Mozart was poor, and died destitute. He patronized the kings and the rich because the kings and the rich owned or contributed to the funding of, you know*, symphony orchestras, which are prerequisite for realizing, you know*, symphonies. And its not arrogance of condescention to say that some things in this world have prerequisites for full understanding and appreciation. Including aesthetics; see the other thread for details. Thankfully, in modern times, the average Joe's exposure to music of all sorts is, like*, 2000 times what Joes in Mozart's time got, so music in general is more accessible now because there is more general cultural experience to draw from.
*All parenthetical phrases set off by commas purely for 'lowbrow' effect. Or sarcasm, demending on how much of an ass you think I am.
It prompted discussion, so it must have some value;)
Indeed! I guess I missed the subtler sociological implications of the word 'highbrow', specifically as being explicitly contrasted with 'lowbrow', in the context of the discussion. When talking about historical legacies, like say, Van Gogh, or Dostoyevsky, or obviously Mozart, there was a certain very specific and probably very sharp economic and class tint to everything that they did. Most artists were patronized by people with money because people with money were the only ones with the resources to allow them to realize their art (its awfully hard to realize a symphony without, well, a symphony orchestra.) My only point is that our appreciation of them now seems to have more to do with common cultural cues that have less to do with class than they did in their time, but still tied moderately to education, which of course still has some economic implications. Also, the benefit of time has allowed for some distance from the political and social idiosyncrasies that prevented certain works in their day from being 'classics', as you mentioned, that are considered so now.
I singled out Bach in my post for being particularly ingenious, and certainly some of the asethetic value of Bach's stuff can be appreciated without a prior explicit understanding of what's going on in the piece; I would submit to you, however, that your friends' musical backgrounds was closer to Bach than you might imagine. Rock and Alternative Rock borrow heavily from old blues, it is true, but also from Classical music, particularly its tonal structure, and also its peculiar use of meter (which is not present in a suprising number of other musical traditions), and some of the instruments would sound familiar...at least more familiar than, say a sitar, or liuqin (Chinese lute) which are based on different tonal scales.
If you were to play that same Bach piece to someone who grew up with a different tonal scale, like a 5-tone Chinese scale, I doubt you would get the same reaction as you did with your friends; the gap is far wider, and the music does not transmit emotion with any accuracy. I just (odd coincidence) finished reading an essay by Theodore Gracyk who describes an experiment he runs in his class every year, playing westerm music of various contexts and purposes and then playing eastern music of similar contexts and purposes; the students can easily pick out in the western styles which is meant to be somber and which joyous, which secular and which religious, but have no luck guessing what emotion or purpose is meant to be conveyed by the eastern works.
What I was trying to make clear in my post was that these sorts of cultural contexts (which are present in some extent even in popular music) frame our understanding of music and our appreciation of it; formal education and training reveals the explicit structuers behind the music and also helps to create a reservoir of experience with whcih to compare works and search for similarities.
I'm sorry but this struck me as pretty silly. Mozart wasn't 'high-brow' (i.e. intellectually and asthetically sophisticated) because tickets cost a lot of money; he was, like Beethoven and especially Bach a musical genius who made sophisticated, complicated and beautiful musical constructions. That the people who were predisposed to like him were educated and therefore also predominantly wealthy (in order to get that education) is quite literally a coincidence, a correlation which you confused with causation. That any Joe can pick up a Mozart CD does not mean any Joe can understand and appreciate said CD; music of all genres and categories requires an extant cultural setting and prior aesthetic vocabulary to be appreciated. But, any Joe with exposure and time may learn, like many people with a classical education already had an opportunity to do, to appreciate his works.
anyhow, i believe you ment bread mold, not orange mold.
Penicillium is a genus of what are called 'bread molds' which grow, eponymously, on most yeasted breads. However, they also have a strong affinity for orange rind, and oranges make a nearly ideal culture medium for its growth. Penicillin's antibacteriological properties were discovered in a lab when an orange was accidentally exposed to penicillium and then left in contact with a bacteria culture. Hence, for the story about serendipity and science, its affinity for oranges was more pertinent. Oddly enough, this genus provdes us with some of the molds that make some of the tastiest cheese around (esp. Gorgonzola).
i know the best place to store rubber, place it skin tight on hot girls:D
Taxol, right off the top of my head (comes from a rare type of Yew Tree). Acetylsalicylic Acid probably would be on the list too (salicylates were first extracted from willow bark), if it hadn't been 'discovered' and in wide use long before there was an FDA. There are undoubtedly many others.
Some researchers dicking around with orange molds accidentally discovered this little thing called PENICLLIN. Some Swiss mountain hiker got irritated with little seeds that kept sticking to his clothes, which upon further inspection led to the invention of VELCRO.
On the other hand, researchers trying to solve a critical rubber shortage during World War II came up with an earth-shattering invention: SILLY PUTTY.
