The kind of thinking you are concerned about in science infested the humanities tower first, then the social sciences building. Now they have begun attacking the science and math quad. Fumigate your quarters before they get any farther.

So what they'd like is more inclusive teaching practices along ethnic lines, a greater emphasis on practical demonstration, and an introduction of 'Indigenous knowledge' as a cluster of practical methodologies for doing... stuff. — fdrake

Take for example two food crops on which much of the world depends: corn (maize) and potatoes. The indigenous hunter-gatherer populations of North America did not find these plants in a form anywhere close to their modern presentation. The plants had to be bred up to their much larger, modern (as of 1492) size and form.

Tomatoes are another western hemisphere food crop that had to be improved to be useful. And then there is chocolate which maybe required plant breeding, but also required the discovery of non-obvious methods of processing to become delicious.

Every culture on the planet did pretty much the same thing--all without "Science" as the contemporary world knows it.

I agree with you, but I was just joking about URLs becoming persons.

It was bought by this guy: https://angel.co/innovate — Michael

And a fine job of innovation the angel did. Maybe he was working for Trump.

yes, the education doesn't want the stuff it teaches challenged...for obvious reasons. It leads to science too often being about micro-advances; micro-challenges....which as I said is more akin to research and development, than science. — wax

We will all agree that the education system sucks in ever so many ways. But I don't know how we conduct education to foster intuitional thinking in science (or anything else). One possibility is to minimize immediate goal oriented thinking.

Left to their own devices, people are more likely to think intuitively than when they are being rigidly directed by bosses. That's my theory, anyway. Of course, people left to their own devices sometimes fail to not get much done.

Take for example Bell Laboratories. It was a think tank operated by the Bell Telephone System (back in the day when Bell Telephone was a monopoly). Their job was to do basic electronic research. Among other things, Bell labs is where the transistor came from; they discovered background microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, and so on. They weren't oriented toward specific goals like how to make the rotary dial telephone spin faster. They were doing open ended research that might or might not pay off, and the pay off didn't have to be a product -- nobody made money off the background microwave radiation field (as far as I know).

Until relatively recently, a lot of innovations in technology were brought about by amateurs and people who were not scientists by training and title. One of the reasons why progress was not faster at times was that many of the people who were interested in projects didn't know what they were doing. For instance, the "technical advisor" to Cyrus Field (who laid the trans-Atlantic telegraph cables in 1858) did not know much about electricity and made several significant contributions to the failure of the first cable. Better advice was obtained for the second attempt from William Thomson, who we know as Lord Kelvin, famous scientist.

Who has the big new ideas? — wax

Are there, in fact, big new ideas? As a non-scientist but interested science observer what I see is a lot of incremental progress where the increments are quite small. Scientists ought not feel ashamed to maintain slow and steady progress.

Science and technology make big advances at fairly widely and irregularly spaced intervals, with decades of followup to fully exploit the big new ideas. Take steam power, made practical by Watt in 1775. A century of development followed, and steam still turns generator turbines, even if the water is heated with a nuclear reaction. Electricity became a practical form of propulsive energy in the 1885 (to pick an arbitrary date). Radio waves were used for trans-Atlantic communication in 1901. Radio is alive and well in radio, television, cell phones, and photographic transmission from Ultima Thule by the New Horizon space ship 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. All of that represents a lot of increment cooked up by very bright minds.

I don't know if we can sort out the influence of intuition and logic. It isn't like ideas come tagged with their content source -- like, "this theory is 55% intuition and 45% logic". Logic and intuition are partners, not distant competitors.

The gods can be our creation along with the absurd rituals, and still be useful to us. Most people engage in rituals, even atheists. Shared rituals, shared beliefs, shared space and time, etc. all have a unifying effect. Private rituals are personally reassuring.

We created some nice religious narratives, and those are shared and also have a unifying effect in culture.

Religion, the gods, their assigned rituals and prayers, songs, dances, and so on exist because life is difficult, there is no obvious over-riding meaning to our existence, and without a framework of meaning, life is fairly grim.

So, what has philosophy taught you? — Wallows

Perhaps "philosophy" is no more instructive or therapeutic than collecting and classifying beetles as a hobby (or a job). I mean, any concerted effort to understand the world is beneficial. The effort, in itself--whether one tracks down the last beetle or not--leads to more organized, wider-aperture thinking.

Some colleges offer classes in "critical thinking", which seems odd to me. Shouldn't "critical thinking" be the modus operandi of the entire operation, from Art to Zoology? Analyzing periods of painting, or classifying plants both involve similar kinds of thinking (well, up to a point: contemplating the difference between two related species of plants won't be quite the same as comparing two paintings).

