Quite a few colleges offer students the option of designing their majors. One could, for instance, combine creative writing, physics, chemistry, and art to prepare for a career in science fiction and sci fi film direction. Better educated writers would avoid sci fi errors like "the spider had 6 legs" or "thorax" when they meant human "larynx". Yes I have seen those errors just recently.

My family would disapprove of me getting a philosophy degree due to concerns about debt and few future job prospects — TheHedoMinimalist

That's why you need a community -- not just your family. My family would have been of limited utility as a support group. My parents were in favor of education but were not themselves educated beyond high school (they were born on farms in 1906 and 1907). By the time I got to college they were in their 60s and glad to see the last of their children finally out of the house.

Well, if you are borrowing money, you should be worried about debt and job prospects majoring in philosophy. English lit, sociology, philosophy, biology, etc. are all perfectly fine liberal arts majors as long as you don't tie your job search strictly to your major. A BA in sociology won't qualify you for many jobs in 'sociology'. But the same degree in sociology proves you have certain basic skills and interests that a corporation or government agency might want -- persistence, broad literacy, ability to meet deadlines (papers due next week), interests, and so on. Philosophy does the same thing. So does English lit and biology.

Radical thinkers have proposed an inverse wage scale with the highest pay for necessary and very unattractive jobs like unclogging big sewer pipes (not your kitchen sink); tedious and difficult work (providing personal care for the elderly or paralyzed -- toileting, bathing, feeding, etc); and crushingly boring work, with lower pay going to jobs with intrinsic interest and status rewards like major league sports, surgery, and so on.

I do not foresee a time when we will actually see sanitation workers getting $15,000,000 a year for clearing those underground sewers, and brain surgeons and NFL players getting $20 an hour. But the principle is sound. I was really very well rewarded in therms of satisfaction for the best jobs I have had, and no amount of money was enough for the drag-ass, boring, tedious, pointless jobs I've had.

I'm brain dead — Amity

Let's hope that's an exaggeration.

TheHedoMinimalist is entertaining the recurrent dream of the self-made man. Maybe 1/2 of 1% of the population (too generous an estimate?) are really able to pull off the job of autodidaction. That's 1,500,000 potential self-educated Americans. Does it seem like there are a million and a half Americans grinding away at collegiate level self education?

I wish, but wishes are fishes. slippery and hard to catch by hand.

One hopes that the admissions office is able to decipher the wheat from the chaff. — Hanover

Yes, one would hope. Vaguely interested students had best start at a low cost community college to find out if they can, and want to do college work. If they take a few courses, spend little, and do poorly -- no great loss to anyone.

But sometimes students misapprehend their readiness and ability, dive in and fail. There's nothing wrong with trying and failing, as long as one doesn't draw the wrong conclusions, like "I'm too stupid to do anything." And as long as one wasn't coaxed into borrowing money up front.

Is it perhaps possible to effectively educate yourself online and find a community of educated persons there? — TheHedoMinimalist

The IQ of an average uni student is probably only like one standard deviation above the IQ of the workforce. Instead, you are more likely to meet some pretentious intellectual wannabe in uni who fails to recognize his ignorance. — TheHedoMinimalist

Do you think you won't run into a hoard of pretentious intellectual wannabe's on line? Guess again!

Yes, It is possible to educate one's self (autodidact) but it is quite difficult. One has to have a lot of drive, patience, persistence, and access to a good set of resources -- at least a good library and on-line access. One of the services that college provides is a 4 year guided trip through the process.

In addition to that, it helps enormously if one is part of a community that cares that you are trying to become a learnéd person. If all the people around you do not give a rat's ass what you are doing, then the task is even more difficult. It helps to have ready access to people who are interested in what you are learning.

I took some classics and literature courses through Extension when I was about 35. It was a good experience, but it was not for a degree. It would have been tough at that point in life to start college while working full time. People do it, but they have to have a lot of drive, and be well organized. Plus, it takes longer. Double plus, it's no longer really cheap.

Over the last x number of years, I have known several high school graduates who were exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inquired, they engaged. They tended to not be well employed (or employed at all) but they had managed to become educated people.