In fact, some religions would indicate that it was a very naughty thing he did. Judaism was very strict about the importance of all texts, and in Islam, Muhammad is actually quoted in one of the holy texts as saying that the ink of a scholar is worth more (in the spiritual, not financial sense) than the blood of a martyr.
I think it might be better to just write in a public official exception to the 2-party rule; a public official, while carrying out his/her duties, is automatically assumed to have granted (by virtue of executing the public business) permission to be recorded. This would preserve your extremely insightful point about private sincerity, but still sticks it to the Man when the Man overreaches.
You also conveniently missed the testimony of several/.ers (of all ages) who claimed that the sound was *actually physically painful*. But, hey! Who cares, right? Facts shouldn't get in the way of a good analysis.
Perhaps even legally entitled. If you are walking along on a public sidewalk and one of these devices is activated, you can hear it, and it causes you pain, that's an assault in progress. You are legally (in most places) allowed to use force in self-defense to terminate an attack on your person.
Yes, someone told this cop, who learned everything he ever knew about high-tech devices and ultrasonics from Star Trek TOS (if you're lucky) that the Neighborhood's Old Man has a 'super duper high tech magically audible only to people the cop doesn't like anyway device', and due to this explanation, everything worked out OK.
Or maybe, in the real world, we all have to deal with authority figures who don't know and don't care about reality whatsoever, find harassing youth darkly amusing (if not their own favorite past-time), and couldn't be bothered to act even if none of the above were accurate.
Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Other Government Activities.-- This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or a person acting pursuant to a contract with the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State. For purposes of this subsection, the term "information security" means activities carried out in order to identify and address the vulnerabilities of a government computer, computer system, or computer network.
As an employee of the Dept. of Environmental Management I absolutely insist that it is crucial to my work of studying and protecting endangered species that I have a keen understanding of animal mating rituals of all species...including my own. Thankfully the local shop has some fantastic informational videos for rent and I just figured that I needed a copy for home for more intensive...study.
It's pretty clear (not least from the number of absolutely shitty papers there were in Revolutionary times which would make the National Enquirer look like the Washington Post) that there was no decision making intended or involved in the protection: you put your opinions into text and publish them using a printing press (and they aren't libel) and you are A 'OK. We've moved away from plain-text, common sense readings of the Constitution for a while now (some for good reasons, some definately not), and so we end up in a world today where the freedom to use a printing press means something very different (and far narrower) than what was originally intended.
You're right that this kind of fighting is a permanent byproduct, but it's a permanent byproduct of a military system that's escalated beyond what a civilian can lay their hands on.
This is an excellent point. Why fight fair when fighting fair will just get you killed? That is what drives the 'terrorist' part of perpetual extremism.
I think what you are underselling is the actual amount of economic rhetoric and brouhaha that gets mixed in to the (these days, mostly) Islamist madrasah grab-bag. People respond pretty strongly to the 'this is why you are poor and your mother is starving' line of argument; mix it with a whipped topping of 'Allah wants you to kill the infidel bastards who keep you poor, starve your mama, etc.' and you got yourself an extremist. Add to that a 400-pound gorilla for an enemy, and as you rightfully pointed out, you got yourself a terrorist. As bad as the violence is in the Middle East, a surprisingly few percent of people have had a family member killed in conflict with the US or with Israel who is perceived to be proxy of the US (or vice versa, where propaganda or evidence serves better), and so they have to recruit people with other stuff than bitter rage. Resentment, as Nietzsche once pointed out, works wonders.
I also agree that the most despicable acts that come from asymmetrical conflicts are when the vastly superior force starts to adopt tactics of impunity (like torture, interminable confinement, carpet bombing, etc.) to cover for the fact that they are fighting what amounts to an implacable, invisible, and permanent foe, and proportionately not doing so hot. That's the kind of crap that gets you a million dead in Vietnam, for instance. Incidentally I think this might have something to do with Israel's recent, um, overreaction: the temptation to crush a basically ethereal foe. Destroy Hezbollah? After all of the firsthand experience they have, how could they possibly kid themselves? When Olmert took office there was almost a shred of hope for the region; he looked like he had the will and the political backing to move out of the West Bank for good. Now, nothing but shreds.
What inspires people to fight is a reason that's personal to them.
Oddly enough, working-class Americans struggling (and some failing) to get to work with crap for mass-transit and rising gas prices are starting (emphasis, starting) to take this conflict personally, because aside from the relatively sparse famnilies and groups of friends who have lost loved ones in this series of conflicts, the closest people have been getting to this war is a brush with economic change. It remains to be seen whether many of them will cut through the party-line and connect a to b to c and force a significant change in policy, if such a change is even possible.
