POMO publication — Bitter Crank

What does POMO stand for? Google search and Wikipedia both pointed at only one meaning, to ANLIC. What did you mean by POMO?

Reality is totally subservient to principled imagination. New York is built on a grid system because someone decided it would be a good idea, and for no other reason. — unenlightened

???

Did the principled imagination contravene the events in reality? I don't think so. It's not even a principle to imagine a city built on a grid system. It's a planning system, much like the unplanned cities in mediaeval Europe, and the planned cities like Paris or Budapest, with the straight boulevards and the concentric circular roads.

The principles of accounting and the principles of a person are not even the same kind of thing. It is a fallacy to use them interchangeably, or to claim they mean the same thing. Aristotle called it equivocation.

Similarly, you are committing equivocation if you equate a principle in city planning to the principles that drive a person's moral behaviour patterns.

Could you please provide examples - because without them, this is just an ad homniem attack, to which I say - pish! — counterpunch

I provide one example. I don't have the research inclination to search for more. I did not attack you, and my argument was not ad hominem.

He says: "It's not enough that I succeed - everyone else must fail." That's the left wing academic agenda in a nutshell. — counterpunch

I gave a reasoning to the opinion why the above is biassed: Because the right wing academic agenda is the same. I even called you out on this later, before I went into the bias thing.

And actually I don't even agree with the statement you made, "It's not enough that I succeed - everyone else must fail." But it is not at all a leftist statement, whether it is true or not. You specifically chose to call it a leftist agenda, due to your bias.

I really don't know how to explain this in greater detail.

***baited Irrelevant aside; it's 'bated', short for 'abated' not 'baited'. I've been using 'baited' for decades, rather than the correct 'bated'. We will now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast, in progress. — Bitter Crank

I understand. I like to spell "bias" in the plural as a noun or in the third person singular or in past tense, with two s-es in the middle. This gives it a badass, anti-disestablishmentarialistic undertone of being open to bisexuality. Rub the nose of the politically correct into it. -- for the record, I am a strong supporter of allowing or letting or living along with people who fall in love and have sex with whichever consenting adult, in whatever way they prefer. Love is love is love by any other name.

I'm a capitalist - for example. I'm not a communist. If you want to call that bias - then I'm biased — counterpunch

What I call your bias is that you go against reason due to a conviction to an ideology. Your ideology is not communist, no problem, but you develop false opinions due to your strong conviction to your ideology.

A capitalist can see clearly too, and so can a communist. Denying this on either side (i.e. categorically denying that the other side can see clearly) would be an example of a biassed opinion.

***baited Irrelevant aside; it's 'bated', short for 'abated' not 'baited'. I've been using 'baited' for decades, rather than the correct 'bated'. We will now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast, in progress. — Bitter Crank

This was interesting read-- watching you debait with yourself on a topic of spelling.

And there we arrive at the inescapable conclusion - that principles are nothing, that values have no value. Now that's what I call a slippery slope! — unenlightened

What it shows me is that reality beats principles.

Show me one instance in history where standing steadfast for a principle which stand has not changed anything for the better, and has not produced any desired results, is worth doing.

That's the left wing academic agenda in a nutshell. — counterpunch

Why did you leave out the right wing academic agenda? Is it any different? No, it is not any different. Not all scientists are left wing in the survey-creating social sciences, yet it is said in this thread that they are all forced to create non-repeatable experiments with consistent results.

Your singling out the left shows nothing else but that you are biassed. God only knows (figure of speech) how many others of your wrong ideas are sourced by your biasses.

why I was not allowed to study philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. I objected to the forceful, totalitarian, and basically unnatural feminization of the School of Philosophy.
— god must be atheist

Sacrificing anything of value for nothing, however, is recommended not to comfort lovers, but to suicidal people, the insane, and the extremely stupid.
— god must be atheist

Sounds like someone acting according to principles whilst decrying such behaviour. But of course it is no real sacrifice to give up a corrupt education, and it is no real sacrifice not to publish corrupt science.

Edit: I'll butt out now, and retreat to ethics to continue to pontificate. — unenlightened

Wow. I made myself misunderstood.

I ran headlong against a brick wall because I did not know better. I THOUGHT I could change the system, I THOUGHT they just did not see the error of their ways. I WAS sacrificing (or rather: not sacrificing, not even risking, only the outcome came to be a sacrifice) something of value (my education) for something of value (their changing their ways). I was CONVINCED that my one outraged letter was going to change the policy of the department because I figured a good argument ought to convince philosophers.

