I disagree. It’s mainly a long-term social area for three or four people talking informally and sometimes intelligently about many different topics, and not in a way that touches on philosophy, sociology, or other disciplines. This is not really a criticism, but it does mean that it doesn’t belong in the main area.

I moved it to the Lounge because it’s more of a chat than a focused philosophical discussion.

It's not nearly as intense, however, as using 'I' as object of a preposition. "This means so much to John and I!" Urrgghhh! If John were out of the picture, would you say "This means so much to I!" ? Or the phrase "try and" instead of "try to". — Vera Mont

I agree with you about “John and I”, but not about “try and”. In my opinion, “try and” is much smoother and more stylish. And it’s totally standard, in fact probably older than “try to”.

Not only do infinitive verbs not require to, but and is a long-established partner in the same position—that is, between a verb and an infinitive following it. The construction has been around since the 13th century, when it mostly occurred with infinitives following begin, take, go, and come. Today it's used with go and come ("Go and ask them," "Come and see"), as well as with other verbs: "Wait and let me finish," "Stop and chat for a while." — Merriam-Webster

Oxford and other dictionaries also treat it as standard (in case you think this is an American eccentricity).

Yep, I felt the same and actually gave up in the first few pages. Then I went back to it a week or two later. It was worth it.

I hope you can go there one day. I think you would like it, as well as Cantabria, their brothers. Santander, Pola de Siero, Avilés, etc. are top cities, but underrated by the public in general. — javi2541997

I dream of doing a cycle tour around the region over a period of weeks.

You must be right about the reasons it isn’t a popular travel destination. The Mediterranean is pretty special and the cold rough Atlantic is no good for beach holidays. The wet weather, of course, is the reason it’s so green and beautiful.

I know that 1Q84 is not your cup of tea. But, trust me when I say that Murakami has books which are worth reading. — javi2541997

I did like parts of it, so I haven’t given up on Murakami entirely.

Asturias (Northern Spain) — javi2541997

I was curious so I googled it. It looks incredible. I don’t know how I managed to live in Spain and not know anything about the region. I must go some day.

PS. I’ve read 1Q84, the only Murakami I’ve read. I have things to say about it but I won’t while praxis is enjoying it.

Nova
by Samuel R. Delany — Pantagruel

What do you think? Here’s what I thought (but I’d avoid reading this review if you haven’t finished it)…

First I liked it, then I disliked it, and finally I liked it a lot. It’s a really odd book, not in a “weird fiction” way or because it’s unconventional, but in the way it manages to (or attempts to) be both conventional and unconventional, to be pulpy Golden Age SF while at the same time transcending or parodying that genre. Or maybe the word is appropriating: it appropriates SF tropes to explore wider questions about storytelling, art, language, and culture, and also to take the genre away from its white American traditions (Delany is American but his Earth locations and future cultures are not—only the antagonists represent the WASP aristocracy).

But if you focus mainly on the plot it sometimes feels like a contrived, hokey pulp adventure, with shallow characters, bad dialogue, and a dash of made-up physics. I think that’s why I was in two minds about it, until the metanarrative came to the fore in the last act. Which is not to say that the last act is the best or that the preceding stuff is all bad, just that it made me reassess the whole book following my hasty negative assessment when I was in the middle.

In its far-future world-building, it has some great ideas. Some of the most interesting:

• Tarot card reading is respectable, and it’s the scepticism about it that’s regarded as simplistic, superstitious, and a relic of the ignorant past.
• Personal cleanliness is a thing of the past now that contagious infection has been wiped out.
• The vast majority of people are cyborgs with sockets that enable them to plug into various tech like spaceships, production lines, and drilling machines. (This idea has been very influential, though whether it was entirely original I’m not sure).
• This allows Delany to imagine a society that, while still capitalist and socially stratified, has banished alienation and to some extent the division of labour, giving everyone job-satisfaction and self-respect by restoring craftsmanship to the individual.
• But he presents conservative arguments against this state of affairs, which now seem prescient, viz., that the freedom and mobility of workers leaves them unmoored from tradition and community (arguments that he proceeds to knock down).
• Earth and its sphere of influence are reactionary and still ethnically divided, while the breakaway colonies of the Pleiades are revolutionary (though in the bourgeois rather than socialist sense), liberal, and ethnically mixed.

Beyond those purely science fiction ideas, Delany also uses his characters to comment on the novel itself (that is, Nova) and to explore his own artistic personality. The battle between the hero and villain is paralleled by a metanarrative conflict between two other characters, one, Katin, who is writing a novel, and another, “the Mouse”, who is a kind of musician or multisensory entertainer. Katin is an intellectual concerned with permanent artistic legacy, and the Mouse is only interested in moving people sensually and in the moment. This has the effect of creating a two-sided novel, with action on one side and commentary on the other, formally revolving around the idea of the Grail narrative and themes of revolution and rebirth.

