lemur

The one you quoted in post #57. I understood your response but not how it was a response to what you quoted.

I agree that this is something that could make you bitter if you derived a lot of security from the idea that scientists are generally good and pure. But why should you have to assume that scientists are either generally biased or unbiased to critically work with scientific knowledge and data? My questioning of scientists' discursive neutrality comes from a general regard for discourse after having studied the politics of representations and language. Scientific language/discourse and representations, while geared toward objective knowledge are still created and communicated by humans with subconscious cognitive biases that cause them to desire to manage their social position in the interest of not losing it. Strongly criticizing well-renouned researchers in your field puts you in the position of greater scrutiny for your own work, so people tend to basically nod and bow to the big names and stick with critical debates with people at a level they can afford to lose at. Who wants to go head to head with Einstein's ghost and end up squared off with Hawking in the public discourse to establish "who's top dog" between the two? Thus, scientists tend to socially discipline each other and amateurs to basically respect hierarchies of authoritarian position, imo. Call it cynical if you like, but to transcend this would allow for enormous social-professional mobility as junior researchers in low-ranked institutions would suddenly rise to the status of canonical names. This would upset so many people that there is resistance to even imagining it is possible. But, yes, it would be interesting to see if institutional academics who are active in online forums would shut down ideas created by a top-dog in their field just because they were posted online in unorthodox language. It would at least prove my hypothesis that discursive cues and posturing affect even the most neutral/objective scientists' critical gaze.

Get a highly reputable physicist or other scientist, like Hawking for example, to take one of their newest and most novel ideas and keep it a secret from everyone except some amateur that they teach it to. Once the expert is satisfied with the amateur's understanding, let the amateur post it in their own words on a web forum such as this one and see what kind of responses they get. See how many people are actually constructive enough to arrive at the full significance of the new idea and how many would actually propose giving this person full credit for their brilliance despite their lack of formal training. Most likely the best they could get would be, "your ideas have potential but without formal training in your field, you will never get anywhere with them." That may be true but it is amazing that science lacks the capacity to see beyond its own institutional nose.

How is this a response to the quote you cited?

I think you underestimate the ability of academic structuring to stifle innovation. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but many people go into academia thinking it will help them pursue their dreams and end up getting talked into playing the academic hoop-jumping games and eventually narrowing themselves to some sub-specialty of a specialty, which convinces them that they are only qualified to be an expert in that one sub-area and to basically give up free-thinking on topics they have come to view as others' territory. Basically, academic structuring protects people with high institutional credentials from having to compete or share the spotlight. If people start to pay attention to your ideas, all someone has to do is point out your lack of credentials and call you a crackpot. They can say, "well if this person's science is so good, why don't they have a PhD or peer-recognition in their field?" That's a social reason, not one based on content, but since few people critically understand content, they take the word of experts. Then, if the experts have learned to filter ideas through aesthetic standards of style, method, etc. they will have basically unlearned the capacity to critically examine radically different approaches to their subject area. They see unorthodoxy simply as evidence of crackpottery without even knowing where to begin to critically evaluate them for legitimacy except by beginning with established canons they learned in their academic training. There are very few totally open critical empiricists anymore that are capable of evaluating knowledge-claims in a totally neutral way, free of bias due to established discourse, imo.

People are capable of consuming media without mindlessly reacting to what they see and/or going along with the trends set. The real culprit is the spirit of conformity, or rather the legitimation of social conformity over independence, which occurs in subtle ways. Ultimately it is individuals themselves who choose to "go with the flow" or think for themselves and resist peer-pressure. Even if people are telling you that "you should just go with the flow," it is you who is responsible for your choice to obey them and it's you who suffers the consequences for your choice to conform to others. People hate this because the whole reason they copy someone else or just do what someone else tells them to is so that they won't have to take responsibility for authoring their own actions. Imo, however, it is this attitude of deferring responsibility to others that culminates in so many social problems.

