• Culture is critical
    The rise of progressive liberalism? — praxis

    I don't know what that means. I can look up the definition of each word, but that doesn't help to decipher the sentence.
    I think it would take more than a contrived ‘culture war’ to instigate an actual civil war. — praxis

    Would all those guns and death-threats bring it any closer? How about the assassination of judges and senators? Tearing up the constitution? Dismantling the federal government? A better organized attack on the Capitol?

    The funny thing economically is that Bidenomics has been more successful in reviving the industrial sector than Trump was, so in a practical (rather than cultural) sense a large portion of Trump’s base should be supporting Biden. — praxis

    The rank-and-file are not interested in economics. Are not informed about economics. They're it it for the slogan. The overweight undereducated white men are terrified of losing their ascendancy; many white people are afraid of becoming submerged in a population of darker hues; many urban people are afraid of replacement by automated modern industry; many rural people are afraid of becoming outmoded, irrelevant. Any far-right figurehead who assures them that they are important, valued, worthy of ruling the world the way they imagine they used to, will be followed. Trump had a particularly strong effect on them because of the frequent noisy rallies, his vulgar familiarity and his howling, spitting anger he expressed toward all the icons he himself had embodied: rich east coast frat boys. All he had to do is promise to bring back industry and mining and American superiority - he didn't need to do anything about it.
  • What if the big bang singularity is not the "beginning" of existence?
    Is "I have no frickin clue." an acceptable answer? I'm pretty sure it's the only true one.
  • Culture is critical
    For decades now, I suppose, north of the US border must feel like living above a freaking noisy meth lab — 180 Proof

    We have our home-grown malcontents, wingnuts and tearers-down. But the splash-over doesn't help. (At least we got some pretty good new citizens through northward drift - though you got a lot more of our drifters, for good or ill.)
  • Culture is critical
    Trump not only uses these people for votes and cash, but I seriously wonder if one of Trump’s multiple personalities actually wants to start a civil war.
    Especially now that he probably feels persecuted; I fear he wants a bloodbath.     — 0 thru 9

    The Trump anomaly is a symptom, not the disease or the cause. All he, as a deeply disturbed individual, wants is attention - all of it, all the time, by any means - and he's getting it whether he succeeds or fails in his aspirations, whether he steals from a city or a charity, whether he keeps a promise to his allies or throws them under buses, whether he gets legislation passed or vetoes it, whether he supports or opposes the constitution, whether he commits misdemeanors, of felonies or treason, whether he faces prosecution or evades it.
    Whether he wants a war - class, civil or foreign - is immaterial. It's going to happen, because that's the inevitable devolution of events from 1963 to the present.
    Trump could never have been able to get the first nomination, had the GOP not reached that level of jingoism, corruption and craven conformity. He could not have stirred up the yahoos at his rallies, had they not already been mustered and enraged by a long line of his predecessors. He could not have squeaked through that election, had the voting procedures not already been fatally compromised by state level tampering.
    Everything, at least from the Kennedy assassination, through the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Viet Nam war has been leading up to a Trump or something like him. If he drops dead tomorrow, or is incarcerated (as any other citizen with his record would have been, years ago) or withdraws from politics, it will make no difference to the march of events.
  • Science is not "The Pursuit of Truth"
    "Science" is an abstraction. Right?

    It's people who pursue truths. Scientific or otherwise. Right?     — wonderer1

    I keep floating that one, with little success. People insist on anthropomorphizing abstract ideas; insisting that religion "says" or science "does" something, as if these concepts had volition and agency. It can become very confusing when coupled with with other big abstract ideas like Truth and Knowledge. You can almost see them pricked out in stars in the night sky: Science in Pursuit of Truth, an eternally incomplete pass.
  • Science is not "The Pursuit of Truth"
    Some sentences are true. — Banno

