The 'real question' isn't whether the humanities and social sciences have a useful place in academia, it's whether your brother has a good reason to go back to college, and a good plan to succeed.

The answer to the question isn't always "Yes, of course he should finish college." It depends on what he wants to accomplish, and whether a college degree will further the plan. It might not. Then there is the cost/benefit question.

What is your brother's goal?

It's an academic joke.

He drunkenly stated, "Humanities and social sciences are no longer useful in academia." — Christopher

So, why are you quoting drunks as useful sources, even if he's your brother?

I have no regrets studying literature and social sciences. Academia is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

My opinion is that we are rapidly closing in on the point of no return — _db

An active topic of debate is whether we have closed in on the point of no return or whether we have a few more weeks to screw around. I suspect that if we have not closed in on our doomsday yet, we are probably too close to back away. I find no satisfaction in that, please note.

Why is that man snickering?

Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same. — Buddha (The parable of the poisoned arrow)

Nice.

“This isn’t going to stop,” Mr. Allen said. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

What makes the new breed of A.I. tools different, some critics believe, is not just that they’re capable of producing beautiful works of art with minimal effort. It’s how they work. Apps like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are built by scraping millions of images from the open web, then teaching algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships in those images and generate new ones in the same style. That means that artists who upload their works to the internet may be unwittingly helping to train their algorithmic competitors. (NYT)

What I meant by "no key problem" is that our problems are entangled with each other--population, food production, global warming, CO2 emissions, global conflicts, etc.

Yes, there are priorities: #1: cut CO2 emissions (a lot). Institute carbon capture (above ground and below). There are false solutions not worth pursuing: a billion electric cars replacing a billion gas-powered cars will help car manufacturers and investors--it's not what I would call a critical solution.

Global warming is happening and consequent conflicts are arising. Drought, minor wars, failed government, etc. combine to create famine and further destabilize regions. And so on and so forth.

You and I can make a long list of problems, and it quickly becomes clear that global solutions might be beyond our human managerial talents. There are many powerful interests that individuals, groups, and nations pursue, in the face of those interests being lethal in the long run. Russia invading Ukraine is an example. Brexit is another. Continued capitalist expansion is still more. On and on

Decarbonization is a key solution that interferes with the interests companies, regions, and nations have in carbon.

It is theoretical possible that we all unite to overcome all of these obstacles, and I hope we do. What supports my pessimism is our poor long-term record.

Nothing has happened since 2019 that changes our grim situation. What was true (false) in 2019 is still true (false). We were screwed in 2019 and we are screwed in 2022. We will be screwed in 2025.

There is no "key problem" to address first, second third... Unless we can rewind history and delete everything that happened since 1700 CE, we are stuck with problems that are nigh unto insoluble. And even if we could rewind and delete, we wouldn't be any smarter this time than we were the last time.

So there were some non-African hominids in Europe (Neanderthals) and Asia (Denisovans). My knowledge of human evolution is limited to the out-of-Africa theory, our neanderthal and denisovan cousins which we probably assimilated and/or exterminated. :scream: That's one reason I don't feel "happy to be alive". My family tree is not something I would be proud of, soaked in the blood of so many my ancestors had to kill as it is — Agent Smith

There isn't a lot of evidence to support the idea that we either assimilated or exterminated our cousins. There was never a large population of Neanderthals in Europe, or so I understand. Small populations self-extinguish more easily than large ones. (That said, they survived as a species longer than we have.)

There is a great book on Neanderthals, out in 2020: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. She not only brings the Neanderthals to life, she utilizes and explains a lot of very impressive science stuff applied to ancient archeology. Very informative and enjoyable.

People who are oppressed have the right to be prejudiced against their oppressors. — _db

Oppressors also tend to be prejudiced against the people they oppress. It is, briefly, hard to think positively about people you have screwed over, not just once but for a long time. If the people I oppress are good, deserving people, then what am I?

That is one of the damnable things about oppressors: forgiving them isn't going to help. Reverse oppression won't help either. As long as oppression serves the purposes of the oppressor (and it generally does) there is no good external reason to stop being an oppressor. People won't stop oppressing until it no longer 'works'. The civil war was an ultimately unsuccessful effort to make slavery (in the USA) stop working. What happened is that a new regime of oppression took the slave masters' place (in some cases they were the same people). Eventually the banks, government, real estate agents, etc. took over.

I don't say this out of approval: It just seems like that is the way it works.

