on Kuhn if you are not aware of this simple fact.
Actually, I take it back. There's
Just wanted to add my opinion. I saw part of a couple of episodes on TV and was like, "Eh, another sci fi show. Could be cool."
Then along came Netflix and I started watching the shows in order. THEN I got it. Now I own the DVD series and I just have to say that unless you see the show in order you miss all of the macro-plots, which are essential to really appreciating the show.
If you haven't watched them yet... go watch them. In order. You'll be hooked after the pilot, and the series builds from there.
Your main point, and your most interesting one, is that "many of the perceived ethical considerations fall away when you ralize that the question of when does life being has not a thing to do with this discussion". Two points on this.
1 - It's the first point you've made that can logically support your stance that non-scientists have nothing to contribute to this discussion (it's not enough to get you all the way there, but it's at least a step in that direction).
2 - You have to use ethics to prove that point. Unless and until you can give "ethics" a purely scientific, quantifiable definition, you're going to have to engage in an ethical debate to draw any conclusions about ethics.
So even though you say you've carefully avoided the religion/science dichotomy, I think you've fallen right into it despite all your protests to the contary.
As a last point, I think you just don't understand the question we're discussing. You say "when you're talking aboutthe physical properties of cells..." Sure, if that's all we're talking about, let the scientists have the arena to themselves.
But that's decidedly NOT what we're talking about. We're discussing policies about funding for such research (bringing in politics and economics) and the ethical aspects of the debate involve decidedly non-physical properties of the cells (do they constitute a unique human life is, I believe a mixture of science and semenatics, should that life (if it exists) be valued moves us even further away from science and into philosophy).
If you want to be an effective scientist, effective in the sense of having an impact outside the lab, you have to learn to embrace the non-scientific ramifications of your research instead of pretending they don't exist. Yes, I am as qualified as any to tell you what is required to be an effective scientist *outside the labratory* because outside the labratory (and outside the university) is where we all live.
"No partial credit?" WTF, mate? I don't even know how to respond to that. Since you're such a scientist, why don't you tell us what DNA stands for?* It's an ad hominem attack, but I try to avoid using too many technial terms when I critique other people's arguments since they're not in my classroom. Of course, I don't *have* a classroom either, but I figure I'll move out of industry and into academia eventually. I love the summer vacations.
*My point is that that's a dumb question, you don't have to be a scientist to answer it any more than I have to be a logician to know what an ad hominem attack is.
I appreciate the tone of your response. And I really don't get any pleasure out of just disagreeing with people, but I just can't stress stronly enough that a knowledge of the science of stem cell research is insufficient to make policy decisions.
It's really simple. If I, or any other non-scientist - comes into your lab and starts telling you how to run your experiments you can laugh us out of the building. That's your area, not ours.
But when you come out of the lab, and we come out of our churches/universities/other jobs and discuss POLITICS, then no one of us gets to pull absolute rank over the others.
You say about scientists and ethical debates "we're not in them". That's the most telling comment you've made. Because you ARE in one, whether you like it or not. It's very telling that you can't seem to recognize it even as your waist-depp in it (although early you did say that your job, as a scientist, is "attempting, with *ethics* and integrity"). No matter how you try to make the ethical implications of embryonic stem cell research go away, it just won't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like DRM, suggest another way for them to sell music. (And no bullshit answers about giving it away and making their money off concerts and t-shirt sales. Suggest a solution which doesn't involve simply giving up all that sales revenue.) If you can't come up with anything better than what's out there now, why would you be surprised that they can't either, and are desperately experimenting with so many bad ideas?
This seems a little over-the-top to me. Consider this example. Ford has just "invented" the assembly line. It's now possible to build cars extremely cheaply. In other words, the cost or reproduction has gone down by an order of magnitude. Let's say there had been car-makers before that, but they made custom cars to order, one at a time. They would see this sudden new method of production as a threat, and try to artificially maintain inflated prices. Would they be justified in shutting Ford down?
I'm well aware this analogy doesn't really work, but there are elements of it that are important. Firstly, the real change here is in production. Music distributors DO NOT MAKE MUSIC. That's what bands do. So when you buy a CD from a Warner or whatever, you're not paying Warner for the music, you're paying Warner for the CD. Of course, you're also paying Warner to market the CD, you're paying them to possible promote the band. And part of your money is actually going to fund the band itself.
So essentially the music industry has become a big middle man. They don't make music, they promote and distribute it. But now they are no longer needed for distribution. The method of production has gotten cheaper and anyone with a PC can do it. They arguably don't need to promote it either - with the internet it's possible to disseminate information for free - or almost.
So before you, or anyone gets all high and mighty about "they make a living selling music, blah blah blah" you have to ask yourself - are they really needed any more? And if not, then why should we keep them around? We don't keep blacksmiths around either. Of course the industy has a vested interest in keeping itself alive, but that doesn't mean we have to roll over and let them extort money from us when they no longer really have much to offer us.