You, Wallows, are a good philosophic example. You actively ENGAGE with philosophical material - ideas. Students' engagement is what a good teacher wishes for. (Sometimes I engaged; quite often I treated the content of a class as garbage to be gotten rid of at the end of the term. Bad student!)

So is there a way to just always simplify one's cognition of causal reality? — Josh Alfred

One way of simplifying one's thinking about causation is to stop thinking about it. WHEN we can only trace a series of causal events back a few steps, then there may be (practically) nothing to think about. Take "your" arrival in the world: You were born because your gestation was successful. A particular "You" was conceived because your father had sex with your mother when she was fertile at a particular time.

Your parents may have attempted to conceive a child many times before they were successful. The failures to conceive are part of your causation, because if they had succeeded in conceiving at an earlier time, a different child would have been conceived, fulfilling their desire to have just one child. That child would not have been 'you'.

Is there any reason to continuing to muddle over the causation of your birth? No, because as soon as we start thinking about it, too many causal elements arise, and we haven't asked anything about the cause of both of your parents coming into the world, or their 4 parents, their 8 grandparents, and so on back in time. The causal factors aren't infinite, but they might as well be.

Almost everything that happens is the result of uncountable causal interactions. It isn't just the big numbers that are the difficulty of identifying causes, it's their complexity. Take the butterfly beating its wings while it sits on a plant on the NE coast of Africa. The perturbations of air caused by the butterfly could (ultimately) cause a hurricane that will wreak havoc in Florida. It might -- if all the air in the world were still, and all other weather and climate factors were in perfect equilibrium. And maybe if the planet weren't spinning, and maybe if the sun wasn't shining, and so on. And we have to assume that there is only ONE butterfly, because if there were two, one butterfly's wing beating perturbations might cancel out the other butterfly's valiant efforts to destroy Miami.

Asking what caused you is like asking what were the 1918 causes that led to the hurricanes of 2018.

So, looking for a nice clean cut cause for a discrete effect is only going to work in certain nice clean cut situations. On Friday 11 March 2011 a 9.0-9.1 magnitude earthquake occurred off the shore of northern Japan. The earthquake caused a very large tidal wave that was very destructive (wrecking the Fukushima nuclear power plant, among other things). That cause/effect relationship is clean, clear, and definite. It would be quite difficult for us to trace a chain of causation leading to the big earthquake because the fault that slipped is 18 miles below the ocean floor, which makes it rather inconvenient to look at the details. But at least we can say the quake caused the wave, and everything was pretty much downhill from there.

what I take it to mean is that humans have formed various models and theories of a god. But that has little bearing on whether there is or is not a god — wax

Yes. The existence of God (or gods) will be beyond proof until such time as God (or gods) decide to manifest himself (or themselves) in an unambiguous way. But I like the way you put it.

Therefore there can be no objective definition of ''evil'. — wax

I don't see why there can be no objective definition of evil because we are not objective all the time.

God is our creation, not the other way around. In making that declaration, I guess I am devaluing god quite a bit, demoting him from the eternal, all powerful all knowing all present being that some people think he is. God and I are on good terms, though, especially if we don't talk to each other too often.

Evil is also our creation -- and something we can be remarkably good at (evil, that is). We are the source of evil.

We live in a world where a handful of people (somewhere between 8 and 25, depending on who is counting) have more wealth than 1/2 of the world's population. So, god-like power... maybe not imaginary.

I'm not sure what you are looking for. Don't know what you already know. Don't know how much time you have. But... maybe the philosopher Nietzsche...

These two books deal with power over people in the ancient world. I haven't read them; one of them is on my shelf waiting to be read (the second one).

The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx 1st Edition
by Jerry Toner (Author), Mary Beard (Foreword) (it is what it is about, but Marcus Faix is a fake name)

Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control 1st Edition
by K. R. Bradley (Author)

Two contemporary books which discuss the power structure... They are both good discussions of the real world; whether they will tell you much about comic book super heroes, hmmm, maybe not.

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills - deals with the military, corporate, and political elite of the US in the 1950s

The Higher Circles : The Governing Class in America: G. William Domhoff

More to the point might be these, I found on Amazon

Review of How to Read Superhero Comics and Why by Geoff Klock -- on Goodreads, one review said "This book has a number of very interesting things to say about superhero comics. However, in this work, Klock had his head stuck significantly up Harold Bloom's arse, and fails to stray far from Bloom's theoretical framework." So... maybe yes, maybe no.

Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes Paperback – November 1, 2007
by Chris Knowles (Author), Joseph Michael Linsner (Illustrator) (This one at least sounds interesting)

Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal Paperback – December 21, 2015 by Jeffrey J. Kripal (Author)

Kingdom Come Paperback – September 30, 2008
by Mark Waid (Author), Alex Ross (Illustrator) The Amazon blurb says... "Set in the not so distant future, the DC Universe is spinning inexorably out of control. The new generation of heroes has lost their moral compass, becoming just as reckless and violent as the villains they fight. With Batman retired, Superman in a self-imposed exile and the rest of the Justice League nowhere to be found, it seems that all hope is lost."

Good luck. This should be an interesting project.

Because I always insist that there is an other to every identity, and every identification is an othering. — unenlightened

On whom does the benefit of this brave insistence devolve?

If some people in Great Britain identify as Scot, Irish, Indian, Kenyan, or Polish, how does that "othering" affect you? If you identify as a Welsh man, you have othered that much larger part of the world that isn't Welsh, which makes what difference to whom? In what way are you affected by the identity of people in Arizona, Peru, Bali, Timbuktu, or the semi-detached house next door?

The group identity of people in Peru is a matter for Peruvians. Ditto for those of Arizona, Bali, or Timbuktu. It doesn't concern you or me, and visa versa.

As a New England wasp of a certain age — tim wood

Tim Wood speaks only to the Lowells, the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.

↪Bitter Crank ...and who was this untrustworthy buyer pray tell? — Minyun

I don't know. The sale was private -- the old forum site was owned by an individual (Paul); somebody bought the site for unknown reasons and then let it languish. This one is owned by Jamalrob. "Somebody" has to own the site -- as far as I know, there is no such thing as a sovereign URL. Corporations are persons, but URLs haven't reached that status yet.

This is what white privilege is - not to have a racial identity, and this is why it is a hateful humiliation to have it pointed out that white is a racial identity, and this is what talk about whiteness does; it call into question and creates a vulnerability — unenlightened

There is something screwy and knotted up about the way you process the topic of race. I just don't see how "white" is not a racial identity, how identifying as white is a hateful humiliation, how having a racial identity and talking about whiteness as an identity creates a vulnerability and so on.

The "privilege of being white" (if one gets any of those privileges) derives from economic factors, political power, and social control. If whites are running things, there is a white privilege. I would imagine that there is a Han Chinese privilege in China.

I didn't take your thread title, "Humiliation" to be about personal psychohistory. I could go into the details of my personal "someone who has been much humiliated". I am not going to do that, but I do know a thing or two about being humiliated. Who doesn't? And yes, one grows a thicker skin in response. A thicker skin is adaptive. One could do worse.

Bluff, genial, self-deprecating, man-of the world, BC is the sock puppet who can afford to be honest because he is unreal and therefore invulnerable. — unenlightened

Not only do we write under pseudonyms here, we project edited, constructed public selves which may or may not be much like our in-the-flesh public self. This isn't a nude beach where we expose all as the price of admission. You can like my sock puppet or not, fuck you very much.

He is a suit of armour of many components marvelously articulated and probably worn even in bed. He is a mechanical man made of components and cannot be hurt. Of the real vulnerable person beneath the armour, not much can be said beyond hurting, frightened, lonely. — unenlightened

This is just your hostility bubbling up to the surface.

We are not stupid. We are quite bright. But... What we are not is sufficiently forward looking. This is one of our Achilles Heels (when it comes to heels, we have lots of legs). We have never been very good at predicting the the outcome of inventions. This was true when we domesticated cattle. We didn't know that anthrax, brucellosis, cryptosporidiosis, dermatophilosis, Escherichia coli, giardiasis, leptospirosis, listeriosis, pseudocowpox, Q fever, rabies, ringworm, salmonellosis, tuberculosis, and vesicular stomatitis would become some of our worst diseases. OK, so we had the excuse of ignorance 10,000 years ago, but we carry on as oblivious now as we were then.

The environment is falling apart right before our very eyes, but we can not add 2 + 2 together to see that our life styles have to change drastically -- yesterday. Not just yesterday, more like 20 years ago.

In addition to not being forward thinking, we are pretty much concerned with our own lives. We might have some grasp of the environmental catastrophe now in progress, but we really like lovely looking perfect grass, so we fertilize and poison our plot of land, and it looks great. Unfortunately 100 million other people do the same thing and the results are a catastrophe for the water table and for insect populations. But hey, our lawn looks great. It's just this one lawn after all...

We are smart enough to feel intense guilt and regret when the whole thing collapses around us and we lay dying, unable to breathe, knowing that we brought it on ourselves.

This is what identity means to me and I think identity is a good and normal thing to have.

One's identity is the core "who I am" which we start building early in life. Large parts of it remain stable throughout life, and some parts may change, but it remains the core self which lasts a lifetime. Who we are is a compound of genetics, experience, family, and community. A secure identity is a component of a healthy personality.