Oh, and I fundamentally disagree with the presumption that economic factors have never formed armies. Both the American Revolution and the American Civil War were (at least initially) fights over economic principles and systems. Ditto in Weimar Germany (these things can turn out well, or turn out badly it seems). Whenever there are starving jobless people, there is an army just waiting for the right gimmick (politics, religion, whatever) to get them going. Desperate and angry (or as you rightly pointed out, aggrieved and angry) people will turn to the flavor of the month if it means they get money, a sense of dignity, or revenge (or any combination thereof). It's hard to get well-fed people to fight (though they occasionally do, such as the AmRev, but they were fighting over a perceived grievance, and grievances have a way of causing resentment the way that more serious wrongs sometimes can't).
It's not as hypocritical as it seems. The situation seems to me that the US, being the dominant economic and military (and cultural, FWIW) superpower on the planet is, by virtue of the office, so to speak, already involved everywhere. The fact that we aid only those who benefit our strategic interests (only send aid to regions to stabilize them, e.g. screw Africa) and bomb threats to our security (again, screw Africa) rather than use economic and military might to help hundreds of millions of people (in, you guessed it, Africa, as well as south east Asia) instead of letting them starve, die of AIDS, and be hacked to death by the leaders of the neighboring tribe (see the two continents above)...that fact might irritate those who are more directly affected by those decisions. We have made some pretty poor choices in, a. when to get involved, b. what sides to take, and c. how to achieve our objectives, and since nobody can stop us when we make stupid decisions, all they can do is complain (or pick up an AK-47 and get riddled with holes or blown to kibbles, so most stick to the complaining.)
The simple fact is that "the only way to fight Islamic terrorism" is to stop doing things that piss off the citizens of those countries, such as bombing civilians.
That might help, short term, and I really applaud the sentiment. Truthfully we could do with a lot less bombings of innocent civilians, or anyone else for that matter.........but..........
But, the unfortunate truth of it is that these conflicts really do have a cultural side and an economic side to them. And I don't mean, to be clear, that certain cultures are pre-disposed to extremism or Terrorism (the last two centuries provide ample proof to any who care to read that we are all experts); I mean rather that the current economic system, i.e world-wide heavily intergrated capitalism, the system that provides people with fruit out of season, computers for cheap, and nowadays prompt (if heavily accented) customer service, is a system that does not respect and has no problem co-opting local cultures and consuming them. The reaction of extremism, violence, and terrorism, is if anything an immune-system type reaction of entire peoples terrified that their way of life is about to be gobbled up by what is, from their perspective, an unfeeling juggernaught. Just beneath the religious or socialist or fascist rhetoric is always, and I mean ALWAYS (these days) an economic critique followed by an impassioned call to protect thier ways of life. And do you really think people actually do this stuff because they care about socialism or their leaders or seventy-frikken'-virgins? Please. That's just the frosting.
Point being if we really wanted to stop these sorts of attacks, we would have to cease being a real factor in other people's lives. Which of course means taking steps to unplug from the world that NOBODY wants to take (if it were even possible). And it's not just about year-round fruit (though I know I'd miss my cherry pies in winter); our economy at all levels is so completely bought in to the world-wide system that any attempt to break free would include recessions that would make '29 look like a market adjustment. As glum as it is, I think terrorism is a byproduct, a permanent byproduct, of the evolution of a system of economy whose consequences are only now becoming apparent to those at the top of the beneficiary ladder. That is, us.
Starting by voting incumbents (Democrat or Republican) out ever time their term is up will do two things. First it'll send a message to Washington that voting America is pissed off and until things really change they won't get the nice perks of staying in office. It'll also limit the amount of damage they can do and the amount of corrupting influences they can build up before we kick them back out of office.
While I like the sentiment, I think the more likely immediate outcome of this strategy is simply to remove what little restriant was left upon the most powerful political actors (that is, Corporations) who, of course, pay into both parties and so don't particularly care which of the two win. Besides the truly rare individual (Ron Paul, R-TX, for example), no politican on either side of the aisle has made a sustained effort to curb monied interests, and it's no surprise, considering that they all need to raise obscene amounts of money just to remain competitive.
P.S. I think you are pretty much right about third parties locally, and many of them are shifting to a local strategy and having more success (esp. the Green party, of whom I am no big fan, but they are more of an alternative than anyone else so far, what with the LP eating itself alive and all). Unfortunately, campaign matching funds and the like are tied to success on the federal level (I think its 5% in many states to retain ballot status), which drags the lion's share of party resources into a, as you pointed out, futile national campaign. But, who's to expect a fair fight anyways.
While Moaning Myrtle was an incredibly depressing character, she didn't commit suicide. She was murdered by a basilisk controlled by Voldemort. There. I've thus admitted not only reading, but paying attention to and liking the Harry Potter books. HAH! I FEEL FREE!!
