Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Well, your definition is purely arbitrary in this regard. A slave is a piece of property. Slaves can't run away from their masters; or they can, but they face punishment for trying.

Serfs and sharecroppers actually have the ability to leave, even if they don't have the financial means. The constitution of a slave rests on its circumscription by its owner, who perceives the slave merely as an extension of his/her own volitional being, or whatever we want to call it. A victim of robbery is no one's property. You're just making an arbitrary distinction, and I don't think any victim of robbery would be convinced that they've been made a slave.

 

[Dak]

I'm looking at the end to make the equivocation, not the means. Appealing to majority (victims in this case) doesn't change that.

 

[Einherjar86]

You admit that it's an equivocation, then?

I don't think you can pick and choose for facility's sake. When using a term as charged as "slavery" it behooves the discussion to consider your examples from all possible angles; otherwise your definition comes off as rhetorical.

 

[Dak]

Of course it's an equivocation, if we go with the traditional definition and understanding. I sometimes like to make an overly strong statement to force the consideration.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well, expect strong rebuttals.

 

[Dak]

Well, expect strong rebuttals.

Appealing to tradition/traditional definitions isn't what I would call strong, at least not for you.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Just a random question (not trolling i swear), do you guys debate stuff with people on any other websites, reddit for instance?

 

[Dak]

I have a couple of other forums I frequent, but not reddit.

 

[Einherjar86]

No, I really don't have time to be participating here as it is.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Cool, haha. I think it's amazing you guys have kept at this for so long. Wish i had more to comment on.

 

[Einherjar86]

I always enjoy getting your "thoughtful" emails. They're an infrequent but stimulating occurrence.

That sounded dirtier than I intended.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Thanks haha, i'll try to keep you in the loop on those.

 

[Dak]

Google Graphene.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Interesting stuff. Which potential applications of it do you consider most noteworthy?

 

[Einherjar86]

Posthumanity!

Not really, it looks to be incredibly (and immediately) practical. I do think that, very soon, we'll start seeing artificial organs and other biological apparatuses being made out of material like this.

On an educational note:

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/greg-klerkx-creative-education-lithuania/

Philosophically, Creative Partnerships begins with the straightforward idea that teachers want to teach and children want to learn, but that too often other things interfere, the most common culprit being fixed ideas — among teachers, parents, even students — about how ‘learning’ happens. Experienced Creative Partnerships practitioners start small. Simply conducting a lesson outside of the classroom — in the sports hall, under a tree on the playground — can produce remarkably positive changes in student focus, just because it introduces novelty and curiosity. One looks for the slightest opening of a window through which new ideas might flow. It might be a throwaway comment by a teacher saying she’d found some new ways to talk to her students; it could be a single pupil who starts showing up in class rather than skipping school altogether.

Practitioners must tread deftly. Perhaps more than any other institution, schools are where a society is laid bare: its values, its aspirations and its cultural and political codes are visibly at work for all to see, for better or worse. Nonetheless, having worked with teachers, artists and students in six countries, I’ve found that some things are universal. Schools are places of constant change, yet can be deeply conservative — not least because they are the most regulated, structured, and procedural public spaces in any society. Even the tiniest change can have unpredictable ripple effects in terms of workload, curriculum, resources and the always-delicate relationship between teachers, pupils and parents.

EDIT: sorry, the weekend is when I try and catch up on news. David's already familiar with this, but still good to see someone reporting on it, even if it only gets brief mention on CNN and FOX:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicide-epidemic-veteran

 

[Dak]

Google Unschooling.

As far as the suicides go, this is the most interesting part to Me. If you read my blog post on it, you know I was pointing out that non-combat related stress was the cause of most. This article agrees with that, but says that trend has supposedly reversed in 2012.

The most recent department of defense suicide report, or DODSER, covers 2011 . It shows that less than half, 47%, of all suicides involved service members who had ever been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just one in 10 of those who died did so while posted in the war zone. Only 15% had ever experienced direct combat.

The DODSER for 2012 has yet to be released, but when it is it is expected to record a sea change. For the first time, the majority of the those who killed themselves had been deployed. That's a watershed that is causing deep concern within the services.

"We are starting to see the creeping up of suicides among those who have had multiple deployments," said Phillip Carter, a military expert at the defence thinktank Center for a New American Security that in 2011 published one of the most authoritative studies into the crisis . He added that though the causes of the increase were still barely understood, one important cause might be the cumulative impact of deployments – the idea that the harmful consequences of stress might build up from one tour of Afghanistan to the next.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

This is just great.

https://twitter.com/KimKierkegaard

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

This wasn't particularly in depth, but I still found it interesting, and refined. A nice distillation of his work.

 

[Dak]

@52 minute mark+

Chomsky says the West does not have a "free market", it is state corporatism, and that all rhetoric about a free market in the West is just that: propaganda/rhetoric.

@pat.

I'm not sure whether or not I'm surprised that Chomsky says this, given his anti-anarchocapitalist (free market) druthers in his anarchosyndicalism tendencies. At least he has the wherewithal and honesty here not to try and seize on the current system as an example of the "failure of the free market".

Unfortunately following this, he mentions Adam Smith and Ricardo but fails to mention Bastiat's rebuttals.

 

[Einherjar86]

I've heard Chomsky say similar things before; I thought I posted one video here at some point, maybe in a different thread. When asked something about capitalism potentially solving our problems, he compared the question to the famous one put to Gandhi about Western civilization, to which Gandhi replied: "It would be a wonderful idea."

Chomsky went on to say that it's possible capitalism may solve the problems we face, but we can't be sure since we don't live in a truly capitalist system.

Theorists who argue about the failure of the free market are working in a very different conceptual apparatus than Chomsky, and many of them disagree with him on several issues; you likely would never find Alain Badiou and Noam Chomsky buying each other drinks outside the École Normale Supérieure.

@Jimmy:

Really cool video; haven't watched the whole thing yet, but it's very good so far. It's crazy, after reading more Wittgenstein, to see how much he has influenced contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of language.

EDIT: here's a mildly entertaining write-up on "why the French hate Chomsky."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/06/14/why-the-french-hate-chomsky/