i have had some extraordinarily interesting thoughts about chickens, including, but not limited to:
the trolley problem but with chickens
chickens in gimp suits
masses of chickens being spontaneously created and destroyed
every chicken on earth being replaced with something that is almost but not quite like a chicken
a chicken spa with rows of chickens being massaged
an infinite amount of chickens
chicken upload
cyborg chickens
becoming a chicken
and a poor family watching in horror as their chickens disappear one by one.
Oh no, chicken politics:
Capitalism: You have two chickens. The chickens have planned obsolescence built in so you have to repurchase them every few years. The chickens are classified as software and you don’t really own them but simply license a right to use them, and thus PoliceMob will hunt you down if you try to breed more chickens or CRISPR away the self-destruct genes.
Social democracy: You have two chickens. The state takes one of your chickens. You spend several weeks filling forms to qualify for the Chicken Investment Subsidy Program, after which you can get your chicken back. If you didn’t do this, your neighbor would be the one to get your chicken instead. The website www.governmentisgood.com explains how great it is that the state gives free chickens to people.
Statist socialism: You have two chickens. The state takes both; slaughters one and gives the meat to its voters; sends the other to the president’s offshore bank account in Panama; sets a price ceiling on eggs; and declares you a class enemy for not being able to produce eggs under that price. You buy eggs from the black market for twenty times the official price.
Anarcho-capitalism: You have two chickens. After your regular payments to Dawn Defense to make sure that your chickens aren’t stolen and that any rooster you would hypothetically buy in the future would actually be a rooster and that you are protected against all the things you couldn’t possibly anticipate, you can save a few satoshis each day. But one day you will surely have saved enough to purchase a rooster and hire your own servants.
Anarcho-communism: You have two chickens. PoliceMob shows up and shoots them because fuck you that’s why. The mainstream media says the chickens must have deserved it because surely PoliceMob wouldn’t do such a thing without a very good reason.
Mutualism: You have two chickens. You keep your chickens in your living room so that they remain unambiguously in your possession. You spend every waking hour doing something vaguely chicken-related so you can claim your daily production of eggs are worth 16 work-hour-units.
Utilitarianism: You have two chickens. You slightly inconvenience yourself to increase their welfare substantially.
Postmodernism: You have two chickens and absolutely no clue how to produce eggs. You invent ever more complicated constructs to try to stop anyone from noticing that material chickens in the material world actually do produce material eggs, no matter how clever your arguments are.
Steel postmodernism: Chickens are a social construct. You can’t eat social constructs, but the social construct “egg” usually refers to something that can be eaten so you use it as a convenient shorthand to conceptualize reality. You laugh at people who seriously ask questions like “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”
My wife and I went through
several IVF rounds, and our doctor even indicated that we could have our
embryos genotyped to select for certain traits. We didn’t, but we could
have. The phrase, “Their doing some very interested research in China
right now” was said during one of our consultations.
I have no
illusions that in 10-20 years, I could have an embryo not only selected
for traits I’m interested in, but the embryo edited using CRISPR if
necessary to express the traits wanted if not already present.
I imagine most people will find these scenarios grotesque.
n_arguments_against_popular_rule += 1
By contrast, the liberal yet strict regulatory environment of the UK, administered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), has made ours a widely envied model of how to foster a productive and responsible research climate that can supply valuable benefits for human health.
Pls no
If we want to avoid this, we had better renegotiate, rather urgently, the priorities of childrearing, so that parents cease to feel a duty (whether they like it or not) to wring every presumed ounce of potential from their offspring.
…wait, perhaps this isn’t so terrible after all. This doesn’t sound like bioethics, this sounds like a reasonable attempt to make the culture less horrible to people.
Beyond the valuable ability to avoid certain severely debilitating illnesses, genetic selection of embryos for a “better child” is no more likely to deliver than is the fantasy that cloning will somehow make us immortal. But what it would do is distract from the value of love and nurture, and of making the most of what you have, in favour of crude biological determinism. Which is why I hope that, in the end, most folks will look at themselves and think: “Well, sex never did me much harm.”
Remember that thing some acquiantances of mine were doing a few months ago? Yeah, this thing which is on BBC now. The only proper use of IP law: trolling violent extremists who are way too close buddies with PoliceMob to have a fair and level playing field with their opponents sans unfair and utterly hilarious tricks. (I hear that at least glittery Sleipnicorn t-shirts and other utterly n e o t e n i c products can be expected.)