Along with these people, there is another batch of people who went to college and became exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inquired, they engaged. Some of them were well employed, some not.

The difference between the well educated and the not so well educated is the degree to which they read, discussed, inquired, and engaged.

When you're 40 or 50 the time will seem like nothing, and you'll be glad you did it. — Terrapin Station

Let's see. I finish college at 24 (BA, MA) and then 16 to 26 years later I'll finally be glad I did it. Is this really the right approach?

In conclusion, most philosophers are humourless gits. — Amity

I suspect that many philosophers probably are humorless gits. This is probably associated with their low appreciation of being embodied beings--creatures of flesh and blood with all sorts of drives which which are "in charge" a good share [or all?] of the time. Confidently embodied people understand that their rational facilities are subservient to their emotions--like it or not. (It's emotional drives that sends people to college to study philosophy which foolishly elevates rationality over emotionality.)

To avoid misunderstanding... I'm in favor of people being rational. But we discount and ignore our emotional drives at our peril.

People too wrapped up in their cogitations can't afford to laugh at their ridiculousness.

And the whole, "meeting intelligent people at college" is a joke, unless you get into somewhere like Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech, where the average IQ is above the norm, in some cases significantly. — Wallows

Oh, come on. It isn't just at Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech that one will find intelligent people. Sour grapes?

So, he started his own business importing cheap supplements from China, and selling them here in the US, and was making close to 100k a month. Go figure. — Wallows

Well, gee whiz, if he is making close to 100k a month he must really be a wonderful person! And by selling cheap supplements of possibly dubious value. He might have done as well by beginning his importer business right out of high school.

It seems you're searching diligently for a justification to advise others that college is a bad decision, but very rarely is it. You still end up with a better type of job, associate with more intelligent people, make more money, and it will expand your intellectual horizons. Be careful with your loans and what you spend, but it's well worth it. — Hanover

Where college is a bad idea is the situation of people taking out loans to attend college (whatever college), for poorly motivated reasons, and then not finishing. They don't have a diploma, they have new debt, and no greater likelihood of a better life.

College was extremely valuable to me as a means to personal growth (intellectual, interpersonal, social, all that). College helped me get jobs, some of which were great, but it doesn't seem to have enhanced my earning power that much.

What plan in life after high school will pay off the best depends on a lot of factors.

How ambitious one is
How wealthy (or poor), how socially connected (or unconnected) one's parents are
What one's long term objectives are: stay on the farm? play it safe, work for civil service, retire? get rich quick and then get richer?
and so on.

One thing to remember: All colleges are in the business of getting students to buy their services. It never was in colleges' interests to tell students that college may not pay off financially.

Well, first of all, being homosexual doesn't rule out fathering children. For men who are 'exclusively homosexual' -- never have heterosexual partners -- children are out of the question. But many homosexuals are not exclusive. A substantial portion of men who have primarily homosexual relationships also have heterosexual relationships, and father children. This complicates life in ever so many annoying ways, but that's just the way it is.

We don't know exactly what determines sexual orientation. It may be determined by factors present in utero which have the consequence of feminizing the otherwise male brain at just the right moment. The male so affected is altogether male, is quite likely to act like most other males, BUT notably, is more likely to prefer other men for sex. Genes may have such an indirect role to play in sexual orientation that we can not now factor them.

Animals and plants have large genomes and even though we have "mapped the human genome" we by no means know what all of the genes do, or what combination of genes and gene switches is required in any instance. So, inheritance of traits (like homosexuality, permissive attitudes, risk tolerance, etc.) is by no means cut and dried.

Sexual behavior in a population plays itself out as a spectrum ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. The number of men who are exclusively homosexual is a small percentage of the population -- 2% to 3%. When you see figures of 10% of males being homosexual, we're not counting exclusively gay men.

As someone said, the only unnatural sex act is an impossible sex act. People like sex, and whatever happens to arouse them at the moment can lead to sex. That's why many men who are not homosexual have sex with another man sometimes. At the moment it was an arousing possibility. Same thing for more or less gay men. Sex with a woman may, at the moment, be arousing.

otherwise so many people would not have the same problem of getting excited by porn but not as much by regular sex after the fact. It's like if you take 100 people who have watched porn and all of them believe that having regular sex isn't as exciting as porn. The point is that porn is what caused them to believe that sex is boring. — Maureen

Well... has this experiment been done? I would be very surprised if, in one form or another, it had not been done. There is a ton of research published on pornography and sexual behavior. Have a look. It's perfectly safe to read -- it's not pornographic or sexy.

