"We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber." — Maw

I'm sure some people are thinking about how big the concentration camps, gas chambers, crematoria, and ash pits will need to be, and where they should be located. Though, the rage of the dominant US demographic doesn't seem to work that way these days. Separating children from parents at the border and then losing the connection between x child and x parent is more like the current regime. There are ways (...ve have vays...) of keeping undesirable groups fairly wretched without actually running them through an extermination center.

Look at blacks. The majority of them have been kept out of the economic horn of plenty for 150+ years. Enough have made it to deprive the rest an excuse for not succeeding. We could make life a lot less convenient for illegal immigrants without resorting to hydrogen cyanide in the showers. The unpleasant bureaucratic resources of the State have not been fully unleashed upon illegal immigrants. The hounds have not been released, yet.

Remember, the Nazi's were successful in encouraging a lot of Jews, communists, and decadent intellectuals to get the hell out of Germany without the gas chambers (that came later). Late night visits to the local police station, limitations on work, residence, travel, benefits, etc.-- people got the message and left if they could. Eventually the Nazis took over the countries where many of the unwanted fled -- like Holland and France. We'd have to take over Mexico and Central America to effect a final solution to the problem, which would be really bad PR. It was bad PR for Germany too, but they were on a roll at that point and war had already commenced, so not too much was made of it.

There is also an economic theory that low unemployment results in demand for labor exceeding supply, and that this drives up wages. I don't know if this has ever been confirmed, but it's not an implausible theory. Even if true, no individual is likely to notice it, so I don't see how this would get him any votes. — Relativist

What you wanted to say and almost did was "Demand for labor which can not be met by reserves of unemployed workers tends to drive up wages."

It's sound theory, but it's not a law of nature. Over the last few years (during the recovery from the last deep recession) unemployment was dropping, employment was rising, and wages were stagnant for quite some time--in violation of the theory. Now, they finally have started to rise.

People don't notice these increases in wages? Bullshit! Of course individuals notice, whether their wages rise or fall. Most workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and changes in their take-home pay whether from a tax change or a wage change has immediate consequences. I've lived paycheck to paycheck, and believe me, a $10 difference in the check is noticeable (even if it doesn't allow one to change one's lifestyle. It just feels good to see a little more.)

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The downside is he's Biden. — Baden

The downside is that whoever runs with even a small chance of success will be a professional politician. "Professional politicians" are not all liars , thieves, knaves, and scoundrels but a lot of them are. Some that are not outright LTKorS are beholden (aka in hock) to powerful interests such as the petroleum industry, the defense industry, or something of that sort. Most politicians are not intellectuals with broad interests and long-term perspectives (they'd go nuts if they were). Then there is the political system which is in charge of delivering the kind of results we tend to get, which are the results the political system wishes to get.

Voters are almost not part of the political system. The individual's single participation in the system (voting) is practically irrelevant. It's irrelevant not because the other candidate won; it's irrelevant because all of the candidates were losers, to use a favorite term of the current Loser in Chief, Donald Trump.

Is Senator Sanders something other than the rest? He might be something other than the rest; so might Mayor Buttigieg. Maybe Elizabeth Warren is the real McCoy. But in any case--gay mayor, socialist senator, or progressive hero--the political system is what it always is, and whoever wins will be unsuccessful in conducting a revolution from the white house. Presidents are successful because their actions conform to the range of options provided by the political system.

Physical and chemical processes are the means by which bodies and brains operate. It might be an error to suppose that the means and output are the same thing.

Did "I decide to respond" to the title of this thread, or was "I compelled to respond"? Did this series of symbols on the landing page of TPF "Unfree will (determinism), special problem" caused me to respond? Or, was I moved by my interest in the perplexing issue of will--determined, free, or a combination of compulsion and freedom?

People don't seem to be entirely free to respond however they wish (or we wish they would), and they don't seem to be automatons, either. (Of course, if we were all automatons, we wouldn't, couldn't care or notice that we were.)

It seems impossible to claim all freedom or all compulsion in our behavior.

All shepherds are sheep shaggers. Where men are men and the sheep are nervous.

