@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.

This is a very good topic.

I had some knowledge of American history. The oldest layer (and framework) came from elementary and secondary school lessons. In 1400 and 92, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; One if by land, two if by sea; Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Lincoln freed the slaves and was assassinated; Teddy Roosevelt; Teapot Dome; FDR; WWII.

Much of what I learned in school was more myth than knowledge. I didn't know that at the time. I thought I was getting the straight dope. In a different sense of the word, dope, I was getting straight dope.

I got by for a long time on myth-history. Myth works, really, as long as one isn't trying to critically examine one's life or one's country or one's world. It wasn't until later adulthood (way way after college) that I began to read material that was more knowledge, less myth, and sometimes not myth at all.

The pieces of mythic history fit together with delusions based on myth, so how can one tell that what we had been given and what we had gathered was not all that true? Was, in fact, bullshit?

It's a process, not an event.

It takes time. First, one hears contrary information -- maybe at a demonstration. Maybe one reads contrary information in a free Newspaper, or a cheap one, anyway, like The Militant, or The Body Politic (gay paper from Toronto) -- NOT the New York Times. Or one goes to a study group. One hears stories on NPR (at least one did in the good old days), or PBS. One sees an eye-opening film like The Fog of War, about Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who escalated the Vietnam War.

Then one starts seeking out contrary information, and one finds that it too fits together, and decidedly doesn't fit the myths on which one's delusions were based. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent was a wedge (like a log splitting wedge) that broke open a large hunk of history.

Many books, talks, magazine articles, films, discussions, etc. later, I have a new history that much better accounts for reality. A book on the history of advertising, marketing, and the creation of desires goes a long ways in explaining how I got some of the myths and delusions that are still deep in my memory.

Not only are we deluded, we have been deliberately and elaborately deceived. Somebody will say, "well that just your new myth". No, it fits too many other pieces in too deep a way. So, knowledge about history doesn't necessarily feel good -- I don't like knowing "I drank the Kool Aid willingly".***

***Historical Factoid: drinking the Kool Aid™ references the mass suicide of the cult led by Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. It means swallowing all sorts of stuff.

Kool Aid, Kool Aid, tastes great
Wish I had some, Can't wait.

Jingle for Kool Aid.

Kool-Aid is a brand of flavored drink mix owned by Kraft Heinz based in Chicago, Illinois. The powder form was created by Edwin Perkins in 1927 based upon a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack. Smack is now, at least, another name for heroin; the word is Yiddish, meaning 'sniff' (but not snort). It's a word the Yiddish lists do not eagerly embrace (unlike "schlong").

Tom Wolfe wrote a book, "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

Kool Aid is the official soft drink of Nebraska.

DO NOT DRINK THE KOOL AID!

One of the 'facts' of mental activity that makes us who we are is that so much of it is invisible to that part of the brain that operates as the conscious self. Most of those sensory signals that pour into the brain don't pass over the desk of the conscious self. They pour in, are processed and stored. Sometimes we take note of them as they happen: A bee stings your foot; you smell roasting meat; you see an inordinately sexy body; you hear an unusual bird call and you stop to listen.

Worse, we don't know what the brain is busy doing. The endless chatter in our heads or the scratching of EEGs, or fMRI scans tell us that a lot is going on in there, but we don't have control over most of it. When I write, "I" -- my conscious self -- is mostly not composing the sentences. What I write is news to my conscious self, quite often -- like when I start a reply to someone, and realize that what I am writing is decidedly not what I want to say.

Even so, we needn't think that anyone else other than "us" is doing the composing. What I see coming out on the screen is almost always completely agreeable, and I recognize the source, the phrasing, the examples, etc. "Great -- that's my stuff, alright."

Sometimes, when we are dealing with a very unfamiliar problem, and we set out to think about it very deliberately, we can (that is the conscious self) do the thinking first hand. But most of the time, all that is carried on out of image, sound, odor, tactile, flavor, etc. We just don't have cameras inside our heads monitoring what is going on in "the big factory" surrounding our little command post of conscious self.

All to the good. We really don't want an update on every operation going on in the brain, let alone going on in the rest of the body.

As our brain forms prenatally, postnatally, in infancy, and on though to adulthood, these capacities are built. A baby doesn't have a big factory surrounding the not-yet-finished command post. As William James put it, to a new baby the world is one big buzzing confusion. It takes time to learn how to process all the input. And it takes time to put together a working self.

I certainly didn't mean to offend those who advocate for the interests of various snakes. It was not I who put the snake in the story.