(And a context note for people who might want to be spoilsports about the superiority of Our American Principles about free speech etc.: I agree with said superiority and would very much prefer see said Principles applied here as well; the US has Skokie, we have PoliceMob shooting people in the eyes with FN 303s and forcibly removing absolutely nonviolent demonstrators (such as a priest simply holding up a sign about loving thy neighbor) because they present an eyesore to the fash on their parades. The only thing the anarchists (disclaimer: the person named is not known to be an anarchist, I’m talking about the demonstrators who regularly get brutally suppressed) are asking for is the same treatment the nazis get.)
IMO Our American Principles about free speech suggest that making glittery neotenic T-shirts about fascists is exactly what we should do. Everyone gets a right to say their piece, and everyone gets a right to be made fun of. EQUALITY.
OBVIOUSLY
But bringing IP law to it is unfair and has a potential chilling effect on legit politics and basically what was done should not be able to be done in a fair world and it is absolutely hilarious nonetheless.
IP law is evil and horrible and just because it can occasionally be used for good ends doesn’t mean it stops being evil and horrible. Just like that cheap sneering on the sneerers can feel good doesn’t mean a situation where people are able to get away with cheap sneering is good.
If these guys had been silly ineffectual nazis (like Pekka Siitoin whose disciple tried to hijack a plane in the 80s using a “hypnotic-magnetic gaze” learned from Siitoin’s batshit occult stuff) trademarking their shit and pursuing it with legal means would’ve set a worrying precedent in suppressing political opponents, but in a situation where those guys have the second-biggest parliamentary party and one of the most popular national medias unambiguously on their side, with PoliceMob playing blatant favorites, and when the SOO started it by threatening legal action on the Loldiers of Odin, they were really really asking for it.
"Vimes is fundamentally a person. He fears he may be a bad person because he knows what he thinks rather than just what he says and does. He chokes off those little reactions and impulses, but he knows what they are. So he tries to act like a good person, often in situations where the map is unclear."
Terry Pratchett, describing Sam Vimes in a Usenet post back in 2004.
Okay, so this is what I love about Samuel Vimes as a Heroic figure.
Sometimes you get Heroes who are paragons of virtue. Even if you see their internal monologues, their mindset is pure and virtuous. Sometimes, they’re tested and you get a Big Moment where they have to choose whether or not to stick to their principles or give in to temptation and expediency.
And then you’ve got the more “Pragmatic” anti-hero types, who do some nasty things in pursuit of the greater good, and who might struggle with the things they’re doing, but they do it anyway because the world is not black and white.
And then you’ve got Sam Vimes, who is dragging himself kicking and screaming into being Lawful Good. Sam Vimes would not beat a suspect into confessing, but NOT because Sam Vimes is an innocent soul who finds the idea abhorrent. Not because he dosn’t think there are some scumbags who deserve to be separated from their teeth. Sam Vimes won’t beat a suspect because that’s not what a good man would do. Sam Vimes is understanding with others, but totally uncompromising when it comes to his own behavior.
Vimes isn’t a “Good Person” by nature, but by choice. By constant, uncompromising choice.
I think this is the only way to be a decent person.
Remember that thing some acquiantances of mine were doing a few months ago? Yeah, this thing which is on BBC now. The only proper use of IP law: trolling violent extremists who are way too close buddies with PoliceMob to have a fair and level playing field with their opponents sans unfair and utterly hilarious tricks. (I hear that at least glittery Sleipnicorn t-shirts and other utterly n e o t e n i c products can be expected.)
(And a context note for people who might want to be spoilsports about the superiority of Our American Principles about free speech etc.: I agree with said superiority and would very much prefer see said Principles applied here as well; the US has Skokie, we have PoliceMob shooting people in the eyes with FN 303s and forcibly removing absolutely nonviolent demonstrators (such as a priest simply holding up a sign about loving thy neighbor) because they present an eyesore to the fash on their parades. The only thing the anarchists (disclaimer: the person named is not known to be an anarchist, I’m talking about the demonstrators who regularly get brutally suppressed) are asking for is the same treatment the nazis get.)
@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else? It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.
Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?” I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go. (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)
(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)
As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.
The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.
(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))
Thanks for the fast response.
IMO, “liberal arts” is not a very useful term here. In modern usage it tends to refer to types of education which in some way hark back to the old quadrivium/trivium and the notion of a “broad education” they represented. The quadrivium/trivium had no “humanities as opposed to STEM” focus – you can sort of break it down (imprecisely and misleadingly) as “trivium is (premodern) humanities, quadrivium is (premodern) STEM,” but logic is one-third of the trivium, so if you count that as “premodern STEM” you’ve got 5 of 7 “premodern STEM” subjects.