AAVE isn't non rhotic like New England, British, or old South (I do declaa), — Hanover

You are not the first person to use "rhotic" on TPF; that honor goes to andrewk, but you are 1 of the first three. You are the first person to say "I do declaa" here.

I think that distinction should be easier to spot for Americans than for other British speakers, because most varieties of American English are 'rhotic', meaning they pronounce terminal 'r's, whereas British and Australian English do not, instead pronouncing the ends of words ending in 'er' as 'ah' or 'uh'. So that distinction is lost on we Poms and Aussies. — AndrewK

Now, what pray tell is a "pom"? Pomeranian (a variety of German)?

Right.

Right (conservative)
Right (correct)
Right (in the direction of most people's dominant hand)
Right (I totally agree)
Right (verbal insertion without meaning)
Right (proper -- as in "Meet, right, and salutary")
Right (a bishop)
Right there, right here, right now, right away, etc.

and many more.

Good point. The overabundance of 'schwa' sounds and liquefaction of ending consonants makes AAVE difficult for Anglo-Saxons to understand. From all the "What?"s I hear in black on black conversations on the bus, I don't think AAVE is working all that well for the primary users, either. Couple AAVE with mumbling, and it's incomprehensible.

But then I couldn't understand a good share of the dialogue in "Trainspotters" which was a film made in Scotland. There are dialects that appear on Masterpiece Theater (usually BBC sourced) that are tricky too. The midwest should probably send missionaries to the UK and help them learn how to speak their own language. The stupid slobs!

Ah gonna ge me som smahz lie tha honky gah. Ah be lauyah lie hi."

Thanks for that search result. The results for on-line searches should be quite different than appearance in print, since on-line searches represent the ripples of current interest/confusion/outré-wish fulfillment, and so on. For the same reason, searches for "flu symptoms" have been shown to match (more or less) upticks in ER visits for acute influenza symptoms.

Presumably (but I wouldn't be too sure) Google doesn't have detailed demographics on the searches -- age, race, economic status, education level, and so on. That would be interesting.

Ironically irreverent... you have no idea how much energy it takes to maintain that stance.

It's the same word. — frank

The phonetic difference between "nigger(s)" and "nigga(s)" probably has its origin in the AAVE tendency to drop the final 'r'. [Dropping the final 'r' is also characteristic of white New England speech, completely unrelated to AAVE.] AAVE has at least some origins in white southern speech, which uses a soft 'r' pronunciation.

The pronunciation of the final 'r' is a good geographical marker. Midwesterners (broadly defined) tend to use a hard final 'r'. There are regional and class differences in pronunciation in the US, and even more so in the UK.

Whether "nigger(s)" and "nigga(s)" is one word with two racially inflected pronunciations or one word (or two) with racial inflections and two separate meanings seems to me unsettled. Time will tell. Lots of words have had decades of popularity, then disappeared (and sometimes, lamentably, have refused to go away.

One of the neologisms I have tracked is "get-go". "She was popular from the get-go." According to informed sources, it appeared in 1962. I first heard in Massachusetts in 1968. I see it in print occasionally, but hear it used only rarely in my Minneapolis milieu. According to Google Ngram, the phrase "from the get go" took off about 1990. We are at peak get go now.

Here is an example of culturally limited knowledge. Google Ngram measures the frequency of words in print. Usually, 1800 is the starting date of its measurements. Here's the Ngram for nigger and nigga. "Nigga" is obviously used more often than indicated here, but it's use isn't showing up in print.

The idea that, if I were teaching in America, I should further the goal of helping my students by potentially insulting a significant number of them on some bogus free speech anti-PC trip, is, frankly, retarded. — Baden

You wouldn't do that, I wouldn't do that, and most people wouldn't do that. The overwhelming majority of people don't. A good share of my work life was involved working with very disadvantaged black people (white people, too). I never used the racially insensitive language with them. Our discussion here, though, is not a classroom or a social service. It is public, and is one of the few settings (like a college classroom) where language can and should be discussed honestly.

If someone says, "Those god damned n word don't belong in a civilized country." that would be unacceptable in any public conversation (and a lot of private ones). Referencing the word 'nigger' explicitly when talking about that very word should not, and I think would not be taken as an insult in most settings -- except those where persons are wired up to react to a list of verboten terms.

