3,623 Forum Posts by "Ravariel"
At 1/22/11 09:47 PM, SevenSeize wrote: I had them wiped because I had a lot of my opinions posted on things I'm not allowed to have opinions on anymore. I wish that was a joke, but it's not.
I mean, global warming.
Global warming deleted my posts.
Laaaaaaaame. Global warming is such a dick >:(
Dunno. Research was done by a fella named Bartels, here is the original data the slide was taken from. Methodology and links to research was not given. One of the reasons I linked this was because of the lack of direct linkage to methodology. Made me wonder if it was spinnerific.
This suggests two things immediately (aside from inter-party bickering):
1) that greater income equality can coexist with, or even increase overall, prosperity growth.
2) The lack of any difference (once we factor in standard deviation) of the prosperity of the ultra-rich shows us that both parties are equally solicitous toward them. So saying that the Repubs are in the pockets of the ultra-rich while the Dems are not (or vice-versa) is folly.
What do you think of these numbers? Do they challenge your perception of the role of government in the prosperity of America? Or do you think there is some other context that may better explain the numbers?
At 1/20/11 03:30 PM, TheMason wrote: Well not sure if it's a good thing or bad thing for the NG politics community...but my wife left for USAF Basic Training (she joined the Air Natl Guard) yesterday. So for the next eight months at least I'll be a lot more involved on the BBS!
Well, congratulations are in order I suppose. I hope the military is good enough to put deploy you two together if/when they do.
Well, when connections break, things don't magically disappear; they are merely re-shuffled into the network and bring about a new reality. If a concrete truck breaks down and cannot deliver a necessary load to the construction site, the construction site doesn't go poof, the contractor shifts his network to include a new truck and schedule repairs. If a person cannot get enough funding for a project, he may instead join a team doing similar work in order to gain better established and find that funding in the future. If a trade agreement with another tribe breaks down, that does not immediately effect the ability of the fire-making tribe to make fire now... but it may shift the balance of power and eventually drive the society to a place where it disperses and then cannot make fire. Through enactment and a shifting of the network, the realities and contexts become much more dynamic, much more stable and much closer to the reality we see every day than a stripped-down stylized approximation. Mol's theory of enactment also falls a little short as in her estimation, human actors are required to enact objects and determine their reality, heading a little close to perspectivalism and the pitfalls of postmodernism and subjective relativism. If we allow non-human objects, through the networks, to enact each-other via the rules of the universe, we can expect a systematic understanding, and empirical consistency that neither theory allows for, without sacrificing the dynamics and variability that we see in the world. We still get context-sensitive reality while maintaining a foundation in reproducibility, logic, and reason.
The study of science as a social endeavor (usually called Science and Technology Studies, or STS), I tend to think of more in terms of anthropology: the study of human behavior and culture. It grounds the study in an empiricism that a sociological approach can skirt in favor of a certain level of relativism. In Anthropology, when you study a culture, you must necessarily produce artificial bounds on what you study, because if you tried to study a culture including all of the ways that they interacted with other cultures, then you would also have to study those other cultures in order to understand the dynamics, and then it's turtles all the way down. The same is true here: We need to realize that context for anything we look at is, in truth, infinite. We must, if we want to fully understand, include all aspects of the world in regards to everything. This is, naturally, impossible... so we must artificially end our study at some point. My attempt with my own relational theory is to better understand where the limits of effective study actually are. If we can find significant tangential effects of a discovery or of a scientific practice we should explore them. If we can enumerate all of the first-order connections that make a thing be, then we can better trace lines of effect throughout the greater society, and I think that will give us a greater understanding of science and technology as it relates to society.
Thank you to all those who finished all 3000 words of that monster, and discussion as usual is welcomed here.
Starting in 1979, a French scientist and philosopher by the name of Bruno Latour (a student of Michel Foucault, whose name you may recognize from earlier), began to look at the work of science as a social construction. A couple of his most seminal works include Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern. In Science in Action, he introduces the concept of studying scientific endeavor as a social object, that has to be studied, as it were, in action. To merely take the final result would be to miss a lot of the important contextual factors that bring about the answer. He uses the example of the discovery of the double helix as evidence that social and political forces are instrumental in how a scientific discovery is brought into being. Without Francis Crick's political maneuverings, without the constant fight for funds, without a face in the political arena that gathers support, scientific discovery is nearly impossible to do. This is the first blending of the natural and the social, of bringing context back into the equation of empirical, objective reality and letting the methodology color the result. In We Have Never Been Modern, he breaks down the modernist (and post-modernist) nature/society dichotomy by introducing the concept of hybrid objects. Objects that blend the social and the natural, and uses the idea of networks to hold up the construction of things in a way that bypasses the need for purification and translation.