    Yes, if the words they contain actually convey the meaning which is both intended and apprehended.
    This is why I'm particular about the use of large, comprehensive words in small, factual sentences. Since those big concepts contain so many possible specifics, the hearer can all to easily interpret a sentence as saying something quite different from what the speaker meant.
  • Science is not "The Pursuit of Truth"
    ↪Banno
    Truth and knowledge are very large concepts that can be subdivided into an infinite number of smaller parts that also have the same word attached to them. I know when my corn chowder is ready, but I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of soups, even less of culinary arts, and less still foodstuffs. It's true that the date where I live is either 2023 - 10-20 or the twentieth of October in the year twenty twenty-three CE, but I don't know how true or faithful this calendar is to the solar year, and I certainly am not in possession of the ultimate truth about Time.
    All I can gather these little discrete pieces of true knowledge called facts, to form a mental mosaic of reality which is my provisional, malleable knowledge of the world.
  • Science is not "The Pursuit of Truth"
    "organise facts" that were not true. — Banno
    And here I was, thinking words had meanings.

    Oxford: fact /fak(t)/
    noun
    a thing that is known or proved to be true.
  • Science is not "The Pursuit of Truth"
    Science does nothing at all. Science is the acquisition, verification and organization of facts regarding properties of the material world. (And I doubt there is such an entity as 'the truth').
  • Culture is critical
    I speak of democracy. — Athena

    Yes, often. But not regions, as a rule.

    Despite all the human faults of Athens, it was the beginning of science and democracy, rule by reason. — Athena

    What makes you think that?

    It is the concept of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe, and our ability to discover logos, universal laws, and figure out how to live with those laws and improve our lives. — Athena

    Yes, you often speak of that, too. But I don't think it sits on an American board of education or the electoral college.

    We are not living with the fear of people we know starving to death in the long winter months. — Athena

    Not you and I, maybe, but according to the UN many are.
    Each day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes. Some 854 million people worldwide are estimated to be undernourished, and high food prices may drive another 100 million into poverty and hunger. The risks are particularly acute among those who must spend at least 60 per cent of their income on food: the urban poor and displaced populations, the rural landless, pastoralists and the majority of smallholder farmers.
    Yes, in America, too.
    And it's all about money, not democracy.

    Do you have anything to say about how military technology changed education and how bureaucratic technology increases the power of government to control our lives or what abundance and security has done to how we think? — Athena
    Nope. America was always aggressive; never in its whole history at peace for more than 15 years. The military technology advanced right along with the industrial might, and education was always aimed at what kind of work-force was required by industry and what kind of mindset was required for war. The landowners and bosses have always controlled people's lives as they also controlled government. That the bureaucracy and education were upgraded to fit into the post-war world order led by the US is a natural byproduct of geopolitical change.

    Abundance and security, in the pockets where it existed, while it lasted, did affect how people think: it tends to make them more open-minded, tolerant and liberal. But one good scare - just throw a couple of planes at a financial institution's urban monolith - can undo a whole lot of progress.
  • Culture is critical
    Future generations will prevent such dry rot getting hold in the first place, at least better than your or my generations where able to. But I think we did, and continue to do ok, all things considered. — universeness
    *sigh*
  • Culture is critical
    You tire too easily Vera. — universeness

    It's nothing to do with my energy level. When the structural elements are riddled with dry rot, I don't waste my time plastering the walls.

    'Better,' is always within the realms of human aspiration. — universeness

    Sure. Aspire away!
    Even members of different animal species can bond, and make new relationships, unlike any that have gone before: — universeness

    And that's due to evolution, is it?
  • Culture is critical
    I have described to you a political system that could change this. — universeness

    As have I and many others before us. It sounds good, and then it is either snuffed in infancy or else corrupted in its early youth. So far. Maybe next time, it'll be different and the pigs really will fly.

    You keep offering examples of the way things were or are and seem so ossified in your insistence that this status quo is utterly immutable, which to me seems irrational, — universeness
    Given the actual facts on the actual ground, it seems rational to me.
    This house is beyond repair, beyond restoration. It needs to be bulldozed before a new and better house can be built on the site.
    Note that aggression and predation have persisted all these millions of years; the lion may lie down with the lamb - inside him. The single hope for our future is that human social and economic arrangements no longer defer to nature or evolution.

