This thread is a very good example of me trying to communicate my mental life to others. — T Clark

Which is, of course, what we are all trying to do. Can we do it?

One of the great limitation in sharing our minds, mental life, inner being... with others is the enormous volume of content that amounts to even brief experiences. For a good deal of experience we have no words. There are odors, for instance that we find attractive, disgusting, appetizing, and so forth which we would be very hard-pressed to describe beyond saying "Mint smells like mint". How does one describe the odor of a ripe pear? Or a spoiled tomato? Or a quite dead squirrel? Or rain on a warm concrete road? Or the sensation of swallowing a spoonful of haddock chowder? The feel of a very dry, cold wind? A twitching muscle? The sensation of suddenly remembering something important you forgot?

Then there is the connectedness of memories. When I see ground cherries at the farmers market (never see them anywhere else) I remember seeing ground cherries growing in our neighbor's garden; that memory is at least 60+ years old. There is the memory of offering ground cherries to people who have never seen them before, and being puzzled at their suspicions -- you'd think I was offering them a mushroom that was quite possibly poisonous. (Ground cherries belong in the nightshade family of potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, eggplant (aubergines) and peppers. The leaves of these plants are poisonous.).

Something as simple as a husked tomato has a lot of baggage. How much more baggage does the topic of God have. Or thoughts about your wife and children? Or... 250,000 other topics.

Then there are all sorts of ambiguous thoughts. I officially do not believe in God, but there is nothing else that I do not believe in that is so much in my thoughts. Some of our brave convictions do not hold up well on close (self) examination and we are probably loath to expose these convictions to the unfriendly examination of others.

Some of our actions are just too embarrassing to talk about, and I wasn't even thinking about sexual misadventures.

So, to make a long story short, we may over-estimate just how much of our selves we can or will actually reveal.

Would a flower help? Here, have a flower: :flower:

I stole it from a grave. — S

Well done.

Premature withdrawal is not an option. You can't leave. Your participation will endure, like it or not, so you might as well stay and be active. To distressing? Try Xanax.

Maybe "Who could imagine that they would freak out somewhere on The Philosophy Forum" (instead of somewhere in Kansas).

Up with Zappa.

@T Clark

Self-knowledge is real knowledge, though it is knowledge that only the subject person can possess in detail, and introspection is the essential process of gaining it.

A question: How much of our self-knowledge can a benign interrogator (not the water-boarding type) gain through long-term discussion (such as that with a psychoanalyst)? Can one unpack somebody else's mind, with their cooperation? (Not now. if there is no willingness to share.).

I've engaged in intense self-examination / reflection during the last third of my life (so, starting about 23 years ago). I've written many pages of the results (now lost on dead hard-drives, which is probably just as well). One of the shortcomings of self-examination is that one must be both advocate and adversary: "Is that really what happened 60 years ago?" "How sure can you be that the memory of your first love in college is accurate, now?" "What happened in years where there are no clear memories, compared to the year before when there are more memories?" (Second grade is kind of a blank. Did bad things happen in that room?)

There is a paradox in "the unexamined life is not worth living" and that is that most of us can not do mature self-examination until much of our life has been lived. At 25 or 45 I did a lot of ruminating, but it wasn't very informative. Of course I may have been an unusually uninsightful schmuck when I was a young man. (There is some evidence that I was.).

My soundest advice is this: Never engage in introspection while riding a bike in downtown traffic.

slave-dealing — tim wood

Slave dealing was not a problem for the Jewish authorities until some point which I can't identify, just now. Slavery was during some OT periods was quite common.

what do I think of religions that push fear and hatred? I think they're ignorant and stupid. — tim wood

Your phrasing has come out of my mouth on a number of occasions, but I am not sure the problem is ignorance and stupidity. The targets for hate are many and varied, and most of us are capable of hating people who, to our minds, are really loathsome, but who, to themselves, are perfectly lovable and decent folk.

One of the big problems of Christians & Moslems is the idea that people who violate the holiness code are spectacularly evil. Therefore, Jews, homosexuals, apostates, heretics, adulterous women, and so on have been the objects of focused hatred and violence. But to repeat, "homophobia" doesn't fit these situations.

People don't hate Jews because they fear they are Jews. The self-righteous religious haters usually do not think they are deep down, homosexuals. Or apostates, heretics, adulterous women, and more. Hatred has other sources than what drives the properly diagnosed homophobe (which is the fear he is queer). People who hate blacks usually have some picture of the uppity Negro who is violating the proper order of things: he or she is not being submissive. NO, he and she are out there integrating the schools, the pool, the shopping center, and the neighborhood; marching, yelling, getting the federal government involved, and... and... there goes our way of life!!!

People sometimes hate the people over whom they have absolute power. It's not a phobia, it's a more complicated reaction.

