The history of anarchism is mainly Leftist. To say that Chomsky is anarchist tout court is to say he is on the Left.

Planning is guessing, as David Heinemeier Hansson used to say.

I think it depends on whether or not you've done the task before, and how complex it is. I agree with the spirit of the claim but would be compelled to vote No, because I don't think it's impossible, but just most often impossible or close to impossible.

Not just that. I'm talking about the bigger picture, and whether it would or would not make sense if certain elements were removed. Morality requires more than moral agents, it requires the right kind of environment and the right kind of activity. — Sapientia

I agree. It looks like you might be describing intersubjectivity, which I would say counts as objectivity in this case--unless one means objectivity in the sense of being entirely independent of minds (which I think you don't mean).

So, if there is no first/second order distinction, would you say that under consequentialism, killing an innocent person just becomes ethical if it is done for a good ethical reason, i.e., because it will somehow (we can imagine scenarios) bring about more happiness or less suffering in general? To me, a first and second order scheme describes the situation better, because it acknowledges the immorality of killing an innocent person, rather than just cancelling it out with a consequentialist calculus.

And one for Chrome too.

But it's your problem. The colloquial sense is not the sense it is used with in philosophy, and speaking personally, the "attitude" of stroppy teenagers has never occurred to me in the context of philosophical discussions about belief. We can happily use "accident" in the Aristotelian sense without worrying about car crashes, "formal" without thinking about wearing suits, "begging the question" without getting confused with "raising the question", and so on. And they're not even colloquialisms, except maybe the last one.

When I see the word "attitude", I think of things like stroppy teenagers. — Sapientia

That's just a colloquialism. One's attitude is one's position, or orientation, either physical or mental (or both).

I think "attitude" is perfect (as well as being standard in philosophy), and I don't buy your separation of cognition and affect.

No, you don't know what belief is. Belief is not an attitude ... — Sapientia

I think you'd have to argue for this, because it's very common in philosophy to characterize beliefs as attitudes, especially propositional attitudes.

Say no more, or you'll summon the Trekkie beast within me.

I think the biggest problem with it is that it's a truism. We tend to argue for our own views, so our knowledge about fallacies will obviously be used in the service of those views. Maybe Q could have put it a bit more strongly and more interestingly by saying that we never turn our eye for logical fallacies on to ourselves, or something like that.

(When you quote yourself, you're asking for a kicking)

The contemporary story is unique. It's who we are. You pick up the thread of a communal story by starting with your own experiences, right? — Mongrel

But why should the public artist pay any attention to that? Granted, if we lived in Stalin's Russia this would be a more difficult debate, but I'm wondering why you think--if indeed this is what you think, which I'm not sure about--that artists should not present challenging, difficult or bizarre work in the public space. If an artist is expected to service an ideology--and I think that's what your criticism amounts to, i.e., that it's not doing so--then in what way can it be free and independent, as we would surely want it to be?

It's public art, so it should reflect the contemporary story. — Mongrel

Why should public art "reflect the contemporary story"? I take that to mean: repeat platitudes.

Actually, I stand corrected. The OED offers a secondary definition of "Zealous advocacy or support of a particular cause." — Michael

Duh.

Only a few of the BBCode tags are recognised, and the rest will just appear in the post as written in the editor.

I don't know what's come over me, but on this occasion I agree with Agustino — mcdoodle

:o

I'm confident you're in a minority, but if you manage to get several more members together and form a movement for change, I'll consider asking the devs to implement it--unless there's a strong counter-movement, as I suspect there would be.

:-O

I remember several people, including 180 Proof, using colors and different font sizes too! — Agustino

It made his posts unreadable.

Honestly Agustino, if you're the kind of person who thinks user-defined fonts and text colours are a good thing, then I doubt we have enough in common for a rational discussion about it. Several reasons have been given in the thread already. It would be messy, and communication depends on common standards, especially common standards of presentation. You say that one of the problems with philosophy is the form in which it's published. Are you saying that, e.g., the World as Will and Representation would have been better if Schopenhauer had been able to get it printed in his favourite purple Comic Sans?

Are you trolling?

No, that would be terrible. I'm baffled that anyone thinks it would be good.