As far as I know, only artificial legal persons (corporations, states) can be restricted from pro se argumentation. Real flesh and blood non-insane people are always allowed to argue on their own behalf. Am I missing something?
The relatively stupid and/or lazy ones would. And, as we know (look around a courtroom some time) that's, like, 99% of malevolent people (also about the same proportion of benevolent people, but we notice them less). Conversely, even a good lock isn't going to keep a professional burglar out of your house. And, finally, nobody goes through the trouble unless, a.) they have an incredibly large chip on their shoulder, b.) unlimited amounts of time and hence suicide-inducing amounts of boredom or c.) a good reason to believe that the invasion will pay off significantly in some way. Free internet is usually not a large enough inducement for people well-equipped enough to sniff your packets; they have better things to do.
Not to be a Microsoft-Bash party pooper, but MS has made a few things that 'work', and even work well (as you mentioned, BASIC). The two that come most immediately to mind in the present world are MS Word and MS Excel. I personally use Open Office, not because it is better (because it isn't), but because I am poor. For those who can afford it, these programs are worth the investment. Though, I will admit this does not make up for the crap we have had to put up with from their OS department.
I love it when Slashdot produces an actual conversation. ^_^ You're going on the friends list.
Ditto. It's always a breath of fresh air to talk (type?) with a person who likes to grapple with ideas.
I tend to resist artificial in the sense you point out at well; like you say, there is nothing 'unnatural' about producing ideas. Rather, I mean artificial in the basic sense of artifice, a device for making or giving order. I tend to think of the whole map of a person's ideas as a tool for comprehending experiences. The most fundamental function of this device is to describe distinctiveness: when is one object not another, one experience not another, one idea not another (these are meta-ideas), and so forth. Why do we describe a pencil as a pencil, and not as wood, paint, and graphite, or even covalently bonded atoms, or even groups of subatomic particles? How is the idea 'pencil' not arbitary?
As you point out, ideas are a group endeavor, and most people would agree that 'pencil' is a non-arbitrary description for a certain class of object. Thus, the suspicion is that either we are all hard-wired to make convenient arbitrary distinctions (pragmatism) or there is some more fundamental underlying order that makes the idea of 'pencil' a sensible one (realism). I tend to believe the second, in a sense.
The forest metaphor itself is a neat elucidation of this problem; what is a forest but a bunch of trees and fauna? If you remove any one part, is it still a forest? What is the critical line between forest and 'just a bunch of trees and squirrels'? My personal view is that these ideas of distinctiveness are sensible in that they describe behaviors (and I mean that non-animalistically). That is to say, an object is described sensibly if it describes a mode of being that is different than any of its components would produce given those components' natural behavior. An atom is an atom because it describes how particles that make it up behave in an orderly rather than a random way (the way they would act had they not been tied up in an atom). Given this sort of definition one could bootstrap one's way all the way up to higher level abstractions; this is a pencil because it has properties which allow it to be used in ways that graphite or wood or paint, or any random combination thereof, would not allow.
At a certain level, however, the ideas thus produced make distinctions about virtual rather than real objects, that is about ideas themselves. Politics, for example, is a virtual object, since one cannot locate 'politics' itself anywhere but in the thought-simulation of someone's head. And yet, it is still a sensible object description, since 'politics' is a method of describing why human beings act in a concerted way rather than a random way (and sometimes even how). The fact that the object itself doesn't exist is irrelevant to the reality of its effects.
Any metaphor which describes complicated relationships of interlocking dependencies, cooperations, and competitions would be in some measure apt to describe the idea-field at pretty much any level of abstraction. The strengths and weaknesses of each metaphor become apparent when trying to describe different types of relationships among ideas, their distribution, and communication. I personally still have a decent amount of affection for the marketplace metaphor only because it describes better than most others the way that ideas are communicated and are spread. It is poor at describing how ideas relate to each other in a fideistic sense (your forest perhaps is better at this).
At the very least, very interesting. I suppose what both metaphors have in common is they attempt to describe vast systems of resource distribution; money (and capital) for the first, and life and food (at least, energy) for the second. I think to a wolf hunting for deer, the forest is just as much about scarcity as the marketplace is to us. I suppose my only quibble with the enviornmental metaphor is that humans generate ideas, that is abstractions about experiences, they do not pre-exist us. Sure, the Truth (depending on one's theological proclivities) may precede men's meddlings, but ideas themselves are our own. Thus, if it is an environemnt, it is an entirely artficial one. I think the advantage of your metaphor is it more strongly ties the metaphor to the seeming genetic behavior (meme propogation and morphology) of ideas, whereas in describing the same, the marketplace metaphor by comparison is slightly impoverished.