Maybe a dozen components, give or take a few, make up one's identity. Sex, sexual orientation, and Christian are three major parts of my identity. I grew up in a rural community and longed to leave it. When I landed in Boston at 22, I knew that "urban dweller" had been a missing part of my identity. "gay" and "male" became much more important without displacing other parts of my identity.

I identify as a midwestern American. I have given myself several different political party names over the years, but what I really believe is that politics are possible, important, and matter.

I identify as a descendent of Europeans. They were the people that populated my family, my town, my county, 90% of my state, and at least 90% of the region of the country I grew up in. They were the people who were by far the most prominent in media, education, government, business, religion, and culture of my first 22 years.

I have, most of my life, been involved with media, education, government, business, religion, culture, and personal social life where descendants of Europeans are most prominent. Some of my best friends have not been black, Asian, South American, or aboriginal North Americans. They have all been descendants of Europeans. Most of them, further more, have been gay men. (Some of my worst enemies have also been gay men -- crass homosexuals, in fact.)

Some people here will take this as the confession of a white racist. It isn't, and I am not. I am white and I like who I am. That's all. I hope blacks, asians, hispanics, American Indians, et all like who they are, as well. There is nothing wrong with racial pride, any more than there is something wrong with personal pride in being a great cabinet maker or a barber.

Have you considered (apparently not because you haven't done it) arguing for antinatalism on the basis of global warming?

Fact is, human beings are wrecking the ecosystem on which we depend. It's probably too late to do anything about it, except if people stopped reproducing altogether. The population would fall, there would be less demand on resources, less CO production, less methane, less chlorofluorocarbon gas. Little, less, least -- eventually.

Plus, many people are assholes. The KGB, the US Census Bureau, Pew Research, and Cambridge Analytica all agree that a minimum of 40% of human beings are permanent assholes. They will always be assholes. 4 out of 10 people you meet on the street will be assholes. 4 out of 10 relatives will be assholes. 4 out of 10 school children in third grade will be assholes. Because some of the 40% of the population who are assholes comprise 99% of Republicans, the prospect of having Republicans in power is a very good reason to never have children.

One double benefit reason for not having children is that non-existent children would neither be assholes nor would they have to put up with assholes. And bear in mind, 40% is a minimum; it's a floor, not a ceiling.

I'm not an antinatalist, but I can see a certain logic to it. — Bitter Crank

Life is suffering.
Being born entitles one to life's suffering.
therefore
not being born is good and being born is bad.

One could say

Life is adventure.
Being born entitles one to life's adventure.
therefore
being born is good and not being born is bad.

Life is good enough.
Being born entitles one to life's reasonable goodness.
therefore
being born is fairly good and not being born is fairly bad.

Life is full of shit.
Being a scarab beetle makes a heaven out of the shit pile.
therefore
be a scarab beetle.
Enjoy.

we should all die. — TogetherTurtle

And in the fullness of time we will. All of us. Drop dead.

But Schop's plea is to not have children. None of us. Not one.

Is Schop depressed? I don't know -- could be. But quite a few people have decided to not have children who are not explicitly antinatalist and who are no more depressed than the average person (that is, slightly depressed from time to time). They view the world as too screwed up to be a fit place for a child. The big problem used to be the threat of nuclear war (which actually hasn't disappeared). The new threat is ecological collapse. The various harbingers of ecological collapse are already coming home to roost, so... just a matter of time. If the left one doesn't get you, the right one will.

I'm not an antinatalist, but I can see a certain logic to it.

On the other hand, i know men who were in hospice in 1996, waiting to die in very painful ways from terminal AIDS. About that time the trifecta cocktail of anti-HIV drugs arrived and quite a few of these men regained their health. They all seemed pretty happy to be alive once they started to regain their health and vitality--though they still had AIDS, it was under control. They certainly knew a thing or two about suffering, as do many people who have had other severe illnesses and accidents. Or just grown very old.

The fact is that life does involve suffering, and many people (probably most people) consider the pleasures of being alive worth the suffering that goes with it.

that is to simply not have future people. — schopenhauer1

Right. You are preaching to the already doomed. As global warming escapes our control, climates become unsuitable and too erratic to support the necessary agricultural output, as insect populations crash and further shrink the food supply (exit the pollinators), as plants find it difficult to adapt, as we wipe out the megafauna (of which we are one), as ocean life dies, we will eventually slip the bonds of mortal existence and pass into the thick layer of geologically preserved plastic.

And then there will be no more humans whinging about the misery of existence. Life will go on in one form or another. Perhaps slime molds will become sentient, and eventually they too will be bitching and carping abut the bad deal of existence -- but that is a ways off and you won't be around to say "I told you so".