So what should replace this business model? Clearly bands need to get paid or we won't have full-time artists anymore. So money needs to change hands. That is clear. I'd recommend dropping the price on physical CDs considerably - like $5 bucks a pop. If the good is sufficiently elastic you'll make the m oney back in increased revenue. Shift to an online model. There are plenty of sites that want to sell music cheap. Reduce the price for an mp3 to 10 cents or something. Share the profits more equitably between distributor and band. There you go. Let fan sites handle promoting.
That may or may not be the perfect solution, but here's the key point. It's not the consumer's job to come up with a new business model. And if the currrent business model has become irrelevant, we don't have an obligation to develop a new one before pointing out that the current one is irrelevant.
Let's be realistic. Change is inevitable. The industry can fight it, and be crushed eventually, or they can downsize and reinvent themselves. Painful, yes, but nothing like the alternative.
stormin
I'm looking for the Thomas Jefferson quote I alluded to, and will post it when I find it.
In the meantime I'll just say this. Thomas Jefferson clearly advocated a seperation of church and state, but the problem is the term that he meant when he said "church" is not the same as what many Americans mean when they say church.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is to say that while a seperation of church and state is inherent to American gov't, a seperation of religion and state is not. Gov't should be seperated from any particular establishment of religion, but it should not necessarily be seperated from religion in general. Those who seek to outlaw the pledge of allegiance (yes, I know "under God" was introduced in the 1950's) and essentially chase God from the public view are misguided, misuse the "seperation of church and state" clause, and, as I said in my initial post - tend to radicalize.
-stormin
1. I think by dampen the ones that try to fuel the fire he probably meant the ones that were explicitly inciting further violence. So we're (you, me and parent) are probably in agreement that those specific guys could have their free speech rights truncated in interests of greater public safety.
2. Perhaps that's because we have better religious freedom? I think more than just religious freedom it might have to do with the fact that the French state is a secular one. When they beheaded their king back in the French Revolution they were not just doing away with the monarchy, they were also symbolically dethroning God. Ever since they have had an aggressively secular government. So it's no wonder that a minority group that is extremely religious feels at odds with a government that borders on anti-religious.
This is in contrast with American government, which was not founded as a secular state. People who say it was are misreading the Constitution and ignoring history. I'm not saying it was Christian, but it was at least fundamentally theist. Just read the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, certainly not a Christian by any conventional standard, began attending a Christian church when he was president. Why? He explained that he felt that the Christian faith tended towards the betterment of society and thus it was up to him to set a good example and attent. The "seperation of church and state" was really only intended to be a seperation between the state and any specific establishment of religion - not to set the state against religion or expel God from the state.
There are dangers in giving into the demands of the religious right - ID and all the nonesense. But by the same token, if we allow America to continue to be secularized (ala banning the Pledge of Allegiance and essentially declaring the Declaration of Independence itself to be ruled "unconstitutional") we are perhaps setting the stage to follow France towards an inevitable confrontation between the forces of religion and atheism.
I'm not saying that it is only religious tension that has resulted in the French violence, but it is certainly an exacerbating element.
-stormin
So I'm curious - how could evolution be falsified?
Note: I'm not a fundamentalist/IDer or anything. I dont' have any trouble with the theory of evolution: I'm just not an expert on evolution.
Wow. You really do work 40 hours a week. Like I said, best of luck with that, and you have my sympathies. I'm starting a program to get my masters in 11 months while I work full time in May... I'm not really looking forward to going back to that insanity.
Hey - I don't think you should feel so ostrasized. I hate epic fantasy. From Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks to David Eddings - I can't stand the stuff. Tolkien I love, but I don't consider it part of a genre. And Jackson did a good job except with training Frodo to shoot for biggest wuss in a movie award. I don't like the Dukes of Hazard, I've never had Velveeta or Spam, and i've never seen the A-Team.
So relax - we're all weird here.
Oh yeah, and I was a philosophy major for a while, but I dropped it and switched to math when the philosophy professors got on my nerves too much.
-nathaniel
Dude - you are full time and work 40 hours? I never understand that. That's just not possible to do. There are only 168 hours in a week. If you take out 40 for work and 15*3 = 45 for a full course load of classes and then another 15*3 = 45 for a very light homework load you're only left with 168 - (40 + 45 + 45) = 38 hours. In a whole week. that's like 5.5 hours a day. In that 5.5 horus a day you'd have to eat, sleep, travel, brush your teeth, etc. I just don't think that's possible on a long-term scale. You're either taking a full load as an English or psych major or something (where you can skimp on homework), or you can do homework while you work or time-share in some other way. I was utterly swamped by my last semester as an undergrad with a full load (math major) and just a couple of part-time jobs (about 25 hours a week). Then again, it also depends on the job. I was doing pretty professional-grade stuff not run-of-the-mill student work, so that's different too.
But hey, maybe you can get by on less sleep than me (I get 8 hours now and I'm still exhausted every morning). Seriously though - best of luck with that. I just graduated in May of '05, so the memories are fresh and painful.