I will have to take your objection to the identification of snake/evil tempter under advisement for now. You may be right, that the snake was not yet identified with Satan when the Eden story was composed, and I may have dipped into doctrine.

What was going on in the story is more portentous than Snake merely inviting Eve to doubt what she doesn't understand. What interest did Snake have in Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit? What was his agenda (or her agenda -- the snake could have been female; in fact, I have the distinct feeling just now that the Snake in Eden was definitely female).

Revelations is certainly later than Genesis, but where did the Revelation author get the basic idea of snakes not being reliable advisors (I don't know, I'm asking).

Note that the Jews see our elevation which Christianity sees a fall. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

good point

How do you understand the fall of man in a different way? — TheMadFool

The story is an attempt to explain why life is a bitch, and then we die. It would not have escaped the notice of the biblical authors that some, many, most, or all of our problems (depending on the situation) are a result of our own unwillingness to a) follow the rules, whoever announces and enforces them, b) take responsible courses of action, c) reject the seductions of various snakes in the grass who have agendas which are not in our interest, d) avoid really stupid policy and practice, and more.

For the biblical writers who believed in a just God, there had to be a monumental cause to justify/explain the enduring disagreeableness of life. Their artistic solution to the problem of the difficulty of life was to place in the story of Eden, where Adam and Eve sacrificed their innocence to the seductions of the snake/evil tempter. the cause of our daily suffering.

The faithlessness of the descendants of Abraham, is a recurrent theme in the Bible. Again and again they display ingratitude, disobedience, wanton disregard toward God. Gross negligence followed by unpleasant consequences. It's a pattern that needed a symbolic explanation which the biblical writers placed in the story of Eden.

The ancient biblical authors weren't the only writers/compilers of myths to explain the problems of the world through various kinds of divine action. Some parts of the Bible are straightforward (if biased) history. Some parts are liturgy (the Psalms). Some parts are law. And some parts are literary. The stories in Genesis are literary, mythic. They aren't intended to be literal explanations. Take the story of the flood that ends with the promise of the rainbow. It's a second creation story with a happier ending. We don't have to go hunting for evidence that there was once a flood that covered up the whole earth. Noah and the flood is another nice story that explains our being here.

If you read Job, you would not go looking for evidence that somebody named Job actually existed. Job is another story about the evil one and suffering. It is literary material, not historical. Don't take it literally.

In the New Testament, the lovely story of Jesus born in the town of Bethlehem--stars, angels, shepherds, kings, etc. is clearly LITERARY not historical. The authors who wrote that story were separated in time and place from Israel. The Temple in Jerusalem had long since been turned into a temple for the worship of Roman (pagan) gods [referenced in Jewish literature as "the abomination of desolation"]. A good share of the Jews had been deported. It wasn't a few years of separation -- it was centuries. The authors had probably never been to the former nation of Israel, now a province of the Roman Empire.

The Christmas story places the messiah in the right place and time (per literary requirements). We don't have to take that part of the story of Jesus literally.

1. We lack a complete knowledge of "good and evil"

2. God punished us for knowing "good and evil" — TheMadFool

Well, I suppose we won't have "complete" knowledge of good and evil until our time comes to an end.

Feel free to interpret the Bible however you want -- everybody else does. But in my arrogant opinion, I don't think god was punishing us for knowing "good and evil".

It doesn't make sense. Sentient beings MUST distinguish between good and evil, and nothing in the Bible suggests that we can get along without knowing what is good, and what is not good -- or evil. the Bible teaches us to do good and avoid evil. One has to know the difference.

The creation story wasn't written as biography, you know. Or history. Even if you thought the world is 6023 years old, it is OBVIOUSLY the case that nobody was walking around behind God, Adam, and Eve and taking notes. Furthermore, you know, the creation story in Genesis has common features with creation stories in adjacent cultures (in the ancient world).

The Creation story is in part the story of why there is anything at all. (God made it.). It's the story of why life is such a predictably severe pain in the ass. (A & E fucked up.).

One might think that in a world made by the hand of God that things would be a lot nicer. Instead of living in the grandeur of a spiritual 'house beautiful', we live in dismal shit holes, and carry on the way we do.

The creation story is a great piece; just don't take it literally.

If neither confer any survival value — 3017amen

I'm not a biologist, so this may not be precisely right.