The main idea behind actor-network theory is that every "thing" is a hybrid of the social and the natural. And we can consider the ideas of nature and society as opposite poles of a scale. Where religion may be strongly on the social end of the scale, a rock in the wilderness no one has ever seen may be heavily to the natural end of the scale. And these objects, both human and non-human are held together by specific networks that, without any one part of it, could not exist. And that the only real difference between any two objects (be they something as small as a campfire, or as large as a nuclear reactor, or as complex as a society) is the length of the network necessary to hold it up. For example, if we compare a cooking fire and a nuclear reactor, we can see that effectively they do the same thing: provide heat and light to people. However, in order for the fire to exist we need very few human and non-human actors to make it possible; the wood, the spark, the person who made the spark and gathered the wood, and the teachings that let the person know how to build a fire... aaaand that's about it. For the Nuclear reactor, you need hundreds of construction workers, instruments and machines, and thousands of hours of schooling and infrastructure, etc, etc... much, much larger network necessary to make it possible. Two objects, which do similar things... whose only difference is the scale of the networks necessary to bring them into being. We can look at cultures the same way. Instead of the modernist hierarchy of societies, we can see that the size of the networks that a small, tribal, "savage" society needs to exist are simply much, much smaller than the networks necessary for a "civilized" society such as that of Europe or the US.
There is one more author whose work I need to reference before we come to the end, and that is Annemarie Mol. You may remember I referenced her work last week, but in her book The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, she puts forth the idea that, basically, context determines reality. Only through interaction can anything be shown to exist. She uses the example of arthrosclerosis (and let me tell you when you have a class that is a 3-hour discussion and you need to say arthrosclerosis dozens of times a day... eeeesh) to show that no thing is only ever one thing. To a patient prior to diagnosis, arthrosclerosis is pain in the legs, inability to walk and swelling in the extremities. To the doctor who diagnoses the condition, it is a weakening of the pulse through a stethoscope. To the surgeon it is crunchy veins and the plaque he just used a tool to scrape out of those veins. To the guy doing necropsies on amputated limbs, it is a thickening of the arterial wall under a microscope. The idea is that in each of these contexts, arthrosclerosis is a different object... because how it is interacted with is different. To the person in the lab looking at slices of sclerotic veins under a microscope... without the microscope, the amputated leg and all of the tools relevant, that thickening of the arterial wall doesn't exist. Depending on who is enacting an object and with what, an object has a different reality. There is no practical single objective reality to anything. It all necessitates interaction. Things literally cannot exist in a vacuum.
My own philosophy is sort of a blending of Mol and Latour's ideas. Latour's networks are too static, they assume a network for each object and that if any part in the network breaks down, the object it holds up will fail to come to be. If we look at Mol's theory in comparison, we see that everything is in constant interaction, it must be continually upheld by enacting other things and being enacted by them. This gives us a much more dynamic, shifting environment than Latour. But Latour is still correct in that the network is necessary for an object to exist. Without the concrete, we could never build the nuclear reactor. So how do we get through this stalemate? With one, very simple, change: There is only one network, the only difference between objects is not how long their network is, it is how many first-order enactments are necessary to uphold it. So what do I mean by all of that? Well, if we follow the networks that are required to hold up any object in Latour's model, we can eventually follow them to include everything. For instance, I mentioned the comparison between the fire and the reactor earlier, and I said that there was very little necessary to make that fire possible: wood, spark, person, culture that taught fire-making. Well, that was a bit of a lie. In order to get wood, you need trees, which need an ecosystem in order to grow, mature, and then die in order to provide wood. In order for there to be a society that can teach fire-making there needs to be several people, all who do many things, including hunt, gather, farm and trade with other societies, which expands their network to include many other societies, which can then expand into the entire world. But if we can connect the fire in the mountains of Peru with the entire world, then how is that different with the reactor which must be able to do so as well? Well, that's where the first-order connections come in to play that determine a thing's being. My original list of network connections for the fire was only kind of a lie... all of the things I mentioned are necessary first-order connections, they are the things immediately necessary for an object to exist in a specific time. All of the other parts, the greater society and the connections with a large ecosystem and trade with other societies, are only necessary to uphold the objects that are the first order connections. They take two or more steps to reach from the "fire" object. But how does this improve over Latour and Mol?
Okay... 3-parts... >_>
continued...
Blog post #2. A big one this time, almost 3000 words, so a two-poster here at Newgrounds.
