As for whether William's literate enough to edit a magazine, you could always go read the magazine in question -- it's free, after all, and up for a Hugo.
That was my point. Kind of raises the bar for selling "he expressed himself badly" as an explanation, you know?
I like William
Then one would think you'd feel he ought to KNOW just how far out of line he was, so he can correct it and be better appreciated for his fine qualities. Which I believe you that he has.
I can think of a few reasons for someone who is not racist or bigoted to write something like that, but none of them are compatible with being fluent in English and literate enough to edit a magazine.
Not that you're going to listen to me, but 1) The man is BUSTED LIKE A CHEAP WATCH, and 2) You're making the fallout worse.
279: You see there is this hole in the sidewalk. I didn't see it and I fell in. Took me awhile to climb out and I saw the next hole. But I fell in. And so it goes.
I get that a lot, myself. Here. You can share my icepack.
278: I asked Marna for a clarification. She refuses to reply.
In fairness to myself, I use my head badly when it's just been bitten off.
Please restate what you want me to clarify, and I'll have a go at it, okay?
Brenda: No, I didn't. But lots of other people have, and I'm not actually obligated to.
Greg: Rock candy party in the corner!
253: I wouldn't know. I never had your advantages. I never went to college, it wasn't allowed for me.
Quite a number of "us" never had "our advantages", either.
Brenda, I started university at the age of 27, after I had been on my own for the better part of ten years. Someday, I may get the last of the loans paid off.
Outside my own specialty, I'm as much, and no doubt as spottily, self-educated as you are.
I was snarky in my tone to you because you pulled the exact same thing you're accusing others of pulling: came in here guns blazing -- trying to conceal your self-educated status as if it were something to be ashamed of, I suspect -- and were snarky, condescending, smug, and generally nasty. And hurtful.
These people you seem to think are infinitely above you? THEY do not think so. They can be hurt by nasty remarks and by having their words twisted. They can be hurt by things YOU say.
I should have recognised the approach, actually. I used to be very good at it myself.
Nobody cares, okay? There are people on here who make me feel like a subliterate moron on a regular basis, and some of them went to very good schools indeed and some of them just went to the public library a lot.
And while, yes, I was nasty, I was actually dead serious: you should read those people. They're available at the library, mostly, and they're mostly interesting. Durkheim isn't, but if you're interested in Social Sciences you need to read him anyway, because otherwise lots of stuff that IS interesting won't make a lot of sense to you, because he's insanely influential. Berger, on the other hand, is a delight.
256:
Because it's the best you're going to get from a Senate that will not impeach and voted 69-28 for this bill. It was a rout. There was no way it wasn't going to pass.
Second, it means that Obama doesn't have to expend political capital revising FISA during his term. And he is free to interpret it as he wishes, which he no doubt will and will be infinitely better than McCain.
Now, THERE is a defensible argument. You may want to consider starting fresh from there as if none of the previous had ever happened. I predict you will be AMAZED at how quickly it is possible to retrieve a reputation around here, just by, well, honestly trying to join the debate instead of dominate it.
Oh oh, they brought in a ringer. Ima gonna get pwnd now.
..."NOW?"
You know Marna you didn't really say a whole lot.
Nope.
As I am enjoined not to guess at what you are thinking, kindly explicate what else you were wanting. An explanation of what "falsifiable" means?
Do you know why or in what context it was that I referred to "Civilization And Its Discontents"?
I know in what context. As for why, that's between you and your theories. Am I to understand that if people understood you, they'd agree with you?
Well you see there was this big argument about whether this thing called "the surveillance state" was inevitable or not. I was second guessing on why it might be
Goodness. Was there?
It's an interesting guess, but the data does not support you.
given enough people and the right circumstances and that primitive nature will rise up.
And that's where you first went wrong. Because one of the things that Freud and his sources are, in fact, dead wrong about, is that whole Primitive Nature/Primal Hoarde schtick.
I believe Freud was right, culture is but a thin veneer, a mask of sanity.
Freud was dead wrong. His error followed naturally from his method: he dealt with individuals, mostly disordered ones, self-reporting on their relationship, as individuals, with their surroundings. You might look at Peter Berger's work on Social Reality for a good discussion of how physical reality, individual humans, and social realities interact and continually alter one another.
