Of course, holding up a mirror to society might be an extremely political thing.

Full disclosure: I don't much care how you, or someone else, defines "action". However, as a confessed uninterested party, I would make this suggestion: Simplify.

Why?

The longer, more elaborate, and maybe rococo the definition, the more opportunities for misunderstanding, misconstrual, definitions of the words used to define the term under discussion, unproductive quibbling, and so on.

At some point the lengthy definition departed the road and ended up in the weeds.

Wouldn't your definition for "action" be a lot simpler, and say essentially the same thing if it was worded something like this: "anything which results in a change"? — Metaphysician Undercover

I like MU's definition better than yours. His may not be the best definition possible, but with a glance I can entertain his definition and think about it.

Practice prudent parsimony.

Hmmm, never looked it up. Well... never too late.

Yes, people do make money trading insubstantial derivatives. I don't really understand how this works, but a lot of money is involved. All kinds of commodities are covered by futures contracts -- everything from peanuts to platinum. People in this group trade commodity futures, currencies, credit derivatives, credit default swap insurance contracts, financial instruments--insubstantial - but real paper stuff. There is usually something of real substance underneath the speculation.

This is a short list from one small site

Bill Lipschutz - probably a Five Percenter; worth less than a billion. He was bringing in $300,000,000 a year for Salomon Brothers for a while. He was very good for Salomon, at least.

Joseph C. Lewis - worth over $4½ billion

Stanley Druckenmiller - worth over $4.7 to $4.8 billion; worked with Soros

Paul Tudor Jones - worth over $5.3 billion

George Soros - worth about $8.3 billion, but that is after transferring 20 billion dollars to the Open Society Foundation. Soros and Druckenmiller made $1B in their bank breaking bet against the Bank of England.

Bruce Kovner - worth over $5.3 - $5.5 billion

Martin Schwartz - a well known player, but his wealth figure is unknown; he's 75; he spends his time owning and racing champion horses

Andrew Krieger - unknown, but probably in the $100 million range

The last Tzar of Russia, Nicholas II, was worth an estimated $300-400 billion in current money. Well worth the Bolsheviks' time to liquidate his fortune. And it was time. The Romanovs had been running things for several hundred years (think Peter the Great--that's what his friends called him, anyway).

Except for those 1 percenters who make their money by trading in currencies and the like, most of the Uber-rich, super-rich, and merely rich make their money by supplying the world with stuff. Here's a list of the first 50 of the Fortune 500 companies:

Walmart
Amazon
Exxon Mobil
Apple
CVS Health
Berkshire Hathaway
UnitedHealth Group
McKesson
AT&T
AmerisourceBergen
Alphabet
Ford Motor
Cigna
Costco Wholesale
Chevron
Cardinal Health
JPMorgan Chase
General Motors
Walgreens Boots Alliance
Verizon Communications
Microsoft
Marathon Petroleum
Kroger
Fannie Mae
Bank of America
Home Depot
Phillips 66
Comcast
Anthem
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
Valero Energy
General Electric
Dell Technologies
Johnson & Johnson
State Farm Insurance
Target
International Business Machines
Raytheon Technologies
Boeing
Freddie Mac
Centene
UPS
Lowe's
Intel
Facebook
FedEx
MetLife
Walt Disney
Procter & Gamble — Fortune Magazine

Chances are, everyone here has bought something from one of these companies or from the other 450 companies on the fortune list. The major stock owners of these companies are likely to be among the richest 1%, 5%, or 10% (United States). Of course, companies own shares in other companies. 4½% of UPS is owned by Black Rock Fund advisers (31,243,809 shares). In turn, a large hunk of Black Rock is owned by Laurence D. Fink--Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He is worth about $1 billion.

Jamie Dimon is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the big four American banks. He owns a small percentage of MorganChase and is worth 1½ billion.

Hey, let's not be sneering at people who are worth only a billion bucks. I would gladly settle for $1B!

Just an aside... Rich, Super Rich, and Uber Rich.

With a fortune of around $400bn, Mansu Musa 1 of Mail, the first king of Timbuktu, may not be a household name, but by most estimates is the richest person who ever lived.

Deriving his wealth from his country’s vast salt and gold deposits, which at one time accounted for half the world’s supply, Musa ruled West Africa’s Malian Empire in the early 14th century, constructing hundreds of mosques across the continent, many of which survive to this day.