That said, it seems like one of the principles of evolution is that new traits, capacities, abilities, don't just appear out of thin air in organisms. Rather, traits, capacities, features, etc. that are already present in some form are gradually modified until they are something different. For instance, early in life history, some multi-celled organisms possessed light-sensitive cells on the surface of their body which aided the organism in avoiding harm, finding food, or moving purposively. Eventually. these light-sensitive cells became more numerous, more structured, more complicated. Eventually they became eyes. Nervous systems likewise started out as very simple arrangements, and over time became more structured, more complicated, and eventually developed little brains, to which the little eyes supplied sensory input.

Music, or counting or calculation, didn't suddenly appear either. Organisms need to signal information to each other (warnings, mating availability, calling to young, etc.) and this is often done by sound. Making sound, and hearing sound, starts out simply and over time gets more complicated. Some animals make sounds with different pitch, tone, rhythm, and so forth. Similarly, counting and calculating come into play in very simple ways, like figuring exactly how an insect is located in 3 dimensions from moment to moment, and snatching the meal with a long, sticky tongue. Or an animal may need to know how much of something is available. There is a big difference between 1 wolf and 10 wolves, if one becomes the focus of wolfish attention.

Humans probably did not evolve from a line of animals that were capable of seeing ultra-violet or ultra-red radiation. As handy as it might be now, that feature was never in the cards--or the genes. We're not going to develop that kind of vision.

I was pretty sure it was Augustine, but I was too lazy to double check. Thank you for confirming.

Harvey Cox, a Protestant theologian, says this: Adam and Eve were meant to eat the fruit of The Tree. Cox emphasizes that in His relationship to mankind, God constantly calls us to fulfill our potential as God's creation. God, Cox posits, wished that Adam and Eve would decide on their own volition to gain the knowledge the tree offered. That happy event isn't what happened. Eve, and by extension, Adam, allowed themselves to be seduced by the Serpent into eating the fruit of The Tree.

So, God sees that the artificial perfection of Eden is no longer suitable to Adam and Eve. It was nice while it lasted, but now it is time for them to leave the cradle and start dealing with the kind of problem that mankind has always been dealing with. You know what kind of problems humans have to deal with, because you, being human, have to deal with all this crap too.

God keeps urging his human creation to live up to its potential.

Some time well after the death of Christ, the Church cooked up a plan of salvation which begins with Adam's and Eve's "original sin" and ends with Christ's crucifixion. Christ died to take away the sins of the world, the first of which was Eve's disobedience.

Listen, YouCrazyFool: For the time being, just forget the whole business of sin and salvation. Think about God trying to get people to be good, be ethical, be honest, loving, faithful, and so on and many so forths. That's what a lot of the Bible's prophetic speech is about: Live up to your God-given potential, people. Stop dilly dallying around in the fleshpots of the world, where you just end up getting gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, warts, and worse. "I know sex feels good," God says. "After all, I created sex as part of existence. It is meant to feel good. But pullllease, raise your standards a little, will you!" You get a stiff dick and all judgement and reason goes out the window. At least go for quality!"

You can read Harvey Cox's exegesis in his short book, "On Not Leaving It To the Snake".

Your misinterpretation of the Bible is one reason why some people say that only adults should be allowed to read it. It is a richly complex book, and the uninitiated, unguided often make a hash out of it.

It is probably not the case that "music" and "math" evolved as we now experience them. "Music" and "mathematics" are cultural inventions, resting on innate capacities. Language involves a number of 'musical' qualities: tone, pitch, rhythm, and so forth. Our need and capacity to think about the world involves quantitative elements -- how big, how far, how many, how fast, and so on.

Animals which have evolved along side us also employ some of these innate capacities because they did have survival value.

Our evolutionary line has been developing these innate qualities for a few million years, and it is likely that the innate qualities mentioned DID play a role in evolutionary success. The first evidence of a musical instrument that was made to purpose is an ivory instrument with holes drilled at regular intervals. This instrument belong to 'modern man' and was made 45,000 years ago. There may be other, and earlier musical devices, which have either rotted away or we have not found.

Did musical instruments play a role in survival? Yes, because 'culture' is how we live, and everything that helps bind a group together and stimulate interaction has survival value.

At an early stage, I suppose, what mathematics did was make explicit skills that are implicit. You can throw a rock and hit the target because you are capable of calculating (not consciously) the required force, the necessary trajectory, and timing of the the throw. Other species have to do similar background calculations to be able to catch prey, or avoid becoming dead prey. But the first applications of math were (as far as I know) applied to trade, which is very recent, 5,000 years ago, after the invention of writing.

We have been evolving for a long time, and we won't be finding any evidence in the fossil record of how innate abilities that would one day produce music and math developed.

Monte Python is up there with the greats, in my humble opinion, and I have laughed a lot in some Seinfeld episodes.