I am one of those people who uses Gmail as a backup betting it's more reliable than my hard drive.
What I do is this: I use Gmail as my main e-mail address, but I have it set up in IMAP mode at my job's Thunderbird. In my home, I also have Thunderbird downloading e-mails, but in POP3 mode. Why, you ask? Simple: because there I have many special filters set to distribute my mail to special mailboxes so as to make it easy, and fast, to backup them, in encrypted form, to Amazon S3 using Jungle Disk (together with the remaining of my/home dir). Jungle Disk is set to keep old copies of changed files for 60 days. And now and then I also backup these files to DVD.
So, even if my Gmail account is lost, my job's IMAP is also lost, I do something really stupid in my home computer and either lose my mboxes here or upload corrupted files to S3, and my house burns down, I'll still have a good chance of recovering most, if not all, of my e-mails.
After losing two or three hard disks I learned to take backups seriously. Good thing it's easier now than when our only reasonably cheap option were 1.44 MB floppies.:-)
. . . Still, if we can take words literally for a moment (it's fun I do it a lot), there has never been a true communism of any large scale.
We cannot do this because the word "communism" is by design ambiguous. Or, rather, we can, but doing so is ipso facto adopting a rhetorical mode of argumentation, which in itself isn't bad, as rhetorics is the mode of conversation we all use when trying to convince others to do (or not do) something. The moment we wish to step outside the rhetorical discourse and enter those of a proper scientific understanding, we must adopt the scientific procedure of establishing identities and distinctions, i.e., dialectics.
The alternative is to talk about and, at best, compare dreams to see which one is more beautiful, if that much. Then we'll talk first about the nice communal life of dreams, where everyone works "according to their ability", getting "according to their needs", with the world in a perpetual peace, no class differences exist, nor division of labor, meaning someone can be a fisher at morning, an acclaimed painter after lunch, a distinguished thermonuclear engineer on weekends, etc. etc. etc. And when we're done talking about how beautiful the communist utopia is, we'll switch to discussing the beautiful, say, Islam utopia, where a worldwide caliphate under a sage leader rules the world, of which all evil was banished and peaces reign. Or maybe about the Christian utopia, or the fascist utopia, or the neoconservative utopia, or the hippie utopia, or the new age utopia, and so on and so forth, all of which have all world people living happy lives forever. In short: select your and dream and... happy dreams!
But what good is that in the real world? Here we have actual people doing actual things that oppose what other people would want to see accomplished. And if we're to talk about realities, the dreams must get out of the way. Here, the communist dream doesn't matter, except so far as a fact that it was in the minds of actual people who called themselves communists. And what happens here, what really defines "communism" as a term that applies to the real world, is what actual communists actually did to actual persons in actual places at actual, determined times.
Now tell me, who is "so used at arguing inside their specific frame of reference that they most of the time lose sight of the broader categories under which their thinking is conditioned?" I'll give you a hint. It's not me.
I didn't say you were. You just take, mistakenly, their utopic concept of what communism is as something deserving consideration in itself, what I don't. As for who they are, I can say that they're roughly 99% of all my colleagues at the Philosophy college where I'm getting my major. Now and then I help one or other to wake up and get out of the world of empty words they live in, but most of them prefer to keep dreaming. It's sad in fact. Good minds filled with garbage memes. But then, that's no wonder. Brazil is stuck on 1968. Except for technology improvements, 1969 and the following years are still non-events here.
On the subject of interesting articles, I love this one from 2004, by Mises Institute editor Jeffrey Tucker, where he explains why they allow everyone to download for free books which are under copyright, some of which they even had to pay the current copyright owners to be allowed to put online for free. In short: they understood that a book online is in fact an advertisement for the printed book, since most people prefer to have the real thing instead of reading on a CRT or LCD. Sure, he recognizes many people who download will never, ever, purchase printed copies. But then, who cares? The important thing is that the aggregate number of purchasers increase, what, to the amazement of the copyright owners to whom they paid for the right, in fact happened, with all of them seeing increased sales of the books available online. In any case, more people reading libertarian books means more libertarians on the long run. Thus, from all perspectives a win-win situation.
I strongly recommend reading the full text. It's really worth it.
Sorry, but that doesn't work. Not because of some "double standard", but because the crop output of a piece of land is completely lacking when you don't have modern technologies aiding you. Also, don't forget that in a medieval-like technological level that girl, instead of working now, would most probably have died when she was 2 years old. We can say what we wish about these issues, but for most people, "to be alive, although having to work at an early age" is way more desirable than "to be dead" or "to be starving".
Don't give me the crap line about how that's a double standard - how Americans get to work a desk and the Global South has to work the fields. In a few short decades, it's not going to make that much difference. Americans will be growing huge amounts of their own food. Eventually, as they slide down the energy curve, they will be just as agrarian as they ever were.
Bah! I've read tons of old dystopian futurists foreseeing since the '50s the imminent end of the world energy sources. In the '70s you had many of them saying that by 1990 we'd be back to using horses because the oil supplies would have ended in 1986. Sorry, but that's all bullshit. Nowadays we have fission reactor technologies which can use 99% of the radioactive material, not the 10% or less of the previous generations. These beauties can use the waste of the old reactors as source of energy, and output harmless materials. Also, fusion reactor technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, as is the efficiency of almost any alternative technology we came up before and are coming up now. Once oil supply diminish enough for these technologies to be more economically viable, you'll see an explosion of research in these areas, followed by a huge number of implementations, meaning lower costs on the long run and thus even more implementations. Everything points to a steady sustenance and increasing of our energy production, not a decrease.
If Brazil has any sense,they will avoid the problem altoether,and focus on develping permacultural practices ASAP.
We actually do. If Brazil can be proud of something, it's of its agriculture, which explored in efficiency since the late '80s. We produce much, MUCH more food than we consume. The result is that food here is extremely cheap, and we get a lot of money from exporting the surplus.
The only problem in it, to be sure, is our left-wing ruling Worker's Party, which opposes agricultural business saying it's "too much capitalistic". It doesn't matter for them that our "evil capitalistic" agribusiness completely and absolutely ended hunger in the whole country. Our President is blinded by ideology and wants to redistribute even the productive lands to the small family farmers of the "landless movement", who'll be able to produce only 10% or less of what big agribusiness can. If this madman succeed, we'll see not only a huge rising in food prices, but also the return of hunger, all thanks to his socialism.