Well, class figures in here. While upward mobility has been possible for a lot of people, downward mobility is an ever-present risk. Working people (which most people are) can sense many gradations in working class culture, from securely prosperous, to tentatively prosperous, departing prosperity, and so on down to rock bottom. Trailer trash and white trash are not the bottom, but they are close to it, and people are afraid of ending up there.

A lot of working class prosperity is quite shallow and operates paycheck to paycheck. Lose the job and the appearance of prosperity can fall apart. Depending on how much credit they are floating on, a family hit by adversity (losing the main job, or both jobs) can lose everything in a few months. people are afraid of that happening to them.

So, while they are riding high, they look down their noses on the people toward the bottom -- unsuccessful, poor, defeated, riff raff, trailer trash, white trash, white 'n's, and so on.

If pejorative class terms have disappeared from Finnish usage, my guess is that class distinctions have become smaller and people feel more secure. There are probably fewer poorer Finns, and poorer Finns are just poorer Finns, not a group representing a feared personal financial collapse.

I can't relate to the childish joy you get out of being ignorant about this. — Baden

That's because you are suffering from humorless pedantry.

I understand it perfectly well, which is why I am opposed to words being judged "unspeakable". Childish rules call for a similar response. I do not use the word "nigger" in casual conversation or writing, but that does not mean I approve of anyone's ban on the word. Yes, Baden, I ridicule intelligent adults discussing language using circumlocutions like "the n word" when the word in question is "nigger". It's childish.

B-word people (AA err, N word, n word?) use "the n word" in the same way that "c s word" use the "Q word". Ameliorating the term "Q word" or "n word" is a way of disarming the term when it comes out of the mouths of people who hate the people to whom the "x" word is applied.

"Now quiet down children, you know we aren't allowed to reveal what the "..." words are until you are at least 18--possibly 28. So you are 13 now -- you will just have to wait until you are all grown up."

Blacks (African Americans, err, Negroes... niggers?) use "nigger" in the same way that cock suckers use "queer". Ameliorating the term "queer" or "nigger" is a way of disarming the term when it comes out of the mouths of people who hate the people to whom the term is applied.

I do remember feeling that I had overstepped a mark when I once tried to discuss the exact meaning and use of the six-letter C-word with a French person — andrewk

What word was that? Cospic? Crutle? Cuckoo? Confus? Christ? Caudal?

Oh common, tell us...

The N word problem again. We are all grown up here so we can actually write the word: Niggard! There I wrote it. Watch the ceiling collapse.

Peak niggard was at least as far back as 1800, according to Google Ngram. It comes from somewhere in whitest Scandinavia, at least as far back as 1400 give or take 15 minutes, when the Middle English started using it. Those creeps.

"Nigger" can't be verboten, because I hear Negroes (another N Word) who perform rap using it almost continuously. If it were so insulting, they surely wouldn't use it. Just like I don't hear people describing themselves as "niggardly". Usually not, anyway.

"Jew" strikes my ear as problematic. One can't read periods in European or American history without seeing the term used again and again as a vicious epithet. One almost hesitates to use the word at all.

Not as traumatic as there of course, yet slavery, segregation and the hangings of blacks simply is an issue that white America has a problem with. — ssu

But not nearly as big a problem as black America has. Frankly, I don't know why we white people should have much of a problem with it -- after all, white people were owners not slaves, and white children went to the better schools, and were rarely if ever lynched (though it did happen, but not in quite the same context as black lynchings). White people got the better end of the stick, which somebody always does.

Losing those feelings of racial guilt will help us white folks deal with the bad hands that have been consistently dealt to black folks. After all, most of us have not had the opportunity to personally oppress black people. Most of us (like 99%) were not involved in writing the Federal Housing Administration rules back in the 1930s. Those rules were the key tool of post Jim Crow oppression -- creating the modern black slum and white suburbs. Those rules set the pattern for continuing segregated schooling. Quality of school and place of residence are geographically linked.

Most of us weren't personally responsible for maintaining the long term impoverishment of blacks, and the resulting degrading slums.