Anyway, maybe because of that exhaustion you didn't really read my post thoroughly. "Pelt" to me implies more than just a negative or judgmental context. Take snowballs. If I lob a snowball at you, that's one thing. But if I "pelt" you, then there have to be lots of snowballs, coming quickly. Like, a whole barrage. So I restricted my negative comments to a few barbs. I got a little carried away, but I think you're really just nit-picking here.
As far as "what makes you think the poster is conversant". The whole point of the word converant as I was using it is that it needs to be followed by the prepositional phrase "with ______". You see, I was NOT criticizing the parent poster for not liking Star Wars, or for dismissing it as "pretentious crap". I let that pass, along with LoTR the movie with comments that boiled down to "hey, I disagree, but I see where you're coming from".
That's because we're all conversant with pop culture - the realm of Star Wars and Jackson's LoTR. What I took issue with was the dismissal as "pretentious crap" of Tolkiens LoTR. See to me, dismissing that requires more than just being converant with pop culture, but also being conversant with literature.
Maybe you are, and maybe the parent poster is, conversant with that topic. But nothing either you or him as has said makes me think that you are. Then again, you only said you didn't like Star Wars. That's fine - as I've said before.
But the poster dismissed LoTR out of hand. As I told him, and I'm telling you, it's fine not to like it. But when you dismiss one of the classics without any evidence you have any idea that you understand why it's a classic in the first place, the only think you make look silly - or like pretentious crap - is yourself.
-stormin
No no no.
The main point is that is "pretty well 100%'. I mean, why qualify the "pretty well"? That's like saying "I'm 100% sure that this is probably true".
Then the fact that he (you?) *think* it's 100% of pretty well...
are you seeing the absurdity yet? The "think" contradicts the 100% which added nothing to the "pretty well" to begin with.
Jokes aren't funny when you have to explain them.
-stormin
You know, as a joke article I think this could be really funny. But after reading through it, I'm pretty sure it's just further evidence that anyone who wants an English degree should have to base a basic IQ test before graduating. Some of these guys just shouldn't be let out in the wild.
Sometimes something is so awful it's difficult to point out any one thing that's wrong with it. Not because there's a lack of weak points, but because there are simply too many targets. This article is one such piece. Nevertheless, I'll take a few whacks.
Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. "This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level," one of John Ashbery's works begins.
Now, if Star Wars had any line of dialogue in the whole movie that hung together that well, there may have been hope for the series. The article could use this point to humorously emphasize how bad the dialogue of Star Wars was, but apparently our kindly author is oblivious to any irony except the dramatic kind he invents himself.
As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure,
In other words, the characters were so damn unbelievably bad that I couldn't watch the movie without wondering why Lucas had to try so hard to shoe-horn his 2d characters into what could have been a very interesting plot.
The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.
"But all my english professors loved it when I copied phrases I heard them use in class to papers that I turned in!" Or, from another viewpoint: the Star Wars fans were so desperate to see a good movie that they saw one even though Episode I was playing in on their screens.
The Force is the power of plot.
So... the plot is powered by mitochalorians that appeared only briefly in Episode I?
Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film.
Oh, now I see the problem. I went to see a movie about Jedis. My bad.
Lucas now says that he's finished with popular filmmaking and wants to return to the experimentalism of his early career
But wait - wasn't the WHOLE POINT of this article how experimental and edgy Star Wars was? This is the line that really sinks the whole article. If Star Wars was popular as opposed to experimentalism (I'm not the one saying the two are mutually exclusive, the author just did) then didn't he just torpedo the thesis of the whole article?
Yes. I think he did.
-stormin
I think he succeeded pretty well 100%.
You think he succeeded pretty well 100%?
Conflicted much?
Hey, you're entitled to your opinion. I'm not going to pelt you with anything. But I have to wonder - when you have an opinion that the "Lord of the Rings" novel is crap - and yet that novel was pretty consistently voted the best book of the 21st century, do you ever - in the dead of night - suspect that you just might be missing something?
I think you're wrong about the original Star Wars movies and about the LoTR movies - but I see your point. There's a lot to crticize in both. Star Wars was cheesey, and Frodo only had two expressions in the movie: "oh sam!" (the silly grin) and "ugghhhh" (the hobbit pushing out a man-size turd grimace).
But the LoTR? I mean, in high school I thought a lot of the books I was told to read sucked. I still have papers I turned in ridiculing Kafka's "Metamorphis", Hesse's "Siddhartha" and pretty much every other book I had to read. But to me the only thing that looks ridiculous now is how self-assured I was at age 14 that I was smarter than all the novelist, critics, and readers who had read the books for years, decades, or centuries before I was born. It took me a few years to realize that even when I really disliked a "classic" novel (I hate Moby Dick) the only thing I achieved by stating categorically that the works "sucked" was to make myself look like an utter idiot.
It's not that I've learned to bow before the group consensus - I still really disllike "Siddhartha" for example, and for a lot of the same reasons I had when I first read it. But I would be hesitant to call widely acclaimed books that have stood the test of time "a bunch of pretentious garbage". Instead, it's better to be conversand on WHY they books are lauded in the first place - and to respond to that ongoing discussion. It's not like the "classics" are all universally hailed by English professors everywher either.