Which in fact is the usual result of socialism: inefficiency, misery, famine, lack of freedom, lack of sound reasoning. Yes, no surprise there indeed.
Actually, you are thinking of Hegel. Marx's idea of history was a constant struggle between the poor and the rich elite. There's no reason to bring in Christianity.
Lol. Let me summarize what goes on here:
a) There are those who are 'the correct', 'the good'. b) There are those who are 'the wrong', 'the evil'. c) Those in 'b' are perpetually opposed to those in 'a', and the other way around. d) There will come a moment when 'a' will win their struggle against 'b'. e) When that happens, 'b' will be punished and 'a' will live happily forevermore.
In Christianity (of the gnostic type, other kinds don't fit in this scheme), 'a' equals 'believers', and 'b' equals 'everyone else'.
In Fascism, 'a' = nationals, 'b' = foreigners.
In Nazism, 'a' = whites, 'b' = other races.
In Communism, 'a' = bourgeoisie, 'b' = proletariat.
That's why everyone who have understand both this side of the coin as well as the other side (which includes such mutually opposed thinkers as Nietzsche on one extreme, and Guénon/Voegelin/Mises on the other) see these movements as mere variations around the same theme. Communists are so used at arguing inside their specific frame of reference that they most of the time lose sight of the broader categories under which their thinking is conditioned.
. . . one of the key parts of communism is rule by the masses.
Ah, yeah. The typical ideological discourse, I know. And yes, I mean "ideological" in the proper meaning of "false conscience", as a set of rationalizations to justify one's actions while hiding their true motivation. If you reach out it and look at what Marxists and socialists always actually did and do, historically, rather than what they said and say they're doing, it becomes pretty clear that this isn't the case at all. To be more clear, this is what really happened in all revolutions, and continues happening today:
When Europe entered the Modern Age, with the consolidation of the Nation States and the centralization of the power on the hands of the King, rather than distributed over a wide number of local powers (nobles), it became clear that the new centralized powers would need a huge number of public servants to help manage it. The kings started expanding existing Universities and building new ones as a means of training a new bureaucrat elite to handle the government under their orders. The upside of this strategy is that it worked: the kings got lots of efficient and loyal bureaucrats. The downside, not noticed at first, but increasingly evident, was that Universities, by their own nature, always produce more people with bureaucratic training than there are spots in the public service. This is a huge number of people who are trained to handle a government, but cannot do so for lack of opportunity, then go seek something else on which to work, but the whole time keep that desire to be in power. However, admitting this wish to be just that, greed for power, doesn't "feel right" to all those who consider themselves some kind of elite, rightfully superior to "those who are in charge of 'the system'".
So, what do they do? They start developing ideological discourses to justify their greed for power, of course! If you go see the actual list of people who did ALL, and I mean ALL revolutions, from the French one to the Russian, Chinese, Cuban etc. ones, what do you notice? First, that their file and rank are composed mostly by members of the virtual bureaucracy, and that the leaders are all 100% members of the virtual bureaucracy. Second, that it's done in name of another group, never in name of the virtual bureaucracy itself. Third, that no member of the group which is the alleged beneficiary of the revolution is present among the revolutionary leaders, much less among the governing class after the revolution is completed. Who were the bourgeois capitalists among the French revolutionary leaders, which made the revolution
Though the Soviet Union was founded in the spirit of Marx's work, it was by no means the kind of state that Marx thought would necessarily appear.
The interesting thing is that Marx never wrote about what the communist state would be, only about what you'd need to have before it that would lead to it (and yes, that included a generically understood "dictatorship of the proletariat" -- the URSS was Lenin's understanding of what such a dictatorship meant in the fine details).
And why didn't he talk about the future society? Because his method forbids it. If one believes (and this is just a belief, no matter how much one says it's a "science") that History unfolds in a dialectical pattern, then any attempt at guessing what comes two or three "steps" from now is in vain.
That's also the reason why even nowadays you cannot get an answer to this question from any leftist. All they "know" is that they must practice the "antithesis" of what currently exist (the "thesis"), that at some point both will be overcome by a "synthesis", which in turn will become a new "thesis" with its own "antithesis", to be overcome by a new "synthesis", and so on and so forth, until the "a new world is possible", whatever it is, comes to happen, and then there will be bliss everywhere for all of eternity.
Anyone who is a cynical and isn't a leftist can see that the Marxist "scientific" understanding of History is hardly more than a secular version of the belief in the monotheistic Heaven. You take what for Christians is "located in Eternity" and place it "in the Future", all the while identifying yourself as the chosen one whose destiny is helping it to happen. And since it's an undetermined future, thus something you can never know whether was or wasn't already reached, and if not, what's the distance between "now" and "then", what specifically still needs to be done, this results in that anything you wish can be put in that void.
That's why the typical communist will always say that a "communist society" never existed. Because the society he himself thinks should exist (the one he right now is thinking about, because tomorrow he might change his mind on some detail), that one isn't equal to any which actually existed, even when its founders called themselves communists. The ideal society of his dreams is always, by definition, "in the future". Always.
As such, he is always justified both in the acts he takes that he believes will bring "the future" to fruition, as well as in his criticism of other marxists whose acts don't (right now) fit nicely with his (own, personal) model.
Sure - as long as you're not the nine year old girl in indonesia sewing sneakers together or rolling cigarettes for the American Marketplace.
Are you sure you want to use this argument? Because, suppose you Americans (btw, I'm Brazilian) stopped purchasing Indonesian sneakers and cigarettes. In that case, how, exactly, do you suggest that nine year old girl, and probably their parents, obtain food?
Children working, and worse, working in harsh conditions, is despicable. It would be thousands time better if they hadn't to. But the thing is, children can only stop doing so once their parents start earning enough by themselves so that their children don't need to work anymore. And how do parents earn enough so that their children don't need to work anymore? Well, I'd say the best way to know is by studying the history of those countries where society managed to actually stop children labor.
There was a time when USA itself had children labor. How did you Americans stop that? I mean, in practice? Suggest Indonesia do to the same. The probability of it working in practice a second time, since it worked once, is huge.