The only person that doesn't look at peace in these pictures is bert and that is because the person who set up the doll for the picture wanted to try to project a certain disposition onto the picture of Bin Laden. I did a google image search on both Bin Laden and Bush and I could not find any pictures that looked as hostile as pictures of soldiers associated with their respective military movements. Do you remember discussions either slightly before or after the 9/11 attacks where the issue was having disciplined military organization to avoid rogue bands of militias? Isn't it possible that these CIA-associated leader-figures such as Bush, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are used as figure-heads in propaganda campaigns to convince potentially militant people that there are organized factions whose authority they must assent to if they want to effectively fight an enemy? Whether or not this is a viable (conspiracy) theory, the fact remains that the public images of these men do not evoke aggression and hostility as much as the media commentary about them does. Even their own words/speeches are very calm and non-provocative compared with the media scripts, sound-bites, and discussion. The conclusion I draw is that if anyone is riling people up into a frenzy, it must be the media because it can't be these men and their speeches. You can attribute all sorts of totalitarian coercion to them but all the evidence I have directly available to me of the men and their speech-acts, I don't see any brutal domination. Sure, I could read reports, leaks, and other second-hand information about them that leads me to other conclusions, but why would I trust those sources? What evidence do I have that such sources are not simply paid to propagate negative imagery for the sake of riling up people into a frenzy to stimulate hype/controversy and generating ratings? Believe me I'm not just an apologist for anyone. It's just that I think the media have more power than government and individuals acting individually, and I think part of the media's power is to render the textuality of the representations transparent and shift attribution of perceived effects to the people in the spotlight. This is why I resist jumping on the bandwagon of playing "blame the leader."

If the universe began from nothing, which somehow had the tendency to differentiate into positive and negative energy, what would have caused the potential to differentiate in this way in the first place? The only thing I can think is that maybe all forces emerge as distinct from one another due to the entropy of expansion. In other words, gravity field-force may have been so condensed at the point of the big bang, that it was indistinguishably strong from the other types of force. As such, maybe gravity and the other forces began to differentiate as spacetime emerged from the expansion, since this would have allowed some parts of the field to fragment into particles of matter and others into residual gravitational field-force extending beyond the matter. But still, what would have caused such an intense lump of field-force to form in the first place and why would it expand? Is force itself an eternal fixture of existence or does it have a defined life including birth and death? My guess would be that it is born as strong nuclear force, which degenerates into weak nuclear force leading to primordial fissionary fragmentation of the initial macro-atom into increasingly smaller particles. As these particles stabilized under their remaining strong nuclear force, they were in (heat) motion relative to each other which resulted in expansion and radiation. So, EM radiation is the product of dying force, which dissipates to an ultimate volume of spacetime. If the big bang began with such a single unified macro-atom, it seems to me that such an atom would be the product of a black-hole capturing a great deal of matter-energy, and that the residual EM radiation of the universe could ultimately condense under its own gravity and form such a black hole again and start another big bang. Still, why would a black hole evolve internally into a spacetime-expanding fragmenting universe of matter-energy? Would it do this just because nothing has any way of escaping therefore it has to propagate internally in some way just b/c it contains energy?

Yes, and it's because we are exposing ourselves to a provocative sensationalist mass-media. The cliff is, however, not inevitable. People are still capable of resisting provocation and reactionism. Wiser people, imo, are able to recognize that people are free to choose the easy path of exercising their power destructively instead of constructively and that there is no way of stopping others from doing so. Ultimately individuals are responsible for their own actions. You can try to use your own power constructively and influence others to do so as well, but even if you succeed there is no guarantee that they still won't succumb to the temptation to react and destroy. The positive side that never gets reported in the media is that there are a great deal of situations everyday where people choose to forego hate and destruction and choose a more positive, constructive path, at least for the moment. That is the "glass half full" perspective but, imo, if it weren't for all those good actions, the glass wouldn't just be empty, it would be shattered and everyone would be living in constant hell at each others' merciless enraged hands.