Anyone here able to cite those parts of the Bible... — tim wood

Everyone who can use Google can do it.

I encountered this biblical material back in 1978, particularly in the book, Is the Homosexual my Neighbor? by Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Since then many books have been published on the topic.

Leviticus

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." Chapter 18 verse 22[2]
"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." Chapter 20 verse 13[3]

Genesis

Sodom and Gomorrah have been used historically and in modern discourse as metaphors for homosexuality, and are the origin of the English words, sodomite, a pejorative term for male homosexuals, and sodomy, which is used in a legal context to describe sexual crimes against nature, namely anal or oral sex (particularly homosexual) and bestiality.

Judges 19 has a very unhappy tale similar to the one in Sodom and Gomorrah.

The relationship between David and Johnathan has been interpreted as homosexual (and as not homosexual)

1 Samuel 18:1:

And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. (KJV)

Another relevant passage is 2 Samuel 1:26, where David says:

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. (KJV)

Book of Ruth

The relationship between Ruth and Naomi has been interpreted as a lesbian relationship (and as not a lesbian relationship)

Paul Romans 1:26-27

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.[25]

arsenokoitai gets mentioned in the Corinthian quote, and is a good example of why all this is difficult. We don't have numerous dictionaries, many volumes of secular writing, and so forth to interpret the New Testament. We have what we have and it is often a struggle for scholars to determine what, exactly people meant.

It seems to me quite likely that the ancient Jewish authorities did not like homosexuals. Their competitors in the land of Israel, the heathens, pagans, and uncircumcised Philistines practiced male prostitution in some temples. Why? Fertility. Don't ask me -- I don't know whether the temple prostitutes were gay or not, and nobody else does either.

In one passage (can't remember) the Bible says that the wages of a dog may not be offered in the temple. Dogs got paid? No, "dog" was a term for a male temple prostitute.

Did homosexuality exist in ancient Israel? As far as I know, it did. BUT the given form male homosexuality would have taken would depende on the options available and what was tolerated. We really don't know much about it.

anyone here care to venture a definition of what homophobia is? — tim wood

In the context in which it was used, it means someone who has a fear of their own homophobia. It was theorized that men who could not accept their sexual attraction to other men would react to it with fear, loathing, and sometimes, violence directed at a suspected or known homosexual. Many gay men have experienced this reaction to actual or suspected homosexuals before they openly accepted their own sexual attraction to men. This was true for me at one period of time, also.

This kind of phobia and self-hatred is dispelled by self-acceptance.

The homophobia model has since been applied to hatreds for which the mechanism of 'homophobia" doesn't exist in any way, shape, manner, or form. So, heterosexual people are accused of being homophobic because they intensely dislike homophobia, not because they recognize any same sex longing in themselves.

Better to call hate hate, then adopt a term for an anxiety reaction for plain old hatred.

Xenophobia doesn't exist because people secretly fear that they are foreigners or something strange. Some people just fear and hate strangers or foreigners or anything that is strange or foreign. We seem to be primed for this, and in some communities xenophobia is encouraged and strengthened by group behavior.

Arachnophobes do not suspect they are really spiders. Spiders simply scare them to an inordinate degree.

Get the picture?

Good observation. Thanks.

In modern days, religions should keep their Jesus off of our penises. They have no business in the bedrooms of the nation. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Christians could make some progress in that direction by recognizing that Jesus had a penis himself, and probably employed it in activities besides urination. He was an embodied being, after all, with all the urges contained therein. Many Christians have difficulty with embodiment -- including their own. Some seem to want to be above the physical, somehow being etherial disembodied beings.

Yes, there are many flavors of Christianity, everything from Mormons to Old Calendar Bulgarian Orthodox; and a lot of members -- 2.4 billion, give or take a dozen. Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism comprise billions more. Characterizing these religions as one thing or another is risky, because there is going to be variation on each facet of faith and religious behavior. You know that, of course.

That said, I have had quite a bit of experience with Christian anti-gay attitudes and policies, both pro- and con. The Methodist Church in which I was raised is coming apart right now over the issue; my siblings are in the anti-gay camp. On the other hand, there are Methodist congregations that are gay-affirming. One of the strong drivers behind my effort to pursue atheism was the impossibility of affirming my gay sexual being within Christian Theology. Catholics, Anglicans, and others are also having difficulty finding an accommodation for gay people and women who want an equal share of participation and power in the Church.

Some churches are misogynist too. Methodism has done better on this score, electing women bishops before many denominations accepted women as pastors. One of my sisters belongs to a Baptist church that is remarkably antediluvian in its attitudes toward women in the church.

Most Christians can be faulted on their failures to even remotely approximate the performance that Jesus Christ established as the standard (I was naked and you clothed me, I was hungry and you fed me...) and believers in every other religion similarly fail to meet whatever mark is expected of them. That's just normal human behavior.