Who’s going to take care of us when we’re 90 if people stop procreating? Bet you didn’t think of that. — Noah Te Stroete

Apparently you haven't heard that we will all be looked after by machines of loving grace.

We must complete our mission. — Judaka

We are working hard to do a good job of it. Our homeland planet is heating up; insect populations are crashing; big mammals are going extinct. Soon for us the way of the dodo bird.

How did you come to be obsessed with that? — frank

It started with the early days of AIDS. I was involved in producing educational material for high risk gay populations and straight youth, some of whom were quite literate, and some of whom were not at all. At the time, Public Health information tended to be pitched in a more literate, formal language. The readability levels were too high for poorer target populations more at risk.

So, it occurred to me that what health education writers (and others) needed was a readability measure which could offer easier words to use. I put together the easy-to-read-word-list and the program which would sort a text into two lists: the easy-to-read words and the more-difficult words. Then writers could peruse the word lists for alternatives.

Testing various texts showed that the more words that composed a text derived from Anglo-Saxon and common words (based on word-frequency studies) which entered the language from French around 1066 to 1400, the easier it was to read. (Why? Well, Anglo-Saxon and early French borrowings (forming Middle English) compose the core of the language and most people who speak English use these words a lot.

Educated people decorate their language with more difficult terminology derived from early-modern and modern language, in which many words were coined from Latin and Greek roots. the 16th and 17th centuries were a hot-bed of more difficult abstract-word creation.

The upshot was that I learned a lot about how to write easy to read text. The people I targeted for writing improvement persisted in their feeling that their intelligence had been insulted by the whole discussion and that I could go to hell.

The other thing (some of us) wanted to do was create sex-positive educational texts. Public health professionals aren't necessarily enthusiastic about the details of sex-positive educational material -- because it is... you know, enthusiastic about sexual activity as such. They found sex-positive material to be too scandalous for government funding. (Some of our stuff was pornographic--by design.)

Stuff handed out in bars might be dropped on the sidewalk (it happens) and the next day some child might pick it up (it happens) and show this piece of shocking unwholesome safer sex material to her mother (it happens) who would then call a local elected government official to complain (it happened).

So not only was it nicely illustrated, but the terminology was easy to read, all of which added up to SMUT and FILTH in the mind of the mother and elected official. We would hear about it a few days later.

That's how it happened.

Things work out that way quite often.

I’m not sure you actually believe all this socialist stuff. — Noah Te Stroete

That's a good observation. Sometimes I'm not sure either. What I do believe is that Justice has an economic basis (as do most forms of Oppression). We can not achieve justice without altering the economic determinants of lives. Capitalism is a satisfactory system for some (maybe many) people and Socialism would be a satisfactory system too. The main problem is, "How do we get from capitalism to socialism?"

Then there is the social / political system. There are freer and more open social / political systems, and there are more authoritarian and closed systems. One can have either system with either economic system, and we have had, at various times and places.

At the very least, a freer and more open social / political system requires a redistribution of wealth--not all wealth, but certainly the big and really big piles. There are civil mechanisms for doing this, but if the ultra-wealthy have a tight grip on the political systems...

Socialism has some attractive features, but it is the destruction of the capitalist system that is the problem. How do we do that without veering into the Soviet experience?

Do you think consciousness can be fluid enough that a person can get a sense of what it's like to be autistic? — frank

As far as I know I am not autistic, but one winter I became obsessed with readability and how to engineer it. I developed a plan which required compiling a list of basic, simple English words. I went through the dictionary 3 times, writing down lists of words that fit the scheme -- maybe 20,000 (including 8,000 words with Anglo-Saxon origin) in all, then typed them up to plug into a computer program which I later wrote. (I was using a Mac Plus; the external hard drive had a whopping 20 meg of memory.)

The point is that this project required a narrow focus like someone on the far side of the autistic spectrum for several months. I've needed that kind of focus since that project but haven't been able to build up a suitably autistic head of steam again.

It looks like you think that collective memories (therefore, contemporary temporalities) are the main reason as well as the explanatory model, explaining the phenomenon of Yellow vests movement. I am not sure that it is an entirely Marxist approach. — Number2018

No, no. I wasn't thinking about collective memories, contemporary temporalities (whatever that is) and so on. I only meant that people haven't recently seen a strike or a demonstration that was effective in changing things. The big strikes at GM in the 1930s actually changed things materially.. So did various other strikes at the time. The civil rights marches in the 1950s-60s resulted in some change. What people have mostly seen since the late 1960s is NO CHANGE. Take the urban black riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated, or the huge antiwar marches: Large swaths of burnt out blocks stayed empty for 30 years. or longer. The huge protests against the war were not able to achieve long-term changes in foreign policy or domestic militarism. "Gee, we've hardly fired a bullet since Vietnam!" he said sarcastically.