What's funny to me is that so many people have unified into the same patterns of critique for the decision to pursue war. I don't believe there is anyone independent or brave enough to actually question the assumptions and reasoning circulated in the media and other public discourse that demonize Bush. No one seems to remember that while Bush was viewed as the responsible individual for initiating war, as "commander-in-chief," almost everyone asked supported the decision to pursue war. Now it is easy to claim that Bush lied and misled people into supporting him, but the fact is that the very same people who claim to be upset about being misled are people who would have criticized anyone who suggested questioning Bush's authority at the time as being dangerously unsupportive of a war-effort that was viewed to be a life-or-death matter. My question is that if the same situation were to be repeated, would people this time choose to disobey, undermine, or just question the "commander-in-chief" or would they once again engage in either bullying those who dissent or themselves failing to dissent out of fear of being bullied by war-supporters? I believe that few people would behave any differently if the situation happened again, so why do they find it relevant to try to do now in retrospect what they couldn't when it would have made a difference? Guilt for cooperating with authority they now view as corrupt? Why can't people just recognize that their support of security-measures at the time makes them just as responsible for the war as was GW Bush, if not more so since Bush was actually making an effort to control and temper the fear-driven aggression widely dispersed at the time. The actions taken by the administrations may not have immediately and completely controlled the public outburst, but I think they did a lot to channel them into relatively less damaging expressions and helping people overcome the intense fear and hostility they were experiencing. And in fact, it seems like the only two people that seemed to manage to stay calm through the whole period were Bush and Bin Ladin. I remember seeing a photo of Bush on an aircraft carrier and one of Bin Ladin with a machine gun lying calmly in his lap and thinking that these were both men who could have deadly force at their disposal and resist using it. I don't know how many other people in that period had their emotional reactions under control.

You make good points. I have always been fascinated by plural sexual partnerships and open relationships but I have found that it is difficult to study how they work in practice because people are often fairly guarded and closed about their experiences with them. You can say that this is due to the relative stigma attached to promiscuity, but the fact remains that engaging in illicit sexuality tends to provoke secrecy and distrust of other people knowing "what you're up to." People in monogamous relationships, on the other hand, seem to have a weight lifted from their shoulders by not having to hide their sexuality from others, perse'. I'm not saying that this isn't the fault of people who negatively judge promiscuity; just that it isn't really possible to transcend. The only evidence you really need to to look at the way Tiger Woods was treated in the media and what anyone you talked with about him said, and the judgmental attitudes. People are naturally sexually curious, so when they have learned to repress sexual desire and channel it into monogamy, their repression tends to get displaced to anyone who engages in the behaviors that they are prohibiting themselves from considering. That's the practical aspect of exploring polyamory. In theory, though it's possible the ultimate consequences would be several. For one, women would become primary parents for their children unless one of their partners (or someone else) chose to take on the responsibility. Men tend to want to know, or at least believe, that the genetic link exists between them and their offspring before investing in full-blown fathering responsibilities. If a woman has multiple partners and becomes pregnant by one who is not her favorite, it would make it more difficult to combine the parenting relationship with the interpersonal and sexual relationship between parents. Of course, you can say that parenting should be separate from sexual and other interpersonal bonding, but there is some benefit to children having parents who are in love or at least very devoted to one another. Then, if a woman has chosen to only want children with a certain partner, she would have to be very comfortable with the prospect of aborting pregnancies if they turned out to be caused by unwanted fathers. Then, the question would be what would happen to women who were uncomfortable with the idea of having abortions at all, and were willing to forego multiple partner indulgence to prevent the possibility of getting pregnant by the wrong man? Would such women come to be seen as prudish and avoided by men who feel guilty for indulging in polyamory while their devoted wife patiently waits for them to "return home?" Likewise, would men who prefer monogamy come to seem like domineering, controlling chauvanists and be systematically avoided by women who don't want to give up their sexual freedom? In fact, wouldn't relationships generally become competitive on the basis of the least controlling/jealous person wins the most love/attention, since such people would make their polyamorous partners more comfortable than those who would hope for devotion and monogamy?

It sounds like you are barely describing the phenomenon and then claiming that friction is not necessary in the explanation even though you don't really give a reason why/how it is logically frictionless. When a particle decays, I think that the energy that was holding it together gets released in the form of momentum of the daughter particles (i.e. the pieces). Is there photon-generation at the moment of the split? Honestly, I'm still trying to get a systematic picture of when photons get emitted, how, and in what amounts relative to the causal event. I'm not making statements claiming to be right - just exploring through hypothesis and critical feedback.