But hey, I guess you're just way more perceptive than all the millions of people, some of whom have devoted their lives to words, novels, and literature, who love Tolkien's works. Maybe you should consider becoming conversant with the external context of a work before you display your unabashedly uninformed categorical opinions on it. I wouldn't say for every Coke commercial you see on TV you need to exercise this degree of care - and hey, you don't HAVE to do it at all. But when you come across a work of truly significant stature you can either converse, or you can whine. It's your pick.
You're welcome to your opinion, whatever it may be, but some opinions cast you in a worse light then you could ever cast the object of the opinion in.
-stormin
You cleary have either 0 artistic taste (and probably keep wondering why those annoying butt-heads in Mystery Science Theater keep ruining good movies by talking during them) or are simply, hopelessly, desperately in denial. That's OK. I was once as you are now.
I found out about the new movies when I was in middle school. Back in 1995. I had heard rumors, but that was when I found out they were going to be made for sure. I can still remember the day I found out, how excited I was, trying to figure out how I could ever wait 4 years.
When Phantom Menace rolled around I was ready. I got my parents to drop me off at the theater at 11am the day before tickets went on sale. I was #5 in line. I spent a fun night there, plotting to throw soda cans at the car that kept driving by yelling at the fans, winning two out of two games of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, and strolling down the line that by nightfall went all the way from the entrance of the theater to the rear wall. By the time the tickets went on sale the next day - the line wrapped around the entire theater.
Two weeks later the movie actually came out and I was there hours early, waiting in a "line" that was in fact a densely-packed mob that was worse then any crowded show I've ever been too. But I managed to stake out an entire row in the theater for me and mine.
To be succinct: the movie sucked. The "Duel of the Fates" scene was awesome. Well, the music was anyway. The music was so good I felt like I was watching Star Wars. But the rest sucked.
And yet I watched it. Not just then, but SIX MORE TIMES. Why? Beccause I had waited for Star Wars since 1995. It was an essential part of my childhood. I grew up on Star Wars, I loved Star Wars, I read the novels (until they started sucking too) and I just could not give up on Lucas - I kept willing the movies to somehow, miraculously, stop sucking.
So there are your three reasons for the movie being a blockbuster even though it sucked.
1. People are so desperate for Star Wars that they go no matter how much the movie sucks. It still has lightsabers, Jedi, spaceships and Yoda. It's awful, but it lets them back into the Star Wars universe.
2. People have invested so much in the movie - emotionally - that they can not bear to admit what they realized deep-down the first time they saw the movie: it sucks.
3. The same star wars freaks who probably thought the Halo novelization was good, and keep buying assinine Star Wars novels, are the same dweebs who just have no sense of taste or style whatsoever. They simply don't know that the movie sucked anymore than they understand the basic need to take a shower every now and then. Don't mean to offend people. I'm sure there are some perfectly hygenic Star Wars fans out there who just simply CAN NOT see that the movies sucked. That's OK. As long as they're happy.
Now to your other question: why did the movie suck?
Well, you can't really quantify the "goodness" of a movie. It's subjective, so you can always argue any side of the issue. But some movies are just so universally AWFUL that a general consensus emerges. So, what are the reasons that Star Wars sucked? Here's just a brief, off-the-top-of-my-head list:
1. Jar-Jar.
2. All the rest of the gun-gedins (or however you spell it). I mean really, throwing purple blobs at droids? The Ewoks with their sticks and stones were less unabashedly stupid.
3. Mitocholorions. Or however you spell it. So awful that, like Jar-Jar, they got more or less dropped after the 1st movie. Talk about killing the magic. "The force is not strong with you? Try new mito-booster! It'll send your mito-count through the roof in no time! You too can have super-jedi powers..." Give me a break, I'm surprised Lucas didn't really try to market a beverage based on it. Admit it - you'd buy it.
4. The Dialogue. This is #4 on the list, but it's really the #1 reason the movie sucked. George apparently simply can not write dialogue. I mean
What's interesting to me is that we even have a concept of "natural". Philosophically, we'd most likely presume a fish doesn't have a concept of wet because it is always wet. Without an opposing concept, the concept itself disappears into the paradigm.
Yet we as humans have this concept of "natural" and generally consider ourselves to be exempt from it. Silly vegetarians are the best example of this. It's wrong for people to eat animals. But apparently OK for animals to eat animals because that's "natural". But on what basis do we presume to conclude that people and animals are fundamentally different after all? (Not that all vegetarians are silly by any means. There are good ethical arguments, but your run of the mill high school / college "radical" will provide a textbook example of this strange phenomena.)
