"There is no scientific evidence that..."

QED.

So here's a study that might interest some.

What I found rather shocking though was the unwillingness of government even to compile statistics on mass shootings or to fund studies.

To further the understanding of the underlying root causes of these events, and to confirm whether or not contagion truly plays a role, an official comprehensive detailed, accurate, and publicly available federal database of incidents of all mass killings and school shootings in the US is necessary. A database that includes, at a minimum, details on the background events, mental health status and access to mental health treatment of the perpetrators, exactly what kinds of weapons were used, where the perpetrators obtained their weapons, and whether they did so legally or illegally. Several studies of firearm violence over the past decade have pointed out the need for such a database (see, for instance, References [46, 47]). For the time being, while waiting for such a database to become available, studies such as this must use what data are available, paying attention to cross-checks of the robustness of the modeling methodology to potential biases, as we have attempted to do here.

Studies into the prevention of such tragedies are also hampered by the freeze on federal funding for research into gun violence in the United States, put in place by Congress in 1997 [48, 49]. In January, 2013, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to resume studies into firearm violence. However, at the time of this writing in September 2014, the majority of members of Congress have vowed to continue to block allocation of federal funding to the studies. In the near term it thus appears that federal legislation will not be put forward to address the need for the documentation and detailed study of such events.

There's none so blind as they who will not see. But I have hope that minds will change and that argument and appeal is worth the effort.

Britannia blazes the trail. All you need is the human rights convention.

where do you stand now — T Clark

Well my experience is very limited and close-up, so it is only anecdotal. It was definitely pie in the sky, and also remarkably successful given the circumstances. The difficulty with education is that it is always an unethical experiment for the results of which one has to wait about 20 years. There was a move in the general direction of 'freedom' advised by the Plowden report, in the early 60's. But there is a fundamental difficulty with such top down policy moves, that they expect the same smacking and shouting teachers to implement the new 'child-centred' policy. what resulted was a sort of covert war of manipulation between teachers and children which continues to this day. It's like expecting the Conservative party to run the NHS - but literally, wiping up the blood and performing the operations. :yikes:

Two things surprised me 1) the venom with which conservative essayists hated Summerhill and its ideals and 2) the extent to which the liberal writers understated the radical nature of what Neill had done. — T Clark

Well they go together. Someone says you're ruining the children in your care and bringing up ignorant monsters, so you want to say - it's really not that bad.

But it is scary. While I was working at Leeds Free School, I started to worry - kids not learning to read at 11 or 12 yrs. Were we messing their lives up? It was years later, coming back to find these ex-pupils had made something of their lives, that I was reassured. These were already excluded kids that were one step from reform school or prison, and I found a girl who preferred football in the street had decided to get some qualifications and become a physical ed teacher, another lad had rejected his older brother's violent lifestyle in favour of a job on the railways and a mortgage. And these were the dregs of society being taught by dole- scroungers like me with no pay or qualifications using scrounged materials in a semi-derelict and condemned house. Rather different from the rich brats at fee-paying Summerhill.

Summerhill used to be famous. Now most people haven't heard of it. Had you heard of it before. — T Clark

Oh yes. I read Neill at uni and was involved with the free school movement and the British home schooling organisation. So I am firmly partisan on this issue. But have some scholarly research on me.

I have trouble following what you mean here. — Agustino

I mean that whatever innovations they made would spread to their potential conquests by osmosis, aka trade. Very different from Europeans with guns reaching cultures that did not have metal.

What were the slaves used for? What kind of work did they do? And why didn't earlier peoples, which were arguably a lot better organised than the European countries at that time (thinking now about the Roman Empire) make use of slaves and achieve a scientific revolution? — Agustino

Agriculture, sugar, cotton mainly. I think the crucial developments were in navigation, boatbuilding and guns. I'd guess that the Romans were unable to get far enough away from their own influence to have that overwhelming advantage that enables a total subjugation, but this is another 'what if' question, that is pretty unanswerable except by imagination supported by prejudice.

There's a time for honesty, and a time for moderation; I believe in whichever suits me at the moment. :grimace:

It would be extremely interesting to do a control study on children from Summerhill, and that's about the nearest you could get to controlling for education system. In the meantime, finding that a test for anything that Nasa finds important that kids can do that much better than adults is quite striking. I may well be over-interpreting above, but I don't think there is much 'bogus'. Did you watch the vid?

