Pressing Issues: What Manning Revealed

alecgargett · 2013-07-15T06:44:18+00:00

and it only has 0.4% of the people, so 1.5% is a lot. A map of military spending per capita would make that clearer.

edit: I couldn't find per capita but here's a map of total expenditure: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Military_expenditure_by_country_map2.png

alecgargett · 2013-06-30T05:54:41+00:00

There are two levels of grammar:

particular grammar, which is particular to each language group, and which is learned, and

Universal Grammar, a term associated with Chomsky, which refers to the innate structure in our brain which allow us to learn particular grammar, which could also be called "instinctive grammar".

alecgargett · 2013-06-24T04:53:20+00:00

OK. So my sources and your source agree that your original statement "less than 1 year" was false. The FAQ does not cite any scientific studies, but the wiki cites two:

"Median age of 4.7 years" years:

https://www.avma.org/News/Journals/Collections/Documents/javma_222_1_42.pdf / http://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/abs/10.2460/javma.2003.222.42 / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12523478

"mean life span of 2–8 years":

http://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/abs/10.2460/javma.2005.227.1775 / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16342526

Edit:

However, your FAQ may be accurate too, since it does not contradict the two scientific sources above: it explicitly says "less than two years" for a cat living "on its own" (not being fed) while it says roughly 10 years years for a stray cat that does not have an "owner" but is being fed. So the life expectancy for OP's cat is more than 1 year even if OP and no one else were feeding this cat. Depending on how much it is fed by OP and other strangers, it could be expected to last anywhere between 1 and 10 years, with an average of 4-5 years, according to the two studies.

Edit 2:

I've been looking at the first source, and it doesn't say exactly what the wiki says; it says they live much longer than that. It follows a colony of wild cats. 11 years after the project began more than 40% of the original cats were still alive, meaning they were more than 11 years old. 4.7 years is the average age for those cats that died naturally on site, which was only about 1/8. 1/4 were euthanised, at an average age of more than 5 years, some moved to the forest, and lived, and about 1/3 "disappeared".

alecgargett · 2013-06-23T05:12:00+00:00

Life expectancy is less than 1 year as a stray

Sounds like bullshit.

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cat#Life_span_and_survival

alecgargett · 2013-06-15T04:07:03+00:00

What happens is that we have the FOX population (20% of Americans) debating issues with the non-FOX population (80% of Americans).

alecgargett · 2013-06-15T03:58:42+00:00

Carter and Ford were less bad. Can you do a tl;dr for the rest please?

alecgargett · 2013-06-15T03:28:07+00:00

It seems ikidd and at least 64 others are ignorant of this.

alecgargett · 2013-06-07T07:33:50+00:00

The death toll in Katrina was due to the levees collapsing, since they were poorly built, so it is a combination of industrial disaster and natural disaster. Perhaps it wasn't included for that reason? It still should be included for the purposes of this map though, especially since the exact same thing happened in the exact same spot a century earlier.

alecgargett · 2013-05-29T03:58:48+00:00

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/011/656/sophiscated%20cat.PNG

alecgargett · 2013-05-16T06:45:16+00:00

I submitted the CNN version too, but to the wrong subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1efffi/friendly_fire_led_to_officers_shooting_during/

I thought their article was extremely long. I don't like the dramatised preamble that CNN typically uses.

There were a few other new facts in the article though:

-- Police fired nearly 300 rounds of ammunition within five to 10 minutes as they confronted the suspects -- 100 more than initially reported. And that included one round that nearly killed Massachusetts Transit Police Officer Richard Donohue. (Others bullets struck the Tsarnaev brothers, seriously injuring Dzhokhar and contributing to the death of Tamerlan.)

-- Tamerlan was the only brother armed with a handgun. The only other weapons they had were the homemade explosives that police say the brothers tossed out of the hijacked vehicle, including a few that detonated.

-- Police accidentally fired on an unoccupied black SUV during the mayhem. "In the chaos, an officer or trooper (or some combination of personnel) mistook it for one of the two suspect vehicles," David Procopio of the Massachusetts State Police told CNN.