    Do we have to keep insisting that this guy or gal did a thing and just keep ignoring all the others involved or the previous work they were/are so utterly dependent on? — universeness
    I can't observe what and whether we "have to" or "will always"; only what has been done and what is done.
    Carl Sagan was a fantastic influencer — universeness
    He evidently inspired you. Yet I do not see the world much changed in his wake.
    Carl and I are equal in status, — universeness
    Insofar as your impact on the future, probably.
  • Culture is critical
    To me, each such person is more valuable than most Kings, Popes, Messiahs, or Elon Musks, — universeness

    More valuable and infinitely less influential.
    About 50% of any modern economy rubs on unpaid labour, one way or another: volunteers, students, neighbours, friends, family, all helping one another out or contributing to the community's welfare. None of these people set the nation's economic policy. No business could operate without all the conscientious employees, who do the best work they can, whether they're properly compensated or not. None of those employees have a say in corporate decisions.
    It's the generals and presidents and Ceo's who get commemorative portraits in ugly gilt frames, prominently displayed in marble foyers, or heroic statues in public squares. They run the world. The helping and working people might be given a plaque next to a doorway, or a dusty photograph in a school library. They keep the world running.
  • Culture is critical
    What do think of this short speech from the film Gettysburg? — universeness

    I'm sure many people did believe all that. Some of the commanders were patriots, idealists, and even competent commanders - some always are, on every side. And most of the troops very probably did believe it - they always do, on every side.
    They were largely ignorant of the economic reasons for war, and entirely unaware of its consequences. They could not know what their leaders would eventually make of their sacrifice or their victory. For sure, the average citizen of the North was burdened less by the costs of that war than citizens of the South, who carried that greater burden much longer. Hence the lasting resentment. That, and the Reconstruction Acts - which, incidentally, don't mean reconstructing the shattered social and economic system in the Confederate states, but military occupation and imposed new constitutions.
    So there was really never any healing of the so-called Union.
    But the armies didn't know any of this. They went where they were led and did what they were ordered to do.
  • Culture is critical
    I Corinthians 13:12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
    Or maybe the movie about a girl going mad.

    ↪universeness

    No empire is meant to last forever. A century is short by Roman and British standards, but then, the US republic has done pretty well, considering
    The Liberty Bell
    It speaks of the rights and freedoms valued by people the world over. Particularly forward thinking were Penn's ideas on religious freedom, his liberal stance on Native American rights, and his inclusion of citizens in enacting laws....
    The cause of the break is thought to have been attributable either to flaws in its casting or, as they thought at the time, to its being too brittle.... the final expansion of the crack which rendered the Bell unringable was on Washington's Birthday in 1846.
  • Culture is critical
    What have you read? This is a sincere question because when people disagree it is usually because their sources of information are different. — Athena

    All those sources I cited in the first umpteen pages of this thread, from different time periods and regions.
    the region we are talking about could be important. — Athena
    You have mainly talked about the whole nation - as if it were one country, rather than four or six.

    There are samples of stories passed down the ages that are the foundation of our culture, and important people of the past and that time in history are mentioned along with passages about the constitution and liberty. — Athena

    I believe you. Propaganda of then and propaganda of now are not substantially different: the Great Men, the Great Wars; the Great Achievements. Monuments, flags and marching songs. But the constitution is fatally flawed, and the much-touted liberty is limited to the privileged, even now; it was even more so, in those good old days.