With a fortune estimated at between $300 to $400bn in today’s money, Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicolas II) of Russia was deposed and subsequently executed by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

What you say sounds a lot closer to what people understand as Chomsky's approach.

It makes sense to me that the capacity and operation of language would reside in the brain as directed by our species' genetics. Our very complex brains were not built 'de novo'. The need for, and means to communication existed in our predecessor species. We are not born with a ROM-stored language (Chinese, Urdu, Swahili, Norwegian...) but we are born with instructions to acquire the available languages which present themselves to us. We don't have to be taught' it's more like "language falls into place in our brains".

an English text avoiding entirely words of French origin would be just as artificial — Olivier5

It would be artificial and it would be inordinately inelegant. However complete the Old English corpus of words might have been in 800 a.d., it has been irretrievably obsolete for a long time. I do not speak French (hélas; jugez-moi à la légère) but my guess is that Old French had a much larger, more sophisticated corpus than Old English did. Middle English had a much larger corpus, and then became Modern English in the 16th and 17th century as writers reached back into Latin and Greek for word-building materials. [One of the courses for training medical transcriptionists is a study of relevant Greek and Latin vocabulary.]

I like looking up those inordinately obscure words, and I keep a list of them--pearls snatched from the jaws of swine.

I have a (now retired) interest in common short words. When I was working in AIDS prevention back in the mid 1980s, I found it frustrating and annoying that public health pros found it difficult to simplify information for readers or audiences who sometimes were marginally literate. So I started investigating readability, word frequency, "Basic English", and the Anglo-Saxon words that make up the core of English, along with common words acquired from French, making Middle English into a richer language (thanks, of course, to William the Bastard).

One can write pretty good, best-selling texts in predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English; Tolkien wrote several volumes of it. Granted, Tolkien didn't have the problem of explaining viruses, the risks of anal sex (which is probably what the orcs preferred) or proper condom use.

My plan was to write a manual on how to discuss publicly important matters in widely readable text. I didn't finish that project, though I did write a computer program to evaluate readability and to sort the words in texts into several buckets, which involved making a lot of lists. This was pre-WWW. One can now find tools on line to do much of what I intended.

Unfortunately, the book on how to put the hay down where the goats can get at it, never got written.

What nonsense. Chomsky's approach isn't anything like this whatsoever. — Xtrix

The mods will punish Oliver5 for writing reckless declarative sentences. Or Xtrix, once the most faulty declarative statement has been determined. I'm an agnostic on the matter of Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I have not found linguistics of much interest, but thanks for the historical piece.

Google Translate is useful --no doubt about that. Google Translate was introduced around 2006. I don't remember when I first used it, but it has gotten a lot better since. It still has significant limitations, depending. Sometimes it can't render a term at all, or renders it in an exceeding clumsy way. Specialized terms present more problems than everyday text.

Applications which turn voice into text are quite impressive too, as are apps which can interpret handwriting. I tried it on a handheld device back in the 1990s, and was impressed that it could do a pretty good job interpreting cursive writing that was not-too-carefully performed. .

Google Ngram is one of my favorite tools. It uses the vast text scanning project that has been going on for at least 15 years. 30,000,000 books have been hoovered into its servers. From the billions of words used, Ngram charts the use-frequency of words and short phrases since 1800. Knowing word frequency is useful for, among other things, studying readability. And it's just plain interesting. The term "readability" was scarcely used before 1900, but there were peaks in its use in the 1960s and 1980s.

One of my pet peeves is writers using inordinately obscure words. "canaille" for instance. It's a derogatory word meaning 'the common people'. The English got it from the French who got it from the Italians; it means 'pack of dogs'. It was most popular around 1820, so when a contemporary author uses it, you know the writer is 'putting on the literary Ritz' -- the hotel, not the cracker.

I have pleonastic tendencies. Peak pleonasm was probably before 1800. It's been receding in popularity ever since.

Sure, but what I’m getting at is that it’s someone’s fault that we have so many guns too. I just get the idea that some people treat society as if it was a separate entity capable of making decisions. It’s not. — Pinprick

I totally agree.

We could make a list of individuals who are responsible for the number of guns that exist. First, there is the list of individuals who own gun and ammunition factories. Then there is the list of people who own wholesale and retail companies. There is the list of gun buyers and gun users. We can make up a list of people who are Second Amendment fanatics.

