"Myriad ways" is still windy pompousness.
1,084 karma · joined October 28, 2015
I'm definitely feeling engaged, but not entirely enthusiastic... (EDIT: But I feel like I'm picking a fight with you, and I apologize for that. I'll definitely give this documentary a shot!)
Part 1 sounds like the fascist mode of thinking: "all our intractable emergent problems are due to an evil conspiracy of outsiders in our midst, with an inexplicable desire to destroy the world!" The whole problem with Ayn Rand is that she tried too hard to be anti-communist and accidentally turned fascist; seeing her followers pointed to as a fascist-style internal outgroup is as depressing as it is silly.
As for the other two parts -- tearing down the Gaia hypothesis and the Selfish Gene -- what does he think are the right things to think, if these are the wrong things? Are we going to just start pretending that the establishment Left was always anti-hippie, now that hippieness has turned out to have nasty emergent consequences?
I'm particularly annoyed that he blames the Congo situation on the Selfish Gene. The establishment likes to pretend that the Congo is too complicated to understand -- because the alternative is owning up to how the French backed the Hutus during and after the Rwandan genocide, and how the international community is still more sympathetic to the Hutus than the Tutsis. (See also the allegedly inexplicable causes of WWI.)
He also enumerates the following goals that the personal-computing revolution was after:
* No economic risk or failure
* No boom-bust cycle
* Decentralized political power
* Democracy
* Connectedness
* Non-hierarchy
* Pursuit of self-interest
* Desire to improve the world
Which of these does he think we shouldn't have pursued? Which of them does he think are bad? If you oppose all of them, you're asking to live in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and not even the neo-reactionaries want _that_.
Bacterial infections are no longer a serious threat -- even bubonic plague has been brought under control. It's unlikely that bacteria will ever become fully immune to one or another antibiotic, but if that does happen we've still got penicillin, bacteriophages, and sterilization techniques; bacteria will never again be as dangerous as they were as recently as the late 1800s.
For further clear-cut changes of the world for the better, there's smallpox eradication, the immanent eradication of guinea worms, the extirpation of polio from most of the world, and the development of anaesthesia.
Absolutely. For survival-to-reproduction -- and for quite a bit more than that -- Aristotle's physics are enough; but they're full of absurdities and strange edge cases when you look at them more carefully. To explain the flight of an arrow, you need Newton... and then you start noticing that Newton has edge cases too.
I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but I'm fine with cheering from the sidelines on that one. Whatever the answers are at that level, they certainly seem to be shaping up to be something deeply unlike our intuitions...
There's also no guarantee that a species' final cause isn't self-defeating. Introduce a pair of rabbits to an island with no natural predators of rabbits, and in about ten years the rabbits will eat all the vegetation of the island and then starve to death...
That much, at least, I'd call a good thing. A watchful peace, or a world where violence simmers rather than boils, is a realistic goal, but attempts to permanently end war have a history of semi-permanently ending peace instead. Think of the Peace of Versailles, which will be 100 years old in two years...
(On further reading: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection looks a bit more 'stretched', but keeps the northern latitudes readable while not exaggerating their size.)
Look up ahimsa -- nonviolence, the Jain philosophy of life -- as it applies to diet. Specifically: fruiting bodies of plants are meant to be eaten and possibly have the seed planted; you're not ending a life by eating cucumbers or avocados. (Ahimsa traditionally included allowing milk and eggs -- at least unfertilized eggs? -- although modern Jains are more skeptical; it could probably extend to honey, too.)
Aristotle describes all things and beings as having four causes: matter (what it's made of), form (how it's organized), first cause (where it came from), and final cause (what it's meant to do).
In this model, the final cause of an elephant is to live the life of a happy, well-adjusted elephant; it is not piano keys. I'm not sure what the final cause of a square is (maybe Aristotle's model only applies to that which has both matter and form), but the final cause of a living being is to live the best and most fulfilled form of that living being's life.
This means that an animal's purpose can never be said to be food. Predation interferes with other beings' final causes, so it's always a material evil. Is it always a moral evil? Non-conscious beings are never moral actors, so nothing can be called morally good or morally evil for them (although it's fine to suspect that the Devil had more of a role than God in shaping the evolution of the giant roundworm); for conscious beings, when and whether predation is morally evil depends on the nature of the universe -- on which theology/cosmology is true.
Catholicism, for example, teaches that humans have immortal souls and animals probably don't (although it doesn't rule out the existence of non-human intelligent life, so seared bottlenose dolphin and elephant cutlet are probably not wise meal choices); so raising animals for meat is potentially defensible -- although cruelty is bad for the human soul, and cruelty or callousness towards animals as well as towards people must be atoned for at some point.