China also happened to be the world's largest economy for much of world history. But at the same time, they did not learn how to make use of natural resources on an industrial scale and in a scientific way in the manner, Western Europeans did during and before the Enlightenment. Why didn't they? What made this "scientific revolution" possible in Europe? — Agustino

This handy timeline makes it clear that the slave trade predates the Enlightenment, and anything one can seriously call industry as we think of it. It can be more reasonably argued that it was slavery that produced the wealth that allowed the enlightenment and the industrial revolution to get going, and the industrial revolution in turn produced the ending of slavery, with machines that can be turned off when not needed becoming cheaper and more profitable than slaves.

British people never treated me very well because I was a foreigner — Agustino

Well some of us might have other reasons for treating you badly, but let's try not to go there. :fire:

the just society seeks to promote the unique strengths of each individual, rather than seeking conformity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, the dichotomy between individualism and collectivism that plagues us at the moment is a false one. Difference does not entail conflict, individuality does not entail selfishness and antisocial attitudes, cooperation does not require coercion or conformity.

My guess is that if any of the other races got ahold of technological superiority first and learned to exploit fossil fuels and other natural resources, they would have subjugated the rest of the world themselves, and would have justified it in similar ways. What do you reckon? — Agustino

Who knows, it's certainly possible, but China invented gunpowder, paper, and all kinds of stuff without feeling the need. It's obviously not a racial thing, but it is a cultural thing, and who knows where any culture might have gone if...?

those years are long gone now! I really think we have moved beyond that, especially with the internet and the ease of access people now have to others of different nationalities, skin colors, and to knowledge as well. — Agustino

I do assure you those years have not gone, but continue. Even dinosaurs remain as fossils, and in the imagination, and in the way they influenced the development of the Earth, and that was a very long time ago, before even my time.

So a professor getting fired based on skin color isn't a serious case of racism? — Agustino

Well it's obviously serious for the parties concerned in each case, but the question is in which direction the generality of cases lie. I'm not arguing for the moral superiority of any race or gender, but if you ask me if white people suffer a widespread disadvantage in the culture because of their skin colour, then the answer is that they do not and never have done.

Tangent to the debate, but closer to the title, have a look at this.

My interpretation of this is that the form, as distinct from the content, of the education system is such as to instil conformity, fear of standing out or being wrong, an obsession with 'right answers', competition and not cooperation, and this has a pathological effect that is normal to the extent of being almost universal. And it doesn't make for contented people either.

Talking of legacy, here's a fun fact..

Of course, if you listen to people like unenlightened, if you're white, you don't have to worry about being picked on with regards to your skin color on the street... except if you happen to live in Pakistan, or you go through the wrong neighbourhood, etc. — Agustino

If you ever listened, you would not hear me say that white people never suffer discrimination. What you would hear me say is that there is a legacy from the past, from the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, by (white) Europeans, which was justified by an explicit doctrine of white supremacy. And this doctrine continued explicitly and implicitly through JimCrow laws for example in the US, Racist immigration policy and 'the stolen generation' policies in Australia, Apartheid in S. Africa, and so on and so on. These are things that I remember, they happened in my lifetime, as I remember my aunt and uncle adopting six mixed-race children (along with their own six white kids) because no one else wanted to look after such kids because they were tainted and shameful.

Now you may think that since we started letting black people sit at the front of the bus, all that history is over and done with, apart from a few oddities in pointy hats. But can only think that by covering your eyes and ears to the vast amount of evidence from the media from social scientists, that the attitudes persist, as one would expect them to if one understood the evolution of social attitudes at all.

And a really good example of this persistence is the way, in this very thread, one incident in what the article calls 'a historically black college', of alleged discrimination against whites is taken as of comparable weight to the discrimination against blacks. It is particularly ironic that the black colleges were explicitly set up to educate newly freed slaves who had previously been forbidden by law from being educated.

If you listened to me, you would hear me say that no one is immune from prejudice and partisanship, and anyone can suffer discrimination. But not uniquely, but to a unique extent and extreme, white people have a long long history of justifying invasion, oppression, exploitation, enslavement, and genocide on the grounds of their racial superiority. Probably every culture thinks it's the best, but take a look at the condition of the indigenous people of Australia, India, North and South America, Africa and the blacks in the US, and you see a pattern, and the pattern is not how badly treated and hard done by the white immigrants have been and are. Hey, but every now and then, a white guy gets a bad deal - outrage!

The way you presented it is certainly propagandistic.
— Agustino

And that is true, because it turns out, by your own comments, that the program barely mentions Trump. — Agustino

I presented it as history. It presents a historical analysis that explains the roots of - amongst other current affairs the election of Trump. Being an historical analysis, it talks mainly about history. You have constructed all this nonsensical complaint yourself out of one sentence of mine, that you have used to justify what cannot be justified; a damning condemnation of something you have no knowledge of. And now you go whining to the moderators because I have called you out and exposed your baseless criticisms asblind prejudice.