We can divide this list up in several ways. The manufacturing-wholesale-retail owner group amounts to many thousands. Gun owners are roughly a third of the American population -- 100,000,000. The list of people who own a gun (like a hunting rifle) and regularly use it for hunting is much smaller than 100 million. The list of people who own hand guns and regularly use them for protection is smaller than the list of hunters. The list of people who have a hand gun and use it for nefarious purposes is smaller still.

So, 100,000,000 people is too large a number to not count as "society". Society is made up of individuals and individuals are formed by society. It's a circular relationship, but "society" doesn't trump individual decision making. It isn't society that makes someone put a cheap gun in their pocket and go to a convenient store and kill the clerk and empty the register. Or shoot somebody because they were disrespected.

"Society" can't make a decision, but it can and does constitute the cultural environments in which individuals do make decisions. Sometimes a small number of individuals, or even one individual, "shape" society. A president, a dictator, a pope, a charismatic leader, a madman... can constructively or destructively shape society. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were not a large number of people. Only 19 al-Qaeda men carried out the 9/11 terrorist attack that restructured some aspects of American culture and society. So have individual assassins who have killed charismatic leaders.

Sorting out how society and culture is changed is a difficult dicey game--so many variables.

I am reading Sophie's World and in that book they say that practically only philosophers and children have the similar sense of wonder in the world, — Thinking

One of the things that adults and philosophers tell us is that "We should not believe everything we read."

Childhood is overrated by adults. Do children think about how innocent and pure they are? No. Once we are past the irresistibly cute stages of infancy (similar to puppies) life gets more complicated by the minute. As puppyhood passes, we have to start dealing with reality which, face it, isn't organized for our personal convenience or happiness.

Pairing "a sense of wonder in the world" and "philosophers" is not even wrong. Where in hell did they get evidence for that?

The world has wonders and from time to time we ordinary mortals might apprehend some of them--but not because we are children or philosophers.

You must've met neoteny at some point in your life. — TheMadFool

Actually I just met her the other day. We didn't get along; probably won't repeat it. Too larval.

Who could imagine what could possibly go wrong with our attempt to "liberate Thailand" or Hong Kong? Or Cuba--or Monaco--for that matter. If and when there are enough liberation-motivated Thais they will liberate themselves.

The Book of Enoch is interesting because it speaks of angels coming from heaven and having sex with human women — Hanover

Was there a Yelp review of the experience? Did the women like it? Did human women merit the angelic effort? How did human women give birth to the giants--narrow birth canal and all that? Maybe the tale originated in barely remembered ancient matings of Neaderthals and Homo sapiens?

I propose that books of the Old Testament were granted canonical status by Jewish communities on the basis of then-current use and and usefulness. Different communities had varied preferences which resulted in some texts being present and others not.

A critical difference between the Jewish process of compilation and the Christian one is that Jews were a going concern and accumulated their sacred texts and traditions over a much longer period of time than Christians. The very early 'church' had the urgent task of establishing its own foundational documents because its short period of emergence occurred before there was a religious organization to manage it.

By the time the church fathers met to consider which foundational documents to keep and which to exclude (e. g., gnostic texts were ruled inadmissible) the church was already expanding and establishing traditional practices. Consequently, some passages derived from practice after Jesus' death.) For instance, the words of institution in the eucharistic ritual probably were developed as a commemoration of Jesus, rather than something that Jesus said at a Seder the night before he was crucified.

Just guessing of course; my time machine is in the shop just right now, or I would take a camera and come back with a record of what actually happened.

The critical ingredient missing from utopian schemes is a population of utopians. Lacking an appropriate population, utopias remain unoccupied.

That said, our longest surviving social arrangement (maybe 200,000 years, give or take a dozen, was that of the sparsely populated hunter-gatherers. Not very many people spread out on a large planet, and having limited technology is probably the most enduring scheme we are going to get. Of course, we don't know what that was like. It might not have seemed utopian to the wanderers.

Is this a useful means of encountering the world, as we know it? — Jack Cummins

It's what you got, so you'll just have to make do with it.

"Life" built up these senses (and the additional ones that @Banno listed) over the preceding many, many millions of years. Sensory apparatus and neural processing had to be sufficient to allow animals to cope with and survive a complicated environment. We share these senses with lots of other successful animals.

Does it reach the limits of experience for the baseline, as the starting point of our philosophy adventures? — Jack Cummins

Well... in order to have an experience, you have to have both sensory apparatus and adequate neural processing. Our vaunted neural processing allows us to get out ahead of ourselves enough to have all sorts of adventures, philosophical and otherwise.

