everything you said is true.

The upper, ruling class -- before the very first colonial governors on down -- have always loathed the poor, and have not had a lot of fondness for the "working class" either. They all came from wealth and judged goodness in terms of wealth. Everybody else was dirt under their fine leather boots. Throughout American history, the ruling class has always begrudged assistance to the poor, and would sooner hang a thief as pay for his upkeep in prison.

Poor assistance has been grudging, stingy, complicated, punitive, demeaning, insufficient, shaming, (and more) since the get go. The ruling class (pretty much everywhere, I suspect) ranks "sloth" as the very worst sin among working people. GET BACK TO WORK!!! It certainly worried the founding fathers subsequent administraitors, wonks, do gooders, etc. They feared that any assistance would increase workers' tendency to be "work shy". Food distributed during the great depression, according to a book on depression-era food, was of the blandest variety without any seasonings, so that people would go back to work to earn money for flavoring!

Given our history, it is not surprising that our social benefit programs have been burdensome to beneficiaries.

WHITE TRASH
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.

White Trash reviewed

and if there is was any evidence that doing so actually prevents attacks — m-theory

"The Government" (whichever one we might be suspicious of) is probably not collecting enough information to stop attacks, or for other more nefarious purposes. Or, they are collecting the wrong information. 99.999% of the content on Facebook is rubbish, as far as preventing attacks goes. It's just irrelevant. Electronic systems aren't intelligent enough to pick out the most suggestive posts.

It still takes human agents to detect the early signs of dissent, terrorist leanings, subversive-tending thoughts, deviance, and so forth. The Gestapo controlled the Germans with a fine net of observers/informers--snoopy, loyal people with eyes and ears. Computers can't compete in this activity.

I believe it is the public that should decide what constitutes terrorist activity...not an unregulated arm of the government. — m-theory

That might not be such a nice idea, and how does one actuate the public to perform this function, without that function being worse than government spying? Which is worse: having a trained, supervised, and paid spy reporting on you or having the vindictive old hag who lives on the corner sending in regular reports?

I have mixed views on this. On the one hand, the obnoxious rigamarole conducted at airports seems just plain stupid. "Homeland Security" is becoming an increasingly negative term to my ears. On the other hand, the Bastille Day plow-through truck killing in Nice, the Pulse massacre, the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks, subway attacks, and so forth, reveal that there are agents who are ready to conspire and perform unfocused trust-destroying violence.

I'm pessimistic that we will be able to selectively and positively identify those bad actors ahead of time.

I see. An assemblage of sources rather than a specific book. I thought it might have been the latter, hence my curiosity. — Thorongil

You sound disappointed, but lots of books are essentially assemblages of sources.

I've been thinking about class, crime, poverty, and race for quite a while. I don't know, maybe 30 years--not as a criminologist, but politically, religiously, morally. I believe that there are explanations for criminal behavior that present mechanisms and rise above stereotypes. People don't just commit crime because of age, race, and place of residence. The bullets in the list were instances of good explanatory mechanisms I remembered. Some of them come from books, some from seminars, articles, and the like.

If you want a book quote, Stephen Pinker noted in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE that blacks are almost living in a different nation. He was talking about both exclusion and divergence (language, clothing, styles of personal presentation, etc.). It's a nice thick book with a single author, lots of references, dense prose, footnotes, graphs, etc.

If there isn't any useful information on a topic, I just make it up. You'd be surprised how well that works, sometimes. Mostly just joking.

Information on the culture of poverty came from a seminar at the MN Dept. of Health for MDH-funded projects working with poor people, about 8 years ago, "Bridges Out of Poverty" Ruby K. Payne.

Information on the relationship of poverty, crime, imprisonment, and employment has been discussed at great length in the NYT, The Nation, NPR, PBS, etc. over several years.

Information on the relationship of the kind and quantity of spoken language and performance in schools came from NPR and NYT articles about the Harlem Children's Project.

It's simple, really: work in a variety of unrelated jobs, read widely, remember a lot--especially useless information unrelated to making a living, and digest it at one's leisure.

Most "pro-lifers" don't really care what it means to be human in my experience. They just want pregnancy to be a punishment for sex. — m-theory

I think that is either the truth or damned close to it.

Suppose it was possible to transplant the fetus such that the woman could remove it from their body and the pro-lifer could be the one to carry it until it is time to be born. — m-theory

What limits transplantation is that the placenta has to grow into the wall of the womb. without the working attachment, a fetus would die within minutes for lack of oxygen, etc. At the beginning of a pregnancy there is time for this to happen because the needs of the dividing egg are very, very slight.