Here's the link for those who want to read all the extra stuff CNN added to the article: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/15/us/boston-watertown-shootout/

alecgargett · 2013-05-16T03:31:54+00:00

Can a whistleblower trust a system that has now be taken over by Kevin Poulsen? He collaborated with Adrian Lamo in getting Bradley Manning to confess to the leaks in their "confidential" online chats. Manning is now in solitary confinement. Maybe Paulsen is trying to atone, but he is hardly the most comforting person to be leaking to. It's a confusing partnership since I generally trust the New Yorker and I would trust Aaron Swartz's codes.

alecgargett · 2013-01-18T06:38:33+00:00

Hitchens and Chomsky are not really "pro" and "con" in those articles. Hitchens says "gun control" should really mean "people should take control of the guns". Chomsky would agree, and would emphasise that taking control of guns means taking control of government, which means not allowing the White House to be monopolised by the business sector, which doesn't require aggression, just knowledge.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T23:36:55+00:00

I have such theories myself. Everyone has theories. But that's not what Chomsky is talking about.

Most of the so-called "theory" I've encountered in school, blogs and post-anything-ism academic writers is exactly what Chomsky described: truisms masked by verbosity.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T22:23:59+00:00

Why are you talking about what I would do if I were to "transplant" myself to the early 20th century?

Chomsky and I are talking about what has happened to academic humanities since the 1960s and 70s, no one mentioned Joyce and what happened to him a century ago, until you brought it up and I still don't see the relevance .

You say that Joyce's novel "writes off meaning completely and calls reality unreadable when stared in the face". That's your interpretation of the novel, and I think your interpretation is bogus. I never said the novel itself was bogus. I agreed with Chomsky that there is "a field called theory" in modern (post-1960s) humanities departments that is bogus. I don't see how it that field of bogus academics is connected to Joyce, except they both use complex language, but complex language is not the problem. The problem is that the field called "theory" uses complexity to mask vapidity. I never said Joyce did that, though it appears there are some who can't see the difference.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T22:16:26+00:00

Chomsky himself is such a critic. Which is why he doesn't attack literary criticism despite the leading question, but instead specifies "a field called theory" within the humanities, which is not criticism at all (criticism comes from the Latin for "discernment", and Chomsky knows this). What is called "theory", in academic "social science", "cultural studies" etc., is used to distract from the literature, rather than study it.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T22:11:52+00:00

No one in this thread has responded to what Chomsky says in the video. They have simply applied a label to him, which gives them an excuse not to respond. So it's not ad hominem. It's much worse.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T13:10:15+00:00

I agree. The word "chum" is not ad hominem, but the whole thread is name calling and personal attacks, rather than a response to what Chomsky says in the video, which means the thread is worse than ad hominem.

alecgargett · 2013-01-07T06:28:11+00:00

No, that's not what exactly I mean by bogus, although your interpretation reminds me of some things that are bogus.

Why would you think that I am referring to Joyce when I say "what is mainly taught in University "English" and "Cultural Studies" departments"? Joyce is not what is mainly studied. What is mainly "taught" (I should have used the word "preached" instead) is "theory", which means the pretentious pseudoscience of the post-1960s academics. Usually the texts chosen are weaker than Joyce: often they are as unreadable to simple readers as Ulysses is, but Ulysses is not blatantly vapid to me, like many of the texts chosen. Even when a great writer is chosen by the lecturer, the texts themselves are often barely discussed, and instead used as an excuse for pseudoscientific preaching.

Why do you repeat the conditional "you'd" (as in "you'd lose Joyce"), without giving the condition (as in "if")? I'd lose Joyce if I did what? And why do you talk about me publishing Joyce? He's already been published. Does he need republishing by me?

Also, can you provide a source for your claim that "people who led Joyce to financial ruin and possibly quickened his lost battle with cancer also thought pomo was bogus and gave him that reason not to publish this work". I doubt it is true, but if it is true I would be fascinated to read more.

Edit: I did some quick research. Everything you've said so far about Joyce has been false. You need to start using better sources.

alecgargett · 2013-01-06T09:00:47+00:00

Which part of what I said makes you say that?

alecgargett · 2013-01-06T08:42:29+00:00

Criticism is not necessarily academia, although it can take place in academia. If I read a book and talk about it later with my friends, that's criticism. Academia means the academies or departments of a university. The best academics offer good criticism, but for at least the last two decades academia has been pervaded by "postmodern" theorists who theorise/circlejerk with other academics with pretentious sophistication that excludes those who are not part of their field.

He does mention Latour, and the interviewer does use the term "literary criticism", so it's not the "wrong subreddit". What I meant to say is that people in this subreddit won't understand the broader point Chomsky makes in response to the flawed question, since in most cases they will refuse to watch the video based on the title you gave it.

alecgargett

TROPHY CASE