I was STUPID. No foresight. No insight.

So I did not contradict myself; I did say in this thread that sacrificing something for nothing in return is something what, among other people, the stupid people do.

I was one of them.

Indeed, no good deed ever goes unpunished, usually by crucifixion. Principles are an expensive luxury, and not recommended for comfort lovers. — unenlightened

Sacrificing anything of value for nothing, however, is recommended not to comfort lovers, but to suicidal people, the insane, and the extremely stupid.

I pray each night to God that there is no god.

-----------------

I think the religious have a much bigger investment in having a god not to exist, than to exist.

If god exists, the religious have no choice other than having an afterlife spent either in eternal suffering in Hell, or in eternal suffering in Heaven.

You may be wondering what suffering exists in Heaven. Well, the sameness, the monotoneness of forever. Try humming the same tune for a day, and you'll go insane. Imagine the most complex, complicated, intriguing life you can, and do it again and again over and over a thousand, a million, a billion times, and then infinite times.... you see my point. Everlasting life is horror, unimaginable horror for the human mind.

So the religious have much greater need in a hope that God not exist, than the atheists; and if the religious still hope He does, then so be it. Don't say I did not warn you.

Russell Group university accused of Soviet-style censorship
Camilla Turner 7 hrs ago

A Russell Group university has been accused of Soviet-style censorship after requiring new humanities courses to “move away” from a “white, Eurocentric” curriculum. — counterpunch

Exactly! The carbon copy why I was not allowed to study philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. I objected to the forceful, totalitarian, and basically unnatural feminization of the School of Philosophy. They were frothing at their mouths, and they called me in to sit with rabid feminists working the top echelon of administration. If looks could kill they probably would have. All I said (in my usual and customary provocative style) was that it was self-contradictory to exclude white males for the benefit of males of visible and other minorities and for the benefit of women in the department, because males are males, whether they are white, purple, black or a very intelligent shade of blue.

I spit at the dean and the faculty at Western. They are a bunch of frightened little piggies and tapeworms, who fear for their careers and their pension, so they let the rabid feminists run their lives like Stalin run the entire Soviet empire.

Ha! That is rich! A moral hard line is a slippery slope! You'll have to spell out those implications if you want me to think about them. — unenlightened

Here's a few ways to look at how moral hard line falls on its face:

1. Fudge -- by a socially well-accepted way among your peers -- data or else don't, but at the price of letting your children starve, or not allowing them to reach their potential because you can't afford to support them in that endeavour.
2. Be a maverick, and fail to publish, due to a character that gives breaking social customs more importance than the importance it gives to complete economic, academic and social failure.
3. Be praised for character, for not publishing anything, since you can't obtain repeatable data. This stops your academic advancement in its tracks. But since nobody will notice you, your character won't be praised after all. You sacrifice yourself for a cause for action that nobody will notice.
4. Your character will make you not publish; but your character won't create a way to publish the truth. Finding out and publishing the truth will remain evasive. Unrepeatable social experiments, no matter whether you create them or not, have no alternative to them.

which are the higher life forms you refer to, and why would not referring to them as "higher" be a case of assuming the conclusion you are supposed to be arguing for? — Janus

I know Amen well enough to answer this question, but I'm not answering for him.

I think (not a fact but a conjecture) that 3017Amen calls those life forms higher, that believe in Jesus Christ the Savior. This includes or may include some Catholics, Evangelists, all kinds of protestants, and then the occasional and better educated noble beasts, such as Dolphins, Sperm Whales, German Shepherds, and the majestic Bald Eagle. In the past the two-headed eagle, unicorns, and some special species of Gargoyles also made the grade, but historical records of those are now under skeptical scientific scrutiny.

Oops. You may be more right than I.

I gave it some thought and realized that women (edit: and gay men) do swallow a lot of human protein. Not all women, but enough women to warrant the springing up of the disease should the cannibalistic theory hold water.

Then again, the human protein women swallow are in Zygotes, therefore contain half chromosome pairs, so maybe that is enough to make a difference?

This is way above my pay grade.

Okay, I get you. I only have one question: what is the phenomenon you call the Nordic Model? There must be some attributes that you can use to describe for us (me) what being the Nordic Model entails.

What exactly are the attributes of the Nordic Model? Believe me, I haven't heard it before, so I am ignorant. I may want to Google it, too, but not right now. If you would please care to describe it.