Billions of automobile drivers fail to faithfully follow the rules of the road, for instance, even though it raises their personal risks substantially.

The primary task of civilization is to corral our inconvenient primate urges as well as we can so that the better angels of our Homo sapiens nature can come to the fore. It's a messy business everywhere for everybody.

And even when everybody agrees that there is a boundary, and the boundary is extremely visible (river, big fence) people can't / won't agree on what it means. Does it mean, "Stay on your side until a guard or customs agent says, "Welcome to the -----"? Does it mean that the boundary is irrelevant? "Borders? We don't need no stinking borders!" Does it mean that people who insist on the border not being crossed willy nilly are racist sexist xenophobic white supremacist nazi scum? (to some...)

These borders are well marked but it doesn't make all that much difference:



And thanks for going back to wherever you came from.

I agree with you, I think we're going to have a very wretched time of it. Perhaps the economic system will freeze up again and not be thawed out. Almost certainly, heat waves, famine, drought, (and ironically heavy rains and floods), will destabilize many societies. Governments may not be able to hold their nations together amid the eco-disasters, or the Econ-disasters.

All this is quite different than the demise of the Roman or other empires. The climate isn't a government service of even the most determined nanny sate. If seasonable weather fails, then we starve sooner or later.

@banno: So what are the arrangements for local government in Australia? How is power to carry on local stuff apportioned? When (if) was power apportioned -- when Australia ceased being a colony and set up its constitution?

@banno

Far-flung empires that exist to exploit the territories for the benefit of the central state (Rome, and then the Italian Peninsula) wouldn't seem to have a lot of incentive to develop home rule. The governors sent out to the territories didn't have an interest in home rule either -- after all, their primary function was to extract value.

Where local rule developed, it developed because the projection of power from Rome flagged, and eventually failed. Britannia, Lusitania, Galacia, or Mauritania Caesariensis, et al didn't just fold up because Rome's Imperial Deal was dead. Many people lived in all of these places, life went on as it does, and local management of collective business (government) emerged.

Again, in the late 18th century, local government didn't develop as it did in Rome because powers and responsibilities were specifically assigned to the states and the federal government. Most of what makes a difference in people's everyday lives (health, education, welfare, safety, streets, roads, airports, and so forth are and have been under local management.

Local government is one of the reasons why there are such strong differences in various parts of the country. The NE and Midwest have generally given a strong role for local and national government. States in the SE have felt obliged to limit government at any level to a much greater extent. California is large enough that its local policies on air pollution can force national auto makers to meet their standards.

I don't think there is much validity in comparisons between the Roman Empire and the United States. The Roman Empire's history has no particular parallels with the United States. For one, the RE was a self-starter; the US was the product of English colonialism which occurred 2300 years later than Rome's beginning. For two, the Romans were in business for a millennium at least. Our period of evolution is is less than a quarter of theirs.

Besides, the "end of the Roman Empire" was not an apocalyptic event. It was a very gradual withering away, during which localities picked up the slack. Certainly the shrinking central government was noticed, but it wasn't like Rome fell into the ocean one day.

How many Romans noticed the demise of the empire a day, a month, a year -- or 15 minutes -- after it ended?

The barbarians had been sifting into Roman territory for some time; they weren't interested in destroying Rome, they were interested in what the Romans had on offer, and they had a lot.

Life gradually changed across the old Empire, certainly. Moving around became riskier. Trade with the Far East was stifled by various difficulties. The Church, a decidedly mixed bag, took over some functions, and some functions just disappeared. Power devolved outward and downward. The Eastern Empire was never a mirror image of the western empire.

But none of that fits our history. Will the United States reach a point where outsiders will say, "They collapsed." Of course -- that is true for all the regimes of the world. We won't know until some time afterward. The same is true for Australia, but the fall will be shorter.

I'm not certain that de novo proto-living forms could not arise now, are not arising now, and are developing towards sustainable life-forms, but it seems immensely unlikely that we would be aware of it if were happening.

a) we do not have a list of all the species that now exist.

It's quite complete for mammals and birds, but even for them, a new mammal or bird is discovered sometimes (not very often). For all of the creatures with six, eight, and more legs, or no legs, we have a long but incomplete list. For single celled creatures we do not know how many we are missing. Probably a lot.

b) we do not know where de novo proto-living life would appear, and the surface of the earth has many immensely inaccessible places on it. New life forms could be arising in the bucket of slop on your back porch.

c) we do not know what they would look like, because they would be... new. And they would be very small, smaller than viruses.

d) be careful what you wish for. Several scary science fiction novels inform me that new life forms may not like us, and we may not like them, either.