Individuals and society interpenetrate  There is no individual outside of society, and no society without individuals. Our complex culture is transmitted through society and the individual bears the benefit and costs of the culture. Sometimes the culture a society hands down is to blame, but only individuals can act. So, in American culture of 2020, there are many guns available for individuals to use. Criticize the society for the number of guns. However, only an individual can pick up a gun, point it at you, and pull the trigger. That's the fault of the individual. But if there were not as many guns as individuals in the United States, it is probably that fewer people would be shot.

Black individuals are killed by other blacks at a higher rate than blacks are killed by whites. Why do black individuals pick up guns and kill each other more often than other groups? Because they have been subjected to harsh social conditions, and because there are guns readily available, and because society does not prioritize apprehending the shooters/killers in the black community.

White uneducated middle aged male individuals kill themselves at a higher rate than individuals in other groups. They also use more opiates than some other groups. Why? Because these individuals have been subjected by society to withdrawal of the means by which they formerly maintained their status and meaning as individuals (= deaths of despair).

Only individuals can act, but to ignore the social milieu in which individuals exist is an act of ideology.

I remember reading a study done that concluded that imperialism was extremely expensive from the host country's point of view and the policy of imperialism didn't really make sense economically. — BitconnectCarlos

I doubt if imperialism (meaning, colonies under the control of the 'mother country') didn't make sense economically. On the one hand, the colonies serve as suppliers of raw material (fiber, ore, wood, foodstuffs, etc.) and on the other hand as a market for finished goods.

Smart imperialists use local forces to control the colony -- like the British did in India. Colonialism is extractive--pulling out wealth from the land and the people. Nice colonialists (I suppose the British qualify) didn't too-crudely shake down their colonies the way bad colonialists did (Belgium would qualify). Sure, there was prestige in having colonies. King Leopold II in Belgium had colony-envy, and felt much improved after he had the Congo colony to screw over. But wealth is the point, not prestige.

I would guess that the initial stage of establishing a colony might not pay off; that seems like a normal investment situation. But in the American colonies, the colonists were expected to begin producing ASAP. And they did. Lumber and tobacco, for instance. England didn't need tobacco but they liked it (as billions have), but they needed a new supply of high quality lumber for ship building and construction. The American colonies didn't make a lot on their own, so they bought a lot of stuff from England.

The majority of Americans have not seen massive improvements in their standard of living during the last 40 years. Inflation and wage stagnation--two very important economic processes--have lowered the standard of living, significantly.

40 years ago personal computers were not a significant factor in most people's lives. Granted, the 1970s had seen significant progress in portable calculators. In 1971, our college library had a very impressive adding machine that used an electronic visual display. We kept it in a locked room. By 1976 we had card-reading calculators that were pocket sized, and they sat on a table in the library. We had access to a shared off-site mainframe computer (using a phone modem). Faster internet speeds were a bigger benefit than more RAM and faster CPUs. Of course, having all three is nicer than watching a B&W TV with an antenna. But in its day, remember, the B&W TV was a pretty big deal.

I happen to like technology, but tech stuff isn't what gave me a sense of quality-of-life. What did that was having enough money to exploit the opportunities of living in a big city (after growing up in Podunk). During the next 40 years I had the opportunity to watch as more and more people were finding it just a little harder every year to make ends meet, and maintain what they considered a nice lifestyle. After 40 years, the decline is significant.

No, it isn't that most people are starving or wearing ragged clothes. What you see are more people in a household working to maintain 'x' level'; you see more household debt; you see more rising balances on credit cards; you see rents rising beyond what a single occupant can afford (hence more adult roommates); you see large portions of the population unable to save for retirement. You see more deficits all over the place.

This lamentable state of affairs isn't due solely to capitalism. After all, people were doing much better during the post-WWII capitalist economic boom, which came to an end in the 1970s (triggered by OPEC's oil games). Lots of factors came into play, but one of them was neoliberalism and greed on the part of the ruling class, which decided that they needed more gold -- much more.

It fell to Truman ("The buck stops here") to give final approval, but Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and another city had been left unbombed by design to provide a "pristine target". All the important decisions about the nuclear program had been made under Roosevelt. Truman was not part of the decision making loop.

As for the Dresden (or Hamburg, Tokyo...) fire bombing, the 'total war' approach to civilians was tried out in WWI. The level of mechanization and air power in in the 1914-18 conflict didn't allow for the kind of devastating attack that was possible 20 some years later.

