My memory of Solaris 8 is that egrep is supposed to be there. It was a completely different executable from the basic SVR4 version of grep. Are you sure it isn't there?
My memory of Solaris 8 is that egrep is supposed to be there. It was a completely different executable from the basic SVR4 version of grep. Are you sure it isn't there?
Bruce Cohen @ 360: "For the last couple of decades rich Californians have been moving to the frontiers of Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Never ask the older settlers of places like the Bitteroot Valley or the central Willamette Valley, what they think of Californians unless you want to hear real swearing."
Meh. You can see the same phenomenon without even leaving California. Ask people in San Luis Opisbo what they think about people from Los Angeles and Orange County, or people in Yreka what they think about people from the SF Bay Area and Sacramento. I doubt the state boundary is really that much of a cultural marker compared to the basic rural-suburban split. Yes, California has been exporting its rich, exurban parasites into the rural areas of surrounding states (as well as its own) for some time. In recent years, we've been exporting our underclass suburban parasites too. I contend that has more to do with people feeling alienated by high population density with bewildering ethnic diversity, and also very high costs of living, rather than lot of people responding to an emotional call to move to the wild, wild frontier.
The main reason I think it's possible for something revolutionary to come out of California is that all the potential for incremental reforms to do any good have pretty much been exhausted now. The place is ripe for a major refactoring of how U.S. state governments are organized right at a time when the federal government is almost as dysfunctional as the state government.
To the extent that any U.S. state can really move very far from the baseline set by the U.S. constitution and our federal government, I think Califorinia— if its electorate finally decides pulls the trigger on a convention— might very well show the rest of the country how it should be done.
Charlie Stross @ 249: ...The US has always been a country with a founding myth that if things go bad, you can just up stakes and light out for the frontier."
Yeah, well... for us native Californians, that myth has always rung a bit hollow. (On a vaguely related note, I must recommend this YouTube video of an excellent 1982 live performance of Call Of The West by Wall Of Voodoo. The song quite nicely captures what I believe to be the typical native Californian's internalized concept of the mythical American frontier.)
Out here in Schwarzeneggerland, we've almost completely exhausted that motivating energy as I think everyone here has always known we must eventually, and there ain't nowhere for us to light out for anymore. The ennui is setting in pretty bad. It practically condenses out of the air like fog falling out of redwood tree. Not sure how this will play out for us going forward, but I wouldn't be surprised if that Revolution in conceptual modeling that you think we need starts here.
ObTopic: one thing we have going for us in California is an abundance of ethnic diversity, though it isn't as well mixed as it could be. If we can get our state constitution reorganized properly, we might well revitalize the California dream. Don't hold your breath though... we pretty well messed the bed over the last thirty years or so. We could be in for a long period of decline.
Andy Wilton @ 341: "... they formed an action committee, threw up barricades[3], lit fires, formed human chains across the road, the whole bit. The police stopped by to check that things were properly organised, ..."
I think I see where you're getting stalled.
In American culture, we do not have any notion of the "proper" organization of such things. Thanks to how our labor movement evolved in the early part of the 20th century, our notion of "strike" has come to mean refusing to show up for work before the boss decides you're locked out, and instead, forming a picket line on the public sidewalk down or across the street from the object of the demonstration.
If you've gotten to the point where you're lighting fires, forming barricades and human chains across the roadway, then you may as well be singing L'Internationale while you're planting bombs in the preschools and putting LSD into the water supply. The whole idea of civil disobedience is disconcertinglyunpatrioticun-American to most of us. (Most, I said. There is a beleaguered minority of people here who remember how there was a time when it wasn't possible to mine coal in America without the use of machine guns and children.)
Worth noting: the prevailing cultural hegemony finds the idea of trying to teach Americans how to organize a proper revolution to be even more unpatriotic than actually organizing one, which goes to explain why the Patriot Tea Party phenomenon is such an abject farce.
"If people don't instinctively stand up to corporations or cops, how will they bond effectively to form a revolutionary mob?"