Theory of Relational Ontology
Here in my second post, I thought I'd explain a significant underpinning of my philosophy of how things "be." That is: how do we look at things, and describe how they exist in the world? This study of the existence of things is called Ontology. This discussion will necessarily be far more philosophical and conceptual than likely anything else I post here, but I feel it is necessary to explain in order to avoid needing to go over it multiple times when a related issue emerges in the future. It will also be considerably longer than to what you may be accustomed. This is necessary because I need to first set out the principles and history of four different ideas in order to get mine to make any sense within context. And as context and nuance is a huge part of my own philosophy, this is something that I feel is necessary. Fair warning, I will reference books you've likely never heard of and that are beasts to read... but very worthwhile. I will attempt to give you as much cliffsnotes-style information about their content as I can, but a lot will be lost in the shortening... so I would urge anyone who is interested in these topics to go out and read them.
So in order to first explain what a Theory of Relational Ontology is (would that be considered technically a pun or a tautology?) we need to look at what other ideas exist out there that this may both deconstruct and be informed by. Three significant ideas have been widely accepted in the mainstream over the last century: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Actor-Network Theory. My own theory is most closely related to actor-network theory, but differs in a significant way. But first, let me give you a rundown of the history and precepts of the first two ideas; modernism and postmodernism.
Modernism was a philosophy that grew out of the enlightenment, coming to the fore in the mid to late 19th century after some serious, large-scale conflicts threw into stark contrast the ideals of those in the Enlightenment period with what was beginning to be the reality of an increasingly fractured world, modernism began to try and separate Nature from Culture, seeking to reduce that which was "natural" to a single objective (quantitative, rather than qualitative) view, and what was "cultural" to being a layered, linear, series of (again, quantitative) steps from the barbaric to the civilized. This philosophy was tied deeply into the colonial practices of Western Europe, and contributed greatly to advanced in the physical sciences... while at the same time creating a cultural separation between the civilized colonizers, and the ignorant and backwater colonized tribes. It created a hierarchy of cultural value, as one would create a hierarchy of property value. Ironically, though this was intended to give "savage" cultures a path to "civilization" (as opposed to the static nature of culture from the romantic period), this instead created an "Us vs. Them", "We vs. Other" dichotomy that only harmed other cultures' evolution. There are books and books and papers and papers about the effects of this on cultures around the world (most notably in Africa where national lines and tribal areas are in conflict and have likely been the cause of much of the areas instability over the last 200 years), so I can't get too far into it. But the point is that Modernism tried to separate, to purify, things into their constituent parts. This was definably an English cultural trait; that was definably an African cultural trait. This was definably a natural fruit; that was definably a cultural juice. Kant, Locke, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg, Picasso and Nietzche are staple examples of Modernist philosophers and artists: all of whom extol a fundamental structure, an objective truth, for everything, including music, morality and consciousness.
But the problems arose when we began to realize that in order to purify, in order to rigidly define the nature of a thing, we then needed to use some tricky translations to put everything back together. If fruit was natural, but juice was a cultural creation (after all, we don't see cran-raspberry juice hanging from trees in the wild!), then how do we get from one to the other? Post-modernism came in to save the day. It basically tried to deconstruct all of these established paradigms of what is what, and basically said that everything that modernism said to be true was all really just language games, made to satisfy human curiosity and the necessity of our brains to classify. It put forth the idea that everything is semantics, and that only an individual can truly ever understand what it is he or she sees, and that perspective was the driving force behind reality. Basically the tenet of postmodern philosophy is summed up, oddly enough, by Descartes' famous Cogito Ergo Sum thought experiment, where he found that the only thing that he could not doubt existed was his own doubt, and that following from that, he must also think, and that in order to think, he must exist. Beyond that, everything could be illusion. This movement away from objective truth into subjective truth led to abstraction and minimalism in art and music, and to a sort of cultural relativism that sought to establish all cultures as equal. Michel Foucault, Philip Glass, John Cage, Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemmingway are some influential figures in the realm of post-modern philosophy and art.
The problem there, as it might be evident, is that when everything is relative to the observer, how can we reach any consensus on, well... anything? Not only that, but it doesn't solve the problem of the hierarchical nature of modernism, other than painting it in a new light of semantics. So we are left with nature and culture as semantic arguments instead of material arguments... but we still need to do all of the work necessary to separate and put back together all of the things in the world that are blends of nature and culture. So, how do we effectively describe an object's complex reality? Enter actor-network theory.
As a quick aside, both of these movements are obviously FAR larger and far more complex than the brief paragraphs I have given them here, and include a wealth of context and knowledge into the... epistemology (the study of the growth of knowledge) of the social theories over the last 200 years. I am still not anything close to an expert on any of these movements, so any issues with over-generalization or missing possible critical points can be attributed both to lack of space and possible lack of information by me. However, on to the meat of my point, rather than just the background.