    As I've mentioned before, at its beginning, American democracy looked a lot like Athenian democracy: open to 10-20% of the population; caste, class, exclusion and bondage enshrined in law. It had not become substantially different by 1885. Those textbooks may have conned Americans into the "La-and of the free and the hooome of - the - brave" illusion, but this was not the reality for children in the fields and sweatshops, nor their mothers in the slum food deserts, nor their fathers sweating in the mines, even less so, for the chain gangs of men serving ten years for vagrancy.
    The children who did have access to a decent school, with books, grew up to create the depression and Hoovervilles. They went on to accept internment camps and seizure of fellow citizens' property for having the wrong ancestors. They did not grow up to vote for universal suffrage, the right to unionize, nor equal rights for Indians... nor anything particularly democratic.
    You say they were educated for democracy. So -- why had it still not happened by the mid 20th century?

    The US adopted both the German bureaucratic model and the education model and now it is what it defended its democracy against. — Athena
    You probably wouldn't have liked losing to Germany, either. If you want to be a wealthy, powerful nation, you have to be ruthless. Very few strategies are available.

    Reactionary politics, and everywhere a growing brutality — Athena
    You can't trace that to 1958. There were a few different decades between Eisenhower and Reagan. And, really, I can't see how US education is messing with Danish heads. The plutocrats have been at the helm and that, up ahead, is the Designated Iceberg.
  • Culture is critical
    The Glasgow in Nova Scotia is on my travel 'must go see' list. Have you ever been? — universeness

    Not there, no. Never did get to Nova Scotia. We saw the Bay of Fundy from the other side, watched that crazy tide come ripping in one morning. Had to cut our road trip short because my dog was ill - fatally, as it turned out, so I'm glad we brought her home. Saw a fair bit of Quebec and New Brunswick on that trip. Spent a short time in Newfoundland years before. Loved it.
  • Culture is critical
    At least (I can be assured, I think) that you will never wear a maga cap and go vote for trump (if he is still around) at the next USA election. — universeness

    I don't even live in that unfortunate, hag-ridden country. Of course, we have our home-grown right-wingnuts, anti-vaxxers, etc., as well as the imported agitators. A corrupt fathead is Premier of my province, with a majority, busily tearing down the social safety net it took three generations to construct. Construction is slow and hard; destruction is fast and easy. That's why we have longish periods - decades, even - of optimistic improvement: they act like civilized apes, only impeding social progress by legitimate means, bide their time until we've produced enough good for them to harvest.
    Or, they used to. Now, there is a closing panic: they've gone mad; can't wait another cycle to consume whatever there still is.
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    You kid, right? — baker

    Wrong! Wealth-accumulation is for assholes like Musk.
    So what do people in those "more equal" societies do with all that social trust, health, wellbeing, etc.? What do they use them for? There has to be some purpose to them. — baker

    They're healthier and happier than the striving, climbing, back-stabbing people. Plus, they're not so assholish. They seem be okay with that.

    Like I've been saying all along: It is my understanding that passages like the one quoted from Smith are meant to be taken as instructions, in an ideological sense, not as descriptions based on empirical observations. — baker
    AKA wishful thinking.
  • Culture is critical
    Most didn't know enough about it and the nefarious didn't ever care enough about it. — universeness

    1896 Arrhenius publishes first calculation of global warming from human emissions of CO2.
    Geneva, 13 September 2022 (WMO press release) - Climate science is clear: we are heading in the wrong direction, according to a new multi-agency report coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which highlights the huge gap between aspirations and reality.

    There are no 'nefarious'. There are world leaders, statesmen, economists, captains of industry and job creators. And there is 'progress'. Luddites, go home!

    It's the most recent in a string of defeats to aggressive climate action that stretches back more than 25 years.

    the majority of the population were not informed enough to take serious enough action in response. — universeness
    How come you and I knew? I heard it on ordinary popular broadcast media and read it in news magazines - not privileged scientific communiques. In fact, Sagan said it on popular media. Once there was internet, information was readily available. Scientists' warnings were regularly on the evening news.
    But there was a catch: in order to avoid the predicted bad outcome, they would have had to give up a convenience or two. It was easier to listen to the deniers.
    Especially when denial became official public policy.
    Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the agency in charge of setting conservation policy and enforcing environmental laws in the state, issued directives in 2011 barring thousands of employees from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming”
    You are struggling as best you can, for the sake of all of us, yes? — universeness

    Hell, no! All of yous are on your own.
    Are you not still a secular democratic socialist? — universeness
    Nope. Cynical, burnt-out iconoclast.
  • Culture is critical
    I totally agree with you that we should not add to those threats or exacerbate them — universeness

    Too late! Somebody should have warned us sooner.