And what was this way, you ask? I'll tell you: classic-liberal free-market capitalism.
Because lots and lots and LOTS of pages would break, among other things. Earlier today there was another article in./ with a link to the full rationale behind this, and to me is makes a lot of sense. Basically, with this tag you can specify a version for each browser on which the site was tested and is known to work well, then all browsers might keep internally working versions of their legacy rendering engines (or a compatibility mode built in their newest engine, whatever works best in each case), and forever in future you'd have old sites being 100% readable in new browsers, no matter how much actually existing "de facto" and "official" standards change or get deprecated/replaced over time. An example from the above link, specifying the page renders correctly in IE 8's engine, Firefox 3's engine and (say) Opera 4's engine:
What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem. Sure, it could have arrived earlier, but better later than never.
Anti-aliasing on X now is among the best you can get.
I guess that's the problem: I'd like to get none at all, and this is becoming more and more difficult over time. For example, the Liberation fonts. I tried them in my system, and they're almost unreadable. It seems they were designed for blur-enabled systems only. Disable the blur, and what you get are characters which you can read, yes, but that are made of seemingly disconnected lines with one or another lone dot at odd places. I had to remove them and install the MS core fonts which, contrary to the Liberation fonts, render correctly in sharp mode.
However, any issues you have with turning it off are the fault of whatever distribution you're using, not X itself. If you can't find the option to turn off anti-aliasing, don't blame X.
True, true. The problem is that the solution I usually read about revolves around recompiling some files to enable features disable in the code. It's too much of an annoyance for enabling what is, in Windows, a matter of simply selecting an option in a drop down box, and which was, in X, the standard until some years ago, when it got for whatever reason disabled.
I guess it's about MacOS X proper, because the only thing that happened was some 3rd party softwares having problems with video.
Compare this to the last bug I experienced in my Ubuntu desktop. Some months ago, an automatic kernel update was incompatible with my legacy nVidia driver (also Ubuntu-provided), resulting in my graphical environment being completely killed. Solving this in a pure text mode console wasn't difficult: a matter of browse a little in text mode with elinks, and then copying and pasting some apt-get, wget and dpkg commands. But for those less knowledgeable affected by it, it was a full stop on their usage of their computers.
Last week another problem happened with a broken security fix that also caused a similar problem, with lots of people being dropped outside their graphical environment for apparently no reason. This one was handled better, since the fix came with two additional automatic downloads over the next hours, and I myself wasn't hit by it because luckily enough my computer was powered off the whole incident, of which I only heard afterwards.
So, I don't think you can accurately compare this Apple incident with what a Linux desktop user is subjected to now and then. In Linux-land, when things break, they break in a REALLY spectacular way. In MacOS (and most of the time even Windows) this rarely is the case.
In any case, if you're wondering: I'm still a full time Ubuntu user. Little breakages now and then don't mean much to me. They're actually quite fun to deal with.;-)
The next major version of X.org will introduce a lot of new features and correct some long standing X shortcomings.
Will this include correcting the font rendering engine so that we can have good old unblurred fonts in any easy way? Because I use a CRT, not a LCD, and it took me a lot of clicking and re-clicking and selecting and testing and re-selecting and re-testing in my home Ubuntu machine to get rid of most of the blurring, although not all of it, all the while some softwares, such as OpenOffice, continue to look awful, with near-overlapping characters in menus and very ugly dialog boxes.
The sad thing is that I remember running Debian 1.x many years ago, and at that time fonts looked perfect in my then fvwm2-powered X-Window System, even TrueType ones, without the need of messing around with these confusing and meaningless Gnome font preferences.
Do you know when this font-blurring craziness began? For some reason I missed the transition, if there was one. All I know is that the font technology in X was good, and now it sucks...
. . . power and profit are the exact same motive. People/corporations/governments seek more power as a means of acquiring more profit and more profit as a means of acquiring more power.
This isn't quite accurate. The desire to be rich and "powerful" in the economic sense isn't the same as the desire to be powerful in the proper, political-military sense.
To be more precise, you need tough, ruthless, "comfort is for sissies" guys to tame and mostly pacify a society as a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the soft, efficiency-minded, "me wants monies and beautiful shiny things" to start being viable. That's because it doesn't matter how much money you have, a bullet, or a sword, a knife, two strong hands at your throat... are still pretty efficient at finishing you. And those soft enough to be good at managing money, not weapons, can only do so when the risk of being killed is low. On the other hand, the tough ones don't need to be nice in any way to the soft as a means of acquiring what they want, just think "taxes".
So, no matter how mixed things seem to look like, the relationship between business and government is always one of complete and total submission. Violence (and the monopoly on violence) alway, by definition, controls wealth. The rich know this very well, and that's why they resort so much to bribing as a way to appease the actually powerful: because their only hope of continuing to be rich (and comfortable, and feeling important without actually doing what true power requires) is by making themselves, as they currently are, desirable to the powerful. Remove this factor and the powerful have no reason anymore to not just take what they want and be done with it.
And cardinal Bellarmino, Galileo's main inquisitor whose stance has been defended by Ratzinger, refused to even look through it when invited to do so, rejecting Galileo's claims on theological grounds.
False. Who refused to look was Cesare Cremonini. Belarmino was one of the most intelligent thinkers of the 17th century, and his explanation of the problems in Galileo's work are extremely accurate. Search them on Google. As far as scientific methology goes, you'll have the impression you're reading Popper, this is how good Belarmino is.
This is extremely misunderstood. Gallileo was told not to teach his theories as fact until they could be proven, and to not contradict the church in theological matters, not matters of science.
Thank you posting some actual information on the subject. The common, "pop" understanding of the Galileo issue is completely innacurate as far as History is concerned.
At the time there were lots of people, including many Catholic priests, who understood it to make sense for the Earth to be going around the Sun, not the other way around. But they all agreed that they had NO WAY to prove it, what you can find even on the Preface to Copernicus' main work, "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", where his editor explains that the excellence of Copernicus theory is on his mathematics, and only in his mathematics, since we have no idea at all on what the actual physics of the "heavenly bodies" is.