Continued...
It's a monster... nearly 3000 words. Could have been an entire book, probably... and perhaps it is one that I will write one day... but it's a good primer on a basic philosophy that will be the foundation of a lot of my work in the future.
Comments always welcome.
Also: Penis.
Pic unrelated, but fucking cool...
At 1/13/11 08:27 PM, SevenSeize wrote:At 1/13/11 09:59 AM, zephiran wrote:Blank toastAt 1/12/11 08:18 PM, Proteas wrote: Boobs?Angel Food Cake.
At some point in time I frosted this with Dulce de Leche.
Where'd all your posts go?
Shameless is fucking hysterical.
There are three schools of though on the notion of existence that hold any weight in my opinion.
The first is Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum. Basically the only thing that he could positively say existed is his own doubt of the existence of other things.
The second is the school of thought that says that for anything to exist, everything must exist, because only through interaction (light interacts with objects, bounces off, interacts with eyeballs, ergo we see said object) can we say anything exists. Therefore if we can say anything exists (see #1) then everything we experience must exist, including those things we cannot see but that must logically exist to make what we experience possible.
The third school of thought is to do your own homework :P
So I recently started a blog about science technology and societal issues called The Cyborg Apologist. Today I wrote the first real post and thought I could use this as a method of secondary advertisement/discussion. Below is the full text of my opening salvo. Comments critiques and discussion is welcomed. Tell your friends (but hide your wife and kids), and join me in discussing some really cool stuff that will delve into not only the technical aspects of science, but also science fiction and the place it has in the discussion of societal reactions to science.
What Is a Cyborg, and Why Am I One?
As my blog is titled "The Cyborg Apologist" I thought I should first discuss what, exactly, that meant. The immediate meaning is twofold: first, that I am an apologist for the idea of cyberization, for the idea of the cyborg as a good thing, a positive advancement of the human condition; and second that I am a cyborg, and an apologist for my own existence and the relevance of science and technological advancement as social forces. So we then have to answer the question of what a cyborg is. It will be difficult to be an apologist for a concept if we're not on the same page as to what that concept implies.
Popular media has characterized the cyborg as a mostly-machine villain, human perhaps only in appearance as a disguise to carry out some nefarious robotic program. We need only look to movies such as the Terminator franchise (or more cheesy 80s b-movie in the Cyborg movie franchise... yes, franchise) to see this. Darth Vader is another good example. But in other fiction, cyborgs are not inherently evil. Frankenstein's monster could be considered a cyborg, as a person built of flesh and science... but he, though flawed and scarred, was not evil (ignoring the popular monster movies, of course). The Replicants of Blade Runner may have been antagonists, but they were not evil by nature. In the Ghost in the Shell series, nearly everyone is a cyborg of some level, both hero and villain.
But what IS a cyborg? The dictionary defines it as a person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device. Others define it as a being with both biological and artificial parts. But that begs the question of where "being" and "physiological functioning" begin and end. And those are more difficult questions. Do we only include internal physiological functions via the dictionary definition or do things like sight, hearing and communication qualify? And where, by the second definition do the parts of a person end? Do we include a person's wardrobe, their location, job, and tools? Can we distill a "person" to their flesh and blood body and brain sans everything else that they may use to interact with the world?
No, I do not believe we can. I do not believe that we can only include our internal organs and body parts as our only physiological functions. I do not believe that we can separate our actions, our creations, or our tools from what we consider to be our own being.
Georges Canguilhem, in a lecture given in 1947 called Machine and Organism, laid the groundwork of the idea that the human mind considers the tools it uses to be extensions of the body. A Hammer, once grasped, is no longer a hammer, but rather an extension of the arm that can now drive nails. Considering the ease with which anyone can use simple tools with little to no training, this idea is not so revolutionary as one might think. The idea of tools as organs becomes even more striking when we look at items such as eyeglasses and contact lenses, telescopes and microscopes, microphones and hearing aids, perfumes and deodorants, or more strikingly: artificial limbs, heart valves and joints.
If we consider our "selves" to be only that which we need to survive, and nothing more, then we would still need to include clothing and shelter. Remove those and the human being cannot live except in very small zones near the equator (that we originated in such places is thus no surprise, but I digress). But if we also consider that human society is a necessary part of the human condition, that it is inseparable from what makes us human then we must include the trappings thereof; Religion, philosophy, churches, schools, our books and our stories, our governments and our buildings, our homes and our transportation, our phones and our computers. All of these are necessary parts of our current human society. We could get rid of a lot of it and survive, as a minimal requirement, but many would not survive the removal of modern "convenience," and the very idea of human society would be irrevocably changed. How well do you think your average CPA can hunt, gather or farm for food? How necessary would his skills be in an agrarian society?
