“Full understand”: The new language of the Lesvos refugee camp
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
I don't know if it is intended that way, like a deterrent, but it sure seems like a punishment. These people were just trying to leave the hell of their home countries and find something better for their families. Often the horrors they are fleeing are a consequence of the former meddlings of actors from Western states. And look at how we in the West treat them when they come as a final resort.
If you want to blame the refugees on what the West did, how about the fact that most of these people (most of whom are economic migrants, by the way) would literally not have existed without Western science and technology? Check out the population graphs, look at how many people the land could support before modern medicine, the green revolution etc.
According to Hobbes. Rousseau had some nicer things to say about the state of nature.
In either case, we're not in the state of nature: we live in prosperous societies, and we both can and ought to provide humane treatment to those who seek it from us.
> If you want to blame the refugees on what the West did, how about the fact that most of these people (most of whom are economic migrants, by the way) would literally not have existed without Western science and technology?
What, like algebra[1] and basin irrigation[2]? "Western science and technology" is built on hundreds of years of near-Eastern and Eastern work. Neither region has any right to claim full responsibility for its fruits.
Even if they did, you would need to be wilfully ignorant to minimize our (Europe and the US's) actions in the Middle East. The fact that we had (and continue to have) a reciprocal exchange of knowledge with them does not excuse what we've done in the modern era.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi
Of course al-Khwarizmi wasn't the first or only person to "discover" algebra - he was building off of 2000 years of Greek, Persian, Arab, and Indian work.
The point wasn't that he's another great man[1], but that it's simply incorrect to talk about "Western science and technology" as if they're either isolated or monolithic -- they're neither.
If al-Khwarizmi hadn't have been Latinized and become the reference for Western mathematics until the Renaissance, then someone else would have. But that someone else would have come from the "Eastern" world, simply by virtue of where the relevant research and academic tradition was at the time.
What determines which culture will be the most dominant one is not one single factor, and some of them look completely random. For example, China invented movable type printing before Europe but Europe had an alphabet of discrete symbols that were optimized for stone engravings while China's alphabet was optimized for writing by hand quickly and with room for expression. That was one of the factors of why Europe could start the printing press revolution to democratize science and information.
I'm lucky to be living in Sweden in 2017, I would however want to move if this would've been 6th century Sweden.
And how would modern medicine and western science have faired without Arabic math and the Arabic preservation of Greek medical texts?
World history is complicated, and human misery has many fathers.
Probably just fine. I’ve read my share of Aristotle and let me tell you, it doesn’t seem to have been a boon to Europe that people kept reading that crap. I mean the guy advocated for slavery as a good/natural thing. And was literally anti-empricical. His philosophy of science boiled down into a sentence was basically “if you think it, it must be true.” God knows how long his work kept the Scientific Method from the mainstream. Galileo was persecuted because the church coopted Aristotelian thinking as dogma. It’s great the Arabs saved all that stuff, but imo it’s great for historical reasons. Very little of it was actually useful legit stuff in the way we think of things today.
Aristotle didn't have a "theory of science," because he didn't have just one science: he had the practical, rhetorical, and formal sciences, each with its own first principles.
> Very little of it was actually useful legit stuff in the way we think of things today.
Besides classical logic, universals, and virtue ethics, right?
Well yeah, so I should have said natural science.
> Besides classical logic, universals, and virtue ethics, right?
I don’t know: I went into the Classics expecting to encounter some great stuff—what with like 1000 years of hype and all—only to be pretty underwhelmed. My takeaway was that The Church put these Greek guys on a pedestal around 1200 and everyone in Europe didn’t know better until the Renaissance. Sure they played a role in history, but I never encountered anything particularly uniquely or irreplaceable or exciting in the Greeks that you can’t find elsewhere.
Just out of curiosity, what context did you read him in? Aristotle's influence is still very much felt across philosophy: virtue ethics is one of the three major schools of contemporary ethical thought, and deductive reasoning/classical logic are what every logic class begins with.
Aristotle has definitely been put on a pedestal over the years, particularly by powers looking to associate themselves with some sense of classical Greek "greatness". However, that doesn't diminish his real contributions to philosophical (and mathematical) thought.
The way YOU think of things today. You don't speak for the rest of us.
But this article was really hard to read. The author needs to do a better job of enclosing examples in quotes, it's hard to parse what's article, and what's example quotes.
> Thus speak often does the work of say, tell and ask, as in I speak him why?
I cannot parse that sentence easily, because I struggle to understand what's an example and what's not.
> Thus "speak" often does the work of "say", "tell" and "ask", as in "I speak him why?"
Now that, I can understand reasonably easily, just by adding quotes. Even better:
> Thus "speak" often does the work of "say", "tell", and "ask". For example: "I speak him why?"
Change a couple of words and add some more grammar, and it's crystal clear what the author is trying to convey.
> To commonly stands in for other prepositions such as at, in or on:I rather liked it the way it was. Even if I had to re-read some sentences.