Everything changes and nothing stands still — Heraclitus

Heraclitus nailed it beyond the range of what was perceptible to him, he who had neither microscope nor telescope. What about Parmenides?

Good thing that he mentioned illusion, because an unchanging world IS an illusion. Neither in human affairs, nor in nature does anything remain static. It can seem like human affairs become stuck in static concrete. It is a "world weary" perspective like that of Ecclesiastes -- "There is nothing new under the sun." Everything is futility. One could say that mountains rising out of the earth and then being worn away by wind and rain shows how change is illusory, but such a viewpoint is itself illusory. The galaxies have been spinning and spreading for eons, so what is new?

(Well, we've counted the eons of their spinning and spreading, that's new, and we now know they are all constantly aging (changing). Stars are born, get hot, and then cool off -- some of them blowing up in the process, spreading raw material onto the galactic fields from which new planets and stars will form. The Andromeda galaxy is headed for a collision with the Milky Way galaxy. We will all carry on, but we won't be the same afterwards.)

And, Parmenides, it looks like the universe was wound up once--it's gradually running down, and once all energies are totally spent, there will be no return. It's a once-around world.

Much of the philosophy I read was not written in English and much of it is not by contemporary writers. — Fooloso4

Translation and age of the text is a separate issue, altogether.

But just in English, some writers in past periods (Edwardian, Victorian, Georgian...) have had styles which now seem at least very tedious, if not verbose. Addison's long and lively Tom Jones was written out by hand and one would have thought he would have been more economical, given the labor of writing longhand. Samuel Johnson (1709-1785 author of the first English Dictionary, editor of an edition of Shakespeare, and more) and his close friend and biographer, James Boswell (1740-1795) were both fine writers, imho, and are readily accessible. There are writers in the Victorian period I find just plain tiresome to read because of the style of the times--long winded, erudite, complicated structure. Samuel Pepys, 1633-1703), an administrator in the English navy, wrote his famous diary in very contemporary sounding prose.

Point is, English has had several episodes of rather heavy language, in academic fields as well as in literature.

Amen

While I am in general agreement, one's level of education must be taken into consideration. What may seem to be clearly stated to someone with the requisite knowledge of the subject matter may sound like nonsense to someone who is not familiar with the terminology and issues. If one wishes to discuss the work of philosophers then one needs to move beyond the level of ordinary discourse, which does not adequately address such matters. — Fooloso4

I assume you are an educated person, like most of us here. Educated, one way or another.

Would you rather read philosophy (or pedagogical theory, sociology, history, literary criticism, etc.) that was expressed in familiar language (using words ranked in the most frequent 25% of the English corpus of 172,000 words -- that's still about 43.000 possible words -- or would you like to read texts composed with many of the least frequently used words (like cenacle) and freely borrowing from languages with which you are not familiar? Add to that clumsy sentence structure and other sins of composition.

This difficulty is near and dear to me. Your title demonstrates the concept: Obfuscatory Discourse is an example of obfuscatory discourse. :wink:

The corpus of English is extremely large, and is larded with rarely used and/or obscure terms often coined from Latin and Greek roots relatively recently in the history of the language. Words like

sessile - fixed in one place, immobile; from the Latin verb sedere, to seat
callipygian - nicely shaped buttocks - aka, nice ass - late 18th century: from Greek kallipūgos (used to describe a famous statue of Venus), from kallos ‘beauty’ + pūgē ‘buttocks’, + -ian.
minatory - expressing a threat, late Latin minat- "threatened"
cenacle - a discussion group - late Middle English: from Old French cenacle, from Latin cenaculum, from cena ‘dinner’. The Philosophy Forum is a "cenacle".

Obscure words, or more common words strangely twisted into obscurity are a way of demonstrating that one's word stock is very big, and that one is dealing with such deep and difficult concepts that they simply can not be expressed in ordinary language for worms like us.

I expect to encounter difficulty when I open a book on quantum mechanics (something I assiduously avoid doing) but not when I open a book about English literature, or sociology, or history, or any number of topics which deal with the lives and experiences of real people. Employing obscure vocabulary and terribly complex sentence structure does not signal insight, It is a bright flashing light leading us to an author who knows less than he or she seems to know.

The use of a core of perhaps 25,000 English words that have been in use since the 1400s, and is made up of Anglo-Saxon and Old French words, forces a writer to reveal what he really knows, or does not. Obfuscation is much more difficult in plain language -- as George Orwell said his essay, Politics and the English Language:

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. — George Orwell

In general, then, write in the simplest possible language to honestly convey the content of one's mind.

In my past work, I have found that many professional people really hate abandoning their particular argot (not to be confused with ergot).