Another author whose work has informed my view is Annemarie Mol, through her book The Body Multiple. In it she posits a theory of ontology (the study of how things "be", or how they can be said to exist) that requires interaction, or as she puts it: enactment. The idea is that we cannot separate what something is from the context in which it exists. We cannot purify it down to some conceptual "natural" objective reality, because such a state doesn't exist. We cannot separate the man from all of the things that he enacts each day: his family, his clothes, his job, car, house, etc. To do so would be to strip him of what makes him... him.
So, if we cannot separate the person from the items he uses - and we accept that the mind considers what we use as parts of ourselves - then where are we with regard to the original question? What is a cyborg? Well, we are cyborgs. We all of us have artificial parts that perform physiological functions. In fact, ever since the first proto-human picked up a stick to club his lunch we have been cyborgs. We have been taught to consider the blending of human and machine as other, as unnatural, as scary, as human hubris gone too far. But if we just look around at the amount of machine that we require to live our daily lives, even if those machines may not reside within our flesh, we can see that it is not so scary, it is not unnatural (our machines have grown along with our understanding, our society, and ourselves as humans, in a completely organic way), and it is not other. It is us.
We are.
Comments, constructive criticism and all things related are welcomed below. Next week I will delve more deeply into the idea that I quickly passed over here: existence as interaction. Join me for a look at the Theory of Relational Ontology. Then for an examination of why we fear the idea of cyberization in The Big Bad Wolf: Losing our Humanity.
Just to prove that this time I'm actually serious about teh blawg, The Cyborg Apologist has a new post, and a schedule for the next three weeks of posts, as well. Please join in the discussion and tell yer friends :P
At 12/28/10 09:02 AM, WolvenBear wrote:At 12/27/10 11:01 AM, Elfer wrote: Um, a bunch? Of course, talking about "scientific consensus" more than say, 200 years back is a bit questionable anyway.Global cooling. Population unsustainability. Etc.
When we talk about "consensus science", the percentage is pretty bad.
You need to read this thread. Then, once you miss the point, you can go stick your head back in the sand and yell at democrats some more.
At 1/8/11 10:08 AM, lapis wrote:At 1/8/11 09:51 AM, Ravariel wrote: the fact that there is a minimum distance that something can travel pretty much makes the paradox moot.I don't think it is claimed that there exist no distances smaller than one Planck length, just that due to the uncertainty principle it doesn't make sense for us to consider those distances.
Well, the line between the two is a fine and fuzzy one, but yes, in technicality, the Planck length is the smallest measurable length that has any meaning.
At 1/6/11 08:31 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: - Rational ignorance keeps voters from having any reason to make informed decision
This is true in ANY situation, it is not limited to elections.
- The state regulates it's elections and establishes rules of competition.
To a point, yes.
- High 'startup' requirements for taking office [Elections cost millions of dollars]
Indeed... that is a bit of a problem.
- the fact that competition can only take place during certain intervals
In a system that has a high desire for experience, this is necessary, but I see your angle.
...who are their constituents going to vote for in the next election? The democrats?
Realistically, they won't vote at all, and the balance of power will change through their apathy toward "their" candidate. Mind you while I understand the reasons for the two party system, I do believe we need more varied choices for our elected officials... but that falls squarely under rational ignorance.
Very few believe that two mega-corporations competing against one another is sufficient to call a particular market 'regulated'.
And yet, to stretch the metaphor, we can see how difficult it is for a third party to gain any ground when two megacorps have so much of the power.
But the advocates of state run or state regulated this or that generally are not calling for individual states to adopt policies that, by virtue of their success, would be adopted by other states.
Huh? I'm not sure what you're saying here.
And of course if the fidelity of a state is trusted on it's level of competition with other states, then the rational conclusion would be to advocate the greatest practicable level of devolution of power. And relative to our current predicament I would endorse this.
Wouldn't that espouse large unitary states though? As long as China and India and the EU exist, the only way our state (USA) can maintain "competition" is by being as big and powerful as we are. In order to maintain an equal level of power, each state would have to devolve it's power structures at the same time.
Chronically high incumbency rates in spite of low approval of congress suggests the model of democratic regulation is a farce.
I wouldn't go that far. It is a problem, yes, but I do not believe it is systemic to the concept of democratic regulation, merely to our current version of it. Most of that can be attributed to voter apathy, which can be attributed to a sense of "what does my one vote amongst 300 million matter?" of residing in a massive state... so there's that. But then again, I also think that the media culture of the last 10 years has exacerbated the problem. Noone seems to remember the 2000 election and the import of third parties and the amount a few people's votes could make a difference.