I say I am skeptical, because Hungary is the central-Europe model, and it has the highest suicide rate in the world, competing with Finland, which is also on the shores of the Baltic. Although their historical roots may have been joined with those of Hungary, the two nations are different by blood lines by now, due to the intermarriages with neighbouring countries: Finland with the Norsemen, Hungarians with the Germans, Slavs, and Roman remnants (which makes up the population of Rumania).

Canada, I don't know how well the population scores on the happiness scale, but by some other metrics, in annual surveys of "The Best Country to Live In" Canada ranks consistently 1st or 2nd.

the Nordic Model can liberate the so-called "masses" from the yoke of the partisan deadlock — thewonder

Provided that the model they send from the North to liberate the masses is leggy, has platinum blonde hair and is tall and sporty-slim.

BSE or Mad Cow's Disease was, unless I misremember, thought to be caused by eating sheep's brains (which were being added to their food) from Scrapie infected sheep, so it wasn't cannibalism in that case, and was transmission of a disease by consuming actually infected tissue. — Janus

I don't have any statistics or scientific evidence to show. I garner all my knowledge from hearsay and from posts and newsclips and headlines without reading the articles, and information nuggets.

I'll research this, however, because now I am curious myself.

This is what I found:

Theories suggest — and research supports said theories — that mad cow disease is the result of an abnormality that presents in the prion, a protein typically found on the surface of cells. Though the why is still unclear, researchers believe that when the protein mutates, it begins to feed on the tissue of the nervous system, such as the brain and spinal cord.

As a degenerative disease, BSE grows progressively worse in a relatively short period. Maybe because the destructive prion is “biological,” so to speak, the body of the sick cow does not know it is there. As a result, the body doesn’t know to trigger an immune response against the disease. —

I definitely heard the theory of mammal cannibalism being the root cause. They sent researchers or envoys or some humans to Papua-New Guinea, to ask them to stop eating each other. The envoy cited the reason, which was that MCD is caused by C. The cannibals were cannibals, but not some backward stupid ignorant people, they understood the reasoning, and stopped the practice.

This is how far I got in listening to other people talk about it.

It is conceivable that they fed some bs to each other, because they knew I was evesdropping. I was not very popular in those circles, either.

As you can see, there is no conclusive evidence over what it is that causes the prions to mutate. One theory to name the cause for the disease is eating infected sheep's brains; the other is cannibalism. I guess they did not investigate very much, the scientists were happy that the whole thing was behind us.

Why isn't cannibal behavior widespread? (Or us it just a genetic accident.) — 3017amen

Janus already answered that. Here's a bit of a padded reply; padded with explanation

Those species that stopped cannibalism, had a better chance of survival, because the mad cow disease would strike less often. And those stopped cannibalism, which had a gene mutation that made cannibalism no longer a practice. — god must be atheist

Sure. we don't typically gravitate to such behavior. And of course, those types of barbaric acts in most cases depend upon the individual's value system. And that's whether or not they're starving. It just depends on the person.
— 3017amen

You don't know that, in the extremity of desperate hunger, you would still not eat human flesh; no one does. You can't know that unless you've been in the situation. — Janus

I am on a different opinion. All species produce the protein string that causes the Mad Cow Disease when they eat the proteins of their own species.

So it was an evolutionary mutation that stopped cannibalism. Those species that stopped cannibalism, had a better chance of survival, because the mad cow disease would strike less often. And those stopped cannibalism, which had a gene mutation that made cannibalism no longer a practice.

We still have cannibal behaviour in individuals who are not forced by extreme hunger or exposure to eat human flesh for survival. This is so because a counter-mutation may have counter-effected the no-cannibal behavour. More likely, there is no suriving individual with the anti-anti-cannibal gene; but the gene's dna was kinked at that section that contains the anti-cannibal (for short,) and it had no chance of affecting the cannibal person's behaviour.

We still live in hierarchic societies; more blings, the higher your social status; higher social status, more chances to copulate with more attractive mates; major life events are so important that you gather all your friends and relatives from great distances even to witness it; burials and post-life celebrations indicate a caring for someone's memory (or spirit); religious gurus and other gurus are a source of knowledge, dependable information and counsel; wars are still fought, for the same reasons as in the past; the poor gets poorer and the rich gets richer until a revolution or rebellion rights this; people put each other in prisons; law and morality shape the behavour to be compliant with what the majority wants.