A large part of my argument is that "IF" we were able to extend peoples lives it is likely that either many or most of these people could work longer, work conditions might improve, and society might be able to improve due to the extra idea/input from these people that are contributing to society instead of them just wasting away in nursing homes in their later years. — dclements

My impression is, based on observation, reading, and experience is that most people have their most creative and productive years between by age 40, age 50 at the latest. I'm not thinking of "creative professions" here -- rather, people who can create, innovate, invent, and implement effective solutions to social or technical problems. The two decades following brain maturation (around age 25) seem to be our most mentally productive periods.

It's a very good question why this period of high productivity doesn't last longer (for most people). At age 50 I was past my peak in creativity. Intellectually, I might be reaching my peak at age 75. Time will tell. Too bad I wasn't functioning at 25 the way I function at 75. "I could have been a contender."

There are 100 year old people who remain intellectually and emotionally engaged, but they are really few in number.

The point I am trying to get at is that there is something... existential, not biological that brings our periods of productive creativity to a peak, and then diminishment. You know, Kant said that nothing straight was ever built with the crooked timber of mankind. The fact is, we keep running into our species deep, built in imitations. It wears us out.

True enough, it takes time to grow up, and having grown up, to put adulthood to good use. Personally, I'd assign a little more time to productive adulthood--so age 25 to 70. For physically hard work, less productive time applies.

Longevity will be of no value to people who will be stuck in dead-end and life-sucking jobs until they are 100. One of the reasons people long to stop working is that their jobs are highly unrewarding. We can't all be like Anthony Fauci, still going strong at 81, and ready to move on to something else. I'll take that back: Many of us could be like Tony, still going strong at 81 -- but not under the current circumstances.

Life can be more enjoyable than it tends to be. Work can be more satisfying than it usually is. This can not happen within the existing economic arrangement, even if we lived to be 200.

Things happen in a bathtub, too. — god must be atheist

Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke for bubble baths? Diet or regular?

Most assuredly, we white men are not subjected to systemic pervasive reverse racism/sexism. However, it is entirely possible for non-whites and women to speak and behave in a racist, sexist manner, and it happens.

there are many more men in prison, many more men overdosing or strung out on drugs, many more men die prematurely because of preventable health issues, more men are prone to serious mental health issues, and yet we don't really seem to care very much about and of these issues, — 64bithuman

The demographics you cite are, to a significant degree, class linked. Most upward mobile, middle to upper class white men (or women) are NOT in prison, overdosing or strong out on drugs, suffering premature / preventable death, or having major mental health issues. A significant portion of the men that you reference are downward mobile (or bottomed out) working class men with few to no prospects.

The middle class establishment loathes downward mobile white men because they are an unpleasant reminder that social mobility works both ways, and the middle classes are not all that secure in their prosperity or status. Minority people in straitened circumstances, on the other hand, fulfill middle-class expectations, so the upwardly mobile are much less bothered by them.

OH GREAT! Another sex scandal, this time in outer space! According to the New York Times, the science writer Dennis Overbye mentioned that James Webb was thought to have either participated in, or done nothing when higher-ups purged gays from the State Department. Didn't hear about that? Not surprising, it happened during the Truman Administration, 1945-1952.

Now some torqued out astronomers (and others) want James Webb's name taken off the telescope.

I have no idea what James Webb did at the post WWII State Department. Yes, I am aware that gay people were rousted out of many government and military jobs. The outrage depends entirely on retroactively applying contemporary standards to a past which no longer exists.

Of course [as a gay man] I reject the hatred, loathing, medicalized diagnoses, criminal status, and so on that added up to gay people's pariah status in the post-WWII period. Being outed by the FBI in 1947 wasn't merely inconvenient, it could be life-wrecking. [As a gay man] I can also accept that this was where society was at in the post-war period. Even a modest organized resistance by gay people didn't emerge until 1950, and didn't achieve noticeable results for at least 20 more years.

Whether James Webb led the charge in ridding the State Department of gay employees, or looked the other way, he was acting in light of mainstream values of the time, and during a time that did not significantly change for several more decades.

James Webb's significant achievement was in the very demanding and difficult administration of the APOLLO program. The success of APOLLO was a very big deal. Sure, they could have named this telescope after Pythagoras, Ptolemy, or Pryzblinski, but they didn't. And they should keep the name, especially in the face of people who make it a practice to fly into rages because the past doesn't live up to their expectations.

Oops, just joking about feeling the effects of Hayflick's Limit.

As Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of dying -- I just don't want to br there when it happens." And he, of course, was joking,

Seriously, many people probably experience varying degrees of derangement in the final hour(s). If death isn't swift, there may be successive organ failure and a rapid build-up of toxic substances which amplify the dying process. So yes, it could be pretty unpleasant for a while. But then it is over and the curtain of silent oblivion descends forever.

Rather than focusing on stretching out life, even life without end, an actual attainable goal is to live life in the knowledge that life is short. Make the most of living while one can.

Old age can be a burden, true enough, but I know people (like myself) who are very much engaged in doing what makes life meaningful and interesting to them. One can and should prepare to die with as much serenity as possible, but not dwell on it.

OK, I'll take a deep breath, squeeze very hard, and force those hay flicking cells back a year or two.

I'm feeling the effects of Hayflick's Limit.

Some animals live a very long time, in human terms, like the 500 year old quahog clam found on Cape Cod. But the animal below is thought to be immortal: "Hydra is a group of small invertebrates with soft bodies that look a bit like jellyfish. Like Turritopsis dohrnii, Hydras also have the potential to live forever. Hydras don't show signs of deteriorating with age, Live Science previously reported. These invertebrates are largely made up of stem cells which continually regenerate through duplication or cloning. Hydras don't live forever under natural conditions because of threats like predators and disease, but without these external threats, they could be immortal." https://www.livescience.com/longest-living-animals.html



So, if you want to live forever, be a hydra.

There are also plants that live a long time, like a sea grass off the coast of Australia that is around 100,000 years old.

Presumably, immortal species do not evolve once they become immortal. They just stay the same. So, had you been born an immortal hydra millions of years ago, you'd still be hydra. Or, had you been born into the last common ancestor of apes and humans 20,000,000 years ago, you'd still be the last common ancestor. No philosophic mongering for you, you immortal not yet very bright-ape.

Long ago, evolution produced time-limiting mechanisms in almost all complex plants and animals, including humans. Death clears the stage for another one of evolution's critical inventions -- progeny. If there were no death, life would have long ago consumed the last resources to support life, and life would have come to an end--extinction, not mere death.

Even within healthy bodies, death is an ongoing process. Cells die, either by wearing out or by following instructions -- programmed death (apoptosis). Cells that don't die as intended become, cancers and end up killing the organism.

If this person's existence makes any of you angry — Baden

It's not him, it's you.

I've been aware of and have been reading about trans issues since the 1970s; I've been friends and associates with trans people; I've provided counseling and support for trans persons. it's not new territory for me. What has changed is the extremity of the rhetoric by and/or about trans people. It has become more extreme, such that people like yourself who are apparently very sensitive to rhetoric can no longer generalize about who gets pregnant and who doesn't.

"Well gee whiz, this trans man who still had her original plumbing got pregnant, so I guess we can't distinguish between 4 trans men and 4 billion alleged women who might get pregnant."

You lost the battle for social reality. — Baden

To the extent that social reality is what Baden happens to think, I suppose so. In the larger picture, the existence of trans people is more or less established. The "pregnant women" paradigm has not been shaken. "Pregnant persons" is not a term describing reality; it is a fantasy of lunatics who have lost their grip on the real world.

National Public Radio news casters are now using the term "pregnant persons" as opposed to pregnant women. Such bullshit!

"A trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth" — Baden

No body "assigns sex" at birth. "Assign" is trans rhetoric. Babies' genitalia are recognized as male or female. In the small fraction of cases where genitalia are ambiguous, a specialist makes a closer check. A large clitoris or small penis might confuse things.

Animals don't have genders, just biological sexes. — Michael

And humans are nothing if not animals.

Once upon a time, this topic would have yielded many pages of responses. Not now, not from this crowd, anyway.

I'm 75; gay; was in a relationship for 30+ years, till death did us part. We did not get married; we did not have a civil union. My theory is that couples should stay together because they want to stay together. If they want to stay together, they will. Otherwise, they will eventually go their separate ways. I haven't been in favor of gay couples raising children, either. Of course I know gay and lesbian couples who did raise children, and they did well, as far as I could tell.

What SHOULD gay or lesbian relationships look like? They WILL look like what the partners make of them. Heterosexual married relationships seem to be burdened by a lot of expectations (by both parties). The heterosexual marriage success rate isn't as good as people wish. I'm not sure what the success rate for formally married gays and lesbians is.

A long relationship was never in my 5 year plans, but it happened, and I'm glad about that. Life with someone else is generally better than life alone.