In short, i would say that the statistical fears about Corporations consolidating not only logically applies to states...
Agreed. I certainly don't argue that power consolidation is an issue in states, but I would also think it would be folly to expect the same to not happen with companies.
I don't follow. What are you treating as corporation as and what
Huh? Again, unsure to what you are referring.
...the extent to which the idea of media regulation of government is pure mysticism.
Absolutely. My own belief is that the media is one area from which the government should be completely removed.
If i argued for a minimal state, the next closest thing to a state, I could easily argue that no 'pure' minimalist state existed
Well, that obviously teeters close to a no true scotsman fallacy. The point I was trying to make is that there is nothing but theory backing up a stateless system. State systems have shown themselves to be stable for hundreds of years at a time, and have ushered in every achievement mankind has made since agriculture. It's going to take more than economic theory to make the idea attractive.
But i don't think those objections would be raised against me if i Did start falling back on minimal statism.
Well, they would, but in lower volume because a minarchist state is, at least, closer to what already exists than statelessness.
That a style of governance was tried and failed in the past seems more objectionable than a system that has 'never actually been done'
Well, to say that statism has failed would be folly, I think, because it has proved to be a very stable, and hearty system that has reigned supreme on Earth for the last 3000+ years. What advocates of anarchism need to do is gather and make their idea happen. DO IT. If it works well enough, it will catch on. If your system makes companies work better, and more profitably, then obviously companies will want that system, and the state as it exists will fall, or at least change.
The Bank's power to make lousy decisions [ignoring the whole 'too big to fail' nonsense] is hedged in ways a national state simply is not.
True, because there is less at stake. However, if my government was bad enough, I would take my business (taxes) elsewhere. If enough people did that, the government would either change or crumble.
...the decisions of my neighbors doesn't impose involuntarilly nearly as much upon an individual as it does under statism.
I think this is another mistake that advocates of individual governance make: The idea that other's decisions, desires, or choices in policy will have less involuntary effect on you. In fact, the collapse of a business that provides essential services due to mismanagement or due to neighbors' bad behavior without a larger safety net would be far more devastating to someone than any such event in a state system. The concept of a safety net that a state excels at is not something that people will individually plan for... rational ignorance strikes again.
Individuals cannot 'opt out' of social security in the same way they can switch between insurance companies and banks... Unless you want to abandon your friends, family, culture, language, job, and much of your property and move to another country.
How would this be different in a stateless society, except for the smaller distance one would need to move in order to avoid unwanted policy? Legal protection is necessarily territorial, otherwise it would be unenforcable, so anyone wishing to live under a certain set of laws would need to move to a location that has them. And if a set of people all decide to live, as a singular culture, under a set of rules made by a business, then how, except in semantics, would that differ from a "state"? Especially if, through the power of "peer pressure" the minority of folk who had reservations about certain policies endure them to stay within their familial/cultural system.
To answer your last question, 'No', I don't want the benefits states have to offer.
Not a fan of roads? Pardon the quip, but it serves a point and I'm running out of characters.
I don't think people should have to live in the wilderness and separate them selfs from the benefits of the division of labor, someone of this condition is no more 'free' than convict on the lam is free.
That's exactly what I mean about wanting the benefits of the state system without wanting to pay into it. In these communities (which, granted, are generally very small and slightly more communistic than you'd probably like) the division of labor is very small, and is thus usually relegated to agrarian communities that don't get things like the electricity or flushing toilets. There's just not enough labor to divide to get to such things. When you distill such communities to small enough units where you get complete freedom and autonomy, your level of tech will also fall. It is only in systems that are very large (in the thousands of people at the least) where systems like the ones to which you are accustomed can exist. Once you get there, the line between what is and is not a state I think becomes a matter of semantics.
Max Planck would like to say "hi." Though Archimedes and Newton have mathematical answers for the paradox, the fact that there is a minimum distance that something can travel pretty much makes the paradox moot.
At 1/6/11 11:09 PM, MoralLibertarian wrote: Taking a stand on an issue gives us a chance to prove define how we portray ourselves and maybe even display our intellectual fortitude. But is where we stand on the issues really determine who we are? Is it even a part of it?
Absolutely. I am of the opinion that things only exist in relationship... that you cannot separate the "person" from his thoughts, ideals, situation, or history. A person's thoughts are as much a part of their identity as the flesh of their bodies.
And if it's not, why do we sometimes react harshly to people who don't share our views?