You have to be careful watching the news. TV media tends to be very sensational and aims to provoke emotional responses by running dramatic stories and emphasizing the shock value with provocative commentary. The result is that people get into an emotional frenzy and they become aggressively hostile toward whomever they associate with the threat they fear. During the time of 9/11, it was muslims even though Bush explicitly exonerated terrorism from having Islam as its cause. Now it sounds like you are suggesting that depression or other mental illness should be viewed (and treated) as a murderous threat. Do you have any idea how much social stigma and abuse has added to the suffering of people with mental illness because of people fearing what they don't understand? Until you understand mental illness, I don't believe you can understand how it could possibly be linked to aggression any more than someone who hasn't practices islam could begin to understand how Islam could be used to provoke people into committing terrorist acts. The biggest danger is actually the large number of relatively ignorant people who naively view themselves as normal and therefore immune from sociopathic cognitive behavior. Such people often carry enormous amounts of fear, aggression, hate, etc. inside themselves, which they attempt to repress/hide so as to maintain their "normal" social appearance. This in turn can lead to a build up of emotions and aggression that can either damage their health or lead to outbursts like the one in that movie where Michael Douglas snaps during a traffic jam and tries to walk to his daughter's bday party (traffic?). Anyway, the reason I mention that movie is because it's a good example of how rational people can reach a boiling point and end up in a self-destructive situation even though they may be right about many things and legitimate in wanting to do something about it. It's fine to talk about social problems, but you should be careful drumming up such provocative emotions about things that shock/offend you because it can provoke others who read it into pent-up aggression.

I didn't say it wasn't natural to get emotional about a violent attack. I said it was strange that there's a culture of getting emotional and not acting on it, which leads to a build up of hostility, potentially infecting others socially to the point where you have an angry mob. You're right about feelings not being "legitimate or not," but somehow people often manage to only allow themselves to have feelings that they themselves legitimate. E.g. when you say, "it seems very natural that someone would get emotional about a violent attack on innocent people," it implies that you would get less emotional about an attack on guilty people, or perhaps feel indifferent or even happy. That means your emotions are steered by your sense of legitimacy more so than the act(s) of violence themselves.

Isn't that a form of "De-excitation of an atomic or nuclear system?" This is interesting. I thought photons only formed through de-excitation of excited electrons at the atomic level. I didn't know that whole atoms/systems could generate radiation. It almost seems as if there is a friction-producing medium that the systems are moving in that causes them to lose momentum and radiate it out in the form of photons? Since "ether" has been rejected, could the medium be omnipresent EM field-force, or maybe gravitation? I don't know why I keep coming back to the question of a medium for light but at this point gravitational field-force seems like a candidate to me. Is there any reason why it can't/couldn't be the medium for light?

I don't see why a geodesic path through spacetime has to be located at a minimum distance from a planet/moon/star/etc. Granted, an object traveling at orbital speed at a terrestrial altitude just high enough not to bump into mountains would quickly lose speed from air-resistance or burn up from the friction. But if a satellite was accelerated to orbital speed 10m above the surface of the moon or some other gravity-well without atmosphere, wouldn't the orbit constitute a geodesic path?

What I find interesting is that the feelings expressed toward suicide bombers here and elsewhere are so emotional and aggressive themselves. I'm not condemning that attitude. I just wonder where people get the idea that it is legitimate to feel so aggressively hostile toward something without doing anything about it. I think it says something about a reactionary culture of anti-violence that so much hostility can build up as a reaction to a suicide bombing or just the idea of it. Eventually that hostile aggression culminates in someone taking up the crusade of acting on behalf of the angry mob that has formed. That person could just as well be a suicide bomber too. Why not? Do you think there's a point where anti-Islamic fear/aggression could build up to the point where people commit acts of terrorism against muslims and if someone would die in the process, people would say, "at least if he was going to die, he took out a bunch of those bastards with him?" That would seem to celebrate the same spirit of suicide-bombing but in the other direction.