Yes. When people behave in ways that one thinks are anti-social, uncivilized, or immoral, one must condemn it. One must disavow the unacceptable action.

From time to time, we witness acts that are "bad", whether that's stabbing authors or shooting the convenience store clerk; stealing catalytic converters or defrauding the Medicare program; trying to overthrow the election or seize the neighboring country. We can't be indifferent. We need to be clear to ourselves (and to whoever is in earshot) that we condemn wrongdoing.

I'm not sure I want to "wade into" the murky fluid of "trans and gender issues. Some people believe that, contrary to appearances, they are not the sex they were "assigned". First of all, "sex" isn't "assigned at birth"; sex is identified, based on readily apparent organs. Sometimes, (not very often, .001%) genitals are too ambiguous to make a visual determination. [The term "assigned sex" is employed to support the ideological notion that the identity of male or female is arbitrary.]

Not at all unreasonably or inhumanely, babies are raised to be the sex their unambiguous genitals say they are. More to the point, the genitals are a result of the DNA which has directed a male or female body to exist.

How people identify themselves in the body they are born with is more complicated then which gender roles any given person performs. As a gay man, I prefer sex with other men, but I have no inclination to think of myself as a woman, or to behave like a woman. Some homosexuals do think of themselves as their opposite sex, at least some time. There are heterosexual men who prefer sex with women who like to behave like women, at least some of the time -- cross dressers. It's quite literally "role play". Some women like to play the same game, dressing as men.

It seems to me that "transgendered people" have adopted an extreme form of homosexual drag, one in which they commit to playing their opposite gender role all the time, and making changes to their body to match their concept of the role. So, for some it is a matter of changing costume and hair. For others, it involves an extensive re-upholstering of their body,

I believe their are limits to this game. One can have the opposite's genitals constructed; one can take hormones to shape the body. The appearances can be changed. But, after all that, one remains one's biologically determined sex.

It's a game of appearances, and as Oscar Wilde said, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

Then why condemn what happened to Rushdie? — baker

I condemn it because I want a thicker, and better, veneer of civilization. Civilization is what we use to counter those parts of our brains that send us off into wild rages and flights of irrationality. Religion has delivered a decidedly mixed performance as a component of civilization. Islam and Christianity have a particularly mixed record. Where/when/why it fuels uncivilized behavior, it should be pruned.

If there is a "closed primary", voters have to declare which party primary they are voting in. One can become a member of a party. That puts you on a list.

In the US there are public records of registered voters, voters by parties, voters by voting--that they voted--not who they voted for--and so forth. There are also records of donations to parties / candidates.

Of course, there are ways of donating $10,000,000 to Candidate Crook without being listed. How is on a need-to-know basis. If you have to ask how, then you don't need to know. Similary, if you need to ask how much it costs to buy a candidate, then you can't afford it.

:100: sadly.

Hanover was talking about Jews stoning heretics. If I am not mistaken, the Inquisition was run by Dominicans, a Catholic order not usually confused with Jews. For further information, see Python, Monte: The Spanish Inquisition

You might be God, but in a just universe, definitely not. I, on the other hand, am entirely suitable as a supreme being in a just universe. You being a lesser being, god, cat, whatever... wouldn't recognize Me. Now go back to your room and finish your catechism lesson.

In a current New Yorker piece, Robin Wright says

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini never read Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses,” his son Ahmed told me in Tehran, in the early nineteen-nineties. The Iranian leader’s murderous 1989 fatwa against the British American writer was a political move to exploit the erupting fury in Pakistan, India, and beyond over a fictional dream sequence involving the Prophet Muhammad. The book’s passages, which portrayed human weaknesses and undermined the Prophet’s credibility as a messenger of God, were blasphemous to some Muslims.

The Ayatollah was shrewd that way. At the time, the young Islamic Republic was emerging from existential challenges: an eight-year war with Iraq that produced at least a million casualties; widespread domestic discontent; deepening political rifts among the clergy; a flagging economy that had rationed basic food and fuel; and a decade of diplomatic isolation. Khomeini condemned Rushdie, as well as his editors and publishers in any language, to death.He called on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to go out and kill all of them—without delay—“so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr” and ascend instantly to heaven. Tehran offered a reward that eventually grew to more than three million dollars.

Khomeini often capitalized on issues that distracted public attention from the Revolution’s fissures and failures.

But unlike Christianity, there is no credible central Islamic authority. — Jamal

That is an important feature. Theological interpretation is apparently quite decentralized and local. There's no pope, no Vatican, no infrastructure of command and control.