What did they lack? Simply put, without Einstein's Relativity, i.e., within a purely Newtonian or pre-Newtonian physics, there's no reason for one to suppose a limit to speed to exist. So, you could perfectly imagine that the Earth was fixed in the middle, with the Sun moving around the Earth, the other planets moving around the Sun, and the stars moving around the whole system at trillions of miles per second. Why not? In fact, this was one among all of the theories at the time, and the one defended by none other than Tycho Brahe. You had many theories where things orbited around a fixed Earth, others where things orbited around a fixed Sun, others where some things orbited around the Earth while others orbited around the Sun, all mixed with different proposition about the orbits themselves: some understood them to be eliptycal, others that they were circular, others that you had complex movements composed of a mix of different circular orbits (kind of like a Fourier transform, but without the actual mathematical tool, since it was developed only 100 years later), and in this case different theories on whether these mixed orbits where purely centripetal, whether orbits crossed each other and etc. etc. etc. Galileo himself, for instance, knew the elyptical theories and rejected them based on the notion that circles were more beautiful...
The Church itself didn't mind any of this. Cardinal Belarmino, the inquisitor in Galileo's case, even wrote that the Earth running around the Sun wasn't a problem, that it if was proved to be the case, good, and if not, good too, since in itself the subject wasn't of much importance. The problem with Galileo, he explained, was that, although Galileo KNEW he couldn't PROVE the Sun was fixed in the middle and the planets ran in perfectly circular orbits around it, he STILL demanded everyone to accept this theory as being completely and absolutely true just because, and to reject all other theories also just because. In fact, it took about 200 years for the one predictable phenomenon on his theory (stellar paralaxys) to be actually observed, thus proving PART of it (that planets move around the Sun), all the while disproving everything else he demand everyone to agree on (that the Sun is fixed in the middle, and that orbits are perfectly circular).
So, once we analyse the matter with some fairness, we see that Belarmino was the one actually defending a sound scientific methodology and good intellectual judgment by not jumping to conclusions, while Galileo, on this matter, was the dogmatic guy. The popular misconception is a complete inversion of reality.
One also forgets that the Church was Gallileo's employer (he taught at a Catholic university.)
Not only that. He was a PERSONAL FRIEND of Pope Urban VIII, who was a long time ADMIRER of his work, and the guy who helped Galileo to not be fully punished by the inquisition, but to only be at house arrest. And this considering Galileo mocked Urban's speeches by putting them on "Simplicio's" (literally "simpleton's") mouth in his book "Dialogue Concerning the
I talked to Kayembi (the Scrivener guy) about a linux port using GNUStep. Currently, GNUStep doesn't have all the features Scrivener needs. He gave me a list (not complete, but it's a start) and I've been working on getting them added to GNUStep. So hopefully, we will have a linux version sometime:)
That would be nice. I rarely feel interested enough in a software to crave it, much less when it isn't "free as in beer" and there are plenty of alternatives out there, but Scrivener made it. If a Linux version ends up being released, and it mixes well in my Gnome desktop, I'll surely purchase it.
The fact that you and everyone else who joins in made your post on a computer through the internet shows implicit subscription to the philosophy of science.
Not really, or rather, it depends. There are basically two postures in philosophy of science. One is the so called "realist" position, which understands that unobservable conceptual entities (atoms, particles, DNA, space geometry, natural selection etc.) exist as stated by theory. At times when science is expanding in predictable ways and tons of news discoveries are being made and technologies built upon then, it's common for scientists to adopt it. On the other hand, there is also the so called "instrumentalist" position, which understand that these same unobservable conceptual entities, although in themselves useful because they aid research, are nevertheless pure tools, useful ways to describe real world phenomena, but whose actual existence we have no way to determine. This is an approach usually adopted by scientist themselves when lots of changes are happening too fast, and long established theories are going down fast while very strange alternatives are being simultaneously proposed.
A good argument in favor of realism is that usually theories lead to new discoveries that weren't predicted by them. The realist will argue like this: "See, if these things didn't exist, if they were merely an useful way to describe what we actually see, but not real in themselves, how would they lead to such new and unpredictable discoveries?" The instrumentalist will agree that it's really very nice when this happens, but he'll point that it nevertheless is a very rare event, so rare that it can be explained away by way of chance.
Myself, I think instrumentalism to be the most strictly rigorous way to look at science. The downside is that the "wow!" reaction we feel when reading about science comes from a realist approach to it, and thus, if you deny realism, you also end up denying this reaction.
Name one technological invention or innovation that has come about through the application of theology or faith?
Well, as far as technology goes, if you adopt instrumentalism you don't automatically link technological advancements to conceptual entities posed by scientific theories, taking both technology and science as independent fields, with science working "merely" as a very huge source of suggestions and insights upon which engineers can develop "actual" things. A realist, on the other hand, wouldn't accept this and say that, if technology works, and if it's based on some scientific theory, then that technology is an actual proof of the truth of that theory. To this an instrumentalist would answer that this isn't so, because many inventions in the past were based on wrong theories, and they nevertheless worked and kept working even as theories changed around them, with the new theories themselves having the trouble of taking into account the existing technology.
So, an instrumentalist would conclude, it's the other way around: technology comes first, then a scientific theories follows it, suggesting then new ways in which engineers should work, what leads to new technological discoveries, which in must be taken into account by new theories, and so on and so forth.
In regards to inventions or innovations brought about by theology or faith, if you're thinking about machines and the like, there aren't many, sure. But then, you won't find theology or faith much interested in material matters, so this isn't really a surprise. On the other hand, however, on the fields where theology and faith have practical as well as theoretical applications, such as social organization, interpersonal relations, techniques of discourse, pure mathematics, pure logics etc., then you'll find a very extensive list of innovations and even, yes, inventions. They're just on different fields than those where science operates. And in some case, such as the many Middle Age advances in logics, they are t
Wow that's some pretty impressive double speak and bullshit. Are you in Marketing by any chance?
No. That's the effect of 3 years of Philosophy College.
You don't have faith that words mean the same thing in multiple sentences. They either do or they don't.
So, you trust, have faith and hold a strongly belief in the principle of non-contradiction, eh? Good to know!;-)
That triad works because of the logic underlying each of those statements or propositions.
What if I challenge you to prove this "underlying" you talk about? Yep, you'll have to use logic to prove me logic, thus producing a tautology.