Guilt doesn't always lead to repentance. Sometimes it leads us to hate some people even more. Racial hatreds have long been used to divide the working classes. As the song says,

...That if you don't let race hatred break you up,
You'll win. What I mean, take it easy, but take it! — Songwriters: Peter Seeger / Lee Hays / Millard Lampell

Oil can be produced from coal in a non-pollutant manner (the Nazis did it during WWII), along with methane being utilized to produce oil. — Wallows

Yes, that's true. The Germans made synthetic gasoline from coal. Many cities in the US (and elsewhere) had coal gas plants up until the 1950s, when natural gas pipelines replaced coal and goal gas for heating and cooking. These plants were not exactly environmentally friendly, because goal gasification and synthetic fuel production leaves a lot of waste material that is difficult to dispose of in a harmless manner.

Keep in mind how much oil will need to be replaced: the world currently produces and consumes about 34 billion barrels a year -- each barrel containing 42 gallons. Now, we are not going to run out of oil next week. The peak in the curve of supply is a half-way mark. So, we have been extracting oil since say... 1880. The peak was in 1980, and the practical end of extraction will be around 2080 assuming that the current extraction rate continued. The end of oil won't be like falling off a cliff. It will be more of a fizzling out. We see signs of fizzling in the US -- fracking is an effort to maintain production in marginal geologic formations. In the end, a lot of oil will remain in the ground -- not by reason of ecology, but because the energy required to extract it will be greater than the amount of energy in the oil.

Switching to electrified transportation and an all electric world will obviously reduce the use of oil for fuel (it won't eliminate it, because pound for pound, gasoline contains a lot of energy and is very portable). Completing the changeover to the all-electric world will take... oh, at least until 2080, probably longer. That's only 61 years away.

I'm not sure how long the coal supply would last if we switched to coal to replace petroleum and natural gas.

We can make hydrocarbons by cooking garbage at high pressure; we can reverse engineer waste plastic back into an earlier stage of manufacture. But these sorts of maneuvers take a lot of energy. It would take more energy to make 1 million gallons of crude oil out of x million pounds of garbage than you would get back.

There are all sorts of researches going on into various sources of raw material; algae; lignin (the tough plant fiber); corn, etc. Some of them are kind of crazy -- using corn to make fuel for cars. Corn production is too resource intensive and too hard on the soil to keep that up for a long time.

Part of the solution is to live a much simpler lifestyle that requires less energy, fewer raw materials. This isn't a plan to live in the woods eating roots, berries, and squirrels. I won't go into what "simpler lifestyle" means.

And with the continued valiant efforts of the antinatalists, the population will start dropping and billions will avoid having to live happily ever after.

Is it possible there are people who have an advanced understanding of the world but protect their secret knowledge so as to exert influence over human affairs? — Jonmel

Not only is it possible, it is a fact. Yes, we have secret knowledge and we exert influence over human affairs. Any given ordinary individual may not like the way things are working out, but they are ignorant of our objectives. And they are going to stay ignorant, because we are not going to reveal what our objectives are.

We advise you to discontinue this line of inquiry, for your own good.

I am willing to talk about population growth. That's easy. It's population reduction that is difficult. I defer the problem of population reduction to natural (if unpleasant) processes.

What YOU don't seem to get is that the economic world we know, ever increasing efficiency, decreasing cost and all, is built on and depends on cheap plentiful oil, coal, and natural gas. What nuclear power can not do is provide feed stock in place of these three substances. The entire agricultural, domestic, and industrial machine is fueled by, processes, and requires cheap feed stock. There is no substitute for oil, coal, and natural gas as feed stock or fuel. Yes, electricity created by nuclear, wind, and solar is possible and is being produced, and more will be produced in the future. But solar, wind, and nuclear do not produce one drop of petroleum that can be turned into the gazillion products that fossil fuels can be turned into.

As we run out of coal, oil, and natural gas we run out of a critical substance that is a) cheap, and b) plentiful. Nothing comes close.

Your economy of growing efficiency and decreased cost will become moot once oil disappears. And it will disappear. (Technically, there will be oil left in the ground no matter what, because it will require more value to get it out of the ground than it can have as a product.