None the less, the fetal transplantation from unwilling mother to ardent pro-lifer offer cuts the mustard.

Invariably pro-lifers object to this, insisting that they should not be responsible for the fetus. — m-theory

And if they don't want to be responsible (there are various ways to take on the responsibility for an unborn child) then they should shut up about it.

They insist that they did not have the sex and that they did not cause the fetus to exist so they should not be held responsible. — m-theory

I suppose pro-lifers have enjoyable sex, I wouldn't know. Maybe they feel that pro-choice people are having really great sex, much better than theirs--which they probably are. If pro-lifers can't enjoy great sex, why should they be punished by having to raise children they didn't want? "But... in as much as it is possible, we are going to make sure YOU, slut, suffer as much as possible."

I do not envy a law enforcement officer their job...it is no doubt a difficult one...but that fact should not excuse them from justice when they are in error. — m-theory

I don't envy their job either.

rI feel that they resort to deadly force too quickly -- but they don't have much time in many cases to make a decision. A recent traffic stop in Milwaukee resulted in the death of the driver -- who got out of the car and ran, and was carrying an automatic gun (with 17 rounds in the magazine). Deadly force seemed reasonable there. It seems much less so when a subject is on the street, is not holding a gun, and appears to be deranged. Killing them because they would hurt the cop if they got close enough seems like... overkill.

Raw racism isn't the only factor in play here.

• Cultural divergence is a factor: black culture and white culture are not miles apart, but they are increasingly different.
• Poverty may increase the incidence of crime, but conviction for crime contributes to future poverty (regardless of race). I would argue that even engaging in crime (without apprehension) probably increases poverty, since crime doesn't seem to be an effective poverty exit strategy.
• "The culture of poverty" is real and discourages initiative. People (any race) who are the product of multi-generational poverty have made adaptations to being poor which comprise the culture of poverty. COP features very short term thinking, minimal initiative, fatalism, and so on. It's rational, but still self-defeating. IF, for instance, one finds $100 on the street, the most sensible thing to do with it is spend it immediately on having fun -- because, something that isn't fun will otherwise use up the $100, and extra cash is very rare.
• That poor blacks often have criminal records, that their personal presentation may be markedly different that that of the dominant culture, that black language and style may be either off-putting (or sometimes, unintelligible) discourages hiring by dominant culture employers.
• Affirmative Action is seen by many people to be an unfair assist to unqualified people.
• Poor school performance results in fewer skills to present at employment interviews. The black culture of poverty seems to aggravate this. Black children's language development is significantly handicapped by adult communication styles. Black children hear significantly fewer words (millions fewer), more negative words and more command words (shut up, stop that, etc.), and fewer positive words. By the time they reach first grade, many poor black children have a deep language deficit that immediately restricts performance, and continues to be a problem into the future.

Blacks aren't the only group that have, or have had, divergent cultural practices; and generally people have found that divergent cultural practices are not very well rewarded, if not actually punished. Back in the 1970s, for instance, white 'counter-cultural' practitioners got the cold shoulder in job interviews fairly often.

Where racism isn't a foreground reality, it is quite often a background reality, and sometimes is not the cause of an individual's behavior.

It wasn't only that they had sensitive census information, but the Holorith [IBM] punched card readers were able to assemble address lists (of Jews) quickly. It isn't just that we share more information now than we once would have, the equipment on which we share it distributes it way beyond our control.

An individual's sphere of activity simply can't be as private now as it could be even 30 years ago, unless he lived outside of the technological net: no telephone, no internet, no credit cards, no drivers license, no passport, etc. Most of us actually try fairly hard to live very much within the technological net, and as long as we do that, (or maybe, once we do that) deep privacy largely disappears.

Corporations gather and keep a great deal of information about customers. Credit cards, internet access, telephone calls, library borrowing, and so forth all leave data trails. Data mining sifts the mountain of granular data to find useful facts about each of us. All this is routine. What goes on above and beyond "routine" is more sifting and more correlation, plus more organized searching for specific data about specific people. Corporations are already doing what we fear the government might do.

I don't like it, but that seems to be the way it is.

The one question in philosophy that has engaged me deeply is whether God exists, or not. I was raised in a devout Methodist home, and for the first 40 years or so did not really question religious principles. They were OK or I just didn't think about them. When I did start to question them, I found I couldn't muster up support of the core belief: that God exists as creator, redeemer, and sustainer of the cosmos.

