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Sweeping Generalizationsoops, too obscure.
But surely you've heard of "glittering generalities"? "A glittering generality or glowing generality is an emotionally appealing phrase so closely associated with highly valued concepts and beliefs that it carries conviction without supporting information or reason." -
Sweeping Generalizationsbetween dying like a dog and living like a king. — Agent Smith
That's a scriptural generality: "Anyone who is among the living has hope —even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!" Ecclesiastes 9:4
Are "glittering generalities" a) better than b) worse than c) about the same as sweeping generalities? -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaSola dosis facit venenum. — Agent Smith
Congratulations. You are the first person to post this Latin phrase. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaI have a pessimistic, fatalistic streak, I suppose. I am more confident of pessimistic predictions than optimistic ones. Maybe it's genetic. Some people seem to be born optimists. At 75 it's too late to rewire my brain, neural plasticity not withstanding, You, on the other hand, seem to be very optimistic, so go for it!
I'm not in the battery business, and I'm neither a physicist o chemist. My guess is that a lot of midnight oil is being burned on the problem. It just seems to be very difficult to corral electrons and stuff them into boxes. Then there are problems with heat, chemical stability of the storage media over the long run, not to mention cost $$$.
Still, if you compare a run of the mill D cell with the battery in your cell phone... there was some real progress. Maybe there is an undiscovered exotic molecule out there that will absorb and release electric energy really really well. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaEventually (in a few billions of trillion years) all this will be stopped due to heat entropy, but hey. — god must be atheist
We won't have to wait for a flat-out frosted cosmos to (paradoxical phrased) cook our goose. Long before the last erg of heat is given up, the sun will have expanded to envelop the earth within itself. The planet will survive as a cinder.
Long before the sun fries us, it is likely, under the best of circumstances, that we will have run our evolutionary course into the ground.
Long before we have run ourselves into oblivion, we may have spoiled the earth to a degree that we will have all died off.
Not to leave a disasteroid crashing into earth off the list. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaMagma seems like a fine source of energy to me, at least where it is accessible. The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by a ring of volcanic activity related to continental subduction and ocean floor spreading, I'm not sure where it is, and is not, accessible. I suppose there are limits o how deep a access pipe can go.
So, drill baby drill. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magma(1800s - 1900s), — Agent Smith
In 1960 the world population was 3 billion. At that time, there was, already, some concern about CO2 among expert circles, and there was concern about population. Yes, we could have done more 60 years ago, assuming that the 3 billion free-agent humans were willing to forego what they thought was material progress, what they thought was the right thing to do.
We are not good at planning for long-term consequences. Young people tend not to think usefully about what it will be like when they are old, even though old age is only a few decades away. Once they are around 50, old age becomes a more cogent concern. People alive in 2022 can not usually think very usefully about 2050 or 2060, never mind 2100. It's too distant. 2030 is close enough to worry about,
Were we skilled at predicting and planning for events 50 to 100 years out, we would conduct our collective affairs differently. But we are not. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaWe certainly could slow down the rate at which we produce and consume, allowing nature to catch up on carbon renewal. Unfortunately, even if we did that, global warming would continue for a considerable period of time.
The idea of slowing down production and consumption sounds good, until we consider the severe consequences awaiting. Slamming the brakes on production/consumption will bring about a world-wide depression of great severity. The world's economy simply can not turn on a dime.
There are many ideas like yours which directly address the problem (say, let's all live like it was 1890). The problem is that radical shifts in production / consumption will cause the sort of horrendous catastrophe in the short term that global warming will produce in the slightly longer term,
What does this mean? I think it means we're screwed. It's like this: if you are in the way of an oncoming disaster -- flood, forest fire, category 6 hurricane, a dozen tornadoes, poisonous toads falling from the sky-- whatever, it's too late to do anything about it. You must either flee or perish, maybe perish even I you do flee.
Of course we should keep working diligently towards solutions, but keeping it in mind somewhere between our ears, that there is no magic solution where everything turns out just perfectly. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaI like Vaclav Smil's book -- How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going 2022. For example, he shows how much energy it takes to manufacture a windmill and turbine, for instance, how much energy it will capture, and how long it will last (on average). It isn't that windmills are a bad idea, they just don't provide carbon free energy. Or a nice red greenhouse grown tomato has about 5 tablespoons of diesel fuel embedded in it, figuring all the inputs and distribution. Nothing wrong with hothouse tomatoes; they are just not carbon free.