Slashdot Mirror
Mozart was poor, and died destitute. He patronized the kings and the rich because the kings and the rich owned or contributed to the funding of, you know*, symphony orchestras, which are prerequisite for realizing, you know*, symphonies. And its not arrogance of condescention to say that some things in this world have prerequisites for full understanding and appreciation. Including aesthetics; see the other thread for details. Thankfully, in modern times, the average Joe's exposure to music of all sorts is, like*, 2000 times what Joes in Mozart's time got, so music in general is more accessible now because there is more general cultural experience to draw from.
*All parenthetical phrases set off by commas purely for 'lowbrow' effect. Or sarcasm, demending on how much of an ass you think I am.
It prompted discussion, so it must have some value ;)
Indeed! I guess I missed the subtler sociological implications of the word 'highbrow', specifically as being explicitly contrasted with 'lowbrow', in the context of the discussion. When talking about historical legacies, like say, Van Gogh, or Dostoyevsky, or obviously Mozart, there was a certain very specific and probably very sharp economic and class tint to everything that they did. Most artists were patronized by people with money because people with money were the only ones with the resources to allow them to realize their art (its awfully hard to realize a symphony without, well, a symphony orchestra.) My only point is that our appreciation of them now seems to have more to do with common cultural cues that have less to do with class than they did in their time, but still tied moderately to education, which of course still has some economic implications. Also, the benefit of time has allowed for some distance from the political and social idiosyncrasies that prevented certain works in their day from being 'classics', as you mentioned, that are considered so now.
I singled out Bach in my post for being particularly ingenious, and certainly some of the asethetic value of Bach's stuff can be appreciated without a prior explicit understanding of what's going on in the piece; I would submit to you, however, that your friends' musical backgrounds was closer to Bach than you might imagine. Rock and Alternative Rock borrow heavily from old blues, it is true, but also from Classical music, particularly its tonal structure, and also its peculiar use of meter (which is not present in a suprising number of other musical traditions), and some of the instruments would sound familiar...at least more familiar than, say a sitar, or liuqin (Chinese lute) which are based on different tonal scales.
If you were to play that same Bach piece to someone who grew up with a different tonal scale, like a 5-tone Chinese scale, I doubt you would get the same reaction as you did with your friends; the gap is far wider, and the music does not transmit emotion with any accuracy. I just (odd coincidence) finished reading an essay by Theodore Gracyk who describes an experiment he runs in his class every year, playing westerm music of various contexts and purposes and then playing eastern music of similar contexts and purposes; the students can easily pick out in the western styles which is meant to be somber and which joyous, which secular and which religious, but have no luck guessing what emotion or purpose is meant to be conveyed by the eastern works.
What I was trying to make clear in my post was that these sorts of cultural contexts (which are present in some extent even in popular music) frame our understanding of music and our appreciation of it; formal education and training reveals the explicit structuers behind the music and also helps to create a reservoir of experience with whcih to compare works and search for similarities.
I'm sorry but this struck me as pretty silly. Mozart wasn't 'high-brow' (i.e. intellectually and asthetically sophisticated) because tickets cost a lot of money; he was, like Beethoven and especially Bach a musical genius who made sophisticated, complicated and beautiful musical constructions. That the people who were predisposed to like him were educated and therefore also predominantly wealthy (in order to get that education) is quite literally a coincidence, a correlation which you confused with causation. That any Joe can pick up a Mozart CD does not mean any Joe can understand and appreciate said CD; music of all genres and categories requires an extant cultural setting and prior aesthetic vocabulary to be appreciated. But, any Joe with exposure and time may learn, like many people with a classical education already had an opportunity to do, to appreciate his works.
anyhow, i believe you ment bread mold, not orange mold.
Penicillium is a genus of what are called 'bread molds' which grow, eponymously, on most yeasted breads. However, they also have a strong affinity for orange rind, and oranges make a nearly ideal culture medium for its growth. Penicillin's antibacteriological properties were discovered in a lab when an orange was accidentally exposed to penicillium and then left in contact with a bacteria culture. Hence, for the story about serendipity and science, its affinity for oranges was more pertinent. Oddly enough, this genus provdes us with some of the molds that make some of the tastiest cheese around (esp. Gorgonzola).
i know the best place to store rubber, place it skin tight on hot girls :D
I, too, like rubber and girls. ;)
Taxol, right off the top of my head (comes from a rare type of Yew Tree). Acetylsalicylic Acid probably would be on the list too (salicylates were first extracted from willow bark), if it hadn't been 'discovered' and in wide use long before there was an FDA. There are undoubtedly many others.
Some researchers dicking around with orange molds accidentally discovered this little thing called PENICLLIN. Some Swiss mountain hiker got irritated with little seeds that kept sticking to his clothes, which upon further inspection led to the invention of VELCRO.
On the other hand, researchers trying to solve a critical rubber shortage during World War II came up with an earth-shattering invention: SILLY PUTTY.
