Whatever we think of the Arab world, we still need to look at ourselves. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I previously highlighted in the shoutbox, the US bombed a hospital in Kunduz in Afghanistan and mowed down doctors and patients as they tried to escape the burning building. Dozens were killed. According to Medecins Sans Frontiers, the US army had been given the coordinates of the hospital beforehand and the attack was deliberate.

MSF is disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack on its hospital in Kunduz. These statements imply that Afghan and U.S. forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital – with more than 180 staff and patients inside – because they claim that members of the Taliban were present. This amounts to an admission of a war crime. — Christopher Stokes, General Director of MSF

According to the Pentagon it was "an accident". We will probably never know for sure, but I am personally more inclined to take the word of a group of volunteer doctors than that of the Pentagon. If the attack was deliberate then I don't see any reason why it wouldn't qualify as terrorist in nature (unless we mean to limit the word "terrorist" to simply mean those with more primitive weapons than us). Herein lies the problem; as long as we in the west continue to carry out terrorist attacks on Muslims under the guise of war, it's hard to see how we can hold the moral high ground when we ourselves are attacked. Hollande's comments about being "merciless" and Sarkozy's call for "total war", the results of which will likely lead to more deaths of innocents on both sides, suggest it will be a long time before we learn that lesson.

Liked. Even though it was a bit meandering. Comparing my approach to Foucault's is almost as much of an ego boost as getting multiple likes on my posts. (Note that I'm just going to ignore the parts where you disagreed with anything I said). :-*

Well, they're not visible next to posters' icons when they post. You have to search on profiles to find them. So, there's no need for you to know any post count other than your own. That seems to me to be the right balance.

Option two would be my second choice because it seems to me that the reputation system is unproductive enough to undercut the value of likes. I've seen sites that run largely on reputation, and it affects the behavior of everyone on them—including, and sometimes especially, those who claim most that they couldn't care less. It can also be discouraging to those who are newer in a way that a simple system of likes typically is not. Anyone can get a few likes with a strong post, after all. But a reputation system tracks seniority as much as—and often more than—ability. — Postmodern Beatnik

At the risk of writing a "me too" post, I agree wholeheartedly. There should be no overt signs that could be interpreted as hierarchical or of denoting seniority visible next to members' icons as it may bear the false suggestion that a particular post is more valuable than another for reasons above and beyond its content. This would go for post count as well as a posters' number of likes. I suppose an exception would be the icon that identifies staff as there is some practical benefit for members to know immediately who the staff are (although it's not crucial as the staff are listed in the members section too). In contrast, I see no benefit at all in reading a post to immediate knowledge that the poster has a lot of likes or that they've posted a lot. If we want to know more about a member's competence, the best way to do it is to look through their post history and that's available on their profile page.

Point taken, bert. :)

Or maybe I'm being too linguisticky. Well, that's the way I look at it anyhow.

So much for the shortcuts then. :s

Yes, sentences are just strings of words starting with capital letters and ending in some form of punctuation, usually a full stop. Clauses are more easily identifiable and much more effective units for studying meaning than sentences I would say. But it depends on the level, type and subject of analysis.

I don't think words can be considered to be the units of linguistic meaning, because a word by itself has no particular context. — John

Linguistic meaning often can't be analysed in terms of words, but that's not to say a word like "Hello!" doesn't have linguistic meaning. It does. A case where you can't analyse linguistic meaning at the level of a word would be, for example, a phrasal verb. You can't analyze the meaning of "I gave in" by analyzing the meaning of each word in turn for obvious reasons. The appropriate semantic units are "I" + "gave in". In the case of a morpheme, the semantic unit can be less than a word, and in the case of a proverb it can be a whole sentence, and so on. Anyhow, this is all semantics. Context of utterance comes into play later when you consider pragmatics. They're two different levels of analysis.

Don't worry, you'll never make it to 150 anyway if I have my way. >:)

Anything that stops the members being organized according to likes earned is good with me even if it means no likes at all. The last thing we need here is this kind of popularity hierarchy.

I'm OK with likes on posts but I don't like them accruing. Voted accordingly. (My second choice would be to just turn them off.)

I get 19 for both of those on Wikiloopr. Still can't beat murder the way I'm playing it. :-*

You can take it to both extremes. You can diss plumbers and welders because you're an arrogant ass or you can diss philosophers because you're an ignorant ass. Politicians aside, I think most of us know where the balance lies.