And yes, [***EDIT***] Roosevelt and Churchill should be thrown in exactly the same pile as Hitler and Stalin - the pile of war criminals. That Hitler and Stalin were worse is no defense of Churchill's action. — Benkei

In a response I was writing in another thread I was going to compare Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, and Roosevelt, drawing the conclusion that Hitler was categorically worse than Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. I changed my mind because I figured that someone like you would say they were all guilty. Which, of course, they were -- just not of the same crimes and not under the same circumstances. I've read about Stalin's various crimes, and can think of several things for which FDR could be found guilty. But Churchill? I'd appreciate your pointing out his crimes. The books I've read and the films I've seen about Churchill were all pretty positive. I admit a bias from insufficient study.

While granting the Big Four were all guilty, I'm not willing to concede that their crimes were all equal. Stalin has crimes to his credit that happened before Operation Barbarossa, and continued after WWII came to an end. What are the major counts against Roosevelt? The Manhattan Project (atomic bomb)? Japanese Internment? What? Churchill?

As for "Joe Biden: Accelerated Liberal Imperialism" hasn't imperialism, liberal or otherwise, been US policy, more or less, since the get go? (Earlier eras of imperialism maybe shouldn't be described as "liberal".)

Imperialism tends to be such a good thing for the imperialists, be they Belgian, Dutch, German, Russian, English, French, Italian, American, Spanish, Japanese or Chinese--whosever--it's hard to imagine potential imperialists foregoing the opportunities. If they could be imperialists, why wouldn't they?

Since the beginning, has any country's leadership ever said: "We could become fabulously rich by taking over and exploiting those shit hole territories over there; but, you know, imperialism is just wrong, and we wouldn't want to become wealthy by doing something that moralists would consider distasteful." ????

I don't think so. (We can exclude countries from consideration that lack/ed the wherewithal to conquer Monaco, let alone seize a large slice of a continent.)

The human species began as neither good nor evil. Good and evil were nothing until we thought of them. Because we have set out "good" and "evil" as terms that can apply to us, the terms do apply, and we are sorted good or evil, depending on who is speaking.

We are what we are: a primate species endowed with intelligence (but not too much), driven by a strong will (as often heedless as not) and possessed of wisdom (but a day late and a dollar short).

Ants are also world conquering. — JackBRotten

Great read: "Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson -- a classic short story published in the December 1938 Esquire.

Here's a reading of it on YouTube.

I think there is such a thing as "human nature" but it isn't rigidly consistent from person to person, situation to situation. There is a fair amount of variation from person to person as to which features, traits, drives, and innate responses, and so forth come into play at any given moment. But still, all humans have the same traits, drives, innate responses, emotions, brain structure, sensorium, and so on. You may have a learned fear of the spiders and I may have a learned fear of murder hornets, but learning fears is a common trait.

Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt all exhibited similar human behaviors throughout their lives, even if the consequences of their lives differed enormously. "Human nature" is synonymous with neither goodness nor badness. Adolph, Winston, Joseph, and Franklin were all capable of feeling very similarly emotions, all driven by aspirations (e.g., for power), all having the same sensorium, all having similar learning / memory / comprehension / association / etc. capabilities.

We are all much more alike than we are different BECAUSE we share in a set of features common to our species. We may not like every person we meet -- indeed, we may heartily loathe, despise, and abhor some of them, and the feeling may be mutual. But there is never any doubt that other people, even disgusting ones, belong to the same species as ourselves, as embarrassing or annoying as that might be.

I have been a musician for more than 50 years. — TheQuestioner

I consider your observation to be a creative insight. Up until the time when recorded music became at least fairly good, plentiful, cheap, and easily distributed, music could not be ubiquitous. All that happened between 70 and 90 years ago. Prior to that, hearing music depended on live performance. Now music IS ubiquitous--everything from early medieval to whatever crap was written yesterday is on tap and often of superb quality. Once the recording is finished, the producers of the piece can all drop dead but their music will live on.

Novels, painting, sculpture, opera, poetry, dance, music--all the arts--have become vastly more available to billions of people than they were before high speed printing, photography, motion film, radio, and television came along. What art hasn't been affected by this?

The role of the non-elite composer or performer has declined in value against the backdrop of the mass art market (of which recorded sound is a part).

I have no advice on the matter except to suggest doing something new and different, maybe.