IF we favored insects, birds, fish, plants, and megafauna (including ourselves) we would cease and desist from as much industrial activity (including automobile transportation systems) as possible. A LOT is possible -- people just wouldn't like it.

This discussion isn't the trivial communism vs. capitalism question. It is existence vs. oblivion: What will it be? The route we are on leads to oblivion. Death. Avoiding oblivion means capping the oil wells and closing the coal mines before it is too late. Life won't be the same if we quit using coal and oil. It is the choice of life not being the same or life not being at all.

Assuming this is true, what should we do about it? — frank

According to writers like James Howard Kunstler, and others, it is difficult to even imagine a way of living without petroleum and coal and their various byproducts. It could, theoretically, be done. It would mean initially dropping back to agriculture as it existed in the 19th century. Industrially, it would mean dropping back to 17th century industry -- only a little industrialization. It would mean a return to horse power, and small-plot farming. Railroads would be difficult to sustain without the heavy industry of coal and steel production. Autos and highways would be out of the question. The population would drop precipitously. The lifespan would be shorter (even with medical knowledge intact). Production of drugs and medical equipment is a heavy chemical industry too. It takes a lot of feed stock and energy.

Kunstler's A World Made By Hand series depicts life in a community reduced to 19th century tech. It isn't terrible, but life there is much simpler, much quieter, much thinner, and in the event of disease or serious injury, much shorter.

The human footprint was greatly enlarged in the 19th century, and hugely enlarged again in the 20th. IF we wanted to save the rest of the natural world and some of us, we would have to forgo that hugely magnified footprint in favor of a size close to our natural, size 10 footprint.

There is no way of maintaining life as we know it now and reducing our footprint to a much smaller size. It's an either/or choice.

I suspect it's too late to do anything except perhaps to minimise the damage that will be left after we're gone — Pattern-chaser

I tend to think it is too late; 40 years ago, we would have needed 40-50 years to make significant changes in our relationship to energy and the environment. We could have done that, but we didn't. 40 years have passed and we have made just a little progress (all of us, not just the USA). We still need 40 years (or more) to make the radical changeover from fossil fuels and heavy-chemical-use agriculture, assuming that those efforts were now fully underway--which they are not. By the time we completed those difficult changes, levels of CO2, methane, water vapor, and so on will have passed the tipping point by some years, if it hasn't already. Another 40 or 50 years of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides and our goose will have been thoroughly cooked.

I don't think gay guys in his generation were hankering after heterosexual reproduction. More likely he was saying, "This is what economic planning can do in the short run. In the long run we're all dead.

"In the long run, we're all dead." John Maynard Keynes

Good point.

There are far too many examples of suffering and disasters coming out of short-sighted decisions. — Christoffer

On the other hand, didn't our hunter-gatherer ancestors do just fine for 100,000 years of short term thinking? What changed?

EDIT: I should add, "presumably" to that statement. The anthropologists hadn't arrived on the scene 100k ago.

Short term thinking is an excellent candidate for the cause of our doom, don't you think?

Short-term profit. — Pattern-chaser

And at this point, a lot of people are expecting this quarterly result to be better than last quarter's, or else it's "sell".

We've been able to get away with all sorts of disastrous behavior because the consequences don't loom up over the horizon quick enough.

Would it be better for democracy to evolve to be more long sighted? — frank

Oh, heavens, no! What possible advantage could there be in the electorate being more far sighted? Silly you.

Obviously, it would be better, but... by what means can the people, the parliament, or the dictator become "far sighted"? Which society is it that has solved this problem? Were the French far sighted, they would have planted oak trees 200 years ago to replace the timbers required to repair today's burning cathedrals. Or they might have put better fire protection in Notre Dame's attic 6 months ago.

Were San Franciscans far sighted they wouldn't have rebuilt their city on the spot where it was destroyed in 1906. Were Californians far sighted they wouldn't have built Los Angeles in the first place. There are a lot of things that should just have never happened.

It seems to be very difficult, if not impossible, for groups of people to plan for future goals that are more than 25 or 30 years away. What we do is create organizations that are on going and frequently repopulated by new people and new plans. Ancient religions are still here because somebody kept the sacred fire for 3, 11, 17, or some number of years at a stretch, then somebody else took over. Political parties stay in business for 150 years because every 2 years they have an election to attend to. Plus, politicians have to look after their domains every day.