Thanks for this @StreetlightX. It's provocative to reflect that while autistics suffer from a degraded form of interpersonal communication, that may be just what allows them to experience an enhanced form of extrapersonal communication. So, it could well be that the extralinguistic deficiencies of we NTs reflect a gradual evolutionary trade-off between being in the world and being in the world of others, a trade-off that autism somehow circumvents. I think of Temple Grandin, the well-known autistic Professor of Animal Science, who claims that words are her second language, and maybe there's a sense in which words are the second language of all of us, our first language having become more and more marginalized in the face of sustained evolutionary and sociocultural pressures. This underlines again the argument that philosophical theories of language that fail to address the origins and groundings of their subject matter can be of no lasting interest.

For @Pneumenon and all those with heavy metal hearts.

- Good questions. The software's a bit different here, so it's not possible to auto-PM reasons for edits or deletions etc. And we decided against logging every moderator action as it seemed it would be too time-consuming. It's up to the moderator to contact the poster manually if he or she thinks it's necessary. A "deleted posts" thread sounds like a reasonable idea though. If other posters want that or anything else, please make your views known here. So far, all I've modded have been double posts and spelling/grammar issues. Long may it last.

Who wants to be Piggy? :B

(Probably because it automatically puts English phrases in quotes or some boring reason like that but let's not spoil the fun...)

No.1 in China. (Y)

Rubio is clearly in favour of vocational education, even going so far as favouring it at the expense of academic educution. Is he right to do so? — Sapientia

Rubio's in favour of getting himself into power and he's appealing here, for obvious reasons, to a kind of lowest common denominator anti-intellectualism that represents a significant percentage of the grass roots Republican vote. If he thought that saying philosophers were in league with Satan and should be burnt at the stake would get him votes, that'd be the riff he'd be playing.

But on to the matter at hand...

Do we need more welders and less philosophers? Is the amount of money that a job makes the only thing to consider here? Is it the primary thing to consider? Does and should financial status take precedence over other societal and individual concerns and values when considering the relative importance and prioritisation of jobs? — Sapientia

No, no, no, and no.

Rubio talks about making enough money to live a good life. But how much money - if any - is required to live a good life? — Sapientia

This largely depends on how much money you feel you require to live a good life. If you swallow the story that you need to be rolling in material possessions to be a success then you will never be happy without those possessions, and maybe not even with them. As far as I'm concerned, the benefit of earning money is the freedom to not have to earn more of it.

Cynicism and Stoicism come to mind as rejecting the particular sort of reasoning and values of those such as Rubio, regardless of their popularity — Sapientia

I guess Diogenes didn't watch enough TV...

Yes, without a common sense approach to language as grounded in a world of meaning from the beginning (and a recognition of its evolutionary flourishing in this ground ) you get drawn into all sorts of absurdities like Quine's destruction of meaning, which bleeds into reference and (though he tries to deny it) ontology. Davidson follows him down this route and we are left with a dizzy relativism where the forms of life behind language seem to float magically in some philosophical ether. I guess it's all a very interesting intellectual endeavor but essentially an aimless one.

Thinking in retrospect, it might perhaps be better to characterize this as as naturalism of language, rather than a realism. But I suppose this is more provocative and fun, knowing our little crop of posters. — StreetlightX

I think naturalism is a better term here too (although hardly any term is untainted by unwanted associations). Language is a natural evolutionary phenomenon and that needs to be the basis on which we come to both a scientific and philosophical understanding of it. Certainly we shouldn't be using language to extirpate the very tools necessary to comprehend it.

Baden, 13 clicks. Beaten by squirrels. And religion. Holding my own with cheese though.

Donald Trump, 11 clicks. Las Vegas, 14 clicks. The Click, 12 clicks. :-|

Religion, 11 clicks. On a par with squirrels then.

They're only losing, or at least not winning, their battles in the Middle East and Afghanistan because they're not willing to take the number of casualties it would be required to win them. And they're not willing to take those casualties because they know doing so would lose them the support of the public. Presumably, if they decided to attack the public, those considerations would be out the window,

I'm not sure the analogy with mustard gas holds. Mustard gas may be repulsive but it's not particularly destructive or militarily effective in modern war. The unique thing about nuclear weapons is their level of destructiveness and military effectiveness. Their gruesomeness is a side-effect by comparison. We don't need a like-for-like deterrent against mustard gas or other such weapons because we have more effective options to counteract them. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are of such devastating power that they give the holders of them a massive amount of leverage in war. It is certainly inhumane to use them but if unilateral disarmament leaves open the risk of complete destruction of your citizenry by an adversary who isn't as morally sensitive as you then that decision could be considered inhumane too.