Well, being wrong sucks. It's embarrassing, humiliating, and can throw into question everything else you've believed. Our ideas are just as interrelated as our being. One's philosophy on marriage or politics is intimately related to their thoughts on religion, their opinions of their parents and their idea(l)s, and likely to the opinions of everyone that they respect. When you challenge a person's worldview, you are similarly challenging every person whose whose ideas were the foundation of that worldview. It is no surprise that changing a person's mind makes pulling teeth sometimes look like taking candy from a baby, to mix a few metaphors.
What else is part of identity?
Everything.
At 1/6/11 04:41 PM, Elfer wrote: Not sure if they did in fact work together, but it's certainly not impossible.
Eh, perhaps a better phrase would have been "A contemporary of." Bad phrasing on my part.
At 1/5/11 03:07 PM, lapis wrote:At 1/3/11 05:40 PM, Ravariel wrote: So with the new year I have decided to jump on the blogger bandwagondéja vu ;)
How the sam fuck did you remember that? :P Problem with that balg was a bad title and too little focus. This new one has purpose, and I can see where it will be going.
At 1/4/11 11:53 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: ...what is CLEARLY self regulation when the role of punishing state violations of law and justice is left to the state itself.
Except that your own audacity in thinking that the state is self-regulatory is based on the idea that the "state" per se is a singular organism that works in coordination to promote it's own existence/agenda/expansion. Elsewhere that might be true, but in the US it certainly isn't. For that very reason we have built a tiered system of federalism and separation of powers to ensure that they are always in conflict. Two (main) warring parties keep each other in check, State government and Federal government are separated to ensure a certain level of polarization. Judicial-Executive-Legislative split each have warring loyalties that keep them honest. The media and NGO watchdog groups (both for- and non-profit), as well as grassroots movements can change the direction of government rather rapidly. No the system doesn't work as ideally as I have simplified here, but it is fallacy to say that the self-regulation of government is the same as the self-regulation of corporations.
See, this is the biggest problem a lot of the people in these discussions have: they assume that the State only acts like a state when it's convenient to their point, and like a corporation in areas where it's convenient to their point. The reverse is also true in the fact that people who are opposed to corporation-ism (rather than for "statism" whatever the hell that even means) who see corps as acting like corps and states where it is convenient to their own argument.
...when the FCC has the power to shut down any station, largely on a whim.
That may have been true 10 or even 5 years ago before the internet exploded and blogs and social networking became wholesale purveyors of news and information. The FCC is scrabbling at "net neutrality" trying to keep it's hold on things and is losing (though the latest coup they got by getting wireless communication under their scope may prove immensely important)... and hurray for that. The less control anyone has over the media the better.
...misguided and unfounded presumptions of popular control of government through popularity contests, etc, continually enforce the idea that the state as an institution is somehow sacrosanct and above the problems of the rest of society.
I was with you until this bit of dramatization and spin.
...believes in the government as an institution, even if it never has [and never will] meet it's expectations.
When your own philosophy has only shown us the exact same thing, how can we ever even say it is better, especially when it's never actually been done?
Liberals pay taxes and thereby tacitly support american empire in the middle east, and conservatives pay taxes to finance Obama's "Socialist" domestic policy.
Well, yes... the whole majority rule thing is part of our whole thing. And yet I can't see how having private corps provide the same services running under any different circumstances. I, as a member of my bank, do not get to weigh in on every loan they make, nor every investment. If they do bad things, they are doing it with my dollar, but as long as the good outweighs the bad I will stay with them... the same goes here for taxes and the government. Until the actions of the government weigh more bad than good, my taxes will continue to fund them. Once the balance tips, then you can go into things like protests and withholding of taxes, and grassroots movements, and revolutions to change what is wrong. Obviously the tipping point with each person, and their own hot-button issues, will be different, which is how things like the Tea Parties and class-action lawsuits and million-man marches happen. Something wrong resonates, the people respond and it gets changed.
But more importantly is the issue of the land claim, and this is relevant and key to understanding the difference between a state and non-state legal order. The state claims territories it hasn't touched, even if a company could get everyone in an area to agree to it's services, this doesn't stop people from going off the grid [this is not the same as going into the wilderness, I am talking about building a neighboring community outside the]
So is your complaint in the difficulty of being "off the grid?" Because you can do that now without doing the shack in the wilderness... people have constructed their own communities that live completely outside of "the man." So I don't see how this is even an issue. It almost seems like you want your cake and to eat it too, by having all the benefits of the current USA status but none of the bothers, instead of finding a way to make your own idea work in the world we have: i.e. that of states.
because Keep in mind that when people pay for services, if a private company builds its arms up too heavily people are liable to switch to another agency.