Thought experiment: ask the reverse of this question. If people don't bond effectively to form a revolutionary mob, then how will they develop an instinct for standing up to corporations and the cops? (and if your goal is keep people from standing up to authoritarian power, then the question becomes: what's the best way to keep people from bonding effectively to form a revolutionary mob? p.s. At times, I think the list of answers must include: fergawzakes, don't let them see how the foreigners manage to do it.)
Leroy @ 190 writes: "purls of wisdom."
Not from me, Leroy. I'm just a crochety git.
Fragano @ 185: "That's a match where I'm not sure which way I'd place my bets."
I would naturally place my bets on Rorty, mostly out of tribal solidarity and affection for his way with English, but I'm pretty sure the mad French bastard would have chewed him up and spit him out.
heresiarch @ 188: "Of course, to fully embody your point you'd have not posted at all."
Alternatively, Mr. Stross, you could have contributed to the laying down of a thick skein of irony by attempting to derail the thread with knitting puns. (Oh snap, I fear I may have given away the game. Crap.)
Andy Wilton @ 168: "I don't think producing or maintaining a heterodox society is one of the higher priorities of the French Republic: not up there with liberty, equality and fraternity anyway."
Cage Match! Foucault vs. Rorty: two philosophers enter, only one leaves!
PNH writes: `I'm beginning to think that "I believe I am entitled to a robust viewpoint" deserves to be as immortalized as "I am aware of all Internet traditions."`
Oh, I am so there with you.
Rob T. asks: "I'd love to see the left kidnap the phrase right back, and broaden it to include counterproductively rigid ideological purity on the right as well as the left. (Both of my home state's senators are paragons of right-wing "political correctness," for instance.) Think there's a chance of that happening?"
We never stopped using the phrase that way. The reason you don't know that is because you're not allowed to communicate with actual leftists, living as you do in Oklahoma. You're not allowed to read our websites, you're not allowed to subscribe to our email relays, you're not allowed to speak with us in our coffee houses and other dens of godless iniquity (ubiquitous in Oklahoma, you just have to know where to find them).
Hell, in Oklahoma, leftists aren't even allowed to communicate with one another. Thing is, though... we're leftists, so we do it anyway. Screw the imperialist running-dog capitalist roader pigs. Having been kidnapped by right-wingers, you're of course not allowed to know any of that either.
Sorry, that's just how we roll.
Terry, it should also be noted that American leftists adopted "politically correct" among themselves for use as a pejorative around the time the shine started to come off the USSR for them after the rise of Stalin.
Ambar asks: "...Is the intent to persuade them to your way of thinking, or to figure out why they think the way they do?"
Oh heavens certainly not the former. Something of the latter mixed with a bit of foreboding about the implications.
One of the things that feeds my social anxiety is the nagging fear that I cannot rely on very many people to share my thoughts and philosophy about the importance of informed consent in social situations. I can sometimes be a little obsessive over things that other people would rather ignore. It's a problem— I'm working on it.
I can understand the people who think that both the veil and the collar are always tools of patriarchal oppression and cannot ever be tools of empowerment. I don't think I agree with them, but I can see a consistency in their position: they seem to regard all of it as dangerous paraphilia and disregard the testament of consensual practitioners that conflict with their own opinions. It's the people who inconsistently see the need for safety, sanity and consent in sexual dominance/submission practices— those people worry me. What kind of distinction would be important enough to draw that it should override that basic concern? I don't get that.
Vicki writes: "...prepared to defend me if I exercised my legal right to walk down the street wearing only a pair of shorts and my sandals? And then to ask whether it would change their minds to know that I'm 45, fat, and neither shave any part of my body nor dye my hair."
I can't speak for the others, but I'll stand up for you should that temptation prove too difficult to resist. I'm about the same age, overweight, and I rarely shave or dye my hair, but the San Francisco PD would certainly not arrest me for appearing in public on the sidewalk in front of my house without wearing a shirt. In fact, I do this all the time during the summer months.
I'd much prefer to live under a system of laws that treated the two of us equally in that regard. But then, people think I'm very weird at times.
Ambar @ 67: "If you can manage to formulate a question, I can try to answer."