People do tend to like novelty. Porn can become boring and dull. Sex with the same person doing exactly the same moves time after time can become boring and dull (maybe not in a week or two, but give it 20 or 30 years...)

if it reminds us of something we want to separate ourselves from. — Metaphysician Undercover

Does CK want to separate (somebody, himself, whoever) from the American Revolution? Maybe he feels it was an inadequate revolution? Too bourgeois? Just a bunch of privileged anti-tax whiners? Not a revolution for the slaves? Perhaps his criticism was too timid?

The Guardian reader responses are not tightly moderated, and the result is more amusing moments, as well as more pointless (but not rude, crude) response. The New York Times reader responses are very tightly moderated and the result is a high level of comment, very little humor, and no pointless posts. I think the Guardian gets it a little closer to just right than the NYT, but degustibus non disputandem est.

It's a bit like putting a crucifix on the sneaker. — Coben

Might be helpful for the "Hail Mary pass".

Does it really take that much effort not to pick a symbol like that? One imagines the use of the symbol by political groups shows up in basic research. — fdrake

The original flag of the USA is not a 'symbol like that'. It is a distinguished symbol, abused or not. The cross has been abused at cross-burnings, yet we continue to use crosses without anyone thinking that it's display represents racism (unless it is on your lawn, burning away). Proctor and Gamble dithered over the "Satan worship" smear, but in the end they kept the symbol.

It's too late in the advertising game to complain about using the flag to sell products. It's far, far too common.

there must be something about pornography in general that makes it more exciting than regular sex, although it's anyone's guess as to what that is. — Maureen

Pornography is produced to meet a very wide variety of tastes. Practically, no matter what you are into, somebody is making porn that you will like. Because porn images are often shared and re-shared on social sites, Tumblr, BlogSpot, et al, the selection of images becomes even more specific and refined.

Watching a fairly narrow selection of porn is likely to raise one's expectations. Bodies are buff, organs are large, skin is healthy and tanned, the action that is shown is often "the best of". An ordinary person (one's self and one's mate) are likely to fall short.

In the other direction, unsatisfactory sex may lead individuals to seek pornographic stimulation. People who are unhappy, depressed, ill, and so forth may not feel like having sex, or giving the sexual encounter their full attention. Their partner may seek satisfaction using porn.

Pornography of a sort was produced in the Roman Empire. The invention of printing increase the supply of images. In the late 19th century, photography made possible a more explicit pornography. It takes much more time to draw and paint a sexual episode than to capture it on film. When motion pictures came along, still images were supplemented by short films.

Then sound and color were added (enabling us to hear all sorts of ecstatic moaning that rarely occurs in real life). But it wasn't until the late 1960s when the legal restrictions on producing and distributing pornography were removed that high quality porn became plentifully available at an affordable price. Since then it has gotten better and better. (Sex is sex; sex hasn't gotten better. It's the technical aspects of producing porn that have improved. So, our experience with ubiquitous porn is relatively recent.

As good as porn is, most porn productions are exemplars of third rate movie making. If it wasn't for the sex, NOBODY would watch it. Ever. I avoid porn with a plot. I want to look at just the high points of the show. The hottest parts of the hottest scenes. And stills are perfectly acceptable.

I say it's about the dumbing down of the public discourse. — ssu

How can public discourse, involving billions, be anything other than "dumbed down"?

The elderly among us will remember the "Satanic Panic" of the 1970s-1990s. Satan was to those lunatics what being racist or fascist is to the current crop of lunatics. Proctor and Gamble had somehow gotten away with being a satanic cult for decades, when someone noticed their logo. Paroxysms of paranoia! What is America coming to? Satan's soap?

atlasobscura.

Clearly this is a satanic symbol. 13! stars, a bearded man in the crescent moon... obviously satanic. How could anyone interpret it otherwise? Wicked, wicked, wicked.