No, my friend. It's an assumption, or an axiom, if you prefer. In any case, something you either "accept", or don't. Now, exchange the word "accept" for one of its synonyms ("belief", "trust", "faith" etc.) and you'll see where's the problem. Waving it away won't do it, sorry.
Scientists who disagree do not burn each other at the stake, or begin wars of extermination against those who advocate alternate theories.
Maybe not, but notice that, the way you put it, there's still a requirement for both parts to agree on principle on the validity of science and of the scientific method.
What would scientists do if, say, a political movement grew around the idea of "separation between science and state", arguing that the scientific method is just a philosophical concept, and thus the government, since it must be neutral, must therefore refrain from placing public money at the service of any specific philosophy, be it through teaching to children, be it through officially-sponsored research?
My bet is that scientists wouldn't take it lightly. And were they in sufficient numbers, and with sufficient political power, and the "anti-science" folk growing in numbers by leaps and bounds, who can say the scientists wouldn't pursue a more... definitive... solution to the problem? Knowing human nature, I surely won't say they wouldn't.
Given that "faith" is just a synonymous of "trust" and "confidence", here's a way to construct a "logic of faith" as a special case of your typical inductive logics:
"For each 'n' in the range 1 to 'p', 'X' said on occasion 'On' he would do 'Yn' at moment 'Mn'." "For each 'n' in the range 1 to 'p', 'X' actually did 'Yn' at moment 'Mn'." "Therefore, 'X' is faithful."
Going on the other direction, one can hardly ignore that logic is "believed in" because we trust what, to our eyes, looks like absolutely undeniable a priori evidence: the implicit connection between logical statements. Meaning, when we say:
"All men are mortal." "Socrates is a man." "Therefore, Socrates is mortal."
We "trust" (have faith) in the meaning of the words "man", "men", "Socrates", "mortal", "is", "are" etc. to remain the same from one instant in time to the next, and thus for the 3rd sentence to be saying something valid and actually contained in the two previous sentences. In other words, for logic itself to be possible we must first have "faith on it".
As you see, either by going the more abstract path of a "logic of faith", or the more subjective one of our "faith on logic", or even by following both, there's no difficulty at all in "reconciling" these two fields. Whoever thinks one is exclusive of the other has clearly not understood what each term means.
I once did something slightly less damaging, but even so enough to give me an hours long headache. To put a long story short, let's say that having ALL files in your hard disk belonging to root.root is something you shouldn't wish to your worst enemy...
Copyright has worked well for over 200 years in this country.
And "copyrightlessness" worked well for over 10 thousand years in this world before that.
Songs, books, plays and even libraries existed and thrived millennia before anyone developed the bad notion of asking governments to grant monopoly rights on intellectual realizations. Will this change once these rights disappear, since everything that has a beginning has necessarily an end? No, intellectual productions will continue thriving just as before.
Copyright is nothing more than a side note on human history. Unneeded before it existed, annoying during its existence, unneeded after it ceases to exist. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is what I can't stand about science by press release (and yes, I'm a scientist). Pretty sweeping conclusion drawn from a miniscule sample size.
What I find worse than this is the lack of precision on the terms employed. The word "evolution", for example, usually mean speciation due to genetic variation resulting from adaptation to an environment via natural selection, ant this is what most people understand when they read the word. Thus, if what the article is talking about doesn't have all these characteristics, why employ this word?
Talk all you want about how humans have had lots of genetic variation, show how this is due do adaptive natural selection, if it in fact is, and maybe explain how it can lead to an evolution of the human species by someday causing speciation. But don't say it already is evolution, because it isn't.
True. From my experience, it seems normal people assume MP3 to mean "music player, version 3". So much that in the streets you see people selling not only "the new MP4 players" as well as the "brand new MP5 players!!!!". Sad but true.
We should revert the argument by requiring news reporting agencies to pay for facts. After all, one might argue, what they do is just sending people around to look and tell what they've seen. They don't "produce" anything! Is it fair that all the people who produced facts to be seen and told not be paid for them? And how about those photos of buildings? And of people walking on the street? All of them should be paid too! It's time we stop news reporting agencies from leeching the hard work of fact producers without paying back their fair share!
Me? Well, I grant any news reporting agency the right to look and tell anything about me not prohibited by law for free, provided such reportings about me are in their entirety freely available to news aggregators. Don't like it? Then please pay me $1000 per mention of any data directly related to me. Oh! And I accept PayPal!
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So, even if my Gmail account is lost, my job's IMAP is also lost, I do something really stupid in my home computer and either lose my mboxes here or upload corrupted files to S3, and my house burns down, I'll still have a good chance of recovering most, if not all, of my e-mails.
After losing two or three hard disks I learned to take backups seriously. Good thing it's easier now than when our only reasonably cheap option were 1.44 MB floppies.
The alternative is to talk about and, at best, compare dreams to see which one is more beautiful, if that much. Then we'll talk first about the nice communal life of dreams, where everyone works "according to their ability", getting "according to their needs", with the world in a perpetual peace, no class differences exist, nor division of labor, meaning someone can be a fisher at morning, an acclaimed painter after lunch, a distinguished thermonuclear engineer on weekends, etc. etc. etc. And when we're done talking about how beautiful the communist utopia is, we'll switch to discussing the beautiful, say, Islam utopia, where a worldwide caliphate under a sage leader rules the world, of which all evil was banished and peaces reign. Or maybe about the Christian utopia, or the fascist utopia, or the neoconservative utopia, or the hippie utopia, or the new age utopia, and so on and so forth, all of which have all world people living happy lives forever. In short: select your and dream and... happy dreams!
But what good is that in the real world? Here we have actual people doing actual things that oppose what other people would want to see accomplished. And if we're to talk about realities, the dreams must get out of the way. Here, the communist dream doesn't matter, except so far as a fact that it was in the minds of actual people who called themselves communists. And what happens here, what really defines "communism" as a term that applies to the real world, is what actual communists actually did to actual persons in actual places at actual, determined times.I didn't say you were. You just take, mistakenly, their utopic concept of what communism is as something deserving consideration in itself, what I don't. As for who they are, I can say that they're roughly 99% of all my colleagues at the Philosophy college where I'm getting my major. Now and then I help one or other to wake up and get out of the world of empty words they live in, but most of them prefer to keep dreaming. It's sad in fact. Good minds filled with garbage memes. But then, that's no wonder. Brazil is stuck on 1968. Except for technology improvements, 1969 and the following years are still non-events here.