I am not hostile or hateful toward religion or religious people (except for predatory sex-hating fundamentalists) and I don't find most atheists to be very good company, even in the short run. But resolving disbelief turned out to be a long and arduous process of arguing and rearguing the case against God's existence. Intellectually, it's settled. Sorry God, you don't exist. Emotionally, the god-shaped hole is very magnetic.

Now about to pass "3 score years and 10", I feel settled and contented, which is more a matter of fortunate chemistry than powerful ideas. Unfortunate chemistry, not bad ideas, kept me fairly miserable for a couple of decades. I don't look to philosophy for much, but there are many unsettled questions, like how rapidly will global warming and its negative sequelae accelerate? Will the global economy crash badly within the next 20 years, and what will that mean? (Hopefully I won't be alive longer than 20 more years. Even 10 more years might be too long--I want to get out before the party is over.) I do look forward to hearing about the results of brain research, and research into the human biome. I have a long list of books to read, but I'm scratching some of them off the list. The life that remains is just too short to plow through too many leisurely and hefty novels of the Victorian era.

You are supposing that the arts actually do shape the mind. I'll drink to that; I think there is some proof. But let's define the arts very broadly, and include theater, film, video games, and Saturday morning children's television as "art". We'll include everything from the most degraded Muzak and rap music to Mozart and Rameau. Everything counts from Michelangelo to the frankly stupid pile of gravel in the gallery.

Let's start with language: Psychologists have shown that watching television (from which there is a continual stream of language) has little effect on children's linguistic development. What matters is language spoken by real, and significant, people--parents, siblings, caregivers. Music, on the other hand, doesn't have to be performed live to interest children, but if they are going to participate (through movement, or banging on a can) they have to actually do it. When children play, they frequently enact stories either from real life (let's play doctor) or in imitation of art (let's play cowboys and indians).

Very effective art, like a very compelling drama (live or via media), can heighten our sense of self-awareness, add to our self knowledge. Mediocre, shallow, poorly performed, drama might divert, bore, or annoy us, but it may not "shape" us in positive ways. Immersion in mediocre, shallow, poorly performed drama (the worst of television, video games, films, etc.) could reduce our self-awareness by providing nothing but false leads to self-understanding. Our minds are shaped, but not in a positive way.

Since people always seem to produce and listen to music, there must be a connection between music and mind, but... don't know what it is.

After we run over the 5, can we back up the trolley and finish off the guy tied up by himself? Or is that against the rules, for some odd reason? It should go into reverse, since it doesn't appear to be a cable car.

I didn't make it up. From his recordings. — Wosret

Of course you didn't make it up. At least back then they weren't messing around with all this inclusive, opinion-neutral inclusive language bullshit. People's feelings were upfront and openly expressed, which made for faster more accurate communication. "Faggy" -- hey, I know instantly and exactly what he means, where I stand, and whether I should just leave or not. Identifying faggy fags clarified all sorts of things. For one thing, he was keeping track of where all the faggy fags were. I very much wanted to know where faggy fags were in 1968, and just couldn't find them. I should have just called up Dick and said, "Hey, Dick -- where is the best place to find a bunch of fags?" It would have saved me a lot of time.

↪Bitter Crank Only because Nixon saw through the homosexual agenda to dominate the fashion industry, and fool women into wearing ridiculous things making them less appealing, and less attractive. — Wosret

Thanks for noticing.

Like most of the slurs cast against Homosexuals, yours is 100% true. The agenda continues, of course. I'm not involved in this particular area of destroying Western Civilization, but whenever I check in on fashion reports in the NYT, it is encouraging to see such good work being done. Women (and some men as well) are even more unattractively dressed, ridiculous, and unappealing this year than they were during the Nixon Administration.

I'm retired now, but I served in the program to saturate public parks with obscene sex acts so that nuclear families venturing into them would be totally scandalized and would experience nervous collapse. Children living in the vicinity were, of course, at total risk of being exposed to alternate sexual lifestyles. What questions they must have asked of their mortified parents!

I pioneered the effort to scatter bits of obscene literature masquerading as AIDS education material all over the city streets. Children would pick it up and bring it home, handing it to enraged mothers, who would call City offices to complain about the filth. They taught their children to fear bits of paper on the street. They were harangued to stay away from city centers where the most vital culture is. In this way, the culture of respectable Americans was further impoverished.