Tbh, I think Trump actually believes a lot of the stupid shit he comes out with — Baden

Tbh, it's an important question whether he believes a lot (or any) of the stupid shit he says, but a commentator today on NPR noted that while presidential candidates have all backed off of statements that fact-checkers found to be erroneous, Donald Trump doesn't back off -- he repeats the information that had been found false (or misleading) and amplifies it. His "base", who think he is persecuted by the press, hear the press identifying un-truths, lies, make believe, etc. coming from the WH, and they think to themselves, "No matter what Trump says, the press accuses him of lying, or being wrong..."

Fascism has been characterized as "more of a method than a message". Fascism destroys the basis of cogent discussion of real issues by deeply obfuscating policy, lying, issuing misleading information, and in general presenting a chaotic front.

I have not yet arrived at the conclusion that Donald Trump is a fascist, but there is an odor of fascismo about him that is unsavory; it has top notes of cadaverine. Proposals to eliminate ALL refugee admissions to the U.S. (refugees -- not talking about illegal immigrants here) is a the sort of hateful move I would expect from someone with fascistic tendencies. Ditto his reversals of progressive environmental policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. Ditto ad nauseum.

Despite all this devolution, stupidity, idiocy, and so on, YOU managed to overcome all. Why are you not one of the many devolved, degenerate morons?

The answer, of course, is that most people, including you, have not been degraded. The average person never had a heroic age of thought, art, industry, brilliant invention, and so forth. In fact, most people -- including everyone from the decidedly inferior to the decidedly superior -- have ever experienced a personal age of heroic achievement.

Most people, like somewhere in the upper 90s percent range, get up, go through the day doing what they are obligated to do, and at the end of the day, sleep. They persist; they endure; they keep working. That is what it takes for brilliant smart asses like you and me to even exist.

The People are not stupid. The People are merely busy getting through their day, taking care of their children, doing their job, and so on. Be grateful for their efforts.

you cannot keep drilling holes in the same piece of wood — Metaphysician Undercover

You are obsessed with these old holes.

do they make electric SUVs? — uncanni

Yes, but the extension cord has to be really long.

The cosmos does not give us a meaning for our lives. What the cosmos gave us (through the evolutionary process) is the capacity to ask questions about meaning, and to think that there is an inherent meaning in life, or to the contrary, there is not. I side more with the "there is not" side -- no given meaning. But we can give our lives meaning. In fact, we can give the entire cosmos meaning if we so wish -- not that our actions have any effect on the cosmos.

Well, we don't know how they decided where to put the holes, and we won't be finding out because they didn't leave any documentation inside the bone flute we found. They probably worked it out by trial and error until they got something that sounded good to them. Whether it would have sounded good to us is an open question. Some Chinese music sounds lovely, some of it sound terrible to me.

Estimations of what Roman music sounded like are not very pleasant--to my ears. I would guess the Romans liked their music, and would have found Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome cacophonous.

And I do appreciate your invention of the term polymorphic: it's just not Freud's term. — uncanni

No, no, I didn't 'invent' it. It's a real word, I misapplied it, and you are correct -- polymorphous is the word I was reaching for. Mrs. Crabapple ordered me to stay after school and write on the blackboard 100 times, "I will not mistake polymorphous perversity for polymorphic perversity ever again."

I wasn't referring to human behavior, which I still resist characterizing in "natural/unnatural" terms. Perhaps all activity performed by human beings is natural to them, so that nothing would be unnatural if it's done by someone. So natural human behavior includes a tremendous amount of destructive activity... Violence and all-consuming greed certainly appear to be natural to humans.
That still leaves me thinking that climate change is an unnatural process brought on by poisoning the environment, which would be included in natural, destructive human activity. — uncanni

Homo sapiens and our various poly-morph-ous per-ver-si-ties in all categories are natural, but we are a special case. Invention of complex technology which never existed before is natural for us, just as using tools is natural for New Caledonia crows. The crow's reach, however, does not exceed his grasp. Ours does. We consider it a virtue for a man's reach to exceed his grasp.

It is also natural for us to not think ahead 10, 20, 30 or 300 years to assess what the effects of our de novo technology might be. Let me emphasize that point: We aren't merely being stupid: we did not evolve the behavior of 10, 20, 30, or 300 year foresight. We evolved into modern human beings between 100,00 and 300,000 years ago, and during that long stretch of time, we hunted, we gathered, we chipped stone tools, and we had minimal impact on the planet. When we get something new and nifty like an automobile or a cigarette, we don't think about 50,000 - 100,000 deaths a year as the consequence. (It's taken us 60 years of concerted effort to reduce the rate of smoking significantly; cars have been made safer. But it's an uphill effort, requiring states to pass legislation making it illegal to hold and use a cellphone while driving. One would think that the paragon of animals could figure out that texting while driving was stupid, but... no.