On the subject of interesting articles, I love this one from 2004, by Mises Institute editor Jeffrey Tucker, where he explains why they allow everyone to download for free books which are under copyright, some of which they even had to pay the current copyright owners to be allowed to put online for free. In short: they understood that a book online is in fact an advertisement for the printed book, since most people prefer to have the real thing instead of reading on a CRT or LCD. Sure, he recognizes many people who download will never, ever, purchase printed copies. But then, who cares? The important thing is that the aggregate number of purchasers increase, what, to the amazement of the copyright owners to whom they paid for the right, in fact happened, with all of them seeing increased sales of the books available online. In any case, more people reading libertarian books means more libertarians on the long run. Thus, from all perspectives a win-win situation.
I strongly recommend reading the full text. It's really worth it.
The only problem in it, to be sure, is our left-wing ruling Worker's Party, which opposes agricultural business saying it's "too much capitalistic". It doesn't matter for them that our "evil capitalistic" agribusiness completely and absolutely ended hunger in the whole country. Our President is blinded by ideology and wants to redistribute even the productive lands to the small family farmers of the "landless movement", who'll be able to produce only 10% or less of what big agribusiness can. If this madman succeed, we'll see not only a huge rising in food prices, but also the return of hunger, all thanks to his socialism.
Which in fact is the usual result of socialism: inefficiency, misery, famine, lack of freedom, lack of sound reasoning. Yes, no surprise there indeed.
Lol. Let me summarize what goes on here:
a) There are those who are 'the correct', 'the good'.
b) There are those who are 'the wrong', 'the evil'.
c) Those in 'b' are perpetually opposed to those in 'a', and the other way around.
d) There will come a moment when 'a' will win their struggle against 'b'.
e) When that happens, 'b' will be punished and 'a' will live happily forevermore.
In Christianity (of the gnostic type, other kinds don't fit in this scheme), 'a' equals 'believers', and 'b' equals 'everyone else'.
In Fascism, 'a' = nationals, 'b' = foreigners.
In Nazism, 'a' = whites, 'b' = other races.
In Communism, 'a' = bourgeoisie, 'b' = proletariat.
That's why everyone who have understand both this side of the coin as well as the other side (which includes such mutually opposed thinkers as Nietzsche on one extreme, and Guénon/Voegelin/Mises on the other) see these movements as mere variations around the same theme. Communists are so used at arguing inside their specific frame of reference that they most of the time lose sight of the broader categories under which their thinking is conditioned.
Ah, yeah. The typical ideological discourse, I know. And yes, I mean "ideological" in the proper meaning of "false conscience", as a set of rationalizations to justify one's actions while hiding their true motivation. If you reach out it and look at what Marxists and socialists always actually did and do, historically, rather than what they said and say they're doing, it becomes pretty clear that this isn't the case at all. To be more clear, this is what really happened in all revolutions, and continues happening today:
When Europe entered the Modern Age, with the consolidation of the Nation States and the centralization of the power on the hands of the King, rather than distributed over a wide number of local powers (nobles), it became clear that the new centralized powers would need a huge number of public servants to help manage it. The kings started expanding existing Universities and building new ones as a means of training a new bureaucrat elite to handle the government under their orders. The upside of this strategy is that it worked: the kings got lots of efficient and loyal bureaucrats. The downside, not noticed at first, but increasingly evident, was that Universities, by their own nature, always produce more people with bureaucratic training than there are spots in the public service. This is a huge number of people who are trained to handle a government, but cannot do so for lack of opportunity, then go seek something else on which to work, but the whole time keep that desire to be in power. However, admitting this wish to be just that, greed for power, doesn't "feel right" to all those who consider themselves some kind of elite, rightfully superior to "those who are in charge of 'the system'".
So, what do they do? They start developing ideological discourses to justify their greed for power, of course! If you go see the actual list of people who did ALL, and I mean ALL revolutions, from the French one to the Russian, Chinese, Cuban etc. ones, what do you notice? First, that their file and rank are composed mostly by members of the virtual bureaucracy, and that the leaders are all 100% members of the virtual bureaucracy. Second, that it's done in name of another group, never in name of the virtual bureaucracy itself. Third, that no member of the group which is the alleged beneficiary of the revolution is present among the revolutionary leaders, much less among the governing class after the revolution is completed. Who were the bourgeois capitalists among the French revolutionary leaders, which made the revolution
And why didn't he talk about the future society? Because his method forbids it. If one believes (and this is just a belief, no matter how much one says it's a "science") that History unfolds in a dialectical pattern, then any attempt at guessing what comes two or three "steps" from now is in vain.
That's also the reason why even nowadays you cannot get an answer to this question from any leftist. All they "know" is that they must practice the "antithesis" of what currently exist (the "thesis"), that at some point both will be overcome by a "synthesis", which in turn will become a new "thesis" with its own "antithesis", to be overcome by a new "synthesis", and so on and so forth, until the "a new world is possible", whatever it is, comes to happen, and then there will be bliss everywhere for all of eternity.
Anyone who is a cynical and isn't a leftist can see that the Marxist "scientific" understanding of History is hardly more than a secular version of the belief in the monotheistic Heaven. You take what for Christians is "located in Eternity" and place it "in the Future", all the while identifying yourself as the chosen one whose destiny is helping it to happen. And since it's an undetermined future, thus something you can never know whether was or wasn't already reached, and if not, what's the distance between "now" and "then", what specifically still needs to be done, this results in that anything you wish can be put in that void.
That's why the typical communist will always say that a "communist society" never existed. Because the society he himself thinks should exist (the one he right now is thinking about, because tomorrow he might change his mind on some detail), that one isn't equal to any which actually existed, even when its founders called themselves communists. The ideal society of his dreams is always, by definition, "in the future". Always.
As such, he is always justified both in the acts he takes that he believes will bring "the future" to fruition, as well as in his criticism of other marxists whose acts don't (right now) fit nicely with his (own, personal) model.