Since our campaign in the 1960s - 1980s, families now restrict themselves to their fenced in back yards. Even the Internet is a risk for them, because of our Total Degradation web sites which are awaiting the clicks of their innocent (but ever so curious) babes.

And how does Donald Trump fit into all this you, you ask? Heh, heh, heh...

Going on rather old memory (30 years back, at least) what Koko's handlers were looking for was combinations of words that were novel. They kept track of what they had taught her, so knew when she was repeating what she had learned, and what she was generating from scratch. She might have learned "want" and "visitors" in very separate sessions, ad might not have ever heard those two words used in combination. If she saw "visitors" nearby, initiating the phrase "want visitors" would be language generation. Not very complicated but... language none the less.

It seems to be the case that primates possess very limited language ability, but how much, how little, isn't settled. Some primate specialists doubt that Koko generated anything spontaneously.

Humans do both -- imitate and generate speech. Baby humans spend quite a bit of time learning how to generate sound -- baby talk. They don't generate "ma ma" or "pa pa" without having sounds, words, and meanings, modeled for them. Eventually they go beyond imitation to generation. Then they won't shut up.

Donald Trump arouses many worries. One of mine is that he would be a very unpredictable loose cannon rolling around the White House -- one that could go off (be fired!) at a very inopportune moment with very unfortunate consequences. Aside from that, it is very difficult to predict what actual policies Trump might pursue.

At the very least I would expect gifts for the rich and hard work and frugality for the rest of us.

Trump would be way too "interesting". Presidents should not be carnival side shows. They can be inspiring, but otherwise they should be boring and efficient.

I loathed Nixon; I expect I shall also loathe Trump as president. I hope to god that it won't be necessary.

whether or not they have anything to say — anonymous66

Not many primates have been taught sign language (or some other system) but it seems to be that at least one that had learned did initiate communication. The first thing Koko said was "Heidegger sucks." Then it asked for things that it liked: scratches, tickles, pieces of apple.

I would expect a primate to have rather simple concerns, like wanting something pleasurable, be it food or getting tickled. The life of a wild primate, probably a lab primate too, is fairly complex. How would it talk about any of it's complexity until it had learned words that described this? We have to learn the right words and concepts before we can describe our experiences. We generally need some sort of motivation to talk. (Yes, I know, this sounds contrary to fact since a lot of people seem to need no motivation whatsoever...) We don't just start talking about the difficulty of finding good and affordable rental units when we live on a farm and have no plans to move. Or, we don't start talking about the details of our feces while at a fancy dinner (or, probably, anywhere else except at the gastroenterologist's office). A verbal animal would probably also need a reason to talk about the unpleasantness of one's mate, for instance (its mate, not your mate).

I think she did better, but her quippy comment is fun, anyway.

There is a set of people who

• distrust authority and/or expertise
• distrust the government
• distrust large institutions (like WHO, Abbott Laboratories, Pfizer, etc.)
• distrust public water treatment
• distrust multiply validated theories about disease
• and more...

These are the people who buy bottled water, even though they live in cities with excellent public water, and even though the bottled water is no better (it often is local tap water); people who trust homeopaths, naturopaths, quackopractors, and psychopaths more than medical doctors; believe in conspiracies; trust the counterculture because it is the counterculture; believe that meditation, prayer, positive thinking, up-beat attitudes, and so forth make a significant difference in disease outcomes (sorry, nothing fails like prayer); fasten on to "new diseases" like celeriac disease, lactose intolerance, "multi-chemical sensitivities", think massage which involves no physical contact by the masseur (energy adjustments) improve physical function; and more. Much, much more.

It isn't stupidity, it's anti rationalism. It's superstitious thinking. It's a way of claiming person authority: ("I know what is best for my children. No vaccination for them, nosiree. Whoever heard of anybody getting polio and tetanus anyway?")

When AIDS surfaced in the early 1980s, before the HIV test; before even the bad side-effect loaded drug AZT, AIDS victims (oops, sorry -- they aren't victims...) flocked to whatever group offered comfort--and thank god there were some! Bogus therapy can be comforting. Quacky groups can provide real community; if you have nothing to lose, by all means meditate with candles and healing crystals and have a Reiki 'therapist' wave their hands around you. If it makes you feel better, go for it -- as long as nothing else is available.