There is no central authority to which condemnation, approval, or appeal can be addressed.

IF you polled 10,000 Moslems from various countries, my guess is that a majority would not be in favor of executions for book writing. There would be a minority (10%? 20%? 30%?) who would approve, and they would approve for various reasons.

TRUE BELIEVERS of any stripe are more likely to follow available "hard lines" than people for whom belief does not dominate their thinking or their life. There are Christian fascist and white nationalist TRUE BELIEVERS who are quite capable of carrying out violence against fellow Americans who are not displaying sufficient loyalty to the Prez, for example. There are TRUE BELIEVERS in Islamic countries who have no qualms about blowing up a bomb in a market to to kill Shias or Sunnis.

I don't have much understanding of differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims. I won't draw any analogies.

The Catholic Church has, had, or used to have something called the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" -- banned books. In recent times no one has been burned at the stake for either writing or reading a forbidden book. In the past, at various times, Christians resorted to grotesque executions for violations of doctrine. William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. What a monster! John Wycliffe was executed in 1384. Wycliffe also translated at least part o the NT into Middle English, and questioned some core Catholic theology. He was so heinous that years later his corpse was dug up and burned at the stake.

No -- Rome's or Canterbury's excesses neither justify nor excuse Tehran's pontificating mullahs. A plague on all their houses!

Most Christian churches have, through reformation, incremental change, an embrace of secular ideas (the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and science) lost a lot of their former triumphal absolutism--all to the good. There are some outstanding exceptions, of course.

Islam has not had a reformation (so I am told). There seems to be a substantial core of absolutism remaining. The Taliban demonstrates this, as does the malignant Islamic State and various spin-offs.

So we have a medieval ayatollah issuing death warrants for authors who they think ought to be punished by death. Then we have young Moslems cultivating the same medieval thinking on line, unto the heathen state of New Jersey.

All religions which presume to hold the final and absolute truth are a mortal danger.

I stand corrected but lament the fact. — Agent Smith

Oh, do you regret not living in Peoria?

News for the worried-well OR well-they-should-be-worried from the New York Times:

ng about having gay sex recently — Varde

Should you have anal intercourse? Sure. Will you get Monkeypox as a result? That depends on what circles you travel in. If you plug into the circle of, say New York gays who are most sexually active, your chances are much higher of getting infected. If you start with the boy next door in rural Georgia, your chances are much much smaller. It is considered good manners to ask if it is OK first.

Why are so many gay men in New York infected with Monkeypox? Because groups (like gym rats or theater workers) tend to mix among themselves. Eventually infectious diseases spread widely, erasing group boundaries. AIDS landed among a group of fairly affluent, similarly employed gay men in New York--like artists, musicians, writers, actors, etc. They went to the same watering holes and had sex with each other.

Anal intercourse more common among straights than gays? Not likely. 80% of gay men report anal intercourse while about a third of straights report anal intercourse. And the third of heterosexuals reporting anal intercourse ay not be your typical couple in Peoria or suburban Atlanta:

According to the NIH:

Previous research has shown that HAI is associated with a variety of risky behaviors, including drug use (5–7), multiple partners (6, 8–10), concurrent partners (8), and exchange sex (6–8, 11), suggesting that people who engage in HAI are in a higher risk population for acquisition of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI). This is supported by studies that also show a higher prevalence of STIs among those who engage in HAI (12). Additionally, condom use is uncommon during HAI, with some studies indicating that condom use during HAI is less common than condom use during vaginal sex (13, 14).

Is it the sexual event that spurs it, or why it spread originally? Do penises and arses create it, or, well, do gay monkeys? — Varde

The same question came up in relation to AIDS in the 1980s: does anal intercourse produce the virus? The answer is absolutely not.

Why does anal sex transmit HIV and Monkeypox more efficiently than oral or vaginal intercourse? It has to do with the details of different organs and how viruses are shed and transmitted. You can look it up.

Monkeypox is related to the Variola virus that causes smallpox. Smallpox had a fatality rate of around 30%; Monkeypox is rarely fatal (but still pretty unpleasant). Smallpox and Monkeypox are NOT related to chickenpox (herpes zoster). Smallpox is an ancient disease which killed many millions of people. Monkeypox was discovered in 1958. Rodents and monkeys may both be an anima reservoir of the virus. The virus spread to humans through butchering monkeys (which are eaten in parts of Africa).