A lot of developers don't pay adequate attention to graphic + typographic design, but I don't understand why not. These are essential elements that should be incorporated and thought out in each design. Most people just stick Montserrat or Roboto with 2 lines of code and then forget about fonts, but that's the wrong approach. The right font + the right graphic design significantly increases conversions, and most clients don't want websites just to look cool, or work cool - they want them to sell for them. — Agustino

This goes against your case, because it's an argument for good design, under the control of a web designer, which is the opposite of what you're asking for.

Ok, understood. Formatting and style though is a means of communication too, and as such, it is a writer's concern. One of the things that I think has brought philosophy down in the past is that the content is there, but the FORM isn't used to reflect and support it as effectively as possible. — Agustino

I don't see how. And I can't get over the fact that you work in web development and yet you think it's cool for users to be able to change the font and text colour. That's insane.

One thing I totally hate about the interface of this forum is that there's no adequate text editor. I can't centre text, can't wrap text around images, use different fonts, change font size, etc. It would make communicating stuff more interesting if we had a Word document kind of interface which gave you full flexibility. — Agustino

I abhor WYSIWYG and so-called word processors and think their invention was a terrible mistake. Formatting and style is not the writer's concern. I think the editor is fine as it is and I will not be requesting that feature. I wouldn't mind seeing Markdown support, though.

test

@StreetlightX It's a good point that we have to pay attention to politics and particular social and economic conditions. This still doesn't imply that "Islamic culture" is a bad concept. It depends what you're saying about it.

Otherwise, I had already made three points that have been made by others since: that there are several Islamic cultures, that this does not imply that there is no Islamic culture (singular), and that which Islamic cultures we talk about--and when we should use the singular "Islamic culture"--depends on what we're interested in.

Generally, those in this discussion who deny the usefulness of "Islamic culture" are being quite irrational.

yeah, I was kidding.

It's sad that 2001 never happened — Question

It's sad that there haven't been monoliths guiding the evolution of the human race so we can become space babies?

When I said it didn't matter, it was in the context of the rest of my post and of the point at issue. I meant that the fact there are intersecting cultures does not go against the point that we can legitimately speak of Islamic culture--obviously, when it's accurate to do so.

Incidentally, one very broad but interesting way to see what's happening in Islam is not merely as a reaction to Western secularism--several Muslim-majority societies accommodated those changes, even if they've since been reversed--and not as a reaction to Western military interference, but as a competition for moral and religious authority, for the leadership of Islam, being fought between Sunni and Shia Islam. One can see how this would generate a kind of arms race of conservatism.

It's been said that one thing that Kubrick introduced in the film, which doesn't fit well with the theme of technological progress that Q talked about, was the theme of humans' losing control of their technology, symbolized by the floating pen, and then played out for real with HAL.

(Y)

Not to mention religion and language. Of course, these are not universal among Muslims--the Arabic language didn't take over in, for example, Iran or Indonesia, and there are deep religious divisions--and it might be better to say there are several Islamic cultures. But that doesn't mean it's always inappropriate to refer to "Islamic culture" as such, because some cultural dimensions, such as religious interpretations and ideologies (and pottery), can spread very quickly beyond the original source ethnicity, nationality, language, etc., and considering that this happens with Islam primarily among Muslims (obviously), it's indispensable to be able to refer to an Islamic culture in general. A relevant example is the ultra-conservative Salafist movement, which has been influential far beyond Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There are trends in religious interpretation that can be seen across Islamic cultures (plural), thus allowing us to refer to a single Islamic culture, insofar as the dimensions of religion and ideology are considered important aspects of a culture.

I take andrewk to be saying that you have to be careful about making claims about all Muslims, which is right, but that doesn't mean there are not trends, e.g., towards conservatism, that can be identified and which cut across other cultural dimensions. To say things about Islamic culture is not necessarily to make sweeping claims about all Muslims. andrewk and Benkei are probably sensitive to those times when such terms as "Islamic culture" are used to make sweeping claims about all Muslims.

So, to get back to the point: against andrewk's first post in this discussion, it may be quite legitimate to say that Islam is currently theocratic, i.e., that theocratic tendencies are pronounced, though I wouldn't go so far as to say this is essential to Islam, notwithstanding its theological support.