How old are you now? Maybe age is snowing white hairs on your head; maybe you are past your creative peak? People peak at whatever it is they do--though some peak a lot later than others. I peaked around 50. I wasn't in the arts but I still had a creative peak. Since then bright ideas have been fewer and farther between. My depth has improved (I'm 74 now) but not speed, efficiency, or brilliance.

Where were you thinking Felonia should be? Depending on one's politics, Manhattan? Georgia? Los Angeles? Puerto Rico? North Dakota? Isle Royale (its in Lake Superior--(206 square miles--much bigger than Manhattan and unoccupied, except by wolves and moose)? Aleutian Islands? Or maybe Russia would rent us a couple of gulags in Siberia.

Banishment would have some real, positive benefits.

Given the high cost of crime and punishment, it behooves us to spend more money on prevention. Poverty + harshly uneven opportunity in education, employment, health, housing, and so on contribute to crime because it makes people bitter, resentful, and unwilling to abide by the social norms of polite society.

Granted, there are people who commit crime who had some opportunity -- and even made use of it. But a lot of crime comes out of a collective of bad circumstances.

A better society will probably produce less crime. No guarantees, but improving our society makes more sense than what we have been doing in the last 50 years (like the neoliberal regime).

So what evidence do we have that corporeal punishment (beating, whipping, caning, shock, etc.) works as a deterrent to crime, and what are the psychological damages to the person performing the whipping and the person receiving?

We need secure prisons for dangerous criminals who are likely to pose a serious threat to society. How many would that be? Far less than the present prison census. Violent gang leaders, hit men, serial murderers... yes. Lock 'em up for life or execute them.

Society has collective responsibilities to its members as well, and ought to arrange things so that being good, and not resorting to crime, is easier--a more difficult proposition than building lots of concrete bunkers to stuff people into.

Will we do a better job improving society so that fewer people turn to predatory crime? I'm not confident.

I think your guess is pretty much spot on. English didn't become a world language on the merits of the language itself. The British Empire projected English into North America, South Asia, and Africa. Later on, the United States continued the process. Conquest, trade, politics, religion, etc.

Latin and French, two other lingua franca, achieved their status in the same way.

The fussy French have guarded the development of their language much more closely than most languages have -- "The Académie française was established in 1635 to act as the official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, and to publish an official dictionary of the French language. Its recommendations however carry no legal power and are sometimes disregarded even by governmental authorities."

Curiously, Google Translate French to English doesn't even recognize "lingua franca" as French. It thought that it might be Corsican.

Esperanto was invented to serve as a universal language. There are language hobbyists who learn it, but it hasn't caught on yet. It was created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. There are a couple of million people who speak it. If someday you find that you have absolutely nothing else left to do, you could become the first Esperanto poster on this form.

Anything further you might want to add? — TheMadFool

Old English wasn't simple, but it was the Germanic language of an agrarian people who decamped from Western Europe and took up life in England. The Angles and Saxons pretty much dominated the people already living there, so they didn't have to borrow a lot of words from the natives. That changed in 1066 when William the Conqueror (AKA William the Bastard) invaded and took over England. The Normans didn't make any effort to stamp out Old English, but since they spoke Old French and were running things, it behooved the English to pay attention to French words. a lot of French was added to OE, and usage gradually changed OE into Middle English. Just one of many changes, pork (Fr.) was added to pig, hog, and swine (all Old English). Cow is from the Germanic, Beef (boef) is is from the French.

A lot of the complexity of Old English was milled out of Old English over time. Old English became Middle English, which with some effort and patience a Modern English speaker can learn fairly easily. Middle English became modern English as the result of use. Intellectuals began writing in English, and late Middle English had a relatively lean vocabulary. Writers reached into French, Latin, and Greek for more complex word-stock that could carry big ideas.

So, a lot of words were added to English in the 1400s and 1500s. By 1600 English had become pretty much the language it is today.

Bringing this back to God Almighty, William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible came out in 1525. It had a strong influence on a more famous version, the King James Bible, published in 1611. For his scholarly efforts, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, strangled, and then burnt at the stake in what is now Belgium. Tyndale had completed the NT translation, but hadn't finished the OT books when he was executed. Religious authorities were very touchy back then, and just didn't like democratizing the Word of God, which was their bailiwick.