The writing itself, I was again in two minds about. It’s slapdash and yet full of energy, confusing yet sometimes stunningly effective and original. The flashback sections set in Istanbul, Paris, and Athens, are immensely involving and evocative, but at other times I couldn’t keep track of exactly what was happening, who was standing where, what kind of place the characters were in, why he just said that, etc. I put this down to Delany’s youthful exuberance (he wrote it in his twenties) and sloppiness rather than my inability to read experimental literature, but I could be wrong—or it could be both.

Some of the dialogue seems awkward, the subject-object-verb dialect of the Pleiades can be annoying and unconvincing (and unfortunately now brings to mind Yoda), the antagonist is an unrealistic camp villain, and exposition is dumped on the reader in an unsubtle way. But focusing on these criticisms is probably to miss the point: it’s not a realist novel (although it does have excellent realist sections, such as the party in Paris) so much as a playful meta-romp. I particularly appreciated the way that the metanarrative aspect of the novel, rather than dropping away in the final denouement as you might expect from the shape of the plot and the conventions of popular fiction, actually ramps up towards the end.

Close to the end, the character Katin says something that might be straight from young Delany himself:

Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.

In summary: :100: :confused: :starstruck: :nerd: :cool:

Currently reading Triton by Samuel R. Delany.

The actions of vile human beings like Maggie Thatcher created as many, if not more socialists in Scotland and elsewhere, than any British socialist leader I have heard of.

There is also the famous line of "The most effective way to convert a Christian to atheism, is to get them to actually read the bible." — universeness

Thatcher helped to destroy the labour movement and accelerate the decline and disappearance of socialism as a credible challenge, and oversaw the move to the financialization and neoliberalism that we have today, and which remains almost totally unchallenged. Thatcher —> capitalist realism.

Not only that, but she enticed millions of people away from socialism and organised labour, e.g., with the Right to Buy legislation.

It might be personally comforting to think that Thatcher’s policies backfired by radicalizing the working class, rather in the way that tsar Nikolai’s intransigence helped to bring about the Russian Revolution, but except in isolated cases that represented the last gasp of the political working class (the miners’ strike), that’s not the legacy. She certainly produced a lot of resentment, but it was and remains a resigned and inactive kind of resentment.

EDIT: On the other hand, Thatcher might have helped to instil or maintain a broadly left of centre tradition in Scotland in particular, so maybe there’s a kernel of truth in what you say.

Personally I’m ok with “limey”, but Baden won’t be, since it applies only to Brits.

The most convenient term is the people of the Anglo-Celtic North Atlantic Archipelago.

Supermarket music — Vera Mont

In my middle age I have begun to positively enjoy shop and restaurant music. When it’s good I enjoy it because it’s good, and when it’s bad it amuses me and gives me something to wryly rant about. It’s the same as the enjoyment of watching a bad film.

On the whole though, this attitude of mine is driven by a spirit of determination to enjoy things about the world that I don’t really like, but cannot change.

Soundtracks so loud you can't hear the dialogue. — Vera Mont

Agreed. I watch most films with subtitles these days, even when it’s in English. I don’t think this is entirely due to age-related hearing loss, but I guess that’s part of it. Relatedly: annoying and unnecessary background music in documentaries and YouTube videos.

Just thought of another one: people who put on the car radio very quiet just so that there’s some background music to stave off their dark existential angst.

And people who put the TV on when there’s nothing they particularly want to watch and you’re trying to have a conversation.

Just my browser? — Banno

Possibly. It’s working normally for me.

Because of the unusual concentration of bellends no doubt.

Bellicism — T Clark

You've taught me a new word. Thanks. — T Clark

Yeh it’s good to have an -ism for it, to oppose to pacifism, but most often the more common bellicosity is probably better.

Wasn’t me, but it looks interesting, so I’ve added it to the list :up:

The author does not say that synthetic a priori knowledge makes experience possible, but that it pertains to the formal cognitive structures that make experience possible.

So it's consistent with what you say here:

[synthetic a priori knowledge] gives us (makes possible) a lot of human knowledge (mathematical, geometrical, and metaphysical judgments, etc.). — KantDane21

:up:

Note: I wrote it some time around 2010, not 2020 as it says there.

I look forward to that!

And it’s probably about time that I responded to your monster post.

Thanks for reading.