    It would be more useful imo, if you spoke/typed in ways that encouraged others to be in favour and actively support that pursuit, — universeness
    Been there. Done that. Carry the scars.
  • Culture is critical
    The vast majority of the human cities currently existing on this planet, were not bombed today!
    The vast majority of humans currently alive today were not raped, shot or slaughtered today!
    Most of the human nations/tribes of the world are not currently at war today!     — universeness

    Attach any date, in recorded or unrecorded history so far, and this would be true.

    Today, the vast majority of the population of the planet, human and every other species, is in imminent danger of being incinerated by nuclear devices.
    Today, the vast majority of humans and other animals on the planet is in danger of being killed or injured or displaced by climate events.
    Today, the vast majority of fish and birds and animals on the planet is at risk of poisoning or illness via human waste.

    This would only have been true of any date since Oct. 16, 1962 CE and is more true every day since.
  • Are you against the formation of a techno-optimistic religion?
    Like money, technology is good servant. Like domesticated animals, technology can be a good teammate. Neither would make a suitable master, let alone object of awe and reverence.
    On the whole, I think reason is a better guide to living well than spirituality.
  • Culture is critical
    This prepared the young for life and self-government and was along the lines of liberal education. — Athena

    I still don't agree. According to what I've read, American education before that act, followed by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, finally made some semblance of an academically rounded education possible for the majority of students. (Except where nobbled by state law and disabled by religious segregation.)
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better was published in 2009. Written by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the book highlights the "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption". It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.
  • If only...
    Are you talking about the purgatory for people who were bad while on Earth? — L'éléphant

    I was only talking about Paradise. Purgatory is all of this.

    Anyway, my ideal place actually existed years ago. — L'éléphant

    And that's what I mean by a place for which we feel homesick - a place where we found happiness. It doesn't seem to take very much, does it?
  • If only...
    I guess this thread should really have been about happiness. English - or, for that matter, Japanese or Canadian or Estonian countryside can inspire happiness, as
    ↪Nils Loc
    recalls. My own fantasy island was quite real: Montserrat in the 1970's - long before the volcanic eruption - two weeks of feeling completely at ease, completely at home.

    Inside spaces can do it, too. I have a book of architecture by Christopher Day called Places of the Soul and I know what he means. I also have an image of happy people in my head: three men raising the main beam of a storage shed with just ropes and a pulley. The challenge itself was mundane; the process of working it out together was both hilarious and supremely rewarding.
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    ↪baker

    That's the second most ... ah ... novel question I've been asked today.
    Whatever the actual alternatives might be [since I doubt social justice is available atm] , of course I do not want to be rich!
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    Not all poor or otherwise disadvantaged people have a socialist (or some such) outlook — baker

    True. Some are brainwashed into believing no other arrangement is possible, or that they have their proper 'place' and should aspire to nothing more, nor envy their 'betters'. Some are deluded into believing that anyone can achieve their goals if only they work hard enough. Some are cajoled into accepting God's will and awaiting their reward on the Other Side.

    Some have a bourgeois mentality -- and they don't all stay poor for long. — baker

    Sure. One in a thousand work, innovate and elbow their way into the lower echelons of the middle class and their descendants might continue that upward mobility - unless they're wiped out by a bad illness or season or loan - or get caught in a 'market-adjustment' cycle. One in ten thousand get lucky or ruthless enough to make their fortune in the slave-trade, piracy, arms-smuggling, racketeering... and their descendants invest it legally, so that the third or fourth generation join the financial aristocracy. One in a hundred thousand exhibit some lucrative talent; unfortunately their descendants tend to be mediocre middle-middle class. One in a million marry into the aristocracy.