What was pathetic was that some of these groups continued on spouting this stuff, after the highly effective anti-retroviral therapies came on line. Some people had a "medical libertarian streak" which led them doubt the whole business about retroviruses.

At the other extreme are people who are so fearful of actual germs, that they maintain home environments which are so deficient in natural substances (like dirt, pollen, bacteria, etc.) that their children's immune systems don't learn enough about the real world and go crazy with allergic reactions when they encounter the real world. [This theory might be erroneous. Don't stop cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, please.]

I'm sympathetic with the ignorant and deluded, in so far as the tons of good, solid, reliable, useful information are not always accessible and actionable; are not always readable (too complicated); and aren't always practical. If you live in Brazil and just got pregnant, there may not be much you can do about avoiding mosquitos and Zika virus.

However, if it were only men that might get undesirably pregnant — David

"If men got pregnant, abortion on demand would be a sacrament." Gloria Steinem.

...there is a sizable percentage of people that believe it qualifies them for being killable. — David

It seems to be the case that lots of people - prenatal and postnatal - are killable if there is sufficient reason. Most people say "killing is wrong" (God himself says that) but at the same time we are perfectly willing to support killing people when it is reasonably well organized and in pursuit of a more or less suitable goal (so is God, apparently). We frown upon individuals opting to kill other humans for their own screwy reasons on an ad hoc basis.

Some people have a fetus fetish. Of course a woman's fetus is human -- what else would it be? Clearly a fetus is on it's way to becoming a being, provided something doesn't go wrong. (I say "becoming"; Maybe an hour-old newborn isn't quite a being yet, either, but it is a lot closer to being a being than a 5 month-old fetus.) That said, I don't think abortion needs to be "celebrated". Whatever else it does, abortion terminates a being-in-the-process-of-becoming, which is a at least a freighted decision. I find it OK if there are serious reasons for doing it.

Pretty much everybody has engaged in, supported, paid for, grown food for, or made bullets for war at one time or another. We are quite comfortable with killing people in an organized way, even if a lot of the people who actually die aren't the cause of our anger/anxieties/discomfort/annoyance/etc. Generally we don't know them, so... bombs away.

Does being anti-abortion (killing of innocent people) require one to be a pacifist as well? War involves killing innocent people a good share of the time. The "guilty" generally don't make themselves available for target practice. It also seems like people who are anti-abortion, pro-life, anti-contraception, and so on should also be ardent funders of orphanages. They are, generally, no such thing. "You made the choice to get pregnant with the brat that we wouldn't let you abort, so now you'd just better support it on your own, and don't come whining to us about it."

"Rules for the Human Zoo" is good, but so is the Bullshit article. The Human Zoo seems especially current, what with the question "Are Trump and Clinton one of us or are they different than us?" Why are we proceeding to chose one of them to be our shepherd?

Possible reason for online interaction being more appealing to some...

- online communication eliminates non-verbal aspects of communication
- written communication draws on a set of communication traits different than spoken language. Most people have separate (but overlapping) vocabularies for comprehending and generating speech and text. People also think in another overlapping vocabulary.
- some people find it easier to express thinking through a keyboard than with a pencil or speech.

The differences between speech and writing have been noted for quite some time, but the printing press (Guttenberg died in 1468) brought the issue to the fore. The invention of readily usable typewriters (19th century) introduced a new element in communication: direct thought to print. A typewriter produces a line of print which is, apparently, psychologically quite different than a line of script. Electronic "word processors" (ghastly name) were introduced in the 1970s. A CRT screen displayed the pages of text entered by way of an electronic keyboard. The text was outputted to what was essentially an electronic typewriter. It wasn't quite WYSIWYG.

The Apple Macintosh introduced real WYSIWYG screens. The personal computer presented users with something different than ink on paper output of typewriters: now you could see what you were going to get, and it was easy to edit. No more frustrated ripping the paper out of the machine, wadding it up, and throwing it across the room. Now the writer could redo it at no psychological cost at all.

I experienced the progressing from manual typewriters to electronic typewriters to word processors to personal computers. I can vouch for the significance of the method of expression.

GM (Standard Oil, Firestone Rubber, et al) at least a rational business plan: get rid of the mass transit systems and sell more cars. I don't approve, mind you, but at least there was a plan. Plus they weren't (presumably) laundering money -- they were syphoning it off.

Age flattens everything. — The Great Whatever

It's not flattening my gut. Clearly your theory is flawed.