"Culture" is the first thing human beings in groups generate, the very second their immediate physical needs are met. People get one meal ahead, they start writing songs. Two meals and a change of clothes ahead, they're embroidering their shirts. A nice solid roof that will last out the winter and they'll invent a form of government and start planning to build a church.
It doesn't take a whole lot for people, left or right, to tear that off and show their true nature.
Nonsense. People starve for culture, in the sense we are using the word. They go cold for it. They suffer considerable physical pain and emotional anguish for it. They leave perfectly nice houses to go to where people are cold and hungry and unsheltered. They leave perfectly peaceful countries to join armies and be shot at in conditions of considerable discomfort. They take the food that is inadequate for their own immediate needs, tear it in pieces, and hand it to children.
Is there something wrong with that? Are you saying that under duress societies do not experience a break down in the social order.I just didn't want to bring up the whole post-modern bugaboo just to make one little point. I simply thought that here was something that we might have in common that I can point to.
... oops?
I also said this:
Our instinctual imperatives are at odds with the demands of civilization.
That is, there is a fundamental conflict, an antagonism, between my basic needs for survival and the demands of civilized society.
Again, is there a problem with that?
Yes. It's wrong. "Civilised society", i.e. culture, is fundamental to human survival and the drive to form cooperating groups of ever increasing complexity is one of the strongest "instinctual imperatives' we possess.
It seems unremarkable to me. Why else do we have laws?
Laws, customs, mores, rules... because we generate them. Obsessively. Instinctually. Invariably. Which I think you will find tends to suggest that the 'thin veneer' argument is, well, cracked.
Where does civilization come from if not from the collective actions of the individuals who comprise that society?
See reference to Berger, above: of course that is one place that it comes from, but it remains the case that if you want to know where it is going, you can't start with a finite group of individuals, analyze them in detail as individuals, and extrapolate to generate a model that tells you when you need to know, because what we experience as our individual selves isn't all of us by a long shot. We are also our position and function in the group and our position in an relationship to physical reality. We are not the only generators of the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are, much as we like to think it.
So wouldn't understanding how people work help us to understand human culture? wouldn't psychoanalysis be one tool that might prove helpful?
Certainly. Used properly. Which is not as a tool for understanding how societies and large groups within them handle large-group interactions and environmental stressors.
Brenda 169: Did somebody call for an anthropologist? Not that this needs a particularly good one; this is fairly basic stuff.
This strikes me as unfair.
Does it?
If the standards here are that all appeals to authority are disallowed then I'm going to have to reject it. You are not permitted to do the very things I am not permitted to do. Nor do I consider an anthropologist to be a proper authority on psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis takes place between a therapist and a patient. On the matter of Freud's theories on psychoanalysis, I am not even an improper authority.
As soon as he starts talking about cultures and societies, on the other hand ... he's out of his field. And in mine.
Yes, I have read, and studied, quite a lot of Freud, most intensively Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and Civilisation And Its Discontents. Under Naomi Goldenberg, with whose extensive writings on Freud you are doubtless familiar.
The study of psychology is the study of individuals within society. As soon as Freud gets into cultures and societies and how they function and mis-function, he's doing Anthropology and Sociology.
And the theories you are leaning on are his theories on culture, and yes, they are debunked. Extensively and some time ago.
Freud had effectively no experience of cultures outside the West. His psychoanalytic theory, whatever one thinks of it, and I remain agnostic, came from his own direct clinical experiences.
His theories about culture were amateur and armchair. Not only have I read him, I've read his sources. He relied extensively on Durkheim -- particularly on his work on Australian Aborigines, see Elementary Forms -- and Fraser, and to a lesser degree on Marx, all three of whom were themselves armchair: Durkheim and Fraser developed their theories by looking at whatever they could find about other cultures from what sources were available, which was mostly explorers, travellers, and soldiers -- nothing wrong with explorers, travellers and soldiers, but there's a deal wrong with assuming that everything they saw was everything there was to be seen, and Marx largely developed his theories of culture by beginning with his own experiences and extrapolating outwards with the aid of accounts by others.
So, yes. Freud on culture has been debunked, once, for all, and beyond saving. It's not that his theories are outre or even that they are outdated -- it is that his data was corrupt -- in the technical sense -- and can be shown to have been corrupt.
