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| Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - - Posts by Zarathud |
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Zarathud Level: 12  Posts: 41/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Ziff - Jesus Crimeny. That really, really blows. I'm in college taking a computer/electronics technician course. I really wish I wasn't going to the one I'm at, but it's alright I guess, though half of my classes in the first semester were pathetically remedial. My main complaint is that it's ten minutes out of town so I can't just get one bus there; I have to transfer to a bus from the next town over, which means a longer journey and paying double fare. It's really annoying. (edited by Zarathud on 01-05-05 07:53 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 42/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| First came the Grey Album, and that was a surprisingly listenable bit of experimentation, if not something I'd pay for. But then we got the Double Black Album, the Black and Blue Album, and finally (my personal favourite of these awful ideas) the Slack Album. ENOUGH ALREADY! In any case, there's good genre-mixing and bad. Most of the time it's good if the genre-blending seems natural and unforced (see: the shoegaze-gospel-rock of Spiritualized, Miles Davis' jazz-rock fusion, the dancefloor electropunk of Out Hud and !!!, Blur's blending of britpop with all sorts of stuff, and at least half of Bjork's albums), and bad when it's self-conscious and contrived (see: every angry rap-rock artist like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Methods of Mayhem [anyone remember Tommy Lee's little abortion?], Project Wyze, etc, each more derivative and banal than the last; also collaborations that should just never have happened like Eminem and Elton John, Nelly & Tim McGraw, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, Aerosmith with anyone at all, etc). (edited by Zarathud on 01-05-05 09:22 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 43/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Odds are that there probably is some life out there somewhere in our galaxy, but odds also are that all alien-sighing stories to date have been bullshit. It's just people who like the idea, so they make this shit up to make life seem more interesting and get some attention. Most of them even believe it I'm sure, but self-delusion is nothing new. | |||
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 44/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| [ ACHTUNG: Long, slighty high-brow and very immodest post ahead. ] Oh dear, it's amateur philosophy night I see. It's like karaoke for intellectuals and hurts my head every bit as much, but on the plus side you can teach people good philosophy even if you can't teach them to sing. Before I go into the big stuff, I'll answer Chriti's second question first because it's simpler: Originally posted by Christi I have never encountered a single person who was not, in their own estimation, pursuing the good. Everyone from philanthropists to businessmen to terrorists are doing what they think is right in their own view. The problem is that quite often they're just wrong. So I think that, generally speaking, we are all good but we are also all a little stupid. The upshot of this is that stupidity is theoretically easier to remedy than evil. Now, on to the whole free will/destiny issue. As a smart fellow I know recently said: "this is the language of theology and I will have no truck with it." I prefer to deal in verifiable empirical claims and falsifiable theories, thankyouveddymuch. So here are a few basic statements: 1) The knowable universe is made up of various types of matter and energy. People can talk about supernatural forces if they want, but the bottom line is that everything we observe is explainable without them and they're impossible to empirically verify or falsify anyway, and hence pretty useless concepts. 2) All matter and energy follows certain regularities of cause and effect; we may not necissarily understand everything about these regularities, but we can be confident that they are there and all we have to do is discover them. Anyone who doesn't believe this has some explaining to do, since this is the only thing that allows us to make any sense of the universe at all, and everything we know supports it. 3) We are made up of matter and energy, just like everything else. This includes our brains, the whole shebang. This is where people usually start to see where we're headed and get a little queasy. Yes, the processes of our brains follow causal laws just like everything else. No, the idea of a "soul" won't change that. If you buy the first two points, then you necissarily buy this one too. That's it. If you buy those three points, then you're a filthy (soft) determinist like me. People tend to get hung up on this because we tend to think of physics in the abstract as if it's something seperate from "us", when in fact we are a continuous part of phsyics. Picture a three-dimensional cube of space, then picture a bunch of atoms doing things inside it. This space can be filled with gas, crystals, a ball rolling down a hill, a fire, bacteria, a frog, a monkey, a human, anything at all. The only difference is the arrangement and behaviour of the matter and energy. Some people find this thought disconcerting, but I think it's damn cool. What we call consciousness is a remarkably complex information-storage and processing system. A computer program can be made to select the best percieved move in a chess game, and what humans do isn't fundamentally different; just a heck of a lot more complicated. We select whatever appears to be the optimal choice from the available data we have. That's all. This doesn't even have to be a "conscious" process: everything from RNA to viruses to ants to dogs do it, they just don't have the processing capacity and reflexive feedback loops that give rise to what we call "consciousness". However, none of this should be cause for despair and fatalism. This doesn't change anything in our everyday life. Pain is still pain and pleasure is still pleasure, we can still appreciate life, our experiences and our emotions for what they are, we can still have rational ethical discussions, and we need not relinquish the idea that we can and do make choices. We just have to strip away the fuzzy metaphysical connotations of the idea of "choice". Choice means changing our behaviour based on new input; no more, no less. We can still analyze what the best behaviours are (ethics) just like always, but at least now we can have a clearer head about it. (Believe it or not this is the simple form of the argument. I've seen all of this proven mathematically, it would just take a lot more background explanation.) (edited by Zarathud on 01-07-05 01:09 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 45/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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Well would you look at that. Apparently a few people in Thailand did know about the earthquake and still nothing got done:
Well that's just great. (edited by Zarathud on 01-07-05 01:28 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 46/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Apparently nobody noticed when I already linked to the same site (though not the same page) several posts up. | |||