Hinduism teaches that humans, animals, and all other beings share fragments of a single immortal soul; so killing an animal for meat is pretty much the same as killing a human for meat. Jainism -- which might be the original source of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology -- takes this a step further, and similarly condemns killing plants, recommending that one should live on products that can be gathered without killing their source. Classically, this meant milk, eggs, and fruiting bodies; modern Jainism is increasingly skeptical of the idea that one can keep animals and birds without violence, and prefers eating only nonviolently-gathered products of plants. This is an unfamiliar diet -- ahimsa diets are in general -- but I doubt it would be as restrictive as it sounds; and if it's the only diet that isn't literally homicide, it would be particularly well worth following.
If such-and-such a person can't write a book, they shouldn't get the credit for having written one; there was a time when a politician or general had to either write his own memoirs, or live with their not existing.
I say if a person can't write a book, they should either learn to write or not write at all. Ghostwriting degrades the idea of authorship; "having written a book" becomes just one more thing you can buy with money, instead of the product of genuine effort and skill.
What Trump said on the campaign trail was absolutely appalling, but people need to cool off unless he actually starts delivering on it -- and should figure out how to change the hearts of the large proportion of this country that's delighted by promises of Genghis Khan tactics. (I vividly remember talking with an ethnic Sicilian in Boston who couldn't imagine why an army wouldn't want to shoot enemy medics, so the problem's not unique to Appalachia.)
http://www.idlewords.com/2010/07/mission_burfjord.htm
Search for "The social center of Burfjord" and read that paragraph and the next. Something like this might be necessary if the US government wants to keep Appalachia populated; I genuinely don't know if I'd support that goal or be indifferent to it.
I particularly can't get over his outright xenophobia at the end: "Keep the dirty foreigners out, but I still hate Trump!" He can't have it both ways; either live with immigration and learn how to make it work well (which is probably the better idea), or allow everyone else to be raging xenophobes just like he is.
I noticed that, too. The first sentence says that many people hold unfalsifiable beliefs. The second says that many of these unfalsifiable beliefs are false. Which is it?
But that said, the Amsterdam School and the WPA work were beautiful, and I'd never heard of them before. Thank you for mentioning them! I'll be sure to look into both in a lot more detail.
Amazon might be a little bit like that: a fountain of wealth for Seattle (and check out real estate prices there if you think that's an exaggeration), but pumping that wealth out of all the rest of the globe.
But I see a weakness in this argument: Wal-Mart mostly displaced existing chain stores, which had similar wealth-pump effects -- and which had much higher prices than Wal-Mart, partially because they wanted higher prices but mostly because they didn't have Wal-Mart's hyper-efficient supply chain. And the old corner groceries and general stores had supply chains that were even worse than the previous generation of chain stores, and therefore even higher prices and even smaller variety...
So: you hear the wealth-pump argument, wealth pumps do sometimes exist, and I'm pretty sure the previous poster was accusing Amazon and Wal-Mart of both being wealth pumps; but I'm not entirely sure that that's what's going on with either business. If it is going on, of course, it's a problem. (Have there been any studies on Wal-Mart's effect on areas where it opens?)
Still, I see your point: are they getting to the right answer in the right way? I like the idea of breaking up blank facades, but I agree with your point that an area can look ugly or frightening to an outsider but fairly pleasant to a local -- and that if this way of doing things grows beyond the blank-facades question, it could become a serious problem.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe), Pruitt-Igoe was a slum-clearance project, intended to provide more hygienic, healthier, cleaner, less crowded, and generally better living conditions for people who were already living in the area. The hope was that it would integrate its inhabitants better into the economy, and help everyone living there -- both black and white -- to get ahead in life. The project was actually really well racially integrated for 1950s Missouri: blacks lived in buildings named for Pruitt (a black ace pilot in WWII), whites in buildings named for Igoe (a white Congresscritter), but they were all in the same vicinity. Presumably this reflected the composition of the slums Pruitt-Igoe was replacing, since the inhabitants of the old neighborhood (called DeSoto-Carr) were moved into Pruitt-Igoe as the old buildings were torn down. (No need to pity them for being expropriated: the inhabitants didn't own the buildings, and slumlords don't deserve much sympathy.)
And, strikingly enough, the initial design for the neighborhood would have been a success. High rises aren't the Devil when they're integrated into the urban fabric (otherwise present-day Manhattan would be a nightmare); Pruitt-Igoe was meant to be a mix of high-rises, mid-rises, and two- to four-storey walk-ups, until cost cutting came into play and they ended up with towers in a park.
Since the same people had the same economic conditions before, during, and after Pruitt-Igoe, and since they committed more crimes during Pruitt-Igoe than before or after, I think it's fair to say that the architecture, not the economic conditions, was at fault.
The rich, and the prosperous upper-middle class, can live where they like and enjoy traditional architecture (look up New Traditional construction), but ordinary people are stuck with ordinary buildings, which are awful under a Modernist regime -- or under our current Postmodernist regime of cheap pull-up sheds adorned with ticky-tacky.