I also considered the literary Cersei much more impulsive and emotionally flawed. The problem with this more thoughtful, more commanding Cersei is that it makes her most important contribution to the plot (thus far) — her incestuous relationship with Jaime — totally implausible. I could believe the written Cersei would do something so obtuse and self-indulgent, but do you really think the cinematic Cersei would do something so suicidally dangerous?
Both worldviews are equally corrupted by absolutism. There is in many smart people a fundamental need to build worldviews only logically and consistently from absolute assumptions, and that's reinforced when people start declaring loyalty to philosophical systems, which are built that way by definition.
Personally, I think the only fundamental belief systems should be moral/ethical ones as well as some form of the scientific method (which is really just a restating of a commitment to be open to and learn from your mistakes) and everything else is ad hoc.
Letting the slip show a little more than the last one when it comes to the biases of the creators. That said, I agree with those biases, so I can't complain much.
The proportion of "argumentation" that occurs on the Internet or in any other arena even vaguely relating to politics that could be considered or even aspires to be formal argumentation is so ridiculously small that it's basically a rounding error.
Political commentary (and the counter-commentary that exists in comments) is a combination of people enjoying the sound of their own voice, tribal identification, worldview reinforcement, ego stroking, proxy combat, and entertainment.
It would be an interesting exercise to set up a comment thread in which there's an enforced rule that all comments have to at least attempt to be informally logical, but I doubt it would get any use after the novelty wore off.
As a practical matter, a religious philosophy that encourages people to sit around and hope they get saved would have a lot of useless/dead adherents and would be a memetic failure and likely die out.
I admit I missed a lot of the personal back and forth in comments, but my understanding was that the LOG did in fact pass DougJ's test, and you're right as rain.
The implication of DougJ's original formulation, which I think has not yet been dealt with in any of the many responses, is that there is a sort of hierarchy of reasonableness. Some things require more irrationality to believe. And he's selected his filter (GW + Evolution) at a level where he believes any source below that level of rationality is a waste of his time.
So there are two potential critiques of this process. One is that the particular filters are inappropriately selected (that is, that there are many people who disbelieve that the temperature of Earth's atmosphere is rising but have conservative insights that DougJ would find interesting).
The other is that the methodology itself is flawed. . that there is no hierarchy of belief rationality. . . that some people who believe things that would, in my opinion, completely disqualify them from sensible conversation (like that a significant proportion of American liberals are secret jihadists) do in fact have interesting insights on orthogonal topics.
In practice, I think DougJ is mostly right that some beliefs are naturally crazier than others and that a point along the spectrum can be used for easy filtering. I might pick a different point, though. I think that evolutionary theory applies to a process sufficiently distant from daily life that it wouldn't take much ideological or religious pressure to push an otherwise rational person to stick to mysticism.
On the other hand, he picked a couple of topics where the Republican ideological base has, as has been repeatedly polled, a distinct interpretation, so those filters could help identify conservative iconoclasts, who are probably more fun to read.
When will the cyborg-baiting end? This country will continue to spiral out of control as long as the cyborg-hustlers are out there playing the cyborg card.
I suspect Oksana Grigorieva is one of these moths – perhaps if Gibson had taped her without her knowledge a broader picture of their relationship would have emerged. I suspect there is much more to the story.
When one enters the business of defusing speculation about other souls, it's probably best to avoid speculating oneself, especially when the speculatee was, by all appearances, beaten hard enough to break teeth while holding her child.
@Jaybird, people tend to pay too much attention to wages. California civil servants can earn a healthy pension after 20 years. Get hired at 22, retire in your early forties and the state pays you for the rest of your life.
The reason lower income people 'suffer' when income or services are taken away is that their more marginal lifestyle means a higher percentage of their income and government services go towards concerns further down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. For example, a greater tax burden on the wealthy may mean fewer vacation homes or less time to go back to school for an MBA, whereas reduced government services more likely means public school music and art programs are cut, after school care is eliminated, public transmit is reduced (crippling the carless), and police services are reduced.
So do you honestly think the 'suffering' is equivalent in those scenarios?
If science discovers a cause and as a corollary develops the capacity to prevent homosexuality before society evolves into full acceptance of it then yes, homosexuality will disappear one way or another.