Buying something that has value and then wrecking it sounds more like a money toilet than a money laundry. Don't you have to get the money out, in some way, to erase the odor of sleaze?

The exchange of goods and services through the use of money. — Thorongil

The "Longfellow Market" sells groceries in exchange for money.

I don't generally use the term "market" to talk about a "store". To me "market" is a rather abstract term that names large impersonal forces, of the sort that can "freeze up" which is a catastrophe. In 2007 central banks acted to prevent this from happening by creating money. The theory is that if nobody trusted anybody else, an infusion of cash into the system would help. Maybe it did. Some places haven't really recovered 9 years later.

The market is operated by very large institutions and very rich individuals. Not just the stock market, which of course serves institutions and very rich individuals, mostly. But there are other markets: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (The Merc), Nasdaq, exchanges around the world, and various financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and so on. There are future markets, and markets on the fluctuating value of currencies.

I don't look at "markets" as some sort of conspiracy (I'll be the last one to find out, most likely) just very big and under no individual's thumb. The markets are everywhere, and in some senses, nowhere, or maybe better, everywhere at once. Markets are like "the climate". Everywhere, subject to influence, not under control.

I don't see any consistency in our naming. Pluto was a planet until some size queen decided it was too small. Perhaps Jupiter is not a planet because it is too big. Maybe it is a failed star. (Perhaps Jupiter feels it could have been a contender.) Why should gas bags like Saturn and Jupiter, and a small rock like Mercury all be planets? Maybe Ceres is a planet, since it is the largest of the non-planets within the orbit of Neptune. Gee whiz, shouldn't it get some credit for that? It was big enough to get itself together into a ball by dint of its own gravity, after all.

Pluto has suffered enough. Return it's dignity as a planet. FAIR PLAY FOR PLUTO!

No, I would have been a monk. — Thorongil

It's not too late. Even though the Middle Ages are over, some of the institutions spawned back then are still in business. You can still become a Benedictine monk, live a monastic lifestyle, wear a dark brown wool robe, and practice poverty (been there, done that), chastity (horrors) and obedience (double horrors). You could even be a cloistered monk and never have to type www again. (Even cloistered monks have web pages these days ... http://www.carmelitemonks.org)

Bullshit. — Thorongil

One theory is that some people are prone to becoming "addicted" to whatever gives them pleasure, be that drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, exercise, pornography, etc. Couple that with the tendency of some people to behave impulsively or in obsessive/compulsive patterns, quite apart from any addiction. "Some people" is a small minority of the population as a whole. Most people occasionally use drugs or drink alcohol; gamble; have sex; look at pornography, and so forth. They find them pleasurable, but not so compelling that they become addicted.

If 10% of the population becomes "addicted"or "dependent" or "compulsively attached" to drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography, and so on, the 90% who do not need not be "protected" from exposure.

I understand the desire of persons who have been harmed by addictive substances (directly or indirectly) to restrict access to adults. It is unreasonable, though, to restrict access to everyone because some people are harmed.

I would add pornography to the list of the Internet's ills. Its effects, especially on young people, I think are being greatly understudied and underestimated. — Thorongil

Pornography hasn't been understudied. There have been efforts to nail down the effects of sexually explicit, and explicit violent material, for many years, without conclusive results. I like porn, and my guess is that yes, it probably does have effects on young people, just like reading Jane Austin or becoming very interested in mycology or baseball has effects on young people. I'm not sure what the effects are, of course, and nobody else does either.

Pre-pubertal children should absolutely not be surfing the XXX Internet; maybe children should not peruse hard core porn before they are...13? 14? 15? At some point, though, like it or not, porn is available and has been available in one form or another since sometime in the mid-20th century. Teen agers (boys, especially) will, sure as the day is long, use it for masturbation. IF they don't mingle, mix, socialize, rub up against each other, and so forth, that's about all they will be doing. Elites had access to porn. It could be explicit, but it was drawn rather than photographed.

Films depicting (not documenting) gang rapes, S&M, etc. should be reserved for consenting adults.

One certain effect of pornography is that it defines what sex is for the uninformed. That's why younger children shouldn't be exposed to porn -- they are not biologically, psychologically, or socially ready yet. Once they are ready, it would be much better if they saw porn devoted to basic heterosexual or gay sex. Save the four-ways, double entry, S&M, and all that for a bit later. Young people should have good, ordinary, vanilla sex before more... exotic experiences.