Personally, the longest period for which I've made plans was about 30 years, and that plan didn't work out very well. I've managed 5 and 10 year plans, but that's about it.

Your suggestion is my command.

"why don't they deserve even more?" — ZhouBoTong

The amount of reward that anyone in a company receives -- wage earners, managers, or stock owners, has to be balanced against the needs of the company. If one pays out too much to any one group, the other two groups have to receive less. And the more one pays out, the less there is to retain for research and development to insure future growth.

As a stockholder, one might object to management collecting too much money, thus reducing the size of their dividends. Workers who aren't getting pay raises object to management getting huge raises. Managers are in the game to get ahead, and they resent limits on their income. No body is entitled to specific share (unless it is workers, who from a socialist perspective, deserve it all).

Society's interest also matters. If too much wealth is being diverted to too small a group of people (like top managers and the largest stock holders) the broad needs of society are likely to be shorted. The rich can not spend all of their money, really. If you earn 50 million a year, how can you actually go out and spend it? You can't. So you accumulate most of it, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, the larger needs of society are not getting met. It is worth noting that the prosperity of society at large is the critical base for building wealth.

That's my theory and I'm sticking with it.

One says "it is what it is" when no more can be said.

I might possibly understand what you are aiming at. How do definitions have any validity when people have diverse, often incompatible definitions? (But again, we're off the topic here.)

The words in language have meaning by consensus. In the case of objects, the consensus is usually correct. 99% of the population agree on which bridge in the United States is the Golden Gate Bridge and which is the Brooklyn Bridge [100% made up statistic]. True enough, some small town with the name of "Brooklyn" might have a bridge which could be called the Brooklyn Bridge, but no body would confuse some small highway bridge with THE Brooklyn Bridge. [Fact: some small towns are named Brooklyn.]

"Justice" on the other hand is a condition whose meaning maybe only a small number of people will agree with. Everyone wants justice, but who has gotten screwed by the courts and who received justice is (often) in dispute. Should the cop who shot the guy who looked like he had a gun be tried for murder? Opinion will be all over the place. "Justice" will be hard to name. "It is what it is" will definitely not be the case.

There is (or was) a consensus about what the USSR was. It was a union of 15 republics. For all practical purposes it was a single state -- the same what the USA is a single nation, even if it has 50 sub units. It was run by the Communist Party of the USSR, with a very strong executive at the top (a dictator more or less). so on and so forth... The histories of the USSR and the USA are both known. These facts are not open to dispute. "Nations" are collectivities of many people, many points of view, many government units, many industries, and so on. Of course, someone growing up taking care of pigs in the USSR or the USA will have a different take on the country than someone dancing at the Bolshoi or making movies in Hollywood.

But the facts of history are still the same, pig farm or Hollywood.

Someone involved in organized crime in the Soviet Union or the United States will have a radically different POV than somebody engaged in honest work. But the facts of the nations history -- including the fact that some people engaged in crime -- remains the same.

Now, if someone has no idea of what the USSR was (this is possible -- the USSR went out of business almost 30 years ago) then they will just be at a loss to understand what knowledgeable people are saying about the USSR. Someone born and raised in New York City, who has never traveled much, probably doesn't know what a pig farm smells like. Or, for that matter, what a barn for milk cows smells like. That doesn't mean that their understanding of the USSR or the USA is invalid. One could know a lot about the history of both countries and not know what pig shit smells like.

I'm afraid I can't go any further here. My knowledge and interest in the topic is what it is. So, if you want to talk about this more, what you could do is take your opening question to me...

Here's a question: when two people argue about "USSR" or "America," are they arguing about the same USSR or America?

Perhaps the reason they argue so much is because each side is arguing about a different USSR or America (but call their mental representations by the same name).

and start a new thread. You might want to expand those two sentences a bit. Like, adding which Buddhism, or which Christianity people are talking about.