Anything goes, literally.
Children working, and worse, working in harsh conditions, is despicable. It would be thousands time better if they hadn't to. But the thing is, children can only stop doing so once their parents start earning enough by themselves so that their children don't need to work anymore. And how do parents earn enough so that their children don't need to work anymore? Well, I'd say the best way to know is by studying the history of those countries where society managed to actually stop children labor.
There was a time when USA itself had children labor. How did you Americans stop that? I mean, in practice? Suggest Indonesia do to the same. The probability of it working in practice a second time, since it worked once, is huge.
And what was this way, you ask? I'll tell you: classic-liberal free-market capitalism.
It works. History offers the proof.
Wow! I wonder why you were moded troll. :-(
In any case, very well said. I couldn't agree more.
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What is there to not like in this? It's a simple, elegant and practical solution to this very real problem. Sure, it could have arrived earlier, but better later than never.
Compare this to the last bug I experienced in my Ubuntu desktop. Some months ago, an automatic kernel update was incompatible with my legacy nVidia driver (also Ubuntu-provided), resulting in my graphical environment being completely killed. Solving this in a pure text mode console wasn't difficult: a matter of browse a little in text mode with elinks, and then copying and pasting some apt-get, wget and dpkg commands. But for those less knowledgeable affected by it, it was a full stop on their usage of their computers.
Last week another problem happened with a broken security fix that also caused a similar problem, with lots of people being dropped outside their graphical environment for apparently no reason. This one was handled better, since the fix came with two additional automatic downloads over the next hours, and I myself wasn't hit by it because luckily enough my computer was powered off the whole incident, of which I only heard afterwards.
So, I don't think you can accurately compare this Apple incident with what a Linux desktop user is subjected to now and then. In Linux-land, when things break, they break in a REALLY spectacular way. In MacOS (and most of the time even Windows) this rarely is the case.
In any case, if you're wondering: I'm still a full time Ubuntu user. Little breakages now and then don't mean much to me. They're actually quite fun to deal with.
The sad thing is that I remember running Debian 1.x many years ago, and at that time fonts looked perfect in my then fvwm2-powered X-Window System, even TrueType ones, without the need of messing around with these confusing and meaningless Gnome font preferences.
Do you know when this font-blurring craziness began? For some reason I missed the transition, if there was one. All I know is that the font technology in X was good, and now it sucks...
To be more precise, you need tough, ruthless, "comfort is for sissies" guys to tame and mostly pacify a society as a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the soft, efficiency-minded, "me wants monies and beautiful shiny things" to start being viable. That's because it doesn't matter how much money you have, a bullet, or a sword, a knife, two strong hands at your throat... are still pretty efficient at finishing you. And those soft enough to be good at managing money, not weapons, can only do so when the risk of being killed is low. On the other hand, the tough ones don't need to be nice in any way to the soft as a means of acquiring what they want, just think "taxes".
So, no matter how mixed things seem to look like, the relationship between business and government is always one of complete and total submission. Violence (and the monopoly on violence) alway, by definition, controls wealth. The rich know this very well, and that's why they resort so much to bribing as a way to appease the actually powerful: because their only hope of continuing to be rich (and comfortable, and feeling important without actually doing what true power requires) is by making themselves, as they currently are, desirable to the powerful. Remove this factor and the powerful have no reason anymore to not just take what they want and be done with it.
Thank you posting some actual information on the subject. The common, "pop" understanding of the Galileo issue is completely innacurate as far as History is concerned.
At the time there were lots of people, including many Catholic priests, who understood it to make sense for the Earth to be going around the Sun, not the other way around. But they all agreed that they had NO WAY to prove it, what you can find even on the Preface to Copernicus' main work, "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", where his editor explains that the excellence of Copernicus theory is on his mathematics, and only in his mathematics, since we have no idea at all on what the actual physics of the "heavenly bodies" is.
What did they lack? Simply put, without Einstein's Relativity, i.e., within a purely Newtonian or pre-Newtonian physics, there's no reason for one to suppose a limit to speed to exist. So, you could perfectly imagine that the Earth was fixed in the middle, with the Sun moving around the Earth, the other planets moving around the Sun, and the stars moving around the whole system at trillions of miles per second. Why not? In fact, this was one among all of the theories at the time, and the one defended by none other than Tycho Brahe. You had many theories where things orbited around a fixed Earth, others where things orbited around a fixed Sun, others where some things orbited around the Earth while others orbited around the Sun, all mixed with different proposition about the orbits themselves: some understood them to be eliptycal, others that they were circular, others that you had complex movements composed of a mix of different circular orbits (kind of like a Fourier transform, but without the actual mathematical tool, since it was developed only 100 years later), and in this case different theories on whether these mixed orbits where purely centripetal, whether orbits crossed each other and etc. etc. etc. Galileo himself, for instance, knew the elyptical theories and rejected them based on the notion that circles were more beautiful...
The Church itself didn't mind any of this. Cardinal Belarmino, the inquisitor in Galileo's case, even wrote that the Earth running around the Sun wasn't a problem, that it if was proved to be the case, good, and if not, good too, since in itself the subject wasn't of much importance. The problem with Galileo, he explained, was that, although Galileo KNEW he couldn't PROVE the Sun was fixed in the middle and the planets ran in perfectly circular orbits around it, he STILL demanded everyone to accept this theory as being completely and absolutely true just because, and to reject all other theories also just because. In fact, it took about 200 years for the one predictable phenomenon on his theory (stellar paralaxys) to be actually observed, thus proving PART of it (that planets move around the Sun), all the while disproving everything else he demand everyone to agree on (that the Sun is fixed in the middle, and that orbits are perfectly circular).
So, once we analyse the matter with some fairness, we see that Belarmino was the one actually defending a sound scientific methodology and good intellectual judgment by not jumping to conclusions, while Galileo, on this matter, was the dogmatic guy. The popular misconception is a complete inversion of reality.