No we don't. Everything you mentioned is superfluous garbage. People need to read, think, and be compassionate. All else is howling in the void. — Thorongil

"Life together" is howling in the void?

How do you suppose the people of the middle ages carried out their lives, if not by mingling, mixing, socializing, gossiping, agitating, organizing, arguing, making love, making war, making peace, etc? Literacy levels weren't very high in the middle ages, so they weren't doing a lot of reading. As for compassion, one has to be in real personal contact with other people in "life together" to be able to exercise compassion. (That's still true.)

Life in the middle ages, at least where it can be documented, wasn't all that bad, at least in good weather and between outbreaks of major illness, crop failures, etc. People sat together, ate together, talked, laughed, danced, worked, all that real stuff.

The pioneers of the World Wide Web thought it would usher in an era of people power and the free flow of knowledge.

> era of people power
> free flow of knowledge
> serious journalism accessible to all
> nation states would become obsolete
> social hierarchies would be dissolved
> emerging conventions would ensure a pleasurable and accessible experience for all — jamalrob

That is rather a lot of transformation to expect in 25 years. Expecting all these things from the Internet is similar to the early high expectations for photography, telegraph, telephone, recorded sound, radio, and television. Wired and broadcast communications have had huge benefits, and some drawbacks, true enough. But so did Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Both the sublime and the fecal would end up in book stalls.

It may be that electronics will yet deliver but more likely, counting on wiring schematics and total digitalization of everything to deliver the goods will be a non-starter. That's because the listed benefits of the Internet derive from social activity, not from bytes and bits flowing along wires or through the air.

To the extent that the Internet improves social activity, it can be a good thing. But freedom and totalitarianism are both outcomes of human social activity. To the extent that the Internet fosters acedia, alienation, angst, anomie, atomization, and all that, it is a bad thing. But "all that" depends on individual and social actions.

We all need to get out more to mingle, mix, socialize, gossip, agitate, organize, argue, make love, make war, make peace--real stuff, not virtual reality.

Google Ngram will find the frequency of words in its db used between 1800 and 2000

I made an addition or two to the article. Your definition is one that many people would suppose to be the case. But in political discourse, (or traffic, or in "the political marketplace) "markets" mean something more, less, and other than mere "exchange of goods and services through the use of money".

1000 nouns won't get anyone very far; one needs verbs, particularly forms of TO BE and TO HAVE.

none possesses the idea that the researcher exists as an individual being, let alone could she be a repository of knowledge. — tom

A dog might know that someone is an individual (has a unique set of odors). But no, I wouldn't think a dog would recognize anyone as a repository of knowledge. (Dogs, and some other animals, will solicit assistance from others, though. But doing so doesn't require verbal knowledge.)

However dogs (etc) are pre-rational; yogis (etc) trans-rational. 'Falling short' is not the same as 'going beyond'. — Wayfarer

I wasn't being serious about dogs and yoga.

Is the human mind a single cognitive power, however complex, one that involves the functioning of our senses and whatever follows from their functioning, such as memory and imagination, or should the human mind be divided into two quite distinctive cognitive powers-sense and everything to which sense gives rise, on the one hand, and intellect, able to understand, judge, and reason, on the other? — anonymous66

I think the mind is a single power composed of cognition, emotion, sensing, memory, imagination, and what flows there from. We can parse out very specific capacities (like vision acuity or memory competence) but that doesn't mean the capacities aren't integrated.

The entity of each 'self' is a whole. How we perceive, think, feel, remember, and act is blended together.

We trip ourselves up all the time, but just right now we are talking about animals. What trips us up is that dogs--an animal people are very familiar with--are also whole entities, and we connect with them where there is common ground, like emotions, perception, memory, behavior. That's enough on which to build very strong bonds. Any signs of thinking are extra gravy.

The sense of "self' isn't the same as awareness of mind. A number of species pass the "self test"--elephants for instance. Dogs have not. Dogs are unique among animals in following our gaze. I don't think wolves are so abled. But following our gaze doesn't mean they recognize mindedness in us, or possess mindedness themselves. The ability of humans and dogs to follow each other's gaze is a fairly big deal, but it doesn't require "mindedness".

Many animals with whom people become very familiar (pigs, horses, cattle...) also reveal a package of capacities which not only allow us to work with domesticated animals, but provide rewards as well. Small herd dairy farmers (like 30 to 40 cows) really know their cows as individuals. Same thing for horse people, pig farmers, and the like. (Pigs are pretty bright animals, actually. That we raise pigs in rather inhumane conditions distracts us from the mental resources they possess.)