Communication "works" because words have limited meanings. Buddhism and Judaism, for example, or Hinduism and Christianity have distinct properties that characterize the religion. When people use the word "Judaism" for instance, they are using a word that excludes the teachings of Buddha and the Apostle Paul, for example. Judaism, like Hinduism, may be diverse but it doesn't mean whatever you happen t wish it it meant.

Tom and Bob may not agree about aspects of Buddhism, but what Buddhism is (in its several main forms) isn't open to invention. It is what it is. The same goes for capitalism, organic chemistry, the French language, and a lot of other things. They all have specific meanings that don't overlap extensively with other terms. So, "capitalism" and "socialism" mean different things. A parliamentary system is not the same as one man rule. Anarchism and Communism have distinct meanings--they don't overlap.

Make sense?

But you're just making up percentages. — YuZhonglu

I'll make up my percentages and you can make up yours. Works for me.

Communication is difficult when people are overly literal. 25% or 2% are guesses, conversational gambits. Tokens. The meter measuring the degree of correspondence between two people will be jumping all over the place as the conversation goes along, because some words will have 90%, 100%, or 2%, or 45%... correspondence.

Every now and then I come across words that have zero correspondence. I don't know what the word means. Like "phlebasing". I never did find out what that word meant. The author made it up. Camarilla means, in my terminology, a group of running dog lackeys. I had to look it up before it meant anything. How about 'flocculent', and 'synecdoche'. Two more words with zero correspondence. Many people like callipygian rear ends -- from the Greek meaning beautiful buttocks. Nice ass, in other words. I had to look it up. Zero meaning at first.

Again, if there are NO common denominators in two people's mental representations of a word, then why do we assume that when each person uses that word they're referring to the "same" concept? — YuZhonglu

This doesn't seem to be the topic of this thread, but... what the hell.

Occasionally people run into the problem of using a word for which several people assign QUITE different meanings. In those cases, communication breaks down. If one of the 3 thinks Jesus is the hispanic guy that lives down the street, somebody else thinks that Jesus is the son of god, and a third person thinks that there is nobody named Jesus, obviously they are not going to have a productive discussion of Jesus.

In real life it happens that people sometimes have difficulty communicating and it usually isn't the end of the world.

Again, if there are NO common denominators in two people's mental representations of a word, then why do we assume that when each person uses that word they're referring to the "same" concept? — YuZhonglu

The USSR is the same entity whether you think it was the workers' paradise or the nightmare from hell. The United States is the same entity whether you think it is the perfect democracy or a racist, sexist disaster. Correspondence between person A's apprehension of the USSR and the USA and person B's apprehension of the USSR and the USA will never be 100%. It might be only 50% or 25%, but that is sufficient to allow for a discussion.

Almost everything there is has many aspects. We all know that, and don't expect 100% correspondence with the people we talk to. People who do expect 100% correspondence quickly become tiresome and we stop talking to them.

You can't step into the same river twice. In fact, you can't step into the same river once.

Most people find something sufficiently constant about the USSR or America to use these terms as if they represent something reasonably stable and commonly perceptible to all observers. Granted, everybody on earth has a distinct perspective on the world, and supposedly no two of them is alike. How the hell do we ever communicate?

We communicate by being familiar with the most common denominators in complex fractions like "Europe", "soil", "birds", "philosophers", and "USSRs". Once we get past the shallows of common denominators, then we have to get more specific: "When I was in Moscow in 1992, people on the streets displayed more than the usual minimum of soviet enthusiasm." [disclaimer: I have never been in Moscow.] Or, "It is wonderful to visit Washington, D.C. when the cherry trees are blossoming." That's probably true if you don't get mugged while you are traipsing around under the pink petals. [disclaimer: I have not seen Washington's famous cherry trees in bloom. Caveat: They are probably a lot like cherry trees blossoming elsewhere in the world.]

Nothing. I love nuclear as much as I love CO2, pesticides, RoundUp, and PCBs. What's not to love? Why, it's probably powering the very computer I'm using, right now. As for burying the waste from the power plants, well fuck it. We'll all be dead before we get the perpetual storage system built, anyway.

Apres moi, le deluge.

Come again?