These, and many others, have not changed since the first human family, mutations from the pre-human ape ancestors, touched the ground.

Of course, I was not there when this happened 200-300 years ago, but the people on the south east pacific islands, who seemed to have forged societies from scratch within a handful of generations ago, give a good example how these things are done similarly to modern man's life.

I assume for the World Happiness Report to be fairly reflective of a person's general livelihood and of their relative freedom and meaningful participation within a democratic process. — thewonder

Okay, I call myself a philosopher, so I have a response.

Meaningful participation in the democratic process... the target task is done by elected representatives. So the laws we need to abide have been made by a very few, who may think entirely differently from their elector base. In Russia the same way as in Sweden and in the USA.

General livelihood... is not a cause of happiness, beyond a certain level. If you are seeing your children perish due to malnutrition and lack of medical aid, because you can't afford food and medicine for them while others around you can, yes, earning power is a source of happiness, by staving off unhappiness. But whether you JUST bought a Jaguar car or a Bentley, or you JUST bought a Zhiguli, you are equally happy, as long as in your social circles everyone drives the same car that you just bought.

Relative freedom... the biggest hoax the West has fed to its free people. They believe they are freer than a Russian dude, and this goes back to communist times, is that the Westerns believe the lies in their news while the Esterns knew they were lies.

I think the freedom is an important factor between the West (including Russia) and highly religious countries (Vatikan, Iran, UAE, SA,...) and it absolutely does not guarantee happiness. A lot, and I mean a lot, of people are happy with freer speech and thought, but a lot of other people (and i won't put a number or proportion on either of these two camps) are extremely happy in stability, in social stability, in their status, in their routine, in what they got.

Some psychologist described happiness as a reaction to returns on investment much higher than expected. This means not only the stock market. If you get an A in physics, whereas you expected a C-; if your English composition in school gets to be read up to the entire class; if your doctor says your wife's condition turned and she has many more years to live, these are things that give you extreme joy. IN the rest of the time, what makes you tick is that you know precisely what you get for doing what; and that requires social stability, and that's precisely less free regimes provide.

And actually a lot of physics is irreproducible these days, being entirely mathematical — fishfry

I am sorry, but if someone can't copy numbers from one sheet to another, he should't have earned his post-doc standing in quantitative analysis of nanomolecules suspended in highly viscous medium flowing through carbon-based hex molecules.

So you publish what you can. And everyone else is too busy to notice because they're playing the same game. — fishfry

Old saying: "Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter, because nobody listens."

And actually a lot of physics is irreproducible these days, being entirely mathematical and not subject to any experimental verification at all — fishfry

From the same publication as the remark above (from the 1970s):

"If it's green or if it wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it does not work, it's phyics."

So true. I used sweat blood sweat and tears to show the preservation of energy in action with a simple, very very simple, heat-transfer experiment in first year. And I still had to fudge the data to get the result the TA wanted, by needing to say "some heat was transferred to the external environment." He bought it, that TA did.

The Swedish living standards may be higher than the Russian ones — Apollodorus

Do you have proof? Have you measured Telephone Poles in both Russia and Sweden?

(C.f.: Who was the world's first telephone Pole? Answer: Alexander Graham Bellski.)

I know I am going waaaay wide off on a tangent. Maybe someone should ask the mods to delete my posts in this thread. I could, but I ran out of energy, thinking up my jokes.

How can you possibly make this claim? — thewonder

The claim may be valid despite the great difference in average happiness. That's because living standards are not measured by happiness. They are measured by height and how fast they can run. (A "standard" in English also means a lamp-pole or telephone pole. A long pole sticking out of the ground.)

wisely said. In communist countries it used to be, especially after the revolution.

Times change. People don't. History repeats itself, if you wait long enough. The more things change, the more things remain the same... because the common denominator is the human spirit.

Well, it's a playground for religious fanatics as well, and for hard-headed right-wing capitalists who spearhead libertarian values, by decrying those aspects of Marxist-Leninist communist economic mechanisms and social values that they haven't a slightest clue about.

What you descrobe of the properties of English, are typical of Chinese. (I think. Correction or confirmation needed.) Much like in Chinese, in English (for foreigners) the hardest part is the writing (neither is very phonetic), and pronunciation. Grammar is easy in the beginning of learning, but the more foray the students make into learning English properly, the more of its complexity shows. What other languages simply express in terms of conjugation, tenses, moods, etc. with a different ending for each person, English responds with its own particular and unique use of verb tenses. Russian has a verb tense particularity, as well, and so does Hungarian.