You said something important! Damn my memory! It had to do with the masculine pronoun "he" and the word for god - "father" - not implying that god is male. — TheMadFool

Maybe that "he" is the English default for person. He, mankind, men... She, womankind, woman just isn't the default. If a writer says, "all womankind" one would assume the reference was to all women, not all people, while "all mankind" refers to both men and women. Some languages are gendered -- like French, Spanish, Latin, etc. Anglo Saxon may have been gendered (don't remember) but over time English became less and less inflected, so it became simplified. Mother, father, man, woman, brother, sister... are gendered while person and people are neuter. The pronoun for person is he, she. "It" is for objects, not persons, and gods are persons. So, god is either a man or a woman. Athena is a female, Apollo is a male. Jesus was a male, Mary was his mother, and God was his father. That's the way it was conceived, so to speak.

Sometimes woke writers will use "she" instead of "he" as the default. It is less jarring than it used to be, but still requires invoking a mental subroutine to acknowledge what the writer is doing and make allowance for it. I'm 74 and I'm not adopting major new linguistic habits here on out. English doesn't have a neuter gender for individuals, though "we" and "them" are neuter plurals (at least for the last several hundred years).

The masculine default is very deep in English, and might be the default across the Indo-European family of languages--but my knowledge of Indo-European is extraordinarily thin. I'd like to be an expert on everything, but... just wasn't paying enough attention in class.

As for the "fearsome" bit, it muddies the waters - how could someone being decapitated or having faer chest crushed in a vehicular accident be beautiful? — TheMadFool

OK, forget fearsome. I was thinking of a phrase from the Psalms, "Blessed are they who fear the Lord and walk in His ways". The blessed are not scared -- they are awed. But never mind, There is a better word -- sublime -- that describes a certain quality of great things -- like the universe, the earth viewed from the moon, or the starry night sky. The sublime is not merely nice, beautiful, impressive, etc. It is "used to denote the extreme or unparalleled nature" of something.

An ocean of ink has been spilt on such questions of whether God Is A He Or A She, so you have tapped into a deep vein.

God knows what I said about the matter at hand; I don't remember. Hopefully it was nice,

Third, I've almost never heard the words "beauty" and "beautiful" being used on men/males. Too, the personification of beauty in all cultures seem to be women/females. For men/males, the correct adjective is handsome. — TheMadFool

It's not the "correct" adjective, it's merely the current adjective. "Beauty" certainly can be ascribed to males in an entirely masculine way, and "handsome" can be applied to a very attractive woman.

Fourth, this suggests, if not implies, that the universe has a feminine character - the universe is beautiful (womanly) and not handsome (manly). — TheMadFool

The universe is awesome (in its formal meaning). Beautiful, sure, but not in a sexed way. It is fearsome, too. Ineffable. Manly or womanly are just too small terms to bother with.

is the fact that all/most works of beauty are the work of men indicate that women are aesthetically-challenged etc. — TheMadFool

Men may just be more visually oriented than women -- the male gaze, and all that. Camille Paglia pointed out that middle class/upper class women have long had access to arts education -- which they have made use of -- without producing a whole lot of great works.

Is God a male or a female? Why? — TheMadFool

In ancient and modern polytheistic religions, both. Some gods are male, some are female. The three middle-eastern Abrahamic religions happen to be monotheistic male sky god affairs. Why? Don't know.

But look: Human beings create religions, we create gods. Humans see constellations in the sky -- we imagine figures that are not really there. One of the interesting things about the Abrahamic god is that he was conceived to be above and beyond human understanding--not like us, not approachable. Invisible, present from the beginning and in all places. All knowing, Totally unlike us. Male, sure, but not the guy next door,

Religions are perhaps our greatest art form. We produced them. The gods are our work, not the other way around. If you want god to be female, she can be. If you prefer god to be male, he can be. You would not be the first person to call god mother, father, and both.

Some Christian denominations have been trying to de-emphasize the sexing of god--not neutering god, but using fewer masculine terms for... the last 40 years. "Lord" for some people is too masculine. Father is out the window for some. Jesus stays male in most groups, and the Holy Spirit is counted as female quite often. Degendering hymns, scriptures, and prayers can sound truly wretched, and I don't particularly like it. Tough bounce.

J. B. Phillips wrote a book in 1952 by the title of "Your God is Too Small": too limited, too anthropomorphized, too domesticated. He asked believers to think bigger.