Nike's job is to make money any way they can. K is apparently helping them do that. All sounds very American to me. — Baden

Making money any way they can is as French as pate foie gras, as Irish as boiled potatoes, as Ugandan as matoke, and as at home in Thailand as pad Thai. All sounds very economic to me.

That fellow appears to be excessively happy. He should probably be investigated.

So, expressing concern that X symbol has been co-opted by others who are racist is not the same as claiming that if corporation Y uses symbol X, it's a racist gesture, so, unless there's something more to this, it looks like you might be raging against a strawman here, Bitter Crank. — Baden

Sigh. I wasn't claiming that Nike was making a racist gesture. The article states that some people think that the Ross flag is racist, because some people (Nazis, for example) have used the flag in their iconography. I'm pretty sure Nike was making a merely shallow patriotic gesture, having nothing to do with patriotism or racism. It's like the plastic Christmas-design bag at Target or Walmart. The bag design has nothing to do with the Incarnation.

That Christmas-design bags or flags on shoes are shallow uses of common symbols doesn't prevent people from freighting the symbols, and then claiming that Walmart is stealing Christmas or that Nike is promoting racism. What I am objecting to is the anachronistic linking of recent usage of the flag to the original (and dominant) usage of the flag.

People could object to the standard design of the flag (alternating red/white stripes and a rectangular arrangement of state-stars). After all, it flew over the state houses of slave states before 1860, as well as over the state houses of non-slave states. The Declaration of Independence was written by a slave owner and (to some people) a slave raper, Thomas Jefferson. The 'Father of the Country' was also a slave owner.

So national, religious, corporate, university, symbols (among others) get this vague aura around them incorporating all the uses to which they have been put. That's life. Get used to it, Colin Kaepernick, et al.

When The Philosophy Forum organizes a house band it should be called "Raging Against the Strawman"

oops - meant to include the link. Here it is.

"the 13-star model, a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and, for some people, a painful history of oppression and racism." and so on.

An earlier version of the headline did include the word "slavery". It isn't altogether unusual for headlines to be revised, it seems.

The word I was thinking about isn't 'nigger' but rather 'negro' (or, in French 'nègre'). — Pierre-Normand

"The 'N' word" has never represented 'negro' or 'nègre', to the best of my knowledge. And 'nigger' was definitely a term of disparagement and scorn under slavery. We know it was because documents written by slave-holders use the term disparagingly and with scorn. That isn't to say that was the only attitude that slave holders had toward their chattel.

BTW, I wonder if the French use a circumlocution like "le mot 'n'". It seems unlikely.

Further shouldn't we patriots dislike someone putting the flag on a sneaker. It's not illegal, but it is parasitic. — Coben

Correct. Nike and patriotism have no connection. If Nike wanted to prove their patriotic fides, they could start manufacturing their shoes here instead of SE Asia, and pay their American employees a living wage. Nikes aren't expensive because of labor cost. They are expensive because of high profit margins and expensive promotion costs.

Going by the headline in the New York Times which is, after all, the newspaper of record (so they say), the Betsy Ross flag was a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and, for some people, a painful history of oppression and racism.. The headline on the day the story appeared said the flag was associated with slavery. But then, everything about the Revolution of 1776 was connected with slavery directly or indirectly.

Actually, I doubt very much if Nike IN FACT was worried about anything other than the bottom line and how social media might affect their image and sales IF Kaepernick et al were able to stir up enough synthetic rage.

The American flag has been used by just about everybody under the sun for one purpose or another. And, don't forget, it has also been used by those dedicated to justice; peace; the true, the good, and the beautiful; motherhood; apple pie--used by the angels, in other words. Betsy Ross's flag. Old Glory--13 stars or 50.

Just because some Americans out on the far right used it is no reason to be embarrassed about it.

I don't expect to see a swastika on a Nike shoe or a VW car anytime in the near future. 250 years from now? It's quite possible that the swastika will be a neutral symbol by that time. Betsy Ross is about as far back in time.