It seems like no language lacks in at least a section of its grammar and usage, a highly complex structure that is unique to it. I don't know why that is so. It appears as if the human brain requires this complexity not for the sake of pragmatic usefulness in the language, but for the sake of satisfying its own (the human brain's own) need and hunger for the challenge of complexity.

Just my two cents' worth.

Yep. An old man who costs more than he contributes, or a baby that has potential, but it's speculative, a wage earner, etc. Crazy shit. By that metric alone, I could hunt a person down, kill them, gut them, skin them, quarter them, have them mounted on my wall and enjoy the trophy while dining over a plate of them. If anyone had a problem with it, I'd just pay them $X.XX and we'd all be good. Oh boy, man may not be separate, but he sure is different. — James Riley

So... what's stopping you?

usher in Armageddon. — Fooloso4

Yes. There will be seat-sales, when Armageddon strikes. Security, police presence. Searches by the entrance for concealed weapons. Celebrity seats, red carpet. Before you enter the auditorium, where Armageddon is to be held, ushers will check your invitation to your seat assignment. They will point you in the right direction, and tear your ticket in half. Maybe stamp your hand, so you can go to cash bar and the washroom during the show.

I would like to watch Armageddon from Caesar's seat in the Colosseum. First act: Christians vs. Lions. That is, an exhibition ball game of Tampa Bay Christians, vs Kansas City Lions. Second act: Marxists-Leninists vs Menshevik forces. Third act: all of humanity against human stupidity.

It's like a price list for a Ford Mustang or such. Many things must also be evaluated, not just the inherent worth: the present value of future earnings, the accumulated interest on backward averaging the depreciation on equipment, the accelerated or decelerated forward averaging of year-to-date income saturation points, and the boiling point of the justice presiding over the case.

I think you have to individually price each item, not give them a blanket value. A good start is law suits of the tort kind. Many people cash in on the loss of life (of a loved one) or of a limb. Take a survey of the court decisions, and create a potentially reliable average of a randomized plot design*.

Then go and figure out how much a cow is worth, a deer, a dog, a dingleberry, etc. The prices of these can be obtained at point of sale prices.

This way you get a much more reliable metric for your valuation scheme than trying to decide whether a poodle is worth more than a kid, or an intelligent carrot should be priced higher than donald trump.

* randomized plot design == a mathematical arrangement and processing of measurements used in Statistical analysis.

I define god as something like Avogadro's number: 6.5*10^23.

What I mean, is does god need our definition to exist, or to have his attributes, of which we know nothing? Can't we give god enough credit to have some self-knowledge, and not rely on man's ability and obsession to classify him by defining its parameters?

I mentioned that "Abused individuals owe no loyalty" meaning that any moral intuition or social norm could be justifiably considered invalid in that situation when looking at it from the perspective of interdependence and cooperation for mutual benefit. From the perspective of dog-eat-dog competition, slavery is cheap and offers an advantage that can't be shared by all. — praxis

I ask you, pray do tell us: what is the trigger, and what is the response in Slave-keeping societies, and in Abused Uncles' Shelters where dog-eat-dog is the competitive norm of cooperative cannibalism, that establishes the morality or the lack thereof of invalid justification of interdependent perspectives?

Would that approach not reduce the number of dogs ultimately to one, by the processes of cannibalism and elimination, and their being a diploid species, not cause the extinction of these noble friends of man?

Oh, it's easy to explain, praxis. I think my theory congeals nicely and neatly, but from the point of view of you guys (both genders and the spectrum) I appear to be a monkey screamin' and jumpin' up-and-down in its cage, trying to get attention.

I think I painted a pretty accurate picture of this.

:-)

By following I did not mean the modern meaning, sprung out of FB and other social media use, of "supporting, as a follower." By following I meant you carried on understanding the paper.

I old skool. My English is apparently outdated. Pretty soon I need to buy a horseless carriage to get around, to keep up with the times.

You are my hero. For being able to read through the opening post and following what it says.

NOT to misconstrue that this would be some sort of disparaging of the OP. I bow to Samppa's genius, too. He is also my hero, for writing the opening post.

You are both my heroes: one for writing, the other, for reading the opening post. I would be unable to do either.

If you read my paper you'd maybe make a different derisive remark.
— god must be atheist

I flicked through it.

I think you are right. I would. Several. — Banno

Hey! I think I won that argument. (By predicting the results precisely.)