God may exist, even if not the one that we created. If God really does exist, my belief is that this entity would be altogether unintelligible to us, not fitting into any category that we could devise. That sort of being doesn't generate a lot of warm fuzzies so wouldn't be very popular.

Academic thought seems rarely to be comfortable with presenting it's own views to a non-academic audience, and thus influencing their behaviour. — kudos

Universities do not operate as missions of enlightenment to the proletariat. One thing universities do is train people (including some proles) to reach ascending levels of knowledge and expertise. BAs make up the base of the educated, the professoriat fills in the peak. Another thing universities do is provide services to the corporate, governmental, and NGO elite. Whether it's electrical engineering, public policy, investment strategies, medicine, business administration, mathematics, geology, chemistry, and numerous other departments the university produces useful knowledge. It transmits this knowledge through specialized events, networks, publishing, consultation, and so forth.

The people influenced by the university are in a position to influence the rank and file. University geology professors don't drill for oil. Their students and the beneficiaries of university expertise do the drilling. Some corporations have research arms, but the local state university (Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota...) share (or increasingly, license) discovered technology. A lot of drugs have their beginnings in University labs. The internet began in a DOD/Academic partnership,

Some departments -- Classics, Philosophy, English Literature, etc. don't produce knowledge with as ready a market as mechanical engineering, The humanities are taught as part of "the reproduction of society" and as such are important. If university philosophers come up with ideas that find a market, then the knowledge will be transmitted, and will affect others.

One thing, the humanities are supposed to directly influence the students most of all. I hesitate to bet on the net benefit of the humanities, even though I was an English major a long time ago. (I would definitely do it over.)

his re-election would have been the end of American democracy — Wayfarer

Certainly another term would have enabled him to worsen the malignancies he found or started. Whether it would be the end of democracy, I don't know... Trump was unusually and crudely self-centered. Who knows what he might have done to satisfy his needs? CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases are among my biggest worries, and Trump just didn't seem to care about global warming. Pro or con, he just wasn't interested in it. Four more years of that would have been disaster plus. (Disaster plus might happen anyway.)

The fact that a simpl,e decent guy can beat that by popular vote shows that Amnerica lives! — Wayfarer

A lot of us Americans never doubted that America lives, even if the chief executive of the nation (along with a substantial following) was disgraceful. The President, no matter who he or she is, is not the nation. The Congress isn't the nation either. Neither are the courts or the military. I believe that this is true for all countries. Of course, that doesn't mean that "the people are all good". Sometimes the The People are mistaken, or a large share of them are.

I've been reading 1877: Our Year of Living Violently, by Michael Bellesiles (2010) about the election, presidency, and socio-economic-political events during Rutherfraud B. Hayes' presidency -- 1876-1880. It was a disaster for many people--many whites, but especially for blacks and native Americans. A lot of slimy stuff happened during that presidentiad. Roughly a century was required to undo the damage, though really, for most of those years there was very little effort towards change.

Republican obstruction during Obama's administration (and probably more of the same during this administration) will also take a long time to recover from.

Through the 1870s, through everything that happened since regardless of who was in office, there was a core decent America which has abided decade after decade. This isn't a rose-colored view of the past. Decent people, in any country including in the United States, are quite capable of at least tolerating bad things being done to which ever group is the underdog. No countries excepted.

I am very glad to see Donald Trump on the way out. Joe and Kamala will put on a more dignified show, which by itself will be a relief, but let's not get carried away.

70,000,000+ votes were for DT. This was no watershed victory. Even if Biden & Harris had unbeatable Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court, I doubt that anything remotely radical will be proposed. Contrary to Republican certainty, the Democrats are not an insurgent socialist party. Alas, but true.

Covid 19? A lot of people are sick of the disease (so to speak), and unwilling to abide sensible public health measures. Thanks to Trump, the infection got out of control. It will be very difficult to get people to cooperate in suppressing it.

The President, let us remember, is not in charge of the economy. Business is profit bound, and if environmental safety requires significant business losses, then the environment be damned. (Besides which, a lot of undoable damage has already been done.).

The American economy is not in good shape, when you consider the long-term divestment in public services, infrastructure, health, and so on. There has been a long-term decline in wealth among most Americans. Biden can not throw a switch to change all that. The fact is that reinvestment in public service, infrastructure, health, education, environment, renewable energy, distribution of wealth--the myriad needs--is a 30 to 50 year project, not a single or double presidentiad period of time.

Still, I'm glad Donald won't be occupying 1600 Pennsylvania much longer.