I might not be heartbroken if it turns out that there is no evidence.... — anonymous66

I might not be heartbroken either, if it turns out that there is no evidence. And in any case, I don't expect ever (well, not in the next 2,000,000 years anyway) to find a wolf or a whale thinking about God, angels, infinity, souls, the great chain of being, or such topics.

Apokrisis point about grammar makes sense. A grammatical language seems to be required to think and talk about abstractions. Dogs do seem to live in the present--something people practicing Yoga strive to do. "Be present in the moment...." Hey, my golden retriever was an ace at that. At least as far as I could tell. For all I know, she wasn't just laying on the couch staring out the window;; she may have been communing with the Mind of God, or reviewing the various resentments I am sure she harbored. But I can't say.

Oliver Sacks wrote a book about sign language, and the dramatic impact it had on adults, particularly, adults who had recently learned it. Concepts that had been invisible before suddenly became possible. Their experience of time, for instance, was greatly enriched.

But, perhaps your (Bitter Crank) point was that there isn't much evidence now, but if people actively look for it, they might derive ways to find it? — anonymous66

Well yes, that was my point. My conception of "animal thinking" is that their thinking is rather simple. I'm well aware how easy it is to assign more "thought" to a pet than their behavior requires. As we establish our relationship with a puppy, for instance, dog and human are each learning how the other one operates. Dogs make good pets because their species interacts in groups just by nature. They have to learn how to do it, but they are well equipped. They are sensing, learning, and remembering, the same way a young child senses, learns, and remembers.

Some dogs, parrots, and primates have learned word lists, for instance. They can learn that the word "shoe" matches a shoe-shaped object. This genius border collie in Germany managed to learn 1000+ words (each for a unique object, which it was able to fetch on the basis of the spoken word]. This is outstanding performance for a dog, but it is the sort of things dogs do all the time. Include the world "walk" in a sentence, and the dog is likely to pick that word out and start agitating to go for one.

One of the things about animals learning language is that it doesn't seem to do anything for them. WE like teaching them, and WE think it is exciting to watch them learn and perform, and since the animals are rewarded frequently, they like it as long as the rewards last. But knowing 1000+ German nouns probably didn't enrich the dog's mental life. (Just guessing.) What our dog found life enhancing (going by body language) was getting fed, drinking water, being let outside on demand, going for walks, playing, and being scratched and petted. She had a stiff knee so she started soliciting scratching from us--which she found superior, apparently. She liked our furniture and our food a lot, and appreciated heating and AC. That's about it. She refused to learn commands (aside from speaking for food, sit, lay down, and shut up). No paw shaking, no rolling over, no sitting up, etc.

Our language makes anthropomorphizing almost inevitable. We ascribe thinking to animals when we say "she wants...", "she doesn't like...", "she looked disgusted about..." and so forth. Our language works on people, of course (reasonably well), and dogs are as anxious to please (more so, usually) as people. Interpreting their behavior as sentient just comes naturally. Hell, we ascribe sentience to our cars sometimes.

I think population growth is directly related to improved living situation for all. — Cavacava

Cities that have experienced enormous growth over the last 50 years generally have meant better living conditions than isolated villages, small towns, and gawd-awful places like Podunk, Mississippi.

The residents of Rio's favelas, urban but still poor, probably live a better life than they did in the villages whence they came. (That's why they went to Rio.) The water may be dirty; the air may stink; crime, violence, and corruption may be rampant; but the air and water probably weren't pristine where they came from. Ugandans living in agricultural counties can grow their own food (if they have enough cash to buy seed), but their water likely comes from an inconveniently located dirty river, which might dry up. Nairobi's slums keep growing because people find that they can't survive very well in rural Kenya. The bread-basket Midwest and great plains have become less populated because a lot of people went to the coasts--not just during the dust bowl of the 1930s, but just last week when the weather was great.

But if Nairobi's slums are better than the villages of Kenya, that doesn't mean they are great places to live. Water supplies are fitful if available at all; there are no sewers and GI disease is common. Medical facilities are not plentiful and neither are schools. Many people are malnourished, very poorly housed, and quite possibly not employed. But most likely, all those conditions apply to rural life, too.

However good cities are, I find it difficult to believe that the principle of more=better will always apply. 10 million people can not manufacture a great urban lifestyle out of nothing. Resources, production, and markets are needed, and that depends on a larger area than the city itself.