So I watched it. I wasn't as taken with it as you were. Yes, it's good to recognize that nuclear power presents us with some real, substantial advantages at this point in time. Yes, it's true that coal and oil (not to mention autos running on oil) have killed far, far, far, far more people than even nuclear weapons, let alone nuclear power plants.

People feel like they have been tricked, and in fact they have been tricked about a lot of things. Tricked, fucked over, screwed, cheated, and been had, altogether. The solution, doing away with capitalism and unmitigated industrialism, is unacceptable. I don't want to go back to the original daylight savings plan--you go to bed at sundown and get up at sunrise. Without industrialism, we won't even have kerosene, and we've pretty much wiped out cetaceans so whale oil is out. That leaves a wick in grease for lighting.

Our choice seems to be "all or nothing". We either keep the whole industrial thing running (until it buries us with a plastic stake through our hearts) or we slip back into a pre-industrial, real simple agrarian economy.

Oh, those fucking stupid people thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants at the same time. How could they make such an OBVIOUS dumb mistake? — Ever Wise

OK, so let's track what happened. First came nuclear weapons. They weren't a secret. Hundreds of them (a good sized war's worth) were being exploded in the atmosphere, every one of them blasting an isotope salad into the atmosphere, to be distributed by wind and water. All that went on from 1945 until 1963. After that, tests were conducted underground.

The concern about nuclear bombs didn't disappear in 1963, of course. We could just stop worrying about fallout from above-ground tests. Nuclear bombs remained in production until the late 1980s, when I think we all had accumulated something like 36,000 bombs.

The first Earth Day was 49 years ago--22 April, 1970. I don't remember it. I suppose it was about butterflies and pesticides, trees, flowers, and children. It probably wasn't about CO2 levels in the atmosphere. though acid rain was a known consequence of burning coal and oil. CO2 hadn't become a big issue, yet.

Nuclear power plants were on line were humming away by 1970. In 1970, though, people were still worried about nuclear weapons. They had not gone away. Then there was the 3 Mile Island accident, which wasn't so very terrible but the people were frightened, the way sheep are frightened when they see a wolf. The brakes were slammed on and not much new happened in nuclear power. But the plants that were operating continued on, pretty much.

Chernobyl happened in 1986. This was much worse than 3 Mile Island. This one blew up, blasting tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere.

People are afraid of plutonium, uranium; cesium 137, iodine 131, strontium 90, and lots of other isotopes that they had heard about during atomic testing. These and other isotopes came out of the Chernobyl blast. I suppose we could forgive people for thinking that a dusting of plutonium or iodine 131 is what killed the liquidators at Chernobyl. What killed people there were gamma rays -- harsh, penetrating, ionizing radiation. Workers brought to hospital from Chernobyl were themselves emitting gamma radiation.

About this time, give or take a few years, CO2 became an issue, and as a decade or two have passed, seems like the most pressing issue of the day -- no longer atom bombs (though they haven't disappeared), radiation from nuclear power plants (which haven't disappeared either). Those who have inquiring minds that want to know, are now aware of how exceedingly dirty nuclear weapons production has been. Suspicion might have continued to dissipate had not an earthquake's tsunami wrecked the Fukushima nuclear plant. Another melt down, another mess. Not to worry, the levels of radiation are not too much above background radiation. It's all being diluted, we'll clean it all up, everyone will be happy again, yada yada yada.

So, friends, we have more to worry about now. There are the still ticking atom bombs; all the nuclear power plants that haven't blown up yet, and all the CO2 that is clearly screwing things up. The Ozone Hole seems to be OK for now. Bees are disappearing, along with other non-honey bee pollinators, and that could be really bad. Human sperm counts are dropping around the world (about 50% since WWII). Childhood cancers--which were once a rarity--are fairly common now. Various chemicals being used resemble hormone molecules, and these look-alike chemicals are screwing up development of fish and humans (other animals too).

If there is a common enemy here, it's capitalists and state monopolists (USSR) that have always preferred to externalize the costs of their profit making by dumping the crap in the river, blowing it out the stack, burying it in holes (out of sight, out of mind), or just using the lumpen proles as a sponge to soak it all up.

I don't seem to be able to find the link. Could you repost it, please. Thanks.