I wasn't aware that the KKK or the American Nazi Party were using the Ross flag until I read the story in the NYT, and it doesn't altogether ruin the symbol by these birds using it. The KKK and American Nazis put together wouldn't fill up a minor league ball park. These two small bunches of right wing extremism aren't entitled to sole use of a prime America symbol.

Kaepernick and Nike together have ceded an important symbol to the right-wing lunatics. Bad move.

Besides, one could fly a Boeing 747 through the hole in the credibility of the flag-as-symbol caused by grossly promiscuous use of Old Glory to sell everything from cigarettes to Chevrolets.

I would first dismiss from discussion those who are psychotic and experiencing very negative hallucinations and those who have CD, MI, and other 'comorbidity' factors. It isn't that they don't matter -- they do -- but that their circumstances are quite different from those without major MI, CD, or abuse histories, etc.

There are those who have long-term reasons to think about suicide: those with degenerative diseases approaching terminal status; those with cancer which can be treated with only palliative care; those whose lives have become unsatisfactory owing to illness/injury/age (usually in combination).

Actually, it seems to be the case that most people who suffer from terminal illnesses do not attempt suicide. They may talk about it, prepare for an attempt, or seek help, but generally do not complete the plan (when they could). Life becoming unsatisfactory appears to be a more potent cause of suicide.

Middle aged white men with high school educations or less seem to be most likely to kill themselves. I would submit that this is because their lives have become much less satisfactory than they believed it once was. This group faces many large barriers to achieving greater satisfaction: Their best-fit jobs have largely disappeared; they do not have a large set of flexible skills; because they are "middle aged" (35-45 years of age) they are no longer physically able to compete with younger men, or get new kinds of jobs which offer a bright future. Age discrimination is real. Middle aged men are also likely to have ready access to effective means of delivering their own death.

There are quite a few people for whom suicide seems to be a sudden response to a sudden change in circumstances and who were able to act on the impulse immediately (for this group loaded guns pose a much greater than typical danger).

Young people who experience intense emotional lability are likely to go from feeling great to feeling very dejected in a short period of time. Weaker impulse control which will come with maturity may not stop them from reaching for the means to attempt suicide.

Desperate Housewives's ghost narrator came across a box with a loaded gun in it. She impulsively pointed it at her head and pulled the trigger. Dead. Such a scenario is not common, but it does highlight the danger of guns: a loaded gun can deliver a certain death instantly. (Yes, it can be screwed up...). Drugs, hanging, car accidents, suffocation, etc. all take time. Bang. It's all over (for the trigger puller).

total healthcare, as long as it doesn’t double taxes for the working class — 0 thru 9

A national health care program should not increase the individual outlay for health care, because most Americans are already paying premiums for health care either themselves or as part of their compensation at work. Medicare and Medicaid are already being covered by premiums or tax payments. I would expect that wages would remain about the same, but corporate expenditures on employee health care would be shifted to employee wages.

Government funded health care would cut the ground out from under the health insurance industry. Cutting out their overhead (15-20% of your health care expense) would be an immediate savings. Yes, there would be a bulge in unemployment, since these workers would be redundant.

Medicare and Medicaid have very low overhead percentages.

Pleasure vs. pain is too reductionistic. It is probably the case that single celled organisms operate on so simple a basis, moving toward food and away from averse stimuli. Simple organisms probably operate on a similar level. C. elegant has about 900 cells in total. They are far more complex than single-celled animals (or plants); they have about 200 neurons in their bodies. Large animals have far larger brains and can operate at a higher level than a binary + vs - stimuli.

Of course, you can wield an ax or a chainsaw and divide the pile of all possible experiences into + or - , but that seems pretty crude.

When we walk down the street, the most basic evaluation we make of other people is "A Potential",
"A Competitor", or "Irrelevant". That's a three way split.

When you look at the menu in your favourite restaurant, you have to choose among perhaps 5 favourite dishes, all very pleasant. Then there is the competing issue of cost. You might like the steak tartare, but it costs 3 times as much as the stuffed grape leaves which you also like. Your date is a vegan, so splitting the steak tartare is out of the question (you won't have to give so much as a bite of it). The desserts are good too -- Galatopoureko (custard baked in filo crust) isn't vegan so you won't have to share that either.