Point is, you just never know. ;)
In fact, some religions would indicate that it was a very naughty thing he did. Judaism was very strict about the importance of all texts, and in Islam, Muhammad is actually quoted in one of the holy texts as saying that the ink of a scholar is worth more (in the spiritual, not financial sense) than the blood of a martyr.
I think it might be better to just write in a public official exception to the 2-party rule; a public official, while carrying out his/her duties, is automatically assumed to have granted (by virtue of executing the public business) permission to be recorded. This would preserve your extremely insightful point about private sincerity, but still sticks it to the Man when the Man overreaches.
You also conveniently missed the testimony of several /.ers (of all ages) who claimed that the sound was *actually physically painful*. But, hey! Who cares, right? Facts shouldn't get in the way of a good analysis.
Perhaps even legally entitled. If you are walking along on a public sidewalk and one of these devices is activated, you can hear it, and it causes you pain, that's an assault in progress. You are legally (in most places) allowed to use force in self-defense to terminate an attack on your person.
IANAL, and this is not legal advice.
Yes, someone told this cop, who learned everything he ever knew about high-tech devices and ultrasonics from Star Trek TOS (if you're lucky) that the Neighborhood's Old Man has a 'super duper high tech magically audible only to people the cop doesn't like anyway device', and due to this explanation, everything worked out OK.
Or maybe, in the real world, we all have to deal with authority figures who don't know and don't care about reality whatsoever, find harassing youth darkly amusing (if not their own favorite past-time), and couldn't be bothered to act even if none of the above were accurate.
Title 17 Section 1201(e)
Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Other Government Activities.-- This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, information security, or intelligence activity of an officer, agent, or employee of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or a person acting pursuant to a contract with the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State. For purposes of this subsection, the term "information security" means activities carried out in order to identify and address the vulnerabilities of a government computer, computer system, or computer network.
As an employee of the Dept. of Environmental Management I absolutely insist that it is crucial to my work of studying and protecting endangered species that I have a keen understanding of animal mating rituals of all species...including my own. Thankfully the local shop has some fantastic informational videos for rent and I just figured that I needed a copy for home for more intensive...study.
Eat that, DMCA!
It's pretty clear (not least from the number of absolutely shitty papers there were in Revolutionary times which would make the National Enquirer look like the Washington Post) that there was no decision making intended or involved in the protection: you put your opinions into text and publish them using a printing press (and they aren't libel) and you are A 'OK. We've moved away from plain-text, common sense readings of the Constitution for a while now (some for good reasons, some definately not), and so we end up in a world today where the freedom to use a printing press means something very different (and far narrower) than what was originally intended.
You're right that this kind of fighting is a permanent byproduct, but it's a permanent byproduct of a military system that's escalated beyond what a civilian can lay their hands on.
This is an excellent point. Why fight fair when fighting fair will just get you killed? That is what drives the 'terrorist' part of perpetual extremism.
I think what you are underselling is the actual amount of economic rhetoric and brouhaha that gets mixed in to the (these days, mostly) Islamist madrasah grab-bag. People respond pretty strongly to the 'this is why you are poor and your mother is starving' line of argument; mix it with a whipped topping of 'Allah wants you to kill the infidel bastards who keep you poor, starve your mama, etc.' and you got yourself an extremist. Add to that a 400-pound gorilla for an enemy, and as you rightfully pointed out, you got yourself a terrorist. As bad as the violence is in the Middle East, a surprisingly few percent of people have had a family member killed in conflict with the US or with Israel who is perceived to be proxy of the US (or vice versa, where propaganda or evidence serves better), and so they have to recruit people with other stuff than bitter rage. Resentment, as Nietzsche once pointed out, works wonders.
I also agree that the most despicable acts that come from asymmetrical conflicts are when the vastly superior force starts to adopt tactics of impunity (like torture, interminable confinement, carpet bombing, etc.) to cover for the fact that they are fighting what amounts to an implacable, invisible, and permanent foe, and proportionately not doing so hot. That's the kind of crap that gets you a million dead in Vietnam, for instance. Incidentally I think this might have something to do with Israel's recent, um, overreaction: the temptation to crush a basically ethereal foe. Destroy Hezbollah? After all of the firsthand experience they have, how could they possibly kid themselves? When Olmert took office there was almost a shred of hope for the region; he looked like he had the will and the political backing to move out of the West Bank for good. Now, nothing but shreds.
What inspires people to fight is a reason that's personal to them.
Oddly enough, working-class Americans struggling (and some failing) to get to work with crap for mass-transit and rising gas prices are starting (emphasis, starting) to take this conflict personally, because aside from the relatively sparse famnilies and groups of friends who have lost loved ones in this series of conflicts, the closest people have been getting to this war is a brush with economic change. It remains to be seen whether many of them will cut through the party-line and connect a to b to c and force a significant change in policy, if such a change is even possible.