So... let's see. Trump barely gets mentioned, but this documentary is supposed to "explain the place of Trump. — Agustino

So let's see. You dismiss as fake and propaganda a talk by a professor of History that you haven't heard, on the basis that it it is about white supremacy and mentions Trump. Now that is definitely making shit up to suit your prejudices, and frankly wilful ignorance that really ought to be beneath even your dignity.

Dude a half hour monologue of history ranging over four centuries and several continents is way too dull to count as propaganda. The word 'nazi' though is never mentioned at all. It is your hysterical fulminating that is fake and propaganda. What 'we all know' is no doubt extensive, but listen to fucking thing before you know quite so well what it is saying. For a start, the historical legacy of white supremacy as exemplified by the British Empire and attitudes to Indian, Chinese, and African peoples and also natives of America and Australia are covered in some detail. That such a global and longterm cultural construction is not eradicated in a couple of generations does not require that it has the support of a lobby of overt supporters, it survives in law, in patterns of property ownership, in unconscious assumptions available to propagandists.

What is really terrible, is that Trump barely get's a mention, and then as merely the continuation of an historical process.

Have some history dudes. Explaining the place of Trump and all sorts of other inexplicable strangeness.

https://soundcloud.com/historyworkshop/episode-4-the-roots-of-white-supremacy-part-1?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=facebook

Never have so many free individuals felt so helpless – so desperate to take back control from anyone they can blame for their feeling of having lost it. It should not be surprising that we have seen an exponential rise in hatred of minorities, the main pathology induced by political and economic shocks. These apparent racists and misogynists have clearly suffered silently for a long time from what Albert Camus called “an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence”. It was this gangrenous ressentiment, festering for so long in places such as the Daily Mail and Fox News, that erupted volcanically with Trump’s victory.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump?CMP=share_btn_fb

From last year, but worth second glance.

Dudes, 'feedback' is the place to discuss the mods, who will not replace us after the war. Now what about those cockroaches?

↪unenlightened Of course, but why speak of roses, when truly it is the giving to another person that provides the greatest rewards? Are we just not restating the Golden Rule? — Hanover

Well I likened roses to the Nation - why speak of the Nation? Patriotism is a vestige of another kind of relation to the world. People are difficult, much harder to relate to than roses.

You answer for me, and better than me.

"Ask not what the rose can do for you, ask what you can do for the rose."

Feeding, weeding, pruning, debugging the rose, one has a relationship of care that is entirely different from the performing cut roses available to buy.

Cockroaches. I thought everyone knew that.

The more likes, the more worthy the object. There is an inherent emptiness in this, a lack of relatedness, or substance that despite the fact that we are dynamic, active, energetic and doing things, all of it is really nothing. — TimeLine

How are these likes different from the rose's looking at you?

I understand the contrast between the mutuality of relationship and the one way relationship of possession, but to the extent that one sells oneself and buys a trophy husband, at least the semblance of mutuality is restored. Can you articulate why it is only the semblance and thus unsatisfying?

One already has a whip - for horses, dogs, and other men and boys. Clearly it is an impassioned plea for gender equality.

Just so.

Is it possible for wisdom not to lead to success though? — Agustino

It's inevitable. Success is the obsession of the fool. Far better to fail attempting the right thing than to succeed at the wrong.

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom. — My fortune cookie

Timely wisdom from a biscuit.
And Trump has all the wisdom of a fortune cookie.

Give or take, it's the condition of being in the womb, which we're all familiar with. One is not exactly disconnected from all senses, but there is nothing distinctive such as to identify internal and external, and nothing to form a sequence or narrative and give a sense of time.

I'm not sure that the presence of awareness makes sense without having had any of the constitutive experiences of awareness ever. — fdrake

That seems right to me; to be aware of nothing at all is the same as being unaware, in the same way that being married to no one is the same as being single. Sensory deprivation tends to lead to hallucination, but hallucination sans memory of the real would be mere 'static' - indistinguishable.

So I don't think consciousness would arise without contents, without a world to be conscious of. Consciousness is relational. In the beginning, the world created God.

What causes violence within the individual? — Anthony

A big question. But one can also ask, even more heretically, 'Is violence within the individual?

I suggest that (the expression of) violence is normalised socially, to the extent that is almost becomes a realistic career option. If you can't get a decent job, and don't fancy flipping burgers and being destitute and despised, try multiple homicide, no qualifications or experience necessary and a good chance of hitting the headlines and trending on twitter.