Smils is a physicist, now retired from the University of Manitoba, and doesn't come down hard on either side of the global warming debate. Rather he shows what is physically possible, what is physically unlikely, and what can not work at all. He's an exceptionally clear writer, very accessible.
"[It is] reassuring to read an author so impervious to rhetorical fashion and so eager to champion uncertainty. . . Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility — the rarest earth metal of all. His most valuable declarations concern the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” Even under the most optimistic scenario, the future will not resemble the past. "—The New York Times" -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaWe are up against time. Yes, we will transition to fossil free energy eventually, because we will have used it all up--if industrial civilization lasts long enough. As Vaclav Smils explains clearly, we will have to use a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture solar, wind, and nuclear power. Once we have it all in place, we will have to replace it ever so often, because stuff wears out.
new lead — Bird-Up
Never mind lead; what about lithium, indium, lanthanum, cerium, cobalt, neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium, and dysprosium? Rare earths are critical for 'green' energy and related applications. It isn't that rare earths are necessarily rare. It's just that they don't usually appear in concentrations that make them easy to obtain. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaWELCOME to TPF.
Planning is the critical piece missing from the recycling process. Manufacturers must plan for the products entire lifespan. Don't make cars, refrigerators, or computers out of material that can not be recycled. Plan for their eventual retrieval and reprocessing. Don't make trillions of single use objects without establishing the means for their collection and reprocessing (water bottles, paper envelopes, or diapers). Individual efforts are part of the solution, but without industrial planning, we will get what we have got: a large percentage of readily recyclable materials being wasted / lost, and a lot of non-recyclable materials accumulating -- somewhere.
I'm not a chemist, but I understand that some plastics can be made from biomatter. But plastics come in a huge range of molecular structures with all sorts of extreme performance characteristics. Can you make Teflon out of ore oil?
I'm an old man, and I like plastic, just like everybody else does. Great stuff. But people lived full, meaningful, interesting lives before plastic. For instance, people used to keep food in their refrigerators in glass containers. Worked fine, until you dropped it. Very few people died as a result.
NO! We should definitely stop producing, consuming, and disposing of stuff the way we do. It's just that when you look around, there are megatons of stuff that are not going to get recycled. -
Too much post-modern marxist magic in magmaAll well and good about the sources of post modernism. What about too much magic expected of magma?
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The American Gun Control DebateThe US is no more violent, has no more mental illnesses, and has no more crime than other developed countries. And even excluding the US, the same pattern emerges; the more guns there are the more mass shootings there are. Which is fucking obvious. — Michael
Indeed.
The numbers of deaths caused by gun fire will very likely remain high because there is a surfeit of hand guns, rifles, and assault weapons. GUNS=DEATH.
As for the mental health of Americans, I would think that we are no crazier than people in other countries. At least, most of the people I have met in my life have seemed perfectly sane, even if they held insane political and religious views. I live in one of the states with the lowest rate of gun deaths (less than 10 per 100,000) and a liberal political culture (MN). Maybe if I lived in Mississippi I would think differently.
How much violence occurs in one's vicinity depends on where you live in the US. This map shows the distribution:
"Mass murder by gunfire" accounts for a slim fraction of gun deaths, 38 or 513 out of 19,384 murders carried out one-by-one in 2020, depending. ("Mass murder" is not clearly defined. It might be 20 at one go, or it might be 3, depending on the definition. Of course, it's crazy that we even have a statistic for mass murder, however vaguely defined.)
I like to cite the case of the Bath School massacre perpetrated by Andrew Kehoe on May 18, 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, under the category "Nothing New Under the Sun." 38 elementary schoolchildren and 6 adults were killed, and at least 58 other people were injured after dynamite placed in the school was detonated. Kehoe, the 55-year-old school board treasurer, was angered by increased taxes and his defeat in the April 5, 1926, election for township clerk.
Prior to his timed explosives detonating at the Bath Consolidated School building, Kehoe had murdered his wife, Nellie Price Kehoe, and firebombed his farm. Arriving at the site of the school explosion, Kehoe died when he detonated explosives in his truck.