Another example is the global warming argument. Many people act as though humans are somehow the deus ex machina - we've dropped in unanounced from the rafters to save - or in this case destory - the planet. And this is not only a bad thing in the sense that we may all die, but is in fact a "bad thing" in the sense of rather naughty and immoral. But it can really only be immoral if we are ultimately responsible. And we can only be fundamentally responsible if we are somehow distinct from nature. A billion cows farting hurts the environment, but is part of nature. You don't blame the cows - they are just part of the natural ecosystem. A billion cars are some how removed from nature. How? Along the continuum from a gorilla testing the depth of a river with a stick and a fisherman using sonar to test the depth of a river or lake does the tool - and with it the tool-user - cease to be "natural"?
Where did this tendency arise to consider ourselves somehow seperate and distinct from nature? The frequent reasoning, if it can be called such, is an appeal to our "intelligence". What is implicit in this argument is that since we are intelligent we can "make up our own minds". That is, the plants, animals, birds, glaciers, stars and elements all around us are just part of a kind of Newtonian billiards table. You can't hold them responsible because their are merely conduits for causality. You hit a billard ball, it rolls in a pretedermined fashion. You can't ask "why did you roll this way?" and expect an answer any different from the fact that it got hit a certain way. You don't ask a shark "why did you eat this surfer?". It's just a more complex billiards table. Yet we alone are somehow detached, isolated, unique and above all free. Somehow we are considered not merely conduits, but origins of causality.
Perhaps it's not surprising that we humans should have this grand perception of ourselves. It is, in fact, perhaps a result of evolution. It may serve to increase our own sense of self, and thus fuel our drive for self-preservation. All the ape-men ancestors who pondered "but am I really distinct from this tree?" were eaten before they could procreate.
But what IS so surprising is that such a fundamentally critical presupposition of human thought is so rarely the target itself of criticism and analysis. The "free-will debate" is largely relegated to obscure philosophical debates, and hardly ever reaches beyond theology in terms of broader scope. And yet it seems clear to me that much of our fundamental understanding hinges on answering, addressing, or at the very least acknowledging this essential question.
I don't think the distinction between intelligent design and evolution - in this context at least - is as clear as you'd like to think it is. You contend that the difference is that computer programmers are intelligent. You write:
"However, the crucial difference is that the hackers are intelligent. They have an aim in mind when they alter the virus; mutation in nature does not."
But the crucial factor here is not intelligence - it's free will. If a human agent is considered independent, then there is a causal disconnect between the purely biological forces of evolution and at least some of the behavior of that human entity. But that's a might big "if".
If the human is considered from a deterministic model - meaning that every aspect of human behavior can be explained as a product of genetics and non-independent interaction with the system, then the human being becomes indistinquishable from the system. And in that case the virus is a product of evolution by extension. Then again, by the same argument fashion is also a product of evolution.
In any case, the determinist vs. compatabilist vs. free-will advocate argument is millenia old. We're not going to resolve it on Slashdot today. (unless someone quotes Wikipedia).
-stormin
If you'd been this reasonable in your original post it would have been a better post.
Sure, the article was written from a personal standpoint. But the point of the article for the general community - how do we feel about our nicknames when, in a digital community, it's our only genuinely unique identifier is both interesting and relevant to as much of the Slashdot community as any other post.
You guys need to chill out. When CmdrTaco starts writing diatrabes about how much he hates the service at his local Taco Bell, then the integrity of slashdot is being challenged. But as long as what he posts is interesting and relevant who cares if it happens to come from an actual personal experience of his?
Good post Violated. I love my nickname - which I alternatively use in shortened form "stormin" or long-form "theStorminMormon". Sometimes in IRC chats I would be inundated with people who had never met me (in person or on line) but felt compelled to attack me because of my religion. Just to avoid unending debates I would use "stormin" sometimes. On the other hand, when I played Planetside I loved the varied reactions I got from people - positive and negative - to my nickname.
I feel very attached to my nickname, which some friends in college gave me. And more importantly - I think that as the numbers of online users swell this is increasingly going to become an issue. Part of what draws people into online communities of all sorts is the chance for reinvention. I know a lot of people that, like me and Taco here, take their names with them wherever the go online. They have the same name on messageboards, MMORPGs, and FPS's. But there's no guarnatee that they can take the name with them.
As the online community gains importance in our lives, so will the name we choose to assume in that world. And yet those names can be removed, destroyed, or stolen more easily than our birth names (which we don't choose). I don't know what all the implications of this are, but I'm curious to see what others think.
-stormin
Exactly how is "here" any better than "on their website". You sohuld indicate your own vested interests, not feign neutrality. That's the point.
In general I think you're right. Even the preview alone of "Doom" is enough to make me cringe. Video games have a history of utterly awful adaption to film, and the industry is definately lacking for fresh ideas recently. But think about it - that's because most video games (especially shooters) have only enough story to get you through a 2 minute cut scene and back into action. There's no substance to make a movie out of.
But there are some very compelling reasons to think that Halo might be an exception to this problem. You see Bungie put far more love and backstory into their game then the average shooter. In fact more than any shooter that I've ever seen before.