@Benkei The fact that cultures might intersect or contain each other doesn't matter. The relevant granularity depends on what you're interested in. In this case, that's religion, so it's surely then appropriate to speak of Islamic culture, because there are few things more cultural than religion. But it is complicated. The big French survey from a few years ago showed that millions of French people (mostly of North African descent) identify as Muslims but also as secular and non-observant. However, I think this backs up my basic point.

What are you talking about?

2001 : A Space Odyssey, would be my first pick due to being all cozy with logical positivism, which simply became replaced with scientism. — Question

What do you mean by this, Q? What's 2001 got to do with logical positivism and scientism?

Yes, and because, traditionally, conservatism is pragmatic and generally allergic to ideology, it didn't have any trouble embracing things that are now considered to be left-wing--such as the welfare state--when they seemed to promise social stability. And as you say, the communitarian aspect of conservatism looks a lot like the kind of left-wing positions taken by the Left, like the British Labour Party, for example. It's up to those in power to look after the poor, and so on. It's a patrician outlook probably partly stemming from aristocratic noblesse oblige; the decline of--and in America, the non-existence of--the aristocracy may explain why this side of conservatism gave way to the free-market, classically liberal stuff.

Myself, I don't really go for either kind of conservatism, but I appreciate some of their critiques of the Left, and their defence of individual freedoms (what some unreformed Marxists call "mere formal freedoms").

There was a recent article on Spiked, which makes some good points about Nietzsche's position on truth, even though it's otherwise polemically anti-PoMo and a bit shallow.

Nietzsche believed in truth, albeit of an unstable, contingent, perspectival and disposable variety. He believed in constant experimentation and argument. His Übermensch forever goes beyond and above. This is why they had to struggle, because truth was difficult but ultimately necessary to obtain through free-thinking and reason. As he wrote in Daybreak (1881): ‘Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at a cost of spiritual and physical tortures… change has required its innumerable martyrs… Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.’ Far from being casual about truth, Nietzsche cared deeply about it. And any truth we held had to earn its keep. ‘Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, had to be sacrificed to it’, he wrote later in 1888 in The Antichrist.

Nietzsche believed truths had to be earnt. He believed we had to cross swords in the struggle for truth, because it mattered so dearly, not because ‘anything goes’. We had to accept as true even that which we found intolerable and unacceptable, when the evidence proved it so. All points of view certainly are not valid. Walter Kaufmann, who began the mainstream rehabilitation of Nietzsche after the Second World War, concluded in the fourth edition of his classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974): ‘Nietzsche’s valuation of suffering and cruelty was not the consequence of any gory irrationality, but a corollary of his high esteem of rationality. The powerful man is the rational man who subjects even his most cherished faith to the severe scrutiny of reason and is prepared to give up his beliefs if they cannot stand this stern test. He abandons what he loves most, if rationality requires it. He does not yield to his inclinations and impulses.’ — Patrick West

http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/nietzsches-enlightenment/19617#.WRwFGnV96kA

So I'm not sure how to answer the poll, as a lot of what passes for "hard left" today is not part of my political outlook, even though Marx is my go-to guy. I've been called a conservative on several occasions, on this forum and elsewhere. I admit I'm attracted to conservatism despite fundamentally disagreeing with it--I think maybe because it's not culturally mainstream, such that independence of thought sometimes seems more common among conservatives, which is a big change in the intellectual landscape.

From a recent article on Quillette:

The political spectrum creates confusion. It tells us, for example, that both fascist Adolf Hitler and libertarian Milton Friedman are on the “far right,” yet Hitler advocated nationalism, socialism, militarism, authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism, while Milton Friedman advocated internationalism, capitalism, pacifism, civil liberties, and was himself a Jew.

George W. Bush’s big-government, militarist philosophy is considered “right wing” as is Rand Paul’s small-government, anti-militarist philosophy. We say that liberals believe in free speech and conservatives believe in free markets, yet moving to the “extreme left” means clamping down on free speech (as with Stalin or Mao) and moving to the “extreme right” means clamping down on free markets (as with National Socialism). — Hyrum Lewis

http://quillette.com/2017/05/03/time-retire-political-spectrum/

Atheist.