Obviously, the ideal that we should aim for is no country to have nuclear weapons. But it's better to have nuclear weapons if major adversaries retain them. The difficulty lies in choreographing the former situation in order to avoid the latter. You could make an analogy with guns or other weapons. It's safest on the whole for none of a group of adversaries sitting in a room to have guns. However, it's safer for each member to have a gun if any of the other members has one.

...do you think there's good reason to keep them on as a deterrent and therefore implicitly believe there are circumstances that their use would be justified? — Benkei

I would feel safer in a world where America, Britain and France had nuclear weapons than one in which only China and Russia retained them (I've left out a few countries here but you get the idea). I can also imagine circumstances where their use could be justified. But whether their actual use is justified or not, or whether they would ever be employed or not, keeping them on is likely to act as a deterrent as the dialogue above suggests.

One of the reasons that many American's own firearms is to defend themselves against the very government that would feel entitled to such a confiscation. In a much older thread at another place, I asked whom around the world, would believe an American's plea for help, if our government turned on US, it's citizens AND help. The answer to my question was stunning as the ONLY forum member, in a sea of represented countries, that said would help was from Canada (maybe ssu, I would have to look back) and that was in the form of medical support and maybe refuge for American's wanting to flee the USA. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

The lack of support is probably due at least in part to incredulity about the likelihood of any such eventuality. Think of what would have to happen for the stated scenario to transpire: Your leaders would have to cook up an essentially suicidal plan and then convince the entire security apparatus from generals down to soldiers on the ground to accept it and put it into operation. There would have to be an outbreak of simultaneous and sustained mass insanity among the government and its security forces for any such assault to take place. There's just no way it could get off the ground even if someone at the top was crazy enough to suggest it. The fact is that your government and your security forces are made up of real people who are on balance no less irrational than the population as a whole. So, the proposed scenario of an assault by the government on its people is as fanciful as a mass assault by American citizens on the government and its institutions. The only caveat I would add is that if there were some earth shattering event such as a nuclear war, a meteor strike, or some severe climactic disaster, the normal rules wouldn't apply. But that's hardly a basis for opposing policy changes that could save lives now.

(As an aside, this debate is a bit one-sided. Anyone else besides Tiff want to put the opposing view?)

Maybe any monies beyond 3 months worth of site costs go to targeted advertising? — ProbablyTrue

That might be a possibility, but we really don't have much money to spare for that sort of thing. Anyhow, all help in finding new members is much appreciated.

Also, where'd the subscribe button go? Is there a way people could enter an amount greater than the 1 month or 6 month subscription cost? — ProbablyTrue

Anyone who wants to donate more can PM @jamalrob and he should be able to arrange something. Cheers.

Part of the justification for that @Monitor is that files use up much more space than posts, and eventually more space is something we'll have to pay more for.

He's allowed in @Tiff (as long as you're willing to take responsibility for any accidental discharges. :) )

. Unfortunately, as @Bitter Crank alluded to, it's in "honour cultures" like the southern United States, where politeness is highly valued and people are highly armed, that social breaches are more likely to result in deadly violence. So, even if it were the case that an armed society led to a more polite society, if by a more polite society, you mean an honour culture then it's probably not a desirable outcome. You're better off being somewhere where people are generally rude to each other and don't so easily take offence than in a polite environment where conflicts can quickly escalate into the use of deadly force.

(By the way: Welcome PF members! Please leave your weapons at the door before entering.)

Thanks, Joy. Maybe you can send me some links on lucid dreaming by PM.

Thanks @JoyB!

Good suggestions and much appreciated. To be honest, what would help as much as anything else at the moment would be to get the word out through social media that we exist. Until we gain more visibility on search engines, expanding our member base at a reasonable rate is a major challenge.

In the meantime, many thanks to all of you who have donated your hard earned cash and/or your time, energy and intellect. You are making the site what it is

(Y)

Thanks for that. Got any links to more info on NREM dreaming?

f anything philosophy makes someone arrogant and reclusive. — darthbarracuda

Philosophy makes us arrogant? I wouldn't have thought so. If anything, I'd say doing philosophy is a good way to teach ourselves humility. As for reclusiveness, it may make us fussier about our choice of friends, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I guess it is arguable that philosophy makes us better people overall, but I did say "at its best" and I'd have no truck with it if I didn't believe it was somehow - to borrow @The Great Whatever's term - edifying.