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 47/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Don't be so damn lazy Ziff. Slavery was bad because it was forcing people to do things against their will. We commodify ourselves every time we get a job or go on contract for our skills. Commodification!=slavery. "Duh," as they say. You should know better. Nothing escapes economics. Not school, health care, the military, whatever. If you pretend that the standard rules that apply to every good and service somehow magically don't apply to this one, you're going end up with inefficiency. Period. Recognizing this fact doesn't make people any less human. (edited by Zarathud on 01-07-05 01:37 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 48/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| I have nothing in particular against Mos Def, and in fact I kinda like some of his music. But as Ford Prefect... I just don't see it working, I guess partly because I have this fixed idea of Arthur and Ford both being English. But I'm open to being pleasently surprised. | |||
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 49/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| "People are not commodities." This has actually been a straw man from the beginning and I can't believe I didn't explicitly point it out: it's not the children themselves that are commoditized, it's the education. Education and health care are services. Human time, effort and talent is indeed a commodity that people buy and sell every day. The entire economy is based on it. All I'm talking about is recognizing this fact and treating these goods and services (which are finite like everything else) as they actually are and then building as optimal a system of supply as we can manage on that assumption. "You are forcing people, against their will, to submit basic rights, like education and healthcare, to become private property." If you think about it for a moment rather than frothing, it might occur to you that 1) health care and education are not "rights", though we can argue over wether they should be, 2) nobody here is proposing depriving people of these things, only trying to provide them in what we think would be better ways, and 3) both theory and practice have shown that systems based on private property nearly always work better than ones based on a commons. "This is intrinsically evil." No such thing. "This is exactly what fascist Italy and Germany wanted." Okay, now do I get to invoke Godwin? |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 50/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| OMG THE DONGS | |||
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 51/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| I've become dissillusioned with the idea that the death penalty has any appreciably greater deterrent effect than the threat of a life sentence. It has a negligable if not nonexistent effect, and the consequences of a false positive are far worse than in cases of unjust imprisonment where compensation can be given to the falsely accused. At the same time, it just seems senseless to keep people alive who are guilty of heinous crimes beyond the slightest possibility of doubt (i.e. they admit it). So I would like to keep it an option in exceptional circumstances, but the bar of evidence needs to be even higher than it would be for a normal conviction due to the seriousness of the punishment. Scum like McVeigh, once their guilt is nolonger contested by anyone, shouldn't go on wasting air. Unfortunately as hhallahh mentioned, the transaction costs of the appeals process would need to be significantly lowered in order for this to be worthwhile. |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 52/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Voila. | |||
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 53/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| I like instrumental hip-hop in the vein of DJ Shadow, Prefuse 73 and Kid Koala, but there's very little lyrical hip-hop that ever leaves much of an impression on me. Aesop Rock, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Deltron, Mr. Lif, Roots Manuva, Blackalicious, Jurassic 5, and the Beasties are all listenable, but I can't say I'd ever really bother buying any of their albums. They just don't make much of an impact on me really. (edited by Zarathud on 01-10-05 07:15 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 54/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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Originally posted by Silvershield It never ceases to amaze me that anyone can hold two such utterly irreconcilable ideas in their minds at once. Either your actions have been predestined or they haven't. Pick one. But if you really wanna bake your noodle, try Newcomb's Paradox on for size: "Given two boxes, B1 which contains $1000 and B2 which contains either nothing or a million dollars, you may pick either B2 or both. However, at some time before the choice is made, an omniscient Being has predicted what your decision will be and filled B2 with a million dollars if he expects you to take it, or with nothing if he expects you to take both." Think about it for a while. (edited by Zarathud on 01-11-05 07:46 PM) |
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Zarathud Level: 12 Posts: 55/55 EXP: 7184 For next: 737 Since: 12-27-04 From: Terra, Sol. Since last post: 294 days Last activity: 294 days |
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| Ziff - "...condoning murder of mass murderers turns you into one yourself. The death sentence stands not only as detracting to a society, but also as a glaring hypocricy. Anyone who supports it in any case has been lowered to the level of a murderer or some form of slavering beast." It's only hypicrisy if you believe that everyone has an unconditional right to life. I don't. The act of mass-murder is a tacit admission that the murderer is not willing to play by the same rules as everybody else. Tit-for-tat in such cases is a perfectly reasonable strategy, though we can argue over whether or not it's optimal. It may not be. But as soon as someone commits premeditated murder (assuming of course that we have no difficulty at all proving this), they forfeit their own right to life. After that the only question is over what would be the most efficient way of disposing of them. I respect everyone's right to life until they signal that they don't respect mine; then all bets are off. Somerz - "Everyone has a right to life, even so-called scum like McVeigh, and I don't quite understand how anyone can believe they are allowed to decide who lives and who dies. This is basically also my one main problem with utilitarianism; no matter what the economical or social gain for society, killing is wrong." So if some guy pulls out a machine gun in the middle of a crowded market and starts firing at people, it would be morally wrong for me to gun him down in order to stop him from killing others? Are you sure about that? Pre-emptive response: yes, I know that once you've captured and subdued the guy, the emergency is over and killing him is not necissary. But it doesn't matter. Once you've acknowledged that killing is right in some cases, we've passed that threshold and are just arguing over under what circumstances it's permissable to kill people. Welcome to consequentialism. |
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| Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - - Posts by Zarathud |