Not only that. He was a PERSONAL FRIEND of Pope Urban VIII, who was a long time ADMIRER of his work, and the guy who helped Galileo to not be fully punished by the inquisition, but to only be at house arrest. And this considering Galileo mocked Urban's speeches by putting them on "Simplicio's" (literally "simpleton's") mouth in his book "Dialogue Concerning the
Not really, or rather, it depends. There are basically two postures in philosophy of science. One is the so called "realist" position, which understands that unobservable conceptual entities (atoms, particles, DNA, space geometry, natural selection etc.) exist as stated by theory. At times when science is expanding in predictable ways and tons of news discoveries are being made and technologies built upon then, it's common for scientists to adopt it. On the other hand, there is also the so called "instrumentalist" position, which understand that these same unobservable conceptual entities, although in themselves useful because they aid research, are nevertheless pure tools, useful ways to describe real world phenomena, but whose actual existence we have no way to determine. This is an approach usually adopted by scientist themselves when lots of changes are happening too fast, and long established theories are going down fast while very strange alternatives are being simultaneously proposed.
A good argument in favor of realism is that usually theories lead to new discoveries that weren't predicted by them. The realist will argue like this: "See, if these things didn't exist, if they were merely an useful way to describe what we actually see, but not real in themselves, how would they lead to such new and unpredictable discoveries?" The instrumentalist will agree that it's really very nice when this happens, but he'll point that it nevertheless is a very rare event, so rare that it can be explained away by way of chance.
Myself, I think instrumentalism to be the most strictly rigorous way to look at science. The downside is that the "wow!" reaction we feel when reading about science comes from a realist approach to it, and thus, if you deny realism, you also end up denying this reaction.
Well, as far as technology goes, if you adopt instrumentalism you don't automatically link technological advancements to conceptual entities posed by scientific theories, taking both technology and science as independent fields, with science working "merely" as a very huge source of suggestions and insights upon which engineers can develop "actual" things. A realist, on the other hand, wouldn't accept this and say that, if technology works, and if it's based on some scientific theory, then that technology is an actual proof of the truth of that theory. To this an instrumentalist would answer that this isn't so, because many inventions in the past were based on wrong theories, and they nevertheless worked and kept working even as theories changed around them, with the new theories themselves having the trouble of taking into account the existing technology.
So, an instrumentalist would conclude, it's the other way around: technology comes first, then a scientific theories follows it, suggesting then new ways in which engineers should work, what leads to new technological discoveries, which in must be taken into account by new theories, and so on and so forth.
In regards to inventions or innovations brought about by theology or faith, if you're thinking about machines and the like, there aren't many, sure. But then, you won't find theology or faith much interested in material matters, so this isn't really a surprise. On the other hand, however, on the fields where theology and faith have practical as well as theoretical applications, such as social organization, interpersonal relations, techniques of discourse, pure mathematics, pure logics etc., then you'll find a very extensive list of innovations and even, yes, inventions. They're just on different fields than those where science operates. And in some case, such as the many Middle Age advances in logics, they are t
No, my friend. It's an assumption, or an axiom, if you prefer. In any case, something you either "accept", or don't. Now, exchange the word "accept" for one of its synonyms ("belief", "trust", "faith" etc.) and you'll see where's the problem. Waving it away won't do it, sorry.
What would scientists do if, say, a political movement grew around the idea of "separation between science and state", arguing that the scientific method is just a philosophical concept, and thus the government, since it must be neutral, must therefore refrain from placing public money at the service of any specific philosophy, be it through teaching to children, be it through officially-sponsored research?
My bet is that scientists wouldn't take it lightly. And were they in sufficient numbers, and with sufficient political power, and the "anti-science" folk growing in numbers by leaps and bounds, who can say the scientists wouldn't pursue a more... definitive... solution to the problem? Knowing human nature, I surely won't say they wouldn't.
"For each 'n' in the range 1 to 'p', 'X' said on occasion 'On' he would do 'Yn' at moment 'Mn'."
"For each 'n' in the range 1 to 'p', 'X' actually did 'Yn' at moment 'Mn'."
"Therefore, 'X' is faithful."
Going on the other direction, one can hardly ignore that logic is "believed in" because we trust what, to our eyes, looks like absolutely undeniable a priori evidence: the implicit connection between logical statements. Meaning, when we say:
"All men are mortal."
"Socrates is a man."
"Therefore, Socrates is mortal."
We "trust" (have faith) in the meaning of the words "man", "men", "Socrates", "mortal", "is", "are" etc. to remain the same from one instant in time to the next, and thus for the 3rd sentence to be saying something valid and actually contained in the two previous sentences. In other words, for logic itself to be possible we must first have "faith on it".
As you see, either by going the more abstract path of a "logic of faith", or the more subjective one of our "faith on logic", or even by following both, there's no difficulty at all in "reconciling" these two fields. Whoever thinks one is exclusive of the other has clearly not understood what each term means.
I once did something slightly less damaging, but even so enough to give me an hours long headache. To put a long story short, let's say that having ALL files in your hard disk belonging to root.root is something you shouldn't wish to your worst enemy...
Songs, books, plays and even libraries existed and thrived millennia before anyone developed the bad notion of asking governments to grant monopoly rights on intellectual realizations. Will this change once these rights disappear, since everything that has a beginning has necessarily an end? No, intellectual productions will continue thriving just as before.
Copyright is nothing more than a side note on human history. Unneeded before it existed, annoying during its existence, unneeded after it ceases to exist. Nothing more, nothing less.
Talk all you want about how humans have had lots of genetic variation, show how this is due do adaptive natural selection, if it in fact is, and maybe explain how it can lead to an evolution of the human species by someday causing speciation. But don't say it already is evolution, because it isn't.
True. From my experience, it seems normal people assume MP3 to mean "music player, version 3". So much that in the streets you see people selling not only "the new MP4 players" as well as the "brand new MP5 players!!!!". Sad but true.
We should revert the argument by requiring news reporting agencies to pay for facts. After all, one might argue, what they do is just sending people around to look and tell what they've seen. They don't "produce" anything! Is it fair that all the people who produced facts to be seen and told not be paid for them? And how about those photos of buildings? And of people walking on the street? All of them should be paid too! It's time we stop news reporting agencies from leeching the hard work of fact producers without paying back their fair share!
Me? Well, I grant any news reporting agency the right to look and tell anything about me not prohibited by law for free, provided such reportings about me are in their entirety freely available to news aggregators. Don't like it? Then please pay me $1000 per mention of any data directly related to me. Oh! And I accept PayPal!