Why would they? That company would be the best-suited to enforce the policies that you have bought in to... it seems to me like they would snowball in power. Any company that could not compete in militaristic ways could easily be shut out of competing in monetary ones. How does a non-statist address the issue of power imbalances? All I have yet heard is that competition will level the playing field... but no discussion on HOW that might happen.
I apologize for the shameless self-promotion here, but I didn't feel it was worthy of a whole thread. And since pretty much anyone who might be interested in the topics I'll be covering is already here... well, it seemed appropriate.
So with the new year I have decided to jump on the blogger bandwagon and start seriously trying to advance my career in STS with a new blog called The Cyborg Apologist. I will be updating as regularly as I can, I hope to be able to post cool shit every other week, but once a month is as seldom as I ever plan on posting. Those who are on twitter can follow me there at @Ravariel where I will post links, updates and sneak-previews of blog topics.
Right now there is just a welcome message. Next week we will begin the real work, and the interesting topics. I encourage anyone interested in science and technology to follow me, I will be posting links to news and other bloggers that will be really cool reads, I promise.
Happy New Year!
Dear Mr. Harbaugh,
Please don't go to the NFL. Your Alma Mater desperately needs you. Also, if you come to Ann Arbor, I will wash your car... I swear!
Love,
Me
At 1/1/11 01:42 AM, LordJaric wrote:At 1/1/11 01:37 AM, Ravariel wrote: Almost on cue, the New Year hits and Ann Arbor is hit with a completely seasonally normal thunderstorm...Weather has been pretty messed up in the Midwest hasn't it.
...wait, what?
And how. Considering the fury with which winter has pimp-smacked New England and the plains states over the past couple weeks, that we've had a grand total of about 2" of snow is beyond weird. Outside of last years completely fucked up 40-degree February, this is the oddest winter I've yet seen in my... geezus... 14 years in the area.
Almost on cue, the New Year hits and Ann Arbor is hit with a completely seasonally normal thunderstorm...
...wait, what?
At 12/31/10 08:52 PM, lapis wrote: Agh, I left a window open before I left and now my house smells like gunpowder. Bad omen for the rest of the year. Or will it help to scare away evil spirits?
vrolijk nieuwjaar iedereen en het beste in 2011
Completely unrelated tangent: As a person who is fluent in English and can get by in German, Dutch is a really interesting language to me. It strikes a mid-point between the two that is remarkable, in that as a speaker of English only in the (late) 90s, on my trip to Amsterdam I could mostly understand the tour-guides who only spoke Dutch, and now that I have learned German, I can practically read Dutch, too. Granted some of the minutiae of the grammar and the words that don't have easy cognates still get by me, but on a purely etymological level, it's kinda cool.
Oh, und hat jeder eine wunderbar neue Jahre!
At 12/31/10 07:05 PM, ThePretenders wrote: Happy New Year!
Silly brits and your jumping the gun. Don't you know that the only "new year" that counts is the one in Eastern Time?
At 12/30/10 02:48 PM, poxpower wrote: The toaster was never "wrong". The science that produced a toaster wasn't "wrong" as long as the toaster worked. But now we have better toasters. The point of the toaster was never to make the ultimate machine, it was to make the best toaster possible given the available knowledge.
Brilliant analogy! Thank you.
The "science has been wrong before so let's not listen" philosophy doesn't build or advance anything, it only leads to way way way more mistakes than necessary. If you want a surefire way to be wrong more often in life, ignore science and flip coins instead.
And this is another one of my hidden agendas in this thread: The refutation of people who claim that because the "consensus" of science is always changing, it is thus dumb to accept. People who point to the climate scares of the past 20 years and how those fears "came to nothing", or how Darwin's evolution isn't the same as punctuated equillibrium, or other current theories, and say that the scientific answer is wrong because it's been "wrong" before. When, as in your toaster analogy, we can see that it has never actually been "wrong" at all... merely limited by current knowledge and technology. Climate scientists 20 years ago didn't have the information about the multitude of factors that effect global climate. Darwin didn't have Punnitt squares and the Genome to inform his ideas. Newton didn't have the periodic table and knowledge of the strong and weak nuclear forces that made Alchemy impossible.
One of the fundamental points I have been trying to get across (in my normal sideways manner) is that we cannot look at any scientific idea outside of it's social and temporal context. Bringing current knowledge into past science to ridicule it is folly, and claiming that because science was wrong before, that it will be wrong again, and by several orders of magnitude, ignores the leaps and bounds we have made in knowledge and measurement since then.
Actually my point was not that science is always wrong, rather that, aside from statistical anomalies and fraud, science is always as right as it is possible to be.
Eh, I think we've covered everything... we had gotten fairly far off topic anyway. Time to let them discuss the matter at hand rather than some crazy tangential philosophical discussion only vaguely related :P