You have quite mixed feelings about your date. We won't go into all that, but at least it is a lot more than a simple split of pleasure and pain.

There is no need to reduce everything to a + or a - . It serves no useful purpose.

For all we know, the Lord of all Creation may have been micromanaging the affairs of every last bacterium since the beginning. The problem with positing such a position is that we can not show any proof that this is so. Atheists and believers alike are unable to marshal evidence or the non-existence or existence of divine beings.

I have absolutely nothing against people believing in God, or not, as long as both sides retain some modesty about what can be demonstrated.

I believe that there are no divine beings. I used to believe that such beings did exist. In neither case can I show a shred of evidence to support either case. We can legitimately speak at great length about our belief or disbelief in the gods. About the objects of our belief (or disbelief) we must remain silent.

i believe Humans are a reflection of a deep thinking and depressed extra-natural (my term) creator. — christian2017

That's the opposite of what I believe: I believe our gods are actually a reflection of deep thinking and depressed (neurotic) humans. The gods didn't exist and it was necessary that we create them. It was one of our greatest cultural achievements.

the core of depression and suffering is really the ability to feel the need to think deeply. — christian2017

Baloney.

I was reading a book about alienation, and to praise the author (it was a good book) I commented that he must have been really alienated to write so meaningfully about it. A political scientist shot that idea down with "Really alienated people don't write books." Later on in life I discovered that this was true: Really alienated and/or depressed people don't write books. Productivity doesn't come out of misery. More like immobilisation flows out of misery.

Thinking and feeling deeply does not lead to suffering. Actually, I don't know for sure how to get out of the sloughs of despondency, alienation, abandonment, and wretchedness that we get into. I've been in there, and got out, but I can't really say "this is how you get better". I got better. But then, how did I get into that mess? I could tell you about that, but it takes too long.

We are stuck being deep thinking depressed (depressing) creatures. Get used to it.

I don't find her philosophical views appealing; however, there is no reason not to enjoy reading her novels. When I read them I thought they were OK--not fabulous, but you know, not that bad.

That said, I also enjoy the kind of scathing comments people make about her -- mostly because they are well-crafted scathing remarks. Like this one:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Some background:

Mickey Spillane was a VERY popular mystery writer; he sold 225 million books -- far, far more than Flannery O'Connor, who I adore. (All these people are dead.). "his specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers. Critics, appalled by the sex and violence in his books, dismissed his writing."

Ms. O'Connor's writing had a little sex and violence, but it was much subtler than those tight-fisted sadistic revenge stories.

Spillane was criticised for the quality of his writing, but Rand defended him.

Here's one last snide comment:

Ayn Rand defended him. In public, she said that Spillane was underrated. In her book The Romantic Manifesto, Rand put Spillane in some unexpected company when she wrote: "[Victor] Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral--Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide--Spillane gives me the feeling of listening to a military band in a public park--Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter." All of which goes to show that Ayn Rand's literary taste was no better than her literature.

Single cell organisms far outweigh multi cell organisms on the earth. I'm not sure its rational for a single cell organism to partner with other single cell organisms. I think undirected evolution is an irrational concept. — christian2017

Rationality has nothing to do with it.

Single cell organisms have been, and remain, tremendously successful. No doubt about that. Multi-celled organisms formed--not by design, not for rational reasons. They just did -- just as single-celled organisms developed all the various features that various species display.

As for advantages and disadvantages, you have to ask, "In what circumstance?"

Just to add, “social media” seems a grave misnomer. It is more “anti-social media” than anything social, because we are literally interacting with screens and not human beings. Perhaps this adds to the detrimental effect. — NOS4A2

True, interacting with people in the way that this forum operates is not quite the same as sitting down for lunch together. But then, neither is writing a letter (and the recipient reading it), nor is talking on the telephone. People have been communicating electronically since about 1850, first with the telegraph. Telegraphing became an essential activity for many people almost immediately. Business operators, of course, but soon ordinary people found reasons for fast communications: "wll arriv denver noon 7-3 stgcch from golden stop" Over those 170 years we've added more electronics, but it's all pretty much the same: a message carried over wires or fibre optics.