This, and related comments, are just nonsense. Anyone who thinks even a 100% provable, reliable method for 'curing' sexual orientation would 'wipe out' homosexuality are vastly, vastly overestimating the degree to which future parents want to muck around with the uterus. Modern prenatal care consists of taking iron supplements and getting occasional ultrasounds. That's it. If a very noninvasive test (measuring the thickness of the back of the fetal neck) through an ultrasound indicates a potential problem, there is the option of doing a more invasive test that involves sampling amniotic fluid, and which a large number of parents still don't perform.
Future parents have an extremely low tolerance for mucking around with the fetus, and they always will. Nobody is going to be pumping steroids and chemicals into the uterus routinely.
I believe Eames' point (or at least the one I want to draw from it) is that a great deal of the detail around which foods we eat and how we eat them is not about eating at all, but about signalling. Specifically, signalling wealth and status. A banana leaf may be convenient and even add flavor to the food, but they're ubiquitous, so you can't prove anything by using one. If you're eating off of a silver thali, well. . even if you get blood poisoning, you're showing that you're the sort of person who can get a hold of a silver thali. And of course, signalling abounds in western eating as well: wine selection, fine china, beluga caviar, etc.
@Mike at The Big Stick,
Or what if they found 20 dismembered bodies buried in the basement? What then? Huh? Murder? Check plus! It's an unassailable point.
I know, right? Remember all those times I called Bob a hillbilly and made fun of his (theoretical, as I have not heard him speak) accent? Or all those times I reconstructed him? Insufferable on my part.
The only reasonable response is to pretend the Civil War was about cotton.
Ressentiment, indeed.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Liveblog at the End of the Universe”
You mean Holiday. Also Season's Greetings
"
45 minutes to the destruction of Christmas Island
On “Cersei”
I also considered the literary Cersei much more impulsive and emotionally flawed. The problem with this more thoughtful, more commanding Cersei is that it makes her most important contribution to the plot (thus far) — her incestuous relationship with Jaime — totally implausible. I could believe the written Cersei would do something so obtuse and self-indulgent, but do you really think the cinematic Cersei would do something so suicidally dangerous?
On “Keynes vs. Hayek, Round 2”
Both worldviews are equally corrupted by absolutism. There is in many smart people a fundamental need to build worldviews only logically and consistently from absolute assumptions, and that's reinforced when people start declaring loyalty to philosophical systems, which are built that way by definition.
Personally, I think the only fundamental belief systems should be moral/ethical ones as well as some form of the scientific method (which is really just a restating of a commitment to be open to and learn from your mistakes) and everything else is ad hoc.
"
Proof that we live in a blessed age.
Letting the slip show a little more than the last one when it comes to the biases of the creators. That said, I agree with those biases, so I can't complain much.
On “Contra Tu Quoque, Or, Avoiding The Fourth Response”
It makes you feel better because you can go to sleep thinking "I fought racism today".
"
The proportion of "argumentation" that occurs on the Internet or in any other arena even vaguely relating to politics that could be considered or even aspires to be formal argumentation is so ridiculously small that it's basically a rounding error.
Political commentary (and the counter-commentary that exists in comments) is a combination of people enjoying the sound of their own voice, tribal identification, worldview reinforcement, ego stroking, proxy combat, and entertainment.
It would be an interesting exercise to set up a comment thread in which there's an enforced rule that all comments have to at least attempt to be informally logical, but I doubt it would get any use after the novelty wore off.
On ““Reasonable” People”
It's been trumped by the unassailable Argument from Al Gore Is Fat
"
As a practical matter, a religious philosophy that encourages people to sit around and hope they get saved would have a lot of useless/dead adherents and would be a memetic failure and likely die out.
Thus, Jeebus helps those who help themselves.
"
I admit I missed a lot of the personal back and forth in comments, but my understanding was that the LOG did in fact pass DougJ's test, and you're right as rain.
I mean, he may not like you for other reasons.
"
You don't believe in questions that don't start with 'do'?
"
Just to string this along for giggles. .
The implication of DougJ's original formulation, which I think has not yet been dealt with in any of the many responses, is that there is a sort of hierarchy of reasonableness. Some things require more irrationality to believe. And he's selected his filter (GW + Evolution) at a level where he believes any source below that level of rationality is a waste of his time.
So there are two potential critiques of this process. One is that the particular filters are inappropriately selected (that is, that there are many people who disbelieve that the temperature of Earth's atmosphere is rising but have conservative insights that DougJ would find interesting).