Blacks rioted, whites demonstrated because they were fed up. They weren't "performing". The Gilets jaunes are fed up. Whether their protests will be as effective as they hope remains to be seen. I don't think they merely repeating things they've seen on TV.

Demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and so on owe their failures less to the earnestness of the people, and much more the tough resistance and power of the establishment. It has always been difficult to get a firm testicular grip on the balls of the establishment. The auto workers at GM in the 1930s succeeded in getting ahold of GM's balls by seizing control of the assembly plant--the sit-down strike. In that case, the GM and the other majors eventually caved. The same thing happened during WWII. The urgency of war production (and wartime profits -- the corporations weren't making guns and planes for free) gave unions a lot of leverage and they used it.

All this is true as well in struggles between labor and management in small organizations, or between a neighborhood and a developer. If you can't get ahold of the boss's or developer's balls, you'll lose (and in this case, it doesn't matter whether the boss is a man or a woman). If you can, you have a chance of succeeding.

Macron's balls? I'm not close enough to the situation.

Or, why not the Greeks?

My off-the-cuff guess is that most well developed cultures (and the Greeks were not the only one) experience episodes of literary and philosophical high achievement. What makes these episodes enduring is that they get transmitted to succeeding cultures. Greek heritage passed to the Roman Empire. Had the Greeks been swamped by some horse-riding horde indifferent to Greek culture, we probably wouldn't be talking about Aristotle.

On the other hand, it seems to take felicitous combinations of conditions to produce high culture: literacy and numeracy; a minimum of stability over enough time; sufficient prosperity to afford speculative thought; a tolerant state; a sufficiently large and interested public to support and sustain cultural achievement, and so on.

The Greeks were high achievers. They were special. They were at 'the head of the class'. Other cultures could have been contenders but were less fortunate.

The French -- or at least some French -- seem to have a history of collective action which American workers don't seem to manifest. One thinks of the much more frequent strikes in France, of student demonstrations, ands so on. I don't think the French state differs all that much from other states -- they are in business to arrange the affairs of the bourgeoisie, as Marx said -- and if they have been generous with working class benefits, well, that is probably in the past.

Americans in the home of the brave, the land of the free are under more thorough control--not "self-control" but the external control of threatened force and deprivation of employment without a safety net. One doesn't see active resistance very often in the US. Occupy Wall Street was a good experience for participants but it wasn't active resistance. No one went out on strike, traffic was not blocked on major thoroughfares, no effort was made jam the gears of commerce, etc.

And it isn't as if most American workers have it so good that there is no motivation to resist the Corporation and the State. Most workers are being subjected to a gradual multi-decade impoverization whose source is difficult to identify. Taxes, very weak growth in wages (or none), diminished benefits, inflation, shrinking well-paid workforce, growing low-paid service workforce, new costs (things like cable, internet, cellphone service) have been added to old costs, reduced social services, and more contribute to the significantly reduced wellbeing of American workers.

One can hope that Americans will take a hint and follow the suit with the gilets jaunes, but I wouldn't count on it. The memory of active resistance to the power of corporation and state has, I think, become too distant for most Americans.

Amy Klobuchar: FLICKED.

Morally sensitive people will feel like "all of the above".

Take Amy Klobuchar, my esteemed senior Senator from Minnesota. What on earth does this woman bring to the task? She's possibly a nice person -- even if she was a nasty boss -- throwing a binder at one of her employees and hitting him in the head. Does that qualify her to be Leader of the Free World? Her highest achievement before the Senate was podunk County attorney. Big deal. Her most famous line around here is "Bridges are not supposed to fall down in Minnesota" -- after the Interstate Highway 35 bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed during rush hour a few years back.

I propose the Ticket of Bernie Sanders for President with Pete Buttigieg for VP, the 37 year old gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Does Buttigieg know shit from shinola? Maybe. But an old socialist and a young gay guy would be at least a novel combo. He seems sensible.

My goodness; it's been such a long time since the days when I hung out at The Factory and I taught Mr. Warhola everything he knew. :rofl:

I enjoy observing artistic figures at a distance. Had I at a young age been dropped into the middle of Warhol's life I am pretty sure I would have fled in horror. Could I use a time machine to take my present self back to the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s New York City (and dear god, I wish I could) I'd find it fascinating -- the beats, Warhol and Company, Mapplethorpe -- all those and many more. At the time they were doing their thing in New York (and elsewhere) I was living a life of arrested development (really!) in the backwater provinces of the upper midwest. In my life, a Campbell soup can label was a Campbell soup can label and not an object of pop art.