If you want an idea of the depth and breadth of artistic talent behind Halo, you should really consider listening to the I Love Bees story. It was part of a viral marketing game before Halo 2 came out. I love audio storytelling. Everything from unabdridged novels to radio adaptations of sci-fi, and the I Love Bees series is far and away one of the most compelling and involving storytelling experiences I have ever had. It tells a fantastic, exciting and complex tale of life on Earth as humanity begins to face the reality of their own iminent annhilation, weaving narratives from 5-6 different characters and from several timelines to a tightly focussed climax that had me up at 3am listening instead of sleeping before school.
There is a depth of realism (in the artistic sense of "characters that seem like real people in situations that, given the general premise, are realistic" obviously not in the "this could really happen" sense) to the Halo universe that could easily provide an utterly fantastic movie experience. The story - the material - is there.
The real question is just whether or not they manage to capture some of the real essence of the Halo universe. I Love Bees did that by going beyond the shoot-em-up mentality of the game and exploring human issues with an awesome and diverse cast of characters. Master Chief wasn't even a character in the series. Then again the books, I'm ashamed to say I read all 3, were nothing but a quick hack job. Just a way for Halo addicts to get one more hit.
They can do this right. I hope they do.
-stormin
Although you make valid points, there are some pretty good reasons to have certifications. At least in theory.
The first, and most obvious, thing to realize is that certifcations are not really for programmers/technicians, etc. The certifications are actually for the non-technical people that need to hire the technical people. A certificate can establish that a person has at least the minimum required technical skills to do a job.
Then an employer can restrict the pool to just people who are minimally competent. Some may be worthless potential employees because of other problems (anything from social skills to a lack of ability to apply the knowledge that they have).
The problem with certificates is that a lot of people see it as a way to make a cheap buck. There's no serious capital involved once the test is established. You're just selling a piece of paper.
So then you get a ton of people with their eye on the bottom line out there tacking on the miniumum amount of training (got to keep an eye on that bottom line). And you get a lot of people who can't rely on their skills and want to just pass a test and get a pay raise.
So the system fueled by certifications has a lot of downside even though the essential idea is good.
Alright, we'll keep it here.
As far as my poor showing goes, I thought we'd moved beyond condesencion, but clearly we haven't. If in fact I'm missing a point, would you mind at least pointing me in the right direction? I'm not exactly uninformed on the topic, but if there's some truly major aspect I'm missing, please send me in the right direction and rest assured I'll do the reading. But in the meantime lay off the tone or I'll whip out your amazing lack of understanding of both theology ("religious dogma, where the "truth" was cast in stone in ages past, and can never be changed, ever" is about the most unenlightened critique of dogma I've ever heard) and basic logic (straw man != ad hominem). But we don't need to go back to that level, so let's not.
Look, when people debate (on or off the internet) it's extermely rare that one person will ever admit being wrong on even an accessory point, let alone concede whatever the topic of the debate is. Because of that, there's a lot of grandstanding in debate. You're not really trying to convince the person your debating, you're trying to crush and grind them so that anyone watching will come away with the impression that you're right. It's essentially a spectator sport. This way you can support people who share your opinion and sway those who are unsure.
But because of this process, a lot of spurious stuff get's thrown into debates. It's easier to launch attacks then to defend against them, and so for this reason people like to lace their arguments with all kinds of implied attacks, relevant or not, just to put the other guy in the difficult position of having to write extremely boring, long rebuttals, or let the implied attacks stand as stated. In most debates neither the pro nor con representative really sticks to the logic necessary to the topic.
But here's my point - there is NO ONE else reading this. It's just you and me. So really, why are you still making all these asumptions about me? You say you're a scientist. I haven't questioned that. And when you say I'm so wrong it's poor, I actually ask you for more info (though you haven't convinced me of anything yet). I've made no assumptions about you, your profession, your lifestyle, your intentions, or your background. Contrast that with your "suprise" that I know who Kuhn is, your insinuation that I'm trying to "witness" to you, and was it you that had me down as the guy with the herbal remedy books on my bookshelves?
Look man, I don't feel any psychological need for your respect, but your approach presents us with 2 problems. First, you're just muddying the water, and second you seem to be revealing that you're more interested in an appeal to your own authority than in the strength of your claims.
It's clear to me that although you logically concede that theories are never certain, you haven't doubted the superiority of your own position since the time this debate started. And not on the basis of your logic, but because you're assumptions about me (the religious bumpkin, you probably think I live in Utah or Idaho too) only serve to bolster your own appeal to authority argument (yet another common logical fallacy). Your authority. You probably see that as a result of the strength of your position. I see it is as evidence of your dogmatic approach to your own belief system - and I don't care if you picked it up from the Hindu's, the Mormons, Nietzshce, or anywhere else. Though I've demonstrated time and time again that science is not sufficient to understand the policy elements of this issue, you continue to ignore that and act as though all the non-scientific disciplines, from economics to philosophy, have no valid right to be in this debate.
Look, all I'm saying is that it would be nice if you'd drop the arrogance. That's the worst thing about giving someone a PhD. They just never get over it ever.