Was Kehoe insane? He was certainly obsessed -- the dynamiting of the school required considerable planning preparation. Apparently losing this election was intolerable (See Trump, 2020). -
What Happened to Mainstream Journalism's Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted?Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted was NEVER a function of the press or media. That honorable and thankless task belongs to gadflies***. The 'media' have always served the interests of their owners, whether they were crude money grubbers or refined money grubbers.
***a fly that bites livestock, especially a horsefly, warble fly, or botfly.
an annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.
"always a gadfly, he attacked intellectual orthodoxies"
That said, the press and the media have also managed to be a useful source of information, ranging from low quality to high quality, despite themselves. -
This Existence Entails Being Morally Disqualifyingfeck — ZzzoneiroCosm
Congratulations! You are the first person at TPF to use "feck" properly. (It has appeared several other times as a euphemism or local slang substitute for "fuck"). The usual manifestation of feck is in "feckless".
According to Google Ngram, "feckless" appears in print now more than ever before. That more human efforts are being branded as feckless than in previous decades and centuries strikes me as altogether meet, right, and salutary.
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What does an unalienated worker look like?we need shit done and we need people to follow dictates of organizations to do the shit — schopenhauer1
A hymn to shit getting done by The Fugs Gospel Choir:
(gospel sound)
River of shit
River of shit
Flow on, flow on, river of shit
Right from my toes
On up to my nose
Flow on, flow on, river of shit
(transition to Rock)
I've been swimming In this river of shit
More than 20 years, and I'm getting tired of it
Don't like swimming, hope it'll soon run dry
Got to go on swimming, cause I don't want to die
(spoken with gospel sound in background):
Who dealt this mess, anyway?
Yea, it's an old card player's term
But sometimes you can use the old switcheroo and it can be applied to ...
Frontal politics
What I mean is ...
Who was it that set up a system
Supposedly democratic system
Where you end up always voting for the lesser of two evils?
I mean, Was George Washington the lesser of two evils?
Sometimes I wonder ...
You got some guy that says
"For God sake, we've got to stop having violence in this country."
While he's spending 16,000 dollars a second snuffing gooks
(gospel sound musical ending)
A wiiiiiiiiiiiiide, big brown river, yea, bringing health, wealth, and prosperity to every man, women, and child
Go here to hear it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svPDzNO6GQk -
What does an unalienated worker look like?"What would communism look like" is an old debate. In any case, it will be up to the people to decide. Presumably, the people will not decide on a dictatorship a la Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al. I don't know what it will look like.
I still don't think you have an alienated worker if he thinks he's not — Hanover
People harbor all sorts of delusions. On the other hand, waking up every day thinking that one is the victim of systematic dispossession and extortion is generally not good for one's mental health. The exploited have to find ways to get through the day without going berserk.
Whether we live in the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, or today's USA, one has to find a way to live in the world -- and people do. People manage to get through the day -- and actually enjoy life despite Marx.
I think Marx was correct that capitalism exploits workers: it alienates them from their work and from the goods and services they produce. At the same time, I must acknowledge that your observation about people who do not think they are alienated (in Marx's sense) reflects reality for many. Capitalists and workers have negotiated back and forth to reach a tolerable middle ground. Not for everybody, but for many.
schopenhauer1's antinatalist logic is valid. Life sucks, and having children perpetuates life's suckiness. I agree that life sucks, but not so much that no body should have more children. Similarly, I agree that many people do not seem to be alienated from their work, their product--whatever that is, be it nuts and bolts or legal services.
"Managing to get through one's day without going berserk" is not an endorsement of the existing system. Workers' vision becomes much clearer when they experience the harsh side of capitalism, the side where there is no negotiation towards a tolerable middle ground. It is also the case that capitalism works very hard to portray itself positively. The positive portrait is the one hanging in most Americans' living room. -
What does an unalienated worker look like?Stirring words!
"Stirring" is here an adjective, not a verb. Good philosophers, of course, are never caught merely "stirring words". -
What does an unalienated worker look like?True, the worker might feel isolated, true. But workers may well have close companionship in their isolation. Marx's description is abstract; millions-- hell, billions of people are, by Marx's definition alienated and it doesn't feel good. The alienated worker is insecure (he can be abruptly laid off. His workplace can be closed, at great cause to himself and his community. Life may not be the same again, quite literally. A worker's identity as a this sort of worker in such and such a trade may be suddenly stripped away.