    Not instructing here; merely describing, to show I've grasped the difference.

    How is it artificial, if some people come out as the winners? — baker
    I think I'll frame that.
    https://theweek.com/cartoons/429889/editorial-cartoon-percent-playing-field
  • If only...
    ↪praxis
    That reminds me little of
    The Dancers at the End of Time
    I don't know how doing nothing can make people happy.
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    How so? — baker

    Air stays air, water remains water; food is still edible; clothes and walls keep out the cold, regardless of who owns them or how much they cost. I was born shortly after WWII, when people in my country literally ran from work to the bakery, to buy bread before their money was devalued again. Mostly, they bartered real things for real things, because whatever has direct utility holds its value, regardless of monetary changes: we still need them when we have no money. When we have everything we require for a healthy life, we don't need money.

    It seems it's saying that inequality and competition are natural, the natural order of things — baker
    Except that the disparity of rich an poor only becomes "the natural order of things" when it's pronounced so by the spokesman for the caste that has grown rich on the labour of the castes below. There is no competition between a slave-owner and his property, nor between the CEO of a shipping company and a navvy in its employ. All that guff about natural competition might make some kind of sense if everyone played on the same field and had a say in making the rules.

    What you describe is precisely that artificially imposed system of valuation to which I was referring.
  • If only...
    The damn novel (series), however, just hasn't gotten – let itself be – written yet — 180 Proof

    That all depends... I understand it's boring and slow: the most frequent critique of the first volume was "nothing happens".
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    I'd have to say that whether or not money is useful on a desert island isn't relevant to its possessing actual and unique force in the world at large. — Pantagruel

    I was attempting to illustrate the distinction between what I call "direct utility" and what you call "a unique force" in the modern world. Money is an artificially imposed system for measuring the relative worth of things and people, a system whereby resources are collected and allocated unevenly. That's very different from a life necessity. A monetary system can collapse, can be arbitrarily changed, devalued, even abolished, without any loss to the other.
  • If only...
    ↪L'éléphant

    Or Eden, yes: either the perfect place from which we have been excluded for doing wrong, or the perfect place to which we may be admitted if we do enough right. That's a religious idea, not a political or sociological one. You never get to live there: it's only available to the dead.
  • If only...
    Not the kind of place that I’d prefer to call home — praxis

    No place is 100% safe. It's a rule of utopian literature that there should be some external threat. Threadfall is the occasional interruption to a peaceful, happy existence. Plus, you get to ride a dragon.
  • If only...
    ↪Sir2u

    While I consider Wisconsin so beautiful that I placed a good chunk of my own utopian story there, that particular location is surprising.... unless someone very special lives there.
  • If only...
    Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, — 180 Proof

    I had forgotten. I guess it was a long time ago and I only read the first two, though I enjoyed other LeGuin books. I was anything but methodical in my selections: whatever the SA thrift store had for $.25 or Coles dumped in the sale bin would end up in my satchel.
  • Pacifism and the future of humanity
    "If you can't eat it or play with it, pee on it and walk away" Is the post-modern euphemistic poster version of the dog's approach to encountered objects. But I think we can all tell the difference between direct personal usefulness and second- or third-hand social utility. Here's the test: What five items would you pack to survive on a desert island?
  • ChatGPT obsoleting Encyclopaedia and Textbooks?
    There are many reliable sources on line. Of course, for forum posts, the level of rigor is much lower than, say, a university paper, but some interlocutors are too knowledgeable to fob off with estimate or dubious statistics. Some subjects, too, are more demanding than others. If I want a general idea of what conditions were like in a historical period for the setting of a novel, I prefer sources with lots of illustration, so I can form a picture, but then I have to go more detailed accounts of correct language, attire, armaments, furnishings or whatever. If I'm trying to convince someone that vaccinations are effective, I'd better not cite incorrect numbers.
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