Send me some links, or some article/books, and I'll try to find the gaping wholes in my analsysis. But if you're just going t
You like the Kuhn reference? Yeah, I'm just full of suprises. I think we're winding down here, not because we've reached agreement but because we're starting to hit on philosophical issues at such a depth that I just don't have the time necessary to begin to go into the expositions of my own positions. I'm glad you've found the convo to be beneficial, in any case.
What do we consider a human being I don't think that this argument is as easy to reduce as you do. You give the examples of killing cells or a finger, and say that these are "nonsensical examples". But I think that they are actually quite clearly illustrations that it's really not that difficult to tell between cells and a human being. The cells you destroy do not cause a human life to end (assuming we're not talking embryos here). This is not really any different than the natural death epidermal cells are going through all the time. But there's a simple, clear, and obvious difference between killing a few cells and and killing enough cells to end a human life. In my case you'd have to kill a lot of cells, or at least very specific ones, in order to kill me. In the case of an embryo, it's fewer cells. But in either case the important fact is that if you kill the right amount of cells, the individual dies. I think this is a clear and obvious, you do not. We'll just have to agree to disagree for now.
Alleviating suffering I just don't have time to get into the whole "quality" of life thing. Let's just say that while I think the idea is sound at its very heart, it's been so wantonly misused that it does more harm than good at this point. Case in point, most people think it's a kindness to allow MD-assisted suicide in the case of someone with a terminal illness or major disability. But in actuality most people in that position who request death, when psychologically evaluated, turn out to be clinically depressed. After treatment for depression most decide not to die. So while I'm not saying we shouldn't allow people to be able to choose their own fate at all, I am saying that when people get carried away with the slogan they end up practicing an egregious form of bias. Namely if a healthy person attempts suicided we recognize it as a cry for help, but if a quadrapalegic tries it the whole "quality of life" argument has us refuse what is equally likely to be a cry for help. And after all, who needs more help? This is the reason the diabled community was so disgusted by "Million Dollar Baby". The "quality of life" and "right to day" movements are really thinly-veiled versions of American consumerism. We are the ones judging the lifes of others and finding their quality lacking. Americans throw things out instead of fixing them, and now we're starting to apply the mentality to people. As I said - we should allow the diabled to choose their own fate, but only in the context of even more support than we provide to our healthy population. If we're more likely to hand a sick man the cyanide than our attention and love, what does that say about us as a people? There's a lot more to this, and believe me I know this issue rather well, but we can carry on in email if you're really interested. I think you're falling for the hype.
Meta-ideologySure, there's a common thread throughout all (almost all) cultures. But I think peopel drastically overestimate the meaning this has for us right now. The differences tend to be more important, and even the "gut instinct" needs to be well-informed or it can lead to serious trouble. In case you hadn't noticed, the major religions share a common past of oppresion and bloodshed that's just as deep and long as their teachings of love and acceptance. And remember what they say about good intentions (eugenics, anyone?)
IgnoranceI'd love to have an interesting conversaion about faith. Personally I believe that knowledge, in an absolute sense, is unavailable to us. All we have our theories. This isn't to undercut science. Well-tested theories c
OK, the debate has moved to the other thread. But you're confusing an ad hominem attack and a straw man attack. An ad hominem attack is when you attack a person then use that personal attack as basis for refuting their points. A straw man attack is different. That's when you pretend that someone espouses a particular view, and attack that view (even though the person may not espouse it). Usually you add a little subterfuge to this. For example, if I say I'm pro-life, and then you attack me because I would criminalize abortion and send women to jail who seek to end their pregnancies even to even to save their own lives, you would be using a straw man attack (because being pro-life doesn't necessarily involve prosecuting women under any circumstances, let alone when their life is on the line!) and the subterfuge comes in because someone who's not very well informed may think that "straw man" you are attacking is in fact the genuine article. So the two are related (especially if you use a straw man attack to then make me look like an idiot to then launch an ad hominem attack based on me being an idiot - an extremely common double-fallacy of internet debating), but not the same.