No, it's just a dynamic of the free market. Poverty seduces people into crime and criminal records prevent people from working except in certain low-wage jobs. Prison-avoidance motivates people to keep the low-wage jobs to avoid going back to prison by choosing again for a life of crime. Right, but as long as someone with money is willing to pay for that service, the job will exist for someone. US ideology has always strived against injust power. There's no profit in condemning or praising the US vs. any other national ideology or government. The issue really comes down to a human one: are people ever willing to accept downward social mobility to allow others to trade places with them? I don't think they are, so that leaves the question of whether their are systematic ways of preserving privilege and servitude and preventing mobility between the two classes? A truly value-free scientist will always question the results of such research because they know that people who wish to preserve their position of privilege have the strongest interest in proving that they achieved their position fairly. Personally, I think the only way the interest to define the playing field as level will ever be truly neutralized is if there was no division of labor into labor classes. If office workers cleaned their own offices and people prepared their own food, they would not worry about whether it was fair that they had to take care of themselves. As long as people are divided into different sectors and classes, I think there will be conflict over who has to get stuck in the bad jobs and who gets the privilege of having the good jobs. Racial identity may not always be the determining factor; it just has been because the people in the greatest danger of losing their class privilege tend to be the ones who embrace race-blaming to elevate their own status to identify with those who are prosperous (primarily white).

Can you both please give some specific examples of "creating opportunity at will?"

Funny, I was just recently thinking about how monogamy should actually be practiced. It seems to me that when people keep multiple partners it leads to competition and power games. For example, if your partner has more than one partner and they do something rude to you, you would have to be careful standing up for yourself because they might just shift their focus to their other partner. What reason would they have to respect you when it costs them unnecessary energy to go out of their way for you instead of just spending more time with the partner who they're not having trouble getting along with? From a sexual-variety standpoint, abolishing monogamy may make some sense but the practical concerns regarding the total relationships surrounding the sex make it sound silly. It's like saying you'd like to drive a different car to work as you would to go out to clubs and yet another to go camping, etc. but when you get into the practical issues of maintaining all the cars and insuring them, etc. it makes more sense to just choose one car that is well-rounded for all your different driving interests. Sorry to make it sound like I'm comparing sex to driving and women to cars. It's a pretty bad cliche' but I really just mean it as a general analogy to having one or multiple partners.

I would personally find it quite interesting to see how the economy would change if people had the freedom to refuse undesirable jobs without losing their housing, etc. However, I think what would happen if the poor suddenly received middle-class (investment) income without having to go to a dead-end job is that most fast food and restaurants would lose all their employees, as would hospitality services, janitors, etc. Then how high would you have to bid to get someone to clean the bathroom at your office? How high would you have to pay people to clean fryers and make burgers until the late hours of the night? Now, let's assume that people would actually pay the high price demanded for such labor. What would be the purpose of doing such work except to increase your net worth (i.e. savings). So, if some people were trying to accumulate capital/savings by providing services to other people of equal means, how long would it be until the people consuming the services would run out of money and NEED to take a job to make back the money they spent/lost? So, you would end up in the same situation with some people taking "low" jobs because they need the money and others avoiding them because they don't. That's just the way that capitalism works. The people with money try to invest it to get more from others and drive them into poverty so they'll have more leveraging power to purchase those people's labor for less. Haven't you ever played monopoly? When you have hotels on Boardwalk, you hope your opponent will land on them so you can take their money. Then, when they run out of money, you offer them pennies on the dollar or high-interest loans to sell their property. Eventually you own everything and the game is over, which is how capitalist economy works except for the people who lose everything can still be hired to serve you for minimum wage just to avoid having to steal and go to jail. The game always works this way, even when everyone starts with the same amount of money and property.

My impression is that the more you have sex, the more it becomes unsatisfying to have to use a condom. The same may true of regularly changing partners. If you are used to the excitement of a new partner to keep sex interesting, isn't it going to become increasingly boring to stick with the same partner for a long time, let alone settle down in a permanent monogamous relationship? Once you find that monogamy is unsatisfying relative to your previous sexual experience, and sex with a condom is unsatisfying compared to sex without, aren't you going to need more and more unprotected sex with rotating partners to feel happy about your sex life? If your partners are doing the same, isn't it just a matter of time before someone introduces HIV or other nasty diseases into the circuit? I had to think about this recently when I heard that the porn industry shut down because someone tested positive for HIV. Can you imagine what anyone who has worked in porn without a condom (or even with one for that matter) must have gone through at the moment that news came out?