If you want to use Freud's theories about the effects of cultural and social constraints on the psychology of the individual, that's certainly a valid form of engagement.
But if you're going to try to use his admittedly fascinating and creative handwaving about the effects of individual psychology on society and culture to prop up anything but a bookcase -- Moses and Monotheism is, btw, an excellent size for this -- well. No.
And I promise not to try to tell you what you are thinking. I haven't the faintest idea what you are thinking, and am happy to admit it.
#6 Patrick: I for one would be grateful. I wrote Teresa a fanletter
when I first read that piece, and got back a lovely response that began
"Oh, Dear." (I get the impression relatively few well people write her
about that piece... meanwhile I find myself needing to show that piece
to people ALL THE TIME and a) I can only locate and buy so many copies
of Making Book and b) sadly, the rest of the book would bounce right
off of a number of the people I need to show that bit to.
Teresa: I have often wondered, actually, if it would be polite to
avoid telling jokes without warning should I find myself in your
presence again. Or to put it another way, the only reason I would
really be fazed at you falling over is that when *I* fall over it
generally HURTS. If one may ask, is it a sort of controlled and largely
harmless collapse, then?
I should say that what I eventually ended up doing was donating to the Ottawa Chapter.
Apparently www.alzheimer.ca -- the Alzheimers Society of Canada --
is down and has been for a bit, but a google on Alzheimer's plus your
city, country or province will almost certainly give any Canadian a
selection of excellent organisations to give money to.
*goes to donate*
*has completely unforgiveable fit of black humour at the existence
of a "Alzheimer Wandering Registry Program for Veterans" discovered
while googling "Alzheimers Canada"
*considers not sharing this on the grounds of good taste*
*remembers this donation is being made on behalf of the man who wrote the line "bet you half a dollar you're the Widow Jones?"*
*gives money*
Note to Canadians: http://www.alzheimer.ca/ keeps timing out. I knew there were a lot of Pratchett fans in Canada, but wow.
They wouldn't be right. Because you're more than just a single opinion on a single subject.
And so am I.
Not all subjects are equal. Torture is one of those ones where one's opinion does, indeed, define one.
Whatever you are, and I'm sure you have a great many fine qualities, you are standing neck deep in vile right now, and explaining that it smells just great, and everyone ought to climb in there with you.
So, you know. It's a pity if your feelings are hurt, but that's just one of those tough things a person has to do for the greater good sometimes.
People are complex. I do mean what I write. But you won't be able to divine the moral or ethical essence of me from my views on a single, narrow subject.
I'm not yet prepared to put serious money on it, if that's what you mean.
But it's not looking good.
How much are we willing to summarily declare people "bad" for holding opinions, and how willing are we ourselves willing to be declared "bad" for the opinions we hold?
Quite a lot and quite a lot. Look, if you're not your beliefs and actions, what are you?
You're defending a vile position and you're arguing it ... ingenuously, at best.
Pain and death are transitory. A lie, even if told under coercion, will follow you forever. And yes, I've experienced some amazing physical pain in my life. I know from experience that eventually you pass out from it. The police will either have to kill me, or get tired of their schtick and send me to jail and try to prosecute on evidence.
Aaaand now it's the fault of the victims if torture doesn't 'work', because they are just not tough enough.
No, sorry, I feel I now have enough on which to judge your "moral and ethical essence".
It's a right mess, and you may wish to see about getting it fixed. I recommend having your axioms rotated regularly, for a start.
If people think I am somehow a horrible man for what I write, I'm going to say they don't know anything about me and are in no position to make that call.
But I DO know something about you. I know what you write. And presumably you mean what you write.
Is that somehow supposed to be not 'you'?
#83, CRV:
This is what the moral thrust of this thread seemed to be: all forced extraction of information is equivalent to torture, and since we already know that torture is never forgiveable nor excusable in any circumstance, and never works anyway, anyone who advocates it or apologizes for it or commits it is a debased cretin.
I do believe you've got it.
If it was an easy moral call, we wouldn't be having this big national debate on it, now, would we?
What debate? That thing where people explain the concept of WRONG in small words to people with their fingers in their ears, ad infinitum and to the detriment of their sanity?
"Debate" is for topics where the possibility exists that either side might be right.
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