Oh, and I fundamentally disagree with the presumption that economic factors have never formed armies. Both the American Revolution and the American Civil War were (at least initially) fights over economic principles and systems. Ditto in Weimar Germany (these things can turn out well, or turn out badly it seems). Whenever there are starving jobless people, there is an army just waiting for the right gimmick (politics, religion, whatever) to get them going. Desperate and angry (or as you rightly pointed out, aggrieved and angry) people will turn to the flavor of the month if it means they get money, a sense of dignity, or revenge (or any combination thereof). It's hard to get well-fed people to fight (though they occasionally do, such as the AmRev, but they were fighting over a perceived grievance, and grievances have a way of causing resentment the way that more serious wrongs sometimes can't).
It's not as hypocritical as it seems. The situation seems to me that the US, being the dominant economic and military (and cultural, FWIW) superpower on the planet is, by virtue of the office, so to speak, already involved everywhere. The fact that we aid only those who benefit our strategic interests (only send aid to regions to stabilize them, e.g. screw Africa) and bomb threats to our security (again, screw Africa) rather than use economic and military might to help hundreds of millions of people (in, you guessed it, Africa, as well as south east Asia) instead of letting them starve, die of AIDS, and be hacked to death by the leaders of the neighboring tribe (see the two continents above)...that fact might irritate those who are more directly affected by those decisions. We have made some pretty poor choices in, a. when to get involved, b. what sides to take, and c. how to achieve our objectives, and since nobody can stop us when we make stupid decisions, all they can do is complain (or pick up an AK-47 and get riddled with holes or blown to kibbles, so most stick to the complaining.)
The simple fact is that "the only way to fight Islamic terrorism" is to stop doing things that piss off the citizens of those countries, such as bombing civilians.
That might help, short term, and I really applaud the sentiment. Truthfully we could do with a lot less bombings of innocent civilians, or anyone else for that matter.........but..........
But, the unfortunate truth of it is that these conflicts really do have a cultural side and an economic side to them. And I don't mean, to be clear, that certain cultures are pre-disposed to extremism or Terrorism (the last two centuries provide ample proof to any who care to read that we are all experts); I mean rather that the current economic system, i.e world-wide heavily intergrated capitalism, the system that provides people with fruit out of season, computers for cheap, and nowadays prompt (if heavily accented) customer service, is a system that does not respect and has no problem co-opting local cultures and consuming them. The reaction of extremism, violence, and terrorism, is if anything an immune-system type reaction of entire peoples terrified that their way of life is about to be gobbled up by what is, from their perspective, an unfeeling juggernaught. Just beneath the religious or socialist or fascist rhetoric is always, and I mean ALWAYS (these days) an economic critique followed by an impassioned call to protect thier ways of life. And do you really think people actually do this stuff because they care about socialism or their leaders or seventy-frikken'-virgins? Please. That's just the frosting.
Point being if we really wanted to stop these sorts of attacks, we would have to cease being a real factor in other people's lives. Which of course means taking steps to unplug from the world that NOBODY wants to take (if it were even possible). And it's not just about year-round fruit (though I know I'd miss my cherry pies in winter); our economy at all levels is so completely bought in to the world-wide system that any attempt to break free would include recessions that would make '29 look like a market adjustment. As glum as it is, I think terrorism is a byproduct, a permanent byproduct, of the evolution of a system of economy whose consequences are only now becoming apparent to those at the top of the beneficiary ladder. That is, us.
My 2 cents. ;)
Poster sighted outside University Gaming Club in 1999:
"Vote Cthulu 2000. Why settle for the lesser evil?"
I shit you not.
Starting by voting incumbents (Democrat or Republican) out ever time their term is up will do two things. First it'll send a message to Washington that voting America is pissed off and until things really change they won't get the nice perks of staying in office. It'll also limit the amount of damage they can do and the amount of corrupting influences they can build up before we kick them back out of office.
While I like the sentiment, I think the more likely immediate outcome of this strategy is simply to remove what little restriant was left upon the most powerful political actors (that is, Corporations) who, of course, pay into both parties and so don't particularly care which of the two win. Besides the truly rare individual (Ron Paul, R-TX, for example), no politican on either side of the aisle has made a sustained effort to curb monied interests, and it's no surprise, considering that they all need to raise obscene amounts of money just to remain competitive.
P.S. I think you are pretty much right about third parties locally, and many of them are shifting to a local strategy and having more success (esp. the Green party, of whom I am no big fan, but they are more of an alternative than anyone else so far, what with the LP eating itself alive and all). Unfortunately, campaign matching funds and the like are tied to success on the federal level (I think its 5% in many states to retain ballot status), which drags the lion's share of party resources into a, as you pointed out, futile national campaign. But, who's to expect a fair fight anyways.