James Watt might have foreseen that his steam engine would lead to a vast exploitation of coal, but he could not have foreseen what the long term effects of fossil fuel combustion on the climate. Because Watt lived within a capitalist economy, his invention was exploited immediately to maximize production and profit. [The first working steam engine had been patented in 1698 and by the time of Watt's birth, Newcomen engines were pumping water from mines all over the country. In around 1764, Watt was given a model Newcomen engine to repair.]

Did the developers of the cell phone and the smart phone (c. 1992 -- the Simon by IBM combined digital computing with a cell phone) think about the consequences? They did not. Did they intend for the smart phone to be used as a texting device while someone was driving a car? I would hope not; did they expect diners at one table to all be staring at or talking on their phones?

Need I mention what happened after the Manhattan Project produced an atomic bomb?

All that is part of our natural endowment: the capacity to invent and exploit without a balancing capacity to be guided by long-term estimations of consequences (if they are even produced).

We are thus doomed (fated, as it were) to be burnt by our ingenious abilities.

Climate change is natural; if 1000 volcanoes blow about the same time, the released gases will change the climate--naturally. What is tragic (fated, again) is that we have known about imminent climate change for at least 30 years and have so far been unable to achieve any of the targets for CO2 and methane emissions reduction. Yes, there is some progress being made, but business as usual is pretty much not changing and time is running out on our chance to avoid dangerous climate warming.

It isn't that we are just too stupid, too wicked, too... too whatever. We are just not able to change behavior even though we know the threat. Our brains do not work in such a way that 7 billion people can coordinate their behavior to radically change their economic and personal arrangements.

Uncanni: It's a lovely day here in the upper-midwest. The temperature is appropriate to the season, it's breezy, clear, and very pleasant. Global warming? What? Let's buy a big new SUV and take a long road trip.

That's all fine and dandy, but the instrument in question proceeded Pythagoras by maybe 40,000 years. What the 40,000 BCE people had discovered was a) pleasant sound could be made by blowing into a hollow bone and that b) holes in the bone, covered and uncovered, would change the sound. c) one could play the same sounds over and over. Not enough of the bone remains to know how the sound was initiated; an unknown amount of the bone tube has been lost--we can't know how long it was.

Ancient people has plenty of knowledge of material -- for instance, they knew what kind of rock worked best for certain kinds of tools or points. They knew how to knapp the rocks with a minimum of pressure. I would be surprised if they did their work using formal theory about pressure, crystal structure, strength of material, and so forth. I doubt if they applied Pythagoras to the problem of making a bone flute. (Remote as it is, I could be wrong.)

OK, so musicologists said the distance from one hole to the next wasn't random.

Correct: polymorphous. One of those spell-checker insertions. But... I thought you found it "dialogically liberating to listen to and understand the same word one uses being used by others in different contexts which generate different meanings."

I don't find it "dialogically" (do you mean "rhetorical"? liberating to listen to people slinging around the latest cant. it's just annoying.

As I recollect, "queer" didn't develop into the meaning you cite, Queer was ripped off. It was 'appropriated'. "'Queer' now refers to all sorts of different performances or stances inhabited by both hetero- and homosexuals.".

I'm an old fag; I got done discussing all this stuff ages ago. It reminds me of my long-since-past youth.

As Kinsey wisely observed (based on a lot of research)

The only unnatural act is one you cannot perform.

It's natural for a guy to give himself a blow job, (natural if one is sufficiently well hung and flexible). it is very unnatural for anyone to actually do what is often speculated upon, to have one's head up his or her ass. The adult head is too big, for starters, and the neck is neither long enough nor sufficiently flexible.

The woman who thought she was now a man and had announced this to the world, discovered she was inconveniently pregnant. It is impossible for men to become pregnant, so it is unnatural. It is possible for women to think they are men, and visa versa, so that's natural. It's unnatural for women to become men, and visa versa, because what was decreed at conception can't be undone 30 years later. Every cell in the body is marked with its male or female heritage. Men stay men and women stay women, regardless of what pills or plastic surgery are employed. So, actual "trans sexuals" are unnatural - and impossible.

Can we talk about perverse? Polymorphic perversity? Is being "perverse" the same as, better than, or worse than being unnatural? I suppose it depends on whether it's done well, or not. Wouldn't most of us take consummate perversity over mediocre normality?

Variety is an essential feature of nature and quite aptly the LGBT community's symbol is the rainbow. — TheMadFool

The rainbow, that overworked spectrum, is only the latest symbol for gay people, and anybody that wants to associate themselves with the gay community for whatever reason. It has been debased.

There have been several other symbols for the gay community:

Walt Whitman's suggestion for the gay symbol was the phallic calamus plant, which has nothing to do with calamine lotion.