A related question is how does historical discourse render people noteworthy historical figures and others not. Feminist historiography has asked this question about the male/female distinction as well as about 'masculine' historical focus like war, politics, industry, science, etc. instead of 'feminine' cultural forms such as education, childcare, children's book writers, housekeeping and household appliances, sexualitly/childbearing, etc. Because they come to see the world simply as a collection of economic processes? Idk, I got interested in the idea of self-managing workers some time ago. So much economic waste occurs as a result of every task requiring one person to perform the task and someone else to plan, manage, and take responsibility for it. It's like the old jokes about how many people it takes to change a lightbulb. It would be interesting if everyone could be educated and trained to take responsibility for their work (i.e. trained as a manager) and then if all managers would also perform labor. Some would say this is a waste of managerial time, but it make workers and managers a lot more independent of each other and capable of making real-time decisions based on both theoretical and practical knowledge/experience.

My impression is that there are various mechanisms that help connect white racial identity with higher class status and economic privilege. One is the fact that whites tend to divest in more racially mixed areas and invest in more white-dominant ones, which creates a disparity in property values. Another is that relative occupational segregation has continued in such a way that even recent immigrants are likely to track into "racially appropriate" careers based on racial identity. This means that racial identity continues to play a role even after slavery was outlawed and race proven to be a scientifically empty concept. So it's not that post civil-war immigrants are to blame for slavery or not; it is that they have benefitted from a racialized system of economic privilege that persists in influencing social outcomes. I think you underestimate how many present-day people who identify as having slave-ancestors are quite proud of the work their ancestors did to "build the nation," and how superior they feel to Africans living in Africa. This actually gets into the issue of nationalist racism against Africa and the global critique of how European diaspora has generally harmed Africa and helped retard its development. The US slavery issue is really part of a global discourse, but so many have nationalist-blinders on that they tend to ignore or eschew the global level, either consciously or unconsciously. Well, what happens unfortunately is that people who identify with historically constructed minority identities can view themselves of heirs of past injustice. So, for example, some people look at property lost by their parents or relatives in Auschwitz as presently belonging to someone, so why not them? Some people look back the same way at property burned in Atlanta during the civil war or to property nationalized in Cuba by the revolutionary government. Such losses can either be chalked off as casualties of war or people can question why someone benefitted from them but not them personally. Then there is the problem that some people benefited from losing family members to war, e.g. life insurance or G.I. bill etc., while others received no such benefits. These are all the issues of disparities in inheritances. They are hard to resolve one way or the other. The best solution, imo, is to create a better economy where people are satisfied with the opportunities available to them as being fair and sufficient. The problem is, imo, that most people want more than is possible for everyone to have so disparities are practically guaranteed. The problem is that this kind of tax-spending economy tends to favor those in the position of collecting revenues and profiting form the spending. So the poor may be getting some free money, but once they spend it the money goes into the pockets of the rich and perpetuates the class-hierarchies. Right, but if everyone got a world-class education and a world-class economic position to go with it, who would serve french fries to whom? Who would clean whose motel rooms so who could travel comfortably? Who would clean whose offices so who could leave the office without having to worry about coming in to a dirty office the next morning? Education is great, but how many people do it for intellectual enrichment so that they can perform a low-wage service job? This isn't an issue of the wealthy having to make "some effort." This is about the wealthy, middle-class, AND poor giving up the culture of relying on others for work that they do not want to perform themselves. Congress would not need to do anything if people would stop consuming such services to begin with. Until this happens, there will be social class differences that divide people into desirable and undesirable jobs. Then, as long as people are desperate to make the cut, they will play race cards and any other card in the deck to avoid getting stuck in the lower classes. This is unfortunate, but there's really no way to achieve equality in a system of economic subjugation, imo.

Apologies. I can be too hasty because I've read and analyzed such statements so many times, always to the same conclusion. Still, I also don't appreciate it when people are able to deploy subtleties with discriminatory undertones and then chastize me for holding them accountable. Can anyone at least admit that it is irritating when someone makes an implicitly racist statement about, say, Obama and then pretends that the insinuation was meant completely innocently? It would sadden me if I was falsely attributing this kind of behavior to people who aren't doing it, but it would at least be nice to hear someone state that they understand the kind of discourse that I'm critical of.