Just a few years ago I read Alan Ginsberg's poetry and other beat works with appreciation for the first time. When I was a young man I was too stupid to get it. I tried, but was developmentally way worse off than a day late and a dollar short. I didn't start catching up until later.

One goes along the road of life and one often comes to a forking road. Maybe a fellow traveler urges one to take the road into the dimly lit side street where a lot of interesting things seem to be going on, but the other road is well lighted, familiar, and safer. I tended -- not always but often -- to stick to the safer fork. It was probably a good thing. Plunging into all the interesting things going on in the side street would probably have led to either an early death or an early awakening... One has to keep one's bearings, though.

So I like the Warhol prints I've seen in museums, and in books. I've seen a couple of documentaries about Warhol and he was an impressive worker.

Your opinion about Andy Warhol, please.

At the rate we are going, I think we are laying the necessary groundwork for implementing a thorough-going anti-natalist plan.

@Blakley seems to have read something about hunter-gatherer societies. I have not -- I know what I hear from a friend who has recently gotten into anthropology/archeology and has been intensely reading about it.

Anthropologists seem to think that modern day hunter-gatherer tribes (what few of them left there are) are a good sample of what HG societies were 200,000 years ago. It seems to me probably that HG people evolved and developed over time. Whether the HG societies we see today are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, I doubt. in his book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE, Pinker said that archeological evidence suggests that the 200,000 years ago HG societies were pretty violent (based on the number of skulls that were bashed in).

Anyway, from your perspective been born has been a bad deal for a long time. Being born seems to have been a bad deal ever since animals evolved the means of eating each other. Nature red in tooth and claw, and all that gory mess.

choosing for someone to be born, is to bring someone who will try to enculturate and labor for society. — schopenhauer1

This principle is much less clear in mass society than it was in simpler agricultural societies -- and that wasn't a long time ago--just a couple of hundred years. Breeding slaves for future laborers would be the most obvious example, but free farmers expected children to labor, too.

The exchange of work and rewards in mass society is just a lot more rococo than it is in simple societies, and it's harder to keep track of the simple details. Not working, and being a consumer of goods and services, is a real role in mass industrialized mature capitalism. Children fill that roll for at least 18 to 26 years, depending on how long they are in school. Everyone receiving support for old age and disabilities fits into that group. And of course, the idle rich parasites.

Consuming without working is an absolutely essential function. In a modern economy (like ours currently is) where consumption amounts to 72% of the GDP, buying stuff -- consuming -- is an essential task. Buying stuff is dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

Of course, if we consumed less some people would have to work less.

Suppose automation took over all work -- from raising food to high fashion. Would being born still be such a bad deal? E. M. Forster wrote a science fiction noel around a century ago, The Machine Stops. In it machines supplied everything we needed. Individuals lived in 6 sided cells (not prison cells, more like bee hive cells) where everything they needed was supplied by The Machine. The function of people was to produce and consume ideas. One had to apply to the directorate to be a parent. That was all fine and dandy for a long time, until The Machine started wearing out and eventually stopped. Bad things happened at that point.

Great story. A PDF is here.

realize that happiness itself is the problem. — Wallows

People who are happy -- some how, some what, some time, some where -- don't think happiness is the problem. professing indifference to happiness reminds one of the fox and the grapes in Aesop's fable: the fox couldn't jump high enough to reach the luscious grapes, so she left muttering, "They were probably sour, anyway." -- hence the expression, sour grapes.

I doubt if anyone can become even moderately never mind completely indifferent to pleasure and satisfaction. It's wired in. We need it. Indeed, the effort to affect indifference to pleasure, satisfaction, good feelings is more a validation of happiness than a rejection.

In a strange manner, I feel as though I have leaped ahead of my psychoevolution and am living as if I were an old man. Nothing bothers me anymore, I feel content, I have someone I care for, and I feel safe and secure. — Wallows

Is that not happiness?

From an old man to a man who is not old yet, what you describe makes me think you have achieved contentment. You were expecting happiness to be a rip roaring orgasm? Take your breath away?

the supreme philosophical goal of eudaimonia. — Wallows

How do you define the state of eudaemonia? Must it mean "happiness" (which is, unfortunately, a very overworked term)? Maybe eudaemonia is being contented, flourishing; getting on with living your life in a way that you find satisfactory and consistent with your values.

Every one of us has to define what a good life is, and it will vary from person to person. I don't think that Eudaemonia should be narrowed down to a highly specific meaning.

It's 2:30 a.m. Time to go to bed, happy or not. Good night.