The conditions of work, particularly intrusive monitoring, control, pressure to perform at a high rate, is part of the experience.
per WikipediaKarl Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, 'species-essence') as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.[1]
The theoretical basis of alienation is that the worker invariably loses the ability
- to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions;
- to determine the character of said actions;
- to define relationships with other people; and
- to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.
Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists. -
What does an unalienated worker look like?Most organizations, whether government, corporation, or non-profit, operate under a very similar model of top-down authority and control, which practically guarantees that few employees will possess independence, executive agency, and minimal supervision. It may well be the case that large swathes of workers either prefer or readily adapt to top-down authority and control, and do not feel limited in their job experiences. I've met plenty of workers who were not bothered by the (often heavy) hand of management.
That isn't to say they are unalienated. It is to say they are not unhappy in their work--lucky them.
Alienation isn't primarily a "feeling". It's an objective circumstance. How unhappy employees may feel depends to a large extent on their expectations. I've worked in temp jobs where I had very few positive expectations, and wasn't oppressed by the meagre quality of work life. Landing in a job where one lacks competence to perform leads to many unhappy experiences, and may not be the fault of the employer. I've found myself in a couple of jobs where I was not competent to handle loathsome detailed paper processing systems and failed. Not the employer's fault -- more mine for lack of self knowledge. -
What does an unalienated worker look like?What does unanlienated worker look like? — schopenhauer1
I don't know what percentage of workers are alienated or not alienated. I've been in both camps (more the former than the latter). Unalienated work (and this worker) experienced in a specific job:
a) considerable executive agency
b) minimal supervision
c) recognition and reward
d) independence to shape the work
I was not self-employed. The job was with an AIDS prevention non-profit. I was not highly paid, but received what I considered a good wage. The job was performing "street outreach" in situations where HIV could be transmitted sexually--bath houses, adult bookstores, parks, bars, and the like.
While "street outrace" had been carried out in other contexts, and AIDS outreach was being carried out in most large cities, every agency seems to have started from scratch. The task of the agencies was to find workers who were competent and willing to carry out the job. There were enough who were competent, but few who were willing. As a result, the hired workers were generally given carte blanche.
It was "mission driven" work; I had a very real stake in the gay male community, and its future. So I was very engaged and was quite willing to perform the under very unstandard hours and working conditions.
I felt very fulfilled.
Another job which involved fulfillment and the the four characteristics listed above was teaching a smoking cessation class for a hospital. This was a part time job involving a month long class (16 hours) for small groups of smokers who had not managed to quit smoking on their own (which most people do manage).
I felt less of a "mission" in this job, but I enjoyed delivering the instructional and group-processing content.
In contrast to these two fulfilling experiences, I had another job in AIDS prevention which was a nightmare -- not because of the clients, but because of the agency.
The features of this job were:
a) minimal executive agency
b) intrusive supervision
c) minimal recognition
d) hostility
Almost all of the negative aspects of this job could be laid to the peculiar psychopathology of the management (and consequently, the staff). Tight control with minimal direction, poor communication, and internal competition characterized the workplace. It was an unwindable game, one leaving most of the staff dissatisfied with their individual situations. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?So imagine you live in a state where sexual abuse of children is tolerated, say it's Montana. There's no law against it. Would you say that in Montana, sexual abuse is a matter of choice? — frank
Well, Frank -- if a behavior is tolerated, and there are no laws defining what a behavior is, then it is a matter of personal interpretation as to whether one can permissibly do x, y, or z. You've raised a non-issue, seems to me. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?If some people think sexual abuse is OK, should they be allowed to do it? — frank
No, because it has been defined as a criminal act.
NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association (not sure if it still exists) held the view that sexual relationships between adults and youth were moral. In a few places, depending on other laws, it was legal under certain circumstances -- where homosexuality was not criminalized, and where the age of consent was low enough. Man-boy sexual relationships occurred long before NAMBLA was organized in 1978. Mostly they just flew under the radar of respectability.
The organization causes a PR panic in the gay community because pederasty threatened to blow up gay efforts to achieve respectability and legality. The issue was less one of legality than one of morality and optics. NAMBLA was denounced as if it was a doorway straight to hell.