I think my first almost coherent [you decide] question is, "How do I say anything with respect to one of these topics without jamming both of my feet up to the ankles into my stupid piehole in the context of the other?"
On the one hand, I'm a generally kink-friendly person despite the sad fact that my sexual life is totally devoid of all kink. Sigh. I understand that BDSM Done Right is safe, sane and consensual, and I believe that a lot of the criticism of the BDSM community comes from ill-informed reactionaries with axes to grind.
On the other hand, when I hear women insisting in the face of loud criticism to the contrary that their conforming to religious dress codes (and here I am casting a wider net than just Muslim dress codes... I'm looking at Baptists and others too) that I frankly find mysterious is somehow a submission to an oppressive patriarchal system, then I can't help but see what I think might be a parallel.
In each of these cases, we see women on both sides of the debate claiming that the other is voluntarily submitting to oppression by the Evil Patriarchy. Women in BDSM, I suspect, get this all the damned time from outsiders, just like Muslim women who take comfort from wearing the veil are constantly getting it from dumb-ass Westerners.
In the case of the religious dress codes, I think it's apparent that there are some women who are oppressed by the dress code [because it's neither consensual nor sane] and there are some women who empowered by the dress code [because it's both sane and consensual]. Likewise, it would seem the same to me when you replace the veil with a leather collar sporting a D-ring and a padlock, there's going to be a similar sorting out.
The problem for me is that I suspect there's a significant fraction of people who don't see this the way I do, and I'm not sure how to talk to them. Are there people who think the veil is always a tool of oppression but that the collar can be empowering? Are there people who think vice-versa? How do they manage to pull off that trick?
I mean to say this all seems blitheringly obvious to me, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years of following Making Light, it's that if it's blitheringly obvious to me, then it's probably five kinds of wrong. Hence, the I Don't Know What To Think posture.
If you'd like to put your cognitive dissonance suppressor to a good test, I recommend following up the discussions about the feminist critique of the hijab by reading this article in San Francisco Bay Guardian about women and BDSM.
I have a hard time making coherent language when I try to think about both of these things at the same time. Any help here would be hot.
Jacob Davies @ 40: "There's a strain of public atheism that seems to have latched onto attacking Islam and giving a pass to Christianity [...]"
Thankfully, I seem to have failed completely to notice it. I don't think I much want to know too much here, but some pointers beyond what we might see in the BoingBoing thread would be helpful. It might be worth understanding how folks are managing to pull off such a tawdry imitation of atheism.
I sure do hope the inanity doesn't leak over here. Just reading the comments over there in which the token 'Hayden' appears is enough to give me a headache.
I'll say this and try to shut up afterward: it saddens me that some of my fellow atheists have heard the call to come out of the closet but not the call to pragmatism. I see a lot of people in those threads who think they're helping care of freedom*, when in fact they're standing athwart the gates. I suppose the gooder news is that they're likely to be stomped doing that.
* c.f. http://books.google.com/books?id=XIoke44nJKMC
It's all so clear to me now. Michael Schwartz has been reading MacKinnon and Dworkin. Obviously.
"What, if any, is the distinction between a bully and a person who bullies?
I draw the distinction this way: a person with an orientation toward social dominance behavior is a bully, but a person who is oriented away from social dominance behavior can sometimes be moved to engage in social dominance behavior under limited circumstances for specific ends.
It's similar to the question of whether having one or two same-sex encounters in my sexual history gives me a claim to membership in the LGBT community. Sexual behavior, orientation and identity are all three different dimensions, and lots of people have differing opinions about how much behavior is required to establish an orientation. I don't think we have sufficient consensus on which to set a standard.
It is the same with bullying behavior and high social-dominance orientation. Can one be a high-SDO person without actually bullying anyone? Never met anybody like that, but I suppose it's unwise to declare it impossible. Can one act like a bully at times without actually having a high-SDO orientation? I say yes, absolutely, because I know people who have learned how to adopt such methods in order to function in authoritarian work environments where bullying is the only way to get the other authoritarian monkeys to make any useful progress. They hate it immensely, because it is not their orientation; it's an adaptation.
And then there is the question of identity...
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| 2005 | 6 |
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