In 19th century England, a green carnation signaled the faggot, probably because green is not a color in which carnations appear -- it's "unnatural". Lately several flowers like roses, zinnias, and mums have been bred into green.

. In the 1960s-early 70s, the Lambda sufficed.



The Nazis coded prisoners using colored triangles; homosexual prisoners were identified with pink triangles. This was picked up from a play in the early 1970s, Bent. "Bent" was/is a European term for homosexuals.

I make up most of the stuff I write on this forum. — T Clark

Are not we all?

May we hear from daughter Phil what she thought? And what did you name the fourth one? Were Bob and Phil resentful about not getting ice cream named after them? (I don't like Cherry Garcia --too much amaretto flavor. Not that any one, including me, cares much one way or the other.).

Having children was never something I particularly wanted to do, being an exclusively gay guy of the not-marrying and not-having children kind. Whether deciding to have children is ethical or not depends on circumstances.

For those who have a choice in the matter: if one is not married; if one is a chronic drug/alcohol user; if one is poor; if one is mentally unstable; if one thinks that they can, singly, be a completely adequate parent; and so on, I would judge it as at least inadvisable to have children, and it might be unethical.

Lots of people are poor and manage to be good parents, but deciding to be a poor single parent is stupid. Alcoholics and chronic drug users should not be in charge of children. Period. Raising healthy children requires a fair number of challenges; deciding to have children (alone or with a partner) and knowing that one is mentally ill seems inadvisable. Children benefit greatly from having two parents who both participate in the rearing of the child. It is a question of both role models, sufficient time, attention, and income.

Over population is a major concern to me, and I don't think we can succeed in avoiding catastrophic global warming without restricting, reducing population.

People who decide to have children, especially many children, for doctrinal reasons are being unethical. They are demanding a greater share of the world's diminishing resources in the service of some god or religious obsession. [I am the youngest of a large family; I have 2 brothers and 4 sisters, two died in infancy. Effective and convenient birth control was not available until the 1960s, by which time I was in college. My parents didn't want to have 7 children, they just did.]

There are no ethical grounds for considering methods for quickly reducing the population. Fortunately for us, we don't have to think of methods: Nature can and will reduce our population if we run out of resources.

The excessively large human population is not growing as fast as it was growing, but it is still growing --it is not shrinking. IF we want to avoid being subject to nature's harsh culling methods, we would do well to have fewer children. Nor trying to reduce the population by having fewer children is also unethical.

I reject anti-natalism. People are not quite as good a thing as flowers that bloom in the spring; we are frequently less appealing that birds on the wing; but we aren't a curse on the world, either (most of the time, anyway).

It's 84.25%, actually. — S

"T"'s was a zinger; this is just sour grapes.

I am extremely skeptical of evolutionary biology or sociobiology. Looking for correlates between specific genes and specific behaviors seems wrongheaded — T Clark

It is wrong headed, because specific genes evolved long before the specific behaviors arose that we most like to dwell on.

Some people like to gamble (roulette, poker, farming, real estate, see what is going on in dark alleys, etc.). The set of genes that enable some people to comfortably gamble (take real risks) arose long before poker, farming, and dark alleys came into existence. 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, risk takers must have had some advantages, or they would have died young without progeny. Perhaps they were more successful hunters than the nervous nellies who hung back. Perhaps they were willing to see what lay over the next mountain as they explored the world, and found fertile valleys.

We wouldn't have evolved genes for academic success because academies appeared just 5 minutes ago. But organized thinking must have been an advantage a million years ago, granting H. erectus, H. habilis, or H. heidelbergensis a big of better life.

A principle of evolution that seems to me true is that "new features do not appear from nowhere." If batters can hit a little ball moving at high speed, it is because genes were developed a very long time ago for vision and body movement coordination. What mammal doesn't require that kind of capacity?

But I agree with you -- there is no poetry gene, no leather scene gene, no civil engineering gene, no Formula 1 gene.

Can you try to tie this in, briefly is fine, to the feeling of knowing/body of knowledge theme a bit. — T Clark

Reading better history than what we were given in high school (and college too, for that matter), I gained a more granular understanding of "what happened" in Russia under the dismal Romanovs as well as the dismal Bolsheviks; in Germany the brief Weimar years and the Nazi years; in the United States the promise of abolition, emancipation, and reconstruction followed by decades of retrogression through legal and extralegal suppression of black people; the history of the labor movement reveals how good theory and practice led to solid progress for workers, but was followed by weaker strategy and a very determined effort on the part of Capital to suppress labor rights, and so on.

Several years of focused reading on these topics (in the last decade, mostly) is responsible. There is a lot of hand-wringing over the rise of populism in Europe and the U.S., as if populism was equivalent to fascism. It isn't; but there is some common ground they both occupy. For the "leftish politicians" populism is a retrograde movement. Remainers in UK must feel a sharp sense of disastrous retrograde movement as the conservatives (and whoever the hell voted for Brexit) decided to negotiate their way out of union with the continent and now, under Boris & Co., crash out.