Over the next 20 years, (less because of NAMBLA and more because of a moral panic about children) there were some very public child (<6 years old) abuse prosecutions, some of which were, in the end, found to be completely baseless.
Now relationships between adults and 15 or 16 year olds (males or females) count as a sex crime. It's illegal, Is it immoral? Not by default. It would be immoral and illegal if deceit and exploitation is involved. If it is consensual and conducted honestly, then it would not be immoral, but still illegal. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?Did I?
There is a difference between behavior we disapprove of and behavior which has been legislated against. Abortion, homosexuality, polygamy, corporal discipline of children (spanking with the hand--not beating), recreational drug use, and other behaviors can be legal, illegal, moral, or immoral. Abortion, obviously, is legal in many states, even though some people in those states consider it immoral. In many other states it is (or soon will be) illegal and considered immoral by some. Other people will consider abortion moral, even if it is illegal.
So: In states where abortion is legal, some people consider it murder and others consider it medical procedure. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?If some people think sexual abuse is OK, should they be allowed to do it? — frank
Sex abuse (I'll assume for the present that our definition of 'abuse' is more or less the same) has been widely rejected as an acceptable behavior for some time. Not always, certainly -- standards have changed over time, and are still changing. Some behaviors that were once considered normal are now considered abusive, or even pathological.
What constitutes acceptable behavior and what constitutes abuse varies from time to time, place to place, but where something is generally defined as abusive, it's generally rejected.
Some people consider spanking children abusive while others consider it proper. Time will tell. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?Great minds think alike, I've heard.
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The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?Otherwise it's like: "abortion is moral for some of us, but not all." — frank
We do not all have to agree on every definition of moral and immoral behavior. I'm OK with some people thinking that I, as a homosexual, behave immorally. I'm OK with some people thinking that my beliefs about god are immoral. I'm OK with some people thinking abortion is immoral.
What we have to agree on is whether behavior is legal and acceptable in a diverse society. Most people are willing to accept abortion is acceptable; ditto for single parenthood; ditto for non-married people living together as a couple; ditto for homosexuality and homosexual behavior. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?This seems to be the point that needs to be discussed. — Harry Hindu
The question of whether abortion is murder or not hinges on whether one considers a everything from a just-fertilized egg on to a blastocyst on to a fetus with a beating heart but not much more than a neural tube for a brain on to a barely viable fetus, on to an entirely viable fetus is a "person" in the way a healthy new-born is a person.
The fetus-fetish folks think a just-fertilized egg is owed as much legal protection as a two-year od, Hence, the expected moves to outlaw 'day after' pills.
Many people do not grant personhood to a non-viable fetus; some grant personhood to a fully viable (7-9 month) fetus.
There is also this celebration of abortion that the left has, as if having an abortion is a badge of honor rather than a tragedy. — Harry Hindu
I've been among the left for the 49 years of Roe vs. Wade and I have NEVER witnessed abortion being "celebrated" or considered a "badge of honor".
Aborting a fetus may be considered a personal medical decision, but it is not a casual, pleasant procedure. Most women apparently consider it a difficult decision--far more fraught than other medical procedures. -
Psychology Evolved From Philosophy ApparentlyThe third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective, which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out. — Joshs
The psychologist, social scientist, wishing he needed the apparatus of a chemist, dehumanizes the subjects by making objects (it) of them. There is no pressure from physical scientists to do this of course. It's envy on the part of the social scientist. There is more influence flowing from the corporate world, which objectifies employees and consumers as a matter of course.
The social science research that has moved me has been written from the POV of the participant observer - getting inside the group. One can observe social behavior like one observes beetles; the gang behavior one observes is equivalent to observing ant warfare--no personal involvement. Better to ingratiate one's self with a gang and put (just a little) skin in the game.
In the 1980s AIDS crisis response, quite a few gay men engaged in various educational 'interventions' which required participant observation. How else to figure out how to reach risk takers in bath houses, parks at night, back rooms, and so forth. There are risks, of course, which more objective research doesn't involve--temptation not being the least of it.
Or, this example: Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, an anthropological account of the up-scale women of the upper east side of New York City and their sharp-elbow interactions.
Long story short, if you want to understand your fellow humans, study them as fellow humans. -
Psychology Evolved From Philosophy ApparentlyBut why is this the case? — Joshs
Had I the wherewithal to answer that question, I'd probably be a tenured psych or social science professor, enjoying a comfy late career or a generous pension. Sigh.