After years of reading various books, magazines, internet forums, this forum, public radio talk shows, and the like, I am heartily sick of hearing about sexism and racism, homophobia, body elitism, classism, and so on and so forth.

It isn't that I like, approve of, and practice crude racism and sexism, homo hatred, body elitism, classism and every new "----ist" oppression. I don't. What I dislike intensely are the frankly highly imaginative ways that extremely esoteric offenses are put forward as crimes against humanity. I hate the "non-negotiable demands" of the craptivists who seek out these imaginary offenses which are, frankly, just self-righteous tantrums in many cases. Frankly, the academic demonstrators yowling about sexism, racism, transphobia, etc. are not compelling. They are repellent.

Discrimination based on race and sex seems to be declining, even if it hasn't begun to disappear, and when it occurs it's usually not symbolic. It's material. For instance...

There is nothing symbolic about financial institutions targeting poor neighborhoods (black, hispanic, native American, white) for exclusion from home loan programs. There is nothing symbolic about bad schools in core urban areas. There is nothing symbolic about the high and rising rates of HIV, AIDS, and STDs in the gay black, gay hispanic populations. There is nothing symbolic about 1% of the population controlling more wealth than 99% (or however the percentages are distributed). There is nothing symbolic about women who work 8-10 hours a day on the job also doing 85% (or more) of work at home. And so on.

The most intense, and harmful forms of discrimination boil down to discrimination based on class. People with very little -- or no -- wealth are severely discriminated against by very wealthy people. This is just plain old classism. One could rightly say,"When it comes to discrimination, the only war is the class war."

Those who have the most wealth have the most power, and they clearly intend to keep both their wealth and their power. THEY are not going to share their wealth or their power with US. THEY are going to keep US as oppressed and powerless as is convenient. The overthrow of the class system (of highly disproportionate wealth and continual exploitation of workers) is the SINGLE most important cause -- the key "site of resistance".

(Sure environmental disaster is important too -- and the means of making more and more CO are in the hands of the ruling class. So again, the only war is the class war.)

Workers of the world unite, etc.

In these later years, I have spent a lot of time evaluating the course of my life and have often wondered, "What intervention, taken at the right time, what kind of program, might have significantly changed my life so that it would have turned out 'better'?" Not that my life was or is terrible. It wasn't; it isn't. But one wonders...

What I lacked at age 18 was maturity. Four years in college, two years in the domestic Peace Corps; a couple of years of graduate school helped enormously by giving me time to grow up some. My entry into the real world was delayed by 8 years. Finally, at age 26, i landed a responsible professional job, had an apartment and was living a more or less normal life.

The next 40 years were a bumpy ride -- there were some peak periods and several long ditches.

Could school (at any time from K to 17) have taught me what I apparently had not learned very well on my own? Such as...

how to conduct a satisfactory sex life?
how to work constructively in very volatile political settings?
how to understand the nature of (my own) mental health and mental illness?
how to effectively pursue life plans...

I've been around long enough to know these are common problems. Many people have chaotic sex and family lives because they don't know the basics of relationships (among other things). Community groups often come together to address important issues, and find their efforts disrupted by intense conflict over ends and means. People experience intense anger, loneliness, fear, alienation, confusion, etc. -- even actual depression -- without having enough self-knowledge to see that their functioning is failing. Millions (billions?) of people can not maintain long term plans (like... 5 to 10 years) to achieve desirable and practical goals.

Having these good features adds up to being effective persons. Let's say that 60% to 70% of the population consists of at least effective people, including many who are highly effective. Still, that's 30% to 40% of the population that flounders about ineffectively. COULD SOMETHING HAVE BEEN DONE TO IMPROVE THEIR PERFORMANCE?

Maybe not. Skills are at least somewhat normally distributed. The largest group of people are going to be reasonably effective; smaller groups are going to be very effective, and some are going to be ineffective to very ineffective. The distribution is probably skewed in favor of "ineffective".

Can we suppose that everybody can be a big success? No, we can not. There are too many variables in intelligence, background (race, class, sex, physical health / physical handicap, wealth / poverty, etc.) birth order, # of siblings, family health or disorganization, quality of communities and schools, genetics, disinvestments, and so forth. If children reach K or 1st grade with significant deficits, it is almost a certainty that the child will either overcome them himself, or will suffer negative outcomes. Children can not be started over under better circumstances.

IF in the United States, 30% to 40% of the 56.6 million children in school (K-12) have significant life-skill deficits, those 16.8 million to 22.4 million children are too numerous to provide provide remediation--assuming we knew what effective remediation looked like.

I think a certain level of individual failure in life is inevitable--more inevitable now than in the past when the technical demands of work, play, learning, etc. contained more -- and simpler -- options.