Note that the link is now down and perhaps the domain needs to be renewed — Leontiskos

Yes, I let the articles site lapse since nobody ever sent in a suitable article; there was only that one by me. Maybe I'll just re-publish it within this site somehow, although I no longer stand by it entirely: I think I may have made a couple of stupid mistakes of argumentation, and it's probably a bit shallow.

(Note that I've edited your post to remove the broken link)

:up:

Do your posts go to the "drafts" even after posting them? — javi2541997

They shouldn't.

I mean, when I post a comment in a discussion, it is also being kept in the drafts. I answered to Tom Storm in a discussion and curiously such reply went to the draft too. Like if I never posted it when I actually did. — javi2541997

In the first sentence here, you imply that this has happened a lot. Is this true, or did it just happen in the one instance you then describe?

Sounds like a glitch, to do with an intermittent and interrupted connection.

I'm enjoying it a lot. It's more New Wave than Golden Age, but it has a lot of the classic SF stuff like FTL travel and galactic empires.

No, it's my first, and I intend to read more of his work. I'll probably avoid Hogg though.

Nova by Samuel R. "Chip" Delany.

Thanks Russ :up:

I was willing to move on, but now that you’re arguing…

Within the text of yours that I quoted—text that is presented as yours and is at least partly or mostly yours—you did embed sentences and fragments of sentences that you copied from a book. That’s plagiarism. But it’s no problem if you make the quotations obvious in future.

:up:

Actually though…

I will be more careful in the future — RussellA

I hope this doesn’t mean you’re just going to plagiarize more skilfully. :wink:

Many philosophers believe that the first task is finding a theory of meaning in language. Given such a theory, they can then turn to the problems of philosophy. However, for Wittgenstein, whose first interest is in philosophy, it is this interest in philosophy that makes him then interested in language, but concludes that there is no theory of meaning in language that will enable the solving of philosophical problems. It is incorrect to say that Wittgenstein is an ordinary language philosopher in the sense that JL Austin is.

Wittgenstein urges throughout his later work that mistaking a grammatical claim for a philosophical one is a common source of philosophical confusion, Wittgenstein says that the philosophical problems that concern him are not empirical problems, but are problems solved by looking into and recognizing the workings of our language.

Wittgenstein often insists that he is not presenting a philosophical argument. In PI 109 he writes "We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place", whereby such descriptions get that purpose from philosophical problems.

For Wittgenstein, a standing source of philosophical confusion is the tendency to transpose a remark concerning the grammar of an expression into a substantive claim about the things referred to in the expression. For example, from PI 246 is the sentence “Only I can know that I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it”. This is clearly false, as that on many occasions we can know full well that someone else is in pain, there is no surmising about it. The grammatical difference between the first person "I have a pain" and the third person "he has a pain" wrongly becomes a substantive philosophical problem

For Wittgenstein the first step is to acknowledge the confusion between statements of grammatical fact and the use of them in the search for substantive philosophical meaning. — RussellA

Please make it clear when you are quoting from a book.

Parking lot?

I’m not sure they sound English, even though they were.

So when I said that sometimes I feel that Cardiacs are too English, I meant something quite specific. An aesthetic shared by Cardiacs, XTC, Monty Python, Genesis, the Clash and the Carry On films.

:up:

Simple!

Imagine not being English and someone doesn’t understand you when you say you’re not English, and you’ll understand why people who are not English insist on not being referred to as English.

Scotland, England, and Wales are neighbouring countries, and together with Northern Ireland make up the United Kingdom.

Scotland, England, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, also known as Britain.

England is the biggest country in Britain but is not synonymous with it, therefore “English” is not the same as “British”. To be English means to be from England, to be Scottish to be from Scotland.

Among Americans, Russians, and much of the rest of the world, English is used casually as a synonym for British, so if there are no Scottish or Welsh people around it’s probably acceptable.

And I’m not explaining it again.

:chin: — Noble Dust

I thought you were implying that I’m English.

I feel the same, although of course I'm not English — Noble Dust

I’m not English either, although I do have close connections.

I'm sure I've posted Oceansize many times here, but do you know them — Noble Dust

I think that was the band you posted a couple of years ago that seemed a bit too late nineties or early 2000s for my taste. I do like the bits that show the Cardiacs influence, and that Sleeping Dogs one is probably the best track I’ve heard from them, although I’m still not completely into the sound.

Have I posted Cardiacs before? I’ve been trying to like Cardiacs for years, and I’m pretty sure I’ll get there. Right now though, it seems to me they’re too English, too silly, too punk, too Monty Python. But I’m trying. I know there’s much more to them than that, musically, conceptually, lyrically, stylistically.

My way in to Cardiacs was the beautiful guitar solo in the song R.E.S. It happens at about 3 minutes and it’s incredible.

Then I grew to love the whole piece.