A large part of the answer is institutional: colleges require "knowledge production" from its faculty (aka, publish or perish) and bs research is, frankly, a lot easier than coming up with deep ideas. So you have thousands of psych and social science graduate students and the several grades of the professoriat doing what they can to "produce knowledge" on a regular schedule,
The earlier psychologists who were measuring perception, learning, memory, recall, and so on did legitimate experimental scientific research -- they were doing the best they could on some of what would later be taken up by neurology. Its pretty dull stuff, imho, but baselines needed to be established.
When we turn to questions like, "How does college attendance affect the value system of working class students?" or "How does one develop character in students" the required research effort is difficult, requiring longitudinal study over maybe a decade, among other things.
You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,
The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind.
Pedagogy produces a lot of research that often gets excoriated for being trivial. Pedagogy and Psychology are two peas in a pod in a number of ways.
Universities could maybe do us all a favor and start discouraging research in psychology, social science, and pedagogy, unless the researcher has solme really good ideas, much better ideas than what has so far been put forward. -
Psychology Evolved From Philosophy ApparentlyThe social sciences--I'm including psychology--have a lamentably justified bad rep for half-baked research, sloppy methodology, unconfirmed results, and so on.
Still, have we not all read really interesting articles in the social sciences that were enlightening, and which either have been subsequently validated or which struck many readers as immediately truthful. David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, Domhoff's The Power Elite, Humphrey's study of public sex in St. Louis, MO around 1970 (Tearoom Trade), or Faith and Ferment: An Interdisciplinary Study of Christian Beliefs and Practices by Sr. Joan Chitister and Martin Marty, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm. None of these books utilized the scientific method, though document research observation, surveys, and interviews were used. -
The Post-Modern StateThe graph is from this source and there is some discussion about the interpretation.
"And Jesus said, "How can you help your fellow philosopher from sinking deeply into bullshit, when you yourself are sinking pretty fast in the same bullshit?" Oh oh, my out of depth alert just went off. -
The Post-Modern StatePromiscuously promoting political nouns to the dustbin of history is something like the odd condition non-soviet communist parties found themselves in after the Hitler / Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939: "premature anti-fascist". I have read that we are now post racial, post industrial, post modern, post colonial, post binary, post brick and mortar retail, post feminist, post Christian, post-human, post de jour.
Unfortunately we are not post bullshit yet.
Ask yourself what rhetorical advantage a writer gains by decreeing that we are "post binary" for instance. The term rhetorically relegates to irrelevancy the 99.9% of the world that clings to binary terminology. But the term, post-binary, is not substantive, It's just rhetorical vapor.
"Post industrial" relegates factories to irrelevancy. "We don't manufacture anything anymore." Industrial production has, in fact, been level since 1945. True, the number of jobs in manufacturing has declined. Anyone heard of automation? Most of what looks like decline is owing to price reduction, not volume reduction (according to the Federal Reserve).
As William Faulkner said (in a novel) "The past isn't even past." The UK may be post colonial, but a lot of colonial wealth is embedded in the UK, and the economic, social, and political problems caused by the British Empire have, in many cases, not been resolved.
"Everybody is shopping on-line; brick and mortar retail is dead." Odd, then, that on-line sales amount to only 13% of retail sales in 2021. 87% of retail in the flesh is a lot retail to overlook. And it's not like Amazon hasn't built a huge infrastructure of brick and mortar to enable on-line commerce. -
Psychology Evolved From Philosophy ApparentlyIf you have read a lot of Freud, then you would know better than me. I have read about Freud, discussed him with an intellectual type who received psychoanalysis, and have read a little of his writing. Did he need to call it 'science' to consider it science? Do you think he was doing 'science'? If he had been writing in the 17th century, it might have been called 'natural philosophy', or maybe like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholia, it might now be considered literature.
That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science. -
The Post-Modern Statebaby eating alien reptiles — frank
The political class isn't homogeneous, certainly, but most members of the political class (at the federal, state, and local levels) are quite similar and cohesive. True enough there are some glaring exceptions -- and these pop up every now and then. But Trump and the portion of the Republican Party hoping to exterminate the alien reptile baby eating Democrats hold on to the Prime Directive of maintaining the capitalist system, along with the rest of the political establishment.