While Moaning Myrtle was an incredibly depressing character, she didn't commit suicide. She was murdered by a basilisk controlled by Voldemort. There. I've thus admitted not only reading, but paying attention to and liking the Harry Potter books. HAH! I FEEL FREE!!
That is all.
As far as I know, only artificial legal persons (corporations, states) can be restricted from pro se argumentation. Real flesh and blood non-insane people are always allowed to argue on their own behalf. Am I missing something?
The relatively stupid and/or lazy ones would. And, as we know (look around a courtroom some time) that's, like, 99% of malevolent people (also about the same proportion of benevolent people, but we notice them less). Conversely, even a good lock isn't going to keep a professional burglar out of your house. And, finally, nobody goes through the trouble unless, a.) they have an incredibly large chip on their shoulder, b.) unlimited amounts of time and hence suicide-inducing amounts of boredom or c.) a good reason to believe that the invasion will pay off significantly in some way. Free internet is usually not a large enough inducement for people well-equipped enough to sniff your packets; they have better things to do.
Not to be a Microsoft-Bash party pooper, but MS has made a few things that 'work', and even work well (as you mentioned, BASIC). The two that come most immediately to mind in the present world are MS Word and MS Excel. I personally use Open Office, not because it is better (because it isn't), but because I am poor. For those who can afford it, these programs are worth the investment. Though, I will admit this does not make up for the crap we have had to put up with from their OS department.
I love it when Slashdot produces an actual conversation. ^_^ You're going on the friends list.
Ditto. It's always a breath of fresh air to talk (type?) with a person who likes to grapple with ideas.
I tend to resist artificial in the sense you point out at well; like you say, there is nothing 'unnatural' about producing ideas. Rather, I mean artificial in the basic sense of artifice, a device for making or giving order. I tend to think of the whole map of a person's ideas as a tool for comprehending experiences. The most fundamental function of this device is to describe distinctiveness: when is one object not another, one experience not another, one idea not another (these are meta-ideas), and so forth. Why do we describe a pencil as a pencil, and not as wood, paint, and graphite, or even covalently bonded atoms, or even groups of subatomic particles? How is the idea 'pencil' not arbitary?
As you point out, ideas are a group endeavor, and most people would agree that 'pencil' is a non-arbitrary description for a certain class of object. Thus, the suspicion is that either we are all hard-wired to make convenient arbitrary distinctions (pragmatism) or there is some more fundamental underlying order that makes the idea of 'pencil' a sensible one (realism). I tend to believe the second, in a sense.
The forest metaphor itself is a neat elucidation of this problem; what is a forest but a bunch of trees and fauna? If you remove any one part, is it still a forest? What is the critical line between forest and 'just a bunch of trees and squirrels'? My personal view is that these ideas of distinctiveness are sensible in that they describe behaviors (and I mean that non-animalistically). That is to say, an object is described sensibly if it describes a mode of being that is different than any of its components would produce given those components' natural behavior. An atom is an atom because it describes how particles that make it up behave in an orderly rather than a random way (the way they would act had they not been tied up in an atom). Given this sort of definition one could bootstrap one's way all the way up to higher level abstractions; this is a pencil because it has properties which allow it to be used in ways that graphite or wood or paint, or any random combination thereof, would not allow.
At a certain level, however, the ideas thus produced make distinctions about virtual rather than real objects, that is about ideas themselves. Politics, for example, is a virtual object, since one cannot locate 'politics' itself anywhere but in the thought-simulation of someone's head. And yet, it is still a sensible object description, since 'politics' is a method of describing why human beings act in a concerted way rather than a random way (and sometimes even how). The fact that the object itself doesn't exist is irrelevant to the reality of its effects.
Any metaphor which describes complicated relationships of interlocking dependencies, cooperations, and competitions would be in some measure apt to describe the idea-field at pretty much any level of abstraction. The strengths and weaknesses of each metaphor become apparent when trying to describe different types of relationships among ideas, their distribution, and communication. I personally still have a decent amount of affection for the marketplace metaphor only because it describes better than most others the way that ideas are communicated and are spread. It is poor at describing how ideas relate to each other in a fideistic sense (your forest perhaps is better at this).
At the very least, very interesting. I suppose what both metaphors have in common is they attempt to describe vast systems of resource distribution; money (and capital) for the first, and life and food (at least, energy) for the second. I think to a wolf hunting for deer, the forest is just as much about scarcity as the marketplace is to us. I suppose my only quibble with the enviornmental metaphor is that humans generate ideas, that is abstractions about experiences, they do not pre-exist us. Sure, the Truth (depending on one's theological proclivities) may precede men's meddlings, but ideas themselves are our own. Thus, if it is an environemnt, it is an entirely artficial one. I think the advantage of your metaphor is it more strongly ties the metaphor to the seeming genetic behavior (meme propogation and morphology) of ideas, whereas in describing the same, the marketplace metaphor by comparison is slightly impoverished.