(The quadrivium included music, because this was thought of as the study of “number in time,” to go along with arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), and astronomy (number in space and time, i.e. something like physics).)
Hardly anyone actually uses the original trivium/quadrivium anymore, but modern “liberal arts education” tends to aim for the same breadth. For instance, at the “liberal arts college” I attended (where I got a physics degree), all students were required to take at least two classes in each of four “groups,” one of which was natural science (and there was nothing like “physics for poets” – everyone had to take the same intro science classes that the science majors were taking, which were taught with appropriate rigor), and one of which was something like “syntactic systems” (it included math, symbolic logic, foreign language courses excluding those classed as “literature courses,” and linguistics).
(Also, the “liberal arts college” as a a subtype of American colleges has a bunch of other characteristics, like being expensive, having small class sizes, and holding many classics as Socratic-ish discussions rather than lectures. None of these have much to do with the distinction I think you’re drawing.)
“Humanities” I think is a term that works strictly better than “liberal arts” here, because in the modern university it tends to mean stuff that isn’t “natural science” or “social science,” e.g. literature and history. Still, even this is way too broad, since the “dialect” of a history department, say, will be different from that of a literature department, and even literature departments with different focuses will have different “dialects.” (There’s been a fair amount of friction involved in the attempt to bring things like deconstruction into the discipline of classics, which tends to be old-school about most things, including literary analysis.)
What I think you’re pinpointing is something like “the most commonly used intellectual dialect in modern university literature departments, excluding classics.” Although that isn’t a very snappy phrase. “Talking like an English major,” although crude-sounding, is actually pretty close, but is likely to make you sound like don’t know whereof you speak (cf. the reaction to @theungrumpablegrinch‘s review of NAB). I’d love to find a phrase here that is readily and mutually intelligible.
Okay, the concept I’ve been trying to translate has been, in my brain, defined by a Finnish word which basically means “not STEM” and I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the word ‘humanities’. That specific dialect is a subtype of it, but there seems to be a general pattern of “humanist” vs. “mechanist” language and thinking which this dialect, the postmodernist “reality don’t real” meme, the “scientists are soulless, understanding destroys wonder” meme, the idea that science has difficulties modeling fluid dynamics because our systems of knowledge are founded on patriarchal rigidity [sic], etc. are extreme edge cases of.
The thing isn’t limited to English as eg. gender studies tends to feature the same thing to some degree as well; whatever the fuck CrimethInc. is its “Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant” is exactly that thing(“Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.”); the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is also partially about that thing; I’ve seen many humanities people comment on issues of science with an embarrassing unawareness of the actual mechanisms of how things operate (because the broader version of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility lets them believe things are way simpler than they actually are (and it obviously operates in reverse too with naive STEM people on humanities questions causing enough facepalms to extract all the world’s cooking oil needs from)); the people who stop treating others as humans if they say the word “rational” are that thing; etc.
(And similarly the “mechanist” edge case would be the stereotypical weakman “soulless” engineer who thinks emotions don’t matter and Spock is something to emulate instead of an embarrassing failure of a humanist attempt to cargo-cult rationality, identifies as Objective Rational Thinker™, uses models derived from physics to explain all human behavior and forgets that they are crude simplifications at best, etc…)
The memory grew brighter. “Professor Slughorn,” Hermione asked brightly, “What if someone wanted to split his wealth into multiple offshore accounts? Say…seven?
“Good heavens, seven?”
“Well, isn’t seven considered a magically significant number?”
“Merline’s beard, girl! Isn’t it bad enough to consider doing it once? To dodge their tax bill seven times…This is all hypothetical, isn’t it, Hermione? All academic?”
“Of course, sir,” Hermione said, smiling. “It’ll be our little secret.”
@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else? It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.
Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?” I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go. (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)
(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)
As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.
The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.
(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))
latin:
words like 'yes' and 'no' aren't important. memorize these 3000 different ways to talk about killing people though because you will use them
greek:
hello naughty students it's participle time
egyptian:
ancient pictionary
french:
pronouncing every letter is for chumps
german:
let's combine every other word together to create the U L T I M A T E F R A N K E N W O R D
mandarin:
lol whats a verb tense
spanish:
LOL WHAT ISN'T A VERB TENSE
japanese:
I heard you like learning new writing systems so here, have three of them (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
russian:
can verbs of motion "go" kiss my ass or can they "be carried by vehicle towards, and eventually reach, on one singular incident, that has not yet happened, but is certain to happen" my ass
finnish:
take a few root words, worderize rootsfromforth quiteunfew deroottakenworderizations for everything else you needeth towordalize