Trump's more egregious deviations are owing to his venality and stupidity.
I do not dismiss the far right as harmless, mind you. They may yet seize power (I don't think they will get it in an honest election) and if they do, repealing Roe vs Wade will be the least of our worries.
The radical right isn't new. They have phased in and out of importance ever since Reconstruction. Think of the KKK and the late 19th century authors of the Jim Crow laws; think of the violent reaction to the labor movement; think of Father Coughlin (an odd-ball fascist in the 1930s), think of Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and so on and so forth. They tend to be hateful bastards, and they have a much larger base than the sad left, which might fill up a good sized church if they all got together in one place. -
The Post-Modern StateThe USA was a functioning nation-state from the end of the Civil War until sometime after WW2, when it began to evolve into a post-modern state (not to be confused with postmodern, although it's that too.) — frank
No doubt the Civil War was a 're-defining moment' in American history, but it seems that a strong case could be made for the US being a functioning nation state before the civil war (but perhaps not immediately after the Revolution). It was certainly not a strong nation state until after the Civil War.
WWII was the end of the US being a nation state? Seems like a nonsensical claim. IF, as you say below this is what a nation state is...
The main features of a nation-state are: mass education which establishes the literacy required for national identity, a cohesive political class which reinforces the power of the bureaucracy, a centrally controlled military which reinforces the nation's sense of place, and mass industry which, among other things, supplies the military. — frank
the US has these in abundance. We still have mass education. You or I may not like the way schools are run but they are turning out students who are more or less literate. 35% of Americans have a BA degree - which still requires that one read and write. We have a highly cohesive political class which reinforces the power of the bureaucracy and the centrally controlled military. How did Kurth miss that?
We fret a lot about manufacturing in the US. True, a lot of stuff is made in China and SE and S Asia, but last I heard, our aviation and rocketry and so on are made in America. Sure, I'd like to see more production brought back to our shores, but this isn't a recent development. Off-shoring production was a decision made by the highly cohesive political / corporate class that run the US,
There is an apocryphal story told about Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the PRC. "Was the French Revolution a good thing, Zhou? "It is too early to tell," said Zhou. Apocryphal as I said, but it makes a good point: It not only takes time to judge events, it takes time for events to happen.
The US is changing: how big a change and from what to what is not clear at this point. It is way too soon to announce--whatever is happening. -
Bumping ThreadsBumping threads isn't allowed? I don't know what that means.
I would think that returning to a more or less dead thread and adding something to it would be altogether acceptable. -
Nuclear Weapons, the Centre and the RightIF the missile's command /control system were damaged, then the least that one would get is an impact-driven release of plutonium--never a good thing. If the damage to the missile was slight, the missile might miss it's target, but still deliver a nuclear blast--on someone. Never a good thing.
If a large number of missiles were launched (which we or they might as well do, considering the likely result) most of the missiles will succeed in blowing up their targets.
Einstein said WWIV would be fought with rocks. -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?But if some Americans firmly believe abortion is murder, that matters. Their opinion shouldn't be brushed aside in the name of someone's privacy.
I maintain that defining abortion as murder is a particular religious belief. Medically aborting a blastocyst (recently fertilized egg) is clearly not the same as killing a someone who has been born (5 minutes, 5 years, or 50 years ago), Neither is aborting a 6 week fetus, which is entirely non-viable. Neither is aborting a 5 month non-viable fetus.
Aborting an 8 month altogether viable fetus comes much closer to your claim of abortion as murder. Such abortions are extremely rare and are the result of severe compromise of maternal health, where it's the baby OR the mother.
So yes: privacy matters here. Abortion as murder can be a privately held idea, and should apply only to the person holding the view. Hence the good slogan: "Opposed to abortion? Then don't have one." — frank -
The Death of Roe v Wade? The birth of a new Liberalism?We are shocked -- shocked!! -- that union organizing is going on in this bar!
It probably was; bars were an essential working class meeting place prior to 1920. However, prohibition's primary drive came from women who wanted to end the domestic violence and domestic poverty caused by alcoholism. (Suffrage and temperance were often partners.).
Before I accepted the idea that anti-unionism was a prime driver of prohibition, I'd want to read a strong case for that view. But again, another major drive for prohibition came from rural protestants who were not witnessing a whole lot of union organizing.
BC
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