To put it another way, the madness of the oppressed in society is by definition escape or revolution - drapetomania or some version of rabidity.

Perhaps it is the repressed, projected violence of society that finds - shall we ironically call it a safety-valve? - in the weakest most alienated individuals.

On the op's topic more specifically, I would suggest that drugs that expose the madness of normality can be therapeutic to a mad world, but should be treated like a sacrament, that can awaken one to one's folly, but that should not be used habitually so as to become incorporated into it.

I suspect that the ancients did not believe that all men were equal, so the case is entirely different anyway. My point is that the category of 'equals' whether it is 'men' or 'citizens' or whatever, is defined recursively by the group to include or exclude women, blacks, the insane, the property-less, immigrants, natives, and so on. Whatever or whoever is excluded is not equal, and the truth is 'self-evident'. 'We' do not ask 'them' whether they are equal or not.

I thought it was 'equal in dignity and rights'. But the whole rationale for slavery is founded on the notion that slaves are not men, but only (charitably) 'boys', rather as dogs are. And this too is self evident, precisely because 'all men are created equal.'

My position is that we do not believe that there are patterns in reality because we apply an inductive method.

But rather that we see and become certain of the patterns themselves. — Banno

So we see, or we used to see, a pattern of birds of a feather - a white feather - with long necks, webbed feet and quite big, and come up with a word 'swan'. I suppose the word might have an ostensive definition in the first instance(s), "a bird like that one", but pedantic classificationists eventually come up with a specification of 'likeness' that constitutes the natural kind -'swan', a definition.

"A (adult) swan is a big white bird with a long neck."

From which we can deduce, 'All (adult) swans are white'. And that is a necessary truth, according to the definition.

Then captain Cook, or whoever it was, rocks up with stories about big black birds with long necks that look remarkably similar to swans, except for the colour. And it seems to me we have a choice; either we can invent a new word, 'naws', to signify these strange colour-inverted creatures, or we can change (widen) the definition to include them as swans.

But if this is a true account of how it goes, then on the one side the claim that all swans are white is not an induction, but says nothing about what Captain Cook might or might not find on his travels, and on the other, neither is it an empirical fact that what he found were black swans. The truth of the matter depends on how we choose to use words. We decided to call them swans, and changed the meaning of the word. The decision confers certainty either (contradictory) way, and the facts (of there being long-necked black birds) are not decisive after all.

And does the Eiffel tower not have foundations, too?

It's not that I sit on the fence about all these ismic controversies, so much as I find myself firmly on both sides; 'other' suggests something not either, rather than both, but it is the nearest I can get to not misleading. Sometimes, though I had to more or less invent a position not to seem entirely contrarian.

I think you'll like this. Have a little philosophy with your science.

Thought you might find this interesting:

"Well, one day in 1917 I was standing on the deck of my ship looking back at the wake—it was all white because of the bubbles—and I began wondering idly how many bubbles there were back there. Millions, obviously. I’d learned at school that in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ pi, and I’d also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn’t use pi. I said to myself, ‘I think nature has a different system, and it must be some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coördinate system, because nature has all kinds of models." Buckminster-Fuller.

Well yeah, people reject indoctrination - especially when the indoctrination places them at a disadvantage, say black kids in the US for example. And that's bad, motherfuckers! Have you been indoctrinated into that contrary language, or into cockney rhyming slang or any of the languages of resistance? Are you saying that this is evidence against what I am saying? Are you suggesting that your kids can't understand me?

we are also free to use the words however we like. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure we are, but note the 'we' there. We are a community, and to understand our language is to be inducted into the community and become to that extent part of the 'we' to whom the inversions are self-evident. The inversions are predicated on the understanding of the original, which may eventually fall into disuse and be forgotten, at which point the new language has become simply the language.

So you don't think that the will is free? You believe that we learn by being indoctrinated rather than through the will to understand? If we learn by understanding, then those principles must be justified or else they would not be understood. If we learn by being indoctrinated then the principles are accepted as necessary without being understood. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think you are free to make up the meaning of words, rather you are obliged to adhere to the meanings assigned by the community. To learn the language is to learn that bachelors are unmarried men - free will is not in play.

So it's self-evident to those who see it as self-evident, and not self-evident to those who do not see it as self-evident. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Evidently we agree.

But there will always be those children, or speakers of different languages, who do not see it as self-evident, so the self-evident will always need to be justified. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. to teach someone a language is not to justify anything to them, it is to indoctrinate them into a community.