What I really disliked about FaceBook is that it pushes way too much stuff at one's attention. It's to immersive. I prefer to pull information when I feel like it, rather than having it pushed. Here one has to pull information. TPF doesn't send messages like "Hey, SlyWeasel just got banned!" "TClark just responded to fdrake!

It's a good poem. I am familiar. That midwestern boy has pretty much disappeared, not by his own choosing. Banished and erased, more like it, by the moguls at MN Public Radio whose various enterprises reach pretty deeply into the public radio scene across the country.

The capacity of social media to wreak vengeance on those who cross the wrong line in the sand (there are so many lines...) is great. Keillor's erasure didn't require the Internet; radio and television networks or film studios have always had the power to pull the plug on a show or a performer. What the Internet can do via social media is amplify any voices organised enough to start a wave of negative comment. Institutions of all kinds live in dread of being targeted, so they react to any potential negative spin really quickly.

There is another factor having nothing to do with the Internet: Institutions (whether commercial or non-profit) work very hard to control their identities in the market place. Individuals without a lot of money can't really play this game. Corporations changing their names, logos, and advertising is an example. Phillip Morris Tobacco became Altria. They still sell tobacco, of course. Weight Watchers switched to WW with the tagline “Wellness that Works.” Apparently being associated with fat people wasn't good even for them. Lucky and Gold Star Corporation changed their name to LG. "Life's good." IBM doesn't make many computers anymore, but at least they haven't changed their name. Kraft and Heinz haven't become KHZ Corp. yet, anyway.

Language, on the other hand, builds or constructs or sets up information. — Banno

Perhaps in the land of Oz, but I've never seen language build, construct, or set up a damn thing. "English and Swahili are languages." They do not sow, neither do they reap. They are employed but do not get paid.

So I would agree that "Language is not moving information from one head to another." Communication that is sent and received moves information from one head to another, and it may not involve English or Swahili. Old lady elementary school teachers are quite good at transmitting information without language. They have a look which says, "You'd fucking better stop doing that in the next three seconds or I will make you very unhappy." My elderly elementary school teacher sister uses those expressions at family gatherings to convey various disapproving communications to her siblings (usually) or sometimes her (or other people's) children or grandchildren.

Every year it works less and less. Her siblings give her the "fuck you" smile.

English and Swahili are both sets of sounds or ink-bits on paper which have been assigned meanings and uses. Language is a repository constructed by bright apes over many years. We learn it, then we deploy it. If we do it well, those familiar with the language will interpret the sounds or the ink bits and will probably interpret what they heard or read reasonably accurately.

So, Banno, will you bare it all for our edification?

It is a perplexing paradox that "time and space" is in the box we call the universe, but that the box is all there is. There is no larger box. There might be, some think, other boxes (universes). So, if there are other boxes, doesn't there have to be a larger container?

I would probably need some mind altering drug to really enjoy the idea. Dead sober, I don't like it.

Our ancestors -- from hunter gatherers to 20th century immigrants getting off the boat at Ellis Island -- all survived the crises of identity formation and more. How did these billions of people manage to accomplish this amazing feat? One advantage they had was ignorance of all the possibilities for dysfunction of which we are well informed and to which we think ourselves doomed.

I'm not making light of individual struggles; they are real and can be strenuously difficult. My own process of identity resolution was as unsightly an affair as most people's, if not more so.

How do we all get through it?

Time pushes us forward, for one thing. We mature physically and mentally (ready or not), society makes demands on us ("Get a job, you lazy bum!" or "Your grades are slipping, you'd better crack the books!") and so we do. One fine day we realise we are all grown up, the crises resolved or not, and we get on with it.

"Getting on with it" doesn't mean we are all-well-adjusted, fulfilled, highly productive, role-appropriate, sensible people. Many of us aren't. We don't have to be. Like @T Clark's good enough parenting we do well to achieve "good enough adulthood". "Good enough adulthood" is hard enough. If one can achieve excellence in adulthood, fine. We'll award you a blue ribbon. A blue ribbon and 50¢ won't get you a cup of coffee.

Getting to the grave gracefully and not too early is par. Enjoy life as much as possible along the way.