I think we can safely assume that at this point no one else is reading this thread. But the debate is interesting, and so I don't mind continuing. And furthermore you've said a few things that I just can't let slide. Not that they make me angry or anything, but they are issues I can't resist addressing. First of all I really don't think the question "what is life" is the question we need to be asking. That is a nice zen-type riddle, and equally useless from a policy standpoint. The question we do need to ask is what do we consider a human being, and what do we not? No matter how difficult this issue may be to resolve it is NOT one that we can simply ignore. In the past Jews, Africans, Hell, practically everyone has been considered subhuman at some point or other. Even Mormons were considered by some scientists for a short time to be a new, regressive race of humanity more akin to the "orientals" then to the ordinary white Americans. I can find a referrence for you if you'd like. Admittedly, it was scientists at a conference over a hundred years ago, but let's try to avoid the fallacy of assuming we are smarter than our predecessors, or somehow less prone to error in general. And so my point is that if we want to avoid some of the most tragic mistakes in history, we need to have a solid, workable understanding of who we want to extend human rights to. And while you say that life in general may pass mystically from generation to generation, I say that it is our best interest to lay down a line for when a unique instance of human life begins, and when it ends. We already have a working definition for when it ends. The cessation of all brain activity, if I'm right. We pronounce people dead, we write out death certificates. So, even though there's some ambiguity right at the very fringes (as with persistant vegitative state, and some people being resucitated after technically being dead) we have a decent, working cap for when life ends. So it's not like we're on some mystic journey here. We're just trying to put a lid on the other end to match the first end. So that's my case for why we need a definition of when life begins, and for why I believe it's practicable. I don't want to go through my whole spiel again of why I think conception is the best candidate. What you say is complicated beyond all measure is, in fact, not such a complicated question after all. On the other hand, what you claim is simple "alleviate suffering" is not simple at all. The obvious flaw in that little slogan is the text of a lot of B-sci fi moives. The surest way to eliminate suffering is to prevent/end life. I think you need to engage in a little more careful thinking about what exactly you mean by "alleviate suffering" because I don't think it's at all clear. Wouldn't you be alleviating suffering to wander about capping people who are depressed? It's an extreme example, but it's logically sound. If you're afraid of causing suffering to family and friends, no matter. Just start offing people who are terminally ill. Do it secretly. That way you cause no more suffering than would already be there, and alleviate a lot of painful suffering for everyone if the patient were to keep living for another few months, years, or whatever. Finally we stumble on what I believe is your most crucial flaw: "you can't answer the question according to one particular ideology." You seem to believe that there is a way for a person to find a non-specific meta-ideology. But this is simply not possible. There's really no use to searching for a neatral ideology, all ideologies are inherently biased. All you can do is work with one that has as few internal inconsistencies as possible, and be open to changing your idealogy as you grow as a person. But you seem to have the (unconscious?) opinion that a man of science can elevate himself above the masses of the religiously-biased. But science carries it's own biases with it. I suggest you do some reading on Kuhn if you are not aware of this simple fact. Actually, I take it back. There's
Just wanted to add my opinion. I saw part of a couple of episodes on TV and was like, "Eh, another sci fi show. Could be cool." Then along came Netflix and I started watching the shows in order. THEN I got it. Now I own the DVD series and I just have to say that unless you see the show in order you miss all of the macro-plots, which are essential to really appreciating the show. If you haven't watched them yet... go watch them. In order. You'll be hooked after the pilot, and the series builds from there.
Your main point, and your most interesting one, is that "many of the perceived ethical considerations fall away when you ralize that the question of when does life being has not a thing to do with this discussion". Two points on this.
1 - It's the first point you've made that can logically support your stance that non-scientists have nothing to contribute to this discussion (it's not enough to get you all the way there, but it's at least a step in that direction).
2 - You have to use ethics to prove that point. Unless and until you can give "ethics" a purely scientific, quantifiable definition, you're going to have to engage in an ethical debate to draw any conclusions about ethics.
So even though you say you've carefully avoided the religion/science dichotomy, I think you've fallen right into it despite all your protests to the contary.
As a last point, I think you just don't understand the question we're discussing. You say "when you're talking aboutthe physical properties of cells..." Sure, if that's all we're talking about, let the scientists have the arena to themselves.
But that's decidedly NOT what we're talking about. We're discussing policies about funding for such research (bringing in politics and economics) and the ethical aspects of the debate involve decidedly non-physical properties of the cells (do they constitute a unique human life is, I believe a mixture of science and semenatics, should that life (if it exists) be valued moves us even further away from science and into philosophy).
If you want to be an effective scientist, effective in the sense of having an impact outside the lab, you have to learn to embrace the non-scientific ramifications of your research instead of pretending they don't exist. Yes, I am as qualified as any to tell you what is required to be an effective scientist *outside the labratory* because outside the labratory (and outside the university) is where we all live.
"No partial credit?" WTF, mate? I don't even know how to respond to that. Since you're such a scientist, why don't you tell us what DNA stands for?* It's an ad hominem attack, but I try to avoid using too many technial terms when I critique other people's arguments since they're not in my classroom. Of course, I don't *have* a classroom either, but I figure I'll move out of industry and into academia eventually. I love the summer vacations.
*My point is that that's a dumb question, you don't have to be a scientist to answer it any more than I have to be a logician to know what an ad hominem attack is.
I appreciate the tone of your response. And I really don't get any pleasure out of just disagreeing with people, but I just can't stress stronly enough that a knowledge of the science of stem cell research is insufficient to make policy decisions.
It's really simple. If I, or any other non-scientist - comes into your lab and starts telling you how to run your experiments you can laugh us out of the building. That's your area, not ours.
But when you come out of the lab, and we come out of our churches/universities/other jobs and discuss POLITICS, then no one of us gets to pull absolute rank over the others.
You say about scientists and ethical debates "we're not in them". That's the most telling comment you've made. Because you ARE in one, whether you like it or not. It's very telling that you can't seem to recognize it even as your waist-depp in it (although early you did say that your job, as a scientist, is "attempting, with *ethics* and integrity"). No matter how you try to make the ethical implications of embryonic stem cell research go away, it just won't happen.