The other is that the methodology itself is flawed. . that there is no hierarchy of belief rationality. . . that some people who believe things that would, in my opinion, completely disqualify them from sensible conversation (like that a significant proportion of American liberals are secret jihadists) do in fact have interesting insights on orthogonal topics.
In practice, I think DougJ is mostly right that some beliefs are naturally crazier than others and that a point along the spectrum can be used for easy filtering. I might pick a different point, though. I think that evolutionary theory applies to a process sufficiently distant from daily life that it wouldn't take much ideological or religious pressure to push an otherwise rational person to stick to mysticism.
On the other hand, he picked a couple of topics where the Republican ideological base has, as has been repeatedly polled, a distinct interpretation, so those filters could help identify conservative iconoclasts, who are probably more fun to read.
"
Just for clarity, you believe that "AGW is a hoax" and "Evolutionary theories are speculation" are 'reprehensible beliefs'?
On “Nihilism is painless”
Occasional moments of life are quite awesome. I'm sufficiently confident that death contains no such moments.
End of treatise.
On “Thanks, Liberals. Now You’re Making Me Hate Recycling, Too.”
Chilling.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an empty beer can. Forever.
On “Our First Cyborg President”
When will the cyborg-baiting end? This country will continue to spiral out of control as long as the cyborg-hustlers are out there playing the cyborg card.
On “In defense of Mel Gibson”
When one enters the business of defusing speculation about other souls, it's probably best to avoid speculating oneself, especially when the speculatee was, by all appearances, beaten hard enough to break teeth while holding her child.
On “You say austerity, I say prosperity”
@Jaybird, people tend to pay too much attention to wages. California civil servants can earn a healthy pension after 20 years. Get hired at 22, retire in your early forties and the state pays you for the rest of your life.
"
Odd. Is this a crosspost from Red State?
The reason lower income people 'suffer' when income or services are taken away is that their more marginal lifestyle means a higher percentage of their income and government services go towards concerns further down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. For example, a greater tax burden on the wealthy may mean fewer vacation homes or less time to go back to school for an MBA, whereas reduced government services more likely means public school music and art programs are cut, after school care is eliminated, public transmit is reduced (crippling the carless), and police services are reduced.
So do you honestly think the 'suffering' is equivalent in those scenarios?
On “Homophobia’s Littlest Victims”
This, and related comments, are just nonsense. Anyone who thinks even a 100% provable, reliable method for 'curing' sexual orientation would 'wipe out' homosexuality are vastly, vastly overestimating the degree to which future parents want to muck around with the uterus. Modern prenatal care consists of taking iron supplements and getting occasional ultrasounds. That's it. If a very noninvasive test (measuring the thickness of the back of the fetal neck) through an ultrasound indicates a potential problem, there is the option of doing a more invasive test that involves sampling amniotic fluid, and which a large number of parents still don't perform.
Future parents have an extremely low tolerance for mucking around with the fetus, and they always will. Nobody is going to be pumping steroids and chemicals into the uterus routinely.
On “The Parable of the Banana Leaf”
I believe Eames' point (or at least the one I want to draw from it) is that a great deal of the detail around which foods we eat and how we eat them is not about eating at all, but about signalling. Specifically, signalling wealth and status. A banana leaf may be convenient and even add flavor to the food, but they're ubiquitous, so you can't prove anything by using one. If you're eating off of a silver thali, well. . even if you get blood poisoning, you're showing that you're the sort of person who can get a hold of a silver thali. And of course, signalling abounds in western eating as well: wine selection, fine china, beluga caviar, etc.
On “Bad News for US Soccer”
Except that EJ just strained his hamstring for Aris. Nice work.
Ching and Jozy up front would be a disaster. I think Buddle or Gomez would be much more likely.
On “What Tyranny Looks and Sounds Like”
@Mike at The Big Stick,
Or what if they found 20 dismembered bodies buried in the basement? What then? Huh? Murder? Check plus! It's an unassailable point.
On “A good thread is hard to find”
It's a tossup between Hustler and Political Affairs.
On ““The Ghost of Bobby Lee””
@Jaybird,
I know, right? Remember all those times I called Bob a hillbilly and made fun of his (theoretical, as I have not heard him speak) accent? Or all those times I reconstructed him? Insufferable on my part.
The only reasonable response is to pretend the Civil War was about cotton.
Ressentiment, indeed.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.