40 years ago I wasn't very familiar with the long term objections to Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid of the conservative wing of the Republican Party (and the 1% masters). I became aware of court and legislative challenges to each of these programs, and enduring objection to what most people would call progressive programs. Unless there is a significant change in Congress, the conservatives will produce a retrogressive decay in these programs, not by frontal attacks in the courts, but by simply starving the programs at choke points. The IRS has been subject to this kind of choke-point retrogression.

I read maybe 20-25 books about Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. Detroit and Baltimore, in particular, were places that were once considered among the best cities in the country -- prosperous, forward looking, great architecture, colleges and universities, beauty, and tons of industry. Lots of pollution too, of course, but working factory smoke stacks = money and jobs. The greatness of those two cities was turned to humiliation with remarkable swiftness. I won't go into it now, but their humbling was caused by quite understandable economic change and very deliberate policy. Chicago has been surpassed by Los Angeles in population, but it still is a competitive "Second City". Chicago had the advantage of not depending on a single industry (autos) like Detroit did.

The motives and strategies of regression have become part of my body of knowledge about history that once upon a time I didn't have. I figured Social Security and Medicare were here to stay forever more, world without end, amen. It now seems possible, even a bit probable, that they won't, not because the country is going broke, but because of specific policies held by particular groups.

When I graduated from college in 1968 I would not have been able to teach anything better than the shoddy product I received. Now I could teach a much, much better course.

When I graduated from college I would not have been able to teach an English Literature or composition class as good as what I had been taught. At 22, I was woefully lacking in the BoK called life experience to appreciate the pile of literary stock English majors are supposed to be knowledgeable about and love. Now, 51 years later, I've had enough love affairs, funerals, severe disappointments & glorious achievements (exaggerating a bit), mourning and celebration, religious enthusiasms and disappointments, financial progress and regress, conflict and cooperation, etc. to actually GET much more of what literary characters are experiencing. Boswell was once boring; now he's a contemporary.

So now that there is about zero chance of it happening, I have at my command a fairly cohesive body of personal experience, literary and historical reading, and much broader interests, that I would make a very good teacher.

Sorry. The ancient instrument makers didn't scratch a telephone number, street or email address onto the flute, so I wasn't able to ask them.

However, their brains were pretty much like ours by the time the flute was made, so maybe... but we just don't know what kind of quantitative thinking they did.

All you have to do is not die and you can't help but get wise — T Clark

Not dying is insufficient. Wisdom does not necessarily grow with age. There are stupid, arrogant senior citizens who were stupid, arrogant junior citizens. Look no further than our esteemed maximum leader!

No, I don't think I am cynical. But one definition of a cynic is "a disappointed idealist". I have an idealistic streak, and I am even now shocked--shocked!!!---to find that events were made to happen by various operatives. Nope -- not a conspiracy theorists -- I don't think 9/11 was a government plot or that the CIA killed Kennedy. But 9/11 is a good example of a splendidly engineered event.

The person who might well think of conspiracies is Al Gore, the way he lost the presidency in what certainly seemed like a rush to judgement in Florida, then to the SCOTUS. I really don't know how Gore managed to endure. I'd have dissolved into a puddle of bile.

The Gulf of Tonkin business was engineered. Watergate! Nixon was very actively trying to engineer a crooked outcome.

But the biggest example of being shocked was to discover that American consumer culture was not the result of Americans merely having extra cash to spend, and lots of stuff to buy. I was shocked to discover that the culture of consumption was engineered in the latter part of the 19th--beginning of the 20th century by retailers, public relations firms, housing companies, and so on. Consumption as a way of life was a radical change from the previous centuries of thrift, production, and minimal consumption. It's been the new normal for 120 years, and it required a lot of industrious labor to get people to change their behavior that much.

I was shocked to discover that many of the manners and habits which get described as "middle class" (and references the petite bourgeoisie) and may or may not have anything to do with the middle class, were introduced and encouraged by manufacturers, magazine editors, retailers, in a very deliberate effort to shape future consumption. A lot of people's material and experiential aspirations are the result. Mine too, to some extent.

Every time I read a new book about gay history, like a recent title on Chicago's "fairyland" I am shocked and annoyed to discover that 'they' were doing stuff that 'we' 1970s people thought was scandalously revolutionary 40 years (or more) before Stonewall. What all they were doing was suppressed after prohibition. Crackdowns all over the place. Which underlines one of my theories about progress: it can always go into reverse, so we should not think that todays gains are forever.

I never worked in a book warehouse, but a guy I know did, and he also loved the job.